Morag Styles

A Gorilla with ‘Grandpa's Eyes’: How Children Interpret Visual Texts—A Case Study of Anthony Browne's Zoo

This article explores the multilayered nature of a single picture book by Anthony Browne and the sophisticated responses (including their own pictures) children aged 4–11 bring to interpreting such a text. Emphasis is laid on the high-level cognitive skills involved in reading visual images and links are made between seeing and thinking. Some features of the childrens understanding are examined in detail; for example, how they interpret visual imagery and deal with a variety of challenging artistic features, and how their drawings show knowledge and feelings they are not yet able to articulate. The findings also suggest that some children who are not yet confident at reading print have developed impressive capacities for analysing image.

Opening the Nursery Door: Reading, Writing and Childhood, 1600-1900

Opening the Nursery Door is a fascinating collection of essays inspired by the discovery of a tiny archive: the nursery library of Jane Johnson 1707-1759, wife of a Lincolnshire vicar. It has captured the scholarly interest of social anthropologists, historians, literary scholars, educationalists and archivists as it has opened up a range of questions about the nature of childhood within English cultural life over three centuries: the texts written and read to children, the multifarious ways childhood has been considered, shaped and schooled through literacy practices, and the hitherto ignored role of women educators in early childhood across all classes.

Learning through literature: the case of The Arabian Nights

In the last twenty years, the teaching of reading in Britain has moved away from an interest in how children take delight in, and make meaning of, their literature to a preoccupation with a mechanistic approach to literacy which breaks down texts into bite‐sized chunks and fragments reading into a series of isolated skills. Although an expensive, comprehensive system for literacy has been put in place with its plethora of related materials for teachers and pupils, it has not been particularly successful in raising literacy standards, and it has turned some children away from reading. Using The Arabian Nights as a case study (the book most often mentioned as favourite childhood reading of dozens of famous writers from the eighteenth century to the present day, worldwide), I have examined its influence on certain famous writers living in the nineteenth century with particular reference to how it may have shaped their approach to writing fiction. Using a cross‐disciplinary approach, I have tried to combine the skills and insights of the literary critic and the literary historian: the former showing how literary texts work and how writers construct them to provoke a range of responses in their readers; the latter exploring the biographical and social context of the emergent writer, identifying and evaluating the factors that contributed to developing their particular creative identity. A further strand is that of the educator seeking to glean insights from tantalisingly fragmentary historical data which may cast light on some contemporary concerns about children’s learning, including debates about the teaching of reading. By bringing these different approaches together, my specific intention is to further the understanding of one aspect of learning in the modern world—that of children’s reading. The message that my tentative findings suggest is that whatever policy initiatives are taken in literacy, encouraging children to take pleasure in reading whole books of their own choosing should be a priority.

Reading Lessons from the Eighteenth Century

The extraordinary nursery library produced by Jane Johnson (circa 1742–1747), entirely in the private domain with no thought of publication, holds pride of place in the Lilly Librarys collection of early childrens books at the University of Indiana, USA. It has already been celebrated in an exhibition and international conference held at the Fitzwilliam Museum and Homerton College respectively in Cambridge, UK, in 1995. One outcome of the interest aroused in Janes educational materials by scholars from a wide range of disciplines was the publication of Opening the Nursery Door in 1997, which included two essays devoted to her enterprise by Shirley Brice Heath and Victor Watson. Since then, the Bodleian Library in Oxford has acquired and published in facsimile form a story written by Jane in 1744, alongside a fascinating assortment of family letters and other papers. In Opening the Nursery Door, Watson explored the sources for Janes story, while Brice Heath considered the materials from a linguistic and anthropological point of view, but no one has yet examined them as reading materials. This is the focus the present authors have taken, based on their research into her life and work, alongside their exploration of the historical and educational context in which a mother might have taught her children to read in the eighteenth century. This article is devoted to examining Janes nursery library, the philosophical and pedagogical influences on her approach, and the methodologies she used to teach reading, thus throwing a spotlight on domestic literacy and providing insights into the culture of Georgian family life.