Exploring Grade 7 Students’ Responses to Shaun Tan’s The Red Tree

Abstract

As art objects, picturebooks have the potential to contribute to readers’ aesthetic development. Many scholars and practitioners have recognized how using picturebooks with older students can augment their reading motivation and extend their understanding of visual elements of art and design, as well as develop their literacy, language, and thinking skills. The Red Tree (Tan, 2001) was one of the picturebooks used during two multifaceted, classroom-based research projects with Grade 7 students. The studies explored how the students responded to and interpreted picturebooks and graphic novels with metafictive devices, and examined how the students transferred their knowledge and understanding of various literary and art elements when creating their own multimodal print texts. Overall, the content analysis of the students’ written responses to The Red Tree revealed an adoption of an “aesthetic attitude” (Doonan, Looking at Pictures in Picture Books, 1993, p. 11) towards the picturebook. The students’ responses reflected how they positioned themselves as active readers who looked closely at Tan’s sophisticated and metaphorical paintings, and who embraced a co-authoring role as they interpreted the emotional landscapes and textual fragments in the picturebook. The article concludes with a discussion of several pedagogical issues associated with using picturebooks in middle years’ classrooms.