The first might be to look at books that practitioners in the field award honours to.But the picture books that win the American Caldecott Medal or the British Kate Greenaway Medal tend to represent the ideals of practitioners: what people believe children’s books ought ideally to be rather than what really works in terms of keeping publishing houses and most writing careers afloat. I can think of two ways that might be done. But what most interests me here is the way in which individual picture books represent and contain the evidence of the positions their producers or purchasers occupy-reveal and can be interpreted in terms of what their editors, authors, illustrators, and especially picture-book theorists named Nodelman, have taken for granted about what children’s picture books are, and how and what they should communicate. A habitus consists not merely of knowledge of explicitly stated rules and conventions, but also, an understanding, conscious and unconscious, of how best to operate in terms of those rules and conventions in Randal Johnson’s words, it’s a “feel for the game.” In the field of children’s picture books, practitioners-authors, illustrators, publishers, editors, librarians, teachers, children’s literature scholars, even child readers-operate with specific sets of expectations and practices, many of which they are not especially aware of. Considering what I might have taken for granted got me thinking about the kinds of things we all tend to take for granted, as part of what the sociological theorist Pierre Bourdieu calls a habitus: an implicit understanding of what forms of behavior are appropriate or desirable or likely to be productive or have power within a specific field. I found my way to these books and this topic by thinking about what I wrote about picture books in my book Words about Pictures thirty years ago and, more important what I didn’t write-what I didn’t know back then, or ignored, or simply took for granted as I explored the range of ways in which the pictures and words in picture books combined to communicate information or tell stories. This talk is about children’s picture books about fish. In children’s picture books, more often than not, fish is people. But listen to me, because I gotta tell you–fish are. I want to remind you of that famous moment in movie history because in the more comforting world of children’s picture books Soylent Green is not people. In the words of the main character played by Charlton Heston in an old science fiction movie, The version of the talk represented here on the website is based on the keynote given at a picture-book conference at Cambridge–I discuss my response to that conference HERE. The first, at the IBBY Congress in Athens, was the basis of a much shorter essay that appeared in the IBBY journal, Bookbird. NOTE: I gave two different versions of this talk at two different conferences in 2018.
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