Abstract
A team of four general education second grade teachers, who work in a neighbourhood state elementary school in a large urban area in the northeast United States, and their staff developer, redesigned their Kevin Henkes Author Study to equally value pictures and design, along with writing. They asked, what narrative understandings do children express by designing on the page? Using a framework of multiliteracies, they showed how they transformed writing workshop into composing workshop to support their emergent bi- and multilingual population. Through content analysis of 80 students’ completed picturebooks and constant comparison of 13 selected students’ retrospective accounts, findings show how students developed a metalanguage of composing for both writing and design craft moves that facilitated and supported their narrative understandings. Their narrative understandings were supported within the sociocultural contexts of our writing communities. Findings show the value of author studies and transforming writing workshop into composing workshop for primary grade writers. Findings have implications for classroom-based research and teaching of composing workshop, particularly for emergent bi- and multilingual populations.
Keywords
In state elementary schools that use writing workshop, written language is privileged; elements of design, such as typography, layout decisions, illustrations, visual displays, are considered an afterthought (e.g. Calkins et al., 2016). Writing then becomes monomodal and monochromatic: students rely almost exclusively on words and use pencil or pen or wordprocess their final products. Other writing tools, such as coloured pencils, markers, crayons, watercolours, that provide colour and texture, are reserved for the final publishing stage, if at all, or perhaps just for the cover of students’ work. For teachers, this exclusive emphasis on writing derives from state or federal standards, that are steeped in a verbocentric view of literacy (Siegel, 2006). Instead, Harste et al. (1984) advocated a semiotic turn, ‘in which the orchestration of all signifying structures from all available communication systems in the event have a part’ (208). For Harste et al., literacy involves ‘semantic negotiation’ (168) of the multiple semiotic resources available when encountering or creating texts in contexts, or what we consider design work.
After watching videos of Kevin Henkes’s (KH) composing process, we realized that design was integral to how he created his picturebooks. We then committed to making design an integral part of each day’s work, and transforming writing workshop into composing workshop in our second grade KH author study. In this paper, we focus on students’ design work. We ask the following research question: What narrative understandings do children express by designing on the page? In what follows, we present our multiliteracies framework, building on concepts of multimodality and design. Next, we review literature on narrative understanding and children’s multimodal expression of narrative understandings in picturebooks. For context, we discuss our KH author study. We present our data sources, our content analysis, and our constant comparison to derive themes and codes. We then present our findings, featuring dialogic interactions between Ted (first author) and two children that demonstrate their compositional intentions. We conclude with a discussion of how designing on the page supported students’ narrative understandings, with implications for research and teaching.
Theoretical framework
For this study, a multiliteracies framework served our needs. The multi- prefix embraces both specific sociocultural contexts for every literacy event and multimodality. When creating multiliteracies theory, the New London Group (1996) emphasized design work to demonstrate that any semiotic activity ‘is an active and dynamic process, and not something governed by static rules’ (74). The New London Group (1996) described three elements to design: available designs (‘resources for meaning; available designs of meaning’), designing (‘the work performed on/with available designs in the semiotic process’), and the redesigned (the products of design work) (77). They explained, ‘designing always involves the transformation of Available Designs; it always involves making new use of old materials’ (76). Moreover, the redesigned produces ‘new meaning, something through which meaning-makers remake themselves’ (76). Concurrently, the redesigned relies on ‘historically and culturally received patterns of meaning’ and ‘is the unique product of human agency: a transformed meaning’ (76).
These outcomes were what we were aiming for in our KH unit of study. We wanted our second graders to study the available designs in Kevin Henkes’ picturebooks, actively engage in design work for their own narratives, resulting in redesigned picturebooks. For transformed meaning of redesigned work, the New London Group called on teachers and students to develop and apply a metalanguage: ‘a language for talking about language, images, texts, and meaning-making interactions’ (77). A metalanguage is ‘a tool kit for working on semiotic activities’ (77) such as picturebooks, applied flexibly and creatively to serve authors’ purposes and intentions.
Design work is inherently multimodal. Modes refer to historical, social, and cultural sign systems that are available for making and representing meaning, including speech, writing, still and moving images, gestures, music. Each mode has affordances, or ‘what it is possible to express and represent readily, easily, with a mode’ (Jewitt and Kress, 2003: 14), based on its material features (such as writing and drawing tools in two-dimensional space across pages for picturebooks) and on the social and cultural history of that mode. Each mode enables a system of signs – ‘the fusions of meaning and form’ (10) – that are used purposefully within a specific sociocultural context, and in their use, signs are transformed or newly made.
Kress (2003) defines texts as the products of social action. Composing is a more apt term than writing to describe the process of creating a text using one or more modes of expression, as it avoids valuing writing over other modes. Composing, then, is the deliberate use of signs, using specific modes and media, to generate meaning for what the sign-maker intends to represent of the world. A more apt term for this deliberate composing process is design work, or ‘how people make use of the resources that are available at a given moment in a specific communicational environment to realize their interests as makers of a message/text’ (Jewitt and Kress, 2003: 17). Through this deliberate act, the sign-maker’s potential for meaning is changed. ‘That change to a person’s inner resource, both through representation to the outer world and through representation to their inner world, can be thought of as learning’ (13). Our picturebook work with our second-grade students raises the following question: ‘how does learning happen differently or in the same way when we engage with “knowledge” – or the world much more generally – through “different modes?”’ (4). Jewitt and Kress indicate that analysis of the sign-maker’s use of signs reveals ‘the learning engaged in by the maker-of-the-sign-as-learner’ (12).
Picturebooks are a particularly powerful form of semiotic representation. Sipe (1998) explained a synergy of words and pictures. By synergy, Sipe means that ‘the total effect depends not only on the union of the text and illustrations but also on the perceived interactions and transactions between these two parts’ (98–99) and is greater than either the text or illustrations alone. To emphasize this synergy, Sipe blends the words as picturebooks (2001). Picturebooks are multimodal because they include three primary modes for constructing meaning: visual images, design elements (e.g. layout, typography, colour), and written language. Sipe (1998) explains that, because of the multimodal construction of picturebooks, the reader oscillates between the visual, textual, and design elements ‘in a potentially endless process’ (106) of meaning making. As students designed their own picturebooks, influenced by Kevin Henkes’s work, we anticipated oscillation of narrative expression in their multimodal constructions.
Review of the literature
Narrative understanding
Because we wanted second graders to write narratives, it was imperative that they develop narrative understanding. Paris and Paris (2003) assert: ‘narrative competence may be a general feature of children’s thinking that is critical for early literacy and cognitive development’ (66). Narrative understanding is the ability to represent a series of events, using story grammar of setting, characters, initiating event, problem, solution, and resolution, in a spatiotemporal coherent fashion (Engel, 1995; Hughes et al., 1997). Conceptually, narrative understanding includes elements of both macrostructure (i.e. global features, such as the ability to organize causal events to follow traditional story structure) and microstructure (i.e. specific features of the language used to convey ideas, including use of decontextualized language and grammatical complexity). Narrative understanding indicates not only a sense of story organization (Roth, 2000), but also facility with representation (Harris and Schroeder, 2012). Based in Bruner, Lysaker (2019) describes young children’s development of social and narrative imagination, instances when they connect with characters’ inner worlds of thoughts, feelings, intentions, and beliefs (67). In these instances, children express a ‘deep dialogicality within the text world’. They ‘achieve a sense of sharedness or cobeing with the people and places of the vicarious social world of the text’, an enacted intersubjectivity (68).
Pantaleo (2016a) reminds us: ‘Any consideration of the structural frameworks of written and oral narratives must be historically, socially, and culturally contextualized’ (238). Academic settings such as schools privilege temporal coherence of traditional (i.e. European) story structure ‘that matches some sequence of events in the real world’ (McCabe, 1997: 456). We knew this academic privileging would not match the sociocultural backgrounds of all our students, potentially affecting their interactions and academic success. Our awareness then influenced our unit planning. For example, we made sure to accommodate language needs and provide explicit demonstrations with uninterrupted time for enquiry into mentor texts. We established supportive sociocultural environments, such as flexible seating, peer and small group collaborative structures, and easy access to composing resources, materials, and tools, as our students made sense of this work in their interactions.
Children as interpreters and picturebook makers
Researchers and teachers who gave young children opportunities to compose multimodal picturebooks demonstrate how children became agentive interpreters of texts and gained expansive ways to express narrative ideas to evoke personal themes and histories in authentic ways (Maderazo et al., 2010; Martens et al., 2012; Zapata et al., 2015). They also show how teachers guided students with an enquiry stance, exploring the what, how, and why of authors’ craft moves across modes within picturebooks (Maderazo et al., 2010; Martens et al., 2012; Pantaleo, 2016a, 2016b). By developing metalinguistic awareness of what picturebook makers do, children became creators rather than ‘reproducers of common beliefs of texts and literacy’ (Martens et al., 2012: 293). Our study contributes to this work by showing these possibilities for author studies, such as our study of Kevin Henkes with our second grade students.
In studying young children’s composing, Harste et al. (1984) and Kress (1997) showed that their use of signs across modes for representation and communication are motivated and intentional within their specific social and cultural contexts. To understand young children’s representational intentions, Harste et al. (1984), Kress (1997), and Kesler (2020) advocate dialogic social semiotic interaction, attending to their gaze, gestures, body motions, speech, and sign making about their compositions. This informed our analysis of children’s intentions for their design decisions in their picturebooks.
Researchers have shown how children’s narrative understandings expand significantly when they learn to interpret pictures and design, as well as writing, in picturebooks (Arizpe and Styles, 2016; Serafini, 2012; Sipe, 2008). Arizpe and Styles (2016) draw a number of conclusions that are relevant to our study. One is that teachers and students need substantial time to immerse themselves in texts they are exploring for interpretation to occur. Second, visual components are access points for reluctant or striving readers that subsequently develop their reading skills. Third, discussion of texts, with the teacher or among peers, supports children’s comprehension of these texts. Fourth is the importance of teachers to provide a metalanguage of visual and design features of multimodal texts. Fifth, as students apply metalanguage to realize the oscillation of words and pictures (Sipe, 2008), they develop an understanding of how picturebooks work to tell a complete story. They are positioned as more agentive constructors of meaning (Serafini, 2012).
Study context
We work in a state early childhood school (grades preK through 3) in a large urban area in the northeast. The school serves the local community. The school population is 87% Asian, 1% Black, 8% Hispanic or Latinx, and 2% White. Fifty-nine per cent of students are English language learners, and 11% are students with special needs. The school serves a predominantly immigrant and economically-disadvantaged population (67% free or reduced-price lunch). Seventy-eight per cent of families are Chinese immigrants. Mandarin is the predominant language in the home. Fifty-five per cent of students are emergent English learners, and 20% speak two or more languages other than English.
Four of us (the team) are experienced, general education second grade teachers, and White, cis-gendered women, with an average of 12.5 years as lead teachers. Table 1 shows our years of experience, class sizes and demographics at the time of this study (N = 90). Yvonne had a paraprofessional to serve one student with learning dis/abilities at the time of this study. The first author is a White, cis-gendered man, who also is an associate professor at the local college. None of us speak other languages.
Second-grade class demographics.
Our Kevin Henkes study
Prior to this redesigned unit, we conducted a KH author study for several years. Writing workshop educators have articulated valuable purposes for author study with children: it teaches children an author’s writing process; it enables children to develop intertextual analysis to perceive an author’s characteristic style; by perceiving an author’s style, students learn an author’s craft; it sparks ideas for children’s own writing; it inspires students to develop identities as authors themselves (Graves, 1983; Harwayne, 1992; Hindley, 1996). We believe Kevin Henkes is a particularly good choice for our second graders. He writes engaging stories using traditional story structure. Many of his books feature animal characters, predominantly mice, who act and have problems similar to the developmental level of second graders. Moreover, he writes at a text difficulty level that is accessible to most of our students, and we have many strategies for supporting students for whom these texts might be challenging. He uses a wide variety of craft moves that we believe are clear and attainable for our students. On a practical level, we are able to attain multiple copies of his books through our school purchasing system.
While details of our unit plans are beyond the scope of this paper (see Kesler, under review), here we highlight a few ways we valued design and turned writing workshop into composing workshop. Consistent with author and picturebook studies with children (Hindley, 1996; Maderazo et al., 2010; Martens et al., 2012; Pantaleo, 2016a, 2016b; Zapata et al., 2015), we emphasized an enquiry stance. First, we immersed our students in KH’s picturebooks, making sure our students paid attention to his craft of art and design as much as his writing. We gave a balance of minilessons focusing on elements of art and design principles, making sure they learned ‘what the writing conveyed, how [Kevin Henkes] employed text and image to create meaning, and why the text and images moved us as readers’ (Dawes et al., 2019: 164). Consequently, the children learned ‘a disposition towards enquiry’ in addition to the craft of picturebook making. For example, we would ask, ‘How does Kevin Henkes show character emotions?’ Students would notice facial expressions, such as the shape of characters’ eyes or eyebrows, the shape of mouths, and body positions. We taught them peritextual elements such as the dedication, title page, and About the Author.
In our multiliteracies pedagogy, we explored the following elements of art and design in KH’s picturebooks: layout, details in drawings, speech bubbles and labels, colour, use of lines, framing, patterns, balance, movement, proportion, creative use of typography, and perspective. We also explored craft moves that often oscillated between words and pictures, such as his use of ellipses, repetition, show not tell, vivid verbs and ‘sparkly language’, ways of showing elapsed time, sound words (onomatopoeia), magic rule of three (showing three examples of behaviour), comeback lines (e.g. ‘Wemberley worried. She worried and worried and worried.’), and ending with a twist. We made sure our anchor charts, checklists, and rubrics equally valued both writing and design. For example, we gave children a checklist of art elements to search for in KH’s books, with space to add new ones. Consistent with advice from writing workshop educators, we made sure copies of his books were on display and accessible for students’ investigation and application during workshop time. We encouraged them to explore the books alone, in dyads, in small groups, and be influenced by his composing decisions.
We put blank 11.5 × 17″ paper in the writing centre that children folded in half to draft their picturebooks. We provided various sized strips of blank white paper for writing. We also cut out many blank frames, consistent with the range of framing Kevin Henkes uses, such as ovals, small and large squares, rectangles, circles, and put out sticky putty at tables. We taught children to use sticky putty on the back of their writing strips and illustrations, so they could move them around on their pages as they designed their picturebooks, exploring layout and typography choices that they noticed in KH picturebooks. For their final products, we invited children to ‘glue them down’, which gave permanence to their design decisions. Children also had access to drawing supplies, such as markers, coloured pencils, crayons. During composing workshop, children were free to compose: to ‘use your time wisely’ to draw, write, design, discuss their stories as we conferred one-on-one, with dyads, or small groups to support their work.
Methodology
Prior to the KH study, we met to redesign the unit, from May to December (approximately five sessions, 1.5 hours each), by weaving in design-based elements. Implementation of the unit of study was six weeks, from February to mid-March. Ted had 12 visits during the six-week study (two visits per week) during composing workshop in each class. Each workshop session lasted for 50 minutes. He functioned predominantly as an observer during these sessions, but also had informal discussions with teachers and students during observations. After the study, we had a 45-minute grade group reflective discussion of what went well, what was challenging, what students learned and how we know, and revisions to the unit. Using purposeful sampling (Merriam and Tisdell, 2016), each team member chose three students who represented the range of students in our classes, based on reading and writing levels and English proficiency, but who also were extroverted in their personalities, with a balance of boys and girls, to meet with Ted for retrospective accounts of their final product, and discussion of what they learned in this study. From one class, we chose four students, for a total of 13 students. Each one-on-one session averaged 20 minutes per student.
Documentation of classroom artefacts included anchor charts, all checklists and rubrics that teachers used with students, in addition to the teachers’ plans. Students’ folders had their story maps, drafting books, checklists, self-evaluations and reflections of their work, along with their final picturebooks. At the end of the study, the team applied our own rubric (out of 4 points) for each student (see https://tinyurl.com/y2fytebx for rubric), then posted on a spreadsheet for the following categories that reflected macro- and micro-narrative understandings and social participation: meaning, structure, voice, writing conventions, sentence fluency, presentation (writing), presentation (pictures and design), sharing.
Data analysis
Beyond the team’s scoring, Ted then conducted content analysis of all students’ published picturebooks for design and writing craft that we explicitly taught in the unit. ‘Content analysis is the method of making inferences from texts and making sense of these interpretations in a context surrounding the text’ (Hoffman et al., 2011: 30). Analysis included various measures, as appropriate, depending on craft elements. We defined craft elements as those that appeared in students’ writing, if their stories had been written in prose form; design elements were those that appeared as a result of working in picturebook format. A rubric (out of 4) worked best for dialogue and for the following design elements: layout, typography, drawing details, and speech bubbles and labels (see https://tinyurl.com/yydmxq64 for rubric). A frequency count worked best for students’ use of ellipses, sound words, show, not tell, double adjectives, time words, ‘sparkly language’ and vivid verbs, as these were craft elements we expected students to use throughout their stories. Finally, Yes/No worked best to notice the magic rule of 3, repeated language (to enhance the central character trait), comeback lines, and ending with a twist. These were craft elements that we wanted students to use infrequently, but somewhere in their stories.
Ted counted each student’s total number of pages (not counting the cover, title page, or dedication page) and total number of illustrations. Only the story writing in the body (not the writing within illustrations) was transcribed to determine a count of total T-units (a main clause, including subordinate clauses or nonclausal elements, which were predominantly sentences), words, and clauses, and words per sentence, clauses per sentence, and words per clause ratio (Beers and Nagy, 2011). Beers and Nagy explain, ‘Certain syntactic structures, such as subordinate clauses, relative clauses, and complex noun phrases allow writers to express more complex ideas’ (184), and the best measures of this complexity are higher scores in words per clause, words per sentence, and clauses per sentence, which increases with age. These data were kept in the same spreadsheet the teachers used for continuity. Mean scores and percentages were tabulated for all these compositional elements to provide an overview of how all participating students did (N = 80).
Ted did two layers of analysis for the 13 students. First, he transcribed videorecordings of their retrospective accounts. To reveal dialogic, social semiotic interactions (Kesler, 2020; Kress, 1997), transcription included notation of voice inflections, deictic gestures to their own or KH books, body movements, overlapping speech, interruptions, and actions, which facilitated interpretations of their design work. Transcripts were demarcated by picturebook parts (i.e., cover, title page, openings). (See Appendix for transcription conventions.) Units of analysis were compositional elements of their picturebooks, coupled with hand gestures and gaze, and utterances, bound by a single focus, which ranged from single phrases to exchanges of several turns. Ted conducted constant comparison (Merriam and Tisdell, 2016) for inductive and deductive analysis, with recursive coding passes through the data, checking for consistency.
Ted then tabulated codes for each student, and coalesced codes into four superordinate categories: sociocultural, narrative understandings, authorship and craft. Sociocultural codes indicated social and cultural influences on children’s decision-making as authors. Sociocultural had five codes: influence of others, cultural influence, social imagination, audience, writing community. Codes in ‘narrative understandings’ indicated children’s awareness of key story elements in their composing decisions. Narrative understandings had the following codes: character, plot, setting, thematic. Particularly pertinent for ‘authorship’ was authority, or instances when children, in their retrospective accounts, clearly stated deliberate composing decisions, often with phrases such as, ‘I wanted …’ ‘I decided …’ ‘It made more sense if I …’ Authorship codes were: character, format (drawing, design, layout, title), writing process (drafting, revising, editing decisions). Finally, ‘craft’ codes addressed children’s explicit references to KH craft moves in their own picturebooks. Craft included: design and layout, character, and plot. Intentions for codes such as character, plot, design and layout helped to distinguish categories. For example, authoritative statements helped distinguish character codes in ‘authorship’ from character codes in ‘narrative understandings’. A second layer of analysis was content analysis of design features in their books. These elements of design emerged from what one or more of the students explicitly referred to in their retrospective accounts.
Findings
We first present Tables 2 to 4 that show 80 students’ scores for various measures of narrative text features (Table 2), narrative production (Table 3), and writing craft moves they used that we explicitly taught (Table 4). In Table 5, we then present design features that were present in 13 students’ picturebooks, and Table 6 summarizes the categories and codes of analysis of their retrospective accounts. We then present two in-depth examples, from Henry and Andrew (pseudonyms), that articulate layered analysis and our coding in Table 6. We apply the grammar of visual design (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2006) to highlight some salient features in their illustrations. We also show the dialogic, social semiotic interactions (Kesler, 2020; Kress, 1997) between Ted and each child, with the intention of showing the synergy of words, pictures, and design as children express their narrative understandings in their multimodal picturebooks.
Average scores of text and design features across four classes.
N = 80.
aRubric available at https://tinyurl.com/y2fytebx.
bOut of 4.
cRubric available at https://tinyurl.com/yydmxq64.
Average scores of pages, illustrations, and writing production across four classes.
aPer student.
N = 80.
Craft scores across four classes.
N = 80.
Design features, 13 students.
Narrative understandings, 13 students.
Total codes: 620; 66% of codes for design.
Overview of students’ narrative features
Tables 2 to 4 present descriptive statistics that provide an overview of all 80 students’ use of narrative features in their picturebooks. Table 2 shows that students met expectations (a score of 3 out of 4) on most text and design features. Their scores were below expectations for typography and dialogue. We reasoned that dialogue was counter-balanced in their picturebooks by their use of speech bubbles and labels. In our group reflections, we discussed ways to encourage more typographical work by children in the future. Table 3 shows total number of pages and illustrations, and total number of sentences, words, and clauses results. Moreover, like dialogue scores, these scores are also conservative because they only consider words in the body of their stories, not words in speech bubbles and labels. Table 4 summarizes writing craft moves they used that we explicitly taught. For craft moves with frequency counts, on average, except for double adjectives, students used all of them more than once, and sparkly words and vivid verbs occurred frequently in their stories. Here is one example from Andrew’s story, ‘The Missing Bone’, about a dog named Michael who loses his favorite bone while playing at break, that we discuss below: ‘Michael run [sic] quickly to his friend Frank and yell [sic], “I can’t find my bone!”’ We counted his choice of run and yell as vivid verbs, and his adverb quickly as sparkly language. Table 4 also shows that the majority of children used all the Yes/No craft moves we taught, especially repeating the central character trait. For example, Andrew repeats several ways in which Michael is playful (and therefore not careful with his things). Overall, these results show that our attention to design did not compromise the length and complexity of their written production. Their picturebooks expressed both macrostructural and microstructural components of narrative understandings.
Table 5 shows design features that the 13 selected students used in their books, with the number of students who explicitly made reference to each design feature in their retrospective accounts indicated in parentheses. For example, early in Andrew’s story, just before the problem arises, he wrote, ‘Later that day …’ all alone on the verso side of the third opening. Andrew explained, ‘I write {this letter BIG} {sweeps p. 4 with his hand} ’cause it’s very SCARY and the, the, the character thinks something INTERESTING is gonna happen next’ (see Appendix for transcription conventions). In this utterance, Andrew both explained why he used a large font and ellipses to build suspense. Table 6 shows frequency counts for each code of four categories that emerged from constant comparison of their retrospective accounts. Parentheses indicate how many of the total codes occurred within design elements, rather than the body of writing. Therefore, from a total of 620 codes, 66% arose within design elements. These descriptive statistics and coding will be illuminated in the next section of Findings as we analyze two openings from two students’ picturebooks.
Messy John
Henry is bilingual in English and Mandarin. He was born and raised in the United States. Only his mother attends parent/teacher conferences. He was one of the strongest readers and writers in his class (level 4 in writing, and levels O-P, DRA 36 in reading). However, he rarely goes beyond expectations in all subjects and is often disruptive to other children because he finishes his work quickly. The characters in Henry’s story are bunnies. In Henry’s story, John is very messy and always losing things. However, John is so messy, that he can’t find his magic supplies before the big show. Figure 1 shows the fifth opening (pp. 9–10), when Henry’s brother recommends that John clean his room. Then John finds his magic supplies, does great in the big magic show, and learns to never be messy again.
Full-page spread, Messy John.
Henry reads to the middle of p. 9 when Ted asks if that is the first time he brings up a brother in the story. Henry nods yes. (50) Ted: Is that an OLDER brother? [‘Yes.’] Do you have an older brother? [Nods NO.] Oh. Okay. Go ahead. (51) Henry: I have cousins. (52) Ted: Oh, older cousins. [Nods yes.] Go ahead.
This was coded as sociocultural: social imagination for writing, as Henry imagined an older brother for John, and the kind of interactions they might have, based on his own experiences with older cousins, and as an older brother to his younger sister.
It is only the pictures that show John’s messy room and then how neatly he organized it when he took his older brother’s advice. For example, in the bottom picture, the green juggling balls are now neatly stacked next to John’s magic hat (that is perched on a blue cube), and his magic wand. The blue squares at the top are windows, showing daylight coming through. It is also only in the picture that we infer that John’s brother is older by showing the two bunnies’ relative heights. While John’s older brother is smiling in both illustrations, John is frowning in the top picture and smiling in the bottom picture. His thought bubble in the top picture emphasizes his main worry, ‘Where’s my magic supplies?’ and his speech bubble in the bottom picture shows his relief, ‘Finally.’ Both illustrations show narrative understandings in design for elaboration of setting and character, as Henry depicted John’s emotional change. This emotional change is reinforced in John’s dialogue: ‘Yay! Now I can go to the magic show! Yay!’ Also noteworthy in the design is Henry’s choice of two equal sized rectangular frames to show John’s room ‘before’ and ‘after’ at the top and bottom of p. 9, giving them equal value. This framing puts our focus on the details of changes John made to his bedroom that ultimately transformed his behaviour. The eye level gaze at a public distance of both characters lets us also appreciate their emotional state.
As Henry reads aloud the top of p. 10, he reads ‘ (53) Ted: Oh, wait. So, {you underlined great} {I point to it} there. So, why did you do THAT? (54) Henry: Because he had a great time at the show.
This was coded as narrative understanding, because Henry used a special font to show John’s emotional response.
As on p. 9, the illustration elaborates the setting, showing the viewer the building where the ‘City Magic Show’ occurred, and that it was a sunny day. From the car, we infer that at least one of John’s parents drove him. Henry again uses the same size rectangular frame, that focuses viewers on the salient features of this scene: John at the magic show, smiling, which reinforces his confidence. As on p. 9, the eye level gaze at a public distance lets us also take in the scene and imagine John’s
At the bottom of the page, Henry uses a three-panel strip. His writing organizes the illustrations in columns. This was a design decision for a craft move we taught children called ‘The Magic Rule of 3’. We noticed that Kevin Henkes (and other authors/illustrators) often give three examples of a behaviour or character trait. Here, Henry gives equal weight to three ways that John showed his transformed behaviour of now being neat and organized. Consistent with Henry’s use of blue squares in the top half of interior spaces, we infer morning in the first panel. Each illustration provides setting details that elaborate the writing. In the speech bubbles of the third panel, John’s father says, ‘Get your books,’ and John responds, ‘OK.’ Henry’s design of his writing in columns makes clear three distinct behaviours that John now practises. His design then reinforces writing, showing narrative understanding of plot. (55) Ted: {Why did you write it like this, in three panels?} {I point out his layout on bottom of p. 9}. (56) Henry: To show that time is passing. (57) Ted: And that with each PART, he’s able to find his THINGS? [Nods yes.] With each activity? [Nods again.] Okay.
Henry again depicts each scene of John at eye level from a public distance. The tight framing focuses John in each setting, and from his smile, we infer that John is generally happy with his changed behaviour.
Also noteworthy is Henry’s control of elapsed time in his writing, another craft move we studied in KH’s work. In this opening, in addition to the more typical then (p. 9), on p. 10, Henry uses ‘Later in the morning …’ ‘After the magic show …’ ‘And after that …’ Henry’s repetition of ‘This time …’ for his ‘magic rule of 3’ craft move gives balance to the three panels, oscillating with Henry’s design and illustrations to reinforce the change in John’s personality.
The Missing Bone!
At the time of this study, Andrew was an English as a New Language student, arriving in the United States in the summer prior to kindergarten. His primary language is Mandarin. At parent–teacher conferences, a translator is provided for Andrew’s parents. Andrew was performing at grade level in writing (level 3) and above grade level in reading (level N and DRA 30). The characters in Andrew’s story are dogs with human qualities, consistent with KH’s stories. In Andrew’s story, Michael’s best friend Frank helps him find his missing bone. Figure 2 shows the fourth opening, when the central problem of Michael’s missing bone arises.
Full-page spread, The Missing Bone.
(62) Andrew: On this page, {like, his pocket} {sweeps over writing}, {his bone fall off of his pocket, but he didn’t know}{sweeps over picture and words}{but his friends are on line, so he quickly run on the line}{continues sweeping over the page} And {then} {points to the large then … at bottom of page}, he reach for his pocket because he wants to take his bone to show his friend that time, and {THEN}{sweeps over this word again}, his bone wasn’t {and he sees it’s GONE}{sweeps to p. 7}.
(63) Ted: {So then, you made}{I point to the word on p. 6} then really big with the ellipses.
(64) Andrew: {Because THEN} {sweeps over word with his hand}, I want the reader to be like excited, gonna be like very SCARED and worried about what’s gonna happen next.
(65) Ted: Oh, so, like, you’re making us wait for it [‘Yeah.’] Wait for it, wait for it.
In this exchange, as he had expressed previously, Andrew stated how he used font size and ellipses purposely to build suspense for the reader. This was coded in two ways. First, he shows sociocultural awareness of audience for this craft move. Second, he shows narrative understanding of plot structure: the central problem is exactly the point in the plot when an author wants to build suspense for the reader. These codes showed up in his writing. (66) Andrew: And I write THESE (the words on p. 7) because he’s yelling. {And dese, dese} {he sweeps over bottom sentence} it’s how he FEEL. (67) Ted: So, here, [I point to character in corner of picture on p. 6], who’s this, Mr. (68) Andrew: Jiang, but I didn’t really add him to the story. (69) Ted: Is that a TEACHER? [‘Yeah’.] {And then}{I gesture towards other characters in picture.} (70) Andrew: {And this is his friend Mike and his friend Frank}{he points to each one}. {And Michael’s right here, picking his pocket}{he points to Michael}. (71) Ted: {and what are these LINES?} {I point to the lines in the drawing.} (72) Andrew: {FAST motions} {He points to lines in the drawing}. {Like when they run very fast and go on line} {points to lines}, {like HE’s like running} {points to Frank}. (73) Ted: {What is this?} {I point to the question mark/thought bubble.} (74) Andrew: It’s a THINK bubble, because he’s putting his pocket and trying to reach for his BONE. (75) Ted: Oh, RIGHT, so that’s like when you’re missing something, you’re thinking: ‘What happened to it?!’ Is that what you’re showing? (76) Andrew: Yeah, he’s first feeling his pocket, and then thinking, ‘I dunno’. (77) Ted: {So, then, is this like a CLOSE UP} {I now point to picture on p. 7} {of THAT?} {I point back to p. 6.} [‘Yeah’.] Why did you ZOOM in like that? (78) Andrew: Because I want the reader to see how he looks like. (79) Ted: {And why did you make his mouth all SWIRLY like that?} {I point to his mouth.} (80) Andrew: ‘Cause he’s SCARED. Because I don’t wanna make his mouth just like NORMAL, I mean like he’s NOT scared. (81) Ted: Yes, so you wanted to show that he’s (82) Andrew: scared. {And even like his, right here} {he points to the eyebrows}. (83) Ted: His eyebrows. [‘Yeah’.] Oh, are going UP crooked to show that he’s, um (84) Andrew: SCARED. (85) Ted: Alright. And that’s why you did {all this [‘Yeah’] different sized FONT?} {I point to the print on p. 7.} [‘Yeah’.] Okay.
Discussion
Content analysis of students’ finished picturebooks and analysis of their retrospective accounts using constant comparison provided evidence of their intentional use of design, and how design, coupled with writing, contributed to their overall narrative understandings. Among all 80 picturebooks, robust design work was evident in students’ scores for presentation for pictures and design, layout, drawing details, and speech bubbles and labels. They showed commitment to telling their stories in picturebook form with mean scores of 11.5 pages, excluding title page, dedication, and About the Author, and 18 illustrations. Among 13 students, Table 5 especially shows their range of design features and how many were explicitly stated. Finally, as Table 6 shows, out of 620 codes, 66% appeared in design. Henry’s and Andrew’s excerpts showed their oscillation across words, illustrations, and design elements, creating a synergy of narrative understanding that was greater than the sum of each part (Sipe, 1998).
The data also show that our attention to design did not detract from students’ writing. This was evident in their scores on writing craft moves (Table 4), and calculation of total words, sentences, clauses, and words/sentence, clauses/sentence, and words/clause ratios (Table 3). This was the balance we aimed for in the design of this unit, heeding the advice: ‘Students deserve to develop as communicators who are able to express themselves both through writing and through multimodal composing (which may include writing as one mode in combination with other modes)’ (Dalton, 2020: 167).
Description of coding in excerpts of Henry’s and Andrew’s retrospective accounts shows how they and the other 11 selected students internalized a metalanguage of narrative understandings. Students were able to describe meaning in both textual and visual, ‘as well as the multimodal relations between the different meaning-making processes’ (New London Group, 1996: 77). Their excerpts showed a synergy of words and design elements to enhance, elaborate, and reinforce story elements. For example, we saw Henry’s balanced use of equal rectangular frames on the verso of his opening to show John’s before and after of his bedroom, with adept use of thought and speech bubbles to convey John’s emotions. We saw Andrew’s manipulation of font sizes and ellipses, coupled with his close-up of Michael’s face, with his squiggly mouth and sharp, upturned eyebrows to express his panic at losing his bone. They gave attention to macro- and microstructural features, such as show, not tell, dialogue, speech and thought bubbles, elapsed time, changes in font, but also motion lines, setting details, drawing details, such as design of Michael’s shirt, all to develop story elements. Their metalanguage was flexible and open ended, ‘a tool kit for working on semiotic activities’, including ‘fuzzy-edged, overlapping concepts’ (77). It was generative because, by its nature, it was ‘shifting, provisional, unsure, and relative’ and particular to our contexts and purposes of analysis (77). Henry’s and Andrew’s excerpts are examples of how ‘designing always involves the transformation of Available Designs; it always involves making new use of old materials’ (76): in our study, how our students made new use of KH craft moves, such as Henry’s use of three panels to show John’s transformed behaviour.
Their narrative understandings were supported in the sociocultural contexts of our writing communities. This was evident in sociocultural codes (see Table 6). For example, Andrew’s main character, Michael, is the name of his older brother, who was in third grade, and who Andrew adores. Other characters were named after Andrew’s class friends. Their keen sense of audience arose from our culture of sharing, interaction, peer, one-on-one, and small group conferencing. Our immersion into KH books made craft moves explicit and achievable to our students, as evidenced in their intentional use of all the writing and design craft moves we taught. Our pedagogy emphasized an enquiry stance, teaching as enquiry, and approaching our students as curriculum informants and collaborators (Dawes et al., 2019; Hindley, 1996; Maderazo et al., 2010; Martens et al., 2012; Pantaleo, 2016a). For example, students redesigned KH craft moves we never taught, that then became popular moves in our classrooms. We enabled our students to use ‘the affordances of the complementary modes to ease the semantic load that has been placed on written language’ (Cope and Kalantzis, 2009: 182). Within our communities of practice, the multimodal affordances we provided in our composing workshops were particularly supportive of our emergent bi- and multilingual students, such as Andrew, who comprised more than one third of our classes (Table 1).
Conclusions
Our study contributes to studies that report positive outcomes of infusing multimodal work within reading and writing processes and workshops (e.g. Dawes et al., 2019; Maderazo et al., 2010; Martens et al., 2012; Pantaleo, 2016a, 2016b; Zapata et al., 2015), for author studies using mentor texts (e.g. Graves, 1983; Harwayne, 1992; Hindley, 1996; Laminack, 2017). We showed the value of enabling students to express their narrative understandings across multiple sign systems (Arizpe and Styles, 2016; Harste et al., 1984; Kress, 1997). Emergent English language users especially need consistent opportunities to develop multimodal repertoires to generate meaning (Bengochea et al., 2018; Kenner and Kress, 2003). Many more classroom-based studies are needed, particularly with emergent bi- and multilingual populations, such as ours. For example, how do they coordinate their language repertoires with their use of other modal resources to facilitate design work? What are the specifics of multiliteracies pedagogy that support their acquisition of design metalanguage to achieve academic intentions? We also wonder how children might respond to authors with cultural backgrounds similar to theirs, who use narrative structures that ‘conform to the structure of the kind of stories they have heard at home’ (McCabe, 1997: 463).
Transforming writing workshop into composing workshop was a risky business. Even though we work in a progressive state school, our administration had trepidations about our intentions. They worried about how attention to design would compromise children’s writing production and if our students would then meet narrative writing standards. Dalton (2020) discusses the mismatch between state and federal standards, that retain verbocentric emphasis, and what we know is most supportive of children’s learning and engagement. We therefore had to revise our lessons and workshop structures and assessments to equally value illustrations and design. We had to devise assessments that assumed all students’ meaning-making intentions, regardless of English language proficiency, within and across all modes of expression, towards narrative understandings. We are fortunate to work in a school where the administration trusts us to do this level of pedagogy by design. We hope the positive outcomes in our study will encourage more teacher teams to take these transformational risks.
Supplemental Material
sj-pdf-1-ecl-10.1177_1468798421995527 - Supplemental material for Designing on the page: Composing picturebooks in a Kevin Henkes author study
Supplemental material, sj-pdf-1-ecl-10.1177_1468798421995527 for Designing on the page: Composing picturebooks in a Kevin Henkes author study by Ted Kesler, Karen Darrell, Yvonne Moss, Jessica Pasternak and Angela Valco in Journal of Early Childhood Literacy
Footnotes
References
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