Navigating Worlds of “Trouble and Woe and Worse” in Children’s Literature: An Exploration into the Double Text of Tony Kushner and Maurice Sendak’s Brundibar

In this article, the author explores the richly layered double text of Kushner and Sendak’s picturebook, Brundibar (2003)—the historical context of Brundibár as a Holocaust-era children’s operetta by Hans Krása and Adolf Hoffmeister, and the present day manifestation of Brundibar as a children’s picturebook. In order to contextualize the discussion of Kushner and Sendak’s text, Brundibar’s historical origins in Nazi-annexed Czechoslovakia and its transition to the stage in the Nazi “model” concentration camp, Terezín, is presented. An extensive semiotic analysis of Kushner and Sendak’s illustrations and text is also provided within the framework of what Kushner (The art of Maurice Sendak: 1980 to the present, 2003) terms “a world of trouble and woe and worse” (p. 210). Furthermore, the author discusses the development of Sendak’s Hitlerian Brundibar and the struggles that both Kushner and Sendak faced as they considered how to portray the story’s antagonist, given their somewhat differing conceptions of which difficult themes and topics children should be exposed to during childhood. To round out this discussion, the author explores pedagogical implications for teachers as they read difficult texts, particularly Holocaust texts, with children.     

“Into Eternity’s Certain Breadth”: Ambivalent Escapes in Markus Zusak’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">The Book Thief</Emphasis>

This article examines the consolatory possibilities presented by Markus Zusak’s recent crossover novel The Book Thief, investigating the degree to which the novel delivers the simultaneous consolation and confrontation identified with children’s and young adults’ Holocaust texts by such critics as Adrienne Kertzer and Lawrence Baron. Contending that the supernatural nature of the novel’s redemptive imagery ultimately undermines its apparently consolatory purpose, the article concludes with an analysis of the extent to which such a reading is complicated by the novel’s status as crossover text, and the triangular gaze that might subsequently be attributed to its adult readers.     

Neuroscience, Play and Early Childhood Education: Connections, Implications and Assessment

Paralleling the works of Cambourne’s Conditions of Literacy Learning (The Reading Teacher, 54(4), 414–429, 2001), Copple and Bredekamp’s (Developmentally appropriate practice in early childhood programs serving children from birth though age. National Association for the Education of Young Children, Washington, 2009) Developmentally Appropriate Practices and the findings from the field of Neuroscience this article explores the important components of creating an active, stimulating learning environment; one purposely designed to actively engage the minds of young children in order to help strengthen their neurological networks. The article concludes its exploration with the role of “mirror neurons” in the learning environment and how they affect the young child's mood, emotions, and empathy.     

Teaching Young Children Self-regulation through Children’s Books

Today’s emphasis on using children’s literature as a tool to teach reading and writing sub-skills distracts teachers’ attention from looking to children’s books for their historical role in helping children navigate the intellectual, social, and emotional terrains of childhood. This article argues, first, that early childhood educators must remain fluent in the use of literature that supports young children’s psychosocial development. Second, teachers must establish criteria for choice. By way of example, it examines two popular books for young children, Sendak’s (1963) Where the Wild Things Are [New York: HarperCollins Publishers] and Shannon’s (1998) No, David! [New York: Blue Sky Press] Three theoretical perspectives guide the analysis. The first combines Dewey’s (1938/97) [Experience and education. New York:Touchstone] impetus for learning and Vygotsky’s (1978) [Mind in society. Cambridge: Harvard University Press] theory that learning precedes development through scaffolded social interaction. The second is Erikson’s (1950, 1985) [Childhood and society. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.] theory of psychosocial development in light of the 4–6-year-old’s drive towards self-regulation, control, and independence. The third is Rosenblatt’s (1978) [The reader, the text, the poem. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English] transactional nature of reading.     

Return of the Hacker as Hero: Fictions and Realities of Teenage Technological Experts

When critics consider young people’s practices within cyberspace, the focus is often on negative aspects, namely cyber-bullying, obsessive behaviour, and the lack of a balanced life. Such analyses, however, may miss the agency and empowerment young people experience not only to make decisions but to have some degree of control over their lives through their engagement with and use of technology, which often includes sharing it with others in cyberspace. This was a finding of research conducted by Nicola Johnson, which also informs the two novels considered in this article, Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother and Brian Falkner’s Brainjack. The article draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of acts of resistance (Acts of Resistance: Against the New Myths of our Time, 1998) to demonstrate how these fictional representations of hacker heroes make a direct address to their readers to use their technological expertise to achieve social justice. Rather than hacking primarily to “see if they can do it,” the protagonists of these novels acknowledge the moral ambiguity of hacking and encourage its responsible use.     

Embodying emotions: making transactions explicit in science learning contexts

In this Forum paper we synthesize some of the main ideas from three papers: Auli Orlander and Per-Olof Wickman’s (Cult Stud Sci 6, 2011), Bodily experiences in secondary school biology, Roger Sages’ (Cult Stud Sci Educ 6, 2011), About Descartes: Uses and misuses, and Steve Alsop’s (Cult Stud Sci Educ 6, 2011), The body bites back! These papers challenged us to identify how emotions functioned as elements of bodily experiences in classroom transactions and why science teachers often are not responsive to students’ emoting. We also explored how teachers making use of curriculum and companion meanings could support the construction of learning environments that more productively support students’ science learning.     

Troubling the proletarianization of Mexican immigrant students in an era of neoliberal immigration

In response to Richardson Bruna’s “Mexican immigrant transnational social capital and class transformation: examining the role of peer mediation in insurgent science”, this paper draws on the author’s research on organizing, mobilization and knowledge production among adult im/migrant workers in Canada. While appreciative of the content and concerns of Richardson Bruna’s argument, the paper argues for a clearer position on tensions between agency and structure, and class and capitalist social relations in which to contextualize the schooling of immigrant children in today’s US classrooms. In addition, it explores some implications of Mignolo’s (2000) work on the geohistory of knowledge, notably his concept of ‘border thinking’ for teachers, teacher education, and curricula. Finally, the article suggests the potential of methodological frameworks and approaches of institutional ethnography (Smith 1987), political activist ethnography (Frampton et al. 2006) and global ethnography (Burawoy 2000) to inform research into this field.     

Can Long John Silver Save the Humanities?

Given the serious decline in the number of undergraduates majoring in the humanities in general, and literature in particular, teachers of Children’s Literature have a unique opportunity to serve their discipline by tapping the power of classroom dialogue to introduce students to the practical reasoning central to humanistic study. This essay takes Long John Silver, from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883), as a model for generating lively discussion that begins with literary matters but leads, with help from the teacher, to fundamental questions about the role of the humanities in students’ education and in their lives. In the process, the essay traces a pedagogical strategy that moves from matters of plot and character, to issues of ethics and judgment, to larger questions regarding approximate knowledge and sound reasoning about the complexities of the human condition. This inquiry focuses specifically on the charming but villainous Silver and the possible explanations for his escape at the end of the novel. But the ambiguity and fascination of his character are also catalysts for wide-ranging classroom discussion of a kind that Children’s Literature routinely promotes and sustains. Such discussion can provide broad, balanced insight into the nature and variety of critical understanding. As such, Children’s Literature and the pedagogy it supports serves to identify and enliven the benefits of humanistic study at a crucial moment of academic history.     

Alcatraz and Iser: Applying Wolfgang Iser’s Concepts of Implied Reader and Implied Author and Reality to the Metafictive Alcatraz Smedry Series

As a narrative series, Brandon Sanderson’s humorous, middle grade, Alcatraz Smedry novels display some of the arguably vague concepts of Reader Response theorist Wolfgang Iser as accessible themes that encourage a critical understanding of the stories. Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians (2007), Alcatraz Versus the Scrivener’s Bones (2008) and Alcatraz Versus the Knights of Crystallia (2009) are the supposed autobiographies of 13-year-old Alcatraz Smedry, who regularly pauses the narrative to comment on the nature of reality and fantasy and on his state as a hero. As the implied author, Alcatraz directly addresses the reader to describe characteristics of the implied readers and to note gaps in the narrative and aspects of the story’s structure. The metafictive techniques incorporated throughout Sanderson’s fantasy parodies guide readers to ask critical questions of the books, the fantasy genre, reality and Alcatraz’s characterization of himself. Examining the Alcatraz series with the lens of Iser’s concepts displays their use in children’s literature and demonstrates how issues of the implied author and implied reader may stretch beyond the scope of an individual narrative into questions and critiques of genre, parody, metafiction, reality and the reliability of a narrator.     

Codes,Silences, and Homophobia: Challenging Normative Assumptions About Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary LGBTQ Young Adult Literature

Since the publication of the first young adult novel to deal with issues of sexual identity, John Donovan’s (1969) I’ll Get There, It Better Be Worth the Trip, over 200 novels have been published centered around gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer and questioning (LGBTQ) characters and conflicts (Cart and Jenkins, 2006, The Heart has Its Reasons: Young Adult Literature with Gay/Lesbian/Queer Content, 1969–2004. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press). In significant contrast to early texts, many authors in recent years have sought to promote inclusion of LGBTQ individuals and to present LGBTQ characters in a positive light. To do so, they frequently create antagonistic homophobic characters and situations that provide a sense of realism (Crisp, 2009, Children’s Literature in Education, 40, 333–348). In this paper, I present several representative examples from these novels that challenge homophobia, but ultimately leave it intact. Text excerpts are drawn from the numerous contemporary realistic LGBTQ-themed texts, published between the years 2000–2005, and marketed to young adults. I then contrast these texts with the novel Boy Meets Boy (Levithan, 2003). Through the novel’s blurred genres and inventive use of linguistic features, Boy Meets Boy is able to more effectively undermine heteronormative assumptions by presenting the unthinkable: children as sexual beings, hegemonic masculinity as in fact non-hegemonic and detrimental to success, and homosexuality as normalized and even ordinary.     

Developing a ‘leading identity’: the relationship between students’ mathematical identities and their career and higher education aspirations

The construct of identity has been used widely in mathematics education in order to understand how students (and teachers) relate to and engage with the subject (Kaasila, 2007; Sfard & Prusak, 2005; Boaler, 2002). Drawing on cultural historical activity theory (CHAT), this paper adopts Leont’ev’s notion of leading activity in order to explore the key ‘significant’ activities that are implicated in the development of students’ reflexive understanding of self and how this may offer differing relations with mathematics. According to Leont’ev (1981), leading activities are those which are significant to the development of the individual’s psyche through the emergence of new motives for engagement. We suggest that alongside new motives for engagement comes a new understanding of self—a leading identity—which reflects a hierarchy of our motives. Narrative analysis of interviews with two students (aged 16–17 years old) in post-compulsory education, Mary and Lee, are presented. Mary holds a stable ‘vocational’ leading identity throughout her narrative and, thus, her motive for studying mathematics is defined by its ‘use value’ in terms of pursuing this vocation. In contrast, Lee develops a leading identity which is focused on the activity of studying and becoming a university student. As such, his motive for study is framed in terms of the exchange value of the qualifications he hopes to obtain. We argue that this empirical grounding of leading activity and leading identity offers new insights into students’ identity development.     

(Re)Storying Obama: An Examination of Recently Published Informational Texts

American publishers have published numerous children’s books about Barack Obama over the past several years; most take the form of informational biographies. This article reports on a research project aimed at how these books incorporate sociohistorical narratives, particularly those related to the civil rights movement. Though the features of the books might cause the reader to presume political neutrality, the books link readers to distinct Discourses (Gee, 1996), suggesting particular ideologies. In this article, we identified the following differences: (1) specific happenings from Obama’s life were included in some texts while omitted in others; (2) when the events were included, how they were framed differed; and (3) the narrative constructions of the events varied. We use the differences amongst these texts to argue for the importance of critical literacy in elementary classrooms.     

What underlies the shift to a modality of partnership in educational development cooperation?

This paper situates the philosophy and politics of partnership in educational development cooperation in the context of wider epistemological and axiological shifts in contemporary social theory. Partnerships in development cooperation are also considered in the light of the alleged failure of international development assistance, a claim that has received much attention with the publication of, among others, William Easterly’s The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s efforts to aid the rest have done so much ill and so little good (2006) and of Dambisa Moyo’s Dead Aid: Why aid is not working and how there is another way for Africa (2008). Partnership as a development strategy offers one response to these claims, but if shared development objectives and policies, shared ownership, shared decisions about where aid is targeted, shared rights, shared responsibilities, and shared implementation strategies still leave the education development community facing challenges as big as ever, it might be time, the paper concludes, to consider whether the concept of partnership has not been expanded too far as a modality in development cooperation.     

Amartya Sen’s Capability Approach and the Brokering of Learning Provision for Young Adults

This paper argues that Amartya Sen’s (Development as freedom, New York: Random House, 1999) concept of “capabilities” provides a useful framework for interpreting the brokering of learning provisions that emerged as a key feature of reforms to education and training in Queensland (Australia) for young people. Sen’s capability approach is presented as a way of understanding the place of vocational learning in capability deprivation and enhancement. Methodologically, this account comes from a case study of the reforms’ birthing and trial phases (2000–2006) (Harreveld and Singh 2007, Queensland’s education and training reforms for the future: the journey so far in senior phase learning. Brisbane, Qld: Department of Education, Training and the Arts). Evidence about the brokering of learning provision for young people comes from Queensland’s youth support coordinators, community mentoring scheme, flexible learning services and a work readiness program.

Holocaust education in Jewish schools in Israel: Goals, dilemmas, challenges

Research has shown the Holocaust to be the primary component of Jewish identity (Farago in Yahadut Zmanenu 5:259–285, 1989; Gross in Influence of the trip to Poland within the framework of the Ministry of Education on the working through of the Holocaust. Unpublished M.A. thesis, Ben-Gurion University, Beer Sheva, 2000; Herman in Jewish identity: A socio-psychological perspective, Sage, Beverly Hills, 1977; Levy et al. in Beliefs, observations and social interaction among Israeli Jews. Louis Guttman Israel Institute of Applied Social Research (Hebrew), Jerusalem, 1993; Ofer in Jews in Israel: Contemporary social and cultural patterns. Brandeis University Press, Hanover and London, pp. 394–417, 2004a) and to contribute significantly to Jewish Israelis’ sense of belonging to the Jewish people. Though the Holocaust is a central event in Jewish history, Holocaust education is mandatory in the state education system in Israel, and some research has investigated the impact of this education, the field has not been conceptualized systematically (Blatman in Bishvilei haZikaron 7:15–16, 1995; Feldman in Bishvilei haZikaron 7:8–11, 1995; Ofer in Jewish Educ 10:87–108, 2004b; Schatzker in Int J Polit Educ 5(1): 75–82, 1982). This article attempts to organize the existing knowledge on the subject through a meta-analysis of the foundations and basic premises of Holocaust education in Israel, using the most important literature in the area. It first suggests a conceptual framework, organizing by period the changing attitudes toward the Holocaust in general and Holocaust education in particular. It then describes Holocaust education over the years, and finally analyzes the goals of Holocaust education, along with its major dilemmas and challenges.     

Exploring Grade 7 Students’ Responses to Shaun Tan’s The Red Tree

As art objects, picturebooks have the potential to contribute to readers’ aesthetic development. Many scholars and practitioners have recognized how using picturebooks with older students can augment their reading motivation and extend their understanding of visual elements of art and design, as well as develop their literacy, language, and thinking skills. The Red Tree (Tan, 2001) was one of the picturebooks used during two multifaceted, classroom-based research projects with Grade 7 students. The studies explored how the students responded to and interpreted picturebooks and graphic novels with metafictive devices, and examined how the students transferred their knowledge and understanding of various literary and art elements when creating their own multimodal print texts. Overall, the content analysis of the students’ written responses to The Red Tree revealed an adoption of an “aesthetic attitude” (Doonan, Looking at Pictures in Picture Books, 1993, p. 11) towards the picturebook. The students’ responses reflected how they positioned themselves as active readers who looked closely at Tan’s sophisticated and metaphorical paintings, and who embraced a co-authoring role as they interpreted the emotional landscapes and textual fragments in the picturebook. The article concludes with a discussion of several pedagogical issues associated with using picturebooks in middle years’ classrooms.     

Books and Good Stuff: A Strategy for Building School to Home Literacy Connections

Engaging young children in literacy activities at home is one way for families to augment and enrich the home literacy setting and to participate in their child’s education at an early age (St. Pierre et al. in Dev Psychol 41(6): 953–970, 2005). Burgess et al. (Read Res Quart 4(4): 408–426, 2002) suggested that the resources families have at their disposal, the quality of literacy role models provided by parents, and the types of literacy and language activities in which parents and children engage, are all related to young children’s developing literacy and language abilities. Other studies demonstrated that even modest literacy-promoting interventions can significantly enhance a young child’s early literacy environment by increasing the frequency of parent–child book-sharing activities (Weitzman et al. in Pediatrics 113(5):1248–1253, 2004). Dever (J Early Educ Fam Rev 8(4):17–28, 2001) and Dever and Burtis (Early Child Dev Care 172(4):359–370, 2002) emphasize the use of family literacy bags for early childhood development. Developing and sharing take-home literacy bags is an exciting literacy-promoting activity that may be shared with children and families to provide support for emergent literacy. This article explores the development of the BAGS (Books and Good Stuff) take-home literacy kits and provides suggestions for content, construction, implementation, and evaluation. Sixteen current books are reviewed and recommended by theme.     

A Blissful Education

A personal reflection from a student of Dr. Sipe showcases the power and humanity of his conversational prowess. In this reflection, a developing discussion with Dr. Sipe around Cynthia Rylant’s Missing May (1992) is connected to Roland Barthes’s concept of jouissance.     

Who Wears the Pants? The (Multi)Cultural Politics of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants

Novels that prioritise the connectedness and strength of girls’ friendships without employing the pervasive trope of “mean girls”—those who typically divide in order to conquer other girls—are potentially empowering in their refusal to perpetuate limited and binary accounts of adolescent femininity. While Ann Brashares’ cult novel (now film), The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (2005a; originally 2002) appears to be representative of this textual shift, underpinning the overt call to value girls’ relationships is a deeply conservative, assimilationist narrative that relies on an acceptance of traditional patriarchal values. This article analyses the ways in which the novel appropriates “multicultural difference” to valorise, sustain and naturalise the central position and authority of patriarchy in the lives of young girls, regardless of their cultural heritage. Kate McInally currently works as a research fellow, and teaches children’s literature at Deakin University, Burwood, Australia. Her particular research interests are feminist, queer and Deleuzean theory, representations of girl–girl desire in young adult fiction, and multicultural children’s fiction.     

Class, Identity, and Teacher Education

This paper explores the possibilities of working with White, working-class teacher education students to explore the “complex social trajectory” (Reay in Women’s Stud Int Forum 20(2):225–233, 1997a, p. 19) of class border crossing as they progress through college. Through analysis of a course that I have developed, Education and the American Dream, I explore political and pedagogical issues in teaching the thousands of teacher education students who are the first in their families to attend college about social class. Arguing that faculty in teacher education too often disregard the significance of deep class differences between themselves and many of their students, I propose that teacher education include coursework in which upwardly-mobile students (a) draw upon their distinctive perspectives as class border-crossers to elucidate their “complex social positioning as a complicated amalgam of current privilege interlaced with historic disadvantage” (Reay in Women’s Stud Int Forum 20(2):225–233, 1997a, p. 25) and (b) complicate what Adair and Dahlberg (Pedagogy 1:173–175, 2001, p. 174) have termed a cultural “impulse to frame class mobility as a narrative of moral progress”. Such coursework, I suggest, has implications for the development of teacher leaders in stratified schools. The paper draws upon the literatures on social class and educational attainment, on the construction of classed identities in spite of silence about class in public and academic discourse, and on pedagogies for teaching across class differences.