Picturebooks as Inclusive and Participatory Play Objects in School

How can children's literature serve as an inclusive and participatory play object in a school setting? Picturebooks in particular enable participation for children regardless of their starting conditions, thanks to their synergistic image-text relationship. Because they transcend the boundaries of the codex medium by creatively utilising its physical materiality for storytelling, they can be understood as playable objects. Especially toy books offer multimodal forms of reception and participation, which makes them predestined for inclusion. This article aims to design a classification that sorts toy books based on their underlying level of encouragement. The resulting observations are then used to weigh up the benefits and challenges of toy books in educational use. The question is how the potential for playful participation can be fully utilized as a pedagogical resource rather than just being a gimmick. Based on this, two dialogue picturebooks nominated for the German Youth Literature Award (Deutscher

Jugendliteraturpreis) 2023 - Spinne spielt Klavier and How to Count to One - are examined. The analysis shows that readers can also become constituent co-creators of literary worlds without mechanical or sensory modifications. It is primarily the communicative interaction, which is characterized by narrative affordances and appealing impulses, that encourages not only to learn with literature, but also to play with it. With this type of playable picturebooks, school can be easily expanded with playful, literary spaces. [Publisher's Text]

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