From a young age, children learn language and concepts through literary response. Teachers can deploy picture books as whole class prompts to stimulate the imagination, narrative understanding of topics, and the comprehension of simple accompanying texts to the pictures, that contain important early markers for spelling, grammar, and vocabulary learning. Picture books and their responses are typically used throughout primary education and early secondary as a basis for learning, and can provide stimulating, story based lesson content to accompany other curriculum learning areas, such as the humanities (e.g., Kiefer, 1988).  As the children progress in their reading, print only literary texts can be introduced into the curriculum to expand the knowledge, language, and communicative bases of the children.

Print only texts can be sourced in many different genres such as novels, short stories, newspapers, magazines, poetry, instruction booklets, pamphlets, brochures, etc. Children can henceforth learn through a variety of literary responses to these texts, that can challenge and expand their thinking with respect to what constitutes a text. It is vital that children are exposed to a diversity of text types in their curriculum learning, so that they gain competency in understanding the genres of these texts, and can respond effectively to information delivered in different manners through texts (Christie, 2013). At this stage, pedagogy will have changed from whole class ‘show and tell’ style lessons, through and in which, teachers typically use resources such as picture books, to evoke a literary response and accompanying skills such as phonemic awareness, to children reading on their own in a variety of genres, and being asked to produce literary responses themselves, or in groups. At this stage, extra skills can be introduced to literary responses, and alongside basic reading competencies, such as critical literacy. Critical literacy requires children to think critically about the text in addition to understanding and responding to it coherently.

Since the 1990s, the need for teaching critical literacy skills through literary response has increased and expanded, due to the exponential multiplication of texts mediated electronically. The introduction of the internet into the way in which children learn has brought a whole new dimension to literary learning (Evans & Po, 2007), that demands, for example, that the children ask new questions about the text, such as: Is it authentic/real? Has it been copied /reproduced from elsewhere? Does the text have hidden messages (e.g., commercial)? What is the text trying to get me to think/buy? New means for understanding online texts have developed, such as multiliteracies (Mills, 2009) multiple literacies, and the new literacies studies (NLS). In combination, these approaches recognise and help to explore the new environments that children are exposed to through their digital devices. As a whole, the curriculum can now be supported and inter-linked through the deployment of online texts, that require students to demonstrate research and critical abilities, to, for example show whether or not the sources for their arguments are valid (Peters & Lankshear, 1996). Students now gain much of their information and language skills online, and digital literary responses must henceforth be analysed in terms of what these skills amount to, how they can be evaluated, and what other skills they complement and enhance, e.g., technology and coding.  In the future, these digitally mediated literacies will only intensify, hence teaching has to adjust and take into account these expanding and authentic practices (Beach et al., 2011).

References 

Beach, R., Appleman, D., Hynds, S., & Wilhelm, J. (2011). Teaching literature to adolescents. Taylor and Francis.

Christie, F. (2013). Genres and genre theory: A response to Michael Rosen. Changing English, 20(1), 11-22.

Evans, E., & Po, J. (2007). A break in the transaction: Examining students’ responses to digital texts. Computers and Composition, 24(1), 56-73.

Kiefer, B. (1988). Picture books as contexts for literary, aesthetic, and real world understandings. Language Arts, 65(3), 260-271.

Mills, K. A. (2009). Multiliteracies: Interrogating competing discourses. Language and Education, 23(2), 103-116.

Peters, M., & Lankshear, C. (1996). Critical literacy and digital texts. Educational theory, 46(1), 51-70.

There are two major factors which are going to keep driving change. The first one is technology… In the past, children’s literature served the purpose of an adult reading with a child. If the children’s literature allowed that to happen and encouraged communication between the adult and the child, then it was useful for education and reading enjoyment in some way.

The vision is that technology, the internet, mobile phones, Ipads have revolutionised children’s literature. Having technology at hand creates a different interface from the adult talking directly to the child. So the child now is getting stories, images, ideas, from a different interface, instead of the adult-child relationship. Nevertheless, there will still be children’s literature written by adults for children, but technology is not going to stop, and that creates a different narrative and structure, and a different interface. The children are learning so much more from technology that the children’s literature has to take account of that in some way. Exactly how, and why and what works, no-one knows. However, it cannot be ignored. Therefore, educators need to find innovative, interesting ways to use these mediums, use these interfaces to still keep doing good intellectual and educational work, such as using elements from gaming, from popular apps and different things that the children use on the Internet and integrating that into real stories, narratives that can be told between generations, rather than just assuming that this child-adult book way is going to be the main way in which stories get transmitted, and education gets built around them, like language learning or ideas.

The other driver of change is the children themselves, as productive of new ways of seeing the world, as being more in charge of the literature or in charge in a novel way. If there is an adult-child relationship, and the story is written by the adults, it is the adults’ perspective and the adult’s assumptions and the adult’s values and worldview that will be portrayed in the literature, but with children more and more getting these things from the Internet, not from adults, from these sites and apps that they find interesting, that starts to change the way they see and tell stories. However, a story is a story, yet the content, the language, the speed in which it is said, using images instead of language or using video will change the rendering of a story. All of these factors tend towards more user-driven content. Are the children being productive of the literature, being productive of different ways of seeing the world?

These are the two bigger drivers of change.