Exploring Grade 7 Students’ Written Responses to Shaun Tan’s The Arrival

Abstract

During two multifaceted, classroom-based research projects, Grade 7 students had opportunities to develop their understanding of metafictive devices and art and design elements by reading a selection of picturebooks and graphic novels. The students also had the opportunity to apply their knowledge and create their own multimodal print texts. This article focuses on The Arrival (Shaun Tan, 2006), one of the graphic novels used during the research, and explores the range of emotions that were expressed by the students in their written responses to Tan’s multimodal text. Excerpts from the students’ work are presented as exemplars of the range of negative and positive emotions evident in the written responses. Learning about various graphic novel conventions and art elements contributed to the students’ aesthetic transactions, as well as to their understanding of how representations can structure perception and interpretation.