scholarly journals Gary Paulsen: A Companion to the Young Adult Literature by Mary Ellen Snodgrass, and: Pre-K Stories: Playing with Authorship and Integrating Curriculum in Early Childhood by Dana Frantz Bentley and Mariana Souto-Manning, and: Reading for Action: Engaging Youth in Social Justice through Young Adult Literature by Ashley S. Boyd and Janine J. Darragh, and: Why Was Billy Bunter Never Really Expelled? and Another Twenty-Five Mysteries of Children's Literature by Dennis Butts and Peter Hunt

2020 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 80-81
Author(s):  
Mark I. West
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Early Childhood ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
Young Adult ◽  
Young Adult Literature ◽  
Children’S Literature

scholarly journals When Authenticity Goes Missing: How Monocultural Children’s Literature Is Silencing the Voices and Contributing to Invisibility of Children from Minority Backgrounds

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 32
Author(s):  
Helen Adam
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Early Childhood ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
Cultural Diversity ◽  
Day Care ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Long Day ◽  
Day Care Centres ◽  
Book Collections ◽  
The Impact

The importance of recognising, valuing and respecting a child’s family, culture, language and values is central to socially just education and is increasingly articulated in educational policy worldwide. Inclusive children’s literature can support children’s human rights and contribute to equitable and socially just outcomes for all children. However, evidence suggests many educational settings provide monocultural book collections which are counterproductive to principles of diversity and social justice. Further, that educators’ understandings and beliefs about diversity can contribute to inequitable provision and use of diverse books and to inequitable outcomes of book sharing for many children. This paper reports on a larger study investigating factors and relationships influencing the use of children’s literature to support principles of cultural diversity in the kindergarten rooms of long day care centres. The study was conducted within an ontological perspective of constructivism and an epistemological perspective of interpretivism informed by sociocultural theory. A mixed methods approach was adopted, and convergent design was employed interpret significant relationships and their meanings. Twenty-four educators and 110 children from four long day care centres in Western Australia participated. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews, video-based observations, field notes, document analysis and a book audit. This study firstly identified that current book collections in kindergarten rooms of long day care centres promote mono-cultural viewpoints and ‘othering’ of minority groups through limited access to books portraying inclusive and authentic cultural diversity. Secondly, that educators had limited understandings of the role of literature in acknowledging and valuing diversity and rarely used it to promote principles of diversity, resulting in a practice of “othering” those from minority group backgrounds. The key challenges which emerged from the study concerned beliefs, understanding and confidence of educators about diversity and inclusion, and the impact of these on their approaches to promoting principles of diversity through the use of children’s books. This research contributes to discussion on the value of children’s literature in achieving international principles of diversity. These findings have important social justice implications. The outcomes of this study have implications for educators, policy makers, early childhood organisations and those providing higher education and training for early childhood educators.

Child

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebekah Sheldon
Keyword(s):  
Children's Literature ◽  
Young Adult ◽  
Young Adult Literature ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Human Action ◽  
Young Adult Fiction ◽  
Self Similar ◽  
To Come

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.

Immaturity: Reflections on the “Great (Queer) YA Debate”

2020 ◽  
pp. 171-180
Author(s):  
Derritt Mason
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
Young Adult ◽  
Young Adult Literature ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
New York Times ◽  
New Yorker ◽  
The New York Times ◽  
High Profile ◽  
The New Yorker

This book’s conclusion reiterates the argument that queer YA is an anxious genre that perpetually rehearses a nervous uncertainty about its own constitution. Mason steps back to consider queer YA’s relationship to children’s literature more broadly, entering the discussion through a concept developed in Beverley Lyon Clark’s Kiddie Lit: the “anxiety of immaturity” that circulates around and within children’s literature and its criticism. Mason revisits the “Great YA Debate” of 2014, which followed a Slate piece by Ruth Graham entitled “Adults Should Be Embarrassed to Read Young Adult Books.” This debate included high profile pieces by Christopher Beha and A.O. Scott in The New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker, both of which evince a profound ambivalence about whether or not adults should be reading young adult literature. These conversations, Mason concludes, illustrate how young adult literature continues to be an unceasing source of adult anxiety.

scholarly journals Understanding (dis)abilities through children’s literature

2017 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie A. Kurtts ◽  
Karen W. Gavigan
Keyword(s):  
Individual Differences ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
Young Adult ◽  
Young Adult Literature ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Related Literature

The authors of this article examined how pre-service teachers can use children’s and young adult literature about disabilities to enhance understanding of individual differences through a bibliotherapeutic approach. An introduction to bibliotherapy is provided along with related literature from the field. Strategies for using children’s and young adult literature to enhance the understanding of issues associated with disabilities are presented along with one teacher candidate’s application of the literature in her classroom. The authors have also included a selected bibliography of children’s literature on disabilities as well as relevant websites.

Moving Beyond the Textbook to Reframe Disciplinary Literacy Using Text Sets

2021 ◽  
pp. 545-565
Author(s):  
Marie A. LeJeune ◽  
Melanie Landon-Hays
Keyword(s):  
Preservice Teachers ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
Young Adult ◽  
Young Adult Literature ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Disciplinary Literacy ◽  
Content Area ◽  
Literature Instruction ◽  
Pedagogical Tools ◽  
Multimodal Texts

This chapter details the authors' rationale for encouraging a hybrid content-area/disciplinary literacy approach to embracing diverse literature, especially youth-oriented literature such as children's literature, young adult literature, and multimodal texts. A synthesis of research in the areas of disciplinary literacy and literature instruction is provided as well as a recommended framework for selecting diverse literature within disciplinary classrooms. Several pedagogical tools are featured where preservice teachers have opportunities to explore, practice with, apply, and design their own disciplinary assignments centered in diverse literature and disciplinary texts. Examples and perspectives from preservice teachers are shared.

Notes on an Anxious Genre: Queer Young Adult Literature and Culture

2020 ◽  
pp. 3-26
Author(s):  
Derritt Mason
Keyword(s):  
Children's Literature ◽  
Young Adult ◽  
Young Adult Literature ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Julia Kristeva ◽  
Oriented Growth ◽  
Queer Youth ◽  
Critical Commentary ◽  
Sociological Work ◽  
Queer Temporality

This chapter traces the emergence of queer themes and characters in young adult literature, as well as critical commentary on queer YA, to demonstrate how anxiety is the affective form that best characterizes this subgenre of children’s literature. Mason argues that, in the long tradition of children’s literature criticism, queer YA criticism functions as an illuminating index of anxieties about how adults address queer youth. This chapter draws on sociological work on adolescence, as well as psychoanalytic theorists Adam Phillips and Julia Kristeva, to illustrate how adolescence and young adult literature are themselves the products of adult anxiety. Anxiety characterizes the affective economy through which queer young adult literature circulates, Mason argues, while itself evincing a queer temporality that places delay and forward-oriented growth in tension with one another. Overall, Mason demonstrates the utility of children’s literature and its theories for thinking more broadly about adult concerns and anxieties.

On Not Defining Children's Literature

PMLA ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 126 (1) ◽  
pp. 209-216 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marah Gubar
Keyword(s):  
Children's Literature ◽  
Young Adult ◽  
Young People ◽  
Young Adult Literature ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Age Group ◽  
Peter Pan ◽  
Conduct Books ◽  
Authorial Intention ◽  
Set Up

As Roger Sale has wryly observed, “everyone knows what children's literature is until asked to define it” (1). The Reasons WHY this unruly subject is so hard to delimit have been well canvassed. If we define it as literature read by young people, any text could potentially count as children's literature, including Dickens novels and pornography. That seems too broad, just as defining children's literature as anything that appears on a publisher-designated children's or “young adult” list seems too narrow, since it would exclude titles that appeared before eighteenth-century booksellers such as John Newbery set up shop, including the Aesopica, chapbooks, and conduct books. As numerous critics have noted, we cannot simply say that children's literature consists of literature written for children, since many famous examples—Huckleberry Finn, Peter Pan, The Little Prince—aimed to attract mixed audiences. And, in any case, “children's literature is always written for both children and adults; to be published it needs to please at least some adults” (Clark 96). We might say that children's literature comprises texts addressed to children (among others) by authors who conceptualize young people as a distinct audience, one that requires a form of literature different in kind from that aimed at adults. Yet basing a definition on authorial intention seems problematic. Many famous children's writers have explicitly rejected the idea that they were writing for a particular age group, and many books that were not written with young people in mind have nevertheless had their status as children's or young adult literature thrust upon them, either by publishers or by readers (or both).

scholarly journals Humour in Children’s and Young Adult Literature: The Work of Gilles Bachelet

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diana Muela Bermejo
Keyword(s):  
Children's Literature ◽  
Young Adult ◽  
Young Adult Literature ◽  
Mixed Model ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Narrative Construction ◽  
Text And Image ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Construction Type

AbstractThe work of the French illustrator and writer Gilles Bachelet has been recognised through numerous awards, but he is not yet sufficiently well known in the critical community. In this article, the multilevel humour that constructs his work is studied, both from an iconic and a textual perspective, as well as the situational humour and the humour of characters that emerge through metafiction, self-referentiality and heteroreferentiality. For this purpose, the theories of humour in children’s literature and the classifications of types of humour offered by different researchers are used as a starting point, and a mixed model of analysis applicable to Bachelet’s work as a whole is proposed. In addition, the analysis of each of the picturebooks is based on the most recent studies on the components of the current picturebook, such as its narrative construction, type of reading, characteristics and organisation of text and image. In this way, the postmodern features of Gilles Bachelet's works, which make him a crossover author, are revealed.

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