Introduction: picture books and pedagogy

Picture books have long had a place in the primary classroom. Bright colours, pleasing formats and good stories have attracted both teachers and children. Teachers have recognised their usefulness in convincing children that reading is worth the effort it involves, and children have delighted in the possibilities of play they offer: they have readily engaged visually, emotionally and intellectually with the ideas on the pages.

For some years, in some infant classrooms, picture books took on a central place in the pedagogy of reading. Waterland (1985) and Ellis and Barrs (1996) showed how skilful teachers might construct from picture books a programme for initial reading tuition, and Meek (1988) went some way in explaining how this worked at a theoretical as well as a practical level. She wrote of the rich, but untaught ‘lessons in reading’ that were afforded by the best books that readers read, and showed how texts such as Rosie's Walk (Hutchins 1969) and Each Peach Pear Plum (Ahlberg 1976) taught children not just how to read the words, but how to think like a reader.

One might have expected that by 2009, a complete and systematic pedagogy for learning to read with picture books would have been developed, but this has not happened. Changing priorities in educational policy in England, for example The National Literacy Strategy (DfEE 1998c), focused attention on reading skills and measurable progression in reading and these ideas sat uneasily with Meek's less tangible concepts of developing an understanding of irony and entering into conspiratorial pacts with authors.