JOURNAL OF RESEARCH IN CHILDHOOD EDUCATION

2016, VOL. 30, NO. 3, 349–360

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02568543.2016.1178673

The Three Pigs: Can They Blow Us Into Critical Media Literacy Old
School Style?
Stephanie A. Flores-Koulish and Wendy Marie Smith-D’Arezzo
Loyola University Maryland, Baltimore, Maryland

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

In this article, the authors show how groups of 2nd- and 4th-grade students Received 14 May 2014
in an urban school district responded to a postmodern children’s book, The Accepted 13 January 2015
Three Pigs by David Wiesner (2001). The students came to the project from KEYWORDS
basal-based direct instruction, and here they were offered a more construc- Children’s literature;
tivist opportunity to engage with a text. The authors found that this text illustrated books; inquiry;
afforded the students with opportunities for discussion and thus were able literacy; media
to hone critical literacy skills, which correspond with critical media literacy
concepts and new expectations within the Common Core State Standards
(CCSS). The authors also make the case that these texts can be especially
useful in settings still lacking sophisticated technologies. Thus, students can
still gain complex literacy concepts despite a school’s limited resources.
What they find then is that students gain conceptual depth from postmo-
dern children’s literature using constructivist teaching methods.

Postmodern children’s books offer teachers a novel way to engage students in critical media literacy
education. As one example, Wiesner’s picture book, The Three Pigs (2001), categorized as post-
modern children’s literature, begins with the familiar fairytale—describing interactions between
three pigs, their houses, and a wolf—but it quickly proceeds in new directions using “diverse
narrative structures” (Pantaleo & Sipe, 2012, p. 6). In Wiesner’s version, illustrations change style,
other children’s stories blend with the traditional tale, and characters “speak” to readers; thus,
Wiesner uses what critical theorists term “metafictional techniques” to convey diverse narrative
structures (Goldstone, 1998). Metafictive devices in postmodern children’s literature can be used to
help children develop the skills to critically analyze a variety of texts, whether print or mediated
(Pantaleo, 2004). A number of studies have been conducted on children’s understandings of
postmodern picture books (Arizpe & Styles, 2008; McGuire, Belfatti, & Ghiso, 2008; Pantaleo,
2002; Serafini, 2005; Sipe, 2008). However, most of these studies focused on students with teachers
who were utilizing rich pedagogical literacy innovations. Given that, there is still a need for further
exploration of children’s understanding of this relatively new genre and, more specifically, how
children might make connections between postmodern children’s picture books and critical media
literacy education (Serafini, 2005).
Postmodern children’s literature has been endorsed as a vehicle for social justice (O’Neil, 2010).
However, despite its complexity of style and concepts like juxtaposition, appropriation, recontextua-
lization, hybridity, and so on, it has yet to be considered as a conduit toward critical media literacy
education. Yet media literacy education, defined as the “ability to access, analyze, evaluate, and
communicate media in a variety of forms,” resonates as a pedagogical approach that would offer
students active engagement with postmodern children’s literature along with other mediated texts

CONTACT Stephanie A. Flores-Koulish sfloreskoulish@loyola.edu Curriculum & Instruction Programs, Education

Department, Loyola University Maryland, 4501 North Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21210.
© 2016 Association for Childhood Education International
350 S. A. FLORES-KOULISH AND W. M. SMITH-D’AREZZO

(Aufderheide, 1993), and postmodern children’s literature, likewise, can aid in similar complex
analyses as found in media literacy education.
Our overall aim in introducing Wiesner’s The Three Pigs to two sets of children, 2nd- and 4th-
graders in an urban public school, was to determine how these particular students, who had no past
formal instruction with postmodern literature, would react to and interpret a postmodern text of an
iconic children’s story. Although the students’ interest in and positive reaction to the text did not
surprise us, their ability to take this single exposure and critically engage with it, incorporating many
elements of critical media literacy, led us to make a connection between postmodern picture books
and critical media literacy.

Postmodern children’s literature

Postmodern children’s books are becoming more prevalent in the children’s book market, providing
another avenue for introducing children to the literary world and expanding their understandings of
new literacies. Specifically, these picture books expose children to new literacies by straddling the
two worlds of traditional picture books (form) and conceptual hypertext (content that though not
linked in the traditional sense of connecting to a web page is presented in very different ways and has
potential to be linked to different stories and ideas that may not be seen as a traditional way of telling
the story) (Anstey, 2002; Pantaleo, 2007).
The studies examining children’s understandings of postmodern children’s literature generally
examined reactions of middle-class students and/or students who were taught in constructivist
classrooms where multiple interpretations of texts were honored (Arizpe & Styles, 2008; McGuire
et al., 2008; Pantaleo, 2002; Serafini, 2005; Sipe, 2008). To advance this research and explore the
reactions of a different population of students, we worked with urban elementary students who were
taught through strict direct instruction using a phonics-based reading program.
Serafini (2005) claims that standardized tests, heavily prevalent in today’s educational climate,
“reduce reading to an identification process rather than an investigative process” (p. 61). In fact, the
students in this study were incredibly limited in their exposure to alternative textual forms at school,
yet we assume that these students, like others, typically go home and play video games, engage in
postmodern television viewing, and surf the Web. In fact, in November 2013, the children’s network
Nickelodeon presented findings from a study on children’s media consumption to advertisers, and
they found that “(m)edia consumption among kids has grown over the past 4 years to nearly
35 hours per week, presenting an increase of 2.2 hours since 2009” (Nickelodeon Press, 2013,
para. 5). This increase in media consumption outside school is significant for schools lacking in
robust analytical literacy practices. Lotherington (2005) writes, “The multiple literacies children are
developing as a matter of 21st century socialization portend much-needed educational reform”
(p. 118). This much-needed reform could easily include analytical engagement with postmodern
picture books.
Goldstone (2004) connects postmodern picture books quite easily with children’s popular culture.
And Serafini (2005) notes that “web pages, multi-media advertisements, music videos, and informa-
tional texts” are all non-linear (p. 61). At the same time, he writes that it is crucial to “navigate these
texts and critically evaluate the information presented.” Anstey (2002) argues that postmodern
children’s literature “is a product of new times and incorporates many of the characteristics of
new literacies, requiring the reader to engage with the text in new ways” (p. 445). In her article, she
has melded together features of postmodern children’s literature (metafictive elements) with those
required for new media literacies as follows:

(1) All texts are consciously constructed and have particular social, cultural, political, and
economic purposes.
(2) Text comes in a variety of representational forms, incorporating a range of grammars and
semiotic systems.
 JOURNAL OF RESEARCH IN CHILDHOOD EDUCATION 351

(3) Changes in society and technology will continue to challenge and change texts and their
representational forms.
(4) There may be more than one way of reading or viewing a text depending on a range of
contextual and other factors.
(5) There is a need to consider the possible meanings of a text, how they are constructing the
reader and the world around him or her in particular ways, and why this construction is
being made. (p. 448)

Within this framework, it becomes easy to consider various ways of critically analyzing a variety
of texts.
In her work, Goldstone (2002, 2004) has provided a schema for understanding the unique
features of postmodern picture books. Those features are nonlinearity of narratives, multiple
perspectives, irony and contradiction, and author transparency, though each feature does not always
appear within every postmodern children’s book. Goldstone (2002) writes, “These books reflect the
world in which children play and learn” (p. 367). Additionally, she claims that author transparency
in particular enables readers to connect directly with everyday life and realize that the “written word
is not above questioning” (2004, p. 201). Ultimately, Goldstone and Serafini (2005) believe that
comprehension of this type of literature is crucial for children’s understanding of their rapidly
changing complex worlds.
Finally, Serafini (2010, 2012; Youngs & Serafini, 2013) has written extensively about multimodal
texts and the use of these texts to teach critical text analysis skills to children. He describes the texts
that students encounter as “print-based texts that contain multimodal elements” (Serafini, 2012,
p. 26). These multimodal elements can be as simple as the text and pictures found within some
traditional picturebooks, or they can be more sophisticated, like the complex drawings found in The
Three Pigs, or the hypertext and video images found on the Internet or within electronic books. As
multimodal texts expand their prevalence, the skills children will need to interpret these texts need to
expand as well (Serafini, 2012). Before children can obtain these sophisticated skills, Serafini (2010)
argues that elementary reading education must expand as well to introduce teachers to overlapping
analytical perspectives, such as perceptual, structural, and ideological. Perceptual understanding
includes the “literal or denotative contents of an image or a series of images” (p. 92). Structural
analysis would include a focus on the interrelationships between image and text. And ideological
understandings take a reader’s understandings to a critical level, that is, to a place where readers can
identify and analyze systems of power. This last critical level can be precarious for some teachers
(Flores-Koulish, Deal, Losinger, McCarthy, & Rosebrugh, 2011). Each of these perspectives also can
be found in critical media literacy.

Critical media literacy

Ernest Morrell (2012) recently discussed the importance of ensuring that students are taught how to
“interpret images” (p. 302) in the media. Yet many schools, especially in urban and rural areas, still
lack readily available appropriate media technologies to engage in such analysis (Alston, Hilton,
English, Elbert, & Wakefield, 2011; Celano & Neuman, 2010; Wood & Howley, 2012). Or where
equipment exists, some students experience a “second-level digital divide,” in which their skills are at a
basic level (Reinhart, Thomas, & Toriskie, 2011) far from the analytical pursuits sought in critical
media literacy education and in the new CCSS. So, how can students in vulnerable communities be
afforded complex pedagogical opportunities to examine visual messages when digital technologies in
schools are missing or limited? We endorse the need for students to interpret images; given inequities
of funding and/or limited analytical abilities, however, creative ideas are sometimes required.
Students can begin to question notions of authorship, voice, representation, and so on, and
actively inquire into texts of a variety of forms. Those skills can readily be transferred across the
curriculum and into life beyond the school. In fact, O’Neil (2011) encourages teachers to dive into
352 S. A. FLORES-KOULISH AND W. M. SMITH-D’AREZZO

visual literacy using picture books, discussing a variety of complex ways that illustrations work in
tandem with text. It is especially important in cash-strapped school districts still lacking current
technologies and/or student skills to use available resources, which may only be print texts. We also
contend that delving into postmodern children’s literature can achieve a depth of conceptual
understanding that is sometimes missing through the inclusion of technocratic strategies for
technology or narrow literacy education (Freebody & Hornibrook, 2005). A more robust curriculum
and pedagogy can be found in critical media literacy education.
The National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE) is a member organization
dedicated to promoting curriculum and pedagogy that engages students in the critical analysis of
our mediated world. NAMLE is guided by core principles developed by leaders of that organization in
2006 “to help individuals of all ages develop the habits of inquiry and skills of expression that they need
to be critical thinkers, effective communicators and active citizens in today’s world” (NAMLE, 2007,
p. 1). Their principles easily correspond with Anstey’s (2002) features of postmodern children’s
literature above. For example, a NAMLE principle states “media literacy education recognizes that
media are a part of culture and function as agents of socialization,” relating to Anstey’s first element
that discusses the constructed nature of texts (NAMLE, 2007, p. 5). In other words, the media are
constitutive of our culture, tied together tightly such that we must pause to determine a variety of
messages being sent our way. Next, another NAMLE principle “expands the concept of literacy to
include all forms of media,” which straightforwardly connects with Anstey’s second statement regard-
ing the variety of textual forms that exist (NAMLE, 2007, p. 3). The important element each
emphasizes involves the notion that multimedia is constructed by authors or analyzed by readers
much like within traditional language arts classrooms. Like Anstey’s (2002) third statement, another
NAMLE principle emphasizes the importance of educating for democratic citizenship such that we are
“informed, reflective, and engaged” (NAMLE, 2007, p. 4). NAMLE has also long emphasized the
individualization of media understandings; in other words, different people make sense of media
depending upon their personal circumstances, beliefs, and so on, which also speaks to a dynamic
nature of media interpretation. In Anstey’s words, “a range of contextual factors” affect one’s under-
standings, and context can vary through time” (2002, p. 448). This, too, is similar to the final Anstey
statement, which corresponds with an additional NAMLE principle, “media literacy education requires
active inquiry and critical thinking about the messages we receive and create” (NAMLE, 2007, p. 3).
The bottom line is that Anstey’s (2002) suggestions for engaging in postmodern children’s books
correspond with NAMLE’s core principles of media literacy education; perhaps most important is that
an ongoing engagement in analysis of our media world is crucial for students’ literacy abilities.
Our focus here is beyond the typical media literacy framework and toward critical media literacy,
which goes past the descriptions above and emphasizes ideological analytical perspectives like power,
privilege, the marginalized, and so on (Serafini, 2010). Sipe (1998) forwards the notion of consider-
ing rich responses to literature, including not only reader response theory, but also various other
approaches from the psychoanalytic to the semiotic. Further, Serafini (2010) proposes an analytical
framework for engaging in multimodal texts that includes structural, perceptual, as well as ideolo-
gical perspectives. Ideological or critical approaches ring clear in particular for the consideration of
the four reader roles, which include code breaker, text participant, text user, and text analyst
(Freebody & Hornibrook, 2005). Freebody and Hornibrook (2005) describe Freebody and Luke’s
(1990) literacy categories not as a sequential process exclusively grounded in psychological processes,
but instead as guidelines to encourage successful future workers and citizens working for social
justice. Specifically, becoming a text analyst “entail(s) knowing about and using the cultural and
ideological bases on which texts are written and put to use, including how texts differentially
position readers and how they use various sociocultural categories to constrain interpretation and
influence the reader” (p. 340). Here, the ideological turn stresses the need for transformative critical
engagement with texts, which we believe can and should take place when using mediated texts, or in
this case, postmodern children’s literature.
 JOURNAL OF RESEARCH IN CHILDHOOD EDUCATION 353

Method
Wiesner’s book, The Three Pigs, won the Caldecott Medal in 2002, an award he won previously for
his book, Tuesday (1991). The Three Pigs is a whimsical cover story of the original fairy tale, although
Wiesner “blows the roof off” of this version, as the pigs travel out of their own story and into other
familiar tales. Pages left behind become illustrations. Stories morph from one to another. Characters
speak directly to their readers. Straight narrative is no part of this fairy tale’s version. Wiesner’s The
Three Pigs offered itself as an interesting and different postmodern children’s book around which to
center our study.
Given our pursuits for obtaining rich student responses as related to their understandings of The
Three Pigs (Wiesner, 2001), qualitative methods were most appropriate. Our methodology was
designed to examine the responses of children who had not previously been exposed to postmodern
texts within a classroom. Dais (1990) states:
Readers’ strategies more often than not develop from classroom practices. Instructional activities make some
strategies more productive than others. Readers’ expectations as to what they must read for are powerful
determiners of how they will approach other texts in the same genre. (p. 3)

Choosing children from direct instruction classrooms was a conscious decision; we wanted to see if
their regular exposure to multi-media, postmodern texts of numerous varieties outside of the school
setting would influence their reading of a postmodern picture book. In addition, our intention was to
see how two different grade levels of children would react to the book. Because of the difference in
reading levels between 2nd- and 4th-grade children, the protocol for reading the story was slightly
different for each grade level.
Each member of the research team, two university researchers and one graduate assistant, met
individually with five groups of approximately five students from the 4th grade. We also met with
five groups of approximately five students from the 2nd grade. For each grade level, the first group
meeting included all three researchers so the research protocol could be observed and preserved
through all group meetings. Fourth-grade children in this study were asked to respond to the text in
three different ways: negotiate meaning making by reading aloud an unfamiliar text in small groups,
respond to specific questions about the text (see the appendix), again in small groups, and finally
respond to the text in an artistic format by expanding the style of the author in writing/drawing a
new story. The 2nd-grade protocol differed slightly in that the children responded to the story while
a researcher was reading it to them. The younger children also responded to the same questions
about the text (see the appendix) and wrote and drew a new story in an expansion of what they had
heard.

Data sources and analysis

The resulting data were numerous; both researchers took field notes as they observed the children
reading and responding to the story in a variety of ways. All interactions between the children, the
text, and the researchers were audiotaped and transcribed. In addition, the works of art made by the
children were retained for analysis. For the purposes of this article, the transcribed discussions were
analyzed, using the field notes and children’s drawings for triangulation purposes only. To analyze
the 10 transcripts, each was broken down into units of conversational turn or utterances (Sinclair &
Coulthard, 1975). We chose to use protocol analysis of the units of conversation to closely examine
the way the postmodern text influenced the children’s responses to the text. Afflerbach (2000) states
that one of the four reasons protocol analysis is beneficial is that it “allows for the examination of the
influence of contextual variables (e.g., text, task, setting, reader ability) on the act of reading”
(p. 165).
We used qualitative content analysis recommended by Straus and Corbin (1998) to code the units
of conversation initially. To give structure to our coding, we then utilized a theoretical template
354 S. A. FLORES-KOULISH AND W. M. SMITH-D’AREZZO

organizing scheme (Crabtree & Miller, 1999), using the four areas of discourse found by Eeds and
Wells (1991) when talking about books with children. This template analysis style allowed for the
template to be created “a priori, based on … theoretical perspectives” (Crabtree & Miller, p. 165),
and we reviewed our process of analysis using this template. The Eeds and Wells (1991) template
provided us a convenient and relevant framework to code the children’s responses as (1) construct-
ing simple meaning, (2) personal involvement, (3) inquiry, (4) critique, and (5) other. Additionally,
these categories allowed us to hone in on specific talk related to aspects important for critical media
literacy, especially personal involvement, inquiry, and critique. For the many responses that emerged
related to media and popular culture, we expanded upon the personal involvement theme. For items
related to peritextual features, authorship, and aesthetic comments, we placed those within an
“other” category not included in the Eeds and Wells framework. Both researchers examined the
data separately, identified themes, and then worked together to finalize the themes and determined
what elements were essential in each final theme. This related to our overall pursuit in making sense
of how these urban school students, whose reading instruction is heavy on decoding, made sense of
and interacted with the postmodern children’s book The Three Pigs (Wiesner, 2001).

Results
We began our analysis by noting student utterances during our reading circles, and we found that
there were some minor differences between the 4th-graders and the 2nd-graders. Overall, the 4th-
graders spoke more than the 2nd-graders did, with an average of 366 utterances per group for the
4th-graders and 284 utterances per group for the 2nd-graders. We could perhaps attribute this to the
fact that the 4th-graders read aloud themselves, while we read to the 2nd-graders. Additionally,
however, the 4th-graders have more literacy experience and general prior knowledge, thus enhancing
their perceptual understandings (Serafini, 2010).
More importantly, much of the meaning making talk for both groups consisted of comments on
how the story was different from the “real version” of the Three Little Pigs. For example, one student
remarked, “I like the old version, but this version is kinda funny and not how it’s supposed to be.”
Although another stated, “I didn’t like how it used the exact same, like they used the same story, but
I liked that they changed it around because it wouldn’t be really good if they used the exact same
story.” As the student talked, it seemed that she was contradicting herself, yet we also read this as a
verbal attempt at making sense of this story, a good example of how this postmodern children’s book
inspires readers to read and critically reread. Wiesner’s version wasn’t exactly like the original and
thus was something that she saw in a positive light.
There were also several comments on how the story melded together various stories. For example,
a 2nd-grader remarked, “I learned that some stories can be fun and get mixed up … (and) go to
different stories.” One of the 4th-graders likened this to a choose-your-own adventure story, “It’s like
you start out on top and have to go to the one and you find two passages, so you choose one … and
one is when you are a lawyer and one is you’re a clown.” Adding on to this description, another 4th-
grader said, “So, it turns into a bunch of different stories…. So it’s definitely not copying and I like
that. If it were copying, it would just be the same book redone.” Here we can relate the students’
understandings to Serafini’s (2010) structural perspective in the ways that the students notice how
Wiesner manipulates readers’ assumptions of form and the typical historical context found in the
familiar stories nested within his book. Additionally, by emphasizing how Wiesner does not copy,
the student might begin to view the author in new ways, gaining esteem among youth for his clever
appropriation.
One of the 4th-graders exemplifies how the students were able to make meaning from the book’s
hybridity, “It’s a yes/no book. There are two halves, but they sort of sploshed together. Like if you
put blueberries in a strawberry—it tastes weird. It’s not blueberry, it’s not strawberry; it’s both.”
Another student also liked the fluidity of the story within a story, stating it in this way, “I also
liked how it used the basic facts of the little pigs—the three little pigs, but it kind of put something
 JOURNAL OF RESEARCH IN CHILDHOOD EDUCATION 355

else in the middle of it.” And a third noted, “It’s just basically a mix-up of the other story.” A student
from another group noted, “I like that it had a whole bunch of different fairy tales and they got all
mixed up.”
In the category of personal meaning, which Eeds and Wells (1991) describe as “being able to talk
about the text in oblique and personal ways” (p. 135), we found that many of the students’ comments
included references to familiar media and popular culture. In this area, the 4th-graders had many
more comments than the 2nd-graders, and they referenced popular culture about twice as much as
the 2nd-graders. These references ranged from the National Football League to fairy tales to the
television show, Survivor, to Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. All of these references were spontaneous
on the part of the student participants. We take this to mean that their exposure to multimedia,
whether postmodern or otherwise, aided in their engagement and/or interpretations of the post-
modern children’s book.
The category of inquiry had the fewest utterances, ranging from zero to 20 utterances per group.
Eeds and Wells (1991) define this as “actively hypothesizing, interpreting and verifying” (p. 136).
The smaller number of utterances in this category may have been the result of the direct instruction
used by the literacy teachers at this school, where the students most likely did not get an opportunity
to actively hypothesize or engage on any written text. Despite their lack of exposure to open-ended
reading and discussion in school, there were some sophisticated responses to this book, including, “I
don’t get how they put other stories in the stories in a totally different story.” Here, we see the
student problem solving through the writer’s process of blending various stories to create a brand
new story.
Another area of inquiry was seen in at least one half of the transcripts where students noted and
questioned a difference between the text and the pictures. A line near the beginning stated, “So the
wolf huffed, and he puffed, and he blew the house in … and ate the pig up” (Wiesner, 2001,
unnumbered page). Two pages later, this line is repeated with the second little pig. Yet the pigs show
up again in the story, confusing multiple readers. For example, a student seemed puzzled by the
contradiction, stating, “(I)t said the wolf ate the pig up and he never ate the pig up.” Another student
noted, “I’m confused because they get eaten up and then they go somewhere else.” And finally, “And
he ate it and then later in the story the two pigs appeared.” One 4th-grader, in trying to make sense
of this, said:

It says that he got eaten, but it ended up that he didn’t get eaten. Or maybe, maybe he forgot, maybe one of the
pigs is lying, or maybe the wolf is lying. Or maybe the author’s lying. Maybe he just ran away so quickly that it
looked like he was dead and … so it looked like he was lying on the ground, so the wolf started lying that he
ate it.

Not only are the children puzzled by this incongruity, some were actively working to come up with a
solution to the problem this poses, thus implying their active engagement with the text.
Critique, positive and negative, dominated in the discussion groups, especially for the 4th-graders.
Eeds and Wells (1991) remind us that critique includes not only negative responses to texts, but also
positive and general evaluation as well. Critique comments mainly occurred in the second part of
this study when we were asking students specific questions about the book, including what they liked
and didn’t like. Both groups had roughly twice as many positive comments as negative. Second-
graders liked the way the story was told with a mixture of other stories, several of which they
recognized. They appreciated the illustrations, and most groups noticed that the illustrations were a
mixture of styles, especially noting where the pigs were represented realistically. They did not like
when the letters were jumbled on the page, which made it difficult to tell what word was supposed to
be read.
Fourth-graders’ positive comments focused on the book’s humor and creativity, confirming
Pantaleo and Sipe’s (2012) contention that children are attracted to the ludic nature of these
books. Students noted several times that though they expected the book to be boring, because it
was a picture book and, thus, beneath their reading level, it was not. One 4th-grader remarked,
356 S. A. FLORES-KOULISH AND W. M. SMITH-D’AREZZO

“[Wiesner is] trying to make it more interesting by changing into different stories. And trying to
make it interesting so more people can read the book.” This idea was echoed by a 4th-grader who
said, “I liked it because it was different from the original. You would think it was just going to be the
boring old little pigs.” In a similar vein, one student commented on his feelings about how Wiesner
had structured the story:
And it’s nice to give the reader, they say like twists and turns, instead of just, like “The three little pigs. One
built his house, the wolf puffed it down, the second built his house, the wolf puffed it down. The third lived.”

Adding to this, another said, “No wait, this is not babyish. This is awesome!”
The students overwhelmingly loved and appreciated the illustrations, especially noting the
different styles, such as realistic and cartoon drawing, as well as the transitions from black and
white to color. One 4th-grader described the pictures like this, “It’s like realistic and all hairy and
then there’s the cartoon and then suddenly all black and white.” Another stated, “I mean some of
them are real pictures, some are like cartoons. It’s a mixture of stuff.” One of the 4th-grade groups
discussed Wiesner’s artistic ability, with one saying he was a very good artist. Another added, “Yea,
because drawing the picture crumpled up in the story and then drawing a picture on top of that, is
probably kinda hard.”
Many of the 2nd-graders had less sophisticated comments when talking about the pictures, with
responses such as, “They were colorful.” But one 2nd-grader expanded on this idea, “It was weird
because they [the pigs] went in different pictures and they had different colors in each one. In the
dragon one [picture], they were all just black and white and gray.”
The 4th-graders offered specific things that they liked about the story, often pointing to a specific
page or drawing. They gave specific positive critiques like, “It’s nice to give the reader twists and
turns, so it is not boring” and “it goes back and forth between stories, making a whole new story.”
Most of these students liked the fact that Wiesner included other stories that they recognized. One
stated, “But, without it being all scrambled up and getting out of control, it wouldn’t be as funny and
then it would be like copying the original story.” They were adamant that it was good because it was
not just a copy of the original story.
Along with the specific positive critiques, the 4th-graders also offered specific negative critiques.
One girl felt that the drawing of the dragon blended in with the background, and it should pop out
more to make the dragon more defined. In addition, the older children were much more concerned
about the jumbled words and crumbled pages. Although these items did not stop the students from
reading the book, they remembered the confusing pieces and went back to them often in the
discussion. They described it in terms of being confusing and hard to read or not making sense
and stated that the illustrations could have been better, one going so far as to say it was “obnoxious”
at the end when the words were falling off the page. Generally, Wiesner’s manipulations of the
metafictive features were most troubling for the students in both grade levels.
In using Eeds and Well’s (1991) constructs, we found that we needed to include an additional
category (“other”), where we included students’ comments about the aesthetic qualities within the
book, authorship, and textual features. There were many comments about the hybrid illustration
genres employed in the book. Students called the pigs “real” and other elements “cartoon-like.” The
pigs’ morphing depictions garnered a lot of aesthetic discussion specifically. One interesting com-
ment came in answer to why a boy thought the pigs were different colors. He said, “Because in
cartoons they might show it like in gold because they don’t have … that color, the hairy kind of
brown so they made it gold or yellow.” He is clearly identifying with the illustrator’s choices and/or
resourcefulness comparing across media.
Relating to the illustrator’s choices, some students laid bare authorship, which we relate to
Serafini’s (2010) ideological category. A 4th-grader made the following comment, “[I learned] that
authors have the ability to twist original things into really different, confusing stuff.” Author
transparency in postmodern children’s literature provides opportunities for students to begin to
notice the power in authorship, as this student begins to acknowledge. This notion is important in
 JOURNAL OF RESEARCH IN CHILDHOOD EDUCATION 357

corresponding with Anstey’s (2002) concept that “All texts are consciously constructed and have
particular social, cultural, political, and economic purposes” (p. 446), also corresponding with critical
media literacy that attempts to get students to understand the constructed nature of a media text.
Also in line with Anstey’s (2002) concept of texts being consciously constructed, our participants
often discussed the varied metafictive features of this book. As we discussed above, these features in
Wiesner’s book disturbed some of the readers, whereas others found these features fun and playful.
The following student’s interpretation came after being asked how others might find this book:
“They (readers) could get used to it [jumbled up words; different style], because some books, I have a
book that turns upside down and you have to get used to turning the books around.” From this
participant, we see that with willing exposure to new textual forms, readers will learn to adapt.

Discussion
The book The Three Pigs (Wiesner, 2001), this study design, and overt questioning about the
students’ likes and dislikes allow for particular themes to rise to the surface, which relate postmodern
children’s picture books with critical media literacy. Taken together, they support expectations in the
CCSS. In particular, the interplay and conflict between text and visual presentation that the student
participants discussed are rich examples of the following Common Core English Language Arts
standard RL.4.7: “Make connections between the text of a story or drama and a visual or oral
presentation of the text, identifying where each version reflects specific descriptions and directions in
the text” (National Governor’s Association, 2014, para. 7). Clearly, the rich quotes throughout this
article illustrate where students made those connections.
Despite their limited literacy classroom experiences, the student participants in this study showed
a willingness to engage in deep analytical conversation. Yet these conversations come on the heels of
many years of prescriptive, limited paradigmatic approaches to literacy education, as apparent in the
school setting we examined. Could it be that the book we chose, a postmodern children’s picture
book, was more familiar and/or engaging to the students because of their vast experiences with
multimedia? In this study, a mere read-aloud and book discussion using a postmodern children’s
book showed the potential to “develop the habits of inquiry and skills of expression (students) need
to be critical thinkers, effective communicators and active citizens in today’s world” (NAMLE, 2007,
p. 1). So, maybe the answer is yes, and the connections between multimedia and postmodern
children’s literature are symbiotic and, thus, inevitable.
The study’s themes relate to the connections between print text and media texts generally;
specifically, however, the themes point to the importance of engaging in the analyses of postmodern
children’s books, which we demonstrate can simultaneously hone critical media literacy skills. In other
words, simply given a nontraditional literary style along with an opportunity to freely discuss, children
inevitably discussed the unique textual features in The Three Pigs, as was evident in this study, and that,
in turn, we believe, builds their abilities to engage in complex mediated texts through similar processes
of reflection, deconstruction, and discussion. Serafini (2010) calls for readers to expand their range of
interpretive frameworks to include perceptual, structural, and ideological perspectives, which we found
evident within a mere discussion of one text. We imagine that it would be a short step for teachers to
consider specific questions or prompts for any text relating to the three perspectives that “[enrich] the
literary and visual experience and [allow] readers to bring multiple perspectives to their interpretive
repertoires” (Serafini, 2010, p. 101). That could lead to easier connections when analyzing nonprint,
mediated texts as required for critical media literacy education.
Also, this study design, which included an informal discussion and interpretation activity, netted
particular dialogue from the students. That is, the nature of our research design promoted open-ended,
personal meanings to emerge. We documented those comments corresponding with the second item in
the Eeds and Wells’ framework (1991). It is also apparent that inquiry and critique were effortless as a
result of our chosen text in combination with the research design; thus, there are many pedagogical
implications, relating to the principles of NAMLE (2007) and Anstey (2002). The book as curriculum
358 S. A. FLORES-KOULISH AND W. M. SMITH-D’AREZZO

lent itself easily to items within the latter, “other,” category that, for us, consisted of aesthetic comments.
For example, O’Neil (2011) describes a variety of ways in which pictures and text interact in picture
books. Here, we saw basal-educated students acknowledging the reciprocal nature of this interaction.
Students also showed the ways in which “pictures carry a parallel story that expands or contradicts the
one told in words alone” (p. 217). Thus, the themes we uncovered through our study easily support the
CCSS in that “the close, attentive reading that is at the heart of understanding and enjoying complex
works of literature” (National Governors Association, 2014).
And so what does this study contribute to the body of research on postmodern children’s
literature as it relates to critical media literacy education? First, it confirms and extends O’Neil’s
(2010) work on the connections of postmodern children’s literature for social justice awareness, also
an aim of critical media literacy. O’Neil suggests that children gain the following social justice
concepts from an engagement in postmodern children’s literature: alternate points of view, stereo-
types, and agency—all components of critical media literacy. Clearly, we showed instances of
students pointing out how a familiar story can be told with different points of view and how authors
have agency through their editorial choices. Our student participants showed their understanding of
agency by their acknowledgment of Wiesner’s power as an author. For example, a 4th-grader
remarked, “[I learned] that authors have the ability to twist original things into really different,
confusing stuff.” Understanding how authors, as creators of texts, have agency, ideally leads to the
ensuing power that authorship brings with it, and the ways in which “authors” exist in any media
text. That confirms the first principle of media literacy: all media are constructions.
There are a variety of implications for future research and practice as a result of this study. First,
more research on the connections between postmodern children’s books and critical media literacy is
obviously beneficial in general. This could be accomplished using new postmodern children’s books,
specific multimedia programming, and/or different research designs. Specifically, researchers could
look to how students’ inquiry capabilities could be deepened by considering a particular context and/
or purpose. In other words, how might students imagine, in this case, Wiesner’s book coming alive
for cinema? There are many creative and exciting possibilities for future research and practice related
to postmodern children’s books and critical media literacy education.

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Appendix: Open-ended research questions

What did you think about this book?
What did you like about it?
Was there anything about the book that you didn’t like?
What did you think about the pictures?
What did you learn from this book?
Have you read any books like this, or has someone read a book like this to you? What were those books?
Do you think this book can help kids become better readers?
If someone were to give you this book, would you want to keep it?
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