Paranoid prizing : mapping Australia’s Eve Pownall Award for information books, 2001-2010

Each year, the Children���s Book Council of Australia (CBCA) administers a number of Book of the Year Awards, including the Eve Pownall Award for Information Books. The books chosen by the CBCA constitute a contemporary canon of Australian children���s literature, and serve to both shape and reflect current educational policies and practices as well as young Australians’ sense of themselves and their nation. This paper reads a selection of award-winning Australian non-fiction children���s literature in the context of colonialism, curriculum, military myths, and Aboriginal perspectives on national history and identity.

The value of books : the fantastic flying books of Mr. Morris Lessmore and the social hieroglyphic of reading

The late eighteenth century witnessed the emergence of new technologies of subjectivity and of the literary. Most obviously, “the novel as a literary form appeared to embody and turn into an object the experience of life itself” (Park), and the novel genre came to both reflect and shape notions of interiority and subjectivity. In this same period, “A shift was taking place in the way people felt and thought about children and the accoutrements of childhood, including books and toys, were implicated in this change” (Lewis). In seeking to understand the relationships between media (e.g. books and toys), genres (e.g. novels and picture books), and modes of subjectivity, Marx’s influential theory of commodity fetishism, whereby “a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things”, has served as a productive tool of analysis. The extent to which Marx’s account of commodity fetishism continues to be of use becomes clear when the corollaries between the late eighteenth-century emergence of novels and pictures books as technologies of subjectivity and the early twenty-first century emergence of e-readers and digital texts as technologies of subjectivity are considered. This paper considers the literary technology of Apple’s iPad (first launched in 2010) as a commodity fetish, and the circulation of “apps” as texts made available by and offered as justifications for, this fetish object. The iPad is both book and toy, but is never “only” either; it is arguably a new technology of subjectivity which incorporates but also destabilises categories of reading and playing such as those made familiar by earlier technologies of literature and the self. The particular focus of this paper is on the multimodal versions (app, film, and picture book) of The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore, which are understood here as a narrativisation of commodity fetishism, subjectivity, and the act of reading itself.

Empathy : narrative empathy and children's literature

The term empathy has only existed in English for a little over a hundred years, but the idea of feeling with another person is an old one. Because of its perceived connection to moral behaviour, empathy and its development are of great interest to educators, policy makers, psychologists, and philosophers. Reading children���s literature is often considered important for developing (among other things) children���s ethical and empathic understandings of society and its people. However, claims as to the impact of reading on readers’ ability to become more empathic, tolerant, and better people are divided. While many readers may attribute positive influences that authors and texts have had on shaping their attitudes and actions, there is no guarantee that a desirable affective and cognitive response will follow the reading experience. The complexity of readers and texts refuses to be reduced to simple universal statements about the capacity of narrative empathy to create a particular kind of empathic reader or person: fiction that engages a reader with the emotional plight of a character does not necessarily translate into actions in the real world towards people who are similarly suffering, marginalized, or victimized. This chapter asks: Does children���s literature foster empathy? There are two implicit features of this question: one concerns narrative empathy; the other concerns empathic reader response. The discussion will focus on how a selection of ‘multicultural’ picture books attempts to create narrative empathy by focussing on cultural and spatial differences.

Memory : (Re)imagining the past through children's literature

There has been a renewal of interest in memory studies in recent years, particularly in the Western world. This chapter considers aspects of personal memory followed by the concept of cultural memory. It then examines how the Australian cultural memory of the Anzac Legend is represented in a number of recent picture books.

Diversity or perversity?: Award-winning children's literature and the Australian curriculum

Two of the three cross-curriculum priorities for the national Australian Curriculum prescribed by the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) are focussed on what might be called diversity education: “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and culture”, and "Asia and Australia's Engagement with Asia” (ACARA, “Cross”). One need not be versed in complex rhetorical theory to understand that, laudable and legitimate as such priorities are, their existence implies that mainstream education in Australia has been or is characterised by the marginalisation or erasure of Australia's history—the original Indigenous cultures are not only living and vibrant today, but also have tens of thousands of years’ “head start” on Australia’s settler cultures—and of its geography—Australia is, after all, located in some physical proximity to Asia. Some might even suggest that Australia is in Asia. These temporal and spatial “forgettings” constitute a kind of cultural perversity which the cross-curricular priorities both seek to address and serve to reinscribe. Even as ACARA requires Australian school students to engage with Aboriginal and Asian histories, cultures, societies, they imply that such histories, cultures, and societies are “diverse”, that they are not those of the students in Australian classrooms; producing them as objects of study rather than as lived experience. This should not necessarily be surprising. Michael W. Apple has provocatively argued that: “one of the perverse effects of a national curriculum actually will be to ‘legitimise inequality.’ It may in fact help create the illusion that whatever the massive differences in schools, they all have something in common” (18). In the Australian context, attempts to mitigate such perversity are articulated via the selection of literary texts. As educators move to resource ACARA’s cross-curricular priorities, ACARA notes that “Teachers and schools are best placed to make decisions about the selection of texts in their teaching and learning programs that address the content in the Australian Curriculum while also meeting the needs of the students in their classes” (ACARA, “Advice”). This assertion appears on a webpage called “Advice on selection of literary texts” which is notable first and foremost for its total lack of any literary texts being named, and its list of weblinks pointing to lists of texts compiled elsewhere, by other organisations, and in the main, compiled to serve agendas other than the Australian curriculum. One of the major resources referred to by ACARA for literary text selection is the Children���s Book Council of Australia (CBCA). Of course, the CBCA’s annual book awards do not share ACARA’s educational priorities, but do have a history of being drawn upon by schools as a curriculum resource. In this paper, I consider the literary texts which have been prized by the CBCA in recent years attending to their engagements with Aboriginal cultures.

Children's Literature Digital Resources Project

Children's Literature Digital Resources is a full text digital repository of Australian children���s literature from 1830 to 1945. Users can read online the complete texts of a selection of early Australian children���s literature, both popular and rare. Digitised items include children���s and young adult fiction, poetry, short stories, and picture books. Users can also read related full text critical articles that were digitised as part of the project.

The whole world shook : shifts in ethnic, national and heroic identities in children's fiction about 9/11

Like many other cataclysmic events September 11, a day now popularly believed to have 'changed the world', has become a topic taken up by children's writers. This thesis, titled The Whole World Shook: Ethnic, National and Heroic Identities in Children's Fiction About 9/11, examines how cultural identities are constructed within fictional texts for young people written about the attacks on the Twin Towers. It identifies three significant identity categories encoded in 9/11 books for children: ethnic identities, national identities, and heroic identities. The thesis argues that the identities formed within the selected children's texts are in flux, privileging performances of identities that are contingent on post-9/11 politics. This study is located within the field of children's literature criticism, which supports the understanding that children's books, like all texts, play a role in the production of identities. Children's literature is highly significant both in its pedagogical intent (to instruct and induct children into cultural practices and beliefs) and in its obscurity (in making the complex simple enough for children, and from sometimes intentionally shying away from difficult things). This literary criticism informed the study that the texts, if they were to be written at all, would be complex, varied and most likely as ambiguous and contradictory as the responses to the attacks on New York themselves. The theoretical framework for this thesis draws on a range of critical theories including literary theory, cultural studies, studies of performativity and postmodernism. This critical framework informs the approach by providing ways for: (i) understanding how political and ideological work is performed in children's literature; (ii) interrogating the constructed nature of cultural identities; (iii) developing a nuanced methodology for carrying out a close textual analysis. The textual analysis examines a representative sample of children's texts about 9/11, including picture books, young adult fiction, and a selection of DC Comics. Each chapter focuses on a different though related identity category. Chapter Four examines the performance of ethnic identities and race politics within a sample of picture books and young adult fiction; Chapter Five analyses the construction of collective, national identities in another set of texts; and Chapter Six does analytic work on a third set of texts, demonstrating the strategic performance of particular kinds of heroic identities. I argue that performances of cultural identities constructed in these texts draw on familiar versions of identities as well as contribute to new ones. These textual constructions can be seen as offering some certainties in increasingly uncertain times. The study finds, in its sample of books a co-mingling of xenophobia and tolerance; a binaried competition between good and evil and global harmony and national insularity; and a lauding of both the commonplace hero and the super-human. Being a recent corpus of texts about 9/11, these texts provide information on the kinds of 'selves' that appear to be privileged in the West since 2001. The thesis concludes that the shifting identities evident in texts that are being produced for children about 9/11 offer implicit and explicit accounts of what constitute good citizenship, loyalty to nation and community, and desirable attributes in a Western post-9/11 context. This thesis makes an original contribution to the field of children's literature by providing a focussed and sustained analysis of how texts for children about 9/11 contribute to formations of identity in these complex times of cultural unease and global unrest.

A child's dreaming: Looking at illustrated Indigenous stories for children

The traditional teaching stories of Australia's ancient Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures can find a new telling in today's literature for children. Codifiers of wisdom, laden with metaphor, these narratives have already inspired wonder in the young for thousands of generations. Today such stories are represented by well over one hundred titles in children's illustrated books. Some demonstrate literary and ethical qualities showing sensitivity and respect for originating cultures. Others do not

Vocabulary acquisition in young children: the role of the story

Sharing storybooks with babies increases their future achievements in literacy, especially in reading (Hall, 2001; Moore and Wade, 1997, 2003; Scarborough et al., 1991; Wade and Moore, 1998; Wells, 1985). This study, focusing on case studies of two 20-month-old children, attempts to identify the role the storybook plays in children���s vocabulary acquisition. Their mothers adopted a regime of daily reading of specific picture books over a six-week period, and recorded the children���s acquisition of new vocabulary, in order to explore what specific contribution these texts made to the children���s speech. The findings demonstrate that storybooks form one source of children���s newly-acquired vocabulary. Factors that might account for this were more difficult to determine through a study of this scale.

Dissonant Voices : Philosophy, Children's Literature, and Perfectionist Education

Dissonant Voices has a twofold aspiration. First, it is a philosophical treatment of everyday pedagogical interactions between children and their elders, between teachers and pupils. More specifically it is an exploration of the possibilities to go on with dissonant voices that interrupt established practices – our attunement – in behaviour, practice and thinking. Voices that are incomprehensible or expressions that are unacceptable, morally or otherwise. The text works on a tension between two inclinations: an inclination to wave off, discourage, or change an expression that is unacceptable or unintelligible; and an inclination to be tolerant and accept the dissonant expression as doing something worthwhile, but different. The second aspiration is a philosophical engagement with children���s literature. Reading children���s literature becomes a form of philosophising, a way to explore the complexity of a range of philosophical issues. This turn to literature marks a dissatisfaction with what philosophy can accomplish through argumentation and what philosophy can do with a particular and limited set of concepts for a subject, such as ethics. It is a way to go beyond philosophising as the founding of theories that justify particular responses. The philosophy of dissonance and children���s literature becomes a way to destabilise justifications of our established practices and ways of interacting. The philosophical investigations of dissonance are meant to make manifest the possibilities and risks of engaging in interactions beyond established agreement or attunements. Thinking of the dissonant voice as an expression beyond established practices calls for improvisation. Such improvisations become a perfectionist education where both the child and the elder, the teacher and the student, search for as yet unattained forms of interaction and take responsibility for every word and action of the interaction. The investigation goes through a number of picture books and novels for children such as Harry Potter, Garmann’s Summer, and books by Shaun Tan, Astrid Lindgren and Dr. Seuss as well narratives by J.R.R. Tolkien, Henrik Ibsen, Jane Austen and Henry David Thoreau. These works of fiction are read in conversation with philosophical works of, and inspired by, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Stanley Cavell, their moral perfectionism and ordinary language philosophy.

Dialogic reading of a novel for children: effects on text comprehension

Estudos experimentais têm demonstrado efeitos positivos da leitura dialógica de livros ilustrados (leitura em voz alta intercalada com prompts e feedback para verbalizações por parte do ouvinte) sobre o vocabulário e a expressão verbal de crianças pequenas. Este estudo verificou o efeito da leitura dialógica sobre a compreensão textual de um romance infanto-juvenil por três crianças de 7-8 anos, utilizando um delineamento de sujeito único. Na Condição A, o texto era lido sem intervenções. Na Condição B, a leitura era intercalada com intervenções dialógicas baseadas nas funções narrativas presentes no texto. As medidas de compreensão mostraram um desempenho superior na Condição B para os dois participantes submetidos ao delineamento B-A-B, mas não para o participante submetido ao delineamento A-B-A. São discutidas possíveis interações da leitura dialógica com características do gênero textual e a necessidade de replicações sistemáticas com um maior número de sessões e reversões das condições.

Children's books.

Compilers: 1964-1980, V. Haviland (with L. B. Watt, 1964-<1974>)

Reading comprehension and mathematical concept acquisition through the use of math stories with bilingual children

Math storybooks are picture books in which the understanding of mathematical concepts is central to the comprehension of the story. Math stories have provided useful opportunities for children to expand their skills in the language arts area and to talk about mathematical factors that are related to their real lives. The purpose of this study was to examine bilingual children's reading and math comprehension of the math storybooks. ^ The participants were randomly selected from two Korean schools and two public elementary schools in Miami, Florida. The sample consisted of 63 Hispanic American and 43 Korean American children from ages five to seven. A 2 x 3 x (2) mixed-model design with two between- and one within-subjects variable was used to conduct this study. The two between-subjects variables were ethnicity and age, and the within-subjects variable was the subject area of comprehension. Subjects were read the three math stories individually, and then they were asked questions related to reading and math comprehension. ^ The overall ANOVA using multivariate tests was conducted to evaluate the factor of subject area for age and ethnicity. As follow-up tests for a significant main effect and a significant interaction effect, pairwise comparisons and simple main effect tests were conducted, respectively. ^ The results showed that there were significant ethnicity and age differences in total comprehension scores. There were also age differences in reading and math comprehension, but no significant differences were found in reading and math by ethnicity. Korean American children had higher scores in total comprehension than those of Hispanic American children, and they showed greater changes in their comprehension skills at the younger ages, from five to six, whereas Hispanic American children showed greater changes at the older ages, from six to seven. Children at ages five and six showed higher scores in reading than in math, but no significant differences between math and reading comprehension scores were found at age seven. ^ Through schooling with integrated instruction, young bilingual children can move into higher levels of abstraction and concepts. This study highlighted bilingual children's general nature of thinking and showed how they developed reading and mathematics comprehension in an integrated process. ^

The monster chronicles : the role of children���s stories featuring monsters in managing childhood fears and promoting empowerment

Children���s fascination with monsters is a normal part of childhood development. Children���s literature reflects this with a wealth of stories featuring monsters, ranging from fairy tales to picture books to books for independent readers. These stories can raise concerns from educators, parents and other sections of the community such as political and religious institutions on the basis that they could be disturbing or harmful to children. In contrast, there is evidence to indicate the potential for managing fears and enhancing feelings of empowerment in children through the reading of stories featuring monsters. A reappraisal of these stories from a predominantly therapeutic perspective reveals that they may act as agents of positive change in six ways – catharsis, naming, taming, integration, transformation and moral empowerment. Two of these functions, transformation and moral empowerment, are examined further in three case studies of stories for the older reader that feature monsters, Wolf Brother by Michelle Paver, Monster Blood Tattoo, Book One: Foundling by D.M. Cornish and my manuscript, ‘The Monster Chronicles’. The insights from this research have been used to inform the writing and editing of ‘The Monster Chronicles’ and inherent to that, my goal of creating a children���s story featuring monsters that is sensitive to children���s fears and their desire for empowerment.