Parenting in Bangladesh: A Review of the Literature from 2006 to 2018

This study was a point of departure for future research on the need for a coherent understanding and knowledge of parenting in Bangladesh. This article presents the findings from an integrative research review on parenting in Bangladesh. A comprehensive search conducted in PubMed, Science Direct, and PsychINFO using the keywords “parenting”, “childcare”, “motherhood”, “fatherhood”, “mothering”, “fathering”, each paired with “Bangladesh” yielded 246 articles. Twenty papers published between 2006 and 2018 were selected for thematic analysis based on pre-set criteria. In most studies, the term mother was used interchangeably with parent, with mothers regarded as the primary caregiver. Parenting in the Bangladeshi context was found to be conceptualized primarily in terms of attitudes, disciplinary practices, feeding, parent–child interaction, and psychosocial stimulation. Parenting components aimed at moral development and attachment building in children were underrepresented. The data revealed largely inconsistent and uncoordinated discussions of parental practices, demonstrating the lack of a holistic approach in the literature in Bangladesh. Research on parenting in Bangladesh favors gendered assumptions of females as the primary caregiver. Based on their findings, the authors recommend qualitative studies to better reflect and conceptualize the concept of parenting in Bangladesh.

How Can We Study Children’s/Youth’s Out of School Experiences to Inform Classroom Practices?

The collection of papers represented in the Integrative Research Review responds to the question: How can we study children’s/youth’s out of school experiences to inform classroom practices? Using a variety of lenses to address the question, the authors consider how to understand, respond to, and serve children and youth in a variety of contexts. Duke explores a quasi-experimental design showing the potential impact on student achievement and motivation in schools that incorporate literacy practices from children’s lives outside of school compared to the traditional curriculum. Bloome and Faust take a philosophical approach to explore the languaging of the relationship between students’ out-of-school lives and classroom practices and its implications for the construction of personhood by examining one classroom event from a microethnographic discourse analysis perspective. García-Sánchez highlights the methodological features that allow linguistic anthropologists to make visible the agentive and innovative character of immigrant children’s communicative practices in a variety of learning situations. Drawing on the transliteracies approach, Stornaiuolo considers work with a group of young people to study multimodal composing and the development of school makerspaces in a 6-year partnership project with a local innovation high school. Alvermann discusses the papers, pointing out the affordances and challenges of each perspective.

Using comics and graphic novels in K-9 education: An integrative research review

The aim of this article is to increase knowledge on the use of comics as materials in K-9 education (ages 6–15). This is achieved through an integrative research review. Reference lists and websites have been searched, both by database searches and manually, and the results analysed and cross-referenced to identify common areas of research and possible gaps in knowledge. 55 texts (research articles and doctoral theses) were found, with 40 first authors from fourteen countries. The results revealed several gaps in knowledge. Most of the analysed studies had been carried out in North America, which suggests that more studies in other educational contexts, published in English, are needed, and that cross-national studies of comics in education will be productive. Furthermore, only three of the analysed texts describe studies that have high ecological validity, while all of the remaining 52 studies were ‘staged’ studies, in which the researcher had introduced material and observed the results. This suggests that further studies that utilize non-experimental research methods are needed. Finally, most studies focus on students’ reading preferences in regard to comics, rather than, for example, on how students compose comics or what they learn through comics. Thus, further studies that explore student work with comics, and examine the kinds of knowledge that reading comics enables, are desirable.

Using comics and graphic novels in K-9 education: An integrative research review

The aim of this article is to increase knowledge on the use of comics as materials in K-9 education (ages 6‐15). This is achieved through an integrative research review. Reference lists and websites have been searched, both by database searches and manually, and the results analysed and cross-referenced to identify common areas of research and possible gaps in knowledge. 55 texts (research articles and doctoral theses) were found, with 40 first authors from fourteen countries. The results revealed several gaps in knowledge. Most of the analysed studies had been carried out in North America, which suggests that more studies in other educational contexts, published in English, are needed, and that cross-national studies of comics in education will be productive. Furthermore, only three of the analysed texts describe studies that have high ecological validity, while all of the remaining 52 studies were ‘staged’ studies, in which the researcher had introduced material and observed the results. This suggests that further studies that utilize non-experimental research methods are needed. Finally, most studies focus on students’ reading preferences in regard to comics, rather than, for example, on how students compose comics or what they learn through comics. Thus, further studies that explore student work with comics, and examine the kinds of knowledge that reading comics enables, are desirable.