Exploring the visual representation of child refugees in Australian children’s picture books

Picture books have long been recognised as a valuable resource for teaching children about complex social themes, from friendship and family relations to war, poverty, and inequality, thereby supporting the development of critical literacy. As picture books create meaning through the interplay of modes, such as language and images, they are also a key resource for fostering critical multimodal literacy. However, critical multimodal literacy studies have primarily examined the linguistic and written aspects alone rather than visuals, and these studies have rarely considered the years prior to school. Consequently, research about visuals as an integral part of picture books has been limited. Yet, in early childhood, where children are mainly visual learners, it is imperative that this gap is addressed. This study explored the role of visual modes and semiotic resources to create meaning potential in a sample of three picture books about child refugees. An integrated framework of Critical Multimodal Discourse Analysis (CMDA) and Social Semiotics Theory served as the theoretical foundation for this study, which aimed to make links and reveal the choices and strategies used by authors and illustrators as a means of social construction. Findings from this study revealed that illustrators and authors used more than one visual-word interactivity to expand each meaning. Often, the verbal component contradicted the visual depiction, and the visual component provided alternative information beyond the scope of the verbal mode alone. The contradictory visual-word interactivity, unified with symbolic resources, cultural artefacts, and modality, complicates the identification of the fictive child refugees’ characterisation, attributes, origins, location, affective emotion, and behaviour, thereby indirectly portraying them as superficial and ambiguous. Young readers must make sense of the contradictory and, sometimes, minimal information presented. The contradiction and ambiguity create tension, where young children are actively positioned in a more interpretative role. The findings support teachers looking to develop their capacity to foster critical multimodal literacy in young children through picture books. The findings can also inform curriculum design and future research to promote critical multimodal literacy in the prior-to-school years.