Educational Alternatives, Volume 21, 2023

Abstract: The new generations of gaze, modern children, are growing up in the context of a society dominated by the title "visual culture". Therefore, visual literacy must be present in the educational landscape both as an object of study and as a means of learning. Through training and acquiring skills in analyzing, understanding, and producing visual texts, children will become visually literate, that is, they will have developed basic visual literacy skills in order not just to look but to learn to see. In the context of the recognition of the educational and pedagogical potential of the wordless book, the proliferation of scientific articles is evident, pointing out its usefulness not only as a tool for supervisory and teaching material, but also the use of the genre as a tool for the development of visual literacy. In this paper we will focus on the works of Sonia Chaine and Adrien Pichelin, specifically in those that are retelling classic fairytales through the encoding of visual symbols. The first part of the paper examines the ways in which a sequence of encoding visual symbols can create an effective narrative and the second explores the “portrait” of the child-reader that is implied in the above books. From our results we conclude that the reader is considered as an active participant in the process of meaning-making. This means that the reader plays a crucial role in interpreting the signs and symbols presented in the visual texts, and that their understanding is shaped by the reader’s qualifications, experiences, cultural background, and perspective. This approach emphasizes that visual meaning is not fixed but is created by the interactions between the visual text, the reader, and the context.