The Three Little Pigs; Challenging dominant narratives

David Wiesner’s version of The Three Little Pigs, takes the original story of The Three Little Pigs but gives it an interesting twist in the narrative. This book is essentially taking a very popular children’s book and appropriating it to encompass other children’s books in a way that calls us to think more critically about children’s literature and about roles of people in society. Critical literacies ask us to move beyond the literal meaning of a text and to think about the text more critically to uncover underlying meanings in the text. “Critical literacy is the ability to not only read and write but to assess texts in order to understand the relationships between power and domination that underlie and inform them” (Morrell 241). If we use critical literacies to analyze this text of The Three Little Pigs by David Wiesner we can see there are a lot of underlying meanings that can be taken from the text. In the original Three Little Pigs we have the idea of the first two pigs as the helpless characters that need saving. However, in Wiesner’s version the power relations shift and it is no longer the wolf that holds all the power. Instead, the pigs take control of their own stories by escaping the book and their presumed destinies and by exploring different worlds in different fairy tales, they chose their own ending.

“Critical literacy can also illuminate the power relationships in society and teach those who are critically literate to participate in and use literacy to change dominant power structures to liberate those who are oppressed by them” (Morrell 241). Here Morell talks about how we can use literacy/critical literacy to challenge dominant power structures and the way they oppress people. Using Weisner’s version of The Three Little Pigs in comparison to the original version in a classroom can be a great way to do this. It would help students to begin to be critical of the way people are presented (in this case the way the pigs are presented), as well as how people’s dominant roles can be challenged (pigs in the story are expected to be weak and powerless but they challenge those roles in Wiesner’s version).