Instant Download Ebook of Children Reading Pictures New Contexts and Approaches To Picturebooks 3Rd Edition Evelyn Arizpe Online Full Chapter PDF

Children Reading Pictures New
Contexts and Approaches to

Picturebooks 3rd Edition Evelyn Arizpe
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmeta.com/product/children-reading-pictures-new-contexts-and-approach
es-to-picturebooks-3rd-edition-evelyn-arizpe/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...
Children s Picturebooks The Art of Visual Storytelling

2nd Edition Martin Salisbury Morag Styles
https://ebookmeta.com/product/children-s-picturebooks-the-art-of-
visual-storytelling-2nd-edition-martin-salisbury-morag-styles/
Sustainable Resource Management: Modern Approaches and

Contexts 1st Edition Chaudhery Mustansar Hussain
https://ebookmeta.com/product/sustainable-resource-management-
modern-approaches-and-contexts-1st-edition-chaudhery-mustansar-
hussain/
Reading Sappho Contemporary Approaches Ellen Greene

(Editor)
https://ebookmeta.com/product/reading-sappho-contemporary-
approaches-ellen-greene-editor/
Text Structures From Nursery Rhymes Teaching Reading

and Writing to Young Children 1st Edition Gretchen
Bernabei
https://ebookmeta.com/product/text-structures-from-nursery-
rhymes-teaching-reading-and-writing-to-young-children-1st-
edition-gretchen-bernabei/
Teaching Early Reading and Phonics Creative Approaches
to Early Literacy 2nd Edition Kathy Goouch Andrew
Lambirth
https://ebookmeta.com/product/teaching-early-reading-and-phonics-
creative-approaches-to-early-literacy-2nd-edition-kathy-goouch-
andrew-lambirth/
Cross linguistic Transfer in Reading in Multilingual

Contexts 1st Edition Elena Zaretsky
https://ebookmeta.com/product/cross-linguistic-transfer-in-
reading-in-multilingual-contexts-1st-edition-elena-zaretsky/
The Reel World Scoring for Pictures Television and

Video Games 3rd Edition Jeff Rona
https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-reel-world-scoring-for-
pictures-television-and-video-games-3rd-edition-jeff-rona/
Advances in Swearing Research New Languages and New

Contexts 1st Edition Kristy Beers Fägersten
https://ebookmeta.com/product/advances-in-swearing-research-new-
languages-and-new-contexts-1st-edition-kristy-beers-fagersten/
The Anthropocene Approaches and Contexts for Literature

and the Humanities 1st Edition Seth T. Reno (Editor)
https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-anthropocene-approaches-and-
contexts-for-literature-and-the-humanities-1st-edition-seth-t-
reno-editor/
Children Reading Pictures
Children Reading Pictures: New Contexts and Approaches to Picturebooks offers up-to-date
research evidence on the responses of the primary audience for picturebooks – children.
The new edition has retained the best of the original while expanding its scope in
several directions, including the role of the art museum in helping children and their
teachers to broaden and deepen their appreciation of the visual, and the significance of
understanding diversity and inclusion while looking at illustrations in picturebooks, in
digital form and in the art museum. In particular, the third edition:
• uses new case studies to bring to life exciting initiatives from teachers and art mu-
seum educators in the UK and beyond, examining the potential of picturebooks
for overcoming cultural, educational, linguistic and other barriers in the classroom
and in other settings;
• continues to draw readers’ attention to significant international theoretical work in
the field and provides structured advice for teachers and graduate students who wish
to carry out their own research;
• focuses on new research with pupils, teachers, art educators and researchers work-
ing on young people’s responses to a variety of visual texts, including digital forms
and fine art, and through children’s own artistic creations, to develop a more nu-
anced understanding of visual literacy;
• celebrates the glorious variety of outstanding picturebooks and their makers who
offer rich challenge, amusement, pleasure and consolation to young readers in a
changing, often troubling world.
Children Reading Pictures is essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students
of education, art and children’s literature, as well as providing important information
for primary and early years teachers, literacy coordinators and for all those interested in
picturebooks and visual literacy.
Evelyn Arizpe is Professor of Children’s Literature at the School of Education,

University of Glasgow.
Kate Noble is a Senior Research Associate: Museum Learning at the Fitzwilliam

Museum, University of Cambridge.
Morag Styles is Emeritus Professor of Children’s Poetry and an Emeritus Fellow of

Homerton College, Cambridge.
Children Reading Pictures
New Contexts and Approaches to Picturebooks
THIRD EDITION
Evelyn Arizpe, Kate Noble

and Morag Styles
Designed cover image: Credit to Rose Noble for the cover image of the book
Third edition published 2023
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2023 Evelyn Arizpe, Kate Noble and Morag Styles
The right of Evelyn Arizpe, Kate Noble and Morag Styles to be identified as
authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78
of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
First edition published by Routledge 2002
Second edition published by Routledge 2016
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Arizpe, Evelyn, 1965- author. | Noble, Kate, author. |
Styles, Morag, author.
Title: Children reading pictures: new contexts and approaches to
picturebooks / Evelyn Arizpe, Kate Noble, Morag Styles.
Other titles: Children reading picturebooks
Description: Third Edition. | New York: Routledge, 2023. |
Second edition: 2016. |
Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2022037637 (print) | LCCN 2022037638 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780367617431 (Hardback) | ISBN 9780367617424 (Paperback) |
ISBN 9781003106326 (eBook)
Subjects: LCSH: Visual learning. | Pictures in education. |
Children—Books and reading.
Classification: LCC LB1067.5 .A75 2023 (print) |
LCC LB1067.5 (ebook) | DDC 371.33/5—dc23/eng/20220825
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022037637
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022037638
ISBN: 9780367617431 (hbk)

ISBN: 9780367617424 (pbk)
ISBN: 9781003106326 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003106326
Typeset in Bembo
by codeMantra
This book is dedicated to the memory of our dear friend and
mentor, Margaret Meek Spencer. She was an inspirational and
influential scholar, teacher and writer on all things to do with
children’s literature and reading. Margaret was an original theorist,
an intellectual of great capacity and a person of warmth, kindness
and generosity. Her students loved as well as admired her. Her
willingness to take children seriously and to spend considerable
time observing and talking to them in order to understand their
thinking was remarkable. She was an expert on a wide range
of topics within the fields of literacy and literature, but she has
a special place in the hearts of those of us who specialise in
picturebooks as her insights were ground-breaking and profound.
Her impact on this discipline will never be forgotten.
Contents
List of figures ix
Acknowledgements xi
Notes on authors and contributors xii
Introduction: How texts teach what readers learn: Reasons for a

third edition of Children Reading Pictures 1
M O R AG S T Y L E S
PART I
The original study on children responding to picturebooks 7
1 The original research and guidelines for emerging researchers 9

M O R AG S T Y L E S , E V E LY N A R I Z P E A N D K AT E N O B L E
2 On a walk with Lily and Kitamura: How children link words

and pictures along the way 22
E V E LY N A R I Z P E
3 A gorilla with ‘grandpa’s eyes’: How children interpret ironic

visual texts – a case study of Anthony Browne’s Zoo 37
M O R AG S T Y L E S
4 Picturebooks and metaliteracy: Children talking about how

they read pictures 50
5 Thinking aloud: Looking at children drawing in response

to picturebooks 59
K AT E N O B L E
viii Contents
PART II
New developments in research on children responding
to visual texts 83
6 Young learners looking and making in the art museum

and classroom 85
K AT E N O B L E , E V E LY N A R I Z P E A N D M O R AG S T Y L E S
7 Psyche, picnics and penguin: Case studies of children

responding to visual texts 98
K AT E N O B L E , M A RC E L A E S C OVA R , L U I S A N A R A N J O A N D
K I M D E A K I N W I T H M O R AG S T Y L E S
Case Study 1: ‘Inspire’ at The Fitzwilliam Museum: Narrative

Art and Storytelling – Kate Noble 98
Case Study 2: Picnic at the MAMBO – Marcela Escovar &
Luisa Naranjo 108
Case Study 3: Danny learning more than reading from Polly Dunbar’s
Penguin – Kim Deakin 114
8 Children reading literary apps 124

A LIN E F R E DER ICO
9 Diverse readers, diverse picturebooks, diverse responses 136

PART III
Research and theory for a better future 149
10 Understanding children’s responses to picturebooks through

theory and research 151
11 Epilogue: What children have taught us about reading pictures 164

M O R AG S T Y L E S , E V E LY N A R I Z P E A N D K AT E N O B L E
Afterword: Reading is marvellous anywhere 168

J O RG E T E T L A RG U E TA
Bibliography 169
Index 183
Figures
2.1 From Lily Takes a Walk by Satoshi Kitamura. (Text and illustration
copyright © Satoshi Kitamura, 1987, by permission of Scallywag Press
Ltd., London) 26
Ltd., London) 26
Ltd., London) 27
2.4 By Charlie (9) 34
5.1 By Amy (4) 61
5.2 By Seamus (7) 61
5.3 By Will (9) 62
5.4 By Sara (4) 63
5.5 By Christina (8) 64
5.6 By Bobby (8) 65
5.7 By Ashok (4) 66
5.8 By Anne (9) 66
5.9 By Erin (7) 68
5.10 By Sally (10) 70
5.11 By Belinda (10) 71
5.12 Unsigned drawing 71
5.13 By Louis (4) 74
5.14 Drawing 1 By Jane (5) 75
5.15 Drawing 2 By Jane (5) 75
5.16 Drawing 1 By Yu (4) 77
6.1 A village festival in Honour of St Hubert and St Anthony by Pieter
Brueghel the Younger © The Fitzwilliam Museum 86
6.2 Sharing The Gruffalo in the gallery 94
6.3, 6.4, 6.5 Drawing together in the gallery, Drawing with a friend,
Drawing with pencils and string 95
7.1 Cupid and Psyche by Jacopo del Sellaio © The Fitzwilliam Museum,
Cambridge 98
7.2 Detail of Psyche’s dress designed and made by children from St Peter’s
School, Wisbech 101
x Figures
7.3 Cupid’s arrows made from string, wood, denim and buttons 102
7.4 Design for Psyche’s dress with idea of arrow necklace 102
7.5 Children and teachers from Linton Heights leading a public talk 103
7.6 Collaborative making with paint, leaves and pencil 104
7.7 Children entangled, arms crossed and working in tandem as they add
final details and texture to mixed media collage 105
7.8 Experimenting with materials and story 105
7.9 Detail of doorway from the collaborative frieze showing the use of
mixed media including paint, oil pastel, petals and grass seed 106
7.10 Detail from collaborative frieze showing the use of mixed media
including paint, oil pastel, paper, seeds, lollipop sticks and cut grass 106
7.11 Detail from the collaborative frieze showing Psyche meeting Cupid and
entering the palace showing the use of mixed media 107
7.12 Mixing palettes, paint brushes, and collage materials 107
7.13 “Joaquín loves Picnic, he was happy today (and he even coloured in the
drawing, something which he never does)”. Zully Pardo, Colombia 111
7.14 Face to face reading in the MAMBO with Joaquín (Dec 2020) 113
7.15 Joaquín examines an exhibit inside the MAMBO 113
7.16 Zully and Joaquín looking at an exhibit inside the MAMBO 114
7.17 Penguin and Ben 115
7.18 Penguin and lion 116
7.19 ‘And Penguin said…’ 117
7.20 Danny’s response to Ben’s tantrum 117
7.21 Danny puts himself in the story 118
7.22 Lion licks his lips after eating Danny! 119
7.23 Danny’s drawing of himself and Penguin 120
7.24 Lion eat Danny 120
7.25 Danny with Lion 121
7.26 Danny bites Lion’s nose 122
8.1 Vignette 1 — Part 1 of the scene – reading the instructions 130
8.2 Vignette 2 — First call from Monkey 130
8.3 Vignette 3 — Third call from Monkey and the end of the scene 132
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank Polly Dunbar and Walker Books for generously allowing us
to reproduce a number of pages from Penguin, including those with Danny Wilkinson’s
drawn and written responses to the book. Copyright 2007 Polly Dunbar, reproduced by
permission of Walker Books Ltd, London SE115HJ www.walker.co.uk. The authors are
also grateful to the following for permission to reproduce material: illustrations and text
from Lily Takes a Walk by Satoshi Kitamura, reprinted by permission of Scallywag Press
Ltd., London. We are grateful to Marcela Escovar, Kim Deakin and Luisa Naranjo for
their contributions to this book. Special thanks are due to Aline Frederico for Chapter 8,
Jorge Argueta for his Afterword and Rose Noble for her drawing for the front cover. We
would also like to thank Katja Schreiber for the excellent work she did in proofreading
and compiling the Bibliography. Finally, we are indebted to our editors at Routledge for
commissioning this third edition and for all their careful work on our book.
Notes on authors and contributors
Evelyn Arizpe is Professor of Children’s Literature at the School of Education, Uni-

versity of Glasgow, and is co-founder of the Erasmus Mundus Joint Master’s Degree
programme, ‘Children’s Literature, Media and Culture’. She has taught and pub-
lished widely both nationally and internationally and has co-authored Children Read-
ing Picturebooks: Interpreting visual texts (2003/2016) and Visual Journeys through Wordless
Narratives (2014). She has also co-edited Children as Readers in Children’s Literature:
The power of text and the importance of reading (2016) and Young people reading: Empirical
research across international contexts (2018). Her current research involves children’s lit-
erature and the arts in projects on migration, conflict and peacebuilding. Evelyn is a
judge for the Han C Andersen Award for 2022 and 2024.
Kate Noble is a Senior Research Associate: Museum Learning at the Fitzwilliam Mu-
seum, University of Cambridge, where she leads a teacher training programme which
encourages creative teaching and learning using objects and images. Her research in-
terests include visual literacy, young children in museums and participatory research
which she has been exploring through a number of museum residencies. Kate worked
as a Primary and Early Childhood Teacher before moving into museum education.
Her PhD explored the development of visual literacy in young children, and she has
contributed articles to the European Early Childhood Education Research Journal,
the International Journal of Art and Design Education and chapters to Working with Young
Children in Museums: Weaving Theory and Practice (Hackett et al. 2020), Talking Beyond
the Page: Reading and Responding to Picturebooks (Evans, 2009) and Teaching Through Texts
(Anderson and Styles, 2001). She also worked as a Researcher for Tate’s Young Cultural
Creators Project, and more recently she has led research and evaluation projects on
behalf of the National Gallery, London and University of Cambridge Museums. Kate
sits on the council for the National Society for Education in Art and Design (NSEAD).
Morag Styles is Emeritus Professor of Children’s Poetry and an Emeritus Fellow of
Homerton College, Cambridge. She has taught and published widely, including From
the Garden to the Street: 300 Years of Poetry for Children (1998), and is co-author with
Evelyn Arizpe of 2 editions of Children Reading Picturebooks: Interpreting Visual Texts
(2003, 2016) and Reading Lessons from the Eighteenth Century: Mothers, Children & Texts
(2006). She is a co-author with Martin Salisbury of 2 editions of Children’s Picture-
books: The Art of Visual Storytelling (2012, 2020). She was Director of the Caribbean
Poetry Project, a collaboration between Cambridge Faculty of Education and The
University of the West Indies (2010–15), and she co-edited Teaching Caribbean Poetry
(2013) with Beverley Bryan. She co-curated an exhibition for the Fitzwilliam Mu-
seum on children’s picturebooks (2000), and the British Library with Michael Rosen
Notes on authors and contributors xiii
on the history of children’s poetry (2009). Morag is a judge for the BolognaRagazzi
Award for Poetry and Illustration 2021 and 2022. She is currently finishing a child-
hood memoir set in Scotland and India.
Jorge Tetl Argueta is an award-winning Salvadoran Poet and Writer of highly ac-
claimed bilingual children’s books, short stories and poems. A native Salvadoran
and Pipil Nahua Indian, he spent much of his childhood in rural El Salvador. His
children’s books are written in poetry form in English and Spanish and reflect the
Latino experience and heritage, as well as the immigrant experience; he also writes
about the Nahuatl Indians and their deep appreciation and respect for nature. Jorge
has spent over 15 years as a Workshop and Classroom Presenter, speaking about the
power of poetry in children’s lives.
Kim Deakin gained an MEd from Cambridge University in 2014, when she was Lit-
eracy Coordinator at Richmond Hill Special School in Luton. Her Headteacher, Jill
Miller, encouraged her to work in the creative way that is evident in her contribution
to Chapter 7. Kim has since retired and moved to Somerset.
Marcela Escovar studied literature at Los Andes University, and has an MEd in Edu-
cation and Children’s Literature and Literacies from the University of Glasgow. She
has worked as an Editor, Writer, Reader, Creator of digital content and Cultural
Manager. She is the Director of the reading project, Picnic de Palabras, from where
she facilitates reading experiences for families around picturebooks in unconven-
tional spaces. This project has been replicated in more than 10 countries and 20 cities
around the world. In 2020, in alliance with the Bogotá Art Museum, they carried
out the project Picnic en el Mambo. Currently, she is an Advisor and works as a Litera-
ture Coordinator in the government of Cundinamarca in Colombia.
Aline Frederico (@aline_frederico) is an Adjunct Professor at the School of Com-
munication of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She obtained her
PhD in children’s literature and education from the University of Cambridge with
the thesis Embodiment and Agency in Digital Reading: Preschoolers Making Meaning with
Literary Apps. Her research focuses on digital literature for children and works at
the intersection of children’s literature, digital literature and media, multimodality
and education. Since she returned to Brazil, she coordinated the research project
Read for a Child –Digital Bookshelf for the Itaú Social Foundation (Brazil), which
promotes quality digital literary reading for children, and published guidelines for
the selection and mediation of children’s digital literature; she also collaborated with
the Unesco Chair in Reading (PUC-Rio) in the research project Brazil who Reads,
which mapped reading promotion initiatives across the country. Aline is an Editorial
Assistant for the journal International Research in Children’s Literature and a Jury Mem-
ber for the awards Selo Cátedra 10 for Brazilian children’s literature and ComKids
Interactive – Digital Books for Iberoamerican digital media for children. For further
information, please check www.alinefrederico.com.
Luisa Naranjo studied politics at the University of the Andes along with history and
theory of art. She worked for six years in the public sector in the Minister’s Office
and the Directorate of Arts and Crafts of Colombia within the Ministry of Culture.
From 2010 to 2020, she was a Researcher in cultural and gastronomic themes. Cur-
rently, she has completed a course of studies in Education and she is Subdirector of
the Modern Art Museum of Bogota.
Introduction
How texts teach what readers learn: Reasons
for a third edition of Children Reading Pictures
Morag Styles
The Introduction draws on Margaret Meek Spencer’s influential How Texts Teach What
Readers Learn (1998) in showing how challenging picturebooks teach young readers how
‘to derive true meaning from pictures’, a quote by Anthony Browne from the first edi-
tion of Children Reading Pictures (2003). He believes this to be innate ability of children
though we also emphasise how important it is to nurture that skill. The current edu-
cational climate in the UK (and most other countries) is focused on a narrow range of
skills where reading for pleasure and visual literacy take a back seat. One of the reasons
for a new edition is to give space to how the art museum has stepped into the breach and
to consider work they have been doing with children and teachers to promote art ed-
ucation and appreciation. It also provided the opportunity to foreground diversity and
inclusion and to take a more international view of children responding to picturebooks.
Their popularity during the recent pandemic and the role picturebooks play in making
young readers aware of environmental issues has also been highlighted.
Beginnings
Anthony Browne had this to say in his afterword to the first edition of Children Reading
Picturebooks:
When I first read Children Reading Pictures I found it intensely moving. I was deeply
touched by the children’s response to Zoo and The Tunnel, and equally impressed
by the gentle and subtle questions of the interviewers. The children’s sophisticated
reactions didn’t surprise me as I’ve known for some time how we often undervalue
the abilities of children to see and understand. They were able to pick up on themes
and ideas that I hadn’t expressed in the text, only in the pictures, and proved won-
derful readers of visual metaphors. This book, I think, proves beyond doubt children’s
innate ability to derive true meaning from pictures.
(our emphasis)
It is more than twenty years since Evelyn Arizpe and Morag Styles started work on
Children Reading Pictures. If we were going to realise our aim of finding out how chil-
dren responded to picturebooks, we needed to work with a large enough cohort to
make our findings viable. This required working with a group of researchers and sev-
eral colleagues immediately came to mind: Kathy Coulthard, then Adviser for ethnic
minority achievement in Enfield; the late Helen Bromley (to whom the second edition
is dedicated) was a tutor for the Centre for Language in Primary Education; and Kate
DOI: 10.4324/9781003106326-1
2 Reasons for a third edition of Children Reading Pictures
Noble, a local infant teacher, who had gained a first class degree at Homerton College,
Cambridge in Art and Education and shown herself to be an outstanding student on
our undergraduate course, Children and Literature. What a team and how excited we
were in 1999 to be on the threshold of investigating what happens when children read
picturebooks.
What the children had to say about picturebooks

Our inspiration came from the many wonderful picturebook authors and illustrators
we admired and from two main scholarly sources at that point – Louise Rosenblatt’s
work on meaning being created in the transaction between the text and what the reader
brings to it at the moment of reading (Rosenblatt 1978); and Margaret Meek Spencer’s
How Texts Teach What Readers Learn (1988). This small pamphlet-size volume with huge
ambition, whose title is explanatory, took the education world by storm, and her ideas
have influenced teachers, researchers and academics ever since. Drawing on Rosenblatt,
Meek’s focus was both on how the reader interacted with the visual and verbal text and
how the perfect alchemy was achieved by gifted illustrators creating picturebooks that
all but taught children how to read these challenging texts. Margaret Meek died in 2020
and we have dedicated this volume to her seminal work on children’s reading, literature
and visual literacy.
Despite the popularity of picturebooks and the growing scholarly interest in the
topic, little attention had been given to what children could tell us about how they read,
understood and valued picturebooks. To find this out we recorded one to one inter-
views with a cohort of about a hundred children, held discussions with interviewees and
invited them to draw in response to the picturebooks.1 As for the books themselves, we
had to find examples which would appeal to children aged 4–11 as the whole primary
age range was our scope. We are enormously grateful to Anthony Browne and Satoshi
Kitamura for not only allowing us to use their books at the heart of the research project
but for taking an interest in the outcomes from the children and being interviewed for
the first edition. ‘Making complex ideas simple’ was the subtitle of a recent article about
Satoshi Kitamura’s picturebooks (Kosaka 2020); this would equally apply to Anthony
Browne’s work. However, this quote does not begin to cover the fervent devotion and
sheer delight we witnessed in young readers’ responses to their books.
The popularity of picturebooks

In the second edition, we were grateful for the generosity of Polly Dunbar and Walker
Books for allowing us to use many pages from Penguin free of charge, and to Danny
Wilkinson, his parents and school for giving us permission to use his inspiring drawn
and verbal responses to Penguin. We were honoured that the distinguished scholar, Mar-
garet Mackey, agreed to write a chapter on the then burgeoning digital revolution. At
that point there was widespread anxiety about the death of the book, including the
threat of picturebook apps to printed material. That concern now seems less pressing
from the vantage point of 2022, where picturebook sales have increased rather than
declined and we can now also look back on how picturebooks were widely used and
celebrated during the coronavirus lockdowns. We also wanted to take a fresh look at
how the digital revolution with its slick electronic gadgets impacted on picturebooks,
Reasons for a third edition of Children Reading Pictures 3
both positively and negatively. For this edition, drawing on Margaret’s valuable insights
about picturebook apps, Aline Frederico has conducted her own case study and updated
research in this area.
Another set of people we need to thank for their contributions to all the editions
of Children Reading Pictures are our students, not only those featured in our books, but
masters and doctoral students in Glasgow and Cambridge who have taught us such a
lot about visual literacy. And we offer a huge vote of thanks to all the teachers sharing
picturebooks with the children we have studied over the years, and to those who have
written to us with words of encouragement from many parts of the world, including a
large number from Latin America as there is a Spanish edition of our book.
A new focus for third edition

Having produced a second edition in 2016, why should we want to do another only five
years later? First of all, Evelyn and Morag have found that in all the books they have
written or edited, separately or together, this is the volume that has received the most
affection and approval from its readers. Indeed, that is one of the reasons why Routledge
invited us to submit a proposal for a further edition. (This is a good moment to thank
Alison Foyle and successive editors of the Taylor & Francis group for their belief in us
and in the book.) Evelyn’s recent work on diversity in general, and refugees in particu-
lar, and its topicality today, made us aware that these were issues we wanted to focus on
and bring up to date in our new edition which is also more international in perspective
than the others.
Another important reason for an update was that primary education in UK and be-
yond had been changing with increasing focus on a narrow range of skills which has
led to a climate where there was less space, time and value given to literature and art
education. Despite living in a world dominated by image, successive governments have
pursued a reading curriculum dominated by the teaching of phonics and an art curric-
ulum squeezed to the margins. Now is the time more than ever to explore how visual
texts teach what it is that readers and viewers learn. This is why we got in touch with
Kate Noble who had written a fine-grained doctorate on children talking and drawing
in response to picturebooks after contributing to the first edition. What we learned
from children drawing in response to the picturebooks they were reading had been one
of the most exciting outcomes of the first edition and, as an art educator, Kate had led
our thinking at the time.
Since then art museum education has taken off, partly to fill the gaps in the school
curriculum, but also in developing creative projects to extend children’s appreciation of
art and to encourage their own art and craft making. Interestingly, for some time there
has been a large crop of picturebooks whose subject matter is museums and art galleries.
Many readers will be familiar with the popular Katie picturebooks, set in an art gallery,
by James Mayhew. Other illustrators make reference to particular artists in stories likely
to appeal to young children – from Babar’s Museum of Art and Linnea in Monet’s Garden to
Scieszka and Smith’s Seen Art? and Anthony Browne’s frequent references to paintings
in many of his picturebooks, especially Willy’s Pictures and The Shape Game.
Now that Kate Noble is an experienced art museum educator and researcher, work-
ing primarily at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, but also on special projects with
the National Gallery and Tate Modern in London, she seemed the perfect person to
4 Reasons for a third edition of Children Reading Pictures
expand the scope of our book to include new approaches in art museum education with
particular reference to children’s responses to reading paintings. We are very pleased she
accepted our invitation to become a co-author of this edition.
What the future holds

The world has changed enormously since we began to research how children responded
to challenging picturebooks. The digital revolution with its instant communication,
access to information and photographic sophistication, contained within a small hand-
held device, has transformed most people’s lives – and children are adept at accessing
its potential. The enormous challenges faced by all nations, such as climate change, loss
of bird and animal species and habitats, the extremes of weather, rising sea levels and
heating up of the planet is likely to exacerbate the refugee crisis which is already peril-
ous. And it is our children who have this uncertain future to face. More than ever they
need a first class educational system which offers emotional engagement, intellectual
challenge, opportunities for discussion, new ways of thinking, aesthetic appreciation
and the drive to communicate, all things which challenging picturebooks offer even
the youngest reader.
We have been experiencing a world-wide pandemic which has killed millions of
people, made economies slump, led to long months of shut-down and the need to
isolate. But through these painful times, there have also been positive signs of hope,
growth and change. One is a renewal in our appreciation of the natural world; another
is the realisation of the importance of the arts in our lives. We have applauded the cre-
ative ways artistic institutions have opened up their treasures to a wide audience, and
how musicians, actors, dancers, singers have found inventive ways to work together and
reach audiences.
Although the picturebook market in the UK and other countries was buoyant
pre-pandemic, sales of children’s books have fallen over the last 18 months. However,
in this same period picturebooks have continued to be published and translated with
independent publishers flourishing, such as Tiny Owl and Book Island in the UK, Ekaré
in Latinamerica and Spain, and Tulika Books and Pratham Books in India.
More optimistically, David Shelley,2 the CEO of Hachette (the second largest trade
publisher), wrote about the state of the publishing market in December 2021. He re-
minded those in the publishing industry that ‘reading experienced a boom whenever
the country locked down’ and this was especially true of picturebooks among other
genres. He also noted the vital role of independent bookshops and the recent rise in
their sales, the fact that issues of diversity and inclusion were now high profile, and that
Hachette national offices had moved out of London to Manchester, Sheffield, Newcas-
tle, Bristol and Edinburgh. In keeping with the emphasis on environmental issues, they
have employed climate change consultants and were committed to ‘science based targets
for reducing carbon emissions.’
How this edition works

We have divided this edition into three sections. The first will be familiar to readers of
earlier editions as we concentrate on what was most significant in our original research
and offer guidance for new researchers in this field.
Reasons for a third edition of Children Reading Pictures 5
The middle section is longest and fullest, focusing on new developments in children’s
responses to visual texts. Here we open with a chapter devoted to research on visual
literacy, what we are learning from approaches to reading pictures in the art museum,
and where picturebooks fit in. This is followed by two new case studies, one of which
is situated in the Museum of Modern Art in Bogota (MAMBO) where reading and
art feature strongly and where contacts between illustrators and young readers are ex-
plored. The other features an exciting project developed at the Fitzwilliam Museum,
Cambridge, with dozens of schools taking part. It shows rich results after children both
learn how to look at and interpret a classical painting and are given the opportunity to
engage in connected art and craft work. We have also retained the engaging case study
of a young autistic person’s powerful reactions to Penguin and Kim Deacon’s sensitive
interpretation and documentation of his comments and actions. New for this edition,
and a chapter on its own, is Aline Frederico’s case study of a child and her mother re-
sponding to a picturebook or ‘literary’ app. It also includes an update of research in this
area. The section concludes with an extensive examination of diversity and inclusion in
picturebook research, a field that has become highly sensitive and is rapidly changing.
The final section of the book is the shortest but it includes a wide-ranging update of
research evidence on children’s responses to picturebooks. We conclude with an upbeat
appraisal of what children learn from picturebooks, fiction and non-fiction alike, as well
as art, design, paintings and all kinds of visual literature. We see huge value in children
as artists and makers, using paintings and picturebooks as inspiration. We look more
closely at the outcomes of the Power of Picturebooks evidence (CLPE 2021) about how
drawing and working with picturebooks both enhances children’s reading and writing
skills, as well as considering the role they play in developing empathy, knowledge and
understanding. We consider the many different contexts for children engaging with
picturebooks which include the classroom, after-school club programmes, libraries and
the art museum, but also, as our studies show, homes, parks, hospitals, even refugee
camps. The fact that ‘reading can be marvellous anywhere’ is beautifully illustrated
in words by Salvadorean poet, Jorge Tetl Argueta, who kindly provided us with the
‘Afterword’.
This third edition sums up what children have taught us after 20+ years of studying
their responses and make the case that in a divided world, picturebooks bring us closer
together because they afford ‘more equal access to the world of story’ and ‘deeper levels
of meaning through the interpretation of both word and image and the space between’
(2003: 189), just as Kathy Couthard showed us in the first edition.
Notes
1 A detailed account of the way the original research design was conducted and justifications
for it is included in the first and second editions of this book.
2 Letter from Sarah Gravestock, on behalf of David Shelley CEO Hachette, to authors, illus-
trators, translators and editors (6 December 2021).
Part I
The original study on

children responding to
picturebooks
1 The original research and guidelines
for emerging researchers
Morag Styles, Evelyn Arizpe and Kate Noble
In the following quote, the art critic, Ernst Gombrich, draws our attention to the ‘in-
quiring mind’ that is required to understand and analyse the visual world:
To read the artist’s picture is to mobilise our memories and our experience of the
visible world and to test [his/sic] image through tentative projections […] It is not
the ‘innocent eye’, however, that can achieve this match but only the inquiring
mind that knows how to probe the ambiguities of vision.
(Gombrich 1962: 264)
This book attempts to show that very young children have inquiring minds and that
picturebooks are vehicles that can indeed ‘probe the ambiguities of vision’. In this chap-
ter, as well as re-presenting the most significant outcomes of our original research, we
offer suggestions and guidance with new researchers, teachers and higher degree stu-
dents in mind.
The aims of the original study

The principal aim of our original research was to investigate how multimodal texts
were interpreted by children, to explore the potential of visual literacy and to find out
more about the skills children needed to deal with visual texts. Some of the questions
we set ourselves had not been asked before of readers aged 4–11. When confronted with
complex picturebooks, how did children make sense of the narrative? What were the
specific skills that young readers brought to interpreting visual texts? How did they per-
ceive the relationship between words and images? How could they best articulate their
responses? Did the reading background of the children affect their viewing? What part
did visual texts such as films and other media play in their ability to analyse pictures?
What did children’s own drawings reveal about their perception of a picturebook? What
did complex picturebooks teach them about looking? How did talking about a book in
depth, with their peers and with adults, affect their responses? What was the relationship
between thinking and seeing?
Research design
Our research design was based on the conclusions of a pilot study during which our re-
search instruments were refined. The basic structure was as follows: we worked in seven
primary schools serving varied catchment areas, interviewing two boys and two girls
DOI: 10.4324/9781003106326-3
10 The original study on children responding to picturebooks
per class from three different classes per school, one of which was early years (4–6), one
lower primary (7–9) and one upper primary (9–11). This meant we worked closely with
12 children of varying ages in each school, usually requiring three whole-day visits as
well as preliminary conferences with teachers. We also identified two further children
from each age group in case of illness; these children were not interviewed but they
were invited to take part in semi-structured group discussions. We used three picture-
books overall but only one with any given group of children.
The picturebooks
We spent some time trialling a range of picturebooks by contemporary illustrators to
find examples of multi-layered texts which should appeal equally to children aged 4–11;
this proved no easy task. However multi-layered and inviting the picturebook, so many
were discarded as they simply would not straddle the wide age group. In the end, we
settled on Zoo and The Tunnel by Anthony Browne and Lily Takes a Walk by Satoshi
Kitamura,1 all highly rated examples of picturebook art with an appeal to both younger
and older children according to our pilot study and ideal for in-depth discussion. Each
picturebook was to be used in at least two schools to allow for comparison: The Tunnel
was read in three of the seven schools; Lily and Zoo were each read in two schools. Both
artists were interviewed at length and were supportive of the project.2
The schools
Seven primary schools participated in the research, ranging from multi-ethnic and eco-
nomically disadvantaged settings in north London to a suburban school in Essex. The
schools were chosen to include those with differing intakes in terms of social class,
though we did not systematically control for these variables, confining ourselves to
collecting data on the proportion of pupils having free school meals.
All of the schools were to some extent multi-ethnic and multilingual, with the ex-
ception of School D in the south-east of England, where the pupils were predominantly
white, monolingual speakers of English. This was in contrast to the London schools,
where a whole spread of ethnic groups could be found, including a large percentage of
refugees from the African and Asian subcontinents. Of the three schools in Cambridge,
around 20% of the pupils spoke more than one language.
The children
The interview sample was constructed in order to produce an equal representation of
boys and girls and to include children from diverse class and ethnic backgrounds. In
addition, the class teacher’s estimate of the reading ability of each child was obtained,
providing a useful point of comparison when assessing children’s ability to read pictures.
Researchers had no knowledge of these reading abilities until after the interviews took
place, though we had asked teachers to select two experienced and two relatively in-
experienced readers. In the event, teachers took a fair bit of licence with our requests,
including children who were fairly average readers and often selecting ‘interesting’ chil-
dren whom they thought the experience would be good for. Overall, we had a sample
of children from 4 to 11 years old with a wide range of abilities, responding to the same
questions based on the picturebook used in their school.
The original research and guidelines for emerging researchers 11
Approximately 35% of the interviewed children were bilingual with varying lin-
guistic backgrounds, from two pupils who had recently arrived in the UK with lit-
tle knowledge of English to third-generation bilinguals.3 Where necessary, interviews
were conducted with a translator. A few children had slight learning difficulties asso-
ciated with moderate dyslexia, autism and hyperactivity, but these were not found to
interfere with their responses. Despite some shyness at the beginning of the interviews,
and once they were assured this was not a test, most children were eager to partici-
pate, to answer the interviewer’s questions and to draw, and by the time of the group
discussion were almost always completely involved in the picturebook. When roughly
one-third of the sample were re-interviewed a few months later, they remembered the
initial interviews and could recall many details of the books even though most had not
seen them for some time. We have changed the names of all the children in the study,
the pseudonyms taking account of ethnicity.
In order to provide a context against which to set our results, we used a short ques-
tionnaire to find out about the reading habits of the 486 pupils (aged 4–11) in the seven
schools that participated in the study. All told, the list of picturebooks mentioned by
children was quite limited and seven seemed to be the peak age for reading them, with
more girls than boys mentioning this genre. The data from the questionnaire suggested
that most of the children’s contact with images had occurred through media texts rather
than through books. It would be interesting to see what differences would emerge if we
applied a similar questionnaire now.
The interviews
In-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with 84 children, 21 of whom
were followed up in a second interview several months later. An interview schedule was
closely followed, normally 45 minutes long, with about ten questions common to all,
and a further ten which were book specific.
Before the individual interviews, we asked the class teacher to read our chosen
picturebook and show the illustrations to the class as a whole, while we observed.
The teachers had pointed out the students we would be interviewing in advance, so
it gave us a chance to watch them responding to a picturebook before we actually
met them.
The interviews began by asking each child about the appeal of the cover and how it
showed what the picturebook might be about (later in the interviews we asked if, in
retrospect, the covers were right for the books). We then read the book through, stop-
ping whenever a child wanted to explore a picture in detail. Next, we read through the
picturebook again, allowing the children to look more closely at the pictures if they
wished, and asked them to tell us about each page or double spread that we had selected
to focus on in turn, using both specific and open-ended questions. We also invited
them to show us their favourite pictures, to tell us how they ‘read’ the pictures and to
talk about the relationship between words and pictures. We questioned them about the
actions, expressions and feelings of the characters; the intratextual and intertextual ele-
ments (without using big words); what illustrators needed to know in order to draw, and
the ways in which they used colour, body language and perspective, etc. In addition, we
took research notes that included references to the children’s body language (pointing,
gazing, tone of voice, use of hand, facial expressions) while reading the books. All the
sessions were taped and transcribed.
Group discussions
After the individual interviews, the children participated in a group discussion with the
other members of their class who had been interviewed, plus the two extra children
who had been identified by the teacher in case of the absence of interviewees. In total,
126 pupils were involved in these discussions, which lasted up to an hour and which
were normally conducted later in the same day. During these discussions, the research-
ers were free to review interesting issues that had come up in the interviews, open up
new areas for debate, including those chosen by children, and give those who had not
been interviewed a chance to grapple with the book.
Revisiting
Preliminary findings indicated that repeated readings of a picturebook could be an
important element in pupils constructing meaning, so we were interested to find out
whether significant changes in interpretation had occurred sometime after the initial re-
search. Accordingly, we decided to carry out follow-up interviews three to six months
after the initial interviews with roughly one-fifth of our original sample, i.e., one child
from each class. The children were chosen to represent a range of responses to the first
interviews – from children who had been outstandingly articulate or passionate about
the book the first time round, to those who had barely been willing to participate,
from children with specific learning difficulties to those who were described by their
teachers as more or less average readers. In the revisiting, the emphasis of the questions
changed from a detailed examination of individual pages to a consideration of the book
as a whole.
Having selected a mixture of children, we set about asking questions which were
more demanding than the first time round and which focused on the book as a whole
and the artist’s likely intentions. For example:
• What goes on in your head as you look at pictures?

• How do you think the artist decides what to write as words and what to draw as
pictures?
• Tell me about the way Satoshi Kitamura draws lines.
• How do the endpapers of The Tunnel take you into the story?
• What do you think Anthony Browne might be trying to tell us about the differ-
ences between humans and animals in Zoo?
We also repeated a few of the original questions which the children had found challeng-
ing initially and asked for new drawings in response to the text. Our first impression
was that although the children returned to the books eagerly enough and remembered
a great deal about their earlier encounters with them, there was little evidence of any
major new thinking. However, after we scrutinised the transcripts we became aware
of small, subtle developments. Amy (now 5), for example, pounced on Zoo, declaring:
‘I just noticed a funny difference I never noticed before… the colour helps you to find
the differences between the animals and the humans’. Her statement about the mother
was more clear-cut than before: ‘Mum is sad and she thinks the animals should be going
free’. She also told us that, ‘I imagine the pictures. I see them with my brain’, while Yu
(4) concluded that, ‘I think of pictures when I go somewhere else’.
The original research and guidelines for emerging researchers 13
Erin’s (7) thoughtful interpretation on the first visit was again evident in the re-
interview. Her summing-up of Zoo as a whole showed her usual insight: ‘Humans
change into animals to learn how it feels; animals look a bit like humans so they know
what it’s like to be free’. She liked Browne’s work because ‘it makes you keep thinking
about things’. Perhaps most noteworthy was Erin’s different style of drawing. Her first
picture is spontaneous, attractive and expressive, full of the experimentation she en-
joyed in Browne’s work; five months later, she seems to have entered the phase which
Davis (1993) calls ‘literal translation’ and she is now more concerned with naturalism
and a sense of morality, so evident in the drawings of the older pupils. In all cases, the
children went a little further in their understanding of the picturebooks.
The evidence for the points we have been making in this chapter about the often
remarkable ability of children to interpret challenging picturebooks with great insight
can be found in Chapters 2–8 to follow.
Children drawing in response to picturebooks

It was purely by chance that children drawing in response to picturebooks became such
a major part of our study. We had noticed in our previous forays with children younger
than seven that their powerful physical, emotional and social responses to picturebooks
were not always borne out in what the children had to say about the books when asked
direct questions. In other words, and as plenty of research has shown, young chil-
dren cannot always articulate their ideas and feelings – but they can often show their
meaning-making through their own artistic creations. We wanted to get as close as we
could to understanding what the younger children in our study were thinking, so we
decided to ask all the participants to draw in response to the book we had examined.
The purpose of the drawing was to access some of the knowledge that might not have
been verbally articulated during the interviews.4 The researchers provided materials
when necessary and the pupils were allowed time to draw, either while others were
being interviewed or later in the day. Some of these drawings are analysed in Chapter 5.
Data analysis
The amount of data generated from the interviews and discussions was considerable and
required many careful readings.5 The transcripts from the initial and the follow-up in-
terviews were analysed qualitatively, partially employing a Grounded Theory approach
(Glaser and Strauss 1967; Strauss 1987), but also using codes derived from previous stud-
ies on response to text (for example, Thomson 1987). We also took into account the data
analysis carried out by two of the most systematic studies on response to picturebooks to
date – Kiefer (1993) and Madura (1998). Kiefer developed categories and subcategories
of response according to four of Halliday’s functions of language: informative, heuristic,
imaginative and personal. Madura took Kiefer’s framework into account but grouped
responses to the particular books she used into three main categories: descriptive, inter-
pretive and the identification of thematic trends.6
Although we found these categories useful, both as analytical tools and as a means
of corroborating our findings, the most useful codes were developed from our own data, which
were successively modified through further analysis. In order to facilitate this analysis, the
oral response was divided into two groups – although it was clear that these groups
were closely linked. We identified one group as ‘categories of perception’ because the
responses were based on codes derived from what the children took from the pic-
turebook, such as the noticing of significant details, intra- and intertextual references
or the relationship between the text and the image. Responses in the second group,
‘levels of interpretation’, corresponded to the way in which the children made sense
of these picturebook codes, for example, giving the interviewer literal, implausible or
plausible explanations, interrogating or evaluating the texts and/or images. This initial
categorisation served as a framework for organising the data. Once this was achieved,
researchers took the analysis in different directions, for example, looking more closely at
the response to visual features, ethical and moral issues, the interaction between written
text and image (depending on the picturebook in question) or concentrating on the
linguistic and cultural context of readers.
Implications for research and pedagogy

In what follows, we summarise some of the main findings from our original research as
well as adding those from the last 20 or so years that have confirmed and supplemented
these initial findings. We also provide some guidelines for those who want to carry
out research on response to picturebooks, based on extensive experience with our own
further studies and those of other researchers. Finally, we review the methodologies that
guided our original research and are still widely used, referring briefly to implications
for pedagogy and further research.
Summary of findings
In this section, we attempt to provide a concise picture of the evidence that supports the
importance of children reading and responding to picturebooks. We start with a list of
the most salient findings from our original study:
• Children as young as four were very good at analysing the visual features of texts.
• Most children were deeply engaged by the texts and keen to discuss the moral,
social, spiritual and environmental issues they raised.
• Analysing visual text, and the relationship between words and images, made de-
mands on higher-order reading skills (inference, viewpoint, etc.).
• There was no clear correlation between reading ability (as identified by the class
teacher) and the ability to analyse visual texts.
• As well as learning through looking, we had clear evidence of children learning
through talking, and the importance of enabling questions was underlined.
• There were many similarities between the responses of children in schools with
completely different catchment areas.
• The younger children’s drawings often showed understandings they were unable
to articulate.
• While we were aware of the development in children’s ability to interpret visual
texts, the trajectory by age was not always clear-cut.
Our findings confirmed our original belief that careful looking and constructive dia-
logue enables children (including those who are very young or do not speak English flu-
ently or do not read print confidently) to make worthwhile judgements about pictures
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
experimental and hypothetical method with which he is already
familiar in the physical sciences.
In this version of the work of the three leading pragmatists it is
assumed, of course, that the pragmatist philosophy is the only
philosophy that can show to the average man that philosophy can
really do something useful—can “bake bread,” if you will, can give to
a man the food of a man. It is assumed, too, that it is the only
philosophy which proceeds scientifically, that is to say, by means of
observation and of hypotheses that “work,” and by subsequent
deduction and by “verification.” And again, that it is the only
philosophy that gives to man the realities upon which he can base
his aspirations or his faith in distinction, that is to say, from the mere
abstractions of Rationalism in any form.
By way of a few quotations illustrative of the fundamental
contentions of the pragmatists, we may select the following: “Ideas
become true just in so far as they help us to get into satisfactory
relation with other parts of our experience, to summarise them and
get about among them by conceptional short-cuts instead of
following the interminable succession of particular phenomena. Any
idea upon which we can ride, so to speak; any idea that will carry us
prosperously from any one part of our experience to any other part,
linking things satisfactorily, working securely, simplifying, saving
labour—is true for just so much, true in so far forth, true
29
instrumentally.” “The true is the name of whatever proves itself to
be good in the way of belief, and good for definite and assignable
30
reasons.” From Professor Dewey: “Thinking is a kind of activity
which we perform at specific need, just as at other times we engage
in other sorts of activity, as converse with a friend, draw a plan for a
house, take a walk, eat a dinner, purchase a suit of clothes, etc. etc.
The measure of its success, the standard of its validity is precisely
the degree in which thinking disposes of the difficulty and allows us
to proceed with the more direct modes of experiencing, that are
31
henceforth possessed of more assured and deepened value.”
From Dr. Schiller’s book, Studies in Humanism: “Pragmatism is the
doctrine that when an assertion claims truth, its consequences are
always used to test its claims; that (2) the truth of an assertion
depends on its application; that (3) the meaning of a rule lies in its
application; that (4) all meaning depends on purpose; that (5) all
mental life is purposive. It [Pragmatism] must constitute itself into (6)
a systematic protest against all ignoring of the purposiveness of
actual knowing, alike whether it is abstracted from for the sake of the
imaginary, pure, or absolute reason of the rationalists, or eliminated
for the sake of an equally imaginary or pure mechanism of the
naturalists. So conceived, we may describe it as (7) a conscious
application to logic of a teleological psychology which implies
ultimately a voluntaristic metaphysics.”
From these citations, and from the descriptive remarks of the
preceding two paragraphs, we may perhaps be enabled to infer that
our Anglo-American Pragmatism has progressed from the stage of
(1) a mere method of discussing truth and thinking in relation to the
problem of philosophy as a whole, (2) that of a more or less definite
and detailed criticism of the rationalism that overlooks the practical,
or purposive, character of most of our knowledge, to that of (3) a
humanistic or “voluntaristic” or “personalistic” philosophy, with its
32
many different associations and affiliations. One of the last
developments, for example, of this pragmatist humanism is Dr.
Schiller’s association of philosophy with the metaphysics of
evolution, with the attempt to find the goal of the world-process and
of human history in a changeless society of perfected individuals.
We shall immediately see, however, that this summary
description of the growth of Pragmatism has to be supplemented by
a recognition of (1) some of the different phases Pragmatism has
assumed on the continent of Europe, (2) the different phases that
may be detected in the reception or criticism accorded to it in
different countries, and (3) some of the results of the pragmatist
movement upon contemporary philosophy. All these things have to
do with the making of the complex thing that we think of as
Pragmatism and the pragmatist movement.
A NOTE ON THE MEANING OF
“PRAGMATISM”
(1) “The opinion that metaphysics is to be largely cleared up by the application of
the following maxim for obtaining clearness of apprehension: ‘Consider what
effects that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of
our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our
conception of the object’” (Baldwin’s Philosophical Dictionary, vol. ii. p. 321). [We
can see from this citation that the application of its formulæ about “consequences”
to metaphysics, or philosophy generally, must be considered as a part, or aspect,
of the pragmatist philosophy.]
(2) “The doctrine that the whole meaning of a conception expresses itself in
practical consequences; consequences either in the shape of conduct to be
recommended, or in that of experiences to be expected, if the conception be true;
which consequences would be different, if it were untrue, and must be different
from the consequences by which the meaning of other conceptions is in turn
expressed. If a second conception should not appear to have other consequence,
then it must be really only the first conception under a different name. In
methodology, it is certain that to trace and compare their respective consequences
is an admirable way of establishing the different meanings of different conceptions”
(ibid., from Professor James).
(3) “A widely current opinion during the last quarter of a century has been that
‘reasonableness’ is not a good in itself, but only for the sake of something.
Whether it be so or not seems to be a synthetical question [i.e. a question that is
not merely a verbal question, a question of words], not to be settled by an appeal
to the Principle of Contradiction [the principle hitherto relied upon by Rationalism
or Intellectualism].... Almost everybody will now agree that the ultimate good lies in
the evolutionary process in some way. If so, it is not in individual reactions in their
segregation, but in something general or continuous. Synechism is founded on the
notion that the coalescence, the becoming continuous, the becoming governed by
laws, the becoming instinct with general ideas, are but phases of one and the
same process of the growth of reasonableness” (ibid. p. 322. From Dr. Peirce, the
bracket clauses being the author’s).
(4) “It is the belief that ideas invariably strive after practical expression, and
that our whole life is teleological. Putting the matter logically, logic formulates
theoretically what is of regulative importance for life—for our ‘experience’ in view of
practical ends. Its philosophical meaning is the conviction that all facts of nature,
physically and spiritually, find their expressions in ‘will’; will and energy are
identical. This tendency is in agreement with the practical tendencies of American
thought and American life in so far as they both set a definite end before Idealism”
(Ueberweg-Heinze, Geschichte der Philosophie, vol. iv., written and contributed by
Professor Matoon Monroe Curtis, Professor of Philosophy in Western Reserve
University, Cleveland, U.S.A.).
(5) See also an article in Mind for October 1900, vol. ix. N.S., upon
“Pragmatism” by the author of this book on Pragmatism and Idealism, referred to
as one of the early sources in Baldwin’s Philosophical Dictionary (New York and
London) and in Ueberweg-Heinze’s Geschichte, Vierter Teil (Berlin, 1906).
The conclusion that I am inclined to draw from the foregoing official statements
(and also, say, from another official article like that of M. Lalande in the Revue
Philosophique, 1906, on “Pragmatisme et Pragmaticisme”) is that the term
“Pragmatism” is not of itself a matter of great importance, and that there is no
separate, intelligible, independent, self-consistent system of philosophy that may
be called Pragmatism. It is a general name for the Practicalism or Voluntarism or
Humanism or the Philosophy of the Practical Reason, or the Activism, or the
Instrumentalism, or the Philosophy of Hypotheses, or the Dynamic Philosophy of
life and things that is discussed in different ways in this book upon Pragmatism
and Idealism. And it is not and cannot be independent of the traditional body of
philosophical truth in relation to which it can alone be defined.
CHAPTER II
PRAGMATISM AND THE PRAGMATIST
MOVEMENT
In considering some of the results of pragmatist and voluntarist

doctrines in the case of European writers, to whom the American-
English triumvirate used to look somewhat sympathetically, we may
begin with Italy, which boasted, according to Dr. Schiller (writing in
1907), of a youthful band of avowed pragmatists with a militant
33
organ, the Leonardo. “Fundamentally,” declares Papini, the leader
of this movement, “Pragmatism means an unstiffening of all our
theories and beliefs, by attending to their instrumental value. It
incorporates and harmonizes various ancient tendencies, such as
Nominalism, with its protest against the use of general terms,
Utilitarianism, with its emphasis upon particular aspects and
problems, Positivism, with its disdain of verbal and useless
questions, Kantism, with its doctrine of the primacy of practical
reason, Voluntarism, with its treatment of the intellect as the tool of
the will, and Freedom, and a positive attitude towards religious
questions. It is the tendency of taking all these, and other theories,
for what they are worth, being chiefly a corridor-theory, with doors
and avenues into various theories, and a central rallying-ground for
them all.” These words are valuable as one of the many confessions
of the affiliations of Pragmatism to several other more or less
experiential, or practical, views of philosophy. It is perfectly obvious
from them that Pragmatism stands, in the main, for the apprehension
of all truth as subservient to practice, as but a device for the
“economy” of thought, for the grasping of the multiplicity and the
complexity of phenomena. It looks upon man as made, in the main,
for action, and not for speculation—a doctrine which even Mr. Peirce,
by the way, now speaks of as “a stoical maxim which to me, at the
age of sixty, does not recommend itself so forcibly as it did at
34
thirty.”
“The various ideal worlds are here,” continues Papini, according
35
to the version of James, “because the real world fails to satisfy us.
All our ideal instruments are certainly imperfect. But philosophy can
be regenerated ... it can become pragmatic in the general sense of
the word, a general theory of human action ... so that philosophic
thought will resolve itself into a comparative discussion of all the
possible programmes for man’s life, when man is once for all
regarded as a creative being.... As such, man becomes a kind of
god, and where are we to draw the limits?” In an article called “From
Man to God,” Papini, in the Leonardo, lets his imagination work in
stretching the limits of this way of thinking.
These prophetic, or Promethean, utterances—and we must
never forget that even to the Greeks philosophy was always
something of a religion or a life—may be paralleled by some of the
more enthusiastic and unguarded, early utterances of Dr. Schiller
about “voluntarism” or “metaphysical personalism” as the one
“courageous,” and the only potent, philosophy; or about the
“storming of the Jericho of rationalism” by the “jeers” and the
“trumpetings” of the confident humanists and their pragmatic
confrères. The underlying element of truth in them, and, for that part
of it, in many of the similar utterances of many of our modern
humanists, from Rabelais to Voltaire and from Shelley to Marx and
Nietzsche, is, as we may see, that a true metaphysic must serve, not
36
only as a rational system for the intellect, but as a “dynamic” or
motive for action and achievement, for the conscious activity of
rational, self-conscious beings.
37
As for the matter of any further developments of the free,
creative religion hinted by Papini, we had, in 1903, the solemn
declaration of Professor James that “the programme of the man-god
is one of the great type programmes of philosophy,” and that he
himself had been “slow” in coming to a perception of the full
inwardness of the idea. Then it led evidently in Italy itself to a new
doctrine which was trumpeted there a year or two ago in the public
38
press as “Futurism,” in which “courage, audacity and rebellion”
were the essential elements, and which could not “abide” the mere
mention of such things as “priests” and “ideals” and “professors” and
“moralism.” The extravagances of Prezzolini, who thinks of man as a
“sentimental gorilla,” were apparently the latest outcome of this
anarchical individualism and practicalism. Pragmatism was
converted by him into a sophisticated opportunism and a modern
Machiavellism, a method of attaining contentment in one’s life and of
dominating one’s fellow-creatures by playing upon their fancies and
prejudices as does the religious charlatan or the quack doctor or the
rhetorician.
The reader who may care to contemplate all this radical,
pragmatist enthusiasm for the New Reformation in a more
accessible, and a less exaggerated, form had better perhaps consult
the recent work of Mr. Sturt of Oxford on the Idea of a Free Church.
In this work the principles of Pragmatism are applied, first, critically
and in the main negatively, to the moral dogmas of traditional
Christianity, and then positively to the new conception of religion he
would substitute for all this—the development of personality in
accordance with the claims of family and of national life. A fair-
minded criticism of this book would, I think, lead to the conclusion
that the changes contemplated by Mr. Sturt are already part and
parcel of the programme of liberal Christianity, whether we study this
in the form of the many more or less philosophical presentations of
the same in modern German theology, or in the form of the free,
moral and social efforts of the voluntary religion of America and
England. In America many of the younger thinkers in theology and
philosophy are already writing in a more or less popular manner
upon Pragmatism as a philosophy that bids fair to harmonize
“traditional” and “radical” conceptions of religion. One of these
39
writers, for example, in a recent important commemorative volume,
tries to show how this may be done by interpreting the
“supernatural,” not as the “trans-experimental,” but as the “ethical” in
experience, and by turning “dogmatic” into “historical theology.” And
it would not be difficult to find many books and addresses in which
the same idea is expressed. The more practical wing of this same
party endeavours to connect Pragmatism with the whole philosophy
and psychology of religious conversion, as this has been worked
40 41
over by recent investigators like Stanley Hall, Starbuck, and
others, and, above all, by James in his striking volume The Varieties
42
of Religious Experience.
The fact, of course—and I shall immediately refer to it—that
Pragmatism has been hailed in France as a salutary doctrine, not
merely by Liberals and Evangelicals, but by devout Catholics and
Anti-modernists, is perhaps enough to give us some pause in the
matter of its application in the sphere of theoretical and practical
religion. It is useful, it would seem, sometimes to “liberate” the spirit
of man, and useful, too, at other times to connect the strivings of the
individual with the more or less organized experiences of past ages.
Turning, then, to France, it is, judging from the claims of the
pragmatists, and from some of the literature bearing upon this entire
43
subject, fairly evident that there has been a kind of association or
relationship between Pragmatism and the following tendencies in
recent French philosophy: (1) the “freedom” and “indeterminism”
44
philosophy of Renouvier and other members of the Neo-Critical
school, and of Boutroux and Bergson, who, “although differing from
each other in many important respects,” all “belong to the same
movement of thought, the reaction against Hegelianism and the cult
of science which has dominated France since the decline of the
45
metaphysics of the school of Cousin”; (2) the philosophy of
science and scientific hypotheses represented by writers like
46 47 48
Poincaré, Brunschvicg, Le Roy, Milhaud, Abel Rey, and
others; (3) the religious philosophy and the fideism of the followers of
the spiritualistic metaphysic of Bergson, many of whom go further
than he does, and “make every effort to bring him to the confessional
49
faith”; and (4) the French philosophy of to-day that definitely bears
50
the name of Pragmatism, that of M. Blondel, who in 1893 wrote a
suggestive work entitled L’Action, and who claims to have coined the
word Pragmatism, after much careful consideration and
discrimination, as early as 1888—many years before the California
pamphlet of James.
The first of these points of correspondence or relationship we
can pass over with the remark that we shall have a good deal to say
about the advantage enjoyed by Pragmatism over Rationalism in the
treatment of “freedom” and the “volitional” side of human nature, and
also about the general pragmatist reaction against Rationalism.
And as for the philosophy of science, it has been shown that our
English-speaking pragmatists cannot exactly pride themselves in the
somewhat indiscriminate manner of James and Schiller upon the
supposed support for their “hypothetical” conception of science and
philosophy to be found in the work of their French associates upon
the logic of science. “The men of great learning who were named as
sponsors of this new philosophy have more and more testified what
reservations they make, and how greatly their conclusions differ from
51
those which are currently attributed to them.” Both Brunschvicg
and Poincaré, in fact, take the greatest pains in their books to
dissociate themselves from anything like the appearance of an
acceptance of the doctrine of the relativity of knowledge, from the
signs of any lack of faith in the idea that science, as far as it goes,
gives us a true revelation of the nature of reality.
Then in regard to (3) the French pragmatist philosophy or
religion we have only to read the reports and the quotations of M.
Lalande to see in this philosophy the operation of an uncritical
dogmatism or a blind “fideism” to which very few other philosophers,
either in France or in any other country, would care to subscribe. “La
Revue de Philosophie, which is directed by ecclesiastics, recently
extolled pragmatism as a means of proving orthodox beliefs.” ...
“This system solves a great many difficulties in philosophy; it
explains the necessity of principles marvellously.” ... “The existence
of God, Providence and Immortality are demonstrated by their happy
effects upon our terrestrial life.” ... “If we can consider the matter
carefully, it will be seen that the Good is the useful; for not to be
good in anything is synonymous with being bad, and everywhere the
52
true is the useful. It is in this assertion that Pragmatism consists.”
And as to the fourth tendency, there is, at its outset, according to
M. Lalande, a more rational or ethical basis for the fideism of M.
Blondel’s book upon action, which starts off with a criticism of
philosophic dilettantism quite analogous with that which Mr. Peirce
follows in How to Make Our Ideas Clear. But M. Blondel “does not
continue in the same manner, and his conclusion is very different.
Rejecting all philosophical formalism, he puts his trust in moral
experience, and consults it directly. He thinks that moral experience
shows that action is not wholly self-contained, but that it
presupposes a reality which transcends the world in which we
53
participate.”
Finally, maintains M. Blondel, “we are unable, as Pascal already
said, either to live, or to understand ourselves, by ourselves alone.
So that, unless we mutilate our nature by renouncing all earnestness
of life, we are necessarily led to recognize in ourselves the presence
of God. Our problem, therefore, can only be solved by an act of
absolute faith in a positive religion [Catholicism in his case]. This
completes the series of acts of faith, without which no action, not
even our daily acts, could be accomplished, and without which we
should fall into absolute barrenness, both practical and
54
intellectual.”
Now again these words about our being unable to understand
ourselves “by ourselves alone” contain an element of truth which we
may associate with the pragmatist tendency to believe in a socialized
55
(as distinguished from an individualistic) interpretation of our
common moral life, to believe, that is to say, in a society of persons
as the truth (or the reality) of the universe, rather than in an
interpretation of the universe as the thinking experience of a single
absolute intelligence. This, however, is also a point which we are
56
obliged to defer until we take up the general subject of the
relations between Pragmatism and Rationalism. The other words of
the paragraph, in respect of our absolute need of faith in some
positive religion, are, of course, expressive again of the uncritical
fideism to which reference has already been made. As an offset or
alternative to the “free” religion of Papini and James and to the
experimental or practical religion of different Protestant bodies, it is
57
enough of itself to give us pause in estimating the real drift of
Pragmatism in regard to religious faith and the philosophy of
58
religion.
59
We shall meantime take leave of French Pragmatism with the
reflection that it is thus obviously as complex and as confusing and
confused a thing as is the Pragmatism of other countries. It is now
almost a generation since we began to hear of a renascence of
60
spiritualism and idealism in France in connexion not merely with
61
the work of philosophers like Renouvier and Lachelier and Fouillée
and Boutroux, but with men of letters like De Vogué, Lavisse,
62
Faguet, Desjardins and the rest, and some of the French
Pragmatism of to-day is but one of the more specialized phases of
the broader movement.
And as for the special question of the influence of James and his
philosophy upon Bergson, and of that of the possible return influence
63
of Bergson upon James, the evidence produced by Lalande from
Bergson himself is certainly all to the effect that both men have
worked very largely independently of each other, although perfectly
cognisant now and then of each other’s publications. Both men,
along with their followers (and this is all that needs interest us), have
obviously been under the influence of ideas that have long been in
64
the air about the need of a philosophy that is “more truly empirical”
than the traditional philosophy, and more truly inclined to “discover
what is involved in our actions in the ultimate recess, when,
unconsciously and in spite of ourselves, we support existence and
65
cling to it whether we completely understand it or not.”
As for Pragmatism and pragmatist achievements in Germany,
there is, as might well be supposed, little need of saying much. The
genius of the country is against both; and if there is any Pragmatism
in Germany, it must have contrived somehow to have been “born
66
again” of the “spirit” before obtaining official recognition. So much
even might be inferred from the otherwise generous recognition
accorded to the work of James by scholars and thinkers like Eucken
67
and Stein and the rest. Those men cannot see Pragmatism save in
the broad light of the “humanism” that has always characterised
philosophy, when properly appreciated, and understood in the light of
its true genesis. Pragmatism has in fact been long known in
Germany under the older names of “Voluntarism” and “Humanism,”
although it may doubtless be associated there with some of the more
pronounced tendencies of the hour, such as the recent insistence of
the “Göttingen Fries School” upon the importance of the “genetic”
and the “descriptive” point of view in regard even to the matter of the
supposed first principles of knowledge, the hypothetical and
methodological conception of philosophy taken by philosophical
68
scientists like Mach and Ostwald and their followers, the
69
“empiricism” and “realism” of thinkers like the late Dr. Avenarius of
Zurich.
Then the so-called “teleological,” or “practical,” character of our
human thinking has also been recognized in modern German
thought long before the days of Peirce and Dewey, even by such
strictly academic thinkers as Lotze and Sigwart. The work of the
latter thinker upon Logic, by the way, was translated into English
under distinctly Neo-Hegelian influences. In the second portion of
this work the universal presuppositions of knowledge are considered,
not merely as a priori truths, but as akin in some important respects
“to the ethical principles by which we are wont to determine and
70
guide our free conscious activity.” But even apart from this matter
of the natural association of Pragmatism with the Voluntarism that
71
has long existed in German philosophy, we may undoubtedly pass
to the following things in contemporary and recent German thought
as sympathetic, in the main, to the pragmatist tendencies of James
and Dewey and Schiller: (1) the practical conception of science and
philosophy, as both of them a kind of “economy of the attention,” a
72
sort of “conceptual shorthand” (for the purposes of the
“description” of our environment) that we have referred to in the case
of Mach and Ostwald; (2) the close association between the
73
“metaphysical” and the “cultural” in books like those of Jerusalem
74
and Eleutheropulos; (3) the sharp criticism of the Rationalism of
the Critical Idealism by the two last-mentioned thinkers, and by some
75
of the members of the new Fichte School like Schellwien; and last
76
but not least, (4) the tendency to take a psychological and a
77
sociological (instead of a merely logical) view of the functions of
thought and philosophy, that is just as accentuated in Germany at
the present time as it is elsewhere.
James and Schiller have both been fond of referring to the work
of many of these last-mentioned men as favourable to a conception
of philosophy less as a “theory of knowledge” (or a “theory of being”)
in the old sense than as a Weltanschauungslehre (a view of the
world as whole), a “discussion of the various possible programmes
for man’s life” to which reference has already been made in the case
of Papini and others. And we might associate with their predilections
and persuasions in this regard the apparent Pragmatism also of a
78
great scholar like Harnack in reference to the subordination of
religious dogma to the realities of the religious life, or the
79
Pragmatism of Ritschl himself, in regard to the subordinate place
in living religion of mere intellectual theory, or even some of the
tendencies of the celebrated value-philosophy of Rickert and
80 81
Windelband and Münsterberg and the rest. But again the main
trouble about all this quasi-German support for the pragmatists is
that most of these contemporary thinkers have taken pains to trace
the roots of their teaching back into the great systems of the past.
The pragmatists, on the other hand, have been notoriously careless
about the matter of the various affiliations of their “corridor-like” and
eclectic theory.
There are many reasons, however, against regarding even the
philosophical expression of many of the practical and scientific
tendencies of Germany as at all favourable to the acceptance of
Pragmatism as a satisfactory philosophy from the German point of
view. Among these reasons are: (1) The fact that it is naturally
impossible to find any real support in past or present German
philosophy for the impossible breach that exists in Pragmatism
between the “theoretical” and the “practical,” and (2) the fact that
Germany has only recently passed through a period of sharp conflict
between the psychological (or the “genetic”) and the logical point of
view regarding knowledge, resulting in a confessed victory for the
latter. And then again (3) even if there is a partial correspondence
between Pragmatism and the quasi economic (or “practical”)
conception taken of philosophy by some of the younger men in
Germany who have not altogether outlived their reaction against
Rationalism, there are other tendencies there that are far more
characteristic of the spirit and of the traditions of the country. Among
these are the New Idealism generally, the strong Neo-Kantian
82
movement of the Marburg school and their followers in different
83
places, the revived interest in Hegel and in Schelling, the Neo-
Romanticism of Jena, with its booklets upon such topics as The
84
Culture of the Soul, Life with Nature, German Idealism, and so on.
And then (4) there are just as many difficulties in the way of
regarding the psychological and sociological philosophy of men like
Jerusalem and Eleutheropulos as anything like a final philosophy of
knowledge, as there is in attempting to do the same thing with the
merely preliminary and tentative philosophy of James and his
associates.
Returning now to America and England, although Pragmatism is
85
eminently an American doctrine, it would, of course, be absurd to
imagine that Pragmatism has carried the entire thought of the United
86
States with it. It encountered there, even at the outset, at least
something of the contempt and the incredulity and the hostility that it
met with elsewhere, and also much of the American shrewd
indifference to a much-advertised new article. The message of
James as a philosopher, too, was doubtless discounted (at least by
the well-informed) in the light of his previous brilliant work as a
descriptive psychologist, and also, perhaps, in the light of his
87
wonderfully suggestive personality.
What actually happened in America in respect of the pragmatist
movement was, first of all, the sudden emergence of a magazine
88
literature in connexion with the Will-to-Believe philosophy of James
and the California address, and in connexion (according to the
generous testimony of James) with Deweyism or “Instrumentalism.”
Much of this tiresome and hair-splitting magazine discussion of
“ideas as instruments of thought,” and of the “consequences”
(“theoretical” or “practical” or what not) by which ideas were to be
“tested,” was pronounced by James, in 1906, to be largely crude and
superficial. It had the indirect merit, however, of yielding one or two
valuable estimates of the many inconsistencies in Pragmatism, and
of the many different kinds of Pragmatism or instrumentalism that
there seemed to be, and of the value of Pragmatism as a “theory of
knowledge,” and as a “philosophical generalization.” The upshot of
the whole preliminary discussion was (1) the discovery that,
Pragmatism having arisen (as Dewey himself put it) out of a
multitude of conflicting tendencies in regard to what we might call the
“approach” to philosophy, would probably soon “dissolve itself” back
89
again into some of the streams out of which it had arisen, and (2)
the discovery that all that this early “methodological” pragmatism
amounted to was the harmless doctrine that the meaning of any
conception expressed itself in the past or future conduct or
experience of actual, or possible, sentient creatures.
90
We shall again take occasion to refer to this comparative
failure of Pragmatism to give any systematic or unified account of the
consequences by which it would seek to test the truth of
propositions. Its failure, however, in this connexion is a matter of
91
secondary importance in comparison with the great lesson to be
drawn from its idea that there can be for man no objective truth
92
about the universe, apart from the idea of its meaning or
significance to his experience and to his conscious activity.
What is now taking place in America in this second decade [i.e.
in the years after 1908] of the pragmatist movement is apparently (1)
the sharpest kind of official rationalist condemnation of Pragmatism
as an imperfectly proved and a merely “subjective” and a highly
unsystematic philosophy; (2) the appearance of a number of
93
instructive booklets upon Pragmatism and the pragmatist
movement, some of them expository and critical, some of them in the
main sympathetic, some of them condemnatory and even
contemptuous, and some of them attempts at further constructive
work along pragmatist lines; (3) indications here and there of the
acceptance and the promulgation of older and newer doctrines
antithetic and hostile to Pragmatism—some of them possibly as
typically American as Pragmatism itself.
As a single illustration of the partly constructive work that is
being attempted in the name and the spirit of pragmatism, we may
94
instance the line of reflection entered upon by Professor Moore in
consequence of his claim that to Pragmatism the fundamental thing
in any judgment or proposition is not so much its consequences, but
its “value.” This claim may, no doubt, be supported by the many
declarations of James and Schiller that the “true,” like the “good” and
the “beautiful,” is simply a “valuation,” and not the fetish that the
rationalists make it out to be. It is doubtful, however, as we may try to
indicate, whether this “value” interpretation of Pragmatism can be
carried out independently of the more systematic attempts at a
general philosophy of value that are being made to-day in Germany
and America and elsewhere. And then it would be a matter of no
ordinary difficulty to clear up the inconsistency that doubtless exists
between Pragmatism as a value philosophy and Pragmatism as a
mere philosophy of “consequences.” It is “immediate,” and
“verifiable,” and “definitely appreciated” consequences, rather than
the higher values of our experience that (up to the present time)
seem to have bulked largely in the argumentations of the
pragmatists.
And as an illustration of a doctrine that is both American and
95
hostile to pragmatism, we may instance the New Realism that was
recently launched in a collective manifesto in The Journal of
Philosophy and Scientific Methods. This realism is, to be sure,
hostile to every form of “subjectivism” or personalism, and may in a
certain sense be regarded as the emergence into full daylight of the
96
realism or dualism that we found to be lurking in James’s “radical
empiricism.” It is, therefore, as it were, one of the signs that
Pragmatism is perhaps breaking up in America into some of the
more elemental tendencies out of which it developed—in this case
the American desire for operative (or effective) realism and for a
97
“direct” contact with reality instead of the indirect contact of so
many metaphysical systems.
It is only necessary to add here that it is to the credit of American
rationalism of the Neo-Hegelian type that it has shown itself, notably
98
in the writings of Professor Royce, capable, not only of criticising
Pragmatism, but of seeking to incorporate, in a constructive
philosophy of the present, some of the features of the pragmatist
emphasis upon “will” and “achievement” and “purpose.” It is,
therefore, in this respect at least in line with some of the best
tendencies in contemporary European philosophy.
Lastly, there are certain tendencies of recent English philosophy
with which Pragmatism has special affinities. Among these may be
99
mentioned: (1) the various general and specific criticisms that have
been made there for at least two generations on the more or less
formal and abstract character of the metaphysic of our Neo-Kantians
and our Neo-Hegelians; (2) the concessions that have recently been
made by prominent rationalists to the undoubtedly purposive, or
“teleological,” character of our human thinking, and to the connexion
of our mental life with our entire practical and spiritual activity. Many
of these concessions are now regarded as the merest
commonplaces of speculation, and we shall probably refer to them in
our next chapter. Then there is (3) the well-known insistence of some
100
of our foremost psychologists, like Ward and Stout, upon the
reality of activity and “purpose” in mental process, and upon the part
played by them in the evolution of our intellectual life, and of our
adjustment to the world in which we find ourselves. And (4) the
ethical and social idealism of such well-known members of our Neo-
Hegelian school as Professors Jones, Mackenzie, and Muirhead.
These scholars and thinkers are just as insistent as the pragmatists
upon the idea that philosophy and thought are, and should be, a
practical social “dynamic”—that is to say, “forces” and “motives”
making for the perfection of the common life. (5) A great deal of the
philosophy of science and of the philosophy of axioms and
postulates to be found in British writers, from Mill and Jevons to Karl
101
Pearson and Mr. A. Sidgwick and many others.
Apart from all this, however, or rather, in addition to it, it may be
truly said that one of the striking things about recent British
102
philosophical literature is the stir and the activity that have been
excited in the rationalist camp by the writings of the pragmatists and
the “personal idealists,” and by the critics of these newer modes of
thought. All this has led to many such re-statements of the problems
of philosophy as are to be found in the books of men like
103 104 105 106
Joachim, Henry Jones, A. E. Taylor, Boyce-Gibson,
107 108 109
Henry H. Sturt, S. H. Mellone, J. H. B. Joseph, and others,
and even, say, in such a representative book as that of Professor
Stewart upon the classical theme of Plato’s Theory of Ideas. In this
work an attempt is made to interpret Plato’s “Ideas” in the light of
pragmatist considerations as but “categories” or “points of view”
which we find it convenient to use in dealing with our sense
experience.
CHAPTER III
SOME FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTERISTICS
We shall now attempt a somewhat detailed treatment of a few of the

more characteristic tendencies of Pragmatism. The following have
already been mentioned in our general sketch of its development
and of the appearance of the pragmatist philosophy in Europe and
America: (1) the attempted modification by Pragmatism of the
extremes of Rationalism, and its dissatisfaction with the rationalism
of both science and philosophy; (2) its progress from the stage of a
mere practical and experimental theory of truth to a broad humanism
in which philosophy itself becomes (like art, say) merely an important
“dynamic” element in human culture; (3) its preference in the matter
of first principles for “faith” and “experience” and a trust in our
instinctive “beliefs”; (4) its readiness to affiliate itself with the various
liberal and humanistic tendencies in human thought, such as the
philosophy of “freedom,” and the “hypothetical method” of science,
modern ethical and social idealism, the religious reaction of recent
years, the voluntaristic trend in German post-Kantian philosophy,
and so on. Our subject in this chapter, however, is rather that of the
three or four more or less characteristic assumptions and
contentions upon which all these and the many other pragmatist
tendencies may be said to rest.
The first and foremost of these assumptions is the position that
all truth is “made” truth, “human” truth, truth related to human
attitudes and purposes, and that there is no “objective” or
“independent” truth, no truth “in whose establishment the function of
giving human satisfaction, in marrying previous parts of experience
with newer parts, has played no rôle.” Truths were “nothing,” as it
were, before they were “discovered,” and the most ancient truths
were once “plastic,” or merely susceptible of proof or disproof. Truth
is “made” just like “health,” or “wealth,” or “value,” and so on.
Insistence, we might say, upon this one note, along with the entire
line of reflection that it awakens in him, is really, as Dewey reminds
us, the main burden of James’s book upon Pragmatism. Equally
characteristic is it too of Dewey himself who is for ever reverting to
his doctrine of the factitious character of truth. There is no “fixed
distinction,” he tells us, “between the empirical values of the
unreflective life and the most abstract process of rational thought.”
And to Schiller, again, this same thought is the beginning of
everything in philosophy, for with an outspoken acceptance of this
doctrine of the “formation” of all truth, Pragmatism, he thinks, can do
at least two things that Rationalism is for ever debarred from doing:
(1) distinguish adequately “truth” from “fact,” and (2) distinguish
adequately truth from error. Whether these two things be, or be not,
110
the consequences of the doctrine in question [and we shall return
to the point] we may perhaps accept it as, on the whole, harmonious
with the teaching of psychology about the nature of our ideas as
mental habits, or about thinking as a restrained, or a guided, activity.
It is in harmony, too, with the palpable truism that all “truth” must be
truth that some beings or other who have once “sought” truth (for
some reasons or other) have at last come to regard as satisfying
their search and their purposes. And this truism, it would seem, must
remain such in spite of, or even along with, any meaning that there
may be in the idea of what we call “God’s truth.” By this expression
men understand, it would seem, merely God’s knowledge of truths or
facts of which we as men may happen to be ignorant. But then there
can have been no time in which God can be imagined to have been
ignorant of these or any other matters. It is therefore not for Him truth
as opposed to falsehood.
And then, again, this pragmatist position about all truth being
111
“made” truth would seem to be valid in view of the difficulty (Plato
spoke of it) of reconciling God’s supposed absolute knowledge of
112
reality with our finite and limited apprehension of the same.

Instant Download Ebook of Children Reading Pictures New Contexts and Approaches To Picturebooks 3Rd Edition Evelyn Arizpe Online Full Chapter PDF

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Instant Download Ebook of Children Reading Pictures New Contexts and Approaches To Picturebooks 3Rd Edition Evelyn Arizpe Online Full Chapter PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Children Reading Pictures New

Contexts and Approaches to

Children s Picturebooks The Art of Visual Storytelling

Sustainable Resource Management: Modern Approaches and

Reading Sappho Contemporary Approaches Ellen Greene

Text Structures From Nursery Rhymes Teaching Reading

Cross linguistic Transfer in Reading in Multilingual

The Reel World Scoring for Pictures Television and

Advances in Swearing Research New Languages and New

The Anthropocene Approaches and Contexts for Literature

Evelyn Arizpe is Professor of Children’s Literature at the School of Education,

Kate Noble is a Senior Research Associate: Museum Learning at the Fitzwilliam

Morag Styles is Emeritus Professor of Children’s Poetry and an Emeritus Fellow of

Evelyn Arizpe, Kate Noble

ISBN: 9780367617431 (hbk)

Introduction: How texts teach what readers learn: Reasons for a

1 The original research and guidelines for emerging researchers 9

2 On a walk with Lily and Kitamura: How children link words

3 A gorilla with ‘grandpa’s eyes’: How children interpret ironic

4 Picturebooks and metaliteracy: Children talking about how

5 Thinking aloud: Looking at children drawing in response

6 Young learners looking and making in the art museum

7 Psyche, picnics and penguin: Case studies of children

Case Study 1: ‘Inspire’ at The Fitzwilliam Museum: Narrative

8 Children reading literary apps 124

9 Diverse readers, diverse picturebooks, diverse responses 136

10 Understanding children’s responses to picturebooks through

11 Epilogue: What children have taught us about reading pictures 164

Afterword: Reading is marvellous anywhere 168

Evelyn Arizpe is Professor of Children’s Literature at the School of Education, Uni-

What the children had to say about picturebooks

The popularity of picturebooks

A new focus for third edition

What the future holds

How this edition works

The original study on

The aims of the original study

• What goes on in your head as you look at pictures?

Children drawing in response to picturebooks

Implications for research and pedagogy

In considering some of the results of pragmatist and voluntarist

We shall now attempt a somewhat detailed treatment of a few of the

You might also like