Wordless picturebooks as resources for the construction of the pedagogy of multiliteracies. The case of migrants, by Issa Watanabe

Abstract

This article presents the study of Migrants (2019), a wordless picturebook by Peruvian author Issa Watanabe, developed to answer the following research question: To what extent can this visual text become a resource for the learning of multiliteracies? A visual discourse analysis of the narrative was performed, focusing on the identifcation of key meanings and semiotic resources used in their visual construction. Our fndings unveil the prominent role of semiotic resources such as anthropomorphism, vectors, colours, position and unboundedness of the page frame, in the visual realization of key meanings such as diversity, journeys, death, and empathy. Upon these fndings, we present Migrants as an extraordinary literary text to initiate children in learning the visual mode, one of the multiple modes currently used in the representation of meaning. We discuss our fndings with reference to the main question leading the study, the pedagogical conceptualizations endorsed by the multiliteracies theoretical framework and other relevant research. While the study suggests that wordless picturebooks are called to play a prominent role in the construction of the multiliteracies pedagogical agenda, it furthermore points to the potential of the pedagogy of multiliteracies in the conceptualization of literary pedagogy itself.