Reflections and distortions: Canadian folklore as portrayed in children’s literature

Abstract

In Great Britain and the United States common developmental issues have resulted in the evolution of two very different models of school library provision. In the United States, school libraries are integrated media centers, separate from public library influence, staffed by specialists with dual training in teaching and librarianship, and dedicated to an educational mission. British school libraries are contested terrain with two patterns of staffing, support by Public Library Services, and incomplete formulation of mission and rationale. This article discusses five factors which have facilitated or retarded school library development in the two countries (standards, staffing and certification, government support, rationale, professionalization) and generalizes about development factors and the successful promotion of school libraries.     

Women’s Studies Collections: A Checklist Evaluation

A checklist evaluation on thirty-seven Women's Studies programs conducted using the individual institutions' online public access catalogs (OPACs) is presented. Although Women's Studies collections are very difficult to build, an evaluation of existing programs shows that collections, for the most part, have managed substantial coverage of the subject area.     

Victorian Women’s Liberation and Lesbian Feminist Archives Inc

With this paper, I first of all acknowledge the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people as the traditional owners of the land in Australia. I go on to mention early radical actions by lesbians and womyn, including setting up the Queen Victoria Women’s Hospital in 1896, and how lesbians and feminists in Victoria joined the worldwide Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) to fight for womyn’s rights from 1969 onwards. The paper explains why there was a need to set up a WLM Archives in the first place, the herstory of the Victorian Women’s Liberation and Lesbian Feminist Archives (VWLLFA) and the reasons for maintaining and adding to the collection into the new millennium.

The Victorian Women’s Liberation and Lesbian Feminist Archives Inc was established in 1983 with the objective of collecting any and all of the material relating to the WLM in Victoria from 1969 onwards; to store, archive and preserve this material for posterity and make it accessible for research and other purposes.

Now housed at the University of Melbourne Archives, the VWLLFA is a unique record of the enormous amount of political work lesbians and feminists in Victoria have done over the past 50 years.     

Educational TV Consumption and Children’s Interest in Leisure Reading and Writing: A Test of the Validated Curriculum Hypothesis

The relationship between children’s TV consumption and literacy outcomes is currently unclear, as past research has identified both linear and curvilinear trends. One explanation for the contradictory results is the varying content children consume; specifically, researchers have argued that research-based educational TV programming should be positively related to literacy outcomes whereas non research-based programming should be negatively related to literacy outcomes (what we refer to as the validated curriculum hypothesis). To test this hypothesis, students in grades 4 and 5 N = 120) completed a survey assessing educational TV consumption and leisure reading/writing behaviors. The results upheld the validated curriculum hypothesis and revealed several key moderators including composite TV consumption and parents’ reading behavior.     

Far from Fifty-Fifty: Legal Measures and the Relative Lack of Women in Powerful Decision-Making Positions in Germany’s Broadcasting Sector

A gender-equal organization of institutions requires adequately qualified women to be equally present on every hierarchical/functional level. In light of this, the authors evaluate how women participate in leading managerial and supervisory positions of administrative relevance, i.e., beyond editorial departments, in public and private broadcasting corporations and organizations in Germany. The study comprises an examination and comparison of existing legal requirements/regulations for gender equality on the supervisory councils of Germany’s broadcasting corporations/organizations and contributes to the analysis on the contemporary politics of gender in Germany’s broadcasting sector. It is the first study of its kind.     

An international children’s literature network: a position paper

This study investigates how Chinese students make credibility assessments of web-based information for their research, and what evaluation criteria they employ. Our findings indicate that presumed credibility, reputed credibility, and surface credibility have a stronger impact on undergraduate students than on graduate students in credibility assessment. Graduate students tend to value experienced credibility more than undergraduate students. Undergraduate students predominantly rely on author's name/reputation/affiliation as well as website reputation for their credibility evaluation. In contrast, graduate students focus more than undergraduate students on information accuracy/quality. Similarities and differences in credibility assessment between American students and Chinese students are also discussed.     

The Influence of Device Access and Gender on Children’s Reading Frequency

We explore the role that devices currently play in children’s book reading, finding that while children have relatively high access to devices with eReading capability, these devices are underutilised for reading purposes. While ownership of devices was negatively associated with reading frequency for both genders, its negative impact was more significant for girls than boys. We also found that when boys and girls identified themselves as daily readers, and where they had access to devices, they did not use them frequently for book reading, suggesting that paper book reading is still preferable for frequent book readers of both genders.     

Different Paths,Different Voices: The Historical Contexts of Women’s and Minorities’ Access to Broadcasting

This essay extends Susan Carter’s (2004) models of women’s access to broadcasting to include racial and ethnic minorities. It investigates the different historical contexts of female and minority access to commercial broadcasting, and argues that women and minorities have rooted their media access in different models. The intersection of race and gender, combined with an evolving cultural, political, and regulatory environment, has had a powerful influence on which of the three access models were used by women and people of color.     

Tradition Never Goes Out of Style: The Role of Tradition in Women’s Naming Practices

The goal of this project is to explore why, given United States women’s historical struggle to gain legal and social acceptance of nontraditional naming forms, the overwhelming majority of women continue to follow tradition and adopt their husbands’ names upon marriage. To begin to explain this phenomenon, this study focused on Catholic women, who changed their names between 1940 and 1998. This article illustrates the role tradition plays in participants’ worldview and how tradition influences their behavior and attitudes toward naming practices. The naming behaviors and attitudes of the women in this study are then analyzed within a larger sociocultural and political context.     

African American Women’s Language Use in Response to Male Partners’ Condom Negotiation Tactics

African American women are vulnerable for sexual health risk; thus, condom use is essential. Guided by research linking goals to communicative content, this study explored women’s use of I-, you-, we-, and hedging language during condom negotiation. Female participants (N = 193) engaged in a condom negotiation role play with male confederates, where language use measures were coded. I-language was used the most frequently. Language use differed as a function of men’s tactics, such that women primarily used I-language in response to verbal attacks, you-language in response to seduction, and I- and we-language in response to information seeking. Women who engaged in more recent condom use were more likely to use you-language and, when confederates attacked, they responded with more you-language and less hedging.     

The Good Working Mother: Managerial Women’s Sensemaking and Feelings About Work–Family Issues

We use a sensemaking lens to explore how women managers experience and articulate work–life concerns upon their return to paid work following maternity leaves. We focus on 11 women who held different types of managerial positions, including vice presidents, circulation managers, and human resources experts. We found that our participants re‐framed the good mother image into a good working mother role that fit their lifestyles and interests. To accomplish this reframing, participants engaged in three thematic processes supportive of the good working mother image: (a) good working mothers arrange quality child care; (b) good working mothers are (un)equal partners; and (c) good working mothers feel pleasure in their working mother role. These themes and image were both ironic and fragile constructions of working motherhood. Because these themes and images enable participants to make sense of and establish the worth of working motherhood to family members, friends, acquaintances, organizational members, and community members, they provide a reason why middle‐ or upper‐class working and stay‐at‐home mothers may be in conflict about work and family choices.