The Role of Children’s Literature in Cultivating Preservice Teachers as Transformative Intellectuals: A Literature Review

2019 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 214-232 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tracey T. Flores ◽  
Saba Khan Vlach ◽  
Catherine Lammert

This review of literacy education scholarship examines the ways that children’s literature is used as a resource within literacy methods courses in the preparation of preservice teachers (PTs) as transformative intellectuals. The research indicates that the use of children’s literature in literacy methods courses has served two distinct purposes: (a) to engage PTs in learning literacy instructional practices and (b) to engage PTs in building sociocultural knowledge and learning transformative (e.g., culturally relevant) pedagogies. This review is framed by Giroux’s call for educators to disrupt technocratic approaches to instruction. The findings emphasize the importance of using children’s literature with PTs to broaden PTs’ understandings of their future student’s lives, so they might engage in transformative pedagogies as future K-12 literacy educators.

2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-217 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vanessa Joosen

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.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
А.Б. Бритаева

В представленной статье на материале произведений Музафера Дзасохова известного современного осетинского писателя, поэта, публициста, переводчика, рассматриваются художественные особенности лирической прозы, а именно, автобиографической повести в осетинской детской литературе. Повесть Весенние звезды (1973) и ее продолжение На берегу Уршдона Барагун (1981) стали началом эпопеи о жизни отдельно взятой семьи, а на их примере всей страны в тяжелые послевоенные годы. В качестве одной из важнейших констант художественного мира писателя рассматривается образ детства. В ходе анализа особое внимание уделяется преобладанию нравственного аспекта, актуализации проблемы регулятивно-воспитательной функции национального этикета, ценностно-нормативных ориентиров осетинской ментальности. С опорой на биографический и историко-генетический методы, основное внимание в исследовании акцентируется на темах послевоенного детства, роли семьи и общества в формировании нравственных ориентиров, в становлении личности, образе матери, теме памяти, а также на художественном осмыслении этих проблем и тем в автобиографических повестях писателя. Типологически воплощение детской темы в творчестве М. Дзасохова во многом опирается на традицию изображения детства в русской автобиографической прозе XX в. В заключительной части сформулированы выводы, отражающие особенности лирической прозы в творчестве М. Дзасохова, обозначено место автобиографических повестей автора в контексте осетинской детской литературы второй половины XX века.Актуальность и научная новизна работы обусловлены недостаточной исследованностью истории и проблем осетинской детской литературы. Результаты исследования могут быть использованы при написании истории осетинской детской литературы. The present article examines the artistic features of lyrical prose, namely, autobiographical story in the Ossetian childrens literature in the works of Muzafer Dzasokhov, a well-known modern Ossetian writer, poet, publicist, translator. The story Spring Stars (1973) and its continuation - On the Bank of Ursdon Baragun ... (1981) marked the beginning of an epic about the life of a family, and via their fates the author shows life of the whole country in the difficult post-war years. The theme of childhood is considered as one of the most important constants of the writers artistic world. In the course of the analysis, special attention is paid to the predominance of the moral aspect, the actualization of the problem of the regulatory and educational function of national etiquette, the value and normative guidelines of the Ossetian mentality. The focus of the study is based on biographical and historical-genetic methods and highlights the themes of post-war childhood, the role of the family and society in the formation of moral guidelines, in the formation of personality, the image of the mother, the theme of memory, as well as on the artistic understanding of these problems and topics in autobiographical novels of the writer. Typologically, the embodiment of the childrens theme in the works of M. Dzasokhov is largely based on the tradition of depicting childhood in Russian autobiographical prose of the XXth century. The formulated conclusions in the final part reflect the peculiarities of lyrical prose in the works of M. Dzasokhov, the place of the authors autobiographical stories is indicated in the context of Ossetian childrens literature of the second half of the XXth century. The relevance and scientific novelty of the work are due to insufficient research on the history and problems of Ossetian childrens literature. The results of the study can be used in writing the history of Ossetian childrens literature.


2021 ◽  
pp. 219-237
Author(s):  
Nataliia Yakubovska ◽  
Halyna Kutasevych ◽  
Kateryna Balakhtar

The translation of children’s literature has certain specificities because it must be subject to several constraints: taking into account the double recipient in children’s literature (child and adult), the educational purpose, the diastratic variation, etc. Wonderful Neighbors (2016) by Hélène Lasserre is a children’s book about difference, tolerance and living together. The gap between French and Ukrainian cultures leads to problems with the perception of socio-cultural realia by readers of the target language who sometimes misunderstand or even reject them. In this intervention, we analyze the perception of the album by the readership of the source and target culture based on the comments of the readers which will allow understanding the editorial strategies and the choices of translation procedures made by the translators. In particular, we study the text-image relationships and the influence of extralinguistic factors on the lexical level. In a second step, it is necessary to analyze the role of the educational purpose which may provide for certain censorship of children’s text to which the translator must obey in order to meet the demands of a publisher and his/her readership.


2021 ◽  
pp. 71-108
Author(s):  
Marilisa Jiménez García

This chapter centers on the education and role of “ethnic” librarians during the founding and professionalization of children’s literature and librarianship at the New York Public Library, tracing a legacy back to Afro-Boricua public pedagogies in Puerto Rico. This chapter also analyzes the centrality of Blackness and activism project of Latinx children’s literature as a US tradition grounded in the work of librarians of color, interweaving the stories of Pura Belpré and Arturo Schomburg, both key figures in the Harlem Renaissance and history of African American and AfroLatinx literature.


Author(s):  
Deanna Day

This chapter describes how a children's literature educator provided a space for preservice teachers to select, read, and discuss diverse and social justice literature through read-alouds and literature circles. In addition, the preservice teachers questioned and challenged their own assumptions about their world during a semester-long read-aloud partnership with elementary students focusing on diverse or social justice children's literature. The college students involved the children in discussions around the texts and planned response activities for them. The findings suggest that partnerships, emphasizing diverse literature, help preservice teachers practice how to choose diverse books, experience the value of read-alouds, and discover how to encourage discussion around diverse texts.


Author(s):  
Erin Hogan Rapp ◽  
Melissa Landa

This chapter presents the results from a collective case study of 23 undergraduate preservice teachers enrolled in a Children's Literature course at a large Mid-Atlantic university. It explores how course instruction in and around high-quality, culturally diverse children's literature facilitated both displays of culturally competent dispositions and cultural knowledge of self and others. The chapter also describes how the preservice teachers under study applied their culturally competent dispositions as they rehearsed selecting texts, planning activities, and asking questions to their future students. The Cultural Competence for Teaching Framework provided a useful metric to evaluate participants' displays of cultural competence across the course of the semester. Within this chapter, the authors describe how they embedded cultural competence education inside the course including a description of the activities, texts, and pedagogy used.


Author(s):  
Rebekah Sheldon

In the conclusion of The Child to Come, the book asks, ‘What happens when the life figured by the child--innocent, self-similar human life at home on a homely Earth--no longer has the strength to hold back the vitality that animates it?’ This chapter looks at two kinds of texts that consider this question: Anthropocene cinema and Young Adult Fiction. By focusing on the role of human action, the Anthropocene obscures a far more threatening reality: the collapse of the regulative. In relation, both children’s literature and young adult literature grow out of and as disciplinary apparatuses trained on that fraught transit between the presumptive difference of those still in their minority and the socially necessary sameness that is inscribed into fully attained adulthood.


2012 ◽  
Vol 82 (3) ◽  
pp. 243-295 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sally Campbell Galman ◽  
Christine A. Mallozzi

For this literature review, the authors asked, “What is the role of gender in research about elementary-level women teachers and preservice teachers in the past 15 years, and what have scholars learned about the gendered nature of women’s experiences in elementary-level preservice and in-service teaching in that time?” To be eligible for inclusion, works had to be published during or after 1995, study elementary preservice or practicing women educators, take place in the United States, focus on gender, and be empirical. Of the 54 articles that warranted in-depth investigation, 42 articles were excluded because teachers’ gender was subsumed under other social categories such as K–12 female students or male students and teachers. The majority of the 12 relevant articles employed small participant samples and exploratory approaches and depicted female teachers as struggling with or marginalized in the profession. A minority presented women teachers as reveling in the legacies of teaching. These findings beg for more research on women teachers’ gendered experiences.


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