Letterforms for handwriting and reading: print script and sanserifs in early twentieth-century England

This essay is about letterforms and typography in reading books for young children and how they were influenced by the teaching of handwriting in the early decades of the twentieth century. I examine the contributions made by infant teachers to typography and book design and draw particular attention to the print script movement and the gradual introduction of sanserif typefaces in reading books. I suggest that the use of sanserifs in reading books for young children is one of their first appearances for continuous text. Although the influence of print script on the teaching of handwriting may have had some undesirable effects, I suggest that it indirectly contributed to some innovations in book design.

Explaining history to children: Otto and Marie Neurath’s work on the ‘Visual history of mankind’

This essay traces the development of Otto Neurath’s ideas that led to the publication of one of the first series of children’s books produced by the Isotype Institute in the late 1940s, the Visual History of Mankind. Described in its publicity material as ‘new in content’ and ‘new in method’, it embodied much of Otto Neurath’s thinking about visual education, and also coincided with other educational ideas in the UK in the 1930s and 1940s. It exemplified the Isotype Institute’s approach: teamwork, thinking about the needs of younger readers, clear explanation, and accessible content. Further, drawing on correspondence, notes and drawings from the Otto and Marie Neurath Isotype Collection at the University of Reading, the essay presents insights to the making of the books and the people involved, the costs of production and the influence of this on design decisions, and how the books were received by teachers and children.

Morphological awareness and reading development in bilingual English-Chinese children in Singapore

Addressing two aspects of morphological awareness – derivational and compound, this study investigates the relationships between morphological awareness and vocabulary and reading comprehension in English-Chinese bilingual primary 3 children in Singapore (N = 76). Comparable tasks in Chinese and English were administered to examine the children’s morphological awareness, vocabulary, and reading comprehension. The results show that morphological awareness is highly related to vocabulary and reading comprehension, with higher correlations between morphological awareness and reading comprehension than between morphological awareness and vocabulary. This indicates that morphological awareness may have direct influence on reading comprehension beyond the mediating effect of vocabulary. Furthermore, the results indicate that children displayed more compound than derivational morphological awareness for Chinese due to the dominance of compound morphology in Chinese. However the children also displayed similar levels of derivational and compound morphological awareness for English despite far more derivatives than compounds in English. The robust cross-linguistic correlations suggest that Chinese compound morphological knowledge plays a facilitating role not only in learning English compounds, but also in learning transparently derived words that do not involve phonological or orthographic shifts.

Geographies of children, youth and families: an international perspective

This edited collection brings together international experts from the vibrant and growing field of geographies of children, youth and families. The book provides an overview of current conceptual and theoretical debates, and gives a wide range of examples of cutting-edge research from a variety of national contexts across the globe. The theme of 'disentangling the socio-spatial contexts of young people and/or their families' advances debates in geographies and social studies of young people and families by emphasising the context of young people's social agency. The book is designed to provide an introduction to the topic of geographies of children, youth and families and is an invaluable course text for undergraduate and postgraduate students of geography and the social sciences. This interdisciplinary text is also of likely interest to students and practitioners of education, youth work, social policy and social work.

Developing responsive preventative practices: key messages from children's and families' experiences of the Children's Fund

As part of the prevention and social inclusion agenda, the Children's Fund, set up in 2000, has developed preventative services for children at risk of social exclusion. Drawing on a large qualitative dataset of interviews conducted in 2004/05 with children, young people and their parents/carers who accessed Children Fund services, this article analyses key practices and approaches valued by children and parents. These included: specialist support tailored to individual support needs, family-oriented approaches, trusting relationships with service providers, multi-agency approaches and sustainability of services. Finally, the article draws out key lessons for the future development of preventative services.

Smoking and symbolism: children, communication and cigarettes

Health promotion, with its concern with empowerment and autonomy, must recognize the agency of its target population. Based on 85 in-depth interviews with 10- to 11-year-old children throughout Northern Ireland, this paper argues that it is necessary to focus on the social relations of children if we are to understand and prevent childhood smoking. Addressing the complex issue of childhood agency, it is argued that regardless of various restrictions to their choices, children can act intentionally in constructing their identities. Instead of viewing the smoking children as communicating with the adult world, we focus on smoking as negotiation of status within the children's culture. Such negotiations utilize symbolism derived from and shared with the `adult world'. It is important that those analyzing children's lives understand children's ideas and behaviour on their own terms. We must make sure that the very concepts in which the children's experiences are put are appropriate ones. It is suggested that the metaphor `rite of passage' and terminology such as peer `pressure' versus adult `influence', commonly used to analyse the children's smoking behaviour, may actually conceal important aspects of childhood agency.

Children, futurity, and value: 'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'

A recurrent but relatively unquestioned element in the canonisation of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is that the novel is about securing a meaningful way forward for the American child. The sense is that the novel deserves to live and to have a future because it is about a child, and tied in with the need for the young nation to project and to determine its future. This might seem, to apply the terms of queer debate, to lend weight to ‘reproductive futurism’: the child and ‘American family values’ are to the fore, while sexual minorities and alternative social models are excluded. The present essay re-reads Huckleberry Finn and Twain’s other Huck narratives, using the coordinates of queer theory. The result is a more equivocal picture. Twain does use Huck to assert the rights of the white American family, but he also uses him to explore alternative ideas of social organisation. More fundamentally, Twain increasingly finds that the idea of the child is no longer a sufficient motive for believing in and projecting a future. Rather, his writing leads the reader towards the impossibility of the future, both for the nation and its child.

Non-display uses of digital works: Google Books and beyond

With the advent of mass digitization projects, such as the Google Book Search, a peculiar shift has occurred in the way that copyright works are dealt with. Contrary to what has so far been the case, works are turned into machine-readable data to be automatically processed for various purposes without the expression of works being displayed to the public. In the Google Book Settlement Agreement, this new kind of usage is referred to as ‘non-display uses’ of digital works. The legitimacy of these uses has not yet been tested by Courts and does not comfortably fit in the current copyright doctrine, plainly because the works are not used as works but as something else, namely as data. Since non-display uses may prove to be a very lucrative market in the near future, with the potential to affect the way people use copyright works, we examine non-display uses under the prism of copyright principles to determine the boundaries of their legitimacy. Through this examination, we provide a categorization of the activities carried out under the heading of ‘non-display uses’, we examine their lawfulness under the current copyright doctrine and approach the phenomenon from the spectrum of data protection law that could apply, by analogy, to the use of copyright works as processable data.

Phonological sensitivity and reading: evidence from precocious readers

This paper reports the results from a study investigating the level of phonological sensitivity, letter knowledge and reading ability of two groups of children between the ages of 5 and 7 years. One group of children were identifies as being fluent readers at the age of 5 years, before they had begun school. These children were paired with a group of children of the same age and vocabulary development but who were not yet reading. The performance of the two groups of children on the tasks measuring phonological sensitivity confirmed the view of Stanovich (1986, 1992) that phonological sensitivity lies on a continuum from shallow to deep. Shallow levels of phonological sensitivity, tapped by rhyming tasks, seem to be necessary for reading to progress whereas deeper levels of sensitivity develop later and have a more reciprocal relationship to the reading process.