The Picturebook Project: Addressing Tensions in a Micro/Ethnographically Informed Case Study

• In Event: Aspects of Learning Cultures: A Dialogic Approach to Meta-Ethnography of Learning and Teaching

Abstract

Purpose
Numerous recent picturebooks engender literacy practices that welcome innovation and exploration of their multimodal design affordances—perceivable action possibilities. These titles promote reader responses that deviate from learning standards that potentially undervalue social constructivism and privilege print-centric texts as imparter of authoritative meaning. Instead, an "aesthetic impulse" prevails among these elementary-aged readers’ idiosyncratic and multifaceted responses to a collection of these picturebooks (Sipe, 2008). Varied meanings arise from their transactions within a particular sociocultural context, that is, in an informal, out-of-school, urban setting—a subsidized summer program at a community center in a major Mid-Atlantic metropolitan area. Of significance to educational research, this presentation will focus on the adaptability of ethnographically informed methodological design while conducting The Picturebook Project. Specifically, the presentation will discuss the apparent need to relationally foreground the sociocultural concatenation of materialities, tools and spaces, and participants’ voices in the knowledge production of this literacy community (Nespor & Groenke, 2009; Rowe, 2010).

Theoretical Perspective
To situate this educational case study within a particular sociocultural context’s existing literacy practices, interpretations borrow from reader response theory (Rosenblatt, 1978), New Literacy Studies (Street, 1993), affordance theory (Gibson, 1979; Norman, 2002), theories on play and learning (Sutton-Smith, 2001; Vygotsky, 1978), metafiction (Waugh, 1984), and postmodern picturebook theory (Allan, 2012; Sipe & Pantaleo, 2008).

Data Sources and Methods
To position child participants’ agencies as co-constructors of meaning requires a framework for listening rather than information gathering. Borrowing from the mosaic approach to data collection (Clark & Moss, 2015), child participants become the primary knowledge producers. To enhance trustworthiness and contribute to an understanding of these reading experiences, data sources include field notes, photographic documentation, interviews, physical artifacts, observations of The Picturebook Project’s ten sessions, and visitors’ written feedback to the culminating art and literacy exhibit (Patton, 1990; Yin, 2003). Unlike classroom ethnography (Bloome, 2012), The Picturebook Project applies a microethnographic approach to child participant’s transactions with picturebooks. Particularizing their multimodal communicative dimensions from audio and video recordings during each session alongside these data sources constructs vignettes that inscribe intention within a particular sociocultural context (Streeck & Mehus, 2005; Holloway, 1997). Representing thick description (Denizen, 1989; Ponterotto, 2006), these vignettes shed light on the multimodal nature of child participant’s aesthetic responses to shared readings of metapicturebooks.

Results
Although preliminary findings indicate The Picturebook Project not only opportunes knowledge construction about visual design affordances, but also influences literacy learning as a social practice, this presentation addresses methodological tensions that arose, including: (1) balancing the role between facilitator and participant observer (Spradley, 1980); and (2) responsiveness to cultural materialities, e.g. child participant’s requests for additional “loose parts” to further inventiveness and creativity (Daly & Beloglovsky, 2015), community center’s space limitations, and potential participants’ sociospatial relations to The Picturebook Project.

Scholarly Significance
This study furthers Sipe’s (2008) grounded theoretical findings on aesthetic impulse that celebrate the freedom of a picturebook’s interpretive possibilities within informal learning spaces. Methodologically, the study provides means to support ethnographic approaches to interventions and informal settings.

Author

• Laura Anne Hudock, The Pennsylvania State University - University Park