Bringing Form, Content and Aesthetics Together: Preservice Teachers Reading Contemporary Picturebooks and Designing Multimodal Responses

ABSTRACT This article draws on research with elementary preservice teachers (PSTs) in a children’s literature course focused on understanding and appreciating picturebooks as esthetic objects through multimodal analysis and multimodal response. PSTs received explicit instruction on picturebook and visual design elements then designed digital/multimodal responses to showcase their interpretations. We analyzed their responses using a multimodal framework to understand the intersection of form and content. Results showed PSTs constructed complex modal configurations to represent their interpretations and threaded visual themes and structures of these picturebooks into their compositions. This study suggests that instruction on reading multimodal texts can influence the depth and creativity of responses and holds potential for PSTs to carry it forward into their future classrooms.