ABSTRACT
We began our research after many years of combined expertise in teaching reading to pupils and undergraduates and with considerable experience of reading picturebooks with children. We were already well versed in most of the standard theoretical and practical texts published in Britain and the USA about teaching reading, children’s literature, reader-response theory and the role and scope of picturebooks. We thought we were quite well educated in visual literacy when the project started; now we know we were wrong! Two years on, after much reading of art history, art education and aesthetics, and revisiting and supplementing a fairly basic knowledge of psychology (though we did read comprehensive digests of psychological approaches to visual literacy), as well as dipping into relevant reading within media education and related disciplines, we realise what an enormous body of literature exists on this topic and how many different disciplines impinge on it. This wide reading has underpinned the analysis of our
findings and we have used it to support or challenge our arguments and contentions.
