Landscapes of Consciousness: Reading Theory of Mind in Dear Juno and Chato and the Party Animals

Picturebooks aid children’s developing social understanding because they are dialogic, relational contexts where child readers have opportunities to engage vicariously with a wide range of imagined others. We use research by literacy and literature scholars, including our own past work, to showcase a series of visual and linguistic elements in picturebooks that invite readers to co-create characters’ consciousness via social imagination, the equivalent to a Theory of Mind in the world of story. We ground these relational and dialogical invitations by presenting an analysis of these elements in the picturebooks (in: Pak, Dear Juno, Puffin Books, New York, 1999 ; in: Soto, Chato and the Party Animals, Puffin Books, New York, 2004 ).