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Children's Literature in Education

, Volume 48, Issue 3, pp 262–275 | Cite as

Landscapes of Consciousness: Reading Theory of Mind in Dear Juno and Chato and the Party Animals

  • Zaira R. Arvelo Alicea
  • Judith T. Lysaker
Original Paper
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Abstract

Picturebooks aid children’s developing social understanding because they are dialogic, relational contexts where child readers have opportunities to engage vicariously with a wide range of imagined others. We use research by literacy and literature scholars, including our own past work, to showcase a series of visual and linguistic elements in picturebooks that invite readers to co-create characters’ consciousness via social imagination, the equivalent to a Theory of Mind in the world of story. We ground these relational and dialogical invitations by presenting an analysis of these elements in the picturebooks (in: Pak, Dear Juno, Puffin Books, New York, 1999; in: Soto, Chato and the Party Animals, Puffin Books, New York, 2004).

Keywords

Picturebooks Social imagination Consciousness Dialogism Theory of mind Multimodality 
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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media New York 2016

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.English DepartmentUniversity of Puerto Rico-Aguadilla CampusAguadillaUSA
  2. 2.Purdue UniversityWest LafayetteUSA

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