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December 06, 2015

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Top Ten Postmodern Picturebooks

December 05, 2017

Top Ten List: Favorite Postmodern Picturebooks Frank Serafini (Originally published on the Nerdy Book Club Blog) When I started teaching children’s literature, I was drawn to picturebooks, in particular a weird set of books that I came to know by the label “postmodern picturebooks.” What is interesting about postmodern picturebooks is not necessarily what they are , but what they can do for readers and literacy educators. Postmodern picturebooks invite students to navigate non-linear structures and attend to the various symbolic representations, literary codes and conventions in order to make sense of the complexities inherent in these texts. Postmodern picturebooks distance readers from text, often frustrating traditional reading expectations and practices, and position readers in more active, interpretive roles forcing them to utilize a variety of interpretive strategies in order to make sense of these complex texts. Postmodern picturebooks often contain non-linear plots, polyphonic

The Best Of Frank Serafini: Getting Ready for the Reading Workshop

August 17, 2016

Before summer vacation comes to an end, I begin to plan for the upcoming school year. I consider some of the new selections of children’s and young adult literature that I have read over the summer for my literature study groups. I create and add to the resource files I maintain for the various units of study and literary experiences I provide each school year. If there is time, I re-read some professional literature that has had a tremendous impact on my thinking for the past fifteen years. Some of the books that I have revisited many times during the summer months are Life in a Crowded Place by Ralph Peterson, The Reader, the Text, and the Poem by Louise Rosenblatt, The Culture of Reading and the Teaching of English by Kathleen McKormick, and The Pleasures of Children’s Literature by Perry Nodelman. Re-reading these books helps me remember the theoretical foundations upon which I build my reading workshop, and provide an impetus for refocusing my thinking about th

Excerpt from new Language Arts article

August 31, 2015

Serafini, Frank. (2015). Multimodal Literacy: From Theories to Practices. Language Arts. 92(6), p. 412-423. Using the above mentioned tripartite framework as a lens for investigating the nature of the multimodal ensembles that our students are exposed to in contemporary classrooms, multimodal ensembles are conceptualized as: 1) visual objects, 2) semiotic events, and 3) cultural artifacts (see Figure 1). This reconceptualization of the nature of multimodal texts from three different perspectives provides a foundation for the instructional approaches used to expand students’ interpretive repertoires. It is through these various lenses that we can begin to move beyond the literal or denotative aspects of written text and visual images to consider the semiotic and ideological dimensions of the multimodal ensembles encountered in today’s classrooms. Three Perspectives on Multimodal Ensembles Theoretical Perspective Multimodal Ensembles Instructional Approa

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Dr. Frank Serafini: Dr. Frank Serafini is an award winning children’s author and illustrator, a landscape photographer, a literacy researcher, and a Professor of Literacy Education and Children’s Literature at Arizona State University. Frank was awarded the Arbuthnot Award from the International Reading Association as the Distinguished Professor of Children's Literature and the Distinguished Educator Award from the International Visual Literacy Association, Frank has published seven books with Heinemann Publishers including: The Reading Workshop, Lessons in Comprehension, Around the Reading Workshop and Classroom Reading Assessments. Frank’s new book is entitled: Reading the Visual: An Introduction to Teaching Multimodal Literacies with Teachers College Press. In 2008, Frank began writing and illustrating a series of non-fiction picturebooks focusing on nature with Kids Can Press. The Looking Closely series contains books about the desert, garden, pond, rainforest, shore and forest. In 2009, Looking Closely Along the Shore won an International Reading Association’s Teachers’ Choice Award, and Honorable Mention from the Society of School Librarians International.

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