Didacti-ception: Text Chaperoning in Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?

In Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?, illustrated by Eric Carle and written by Bill Martin Jr., readers go on a journey of discovery through a series of colors and animals. While the first portion of the book feels like a fairly standard book of identification and recognition, the end does something rather unique: It reveals both its implied audience and its implied text chaperone in the book itself.

Brown Bear’s final few pages break from its structure of identifying and interacting with animals in bright, single colours by introducing the text’s chaperone: a teacher, who is reading to a room of children. As Natalie op de Beeck explores the significance of the picture/text and picturebook/reader relationships, she quotes Joe Sutcliff Saunders: “‘This is the design of picture books, a book with ideological implications’ because ‘the speaker inevitably performs the words in a way that narrows their meaning even as the words fix the meaning of the images’” (23). Because the speaker is explicitly identified as a teacher, the identification solidifies an additional code onto this picturebook, one that emphasizes learning and discovery. The choice renders the book necessarily didactic, thus narrowing the meaning additionally before the book even reaches its actual, physical speaker.

The inclusion of the teacher also presents a possibility for cognitive dissonance. If this book’s collection of codes is placed in the hands of someone who does not fit the explicit speaker’s identity, such as a father, an older child, or anyone other than a teacher, how does its meaning change? The resulting dissonance could potentially further reveal the book’s didactic angle, but rather than creating an environment that facilitates learning, it could reveal to children the ways in which they are manipulated by seemingly innocuous texts into learning messages and information adults wish them to learn.

Works Cited

op de Beeck, Nathalie. “Picture-Text Relationships in Picturebooks.” The Routledge Companion to Picturebooks. Ed. Bettina Kummerling-Meibaurer. Routledge 2018.

Carle, Eric. Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? Written by Bill Martin Jr. Henry Holt 1967.

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