Children’s Responses to a Challenging Picturebook with a Contrapuntal Relationship Between Historical Facts and Humorous Fiction

Abstract

In this article, the authors explore how Norwegian second-graders respond to the challenging picturebook, Min bestemor strøk kongens skjorter (My Grandmother Ironed the King’s Shirts) (Kove 2000). The cognitive challenges for the young readers lie in the picturebook’s humorous iconotext with a contrapuntal interplay between historical facts and fiction about World War II. In this classroom-based study, a reading event was designed to give the children an aesthetic experience with the picturebook and the possibility to explore it further. Each reading event included an opening in which the peritexts were discussed, a read-aloud (where two groups read the images on a Smart Board screen and two groups read the images in the physical book), an explorative dialogue, a creative workshop, and an ending. The analyzing process drew on Lawrence K. Sipe’s (Storytime: young children’s literary understanding in the classroom, Teachers College Press, New York, 2008) model of young children’s literary understanding and included an inductive analysis of the pupil’s responses that was inspired by a collective qualitative method (Eggebø in Norsk Sosiol Tidsskrift 4:106–122, 2020). On this basis, the authors present a model of children’s overlapping responses to a challenging picturebook. The pupils’ responses were embodied, creative, playful, analytical, personal and intertextual. Findings indicate that the reading event created a pleasurable aesthetic experience in which the children might develop tolerance for the complex fact-fiction relationship. The mediator’s facilitation and openness for a variety of responses and literary meaning-making during the reading event allowed the pupils to use their entire selves and express meaning-making in different ways. Findings indicate slightly more embodied responses and social interaction when the children read the pictures in the physical book rather than on the Smart Board screen.