Multimodality in Children's Literature: Engagement, Enlightenment, and Enabling through the Arts

Over the past two decades multimodality has become a frequently used word in the professional arena as educational forums call for more options beyond texts for students to express themselves and comprehend within varied disciplines. A concept whose history goes back to ancient times, multimodality brings to mind a diversity of meanings inclusive of the visual arts, music, dance, enactment, and in contemporary times, technology. When we shared the call for this issue of Bookbird, we were curious as to the different perceptions and experiences around multimodality that potential authors might offer through their scholarship. We realized they most likely shared the agreed-upon notion that the power of picturebooks lies in the "interdependence of pictures and words" (Bader), and that other communicative modes are often shared as a focus or within the narrative content of different genres, in both picture and chapter books.

Indeed, we received a variety of scholarly topics that extended understandings of multimodality in children's literature--topics reflective of the diversity of our Bookbird community and the scholars that inform them. We proudly share a celebration of these many ways of knowing reflected across the contents of this issue.

"Repackaging Chinese Culture through Diverse Visual Arts: A Multimodal Approach to Contemporary Chinese Picturebooks" by Xi Chen explores how early Chinese culture is repackaged in contemporary Chinese picturebooks through visual narratives with emphasis on multimodal representations of Chinese culture through three typical Chinese visual art forms: paper cutting, Chinese painting, and clay sculpture.

"Mismatched Yet Perfectly Puzzled": Collage and/as Black Girls' Literacies in Piecing Me Together" by Karly Marie Grice, Rachel L. Rickard Rebellino, and Caitlin Murphy examines Renée Watson's Piecing Me Together (2017) as a text that celebrates art and Black girls' literacies, in particular multimodality and criticality. Their analysis focuses on how Watson uses collage—the action, the artwork, and the conceptual metaphor—to address identity and history (re)making in the Black diaspora for Jade, her protagonist.

Although cooking may not be often considered a modality for communication, Roxanne Harde in "'The Flavors Mix Together Slowly': Cooking Connections in Picture-Cookbooks" explores picturebooks that offer stories about cooking, with a focus on the commensal connections these cookery narratives make between generations and communities. These picture-cookbook examples reveal the embeddedness of the narrative and the recipe, thus building community through connections within the text and among readers while communicating values, emotions, and unique cultural experiences.

A historiographical examination of the development of multimodality in Bengali children's literature is the focus of "A Revolution in Print: Multimodality in Bengali Children's Literature and Its Challenges" by Stella Chitralekha Biswas. Since the turn of the nineteenth century, technological and textual developments paved the way for cosmopolitanism as well as greater engagement of the target readership and the subtle reformation of child-rearing and pedagogic practices within the home. This article provides examples of key literature in this process.

"Who Came First, the Lion or the Bear? The Translation and Rendition of We're Going on a Bear Hunt into Spanish" by Catalina Millán-Scheiding addresses thirty years of commercial success of the book We're Going on a Bear Hunt (originally published in 1989) and considers it a contemporary example of a historical trend: the transformation of oral texts into publications. A textual analysis of the Spanish-published translation Vamos a Cazar un Oso and a musical analysis and qualitative survey of the use of Spanish in the oral rendition "Voy en Busca de un León" illustrate four different elements entailed in the translation of a children's rhyme.

The multimodal focus of this issue continues beyond the five featured articles as Hirak Bhattacharya gives insights about book creator Sukumar Ray in "Rethinking Sukumar Ray's Abol Tabol as a Multimodal Text," and Susan Corapi shares her students' reading engagement and responses in "Language Learning with the Novels of Thanhhà Lai." Two articles take readers to places where multimodal expressions abound: "A New Slovenly Peter World" by Antje Ehmann, translated by Myriam Halberstam, and "'Europe Illustrates the...