The Polysystem and the Translation of Children’ s Literature

Polysystem Theory was developed in 1970s by Israeli scholar Itamar Even-Zohar,and was well known for its three circumstances.Children’ literature,as a special branch of literature,attracts more and more research nowadays.This paper explores the process of translation of Children’ s Literature in China under polysystem.     

Gender Effects in Children’s Development and Education

This paper attempts to clarify several lines of research on gender in development and education, inter‐relating findings from studies on intuitive/informal knowledge with those from research on achievements and attitudes in science. It acknowledges the declining proportions of male teachers world‐wide and examination successes which indicate a reversal of educational disadvantage from female to male; as well as the recent evidence on the effects of the gender of teachers upon student success. An empirical contribution to the literature is offered, drawing from the gender‐related findings from research on children’s cosmologies in China and New Zealand with 346 boys and 340 girls (of whom 119 boys and 121 girls participated in the current study). The investigation focused on children’s concepts of the motion and shape of the Earth through observational astronomy and gave children opportunities to express their ideas in several modalities. The in‐depth interviews allowed children to share their meanings with gender differences becoming apparent (e.g. girls’ superior ability to visually represent their cosmologies and boys’ greater awareness of gravity). However, these differences were not universal across genders or cultures and marked similarities were apparent both in the content of children’s responses and in their reasoning processes. By comparing boy/girl cosmological concept categories and by tracking their developmental trends by age, statistical evidence revealed the extent of the similarities within and across these diverse cultures. The findings reinforce those from the authors’ knowledge restructuring and cultural mediation studies and provide support for the view that boys and girls have similar, holistic‐rather‐than‐fragmented, cosmologies which have features in common across cultures and ethnic groups.     

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.     

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

Children's Literature in Education -     

The Implementation of Character Education and Children’s Literature to Teach Bullying Characteristics and Prevention Strategies to Preschool Children: An Action Research Project

Bullying behaviors among young children are taking place in preschool classrooms and child-development centers. The author makes a case, based on bullying themes in children’s literature and both qualitative and quantitative data collection with young children, for the use of children’s picture books to teach character as bullying prevention to 4–6 year old children. Through the reading of picture books and character education activities with a bullying theme preschool children develop a better understanding of bullying characteristics and strategies for dealing with bullying behaviors. Included are the results from questionnaires and interviews with preschool children and an annotated bibliography of children’s picture books and activities useful in the instruction and prevention of bullying behaviors.     

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

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

The Necessity of an Anthropomorphic Approach to Children’s Literature

The study focuses on the necessity of an anthropomorphic approach in deconstructing the symbolic understandings of animals in children’s literature, and considers how such an approach can be used to draw ethical attention to the unnatural history of animals in the Anthropocene. The paper analyses three children’s novels that depict animals without representing their subjectivity in characteristically human terms. These novels are Eva Hornung’s ferality tale Dog Boy (2009), Sonya Hartnett’s fable The Midnight Zoo (2011) and Kate Applegate’s animal autobiography The One and Only Ivan (2012). Informed by Jacques Derrida’s anti-anthropocentric views and the ethical discourse of creaturely vulnerability, this essay argues that the world’s present state of cascading environmental impoverishment demands an anthropomorphic approach that is not inherently anthropocentric, along with an emerging kind of creaturely consciousness.

     

National Identity in a Multicultural Society: Malaysian Children’s Literature in English

This article explores the question of how children’s literature reflects national identity in a diverse society. Drawing parallels with Ellison’s Invisible Man, it speculates on how literary omissions and misrepresentations of diverse groups may influence the minds of young readers in their attitudes toward themselves, their nation, and others. In a sampling of the current children’s picture book literature of Malaysia in English, it relates current thinking in multiculturalist and post-colonial theory to the forms of multiculturalism found in these works. It examines this literature’s representations of history, diversity, class, gender, and values to determine who is represented, how they are portrayed, who is excluded, and what values are promoted, exploring what image of national identity this literature projects.

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.     

Knowledge Restructuring in the Development of Children’s Cosmologies

The development of children’s cosmologies was investigated over a 13‐year period, using multi‐modal, in‐depth interviews with 686 children (217 boys, 227 girls from New Zealand and 129 boys, 113 girls from China), aged 2–18. Children were interviewed while they observed the apparent motion of the Sun and Moon, and other features of the Earth; drew their ideas of the shape and motion of the Earth, Moon and Sun, and the causes of daytime and night‐time; then modelled them using play‐dough; which led into discussion of related ideas. These interviews revealed that children’s cosmologies were far richer than previously thought and surprisingly similar in developmental trends across the two cultures. There was persuasive evidence of three types of conceptual change: a long‐term process (over years) similar to weak restructuring; a medium‐term process (over months) akin to radical restructuring; and a dynamic form of conceptual crystallisation (often in seconds) whereby previously unconnected/conflicting concepts gel to bring new meaning to previously isolated ideas. The interview technique enabled the researchers to ascertain children’s concepts from intuitive, cultural, and scientific levels. The evidence supports the argument that children have coherent cosmologies that they actively create to make sense of the world rather than fragmented, incoherent “knowledge‐in‐pieces”.     

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.     

“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.     

The Construction of the Identity of Chinese Canadian Women--Analyzing the Characterization of May-Ying in the Concubine’s Children

Denise Chong’s first novel the Concubine’s Children, not only enjoys the high compliments from the critics but also gains great popular among common readers. This paper intends to study the constructio...     

“It’s Groundhog Day”: Foucault’s Governmentality and Crisis Discourses in Physical Education

ABSTRACT

Dominant discourses in physical education research center on subject-wide crisis. This is despite repeated calls to address enduring concerns about how physical education is taught. In short, the subject seems caught in Groundhog Day (defined by Oxford Dictionaries (n.d.) as “a situation in which a series of unwelcome or tedious events appear to be recurring in exactly the same way”). This article scrutinizes this position through Foucault’s lens of governmentality, which focuses particularly on power/knowledge relations and their relationship to subjectivity. Through this lens, research functions as a shaper of contemporary understanding and becomes a means for intervention by “experts.” The article is structured as a conversation between authors about dominant discourses in physical education research and issues of governmentality. It argues that research approaches such as action research are framed within other power/knowledge relations and may provide a way to wake up on a new day.     

On the Pilgrim to “A Room of One’s Own” in The Hours

In A Room of One’s Own,Virginia Woolf argued her famous proposition that a woman needed to have a room of her own to achieve literary autonomy,and laid the foundation for present-day feminist criticism.Yet the author believes that economic independent does not foster women’s identity with certainty.In this thesis,the author explores the crucial place of spiritual and economic independence in building up women’s autonomy through analyzing Michael Cunningham Pulitzerwinning work The Hours,which he draws inventively on the life of Virginia Woolf and her work Mrs.Dalloway.     

The Value of Education and Educación: Nurturing Mexican American Children’s Educational Aspirations to the Doctorate

Guided by the framework of community cultural wealth, this study uncovered how 7 low-income, 1st-generation Mexican American PhDs interpreted their parents’ and families’ educational aspirations, messages imbued with aspects of normative parental/familial involvement as well as cultural forms of support. This study demonstrates the power of narratives that children carry with them as they navigate various educational systems. I discuss strategies for helping Mexican American students make meaning of these messages and negotiate potential conflicts with their goals of degree attainment, and I add a new dimension to research on the formation of educational aspirations and the role of educación.     

Ted Hughes: The Development of a Children’s Poet

This article looks at how Ted Hughes’ poetry for children developed over more than 30 years of publication. It traces the movement from his earlier, more conventional rhyming poems, such as Meet My Folks! (1961) and Nessie the Mannerless Monster (1964), to the mature, free verse “animal poems” for older readers of Season Songs (1976c), Under the North Star (1981) and the “farmyard fable” What is the Truth? (1984). The article argues that the later lyrical poems for younger readers where Hughes returned to rhyme, The Cat and the Cuckoo (1987) and The Mermaid’s Purse (1993), represent an undervalued final phase of Hughes’ work for children which is rarely discussed by critics. The discussion considers Hughes’ changing attitude to the concept of the “children’s poet” at different periods of his career. Reference is made throughout to Hughes’ own writing about children and poetry, such as Poetry in the Making (1967), and to parallel developments in his poetry for adults.