Bob Barton in Canada (1986) have shown the value of working along a continuum in
which listeners become tellers.
It is no surprise, given the value of stories to early communities, that traditional tales
are especially well received in the classroom. (There is, in any case, little point in taking
a carefully crafted written story and turning it into a spoken tale, losing much of its
linguistic subtlety along the way.) Since a traditional tale has already been told by many
voices, there is a fitness in a teacher taking that tale and making it her own to tell to her
classroom community of listeners. A class working on the Greeks, for example, might
hear the adventures of Odysseus or Herakles as a daily serial. Teachers concerned to
introduce a multi-ethnic dimension might tell a series of Anansi adventures or Raven
the Trickster tales from North America. Story-tellers soon find a distinctive personal
style, a kind of signature which marks their stories and which listeners come to expect
and relish.
Picture BooksThe potential value of picture books in the classroom remains far short of full realisation.
The belief in the worth of picture books in upper primary and secondary schools is more
honoured in theory than in practice, while teachers of younger children sometimes have
such a commitment to ‘enjoyment’ that the idea of studying picture books is greeted
with misplaced hostility.
Clearly, simply reading a picture book can be a delight in itself; but the form may also
offer much to literature students in understanding how other literary forms work.
Picture books have suffered from a lack of critical exposition, especially of the
interrelationship of words and pictures; and from a failure of experts in pedagogy to
suggest how they might best be explored. The work of critics such as Jane Doonan in
Britain (1993) and Perry Nodelman in Canada (1988) has begun to provide a better
sense of how picture books are made; as yet, we have not enough evidence of the mental
activity of young readers as they read them, and what they take from them.
Writer-artists have to be conscious of how pictures and text work together, unless
they are content merely to illustrate what is already evident in words (sometimes
described as ‘decorating’ the text). Maurice Sendak is clear about the interplay of word
and image when he writes:
You...must not ever be illustrating exactly what you’ve written. You must leave a
space in the text so the picture can do the work. Then you must come back with
the word, and now the word does its best and the picture beats time.
Sendak 1988:185He demonstrates that belief in books such as Where the Wild Things Are (1967) and
Outside Over There (1981).
Certain books recur as exempla of this dynamic interplay between words and
pictures, such as Anthony Browne’s Gorilla (1983) or Hansel and Gretel (1981). It has to
be admitted that, initially, children do not always share adult enthusiasm for such
books where the reader is required to ‘work’ to fill the gaps between words and pictures.
592 TEACHING FICTION AND POETRY