Motor Impairment in Children’s Literature: Asking the Children

How do schoolchildren respond when they encounter a wheelchair user in a fictional text? This article describes a doctoral project where groups of children were presented with excerpts from books by Hilary McKay and Jacqueline Wilson in which wheelchair users play a significant role. The pupils were asked to discuss issues arising from these readings. The views pupils expressed were relevant, imaginative and positive. Only on two rare occasions did the pupils respond in ways that could be categorised as prejudicial towards disabled people. The article describes the methodology adopted for the study, directly quotes from and explores the views of the pupils. The teaching of children about disability and disabled people currently in the English curriculum for Personal, Social and Health Education (PSHE) is alleged to be inadequate; a weakness which could be addressed in the manner described, using literature for sensitive educational debate. This study is unusual in that the research subjects include a group of children who are motor impaired. The Doctor of Education who conducted the research for her thesis and authored this article is also herself a fulltime wheelchair user.     

Pakistani Teachers’ Perceptions of Kindergarten Children’s Learning: An Exploration of Understanding and Practice

This paper considers perceptions of children’s learning and classroom practice to support learning in the Pakistani early years educational context. In Pakistan, there is a growing focus on quality provision of early childhood education and building early childhood education teacher capacity. Over the course of one academic year, data were collected from kindergarten teachers in a Pakistani urban school through interviews and classroom observations as part of a larger study. Findings presented in this paper are based on the interview data of two teachers in the sample, a novice and an experienced teacher. Data analysis examined their perceptions of kindergarten children’s learning and of their practice to support kindergarten children’s learning, taking into consideration the gender perspective. The results showed tensions in the teachers’ perceptions which contrasted between a constructivist approach and a teacher-directed skills approach. Perceptions of their practice reflected a formal, teacher-directed approach rather than a constructivist approach and a teacher-directed skills approach to teaching. Several factors, including deep-rooted perceptions as well as curriculum structure, time, number of staff and resources, contributed to this.     

Maurice Gee’s Brilliant Borrowings of Maurice Gee and Significant Others: Realism and Postmodernism in Gee’s Books for Children and Adults

This paper examines the work of one of New Zealand’s most acclaimed writers, Maurice Gee, and the use of his children’s fiction as an experimental ground for postmodernist techniques further developed in his writing for adults. In particular, it considers Gee’s borrowings of his own and others’ non-fictional and fictional material, to produce richly literary, historical novels. The paper argues that realist and postmodernist features are woven into the children’s and adult books, but that the balance is differently skewed in each. It thus addresses an area largely atypical of the children’s novel, but one that should be of concern to children’s literature critics.     

Words Apart,Worlds Apart: Peritexts from Islamized Translations of World Classics in Children’s Literature

This article examines the political polarization between Republicans and Islamists in Turkey as reflected in the peritexts of recent translations of world children’s literature. This is reflected in terms of van Dijk’s notions of an us vs them binarism, where a positive in-group is opposed to a negative out-group representation. In this way, the construction of an anti-Western (and pro-Islamist) ideology can be seen, regardless of the content of the actual literary works themselves.     

“Keeping Some Wildness Always Alive”: Posthumanism and the Animality of Children’s Literature and Play

This article explores posthumanism as a philosophy that emphasizes human relationships with the natural world by examining representations of animality, both in children’s literature (e.g. titles such as Where the Wild Things Are, Wild, Virginia Wolf, and No Fits, Nilson!) and in children’s play in order to better understand the significance of philosophy in children’s literature and lives. By fostering a feeling of “necessary wilderness,” or connection to nature (Almond, 2011, p. 110), and by practicing a sense of being in nature, “keeping some wildness always alive” (Lerman, 2012, p. 311) through literary engagement and animal play, the authors suggest that children and adults can maintain an interconnectedness with the natural world, even when they cannot be in it themselves. Through a mixed methods approach that combines educational theory, ecocriticism, and qualitative research, we discuss links between children’s stories and bodies, identifying how becoming animals through narrative engagement and play reflects posthumanist theory in practice, and encourages a child’s embodied knowledge of nature. The authors also speak to the ways that embodied education approaches that encourage animal play and “expressive literary engagement” [Sipe, 2002, pp. 476–483]) can support a shifting and necessary worldview informed by posthumanism, suggesting that philosophical change is necessary if humanity aims to survive the ecological and technological changes to come.     

Introduction to the Issue: Exploring Affect in Children’s Literature

Children's Literature in Education -     

Empire and Children’s Literature: Changing Patterns of Cross-Cultural Perspective

Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem “Foreign Children,” Rudyard Kipling’s poem “We and They,” and Frances Temple’s youth novel The Beduins’ Gazelle are the texts submitted to detailed analysis in this article, which examines cross-cultural perspectives in relation to imperial and post-imperial social contexts. Stevenson is shown to portray the basic structure of an imperial cross-cultural perspective, which Kipling problematizes and calls into question. Analysis of Temple reveals her awareness of the problems and limitations that inhere in an imperial perspective and shows that her work presents innovative, contemporary approaches to the representation of cross-cultural perspectives.     

Goodbye Yellow Brick Road: Challenging the Mythology of Home in Children’s Literature

The myth of home is what distinguishes children??s literature from adult novels (Wolf 1990). Nodelman and Reimer (The Pleasures of Children??s Literature, 2003) write that while ??the home/away/home pattern is the most common story line in children??s literature, adult fiction that deals with young people who leave home usually ends with the child choosing to stay away?? (pp. 197?C198). In a critical content analysis of recent award-winning middle reader novels from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, a new pattern was observed. This pattern, called a postmodern metaplot, begins with the child being abandoned, rather than the child leaving the home. The child??s journey is to construct a home within a postmodern milieu complete with competing truths and failed adults. Ultimately, the child??s postmodern journey ends with very modern ideal of the child leading the adults to a hopeful ending, a home. The article explores the changing roles of childhood and adulthood in children??s literature and questions if the mythology of home can be undone.     

Thought-Experiments About Gravity in the History of Science and in Research into Children’s Thinking

This article examines the main strands of thinking about gravity through the ages and the continuity of thought-experiments, from the early Greeks, through medieval times, to Galileo, Newton and Einstein. The key ideas are used to contextualise an empirical study of 247 children’s ideas about falling objects carried out in China and New Zealand, including the use of scenarios involving thrown and dropped items, and objects falling down deep well holes (as in Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland). The sample included 68 pre-school pupils, 68 primary school pupils, 56 middle school students, and 55 high school students; with approximately equal numbers in each group and of boys and girls in each group in each culture. The methodology utilised Piagetian interviews with three media (verbal language, drawing, and play-dough), a shadow stick; and everyday items including model people and soft model animals. The data from each group was categorised and analysed with Kolmogorov–Smirnov Two-Sample Tests and Spearman r _s coefficients. It was hypothesised and confirmed (at K–S alpha levels .05; r _s : p < .001) that cross-age and cross-cultural research and analysis would reveal that (a) an intuitive sense of gravity is present from an early age and develops in association with concepts like Earth shape and motion; (b) the development of concepts of gravity is similar in cultures such as China and New Zealand where teachers hold a scientific world view; and (c) children’s concepts of Earth motion, Earth shape, and gravity are coherent rather than fragmented. It was also demonstrated that multi-media interviews together with concrete experiences and thought-experiments afforded children the opportunity to share their emerging concepts of gravity. The findings provide information that teachers might use for lessons at an appropriate level.     

Connecting Teacher Beliefs to the Use of Children’s Literature in the Teaching of Mathematics

This article presents examples that illustrate how teachers use childrens literature in the teaching of mathematics. The examples are related to four curriculum ideologies that have influenced mathematics education in the USA for the last 75 years. It discusses why it is relevant to help teachers understand the ideological positions that influence their use of childrens literature during mathematics instruction, summarizes the four ideological positions, and presents results of a study of how teachers ideological positions relate to their use of childrens literature in the teaching of mathematics. The study examines two research questionsCan an instructional tool be developed that will highlight for teachers the different ways in which they and others use childrens literature to teach mathematics? and Can that instructional tool stimulate teacher discussion and reflection about their own beliefs and the ideological nature of the instructional environment in which they learned (as students) and teach (as teachers)? Study results indicate that both questions can be answered in the affirmative.     

Transcending the Nationalist Conception of Modernity: Poetic Children’s Literature in Early Twentieth-Century China

Modern children’s literature in China has largely been dominated by narratives of the nation and nationalism. The present article sets out to question the dominance of that nationalist stance as the country transitioned into the modern era in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By examining poetic children’s literature, the author unravels distinct non-nationalist intellectual sentiments in competition with the mainstream nationalist discourse that point to an imaginative envisioning of modernity. The article starts with a discussion of children’s poems and school songs imbued with a strong patriotic zeal in the late Qing and early Republican periods, and then moves on to the May Fourth period when lyricism and romanticism drew the attention of children’s literature advocates. Romantic-minded translators and writers, such as Bing Xin, embraced love as a humanist cosmopolitan vision while others, such as Zhou Zuoren and Liu Bannong, turned to local literary heritage, giving rise to a form of children’s songs with strong local consciousness. The article concludes by addressing the relevance of the insights derived from the historical case studies for contemporary children’s literature in China and beyond. It highlights the possibilities of envisaging modernity in non-nationalist terms and stresses the importance of cultivating in children alternative sentiments in the age of rising nationalism, both past and present.     

“But The Soldier’s Remains Were Gone”: Thought Experiments in Children’s Literature

In this article thought experiments are uncovered as key stimuli of philosophical potential in children’s literature and their presentation and function is examined in a selection of focal texts, including: Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871); Even the Parrot by Dorothy Sayers (1944); Nina Bawden’s Carrie’s War (1974); and A Game of Soldiers (1985) by Jan Needle. The thought experiment is a device common to science and philosophy and has been recognised as an heuristic tool in literature generally, but here children’s literature is drawn into the conversation, revealing that—as a dynamic mechanism of children’s narrative—thought experiments have a long-standing and particular role to play in books for young people. This paper connects with a recent turn in children’s literature discourse toward the conditions of power in books for young readers; it moves on the debate by demonstrating that the apparatus of thought experimentation places the implied child reader in a position of philosophical responsibility and forward thinking. Presenting thought experiments in different ways, formal properties of the thought experiment—such as conversational mode, double engagement and modal positioning—are identified and shown to open up a philosophical space of subsequence in children’s texts.     

Wayward Warriors: The Viking Motif in Swedish and English Children’s Literature

In this article the Viking motif in children’s literature is explored—from its roots in (adult) nationalist and antiquarian discourse, over pedagogical and historical texts for children, to the eventual diversification (or dissolution) of the motif into different genres and forms. The focus is on Swedish Viking narratives, but points of comparison are established with Viking children’s literature in the English-speaking world. Differences and similarities are pointed out, but more importantly, patterns of reciprocity and influence are examined. Finally, it is shown how international representations of Vikings to a growing extent have replaced the ones that are nationally and regionally determined. The Viking has ultimately become a deracinated and commodified symbol: a free-floating signifier and a wayward warrior.     

Beyond Borders: Reading “Other” Places in Children’s Literature

The author analyzes two texts, Gloria Whelan’s Homeless Bird and Deborah Ellis’s Parvana’s Journey, in an attempt to explain some of the problems and difficulties associated with those texts. The author examines Whelan’s representations of India and finds troubling binaries associated with that text. In comparison, the author finds Ellis’s depictions of Afghanistan more nuanced and complex. The author also discusses student reception of both texts and offers ways to problematize some of their reactions.

Children’s Literature and Education: A Memoir of Dr. Lawrence Sipe

A personal reflection about Dr. Sipe as a teacher and a mentor.     

Anti-racist Strategies in Finnish Children’s Literature: Physical Appearance and Language as Signifiers of National Belonging

This article examines anti-racist strategies employed in Finnish children’s literature. The examples from four stories illustrate that certain physical characteristics and cultural markers can become strong signifiers of nationality, that is Finnishness. The characters in these stories have to cope with experiences of exclusion and loneliness before the people around them learn that difference and diversity do not change the fact that all humans are worth the same. However, the paper argues that the intended positive outcome of books with a strong anti-racist agenda threatens to be lost as heavily accentuated moral lessons often become counterproductive. The paper demonstrates some of the changes that have taken place in Finnish children’s literature during the past two decades and addresses significant cultural and societal issues that affect children’s everyday lives.