Romanticized rural storytelling creates difficulties for rural children in finding mirrors, seeing people like themselves and places like their homes as principal characters and settings in picturebooks. The same romanticism likewise makes it unlikely for picturebook readers in cities and suburbs to find realistic windows into rural life. Despite…

Classroom discussions of multimodal texts, in particular historical fiction picturebooks, offer an interpretive space where readers are positioned to construct meanings in transaction with the written language, visual images, and design elements created by authors, illustrators and publishers (Serafini & Ladd, 2008; Sipe, 1999). This study was…

In the last ten years, historical fiction picturebooks have won numerous children's literature awards and have assumed a prominent role in the literacy landscape of elementary and middle school classrooms. Whether read in read-alouds, study groups, as a focus of genre study, or as a supplement to the social studies curriculum, historical fiction…

Ideological assumptions about childhood play into the production and selection of children's literature. Various ideologies proclaim that children should be happy and free from stories of evil, children's literature should help children encounter the joys in life, it should be filled with bright colors to keep children's attention, and it should…

As the texts readers encounter in and out of school grow in complexity, the strategies that teachers demonstrate and encourage students to employ need to expand to accommodate the changing nature of these texts. In this article, the authors present a three-part framework for utilizing historical fiction picturebooks as instructional resources.…