Abstract
Child-produced marginalia, annotations written or drawn in the margins of a text by a young reader, have been stigmatized as devaluing the book on which it was created and often dismissed as “graffiti.” Recent historical studies of marginalia created by older children, those who have mastered conventional writing and drawing, have challenged this notion by looking at extratextual annotations as a means to understanding children’s diverse uses of books as both intellectual and physical objects. However, pre-conventional scribbles on books by very young children have not been explored as artifacts of emergent literacy practices or reader response. Yet, scholarship in the fields of literacy education, art education, early childhood education and theories of place suggest that children can develop expectations for books in the first few years of life and that their earliest drawing experiences show evidence of intentionality. This reader response study draws from video data of three-year-old Elijah and his eighteen-month-old sister, Hannah, to explore the production, of pre-conventional marginalia in early childhood. The findings of this study suggest that toddlers and preschool-aged children can understand books as distinct and pleasurable artifacts in their immediate environments, that the marks they make in their picturebooks are evidence of reader response, that the act of drawing enables them to engage in a fictional landscape, and that pre-conventional marginalia can provide us with insight into very young children’s earliest aesthetic responses to texts.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Arizpe, Evelyn and Styles, Morag. (2003). Picturebooks and Metaliteracy: How Children Describe the Processes of Creation and Reception. In Art, Narrative and Childhood. Sterling, VA: Trentham Books Limited.
Baghban, Marcia. (2007). Scribbles, Labels, and Stories: The Role of Drawing in the Development of Writing. Young Children, 62(1), 20–26.
Benton, Michael. (2009). Readers, Texts, Contexts: Reader-Response Criticism. In Peter Hunt (Ed.), Understanding Children’s Literature (2nd ed.). London: Routledge.
Cambourne, Brian. (1995). Towards an Educationally Relevant Theory of Literacy Learning: Twenty Years of Inquiry. The Reading Teacher, 49(3), 182–192.
De Corte, E., Verschaffel, Lieven and Van De Ven, A. (2001). Improving Text Comprehension Strategies in Upper Primary School Children: A Design Experiment. British Journal of Education Psychology, 71, 531–559.
Doake, David. (1985). Reading-Like Behavior: Its Role in Learning to Read. In Angela Jaggar and Trika Smith-Burke (Eds.), Observing the Language Learner (pp. 92–99). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.
Dyson, Anne Haas. (1986). Transitions and Tensions: Interrelationships Between the Drawing, Talking, and Dictating of Young Children. Research in the Teaching of English, 20(4), 379–409.
Dyson, Anne Haas. (1992). From Prop to Mediator: The Changing Role of Written Language in Children’s Symbolic Repertoires (pp. 5–28). Berkeley, CA: National Center for the Study of Writing and Literacy.
Gardner, Howard. (1980). Artful Scribbles: The Significance of Children’s Drawing New York:Basic Books Inc.
Geertz, Clifford. (1973). The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.
Grenby, Matthew. (2011). The Child Reader, 1700–1840. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Holdaway, Don. (1982). Shared Book Experience: Teaching Reading Using Favorite Books. Theory into Practice, 21(4), 293–300.
Huck, Charlotte. (1982). Children’s Literature in the Elementary Classroom. Chicago: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.
Jackson, Heather. (2001). Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Kellogg, Rhoda. (1970). Analyzing Children’s Art. Palo Alto, CA: National Press Books.
Kindler, Anna and Darras, Bernard. (1997). Map of Artistic Development. In Anna Kindler (Ed.), Child Development in Art (pp. 17–44). Reston, VA: National Art Education Association.
Lancaster, Lesley. (2007). Representing the Ways of the World: How Children Under Three Start to Use Syntax in Graphic Signs. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 7(2), 123–154.
Lapp, Diane, Grant, Maria, Moss, Barbara and Johnson, Kelly. (2013). Students’ Close Reading of Science Texts: What’s Now? What’s Next? The Reading Teacher, 67(2), 109–119.
Lerer, Seth. (2012). Devotion and Defacement: Reading Children’s Marginalia. Representations, 118(1), 126–153.
Lowenfeld, Viktor. (1947). Creative and Mental Growth. New York: McMillan.
Mavers, Diane. (2012). Transcribing Video (pp. 1–21). London:National Centre for Research Methods.
Meek, Margaret. (1987). How Texts Teach What Readers Learn. Great Britain: Thimble Press.
Neufeld, Paul. (2005). Comprehension Instruction in the Content Area Classes. The Reading Teacher, 59(4), 302–312.
Nodelman, Perry and Reimer, Mavis. (2003). The Pleasures of Children’s Literature, 3rd ed Boston, MA:Allyn & Bacon.
Owocki, Gretchen and Goodman, Yetta. (2002). Books and Book Handling. In Kidwatching: Documenting Children’s Literacy Development. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Patton, Michael Quinn. (2001). Qualitative Research & Evaluation Methods, 3rd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Posner-Sanchez, Andrea. (2012). Jake and the Neverland Pirates: A Skipping Day. New York: Golden Books.
Schulte, Christopher. (2013). Verbalization as a Threshold in Children’s Drawing Encounters. Visual Arts Research, 39(2), 54–69.
Shane, Ruth and Shane, Harold. (1975). The New Baby. Racine, WI: Western Publishing Company Inc.
Thompson, Christine Marmé. (1990). “I make a mark”: The Significance of Talk in Young Children’s Artistic Development. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 5, 215–232.
Thompson, Christine Marmé. (2014). Lines of Flight: Trajectories of Young Children Drawing. Visual Arts Research, 40(1), 141–143.
Unt, Liina. (2010). Playing with Places: The Aesthetic Experience of Place in a Play Situation. In Phenomenology and Existentialism in the Twentieth Century (Vol. 104).
Wilson, Marjorie and Wilson, Brent. (2009). Teaching Children to Draw, 2nd ed. Worcester, MA: Davis Publications.
Wohlwend, Karen. (2011). Playing Their Way into Literacies: Reading, Writing, Belonging, in the Early Childhood Classroom. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Sarah Fischer is Assistant Professor of Literacy Education at Messiah College in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania where she teaches literacy methods and children’s literature courses.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Fischer, S. Reading with a Crayon: Pre-conventional Marginalia as Reader Response in Early Childhood. Child Lit Educ 48, 134–151 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-016-9292-4
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-016-9292-4