scholarly journals The Sydney Taylor Book Award at Fifty: Trends in Canonized Jewish Children’s Literature (1968–2020)

2020 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Leket-Mor ◽  
Fred Isaac
Keyword(s):  
Children's Literature ◽  
Jewish Education ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Holocaust Studies ◽  
Bibliographic Records ◽  
Jewish Experience ◽  
Book Award ◽  
Data Points ◽  
Time Periods

The Sydney Taylor Book Award, sponsored by the Association of Jewish Libraries since 1968, is the only book award for children’s literature that represents the Jewish experience. The award’s fiftieth anniversary, celebrated in 2018, provided an opportunity to conduct a content analysis study of 102 books and summarize thematic and publishing trends across award categories and time periods. The data points collected were based on bibliographic records and, to smaller extent, on coded Holocaust-related themes. Conclusions refer to Jewish education in the United States and concepts of gender, identity, history, and Holocaust studies that have shaped it through children’s literature for over fifty years.

Middle-Class Victorian Street Arabs: Modern Re-creations of the Baker Street Irregulars

2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dominic Cheetham
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Street Children ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Sherlock Holmes ◽  
Upward Shift

In three of Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories there are brief appearances of the Baker Street Irregulars, a group of ‘street Arabs’ who help Holmes with his investigations. These children have been re-imagined in modern children's literature in at least twenty-seven texts in a variety of media and with writers from both Britain and the United States. All these modern stories show a marked upward shift in the class of the Irregulars away from the lower working class of Conan-Doyle's originals. The shift occurs through attributing middle-class origins to the leaders of the Irregulars, through raising the class of the Irregulars in general, and through giving the children life environments more comfortable, safe, and financially secure than would have been possible for late-Victorian street children. Because of the variety in texts and writers, it is argued that this shift is not a result of the conscious political or ideological positions of individual writers, but rather reflects common unconscious narrative choices. The class-shift is examined in relation to the various pressures of conventions in children's literature, concepts of audience, and common concepts of class in society.

scholarly journals Prize Culture and Diversity in British Children's Literature

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 90-106
Author(s):  
Lucy Pearson ◽  
Karen Sands-O'Connor ◽  
Aishwarya Subramanian
Keyword(s):  
Children's Literature ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Cultural Value ◽  
Imagined Community ◽  
Children's Book ◽  
Book Award ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The Guardian ◽  
Prize Culture ◽  
Minority Ethnic

Literary prizes often determine eligibility in terms of nationality; this article posits that they also play a significant role in constructing national literatures. An analysis of the Carnegie Medal, the UK's oldest children's book award, and some of its competitors, including the Guardian Prize and Other Award demonstrates the tension between the desire to claim cultural value for children's literature and to construct a body of literature that represents the real and imagined community of the nation. In the UK, this tension appears most notably with regard to depictions of Black, Asian and minority ethnic Britons.

Philosophy for Children

2020 ◽  
pp. 25-57
Author(s):  
Kenneth B. Kidd
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
Progressive Education ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Children's Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
Philosophy For Children ◽  
Literature And Philosophy ◽  
Matthew Lipman

Emphasizing the contributions of Matthew Lipman and Gareth Matthews, Chapter 1 examines the P4C movement, which promotes the idea that both children and children’s literature have philosophical tendencies. For P4C, to think philosophically means to think both critically and creatively. This vision of philosophy aligns with a similar understanding of theory. P4C got its start in the United States and has since spread to other countries and continents. At one point there were reportedly 5,000 P4C programs in the United States alone. P4C is enjoying a recent resurgence and continues to be influential worldwide. Chapter 1 examines the evolving use of children’s literature in P4C, as a way of understanding the mutualities of children’s literature and philosophy. P4C has helped to establish children’s literature as philosophical and ethical engagement, linking it with progressive education and children’s rights. It promises also to keep philosophy fresh for practitioners and the larger public. Contemporary PwC (philosophy with children) gives priority to the use of picturebooks.

scholarly journals What Can Danish Multicultural Children’s Literature and African American Children’s Literature Learn from Each Other?

Barnboken ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nadia Mansour ◽  
Michelle H. Martin
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
Multicultural Education ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Multicultural Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Multicultural Children's Literature ◽  
African American Children's Literature ◽  
Literary Histories ◽  
Definition Of

In its pedagogical context, multicultural literature is defined as an instrument for multicultural education that seeks to include and raise the voices of historically silenced and invisible minorities in the school curriculum.The contemporary American definition of multicultural literature emphasizes #OwnVoices and elevates authentic stories from insider perspectives, while in Denmark, no clear line is drawn between the author’s background and the literary content when categorizing multicultural literature that depicts minorities’ experiences. In this article, an African American scholar and a Danish scholar will put Danish and African American children’s literary histories in dialogue with one another and ask what Danish multicultural literature can learn from existing definitions within American multicultural and African American children’s literature, formulated by Rudine Sims Bishop, Mingshui Cai, and Michelle H. Martin. They will also address what literary movements and practices might be adapted to facilitate a more welcoming space for minority stories in Danish literature. In the United States, lively conversations are occurring about insiders vs. outsiders, #OwnVoices, and stereotypes; what are the implications for Danish children’s literature? The writers will analyze recently published works from each country that depicts the lives of minoritized people such as Özlem Cekic and Dorte Karrebæk’s Ayse får en lillebror (2018) and Derrick Barnes and Gordon C. James’s Crown: An Ode to the Fresh Cut (2017). This comparative analysis will highlight how marginalized and silenced voices bring new perspectives and fresh ideas into the cultural conversations of each country that would otherwise go unrepresented in children’s literature.  

Asian American Children’s Literature

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Park Dahlen
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Children's Book ◽  
Asian Diaspora

Asian American children’s literature includes books of many different genres that depict some aspect of the Asian diaspora. In total, the books should depict the breadth and depth of Asian diasporic experiences. Children’s books published in the early 20th century include mostly folktales, while books published after the 1965 Immigration Act tend to include contemporary fiction, poetry, and biographies. They address topics such as immigration and acculturation as well as capture landmark moments and experiences in Asian American history, such as the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II and the transnational, transracial adoption of Asian children to the United States. Books published at the turn of the 20th century have broached newer topics, such as mixed-race identities, and are written in a variety of genres including fantasy. As noted by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center, the number of books by and/or about Asian Americans published is disproportionate to the total number of books published each year and to the population of Asians in the Americas. Also some Asian American writers continue to publish on topics unrelated to their identities. Academic researchers, practitioners, and writers have addressed various aspects of how this body of literature represents Asian Americans, mostly noting distortions and erasure and offering suggestions for improvement, emerging topics, and engagement with young people.

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