Reading Images: a Place for Relationship and Reflection. The Exemplary Case of Shaun Tan’s Rules of Summer

Since its appearance in the mid­nineteenth century, picturebook as a multimodal narrative form based on the dialogue between verbal and iconic language in the space of the page has proved to be a border territory – of encounter and clash – between the world and perspective of adults and that of children. As shown by the emblematic case of Struwwelpeter (1845) and by the various and different interpretations that his iconic figure has aroused over the centuries, images rep­ resent powerful symbolic objects «to think with»: places where the different hermeneutic work carried out by adult readers and children can manifest, involving not only the cognitive dimension but also the affective one. In the first two decades of the 21st century there has been an exceptional development on a global level of both fiction and non­fiction picturebooks, testifying how the pictorial turn theorized by W.J.T. Mitchell – a real epistemological turning point – indicated and actually indicates a real transformation in the way of looking at the world of images and at their power in condensing meaning. In the meantime, picturebook has established itself in the most diverse educational contexts, and transversely with respect to the age of the readers, as a medium with extraordinary versatility for what concerns the solicitation of the reader: picturebook indeed is a literary form highly capable of promoting the establish­ ment of fruitful spaces for relationships between adults and children, spaces within which to exercise the calm eye desired by Maryanne Wolf in the sign of slowness and cognitive patience, offering unique opportunities to test interpretative ability and nourish the dialogue with peers and teachers, educating to mutual listening. Narrative picturebooks demand indeed a reading experience with extended times and, in the interpretative uncertainty it discloses, also invites the prac­ tice of re­reading, often full of surprises for the reader willing to look at images and words not superficially, who can dis­ cover details escaped during the first reading and perhaps reformulate his own interpretation on the basis of the new evidence gathered, like a hunter intent on reading the traces left by his prey. Starting from these historical and theoretical premises, this contribution aims to explore the opportunities offered in this sense by the picturebooks conceived by Shaun Tan, one of the most interesting contemporary visual storyteller, author of literary objects extremely heterogeneous but always characterized by the presence of ambiguous figures, never uniquely interpretable, which invite to contem­ plative pause and to reflection, personal and collective. More precisely, this paper will present the results of an educational experimentation focused on a specific Tan’s work, Rules of summer (2013), with a focus on the diverse forms of discussion this iconotext activated in four differentiated Italian school contexts ­ kindergarten, primary school, lower middle school and high school ­ testifying to the extraordinary flexibility of the medium picturebook and the plurality of readers it can intercept.