scholarly journals Children's Books that Promote Understanding of Difference, Diversity and Disability

2016 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 218-251 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda Gilmore ◽  
Glenn Howard
Keyword(s):  
Individual Differences ◽  
Inclusive Education ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Psychology Students ◽  
Children's Books ◽  
Children’S Books ◽  
Important Goal ◽  
University Of Technology ◽  
The World ◽  
Different Ages

An important goal of inclusive education is to create an environment in which individual differences are appreciated, and where all children are valued. Books are an important way in which children learn about themselves, others and the world around them. Children's literature can potentially promote awareness of individual differences and similarities, acceptance of self and others, and information that counteracts ignorance, misperceptions and stereotypes about disability. This awareness, acceptance and knowledge should ultimately contribute to greater understanding, empathy and respect for diversity. In this article, we review over 50 children's books that may be of value for assisting children of different ages to understand and appreciate individual differences and disabilities. Most of the reviews were contributed by postgraduate psychology students who were enrolled in a disability unit at Queensland University of Technology.

scholarly journals Illustrations in Children’s Educational Books in Russia in the Late 17th – Early 19th Centuries

2020 ◽  
pp. 82-99
Author(s):  
Nina L. Panina ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Children's Literature ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Transition Period ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Russian Language ◽  
Children's Books ◽  
Children’S Books ◽  
Children's Book ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

The aim of this article is to analyse the transition period in the history of illustrating children’s educational books on the material of Russian-language publications. It is the period in which the function of an intermedial representation gradually develops from emblematic to encyclopedic and narrative-figurative images. This process is related to the literary history of children’s books and their genre transformations. In the last third of the 18th century, children’s literature in Russia was formed as an independent direction with its special goals, and the basis for further search for specific methods of children’s book design, including educational ones, was laid. In the first quarter of the 19th century, the children’s book had a typical European visual design and continued the trends inherited from the 18th century: translations, borrowings, and revised texts in publications often copied illustrations rather than made new ones. A new stage came at the end of the 1820s, when Russia was actively developing independent children’s literature, and professional authors and criticism appeared. It was the time of the pedagogical experiments of Vasily Zhukovsky. This article does not claim to analyse Zhukovsky’s pedagogical activity comprehensively, but this activity is significant for the subject-matter of the study. In his pedagogy, Zhukovsky went to a new level when searching for intermedial ways of transmission of the universal coherence of phenomena, the systemic representation of knowledge about the world, and the ideas of the world as a system. The search, though much slower, was also observed in contemporary children’s books. The integration of cognitive and didactic functions in the Russian-language children’s book of the 18th century resulted in a mix of different principles of illustration in one publication. These principles are: (1) emblematic: the title, image, and text form a three-part structure; (2) encyclopedic: the sheet contains separate numbered images of the same type of objects excluded from the visual context; (3) narrative: the plot, expressive and figurative, including caricature, illustrations are readily used in an educational book due to their persuasiveness. Each of these principles has its own ways of displaying coherence. An encyclopedic illustration shows an object in a series of similar ones, in an enumeration, shows the structure of the object. An emblem gives its symbolic and allegorical interpretation. A narrative illustration shows its functions and its involvement in causal relations, depicting the environment of events and objects. The children’s book of the studied period tends to integrate all these ways. While the emblem as an independent intermedial genre degrades, certain elements of the emblematic tradition are actively borrowed by new forms of publications. The emblem gives the European book of modern times the most important intermedial tools for displaying universal coherence, the world as a system. The change of the epochs leads to an inevitable blurring of the meaning of the emblematic sign. The transitive nature of the analysed period is expressed in the search for a new intermedial form of coherence, similar to the lost emblematic bimediality of the text and illustration in terms of effectiveness. In the search for such a form, encyclopedic publications that claimed to be all-encompassing use the emblematic and narrative principles of illustration. In turn, the narrative illustration, driven by a similar desire for inclusiveness, consistency, and universality, absorbs the emblematic and encyclopedic principles.

Damaging Goods? Francophone Children's Books in a Postcolonial World

2009 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 228-242 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kiera Vaclavik
Keyword(s):  
Children's Literature ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Racial Stereotypes ◽  
Maryse Conde ◽  
Children's Books ◽  
Children’S Books ◽  
Michel Tournier ◽  
Satisfactory Response ◽  
The World ◽  
Canonical Texts

The recent furore over Tintin au Congo in Britain is symptomatic of Western concerns about the perpetuation of negative racial stereotypes within much classic children's literature. This article interrogates such anxiety via discussion of three texts (by Hergé, Michel Tournier and Maryse Condé) produced for a European readership but set and – crucially – read in other parts of the world. Each text demonstrates the difficulty of predicting responses which frequently confound expectations and vary widely according to the situation of the reader. An ostensibly disparaging text can be a source of pride and hilarity, whilst a work produced to fight the cause of an oppressed community can distress and disturb members of that very group. Critical attendance to the reception of canonical texts within colonial and postcolonial settings will, it is argued, provide the most satisfactory response to the calls for censorship which utterly neglect alternative, resistant readings and non-European readers.

‘Here in India’: Nineteenth-Century British Women Navigating their Position in the Empire through Children's Literature

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-185
Author(s):  
Jesse Aberbach
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Infants And Children ◽  
Children's Books ◽  
Children’S Books ◽  
Maternal Roles ◽  
Female Writers ◽  
And Control ◽  
Botanical Study

This article considers how the children's books written by two nineteenth-century female writers, Eliza Tabor and Mary Martha Sherwood, when they accompanied their husbands to India, enabled them to navigate this new environment and their position as respectable middle-class women while revealing how India was deemed a place where British childhood was impossible. Just as many women took up botanical study to legitimise their ‘otherwise transgressive presence in imperial spaces’ (McEwan 219), writing for children enabled others to engage with the masculine world of travelling and earning money without compromising their femininity. Addressing their work to children also seems to have helped both writers to deal with the absence of their own children: the Indian climate made it impossibly challenging for most British infants and children. In this way their writing gives expression to what might be termed a crisis of imperial motherhood. Underlying the texts is an anxiety relating to British settlement and an attempt to comprehend and control a place that threatened their maternal roles.

The Adult as Foe or Friend?: Childism in Guus Kuijer's Criticism and Fiction

2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-217 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vanessa Joosen
Keyword(s):  
Children's Literature ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Age Groups ◽  
Children's Books ◽  
Children’S Books ◽  
Memorial Award ◽  
Adult Reader ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
Selection Of

Compared to the attention that children's literature scholars have paid to the construction of childhood in children's literature and the role of adults as authors, mediators and readers of children's books, few researchers have made a systematic study of adults as characters in children's books. This article analyses the construction of adulthood in a selection of texts by the Dutch author and Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award winner Guus Kuijer and connects them with Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's recent concept of ‘childism’ – a form of prejudice targeted against children. Whereas Kuijer published a severe critique of adulthood in Het geminachte kind [The despised child] (1980), in his literary works he explores a variety of positions that adults can take towards children, with varying degrees of childist features. Such a systematic and comparative analysis of the way grown-ups are characterised in children's texts helps to shed light on a didactic potential that materialises in different adult subject positions. After all, not only literary and artistic aspects of children's literature may be aimed at the adult reader (as well as the child), but also the didactic aspect of children's books can cross over between different age groups.

A content analysis of gender representation in Malaysian children's literature

2008 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 49
Author(s):  
Ramesh Nair
Keyword(s):  
Content Analysis ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
English Language ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Children's Books ◽  
Children’S Books ◽  
Minor Characters ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Mental Schemas ◽  
Selection Of

Children's literature serves as a powerful medium through which children construct messages about their roles In society and gender Identity is often central to this construction. Although possessing mental schemas about gender differences is helpful when children organize their ideas of the world around them, problems occur when children are exposed to a constant barrage of uncompromising, gender-schematic sources that lead to stereotyping which in turn represses the full development of the child. This paper focuses on how gender is represented in a selection of Malaysian children's books published in the English language. Relying on the type of content analysis employed by previous feminist social science researchers, I explore this selection of Malaysian children's books for young children and highlight some areas of concern with regard to the construction of maleness and femaleness in these texts. The results reveal Imbalances at various levels Including the distribution of main, supporting and minor characters along gendered lines and the positioning of male and female characters In the visual Illustrations. The stereotyping of these characters In terms of their behavioural traits will be discussed with the aim of drawing attention to the need for us to take concerted measures to provide our children with books that will help them realize their potential to the fullest.

Mapping the Topics and Evolutions of Chinese Children’s Bestsellers

Libri ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 70 (4) ◽  
pp. 305-317
Author(s):  
Jiming Hu ◽  
Xiang Zheng ◽  
Peng Wen ◽  
Jie Xu
Keyword(s):  
Social Network ◽  
Quantitative Analysis ◽  
Network Analysis ◽  
Intellectual Structure ◽  
Structure Evolution ◽  
Children's Books ◽  
Children’S Books ◽  
Correlation Structures ◽  
The World ◽  
Data Source

AbstractChildren’s books involve a large number of topics. Research on them has been paid much attention to by both scholars and practitioners. However, the existing achievements do not focus on China, which is the fastest growing market for children’s books in the world. Studies using quantitative analysis are low in number, especially on the intellectual structure, evolution patterns, and development trends of topics of children’s bestsellers in China. Dangdang.com, the biggest Chinese online bookstore, was chosen as a data source to obtain children’s bestsellers, and topic words in them were extracted from brief introductions. With the aid of co-occurrence theory and tools of social network analysis and visualization, the distribution, correlation structures, and evolution patterns of topics were revealed and visualized. This study shows that topics of Chinese children’s bestsellers are broad and relatively concentrated, but their distribution is unbalanced. There are four distinguished topic communities (Living, Animal, World, and Child) in terms of centrality and maturity, and they all establish their individual systems and tend to be mature. The evolution of these communities tends to be stable with powerful continuity.

scholarly journals Till ”vildingarnas” land: Barnboksförfattaren besöker förorten

2013 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maj Asplund Carlsson ◽  
Johannes Lunneblad
Keyword(s):  
Children's Literature ◽  
Drug Abuse ◽  
Small Business ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Picture Books ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Children's Books ◽  
Children’S Books ◽  
Post Colonial

Title: Where “the wild things” are: An author of children’s books on a visit to the suburbsAbstract:Few studies have been carried out on children’s literature from a post-colonial perspective. In this article, we look closer at four picture books recently published in Sweden with the purpose of giving children from urban areas patterns of identification. The aim of our study is to see how the ‘suburb’ is articulated as a multi-accented sign. Three themes are elaborated in our analysis, i.e. loneliness and alienation, drug abuse and misery as well as small business occurrence. We also discuss the consequences for children in early years of an encounter with a distorted or alienated view of suburban culture.

scholarly journals Children's book in Siberia: a historiographic review

Bibliosphere ◽  
2017 ◽  
pp. 35-40
Author(s):  
E. V. Engalycheva
Keyword(s):  
Children's Literature ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Book Publishing ◽  
Educational Process ◽  
Design Activity ◽  
Children's Books ◽  
Children’S Books ◽  
Children's Book ◽  
History Of ◽  
Childhood Reading

The article is devoted to the history of Siberian regional children's book publishing. The author has collected theoretic-practical opinions of historians, bibliologists, publishers and booksellers, librarians and bibliographers, psychologists and sociologists, which purpose is to generalize and reveal regularities of books' flow for children. V. G. Belinsky, L. N. Tolstoy, F. G. Tol’, N. V. Chekhov developed the first concepts of children's book. N. K. Krupskaya, V. A. Sukhomlinsky studied the «core» of the children book repertoire. V. G. Sopikov, B. S. Bondarsky reviewed children's literature of the 19th century in their bibliographic works. The author allocated some organizational components using formal-logical, comparative-historical and structural-typological methods. The first block is related to studying such definitions as «children's book», «children's literature», «editions for children», «a circle of childhood reading», «the repertoire of children's books», their typological signs. The presented concepts are investigated according to tasks, which children's editions solve. S. G. Antonova and S. A. Karaichentseva touched issues of children's literature typology in their publications. The second block of literature reveals the children's book development in Russia in various periods of its formation. I. E. Barenbaum, A. A. Grechikhin, A. A. Belovitskaya studied general fundamentals of the book's history, while A. Ivich, L. Kohn, I. Lupanova considered the history of children’s books. The third block is devoted to printing and art features of the children's book design, activity of universal and specialized publishing houses to distribute literature for children. The fourth block explains such category as «reader - library», considers techniques of work with children's book, offers methodical recommendations for teachers and tutors. Readers’ activity is examined as well. The author analyzes interests, factors, incentives and aims influencing childhood reading. Dissertation researches disclose the regional specifics of children's book publishing in 1980-2013, confirm the considered subject relevance. The historical, comparative, formal and logical analysis carried out by the author will be useful both the specialists in publishing and editorial affairs, researchers studying the history and development of the children's book, historians, and teachers in the educational process of such courses as «Publishing and Editing», «Children's Literature», «Book Science». The author concludes that the children's book has been studied in different periods of its development in the context of numerous aspects, directions and components, which makes it possible to reveal the special patterns of its existence.

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