The language in which we speak about art has become steadily more abstruse, though for thousands of years this was not the case, Today, we live in a kaleidoscopic new world of images. Is there a vocabulary we can learn in order to read these images? Is there something we can do so as not to remain passive when we flip through an illustrated book or wander through a gallery, or are there ways in which we can 'read' the stories within paintings, monumnets, buildings and sculptures? We say 'every picture tells a story', but does it? Taking a handful of extraordinary images - photagraphed, painted, built, sculpted - Alberto Manguel explores, with delight and erudition, how each one attempts to tell a story that we, the viewer, must decipher or invent. Whether delving into the love of life in the twentieth-century world of Joan Mitchell, or the brutal complexities of Picasso's treatment of his mistress; revisiting the riddles of the past in the fifteenth-century painting of Robert Campin, or exploring the heartrending life of 'the hairy girl' whose matted fur so astonished sixteenth-century Italy, he helps us to enjoy and explore the visual landscape we live in.

A #1 New York Times bestseller, this innovative and wildly funny read-aloud by award-winning humorist/actor B.J. Novak will turn any reader into a comedian—a perfect gift for any special occasion! You might think a book with no pictures seems boring and serious. Except . . . here’s how books work. Everything written on the page has to be said by the person reading it aloud. Even if the words say . . . BLORK. Or BLUURF. Even if the words are a preposterous song about eating ants for breakfast, or just a list of astonishingly goofy sounds like BLAGGITY BLAGGITY and GLIBBITY GLOBBITY. Cleverly irreverent and irresistibly silly, The Book with No Pictures is one that kids will beg to hear again and again. (And parents will be happy to oblige.)

How and what do we see and know when we look at a painting? Conversely, how do we visualize the literary text? These questions are the focus of Claude Gandelman's virtuoso essays on reading and the visual arts. Gandelman's subjects range from the Egyptians to Franz Kafka, from Las Meninas to concrete poetry. His methodology is semiotic. He reads pictures as signs and tries to understand the significance of a wide variety of pictorial and textual signs and gestures. Kafks's caricature of the skeletal "hunger artist," for example, is read against the similarly distorted images of Expressionist painting and film. Another chapter, - on doors as thresholds, as visual rites of passage - studies the "optics of liminality" in art and literature from seventeenth-century realist Flemish painting to Madame Bovary. Two key chapters deal with the body images all of us bear within ourselves, the implicit image of oneself that is inscribed as a sort of imprint in the cortex and that has been visualized as a homunculus. Do we read this image and extract it, sometimes violently, in our images of the Other? -- Book Jacket.

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 museum 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 working 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 nuanced 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.

The third edition of The Social Studies Curriculum thoroughly updates the definitive overview of the primary issues teachers face when creating learning experiences for students in social studies. By connecting the diverse elements of the social studies curriculum—history education, civic, global, and social issues—the book offers a unique and critical perspective that separates it from other texts in the field. This edition includes new work on race, gender, sexuality, critical multiculturalism, visual culture, moral deliberation, digital technologies, teaching democracy, and the future of social studies education. In an era marked by efforts to standardize curriculum and teaching, this book challenges the status quo by arguing that social studies curriculum and teaching should be about uncovering elements that are taken for granted in our everyday experiences, and making them the target of inquiry.