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Handbook of Research on

Children’s and Young Adult Literature

This landmark volume is the  rst to bring together the leading scholarship on children’s and young adult

literature from three intersecting disciplines: Education, English, and Library and Information Science.

Distinguished by its multidisciplinary approach, it describes and analyzes the different aspects of literary

reading, texts, and contexts to illuminate how the book is transformed within and across different academic

 gurations of reading and interpreting children’s literature.

Part 1 considers perspectives on readers and reading literature in home, school, library, and community •

settings.

Part 2 introduces analytic frames for studying young adult novels, picturebooks, indigenous literature, •

graphic novels, and other genres. Accompanying each chapter are commentaries on literary experiences

and creative production from renowned authors and illustrators including David Wiesner, Lois Lowry,

Philip Pullman, Jacqueline Woodson, Markus Zusak, Joseph Bruchac, and M.T. Anderson.

Part 3 focuses on the social contexts of literary study, with chapters on censorship, awards, marketing, •

and literary museums.

Editors’ part-opener essays and chapter introductions point academic and practitioner colleagues to each

 eld’s histories, contemporary concerns, and research methods, while outlining the potential for intersecting

research and scholarship in all three  elds.

Chapter authors write from a combination of scholarly as well as personal perspectives. Readers—scholars,

teachers, librarians, parents, publishers, editors, and those on the verge of entering the  eld—are invited

to join the conversation, to raise their own arguments, contradictions, and questions, to look for personal

re ections on their own lives and their lives among youth and their books.

The singular contribution of this Handbook is to lay the groundwork for colleagues across disciplines to

redraw the map of their separately  gured worlds, thus to enlarge the scope of scholarship and dialogue as

well as push ahead into uncharted territory.

Shelby A. Wolf is Professor of Education at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Karen Coats is Professor of English and Director of English Education at Illinois State University.

Patricia Enciso is Associate Professor of Literature, Literacy, and Equity Studies at The Ohio State

University.

Christine A. Jenkins is Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science,

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Handbook of Research on

Children’s and Young Adult Literature

Edited by

Shelby A. Wolf

University of Colorado at Boulder

Karen Coats

Illinois State University

Patricia Enciso

The Ohio State University

Christine A. Jenkins

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

First published 2011

by Routledge

270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016

Simultaneously published in the UK

by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

The right of Shelby A. Wolf, Karen Coats, Patricia Enciso, and Christine A. Jenkins to be identi ed as authors of the editorial material,

and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,

Designs and Patents Act 1988.

other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval

system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identi cation and

explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Wolf, Shelby Anne.

Handbook of research on children’s and young adult literature / edited by Shelby A. Wolf ... [et al.].

p. cm.

1. American literature—History and criticism. 2. Children’s literature, American—History and criticism. 3. Young adult

literature, American—History and criticism.

PS121.H22 2010

810.9’9282—dc22

2010016339

ISBN 13: 978-0-415-96505-7 (hbk)

ISBN 13: 978-0-415-96506-4 (pbk)

ISBN 13: 978-0-203-84354-3 (ebk)

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2010.

To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledges

collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.

ISBN 0-203-84354-1 Master e-book ISBN

For Ashley and Lindsey—You started me on this path

and have helped to guide me every step of the way. Shelby A. Wolf

For Will and my girls, Emily and Blair—the three of you are my story—and

for Him who provides the work and the grace with which to do it. Karen Coats

For Mary Ann Enciso, my mother; Susan Hepler, my  rst children’s literature

teacher; and Brian Edmiston, my partner and colleague—storytellers and story

revelers whose words and teaching encouraged me throughout this book’s journey.

Patricia Enciso

To my two best librarians: my mother, Marjorie Jenkins Wezeman, and my partner,

Susan Searing. “Books are friends. Come, let us read!” Christine A. Jenkins

EDITORIAL BOARD

Peter Hunt

University of Wales, Cardiff

Deidre Johnson

West Chester University

Barbara M. Jones

American Library Association

Vanessa Joosen

University of Antwerpen

Kenneth Kidd

University of Florida

Valerie Kinloch

The Ohio State University

Gillian Lathey

Roehampton University

Barbara Lehman

The Ohio State University

Kerry Mallan

Queensland University of Technology

Leonard S. Marcus

Author & Historian

Robyn McCallum

Macquarie University

Jonda McNair

Clemson University

Carmen Medina

Indiana University

Claudia Nelson

Texas A&M University

Thomas Newkirk

University of New Hampshire

Perry Nodelman

University of Winnipeg

Lissa Paul

Brock University

Jacqueline Reid-Walsh

Penn State University

Mavis Reimer

University of Winnipeg

Muriel Robinson

Bishop Grosseteste University College

Steven Athanases

University of California at Davis

Maren Aukerman

Stanford University

Eve Bearne

University of Cambridge

Brigitta Busch

University of Klagenfurt

Betty Carter

Texas Women’s University

Stephanie Power Carter

Indiana University

Nancy Chambers

Thimble Press

Mary K. Chelton

Queens College

H. Nichols B. Clark

The Eric Carle Museum of Picture

Book Art

Lesley Colabucci

Millersville University

Eliza T. Dresang

University of Washington

Damian Duffy

University of Illinois at

Urbana-Champaign

Charles Elster

Sonoma State University

Lisa Rowe Fraustino

Eastern Connecticut State University

Vivian L. Gadsden

University of Pennsylvania

Lee Galda

University of Minnesota

Jerome Harste

Indiana University, Emeritus

Janet Hickman

The Ohio State University, Emeritus

Paulette M. Rothbauer

University of Western Ontario

Martin Salisbury

Anglia Ruskin University

Kay Sambell

Northumbria University

Patrick Shannon

Penn State University

Rita J. Smith

University of Florida

J. D. Stahl

Virginia Tech

Susan Stan

Central Michigan University

Beata Stawarska

University of Oregon

Brian Street

King’s College London

Maria Tatar

Harvard University

Amanda Thein

University of Pittsburgh

Ross J. Todd

Rutgers University

Roberta Seelinger Trites

Illinois State University

Virginia Walter

University of California, Los Angeles

Victor Watson

University of Cambridge

Andrea Schwenke Wyile

Acadia University

Vivian Yenika-Agbaw

Penn State University

Jack Zipes

University of Minnesota

CONTENTS

Preface xi

Part 1 The Reader 1

1 Children Reading at Home: An Historical Overview 4

Evelyn Arizpe and Morag Styles

2 Questioning the Value of Literacy: A Phenomenology of Speaking and Reading in Children 20

Eva-Maria Simms

3 The Book as Home? It All Depends 32

Shirley Brice Heath

4 Reading Literature in Elementary Classrooms 48

Kathy G. Short

5 Readers, Texts, and Contexts in the Middle: Re-imagining Literature Education for Young Adolescents 63

Thomas P. Crumpler and Linda Wedwick

6 Reading Literature in Secondary School: Disciplinary Discourses in Global Times 76

Cynthia Lewis and Jessica Dockter

7 Imagining a Writer’s Life: Extending the Connection between Readers and Books 92

Elizabeth Dutro and Monette C. McIver

8 Teaching Latina/o Children’s Literature in Multicultural Contexts: Theoretical and

Pedagogical Possibilities 108

María E. Fránquiz, Carmen Martínez-Roldán, and Carmen I. Mercado

9 School Libraries and the Transformation of Readers and Reading 121

Eliza T. Dresang and M. Bowie Kotrla

10 Public Libraries in the Lives of Young Readers: Past, Present, and Future 134

Paulette M. Rothbauer, Virginia A. Walter, and Kathleen Weibel

11 Becoming Readers of Literature with LGBT Themes: In and Out of Classrooms 148

Mollie V. Blackburn and Caroline T. Clark

12 Immigrant Students as Cosmopolitan Intellectuals 164

Gerald Campano and María Paula Ghiso

viii

Part 2 The Book 177

13 History of Children’s and Young Adult Literature 179

Deborah Stevenson

Point of Departure 193

Lois Lowry

14 Dime Novels and Series Books 195

Catherine Sheldrick Ross

Point of Departure 207

Candice Ransom

15 Folklore in Children’s Literature: Contents and Discontents 209

Betsy Hearne

Point of Departure 223

Julius Lester

16 African American Children’s Literature: Researching Its Development, Exploring Its Voices 225

Rudine Sims Bishop

Point of Departure 236

Jacqueline Woodson

17 The Art of the Picturebook 238

Lawrence R. Sipe

Point of Departure 252

Chris Raschka

Point of Departure 254

David Wiesner

18 Comics and Graphic Novels 256

Robin Brenner

Point of Departure 268

Gareth Hinds

Point of Departure 272

Raina Telgemeier

19 A Burgeoning Field or a Sorry State: U.S. Poetry for Children, 1800–Present 275

Laura Apol and Janine L. Certo

Point of Departure 287

Janet S. Wong

20 Non ction Literature for Children: Old Assumptions and New Directions 290

Barbara Kiefer and Melissa I. Wilson

Point of Departure 299

Penny Colman

21 Genre as Nexus: The Novel for Children and Young Adults 302

Mike Cadden

Point of Departure 313

Philip Pullman

CONTENTS

22 Young Adult Literature: Growing Up, In Theory 315

Karen Coats

Point of Departure 330

Markus Zusak

23 Reading Indigeneity: The Ethics of Interpretation and Representation 331

Clare Bradford

Point of Departure 342

Joseph Bruchac

24 Literary Studies, Cultural Studies, Children’s Literature, and the Case of Jeff Smith 345

Roderick McGillis

Point of Departure 355

David Filipi

Point of Departure 357

Lucy Shelton Caswell, David Filipi, and Jeff Smith

25 Ideology and Children’s Books 359

Robyn McCallum and John Stephens

Point of Departure 372

M. T. Anderson

26 The Author’s Perspective 374

Claudia Mills

Point of Departure 384

Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

27 Archives and Special Collections Devoted to Children’s and Young Adult Literature 386

Karen Nelson Hoyle

Point of Departure 393

Leonard S. Marcus

Part 3 The World Around 395

28 Where Worlds Meet 397

Ana Maria Machado

Point of Departure 400

Katherine Paterson

29 Translation and Crosscultural Reception 404

Maria Nikolajeva

Point of Departure 417

Tara F. Chace

30 The Implied Reader of the Translation 419

Petros Panaou and Tasoula Tsilimeni

Point of Departure 428

Kostia Kontoleon

31 International Communities Building Places for Youth Reading 430

Michael Daniel Ambatchew

Point of Departure 438

Jane Kurtz

Point of Departure 441

Yohannes Gebregeorgis

32 Censorship: Book Challenges, Challenging Books, and Young Readers 443

Christine A. Jenkins

33 Reviewing Children’s and Young Adult Literature 455

Michael Cart

34 Awards in Literature for Children and Adolescents 467

Junko Yokota

35 The Economics of Children’s Book Publishing in the 21st Century 479

Joel Taxel

36 Spinning Off: Toys, Television, Tie-Ins, and Technology 495

Margaret Mackey

37 Listening for the Scratch of a Pen: Museums Devoted to Children’s and Young Adult Literature 508

Elizabeth Hammill

Coda 525

List of Contributors 527

Author Index 535

Subject Index 547

CONTENTS

In 1977 Margaret Meek, Aidan Warlow, and Griselda

Barton assembled a collection of essays on children’s and

young adult literature entitled The Cool Web. The collec-

tion brought together the visions and voices of authors and

scholars, blending classic pieces with new scholarship that

would later become classics. Building on earlier under-

standings that “…writing and reading stories for children

[is] an activity of creative signi cance which adults could

take seriously” (p. 3), they took the argument further by

bringing in the readers themselves. They asked: “What is

the nature of the experience which gives a young reader a

memory and a past not his [sic] own, or projects him into

a future he might never have anticipated?” Furthermore

they argued, “It is the responsibility of all those who play

a part in teaching children to read to examine the nature of

certain speci c aspects of the reading experience, notably

those concerned with narrative, story, or  ction” (p. 5).

In the decades following the publication of this ground-

breaking book, research on children’s and young adult

literature and literary engagement has grown at exponen-

tial speed, but in the process branched off into a variety of

 elds. As a result, scholars often become isolated within

a discipline. For example, scholars in English and litera-

ture tend toward a text-oriented approach that historically

excluded the reader from view. Scholars in Education

focus on the reader, but may well ignore the insights to be

gained from the text being read. And scholars in Library

and Information Science are often between intellectual

worldviews of either end of the text–reader continuum,

because their professional work is located precisely in the

intersection between texts and young readers.

In the view of theorists Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner,

and Cain (2003), the three  elds we represent in this

Handbook of Research on Children’s and Young Adult

Literature and the artifacts, practices, and relationships we

construct operate as distinct “ gured worlds.” By  gured

worlds, Holland and her colleagues mean “…the socially

and culturally constructed realm(s) of interpretation in

which particular characters and actors are recognized,

signi cance is assigned to certain acts, and particular out-

comes are valued over others” (p. 52). We argue that the

realms of interpretation for youth literature have, likewise,

developed particular practices of reading, writing, and

constructing audiences that carry accompanying values

for determining useful ways of describing and analyzing

relations among readers, texts, and contexts.

We are interested in what is considered “normal” prac-

tice regarding the teaching of children’s and young adult

literature in our disciplines, how the book is transformed

within and across different academic  gurations of read-

ing and interpreting children’s literature. We ask, “What

‘gets accomplished’ and what is valued about books and

readers from the locations of these different  gurations

of interpretation?” Thus, the purpose of this Handbook

is to bring scholars representing all three disciplines to

describe and analyze different aspects of literary reading,

texts, and contexts.

For all of us the book is a central “pivot” (Holland

et al., 2003, p. 61) through which it is possible for us to

focus our conversations and examine what we know and

how we know it. In general, we recognize the book as a

place we can all turn to as we consider the changing forms,

purposes, and social practices that accompany research

and scholarship in children’s literature. For example, we

are all interested in award-winning books, but we differ in

how, where, and with whom we value their inclusion in our

scholarship. We argue that a view of our  elds as  gured

worlds can help us begin to examine the continuities in

our practices that create boundaries, as we also point to

the edges and intersections that could be productively

exploited for expanding our conversations—and the schol-

arship of children’s and young adult literature.

In Part 1, we focus on the position of the reader, but in

relation with changing forms of literature and contexts. As

a way to understand the evolving meaning of reader and

reading, we frame the meaning of childhood, adolescence,

and reading in historical and contemporary contexts,

describing ways youth read with adults and peers, both

inside and outside school boundaries. Across this section,

we engage the following questions: Where and how do

young people become readers? How are youth and books

de ned and how are those de nitions changing? In what

ways can familial and institutional efforts in uence or even

boost access to and interest in literary reading? And how

do youth, who recognize and celebrate their racialized and

multilinguistic identities, move across different spaces to

make sense of themselves as readers of literary texts? How

do adults, in schools, libraries, and communities, assist

PREFACE

xii

youth in their efforts to reach out to new possibilities for

themselves and others within the world?

Part 2 concentrates on the book, but again not in an

effort to turn away from reader or context. Here we

concentrate on literary criticism—various kinds, various

genres, various sociopolitical lenses. Critical here will be

the evolving nature of the literature—often to meet the

needs of the changing reader and the changing view of

what the reader wants and needs within a rapidly chang-

ing world. As Bruner (2005) explains: “We know all too

clearly already that the world of the future will not be a

stable and easily predictable one. It’s such a world that we

must have in mind in thinking about our pedagogy. How

do we go about preparing a next generation for a world of

expanding possibilities?” And this is certainly true of the

kinds of books that children and young adults read to  nd

sustenance and possible answers to their many questions

while raising more questions in turn. To this end, these

chapters, as well as a few in Part 3, feature the perspec-

tives of tradebook authors and illustrators who describe

what they perceive to be “points of departure” for new

narrative and illustrative forms, new ways of including

multimedia, and new topics.

Part 3 is devoted to the context and the larger world

that surrounds the multiple connections among books and

youth. How do books get into—or not get into—the hands

and minds of youth? In what contexts do reader-book

connections take place? Under what conditions do these

connections  ourish or languish? We’ll acknowledge the

critical translation of children’s literature around the globe,

the business of literature and the power of publishing

houses and media, the grass roots and institutional con-

nections with censorship, as well as the awards, review

journals, websites, and museums that are devoted to the

preservation and proliferation of literature. Children’s and

young adult books have multiple audiences that include

not only young people and the adults around them, but

also scholars who study the literature from an even wider

range of research traditions.

Because the international scholars and tradebook au-

thors and illustrators represented here come from widely

diverse perspectives, we’ve asked them to raise arguments,

contradictions, and questions—to trouble rather than

settle issues in de nitive ways. We’ve encouraged them

to shift away from the isolation of normal practices within

a discipline and up the ante on the theoretical possibili-

ties that might result when knowledgeable people come

together for good conversation. Most unique, perhaps,

for a Handbook of Research, we’ve asked our authors to

write from a combination of scholarly as well as personal

perspectives. While some chose to remain more academic,

others let us into the interior worlds of lives lived in books

for the young.

Knowing that books can never lift off the page without

readers, we ask our readers—scholars, teachers, librar-

ians, parents, publishers, editors, and those on the verge

of entering the  eld—to join the conversation, to raise

your own arguments, contradictions, and questions, to

look for personal re ections on your own life lived or

about to be lived with youth and their books. Though

we have carefully ordered the chapters in the sequence

that made the most sense to us, we hope that as readers,

you will move around the text as you will. To aid in this

process and following the lead of Meek and colleagues

(1977) in The Cool Web, we have provided introductions

for each chapter—brief insights into the sights and sounds

of particular arguments. We’ve set a course, but hope

you will navigate your own way, stopping  rst perhaps at

favorite places of interest, but then hopefully moving to

other ports that may offer tantalizing ways to widen your

own perspective.

For far too long the  elds of English, Library and

Information Science, and Education have pushed ahead

in their various directions—exploring theoretical ideas,

conducting wide-ranging research, writing books and

articles, and attending conferences within our separate

 gured worlds. We’ve rarely journeyed out of the small

spaces of our own circles. It is our hope that this Handbook

of Research on Children’s and Young Adult Literature will

enable our colleagues across disciplines to redraw the

map of our separately  gured worlds so we may enlarge

the scope of our scholarship and dialogue as well as push

ahead into uncharted waters.

References

Bruner, J. (2005, October). Aiming for the future: Cultivating a

sense of the possible. Presentation for the annual meeting of the

National Academy of Education. New York: Teachers College.

Holland, D., Lachicotte, W., Skinner, D., & Cain, C. (2003). Identity

and agency in cultural worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press.

Meek, M., Warlow, A., & Barton, G. (Eds.). (1977). The cool web:

The pattern of children’s reading. London: The Bodley Head.

PREFACE

Part 1

THE READER

The book may be at rest when found on a shelf, in an

adult’s hands, at home, or in a classroom, but young read-

ers are on the move and they often pull the book out of its

stillness into a whirl of play, voices, media, and memories.

The image of the silent, isolated child-reader has domi-

nated reading theories and pedagogies over the centuries,

but as scholars show across this section on The Reader,

that idyll was wholly constructed from the presumption

that words on a page can exist only in the mind.

Along with the silent reader, another image usually

springs to mind of a Madonna-like mother and child, at

rest, leaning in toward a book. Such images have been

popularized today by the “Read to your bunny” campaign,

spearheaded by author and illustrator Rosemary Wells. A

parallel campaign, aimed at young adolescents, featuring

celebrity athletes and  lm stars happily looking up from

their favorite novel, suggests that the child will grow be-

yond the reach of home and need a more peer-oriented,

popular base for motivating a love of books. In fact,

never mind the poster campaigns, publishers have already

learned that “book trailers,” styled after  lm trailers, can

take the book to where many youth spend a great deal of

time—on Youtube and social media internet sites.

The reader is moving, and educators, researchers, and

publishers are in a hurry to catch up. But a single perspec-

tive on how reading should be experienced and what it

should look like will be inadequate for understanding the

histories, thought processes, and social relationships that

inform all that makes reading an integral part of youth

experience. The truth is, reading is as much a social,

political, and embodied experience as it is cognitive and

critical. Cognitive views on reading rely on the belief that

the mind is schematically organized and seeks reason

and form, while social, cultural, and political theories

understand reading as an effort, and often a struggle, to

establish one’s vision and experiences as meaningful and

valued. From both theoretical angles, the reader is active;

but each has a different orientation to the person—the

fully embodied and social being—who is interpreted along

with the book.

Many teachers and educational researchers look to

young people and their social worlds to understand what

connects them to reading; but as national policies impose

more restrictions on extensive literary reading and focus

increasingly on testing outcomes, they often worry most

about, and organize research and interventions around, the

cognitive domains of reading (e.g., word identi cation,

comprehension skills,  uency). So where does that leave

younger readers who are subject to an ever-widening range

of theories, practices, and policies—what Foucault (1988)

would describe as “technologies of reading”?

For some, their school and public libraries remain the

single most important places for them to discover a favorite

author, picturebooks, non ction literature, and glorious

shelves full of graphic novels and manga. For others, no

book found in school has yet told their stories, so literary

worlds become available in places that innovative and

activist teachers create with youth: like the reading club at

a community center for LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual,

Transgender, & Questioning) teens, young adults, and

allies; or a class of  rst generation immigrant teachers

who  nd the poetry and literary legacy of the Puerto Ri-

can diaspora in the online archives of El Centro; and the

second generation Filipino  fth graders in Los Angeles,

THE READER

who return to their family’s oral narratives of migration

and education to reconstruct a story of dignity for them-

selves and their classmates.

Vital places for reading, whether in community cen-

ters, online, or in classrooms, are usually structured by an

emphasis on emergent understanding over  nalized, pre-

determined meaning. Social psychologist, Lev Vygotsky

(1987) suggested that two forms of sense-making are

important to learning: the  rst, translated as “sense,” can

be understood as a storm cloud of thought and the second

as “meaning” or what eventually becomes represented as

a stable and uni ed idea or concept (Smagorinsky, 2001,

p. 145). Given opportunities to engage in what Ricoeur

(1983) calls “con gurational acts” of reading, sense and

meaning combine to create a composite understanding,

distributed among readers that situates some of what is

known about a story as changeable across circumstances,

times, and people (sense), and other ideas about the story

as articulated and held relatively constant (meaning).

Much of the pleasure and challenge of reading literature

lies in  nding out what sense and meanings can be made

of another world, how that world intersects with one’s own

and others’ worlds, and how it might be possible to think

and move as someone in that world. These are exploratory,

inquiry-oriented questions that rely on readers’ willing-

ness to risk being simultaneously engaged with their own

life’s memories and sensations, and “outside themselves,”

bringing their feelings to others’ lives and to a temporary,

imagined self.

An individual reader might  nd this con gurational

experience wholly enjoyable and engaging, but in a group

situation, where diverse and differentially valued identities

are also in play, many young people learn that unless they

offer the predetermined meanings of a traditional liter-

ary analysis or go along with the prevailing valences of

power and popularity in classroom interaction, they really

have nothing to add to a discussion of literature. Reading

experiences, even when they are supposed to be open to

discussion, can become, again, isolating and exclusive

instead of widening readers’ approaches to sense and

meaning. And even among those students whose voices

are most often heard, the literature often becomes a site

for rehearsing and reproducing dominant social norms and

values rather than a forum for questioning assumptions

or social status.

Too often, reading and literature education are restricted

by  nalized meanings that leave teachers and students

on the outside of literary worlds, moving across words

instead of through them; and missing altogether the many

narratives and ways of viewing the world that youth bring

to a story. Indeed, such narratives are not all that may be

silenced. Eva-Maria Simms (Chapter 2) points out that

although reading produces a wider net for understanding

and imagining experiences, it also carries with it the loss

of genuine interest we feel through our embodied experi-

ence of intense conversation and oral storytelling. When

reading and readers are regulated by implicit and some-

times explicit beliefs about what and how a reader should

sound, sit, move, and even look, such losses multiply and

categories of de ciency, illiteracy, and “at risk” become

a taken for granted part of life with books.

Perhaps it is not surprising to  nd, then, that the most

promising responses to disengagement in reading are those

pedagogies that get everyone moving again—through

image-making, dramatization,  lm-making, social advo-

cacy, and creative writing. The “lived through experience”

of a story as Louise Rosenblatt (1978) described it, does

not have to be created alone. Stories were shared, enacted,

and remembered long before they were written down; in

part because a good story, well told and well acted, will

hold an audience of peers over hours as they collectively

step out of “here and now” and create “if.” When a story

becomes shared again through drawing, or as an enacted

exchange between characters, it is possible to look together

at the ways one moment holds many stories, raises ques-

tions, makes us feel, and makes us want to examine what

we thought was true.

As several chapters on secondary students’ reading

and writing show, the pleasure of making stories has

been revived with gusto, but not necessarily in school set-

tings. While “disciplinary discourses” (Lewis & Dockter,

Chapter 6) in contemporary classrooms reproduce the

same reading lists, assignments, and forms of analysis

instituted some 50 years ago, young people are moving

to online spaces, where they can freely access the sto-

ries they care about and create their own book reviews,

blogs, and fan ctions (Dutro & McKiver, Chapter 7).

The question of equity and access, however, makes such

creative endeavors online a mirror of the economics of

literacy associated with early 17th- to late 19th-century

homeplaces, where parents with economic resources were

able to foster their youngsters’ literary sensibilities with

books, paper, art materials, and games. Those children

creatively remade and invented new stories as they en-

joyed the comforts of their familiar surroundings. They

could run with stories.

Today, the pleasure of moving into and through stories

is afforded to those young people whose adult caregiv-

ers, teachers, and communities recognize and support

the inventiveness of youth narratives, whether these are

in the form of digital videos, theatrical performances, or

poetry slams. Those youth might also travel with their

stories across the global economy of digital media. But

other children, whose literary and digital experiences are

more limited by availability or shortsighted use of media

and literature, are not simply “out of the game” because

of economic disparities; they, too, should have every

opportunity to shake a story from its stillness, whether

that story was made by their friend, an author, or their

grandparent, and move it—out loud, in action, through

images, and rhythm—into a place that invites them to

shape life with others.

THE READER

References

Foucault, M. (1988). Technologies of the self. In L. H. Martin, H.

Gutman, & P. H. Hutton (Eds.), Technologies of the self: A seminar

with Michel Foucault (pp. 16–49). Amherst, MA: University of

Massachusetts Press.

Ricoeur, P. (1983). Time and narrative (Vol. 1; K. McLaughlin & D.

Pellauer, Trans.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Rosenblatt, L. M. (1978). The reader, the text, the poem: The

transactional theory of the literary work. Carbondale, IL: Southern

Illinois University Press.

Smagorinsky, P. (2001). If meaning is constructed, what is it made

from? Toward a cultural theory of reading. Review of Educational

Research, 71(1), 133–169.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1987). “Lectures on psychology.” In  e collected

works of L.S. Vygotsky. Vol 1. Problems of general psychology (pp.

339–349). New York, NY: Plenum.

Children Reading at Home

An Historical Overview

Evelyn Arizpe and Morag Styles

University of Glasgow and University of Cambridge

Evelyn Arizpe and Morag Styles, well known for their work together over the years, provide an historical

account of parent/child reading. From a framework of connections, creativity, and critique, they demonstrate

the similarities and differences in children reading at home over time—both children of privilege and those

who had a hard time  nding any books at all. The authors begin with their high adventure and close scholarly

detective work in unveiling the reading lives of Jane Johnson and her family, and they end their chapter with

modern day parents moving with their children into 21st century technologies. From “reading cards” to digital

books, Arizpe and Styles offer us an insider’s view into the reading patterns in homes across the centuries.

…the ephemera of childhood…reside almost entirely in

memory. Blocks, card sets, small chips and game parts, pic-

tures torn or cut from magazines…lose their value and are

thrown out. But what might such ephemera tell us of what

went on in the nursery, before the hearth, or in the corner

of rooms where children were sent to be entertained or to

entertain themselves. (Heath, 1997, p. 17)

Though the ephemera are often missing, other sources

sometimes lead us into understanding of the relationship

between children and books. For example, an essay by

Robert Louis Stevenson (1992) drew attention to the

Scottish poet Robert Burns’s home-schooled education

and the in uence of his father on his reading. Although a

poor man, William Burns took pains to educate his children

by borrowing books for them “and he felt it his duty to

supplement (their knowledge of theology) by a dialogue

of his own composition, where his own private shade of

orthodoxy was exactly represented.” Stevenson wrote:

“Such was the in uence of this good and wise man that

his household became a school to itself, and neighbours

who came into the farm at mealtime would  nd the whole

family, father, brothers, and sisters, helping themselves

with one hand, and holding a book in the other” (p. 89).

This chapter seeks to celebrate, understand, and cast

some light on other such enlightened parents as well as

the practices of children’s home reading between the 18th

and the 21st centuries. Given the enormity of the  eld, we

have had to be selective in the accounts discussed here.

However, we were guided by the fact that there are rela-

tively few longitudinal studies of children’s development

CHILDREN READING AT HOME

as readers, particularly before the 20th century. We were

greatly helped by secondary sources such as biographies

and histories of reading and literacy. Our primary sources

included personal journals, letters, autobiographies, and

other published texts; in some cases, there were also arti-

facts, such as drawings or teaching materials.

Given the sketchy and uneven corpus of research,

we have tried to provide some structure by organizing

accounts in terms of particular families for whom there

exists more information, usually parents teaching their

own children to read or encouraging, supervising, and

observing children’s early reading in the home context.

However, we have also included some more individualistic

accounts, particularly from selected writers in the 19th

century, drawing on their early reading autobiographies

and recollections of their own childhoods. The accounts

from the 18th and 19th centuries have been patched to-

gether, some pieces larger and more colourful than others,

some rather threadbare, but together providing a strong

enough pattern to allow us to imagine what reading in the

home was like for some families in the past. Accounts from

the 20th century are easier to  nd with parent observers

offering the most structured and detailed descriptions of

their children’s early reading, which is why we have given

them a large section of this chapter.

While we do touch on schooling, our emphasis remains

on childhood reading in the home. Inevitably, those who

have taken the time and trouble to both educate their

children at home and to document the process have been

those who were economically and educationally advan-

taged. That means that most of our evidence is middle

class in origin. We know, however, from Spufford’s (1985)

pioneering work on 17th century literacy, as well as the

research of other historians and sociologists, that domestic

literacy also went on in impoverished households, and

we are keen to tell their stories, too. For example, there

are fascinating accounts of the early reading experiences

of working-class people in the home, but these tend to

be less detailed and comprehensive than those we have

consulted elsewhere.

The writers of this chapter have to own up to both the

Anglocentric scope of this study and giving most space to

British evidence. While wishing to offer an international

outlook, to do justice to such wide scope would be hard

to achieve in a single chapter. We also know the research

coming from the UK much more intimately than else-

where. We have, therefore, compromised by providing

an account that includes data that was relatively easy to

obtain from North America, Australia, New Zealand, and

some parts of Europe, while concentrating on the UK. It

is also important to bear in mind that not only do other

cultures have different views on reading practices and

the value of early literacy (e.g., Schieffelin & Cochran-

Smith, 1984), but also that wide differences can occur

within neighbouring communities in western societies,

as Heath’s (1983) seminal research has shown.1 What

follows is fairly typical of the history of domestic literacy

in western countries elsewhere, and we hope that it will

provide food for thought in considering reading in the

home in other cultures as well.

Connections, Creativity, and Criticism

In their fascinating study, The Braid of Literature, Shelby

Wolf and Shirley Brice Heath (1992) select three key

characteristics shared by Wolf’s daughters who had been

closely observed reading in the home by their mother:

connections, creativity, and criticism. The notion of

connections was mainly concerned with the text-to-life

associations spontaneously made by the young readers.

The links that these readers spontaneously make reveal

the deep impact of reading—almost like a lens through

which we view our own lives, allowing us to re ect on

our experiences and thereby deepen our enjoyment and

our learning. An important part of creativity refers to the

performative aspects of reading (using voice, gesture and

movement), which were borne out again and again in our

research as adults recalled their own or their children’s

fascination with storytelling, role playing, and toy theatres

or puppets. However, our understanding of creativity also

includes all the created “artifacts” related to play and learn-

ing that stem from reading, much of the “ephemera” which

Heath refers to in the quotation that opens this chapter—a

spontaneous re-working of narrative, characters, and lan-

guage into other media, such as writing, drawing, artwork

and, more recently, computer-generated images. Finally,

criticism refers to the evaluative responses of children to

the texts they read; indeed, we would question whether

children are actually reading if there is not, in Dorothy

Butler and Marie Clay’s (1979) words, communication

“between one mind and another” (p. 5). We believe that

Wolf and Heath (1992) have not only identi ed some of

the most important aspects of what it means to read, but

also those features that young readers themselves think

important. Therefore, in this chapter, we attempt to trace

connections, creativity, and criticism throughout the ac-

counts we have found of children reading in the home

across three centuries.

Family Case Studies from the 18th Century

She has a little Compendium of Greek & Roman History in

her Head; & Johnson says her Cadence, Variety and choice

of Tones in reading Verse are surpassed by nobody, not even

Garrick himself: it was Pope’s Ode to Musick that she read

to him. (Hester Thrale Piozzi, cited in Hyde, 1977, p. 40,

on her daughter Queeney, age six)

In this section, we discuss some early case studies of

domestic literacy where either the mother or father took a

special interest in the domestic education of their children

and where there is enough data on which to draw. Apart

from the special case of Jane Johnson, about whom the

EVELYN ARIZPE AND MORAG STYLES

authors have a particular interest and for whom extensive

archival material is available, each of these families has at

least one person in it who is a published author; often there

is more than one. We focus, therefore, on family portraits

of reading in the homes of the Johnsons, the Mathers,

Richardsons, Thrales, Edgeworths and,  nally, the Taylors

who take us into the  rst decade of the 19th century. While

it can be argued that these were rather exceptional families

(for different reasons), it is also true that they re ected the

thinking of their time about the teaching of reading and

in some cases, were themselves in uential in developing

reading practices in the home.

We start with a brief introduction to each of these

families and then proceed to discuss the patterns that cut

across them, such as the reading environment of the home,

everyday literacy practices, and the books and other texts

that were available, as well as broadly considering the

notions of connections, creativity, and critique. Although

we may not have much evidence of children’s responses

to books and methods of teaching, or even know whether

they enjoyed the activities provided for them or became

accomplished readers, the details that can be gleaned from

these historical cases do provide some basis for a general

description of the literacy teaching that was going on in

homes in both England and the United States in the 18th

century.

The Families

Our  rst historical case study has to be that of Jane John-

son (1706–1759) and her children, and in this account we

will continue to refer to her by her  rst and second name

in order to avoid confusion with Samuel Johnson who is

mentioned below. As far as we know, it is the earliest and

richest archive on domestic literacy in the 18th century and

the authors’ in-depth research has shown it is invaluable

for understanding home reading during this period. Jane

Johnson was a well read and pious woman, a “genteel

lady,” married to the clergyman, Woolsey Johnson who

lived in Olney, in Buckinghamshire and later in Witham-

on-the-Hill, in Lincolnshire.

As well as the Nursery Library, which contains the read-

ing materials she made for her children, there are many

other noteworthy documents in this archive, including a

story she wrote for her children in 1744, “A Very Pretty

Story” (2001) and family letters and journals. We will

highlight the most relevant  ndings from this nursery

library, but because we cannot do justice to this extraordi-

nary archive in a couple of paragraphs, we refer the reader

to Reading Lessons from the Eighteenth Century (Arizpe

& Styles, 2006) and to the Lilly Library website.2

Of all the case studies in this section, Jane Johnson’s is

the only one that speci cally points to methods for teach-

ing reading. Letters reveal that Johnson not only taught

her own children to read as soon as they could talk, but

that she greatly enjoyed doing so and approached her

task through a mixture of methods. As well as reading

and writing, “classifying, observing, and re ecting in the

pursuit of understanding mathematics, botany, zoology,

philosophy, and theology” (Heath, in Arizpe & Styles,

2006, p. 204) were part of Jane Johnson’s curriculum for

her children, all of which contributed to their becoming

highly literate adults.

Slightly earlier than Jane Johnson is the case of Cotton

Mather (1663–1728) and his family. Better known for his

numerous sermons and other religious works, this Puritan

minister in Boston was intensely interested in the educa-

tion of his children. Although he had sixteen children, only

two of them survived him; one of them, Samuel, was born

in 1706, the same year as Jane Johnson. Mather’s diaries,

covering about 21 years of his life, provide a detailed

description of both his methods for teaching reading and

writing and his re ections on those methods. E. Jennifer

Monaghan’s study (1991) of his diaries examines these as

well as the general literacy activities, which involved all

family members, including the family’s three slaves.

Although we do not know how his children learned to

read, Mather had a clear idea of his role as instructor: giv-

ing speci c assignments, modelling ways to comprehend

text, and constructing “bridges between life, language

and literacy” (Monaghan, 1991, p. 364). Even though he

quite clearly directed their learning, Mather also allowed

the children some choice and self-expression. We do not

know what his children thought of his methods, but the

few glimpses there are of those who survived to adulthood

show that they also believed in the importance of read-

ing and writing. Mather’s case provides evidence of how

connections, critique and, to the extent permitted by the

religious context, some limited creativity were present in

this family of readers and writers.

One of the most popular authors in Jane Johnson’s gen-

eration and beyond was Samuel Richardson (1689–1761).

Richardson’s work as a writer and publisher, as well as

his interest in pedagogy and children’s reading (he com-

posed a version of Aesop’s Fables in 1740) must have

in uenced his own daughters’ education. Naomi Tadmor

(1996) draws on Richardson’s correspondence to build up

a picture of reading activities in his household that had

religious and moral, as well as social, purposes.

A close friend of many writers of her day, Hester Thrale

(later Piozzi, 1741–1821) started keeping a journal of her

children’s progress, originally called “The Children’s

Book,” in 1766 when her  rst child, Hester Maria Thrale

(known as Queeney) was two years old. It is likely that

she was encouraged to keep this record of her children’s

progress by Dr. Samuel Johnson whom she met in 1765

and who soon became a keen family friend as well as

tutor to Queeney. Mrs. Thrale’s journal was kept over 13

years (sometimes with long gaps between entries) as she

produced 10 more children. As she also recounted hap-

penings of other family members, the name of the book

was changed to the “Family Book” in due course.

While Queeney’s intellect seems to have thrived in

CHILDREN READING AT HOME

the hothouse atmosphere created for her, the demanding

educational expectations of her mother and her lack of

sympathy with Queeney as a person clearly made the child

most unhappy. This reminds us how much of the domes-

tic literacy project is affective and contrasts keenly with

Jane Johnson’s approach to teaching her children where

her interest in educating the child in the widest sense is

evident and the word “love” predominates. There were

few text-to-life connections made for poor Queeney in her

rigorous educational schedule. Feats of memory seemed to

be valued more than understanding, while creative aspects

of learning and critical reading were not encouraged.

The Edgeworths were another exceptionally literate

family whose practices are well documented and were

made public through the writing of two of its most famous

members: Richard Lovell Edgeworth (1744–1817) and his

daughter, Maria Edgeworth (1768–1849). His four mar-

riages resulted in 22 children with nearly 50 years between

the birth of his  rst son in 1764 and his last son in 1812.

Maria was the second eldest and, although she never mar-

ried or had children of her own, through her siblings she had

vast experience of children, which she drew on in writing

textbooks with her father and in her own stories.

Edgeworth’s initial project was to  nd a method for

learning to read, but it soon went beyond this and he and his

second wife, Honora, conceived a plan to teach scienti c

and technical knowledge as well as morality through stories

for children. In a sense, they are a case of parent-observers,

trying out their lessons on real children, which other edu-

cational thinkers of the period did not do and registering

their reactions to new knowledge and experiences. In this

way, they would gather empirical evidence to support their

methods, thus “making education an experimental science”

(Maria Edgeworth, quoted in Butler, 1972, p. 65). Perhaps

for the  rst time, the actual responses of children—albeit

not to imaginative literature but to didactic texts—was be-

ing taken into account. As Maria grew up and after the death

of Honora, she and her father began to work as partners in

this educational enterprise.

Another outstanding family were the Taylors of Es-

sex and Suffolk that, like the Edgeworths, was busy with

reading, writing, and educating children (Davidoff & Hall,

1987). Isaac Taylor (1759–1824) came from a family

of goldsmiths who were “steeped in a literate, religious

milieu” (p. 61). He married Ann Martin and they settled

with their growing family in Lavenham, Suffolk, where

their “two eldest bright and uninhibited little girls were

much admired. The family had little capital but education,

skill, and a formidable energy fuelled by active religion

that centred on raising their children and enlightening their

community” (p. 61). Later they moved to Colchester, Es-

sex, where there were always apprentices and pupils living

in the house alongside the family. The daughters of the

family, Ann (1782–1866) and Jane Taylor (1783–1824),

are now remembered for their poetry for children pub-

lished in the  rst decade of the 19th century.

Literate Environments

There is evidence that in all these households, reading

and writing were regular practices throughout the day

and that these involved, to different extents, the aspects of

creativity, connections, and critique. In the Mather fam-

ily, reading aloud was part of the daily routine, from the

reading of Scripture during morning and evening prayers

to lessons and the reading of what the father deemed

suitable devotional books before bedtime. Monaghan

(1991) provides details from Mather’s diaries, which

show how literacy was a communal activity, and fostered

interactions between Mather and his wife and children,

but also among siblings as they read to each other. In

the Richardson household, reading also took place at

various times during the day, beginning before breakfast

with Mrs. Richardson reading aloud from the Psalms and

after breakfast, when she heard her daughters reading

their lessons for the day. In the evenings, reading was

often combined with other activities such as needlework

or drawing (Tadmor, 1996). Children in the house would

therefore be listening to a variety of texts during the day

and in the evening—from magazines and plays, to Milton,

Locke, and Richardson himself. We have speculated that

conversation would probably have followed reading, thus

allowing for making connections between texts and life,

the moral and the literary.

Marilyn Butler (1972) describes a similar scene in the

Edgeworth household in her detailed biography of Maria

Edgeworth:

At certain times of day—after breakfast, for example, and in

the evening—the family gathered around the library table.

The children were offered books to read (adult books, neces-

sarily) on any desired subject—history, biography, travels,

literature, or science. Short passages that were considered

to be within a particular child’s comprehension had already

been marked for him [sic]. When the child had read the

passage, the adult teaching him would go carefully over the

sense of it, word-by-word and idea-by-idea. The atmosphere

at these sessions was pleasant, and the child was encouraged

to ask questions…. Intellectual work from breakfast time

until the family went to bed was executed in the communal

situation, and accompanied by the hubbub of questions and

answers, or the steady ﬂ ow of reading aloud. (p. 99)

One gets a slightly different impression from Mrs.

Thrale’s diary. She had been a prodigious scholar herself

and she expected great things of Queeney, so she care-

fully supervised what would now be considered a taxing

curriculum for a pre-school child. Although there must

have been a great deal of reading and writing going on

in this household, there is less of a sense of it being done

as a communal activity and more as direct instruction in

subjects such as geography and mathematics. At the age of

barely three, her mother described Queeney as a “miser-

able poor Speller & can scarce read a word” (Hyde, 1977,

p. 26), a comment that suggests the learning environment

was neither relaxed nor entertaining for the children.

EVELYN ARIZPE AND MORAG STYLES

On the other hand, the description of the Taylors again

stresses the familial literate atmosphere. As well as tak-

ing up the ministry and working hard at engraving, Isaac

Taylor also managed to write books of travel, nature, and

advice for young men, and produced learning aids such

as  ash cards with anatomical drawings to be coloured in.

Even so, Isaac spent time with his children “at meal times,

for lessons, in the workroom, on daily walks or special

excursions, family evenings and amateur theatricals” (Da-

vidoff & Hall, 1987, p. 61). The children also enjoyed the

companionship of their mother who regularly read aloud at

meal times. After raising a large family, Ann turned author

in middle age writing popular books on domestic life. As

the literary essayist, E. V. Lucas (1905), suggested, “It

was practically inevitable that Ann and Jane Taylor were

to write, for writing was in the blood” (p. v).

Books and Other Texts

We don’t have a description of daily reading practices in

Jane Johnson’s family, but judging from the existence of

the extensive hand-made reading materials and the books

we know she was reading, it is likely that literacy events

would have permeated this household as well. It was

probably during the 1740s that Jane Johnson created her

extraordinary “nursery library” for her four children: Bar-

bara (1738), George (1740), Robert (1745), and Charles

(1748). This library comprises more than four hundred

“reading cards”, most of them decorated with “scraps”

painstakingly cut out of lottery sheets and coloured in

by hand and then framed with Dutch  oral paper. Some

of them also have a threaded cord on the top probably in

order to hang around the nursery. She also made a couple

of little books that in the manner of primers of the day,

included letters, simple words, and short sentences. Given

that Jane Johnson used some of the material from pub-

lished primers, we can assume that some of these were

also available in this household.

It is probable that other mothers would have created

similar artifacts for teaching their children to read because

they were encouraged to do so by some of the pedagogues

fashionable at the time, such as John Locke and Charles

Rollin. Mrs. Thrale, for example, made her daughter a

“little book” in 1766. Yet, Richard Edgeworth was dismis-

sive of the books and primers available at the time except

for Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s Lessons for Children from

Two to Three Years Old, which he liked for its simplicity,

clarity, and familiar settings (Butler, 1972, p. 61). Follow-

ing this method, two of his daughters apparently learned

to read in six weeks, and this led Edgeworth to begin to

formulate his own theories on the subject.

He was in uenced not only by the Lunar society’s no-

tions on scienti c inquiry, but also by the very early ideas

on educational psychology. He proposed that texts for chil-

dren must be pleasing and therefore founded on children’s

natural preferences for stories. Although the children did

read some books by the new generation of women writers

such as Mrs. Trimmer’s Fabulous Histories, Edgeworth

did not  nd them intellectual enough for his children, so

he and Maria set out writing their own stories for them as

well as for cousins and other family friends.

Performance, the Visual Image, and Other Creative

Activities

In the case of the Thrale family, performance mainly took

the form of recitation in front of adults as a way of display-

ing the child’s prodigious learning. Nor was Queeney the

only prodigy in this family as Mrs Thrale recounted how

her son, Henry, then four years old, “reads the Psalms quite

smartly, seldom stopping to spell his Way; can repeat the

Grammar to the end of the Genders…& reads vastly better

than his sister did” (Hyde, 1977, p. 45).

Fortunately, Jane Johnson’s nursery library provides

richer evidence of creative performance. Wolf and Heath

(1992) distinguish between the creativity of moving from

text to performance and the making of artifacts involv-

ing visual images; there are indications of both in some

of the households in this section. Jane’s nursery library

was clearly intended not only for learning to read, but

also for developing the genteel arts of conversation and

performance. It is almost certain that this was extended

to the reading aloud and enactment of some of these texts

which would have involved gestures and other dramatic

expressions, and the use of voice from the hushed rhythm

of a lullaby to exclamations. Heath (in Arizpe & Styles,

2006) shows that the “play” in many of Johnson’s texts

is in uenced by the public stage in the use of postures,

expressions, and backdrops.

One of the many notable aspects of the Jane Johnson

Nursery Library is the use of visuals, particularly the

images on the cards. The cut-outs, which beautifully il-

lustrate the cards, are not only eye-catching but are also

full of potential for discussion and storytelling as they

can be related either to the text or to other stories. Jane

was aware of the importance of images in teaching read-

ing, but was also using them to foster aesthetic aware-

ness and creativity, which included drawing, painting,

writing, and the careful construction of little books and

paper games.

Text-to-Life Connections, Intertextuality, and Critique

Just as Wolf and Heath (1992) found in their portrait of

modern young readers who made connections between

their lives and what they read, the Jane Johnson archive

reveals that there were many connections for the chil-

dren to make as they read and played their way through

their nursery library. The materials are distinctive in

that they re ect everyday conversational language and

also their inclusion of ordinary familiar experiences.

The texts sometimes include the names of the Johnson

children themselves and refer to particular events in the

household. The inclusion of familiar stories and jokes,

games, street-cries, and names of people the family

CHILDREN READING AT HOME

knew encouraged connections between life and text and

resulted in material that was more interesting and amus-

ing for the children—and it made religious and moral

topics more accessible as well. The children would also

be able to recognize intertextual references, particularly

to the Bible, but also to Aesop’s fables, nursery rhymes,

and chapbook tales.

The aspect of critique is also apparent in this archive. As

her commonplace book shows, Jane Johnson herself could

be very critical of other texts and given the nature of the

narratives and images from the Nursery Library, we can

assume that she encouraged her children to talk and write

about the texts, ask questions, and express their opinions.

The correspondence and journals that the Johnson siblings

maintained throughout their lifetimes reveal them to have

become critical and intelligent readers as well as can be

seen in their frequent comments on books or poems which

they recommended (or not) to each other. Their writing

reveals a similar use of wit, humor, and irony to that which

appears in both the personal and the didactic texts their

mother wrote.

Although Mather’s belief that “improving in Reading”

meant “improving in Goodness” is similar to that of Jane

Johnson, reading in his household seems to have been

more limited to strictly religious material. However, he

often assigned his children books or compositions that

he considered were particularly relevant to their situation

(for example, to deal with bereavement). Mather also

encouraged his children to comprehend and re ect on

their reading; in his case, he commented on the verses

or passages, turning them into prayers or writing about

them. Even when his children were at school, he continued

with his own educational program and encouraged them

to write their own prayers as well as “agreeable and valu-

able Things” in the equivalent of a commonplace book.

He provided them with material from both devotional

and scienti c texts to copy but also encouraged them to

transcribe passages that had “most affected” them.

While his motivation was different to that of Jane

Johnson and Mather, Richard Edgeworth also proposed

that children should be capable of understanding the ex-

periences of the characters in the story and relating them

to his or her own experience:

So long as the child responded to what he met in his read-

ing, he would himself, by the associative process of the

human mind, combine that experience with an inﬁ nitely

proliferating number of fresh impressions. He would relate

the signiﬁ cantly chosen single instance to analogous cases:

intellectually and imaginatively, what he read would become

part of him. (Butler, 1972, pp. 62–63)

As we arrive at the end of the 18th century, we see that

even though changing views of childhood and pedagogy

led to variations in the way teaching occurred at home,

those three aspects of reading—connections, creativity

and critique—are still interwoven through the accounts

from the 19th century.

Individual Accounts of Becoming Readers at

Home in the 19th Century

It gives my grandchildren so much pleasure to look at

pictures and hear me tell stories about them; how natural

therefore that I should go on to paste loose pictures, with

appropriate texts, on to sheets of paper, either in the form

of a letter, or like a book. (Adolph Drewsen, cited in Dal,

1984, n.p.)

By the beginning of the 19th century, efforts to create a

literate population were evident in the Sunday School

movement in England and the development of church

schools from various religious groups that taught thou-

sands of children to read and write. The rationale behind

universal literacy was less founded on notions of equality

of opportunity than the need for an educated workforce and

the fear of their radicalization. In England the government

established a national system of compulsory education

for children between the ages of  ve and eleven in 1870.

A similar growth of educational institutions occurred in

Europe and the United States where schools were estab-

lished for girls and women, for African Americans, and for

aspiring teachers. By the late 19th century, the widespread

belief in the power of education to mold individual char-

acter and improve human life was evident. Parents were

encouraged to send their children to the professionals to

be educated and to use commercial methods and textbooks

rather than teach them at home.

Changes in technology and printing also in uenced

the materials that were available in the home. The be-

ginning of the 19th century saw a growth of interest in

print and a series of new inventions which enabled the

printing process to operate more rapidly and ef ciently,

mainly through the application of steam-power to printing

presses, which also made longer print-runs possible. This

meant that all manner of commercial printing (newspa-

pers, magazines, pamphlets, chapbooks, and broadsides)

could reach a larger audience. Techniques for making

and reproducing illustration also improved and added

to the appeal of printed materials through  ner and, in

some cases, colored images. Even poorer families would

have had the opportunity to acquire some of this printed

material, thus increasing the opportunities for children

becoming literate from an earlier age.

Writers as Young Readers

Detailed accounts of domestic literacy seem to be thin

on the ground in the 19th century in comparison to what

came before and after. However, there are rich pickings

on reading in the home when one examines the memoirs,

autobiographies, and accounts of authors’ early lives.

“A verra takkin’ (appealing) laddie, but ill (dif cult)

to guide” (Eisler, 1999, p. 22) was the astute verdict

on George Gordon Byron (1788–1824) by his Scottish

relatives. Byron spent his early years living above a

shop in Aberdeen, a stubborn, fearless, “holy terror”! As

a little boy, Byron was subject to a beloved and devout

EVELYN ARIZPE AND MORAG STYLES

scripture-quoting nurse who “introduced him to the beauty

of biblical language” (Longford, 1976, p. 6). His fellow

Scot, Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94), “suffered” the

same advantage, and both were without siblings. We

know something of Stevenson’s interest in reading from

his letters, essays, and his poems of childhood, A Child’s

Garden of Verses (1885). His formal education was ex-

tremely patchy—most of what he learned was at home

from books.

John Clare (1793–1864) was a farm labourer who

became one of the  nest Romantic poets. He enjoyed a

brief publishing success but  nished his life in poverty,

indeed, in a lunatic asylum. Clare’s poetry was inspired

by the countryside around him, but he did write about his

early reading experiences for his publisher, John Taylor,

on which we draw.

Charles Dickens (1812–70) wrote constantly about

children, childhood, and schooling in  ction mainly aimed

at adults. Dickens enjoyed little conventional schooling

himself; when he was still a youngster, his father went into

prison for debt and the young Charles was sent to work at

a blacking factory for about a year. Dickens was outraged

both at having to endure such treatment and being denied

an education.

We could have provided many examples from Eu-

rope, but we will only mention one, known not only as a

writer but also as a storyteller, performer, and creator of

extraordinary paper cuts. Among the few factual details

that Hans Christian Andersen (1805–1875) provides in

his autobiography is that his father was fond of reading

and among the books he owned were the Bible, Ludwig

Holberg’s comedies, and the Arabian Nights. Andersen

went to school near his home in Odense around the age

of  ve, having already been taught to read in the infant

school and, like all the authors mentioned above, he soon

developed into a voracious reader.

Charlotte Bronte (1816–1855) and her highly gifted

siblings spent much of their lives isolated from wider

society, partly because of the remoteness of where they

lived, partly because their mother died young, and partly

because their eccentric clergyman father was a loner

largely leaving the children to their own devices. Another

talented, highly literate family about which there is copi-

ous information are the Rossettis; the children (Maria,

Gabriele, William, and Christina (1830–94) were quick

to learn to read and soon became devoted to books. This

is unsurprising as they were brought up in an affection-

ate, demonstrative, bookish Italian/English bilingual

family. Three of the four children went on to become

gifted writers.

Reading the Word and the World

Examples of writers using reading to re ect on their own

lives and connect themselves sympathetically to wider

humanity are legion. Books gave these children what they

needed to develop wide knowledge of the world; imagina-

tion, tenacity, and natural talent did the rest. Indeed, Byron

had most of the books of the Bible under his belt before

he was eight, preferring the drama of the Old Testament

“for the New struck me as a task, but the other a pleasure”

(Eisler, 1999, p. 26). During Aberdeen’s freezing, wind-

lashed winters, the Arabian Nights offered escape into

desert tents and palace harems. At the very end of his

life Byron remembered Knolle’s Turkish History as “one

of the  rst books that gave me pleasure as a child; and I

believe it…gave, perhaps, the oriental colouring which is

observed in my poetry” (p. 26).

Byron and his mother were both avid readers, she a

devourer of newspapers, periodicals, and novels and a pas-

sionate believer in the French revolution. As Eisler (1999)

put it, “Byron literally learned his republican sympathies

at his mother’s knee” (p. 26). He probably picked up her

reading habit, too. Later in life, he boasted that he had read

four thousand works of  ction including Smollett and Scott

before he was 10 years old. Clare, too, educated himself

through reading; and although he is reputed to have said

that he would rather have written Babes in the Wood than

Paradise Lost, he certainly read Milton, Chaucer, Pope,

Cowper, and Defoe as well as contemporary poets like

Byron and Keats.

The adult neglect of the Bronte children, combined with

the fact that their father was a scholar and shared his library

with his offspring, led to precocious juvenile reading and

writing on their behalf. There is clear evidence that the

children’s eclectic childhood reading included Aesop’s

fables, Shakespeare, Milton, Scott, Byron, plenty of his-

tory, periodicals, annuals, works of art, and Blackwood’s

magazine: “Maria read the newspapers, and reported

intelligently to her younger sisters….But I suspect that

they had no children’s books and that their eager minds

browsed undisturbed among the wholesome pasturage of

English literature” (Gaskell, 1975, p. 93).

According to a contemporary, Mary Weller, Dickens

was also “a terrible child to read” (Slater, 2007, p. 4):

He constantly read and reread the books in his father’s little

library—the 18th C essayists, Robinson Crusoe, The Vicar of

Wakeﬁ eld, Don Quixote, the works of Fielding and Smol-

lett, and other novels and stories…. These books became

fundamental to his imaginative world, as is clearly attested

by the innumerable quotations from, and allusions to, them

in all his writings. (Langton, 1891, pp. 5–6)

Stevenson was another autodidact whose early educa-

tion was provided by his nurse, Alison Cunningham, to

whom A Child’s Garden of Verses is dedicated. Although

she looked after young Stevenson devotedly, Frank

McLynn (1993) describes her as a religious maniac  lling

the child’s head with terrifying stories: “When he was

still an impressionable infant she read the entire Bible

to him three or four times…Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and

from Pilgrim’s Progress. Worst of all, she told stories…in

which hell- re and the noonday demon seeking all whom

he could devour were living realities” (pp. 14–15).

CHILDREN READING AT HOME

Storytelling and Performance

The performative and creative side of reading was highly

advanced in most of our chosen authors. Calder (1990)

shows how Stevenson’s writing, which came early, “went

hand-in-hand with an addiction to stories and dramatis-

ing” (p. 8). Stevenson (1992) wrote, “Men are born with

various mania: from my earliest childhood it was mine

to make a plaything of imaginary series of events; and as

soon as I was able to write, I became a good friend to the

paper-makers” (p. 209).

Stevenson was particularly perceptive on the role of

play and performance in children’s learning as the fol-

lowing quotation shows. He was addicted to a stationer’s

shop in Leith Walk in Edinburgh, which sold Shelt’s play

theatres with books to paint and  gures to cut out. Ste-

venson “handled and lingered and doted on these bundles

of delight; there was a physical pleasure in the sight and

touch of them” (p. 64).

Indeed, out of this cut-and-dry, dull, swaggering, obtrusive

and infantile art, I seemed to have learned the very sprit of

my life’s enjoyment; met there the shadows of the characters

I was to read about and love…acquired a gallery of scenes

and characters with which, in the silent theatre of the brain,

I might enact all novels and romances. (pp. 128–129)

Calder (1990) notes how Stevenson not only relished

this fantasy life, but also made every effort to stay in touch

with it when he became an adult. Like Kipling, Stevenson

was late to learn to read, so “until that age he was totally

reliant on the stories that were told and read to him and

the stories he invented himself” (p. 41). As Stevenson

(1992) explained, “It is the grown people who make the

nursery stories; all the children do, is jealously to preserve

the text” (p. 58).

Clare’s mother “knew not a single letter” (Robinson,

1986, p. 2), but she encouraged him to read and learn

and she spent hard-earned money sending him to school

whenever funds could be spared: “…every winter night

our once unlettered hut was wonderfully changed in its

appearance to a school room the old table…bearing at

meal times the luxury of a barley loaf or dish of potatoes,

was now covered with the rude beginnings of scienti c

requisitions, pens, ink, and paper” (p. 4). Clare described

his pleasure in learning favourite passages of the Bible by

heart, singing ballads with his father and reading “those

sixpenny chapbooks hawked by pedlars from door to door

which shaped (his) childhood imagination” (p. xii). He

also remembered old village women telling story upon

story of “Giants, Hobgoblins and fairies” (p. 2).

It is no surprise to learn that Dickens’ mother was

also “an inimitable storyteller” (Slater, 2007, p. 1) who

taught him the alphabet and rudiments of English at

home. Langton (1891) tells us that Dickens also enjoyed

“games of make-believe with his friends and getting up

magic-lantern shows, also performing…comic songs and

recitations” (p. 26). Theatre, of course, remained one of

the great passions of his life.

“When mere children, as soon as they could read and

write, Charlotte and her brother and sisters used to invent

and act little plays of their own” (Gaskell, 1975, p. 94).

Indeed, it was for their juvenile writing and play-acting

that the Bronte childhoods are now famous but it is un-

likely that the well known little books (tales, dramas,

poems, romances, plays), in which Charlotte penned her

lively stories in miniature writing, would have come about

without a childhood also devoted to reading.

Frances Rossetti was a  ne storyteller. Indeed, Christina

dedicated one of her own collections of tales to her mother

“in grateful remembrance of the stories with which she

used to entertain her children” (Marsh, 1994, p. 27). The

Rossetti children often acted stories from history at home,

and Christina started writing poetry herself at eleven.

William Rossetti (quoted in Thomas, 1994) described a

typical family evening as adults talking and the children

“drinking it all in as a sort of necessary atmosphere of the

daily life, yet with our own little interests and occupations

as well—reading, colouring prints, looking into illustrated

books, nursing a cat, or whatever” (p. 26).

Hans Andersen remembers his father reading aloud to

him in the evenings and also making him a toy theatre.

One of Andersen’s stories is called “Godfather’s Picture

Book” (2006/1868) and in it he portrays himself as the

creator of stories:

Godfather could tell stories; so many and such long ones.

He could cut out pictures and he could draw pictures; and

when it was near to Christmas, he would take out an exercise

book with clean white pages, and on these he would paste

up pictures taken from books and newspapers, and, if he had

not enough for what he wanted to tell, he would draw them

himself. I got several such pictures when I was little.

Although this is a description by an expert storyteller,

Andersen’s story also provides a glimpse into the way in

which grownups may have interacted with children when

looking at a text which, in this case, contains pictures as

well as words, and is both amusing and instructive: “‘See,

that’s the title page,’ said Godfather. ‘That’s the beginning

of the story you’re going to hear. It could also be given as

an entire play, if one could perform it’” (n.p.).

Although “Godfather’s Picture Book” may have only

been  ction, Andersen made many real picturebooks,

sometimes with little stories or verses, for the children

of his friends. The only picturebook by Andersen to have

been printed is one that he helped his friend Drewsen make

for his granddaughter Christine for her third birthday in

1859, revealing a desire to entertain rather than to teach.

Alderson and Drewsen (1984) suggest that the “pages may

also have been compiled with an eye to the talk that could

arise as Christine turned to them” (n.p.). There were many

printed sources available at the time from which pictures

could be cut out and pasted, such as calendars, periodicals

and annuals, but the most common sources were the “Bil-

derbogen” or picture-sheets (sometimes known as “lot-

teries”), which were printed by the thousands in Europe,

EVELYN ARIZPE AND MORAG STYLES

particularly in Germany and France. Jane Johnson used

the same sort of sheets for her nursery library.

Critical Readers

From an early age our gifted young writers were also

critical readers who knew their own minds and held strong

opinions of the texts they read. While Byron was able to

translate Horace’s verse into English by the age of six, he

didn’t take to poetry at  rst. However, the lively stories in

the Old Testament were relished and history was enjoyed

for the sense of adventure and drama it offered.

On the other hand, Clare writes movingly about the

moment he discovered poetry when he was thirteen before

he understood “blank verse nor rhyme either” (Robinson,

1986, p. 9).

I met with a fragment of Thomson’s Seasons.…I can still re-

member my sensations in reading the opening line of Spring.

I can’t say the reason, but the…lines made my heart twitter

with joy: I greedily read over all I could before I returned it

and resolved to possess one myself.

Frances Rossetti encouraged her children to read  c-

tion by Maria Edgeworth and “tried to interest them in

pious children’s tales, such as Sandford and Merton and

The Fairchild Family, but the little Rossettis were not

impressed” (Thomas, 1994, p. 27). Christina claimed

only to read what took her fancy—Perrault’s fairy tales,

Dante, Keats, Shelley, Byron, and other poets. Maria read

Greek, loved Homer, and tackled Euripedes in translation,

valiantly trying to keep up with her brothers once they

went to school. Marsh (1994) explains: “Almost from the

cradle the young Rossettis knew a true metre from a false

one, in both English and Italian, and they grew up with a

knowledge of couplet, lyric and ode, to add to the rhymes

of the nursery and the hymns at church” (p. 35).

Working-Class Readers

It was in the 19th century that at last we begin to hear the

voices of the men and women whose labour produced

many of the luxuries that middle- and upper-class families

took for granted. David Vincent (1982) argues that despite

grinding poverty and harsh working conditions, there was

an “established tradition of laboring men embarking upon

the pursuit of knowledge. There was a suf cient availabil-

ity of reading matter, a suf cient level of literacy… [and]

a suf cient access to elementary education to endure that

even in rural communities it would be possible to  nd two

or three ‘uneducated’ men who were lovers of books” (p.

31). E.P. Thompson (1980) cites a typical example—the

poet-weaver, Samuel Low from Todmorden whose work

revealed knowledge of Virgil, Ovid, and Homer.

For the ﬁ rst half of the nineteenth century, when the formal

education of a great part of the people entailed little more

than instruction in the Three Rs, [it] was by no means a

period of intellectual atrophy. The towns, and even the vil-

lages, hummed with the energy of the autodidact. Given

the elementary techniques of literacy, labourers, artisans,

shopkeepers and clerks and schoolmasters, proceeded to

instruct themselves, severally or in groups. (p. 781)

Thompson goes on to talk about a working-class culture

with its eager disputations around the booksellers’ stalls,

in the taverns, workshops and coffee-houses but, as Vin-

cent (1982) pointed out, the autobiographical writings of

working-class people, while almost always  nding their

way to books and valuing them highly, also emphasised

the “general recognition of the subordination of education

to the demands of the family economy” (p. 94).

Most working-class children received, at best, a basic

and fragmentary elementary education and those who

provided it were often barely literate themselves. As the

miner John Harris recounts: “In those days any shattered

being wrecked in the mill or the mine, if he could read John

Bunyan, count 50 backwards, and scribble the squire’s

name was considered good enough for a pedagogue”

(Vincent, 1982, p. 100).

And Sunday Schools apart, this education was almost

always domestic—usually in the sitting rooms or round

the kitchen table of people in the local community. The

eight-year-old, Charles Shaw for example, remembered

the bitterness of poverty, not so much because of hunger

and want, but the injustice in terms of access and time for

books: “I had acquired a strong passion for reading, and the

sight of this [advantaged] youth reading at his own free will,

forced upon my mind a sense of painful contrast between

his position and mine…. I went back to my mould-mining

and hot stove with my  rst anguish in my heart” (p. 91).

The fact that money, books, and a decent education

were in short supply, however, meant that what learning

was available often had to be shared; those with literacy

skills were in close contact with those who were non-

literate with the likelihood that sharing of access to print

was a regular occurrence. Still, Vincent explores how the

tensions between aspiration and opportunity were often

more keenly felt by women who had few avenues in which

to pursue emerging intellectual and literary interests. One

thing many of these women did was to take a deep interest

in the education of their children, particularly their sons.

D. H. Lawrence’s famous account of just such a mother in

Sons and Lovers rings extremely true for the 19th century

as well as the early 20th century. Vincent (1982) explains,

“What was left to both men and women was the freedom

of all those who survived the lessons in one-two and three-

syllable words to travel outside the walls of their homes

and beyond the streets of their neighbourhoods through

the agency of the  ction” (p. 277).

This brief overview of the 19th century allows us

some insights into what was going on in working-class

homes. As the century turned, higher literacy levels among

parents, wider availability of books, and new theories of

development and education all in uenced how children

learned to read in the home. Despite universal state educa-

tion, parents have not been discouraged from doing some

pre-school teaching at home.

CHILDREN READING AT HOME

Contemporary Case Studies

… our reasons for reading are as strange as our reasons for

living. (Pennac, 2006, p. 174)

The most detailed accounts of children reading in the

home in the 20th century are almost exclusively those of

economically and educationally privileged families who,

through their own academic training, become aware of the

potentially rich data that are revealed through observing

their own children’s early literacy.

Although adults writing about their childhood memo-

ries of reading transmit strong impressions of particular

books, pictures, or moments of reading, the most detailed

observations of how children become readers in the home

are provided by parents or carers who kept regular notes

and diaries or made audio recordings of their children’s

language and interaction with books. These observations

allow us access to the earliest stages of reading behavior,

beyond most people’s memories. Although some research-

ers have observed other people’s children at home, the

parental records show that in most cases the deeper under-

standing and interpretation of children’s interactions with

and responses to books (including play, performance, art

and writing) is only possible through continuous, intimate

contact with the young readers. There now exists a group

of texts that have become classics in the literature on early

reader response and pre-school literacy.

In this section, after brie y introducing each case study,

we will discuss them as a whole, attempting to highlight

the main features of this wealth of evidence through the

three strands of connections, creativity, and criticism. It

cannot be denied that these studies present a view limited

to white, middle-class households in which book-loving

adults (most of them academics) had the time and resourc-

es, as well as the  rm intention to introduce their children

to the world of books and reading (this also meant either

limited or no access at all to television). Thus, the children

in these studies were a-typical in this respect. With a few

exceptions, they can all be considered pre-digital because,

like television and videos, computers either did not exist

or were used minimally.

Largely academics, the parents were familiar with

the literature on the subject and therefore highlight ob-

servations related to current issues and controversies on

literacy learning. The fact that most of the studies deal

with children growing up in the second half of the 20th

century and in English speaking countries, allows us to

make useful comparisons.3

The Families

The pioneer among these studies is Dorothy Neil White’s

(1984/1954) Books Before Five. She records her daughter

Carol’s reactions to books from the age of two to the age

of  ve, just before she begins school in New Zealand. The

diary is informal and by no means comprehensive, yet

White provides a clear picture of her daughter’s reactions

to text and the context in which they take place and adds

her own questions and interpretations to those responses.

Curiously, Carol had little experience with books under

the age of two, which perhaps is a re ection of earlier ap-

proaches to child-rearing where babies were considered

too young to be given books (Dorothy Butler’s Babies

Need Books was not published until 1982).

Because of her granddaughter’s special circumstance,

Dorothy Butler (1980) does trace the responses of the

child to books almost from birth in Cushla and her

Books. Born in New Zealand in 1971 with several severe

handicaps, Cushla developed a special relationship with

books, which would sustain her and her parents through

a dif cult infancy (the record ends at the age of four).

Despite Cushla’s dif culties, Butler’s record reveals that

she went through many of the same response stages as

other child-readers, and in some instances her understand-

ing develops even earlier because of the intensity of her

reading experiences.

Anna Crago was born in Australia in 1972. Her parents,

Maureen and Hugo Crago (1983), recorded her reactions

to particular books (and pictures), as well as observations

on language and storytelling, from before the age of two

up to the age of  ve in Prelude to Literacy. Also Austra-

lian, Rebecca (born in 1971) and Ralph (born in 1975) are

contemporaries of both Anna and Cushla. Their mother,

Virginia Lowe (2007), was inspired by White’s book to

keep a diary of her children’s encounters with books, and

she does this almost obsessively from when they are weeks

old to the age of eight and even beyond. Her text, Stories,

Pictures and Reality, presents the most detailed record

to-date and includes evidence on particular cognitive

developments occurring earlier than psychologists have

believed were likely. She focuses in particular on topics

such as reality, fantasy, and identi cation.

The conversation among these parent-researchers is

further enriched by Wolf who co-wrote The Braid of

Literature with Heath in 1992, based on records of her

daughters’ encounters with books and print, from their

birth in the 1980s until 1991. Lindsey was born in Saudi

Arabia but was three when the family moved back to the

United States, where both she and her sister Ashley grew

up. Wolf also looks at how the girls respond to and make

meaning within “possible worlds” but, due to Lindsey’s

intense interest in performance, explores this aspect more

fully than Lowe.

Among the other longitudinal studies that present some

useful insights is Marcia Baghban’s (1984) account of her

daughter, Giti (born in 1976) whose pre-school literacy

practices (in the U.S.) are recorded from birth to the age

of three, but the focus is mainly on the development of

oral language and writing/drawing and only more gener-

ally, on reading. Glenda Bissex’s (1980) often quoted case

study—Gnys at Work—is on her son Paul’s developing

literacy, mainly writing, from the ages of  ve to eleven

years of age. Her records show the in uence of reading on

EVELYN ARIZPE AND MORAG STYLES

Paul’s writing, but it does not begin until Paul is already

at school.

Brian Edmiston’s (2007) case study of his son Michael’s

play between 18 months and 7 years has been published

recently as Forming Ethical Identities in Early Childhood

Play. Although he does mention reading where it is a

source for early play, his particular focus is on play, myth,

ethics, and identity. It is interesting to note that Edmiston’s

research was a way of making sense of his son’s fascina-

tion with horror and violence in books, television, and

videos because this is a response very much missing in

the accounts of all the girl readers mentioned above. Two

other boys have been the subjects of reading case studies

published in the magazine Books for Keeps. In 2001 these

were short, more impressionistic pieces by Gary McKeone

(then Head of Literature at the Arts Council of England)

on his son Jack’s (born in 2000) interactions with books

until the age of one year. These were followed in 2002

(and continue at the time of writing this chapter) by more

detailed observations by Roger Mills on his son Hal from

the age of 12 months. Mills’s account presents the view of

a psychologist and describes Hal’s responses in terms of

issues about security, predictability, and the development of

self-consciousness, yet it also portrays the way in which the

particular fascination of boys with machines and transport,

for example, can stimulate their interest in books.

Finally, we include here extracts from Evelyn Arizpe’s

unpublished diary, which records the language and read-

ing of her two daughters, Isabel (born in 1997) and Flora

(born in 2000) from birth to the age of three in England.

Children’s books played an important role in this academic

household because of Arizpe’s particular interest in this

area but her focus was on the development of bilingual-

ism (Spanish/English). As well as books in Spanish, her

daughters read many of the same English books read

by the children in the case studies mentioned above and

Arizpe’s observations support much of the evidence ob-

tained from them.

The Reading Environment and the Books

Despite different parental approaches to both child-rearing

and research within their own families, and the different

personalities of the children involved, it is interesting to

note how similar some of their reactions are. However,

it is not surprising that the children in these studies were

so enthusiastic about reading at such an early age given

that they were all born to parents already deeply involved

with books, many in a professional capacity, and therefore

into a print-rich environment that was extended by the

purchasing and borrowing of children’s books. As well

as books, there were a plethora of other printed sources,

from newspapers to maps, all of which provided impetus

for talking, reading, and sometimes also writing. Books

were clearly valued as objects and therefore they were to

be looked after although they could be play objects at the

same time. In this setting, book reading becomes a sig-

ni cant activity and “has special powers, since it demands

the total cessation of all other activities by the adult. It

centers exclusively around child and text, and language

and lessons from this context are thus highly signalled for

children as nonordinary” (Wolf & Heath, 1992, p. 80).

Another common element in these households was that

reading occurred in an affective context where the children

were in close contact with the reader, whether it be a parent

or another adult. Mills (2002) stresses the “security” that

reading together means for the child who at this stage is

usually going through “separation anxiety” (p. 9). In this

situation, dialogue and other interactions around the books

arose naturally, as well as teaching, although this was not

the objective of the reading session. Children knew that

in this situation, they and the book had the full attention

of the adults and that their comments and opinions would

be listened and responded to.

These children had favorite books that they could stroke

or even sleep with, and they were often given further texts

by the same authors or illustrators who were part of the

reading process and became household names. Older

siblings encountered the same books again when they

were read to younger siblings, and younger siblings were

exposed to challenging books for older children. Children

knew they had the power to initiate a reading, choose a

book, or stop the reading when they were bored or fright-

ened. They also knew they were allowed to ask questions

and that they could openly say if they liked or disliked the

text or pictures, the  rst steps towards becoming critical

readers.

These children were fortunate in that their genera-

tion was among the  rst to bene t from developments

in printing technology that allowed them to have access

to a greater number of books than any generation before

them. Yet although their reading was much more extensive

than that of the children mentioned in the other sections

of this chapter, it cannot be said that their acts of reading

were any less intensive. Printing technology also offered

them much higher quality image reproduction, particularly

important in the now thriving genre of picturebooks. This

allowed the children to peruse many more books on their

own before knowing how to read print.

Despite the fact that some of the parent-researchers

lived in rather isolated areas, they were able to provide

their children with a wide range of books, including

hand-made books such as cloth-books and scrapbooks

which were so important to children in previous centuries.

Indeed, Lowe (2007) made alphabet books and a series

of “little readers” which included Rebecca’s reading

vocabulary (at the age of four) and adventures featuring

her and her brother. In general, the parents were aware of

new publications and endeavored to  nd books that would

match the children’s interests.

All the children in these studies seem to have been

exposed to nursery rhymes from an early age and parents

give examples of how these rhymes entered the children’s

CHILDREN READING AT HOME

early speech, sometimes in more than one language. Fairy

tales clearly played a big part in the re-creations and per-

formances that Anna, Lindsey, Ashley, Isabel, and Flora

enacted in their everyday lives. They went through a prince

and princess phase even before the Disney Corporation

seized on the marketing potential of this fascination and

turned it into a consumer craze. Rebecca and Ralph seem

to have had less exposure to fairytales, and perhaps be-

cause they were taught from a very young age that fairies

and dragons were “just pretend,” they did not become a

major part of their play. Michael based his pretend play on

myths more than fairy tales, but these did include dragons

and other fantastical beasts.

For the most part, the children in these studies were

read texts that had already become or were fast becoming

classics. Among the picturebooks that had the greatest

impact were those by Beatrix Potter, Dick Bruna, Maurice

Sendak, Ludwig Bemelmans, Margaret Wise Brown, Eric

Carle, Dr. Seuss, and Anthony Browne. At a very young

age, some of the children were also read chapter books that

other parents might consider for older readers. As well as

nursery rhymes, the children were read poetry, but prose

was predominant. Personal circumstances and inclinations

determined which books became signi cant, but all the

children had their favorites that were repeatedly re-read.

Text-to-Life Connections, Orality, and Re-creations

Like the other children, Carol made constant connections

between her books and her life experiences, not just weeks

but even months after the reading. As White (1984) writes

when Carol is two: “The experience makes the book richer

and the book enriches the personal experience even at this

level. I am astonished at the age this backward and forward

 ow between books and life take place” (p. 13).

Lowe and Wolf, in particular, were able to trace just how

the experience of words, literary language, images, and

character’s actions became threaded through the lives of

their children. In turn, these experiences were connected to

other readings and texts, thus forming a familiar network

that gave the children security and con dence in both life

and books as well as double-fold enjoyment.

The children were well aware of the power of story

language to engage both reader and listener or specta-

tor. They could also imitate and reproduce “book talk”

themselves which then developed into storytelling; in

other words, they had a “sense of how to use language

in literate ways” (Wolf & Heath, 1992, p. 228). Whether

or not parent-readers dramatized the reading (Lowe’s

was undramatized compared to the Cragos’s or Wolf’s,

for example), the children were aware of the differences

between literary, poetical language, and everyday speech.

Words from books appeared in the children’s emergent

talk, not only to convey meaning but also as sounds to be

played and experimented with. They were fascinated by

word play, mining it for humor and enjoyment and then

trying it out themselves.

To what extent the texts were re-created depended on the

children’s personalities and interests. Most of them made

up their own stories and some children, particularly Lind-

sey, also made up plays based on their reading. However,

they all explored what it would be like to be others, either

by taking on particular roles or attributes of characters.

This form of identi cation allowed them to become other

people or to explore alternative behavior and circumstances

with the comfort of knowing they could go back to being

themselves at any moment. Through these acts, as readers

they were learning about characterization and empathy as

well as exploring other potential ways of being.

Learning to Read

In all these households, reading was regarded not as the

ability to decode words but as a pleasurable introduction to

the world of literature, so none of these parents used early

reading schemes or primers of any kind. Although none

of them state it expressly, primers were clearly not seen as

something that was necessary for their children’s progress

as readers and, presumably, not considered bene cial in a

literary sense. As we mentioned above, some of the books

parents provided would have been considered above the

age level of the children they were read to. Curiously, Anna,

Rebecca, and Isabel all had dif culties when it came to de-

coding, so we must be cautious about af rming that intense

exposure to books before school will automatically guar-

antee the ability to read early. However, as Lowe (2007)

points out, “the book exposure affected their vocabularies

as one would expect, and acted as a framework for complex

language structures” (p. 11)—and all three girls eventually

became voracious readers. The in uence of older siblings

probably also plays an important role here, as the younger

siblings in these studies did not seem to struggle as much.

Certainly, Isabel (at the age of six) was responsible for

introducing Flora (3.7 to 4.0) to letters and reading through

rather intense instruction during a phase of playing school

which went on for several months.

Baghban’s (1984) account shows Giti at the age of 20

months beginning to distinguish letters from environmental

print. Whatever we may think of the McDonald’s fast-food

chain, their logo introduces children to print long before

school. For Giti, labels and logos became so important

that her mother made her a homemade book with cut-outs

of those she recognized from magazines and newspapers.

Baghban cites various other small-scale studies that, like

hers and those of other parent-researchers, show how by

the age of two that children who are exposed to books are

familiar with concepts of print such as directionality and

also the idea that print triggers stories and certain types of

interactions such as labelling and dialogue. Early pretend

reading, a common activity among the children in these

studies, seems to lead naturally to “real” reading. As

Bissex (1980) writes: “Before a child can read, must he

not have some global sense of what reading is about and

what it feels like?” (p. 130).

EVELYN ARIZPE AND MORAG STYLES

To a lesser or greater degree, parents encouraged their

children to question, to predict, to create hypotheses about

the text, and thus to become critical readers. From these

interactions, the child-readers knew that they could par-

ticipate in the making of meaning with the adult readers

and also in the evaluation of the texts.

Baghban (1984) emphasizes the interdependency of the

language arts which also occurs before formal reading les-

sons take place: “Giti used oral language, reading, writing,

and drawing as partners within a larger system of mutually

reinforcing processes” (p. 97). There is no room here to

discuss the development of writing (before school) that

some of these case studies describe; however, it is closely

linked to reading behaviors particularly because from an

early age these children experimented with scribbles that

they interpreted and read. Bissex (1980) puts her  nger on

the importance meaning has in the process of becoming

readers and writers: “Paul, like his parents, wrote (and

read and talked) because what he was writing (or reading

or saying) had meaning to him as an individual and as a

cultural being” (p. 107).

The Visual Image, Digital Literacy, and Popular

Culture

Even before the 21st century, changes in media and

technology were beginning to affect the ways in which

children became readers in the home, and the visual im-

age has perhaps been most in uential in these changes.

There are many references to the children’s responses to

visual images, not only in children’s books, but also to

“adult” art. Crago and Crago (1983), for example, record

Anna’s developing responses to shapes, sizes, incomplete

objects, and representations of movement as well as her

color preferences, visual memory, and the connections she

makes among images. Lowe (2007) also has a chapter on

her children’s understanding of picture conventions while

Wolf and Heath (1992) connect response to illustrations

with other responses such as drama and play. Before the

age of two, Isabel and Flora expected pictures on one

page to be narratively linked to pictures on the next page

and would point things out in the images as they read to

their dolls. Clearly, the visual image was important to all

the children in both functional and aesthetic ways and it

helped them develop as readers by inviting them to predict,

interpret, and make intertextual connections.

Crago and Crago (1983) suggest that Anna’s high

exposure to book illustrations resulted in her being more

critically aware earlier than expected—such as using the

realism of color as an evaluative criterion—a suggestion

which applies to some of the other case studies as well. By

the age of  ve, parents observed that the children were able

to understand different versions of the same story and pos-

sessed an awareness of artistic style, which allowed them

to recognize the work or the “stylistic signature” (p. 271)

of particular illustrators. The importance of this exposure

is con rmed in the Crago’s conclusion that recognition and

understanding depends on previous artistic experience, not

just (or necessarily) life experience.

Although there are no studies on children responding to

new types of media that are as detailed as the ones men-

tioned above, two articles in particular provide examples

of observations of children in the home interacting with

both books and some new technologies. One case study

by Robinson and Turnbull (2005) is on their goddaughter

Veronica (born in 1998) who, like Isabel and Flora, was

exposed to popular culture in both English and Spanish.

An enthusiastic reader of books (who evinces behavior

similar to that of the other children mentioned in this

section), she also watched television, videos (including

home-made videos), and CD versions of stories as well as

computer games. Robinson and Turnbull argue that all of

these “have been truly porous as she has moved between

them with little need to recognise media boundaries” (p.

69), and that they all contributed to enriching Veronica’s

connections and recreations. This also occurred with James

whose exploration of CD-Rom storybooks led him to

computer-based dramatic play (Smith, 2005, p. 2005).

Isabel and Flora loved watching the British program

for toddlers The Teletubbies, which was taped so that they

could watch them over again. Their  rst computer games,

on the BBC website, were linked to this program, and

by the age of three, they could manipulate the computer

mouse on their own, both clicking and dragging objects.

As soon as they mastered a few keyboard skills, they were

writing their stories using word-processing software,

selecting relevant images from Clip Art, and when Isabel

began teaching Flora letters and numbers, she created the

worksheets on the computer and printed them out.

As these and other studies show, new generations of

children are more likely to be exposed to the electronic

or digital version of books, sometimes before reading

the original book and before starting school. Not enough

research has been done on how this changes the ways in

which children respond to the original text or on how the

possibility of the repeated viewing of so many videos

that are now available affects their understanding of, for

example, narrative, character, and image. As Robinson

and Turnbull (2005) point out, media boundaries have

been broken and it now becomes more dif cult, if not

impossible, to follow particular connections children make

between one media and the other. Yet, in a different but

inseparable way from book reading, children’s interac-

tions with video, television, computers and other new

technologies also have the possibility to lead them to make

connections, evaluations, and re-creations of text.

Conclusion

...it is my inward autobiography, for the words we take into

ourselves help to shape us... (Spufford, 2002, p. 21)

This concluding section begins with two contemporary

writers, Frances Spufford and Daniel Pennac (2006). Pen-

CHILDREN READING AT HOME

nac, whose The Rights of the Reader has been a publishing

sensation, re ected honestly on himself as a caring and

sometimes anxious and demanding father of emerging

readers, whereas Spufford (2002), in a tour-de-force read-

ing memoir, The Child that Books Built, documents his

own domestic reading development.

Pennac (2006) reminds us of the sheer obsessiveness

involved in deeply engaged domestic reading by mak-

ing reference to his own boyhood when people were

always trying to stop him from reading: “Stop reading

for goodness’ sake, you’ll strain your eyes! Why don’t

you go outside and play? It’s a beautiful day” (p. 15). He

also points out the frequent discrepancies between what

parents expect children to read and what children choose

to read:

It’s interesting that even back then reading was rarely a mat-

ter of choice. So it became a subversive act. You didn’t just

discover a novel, you were disobeying your parents too. A

double victory. The happy memory of reading time snatched

under the bedclothes by torchlight. (pp. 15–16)

Thus, the subversive act becomes a creative act as children

begin to make their own pathways through books, develop-

ing their own identities as readers and as human beings.

Spufford’s (2002) account of what it means to be totally

engrossed in reading as a child focuses on the transition

from being part of real life to the journey into the imagi-

nary world created between the reader and the writer. Like

many of the young readers in our study, Spufford, read

indiscriminately everything he could get his hands on but,

at the same time, was forming intelligent critical judge-

ments about the texts he encountered. He also reminds us

of the powerful signi cance of the adults who  rst made

us fall in love with books and of the lessons we learn

from stories: “We tell stories all the time when we speak.

Storytelling may be the function that made language worth

acquiring….The medium of the  rst encounter is an adult

voice speaking, and saying the same words in the same

order each time the story comes around” (p. 46).

These lucid descriptions not only highlight the strands

suggested by Wolf and Heath (1992), but also identify

some of the common themes that link children from dif-

ferent centuries reading in the home. Despite the gaps in

our knowledge before the 20th century, the accounts we

have presented here allow us a glimpse into the connec-

tions, interpretations, and re-creations that were involved

in children’s readerly behavior as early as the 18th cen-

tury. We will now brie y bring these insights together

and point to possibilities for further research in this little

explored  eld.

Although there were differences between the 18th

century families described in our  rst section, there were

also similarities. First, they show that in privileged, liter-

ate families, reading aloud was an important and frequent

daily activity, which children encountered regularly from

a very young age. According to Lorna Weatherill (1996),

estimates of time spent doing various household activi-

ties in the 18th century show that up to two hours daily

were spent reading (p. 143). Conversation, questions, and

re ections followed this reading, so that children would be

encouraged to apply morals to their own lives and presum-

ably link their reading from the Bible to other texts.

Mothers told children stories and usually taught them

their  rst letters through primers or hand-made materials

which began with the alphabet and continued with words

and sentences of increasing length. Sometimes these ma-

terials included images, which would also be sources of

conversation and storytelling. Like Jane Johnson, some

of these mothers and fathers must have provided oppor-

tunities for their children to express their own interests

and to  nd pleasure in these activities. In some families,

games and toys also encouraged early reading. Drama

and performance—where allowed—naturally followed

the processes of reading and reciting. Finally, reading was

linked to writing as children copied passages or lessons

and, in some cases like the Taylor sisters, created their

own poems and stories.

In the 19th century, individual accounts provide clues as

to the development not only of voracious readers but also

of gifted writers. Books provided knowledge but also the

space for re ection, sometimes in economically deprived

or in dif cult emotional circumstances. In terms of books,

quantity and quality did not seem to matter as much, nor

did the extent of parental education and involvement or

even the amount of schooling, as long as there was a strong

will to learn. There is rich evidence for the links to story-

telling, performance, and other creative pursuits.

These latter trends carried well into the 20th century.

The detailed cases, which were often full research studies,

reveal that, well before they can decode text, the children

behave like readers as they make links between books

and reality (and among texts), interpret, and re-create

literary elements in their ordinary life and use these links

and interpretations to analyze and evaluate not only texts

but life.

Some of the expectations with which we began this re-

search clearly emerged in the data: that the roles of parent/

carers would be different according to the views of child-

hood of their time, that the affective relationship between

children and these parent/carers would be important, that

storytelling would be central, that pictures would add to

the pleasures offered by books, and that reading would

be linked to some kinds of performance. However, other

themes also emerged and proved to be signi cant factors

in creating perceptive young readers:

omnivorous reading of books for adults as well as those •

speci cally aimed at children;

popular  ction and comics (chapbooks in the 18th cen-•

tury) playing as strong a part in the domestic reading

diet as rich literary texts of which adults were more

likely to approve;

EVELYN ARIZPE AND MORAG STYLES

the liberty to make one’s own reading choices;•

the time to do plenty of reading.•

These themes suggest directions that future research in

the  eld of domestic literacy might take, but there also

remain important areas that we did not have time to ad-

dress fully here:

the differences in the ways in which imaginative and •

information texts are offered and taken up;

the ways in which the home context has changed given •

the more vital role of school;

the impact of new methods of teaching reading;•

the question of close involvement of parents/carers •

versus children  nding their own ways to reading;

the in uence of siblings;•

the importance of gender—of the reader and of the •

parent/carer;

the incursion of new technologies into the very heart •

of the home and the ways in which television and other

electronic media have changed perceptions of the act

of reading itself.

And yet, we would venture, that despite all the future and

past research—the histories, the memories, and re ections

from autobiographies as well as the close, informed obser-

vation of contemporary children—there is still much about

the process in which children become readers that will

always remain highly personal and totally mysterious.

Notes

1. Heath (1983) provides the most detailed record of learning

to read in working-class and/or ethnic minority households.

Jonda McNair (personal communication) noted that pre-school

reading practices in African American families changed when

reading more African American literature because these books

re ected their personal experiences. She referred us to Durkin’s

(1984) study of poor, black,  fth-grade students which found

that successful readers were those who had been read to at an

early age, had been provided with challenging materials, and

had been encouraged by their families to love reading.

2. This archive is mainly divided between the Lilly Library at

Indiana University, Bloomington, and the Bodleian Library,

Oxford. The former can be accessed online at http://urania.

dlib.indiana.edu/collections/lilly/janejohnson/index.html

3. As Wolf and Heath (1992) point out, “For a comparative

perspective, it is necessary to ask also about what this book

says for single-parent families, cultures incorporating oral

story-telling habits, and extended families that must cram three

generations into a one-bedroom apartment” (p. 192).

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Questioning the Value of Literacy

A Phenomenology of Speaking and Reading in Children

Eva-Maria Simms

Duquesne University

Reading as Technology

The Chirographic Bias

Reading and writing seem to be harmless, innocuous skills,

mere addenda to the basket of natural skills that children

develop throughout their formative years. At least, this

is the impression promoted by handbooks and research

reports on early childhood education (Spodek, 1993; Na-

tional Reading Panel, 2000; Hall, Larson, & Marsh, 2003;

Rasinski, Blachowicz, & Lems, 2006). The contributions

by psychologists consist of discussions of cognitive/infor-

mation processing abilities, memory strategies, Piagetian

stages, and Vygotskian proximal zones—all presented as

part of the cognitive/developmental scaffolding that makes

learning to read possible. But how does the acquisition of

literacy affect the child’s consciousness? There is a sur-

prising silence on this topic. Even among authors who are

critical of the power relations in the educational system

(Burman, 1994; Canella, 1997; James, Jenks, & Prout,

1998; Popkewitz & Brennan, 1997; Soto, 1999) the value

of reading per se is rarely questioned. One of the few in-

stances where the value of literacy is problematized occurs

in the clash between indigenous cultures and the U.S. edu-

cation system: The Native American Cochiti people have

It may seem odd, in a handbook that studies and celebrates the written word for children, to include a chapter

that attends to the losses involved in the child’s acquisition of traditional literacy. But as we are reminded in

Betsy Hearne’s essay, our  rst introduction to literature is through oral stories; thus we need to consider what

it means that our young readers were  rst speakers and listeners, and how that transformation from orality to

literature fundamentally changes perceptual frameworks. Phenomenologist Eva-Maria Simms asks readers to

consider the embodied contexts of language use in children and how these contexts change with the advent

of alphabetic literacy. Such understanding can help us discern what’s at stake for the “reluctant readers” we

encounter in our classrooms, as well as in Campano’s and Ghiso’s discussions of immigrant children learning

to read books from cultures other than their own, or in the arguments Bradford highlights surrounding the

inscription of indigenous narratives.

QUESTIONING THE VALUE OF LITERACY

denied the transcription of their language into alphabetic

notation and refused to have the written language taught

to their children in schools (Martinez, 2000).

Our mainstream cultural belief in the desirability of

literacy is what the phenomenological tradition calls a

“natural attitude” (Husserl, 1952): Everyday phenomena

are accepted without question and the opportunity for

re ection does not arise. The phenomenological method

attempts to bracket or suspend the unquestioned belief in

the obviousness of what is given to our experience, and

the researcher suspends assent (Gurwitsch, 1974). This

withholding of assent does not mean that the phenomenon

is suspended, merely that the researcher creates openness

for a deeper exploration of what is there (Ihde, 1979). Hus-

serl’s (1969) call “to the things themselves” (pp. 12–13)

is a challenge to direct our attention more fully to what

phenomena themselves can disclose through a process of

faithful description. What was taken for granted before

appears now as strange and interesting. Phenomenology

is a philosophical method that, by suspending assent,

awakens wonder (Held, 2002).

The intent of this chapter is to suspend the belief in the

goodness of literacy—our chirographic bias—in order to

gain a deeper understanding of how the engagement with

texts structures human consciousness, and particularly

the minds of children. In the following pages, literacy

(a term which in this chapter refers to the ability to read

and produce written text) is discussed as a consciousness

altering technology. A phenomenological analysis of the

act of reading shows the child’s engagement with texts

as a perceptual as well as a symbolic event that builds

upon but also alters children’s speech acts. Speaking and

reading are both forms of language use, but with different

con gurations of perceptual and symbolic qualities. Chil-

dren’s literature uses textual technology and, intentionally

or not, participates in structuring children’s pre-literate

minds. Some of its forms, such as picture books and early

readers, are directly intended to bridge the gap between

the pre-literate listener and the literate reader and ease

the transition into the literate state. It is my hope that the

phenomenological analysis of the experiences of speaking

and reading might help us understand more clearly how

children’s literature impacts the minds of children. Such

an analysis can awaken a critical awareness of the power

that letters wield as they shape the reader’s psychological

reality, and it can sharpen our sense of wonder about the

metamorphosis of language from speaking to writing.

The question of the value of literacy is not an academic

issue for me. As a parent and as a teacher of parents and

therapists, I am often confronted with the issue of what

children (and the society as a whole) lose by taking on

literacy. One day my eight-year-old son and I wandered

through the glass rooms of the botanical conservatory.

Hundreds of plant species lined the banks of our path,

spilled down from baskets, pots, and ledges, reached

through the humid air towards the glass- ltered sunlight

or the shade of their companions. I tried to read as many

identi cation tags as I could, but Nick was more inter-

ested in the markers for the treasure hunt, which the staff

had hidden among the roots. He did not like reading. We

entered a long glass room which was lined with a dozen

topiaries representing Aesop’s fables. Assuming that this

could be a “teachable moment,” I stopped before the  rst

one, and told Nick that this was the fable of the fox and

the stork and started to tell him the story. “You left out the

good parts,” he interrupted me, and proceeded to recite

Aesop’s tale from beginning to end. Then he rushed to the

next topiary, and, standing before the exhibit, declaimed

the next fable, exactly with the wording and intonation of

his second grade teacher. And the next one. And the next

one. At the end of the hallway he had told me six fables,

metered and formulaic, with coherent plots, interesting

details, and varied voices for the animal protagonists. I

marveled at his ability to remember. Here was a child

who recalled the words of a teacher verbatim. And he

could not read.

This rhapsodic feat of memory, which recalls lengthy

story lines and the details of content and delivery, is typi-

cal of pre-literate, oral people (Goody, 1968). Memory

changes when people learn to read, and Nicholas was no

exception: His recall prowess fell by the wayside a few

years after he became literate. I have always wondered

what other abilities of our children’s perception, imagina-

tion, feeling, and cognition we have sacri ced when we

taught them how to read.

Textuality as Technology

Literacy is deeply entwined with the structures of human

consciousness, and it changes the culture that embraces

it, as well as the individual who learns how to read.

This has been documented by historians and philolo-

gists (Eisenstein, 1979; Havelock, 1982; Parry, 1971) as

well as authors with a historical and cultural interest in

anthropology (Goody, 1968), psychology (Luria, 1976;

Ong, 1982), education (Egan, 1988; Sumara, 1998), and

communication (McCluhan, 1962; Postman, 1994). On

the cultural level, the phenomenon of textual literacy

appears in sharper outline when it is contrasted with the

literary and educational practices of oral cultures, which

transmit their knowledge and traditions without texts, or

with cultures that have pockets of literacy practices that

are very different from our own.

Illich and Sanders (1988) have argued that alphabeti-

zation, i.e., the translation of the phonetic sound system

into visual alphabetic notation, is an epistemological

practice with far-reaching impact on mind and culture.1

Illich (1996) has traced the creation of the “bookish” (p. 5)

mind to the monastic reading and writing tradition of the

12th century, which built the foundation for new thinking

practices, the founding of schools and universities, and

the dissemination of ideas through the printing press in

EVA-MARIA SIMMS

the following centuries. Reading is a mind-technology.

The word “technology” is generally de ned as the ap-

plication of tools and methods, particularly the study,

development, and application of devices, machines, and

techniques for manufacturing and productive processes.

On a deeper level, however, technology is the disclosure

and manipulation of the essence of things (Heidegger,

1993). Technologies extract the essences out of human

abilities by instrumentalizing them and by depriving them

of their original lived context. An example is the invention

of the automobile: The essential ability of human move-

ment is extracted and intensi ed through the technology

of the car, which, in turn, reduces the lived and embodied

context of human motility. When we sit in the speeding

car, our senses are insulated from the heat, smell, and touch

of the places we pass, and we do not notice their details

anymore. The adoption of automobile technology, in turn,

has required changes in infrastructure, which have deeply

altered the landscapes and social fabric of American cit-

ies. According to Illich (1996), when human experience

becomes technologized, a double process of intensi cation

of some experiential elements and the de-contextualization

and reduction of others can be observed. Literacy as a

technology extracts the essence out of human speech—

the content of what is said—and instrumentalizes and

intensi es it through the process of alphabetic notation

and textual practices. The lived context of oral language

is reduced and restructured. In the following sections we

will trace this process of reduction and intensi cation as

language becomes written text.

Introducing literacy into non-literate cultures has had

profound effects on their cultural practices (Eisenstein,

1979; Goody, 1968; McCluhan, 1962; Ong, 1982). Some

of the Pueblo peoples of New Mexico, as we saw above,

have refused to allow their languages to be written and

taught in schools as recently as the 1990s. They argue

that written language is sacrilegious, gives indiscriminate

access to esoteric religious practice, and is an imperialist

tool that undermines the cultural identity and political

sovereignty of Pueblo peoples (Martinez, 2000; Webster,

2006). This echoes Ong’s (1982) statement that “writing

is a particularly pre-emptive and imperialist activity that

tends to assimilate other things to itself…” (p. 12).

The Phenomenology of the Speech Act

A Visit to the Kindergarten

Pre-literate children engage in language all the time, and

their oral culture and the variety of the language forms

they use is surprisingly sophisticated. It would go beyond

the scope of this chapter to discuss the research in the

 eld of language acquisition, but the consensus of the

experts is that by the age of four pre-schoolers use gram-

mar almost as well as adults (Bruner, 1993; Chomsky,

2002; Hirsh-Pasek & Golinkoff, 1996; Pinker, 1995).

The complexity of young children’s speech practices is

apparent in the conversation between  ve children, which

were recorded by Vivian Paley (1981) in her kindergarten

classroom. Even though Paley’s children are exposed to

written language in the form of story books or reference

works fetched from the library, textual material comes to

them in the oral form: It is read aloud and explained by the

teacher. The following analysis of a typical kindergarten

conversation is guided by the ideas of the French philoso-

pher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962) and his discussion of

the phenomenology of speech.

Paley’s (1981) kindergarten class had soaked and

planted lima beans in milk cartons, but after a few weeks

only two sprouted. When Wally sifted through the dirt in

his planter he could not  nd any lima beans—and neither

could the other children. They were puzzled by the mys-

tery of the vanished lima beans and for weeks argued and

theorized that robbers had stolen the beans. Here is one

of their typical conversations:

Andy: My father has two cactus plants in the big windows

in his of ce. You know why? When robbers come

in at night they touch the cactus plants and have to

go back where they came from. To get the prickles

out. That’s why my daddy has those plants.

Deana: What if you got stuck in the desert when you

weren’t stealing anything?

Eddie: What if he stole the whole cactus plant?

Andy: Then he might fall on it and get stuck by it.

Tanya: How about if the robber came in another way

except by the way the cactus are?

Andy: He can’t. The doors are locked.

Tanya: Does he have a cactus in all the windows? The

robber could come through another window.

Andy: Only if he has a ladder. And how can he open the

window if the lock is on the inside? And if he tries

to break the window he could cut his arm.

Wally: They take him to jail if he breaks the window.

Eddie: He could break through the door.

Tanya: Then he might fall on the cactus.

Andy: I am going to tell my daddy to get more cactus

plants for every window. And also one by the

door.

Wally: Hey, here’s a great idea. Let’s put a cactus by the

lima beans the next time. (p. 61)

Merleau-Ponty (1962) points out that speech is always

situated in an interpersonal  eld and a particular loca-

tion, with a speaker and a listener taking turns exchang-

ing language: The children have their conversations in

the classroom, from which the lima beans disappeared

mysteriously. This provides the lived context for the con-

versation and the stimulus for what is talked about. The

children are embodied and share the same environmental

and historical context (they are in the here and now). This

particular conversation refers to conversations the children

had in the previous weeks, and it is part of the historical

stream of speech, which spans a temporal frame that

QUESTIONING THE VALUE OF LITERACY

recalls the past and sets up themes for future conversa-

tions. In oral cultures, as with these children, the context

of the conversation is clear and shared and does not need

to be  lled in (Ong, 1982): Wally’s indignation when he

found the lima beans gone from the dirt in his container

is remembered by all, and so are other things lost over the

weeks before this conversation. In his study of illiterate

people in Uzbekistan and Kirghizia, Luria (1976) docu-

mented how the exclusive immersion into conversational

contexts affected the kinds of thinking and speaking his

participants engaged in: They refused to give de nitions or

comprehensive descriptions of things because situational

events are obvious, and because a description or de ni-

tion would miss many essential (non-visual) experiential

aspects of things. Paley’s (1981) children do not have to

describe or de ne “cactus,” but have an immediate grasp

of the spiny, dangerous plant and its world, and they weave

it into their conversation.

Speech is profoundly interpersonal and social and

makes it possible “to think according to others which

enriches our own thought” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p.

179).2 The children have an implicit understanding that

turn-taking makes speech generative: The cactus theme

suggested by Andy is picked up by Eddie, Tanya, and

Wally, who spin it forward. On the other hand, Deana’s

introduction of “cactus in the desert” falls  at because

it leads too far away from the present location and the

urgency of solving the mystery in this room. In oral con-

versation there is an immediate feed-back loop between

speaker and listener in the service of the conversation. It

is surprising to notice how well the children listen and

take up, or “think according to,” the ideas suggested by

their conversation partners. They excitedly contribute their

ideas, which link up closely with what the other child said

but also amplify and modify and add to the other speaker’s

expressions. When we listen to a conversation partner we

are “taken over by the other’s speech, it fully occupies our

mind,” “we are possessed by it” as if under a “spell” (p.

180). Andy’s story of the cactus on his father’s windowsill

has power, and the children become deeply engaged in the

images and speculative thoughts it suggests. Only Deana

drops out of the conversation because the other children

were not willing to follow the spell of her speech, and she

was unable or unwilling to change tack.

There is a profound connection between thinking and

speaking, but Merleau-Ponty (1962) points out that lan-

guage is not a simple utensil of cognition, as the construc-

tivists claim (Piaget, 1955): It is not thinking that clothes

itself in the garb of language, but the process of linguistic

exchange produces and sustains thinking. Thought urges

toward expression in language, and expressive speaking

moves thinking forward. We do not know what we think

before we speak it. “Thus speech, in the speaker, does

not translate ready-made thought, but accomplishes it”

(Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 178). Andy’s idea of connecting

the cactus to the mysterious robbers is a wonderful conver-

sational gambit. It has so much potential for speculation,

and it intersects with the emotional puzzle of missing

things that has occupied the children for a while. We could

say that speech awakens thought and even accomplishes it

by gathering and directing it and combining old thoughts

into new ones in order for the language exchange between

speakers to  ow. The thought processes that Andy, Deana,

Wally, Tanya, and Eddie produce are not individual but

communal: Thought is born and accomplished in the

evolving of their conversation. It  ows through them,

augmented (or sti ed) by each individual contribution.

Together they think better and more creatively than alone.

The children speak to each other not in order to exchange

information, but to re-live and approach the mystery of

vanishing things. The excitement of their conversation

lies not in its conceptual content, but in how much of the

imaginary world they can open up.

At the beginning of the children’s conversation, they

are not sure where it will go. Andy introduces the themes

of “robbers” and “protection against robbers,” but it is

by no means sure that the conversation will connect the

themes to the missing beans. And yet it seems that the

conversation tends that way. Before our own words are

spoken, we reach for them. Words have a “near presence,”

they are “behind me,” and come to realization in the act of

speaking (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 180). This emergence

becomes particularly clear in Wally’s  nal statement, as

he discovers what everyone was reaching for: “Let’s put a

cactus by the lima beans the next time.” Cactuses protect

against robbers in a physical and magical way. “Cactus,”

“robbers,” and “lima beans” are intuitively connected

from the beginning, but it takes the children a while to

consciously see the associative chain. It is as if they are

working from the emotional complex of “protection

against robbers” towards the  nal cognitive connection

between cactus and lima bean, but need the bridge of

speech to get there.

The conversation about the cactus allows for an imagi-

nary participation in thoughts that are not connected to the

here and now. The cactus does not reside in the room and is

not present to their senses. It exists for all but Andy—who

probably saw it in his father’s of ce—outside their  eld of

sensory experience. It is a purely imaginary object, which

Andy introduces into their thought processes. However,

the conversation partners treat it as completely real, as real

as the lima beans to which it is linked. Language forms

an “organism of words,” which establishes a linguistic

world and a new dimension of experience alongside the

perceptual world. The word “cactus” has a location in the

linguistic world for which the children reach, and some do

it more successfully than others. Every human language,

spoken or read, is a symbolic form of communication,

in which the secondary world of invisible symbols is

experienced as compelling and as real as the world of the

senses. Luria (1981) succinctly summarized the power

that language gives to the human child:

EVA-MARIA SIMMS

The enormous advantage is that their world doubles. In the

absence of words, humans would have to deal only with

those things which they could perceive and manipulate

directly. With the help of language, they can deal with

things which they have not perceived even indirectly and

with things which were part of the experience of earlier

generations. Thus the word adds another dimension to the

world of humans....animals have only one world, the world

of objects and situations which can be perceived by the

senses. Humans have a double world. (p. 35)

The coming of words in the conversation between the

children is based on the activity of trying to affect the

world shared with the other. Speech has an expressive

substructure that is deeply emotional, rather than concep-

tual. Through their speech, they want to draw each other in

and create a common world, where everyone contributes

to the complex cactus/robber/lima bean problem. Speech

is a fundamental activity whereby human beings project

themselves towards a “world” that can be illuminated and

shared with the other. Paley (1981) does not tell us what

happens after this conversation, but I am sure that if the

class plants beans again, the children will want to “put

a cactus by the lima beans the next time,” as Wally sug-

gests. The linguistic/symbolic world and its gestures are

intermingled with the structure of the sensory/experienced

world, which they outline and concur with. If a speech act

is too far removed from the experienced world and does not

 t into the emotional substructure of shared concerns, the

conversation ends or the speaker’s interjection is ignored.

Not every thought is generative. Language, ultimately, is

not a tool for expressing thought, but “it is the subject’s

taking up a position in the world of his meaning” (Merleau-

Ponty, 1962, p. 193). The positions, even within the same

conversation, can vary: Andy’s role is that of an eye witness

and defender of cactus-power, Deana’s that of a silenced

fool, and Wally’s that of the synthesizing genius.

Throughout the year the children talk about the same

theme of robbers when matchbox cars, coats, sweaters, and

rugs disappear mysteriously. The intention to speak resides

in an open experience, which leads to the productivity

of speaking and is not merely repeating the memorized

stack of words stored in the speaker’s memory. The young

child’s desire for speech arises from “the ever-re-created

opening in the plenitude of being” (Merleau-Paley, 1962,

p. 197), and it is this plenitude that lets these kindergar-

teners approach the vanishing of the beans repeatedly and

speak to each other over and over again. The conversa-

tions in Paley’s kindergarten are productive, and we get

a glimpse of the many possible themes and directions for

thinking and speaking that open up when the children

speak with each other: They discuss the nature of the man

in the moon, if mothers collect bones and water and put

them into their unborn babies, the functioning of pulleys,

and how sugar comes from sugar beets. There is always

more that could be said: The silence of the “more” is the

fertile ground for all speaking.

Key Themes/Constituents of Oral Language

Experience

Our brief phenomenology of the speech act highlights

some key themes in the structure of oral language experi-

ence (we should keep in mind, however, that the following

descriptions of the features of spoken language are written

as positive descriptions, but that each of them also contains

the possibility for failure and distortion within it).

1. The Embodied Context:

Speech is situated in an interpersonal  eld and a par-

ticular location, with a speaker and a listener taking

turns exchanging language. There is a lived context for

the conversation, which is also the stimulus for what is

talked about. Conversation partners are embodied and

share the same environmental and historical context

(they are in the here and now.) Engaged in a conver-

sation, we think according to others, which, in turn,

enriches our own thought. Moreover, we are taken over

by other’s speech, it fully occupies our mind, and we

are possessed by it as if under a spell.

2. Speaking and Thinking:

Thought urges toward expression in language and ex-

pressive speaking moves thinking forward. We do not

know what we think before we speak it. Thus speech,

in the speaker, does not translate ready-made thought,

but accomplishes it. Before our own words are spoken,

we reach for them. Words have a near presence; they

are “behind me” and come to realization in the act of

speaking. Language is not a simple utensil of cogni-

tion. It is not thinking that clothes itself in the garb of

language, but the process of linguistic exchange itself

produces and sustains thinking.

3. Sense and Symbol:

Language provides us with an organism of words,

which establishes a linguistic world and a new dimen-

sion of experience alongside the perceptual world.

Every human language, spoken or read, is a symbolic

form of communication, in which the secondary world

of invisible symbols is experienced as compelling and

as real as the world of the senses.

4. Shared Worlds:

Speech is a fundamental activity whereby human be-

ings project themselves towards a world that can be

illuminated and shared with the other. The linguistic/

symbolic world and its gestures are intermingled with

the structure of the sensory/experienced world, which

they outline and concur with. Language, ultimately, is

not a tool for expressing thought, but it is the subject’s

taking up a position in the world of his or her meaning.

Speech has an expressive substructure that is deeply

emotional, rather than conceptual.

5. Language is Generative

The intention to speak resides in an open experience,

which leads to the productivity of speaking and is not

merely repeating the memorized stack of words stored

QUESTIONING THE VALUE OF LITERACY

in the speaker’s memory. Language arises out of the

ever-re-created opening in the plenitude of being.

There is always more that could be said: The silence

of the “more” is the fertile ground for all speaking.

Reading and Perception

To Be Alphabetized

Language enters the child’s life as a powerful and trans-

formative event. It begins as a sensory-musical presence

in the womb (DeCasper & Spence, 1986), develops along-

side the toddler’s symbolic play, and undergoes a radical

transformation when the young child learns how to read.

The musical, the symbolic, and the textual aspects of

language are all manifestations and possibilities inherent

in language itself. Reading is rooted in human speech, but

it also deviates from oral speech practice. Learning how

to read requires that children change the way they per-

ceive and think about the world. Textuality, in particular,

reduces certain aspects of the language experience and

intensi es others.

In their research on oral and literate competencies of

children from kindergarten through third grade, Torrance

and Olson (1985) discovered that children who are better

readers use more psychological verbs that re ect cogni-

tive processes (think, know, decide, wonder, etc.), but do

not use a greater variety of affective verbs (like, hate,

love, care, etc.). They argue that the predominance of

cognitive verbs in young readers indicates their mastery

of de-contextualization: The children understand that

there is a difference between what a person means and

what is actually said, i.e., that words and sentences per

se mean something independent of a speaker. In order to

understand the word on the page, the child must be able

to recognize that words are words and can be represented

in different media. “This is a basic move in coming to

recognize ‘words’ as constituents of utterances, and it is

a move that may be prerequisite to ‘reading’ any words

at all” (p. 268). On the other hand, the researchers found

that good conversational skills and oral competence, such

as turn-taking and holding up one’s end of a conversation,

does not relate to success in learning how to read. This

discovery indicates that successful engagement with text

requires that the child achieves a re ective distance from

the speech act. Language for these readers is no longer

an intuitive, unconscious extension of their bodies, but a

consciously, re ectively used tool.

Speech, in the conversation between Paley’s (1981)

children, was woven into a full sensory  eld. As Andy

spoke about the cactus on his father’s window sill, the

children were sitting or standing together in close proxim-

ity. They saw each other, heard Tanya’s breath as she got

ready to interject her “how about” into the conversation,

and sensed each other’s gestures and facial expressions.

The oral speech act is performed in a synesthetic sensory

environment, where seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and

touching together make sense out of the  ow of conversa-

tion and its context.

Before phonetic/alphabetic writing systems were

invented, many cultures used pictograms as signs for ob-

jects, but the drawback of pictographic systems is that a

vast number of signs are needed to code the many words

of a spoken language (Goody, 1968). Alphabetization, on

the other hand, is the translation of the sound system of a

language into a small set of pictographic signs, which in

the current Western alphabet means 26 symbols that code

5 vowels and 21 consonants (with some standard combina-

tions between them). The invention of the alphabet created

an economical and convenient instrument for recording

languages, and we often forget what a momentous achieve-

ment this was: Goody (1968) remarked that the notion of

representing a sound by a graphic symbol is “a stupefying

leap of the imagination” (p. 38).3

While pictographic notation in general maintains its

connection with the visual world by imitating it in pictures,

alphabetic notation imitates language itself, and not what

it refers to. Reading alphabetic notation means to decipher

the sound of language from an abstract letter pictograph

and then translate it into linguistic references. Alphabetic

signs encode the symbolic system of spoken words, which

are already one step removed from the world of the senses.

The dif culty that many children have with this system is

that the visual letters on the page have no intrinsic pattern

relation with the phonemes they represent. They are arbi-

trary and have to be learned as a system. We could even

argue that discrete phonemes do not exist in the  ow of

language that children use, and that a system of phonemes

is an arti cial and unintuitive construct, which then has to

be linked to the arti cial system of the alphabet. Before

writing can make sense, beginning readers have to submit

themselves to the rules of a senseless, arbitrary system of

letters and phonics. Meanwhile teachers hope that each

child will somewhere undergo Goody’s “stupefying leap

of the imagination” in which the chicken scratches on the

page suddenly come together as a referential text.4

Alphabetic notation, then, is the visual representation of

language sounds (as determined by cultural conventions).

Engaging with texts, child readers have to restructure their

perception: Language that existed primarily as an intuitive,

oral event must be translated into a re ective, visual hap-

pening, where the visual spectacle of letters on the page

has nothing to do with the multifarious visual experience

of the perceptual  eld surrounding the reader. A written

text is a visual abstraction which represents sound and

context by eliminating it. Here we have the  rst example

of the insertion of writing technology into oral discourse

and the dynamic of intensi cation and reduction which

it brings. The very structure of alphabetization, which is

the foundation of Western reading practices, intensi es

the representational capacity of language while at the

same time unmooring it from its sensory anchor in the

perceived world.

EVA-MARIA SIMMS

Reading in an Oral World

In the history of literacy there is an interesting chapter

which describes the transition between reading as an

oral and a visual event. Long after the invention of the

alphabet, the written word remained closely tied to the

ear and the voice: Until the 13th century most European

literate people could not read silently. When you entered a

medieval scriptorium, you would not  nd a hushed, silent

library, but a community of mumblers and munchers (Il-

lich, 1996). The readers would softly read out the words

from the page, the scribes would dictate the words to their

hands as they copied the text, and all would have intense

bodily experiences as the sound settled into their senses

and bones; some readers, like Talmudic scholars today,

would rock back and forth. It is almost unimaginable to us

that most people in the 12th century, even highly learned

scholars, did think it impossible to read silently without

moving their lips. When Peter the Venerable had a cough,

he could not read a book, neither in the choir nor in his cell

to himself. True silent reading was occasionally practiced

in antiquity, but it was considered a feat: Augustine was

amazed that his teacher Ambrose sometimes read a book

without moving his lips. For the mumbling reader, the

page was a “sounding page,” a “soundtrack picked up by

the mouth and voiced by the reader for his own ear. For

the medieval reader the page is literally embodied, incor-

porated” (p. 54). This medieval oral reading practice was

still closely related to the embodied, synesthetic speech act

that we discussed above. The written text maintained its

deep sensory connection to the spoken word, and reading

was a slow recapitulation of an earlier speech act. Compare

this carnal, oral, “deep view” of the written page to our

contemporary understanding of texts as primarily visual

events: “The modern reader conceives of the page as a

plate that inks the mind, and of the mind as a screen onto

which the page is projected and from which, at a  ip, it

can fade” (p. 54).

The text as a purely visual event is a historical invention

with far reaching consequences, and it appeared in the late

Middle Ages when silent reading and a new technology of

text-production took over. The late 12th century invented

(for the Western world) page lay-out, chapter division,

the consistent numbering of chapter and verse, indices,

tables of content, introductions, library inventories and

concordances. Illich (1996) points out that this change

in the technology of textuality fostered a change in the

way reality is conceived. It created a new kind of reader

who could read silently and swiftly, “one who wants to

acquire in a few years of study a new kind of acquaintance

with a larger number of authors than a meditating monk

could have perused in a lifetime” (p. 96). The new kind of

readers and writers looked at the page and experienced the

exteriorization of a cogitatio, a thought structure, a thought

outline of reasons. It became the foundation for the study

practices of European universities and the production of

bodies of knowledge in academic disciplines.5

The new relationship between text and mind, the ability

to conceive of the written word as an abstract and inaudible

record of thought, was the psychological foundation for

the print culture, which began with Gutenberg in the 15th

century. The elimination of sound intensi ed and sped up

the reading process and involved the mind in a different

way. The  eld of sound, as Ong (1982) pointed out, is

not spread out before human beings but is diffuse and all

around them. The visual  eld, however, is focused and

laid out before the eyes. In the oral world human con-

sciousness experiences itself surrounded by sound and

enveloped by a cosmos. In the visual/textual world the

cosmos is spread out before the eye: “Only after print and

the extensive experience with maps that print implemented

would human beings, when they thought about the cosmos

or the universe or “world”, think primarily of something

laid out before their eyes, as in a modern printed atlas, a

vast surface or assemblage of surfaces (vision presents

surfaces) ready to be explored” (p. 73).

Pre-school age children experience their books in a

way that is much closer to the oral, meditative reading

of the mumbling monks. Our son, from the time he was

18 months old, insisted that we read the same book every

night. For years we read Alley’s Busy People All Over

Town (1988), a picture book with extensive descriptive

text. (Even though the book has been out of print for 20

years, there are still three current reviews on the Amazon

website: Parents report that their young children want

to “read” the book “over and over,” “a hundred times”).

Sitting together on Nick’s bed, my husband or I read the

text to him and we talked about the pictures. We were not

allowed to abbreviate or change the wording because even

as a toddler Nick knew the text by heart. The repetitive

reading of the book was not an act of gathering informa-

tion or new experiences, but it served to re-evoke a famil-

iar world, which soothed him before sleep. Ong (1988)

points out that in the oral world the word is essentially a

call or a cry to the other, and that speech is not a rei ca-

tion of concepts or information, “but an event, an action”

between people (p. 267). Every night we—and the other

parents and children who have loved this book—enacted

and performed the same story-event because it made our

child feel safe, comfortable, and protected.

Synesthesia

Reading restructures the perceptual experience of human

beings. We saw that the alphabet requires the translation

of the language  eld into phonemes, which then are rep-

resented by symbols on the page. As a perceptual event

alphabetization reduces the surrounding soundscape to

the words that the reader can recreate in the mind, and the

 eld of vision to the linear progression of letters on the

page. While the medieval reader maintained the close con-

nection between letter and sound, silent reading practice

suppresses auditory perception and language becomes less

and less a matter for the voice and ear. Visual perception,

QUESTIONING THE VALUE OF LITERACY

as well, is altered: The reader must see through the letters

on the page in order to conjure up the invisible presence

that the text encodes.

In his phenomenological analysis of alphabetization as a

perceptual phenomenon, Abram (1996) shows how percep-

tion changes in the transition from oral to textual engage-

ment with the world in non-literate, animistic cultures. His

analysis, however, also applies to the restructuring child

consciousness undergoes in the transition from orality to

literacy. Prior to the immersion into textuality, the creative,

synesthetic interplay of the senses with the perceived world

creates a sense of magical envelopment. The earth is ex-

perienced as alive and meaningful and full of messages to

the perceiver: “Direct, prere ective perception is inherently

synesthetic, participatory, and animistic, disclosing the

things as elements that surround us not as inert objects but

as expressive subjects, entities, powers, potencies” (p.130).

Abram’s description of direct perception parallels Piaget’s

 ndings that young children’s thinking is participatory,

magical, and animistic (Piaget, 1929/1951).

Synesthesia works by bringing all the senses into play

in the act of perception. We see something and know what

sound it will make when we knock on it, how its texture

should feel to the touching  ngers, or how heavy it is when

we pick it up. Even very young infants have this ability of

cross-modal, synesthetic perception (Meltzoff & Borton,

1979; Stern, 1985). When one sensory mode is evoked the

others come into play as well.

In learning how to read we must break the spontaneous

participation of our eyes and our ears in the surrounding

terrain (where they had ceaselessly converged in the synes-

thetic encounter with animals, plants, and streams) in order

to recouple those senses upon the ﬂ at surface of the page.

As a Zuni elder focuses her eyes upon a cactus and hears

the cactus begin to speak, so we focus our eyes on these

printed marks and immediately hear voices. We hear spoken

words, witness strange scenes or visions, even experience

other lives. (Abram, 1996, p. 131)

Abram’s analysis of the relationship between alphabetiza-

tion and perception makes clear that the magical synes-

thesia, the evocation of all the senses, is relocated from

the world to the text. When the eye perceives something,

the other senses participate, even if they do not perceive

directly. This is the virtual, imaginary dimension of per-

ception (Merleau-Ponty, 1962). As the eyes read through

the signs on the page, the mind brings all the senses into

play to create a whole virtual world complete with sensory

resonances. The magical power of books has its roots in

the phenomenon of synesthesia: As we read, the world of

the book is as compelling and sometimes more real to us

than the actual world of the senses. “As nonhuman animals,

plants, and even ‘inanimate’ rivers once spoke to our tribal

ancestors, so the ‘inert’ letters on the page now speak to

us! This is a form of animism that we take for granted, but

it is animism none the less—as mysterious as a talking

stone” (Abram, 1996, p. 131). And Abram is correct: We

are animists when it comes to textual signi cation. We

give ourselves over to the mysterious voices and beings

that arise through the letters on the page and take them

seriously —and among literate people we take the world

of texts more seriously than the world of the senses: Most

children spend more time in the text-centered symbolic

discourse of school than in exploring and talking about

the world they directly perceive.

The introduction of literacy changes children’s relation-

ship to the world because it shifts their attention from the

animated, meaningful context of their perceived worlds

toward the purely symbolic and unperceived dimension

of the text’s virtual world. Abram argues that the magic

of full, synesthetic perception, the spell that it casts upon

us and the force with which it draws us into a connection

with the world, has changed its direction when we enter

a literate world. Literacy is a technology that distances

us from the life world and dulls our ability to attend to

and “read” fully the expressions of the world of minerals,

plants, animals, and the elements: “It is only when a culture

shifts its participation to these printed letters that the stones

fall silent” (p. 131). Here we have a second instance of the

structural intensi cation and reduction which chirographic

technology brings: The synesthetic intensi cation of the

virtual/symbolic dimension of language and the reduction

of the body’s engagement with a plentiful, signifying,

sensory environment.

Reading and the Symbolic Order

The Loss of Context

In order to perform the act of reading and to make the

strange restructuring of auditory and visual perception

possible, the young reader’s experiential  eld of speech

must be recon gured. As long as children pay attention

to the fullness of the perceptual  eld around them, the

magical transportation into the world of the text cannot

happen. In order to be a reader, a child has to let go of

the lived context of the situation they  nd themselves in.

Vygotzky (1986) noted that the young child’s entry into

literacy introduces an abstract process that is removed

from the child’s actual situation. Attention must focus

through the visual process of decoding to the world of

meaning the text transmits. This world of the text has

no relationship to the child’s here and now. The lived

context for the conversation between speakers has to be

eliminated: The room must be forgotten, other children

must be blocked out, and the only one speaking is the text.

Other bodies, and even the child’s own body, are intru-

sions and must be restrained to a chair behind a table so

that they don’t occupy the space in social and disruptive

ways. This is a change in the situatedness of language

(Theme 1: The embodied context from our analysis of

the speech act above). Andy, Deana, Eddie, Tanya, and

Wally must stop talking to each other. Postman (1994)

puts it succinctly:

EVA-MARIA SIMMS

But with the printed book another tradition began: the

isolated reader and his private eye. Orality became muted,

and the reader and his response became separated from a

social context. The reader retired within his own mind, and

from the sixteenth century to the present what most readers

have required of others is their absence, or, if not that, their

silence. In reading, both the writer and reader enter into a

conspiracy of sorts against social presence and conscious-

ness. Reading is, in a phrase, an asocial act. (p. 27)

When we are teaching children how to read, we should

be aware that reading requires a profound change in the

child’s language experience. Speech is a very social and

embodied activity, which has its own momentum and

rewards. Most children love to talk to each other, and as

we saw with Paley’s (1981) class, they draw each other

forward into the world of ideas that they talk about. Read-

ing as an “asocial act” requires the child to engage with a

speaker, the author, who is disembodied and unresponsive

and does not create openings for the child’s own introjec-

tions into the web of language and thought. The conversa-

tion, from the child’s perspective, is passive and receptive,

and the reader has no power to shape and alter the course

of the conversation other than to disagree or put the book

down. The child moves from the dialogue of oral exchange

to the monologue of the text (Vygotsky, 1986). This is

especially dif cult for beginning readers, who cannot yet

reconstitute the symbolic world behind the letters on the

page, and have not yet tasted the pleasure that a good text

evokes. Even though reading also requires an active mind,

its activity is virtual, solitary, and disembodied. The very

power of texts comes from their reduction of the actual,

social, and embodied dimensions of language experience.

The loss of the immediate social context opens the reader

to the new context that the text offers. From a lived social-

ity the child moves into a virtual sociality that promises

encounters with  ctional characters. These encounters

are powerful, disembodied, and invisible to others, which

intensi es the reader’s sense of privacy and interiority.

The Phenomenology of Entering a Text

Most children love stories. As an adult I remember be-

ing spellbound by one of David Abram’s lectures about

the gestural connection between humans and animals.

He mesmerized us with words and movement, and as

I glanced around the auditorium I saw my colleagues

unconsciously bob their heads in imitation of a sea lion,

which they clearly saw in their imaginations. The virtual

reality created by language is extremely powerful. Oral

story telling is supported by the physical presence and

the shared context of narrator and listener. This is also

the case when an adult reads aloud to children. In read-

ing to oneself, however, this context is missing. The full

magic of the written text can only come alive when the

child overcomes the resistance of body and senses and

enters into the particular symbolic structure that the web

of sentences creates.

In his phenomenological analysis of the literary work

of art, Ingarden (1973) suggests that out of the component

parts of textuality (phonemes, words, sentences, and the

textual unfolding as a whole) a particular world arises, and

it is this world (which transcends the author’s intended

meaning) which the reader  nds compelling—or not.

The child has to be able to “climb aboard” and “accept

the given perspectives” (Iser, 1972, p. 282), while at the

same time be willing to collaborate with the text to allow

it to come to fruition in the imagination:

The literary text activates our own faculties, enabling us to

recreate the world it represents. The product of this creative

activity is what we might call the virtual dimension of the

text, which endows it with its reality. The virtual dimension

is not the text itself, nor is it the imagination of the reader: it

is the coming together of text and imagination. (p. 284)

The world displayed by the text refers to Merleau-Ponty’s

(1962) idea of the organism of words, which creates a new

dimension of experience alongside the perceptual world

(Theme 3: Sense and symbol). The child’s imagination  lls

the gaps in the text, supplies what is not there. The text,

on the other hand, allows the child to live and experience

worlds that could never come to his or her immediate,

embodied senses. A book takes on its full existence only in

its readers (Poulet, 1969). If it receives their full participa-

tion, it allows them to absorb new experiences:

As soon as I replace my direct perception by the words

of a book, I deliver myself, bound hand and foot, to the

omnipotence of ﬁ ction. I say farewell to what is, in order

to feign belief in what is not. I surround myself with ﬁ cti-

tious beings; I become the prey of language. There is no

escaping this take-over. Language surrounds me with its

unreality. (p. 55)

The reader’s thoughts and feelings are occupied by the

thoughts of the author, and these in their turn draw new

boundaries in our personality. The consciousness of the

reader “behaves as though it were the consciousness of

another” and “on loan to another” who feels, suffers, and

thinks in it (pp. 56–57). Here we have another intensi ca-

tion and reduction of speech: The possibility of thinking

according to others (Theme 2: Speaking and thinking)

is intensi ed in the monological exposure to the text’s

voice. While in the oral speech act, the child participates

momentarily in the speech of the other and then takes

his or her turn; however, the written speech act requires

the sustained immersion in the  ctional world created

by an author. The writer extends his or her own being by

displaying a world with the hope that readers will share it

(Theme 4: Shared worlds). The silence of the reader and

the temporal structure of the continuous, uninterrupted

voice of the author preclude the reader from interjecting

and changing the direction of the language exchange. The

world of the book worms its way into the consciousness of

the reader. All a reader can do is close the book and refuse

participation in the symbolic world the text promises.

QUESTIONING THE VALUE OF LITERACY

The Symbolic Order

The conversations in Paley’s (1981) class revealed how

language gave the children a linguistic/symbolic world,

which contained things (like the cactus) that were not

actually present. This second order symbolic reality

which is created in ordinary conversations is intensi ed

and ampli ed in texts. The term “symbolic order” refers

to the organism of words and the new dimension of vir-

tual experience beyond the senses that appear in human

language exchanges (Theme 3: Sense and symbol). It

in uences young infants before they themselves engage

in symbolic activities (Lacan, 2002) because their parents

participate in and are shaped by the languages and values

of their cultures. Reading, once the child has mastered

the decoding system, allows the child “to think according

to others” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 179) to have experi-

ences not available in the immediate sensory environment,

and to be immersed in the cultural symbolic order more

intensely.

In oral conversations, children take up each other’s

thoughts and weave a shared web of mind processes. In

textuality, however, others’ thought processes, memories,

and images are recapitulated and accomplished in the

child’s mind without the child’s direct, embodied response.

Silencing the back and forth of embodied conversations

intensi es the reader’s exposure to the author’s thoughts,

images, and feelings. The most signi cant change that

literacy introduces is the ampli cation of the symbolic

order in the minds of children. As soon as children cross

over the threshold of alphabetic decoding, they enter a

compelling wonderland of ideas and experiences which

are not their own, but which powerfully shape the mind.

Literate cultures know that they need this world and that

they have to colonize it. Through this process, on a mas-

sive scale, literate cultures reproduce themselves over the

generations by establishing canons of texts that have to

be read and internalized by children. Cultural memory is

transmitted by texts. We call this process “education.”

We can get a better view of the signi cance of the sym-

bolic order when we look at it from a cultural-historical

perspective. Literate cultures have commerce in the reali-

ties that are created by texts: Books hold knowledge and

cultural memory. Books (and electronic media today) are

a storehouse for memories of all sorts—records of legal

transactions, historical events, philosophical arguments,

poetry, scienti c inventions and ideas, religious texts and

commentaries, maps and calendars. Book content is the

cultural currency that is transferred in the conversations

of literate people and determines the intellectual and

moral climate. Mumford (1934) argues that the invention

of the printing press and the ensuing spread of writing

technology led to a radical transformation of Western

culture. “More than any other device, the printed book

released people from the domination of the immediate

and the local.... Print made a greater impression than the

actual events....To exist was to exist in print: The rest of

the world tended gradually to become more shadowy.

Learning became book learning” (p. 28).

The proliferation of the symbolic order is fueled by the

desire of writers to share their language and virtual worlds

with others (Theme 4: Shared worlds). Print technology

multiplies the audience for texts, as well as the number

of authors who want to occupy the reader’s mind. In turn,

the dissemination of ideas in print, as Mumford indicates,

inserts itself into everyday life practices and changes them

radically (Theme 5: Language is generative). The invention

of the automobile, the telephone, and electronic media was

possible because their inventors could acquire the sediment-

ed knowledge of previous generations through reading. In

turn, these inventions changed where and how people lived,

how they attended to and perceived their environment, and

what they talked about with their neighbors.

Books do not merely contain information, but structure

the way we think about reality. Literacy makes it possible

to erect a conceptual scaffold above our everyday experi-

ence, which then is disseminated and transmitted through

the authority of media and education. This makes the

virtual reality of texts believable and compelling, even if

it contradicts our senses: To exist is to exist in print. The

immediate and local experience has been sacri ced to the

symbolic dimension of texts.

Historically, the invention of print and the symbolic

world it produced led to the cultural appearance of child-

hood. Those who could read and were educated were

altered by literacy. The invention of “the Literate Human”

inaugurated a symbolic distinction between childhood

and adulthood:

From print onward, adulthood had to be earned. It became a

symbolic, not a biological achievement. From print onward,

the young would have to become adults, and they would

have to do it by learning to read, by entering the world of

typography. And in order to accomplish that they would

require education. (Postman, 1994, p. 36)

Unlike biological adulthood, which comes with puberty,

symbolic adulthood requires education and has to be cul-

turally reproduced in children. We ask each child to make

a series of sacri ces on the way to literacy: Bodies do not

lie on the  oor or skip through the streets, but must sit in

rows; the speech of friends is forbidden and re-de ned as

idle chatter; the magic of the sense-world is drained until

it becomes dulled and distant, like the  at piece of sky

beyond the sealed classroom window.

Notes

1. In Of Grammatology (1974), Derrida argues that the alphabet

should not be thought of in terms of visual notation of

phonemes, but as a di erentiated system of visual signs that

relates to the di erentiated system of phonetic signs without

complete congruence between the two. This complicates

Illich’s (1996) and the philologist’s argument since it makes

the historical leap into alphabetization (and I would include

here also ideographic systems of signs) even more surprising

EVA-MARIA SIMMS

as a feat of the human mind:  e acquisition of the alphabet

requires the translation of one arbitrary system into another.

But essentially Derrida’s argument does not challenge the

observation that pervasive writing technology brings radical

changes to a culture (see also note #3).

2. The debate over the nature of language has been one of the most

important discussions in 20th century philosophy. Since the

Greeks, the study of language had been divided into grammar,

logic, and rhetoric, with logic taking the pride of place in

the philosophy of language. Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, the

late Wittgenstein, and Derrida shifted the emphasis—which

was still apparent in Husserl’s work—away from language

as a conceptual tool of the logical mind towards language

as performance within a personal and cultural context. Here

language is no longer the expression of a private subject, but a

means by which thinking is possible (Garver, 1973). Heidegger

(1971) speaks of language as “the house of being” (p. 132).

Merleau-Ponty (1962) thinks of it as the grillwork through

which we can catch our thinking, and Derrida (1974) states

that “we can think only in signs” (p. 50).

3. Since Derrida’s (1974) Of Grammatology, many post-

structuralist thinkers have given primacy to writing over

speech. However, Derrida’s notion of writing does not refer to

the distinction between the spoken word and symbolic notation,

but refers to the complex and in nite web of signi cation

that comes with every language act. Textuality for Derrida

means that every language act exists within a context and

requires interpretation (Caputo, 1997), and that language as

text is a “heterogeneous, differential, and open  eld of forces”

(Deutscher, 2005, p. 33). Language is never the tool of an

interiorized subject, but is given to us by our culture and is

a repetition of what came before. As such it pre-determines

what is expressible on the one hand, and what cannot be said

on the other. Its conventional forms structure human cognition,

identity, and experience.

From the perspective of child psychology, however,

language does not pre-exist in the minds of children: It does

not burst forth fully  edged like Athena from the head of Zeus.

Developmentally, voice and gesture come before speech, and

speech comes before writing. Before infants are able to engage

in the symbolic dimension of the language  eld that surrounds

them, they are attuned to the music and mood of what is spoken.

Speech is an embodied, co-existential phenomenon, and infants

acquire speech only if they are given the opportunity to interact

with other people of their culture. There is a developmental

sequence to language acquisition, a sequence which goes hand

in hand with the development of interpersonal relationships,

perception, and cognition. Infants, for example, have to be

about nine months old before they grasp that a pointing  nger

(signi er) refers to something beyond itself (signi ed), and

they have to have relationships with others that allow them to

want to engage in joint attention. Developmental changes also

mean that language exists for the child in different ways than

it does for adults.

This does not negate Derrida’s (1974) notion of textuality,

but it adds the bodily dimension to the human experience of

language. Even though the language a child “bathes in” is

culturally constructed and instituted, the child’s understanding

and use grows on a daily basis through bodily engagement

with the world. Language—and particularly grammar—as

contemporary linguists have recognized, is not taught by adults,

but acquired by children. We cannot prevent children from

picking it up as long as they live in a speaking environment.

This attests either to a biological/genetic foundation for

language acquisition, as Chomsky (1959, 1969) claims, or

to the child’s insertion into a complex existential ensemble

of bodily, co-existential, spatial, and temporal structures,

complemented by the child’s inborn capacities for attention

and learning that allow him or her to construct their native

language (Tomasello, 2003).

4. Spoken language encompasses other forms of symbolic

expression, which do not use the human voice. American

Sign Language (ASL), for example, is a form of speech and

a full language that is not dependent on the modulations of

the voice. As with hearing infants, deaf infants who grow up

in signing households acquire the language of their parents

almost effortlessly within the  rst three years of life (Meier,

1993) (while children who learn ASL past puberty rarely

achieve  uency). Writing, for deaf and hearing children, is

an often-dif cult modi cation of their speech acts. In writing

the primary speech/language system of a child, such as ASL,

is translated into the alphabetic system. Deaf children, for

example, have an easier time deciphering alphabetic visual

notation if they also learn how to fingerspell (Alvarado,

Puenta, & Herrera, 2008), which is comparable to hearing

children being taught the relationship between phoneme and

grapheme. For both groups of children the in-between step of

translating speech into phoneme, and symbolic gesture into

 ngerspelling attests to the dif culty in transitioning from

embodied, contextual, and unre ected language use to the

conscious acquisition of alphabetic notation and writing.

5. I have argued elsewhere (Simms, 2008) that the late middle

ages saw not only shifts in literacy, but also in the ways

people thought about themselves and how they conceived of

childhood. The (re-)invention of silent reading, the instituting

of confession in the Catholic Church, prolonged adult

pilgrimages, and the children’s crusade happened within a few

decades of each other. The literate adult, the interiorized self,

and the concept of childhood were invented at this time, and

they comprise a web of profoundly entwined historical and

psychological phenomena.

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The Book as Home? It All Depends

Shirley Brice Heath

Stanford University and Brown University

What is it to feel difference—to feel a sense of distance from the traditional happily-ever-after portrait of par-

ent and child reading together at night? Such a narrative has been instantiated in the public mind as the right

way to be. It’s not just one possibility, but the predictive indicator not only of assured school success but also

of a guaranteed, life-long love of reading. In Arizpe and Style’s opening Handbook chapter on reading in the

home, the literary world Jane Johnson crafted for her children clearly demonstrates this narrative. Yet, in this

chapter, Shirley Brice Heath, ethnographer and author of the groundbreaking Ways with Words—deconstructs

the romance and tells us in a highly personal way what no bedtime story means. The intertwining of her child-

hood identity with her evolving adult academic identity and community work braids together a tale of multiple

surprises and serendipitous turns narrating the many paths we take to reading.

No Way to Read

He left our interview, puzzlement written on his face.

He walked across the campus parking lot, crowded with

students, speaking to no one. For more than a week, I

heard nothing from him until he confronted me outside the

classroom where I was about to begin teaching. “I don’t

believe you. What you tell me goes against everything we

believe about learning to love reading.”

Ken Macrorie, teacher, essayist, editor, and inspiration

for so many young writers in secondary school English

classrooms, had asked to interview me for a book he was

writing on language educators. I was  attered. It was 1985,

and we were both faculty members at the Bread Loaf

School of English, Middlebury College. This program

brought secondary English teachers together to study

literature and writing toward a Master’s degree. When I

joined the Bread Loaf faculty in 1982, Ken was a legend in

English education. His books had inspired the “I-search”

paper, an approach to undertaking research essays that

had taken a generation of high school students to success

with the elusive school-favored genre (Macrorie, 1985,

1988).

In the summer of 1986, Ken expected to complete

a book of biographical essays based on his interviews

with scholars he viewed as key in uences in the  eld of

language education. He began our interview by telling

me how much he had enjoyed the stories from eminent

men and women who were to be in his book: James

Britton, Janet Emig, James Moffett, and others whom I

had long admired. Ken told me that each of his previous

THE BOOK AS HOME? IT ALL DEPENDS

inter viewees had credited childhood teachers and favorite

works of children’s literature with shaping their desire to

become language educators. Now Ken turned to me.

“I really have no story about favorite books.”

Ken prodded: “Tell me about a teacher who instilled

your love of literature.”

I shook my head and looked out the window of the

classroom where we sat together with Ken’s audio re-

corder. I searched my memory. Nothing came to meet

Ken’s expectations.

He persisted: “What about your favorite books as a

child?”

“But, Ken, there weren’t childhood books as favorites—

my grandmother’s Bible, and she could not really read.”

Ken forged ahead, certain now that it must have been

teachers who brought me to a love of children’s literature

during my elementary school years. They must be the

inspiration for my life’s work in language and literacy.

I continued to shake my head, and the interview ended

shortly thereafter.

I could not tell Ken the story he wanted—yet another

in the chain of accounts from eminent academics whose

childhoods had been worlds away from my own. I kept

my dissent silent then.

This chapter breaks that silence. Now I tell my story—

one sure to resonate with narratives similar in consequence

if not in detail for some readers of this volume. My story

does not belong just to me. It has much in common with

the unique tales that I hope children all over the world will

stand up and tell at some point in their lives.

Their stories and mine come not out of anger but from

a sense of difference. Our childhood histories are not laced

with bedtime stories, favorite books, academic ambitions,

family models of reading, and a circuit of moral and per-

sonal valuations in support of children’s literature. Our

families have not traveled for leisure or lived in exotic

parts of the world. Like me, these children have lived their

early lives in small spaces, with few possessions of last-

ing worth, and with frequent moves from place to place.

When asked where they live, they answer, “I stay at my

grandmother’s house some of the time, and other times,

I’m….” Their addresses represent households, not homes;

these households have few if any books.

Adults in their lives cannot step back from the demands

of work to tell stories or to sing songs with children. Except

for the occasional Golden Book or Disney- lm-inspired

book picked up at the grocery checkout, books have no

real claim on the budgets of the households in which

they live. Their neighbors and friends  nd it hard to be-

lieve that some people “collect” books. Children like me

encounter books randomly, usually only when someone

else has made the book selection for whatever reason. We

are not guided to cherish books and the time they might

allow us to demand from adults for reading together. If

and when we do  nd our way to books written especially

for children, it is likely to come later in life, when some

unexpected change of status or accidental acquaintance

makes it possible for us to bond with such books. Someday

these children with few books and bedtime stories in their

early lives may, as I did, become enthusiastic converts and

steadfast promoters of bedtime stories, book shelves, and

collections of books for their own children and for the

children of others. But perhaps not.

This chapter tells a counter story to that generally told

by language educators, widely read authors of  ction and

poetry, or scholars, illustrators, and authors of children’s

literature. Theirs is the enchanted tale of the literary cul-

ture of childhood, told and retold by parents and readers

nostalgic for the pleasures that books brought them as

children (e.g., Arizpe & Styles, this volume; Hearne &

Trites, 2009; Scholes, 1989; Schwartz, 1996; Spitz, 1999;

Spufford, 2002; Tatar, 2009; Tucker, 1981).1 All these

works tell us what reading is and what it should be. These

are good people thinking good thoughts and wishing for

others the good that children’s literature has to give. They

(like Ken Macrorie) want others to share their joy, passion,

and convictions surrounding the moral, pedagogical, and

enriching experiences of reading.

My childhood story reminds us that there is no one

age or reason to read, value, and absorb these worlds of

children’s literature. In many households, space, time,

work, and social relationships ensure that there is no way

to read at will and in peace. Children’s literature makes

demands; it involves the “witchery” of story; it can lead

to “addiction” (Nell, 1988; Rugg & Murphy, 2006). Avid

readers, including booksellers, collectors, and scholars,

underscore this point in the genre they have created of

collections of quotations from others like them who have

never recovered from being infected with the “venom of

language” that left them in the joyful stupor of the fantasy

worlds of early childhood literature (Breakwell & Ham-

mond, 1994, p. 18).

Reading with young children requires time for snug-

gling and conversing. As children grow in their reading,

they need ample space for sprawling bodies and books

whose numbers and sizes may overwhelm the capacity of

available bookshelves. Children who read books demand

time for stop-action attention from adults willing to inspect

drawings, watch dramatic re-enactments, and listen to

retellings of tales. Childhood reading comes with a price,

literal and  gurative, in time, space, and commitment by

intimates who love their children and value reading as part

of the expression of that love.

My narrative reminds us that ways to meet and learn to

love children’s literature have always been divergent and

multiple and have not necessarily come with attentive par-

ents and grandparents who spend time reading and talking

with children. Learning to feel at home and to want to  ll

one’s home with objects, values, ideas, and even relation-

ships not experienced in childhood comes for some of us

only with adulthood. For some, neither the books nor the

time and space for conversations about books will ever

SHIRLEY BRICE HEATH

come. For others who have these gifts in childhood, the

accidents of life can erase their promise.

Storied Romance

Literacy educators hold tightly to the long-standing

happily-ever-after transformational effects of children’s

literature or the beloved teacher who instills a love of

books. Since the opening of the 18th century, the Anglo

world has repeatedly made use of this romance, weav-

ing it into children’s books and through ideals of family

literacy (cf. Lerer, 2008). Chapters in this volume attest

to the strong ties that children’s literature holds now and

has historically held in the values of middle- and upper-

class families. The ideology that links books with leisure,

literate identity, and well-roundedness encourages parents

to “cultivate” their children in an extended production

process (Lareau, 2003). They manage time, space, and

talk to ensure their children’s familiarity with books. They

look for performances and  lms, as well as accessories,

to extend the characters and contents of children’s books.

They take pleasure in their children’s language play, meta-

phors, and humor derived from bedtime stories. Parents

draw on children’s literature to tease, praise, chide, and

coax their children (cf. Wolf & Heath, 1992).

Some leisure time of parents goes to reading for plea-

sure. Family conversations reference books and  lms, and

outings include art museums with paintings whose narra-

tive origins lie in written texts. Parents often believe chil-

dren can acquire a fondness for science or mathematics on

their own, but reading and knowing books must be taught.

Educators and child-rearing guidebooks urge parents to

read to and with their children. Didactic recommenda-

tions proclaim the power of storybooks to instill, inspire,

enthrall, in uence, teach, enable, and direct the ways of

children. Children’s songs and musical experiences often

echo the lessons of books—from shapes, colors, and letters

of the alphabet to moral cautions. The cultural resources

that early childhood experiences with books offer are

believed to sustain lifelong habits of reading and even to

change the lives of children forever (cf. Fox, 2001; Meek,

Warlow, & Barton, 1977; Pennac, 2006)

For centuries, upwardly mobile and  nancially estab-

lished families of European, Anglo, and Scandinavian

societies have believed that reading instills discipline

and morality and bears a special relation to ethical action

(Miller, 1987). The stories of children’s worlds reinforce

religious, musical, and visual values, model and inspire

performance, and de ne not only what to stand for but

also how to stand up to the world.

Picture books and illustrated stories, as well as chap-

ter books, demonstrate the wit, curiosity, tenacity, and

shrewdness of the young. In all these accounts, the young

consistently out-maneuver adults, make friends with

non-human creatures, and enlist magic, fantasy, science

 ction, and a host of spirits to reshape the world to their

will. Children’s literature enables its heroes and heroines

to overcome risk, pursue and achieve the impossible, and

reconcile contradictions—all the while underscoring vi-

sions of the world to which adults around them subscribe

(Wolf, 2004). Children can be anything they wish and

travel anywhere on the “story road” (Hildreth, Felton,

Henderson, & Meighen, 1940). Parents, older siblings,

grandparents, librarians, bookshop owners, formal educa-

tors, authors, and edutainers—teachers all—have faith in

the “magic of reading.” Thus, the romance of children’s

literature and the wondrous potential of children merge

into a uni ed whole.

Work Narratives

All romances rely on expectation. Those that extol the

promise of picture books and written texts for children ex-

pect children and adults to have abundant leisure time free

from the time demands of work. Reading is the enemy of

chores and household tasks, for unlike storytelling, reading

stops all other actions. Literary authors speak of their need

to “hide,” “steal time,” “disappear,” or feign deafness to

avoid having to stop reading and to obey an adult’s call to

tasks. In homes and communities where family members

do craft work, gardening, home and yard maintenance,

food preparation and clean-up, and animal care, time for

reading must be stolen away from chores and responsibili-

ties. To read to or with a young child, adults step aside from

the demands of their surrounding work. When youngsters

begin to read for themselves, they must do so as solitary

beings making themselves at home in their chosen book,

disassociated from surrounding demands.

As a child, I had little chance for such disengage-

ment.

For me, stories were told either by my grandmother

or created in my own head in the midst of chores on my

grandmother’s small farm. I was an only child, born to

parents who had caught one another on the rebound from

prior too-early marriages. My father was a traveling sales-

man and refrigerator repairman; my mother a traveling

waitress fond of following her favorite customers home. I

have never known the full story of their life before me, and

by the time I was  ve, each had decided that for the most

part their lives were fuller and freer when I was not around.

For my part, their absence was normal, for my life was full

of play in work, choice of adventures, and the freedom to

create imaginary places, people, and narratives.

I spent most of my early life with my grandmother

in rural Virginia (in counties identi ed in 2008 as those

with the lowest life expectancy in the United States). The

woman I called “Granny” was really my mother’s aunt,

the sister of my mother’s birth mother, who had died giv-

ing birth to twins. My mother had the misfortune of being

the female of fraternal twins. Her father took her twin

brother, leaving my own mother to die. Granny rescued

the 3-pound infant and raised her. As soon as possible, my

THE BOOK AS HOME? IT ALL DEPENDS

mother left home, and I was a product of her wanderings

that she brought home to Granny.

When my grandfather died, my grandmother and I

moved to a two-room tarpaper house without electricity

while a cinderblock house was being built between our

temporary home and the dirt road that fronted the farm.

Our cinderblock house seemed to me a mansion, complete

with oil stove and electric lights. Granny had a bedroom;

so did I. There was an extra bedroom for my parents on the

rare occasions when they came independently or together.

I raised pigs and calves; my grandmother took care of the

chickens. We had a garden and a small orchard. The change

of seasons, care of animals, and rhythms of planting and

harvesting told their own stories—the narratives of life

and work for Granny and me.

On Sundays and sometimes early in the morning,

Granny sat in her chair at the window of her room, where

she had a front-row seat to everything that passed. There

she had “good light” for “reading” her Bible. Each day

she also sat quietly before picking up one of her several

small thin-lined notebooks. She bent her head close down

over her work as she laboriously wrote bits of sayings she

had learned from her parents and short poems memorized

during her few years of schooling. When I sat on her lap,

she retold the adventures of Daniel, Jonah, and other

young risk-taking males from the Old Testament. My

grandmother had barely  nished elementary school, and

she had gone to the local church up the road all her life.

Her grip on reading was precarious beyond the stories she

had heard again and again in Sunday School and church

services. Bible School had instilled in her and passed on

to me a joy in reciting Bible verses while we worked.

We practiced to prepare me for the competitions of Bible

School. Across the dirt road in front of our house was

the local Black church that had services once a month.

Granny and I went to stand at the back of the tiny church

with too few pews for the congregation. There, a deacon

taught me how to read a hymnbook. Granny and I held the

book together and sang our hearts out. Years later I knew

I had learned something else standing in the back of that

church: the printed word cannot restrain the soaring stories

of gospel music, testimonials, and sermons.

Before I started school, the only books that came into

my grandmother’s house arrived in our mailbox. They

carried inscriptions that read “To Shirley, a little girl

who likes to read.” They were signed with names like

“Chuck” and “Bob,” acquaintances of my mother. As a

child, I sometimes puzzled over how these people I had

never met knew of my existence or why they thought I

knew how to read or would even like to read. I remember

an over-sized book with the strange title “Bambi,” a very

long thin book of Mother Goose rhymes, and several Little

Golden Books about tailors, elves, brown puppies, and

ducklings. As strange to my grandmother as they were

to me, these books were slipped reverently into shelves

behind the front door.

When or how I learned to read, I don’t know. I learned to

recite the alphabet song my grandmother sometimes sang

as we picked string beans. Their shapes of lines and curls

went into letters of the alphabet—a welcome diversion as

Granny and I prepared beans for canning.

By the time I was old enough to go to school, my

father, pressured by his two younger sisters to take some

responsibility for me, hired as my foster family a couple

that my mother and father had met during their residence

in North Carolina. They lived in High Point, North

Carolina, where I could walk to the red brick elementary

school. I spent that  rst-grade year away from Granny,

holding onto the promise that I could come back to her

in the summer.

Sensed Memories

My foster mom, “Mi,” worked in a patent-leather purse

factory; my foster dad, Carl, was a milkman. They had one

child, Dick, a year older than I. They became my family

intermittently—at any point when my aunts pestered my

father too much about the absence of any “real schooling”

with my grandmother. There I could walk just up the road

to a three-room school that ran on the agricultural yearly

schedule, starting late in September after tobacco, the lo-

cal crop, had been harvested. So far as I ever knew, none

of the local White families included anyone who had ever

 nished secondary school. For most of us, school was a

palace of play, with its surrounding forest and meadows

and long recesses.

For the  rst grade, I lived with Mi and Carl and walked

to school each day. Bookcases with books lined the  rst-

grade room and the school library. Mi had bookcases in the

front room, and she sometimes read in the early evenings,

but Carl went to work at 3 a.m. each morning, and our

tiny house offered no well-lighted spaces for escape with a

book at night. In that  rst year of school, I discovered the

thrill of reading little bits of print for unexpected details.

My foster mother gave me my  rst spanking when, dur-

ing a bout of the measles, she found me, shut away in the

darkest area of the house, shaking the pennies from my

penny bank to read their dates with a  ashlight.

At school, we ended the year with a “second reader,

level two” hardback book entitled The Story Road (Hil-

dreth et. al., 1940), but we did not get to keep our readers.

By early May when I knew I would have to part with that

little orange-covered book  lled with stories of barnyard

and circus animals, I read the stories over and over again

so as to take them with me back to the farm. I wanted to

tell Granny stories from my book. As I prepared to leave

Mi at the beginning of that summer, she gave me a pack-

age wrapped in brown paper and told me to open it when

I got to Granny’s house. The car ride with my father took

forever. As soon as we reached the farm, the three of us

carefully removed the wrapping. There was The Story

Road (Hildreth et al., 1940). My father read the inscription:

SHIRLEY BRICE HEATH

“To a little girl who likes to read. From some one that loves

her very much, Mi and Dick.”

That summer I tried to interest Granny in the books

that had been secreted away behind the door. The pictures

of Bambi, Smoky the horse (James, 1926), and the wild

creatures of Thornton Burgess’ Old Mother West Wind

Series entertained us on nights when we were not too tired

to stay awake. On my birthday late that summer, Granny

gave me a package wrapped in a paper bag. Inside was

Elsie Dinsmore (Finley, n.d.). The book, with its faded

green cover, carried an inscription in a handwriting I knew

well: “Presented to Rosa May [sic] by Mamma Dec. 25,

1920. Besure [sic] to read it and tell me what you think

of Elsie D.” Granny had given this book to my mother

(Rosa Mae) the Christmas of her 10th year. I had never

seen the book. My own stories from my  rst-grade reader

and our sporadic summer evening reading had resurrected

Granny’s memory of a long-forgotten gift she had given

my mother more than two decades earlier.

For that summer’s birthday, as though to meet some

deep notion of what parents do when they cannot do what

others might expect of them, my father gave me a bookend

in the shape of a black Scotch Terrier. I did not go back to

Mi’s for school that year or the next or the next.

I spent most of my elementary school years with

Granny. I walked to the three-room seven-grade school

of forty-some pupils with its “library” of three shelves

of books kept behind the desk of the head teacher. She

taught seventh grade, and prize pupils in her classroom

won book-borrowing privileges. Otherwise, “books”

meant workbooks.

Black on White

Down the road from my grandmother’s house lived two

teachers at the local Black school, a large brick build-

ing boasting resources, bus transport, and a staff trained

at Hampton Institute, the historically Black college in

a nearby county. Aunt Berta was their mother and the

matriarch who lived in the big wooden house with the

detached kitchen in the backyard. From her porch, Aunt

Berta could see the smaller brick homes of all her children

set nearby under the large oak trees that surrounded her

property. Aunt Berta always welcomed me with a bear hug

and took me back to the kitchen for fresh corn bread and

buttermilk. When my chores were done at home, Granny

knew I might be down the road with Aunt Berta or back of

the big house playing with her grandchildren. Music, talk,

laughter, and an abundance of food and children marked

frequent family celebrations—a sharp contrast to the quiet

life Granny and I lived. Back at home, I had to tell Granny

who had come home to see Aunt Berta, who was getting

married, and who was building a new house. Then we

could unwrap the packet of food Aunt Berta always sent

home with me. Aunt Berta did not venture far from home,

but her family members stopped by to see Granny and visit

whenever they went up the road to the store. A decade later,

I realized they never came to the front door.

My grandmother and I were one of the few White fami-

lies in an area where Black farmers owned most of the land

and raised tobacco, corn, and large gardens. We looked

forward to late August when tobacco season began. In  elds

around the area, farmers pulled tobacco and brought it in

large mule-drawn slides to curing barns. There, children

handed bundles of tobacco to women who tied the tobacco

onto sticks the men placed high in barn lofts where curing

took place. We measured the weeks of tobacco season by

the staged smells of green leaves fresh from the  eld to the

pungent smoky odor of the yellowed dried leaves on the

sticks taken down from barn lofts and hauled to tobacco

auctions at the end of September. On water breaks, we

splashed one another and played with tobacco worms fat

from feeding on the green tobacco leaves.

By early October, the few White children watched

their Black playmates board school buses for transport

to the Black school 15 miles away. That school was a

new sprawling brick building. But the small three-room

elementary school for White students was plenty big

for the few of us. Unlike the Black churches that held

bi-weekly services, the two local White churches had

circuit preachers who came only once a month except

during the two weeks of summer Bible School. On Sunday

mornings, White families collected either in the back of

Black churches or in their own church to plan the annual

Homecoming, clean the cemetery, or hold an informal

Sunday School and sing-a-long.

White schoolteachers were “hired in” for the three-

room school, given a small house, and watched with a

cautious eye. Few stayed more than a year or so. A test

of their adaptation to local ways came in the speed with

which they honored our  exible attendance rules. They

also had to learn quickly that we required long recesses to

run home for chores or to complete our elaborate games

based on comic book characters, such as Batman and

Wonder Woman. How we got those comic books, I don’t

remember, for the nearest city was over 50 miles away.

But the comic books we shared among ourselves incited

vivid reenactments with weapons crafted from tree limbs

cut from the forest that surrounded the school.

Beyond the seventh grade, I walked to the paved road

intersection where a bus took me and the few White stu-

dents to the county seat, location of the small regional

secondary school. The school had no library, but it did

have a jousting  eld adjoining the fair grounds. The year’s

highlight, the county fair, featured a jousting tournament,

4-H booths, and competitions for the best chocolate cake,

biggest pig, and  nest rooster.

Late in my secondary school years, my mother returned

and decided to take Granny and me to south Florida. There

my mother worked as a seamstress in winter months.

In our small town—said to be the tomato capital of the

world—Blacks lived on the other side of the tracks, at-

THE BOOK AS HOME? IT ALL DEPENDS

tended their own high school, and almost never crossed

the tracks except to work in the tomato  elds. The house

where we stayed was very near the tracks on the “White”

side. I sometimes rode my bike to the tracks where I

could hear muf ed voices and laughter and catch refrains

of songs I had learned in the Black church at home in

Virginia. Now that my mother was around much of the

time, my grandmother told no stories and our household

lived in silence.

At high school, I met my  rst Puerto Ricans, Cubans,

Filipinos, Jews, and self-proclaimed atheists. Outsiders all,

individuals from these groups became my friends, and I

learned the stories of the Alvarado, Spitzer, and Mendoza

families and the travels that had brought them to south

Florida. My  tful peripatetic schooling left me woefully

behind all my classmates in every subject. I studied every

spare moment. My Spanish class, taught by a Puerto Rican

woman who spoke little English, topped my list of terrify-

ing experiences, for I had had no contact with any foreign

language other than a bit of Latin from the secondary

school in Virginia. I sought out more opportunities to be

with Puerto Rican and Cuban friends, confessing my fear

of the teacher and the language, and, most of all, of being

called on to speak in class. As though to prove to myself

that I was not an utter failure at this language, I turned

more and more to reading Spanish literature, which I did

with ease. My best-spoken phrases were those I used in

private with the teacher to ask to borrow books in Spanish,

so I could “practice” the language. She started me with

children’s books and allowed me to graduate to novels and

classics from Latin America and Spain. My practice with

the language remained largely restricted to silent listening

and solitary reading.

At 16, I went to work as a grocery store clerk, and I

occasionally baked pecan pies to sell to neighbors. I never

remember going to the school library, though I found my

way to the town library, which was near the grocery store

where I worked. There I found the resources I needed to

write research papers to meet class requirements. I became

editor of the school newspaper, and in the days when

typesetting and “going to press” were literal activities,

I spent most nights of my senior year after work at the

small press that published local small-town newspapers.

There the typesetter talked to me of books, asked about

my reading, and gave me ideas on how to edit, inspire

younger writers on the newspaper staff, and read beyond

the headlines and obvious stories of newspapers.

Never wanting to displease or disappoint, I thought I

should turn all the typesetter’s questions into action. One

of my self-identi ed atheist friends was a reader, and

one day I found my way to her house to ask her about

what she read. She drew from the pile of paperbacks:

“Start with these.” I found solitary reading for pleasure

outside of class assignments or religious contexts strange

and recalled the times when as a young child, my grand-

mother and I leafed through the gift books sent to me by

my mother’s acquaintances. If Granny found me reading

alone, she would ask: “Don’t you have something you

should be doing?” Her “should be doing” never included

reading without instrumental purpose. Her disapproval and

cautionary tone stayed with me through my senior year

of high school. I read alone, but with guilt, for now I was

reading books I could not share with her.

By the middle of my senior year, the guidance counselor

asked what I was doing about college. I looked at her in

puzzlement. She called in my mother, having recognized

the need to convince her that college was a possibility for

me. A friend was applying to the University of Chicago; I

decided to do so as well. My father, who weighed in at that

point from afar, nixed that idea by declaring any college

north of the Mason Dixon line off limits for me.

The college I would attend came down to a choice be-

tween a small women’s college in Georgia and Wake Forest

in North Carolina. My mother heard that the Georgia col-

lege would feed me well (I weighed 99 pounds and stood

5’8” tall), and Wake Forest was a Southern Baptist school.

But in the choice between food and God, the latter won. I

headed to Winston Salem in the  rst year that Wake Forest

admitted females. The campus banned dancing, required

that dating be only double-dating, and insisted female

students wear hats to compulsory Sunday chapel.

The summer before I was to enter Wake Forest, a single

event shaped the course of my life’s work and my future

of trying to understand families and children in relation

to language, literacy, culture, and belief systems. Thomas

Mendoza, my Filipino friend from high school, was driv-

ing through Virginia on his way to college in the Northeast.

I wrote to ask him to come by my grandmother’s farm

in Virginia. When my parents learned of the invitation,

they issued a de nitive “no,” explaining that his dark

skin proscribed such a visit. On this denial pivoted all

the accumulated observations of exclusion, racism, and

discrimination I had seen but not fully reckoned with in

Virginia or Florida. I had been too busy just playing and

working to sort out any analysis of the strangeness of the

givens and the choices that made up my unique world.

Perhaps my blindness came because in Virginia I had

neither witnessed nor felt exclusion. Blacks and Whites

went to different schools, but the Black schools were bet-

ter. Blacks and Whites worked together, but the Blacks

owned most of the land and hired us White children to

work as “hands” in tobacco season. Granny and I went

in and out of our neighbors’ houses and shared garden

bounty. We gathered with friends in the back of Black

churches to hear sermons and sing hymns. The Mendoza

denial brought all that I had not seen into glaring detail

in my memory. Uneasy in spirit and full of shame, I left

for college that fall.

After a year of immersion in European history and

Spanish literature, and a host of courses in mathematics,

I left Wake Forest. The precipitating event came in the

spring of my freshman year when I declared mathematics

SHIRLEY BRICE HEATH

as my major. My professor called me to his of ce a week

later. He counseled against my decision: “You cannot

enter what is a man’s world.” Denial and discrimination

had twice cut short my choices. Now I made my own

choice. I ran away to Mississippi to work in the Civil

Rights movement.

There I lived on the generosity of Black families. I tu-

tored children in Black schools and took part in meetings

and protests. Now I began to seek out children’s books that

related to the lives of the children, families, and churches

that took me in. The few books I could  nd carried little

of the richness of oral stories or the relevance to contem-

porary times I sought. Wonderful as Ezra Jack Keats’ The

Snowy Day (1962) was, neither the children in Mississippi

nor I found much there in common with our experience

of either climate or environment. Night after night, Sun-

day after Sunday, I listened to grandmothers, aunts and

uncles, and parents tell stories, stage performances of their

neighbors’ lives, and plead with and sing for a god they

believed knew them as characters and shaped the plotline

of their days ahead.

From Mississippi, I went to southern California to work

as a part-time substitute teacher in “special education” with

migrant farm workers’ children with whom my spoken

Spanish now  ourished. By now, I knew the work of my

life would be to understand the shaping of cultural differ-

ences and the place of language(s) within everyday ways

and values. Finances meant that I moved often, each time

enrolling in a different college along with correspondence

schools. As a result, I  nished college with concentrations

in Anthropology, Sociology, Education, Spanish literature,

and English. Readings required across these  elds provided

some answers to a few of my many questions. But none

acknowledged the role of stories, oral and written, for

children and adults hard at work shaping and reshaping

their lives and trying to make words and ideas do things

for them and the social world around them.

Searching Stories

Forces that mold what goes into our memories and values

remain largely hidden from us. Only from time to time do

we believe we know what de ned who we now are. For

most of us, any such revelatory insights bear little de n-

able relationship with who we were yesterday or will be

several years hence.

Ken Macrorie and others whose livelihoods are made

in industries that surround children’s reading (from pub-

lishers to librarians and educators) urge consistency in

the course of each individual’s history with language and

literacy. They trust in the causal and directional powers

of socialization into literary culture. Yet reliable patterns

based on single chains of in uence are more often wished

for than achieved. A generalized trajectory cannot account

for the variation of routes that may lead at any point to

respect, reverence, and fascination for books.

After college, doctoral work in anthropological linguis-

tics and Latin American Studies at Columbia University

took me to Mexico to study the history of language and

literacy from the arrival of Cortés until the mid-20th cen-

tury. From 17th-century archives through contemporary

practices in indigenous villages, the power of oral stories

for children came through again and again. Friars sent

from Castile to Mexico learned the indigenous languages

by collecting children within the walls of the monasteries

and then listening through the thin walls of the children’s

dormitory to the stories and legends the older children told

the younger ones to calm their fright. Language policies

of the Castilian Empire in the New World resonated with

expectations that children and their stories were the best

teachers for the missionaries (Heath, 1972).

In the 1980s, my teaching at the Bread Loaf School of

English fed my anthropological interest in how readers and

writers of contemporary American  ction connected with

one another throughout the 20th century. I began that work

by hanging out in workshops that creative writers attended

and by observing readers and writers in their separate

environments. In the  ction sections of bookstores in 27

cities across the United States, I loitered, asking every

 fth client who bought a work of  ction what led them

to the purchase and if I might phone them at set intervals

in the coming months to see how their reading had gone.

Writers from creative writing workshops I attended al-

lowed me to observe them over a full week at random

times during a single year. I followed this pattern for eight

years, socializing in literary events across the country with

major contemporary writers reading and talking with their

devoted readers.

One of the young novelists I met during the course of

my study was Jonathan Franzen. Initially, he had resisted

my project and “the whole idea behind it.” Several years

later, he entered the national scene with his award-winning

novel The Corrections (2002). Critics saw him as a young

writer to be reckoned with in the future.

In April of 1996, Jonathan published an article in

Harper’s Magazine entitled “Perchance to Dream: In the

Age of Images, A Reason to Write Novels.” A major New

York newspaper had asked him to write a piece on the

topic of “the great American novel.” When he undertook

the task, he remembered my research. With my blessing,

he wove my  ndings into his re ections on his own life

as reader and writer. He noted that novelists dislike social

scientists and the idea that anyone could poke into matters

of readership. He described me as a “beacon in the murk”

that inadvertently jarred him from his depression about

the state of the literary world and of his place as writer

in that world. Most meaningful to Franzen from my pok-

ing about in the ways of readers and writers of American

 ction was the fact that I could give names and reasons

to his own childhood discovery of literature. I had found

two key factors in the lives of readers who habitually read

“serious”  ction as adults. The  rst was experience as a

THE BOOK AS HOME? IT ALL DEPENDS

child with reading models—intimates who valued reading

and encouraged others to take up this good habit. Franzen

solemnly reported that he could not remember seeing ei-

ther of his parents read a book, except when they read to

him as a child. He could not declare them good models of

reading or even promoters of the habit. He smirked, think-

ing he had demolished my social science “ ndings.”

I continued: “But there’s a second kind of reader.

There’s the social isolate—the individual who from an

early age feels different from everyone else and who may

or may not read as a child, but will, if fortunate, later

discover literature and  nd others sorting out their unique

destiny in life.” His silence permitted me to go on. I said

to him: “Readers of the social isolate variety are much

more likely to become writers than those of the modeled-

habit variety. You, Jonathan, are one of those socially

isolated individuals desperately wanting to connect with

your own past, a substantive imaginary world, and your

intense lonely existence. You want these to be of some

consequence in the future.”

Franzen’s piece for Harper’s Magazine argued that

writers, almost by de nition, feel estranged from the

world around them and most comfortable constructing

and inhabiting an imagined world (1996, reprinted 2003;

see also Franzen, 2007). The writer Don DeLillo had told

me, as he later wrote to Franzen, that “the writer leads,

he doesn’t follow.” This is because the dynamic behind

the creative act will always live in the writer’s mind and

not in questions the writer ponders about acceptance or

readership. In response to his article for Harper’s Maga-

zine, Franzen received many supporting testimonies to

con rm the ties between loneliness and imagination in

the lives of writers.

Readers wrote to say that they too were lonely and

found joy, solace, and togetherness in reading the com-

plexity of the lives of others. Echoing through these letters

were voices railing against the death of either the novel or

of book reading. Readers and writers both do what they

do to  ll a need—generally unexpressed though keenly

felt and certainly denied to the individual’s harm (Fox,

1992). Society simply had to keep books and reading

alive. Though romance, mystery, and even compulsion

surround ideas of literature, whether for children or adults,

reality lies in the cultural apprenticeship they afford and

the company they provide for lonely writers who will be

society’s keenest critics.

Uncommon Readers

In 2007, the British playwright Alan Bennett  ctionally

portrayed his monarch, Queen Elizabeth II, as a reader

who came quite late in life to reading  ction and poetry.

As she did so, four changes came over her that she attri-

butes to her new self-identity as reader. First, she wants

to talk about her reading with others. Then, she wants to

meet with the authors themselves to probe their motivation

and inspiration for writing. Along the way, she organizes

principles of her reading that derive from to-do and do-

not-do lists, for she wants to read all the works of authors

she comes to admire. For a long time in her reading, she

tells herself to avoid the writings of authors whose char-

acters live their lives in social classes with which she has

little familiarity but considerable responsibility, but she

overcomes this limitation. Ultimately, she determines that

she will co-mingle in the world of writers by becoming a

writer herself. She moves from recording her reading in

her diary to wishing to shape her responses and her own

creative worlds into written texts.

Despite the overdrawn humor and satirical framing of

his book, Bennett hit a nerve for those among us who see

something of our own later immersion in the world of

books in the Queen’s march of revelations. Like her, we

have experienced the disdain of those who equate reading

with shirking other responsibilities. Like her, during our

daily routine duties, our thoughts remain on pages in the

middle of a chapter cut short by the call of responsibili-

ties others thrust upon us. And like the Queen, we have

lost consciousness of outward appearance and relished

curling up before the  re in our favorite baggy clothes

and warmest socks. We have expanded the comfort zone

that the escape of reading offers so that we may distance

ourselves from the intruding world. Ultimately, we have

come to decide we too can write, and we have turned out

our own books or found ways to promote books to others2

(cf. Gilbar, 1989).

Like Bennett’s Queen, I too took up writing books. But

I did so early in my career with an eagerness to explore

and express what I learned about language and its uses in

oral and written forms. Unlike the Queen, however, I was

fascinated by more than words: I was drawn also to the

powers of visual illustration. During  eldwork in Mexico,

I spent time with not only archival remnants of Mexico’s

past but also in sites of excavation of monuments, settle-

ments, and religious centers in Oaxaca, Puebla, the Federal

District, and the Yucatan Peninsula. There texts came along

with sculptured pro les of individuals and events carved

into the stonework of panels that surrounded temples and

public buildings.

Having completed my book on Mexico (Heath, 1972),

I settled in the Piedmont Carolinas to teach in the midst

of the initial turmoil of desegregation, busing, and la-

ments by White teachers that they could not understand

the language of their Black students. At  rst I spent my

out-of-school time between Black and White working-

class communities, working in gardens, gossiping on

front porches, helping can food, and attending church

and Bible School. I gradually wore a natural pathway

into Black and White middle-class communities, where

parents followed the romantic idea that early experiences

with books would ensure their children’s school success

and establish lifelong reading habits.

In White working-class communities, I watched parents

SHIRLEY BRICE HEATH

read religious stories for children, point to illustrations

and letters in alphabet books, and talk through books

that recounted simple “true” stories written for children

about pets, farm animals, and birds and small animals of

the  elds and forests. For these families, reading in and

about the Bible held highest place in time and honor. Their

questions asked for straight and familiar answers—no

opinions or chases into imaginary places.

In Black working-class communities, I relived my

years in the family compounds just down the road from

my home with Granny. I heard gossip laced with jokes,

family stories, and tales full of fun and moral lessons.

Entire families used newspapers, letters, and circulars as

prompt and props for stories.

For White working-class families, the exaggerated

stories of their Black counterparts seemed to be nothing

but lies. For Black working-class families, the stories their

White counterparts told were just plain boring. My book,

Ways with Words (1983), about the ways of reading and

telling stories in these two communities laid bare just how

uncommon some readers are.

In the decade in which my book was published, aca-

demics in  elds from anthropology to religion began to

study what being literate could mean across cultures and

situations. Again and again, these works showed the in-

tertwining of literate habits with different norms of time,

space, relationships, as well as religious, academic, and

commercial incentives (Barton & Hamilton, 1998; Bo-

yarin, 1992; Scribner & Cole, 1981; Street, 1984, 1993;

Taylor, 1983). Books, their accompanying artifacts and

values, and their relation to children’s socialization and

adult habits of child-reading could not be considered apart

from socioeconomic class, geographic location, religious

beliefs, or cultural milieu. The only “common readers”

were, in fact, those created out of the cultural habits and

ideals elevated in Western societies where reading held a

place right up there with morality and advancement in class

status. The majority of the world was  lled, instead, with

“uncommon readers,” albeit of a very different sort than

the Queen Elizabeth of Alan Bennett’s  ction.

By the early 1990s, the unquestionable importance of

sociocultural context to the structures and uses of language

was  rmly established by social scientists and historians.

Professional educators acknowledged the idea, but gener-

ally could not  t the wide-ranging differences into their

 xed curricula and assessment tools for teaching reading.

Educational policy, texts, and tests in the United States

generally ignored the unique language and cultural pat-

terns of African American communities in the South as

well as the North.

Meanwhile, in both the United States and other eco-

nomically advanced nations, migrations, relocations of

refugees, and absorption of asylum seekers further chal-

lenged  xed normative ideas of routes to literacy and

academic achievement. Motivations behind migration

varied greatly for newcomers, as did the extent and type

of their prior experience with either written language or

formal schooling. Some read in non-alphabetic scripts,

some only in a non-Indo-European language. Others had

little experience with schooling or literate expectations.

Yet the norms and modes of teaching reading narrowed.

The appeal of phonics accelerated while arguments for

children’s literature that had previously held for homog-

enous populations fell away as inappropriate and ineffec-

tive. Decoding became the goal. Comprehension according

to formulaic dictates of “main idea” and “supporting evi-

dence” became the primary purpose of such pedagogical

practices. Education policymakers viewed interpretation

and imaginative language, along with creative learn-

ing, as impossible with children vastly different in oral

language  uency and background experiences. Learning

to read mattered more than reading to learn. Surveys of

book buying and reading for pleasure showed that both

were on the decline. The “death of literature” was sure to

come with the reduction of print and growth of images,

technological shortcuts in communication, and shifts in

habits of work and leisure (Kernan, 1990).

Nevertheless, children’s literature and its power to in-

spire learning and to initiate a lifelong love of books and

reading lived on in the intuitional wisdom of con dent

teachers and many middle-class parents whose family life

was increasingly feeling pressure from the information

economy and its partner technologies. Literary and art

critics continued to hold onto the Western-model-tells-

all-we-need-to-know framework. Books on reading and

its values across the ages of individuals and of Western

history proliferated (cf. Manguel, 1996). Romance is a

dif cult thing to dislodge.

Making Images, Expanding Modes,

Shrinking Words

Particularly challenging to established thinking about

children’s reading and their literature have been picture

books and illustrated books, comics and graphic novels

(Eisner, 1996; Fox, 2008; McCloud, 1993). In such works,

image often dominates word. As images expand in their

conveyance of meaning, words shrink in their own power

or work in sync to retain it. Authorities beyond the child

reader lose control over interpretation. Through images,

young readers can take charge.

Once the child has learned to speak, picture books en-

gage child and adult relatively equitably. Infant laughter,

gesture, and imitation are soon followed by the child’s

growing takeover of the story beyond the written words.

Characters and their moves and motivations belong to

the child who now reads images to take them beyond the

written words. Adults read for meaning while children

look for meaning. With the discovery of comics, children

carry their expertise in reading images further into imita-

tion of entire scenes with their friends and sometimes

into their own attempts to draw graphic narratives. The

THE BOOK AS HOME? IT ALL DEPENDS

visual can quickly outpace the verbal. For decades, young

readers have charged into the “plague” of comic books

and all that it represents by its open inclusion of readers

of the lower classes, derision of social norms, promotion

of consumerism, and representation of the horrors of

“man’s inhumanity to man” (Gordon, 1998; Hajdu, 2008;

Spiegelman, 1986, 1991, 1994). With graphic novels, the

imagined world within the page and beyond belongs al-

most entirely to the young (Adams, 2008). The intimacy

of the adult-child reader dyad fades away.

Concern over the graphics of narrative derives from the

long-standing linkage of children’s literature with control

over the moral, behavioral, and linguistic futures of chil-

dren. Children’s literature developed and has continued in

relatively few regions of the world—the majority of those

steeped in Anglo traditions, Judeo-Christian values, and

often the tying of nationalism to moral certainty.

Early in their history, Scandinavian nations enlisted

religious leaders to reinforce the habit of parents reading

with their children, withholding services of the Church

to resisting parishioners. Along with their empire, the

British spread a high estimation of reading with children

and entrusted books to build foundations for commit-

ment to hard work, individualism, academic promise, and

commercial success. American colonies, more than any

others, renewed Protestant faith in reading the Word for

life guidance and placed responsibility on parents to bring

up their children as believers and practitioners of Biblical

truths (see Stevenson, this volume). Sunday School books,

pamphlets, daily devotional readings, and later video  lms,

DVDs, and illustrated music books expanded meanings

of ancient dicta in contemporary life.

The history of visual art in the Western world leaves

little doubt about the spiritual convictions behind the

idealized image of mother and child reading together

in intimate pose with a book. European and American

painters have given us the classic metaphor of the reading

mother through Mary, the mother of Jesus, who becomes

spiritual authority reading with her child as novitiate. The

earliest now-familiar rendering of this narrative comes

from Simone Martini’s 14th-century depiction of the

Annunciation. Medieval and Renaissance artists repeat-

edly portrayed the Virgin Mary startled from her reading

by Gabriel’s announcement of the forthcoming birth of

Jesus, the Christ child. Uses of light, the cast of the eyes

of the reader, and the positioning for the perspective

of the viewer outside the paintings combine to re ect

absorption, tranquility, and solitude in the presence of

book as altar (Adler & Bollmann, 2005). The handling

and elevated placement of the Bible as the Word during

Protestant church services echo these sentiments of Judeo-

Christian art. Such visual narratives portray the duality

of being both outside the mundane world and inside the

sacred realm of certainty, loving care, and promise. The

family Bible in quiet times of intimacy leads to reenact-

ment. Granny had never seen a work of Western visual

art, but she knew how to take her Bible and sit me on her

lap where our reading encircled us.

Women Who Read Are Dangerous

However, an oppositional genre of painting has told an-

other story. From the Middle Ages forward, artists have

suggested that reading may lead the weak and innocent

away from the sanctity of home and into danger, foul play,

and wrongly-placed passion. The romance of reading has,

until recently, largely ignored any such idea. But by the

late 20th century, art critics began to deconstruct details

of classical works of art. This scholarship, along with the

growing body of research on women readers by feminist

writers, revealed images of women reading letters and

other materials that could lead women into danger or even,

more menacing, make them dangerous in uences. The

book as home, retreat, and reliable source of knowledge

could be inciting resistance or rebellion.

These paintings suggest the potential of book reading,

especially for women weak in resolve, to disrupt their

devotion to family, their home, and their chastity. Images

in these paintings show that reading stops time and action

and allows viewers to read into images the secret desires of

women. Jacob Ochtervelt’s La Requệte amoureuse (1670)

and Johannes Vermeer’s The Love Letter (ca. 1669–1670)

tell more than is seen. When these artists portray facial ex-

pressions of women reading book or letter, viewers across

the centuries have imagined lovers, plans of escape, and

inclinations to temptation beyond the bonds of propriety.

Les femmes qui lisent sont dangereuses [Women who read

are dangerous] is a volume of paintings of women lost in

reading through the ages (Adler & Bollmann, 2005). The

images remind viewers that books and their secrets may

stir in women the disobedient nature and weakness of

will of their progenitor Eve. They may step out of place

and wish to be “the woman on top” (Davis, 1965). Yet

the message is that they must not succumb to either the

temptations of others or their own ambitions (Liedtke,

2001). They must not lose themselves in nature, a favorite

suggestion artists have repeatedly made in their paintings

of women reading in open  elds, on park benches, and

before a window looking out onto a garden of rambunc-

tious  owers (cf. Updike, 2005 on “looking”).

Reading invites self-knowledge as well as exploration of

distant places and unsanctioned behaviors. Reading takes

one away from home to places where authority, ownership,

and responsibility differ. Maps and legal documents, along

with instruments for measuring and recording,  gure in

the background of many paintings of individuals reading

and hint of multiple forms of “accounting.” We must take

measure of ourselves, but there are many ways to do so.

Reading books can dislodge the weak and uninitiated—

women and children—from received values that seem not

to account for love or desire for freedom. Books introduce

subversive ideas and lead women and the young to imagine

SHIRLEY BRICE HEATH

behaviors and relations unaccountable in society’s ways

of measuring us. Reading may give women pleasure when

their lives offer little else. La Liseuse, a Renoir (1877)

portrait entitled “The Reader,” became synonymous with

a woman reader “lost in a book” and likely therefore to

shirk her responsibilities as wife and mother.

Some painters portrayed women with books as resistant

to the world of external power. Impressionists often jux-

taposed the woman’s inner world of peace in a book with

the external world of upheaval (see, for example, Claude

Monet’s La Gare Saint-Lazarem, 1877). Female artists,

such as Gwen John (1911), perhaps best known for her Girl

Reading at the Window, made women reading a favorite

theme in their work. The 1970s awakening to the subject of

female artists consistently points to their serene portrayals

of “the reading woman” (with her child or children) (cf.

Barlow, 1999; Fine, 1978/1995; Schur, 1991).

But the quiet world of women reading changed after

World War I when women were vitally needed in the

workplace. Once called upon to work outside the home,

women no longer had to read books to enter the world of

dangers and temptations. They were now in the middle

of them in a world of war and work. Throughout the 20th

century, the realities of women in the workforce eroded

the ideal of mothers having time and place to read at home

with their children. By the end of the century, infants and

toddlers went off to caregivers outside the home for much

of each day; their evenings and mornings with parents

held little time for reading. The image of mother at leisure

to read with her child disappeared from Western art and

norms of family life.

Dislodged and Dislocated

The idea that written texts undermine authority through

alternative readings began well before the printing

press. Storyboard narratives within medieval illustrated

manuscripts and stained glass windows of cathedrals took

readers and worshipers beyond Biblical text. In illustrated

manuscripts of the Middle Ages lie the origins of comic

books, graphic novels, books with illustrations, and chil-

dren’s picture books. This era established the ability of

images to expand modes and shrink the power of words

and bears examination when we turn to the question of

what contemporary children read and the relative extent

of image, print, and talk in their everyday worlds (Kress,

2003). Here the issue is not so much that written texts

may lead the weak away from duty, morality, and ethical

behavior, but that images, even more than words, explode

with unpredictable meaning.

Borders of illuminated manuscripts, as well as sidebars

to the Biblical narratives depicted in stained glass windows

of medieval churches, tell of artistic license. Vignettes, the

term used for borders of medieval illustrated manuscripts,

contained images that suggested stories that only sometimes

related to Biblical texts (Watson, 2003). Vignettes that ap-

peared alongside the text and within initials that opened

textual materials included scenes of everyday life along

with fantasy and foolhardiness. Monkeys covered their

ears, grotesque animals frolicked, children teased dogs,

and wives berated their husbands (cf. Stallybrass & White,

1986). Monks and scribes who illustrated manuscripts

slipped into their images license to let the mind wander,

question, and turn cynical (Heath & Wollach, 2007).

Illustrated manuscripts and stained glass windows of

cathedrals may be the  rst crossover texts of Western

history. For example, the windows gave parishioners in

cold medieval cathedrals incentive to look up to  nd well-

known Biblical characters moving through their narratives

in grouped story-board-like panels. For children, the ap-

peal must have been in the  oating images—the butter y,

industrious squirrel, and bird on its way to build a nest.

These designs were child-like and child-ready as were

embellishments buried in garment folds and background

scenes of distant castles. Cathedral windows were the kind

of text and image artists believed children and adults might

like to read. Text and illustration worked together and yet

apart from one another.3

Chapbooks of the 18th century continued the pesky

trend of working text and illustration into intimate partner-

ships that sometimes quarreled with one another and at

other times joined peacefully. Chapbooks used the license

of image to let young readers see the lives of the poor, the

renegade, and the miscreant. Picture books and illustrative

didactic materials created by educated mothers in the home

to support their children’s reading sustained the inclusive-

ness of chapbooks (see Arizpe & Styles, this volume;

Heath, 2009). Children could look through the visual lens

of the stories of their less fortunate counterparts.

Comic books of the 20th century do the same, telling

stories of war, racial and ethnic divisions, violent crimes,

and supernatural powers that contrast dramatically with

the relatively tame stories of discovery and adventure

rendered only in print (Hajdu, 2008; Heath & Bhagat,

1997). American, British, and European illustrators differ

in use and extent of detail, suggesting national variation in

assessment of when and how young readers can work out

ambiguities and draw judgments on their own from images

and text. In the 21st century, comic books joined graphic

novels in their appeal to the shrinking attention spans of

young people. Films and video games animated images

and added sound effects, further reducing words—even

in the spoken mode. Hand wringing over the dominance

of image over text was inevitable. Of cial reports, such as

Reading at Risk (National Endowment for the Arts, 2004)

and To Read or Not to Read (National Endowment for the

Arts, 2007), declared the decline in both amount of time

youngsters spent reading and their comprehension skills

with extended texts. Public media and educational reports

lamented that young people not only read less now than in

the past; they understood less of what they read.

Debates continue, with extremists certain that not only

THE BOOK AS HOME? IT ALL DEPENDS

is literature “dead,” but the entire publishing industry is in

peril. Still, moderates and advocates of images in every

learning life view the widening range of modes and media

young people use to read, write, and act in the world as a

welcome though drastic change (Kress, 2003; Spitz, 1999).

They argue the need to view the current rise of image, per-

formance, and autonomy—as well as imagination—among

young people as a desirable challenge and expansionist

opportunity for educators (Buckingham, 2003; Doherty,

2002; Flood, Heath, & Lapp, 2008; Hobbs, 2007).

But this opportunity comes with a price. Adults trained

in guided reading and interpretation of print have little

understanding of how the young actually see and inter-

pret images and print in relation to one another and layer

meanings through multiple media. A sense of dislocation

prevails for adults who hesitate to invest in learning how

to navigate visual texts from comic books to on-line

multi-party role-playing games. On the other hand, young

people see themselves as disconnected from resources and

identities that might guide them in ways to deepen skills

and knowledge. The most astute young feel the dislocation

coming for them in a world where their skills with enter-

tainment and diversion via the internet will be no match for

rapidly increasing computing power and electronic control

over their lives (Heath & Wollach, 2007). Adults feel their

past disconnects them from the present; young people see

their present dislocated from the future. The romance of

children’s literature seems distant indeed.

Why Do We Care?

In the history of literacy studies, few topics have generated

as many words of confession and conviction as reading

and writing. Aristotle and Plato held strong views, based

on their own lives and protections of the State. Religions

of the world have celebrated vision as our greatest sense,

and their evocation of the eye as the soul of human essence

reminds us that we are knowledge makers and interpreters.

We speak of cognitive understanding as “seeing,” “gain-

ing a perspective,” having a viewpoint,” and “glimpsing

meaning.” Scientists, artists, philosophers, and theologians

have let us look over their shoulder as they read and left

us their accounts of transformation brought about through

their reading of words and interpreting of visual images

that reveal narratives fundamental to life.

Judgments such as these lead individuals to be unduly

self-conscious about their lives of reading and writing.

How much? What kind? And for what?

When I ask these questions of myself, I admit that my

life with reading started late. In the anger and violence of

Civil Rights in Mississippi, I felt helpless. It was the same

when I confronted in California educational institutions’

exclusion of migrants from their language and culture. All

I could see to do was learn; perhaps books could prepare

me to know how to change things. I had to catch up for

lost time.

It took me more time to overcome the silence of my

childhood and to learn that conversations about ideas had

to come along with book reading.

I threw myself into literature and the social sciences,

burying any memory of my exclusion in college from fur-

ther study of mathematics. Research on people and their

ways of living and thinking came naturally to me. I liked

listening and looking in silence. Fieldwork in Mexico and

archival discoveries opened to me past and present con-

trasts in values and uses of literacy across languages and

cultures. A keen observer of human behavior, I was never

satis ed with only what I could see in the present scene

before me. I had been fooled by that complacency in my

childhood. Now I questioned every form of exclusion and

use of language—oral and written. I searched for origins,

reasons, and consequences. What were the personal pains

and joys, the current shaping forces and those of history?

A career in linguistic anthropology and social history fell

into place gradually and certainly without long-term goal-

directed planning. My reading was eclectic and frantic, the

need to know relentless. Yet my life of scholarship was still

void of extended talk about books. I read alone.

Extended conversations with books came in my head

as I wrote books. I typed Telling Tongues (1972), based on

archival research and  eldwork in Mexico, on an unfurling

roll of shelf paper fed into the typewriter so as not to have

to stop to insert separate sheets of paper.

When bilingual education became a national possibility

in the mid-1970s, I wanted to help. I spent time in Wash-

ington, D.C. with fellow sociolinguists and educators.

Slowly my writing and reading became less dependent

on my solo conversations with my reading and writing.

Expanded opportunities for conversation came when

desegregation of Carolina schools raised questions about

relations, linguistic and behavioral, between Whites and

Blacks. I spent time in local communities and classrooms

talking with teachers and children about their learning. I

traveled to state capitals of South and North Carolina to

lose myself in letters and diaries of plantation owners and

small-town people whose lives centered on farming and

raising tobacco and evolved into millwork with the coming

of textile mills in the 1920s.

I  lled the lives of my young children with books

but without knowing good from bad, rich from shallow.

Grocery store racks and the school library provided their

books. Marriage, divorce, remarriage, and a move to

Stanford University just as my children ended primary

school brought possibilities I had never imagined. My

husband, Charles Ferguson, was a prominent linguist

whose love of language, distant places, and cultural sup-

ports for literacy was as intense as my own. Also an only

child, he had grown up in working-class Philadelphia. As

a young boy, he had been free to explore the city’s many

bookstores, hear other languages, and explore language

in the many religions of the city. Our household was  lled

with children’s literature and talk of politics, travel, and

SHIRLEY BRICE HEATH

languages. Visitors from around the world came to our

home in Palo Alto, and we traveled to parts of the world

where numerous languages and cultures competed for

political and social legitimation.

At Stanford University, I met Shelby Wolf, a young

mother of two girls whose early childhoods with literature

differed immensely from anything I had ever imagined.

Together we talked for hours about how to interpret her

 eldnotes documenting her children’s talk about literature,

dramatic reenactments, and entry into solitary reading. We

discovered together the writings of other scholars who had

also documented their children’s lives with books. We

brought this work together in our analysis of children’s

worlds of reading (Wolf & Heath, 1992).

Children’s literature presented itself as another  eld

in which I could feel simultaneously the panic and joy of

catching up. By happenstance, several years later, I learned

of the existence of an early 18th-century manuscript

collection of children’s literature in the Lilly Library at

Indiana University. Over nearly a decade, I studied Brit-

ish history while analyzing the nearly 500 pieces in the

“Nursery Library” (see Arizpe & Styles, this volume). I

was “possessed” by the quest to learn about Jane Johnson,

the maker of the collection (cf. Byatt, 1990). British schol-

ars of children’s literature Morag Styles, Victor Watson,

and Evelyn Arizpe joined me in the search to know more

about Johnson’s life. Occasions for conversation, debate,

and museum exhibitions, conferences, and books followed

(Heath, 1997; Hilton, Styles & Watson, 1997; Styles &

Arizpe, 2009).

Simultaneously, I was immersing myself and young

ethnographers from Stanford in the lives of urban youth

living in under-resourced neighborhoods across the United

States. Theirs was a world different from my own and

from any romantic notions about books in early childhood

as essential to learning in later life. We studied young

people who found their way to community organizations

in their early teens to join theatre and music groups, artist

cooperatives, and community service projects. They took

up reading for pleasure, often motivated by the collabora-

tive work of the group. But they also relished risk-taking,

challenge, and long conversations. Talking about what

they had read or were learning became socially accept-

able among peers and adults who shared their interests.

Talk motivated reading that they could take into action,

contemplation, and further accumulation and testing of

information (Heath & Roach, 1999; Heath & Smyth, 1999;

Heath & Soep, 1998).

Meanwhile, I continued to follow the Black and White

families of communities I had begun to study in the 1970s.

The twists and turns of their lives took them far away from

the South we knew in those days. Within two decades,

their de nitions of family, social life, religious values, op-

portunity, race, and work bore no resemblance to the lives

I had captured in print in Ways with Words (1983/1996;

Heath, 1990). I wrote and continue to write to document

the dynamic of their mobile existence as individuals and

families in “liquid times” (Bauman, 2000).

Knowing books, talking ideas, and seeing the world

is sure to dislodge certainties—one’s own and those that

others try to force on us. For me, sweeping generalizations

about language, culture, youth, childhood, race, gender,

family, and tenets of socialization were boulders to be

pushed away in order to open landscapes of difference,

possibilities, and human capacities. The issue of difference

is not that it is there, but how much difference we allow

it to make for us.

When we are in difference as distinct from indiffer-

ent, we see that persistence of either children’s literature

or book reading as intimate parent-child dyads in quiet

spaces of homes cannot take us where we now have to

go. Families in economically advanced societies, those

that have been the primary producers and consumers of

books for children and young adults, have less and less

time, space, and inclination to read with and for their

children beyond the toddler years. Economic realities,

two-working-parent homes, single-parent homes, and

competing forms of home entertainment push interactions

with print, image, music, and talk into layered mediated

forms, places, and relationships. Recently, the number of

hours libraries remain open across the United States has

decreased, and many libraries have closed. Libraries and

schools, as public institutions, are increasingly required

to censor young learners’ access to the internet and to

new media, such as graphic novels and novels written for

young adults.

Yet young people who learn that reading books may

feed their special interests will  nd ways to get what they

want. On buses, in community centers, and with special

friends, they create for themselves mobile home-like atmo-

spheres. The future of the book’s home will be the “non-

spaces” of supermodernity, away from private households

into public spaces and in search of human company around

and through technologies (Augé, 1995, p. 94).

Coda

What about Ken Macrorie’s proposed collection of au-

tobiographies of language educators? It never appeared.

Whether or not my dissonant pattern moved him to set

aside the project, I do not know. In the intervening years, I

have resisted attempts to universalize ideas about literacy,

language development, readers and writers, and modern

childhood and youth. As individuals, we matter not in the

ways we  t into categories or meta-narratives. Instead,

we matter in the ways we experience and remember the

emotions, expectations, and connections of our early lives

and attempt to understand how those of others affect who

they have become. “Each childhood is a nightlight in the

bedroom of memories” (Bachelard, 1960, p. 140).

All childhoods of promise do not begin with reading

as an archetypal activity. In this chapter, I have tried to

THE BOOK AS HOME? IT ALL DEPENDS

shift us away from treasured reveries of childhoods with

books. Through the lens of my life story, I have urged us to

understand that people embody many different aspects of

human potential—artistic, spiritual, economic, cultural, and

intellectual; realized human potential does not depend on

childhoods with favorite books. I hope to have disengaged

us from constructions of single trajectories toward set desti-

nations of literate lives. I have wished to heighten acknowl-

edgement of difference not as deprivation but as incentive

and inspiration to recognize that we are born to grapple—to

observe and re ect on all that we experience.

From my life with books of all kinds, some written for

children and the young, others about them, I have formu-

lated two principles. The  rst recognizes that expecta-

tions embedded within metaphors of trajectory, pathway,

and life course rely on a horizontal view to the past that

precludes an open future. Such a perspective blinds us to

differences of circumstance and will that lie beneath the

shade of our skin and con nes of our childhoods. The

horizontal fails to account for the randomness of accident

and serendipity.

A vertical perspective lets us see the intertwining of

regional, racial, and gender origins with individual will

and convictions of change. Verticality takes us deeper and

higher and may even force us to return to places we think

we have known before. We have to look up and down

before we move ahead.

The second principle concedes that we cannot always

move either ourselves or others—even those we love

most—forward. The case in point is my daughter Shan-

non. In her childhood, we lived the romance of the book

as home in our hours of reading, enacting, talking, col-

lecting, and relishing books. When she was 18, on the

cusp of adulthood, she suffered a severe head injury in a

mountain-climbing fall. Memory, affect, engagement, and

promise—all that had made children’s literature part of the

 ber of her being—left her. Today, a woman in midlife,

her af ictions limit her to collecting and categorizing

children’s books and sometimes bringing their names into

conversations she otherwise could not choose to enter. Her

subterranean childhood passion survived brain insult to

transform into the comfort and control that book names

and taxonomies can give.

There is, to be sure, a correspondence here with the

book as home. But resemblance is not sameness. Differ-

ence and an absence of predictability must summon in

all of us a faith that goes beyond mere incidence to the

certainty of awe in the motions of the mind.

Notes

1. Instances of this genre are numerous, and their forms range

from substantive date books and journals designed for “the

reading woman” (Schur, 1991) to the innumerable accounts

by parents recalling their pleasures of reading as children or

with their own children (Hearne & Trites, 2009; Tatar, 2009;

Wolf & Heath, 1992).

2. Of those who collect essays or quotations about the powerful

hold that books can have on life, women make up the vast

majority. Of these, most have careers as scholars, writers,

booksellers, small press directors, or collectors. See, for

example, Bascove, 2001; Bettman, 1987; Hearne & Trites,

2009; Tatar, 2009. Alter (1989) analyzes the extent to which

the ultimate complexity of reading for each individual will

always ensure that no one else will ever replicate the process

of another. This sense of “original creator” so inspires some

readers that they cannot resist taking up the “many-voiced

conversation” to write (p. 238).

3. De nitions of crossover texts abound and shift from year to

year. As the genre of young adult  ction grew in popularity

after the turn of the 21st century, debates raged over questions

of appropriateness of topics and category assignment by award

committees. When a thick volume, The Invention of Hugo

Cabret (Selznick, 2007), won the Caldecott Medal for picture

book, the matter of crossover took on new meaning, for here

text and illustration announce themselves as partners in the

progression of the story. The verbal and the visual never appear

together on the same page; instead, the words and images

take turns telling the tale. Within two years, other such books

followed to complicate further the meaning of crossover. The

Selected Works of T. S. Spivet (Larsen, 2009), described as

“a boundary-leaping novel,” tells the story of a 12-year-old

cartographer who renders his adventures in both words and

maps. The debate here is dual. Is the readership adult or young

adult? And the medium—picture or word? T. S. Spivet leads

us back to some of the earliest crossover texts—the accounts

of explorers who could not tell their tales without lists, maps,

drawings of plants and creatures discovered, and illustrations

of fantasies imagined. He reminds us that rigid categories will

never con ne books, authors, and readers regardless of age.

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Reading Literature in Elementary Classrooms

Kathy G. Short

University of Arizona

Literature in elementary classrooms can be viewed as no more than  ller that buys some free time or as a

tool that sits alongside a skills worksheet. National policy trends lean heavily toward such limited visions of

reading, and yet, as Kathy Short argues, it is possible to create practices of literary reading that support chil-

dren’s interest in reading processes, enjoyment in personal reading, and engagement in critical inquiry about

the representations and themes literature presents. If literature opens an inquiry into life, then teaching must

follow the curiosity and compassion that students are capable of bringing to reading. In this exploration of

literature’s place in reading education, Short recognizes the political forces that reduce reading to test scores,

but provides a clear outline for framing literary reading in classrooms as vital to personal, communal, and

intercultural understanding.

As a child, reading literature in the elementary classroom

meant pulling a book surreptitiously from my desk when

the teacher wasn’t watching. My second-grade teacher

once caught me sliding out a book between spelling words

on the weekly test and reprimanded me for not paying at-

tention. I was paying attention—to what was compelling

for me. My life as a reader was fed by the school library,

not by reading books in the classroom. In fact, I don’t have

memories of reading literature in school; my memories are

of reading basal textbooks in round robin reading groups

and completing comprehension cards to see who could

get to the next color level  rst.

As a beginning classroom teacher, I struggled with the

textbook programs and basal readers that were the heart

of reading instruction. The signi cant role that literature

played in my life outside of school was a constant reminder

that I needed to somehow integrate literature into the life

of the classroom. So while my  rst-grade students met in

ability-leveled reading groups and read from inane stories

in basal readers, I made time to read aloud from picture

books and novels several times a day, created a classroom

library, borrowed books from the school library, and set

aside daily time for independent reading of self-selected

books.

When I found myself falling asleep in the basal reading

groups, I knew that it was time to rethink the curriculum.

I was clearly the most active thinker in these groups and

knew that my boredom was indicative of students’ experi-

ences. I noticed that the students who struggled most as

readers never  nished their worksheets and so rarely got to

read. I became increasingly suspicious that the worksheets

 lling the majority of their time served only to keep them

READING LITERATURE IN ELEMENTARY CLASSROOMS

busy. In fact, I often felt that children were learning to

read in spite of me.

Another tension occurred when my students and I

gathered each afternoon to re ect on what they saw as

signi cant learning for that day. They always talked about

the afternoon experiences with our thematic units and never

the morning instruction with the reading program. In the

afternoons, we read literature for meaningful purposes,

while in the morning we read stories designed to teach them

to read. Children were clearly signaling which of those ex-

periences were signi cant. The tension that  nally caused

me to take action was realizing that students rarely chose

reading when we had “free choice” time on Fridays. Books

had become “schoolwork” for them and not life work.

These tensions led me to engage students in books

based on my goal that they view reading literature as

integral to understanding themselves and the world. I

immersed them in continuous experiences with literature

through reading-aloud, independent reading, shared read-

ing, book extension projects, and thematic units. These

extensive experiences of reading many books encouraged

children to enjoy books and to become pro cient readers.

I also observed, however, that while my students loved

books, they did not necessarily think deeply or critically

about what they read.

This observation led me to introduce literature circles

where small groups of students met to share their responses

to literature. Although they loved chanting the repeated

language patterns in Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You

See? (Martin, 1968), this book did not invite the thoughtful

sharing of feelings and experiences as did books such as

Stevie (Steptoe, 1969). Stevie led them beyond chanting

to discussions of quarrels and their complicated feelings

of resentment and connection with siblings or cousins.

Their sharing led to dialogue as students critically explored

their understandings with each other. I also realized that

students need support in developing their strategies as

readers and in explicitly thinking about how literature and

language function. I introduced metacognitive strategy

instruction and individual conferences around the books

students were reading. Instead of teaching isolated phonics

skills through drills and worksheets, we talked about the

books they were reading and looked at parts of the text

where they were struggling to determine strategies they

could use to  gure out unknown words. These cognitive

and social processes included making predictions based

on context and letter/sound relationships, reading on to get

more information, breaking a word into parts, examining

the pictures for meaning cues, and thinking about a word

that would make sense within the world of that story.

Over time, reading literature in my classroom re ected

a balance of invitations to experience literature that in-

cluded reading widely for enjoyment and personal inquiry

along with in-depth dialogue about a few books, inquiries

on content themes and topics, and discussions of reading

strategies and literary elements. My changes as a teacher

re ect similar shifts in the broader educational context as

well. Schools in the United States have made major swings

in how reading literature is viewed within elementary

classrooms. For many years, reading literature was seen

as supplementary, as something to do “when your work

is done”—a time  ller but not essential to learning about

reading or literature. The 1980s and early 90s brought a

major shift in reading instruction as many schools adopted

literature-based curricular approaches that immersed

children in reading literature across the classroom day for

many different purposes (Huck, 1996). Literature was seen

as a way to teach reading and to facilitate the learning of

content across subject areas.

More recently, the pendulum has swung again; literature

has been pushed to the margins within many elementary

classrooms as politicized policies impose a return to teach-

ing isolated skills through hierarchal, sequential reading

programs and as stories are limited to excerpts in antholo-

gies and controlled-vocabulary stories for reading schemes.

Reading literature throughout the school day is not con-

sidered to be an “evidence-based practice for literacy

instruction” with a stamp of approval from experimental

research (Shanahan, 2003) and so has been relegated again

to “free time” when other work is  nished or assigned only

to readers who have reached a level of  uent pro ciency.

This shift in reading literature is challenged by educators

who are committed to deepening children’s reading com-

prehension and engagement with literary forms (Peterson &

Eeds, 1990; Lehman 2007) and by those who advocate for

literature study that shows children how to locate, explore,

and critique their own cultural identities and views of the

world as the basis for social understanding and change

(Lewison, Leland, & Harste, 2008).

My point in starting with a personal story is to illus-

trate that literature and its role in reading education in

elementary classrooms are subject to changing political

policies. The opportunities that children have to read

literature, the literature that is available, and the types of

experiences children have with that literature shift along

with the sociopolitical context. The speci c changes vary

by country, but often those shifts in reading literature have

less to do with educational theory and research than with

political expediency and economic factors. For example, I

was invited to Taiwan in 2001 to present several research

seminars on the teaching of reading, particularly focusing

on reading literature as a way to encourage critical think-

ing. Reading and discussing literature were seen as the key

to shifting away from the General Method, which focuses

on rote learning of Chinese characters and a centralized

government textbook. The shift in reading pedagogy and

philosophy was initiated, in large part, by a change in the

Taiwan’s economic development base from assembly-line

mass production of trinkets to sophisticated electronic and

technology industries that require workers who can think

critically and creatively. Publishers created sets of books

for use in schools including picture books and novels by

KATHY G. SHORT

Taiwanese authors and illustrators that competed with

the many translated books from other countries that had

dominated Taiwanese markets. Ironically, the drive for

more critical and creative education has recently been con-

strained by a conservative political shift seeking a return

to a centralized textbook-based approach to reading.

An international perspective on reading literature in

elementary classrooms must therefore address the politi-

cized nature of reading across the world as well as the

ways in which literature has been viewed in elementary

contexts. Unlike secondary schools in which literature is

a  eld of study, children’s literature in elementary schools

has primarily been viewed as a reading material that is

used to teach something else, typically either skills or

facts, or as a “free time” activity. This chapter begins with

the argument that children’s literature as a  eld of study

can be opened up through a focus on literature as inquiry

into life and that critical inquiry is central to dialogue and

literary understandings. The practices of critical inquiry

are made more complex when connected with issues of

cultural relevance, identity, and authenticity and with a

broad range of types of texts and ways of responding.

Although critical inquiry is often constrained by political

agendas, teachers can and do create conditions for critical

literary study through strategic reading, personal reading

and transformative reading.

Literature as Inquiry into Life

Inquiry as a stance toward reading literature can serve as

a bridge between views of literature as an artistic, human-

izing force and literature as an instrumentalist tool for

learning to read. As a stance of uncertainty and invitation,

inquiry supports a willingness to wonder and question as

well as to seek to understand and think with others (Lind-

fors, 1999). Rather than settle for readymade answers,

inquiry urges learners to reach beyond information and

experience to seek an explanation, to ask why, and to con-

sider what if. Learners, however, need to remain anchored

in their own life experiences in order to generatively reach

beyond themselves to create a productive tension between

current understandings and new experiences. Tension and

the state of being off balance during inquiry are the driving

forces that compel learners to move forward, particularly

when supported by a collaborative community (Dewey,

1938). Inquiry is thus a collaborative process of connecting

to and reaching beyond current understandings to explore

tensions signi cant to the learner (Short, 2009b).

Children need to have a voice in both identifying and

pursuing the tensions and questions that matter to them

within a literary study. In most cases, inquiry is conceived

as problem-solving and guiding students through a process

of research, with a predetermined outcome. This process of

research usually begins with a form and focus for students’

questions that has been predetermined by the teacher

and curriculum. Freire (1972) argues, however, that the

person who poses the problem is the one who remains in

control of learning; therefore, learners need to question

the questions, not just answer questions. Students can

learn to determine which issues are signi cant and worth

investigating and which tensions are compelling and offer

the potential for transformation and new understanding.

Reading and responding to literature as problem-posing, as

well as problem-solving, provides a critical frame through

which multiple voices and perspectives can contribute to

inquiry about oneself and the world. Inquiry through lit-

erature means understanding the particular contributions

that literature makes to ways of thinking and knowing.

Literature as a Way of Knowing

In elementary classrooms, literature is rarely seen as a

way of knowing the world that differs, for example, from

ways of understanding science or history. Peterson and

Eeds (1990) argue that educators have been so focused

on using literature for purposes such as conveying infor-

mation or teaching reading that they have lost sight of

literature as valuable in itself. Peterson and Eeds believe

that literature illuminates what it means to be human and

that the aesthetic nature of literature makes accessible

the most fundamental experiences of life–love, hope,

loneliness, despair, fear, and belonging. If literature is the

imaginative shaping of experience and thought into the

forms and structures of language; children are the readers

who reshape experience and use literary language to name

and transform life. Living inside the world of a story may

enable them to engage in inquiry that transforms their

thinking about their lives and world (Rosenblatt, 1938).

Huck (1982) argues that literature, whether in the form of

 ction or non ction, creates the playing  eld of imagina-

tion and encourages readers to go beyond “what is” to

“what might be.” Literature expands children’s life spaces

through inquiries that take them outside the boundaries

of their lives to other places, times, and ways of living.

Hope and imagination make it possible for children to rise

above their experiences in order to challenge inequity and

envision social change. Transformation occurs as children

carry their experiences and inquiries through literature

back into their worlds and lives.

The Limits of Knowing Through Literature

Hunt (1994) argues that this view of children’s literature

as exploratory and mind-expanding is contradicted by

adults’ focus on the educational, psychological, and cul-

tural in uences of literature on children’s development.

Since adults are the ones who write and share literature

with children, he argues, “children’s books very often con-

tain what adults think children can understand and what

they should be allowed to understand” (p. 5). A particular

culture’s view of childhood is re ected in the books cre-

ated for children. Because children are seen as being in

READING LITERATURE IN ELEMENTARY CLASSROOMS

the process of becoming, this literature can be viewed as

manipulative—as adult writers create circumstances and

characters that in uence children’s perspectives and ac-

tions. In this sense, adults are problem-posers who limit

children’s roles to problem-solving. Hunt’s view, however,

ignores the strategies that children have used through the

ages to subvert adult control of their lives; neither does

it acknowledge the stated intentions of many authors to

invite children into inquiry, not determine their perspec-

tive and focus. On the other hand, many forms of media

and literature do position readers as people who identify

with stereotypic or passive perspectives. Children and

teachers do not have to remain indifferent or unaware of

such portrayals; rather, they can pursue questions about

how they are positioned by texts in ways that make them

feel less able than or even superior to others. Through

such questioning, children develop an ability to critically

analyze the ways things are in the world around them as

they also view their world, their reading, and learning as

part of a process of transformation and becoming.

Experiencing Literature as Democratic Life

Although teachers of literature in secondary schools and

universities view literature as a  eld of study or content

area, their focus has often been on teaching the formal

art of words and structures and inducting students into

a literary heritage, rather than on experiencing literature

as life. Literary theorist Louise Rosenblatt (1938) posits

reading as a transactional process through which each

reader brings personal and cultural experiences, beliefs,

and values to the reading of a text so that both the reader

and the text are transformed. Although a text has particular

potential meanings based on shared cultural codes, readers

construct their individual interpretations as they engage

in “lived through experiences” with that text. During and

after reading, people construct understandings in light of

their experiences and rethink their experiences in light

of the text, thus bringing meaning to and taking meaning

from a text through a process of inquiry. Further, as readers

share their responses with others through dialogue, they

are pressed to critique and take responsibility for these

responses (Bleich, 1981).

Rosenblatt (1938) argues that reading literature en-

courages readers to put themselves in the place of others,

to use imagination to consider the consequences of their

decisions and actions. Imagination and the balance of

reason and emotion are further developed when readers

move from personal response to dialogue where they

wrestle with their interpretations of literature with other

readers. These discussions, therefore, are not just a better

way to learn, but essential to democracy. Rosenblatt’s

vision of democracy is equitable social relationships in

which people choose to live together by valuing individual

voices within recognition of responsibility to the group.

She believes that people need to have conviction and

enthusiasm about their own cultural perspectives, while

remaining open to alternative views and other’s needs.

Dialogue about literature provides a vital context through

which students learn to live with the tension of recognizing

and respecting the perspectives of others without betraying

their own beliefs (Pradl, 1996). Through dialogue, students

develop faith in their own judgments while continuing to

inquire and remaining open to questioning their beliefs.

Literature as Inquiry into Life: When My

Name Was Keoko

Reading literature to experience and inquire about life is

not in opposition to literature as a way to learn and inquire

about particular content. Literature can encourage interest

in speci c topics, develop conceptual understandings of

issues, and provide insights into written language—all

within the context of literature as a way of knowing and

critiquing the world. Rosenblatt (1938), however, argues

that readers need to  rst experience literature as life before

examining that literature for other purposes.

A focus on literature as inquiry into life permeated the

responses of fourth-grade students as they read When My

Name Was Keoko (Park, 2002), a novel about the experi-

ences of Sun-hee and her brother in Korea during the

Japanese occupation and suppression of Korean culture

in WWII. The teacher, Kathryn Tompkins (2007), read the

book aloud to her students to support their overarching

inquiry on culture. This classroom work was the focus

of teachers’ school-wide action research on intercultural

understanding (Short, 2009a); a form of research that

documents students’ and teachers’ perceptions of learning

as well as analyzes and makes changes in the context for

teaching and learning to challenge students’ (and teach-

ers’) thinking. In Tompkins’ classroom, issues of culture,

identity, gender, war, freedom, courage, resistance, hope,

and family relationships wove through students’ talk,

writing, and artistic responses as they engaged in critical

inquiry around Park’s novel. They particularly identi ed

with Sun-hee’s frustration at her lack of freedom. They

connected her experiences with their own feelings of

resentment toward adults who tell kids what to do and

when to do it, but realized that her lack of freedom was

based in fear and oppression of her culture and identity

that went far beyond anything they had experienced. Their

discussions naturally led them to insights into Korean

culture, language, and history, and they pursued their

tensions through inquiries using informational materials

and web sites. Later, students returned to this book in a

writing workshop study on the strategies that authors use

to develop characterizations.

Literature and Critical Social Inquiry

Much of the research and classroom work around reading

literature has focused on talk and writing as a means of

KATHY G. SHORT

responding to literature. Freire (1972) argues that dialogue

is a tool for transformation and social change and his

work has in uenced educators to invite children into talk

in which they think with each other and engage in collab-

orative inquiry and critique around critical social issues.

Through practices of critical literacy, which encourage

analyses and questioning of oppression and all forms of

domination, readers are challenged to critique and ques-

tion “what is” and “who bene ts” as well as to hope and

consider “what if.” Through critical literacy, children

learn to problem-pose and question the everyday world, to

interrogate relationships between language and power, to

analyze the images and messages conveyed through popu-

lar culture and media, to understand how and why power

relationships are socially constructed and maintained, and

to consider actions that promote social justice (Edelsky,

1999; Lewison, Flint, & Sluys, 2002).

Critical inquiry can grow out of a focused study such

as described in relation to When My Name Was Keoko

or children reading together may suddenly encounter a

question that they know they must address. DeNicolo and

Fránquiz (2006) describe such questioning as “critical en-

counters” and de ne them as a realization that can emerge

when “a word, concept, or event in a story surprises,

shocks, or frightens readers to such a degree that they

seek to inquire further” and so sustain their dialogue and

scrutiny of the text (p. 157). In their study, such a critical

encounter occurred in reading Felita (Mohr, 1979) when

students read about the main character’s experience of a

pejorative racial slur called out to her by another group of

teens who rejected the presence of her Puerto Rican family

in the predominately white community. The girls agreed,

“You have to stand up for yourself,” but disagreed on how

they would respond to a racial slur. Several indicated they

would “get all my friends and beat them up,” while others

argued that “ ghting with them would make the problem

worser” and would lead to being “scared of these kids”

and that wouldn’t solve anything (DeNicolo & Fránquiz,

p. 165). Collaborating to make sense of the racism in

this book led to a transformation of their relationships

with each other as well as their understandings about

racial issues. The group member who usually dominated

discussions began to listen and consider alternative view-

points; and a more careful, shy member spoke clearly and

forcefully about the importance of questioning racism.

Literature discussion provided a space for disagreement

as it also supported the members in developing a critical

lens to examine “values, beliefs, and events in personal

and collective lives, and the recognition of literacy as an

empowering rather than silencing force in classrooms” (p.

168). This space was in uenced by the choice of literature

that encouraged students to use their life experiences as

linguistic and cultural tools as well as challenged them to

deepen their understanding of social issues.

In another example, Martínez-Roldán (2005) docu-

ments the signi cance of an inquiry approach to dialogue

for a group of bilingual children as they read Oliver But-

ton is a Sissy (de Paola, 1979). They engaged in acts of

inquiry in which “a speaker attempts to elicit another’s

help in going beyond his or her present understanding”

(Martínez-Roldán, p. 23). For example, Amaury won-

dered, “What was so girly about playing dress-up?” to

which Steve replied, “Probably he likes to play girls’

games.” Amaury explored another interpretation, noting

that Oliver “says that he was pretending to be a star” and

returned to his question about why dress-up is considered

a girls’ game. Steve later argued that “his dad wants him to

play a boys’ game instead of a girl game ‘cause maybe his

dad doesn’t think he gets exercise,” to which Ada replied,

“I think he dresses up because boys dress up too.” Their

inquiry continued when Amaury commented that “Steve

played dress-up before,” and Steve immediately replied,

“I know. I’m not a girl.” (p. 26).

This authentic discourse did not resolve students’

inquiries—Steve still wondered about boy/girl issues and

Ada was not sure what to think—but their talk remained

open and focused on the process itself. Martínez-Roldán

(2005) notes that these students were able to engage in

dialogue about gender because their focus was on their

processes of thinking, not a  nal answer. She argues that

an overemphasis on guidelines and procedures when talk-

ing about stories can instead force students to focus on

product and performance.

Expanding Dialogue and Inquiry

Including Everyday Texts and Oral Narratives

Luke and Freebody (1997) argue that all texts represent

cultural positions, ideologies and discourses and that all

readers construct readings from particular epistemological

stances. Critical literacy presses for an awareness of how,

why, and in whose interests a particular text might work

and an understanding of reading positions and practices

for questioning and critiquing texts as well as oneself.

In de ning critical literacy, Luke and Freebody outline

four key practices: (a) coding practices through which

readers focus on developing their skills and resources as

code breakers, (b) text-meaning practices that focus on

developing meaning and participation in text production

and interpretation, (c) pragmatic practices through which

readers develop knowledge of how everyday texts (e.g.,

library card or cell phone contract) may work for and

against their interests, and (d) critical practices that en-

able readers to question how a text shapes their point of

view and challenges their assumptions. Their framework

for reading that recognizes codes, meaning, pragmatic

and critical practices is intended to initiate and guide a

multi-voiced dialogue about texts in peoples’ lives. Such

a dialogue would value and extend each reader’s right to

be heard, critiqued, analyzed, and constructed in public

forums. They argue that reading as a critical social practice

could displace the cognitive emphasis on comprehension

READING LITERATURE IN ELEMENTARY CLASSROOMS

strategies in reading education and, instead, foreground

concerns about the ways we understand power and change

across personal, cultural, and social histories.

Luke and Freebody’s outline of critical reading implies

that literature should be de ned broadly to include oral

and written forms. The values that elementary schools

place on written text have created de cit views of children

from communities where oral traditions are integral to the

culture. Children from these communities enter school

with a background in oral literature and storytelling, rather

than in written literature. They may not have been read to

on a regular basis, but they do know story and have rich

oral literature experiences (Dyson & Genishi, 1994; see

Campano & Ghiso, this volume). In addition, children

from families living in poverty frequently have many

experiences with everyday print including family letters,

newspapers, magazines, contracts, and bills (Dorsey-

Gaines & Taylor, 1988). Children’s success in reading

literature in school contexts depends on whether teachers

build from children’s strengths in oral stories and critical

insights about the materials they encounter every day.

In many countries, including Asia, Africa, and Latin

America the dominant books available are translations from

English-speaking countries, especially the U.S. and U.K.

(Freeman & Lehman, 2001). Children do not  nd their own

lives and cultural experiences within these books and are,

instead, immersed in a constant diet of books that re ect

dominant Western worldviews. As described in Chapter 31

of this volume by Michael Daniel Ambatchew, educators,

authors, and publishers within these countries struggle with

encouraging the writing, publication and distribution of lit-

erature from their cultural perspectives. Their debates about

reading literature are often less about engaging children

with books than about creating a body of literature from

within the culture. Market forces work against their efforts

since large corporations can provide translated books for

lower costs than the small presses who work with authors

and distributors to produce local literature.

Furthermore, as I discovered while teaching interna-

tionally, my Western, culturally speci c view that reading

for enjoyment should be a primary goal when creating a

literature program, is not shared by educators around the

world. My assumptions were met with puzzlement when I

argued that they should immerse children in a wide range

of literary reading so that they grow to love books and

see reading as enjoyment. They valued, instead, reading

widely for utilitarian purposes, to accomplish a task or

to learn something of importance in their lives. Although

we held different assumptions about reading for pleasure,

we agreed, along with Luke and Freebody (1997), on the

value of centering reading in children’s questions, and

supporting literacy in order to encourage personal lifelong

inquiry. This difference in cultural perspectives speaks,

again, to the importance of de ning literature broadly in

ways that include the texts and stories readers value and

use in their daily lives.

Literature Relevant to Children’s Cultural Identities

Building a democratic dialogue that includes the voices,

questions, and texts of all students requires attention to and

knowledge of culturally relevant and culturally authentic

literature that connect to the reader’s own cultural identity

as well as to multiple ways of thinking and being in the

world (Gay, 2000; Harris, 1997). Dialogue about cultur-

ally relevant literature provides a means for readers to not

merely “look in on others” lives, but more importantly, to

critique and inquire into their own world views, cultural

values and possible biases. Culturally relevant literature

allows readers to “see themselves” within a book and

provides opportunities for linking cultural knowledge and

experiences to story worlds. In addition, reading books

intended to represent the experiences and lives they know

well can be the starting point for questioning how certain

representations might offend, silence, or contradict their

cultural knowledge and lived experiences (Brooks, 2006;

Dutro, 2009).

Luke and Freebody (1997) suggest it is possible to cre-

ate dialogues that develop insights into both literary forms

and the issues implied within stories by foregrounding a

social view of reading. However, discussions of social

issues may be unfamiliar and, therefore, create a forum

for resistance and confusion among many students. In

discussions with fourth and  fth graders about picture

books highlighting racism, Short with Thomas (in press)

found that the students avoided dif cult issues by simply

evading the central premise that racism exists: “It doesn’t

matter what you look like on the outside, it’s the inside

that matters.” They also believed that racism was only

between Blacks and Whites in the U.S. and that racism

ended when Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his famous “I

have a dream” speech. We had to acknowledge that their

perspectives were grounded in the discourses promoted

by adults around them that emphasized racial harmony

through events and experiences such as the school’s cel-

ebration of Martin Luther King Day. To challenge these

assumptions, we searched for picture books with a range

of contemporary portrayals of racism and questioned

children’s narratives when they referred to clichéd expla-

nations of their social life. We also spent time as teach-

ers talking about how to discuss race with children and

confronting our own hesitations and fears about openly

addressing these issues.

Cultural authenticity is a critical issue for readers,

both in identifying with and challenging the social worlds

portrayed within literature (Fox & Short, 2003). Cultural

authenticity goes beyond accuracy or the avoidance of

stereotyping to include the cultural values and practices

within a social group (Mo & Shen, 2003). Given the range

of experiences within any cultural group and the unique

transactions of each reader with a text, cultural authentic-

ity is often interpreted through multiple, competing points

of view. Reading literature from a critical perspective

helps readers question the signs and structures embedded

KATHY G. SHORT

within texts, so that a story’s construction and sources of

meanings can be identi ed and examined. Amy Edwards

(2008), a  fth-grade teacher, found that providing brief in-

formation about the background of authors and illustrators

before reading aloud raised children’s awareness about the

signi cance of a critical inquiry stance while interpreting

literature. Students realized that they needed to know if

an author was a cultural insider, had visited the country,

or had engaged in research or some kind of experience

related to the content of the book. They saw a need for

contextual information so they could imagine an author’s

perspective and consider how and why authors write

about a particular topic as well as position themselves as

authorities on a story world. Yenika-Agbaw (1998) argues

that readers have the social responsibility to negotiate

personal and cultural meanings from literature that create

the possibility for social change in both their immediate

and global communities.

Readers’ responses to culturally relevant literature

are not a simple matter of cultural identi cation because

readers engage in continually negotiated cultural practices

and have multiple cultural allegiances and subjectivities.

For example, Brooks (2006) found that African American

adolescents brought strong cultural connections to Scor-

pions (Myers, 1988), a novel about an African American

teen struggling with gang membership, defending his need

for a gun as a desire for respect and to keep others from

“messing” with him. They rejected identi cation with

The House of Dies Drear (Hamilton, 1968), a mystery

involving an African American family living in a house

inhabited by ghosts, stating “only white people would stay

in a haunted house” (p. 388). Brooks argues that although

the book is acclaimed as authentic culturally conscious

African American literature, beliefs in the supernatural as

a cultural practice was unfamiliar to this group of teens.

Enciso (1994) argues that students interpret literature

based on their own cultural maps that “provide a frame-

work for constructing the meaning of new events” and that

include cultural resources and social allegiances drawn

from popular culture (p. 527). She analyzes a discussion

of Maniac Magee (Spinelli, 1990) by a small group of

African American, Latino, and European American fourth

and  fth graders. She particularly focuses on two boys

(African American and European American) who were

both thoughtful readers and transformers of culture but

did not consider one another’s interpretations because they

drew from different cultural maps. Both enjoyed popular

culture and were aware of heightened racial tension at the

time, associated with the trial of white police of cers ac-

cused of beating Rodney King, an unarmed Black citizen

of Los Angeles. During their interpretations of the book

(and related social life), Richard drew from his position

as a “culturally conscious African American male,” while

Mark’s allegiance was with “white liberal culture” (p.

530). Enciso argues that teachers and students need to

examine who is included and excluded in interpretations

of literature and culture within these discussions. Fur-

thermore, they need to develop knowledge and skills for

mediating these discussions so that dominant perspectives

that privilege White, middle-class interpretive resources

are not assumed or taken for granted as the norm.

Learning to Read Interculturally

The increased availability of literature with settings in

different cultures around the world has provided the op-

portunity for readers to immerse themselves as inquirers

into story worlds that present unfamiliar ways of thinking

and living. Teachers’ and students’ dialogue around these

books make it possible to build intercultural understand-

ings and global perspectives (Short, 2009a). Engaging

children thoughtfully with this literature can be a struggle,

however, because the books often focus on ways of liv-

ing that seem far removed from children’s immediate

experiences. The danger exists that children will view this

literature as exotic or strange, and thus, fail to connect in

signi cant ways with the concerns and perspectives por-

trayed by the author and illustrator. Additional problems

with reading cross-culturally will arise if teachers read past

the culturally speci c perspectives and details and instead

focus only on the overarching themes (e.g., friendship,

loyalty, loss) that are relevant, but become tangential, or

even in opposition to intercultural understanding. On the

other hand, too much attention paid to super cial features

of cultural lifestyles can actually reinforce stereotypical

perceptions (Case, 1991). Finally, a limited reading of

culturally relevant literature could develop as teachers

discuss the literature in terms of “we-they” dualisms that

reinforce the normative assumption that “we” are inher-

ently superior to those ”others” who have not yet acquired

a view of the world aligned with “my” view.

Iqbal (D’Adamo, 2001) is a  ctionalized story of a boy

who led an in uential movement to protest child labor

in Pakistani carpet factories. If read in isolation, with no

continuous dialogue or reference to meaningful social

change, this book could lead children to feel pity, rather

than outrage and a sense of empowerment to change the

world. A misinformed reading of the story might also

lead to the misconception that all children in Pakistan are

involved in child labor, chained to looms in carpet mills. If

the book is instead read within a broader study of children’s

and human rights, and includes a collection of books rep-

resenting Pakistan and Pakistani children’s perspectives, as

well as narratives from students’ families and community

members, children will have many more possible points

of connection and opportunities to struggle over the voices

and questions they raise through their inquiry.

Although researchers have provided many accounts

of children’s responses to multicultural literature, few

studies focus on the use of international literature to build

intercultural understanding—a major omission given our

increasingly interconnected world. Children need to  nd

their own lives in books, but if what they read only mirrors

READING LITERATURE IN ELEMENTARY CLASSROOMS

their views of the world, they cannot envision other ways

of thinking and living and are not challenged to critically

confront global issues.

From Dialogue to the Art of Representation

More recently, research and theory related to dialogue

has expanded to consider the potential of a wider range

of sign systems, such as visual art and drama as tools

for thinking and interpreting literature. Siegel (2006)

describes the process of transmediation as way to recast

understanding about literature and its meaning for one’s

life. The concept of transmediation is taken from the work

of the philosopher Peirce (1966), who argues that in mov-

ing an idea across sign or symbolic systems, such as from

a written language to visual arts, we invariably discover

new meanings and relationships between ideas, because

the new sign system heightens attention to dimensions of a

text that were otherwise dif cult to isolate or describe. One

form of transmediation is known as “Sketch to Stretch”

and asks students to use the symbolic language of color,

composition, and object relations to create a metaphor

for a text’s themes or character relations (Short, Kahn, &

Kauffman, 2000). For example, Dan, one of the nine-year-

old children in a class who read Iqbal (D’Adamo, 2001),

created a sketch of a broken chain to represent the boy’s

literal escape from the looms, but he also recognized the

image as a symbol of Iqbal’s freedom, inner strength, and

intelligence. Along the top third of his sketch, he created

an arch of deep red and black colors to represent Iqbal’s

anger. Another student, Gabriela, responded to the same

book with a sketch of the sky and a kite as symbols of

freedom; the kite image was repeated in the bottom right

and left corners of the page, with the added image of the

kites breaking through a fence representing oppression

(Bolasky, 2008; see Figure 4.1).

Edmiston and Enciso (2003) believe that drama is a

forum for text interpretation that can reveal and mediate

children’s diverse cultural and social beliefs, through

deliberate inclusion of multi-voiced, dialogic approaches

that promote “an interplay of meaning among teachers and

students across shifting social positions” within the drama

(p. 868). They argue that these drama practices dialogize

the discourses of literary texts to develop children’s in-

sights about themselves and the world.

Medina used drama practices, such as tableau, acting-

in-role, and hot seat, around the picture book, Friends

from the Other Side (Anzaldúa, 1987), a complex story

of immigration, safety, cultural identity, and community.

Through her use of dramatized dialogue, Medina encour-

aged students to move from interpreting text as outsiders

to the experience of living on the Mexican/Texas border, to

developing an active dialogue as and with the characters.

Students used dialogue to explore multiple perspectives

and questions around social issues that went beyond the

limits of the story to the larger society. For example, stu-

dents took turns occupying the hot seat and asking one an-

other questions that concerned the status of undocumented

immigrants. One student took on the perspective of the

main character, Prietita, and was asked whether Joaquin

and his mother, who were undocumented immigrants,

should be returned to Mexico. Earlier, several students,

drawing on images and stereotypes from the media, stated

that Mexicans should be sent back because they had come

across the border to steal and bring drugs. Their responses

on the hot seat re ected their consideration of the differ-

ent circumstances framing multiple points of view. One

student who took the role of the immigrant of cial stated,

“They have to make a decision if to let them in so they

Figure 4.1 Third-graders’ Sketch to Stretch responses to Iqbal (D’Adamo, 2001).

KATHY G. SHORT

can get work and they can get help. They have a very hard

decision and it is mostly in their hands—all these lives to

let them in or not” (p. 280). Another student argued that

a border patrol of cer who was also Mexican, probably

knowingly passed the house where Joaquin and his mother

were hiding because he did not want to put them in jail.

Dialogue, Literature, and National Reading

Policies

These descriptions of critical dialogues within literary

reading suggest that discussions of literature may be

isolated from reading education. However, policy initia-

tives on the teaching of reading have long evolved from

“pressures, tensions, and crises embedded in national and

regional political contexts” (Openshaw & Soler, 2007, p.

xiv), leading to national governments’ involvement in spe-

ci c decisions about reading instruction with the express

aim of raising literacy standards. Perceptions of gaps in

literacy achievement for particular cultural groups (i.e.,

Black and Latino youth in the U.S.) have further politicized

these decisions and led to debates about whether these

gaps re ect the need for more accommodation of cultural

differences in instruction or for demanding adherence to

national standards for all children, regardless of cultural

differences.

Elementary reading programs, while accountable to

national polices that restrict de nitions of reading, can

be organized so that children and teachers develop per-

sonal, social, and cognitive approaches to reading that

will contribute to pathways for lifelong critical inquiry

through literature. Teachers, working with librarians, can

integrate wide reading for pleasure, reading for insights

about oneself and the world, and reading to learn about

literary forms, themes, and puzzles (e.g., metaphors,

 ashbacks, intertextual references). All of these ways of

reading should be guided and motivated by inquiry—by

investigations that, at times, are relevant to children’s

personal interests, at other times relate to the conditions

and concerns of others’ lives, and, still other times, focus

on literary form, language, and interpretative possibilities.

The following two sketches of reading across a day offer a

sense of the integrative and interpretive work that can be

developed for students in elementary classrooms.

Stepping Into an Upper-Grade Classroom. Nine-year-old

Gabriela begins her day by  nding her book, To Dance:

A Ballerina’s Graphic Novel (Siegel, 2006), so she can

pursue her personal inquiry about becoming a ballerina.

After independent reading, the class moves into reading

instruction and guided reading. The teacher works with

Gabriela and a small group of peers in a guided inquiry

that helps them analyze how an author uses dialogue

for character development in Frog and Toad Together

(Lobel, 1979). They web the differences and similarities

in the viewpoints of Frog and Toad based on their talk

and interactions with each other. After lunch, as part of

a whole-class collaborative inquiry on human rights, the

teacher reads aloud from Iqbal (D’Adamo, 2001). Students

discuss the anger and fear in Iqbal’s life and his willingness

to take action for freedom for himself and others despite

the risks. They talk about the ways in which he took action

and their tensions about whether kids can really make a

difference in a world controlled by adults.

Stepping into a Primary Classroom

In a classroom with younger students, Tim O’Keefe reads

aloud a predictable book, Bringing the Rain to Kapiti Plain

(Aardema, 1981), which has a cumulative rhyme about

rain coming to a drought-stricken area of Kenya. He  rst

reading encourages students to enjoy the story and build a

shared sense of the story’s meaning. After several shared

readings, he and his students focus on the same book,

with a discussion of letter pattern relationships, words

that students recognize, and strategies that students are

using to make, con rm, or revise their predictions about

words and their meaning. The book then becomes part

of the literature available for independent reading (Mills,

O’Keefe, & Jennings, 2004).

In O’Keefe’s classroom, reading experiences move from

a sense of the whole story to its speci c use of language

and structure and then back to its whole experience and

meaning again. His organization of reading literature chal-

lenges the approaches imposed by national standards and

strictly guided reading programs that begin with isolated

phonics skills and delay the long-term goal of whole

text comprehension until later grades. Even when these

skill-based programs  nally focus on comprehension, the

assumption is that comprehension is a form of meaning-

making bounded by a predetermined summary of a story’s

purpose, theme, character relationships, and style. In con-

trast with O’Keefe’s approach to shared reading, Larson

(2002) documents how a shared reading of a predictable

book becomes displaced by teaching isolated literacy skills,

and meaningful discussion and inquiry are undermined

by time restrictions, peer pressure, and district mandates

to raise test scores. Literary reading is reduced to using a

story as the springboard for drills on basic skills with any

questions arising from children about the story or any inter-

est generated by the story’s themes relegated to learning

outside of curricular timeframes and guidelines.

Locating Literature at the Heart of Reading

Education

Roser (2001) argues that teachers like Tompkins and

O’Keefe view texts as mediators of both literary reading

and reading development. A literary text can become a

touchstone for literary understandings, political contesta-

tion, content knowledge, and literacy strategies. Although

this may be a lot of work for one book to carry, when

teachers plan for a range of experiences with literature,

READING LITERATURE IN ELEMENTARY CLASSROOMS

students can learn to read strategically to learn about

thought and imaginative processes when interpreting

literature, read widely for personal purposes, and read

deeply to think about life.

Reading Strategically to Learn about Literacy and

Literature

Literary and literacy knowledge are distinct yet inter-

dependent (Lehman, 2007) and can be taught together,

throughout a school day. Literary knowledge relates to

knowledge about literature as a narrative form (and way

of knowing) and includes concepts such as sense of story,

plot, themes, and language; while literacy focuses on

reading and writing as processes and includes the related

concepts of comprehension, sequence, main ideas, and

vocabulary. Readers need both literary and literacy knowl-

edge as they read in a range of genres so they are able to

adjust their reading strategies based on their knowledge

of the text structures for a particular genre. In addition,

a critical perspective on both literary forms and literacy

processes can be foregrounded in discussions and analyses

of selected literature.

Strategic readers re ect on their reading processes

and text knowledge; the strategies they use are general

cognitive and social processes for constructing meaning

during reading. For example readers need to make predic-

tions based on context, read beyond a dif cult word to

get more information, break a word into parts, or reread a

dif cult passage. Other speci c word-level skills, such as

identifying letter-sound relationships or vowel rules, are

taught as part of an overall approach to solving problems

with words, rather than as isolated information to repeat

and memorize. Teachers and children work together to

explicitly identify and examine reading strategies and

develop metacognitive awareness and control of the read-

ing process through classroom routines, such as guided

reading (Fountas & Pinnell, 1996), guided comprehension

(Keene & Zimmerman, 2007), and conferencing and mini-

lessons (Calkins, 2001).

Through these approaches to strategic reading, teachers

take over the role of problem-poser and guide children’s

re ections on their reading processes, teach lessons on

strategies and text structures, and choose literature to

highlight particular reading strategies or text structures

based on their insights about children’s confusion or

new experiences with literature. The teacher determines

the focus of instruction based on careful assessment of

students’ needs, while students act as problem-solvers

engaged in actively reasoning through reading strategies

and text structures to develop generalizations they can use

when interpreting the words, style, and structures of their

current reading selection. For example, Diane Snowball

and Faye Bolton (1999) describe a guided inquiry where

students gather examples of different letter combinations

for the long e sound by reading aloud to each other from

familiar books. Whenever they hear that sound, they put

the word on a large wall chart. After gathering examples

for several weeks, students engage in problem-solving to

organize the words into groups, each re ecting a speci c

letter combination, and create generalizations to explain

that grouping.

These practices highlight instruction by adults who

help children develop a repertoire of strategies to use

when they encounter dif culty, as they  gure out words,

comprehend confusing plots or characterizations, or en-

counter new text structures and literary elements. Research

by Gambrell (2000) indicates that if teachers and students

depend entirely on a program of reading emphasizing the

super cial skills of decoding and plot-based comprehen-

sion questions, they may know how to read but have little

interest making reading a part of their lives. In the long

run, teachers aim to develop students who know what

it feels like to be engaged, knowledgeable, and strategic.

A Caveat about Strategic Reading. Instruction in com-

prehension strategies is based on the belief that cognitive

processes, such as inference, connection, or visualization,

need to be modeled and explicitly taught to readers who

will then practice them whenever they read (Keene &

Zimmerman, 2007; Moreillon, 2009). This focus on com-

prehension strategies is signi cant because it has expanded

instruction beyond the basic skills of word recognition

and identi cation of story elements and themes. But the

promise of rigor in reading has sometimes led to a shift

from deeply considering a range of meanings to learning

the actual comprehension strategies. Atwell (2007) argues

that this shift is problematic because readers are forced

to approach literature from an efferent frame of mind, to

read in order to acquire information, instead of to read

to live within a literary world (Rosenblatt, 1978). Atwell

believes that this emphasis teaches children to seek and

carry away information about strategies when they read

literature, rather than living through the stories and expe-

riencing the journey. She found that directing her students

to activate their comprehension strategies as they read

interrupted their entry into a “reading zone.” They were

so focused on making connections, drawing conclusions,

and identifying visual imagery as they read, that they lost

comprehension. She argues that there may be occasional

moments in a text when examining comprehension strate-

gies is appropriate, but that “the story, the language, and

the reader are all that matter” in other moments (p. 64).

The issue is not whether or not comprehension strategies

should be taught, but determining when they are appropri-

ate and needed by the reader as well as their role within

interpretation and response.

Relating Literary Form and Meaning. Often literary

instruction in elementary contexts has taken the form of

worksheets that require students to identify and list story

elements, such as character, plot, and con ict, rather than

a thoughtful consideration of how these elements in uence

KATHY G. SHORT

their constructions of meaning. More recently, there has

been a strong emphasis on genre studies, some of which

are formulaic. An inquiry approach to genre study can sup-

port students’ insights into the relationships between form

and meaning. Instead of viewing a genre as a prescriptive

set of rules, genre can be a  exible tool that readers use

to identify social and textual structures for understanding

their worlds (Wolf, 2004).

Cruz and Pollock (2004) invited their students into in-

quiry about fantasy through a touchstone text, The Paper

Bag Princess (Munsch, 1988). Students then gathered

many texts and sorted them into three piles—de nitely

fantasy, not fantasy, and maybe fantasy. This sifting

process led students to develop a working de nition of

fantasy that they continued to explore through read alouds,

independent reading, charting of elements, characters, and

symbolism, and small group book clubs. Through this pro-

cess, students identi ed six characteristics that cut across

different kinds of fantasy and inquired into patterns, such

as the relationship between the villain and the hero, the role

magic plays in the fantasy world, the differing portrayals

of dragons in stories from Western and Eastern cultures,

and the changing roles of female characters. Ray (2006)

argues that an inquiry approach to genre study repositions

curriculum as the outcome of instruction rather than the

starting point. The “noticings and questioning that students

engage in and around texts determine what will become

important content for the study, and depth rather than

coverage is the driving force” (p. 238).

A guided inquiry approach to literary reading re ects

a signi cant shift in the roles of students and teachers as

they interact around literature. Although the teacher, as

problem-poser, engages in explicit teaching around literary

knowledge and reading strategies, this teaching is based

on careful observation of students’ needs and knowledge

of literacy and literature, rather than a predetermined

sequential curriculum. Within this focus, students as

problem-solvers may explore their own inquiries about

reading strategies and text knowledge as they read litera-

ture that engages them.

Reading Widely for Personal Purposes

Reading literature for personal purposes involves not only

personal enjoyment of reading, but social opportunities to

share and become interested in a wide range of genres,

authors, styles, and themes. In personal reading develop-

ment, the focus is on choice and extensive reading for

purposes signi cant to the reader. Those purposes range

from enjoyment and entertainment to personal inquiries

on issues and topics that matter in a particular reader’s

life—often because friends are also interested in the topic

and genre.

Extensive reading promotes positive attitudes about

reading, expands students’ literary knowledge and, thus,

develops students’ con dence in comprehension and in-

terpretation, and encourages the development of lifelong

reading habits. In addition, reading many materials with

ease increases  uency as readers gain experience in ef-

fectively orchestrating a range of reading strategies within

familiar texts (Morrow, 2003). As Galda (2001) points out,

“children’s books provide a reason to learn to read, as well

as a reason to keep on reading” (p. 224), so that children

become readers who not only can read, but who also will

and do read across their lifetimes.

Children will have different purposes for their reading,

and those interests and aims should be recognized and

valued so everyone in a classroom can see that reading

extends beyond the mandates of schooling. When develop-

ing a library for young readers, books and other materi-

als (e.g., letters, class-produced books, annotated photo

albums, postcards) should be accessible for independent

reading. Among these books should be the stories that are

read aloud in class, including patterned language books

like The Very Hungry Caterpillar (Carle, 1968). Older

children will be able to read and discuss different books in

a series such as Lemony Snicket’s “Unfortunate Events”

series or the “Time Warp” series by Jon Sczeiska and Lane

Smith. Many children prefer non ction literature and may

resist an overemphasis on  ction; thus, books that address

and extend children’s interests in the natural world, world

records, history, inventions, and sports should be available

for reading and discussion with peers.

Reading widely develops through independent reading

and read-alouds when adults provide a regularly scheduled

time for these experiences, a variety of reading materials,

and a place for reading alongside the child. While reading

with children from a book of their choosing, the emphasis

should be on meaning and interpretation of character re-

lationships, plot, and connections with related stories and

experiences. In this individualized time between the adult

and child, it is possible to follow the child’s questions and

understandings about the story and about how text works.

One to one conversations such as these inform a teacher’s

perspective on a child’s reading development and can be

recorded to supplement—if not supplant—standardized

assessments of reading that discount the interests, ques-

tions, and contexts of children’s reading.

The main focus of independent reading is immersion

in reading, not writing reports or talking about this read-

ing. These experiences with a wide range of self-selected

texts help students explore personal purposes for reading

within their lives. Research indicates that many adults

stop engaging with books once they leave school and

view reading as boring school work because of the lack

of personal choice in reading materials in schools (Gam-

brell, 2000). Independent reading is supported by reading

aloud to children and telling them oral stories to introduce

concepts of print, book language, and story structures as

well as open up new genres and encourage critical inquiry

around literature (Galda & Cullinan, 2000). The recent

political focus on evidenced-based reading practices has

led to of cial discourse that questions the value of read-

READING LITERATURE IN ELEMENTARY CLASSROOMS

ing aloud in elementary classrooms. Reading aloud and

discussing books with children is often pushed to the

side or has become rushed with little time for children

to explore their thinking with each other about a book.

Copenhaver (2001) argues that the result is the silencing

or marginalizing of children’s inquiries as ef ciency and

control take away the extended time some children need

to wonder about and talk back to a book.

Reading Deeply to Transform Understanding

Reading literature to think about and transform under-

standing about oneself and the world involves reading to

inquire into issues in children’s lives and in the broader

society. These experiences support children in becoming

critical and knowledgeable readers and thinkers. Through

discussions of well-selected literature, readers are encour-

aged to engage deeply with the story world and then step

back to share their personal connections and to re ect

critically with others about the text and their responses.

They engage in shared thinking about ideas based on criti-

cal inquiries that matter in their lives and world. These

critical inquiries involve the types of discussion described

earlier in children’s dialogue and responses to Oliver But-

ton is a Sissy (de Paola, 1979), Iqbal (D’Adamo, 2001),

Friends from the Other Side (Anzaldúa, 1987), and Felita

(Mohr, 1979).

This focus on the intensive reading of a few books to

think deeply and critically, balances the extensive read-

ing of many books. The books chosen by a teacher for

intensive reading have multiple layers of meaning, and

challenge readers to linger longer over ideas, words,

characterizations, setting descriptions, and relationships

among literary forms and themes (Sumara, 2002). Books

such as The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate (Kelly, 2009) and

Fox (Wild, 2001) invite social interaction and discussion

as readers need others to think with as they struggle with

interpretation and understanding. Because the focus is

on children’s thinking and dialogue, the literature may

need to be read aloud to facilitate clarity and questioning

during reading. Sipe (2008) found that the majority of

young children’s conversational turns occur during the

reading of the book. He argues that expecting children

to save their responses until the story is  nished imposes

an adult view of response that may not be productive for

young children whose responses are often of the moment

and in the moment.

Children may also engage with literature as part of a

thematic study or inquiry within content areas, such as

math, science, and social studies. They read critically to

compare information and issues across these books and to

learn facts about the topic as well as to consider concep-

tual issues. Literature becomes a tool for understanding

the world and considering broader social and scienti c

issues as well as a means of facilitating children’s interest

in a topic. Sandy Kaser (2001) used  ction and non ction

literature with  fth graders within a study of astronomy to

explore conceptual understandings of “space,” to examine a

range of cultural theories about stars, and to support student

inquiries into scienti c issues and questions, as well as to

read and discuss science  ction in literature circles.

Reading deeply to transform understanding focuses

on collaborative problem-posing as teachers and students

struggle together to identify and explore the issues they

 nd signi cant within a text. This collaborative problem-

posing and problem-solving balances the guided inquiry

of strategic reading where teachers are the problem-posers

and the personal inquiry of independent reading where

students take on the role of problem-poser. These en-

gagements and purposes for reading are connected by the

belief that the reading curriculum should not be delivered

to students but constructed with students as they engage

in wondering and seeking insights into their own literacy

processes and literary experiences.

Reading Education as a Political Act

Reading education has been one of the most controversial

and contested areas of international debate among both

educators and politicians. McCulloch (2007) argues that

disagreements about teaching reading “swirl around and

between rival camps and interests” to establish political

narratives and alliances that form the basis for the power

that can “undermine and challenge public policy directions

and even entire governments” (p. ix). The intense debate

over literacy has led to the imposition of one-size- ts-all

models of national literacy standards and high stakes

testing through legislation and policy initiatives such as

the National Literacy Strategy in England, No Child Left

Behind and Reading First in the United States, and the

National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy in Aus-

tralia. These initiatives and public debates over reading

standards have shaped the political environments that are

now highly receptive to centralized and prescriptive ap-

proaches to reading education—especially in elementary

and primary schools.

These public debates and government initiatives have

positioned teachers as objects of policy directives, rather

than as active co-constructors of curriculum for their stu-

dents. Ylimaki and McClain (2007) state that the “reading

wars” have been contested within the political arena and

not classrooms, and expressed through punitive legisla-

tion aimed at controlling teachers. Teachers are denied

agency in the teaching process beyond selecting from

approved instructional practices and packaged reading

programs produced by approved textbook companies. At

best, teachers and students are engaged as problem-solvers

in their use of these materials, but not as problem-posers

who inquire into tensions that are signi cant to their lives

within the world or as literacy learners.

The politicized nature of decisions about the teach-

ing of reading has created an ever-changing search for

and imposition of single silver bullet solutions to the

KATHY G. SHORT

challenges of teaching literacy. The solution changes as

governments, politicians, and policy makers move in and

out of of ce and public approval but the focus on quick,

easy solutions that can be imposed on schools and teachers

remains constant. Soler (2007) argues that this emphasis

on solutions re ects a shift from a discourse of liberal

humanism in schooling toward a discourse of management

based in “a view of the individual as a subject to govern

and/or be governed” (p. 43). Child-centered views in

elementary schools have been replaced with technocratic

views that stress basic skills and prescribed methods and

approaches to teaching. Indeed, the current national de-

bates on literacy are not even how best to teach reading,

but how best to teach phonics (Hall, 2007).

Polarities and oversimpli cation have won out over

the realities and complexities of teaching reading in ways

that are motivating, substantive, and relevant. And literacy

research has been characterized as negative, inconsistent,

and irrelevant for informing literacy instruction. Although

literacy researchers, as social scientists, value debate, dia-

logue, critique, and multiple viewpoints across questions

and directions for change, these cornerstone practices of

well-developed research are dismissed because they can-

not provide clear, simple solutions.

Since literature-based approaches are typically viewed

as child-centered and as located within liberal discourse,

literature is often not included in these discussions and

is viewed as a mere accessory to children’s learning and

development. In addition, from an economic standpoint,

the publishers of large textbook literacy programs and

reading schemes have much to gain from the imposition

of prescriptive approaches on schools and so maintain

strong lobbyist positions (Shannon, 2007). Reading litera-

ture in elementary classrooms does not meet the political

criteria of providing easy solutions to literacy instruction

or of supporting large corporate efforts to maintain their

positions in the school markets. The belief that children

learn best in holistic contexts that strive to preserve the

authenticity of materials and encourage inquiry is under

attack or has been dismissed in many parts of the world,

and many policy makers now view reading literature as a

supplementary activity in elementary schools.

Conclusion

An inquiry stance to literature and curriculum invites

children to make meaning of texts in personally and cultur-

ally signi cant ways to facilitate learning and to develop

lifelong reading attitudes and habits. Children gain a sense

of possibility for their lives and that of the society in which

they live along with the ability to consider others’ perspec-

tives and needs. Engagement with literature thus allows

them to develop their own voices and, at the same time,

go beyond self-interest to an awareness of broader human

consequences. An inquiry stance encourages this engage-

ment through focusing on children as problem-posers who

seek out the questions that are signi cant in their lives and

world, as well as problem-solvers who investigate those

problems to reach new understandings, take action, and

pose more complex questions and problems.

Elementary educators value the role of story in chil-

dren’s lives and the ways in which children use story to

construct their understandings of themselves and their

world. This belief in the power of story as inquiry, how-

ever, has often focused on how to use literature to support

the teaching of literacy and content, rather than on also

valuing literature as a way of thinking and re-visioning life.

In addition, many elementary educators are struggling with

the politicization of reading instruction to the point that

children are no longer able to meaningfully engage with

literature. Research that investigates the complex roles

literature can play within elementary classrooms and that

challenges the current politicization of reading policies has

tremendous potential for opening new possibilities for how

literature is read within elementary contexts.

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Age.

Readers, Texts, and Contexts in the Middle

Re-imagining Literature Education for Young Adolescents

Thomas P. Crumpler and Linda Wedwick

Illinois State University

Becoming a reader, as other authors in this section have shown, is often an unpredictable journey, usually

marked by uncertainty and, if you’re lucky, well-timed guidance. No time is more uncertain for being a reader

than during the middle years of young adolescence, when engaged literary reading seems to wane for many

youth, while becoming the refuge for others. Thomas Crumpler and Linda Wedwick open up the pathways to

reading with an analysis of recent research on readers’ approaches to literature, the literary content of particu-

lar relevance to this age group, and descriptions of the highly engaging forms of drama that can accompany

reading in school and library settings.

When de ning adolescence, a wide range of ages is

typically included. For some researchers, the generally

accepted age range for adolescence is 10 to 20. However,

this generous age span is problematic when considering

the changing nature of “physical and cognitive develop-

ment on youth literacy practices” (Moje, Overby, Tysvaer,

& Morris, 2008, p.110) and the changing contexts from

primary school to middle school to high school that often

mark signi cant shifts in adolescents’ interests, experi-

ences, and responsibilities. While we recognize that certain

continuity exists between elementary and secondary-aged

readers (such as identifying with characters in a story),

there is value in focusing on a narrower age range, 11–14

speci cally, for interpreting research and for considering

how to engage young people in literary reading. In this

chapter we focus on the dimensions of reading experi-

ence, especially social contexts and individual engage-

ment, that can be formative for readers who are leaving

behind episodic, humorous  ction and entering into a

more critical and exploratory approach to book selection

and interpretation. We begin with brief portraits of three

readers and analyze these through the lenses of identity,

social and cultural expectations, and motivational differ-

ences among readers.

The second section focuses on the characteristics of

texts that have been viewed by critics, scholars, and edu-

cators as particularly well-suited to middle grade readers.

We examine these characteristics in order to establish

THOMAS P. CRUMPLER AND LINDA WEDWICK

a sense of distinction for readers as they move into the

transformative period of young adolescence.

Finally, we describe pedagogical approaches, especially

dramatic processes, that support and extend readers’ en-

gagement in and interpretations of story worlds that may,

at  rst, seem distant or confusing. Using several examples,

we describe active, inquiry-based, social approaches to

literary reading that enable young people to live inside

worlds, rather than looking in from the outside.

Readers and Reading Inside Social Worlds

Some studies of adolescent readers have claimed that

students’ interest in reading declines in middle school.

McKenna, Kear, and Ellsworth (1995), for example, found

that students attitudes toward reading steadily declined

from early elementary to middle school. More recently,

Greenberg, Gilbert, and Fredrick (2006) claim the results

of their study “indicate that middle school students show

a signi cant lack of interest in reading and a lack of read-

ing behavior” (p. 168). This survey research examined the

responses of 1,174 middle school students from both rural

and inner-city schools. Although their questionnaire was

somewhat limited in complexity, participants’ mean score

for interest in reading was 2.42 on a 4-point Likert scale.

Despite this evidence, we know that middle school

students’ motivation to read is much more complex. De-

 ning the parameters around a middle-level reader means

taking into consideration the unique characteristics of early

adolescence, their varied developmental characteristics,

how they de ne reading, how they participate in reading

as socially and culturally positioned people, and how

they perceive their access to and comfort with unfamiliar

ideas and perspectives represented in literature. For the

past decade, researchers are more cautious in labeling

adolescent students as unmotivated or non-readers. Not

only do we need to consider both in and out of school

practices; we must also consider their view of reading and

their reader identity.

Ivey and Broaddus (2001) recognized that studies of

young adolescents’ attitudes toward and interests in read-

ing were limited and few examined the instruction that

may contribute to students’ interest in reading. In their

study, 1,765 sixth-grade students responded to a question-

naire about reading in their language arts classroom. The

results suggest a mismatch between school structures,

such as mandated curriculum and instructional approach.

Additionally, they realized that motivation to read is not

an “all-or-nothing construct” (p. 366).

More recently, in a study of 584 urban minority middle

school students, Hughes-Hassell and Rodge (2007) found

that 72% of the students reported that they engage in

reading as a leisure activity. A majority of the students

who engage in leisure reading report that they do it for

fun, and magazines are usually their material of choice.

Both of these studies con rm that readers’ attitudes are

multidimensional and  uctuate based on the context. As

the reading portraits presented below suggest, young

adolescents’ attitudes toward reading are deeply tied to

contexts and purposes, as well as their beliefs about how

books “talk” to you.

Katie, a seventh grader, says that “reading is something

you do in your spare time, for enjoyment, to learn, and to

 nd out what other people think about different topics.”

Katie reads for pleasure all the time. She likes contempo-

rary realistic  ction the most, such as The Lottery Rose by

Irene Hunt (1976) and Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech

(1996), but she admits that she will read anything. She

rarely abandons books because even if she is not all that

interested in the book, she “doesn’t mind  nishing it just

to see what happens.” In her language arts class, she is

routinely  nishing one book and checking out another. She

also reads all the texts assigned in the other classes but

only because she wants good grades. Katie’s understand-

ing of reading distinguishes between what she reads for

school assignments and what she reads for pleasure. Her

de nition of reading does not include any reading that she

might do for a school assignment.

Steven, on the other hand, understands that reading has

a variety of purposes and exists in a variety of contexts,

including both in and out of school. He de nes reading

as “a way of being communicated to. Sometimes reading

is needed to  nd important information. Or, sometimes it

is just for fun.” Steven primarily selects fantasy texts for

pleasure reading, including series such as the Redwall

series by Brian Jacques.

In contrast, Bailey, an eighth grader, believes that “read-

ing is when you are looking at words and saying what they

are/say.” Although he does not have a “reader” identity,

and does not show much interest in reading novels, he

uses a variety of comprehension strategies (such as mak-

ing connections and asking questions) to understand texts

that interest him. When asked, Bailey cannot name speci c

book titles of what he has recently read.

These three readers show three very distinct reader

identities and three different de nitions of reading. To

complicate matters further, teachers and students may also

conceptualize reading and what it means to be a reader

differently. Williams (2004) suggests that young children

believe that all reading both in and out of the classroom

counts towards making them readers. However, by middle

school, “reading becomes more connected to work and the

demonstration and assessment of knowledge” (p. 687),

so young adolescents’ conceptions of their identities as

readers change.

Describing oneself as someone who does not like read-

ing does not necessarily mean that a young adolescent does

not read or lacks fundamental skills for reading (Hughes-

Hassell & Rodge, 2007; Strommen & Mates, 2004). Ac-

cording to Ivey (2001), middle-level reader differences can

be viewed from two distinct and related dimensions: dif-

ferences between readers and complexity within individual

READERS, TEXTS, AND CONTEXTS IN THE MIDDLE

readers. Differences between readers include the wide

range in ability that is both academic and cognitive. In ad-

dition, a multi-case study of sixth-grade students found that

“individual middle level readers were multidimensional as

readers, and their abilities and dispositions toward reading

varied with different contexts” (p. 66).

Along with their perceptions of classroom-based read-

ing, it is also important to understand how adolescents

interpret reading in other parts of their lives. Moje et al.

(2008) found that adolescents’ social networks such as

informal reading and writing groups and more organized

reading groups became spaces “that allow racial or gen-

dered identities to be constructed or enacted” (p. 132).

Their longitudinal research challenges traditional views

of reading practices among adolescents that describe

them as indifferent or unmotivated. These  ndings help

to explain why the readers described above think about

reading very differently. Indeed, their reader identities are

unique, multidimensional, and contextualized.

We take as further evidence of these nuances in reading

interest, Tatum’s (2008) analysis of the social and politi-

cal contexts informing young African American males’

reading choices. Tatum demonstrates, through interview

data and evidence of students’ literature-based writing,

that racially based biases and judgments both in and out

of school often collide and constrain reading interests for

many students—particularly if they grow up in communi-

ties of high poverty.

In one case, Tatum (2008) focuses on a young man from

Chicago whose choices of texts were mediated by racist

experiences such as being pulled over by white police

of cers who assume the African American occupants pos-

sessed drugs or other illegal substances. These phenomena

of “driving while black” and other “devaluing” situations

are “often overlooked by literacy models that are solely

grounded in cognitive reading processes” (p. 172). Tatum

argues that these cultural experiences become texts that

mediate other literacy practices (e.g. selection of books)

for adolescent readers. Further, literate identities, for many

African American males are informed by performative

popular cultural texts such as hip hop music and rap lyrics.

Tatum argues that these texts are key to the social networks

that African American males inhabit, and that, as literacy

practices, they exercise profound in uence on the identities

the young men enact as part of a more relevant and success-

ful form of literacy experience outside of school.

Moje et al. (2008) contend that we need to know more

about relationships between literacy practices outside

of classrooms and school-based literacy, as well as how

they are mutually constitutive. We believe this is particu-

larly important for middle-level readers because they are

involved in constructing and performing identities that

are linked with, yet, challenge and transform traditional

cultural understandings of literacy. What are the best

contexts for successful literature instruction, and how

are those spaces constructed and negotiated by and with

middle-level students? As instructional walls become

more porous through technology and students become

more attuned to their roles in a global economy, how do

constructs of middle-level readers, middle-level novels,

and instructional practices shift?

Engaging Middle-Level Readers

From 2005 to 2007 nearly 80 articles appeared in Read-

ing Research Quarterly and the Journal of Adolescent &

Adult Literacy that speci cally focused on adolescents’

motivation and engagement in reading. According to

Cassidy, Garrett, and Barrera (2006), literacy leaders agree

“almost all the literature on adolescent literacy mentions

the importance of motivation or engagement” (p. 35).

Case studies included in the journal review may appear to

be limited in scope or usefulness in making an argument

for improving teachers’ knowledge of engagement and

motivation in reading the middle years, but according to

Hinchman (2008), such perspectives have the potential to

in uence policy to consider a more diverse range of litera-

cies and texts. Even the most recent studies on motivation

indicate that school texts do not match what adolescents

want nor need (Pitcher et al., 2007). Clearly, connected-

ness, or the transaction that takes place when a reader is

engaged is imperative for students to develop as readers

(Hunsberger, 2007).

Brozo, Shiel, and Topping (2007/2008) suggest that low

motivation to read is not unique to young adolescents in

the United States. Rather, “youth from across the globe

exhibit a similar decline in performance and interest as

they move from primary to secondary school” (p. 307).

In a recent column of International Reports on Literacy

Research, Botzakis and Malloy (2005) asked all Interna-

tional Reading Correspondents (IRCs) to identify the most

pressing issues in literacy from their region. The disen-

gagement with literacy of middle school students (grades

5–8; ages 11–14) was the issue most often identi ed. In

response, each IRC sent out surveys to 20–25 people in

their regions in order to gather more information about

young adolescents’ disengagement with literacy. The re-

sults across geographic regions showed that both gender

and out-of school interests were reported as in uential

on literacy engagement. Girls were reported to be more

engaged in school-approved literacies, but out-of-school

literacies were rarely incorporated in classroom instruc-

tion. Further, students are more engaged and in uenced

by new technologies; however, these technologies are not

used very often in classroom situations, particularly in

areas of high poverty (Botzakis & Malloy, 2005).

In another recent International Report of Reading

Research, Malloy and Botzakis (2005) summarize a lon-

gitudinal study of 370 students as they transitioned from

childhood to adolescence. Schillings (2003) investigated

the development of reading comprehension skills as well

as motivation to read, metacognitive reading awareness,

THOMAS P. CRUMPLER AND LINDA WEDWICK

and reading achievement based on Guthrie and Alverman’s

(1999) framework of reading engagement. Participants

consisted of 370 students at the end of Grade 6. Findings

indicated support of the process of engagement adapted

from Guthrie and Alverman (Malloy & Botzakis, 2005).

Finally, the Program for International Student As-

sessment (PISA) indicated that there is a link between

engagement and achievement. PISA is a global effort

that attempts to assess the reading literacy of adolescents.

Based on the results of the PISA 2000 report, Brozo et al.

(2007/2008) suggest that engagement is a critical factor

in reading achievement and “keeping students engaged in

reading and learning might make it possible for them to

overcome what might otherwise be insuperable barriers to

academic success” (p. 309). Highly engaged adolescents

from the lowest socioeconomic indicators performed as

well as two other groups in the study: (1) highly engaged

youth from the middle socioeconomic status (SES) and

(2) medium level engagement from high socioeconomic

status. Socioeconomic status is  gured by averaging the

value for the dimensions of occupation, education, house-

hold income and family income. These studies along with

the portraits of Katie, Steven, and Bailey suggest that read-

ers are motivated to read in different contexts. The above

study, speci cally, calls for a need to change our approach

for motivating and engaging students in schools, libraries,

and other spaces for reading, especially when students

have different goals and social values. With a clearly

established link between engagement and achievement

(Brozo et al., 2007/2008), we must focus on what we do

in the classroom to motivate all students while accepting

their unique reader identities and personal preferences.

De ning Middle-Level Narratives

From a policy makers’ perspective, in the area of adoles-

cent literacy there is tremendous need for researchers to

assist with selecting materials and developing interven-

tions for striving readers (Wise, 2007). Doubek and Cooper

(2007) suggest that researchers  nd out not only why

certain texts are chosen, but also explore the process of

text selection. Instructionally, there need to be clear guide-

lines for selecting appropriate texts not just for educators

but for non-educators in the community who work with

young readers outside of the school context. Wedwick and

Wutz’s (2006) work with BOOKMATCH, a tool used for

teaching self-selection strategies to middle-level students,

is appropriate for both educators and noneducators. This

tool scaffolds readers as they learn to match themselves to

books that are just right for them rather than relying on a

teacher, a publisher’s assumption of what is just right for

a grade level, or a scripted program, such as Accelerated

Reader. Thompson, Madhuri, and Taylor’s (2008) study of

the Accelerated Reader program con rmed other studies

that indicate students did not like the limited book selec-

tions associated with this program. Students also revealed

that they did not enjoy the book selections, and African

American students felt there were very few books by black

authors or with black protagonists other than books on

slavery. Empowering students to choose their own books

with a process like BOOKMATCH, may motivate them

to continue reading rather than discourage them.

The literature for young adolescents is also evolving

from children’s literature to adolescent literature. At times,

this transition may happen too quickly for some students.

Additionally, middle school teachers are forced to consider

the explicitness of some adolescent literature for whole

class novels or even inclusion in their classroom libraries.

In Wedwick’s own teaching of middle school students, she

had students every year who wanted to censor some books

in the classroom. This inevitably led to a debate between

those students who believed they should be able to read

anything they wanted and those who believed that some

books were inappropriate for everyone.

In selecting their own texts for independent reading,

these students were expected to consider the topic appropri-

ateness or their comfort zone for a particular text (Wedwick

& Wutz, 2006). Students openly discussed that adolescent

literature is often at a dif culty level appropriate for them,

but that those books regularly have “touchy” topics which

they may be uncomfortable reading. While choosing their

own books, students ranked topic appropriateness as one

of their top criteria for selection. Some students expressed

that sometimes they are comfortable with a book’s content,

but their parents were uncomfortable with them reading a

particular book and would not allow it. Of course, parents

and adolescents may not have the same perception of what

is appropriate. Nevertheless, young adolescents are quite

aware of their comfort zone and must be allowed to choose

books that match their comfort zone.

Having a way for both teachers and students to identify

books in the middle of a children’s literature and adolescent

literature continuum could be bene cial. Trites’s (2000)

scholarship in adolescent literature helps to inform an argu-

ment for a middle-level genre. According to Trites (2000),

the primary characteristic “that distinguishes adolescent

literature from children’s literature is the issue of how social

power is deployed during the course of the narrative” (p. 2).

For children’s literature, “the action focuses on one child

who learns to feel more secure” in his or her environment,

“represented by family and home” (pp. 3–4). In adolescent

literature, however, “protagonists must learn about the

social forces that have made them what they are” (p. 4).

In adolescent literature, the protagonist  gures out how to

“negotiate the levels of power that exist in the myriad social

institutions within which they must function” (p. 4).

Appleyard (1990) explains what he understands to be

the difference between books for children and books for

adolescents:

The difference is that the juvenile books all deal with an

innocent world, where evil is externalized and ﬁ nally pow-

erless, where endings are happy. The adolescents’ books

READERS, TEXTS, AND CONTEXTS IN THE MIDDLE

deal with sex, death, sin, and prejudice, and good and evil

are not neatly separated but mixed up in the confused and

often turbulent emotions of the central characters them-

selves. (p.100)

Books for the young adolescent, then, do not completely

re ect the innocent world of children’s literature, but also

do not position the reader in explicit situational contexts as

adolescent literature does. Although books can be a safe

place for new experiences before adolescents try them out

in the real world, young adolescents are not always pre-

pared for the content of literature for older adolescents.

Drawing on the work of these scholars, and particularly

Trites (2000) and Appleyard (1990), the chart in Figure

5.1 outlines a proposed set of criteria that distinguishes

middle-level literature from children’s literature and ado-

lescent literature by the representation of sex/sexuality,

power, and the innocent world.

We understand these criteria as guideposts for theoriz-

ing the genre of middle-level literature; they help mark

explorations into the genre but are not meant to restrict

them. Three texts are used here to help illustrate these dis-

tinguishing characteristics of children’s literature, middle-

level literature, and adolescent literature: And Tango makes

Three by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell (2005), The

Mis ts by James Howe (2001), and Geography Club by

Brent Hartinger (2003).

In And Tango Makes Three, sex and sexuality are

focused on the concept of family—speci cally on same

gender adults who are the caregivers in one family. Fami-

lies are  rst described traditionally when a boy and a girl

penguin become a couple. They build a home together, the

girl penguin lays an egg, the couple takes turns warming

the egg until it hatches, and the families become mama,

papa, and baby. However, the male penguins, Roy and

Silo, have no interest in the girl penguins, and the two of

them do everything together, such as swimming, singing,

walking, and nesting.

When the other penguins prepare their nest to hatch an

egg, Roy and Silo follow their rituals, but without an egg,

no baby penguin is hatched. The zoo keeper provides Roy

and Silo with an egg, and the two penguins take turns sitting

on the egg until it hatches. When Tango is born, the three

of them live happily as a family. Tango has two daddies.

Roy and Silo enact power by hatching the egg in their nest

and taking care of Tango. Together they experience both a

sense of self and a sense of family. The innocent world is

represented in the plot as the focus is only on the happiness

of all the characters. Roy and Silo do not experience ostra-

cism by being a non-traditional family, and they experience

the same happiness as all the other penguin families. There

is essentially no evil in the story.

In the middle-level novel, The Mis ts (Howe, 2001),

sex and sexuality are evident in the harmless crushes the

characters have on different people in their lives. For ex-

ample, Bobby has a crush on the older Pam and the very

shy Kelsey. Skeezie has a crush on Stef , the older waitress

at the Candy Kitchen. Joe has a crush on his classmate,

Colin. Joe’s gay identity is explicit, but he dreams only of

Sex/Sexuality

Children’s Literature Middle Level Literature Adolescent Literature

Focus is on gender roles/constructions;

Implicit rather than explicit

Sexuality is viewed as innocent and

harmless; perhaps even comical.

The potential of its power is not fully

understood.

Characters deal explicitly with issues

of sex and sexuality; “experiencing

sexuality marks a rite of passage that

helps them deﬁ ne themselves as having

left childhood behind” (Trites, 2000, p.

84).

Power

The reader learns to feel more secure in

immediate environment (Trites, 2000).

The protagonist’s struggle enacts

personal power and a sense of self

(Trites, 2000).

The reader learns that there are social

institutions that have varying levels of

power over them.

The protagonist’s struggle propels

her/him forward on an identity quest

and empowers him/her to continue the

exploration.

The reader learns to negotiate the levels

of power in social institutions (Trites,

2000).

The protagonist’s struggle is more

on an institutional level, and he/she is

more likely to be disempowered by the

social institutions in this struggle.

Innocent World

Social injustice is rectiﬁ ed.

Evil is externalized and powerless

and endings are happy (Appleyard,

1990).

Social injustice may exist but individuals

have the power to overcome it.

Evil can be internal and external.

The protagonist learns to overcome the

power of evil rather than understand it

to be powerless.

Social injustice is a fact of life and

difﬁ cult if not impossible to eradicate.

“Deal with sex, death, sin, and

prejudice; good and evil are not viewed

as binary opposites but tied up in the

turbulent emotions of the characters”

(Appleyard, 1990, p. 100).

Figure 5.1 Characteristics of literature by category

THOMAS P. CRUMPLER AND LINDA WEDWICK

holding hands with someone he likes. The comedic also

plays a role in the characters’ sexual awakening: DuSh-

awn likes Addie so he hits her with spitballs and puts a

whoopee cushion on her chair; Bobby  nally works up the

nerve to call Kelsey, but he hangs up twice when someone

answers, and then keeps telling Kelsey that there is some-

thing wrong with his phone; Addie thinks she and Colin

are going together because he showed up at the  agpole,

gave her a compliment, and told her he’d get a soda with

her another time; and Skeezie becomes speechless when

the older Stef  irts with him.

In terms of power, the gang of  ve experience struggles

with the institutional powers of school and social status.

They want to create a third party to run for student council,

but they are repeatedly met with barriers from the teacher

Ms. Wyman, the principal Mr. Kiley, and the larger institu-

tional power of the two party governmental system of the

country. However, the gang of  ve is granted permission

to create their third party, the No-Name Party. The gang

also believe themselves to be on the lower end of the social

status, but they have each other, which empowers them.

Even though they don’t end up winning the election, they

are still empowered by the experience and learn that each

has “the freedom to be who you are without anybody

calling you names” (p. 266).

Characters in The Mis ts understand that evil exists.

They have all been called names at least since the third

grade. But, together, they learn to overcome this evil, or

at least to  ght against it. By not winning the election,

they recognize that evil has power, but they learn that

they can overcome it. They learn that they can stand up

for themselves, and they believe that they have the power

to make a difference.

In Geography Club (Hartinger, 2003), sex and sexuality

become much more explicit. For example, Ms. Toles, the

health teacher, teaches the students how to use condoms,

demonstrating on a cucumber. The high school students

in this novel describe sexual encounters as though sex in

high school is a matter of fact. For example, Jared says,

“she was begging for it, squirming around like a baby,”

and once he “started going at her, she couldn’t get enough”

(p.181). Russel Middlebrook, the novel’s protagonist, is

a gay teenager who occasionally visits gay chat rooms,

and eventually experiences sex with another boy from his

school. Russel’s coming to terms with his sexuality is an

explicit plot feature throughout the book.

However, while Joe in The Mis ts does not hide who

he is, the gay characters in Geography Club recognize

the loss of power and social status should they reveal

themselves. Russel learns that one’s fear of exposure is

more powerful than any other emotion. Kevin, Russel’s

boyfriend, knows that the power that comes with his social

status as a popular jock is more important than being true

to himself and being associated with the gay Russel. At

the end of the novel, the institutional power seems to win.

The Geography Club is defunct, and even though a Gay-

Straight-Bisexual Alliance is formed, the gay members are

content with the rest of the student body believing they

are the “straight” members and Brian Bund is the one gay

member of the club.

The innocent world is problematic in adolescent lit-

erature and injustices are prevalent. Topics like sex and

drinking are positioned as sinful in the world of the novel,

and characters deal with “real” consequences of their

behavior. Russel learns that good and evil are not simply

opposites. When Brian Bund is being tormented in the

cafeteria, Russel says that he’d like to help him, but “it

wouldn’t have made any difference anyway” (p. 9) because

he risked being a victim as well. Later, when Russel starts

hanging around with the jocks, he too, teases Brian, even

though he knows it to be wrong. When other members of

the Geography Club invite Brian to join them, Russel votes

no because he doesn’t want to risk losing Kevin.

These three texts present unique characteristics and

demonstrate the need for a middle-level genre. In chil-

dren’s literature, the protagonist experiences personal

power. In the adolescent novel, protagonists struggle on

more of an institutional level and they discover that they

are more likely to be disempowered by the social institu-

tions. The middle-level novel propels young adolescents

forward on their identity quests and empowers them to

continue that exploration. Trites’s (2000) distinction be-

tween the Entwicklungsroman “which is a broad category

of novels in which an adolescent character grows, and the

Bildungsroman, which is a related type of novel in which

the adolescent matures to adulthood” (p. 9) shapes our

thinking about this identity quest. Middle-level novels are

Entwicklungsromane, not Bildungsromane. Growth novels

are not punctuated with graphic language and sexual how

to, although there may be a sense of sexual awakening

within the protagonist.

Overall, we believe work by these scholars and re-

searchers, along with our newly de ned characteristics,

support our claim for recognizing texts for the middle-

level reader as a viable category, situated between litera-

ture for children and literature for older adolescents. We

acknowledge that the category we are arguing for may

not encompass the experiences of all readers, and that

particular groups of readers may  nd other types of texts

engaging on a personal or political level (Enciso, Wolf,

Coats, & Jenkins, 2010). However, we believe that identi-

fying texts for middle-level readers has educational value.

In the next section, we explore instructional contexts in

which middle-level literature can be brought to life through

meaningful, interactive experiences.

What Instructional Contexts are Most Likely

to Engage Middle-Level Readers?

In this section, we focus on instructional research that

suggests successful practices for teaching middle-level

literature; we also argue for an expansion of research

READERS, TEXTS, AND CONTEXTS IN THE MIDDLE

on teaching the middle-level novel that is informed by

innovative pedagogy—particularly process drama. We

believe that process drama, the practices of using dra-

matic structures as tools facilitate response to literature,

offer new opportunities for thinking about research on

teaching literature for middle-level readers. The work

of the New London Group (1996) helped crystallize the

notion of multi-literacies into a pedagogical frame that

emphasized the concepts of design and literacy work for

re-imagining “social futures” for learners. This approach

offers a powerful heuristic for researchers and teachers

who want to explore how middle-level readers draw on

multiple sign systems (Siegel, 2006) as they respond to and

construct understandings of literature. We argue that par-

ticularly promising are studies that draw on process drama

to engage readers in complex meaning making around

literature. In this chapter, we situate process drama in a

larger context of reader response research; however, we

also acknowledge that others would view it differently.

Readers Responding in the Middle-Level

Classroom: Categories for Interpreting

Middle-Level Reading Engagement

Early research by Appleyard (1990) discovered that be-

coming a reader and responding as a reader are develop-

mental processes. He argued that to understand readers’

responses to texts, we need to move beyond cognitive

explanations of development and consider sociocultural

factors. According to Appleyard, as readers mature, their

attitudes, intentions, responses, and use of reading shifts

along  ve roles: player, hero and heroine, thinker, inter-

preter, and pragmatic. He generated his concepts from

a narrative analysis of three “instructive accounts” (pp.

23–25) of young readers and extrapolated his categories of

role from these examples. Young adolescents fall between

and among the characteristics of reader as hero and heroine

and reader as thinker. The reader as hero and heroine imag-

ines herself as the protagonist who solves the problems of

the world through competence and initiative. The reader

as thinker looks to literature to discover authentic roles for

imitation, ideal images, and values and alternative values

and beliefs. The shifting nature of these roles is related

both to young adolescents’ emerging identity and their

cognitive development, as well as the situational context

of middle school and their social practices.

This shifting of readers’ responses is also documented

in Galda’s (1992) four-year study of students as they

moved from fourth grade to seventh grade. The results

showed signi cant differences in students’ responses as

they grew older. Students read two novels each year (one

realism and one fantasy) and discussed those novels with

the researcher leading the discussion with open-ended

questions. Students’ responses during these discussions

and individual interviews with the researcher were clas-

si ed into categorical and analytic responses. The results

indicated that students’ responses changed from primarily

categorical to more analytic, and “their preferences and

understandings about reading literature became increas-

ingly complex across the four years of the study” (p. 132).

Although these students are not rereading the same texts,

their experiences over time are contributing to the increas-

ing complexity of their cognitive processes.

More recently, studies have concluded that adolescents

have little critical response to texts (Beach & Freedman,

1992; DeBlase, 2003; Garner, 1999; Pace, 2003; Pearlman,

1995; Smith, 1992). Still, these  ndings do not imply that

students lack the cognitive capacity for understanding

ideology. The reader’s social stance or subject position

plays a salient role in the thinking readers do about the

texts. Considering young adolescents’ emerging identity,

their need to explore alternative roles, the complexity and

variability of their developing cognitive ability, and their

shifting reader roles, these characteristics are distinctly

different from those of childhood and those of later ado-

lescence. This difference is related to the inchoate nature

of young adolescent identities and a need to “try on” dif-

ferent selves in ways that are safe for middle-level readers.

Therefore, middle-level texts will need to provide oppor-

tunities to interactively respond and explore some of these

same distinct characteristics. However, young adolescent

readers will also need instruction on how to read a novel

and how to critically analyze ideology.

Shifting Practices

How middle-level readers respond to and engage with

literature has been a trend in recent research (Almasi,

1995; Alverman et al., 1996; Lewis, 1997; Evans, 2002).

These studies have established how understandings and

interpretations of literature can be mediated successfully

through literature circles and other discussion groups.

Together, they are salient for recognizing the importance

of highlighting social interactions as signi cant features

of literature instruction for middle-level readers.

Recent scholarship has investigated how response to

literature is culturally situated in speci c contexts and

how readers’ responses to literature may be transfor-

mative—helping them see literary texts and their own

meaning making practices differently. Galda and Beach

(2001) chart the development of response to literature

by reviewing scholarship in three areas—text, readers,

and contexts. Based on their synthesis of work from the

1960s though the late 1990s, they contend that research

on response has been informed by sociocultural theory. To

deepen their pedagogical understanding of how middle-

level readers respond, Beach and Meyers (2001) focused

speci cally on a group of 15 seventh-grade girls respond-

ing to a young adult novel in an after school book club.

Their  ndings suggested exploring responses to the novel

through dialogue journal entries helped these middle-level

students unpack and question traditional roles of women

in society.

THOMAS P. CRUMPLER AND LINDA WEDWICK

Brooks’s (2006) investigation of how African American

middle-level readers respond to and interpret texts that

include authentic representations of their own ethnic group

was theoretically situated within a convergence of reader-

response scholarship. She frames her inquiry by arguing

for separating reader response categories proposed by

Beach (1993): textual, experiential, psychological, social,

and cultural; and selecting experiential and cultural as the

most potentially generative for examining how this class

of students responded to a group novels selected by the

researcher and the librarian at the school where the research

was conducted (Brooks, 2006, p. 375). Brooks de nes

experiential as signi cant for readers of African Ameri-

can literature because it focuses on “the value of life-text

links” and cultural as how readers “draw from historical,

discursive, ideological and social contexts (p. 376) in their

responses. The list of novels for the study included Scorpi-

ons (Myers, 1988), Roll of Thunder Hear my Cry (Taylor,

1976), and the House of Dies Drear (Hamilton, 1968).

Brooks’s analyses of responses during literature discus-

sions indicated that textual features across novels (e.g.,

forging family and friend relationships, confronting and

overcoming racism, surviving city life), could be used to

augment effective literacy instruction with middle-level

readers. What was particularly signi cant in Brooks’s

study was her implication that middle-level African

American reader’s responses to and understandings of

the novels listed above were tied to student’s culturally

speci c knowledge, yet were also complex. Pedagogi-

cally, this supports our argument that we need innovative

instruction that both honors the cultural background of

the middle-level reader and creates avenues to explore

individual complexity across literary texts.

Other research (Juzwik & Sherry, 2007) has examined

how the use of teacher oral narratives promoted speci c

categories of response in a seventh grade classroom and

also enhanced class discussion of literature. Additionally,

Stone (2006) looked at how students used the development

of picture books as a way to mediate and respond to rela-

tionships between school culture and their communities

and found that this type of genre-speci c writing response

opened dialogues for teaching critical literacy. These

two studies suggest that culturally constructed textual

features and a literacy practice like oral narrative foster

more complex and potentially identity shaping responses

in middle-level readers.

Others have built on this body of scholarship to consider

how constructs of power, gender, and identity mediate

reader’s construction of meaning (Broughton & Fairbanks,

2003; Cherland, 1994; Smith, 1992). Clarke’s research

(2006), for example, investigated literature circle discus-

sions as spaces where  fth-grade girls were positioned and

positioned themselves along narrative and cultural story

lines. Findings from this study challenge researchers to

think more carefully and deeply about relationships within

engagement with literature, and how teachers can “create

situations in which power and positioning become normal-

ized” (p. 77). These patterns can reify traditional patterns

of dominance in classrooms, and create opportunities for

some students’ voices to be squelched. In the next section

we detail the power of drama and its pedagogical use with

middle-level readers and argue that this approach brings

together reader, text, and context in potentially powerful

ways.

Drama and Readers’ Response to Middle-level

Literature

Identifying middle-level literature creates opportunities for

teachers and students to select books that resonate for a

particular category of reader; using drama as a pedagogi-

cal tool can shift instruction so that a student’s “whole

being” (Crumpler & Schneider, 2002) is engaged in the

study of that literature. Wagner’s (1998) survey and syn-

thesis of research studies about using drama in language

arts provided evidence for how process drama could

impact students’ learning and engagement. In the area of

drama and literature instruction, the work of Rosenblatt

(1938/1983, 1978) is conceptually salient. Scholars built

on her theories and extended them to explorations of liter-

ary understanding (Steig, 1989), argued for how literary

texts encouraged readers to enter  ctional worlds (Benton,

1992), and developed performative theories of responding

to and interpreting texts (Iser, 1989, 1993).

More recently, researchers have argued for the impor-

tance of literary theory for underpinning literature instruc-

tion with adolescents (Appleman, 2000; Soter, 1999;

Sumara, 2002). Based on the works of these authors and

others, researchers have explored how process drama can

serve as a pedagogical tool to augment and enrich literature

instruction and challenge traditional interpretive stances

with readers (Crumpler, 2006; Gallagher, 2001; Medina,

2004; Wilhelm & Edmiston, 1998). In this chapter we

conceptualize process drama as using methods of teacher

in role, student in role, tableaux, and other dramatic struc-

tures to promote learning (O’Neill, 1995).

Heathcote and Bolton (1995), as well as more recent

work, have investigated possibilities for drama as response

to literature (Edmiston, 2003; Edmiston & Enciso, 2003;

Wolf, Edmiston, & Enciso, 1997). Wolf (2004) delineates

between “text centered” and “text edged” drama as inter-

pretive work in which an author’s words are either central

to creating a performative event such as reader’s theater

and classroom theater or, on the other hand, tableaux and

unwritten conversations, which stray further from the

text. Key to both approaches is the concept of “critical

space” in which teachers and students step out of a dra-

matic sequence of instruction with literature to examine

how roles were taken up and critique the creation of the

 ctional experience.

Using such a framework, a teacher could use text

edged drama to explore issues of family or perspectives

suggested in the middle-level novel, No More Dead Dogs

READERS, TEXTS, AND CONTEXTS IN THE MIDDLE

(Korman, 2000). In this novel, Wallace, who refuses to lie

under any circumstances, is an unexpected football suc-

cess who gets suspended from the team after writing an

unfavorable review of his English teacher’s favorite novel,

Old Shep My Pal. When he refuses to rewrite the report,

he is forced to attend rehearsals of a school play based on

the same book and directed by the same English teacher.

Through drama, students working with their teacher in

role, can use the  ctional world of No More Dead Dogs to

examine the real con icts that might arise when someone

sticks to their convictions. In other words, participants in

a text edged drama can use roles they create to consider

biases of teachers, the dif culties of telling the truth, and

negotiating peer pressure.

Drama expands practices of literature instruction in

classrooms in a variety of ways, including working in

role, tableau, and other dramatic structures. Literature

instruction that is informed by process drama provides

opportunities for a teacher in role to de-center her or

himself in the classroom and become a co-learner with

students. For example, a teacher could move into role as

Wallace, the main character. From this position, she can

facilitate conversations between a character from a story

and the students; and in this case explore how it might

feel to have a group be angry at you, when they represent

a group in which you really want to become a member.

These ( ctional/real) conversations allow the teacher and

the students to activate background knowledge, draw on

the text of the story, and re-access knowledge about texts

they have read in the past while engaged in this interac-

tion.

Crumpler’s (2001–2002, 2006) research has argued

for the theoretical power of drama for exploring issues of

social justice in middle school classrooms and as a form

of response to literature. In one study of a sixth-grade

classroom (2001–2002), drama was used as a research

approach to inquire into how students responded to

Encounter, Jane Yolen’s (1996) recasting of the story of

Columbus from an indigenous boy’s perspective. In this

study, the teacher worked in role to become Columbus and

invited the children to talk with her about plans for the

island she had landed on in the story. Then stepping out

of role, the teacher asked one of the students to become

a reporter and interview the rest of the group in role as

the ship’s crew.

The sixth graders decided to put Columbus on trial

so the teacher helped identify defense and prosecuting

attorneys and jurors for the courtroom  nale. In role as

jurors, these children argued over what constituted proof

of guilt, and challenged one another about who really un-

derstood the story that Columbus and his attorney told in

the classroom court. Results from analysis of transcripts

of the children’s conversations in role indicated that “in

self-spectatorship, participants’ attentiveness to how

they are developing a role, positioning themselves in

relation to other participants, and the language choices

that they make” (Crumpler, 2001–2002, p. 59) can be

examined by adopting dramatic orientation to inquiry

with students.

Crumpler (2007) has also conducted case study research

to explore how a middle-level teacher used process drama

to facilitate eighth-grade students’ responses to and under-

standing of To Kill a Mocking Bird (Lee, 1960). Results

of this study found that the use of the dramatic structures

of teacher in role, student in role, tableaux, and writing

in role as instructional tactics to foster response, helped

students enter the world of the novel and then, as Galda

and Beach (2001) recommend, critique and transform

the world of Scout, Boo Radley, and the other characters

in Lee’s classic literary text. Particularly interesting was

the teacher’s use of tableaux, silent frozen images, which

served as a mediator to help students access different

meaning systems and tap into what the New London Group

(1996) called “the resources for design” (p. 74). Through

using these resources, students began to understand the

“conventions of semiotic activity” (p. 74).

In other words, they internalized some of the structures of

the novel (divisive opinions, the oppressive nature or racism,

and the desire for freedom) and were able to translate them

into their own literacy practices. In this study the students

were engaged in a sequence of process drama activities

with their teacher. The teacher, Gloria, stepped into role as

a lady from the 1930s, and began to read from an imaginary

book of manners, “Being a Lady.” She stepped primly to

the front of the room and read a passage from her “book,”

and it became a pretext (O’Neill, 1995) for the dramatic

work on that day—its genesis and reason for coming into

being. The pretext initiated the use of the tableau (singular

for tableaux) in this case. She described the importance of

manners and speaking when spoken to, the way legs should

be crossed, and how a lady should dress.

After reading in role, the teacher stepped back into her

role as classroom teacher and asked the students to write

down what would be a gesture or behavior that they be-

lieved would represent or serve as an emblem or metaphor

for how girls should act at the time in history portrayed in

To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee, 1960). Five minutes passed as

students wrote. She spoke as herself and asked the students

to tell her what they had written down. The students called

out their ideas, and she wrote them on the board. This is

the list that was generated:

Having tea with a group of elderly ladies•

Quietly reading a book •

Sitting on a porch waiting for father to come home•

Writing a letter to an aunt at a desk•

Curtseying•

The teacher asked the group to choose one idea from

the list, and they chose curtseying. She then divided the

group in half, and they faced each other in the middle of the

room. She explained to them that when she counts to three,

they would all curtsey simultaneously. She acknowledged

THOMAS P. CRUMPLER AND LINDA WEDWICK

that there were boys in the room, but they were working

in role to represent the 1930s. They created the tableau, as

two groups of 10 faced each other and then asked them to

“freeze,” and then hold their position. The students were

in two lines facing each other, trying to hold the concept

of curtseying and looking intently at each other at  rst,

and then slowly began to laugh. The teacher told them to

relax and moved them into a second tableau.

Gloria invited them to think about a situation that would

be totally opposite to curtseying that they could perform

via tableau to show a polar contrast to this formal act/

gesture. After a few minutes of discussion in small groups,

the students decided to present a tableau of a mosh pit. A

mosh pit is something that happens at a punk or heavy metal

concert. People attending a concert gather in front of the

stage where the band is playing and will furiously push,

shove and body slam each other. The goal is not to hurt one

another but to enjoy the music in a less passive way.

For this tableau, the entire group worked together to

wrap their bodies loosely around each other, some students

were lying down, and some were kneeling, and others

raised one leg off the  oor to simulate  ying through

the air. The teacher asked the students to freeze into a

tableau. The scene was intriguing as they concentrated to

hold themselves still for less than a minute in this image

of silent controlled mayhem. Process drama as a mode of

response to literature can engage middle-level readers in

learning through fostering complex interpretive decisions

as they access the meaning system of a novel, their social

interactions, and the imaginary world they construct using

dramatic structures.

In other studies, research suggested that practices of pro-

cess drama like tableaux, the creation of silent frozen mo-

ments, can act as an image to activate students’ thinking and

understanding about a particular literary work. Tableaux is

a practice that has been used to enhance literature instruc-

tion with a variety of age learners (Downey, 2005; Wilson,

2003). Wilson’s work with young children suggested that

tableaux is a “way of thinking” (p. 375) and linked using

tableaux to cognitive and language development literacy

instruction. Downey (2005) worked with middle school

students, and integrated tableaux into classroom instruc-

tion to explore issues of social justice and help students

think critically about literature as well as social and his-

toric episodes. She found that students creating tableaux

moved to more abstract thinking, going beyond plot to an

understanding of theme and metaphor.

Another area of inquiry with drama is performative

critical literacy work (Medina, 2004). Medina (2006)

draws on Sumara’s (2002) work in literary interpretation

to examine critical performance literacies with  fth-grade

students who were recent Latino immigrants. These stu-

dents were working in literature discussion groups reading

My Diary from Here to There/Mi Diario de Aquí Hasta

Allá (Peréz, 2002) and working through drama structures

such as writing in role and tableaux. The discussion groups

provided opportunities for the students who are English

learners to create a “common place” (p. 66) through drama

where they could better understand characters through

their own personal experiences. Clearly, process drama

for working with middle-level readers and texts is an area

of theoretical and instructional promise.

Reaching Middle-level Readers through Drama

Instructionally, process drama is a potentially powerful

tool for engaging middle readers in rich explorations of

literature. As we argued earlier in this chapter, research

suggests that the identities of middle-level students are

performed within various social networks and spaces—

including classrooms—and the texts they engage with are

mediated in speci c ways within those contexts. Teachers

who use drama as a tactic to explore literature can ask

“what if” (Edmiston, 2003) when they are studying novels

and create other possibilities for the direction of a story,

bring in alternate characters, and build the “drama world”

(O’Neill, 1995) so that learners can take up roles to try

out language and perspectives within safe spaces of a

classroom or an online environment (Carroll, Anderson,

& Cameron, 2006).

Through this kind of work, middle-level readers use

both cognitive and imaginary faculties to respond inno-

vatively to texts because they are able to draw on textual,

personal, social, and dramatic meaning systems to extend

and deepen their understandings of literature. Teachers

who bring process drama into their literature instruction

create multiple contexts for middle-level readers to engage

in rich conversations that generate new learning possibili-

ties with texts. These possibilities may help middle-level

students become more con dent, critical readers who

can re-imagine their own “social futures” (New London

Group, 1996). The literature is mediated within the se-

quence of drama activities so that that the teacher and

students co-construct the drama world through working

in role, tableaux, and other dramatic structures. This al-

lows possibilities for co-learning, and modeling, and it

can involve students in reading, speaking, listening, and

writing in response to middle-level novels.

New Directions for Research

In this last section, we consider new directions for research

that will help detail and de ne instructional practices for

teachers working with middle-level readers. The three

constructs we identi ed at the beginning of this chapter

intertwine, and while we recognize that studies can ex-

amine reader, text and context separately, we also call

for research that integrates and probes their intercon-

nectedness. Additionally, Hinchman and Chandler-Olcott

(2006) have investigated researchers’ representations of

adolescent viewpoints about literacy and have argued for

situating youth in central positions in research studies.

However, their work is primarily theoretical, and empiri-

READERS, TEXTS, AND CONTEXTS IN THE MIDDLE

cal studies with middle-level readers are needed to  esh

out theoretical claims.

How do we more carefully de ne middle-level readers

in ways that bring their voices into that de ning process?

Studies that view middle-level readers as co-researchers

(Egan-Robertson & Bloome, 1998) and examine how

readers position themselves are important for deepening

understandings of the literacy practices and preferences

of this group. We need longitudinal studies that focus on

individual readers as well as classrooms and unpack how

and why a middle-level reader chooses books for himself

or herself. Additionally, we need a better understanding

how those texts  gure into larger constellations of literacy

practices. We need a more  nely grained knowledge of

of how middle readers use school-based and community-

based practices to negotiate literate identities. Finally,

we have theorized that process drama as a tool of lit-

erature instruction with young adolescents could help

them discover intersections of reader interest and social

positioning, and we believe such a line of research could

provide evidence that would enrich learning in literature

classrooms.

In this chapter, we have argued that middle-level read-

ers need an interactive approach to literature education

that engages their interests and shifting identities as they

move into older adolescence. We also made claims for

identifying literature that is particularly interesting and

imaginatively evocative for middle level-readers, and we

theorized characteristics of this new category of literature

based on research with this age reader. These categories are

dynamic, and we believe may help young readers choose

literature that interests them and provides a catalyst for

imaginative thinking. Finally, we see process drama as a

mode of response that can help teachers of these young

readers step into  ctional worlds that they have created with

students, and engage in interpretations of literature that are

social, innovative, critical, and could transform classrooms

into spaces where imagination fuels learning.

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Reading Literature in Secondary School

Disciplinary Discourses in Global Times

Cynthia Lewis and Jessica Dockter

University of Minnesota

While the preceding chapters on elementary and middle school literature demonstrate the dynamic change in

classroom environments focused primarily on inquiry and response-based curriculum, Cynthia Lewis and Jes-

sica Dockter rede ne what literature and reading are becoming in secondary settings. Caught between the rock

of unchanging text selection and the hard place of rigid curriculum based on testing expectations, secondary

English teachers struggle to  nd room for movement in the face of cultural change. Yet, the authors lay out a

vision for loosening the grip of disciplines that are consistently and ironically disciplined by tradition, and they

argue for a more dynamic pedagogy that would highlight the potential of identity formation and transformation

for youth within hybrid and multimodal “rede nitions of text, language, and global citizenship.”

Nearly a decade into the 21st century, the teaching of

literature in secondary school has  nally reached the

crossroads that some predicted in the early 1990s. In 1993

Robert Morgan proposed changes in secondary English

that are still contested today because they call into ques-

tion the purpose of “English” as a school subject. As

scholars debated the merits of cultural literacy (Hirsch,

1987)—itself a rehashing of an age-old cultural heritage

debate—versus more student-centered (e.g., reader re-

sponse) or text-centered (e.g., new criticism) approaches

to teaching literature, postindustrial nations in the last two

decades of the 20th century were undergoing a social,

economic, and digital revolution that would, inevitably,

change the nature of teaching and learning. In arguing for

an English curriculum centered on approaches found in

cultural studies, Morgan (1993) depicted debates about the

purposes of literature as leading “not to border crossings

into new disciplinary formations, but to staid reaf rma-

tions of English as a curricular form (cf. Scholes, 1991,

Dasenbrock, 1989)” (p. 21).

The form of English as a school subject that Morgan

(1993) bemoaned is one in which texts are taught and read

as bound objects of analysis or, in more reader-center mod-

els, a conduit in a text-audience circuit. The latter remains

bound in its focus on the transaction of meaning between

text and audience rather than on practices of articulation,

which Laclau and Mouffe (1985) de ned as “any practice

establishing a relation among elements such that their

READING LITERATURE IN SECONDARY SCHOOL

identity is modi ed as a result of the articulatory practice”

(p. 105). According to Morgan and the scholars he cites

(cf. Radway, 1988), the subject of English should focus

on practices of articulation rather than on a fetishizing of

texts. In other words, students should learn how readers’

identities are shaped not only by texts, but also by disci-

plinary and institutional discourses and by culture as it

is produced and consumed in everyday life. In so doing,

Morgan argues for English as cultural studies.

Fast forward to 2007, the publication year of an issue

of English Journal that includes an article by Zancanella

in which he asked eight educators, writers, and researchers

to answer the question, “What should high school English

be?” There were no arguments in favor of English as the

purveyor of cultural literacy among the answers. Instead,

most contributors offered impassioned pleas for the inher-

ent worth of story in the lives of individuals and cultures.

Although several mentioned 21st-century media as part

of the mix, only one contributor, Kevin Leander, argued

for a radical break with high school English as we know

it. As  rst conceived by the Committee of Ten—a group

of scholars that met in 1894 to determine appropriate high

school subject preparation—the English of yesterday and

today is primarily a course in “masterpieces” of literature.

Despite the current attention and acclaim given to young

adult literature within literary and academic circles—and

despite the wide range of genres and diverse literatures

represented therein—young adult literature is rarely in-

cluded in secondary English classrooms.

According to Leander (Zancanella, 2007), English is

currently bracketed around three outdated representations

of the subject:  rst, it is bracketed around print literature;

second, it is bracketed around English nations, especially

the United States and England; and third, it is bracketed

to exclude purposes for literature outside of a relatively

closed text-reader circuit.

Leander’s answer to the question of what English can

be was strikingly different from the others, which were

notable for their continuity with previous incarnations

of progressive English education, particularly in their

attention to the power of story and word to shape and

be shaped by diverse human experience. As book lovers

and English educators, we can’t help but respond to the

“call of stories” to borrow the eloquent words of Robert

Coles (1989), but we believe that in the lives of many

contemporary high school students this call is mediated by

Web 2.0 technologies that not only incorporate sound and

image, but also offer students transactions with literature

that include text-making options unavailable to previous

generations. Students can read and write fan ction, dis-

cuss and create graphic novels, write scripts for YouTube

productions, all the while receiving a steady stream of

personalized commentary and critique. In short, distal

technologies broaden Coles’s “call” to include, crucially,

“call and response” and open the notion of “stories” to

narratives of any kind across texts, groups, and disciplines.

Secondary “English” as a subject remains, today, a stable

category with changes being made only around its edges.

What we need is to unhinge the brackets that Leander has

rightly identi ed.

Global  ows heightened by digital technologies and

new economic structures (e.g., fast capital and neoliberal-

ism) that bene t  rst world nations over the developing

world and the af uent over the poor have resulted in fun-

damentalisms (Castell, 1996) that have led to new patterns

of immigration and an increase in English language learn-

ers (ELL) in high school classrooms. As the sociologist

Zygmunt Bauman (1998) explained:

An integral part of the globalizing processes is progressive

spatial segregation, separation and exclusion. Neo-tribal

and fundamentalist tendencies, which reﬂ ect and articulate

the experience of people on the receiving end of globaliza-

tion, are as much legitimate offspring of globalization as the

widely acclaimed ‘hybridization’ of top culture—the culture

at the globalized top. (p. 3)

It is the “globalized top” that live the utopian dreams of

globalization widely touted in the press and, at times,

in scholarship focused on the Internet as a medium that

promotes equity.

However, the globalization process as depicted by

Bauman, Castell, and others underscores its conse-

quences to those on the gendered, raced, linguistic, and

socioeconomic margins. In a later section of this chapter,

we will make the connection to the teaching and reading

of literature in secondary school. For now, however, we

want to make the point that times of monumental social

and economic change produce the anxiety that leads to

what Luke (2004a) has called “educational fundamental-

ism,” a harkening back to what is perceived as “basic”

(e.g., decoding, grammar), a limiting of what counts as

knowledge (e.g., canonized Euro-American texts). This

fundamentalism occurs at the same time that responsible

teachers, concerned about the needs of English language

learners, feel bound, ethically and pedagogically, to teach

literature beyond the North American and British literary

canon and to invite a wider range of responses to literature

that allow ELL students to share their interpretations and

demonstrate their understandings through artistic, perfor-

mative, and digital mediums.

Research on reading literature in secondary school

points to the tug and pull of transformative and funda-

mentalist moves in classrooms. Despite the transformative

changes underway, federal and state mandates, including

high stakes testing, have caused many English teachers

to focus more intensely on what some call “the basics.”

In other words, teachers of secondary English need to

account for the dramatically changing contemporary

realities in the textual landscapes of their students, but

at the same time they also need to attend to expectations

that their classrooms will deliver instruction in “common

culture” texts that have been canonized in the secondary

curriculum and in the disciplinary apparatus.

CYNTHIA LEWIS AND JESSICA DOCKTER

What remains unchanged, then, is that a primary

function of literature in secondary schools is to produce

a particular kind of citizen. Whereas the kind of citizen

considered desirable (i.e., religious, moral, empirical,

personally engaged, socially conscious, culturally criti-

cal) changes with time, the use of literature and schooling

to produce particular kinds of citizens is long-standing.

This function of literature is evident in Caughlan’s (2004)

study of cultural models of literature teaching. Following

Foucault (1982), she identi ed a pastoral function for the

teaching of literature meant to control students’ values

and dispositions as individuals who will self-regulate for

the common good. Caughlan (2007) brie y traced this

tradition from Matthew Arnold, who promoted literature

as a vehicle for re ning the values of the working class

(Hunter, 1988), through the expressive movement (Harris,

1991) in English education, best exempli ed in the work

of American and British scholars at the 1966 Dartmouth

Conference advocating for personal expression in Eng-

lish as a school subject. John Dixon’s (1967) in uential

report on the conference and the popularization of reader

response English classrooms in the United States and

Britain followed soon after. As Caughlan (2007) put it:

“In contrast to the opaque text of New Critical Analysis,

the text is transparent in this cultural model, a vehicle for

the moral and ethical issues raised, and a representation

of real people making real decisions” (p. 18).

As this history indicates, a primary function of litera-

ture as it is used in schools is to produce and reproduce

particular values. However, we argue that the social,

economic, and technological conditions that shape the

teaching and learning of literature in secondary school

today have led to value being placed on the production of

the global citizen and, by consequence, a state of  ux in

English classrooms. Several excellent literature reviews

provide an historical look at research on response to lit-

erature as well as the foundation of our knowledge base

over the last 30 years (Beach & Hynds, 1991; Marshall,

2000; Probst, 1991). The same is true of the chapters on

elementary and middle school learning in this handbook.

Given the scant use of young adult literature in second-

ary classrooms, other chapters in this volume (especially

Chapter 22) provide analyses of young adult literature

beyond what we include in this chapter. Our chapter will

take a different turn by considering how some of the

following changes have shaped research and practice on

literature in secondary school:

New de nitions of what counts as a literary text.•

New ways of responding to literature, using digital tools •

such as blogs and wikis.

In uences of digital media and popular culture on •

young adult literature that fundamentally changes fea-

tures of texts and reader response, including reader-text

transaction, text structure, and text dissemination.

Expectation among youth that the literature they read •

will serve the purposes of identity representation and

af nity building (e.g., spoken word, fan ction, zines,

online journals).

Greater linguistic diversity with the need for teachers to •

select literature that will build students’ understandings

of English in the dominant culture but also af rm the

role of identity in language use and literary texts.

More access to what Jenkins (2006a) calls “participato-•

ry culture” (usually online or through mobile technolo-

gies) that crosses race, class, gender, age, religion, and

nationality as an outgrowth of globalization. This access

also has consequences for young people’s expectations

about and responses to the books they read.

Theoretical perspectives that view texts, readers, and •

contexts as socially, culturally, and politically consti-

tuted.

Greater need for a critically literate public in the face of •

all of the above, including the changing economic and

informational  ows brought on by globalization.

The chapter is organized through the use of key terms to

help communicate how the teaching and reading of litera-

ture in secondary school has been shaped by globalization.

These terms—disciplinary discourse, identity/identi ca-

tion, hybridity, and multimodality—intersect and overlap,

as will be clear in each of the sections. Nevertheless, they

are distinct enough to be considered separately as impor-

tant features of literature study in contemporary secondary

classrooms. We have not attempted to be comprehensive

in our review of literature, but rather have decided to draw

on a few studies within each key category that we deem

to be important in understanding secondary literature

teaching and learning in a way that conceptualizes a  eld

in transition and the promise of new directions. We begin

with a brief explanation of why it is important to consider

how globalization shapes the teaching and learning of

literature in schools.

Globalization and the Teaching/Learning of

Literature

Globalization, according to sociologist Arjun Appadurai

(2000), is marked by increased “ ows” of objects, im-

ages, persons, and discourses. Such  ows expand the

connectivity between ideas, bodies, and identities across

local spheres, which are continually shaped by the global

interdependence of economies, technologies, and politics.

As such, locally manifested ways of being, producing, and

interpreting are anything but local. As Pennycook (2005)

observed, classrooms “can no longer be considered as

bound sites, with students entering from  xed locations,

with identities drawing on local traditions, with curricula

as static bodies of knowledge” (p. 41). With the demise

of neighborhood schools and the blend of students’ racial,

gendered, and transnational identities, the relevant unit of

space has become the globe (Kress, 2007), and notions

of stability and certainty have given way to  uidity and

multiplicity (Bauman, 2007). Yet, the processes of global-

READING LITERATURE IN SECONDARY SCHOOL

ization are also framed by a neoliberal logic that attempts

to unify and standardize knowledge in the interest of the

market (Luke & Carrington, 2002). Thus, globalization

creates a push and pull between its desired outcomes of

standardization and diversi cation.

We view globalization as a set of complex economic

and cultural processes with both positive and negative im-

plications on the teaching and learning of literature. First,

while we argue that the goal of producing and reproducing

certain kinds of citizens through the teaching of literature

remains, we argue as well that globalization rede nes who

counts as a relevant, desirable, and global citizen. Although

we may only guess at how global  ows will shape selves

over time, several authors envision the globalized citizen

as enterprising (Apple, 2001), an ongoing project (Arnett,

2002), and shape-shifting (Gee, 2004). In turn, this rede -

nition of citizenship as  uid shapes students’ expectations

for the texts they read in English classes and the ways

in which possible identities, discourses, relationships,

and futures are represented and broadened by them. For

example, in Demerath and Lynch’s (2008) ethnographic

study of students in an af uent, middle-class high school,

students actively sought out and negotiated opportunities

and texts that would allow them to develop the kinds of

skills and capital, both social and academic, which would

make them marketable to elite colleges.

Second, globalization expands the interpretive positions

that students take up in the study of literature (National

Council of Teachers of English, 2007). More and more,

signs and images are mediated through distal interactions

among geographically dispersed students. At the same

time, the increased uncertainty that comes with increased

movement creates intensely competitive notions of what

counts as legitimate global knowledge (Apple, 2001)

as nations, states, communities, and individuals vie for

market niches. Thus, while globalization expands inter-

pretive positions in literature classrooms, it expands their

surveillance as well. Finally, while the new technologies

of globalization rede ne the selection, genres, and dis-

semination of literary texts, a reactionary anxiety calls

for a return to the textual canon.

In part, this anxiety is ontological in that it is fueled

by apprehension about the essence of adolescence, or,

from a more postmodern perspective, the construction of

adolescence in global times. Adolescence as a life stage

is a sociohistorical and cultural invention that emerged at

the onset of the industrial era when further education was

needed to educate the job force, and thus young people

were taken out of the work force to allow them to spend

more time in school (Lesko, 2001). Tracing the evolving

history of adolescence is beyond our scope, but character-

izing the construction of adolescence in global times is

central to this chapter. Naturally, secondary schools, in the

hopes of addressing the educational needs of adolescents,

are working from some normative assumptions about

adolescents—who they are and the kind of adults they

“ought to” become (with differences between middle and

high school). Teachers’ assumptions about the adolescents

they teach are fundamental to how they interact with their

students, select texts to share with them, and raise issues

relevant to them.

Global youth are often described in terms of their

hybrid identities (Nilan & Feixa, 2006), shaped at the

same time by seemingly opposing forces of nationalism,

cultural traditionalism, transnationalism, ethnocentrism,

blended ethnicities, multilingualism, digital culture, and

consumerism. When cultural  ows across the globe merge

with local identities and ways of taking up these  ows,

new hybrid youth cultures emerge (Pennycook, 2005).

Despite this generative view of the effects of globalization,

some youth are restricted from taking up hybrid identities

by processes of globalization that work to localize those

with fewer resources rather than expand their spaces and

repertoires. Thus, we have a “breakdown in communica-

tion between the increasingly global and extraterritorial

elites and the ever more ‘localized’ rest” (Bauman, 1998,

p. 3) who do not have the means to participate in the risks

and bene ts of global citizenship.

Bean and Moni (2003) argued that critical discussions

of contemporary young adult  ction rely on understand-

ing contemporary adolescence. Adolescent identity, they

point out, is “a matter of self-construction amidst unstable

times, mores, and global consumerism” (p. 642) with me-

dia and digital  ows connecting macro and micro cultures

in a postmodern landscape. In this landscape, institutions

are viewed as “fragmented and unreliable” (Wyn, 2005,

p. 45), causing adolescents to forge their own futures in

risky and uncertain new economies. Young adult literature

has shifted to address the needs and interests of this new

adolescent (Dresang, 1999), yet global youth are normal-

ized by the institutional discourse of education, according

to Luke and Luke (2001), as the “uncivil, unruly techno-

subject” (p. 8).

This way of characterizing adolescence—as dangerous

other—has rami cations for the kinds of literature and

forms of literary response found in school, with particu-

larly detrimental effects on struggling readers and other

marginalized students who are often engaged by out-of-

school vernacular literacies and have the most to lose in the

lethal atmosphere of high-risk economies and high-stakes

testing. Indeed, most of the bullet points we listed earlier

to describe changes that have shaped research and practice

on literature in secondary school depend on a different

construction of adolescence—one that views adolescents

as savvy, resourceful, and, competent. Wolf and Maniotes

(2002), for example, advocated the pedagogical use of

literature that has typically been viewed as inappropriate

for the classroom due to a focus on abusive sexual mo-

lestation, rape, and child abuse. These authors construct

adolescents as capable of understanding the dif cult world

in which they live and bene ting from the chance to work

through dif cult issues through aesthetic experience and

CYNTHIA LEWIS AND JESSICA DOCKTER

agentic discussion. The anxiety fed by new constructions

of adolescence, then, can lead to particular disciplinary

discourses in the study of literature. In fact, disciplinary

discourse, discussed in the next section, plays a critical

role in both the transformations and fundamentalisms as-

sociated with secondary school literature studies.

Disciplinary Discourse

Secondary school is commonly perceived as a space/time

for learning disciplinary knowledge, with achievement

in secondary school often measured by students’ knowl-

edge of disciplinary epistemologies and their attendant

terminologies. Understanding the nature of disciplinary

discourse over time in secondary school literature studies

is central to understanding how literacy studies take up the

function of producing and reproducing values and citizens

for particular times. An unfortunate result of disciplinary

discourse is that it often functions to “discipline” disci-

plines in ways that cause them to lose their dynamism.

Literary canons, for example, change over time, but the

changes come slowly to required text lists in secondary

school, where budgets are constrained and where, as

Luke (2004b) noted, teachers are attached to particular

disciplinary traditions, and the institutional viability of a

school is determined by public perception and standard-

ized test scores. Thus, with the exception of a few titles,

texts taught in the early 1960s, such as Romeo and Juliet,

Julius Caesar, and Huckleberry Finn, remained constant

in the late 1980s (Applebee, 1992). More recent studies

(Hale & Crowe, 2001) have shown much of the same,

with works by Shakespeare and other canonized authors

dominating the top-10 list.

The static nature of disciplinary knowledge in the sec-

ondary classroom is re ected not just in text selection but

also in approaches to instruction. In a study of classroom

interaction in high school English classrooms (Marshall,

Smagorinsky, & Smith, 1995),  ndings revealed that

teachers took longer speaking turns than students, stu-

dents responded with primarily informative statements,

and teachers carried the interpretive agendas. Moreover,

students generally cooperated with teachers in construct-

ing this discussion pattern. According to Nystrand, Wu,

Gamoran, Zeiser, and Long (2003), to promote student

engagement and learning in literature classes, discourse

must actively involve students in the production of knowl-

edge and be highly interactive; students should be viewed

as thinkers and, as such, asked to explain their thinking

rather than simply report on the thinking of others. Impor-

tantly, they note that speci c modes of classroom discourse

engender particular epistemic positions for students,

which, in turn, empower or constrain their thinking. The

epistemic positions available to students in classrooms

driven by district tests are explored in Anagnostopoulos

(2003), a study of discussion in two English classrooms.

Rarely did discussions approach the dialogic ones that

Nystrand et al. (2003) found to promote engagement

and achievement. Even when one of the teachers joined

with students to discuss racism in their lives related to

To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee, 1960), the specter of the test

would quickly cause the teacher to redirect the talk, thus

“re-positioning students as minimally skilled readers and

reading as producing details” (p. 200).

Despite the tenacity of teacher dominated discourse

patterns, reinvigorated, now, in a ubiquitous testing cli-

mate, the move from New Criticism to reader response

theory as a critical framework in more process-oriented

classrooms over the last two decades has helped to change

classroom interaction in many secondary classrooms. Al-

though reader-response theory takes many forms, includ-

ing the sociopolitical, the way that it has been practiced

in schools—largely in opposition to New Criticism—is to

highlight the life of the reader through personal response.

Langer’s (1995) research on the qualities of English class-

rooms that help students to enter the literary world of the

texts they read found that students in such classrooms are

invited to pose questions and are treated as capable of

developing important understandings. Athanases (1993)

pointed to important principles gleaned from a range of

reader-response theorists, including moving students from

private to public response, providing opportunities for stu-

dent re ection, and transferring interpretive control from

the teacher to the students to develop what Fish (1980)

has called an interpretive community.

By the early 1990s, many scholars (cf. Corcoran, Hay-

hoe, & Pradle, 1994; Freebody, Luke, & Gilbert, 1991;

O’Neill, 1993) argued that reader response as it had been

applied to English education failed to acknowledge the

sociopolitical constitution of textual interpretation and

evaluation. These critics all shared the view that by valoriz-

ing the personal, educators ignored the ideological. Early

on the scene to translate contemporary literary theory

for use in high school classrooms were Mellor, O’Neill,

and Patterson (1987) whose text leads students through

activities with short stories that teach them how texts are

constructed ideologically to position readers in particular

ways. (The National Council of Teachers of English has

reprinted these books from Australia’s Chalkface Press

to make them available to an audience of United States

teachers.) By the late 1990s, many scholars wrote prag-

matically about the pedagogy of cultural criticism in the

teaching of literature, providing questions or issues meant

to help students and teachers examine the social, cultural,

historical, and political construction of texts and readers

(cf. Apol, 1998; Lewis, 2000; Morgan, 1997).

Around this time, several in uential books were pub-

lished that offered preservice and practicing teachers ways

to practically rethink high school literature instruction in

a way that combined reader response with cultural studies

and postmodern theory (Carey-Webb, 2001; Pirie, 1997).

Perhaps the most explicit use of contemporary literary

criticism for high school teaching is found in Appleman’s

READING LITERATURE IN SECONDARY SCHOOL

(2000) book focusing on what she calls “critical lenses”

in the teaching of literature. In each chapter, she applied

critical lenses such as feminist, deconstructive, archetypal,

and so forth to literature commonly taught in high school

classrooms in the United States, with accompanying ma-

terials for teachers to adapt for use in their classrooms.

Critical theories also have been explicitly applied to

young adult literature (Moore, 1997; Soter, 1999), but

the disciplinary discourse of high school English situates

canonized American and British literature as central to

the high school literature curriculum despite calls from

scholars of English education and adolescent literature

to include more young adult literature.

An important component of Appleman’s (2000) book is

its persuasive argument that critical lenses invite readers

to probe commonplace assumptions and ideologies in text,

media, and life. This function of critical lenses pre gures

recent work that links the goals of secondary school litera-

ture studies to social justice commitments. Several articles

have put forth arguments for change in English education

that call for an explicit relationship between English and

social justice. Morrell (2005), for example, de ned literacy

development as a revolutionary tool “intended to challenge

existing norms and disrupt existing power relations” (p.

314) and argued that English educators should act as activ-

ists and political agents. Kirkland (2008) described what

he calls “New English Education” (p. 69), which seeks to

transform society by understanding how the postmodern

condition, particularly “postmodern Blackness” shapes

the lives of youth and their popular media and culture.

The disciplinary discourse Kirkland (2008) and Morrell

(2005) offered is one of critical rede nition, both building

on popular culture to extend the important critical literacy

perspectives already discussed from analysis of language

and image into the realm of social action.

Urban youth in Morell’s study, for example, merged

in- and out-of-school literacies by serving as critical

researchers in their own schools and communities. After

a  ve-week seminar, which prepared students as col-

laborators in praxis-oriented research, students collected

 eld notes, wrote analytic memos, and produced critical

memoirs chronicling their changing identities. This work

stemmed from students’ critical analysis of popular

language and uses of literacy in their communities and

involved them in presentations and publications at both

national and local levels. Their results carried implications

for practice, policy, and future research, and in this way,

students developed critical literacies with a goal of social

transformation.

This work builds not only on the traditions of scholars

in critical literacy and cultural studies, but also on the tradi-

tions of those who have written eloquently on the subject

of culturally-relevant pedagogy. Speci c to culturally

responsive teaching, Ladson-Billings (1995) has main-

tained since the early 1990s that classroom discourse and

practices should include a range of cultural perspectives,

show the ways in which power relations have shaped the

outcome of the production of knowledge, and legitimize

students’ previous learning and experiences, including

linguistic experiences.

Lee (2007) has developed a theoretical framework

and method she calls “cultural modeling” to help teach-

ers recognize and value the contextualization cues and

communication patterns that students bring from their

speech communities and use those cues and patterns as

a bridge to the study of literature and classroom tasks.

This project marries culturally-responsive teaching with

domain-speci c instruction in literary analysis. For ex-

ample, Lee shows how a class discussion of a song by The

Fugees engages students in effectively using strategies for

literary interpretation to order to understand the song’s

symbolism. Moreover, students commented articulately

upon their own processes of interpretation, indicating a

“form-function shift” (as cited in Saxe, 1991, p. 67) that

suggests a transfer of conceptual knowledge from one

context to another. Lee’s (2007) research provides many

examples of this kind of transfer, which extends, in the next

stage, to applications of students’ interpretive capacities

to canonized literature. The role of the teacher is central

to the process of marrying culturally-responsive teach-

ing with domain-speci c instruction in literary analysis

in that the teacher must recognize students’ developing

interpretive strategies in order to make them explicit and

to reinforce them as conventions that can be applied to

other texts. This pedagogical skill is essential if the goal

is for students to learn how to analyze literature in ways

that are expected in school and on achievement tests that

include literary reading.

Earlier we discussed Caughlan’s work on the cultural

models of English/language arts (ELA). In a 2007 study,

after examining standards for ELA in two states, she wryly

noted cultural models that could be but were not present in

the standards. Given the changes in disciplinary discourse

discussed in this section, we  nd Caughlan’s insight about

the absence of cultural models that re ect critical aspects

of response to literature, such as the following, notable:

“Literature expresses and reveals ideologies” (p. 188).

Although this cultural model is very much present in

the disciplinary discourse of the English education and

literature scholars cited in this section, it is not typically

the disciplinary discourse of literature study in secondary

school. Yet, if students are going to become critical readers

in the face of the changing economic and informational

 ows of global culture, it may well be this very disciplin-

ary discourse they need most to learn. As Yagelski (2006)

pointed out, English is a discipline that can help reshape

society in the context of globalization. Through the analy-

sis of language and image in new multimodal literatures,

students can better understand the practices of articulation

that create and sustain particular identities, which, in turn,

have material consequences (such as the normalization

of Whiteness through everyday images; see Dyer, 1997).

CYNTHIA LEWIS AND JESSICA DOCKTER

They can also participate with their teachers in developing

a metalanguage based on the meaning-making potential

of multimodal texts (Unsworth, 2006).

Students reading the graphic novel Re-Gifters by Mike

Carey, Sonney Liew, and Marc Hempel (2007) might,

for example, discuss the signi cance of Korean cultural

heritage for the main character Dik Seong Jen—known

as “Dixie”—as it is articulated through both words and

image. Dixie is a master at the martial art of hapkido, but

her  ow, or “ki,” is compromised when she falls for Adam,

a California surfer-boy and her potential opponent. For

Dixie, hapkido represents pride for the warrior spirit of

her ancestors and also an obstacle to Adam’s affection.

This collision of worldviews expresses particular cultural

ideologies in a rather explicit manner in the novel, but

teachers might also encourage students to analyze how the

images reveal their own set of ideologies, which at times

may contradict those implied by the plot. Students might

interrogate how race, class, and gender are depicted in the

images and question why many of the White characters,

including Adam, appear to be from upper middle-class

backgrounds while Tomas, who we learn is from the

“street” and to whom Dixie’s affection ultimately turns, is

drawn with Latino racial markers. The articulation of iden-

tity in this graphic novel takes place on the level of both

word and image, and this shift in the discipline of English

requires that teachers and students develop a language and

practice through which to analyze such texts.

As important as it is to develop a metalanguage for

transformative disciplinary discourse, secondary students

also need to be competent in the ever-evolving established

metalanguage of disciplinary discourse in the study of

literature. We saw this at work in our recent research study-

ing the discursive construction of critical engagement in

an innovative high school English class that included the

production of podcast memoirs and documentary  lms.

Students needed to develop a language for talking about

how narratives worked in order to analyze and eventually

produce their memoirs and documentaries, which included

new forms of layering and transitions that built on those

found in print literature. In this vein, they analyzed ex-

cerpts from Our America: Life and Death on the South

Side of Chicago (Jones, Newman, & Isay, 1997) and the

related radio documentary Ghetto Life in order to learn

the skills they would need to compose their own memoirs

in the form of audio podcasts.

In a memoir about the importance of basketball in his

life, one student began his podcast by dramatically placing

himself in his bedroom waking up at 4:00 a.m. in order

to travel the long distance from his home to morning

basketball practice at school and show his determination

to meet his goals in the face of dif cult circumstances.

He used background music with a consistent beat and

repeated chords to communicate the repetitive nature of

this aspect of his life, then shifted to louder music in order

to introduce his transition from dramatic reenactment to

traditional narration. In so doing, he modi ed narrative

conventions related to cohesion and point of view and

applied this disciplinary knowledge about literature to

a format usually associated with out-of-school literacy

practices (podcasts), but which is now becoming part of

the established world of English studies.

In an article that examines response to literature as

sociocultural activity, Galda and Beach (2001) contended

that recent work on response to literature rede nes earlier

work by focusing more on “ways of integrating literature

instruction within the development of students’ larger lan-

guage systems” (p. 64). As Willis (1997) explained in an

article on exploring literature as cultural production in her

course for preservice teachers: “I want the future teachers

of my own children to understand that children bring with

them rich and culturally mediated language, experience,

and knowledge to the classroom” (p. 135). Certainly, the

work on reader response, culturally-relevant pedagogy,

cultural modeling, New English Education, and culturally

critical English education described in this section  t the

bill. All offer theoretical frameworks and pedagogical

approaches for response to literature in secondary school

that key into young people’s uses of language (and other

modes of representation) in family, community, and peer

contexts, from formal to vernacular. Taken together they

speak to the transformative potential of globalization—

an expanded conception of what counts as literature, for

instance—as well as the anxieties it creates about the

identities produced through globalization and the kinds of

readers produced through new forms of literature.

Identity/Identi cation

Conceptions of identity have long in uenced the teaching

and study of response to literature in secondary schools—

albeit in varied and often competing ways. Whether texts

are taught, for example, as bound objects of analysis or

as conduits in the text-reader circuit, the teaching of lit-

erature has always been and remains tightly connected to

readers’ identities as it seeks to in uence the “making” of

particular kinds of people and particular kinds of readers.

But literature shapes identities only to the degree that the

reading transaction (which includes the reader, text, and

context) involves a process of identi cation. This process

is not necessarily one in which the reader’s identity melds

with the text, but may instead involve a connection be-

tween some aspect of the reader’s identity and the text.

Depending on the conception of identity in use, research-

ers de ne the making of selves with greater or lesser

degrees of imposition and agency, stability and  uidity,

consumption and production, legitimacy and resistance, to

name just a few dichotomous classi cations surrounding

identity. Although identity can be interpreted differently

depending on the interpreter (Gee 2000/2001), it remains

central to studies on response to literature because texts

have little meaning outside the contextualized lives and

READING LITERATURE IN SECONDARY SCHOOL

identities of their readers. Moreover, the social, cultural,

historical, institutional, and political nature of identity car-

ries with it material effects related to lived realities in the

form of resources, goods, and emotional well being which

in uence students’ motivations, access, and interpretations

with regard to literature and response.

A central concern for researchers interested in how

readers’ identities shape their responses to literature has

been the participatory or exclusionary nature of classroom

practices. For example, in an important study on students’

responses to multicultural literature in a secondary class-

room, Spears-Bunton (1990) contended that culture is

a source of con ict for readers “at the level of the text”

(p. 567) and that the exclusion of African American lit-

erature left students in her study uninterested in literacy

tasks which in turn negatively affected their performance

in English classrooms. A “cultural mismatch” between

students and the books they read, Spears-Bunton argued,

pushed students to judge textual worlds negatively and to

refuse to read, perpetuating the institutional identities of

African American students as low readers. The inclusion of

texts that represent varied cultural identities, on the other

hand, has the potential to expand literary experiences, and

according to Sims Bishop (1992), demonstrates a valuing

of multiple identi cations among students in school and

society.

In a similar study, which analyzed the experiences of

two African American female high school students, Pam

and Natonya, in a traditional British Literature class, Carter

(2006) found that the young women used nonverbal com-

munication to challenge symbols and text that situated

their cultural identities negatively. In one example, as a

reference to the Confederate  ag went unchallenged in

a discussion, the two girls used their eye gazes to assert

their gendered, racial, and cultural identities which stood

in opposition to such a reference. Despite the assaults to

their identities and the marginalization of their ways of

knowing, the girls’ social interactions, although often

subtle, enabled them to master skills necessary to pass

the class. Such a study demonstrates the need in literature

classrooms to make the negotiation over knowledge and

identity more visible, not as something students either

possess or do not. When the experiences, perceptions,

and relationships students value are not acknowledged,

they often learn that literacy is an exclusive activity that

diminishes their efforts to construct expanded identities

(Enciso & Lewis, 2001).

Access to certain kinds of texts and ways of read-

ing them demonstrate one signi cant aspect of identity

making as it relates to response to literature. Yet, several

researchers have taken up the question of how engage-

ment with texts and the interpretive process do identity

work as well. Sumara (1998) writes poignantly on this

topic in the following way: “Because the reader’s sense of

identity emerges, in part, from perceived and interpreted

knowledge about the world, response to reading alters a

reader’s sense of self. As the  ctional text is interpreted

by the reader, the reader is, at the same time, interpreted”

(p. 205). In this way, the very act of interpretation of lit-

erary text becomes an act of negotiation of shifting and

slippery identities as readers re-imagine and re-identify

themselves, past, present, and future, and experience new

self-possibilities in the process.

One of our own readings of Sherman Alexie’s (2007)

novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian,

serves to articulate this point. For Jessica, the understand-

ing of the main character and narrator, Junior, was tied up

in her own identity as a White reader. Junior, a Spokane

Indian who decides to leave his reservation school to attend

an all-White school, interprets his burgeoning relation-

ships with White students in humorous and powerful ways:

“And Roger, being of kind heart and generous pocket,

and a little bit racist, drove me home that night. And he

drove me home plenty of other nights, too” (p. 129). For

Jessica, such statements not only revealed Alexie’s keen

insight into the complexities of White racial identities—

kind of heart and a little bit racist—but also forced her to

consider where she imagined her own White identity in

the reading of the novel. Aligning herself with the kind

White character could no longer be so simple. She, too,

had been interpreted. Such practices of interpretation,

Sumara (2002) argued, must be facilitated by “literary

engagements” and “focal practices” (p. 150) with texts that

require attention, energy, and interest. Literature still mat-

ters in school, he contended, because it seeks to interrupt

familiarity and serves as a “commonplace” for readers to

border cross into each other’s interpretations.

Yet, readers do not necessarily depart on such border

crossings on their own, nor do they make their literary

journeys outside structures of social power. Lewis (2000)

reminded researchers and teachers of literature that there

are limits to identi cation when readers engage with

texts, and that disrupting the “inclination to identify”

may heighten the readers’ consciousness of text and self,

as well as status and power relations. Enciso’s (1998) re-

search with early adolescent working-class girls reading

the Sweet Valley High series serves as a good example of

how status and power frame responses to literature. The

girls positioned themselves as “good” and “bad” girls ac-

cording to dominant cultural discourses available to them,

while at “carnivalesque” (p. 57) moments, they challenged

authoritative expectations of school-based and masculine

norms. Thus, the girls enacted positions that both inscribed

their gendered selves with certain kinds of “good” and

“bad” femininity embedded in literary texts while resisting

those identi cations at the same time.

Several authors consider the relationship between

identity and response to literature in the teaching of

multicultural texts, particularly when it comes to White

students’ responses to culturally diverse characters and

experiences. Thein, Beach, and Parks (2007) and Thein

(2006), for example, focused on the identity construction

CYNTHIA LEWIS AND JESSICA DOCKTER

of working-class high school students as they read and dis-

cussed literature. Their work demonstrates how students

mediate their identities through competing discourses

related to the multiple social worlds they must negotiate

and the textual world that is the object of discussion. Such

mediation points to the tensions that often exist as part of

response to literature, and the authors contended that trying

on alternative perspectives is a “habit of mind” (p. 55) that

helps students acknowledge other ways of understanding

the world, even if they do not agree with those perspec-

tives. It is the capacity to expand and imagine alternate

realities that reading literature offers.

Given the tensions inherent in students’ literary engage-

ments, particularly with culturally diverse texts, Rogers

and Soter (1997) advocated thinking about classrooms as

“cultural sites” (p. 6) where interrogation, struggle, and

social critique are commonplace. At the same time, they

worry that students cannot distance themselves from the

personal nature of their responses for a critical evaluation

of text as disturbance instead of universal agent. Adult

readers can also fall into the same universalizing stance.

For instance, in previous research (Lewis, Ketter, & Fa-

bos, 2001), Cynthia found that among a group of White

teachers reading multicultural young adult literature, the

members of the group often generalized across universal

themes that they saw in the texts—such as the challenges

of being a female adolescent—at the expense of examin-

ing oppressive structures outside their experiences. Vinz

(2000), however, offered several pedagogical ideas for

teachers in literature classrooms to encourage students’

ongoing analysis of their own interpretive acts. She found

that students are more likely to occupy the “spaces of

others” (p. 43) and carefully attend to characters’ textual

motivations when they become those characters through

drama and writing. Additionally, she argued, the juxtaposi-

tion of texts and the inclusion of popular culture creates

spaces for students to recognize the plurality of meaning

and to examine their own social, cultural, and ideological

in uences as text as well

Decades of work on identity and response to literature

have brought researchers to important conclusions about

literary access, interpretation, and tension. We argue, how-

ever, that these questions must be reframed as notions of

identity continue to shift as adolescents confront a world in

which the global economy demands constant negotiation of

a multiplicity of texts (Moje, Young, Readence, & Moore,

2000). Questions remain as to how globalized rede nitions

of nationalism, cultural traditionalism, multilingualism,

technology, and consumerism will change notions of text

and the teaching of literature. How, for example, will access

(or lack of access) to digital forms of literature and other

art forms transform students’ literary engagements? And as

students make identi cations across a matrix of identities,

relationships, and discourses, how might their insights and

interpretations in relation to text be altered? The next two

sections take up some of these questions.

Hybridity

Research in digital and transnational spaces demonstrates

that literacy practices are evermore networked within local

and global  ows of activity (Leander & Lovvorn, 2006).

Digital media, in particular, hold the potential for a more

“participatory culture” (Jenkins, 2006a) for literacy and

learning. At the same time, however, digital media can

limit participation (i.e., digital divide) and control capital

through commercial content. Given such a paradox, we

think about hybridity in this section both in terms of the

hybrid geographies that students bring to reading from

their translocal identities, but also as productive, hybrid

spaces where new youth cultures merge with “old” ways

of teaching, learning, and knowing. We consider in the

following paragraphs research that reframes response to

literature through hybrid rede nitions of text, language,

and global citizenship and start with a discussion of the

acclaimed graphic novel, American Born Chinese (Yang,

2006), which provides an example of all three forms of

hybridity.

Several studies included in this section focus on the

classroom use of texts that are normally associated with

youth culture outside of school or that combine elements

of such texts with features of what teachers and critics

might call “quality literature.” American Born Chinese is

a graphic novel that serves as an example of the latter be-

cause it combines comic book conventions, such as stock

characters (the very stereotypical Chin-Kee) and fantasti-

cal characters (the transforming Monkey King and other

gods) with the deep themes often associated with quality

literature—identity, alterity, assimilation, and cultural

af liation. The novel tells the interrelated stories of three

main characters, each trying to contest an identity imposed

by others who, in the process,  nd an identity enriched by

hybrid cultural and linguistic resources. There’s a great

deal of pain in this book, despite its built-in parody, humor,

and comic pseudo-violence. The characters are unable to

claim a comfortable space as cultural insiders or outsiders

or as global citizens in the face of overt and subtle racism.

In writing about the postcolonial dilemma of being at once

a cultural insider and outsider, Minh-ha (1997) comments

on the consequences of cultural and racial hybridity:

Not quite the same, not quite the other, she stands in that

undetermined threshold place where she constantly drifts in

and out…. She is, in other words, this inappropriate other

or same who moves about with always at least two gestures:

that of afﬁ rming ‘I am like you’ while persisting in her differ-

ence and that of reminding ‘I am different’ while unsettling

every deﬁ nition of otherness arrived at. (pp. 415–419)

The pain of wanting to belong—to be accepted—while,

at the same time, persisting in difference resonates

throughout the book and speaks to young adult readers

through hybrid genres (myth, fantasy, realism), languages

(English and Chinese), and forms (comic strip, novel). In

the process, the book tackles important themes related to

READING LITERATURE IN SECONDARY SCHOOL

the possibilities and perils of embodying and performing

hybrid identities within oppressive frameworks.

Textual hybridity is conducive to pedagogical practices

that invite students to respond critically from their own

hybrid positions of global citizenship and multlingualism.

For example, in her study of students’ responses to postco-

lonial literature in a Canadian high school, Johnston (2003)

set out to determine whether postcolonial pedagogy held

potential for introducing deconstructive reading strategies

for her students’ reading of the “other” in canonized texts

as well as new international literature. While postcolonial

literature was appealing to both her immigrant students

as well as those from mainstream backgrounds, Johnston

found that postcolonial pedagogy demanded a commit-

ment to helping students “cross borders constructed within

discourses of race, class, gender, and ethnicity” (p. 144).

Such crossings often led to anger as interpretations brought

out tensions and contradictory viewpoints.

After reading Joy Kogawa’s (1993) novel Obasan,

Bob, a White student with German and Ukrainian heri-

tage, began to question his vision of Canada as a fair and

just society and asked in reference to the internment of

Japanese-Canadians during World War II, “Was I one of

many who was not aware of such horri c details, or do

most know and not care?” (Johnston, 2003, p. 118). At

the same time, Myka, a  rst generation Canadian whose

parents had emigrated from China, reacted to Obasan

with anger for other reasons. Collective memories of war

and destruction at the hands of Japanese soldiers in China

infuriated Myka and made him “sick” (p. 121). Yet, he

refused to express such sentiments for fear that others

would interpret his responses as racist. Given that feelings

of vulnerability, anger, and exposure were common among

students in her study, Johnston concluded that teachers

must engage students both personally and emotionally

through aesthetic readings of texts and critically through

sociopolitical readings in order to create spaces where

students might deconstruct repressive ideologies and

“re-map” their cultural memories, painful and shocking

as they may initially be. Although he continued to say

little in class, Myka’s initial reaction was mediated by

other students’ points of view, and, in a later interview

with Johnston, he revealed that he had arrived at a more

ambiguous conclusion about his inherited history after

reading other, unassigned texts by Kogawa. Without eras-

ing his own painful memories, a postcolonial pedagogy

encouraged Myka to permit the hearing of other voices

and histories as well.

In the new edition of her well-known text on literary

theory, Deborah Appleman (2009) included a chapter on

the teaching of postcolonial literature in which she offered

examples of students re-reading and re-writing Conrad’s

Heart of Darkness (1902/1993) and other colonial texts

through a postcolonial lens. Appleman (2009) argues

that a postcolonial lens, with its focus on political and

historical contexts, allows for interpretations of literature

which move away from “universal” readings to readings

which instill global signi cance to those whose experi-

ences have been represented only as “the other” to the

Western world.

Immigrant students must regularly cross the dif cult

discourse borders that Johnston found to be dif cult even

for students who were not immigrants. Sarroub, Pernicek,

and Sweeney (2007) offered the reading experiences of

Hayder, a Kurdish refugee student from Iraq, as repre-

sentative of a “new type of immigrant” (p. 669) whose

home life is often incompatible with school expectations

that put him in a position to fail or drop out. Additionally,

Hayder’s arrival in the United States forced him to rede ne

masculinity and responsibility in light of assumptions

about Iraqi men as dangerous in a post-9/11 world. The

hybridity of Hayder’s identity, then, as refugee, male,

and student placed him in an often-confusing position.

Despite his avid reading outside of school for purposes

related to work and the navigation of day-to-day living,

Hayder’s success in school literacy tasks was mediated

by varying degrees of support. Sarroub et al. argued that

teachers and researchers must rede ne reading and text

in school contexts and make use of the multiple literacies

that students like Hayder already practice in other contexts

of their lives.

The literacy practices of youth in contexts outside of

school have begun to productively merge with more tradi-

tional literacy practices in school, thus creating important

hybrid spaces. Urban youth often engage voluntarily in

literate practices through poetry and rap lyrics, which play

an important role as social critique of poverty, violence,

crime, and drugs (Mahiri & Sablo, 1996). English teach-

ers interested in engaging students through non-school

based literacies have begun to integrate such practices

into their classrooms in powerful ways. Morrell and

Duncan-Andrade (2002), for example, contended that

hip-hop should be taught as subject of study in its own

right, but also demonstrated how popular culture texts act

as a bridge to engagement with traditional, “canonical”

texts. In their study of high school English classrooms,

teachers juxtaposed readings of poems such as Coleridge’s

“Kubla Khan” with Nas’s rap lyrics for “If I Ruled the

World.” They found that the rap lyrics not only helped

scaffold students’ understanding of conventions such as

metaphor, irony, and symbolism, but also helped students

deconstruct dominant narratives in both poetry and their

own lives (Morrell, 2002).

Building on such conclusions, Fisher (2005) and Joc-

son (2006) studied urban youths’ literacy practices with

poetry in spoken word and SLAM competitions in hybrid

contexts where both in-school and out-of-school literacy

practices merge. In Jocson’s study, Antonio blended the

musical genres and cultural forms as he mixed Bob Dylan

and hip-hop in response to commercial manipulation of

Black music and culture. In this move, Antonio negotiated

his “multilayered social worlds” (p. 232) and rede ned text

CYNTHIA LEWIS AND JESSICA DOCKTER

as a hybrid form. Through his writing and performance of

poetry, Antonio’s literacy practices intersected in hybrid

ways around both text and context. Jocson argued that

researchers and teachers must rede ne literacy as hybridity

itself in order to embrace the cultural, linguistic, cognitive,

and material resources, which characterize the relevance

of a rich context for learning.

Medina and Campano (2006) also worry about the

“marginalization of alternative literacy practices” (p. 332)

and the impact it has on students in low-income, ethni-

cally and linguistically diverse schools. They looked to

drama, however, as the connection between school-based

literacy practices and students’ own identities. Because

drama is a complex semiotic system, which allows for the

embodiment of multiple social positions, students in their

study were better able to re ect critically on various ways

of knowing and to use  ction as a way of understanding

their own mediated worlds. Through drama practices

and teatro, political theater, students entered into spaces

between characters’  ctional lives and their own actual

lives and identities. For example, students used drama to

“ ctionalize reality” (p. 333) by incorporating their own

collective readings of unjust historical situations in a scene

they called, “What the Teacher Didn’t Know.” Here, they

offered alternative readings of  ctional characters’ lives

and motivations by “freezing” text and inserting their own

cultural experiences and understandings of how they are

positioned by powerful others. As Edmiston (1998) argues

in his work on drama and ethical imagination, drama can

support the development of “dynamic relational selves

that acknowledge and embrace internal contradictions

in their views” (p. 83). As such, drama creates a hybrid,

in-between space where students reshape text and self

through their own critical readings.

Globalized processes, we argue, create increasingly

hybrid identities, spaces, and literacies, and as such, no-

tions of text, canon, and language have shifted. As we

move beyond Western, dominant conceptions of litera-

ture and interpretation, studies of response in secondary

schools continue to move toward an understanding of the

hybrid merging of school and non-school-based literacy

practices as well as the inclusion of multiple modalities.

We take up a signi cant aspect of the rede nition of text

in the next section.

Multimodality and Literature

Perhaps the most obvious effect of globalization on litera-

ture study in secondary school is the inclusion of multi-

modal texts, which often are shaped by global economic

and cultural  ows produced through digital media. These

texts lead to transactions that involve readers not only in

interpretation, identi cation, and critical analysis, but

also in text production involving print and other modes

such as sound, image, and gesture. We’re using the term

multimodality in the social semiotic tradition (Halliday,

1978; Kress & Jewitt, 2003) that focuses on the agency

of individuals and groups to interpret and make signs

within sociocultural contexts and transmediated across

sign systems (Ranker, 2008; Siegel, 2006). Despite social

and power structures that can be unyielding, these contexts

have the potential for transformation through semiotic

activity. It may well be this potential for change that at-

tracts so many young people to “read” (read, in this case,

means to consume, interpret, view, listen to) and create

multimodal texts. As the sections on identity and hybrid-

ity attest, young people are motivated by the possibilities

inherent in multimodal communication and expression.

Moreover, multimodal texts are not a novelty to youth as

they remain to many English teachers. Instead, they are an

expected (and demanded) part of the literary landscape.

Young people expect that literature will speak to them

in the way that rap, hip-hop, spoken word, graphic novels,

zines, fan ction, and other relatively new literary forms

speak to many youth. They also expect that they can

speak/write back to these texts, sometimes in the form

of intertextual new creations (e.g., a new rap that speaks

to an existing one; a serial fan ction), and sometimes

in the form of actual commentary, which they write and

respond to. This commentary often initiates a chain of

responses in a motivated exchange that is unlike most we

see in schools relative to either teacher or peer response

(Black, 2007). This process of speaking/writing back to

texts makes it dif cult to separate text production from

text consumption when considering how multimodal

texts work in the secondary classroom. However, given

the scope of this chapter, we will limit our discussion to

research related to multimodal forms of literature and

response to these texts.

Multimodal texts and their attendant literacy practices

can be daunting to English teachers, most of whom are

not “digital natives,” as millennial youth are often dubbed.

Despite the persistence of a digital divide (Pew, 2005),

youth of all demographics naturalize digital technology,

often through the ubiquity of mobile technology even

among low-income teens and the efforts of community-

based organizations that provide Internet access. More-

over, not all multimodal texts require digital technology,

as can be seen in the increasing popularity of the often

community and performance-based texts of spoken word

(Fisher, 2005; Jocson, 2006), and peer-culture texts such

as graphic novels (Schwarz, 2006) and manga (Schwartz

& Rubinstein-Ávila, 2006).

Daunting as this textual landscape may be, school-

based and university-based educators, especially in

England, where media education is part of the national

curriculum, have been making multimodal texts and text

production the center of their curricula for over a decade.

In 1994, Buckingham and Sefton-Green (1994) argued:

English teachers should be concerned with the whole range

of cultural products, from Shakespeare plays to hamburger

advertisements. Any text that we might choose to use in our

READING LITERATURE IN SECONDARY SCHOOL

classrooms will come already surrounded by assumptions

and judgements about its cultural value, which students

themselves will inevitably articulate and wish to debate.

(p. 5)

In nations that have required media education since the

1990s, such as England, Canada, and Australia, the re-

sponsibility for teaching students to interpret signs and

symbols, not only in print literature but in a range of me-

dia texts, typically fell to secondary English. One of the

striking conclusions that can be drawn from Buckingham

and Sefton-Green’s work in a working-class second-

ary classroom that focused on analyzing and producing

popular media texts is the sophisticated level of analysis

that resulted from students grappling with elements of

composition and message as they produced their texts.

Students’ experiences with this process made it hard for

them to either vilify or romanticize the process or the

products, resulting in complex thinking about texts and

readers’ responses.

In the early years of the new millennium, Canadian

scholars, Hammett and Barrell (2002), edited a collection

to help teachers use texts and technologies not usually

taught in English, including, for example, a chapter ex-

ploring popular culture texts using hypermedia and pair-

ing them with canonized texts such as Macbeth. In 2004,

Hammett and Barrell joined with United States scholars,

Mayher and Pradl, to publish a volume that focused on

developing new ways to conceptualize and teach English,

given the sort of changes outlined earlier in this chapter,

albeit with references to some now outdated technologies.

For example, Mackey’s (2004) chapter applied Thomp-

son’s (1987) levels of literary analysis among teens, which

included empathizing, analogizing, and understanding of

textual ideologies, to her own reading of a popular novel

and  lm, suggesting, in the end, that the developmen-

tal levels Thompson described can be used to promote

critical analysis of texts that students already know and

enjoy. Hammett’s (2004) chapter discussed ways to use

technology in supporting response to literature (email,

chat groups) and in understanding intertextuality through

hypermedia links.

An interest in creativity related to literature and lan-

guage arts has also fueled current attention to multimo-

dality (Albers & Harste, 2007). In an article on working

with preservice English educators in ways that encourage

them to support their students’ multimodal expression and

representation, Albers (2006) suggested starting with a

focus novel and inviting students to seek connections to

other art or media in order to better understand the effects

of transmediation across sign systems (for instance, the

different effects of a Tupac poem as sung by his mother,

in one case, and as a Power Point with sound and im-

age, in another). This activity aligns with what Jenkins

(2006b) called “convergence culture,” which underscores

intertextual connections that emerge from global  ows

and active participation across media formats on the part

of audiences/consumers.

One form of multimodal literature that is beginning to

 nd its way into the secondary classroom is the graphic

novel. In recent years, some texts in this genre—such as

Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (Satrapi, 2004)—

have acquired status through prestigious awards and

curricular materials for use in the secondary classroom.

Graphic novels such as these and the Maus (Spiegelman,

1986) series have, to some degree, achieved canon status,

at least within their genre. Many scholars and educators

argued that graphic novels bene t struggling readers and

otherwise disengaged students by engaging them in texts

that often communicate deep and complex messages, while

allowing readers to imaginatively enter the text through

different modalities (Carter, 2007; Frey & Fisher, 2007).

However, the graphic novels that have achieved literary

status may not appeal to young people in the same way as

those that young people exchange among themselves (e.g.,

graphic novel series books and manga), often creating

new meanings and fashioning new identities by remixing

elements of the books with videos and fan ction. Despite

recent research on how youth make meaning within trans-

media frameworks (Ranker, 2008; Schultz, Vasudevan, &

Throop, 2008), we still have little understanding to help

guide our classroom teaching of new literary forms. The

wide-reaching popularity of manga and Asian graphic

novel series, across categories of nation, language, ethnic-

ity, and gender, is more evidence of the effects of globaliza-

tion on literary forms and hybrid youth identities, which

then shape the meaning and method of literature study in

secondary school. For instance, Schwarz (2006) pointed

out that studying graphic novels can lead to discussions

that challenge how literary canons are formed, so that the

making of a discipline and the con icts that are central to

its formation are objects of study (Graff, 1993).

In some cases, forms of response to literature study in

the classroom have changed more than the texts them-

selves. New forms of response, including weblogs and

social networks, are expanding the boundaries of the

classroom by providing students with wider audiences

and conversational partners for their responses to litera-

ture. For example, Robyn Cook, who teaches in an urban

high school program focusing on digital media, decided

to use edmodo, a social networking program much like

Twitter, during a class discussion of Siddhartha (Hesse,

1922/2007). She divided her class into two groups in

preparation for a “ shbowl” discussion in which the in-

side circle discussed the text and the outer circle observed

and commented on the discussion. Whereas in the past

she asked students in the outer circle to take notes and

prepare to talk about their observations, she decided this

time to have all students in the outer circle use edmodo

on individual laptop computers to comment on their

observations related to the content and interactional dy-

namics of the inner circle’s discussion. Cook (personal

CYNTHIA LEWIS AND JESSICA DOCKTER

communication, March 2009) reported that every student

in the outer circle was engaged in this process, with most

making important observations that supported a deeper

discussion than the class had previously experienced. She

hypothesized that her students learned more by reading

their peers’ in-process thoughts, which then provided a

reason for them to support, critique, and elaborate on each

other’s comments.

Responding to literature through weblog entries is an-

other form of response that allows students to make use

of the affordances of technology, in this case to fashion

identities in relation to the texts and the classroom com-

munity. Each week, West (2008) invited her high school

students to respond to what interested them most about

the American literature they had been assigned to read.

She found that students were not only eager to post their

responses and read those of their classmates, but were

motivated to write engaging blog entries to hold their

classmates’ attention. Having the authentic audience of

their peers led them to leverage particular identities to

establish their relationship to the text and to their peers.

One student used her blog entries to leverage her cultural

capital as someone knowledgeable about popular culture

while simultaneously demonstrating her ability to analyze

literature as expected in school. In the course of a para-

graph, she referenced “The Illest Diva” from a song by

the singer Missy Elliot before comparing her experience

reading Huckleberry Finn (Twain, 1885/2002) to that of

reading The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald, 1925/1992) and

ending with enthusiasm for “Hucky” and “Tommy” and

their “loco” adventures. In this way, students in this Ad-

vanced Placement class managed to retain their positions

as serious students, appealing to both their teachers’ and

their peers’ sensibilities as well as taking up “hybrid social

languages” (West, 2008, p. 588).

Transforming Literature Study in Secondary

School

Hayles (2007) argued “the practices, texts, procedures,

and processual nature of electronic literature require new

critical models and new ways of playing and interpret-

ing the works.” In the examples of research included in

this chapter, there are new practices worth underscoring.

First, given an increasingly visual and global culture, it

is important to develop in young people the capacity for

critical citizenship so that they can “read” the linguistic,

visual, and aural signs and symbols that inundate their

lives, public and private. Second, because multimodal

texts are not yet normalized, they tend to draw attention

to themselves and, thus, allow readers to examine the

process of reading involved in interpretation within and

across media. Finally, given all of the new forms of texts

and response that youth engage with in their communi-

ties, young people have come to expect that what they

read will shape and be shaped by their social identities

and af liations. Spoken word, for example, is both global

and local, shaped by global economies and cultures, yet

taken up in particular ways by different ethnic, racial,

national, religious, and linguistic groups in various real-

time and virtual locations. Sha Cage, a spoken word artist

and activist in the area where the authors of this chapter

live, incorporates local issues such as homelessness and

poverty into her poetry while accessing connections to

hip-hop, blues, and jazz and national  gures such as

June Jordan and Martin Luther King, Jr., who she refers

to simply as “June and Martin.” Her poetry draws on the

local understandings of the live audience while connecting

them to larger issues of social justice through globally

known individuals and movements. Some secondary

educators, aware of the multimodal texts that are at the

center of youth culture, have begun to expand the textual

landscape and response repertoires of their classrooms.

As they do so, they create new disciplinary discourses

for the future—discourses that have begun to transform

the study of literature, the subject English, and the young

people, all of whom are already world citizens. May oth-

ers soon join their ranks.

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Imagining a Writer’s Life

Extending the Connection between Readers and Books

Elizabeth Dutro and Monette C. McIver

University of Colorado at Boulder

Annie Dillard once wrote a famous little masterpiece, entitled The Writing Life, in which she suggests that the

writer “is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write.” In this chapter, Elizabeth Dutro and Monette

McIver take Dillard’s comment even further. They begin with the increasing role of literary texts as authorial

mentors for young writers, emphasizing the intertwined nature of reading and writing. But then they up the

ante by looking carefully at what kinds of mentor texts are valued both within and outside of school. They

argue that literary borrowing does not simply supply a “model of skills, genre, and literary conventions,” but

can also serve individual expression as well as resistance to and transformation of the social status quo. The

idea of how one’s reading  ows into “every scratch of the pen” will be echoed in Hammill’s later chapter on

how writing is preserved and serves as a transformational space within museums.

When we consider the relationship between reading and

young writers we think of Jo March, the heroine of Little

Women (Alcott, 2004), retreating to the privacy of her attic

room and writing furiously in her notebooks. Filling page

after page, she created the kinds of thrilling tales that she

read in magazines and that she was sure were just what

publishers wished to print. It took painful rejection, not to

mention the burning of her manuscript by a vengeful little

sister, to convince her that her own voice and story were

more valuable than those she had so carefully modeled.

But, those horror tales played an important, intertextual

role in inspiring and motivating her to pursue a writing

life (Dillard, 1989).

Most of us who spend time writing are well aware of

the writers who have inspired us. If we caught the writing

bug at an early age, we might have a mental bookshelf full

of inspirational authors from childhood forward whose

various styles, genres, characterizations, and themes have

left their traces on our writing lives. Encountering young

writers as educators, librarians, or parents, we know that

children and youth are often inspired to write through their

reading of favorite authors. Whether it is a  rst grader draw-

ing her own version of Jaqueline Woodson’s (2001) The

Other Side, a fourth grader writing “Dragon Sky,” his take

on Laurence Yep’s (1977) Dragonwings, a middle schooler

adding a new chapter to her J.K. Rowling fan  ction novel,

IMAGINING A WRITER’S LIFE

or high school poets performing at an open mic, literature

provides a world from which new ideas can be launched.

As Stephen King (2000) writes in recalling his own journey

as a writer, “imitation preceded creation” (p. 27). Indeed,

one of the powers of literature is how it can inspire a reader

to reach for her pen and weave her own magic with words,

imagining, imitating, creating, even rebelling.

Although successful authors are rightfully celebrated

for their unique contributions, a writing life is informed

by the literary voices that preceded and surround it. Well-

known writers are often asked in interviews to name their

literary mentors. Newsweek magazine recently began

running a regular column, “A Life in Books,” that asks

famous authors to recount their  ve most important books.

Several authors, including Stephen King, Beverly Cleary,

and Anne Lamott, have penned memoirs that explicitly

recount the reading that fueled their writing. Henry Louis

Gates speaks eloquently about how seeing James Bald-

win’s pictures and reading his stories made his dream of

becoming a writer a reality (Lamb, 1997). In addition,  lm

portrayals of developing writers such as Finding Forrester

or Freedom Writers often include scenes in which older

mentors press a book into the hands of a young protégé

that is certain to light his authorial passions. In short, the

assumption of a powerful intertextual connection between

reading literature and authoring texts of one’s own is

captured in the many and varied narratives that surround

the art of writing.

However, even as that reading-writing connection func-

tions as a collective assumption, and even though many

writers are able to name their authorial muses if asked, the

relationship between literature and writing is not often a

tangible, visible one. The act of reading and writing are

so intertwined that we do not often see the individual

threads and how they come together. In this chapter, we

will tease out some perceptible instances of the relation-

ship between young writers and their reading. One of

those tangible instances is how educators have harnessed

the idea of authors as mentors through explicit attention

to the modeling—of genres, voice, imagery, character

development, and word choice—that published authors

can provide for young writers. Thus, we devote a section

of what follows to professional texts written for teach-

ers, curricula, and research that address the relationship

between literature and writing in classrooms.

Although the link between reading and writing is used

as a pedagogical tool in schools, we also know that chil-

dren and youth have long relied on authors as mentors for

their own writing outside of the of cial world of the class-

room and with or without the explicit guidance of adults.

Therefore, we explore that territory as well, including

the socially engaged work of youth, particularly youth of

color, who draw on literary mentors to speak to and back to

their communities and society. We also turn to the writing

of young people who are employing new technologies to

 nd outlets and audiences for their author-inspired writing,

particularly focusing on fan  ction, a genre that uniquely

makes the author-writer relationship visible. As part of our

discussion of fan  ction, we share examples from a fan

 ction community devoted to Harry Potter where young

writers critically engage and re-work the characters and

plots of an iconic, beloved series. By following some of the

tangible threads that tie the writing endeavors of children

and youth to the worlds of authors and texts, we discuss

the complex relationship between textual consumption and

production and the opportunities as well as the inequities

that are revealed through those connections.

Lenses on the Links between Reading and

Writing

To claim a link between what is read and what is written

is to evoke certain theoretical assumptions about texts

and how they function. For one thing, such a relation-

ship presumes intertextuality in the practices of reading

and writing—encounters with any given text connect to

memories of and meanings drawn from other texts one has

engaged. The theories of Mikhail Bakhtin (1981), a Rus-

sian sociolinguist, have been in uential in considering the

intertextual nature of human engagement with language.

Bakhtin argued that to communicate through language

is to “appropriate the words of others and populate them

with one’s own intention” (p. 428). In this view, words are

richly recycled—encountered, taken up, and re-shaped by

people who imbue them with new meanings and embed

them in new contexts. Therefore, no use of language or act

of communication can be considered “neutral” or outside

of the in uence of the social and ideological contexts in

which it is produced and received. The meanings woven

from reading any given novel, for instance, are shot

through with the experiences a reader has had with other

texts. Similarly, when we sit down to write, the blank

page we stare at is far from a void, for when the words

appear they contain a history of encounters with words

written by others.

When writing curricula for students in elementary or

secondary schools draw on published authors as models

for young writers, this intertextuality is made explicit.

Teachers ask their children to be conscious of the process

of drawing on one text to create another. The intertextual

nature of writing, if always present, is also highly visible

in the other reading-to-writing contexts we explore in

this chapter. For instance, the work of youth poets may

draw on canonical poets, rap and other hip-hop genres,

and current events that they’ve encountered in the media.

Writers of fan  ction also work visibly across texts, often

infusing different genres into their re-workings of a favor-

ite text or combining two or more texts in original ways.

As Chandler-Olcott and Mahar (2003) write, “as a form,

fan ctions make intertextuality visible because they rely

on readers’ ability to see relationships between the fan-

writer’s stories and the original media sources” (p. 562).

ELIZABETH DUTRO AND MONETTE C. MCIVER

In addition to intertextuality, the connection between

reading and writing also supposes an active reader, co-

constructing meaning with the words on the page and, thus,

dynamically creating the text as reader, rather than playing

the role of passive sponge for an author’s meaning. Reader

response theories provide various conceptualizations of

the active reader (e.g., Fish, 1980; Iser, 1989; Rosenblatt,

1994, 1995), but what the various approaches hold in

common is a view of reader as integral to the potential of

texts to convey meaning. In other words, an active reader

response is not a quality of reading that one can switch on

or off at will. Rather, these theories argue that it is only

through a reader’s transactions that texts can hold mean-

ing at all. It follows then, that the dynamic reader, taking

up the role of writer, consciously or not, re-visions the

words, feelings, memories, and tone (to name but a few

possibilities) evoked from the texts she has read.

A rich set of metaphors describes the ways that read-

ers actively engage literature in their writing, including

modeling, appropriating, drawing upon, inspiring, rework-

ing, provoking, transforming, sparking, and poaching.

That  nal term, “poaching,” derives from the work of de

Certeau. Jenkins (1992) draws on de Certeau’s idea of

poaching to theorize fan  ction writers’ relationships to

the texts on which they draw. Although the term may hold

some negative connotations, de Certeau uses it to invoke

a sense of readers boldly seizing meaning from texts and

making them their own. In his argument, the metaphor

of poaching infuses a sense of productive rebellion into

the reader-writer relationship. Readers appropriate texts

they encounter for their own purposes regardless of the

“no trespassing” signs erected by theories of reading that

have traditionally viewed authors’ intentions with such

sanctity. As Jenkins (1992) writes, “de Certeau’s poaching

analogy characterizes the relationship between readers and

writers as an ongoing struggle for possession of the text

and control of its meanings” (p. 24). Although this view

of the reader is more confrontational than some, it paints

an evocative image of how a reader wrests meanings from

a text that she can then run with in her own writing.

Jenkins points out, again drawing on de Certeau, that this

idea of readers poaching literary texts for their own pur-

poses is at odds with the traditional ways in which readers

are trained to read and respond to texts in schools—that is,

with respect, if not reverence, for the plots, characteriza-

tions, and themes that are presumed to be directly conveyed

by authors to readers. Although reader response theories

position the reader as an active participant in constructing

meaning from texts, reader as poacher positions the reader

as more than just participant in meaning-making, but rather

as one who  nds something of interest in a text, takes it,

and reshapes it for her own purposes.

This idea of the writer’s own purposes driving the

creation of a new text from those encountered highlights

another important lens on the reading-writing connection.

Written texts, particularly when they are published—

bound and weighty on the bookshelf—do convey authority

and importance. Yet, books are, of course, limited in the

perspectives they include and experiences they represent.

Further, as critiques of the predominance of White male

authors in the traditional literary canon illustrate, some

readers’ experiences are far more likely to be left out than

others (e.g., Bishop, 2007; Gates, 1992; Showalter, 1985).

Therefore, it is sometimes the absences that the active

reader notices in the literature she reads. Those voids can

and do fuel the creation of new texts that allow for a wider

range of experience and voices to be heard.

Theories of knowledge and power explain the absence

of some kinds of literature in the school curriculum,

particularly literature by and about marginalized groups.

These gaps and omissions are evidence of the ways in

which power is made visible and maintained. The domi-

nance of some perspectives in a literature curriculum or in

popular reading represents one instance of what Foucault

(e.g., 1980, 1995) refers to as the disciplining nature of

language. In this view, discourses, those large  elds of

meaning that are constituted through language, “enable

and delimit  elds of knowledge and inquiry, and govern

what can be said, thought and done within those  elds”

(Luke, 1995/1996, p. 3). Although dominant perspec-

tives in literature may in uence what counts as valued

knowledge and may reinforce power, resistance to such

dominance is possible. As Foucault (1990) writes, “Dis-

course transmits and produces power; it reinforces it, but

also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and

makes it possible to thwart it” (p. 101). As we argue,

such resistance is visible and made manifest in the work

of both professional and student writers who insert their

perspectives into the genres and texts they read.

Thus, writers’ responses to the texts they read and the

knowledge that those texts privilege reveal a  ssure in

the relationship between the assumptions embedded in

the text and those brought to the text by its readers. Such

rifts create opportunities for readers to critique the text’s

assumptions and their consequences. A young writer’s

re-working also represents, in and of itself, a “speaking

back” to the original text or genre’s positioning of charac-

ters, settings, and experiences or the absence of particular

perspectives. As we turn now to a few speci c examples of

the reader-writer relationship, we will revisit these ideas

of authorial mentorship, intertexuality, active readers, and

young writers as social critics and transformative “poach-

ers” of published literature.

Authors as Mentors in the K–12 Curriculum

Writing as apprenticeship grounds the increase of writer’s

workshop in American schools. The classroom writing

practices central to writing process theory grew out of the

work of researchers who studied the composing processes

of experienced and novice writers. Chief among these

studies were Emig’s (1971) investigation of 12th graders

IMAGINING A WRITER’S LIFE

and Hayes and Flower’s (1980) analyses of adult writers.

At the elementary level, Graves’s (1983) work inspired

many teachers to make writer’s workshop a part of their

daily classroom life. Though by no means exhaustive,

these studies helped to de ne the conditions and the prac-

tices central to the writing process. Based on this work,

other researchers and practitioners amended the process,

and like the act of writing itself, writing process theory

continues to evolve. Now, students in classrooms across

the nation can describe the writing process (e.g., prewrit-

ing, drafting, revising, and editing for publication) with

the self-assurance of published authors. Much of this can

be credited to the work of Nancie Atwell (1987), Lucy

Calkins (1986), Jane Hansen (2001), and Donald Murray

(1985), who translated the practices of established writers

to the everyday operations of K–12 writing classrooms.

This work is further substantiated by the National Writing

Project (NWP), which creates opportunities for classroom

teachers to engage in the writing practices endorsed by

these authors (Smith, 1996). Given the in uence that the

practices of professional writers have made on K–12 writ-

ing instruction, it is no surprise that turning to “authorial

mentors” is gaining more prominence (Wolf, 2004).

As we emphasized earlier, students have borrowed ideas

for writing from the books they have read and heard for

as long as young readers have also put pencil to paper.

Young writers routinely infuse their stories with opening

phrases, dialogue, character sketches, and plot twists. One

need only review the work of Dyson (1997) or Wolf and

Heath (1992, 1993) for examples of how young writers

have lassoed the personas of super heroes and princesses,

capturing the lives of these characters in poetry, comic

strips, and narrative stories. Young children often begin

their stories with, “Once upon a time” as a result of the

fairy tales they have heard or the movies they have seen.

As we will discuss further in a later section, secondary

students draw on myriad texts from their lives, including

literature, to craft their own writing both within and outside

of school settings. What is new at the K–12 educational

level is the degree to which teachers use these examples,

explicitly showing students how to transfer what they

notice from the work of authors and incorporating these

lessons learned into their own writing selections. Below,

we discuss some of the research that supports the explicit

use of literature as models for young writers.

Problem Solving

In process-oriented classrooms, writing is often equated

with problem solving. In the course of writing, we de-

termine what we know and don’t know about a topic.

Lindemann (1995) makes this connection noting that

when writers practice the various phases of the writing

process (e.g., prewriting, drafting, revising, and editing for

publication), they are working their way through questions

that they need to answer for themselves and for their read-

ers. For example, a writer may change a word or phrase

based on the audience, reorder sections of a manuscript to

tighten an argument, or add an example to clarify a point.

Thus, problem solving permeates the writing process. As

questions—structural, logical, or lyrical—are answered,

more arise, and writers must return to the step that will al-

low them to answer their new questions. Effective writers

cycle through these steps to get a clearer vision of their

message and the best way to convey it.

One of the ways that students can make their writing

more engaging and effective is by eliciting the assistance

of published authors. As Lancia (1997) explains, “Litera-

ture inspires, in uences, and instructs young writers by

providing the examples needed for effective writing” (p.

475). An advocate of infusing the writing workshop with

literature, Harwayne (1992) suggests that “Children too

need lots of in uences. They need to feel free to take the

bits and pieces they’ve learned from others and integrate

them into their own unique ways of writing” (p. 160).

Thus, young writers can read literature with the authors’

process in mind. What issues might have arisen for the

author while writing? How might a particular character

have developed in the author’s mind, and how does the

author assist her readers in getting to know the character

so intimately?

Children learn to lean on the literary examples they

encounter through numerous interactions with literature.

Even more, students can rely on literature to solve their

own writing problems or to convey just the right guidance

or message to a peer. To illustrate, consider the following

conversation between Joseph and Richard, two fourth-

grade students. Richard wrote a non-rhyming poem about

football and has just solicited feedback from his classmate,

Joseph:

Joseph: Okay, I have a question. Is this supposed to be

like a story?

Richard: No, a poem. A poem doesn’t have to rhyme.

Joseph: [agreeing] But it doesn’t  ow like a poem. You

need to make it  ow more like a poem.

Richard: [perplexed] You mean add a comma? You mean

add a pause?

Joseph: [struggling to articulate his thinking] To where

your words connect like a poem. Since it’s not a

rhyming poem, you words are kinda…

Richard: Choppy?

Joseph: Yeah, that’s why I asked, ’cause it sounded

more like a story.

Joseph, still not sure that Richard understood the message

he was trying to convey, turned to a book of poetry, and

together, the boys analyzed several poems. While the po-

ems they reviewed were rhyming, the examples propelled

the conversation forward, causing Joseph to offer Richard

sage advice: “Some poems kind of stop. But then [they]

will start  owing again. It’s kind of like a waterfall when

it gets plugged up. But then it unsticks and starts  owing

again” (McIver & Wolf, 1999, p. 55)

ELIZABETH DUTRO AND MONETTE C. MCIVER

Joseph and Richard’s conversation exempli ed what

Lancia (1997) and others have encouraged for many years.

Reading literature through the lens of the writing process

can remove some of the mystique that so often surrounds

the act of writing. If children and youth understand that

even successful, beloved writers must problem-solve

through the writing process, young writers may be encour-

aged to do the same. They too can engage in the writing

process, working through sticky writing situations by

turning to literary examples. Ultimately, students  nd

themselves in multiple positions to read like writers.

Reading Like a Writer

One of the goals of a proactive approach to authorship

is turning decision making over to students. To produce

effective texts, students need multiple opportunities to

re ect on the plot lines and techniques that they borrow

from authors. Further, student authors gain command

of their writing when they are clear about how and why

they will incorporate what they learn from author men-

tors. Key to this is explicitly teaching students how to use

published authors as resources. In other words, advocates

of writing instruction that engages students in inspecting

texts to identify authors’ tricks of the trade seek to make

explicit the intertextual connections that are implicitly

present in the writing process. If student authors approach

each reading and writing episode with the memories and

meanings from their previous encounters with text, as

Bakhtin (1981) contends, then the products that students

produce are the external manifestations of these internal

musings. Explicitly using literature as a model takes

advantage of the implicit connections that readers make

with all texts.

The distinction between explicit and implicit reading

and writing links is an important one. Many of the inter-

ventions that researchers have studied re ected a casual

connection to mentor texts. For example, the third-grade

students in Bearse’s (1992) analysis studied fairy tales

for four weeks. Students engaged in a variety of activi-

ties, including comparing and contrasting, class-based

discussion, and artwork. Then students wrote their own

fairy tales based on a story map created by the whole class.

Likewise, in a study conducted by Fitzgerald and Markham

(1987), sixth-grade students were exposed to two revision

interventions. Students in the “revision” group received

direct instruction about how to make changes in their

draft documents such as making additions, while the

“control” group read literature such as an adaptation of O.

Henry’s “After Twenty Years” included in an anthology.

Not surprisingly, students in the “revision” group made

signi cantly more changes to their writing that positively

affected the quality of their pieces.

Students in the “revision” group engaged with their writ-

ing from a problem-solving perspective. Working as writing

detectives, these students read their writing, searching for

instances of incongruence between their intended mes-

sage and the actual message. Once identi ed, the students

referred to a growing list of revision strategies, modeled

by the classroom teacher, which might solve the writing

problem and made appropriate changes. Thus, simply

exposing students to exemplary texts does not mean that

students will be able to transfer what they learn to their own

writing. Students need explicit instruction from teachers,

showing them how to incorporate what they learn from the

reading of model texts to works of their own.

Writing experts have long encouraged teachers to ex-

plicitly make this connection between published models

and students’ writing (Atwell, 1987; Calkins, 1986; Smith,

1983). Harwayne (1992) recounts a discussion between

a fourth-grade teacher and one of her students. As the

teacher and her student, Mauricio, talk about a favorite

author, Karla Kuskin, the teacher encourages him to notice

the craft techniques that Kuskin uses (e.g., set in present

time, many references to the sky, paring words). As a

result, Mauricio not only envisions, but actually uses one

of the techniques in his writing. However, Mauricio does

not discuss why Kuskin might employ the techniques that

he identi ed nor does he theorize appropriate instances to

use the techniques in his own writing.

In fact, actually showing students how to incorporate

a technique found in the works of a treasured author is a

more recent phenomenon. Ray’s (1999) Wondrous Words

is primarily devoted to explaining how teachers can ana-

lyze craft with students and help them con dently transfer

this knowledge to subsequent writing tasks. This transfer

pays particular attention to how authors craft their texts

and why a student may decide to include similar craft

judgments. Toward this end, Ray advocates using the

following model to support students as they analyze text

and as they consider how to incorporate literary tricks in

future writing tasks:

The Five Parts to Reading like a Writer

1. Notice something about the craft of the text.

2. Talk about it and make a theory about why a writer

might use this craft.

3. Give the craft a name.

4. Think of other texts you know. Have you seen this craft

before?

5. Try and envision using this craft in your own writing.

(p. 120)

This model represents a signi cant shift from drowning

students in a genre. Although students bene t from the ex-

posure evident in the type of  ooding technique conducted

by Bearse (1992) and Fitzgerald and Markham (1987),

they lack the explicit decision-making opportunities

that Ray’s (1999) framework provides. Following Ray’s

guidance, a student incorporates a popular phrase such

as “melts in your mouth not in your hands” in a non c-

tion piece describing the process for making chocolate.

Having seen an author use a similar technique, and then

envisioning how she might use it during her own writing

IMAGINING A WRITER’S LIFE

process causes the student to make an informed decision.

Intentionality is central to Ray’s framework.

More recent studies documenting the strong con-

nection between the texts students read and the written

documents they produce give considerable credence to

Ray’s explicit instruction. In Corden’s (2007) year-long

study based in the United Kingdom, elementary teachers

engaged students in a variety of interactions with mentor

texts, including discussions of authors’ writing strate-

gies and teacher modeling of author-supported writing.

Throughout the course of a year, teachers read aloud

mentor texts, highlighting speci c features the authors

used. The teachers also showed students multiple ways

to integrate the highlighted features in sample writing.

In addition, students worked in small groups to discuss a

variety of texts, and the teacher routinely joined their con-

versations. All of these strategies supported the students’

ability to integrate what they learned from author mentors

into their narrative writing. Predictably, the students made

signi cant gains in the quality of their narrative writing

samples. Corden’s study exempli es the need for students

to assume the role of literary critics if they are going to

analyze text as Ray (1999) advocates. Espinosa (2006)

also argues that students need multiple opportunities to

engage in critical analysis of written text. The bilingual

students involved in her study used stories to identify the

“seeds” for their own memoirs and as poignant examples

of how authors captured small moments in meaningful

ways. As these and other studies suggest, interacting with

written text in a systematic and intentional manner sets in

place a road map for young writers to follow (Urquhart

& McIver, 2005).

Contexts for Explicit Engagement with Authorial

Mentors

In what contexts does structured engagement with the

idea of authors as mentors occur in K–12 classrooms?

Although the answer to this question could be as vari-

ous as the number of teachers in writing classrooms, the

practice-oriented literature suggests some trends in recent

approaches to the explicit link between published texts

and student writing. For instance, genre study is evident

in many K–12 schools. Through such structured investiga-

tions, students become familiar with the characteristics of

different genres. Calkins (1994) describes genre study as

an opportunity for students to “read and evaluate, muse

over and analyze, learn from and model themselves after

texts that are like those they will write” (p. 365). Although

we make the argument that teachers should explicitly show

students how to transfer the results of their analysis of text

into writing selections, there is no substitute for exposing

students to a plethora of examples illustrating possibili-

ties for their own school-based writing. Selections might

include phrases from a thought-provoking New York Times

article or surprising character twists in a comic strip.

Teachers also are encouraged to point to the way pub-

lished authors employ language to convey meaning, share

information, build characters, and paint rich descriptions.

Building on Ray’s (1999) example of how students can

read like writers, Corden’s (2007) study illustrates how

students’ command of language commandeered from

authorial guides translated to powerful and poetic writing.

Corden analyzes the difference between nine-year old

Joel’s beginning of school year writing and the product

that he produced after 10 months of instruction. When the

school year started, Joel’s writing was characterized by

little to no character development, a lack of suspense, and

simple sentence structure. As the school year progressed,

Joel’s writing evidenced the depth of discussions and ex-

plicit instruction that characterized his writing classroom.

Relying on works such as One Stormy Night (Brown,

1992) to build suspense and The Butter y Lion (Murpurgo,

1996) to craft complex sentences, Joel effectively transi-

tioned from lifeless writing the likes of “There was once

a forest. There was lots of trees in and some animals,” to

“Late one night, the rain was pouring, the wooden gate

opened furiously and the black cat purred” (p. 279).

Explicit instruction like the type that Joel experienced

gives students the opportunity to see themselves as writ-

ers who have the tools and resources they need to move

away from elementary and simplistic writing to the more

imagistic and mature example that Joel exhibited. Implicit

in this review of the role of literary mentors for student

writing in schools is the degree to which “good writing”

is the preferred model for students to emulate. It is clear

that those texts deemed to be “quality” literature are the

context through which students are explicitly shown how

to use published literature to enhance their own writing.

When teachers model analysis of text or reading text like

a writer, the examples they select often represent tried

and true literature. And while Charlotte’s Web (White,

1952), Where the Wild Things Are (Sendak, 1963), and

The Moon (Simon, 2003) may prove to be stellar examples

by a variety of measures, these same texts may not have

the same appeal for students. Indeed, young people’s idea

of “good writing” may include an exchange between the

main characters in a Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, a plot

idea from the virtual world of clubpenguin.com, or the

predictable gender-based character roles evident in The

Princess Collection from Disney (1999).

This discussion about explicitly teaching students

how to rely on and use literary models throughout the

writing process would be incomplete without addressing

Lensmire’s (2000) caution about such a direct approach

to instruction. The opportunities for students’ voices

to be silenced abound. The proliferation of standards

highlighting the genres that students should master by

a given point in their academic careers, the narrow ex-

pectations for achievement on standardized tests and the

literature choices deemed acceptable in classrooms like

Joel’s, Joseph’s, and Richard’s can render the voices of

children and youth meaningless. However, we assert that

ELIZABETH DUTRO AND MONETTE C. MCIVER

providing students with the direct instruction suggested

by Ray (1999) and evidenced by the students in Corden’s

(2007) study give voice to students. Indeed, as Joseph

and Richard demonstrate, when students learn how to use

the guidance that authorial mentors provide through the

exemplary examples of an experienced other, they will rise

to the occasion and assume the role of authors who want

to write a more engaging story or help their poetry  ow.

Educators can expose children to a variety of text,

expanding their repertoire of writing possibilities and

decision-making opportunities. However, it is possible that

students’ preferred texts will be overlooked. Toward this

end, library and media specialists are in a unique position

to bridge the potential gap between the texts that students

admire and the examples that classroom teachers rely on

to illustrate the panoply of literary devices and decisions

that published authors use and make. In the end, educators

strive to boost young writers, helping them see writing

as a useful tool. Students can use writing to demonstrate

compassion for another, to cause someone to reconsider a

decision, or to illustrate deep understanding of a concept.

To the extent that children can take ownership of their

writing, shaping it in a manner that achieves their intended

goals and meets the needs of their audience, they will

view writing as a worthy endeavor and seek the models to

support them along the way. Yet, direct instruction within

school is but one context in which children and youth

explicitly engage the reader-writer connection. In the

next section, we address other instances of young writers

drawing on authorial mentors.

Author Inspired Writing Outside of School

Although some teachers are beginning to harness the

potential of the reading-writing relationship, children

and youth have long drawn on favorite texts to inspire or

prompt their own writing. We now turn to instances of how

young writers have drawn on those reading-writing links

outside of school. Children and youth engage in many

unof cial writing practices beyond the hours of school

(e.g., Hull & Schultz, 2002). Research has highlighted

some of these practices, from keeping diaries to writing

notes and emails to friends (e.g., Finders, 1997) to the

textual work involved in the digital realms of blogging

(Huffaker & Calvert, 2005) and personal networking sites

such as My Space and Facebook (e.g., Lampe, Ellison

& Stein eld, 2006). Our focus in this vast territory is on

the writing practices that occur outside of the context of

of cial school curriculum and that have an explicit con-

nection to literature.

Within this focus, we concentrate on two primary areas

in the research literature that provide useful insights. First,

we examine youth poetry writing, both in written and

spoken word forms. Our review of the research revealed

several studies examining the experiences of youth writing

and performing poetry, either individually or in organized

programs. In both historical and contemporary accounts,

published poetry, particularly socially engaged poems by

authors of color, often served as models and inspiration

for young writers. Second, we turn to the phenomenon of

online fan  ction, a writing practice in which a clear link

exists between published texts and young writers. Perhaps

more than any other genre, fan  ction clearly showcases

the reading-writing relationship as writers create new

storylines that draw upon established characters and/or

plots from a published source. Our discussion of these

areas of research is not intended to be exhaustive, but

rather to highlight some examples of how researchers in

the disciplines of English, education, and cultural studies

have engaged these writing practices in a few national

contexts.

Poetry, Performance, and Socially Engaged Writing

The work of youth poets makes visible the links between

literature and writing. We found examples of youth draw-

ing on established poets as models for their own work in

a range of research highlighting both traditional notions

of the literary genre of poetry as well as programs that

focused on the musical genre of hip-hop as a poetic form.

(e.g., Fisher, 2005; Jocson, 2006b; Morrell & Andrade,

2002; Weiss & Herndon, 2001). Although this body of

work addresses a range of literacy practices, in this section

we showcase the research that explores the links—both

contemporary and historical—between published poetry

and the writing of urban youth.

Research emphasizes that youth engage in writing

practices outside of school that are connected to their en-

gagement with particular texts and genres. As Mahiri and

Sablo (1996) found in their work with African American

youth in urban communities, young people modeled their

own poetry and rap lyrics on favorite writers and artists.

The  ndings of these and other education scholars (e.g.,

Mahiri, 1998; Moje, 2000; Morrell, 2008) drawn from

 eldwork with youth in the United States echoes the con-

clusions of researchers in English and cultural studies who

have analyzed the textual productions of youth as both a

contemporary and historical phenomenon (Dyson, 1997;

Kitwana, 2003; Rose, 1994). This work traces contempo-

rary youth cultural productions in various national contexts

to literary traditions connected to social movements and

cultural shifts, such as the Harlem Renaissance and the

Civil Rights Movement in the United States (e.g., Chang,

2005), the Gay Liberation Front in England (Lent, 2001),

and the rise of anime in an era of globalization in Japan

(Yoda & Harootudian, 2006).

Writers and the texts they craft are always part of a

legacy of life and language. Fisher (2004) captures this

sense of literary inheritance in her exploration of the

poetry and other genres produced by African Americans,

including youth, in community venues such as Black

bookstores and open-mic performance spaces. African

American bookstore owners and operators purposefully

IMAGINING A WRITER’S LIFE

nurtured relationships between established African Ameri-

can authors and members of the community who wished

to share their experiences and ideas through their own

writing. The purpose of the reading, writing, and perfor-

mances fostered in these community spaces extended well

beyond a desire to provide outlets for creative expression;

such literary practices also functioned as political and

social commentary and an important form of resistance to

racial and socioeconomic oppression. As Fisher describes,

“speaking was a natural outgrowth of reading and writing,

but most important, all three were linked with a sense of

purpose” (p. 292).

Such connections between published texts and amateur

writers had important historical precedents and were often

fostered by authors themselves. Of African American poet

Elise Jordan and her contemporaries, Fisher writes that

they understood “their place in a long line of literate and

literary practices,” an understanding “best summarized

in one line [from one of Forman’s poems]: ‘we are new

buds upon the highest branches’” (p. 291). Two well-

known poets, Margaret Walker and Gwendolyn Brooks,

cultivated writing and writers during the Civil Rights era.

Brooks and Walker “would eventually be mentors in the

Black Arts Movement that followed in the 1960s. Brooks,

known for writing about the conditions of working-class

Black Americans in Chicago, led writing workshops for

poets and worked tirelessly with Black youth af liated

with gangs” (p. 296). Both the Black Arts Movement and

the Harlem Renaissance that preceded it were dedicated

to exploring African American experience through writ-

ing and other art forms and employing art to take social,

political, and ideological stances against racism and

other forms of oppression. Authors in these movements

produced writing that became prominent mentor texts to

the generations that followed.

In recent decades, the musical genres of rap and other

forms of hip-hop have inspired some of the most socially

and politically engaged writing among young artists of

color. In the United States, researchers in several academic

 elds have focused on youth engagement with hip-hop.

Cultural historians have linked the recent genres of rap and

other forms of hip hop to their historical in uences (e.g.,

Rose, 1994), while literary scholars have analyzed the

social and political content and context of lyrics (Baker,

1987; Gates, 1998; Shusterman, 1991). Although the

connections between the current authors of these cultural

forms and the prior texts that paved their way are implicit

in these analyses, they underscore the intertextual relations

between production and consumption. As M. E. Dyson

(1997) writes in an essay about rap music and African

American youth culture, “Hip-hop still depends on exist-

ing black music even as it reshapes, often brilliantly, the

groove it steals. Without its creative uses of past black mu-

sic, rap would be a museum of speech with little to inspire

us to conserve its words, much less heed its warnings and

many lessons” (p. 122). As this passage emphasizes, new

textual forms hearken back and pay homage in some way

to those that precede them.

Some textual forms, however, are more valued than oth-

ers in societies and their institutions. Such variance in the

value placed on certain genres, forms, and content is one of

the central concerns of education research examining the

connections between the genres youth engage outside of

school and school literacy practices. For instance, research

points to out-of-school opportunities for youth to write

from their experiences as providing important forums for

young people to express and explore identities that are

not always recognized, sanctioned, or safe to express in

schools (e.g., Blackburn, 2005; Moje, 2000). However,

a consistent  nding in studies of the literacy practices of

urban youth is that although youth use writing in their

daily lives in powerful ways, their out-of-school writing is

neither recognized nor valued in their school experiences

(e.g., Mahiri, 1998; Morrell, 2008). Mahiri and Sablo

(1996) argue that the provocative and engaged writing pro-

duced by youth provide opportunities to foster connections

between students’ lives and school literacies that are left

largely untapped. In an attempt to actively engage those

resources, Morrell and Andrade (2002) crafted a writing

unit that used popular culture texts, such as rap and hip

hop lyrics, as a bridge to literary analysis of more canoni-

cal literature and as model for literary elements that high

school students could apply in their own writing. As they

write, “Hip-hop texts are rich in imagery and metaphor

and can be used to teach irony, tone, diction, and point

of view. Also, Hip-hop texts can be analyzed for theme,

motif, plot, and character development” (p. 89).

Public Enemy’s “Don’t Believe the Hype” is one ex-

ample of a rap that Morrell and Andrade asked students to

analyze in relation to the poem “Oh me! Oh life!” by Walt

Whitman. Through literary analysis, students identi ed

the connections between the lyrics of their favorite hip-

hop artists and the poetry they commonly encountered in

the school curriculum. In addition, they were encouraged

to pay attention to how they applied literary elements in

their own writing.

Other school and community-based programs have

focused more explicitly on encouraging youth to write

using established authors as models. For instance, Jocson

(2006a) has addressed the changes in high school students’

writing as a result of their participation in the program

Poetry for the People (P4P). Founded by the late poet June

Jordan and housed at the University of California Berkeley,

P4P conducts poetry workshops in public schools, pris-

ons, homeless shelters, and community centers. One of

the program’s central goals is to challenge “the so-called

‘classics’” and emphasize the power of poetry to foster

social transformation among oppressed groups whose

voices have been excluded from the traditional literary

canon” (Jocson, 2006a, p. 701). Although young people

encounter canonical poets such as Walt Whitman, ee

cummings, and Emily Dickenson through the high school

100

ELIZABETH DUTRO AND MONETTE C. MCIVER

curriculum, P4P’s goal is to expose students to poets of

color, such as Francisco Alarcón and Suheir Hammad, who

may not appear on those of cial reading lists. Through its

use of such published poets, as well as its emphasis on

program participants serving as models for one another

during its workshops, P4P explicitly engages connections

between reading and writing. For instance, high school

students were expected to write poems in response to top-

ics that grew from their encounters with others’ poetry.

The students subsequently spoke in interviews about how

those encounters impacted their writing (Jocson, 2006b).

Damon, a 17-year-old biracial senior, wrote a poem

called “Identity” in response to Ruth Forman’s (1993)

“Young Cornrows Calling Out the Moon” that explored

his experiences as a Filipino/African American adolescent.

Although Jocson’s analysis is not focused on the speci cs

of Damon’s use of Forman’s poem, for our purposes we

examined the two poems in relation to each other to better

understand some of the speci c ways that Damon drew

on his mentor text (see Figure 7.1).

Examining excerpts from Forman’s and Damon’s

poems in parallel reveal some of the ways that Damon

drew inspiration from Forman for his own writing. His

poem re ects Forman’s in both content and form. For

instance, he addresses the theme of racial identity and,

even more speci cally, the embrace of that identity as

a source of pride and empowerment. In addition, the

form and structure of his poem adhere quite closely to

Forman’s. He uses all lowercase, incorporates informal,

vernacular language, and uses stanzas that hold together as

sentences or related ideas, but do not include punctuation.

Although the in uence of Forman’s poem is clear when

placed beside Damon’s, his use of those borrowed themes,

form, and structure is original and creative. Damon’s

poem serves as a vivid example of how mentor texts can

support young writers as they craft their own effective,

personally meaningful work. Re ecting on his experience

writing from mentor texts, Damon described his increased

attention to revision in his writing, including attention to

“better words” to express his ideas (p. 705).

Damon’s engagement with Forman’s work serves as a

vivid illustration of one of the common themes in research

on connections between poetic genres and the writing of

urban youth: writing as a powerful tool for personal and

social transformation. In both historical and contemporary

examples, writing is introduced to youth as a mechanism

for both self-expression and serving the larger goals

of social justice. Although established authors provide

models of a range of writing skills and purposes, they

also demonstrate the importance of writing as a form of

resistance and empowerment.

Fan Fiction: Devoted Readers as Writers

Fan Fiction represents another explicit manifestation of

the link between reading and writing. The term “fan  c-

tion,” referring to unauthorized  ction written by fans of a

particular text or genre that directly engages some aspect

of the original text, appears to have arisen in the mid-

1960s. However, writing by non-professional admirers

of particular texts has been a recognized phenomenon for

much of the last century and, some argue, has historical

roots that extend as far back as the 17th century where

unauthorized versions of texts such as Don Quixote are

known to have existed. In recent years, fan  ction has

been the focus of burgeoning interest among researchers

in English, education, and library science. As one might

expect, library science research has focused primarily on

the literary-inspired aspects of fan  ction (e.g., Collins,

2006). On the other hand, researchers in both education

and English have focused on a wider range of texts en-

gaged by fan  ction writers, including movies, television,

anime, and music in addition to novels (e.g., Hellekson

& Busse, 2006; Pugh, 2005). Given the primarily literary

focus of this volume, we have chosen to focus the bulk of

our discussion on fan  ction inspired by written texts.

Forman’s

“Young Cornrows Calling Out the Moon” Damon’s

“Identity”

1 we don have no backyard

frontyard neither

we go black magic and brownstone steps

when the sun go down

1 half and half

since the start of my path

mixed wit the best of both worlds

genetics turned my naps into curls

22 we got pretty lips

we go callous feet healthy thighs n ashy knees

we got ﬁ iin brothas n we r ﬁ iine sistas

we got attitude

10 i look deeper than the surface

because i was not

put on this earth to harm one soul

i have no problems

cause i was

31 so you know

we don really want no backyard

frontyard neither

cuz we got to call out the moon

wit black magic n brownstone steps

15 put here to contribute

slice through edge of happiness

and i ain’t close to done

Figure 7.1

101

IMAGINING A WRITER’S LIFE

Fan  ction, as it exists today, emerged in the 1960s

through the writing of fans of the television show Star Trek.

Fans published  ction (called “ cs” by those in the fan

 ction community) based on the series in small-circulation

fanzines, the  rst of which was Spockanalia, published in

1967. The practice of fan  ction grew through the 1970s

and 1980s, particularly around other science  ction tele-

vision shows and movies, such as Man from U.N.C.L.E.

and Star Wars (Jenkins, 1992). Although fan  ction ap-

pears to have its roots in the United States, the practice is

now a worldwide phenomenon. Japan, for example, has a

thriving fan  ction community, including fans of manga.

A distinctive style of comic that began in Japan, manga

is now a common inspiration for fan  ction in the United

States and other countries as well. Given variations in

forms across national contexts. For instance, relatively

lax copyright laws in Russia have meant that fan  ction

authors can publish their work in book form, a practice

that would be subject to legal action in the United States

or England. Although Japan has stricter copyright laws,

authors and publishers tend to look the other way when

fans publish manga fan  ction, as fan writing can serve as

effective advertising for established authors’ work.

As might be expected, the dawn of the Internet trans-

formed the practice of fan  ction. Whereas the authors

of fan  cs previously had to rely on ground mail to share

their work or submit their writing to the few magazines

devoted to fan  ction, writers can now instantly upload

their pieces to one of many websites devoted to fan  ction.

As Kustritz (2003) explains,

By the mid-1990s, all types of fan writing had become,

primarily but not exclusively, an Internet phenomenon….

Accessibility, combined with much lower costs (the cost

of an internet connection versus the cost of printing and

binding), made fan ﬁ ction reading a much more desirable

activity for a much larger audience than it had been in

previous years. (p. 372)

The community created by online fan  ction sites is

an important part of the writing experience. Although

they vary in their foci—with some including fan  ction

across a range of texts and genres, while others focus on

one author’s work—the websites support interactions

among authors, including discussion forums on a range of

writing-related topics, opportunities to respond to others’

writing, and space to share artwork related to the texts or

genres. Some sites are international gathering spaces for

fan writing, while others—due to common language, if

nothing else—are created by and for fan  ction authors in

particular countries. As Thomas (2006) emphasizes, “The

online spaces devoted to fan  ction provide more than

spaces for writing; they provide a supportive community

for many young people” (p. 235).

Children’s and young adult literature is highly visible

on websites devoted to fan  ction. For instance, on the

website fan ction.net fans have built on the work of fa-

vorite authors, such as C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia,

Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl, Christopher Paolini’s Eragon,

Natalie Babbit’s Tuck Everlasting, Ann Brashares’s Sis-

terhood of the Traveling Pants and Stephanie Meyer’s

Twilight series. Fans also write in response to popular

book series, including A Series of Unfortunate Events,

Animorphs, Gossip Girl, and The Jedi Apprentice. How-

ever, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series has dominated

young adult fan  ction in recent years. On fan ction.

net, the numbers of fan  cs listed after each author and

title speak to the proli c writing of Rowling’s fans. For

instance, as we write this, Colfer’s popular Artemis Fowl

series has 3,282 fan  cs on the site and Meyer’s Twilight

books, a recent publishing phenomenon, boasts 55,322

 cs. In contrast, Harry Potter has inspired 384,962. Given

such numbers, it is no wonder that fan  ction devotees

have launched thriving websites devoted exclusively to

Rowling’s books.

As the practice of fan  ction grows, scholars across

disciplines explore this literary phenomenon and its im-

plications. For instance, Jenkins (1992) argues that fan

 ction functions similarly to traditions of oral storytell-

ing, in which tales are passed through communities and

down through generations, with each teller leaving her or

his particular stamp on the story. Jenkins and others (e.g.,

Hellekson & Busse, 2006; Pugh, 2005) view fan  ction as

a democratizing force within the pro t-driven and often

elitist world of literary publishing. Other scholars have

engaged fan  ction as an emerging genre that uniquely

combines features of traditional genres, such as the novel

or short story, with features only available through new

media (e.g., Jenkins, 2006; Stein, 2006). In addition, re-

searchers in English and cultural studies have examined

fan  ction as a space in which new associations between

reading and writing are on display. For instance, Karpo-

vitch (2006) describes the role of “beta readers”—readers

who read, critique, and edit others’ fan  cs—in fan  ction

communities. Finally, much research highlights the role of

social identities, particularly gender and sexuality, in fan

 ction (e.g., Bury, 2005; Lackner, Lucas, & Reid, 2006;

Mazzarella, 2005).

In the  eld of education, some researchers have fo-

cused on the potential of fan  ction to support academic

writing skills. For instance, Chandler-Olcott and Mahar

(2003) discuss fan  ction as an opportunity for language

arts teachers to “help students become more metacogni-

tive about their compositions” (p. 564). In other words,

the very self-conscious engagement with elements of

favorite texts (e.g., character development, plot, setting)

that is inherent in fan  ction may be instructive for other

forms of composition. In another example of education-

focused research, Thomas (2006) examines the fan  ction

practices of one online community made up primarily of

youth ages 13–17. The site was started by two girls in

their early teens who wanted to create an alternative to

the large fan- ction sites that would allow them to focus

102

ELIZABETH DUTRO AND MONETTE C. MCIVER

on pairing two particular iconic texts—Lord of the Rings

and Star Wars—and to engage more easily in collaborative

writing. The girls Thomas interviewed believe that the

collaborations they developed through their fan  ction

greatly bene ted their writing in ways that were tangible

in their writing efforts in school. In addition, Black (2005)

has argued that online fan  ction provides opportunities

for young English language learners to receive valuable

feedback on their English writing within a supportive

community of fellow writers.

One of the reasons some scholars have cited for the

appeal of fan  ction is that it allows readers to inde nitely

extend their interactions with a beloved text (Harris & Al-

exander, 1998). Harry Potter fan  ction is a good example

of this point. Although fans certainly mourned the end

of the series following the publication of J.K. Rowling’s

seventh and  nal book, the fan  ction sites kept the story

very much alive. Some authors write new plots into the

time periods covered in Rowling’s novels, as the fan  c

author ObsidianEmbrace did through an elaborate subplot

involving a murder mystery during the year depicted in

The Goblet of Fire (2003). Other authors extend the books

beyond the end of the series, writing new novels with

Harry’s children as protagonists.

However, fan  ction, at one and the same time, func-

tions as both homage to favorite literary texts and critique

of those texts. As research has emphasized, fan  ction

authors are emotionally invested in the texts that inspire

their writing (Jenkins, 1992). It is, indeed, that investment

that fuels a desire by some young writers to recreate the

original  ctional world in ways that better re ect the

lived realities and identities of a wide range of readers.

As Thomas (2006) writes, “One of the features of most

fan  ction is that fans of the text can take it and write in

characters and plots that are relevant to their own identi-

ties and lives, giving them a voice in a text in which they

might otherwise be marginalized” (p. 234).

In our view, perhaps the most important function of

fan  ction for young writers is the opportunity for criti-

cal appropriation and transformation of favorite stories.

Although little information is available about fan  ction

authors’ class status or racial identities (we could not  nd

any large-scale surveys), scholars appear to concur that in

the United States the vast majority are middle class and

White, although some research focuses on Asian American

youth actively engaging in fan  ction (e.g., Black, 2005).

Anecdotally, we found that several fan  cs that placed

Anglo Asian characters from Harry Potter at the center of

stories were authored by Asian Americans (however, this is

based purely on authors’  rst and/or last names, a method

of identi cation that is very limited due to the widespread

use of pen names). Such moves to turn Cho Chang or the

Patel twins into protagonists in the novels’ plots serve

as examples of fan  ction as a location of resistance to

marginalization. Fan  ction offers the opportunity for writ-

ers to create stories that break with normative traditions,

even as they begin with affectionate relationships with

established texts that reinforce those norms.

The importance of fan  ction as site of resistance has

been cited by law scholars who argue that the creation of

alternative versions of copyrighted texts should be allowed

under “fair use.” They base their arguments, in part, on the

importance of opportunities for fans to recast their favorite

stories in ways that challenge some of the exclusionary

or stereotyped storylines or character portrayals. For in-

stance, fans can place minor characters, those characters

more likely to be female or non-White, at the center of

stories or write into existence romantic relationships be-

tween same-sex couples or characters of different races

that are absent in the original text. As law scholars Chander

and Sunder (2007) write, “Theorists, both traditional and

postmodern, af rm the discursive nature of creativity: all

creators borrow from earlier masters. But contemporary

cultural theorists recognize as an important discursive

tactic the reworking of a discriminatory narrative to retell

history and empower oneself” (p. 601).

One important way in which fan  ction writers re-vision

their favorite texts is through the romantic storylines they

create for characters. In a conversation with two 13-year-

old writers of fan  ction, we were struck by how often

the term “ships” arose in their talk. These were clearly not

sea-going vessels the girls referred to, and these “ships”

sparked heated debate and regular bursts of giggles. As

the girls explained, “ship” is short for “relationship” and

is a central focus of the online Harry Potter fan  ction

community in which they were involved. Ships in Harry

Potter fan  ction run the gamut from same-age, hetero-

sexual pairings that challenge expectations based on the

character relationships established in the books—such as

imagining a romantic relationship between sworn enemies

Hermione Granger and Draco Malfoy—to transgressive

adult/minor pairings—between, for instance, the teacher

Severus Snape and student Ginny Weasley. The central-

ity of ships in the writing and discussions of fan  ction

communities makes sense given both the importance of

romantic relationships to the plots of many of the popular

narratives that serve as source texts and, simply, to the

engaging and titillating nature of crafting such relation-

ships. However, ships can also be viewed as key sites of

resistance to the norms of gender, race, and sexuality that

are embedded in many of the texts that serve as sources

of fan  ction (Willis, 2006).

This leads us to one common category of ships in fan

 ction and our focus for the remainder of this section:

slash  ction. “Slash” refers to fan  ction in which a writer

places two characters of the same gender into romantic

relationships with each other. As Kustritz (2003) writes,

“slash offers its own particular challenge to normative

constructions of gender and romance” (p. 371). Slash fan

 ction  rst emerged in writing by fans of the television

series Star Trek in the 1960s. Slash  ctions wove tales

of romance between Captain Kirk and Doctor Spock. As

103

IMAGINING A WRITER’S LIFE

Kustritz explains, the term slash “comes from the ‘/’ mark

placed between the names Kirk and Spock at the begin-

ning of a story to tell readers that it contained a romantic,

sexual relationship between the two characters” (p. 372).

The term is now common parlance across fan  ction com-

munities and, although heterosexual ships predominate in

most online fan  ction sites, slash stories are highly visible

and easy to locate.

Because Harry Potter is by far the most prominent

example of young adult literature that has inspired fan

 ction, we turned to a popular Harry Potter fan  ction

community for our speci c examples of fan  ction gener-

ally and slash fan  ction speci cally. FictionAlley.com is

a large and well-established site for fan  ction, art, and

discussion centered on the Harry Potter series. Although

survey research has revealed that the majority of slash fan

 ction is generated by heterosexual, White, middle-class

adult women (Kustritz, 2003), the popularity of the Harry

Potter series among children and adolescents indicates

that a site such as FictionAlley includes a large number of

fan  cs authored by younger writers (though, still likely

predominantly White and middle class). FictionAlley

authors publish their fan  cs according to genre/form:

novel-length, romance, humor, or mystery/drama. Within

those forms, FictionAlley also requires fan  ction writers

to indicate features of their published stories, including

rating (using standard movie ratings—PG, PG-13, etc.),

spoilers (indicating which plot lines are revealed from

across the seven Harry Potter books), genre (e.g., action/

adventure), main characters, ships, and era (i.e., the years

Harry attended Hogwarts or when his parents James and

Lily were adolescents, etc.).

If a fic is “slash,” the author indicates that under

“ships” or, in some cases, includes that information in an

“Author’s Note” that precedes the story. In our relatively

brief foray into FictionAlley, we found that many, but by

no means all, authors of slash  ction did include author’s

notes that describe the romantic pairings in their  c. For

instance, one author introduces her/his  c with: “written

for the sirry slash Cookie Jar prompt number 14: Leather

trousers. Dursleys. And. Um. This is my  rst Sirry. I re-

ally hope you like it, and please be gentle. Or give useful

concrit, cause that’s good, too.” In addition to serving as

an example of how authors introduce slash  ction, this

note also illustrates some of the terms and language used

within the fan  ction community. For instance, “Sirry”

refers to a  c focused on a romantic relationship between

Harry and Sirius. The “Cookie Jar prompt” refers to a

discussion board on FictionAlley where writers can post

previews or teasers for their forthcoming  cs. This author’s

reference to “useful concrit” indicates the expectation that

readers will respond to the  c with constructive criticism,

a common and expected practice within fan  ction com-

munities.

The slash  ction ratings on FictionAlley range from

G to R (other sites include the NC-17 rating), with many

falling into the PG and PG-13 categories. The stories are

sometimes centered on romance, whereas others locate the

slash relationships in the background. One PG-13 rated

Harry/Ron slash story begins: “Harry Potter kissed four

Weasleys before he got to kiss the one he had wanted all

along” and centers on the developing romance between

the two young men. The slash pairings on FictionAlley

include almost any combination of characters one might

imagine. Although most slash  ction seems to focus on

relationships between male characters, some female pair-

ings appear as well, such as Hermione/Ginny and Ginny/

Cho Chang. Although the role and enactments of sexuality

vary, all slash  ction challenges the heteronormativity of

the original books.

The propensity for some readers outside of the fan  c-

tion community to interpret slash  ction as transgressive

is illustrated by an article by Collins (2006), a librarian

who writes about a survey she conducted of 30 fan  ction

authors who wrote from literary texts, primarily Lord of

the Rings and Harry Potter. She writes that when asked

about the features they found appealing in fan  ction, the

most common responses included engaging plots, believ-

able characters, vivid description, realistic dialogue, action

and adventure, romance, and humor. Collins writes that

fan  ction readers also cited as important writing style,

pacing, setting, faithfulness to the original work, length

and “oddly enough, homosexuality (or “slash” as it is

referred to by writers of fan  ction)” (p. 38).

Unlike Collins, we do not  nd it at all “odd” that those

involved in fan  ction cite “slash” relationships as an im-

portant and desirable feature of this genre. Slash  ction

represents a particularly pointed rejection of the gender

and sexual norms embedded in many mainstream texts

and, along with the broader genre of fan  ction, serves

as a powerful example of a critical, resistant relationship

between reading and writing. Reader-authors poach from

well-known texts in ways that subvert the characteriza-

tions or social norms such texts may reinforce, crafting an

alternative, more inclusive  ctional world.

Discussion and Conclusions

In this chapter we have attempted to explore a relationship

that is intimate, but often intangible. Indeed, reading and

writing are intricately woven processes, a fact not lost on

any writer who has heard the in uential whispers of the

writers and writings she encountered as a reader urging

her toward her own voice and purpose. Teasing out the

many and varied ways that reading begets writing begets

reading (and on and on) is neither possible nor necessary.

In this  nal section, we consider some of the implications

of those links for both research and practice.

Literature as “Model” and the Idea of Intertexuality

Those concerned with literature and its connection to writ-

ing in the lives of children and youth need to recognize

104

ELIZABETH DUTRO AND MONETTE C. MCIVER

both how reading/writing connections can be explicitly

fostered and how those connections are always and already

inextricably linked. Taken together, these aspects of the

reader-author relationship provide insight and opportunity

for research and practice. The explicit use of literature as

model for writing makes the interconnections of reading

and writing visible, offering young writers insight into

how the individual elements of the writing process add up

to what can too often appear to be a mysteriously crafted

whole. As emphasized in the scholarship on classroom

practice, arbitrarily separating reading and writing through

curriculum and instruction signals a misunderstanding of

the critical connections that students should and do make

as they engage in literacy processes.

Literature as Inspiration, Writing as Transformation,

and the Idea of Critical Engagement

Although the notion of intertextuality supports the recent

move in educational practice toward the explicit use of

literature as models of various aspects of effective writing,

it also points to the importance of providing children and

youth with the freedom to build from and transform exist-

ing texts in ways that make sense to them. Viewed through

the critical lenses we employ in this chapter, literature

becomes far more than a model of skills, genre, and liter-

ary conventions for young writers. Rather, published texts

serve as inspiration for expressions of identity, resistance

to oppression, and movements toward social transforma-

tion. Literature also serves as a landscape of possibility

for young authors who can reshape existing texts to re ect

perspectives, experiences, or simply imaginative territories

that are different from the original source.

As our review makes clear, children and youth are far

from dependent on adults when it comes to bringing a

critical eye to the texts they engage. Thus the disciplines

of education, English, and library science can learn much

from closer attention to the connections between children’s

and young adult literature and writing within and outside

of formal educational settings. For instance, for educa-

tion scholars to more fully examine the reading/writing

relationship, the work must move beyond attention to

function and include analysis of the literature itself. Such

close readings would provide more intricate understand-

ings of how young writers employ particular language and

features of published literature in their own writing and,

thus, lead to more speci c implications for instruction.

Conversely, scholarship in English could move beyond

the text and consider how narrative structures, character

development, and other features of literary genres function

in the work of developing writers. Given the centrality of

writing in university-level literature courses, young writ-

ers would almost certainly be well-served by increased

attention to how the literature students read impacts what

and how they write. In addition, research in English could

employ methods common to Education and LIS that

examine how young people use literary engagement in

expressions of identity, resistance, and social activism. In

turn, if librarians had increased access to information about

the function and potential of literary borrowing for young

writers, they would be better equipped to guide children

and youth to the literary mentors that will most inspire

and nurture them as writers (the website of the National

Writing Project, http://www.nwp.org/, is one important

resource to which librarians might turn).

We posit that one of the most powerful ideas embedded

in the research and practices we discuss in this chapter,

and one that demands attention across disciplines, in-

volves young writers re-working existing texts to include

additional voices and perspectives. The writing of youth

in urban poetry projects and that of writers in online fan

 ction communities raise related, but somewhat different

issues surrounding literature and young writers. In both

contexts, writers pay homage to beloved texts, while also

transforming them in their own image. In urban poetry

projects, young writers build on mentor authors to insert

their own voices in efforts to reveal and address social

inequities. Fan  ction also often addresses absences and

silences, but does so through transforming the original

text. Although the foundational texts that inspire fan  ction

do not necessarily serve as examples of critical writing,

they serve as the launch for critical re-workings of text.

As educators and librarians continue efforts to expand

diversity in the books that children encounter in schools

and libraries, we are struck by the equally important task

of fostering critical tools that support children and youth

in seeing and responding to the absences in literature.

The task for educators, librarians, and researchers, then,

is twofold: children and youth should be encouraged to

“poach” from the literature with which they engage in

imaginative and generative ways; in turn, researchers

across  elds should recognize and learn from the creative

poaching that is always and already practiced in children’s

and youth’s writing. The contexts of school curricula, so-

cially engaged writing, and fan  ction point to the kinds

of inquiries researchers might pursue. What does close

textual analysis reveal about how children and young adult

literature in uences youth writing and, thus, aspects of

youth culture? What are the constraints and affordances

of attempting to transfer particular relationships between

reading and writing to classroom or library settings?

How might educators and librarians positively foster and

build on the inherent engagement and motivation of such

reading-writing relationships?

Equity and Access in the Visible Links between

Literature and Writing

As we write about youth’s engagements with urban poetry

projects and online fan  ction, we are very much aware of

the different populations of youth on which the research

focuses in these two areas. Studies of youth and poetry

writing and performance often focus on the experiences

of youth of color in urban settings. In contrast, research

105

IMAGINING A WRITER’S LIFE

on fan  ction tends to focus on suburban, White, and

sometimes Asian American youth. In general, the research

on youth poetry includes more working-class teens or

those from high-poverty neighborhoods, whereas the

focus in online writing practices tends to be on middle-

and upper-middle-class youth. As we have shown, both

contexts afford stances toward literature that foster criti-

cally engaged writing. However, as new technologies gain

increasing cache across the  elds of education, English,

and library and information studies, we worry that already

entrenched class and racial disparities will become even

more ingrained in both research and practice (Warschauer,

2004). Indeed, research on equity and technology suggests

that not only would it be more dif cult for some youth to

acquire the tools that allow a high level of immersion in

online communities, but that some online practices may be

exclusionary in subtle ways that have nothing to do with

access to the internet (e.g., Warschauer, Knobel, & Stone,

2004). We do not presume that rich online writing practices

are absent in the lives of youth of color and those from less

privileged socioeconomic circumstances; however, those

practices are not as visible in the existing research. When

such opportunities are described in research, the youth

are often supported by extraordinarily technology-rich

schools (e.g., Jocson, 2006b).

To be sure, the issue of access is complex and extends

beyond the availability of technology (and updated hard-

ware). For instance, McCarthey’s (2008) research suggests

that the increased focus on testing in the wake of No Child

Left Behind has led some schools to jettison writing in

favor of instruction in math and reading, the subjects on

which a school’s achievements are most often based. She

found that this trend has impacted low-income schools the

most, often resulting in the mandated use of pre-packaged

curricula that emphasizes tested skills at the expense of

rich engagement with literature and writing. Indeed, in our

experiences teaching and observing in schools, a skills-

based approach to literature emphasizes naming literary

elements such as metaphor, rather than engaging with

rich metaphors and having opportunities to employ them

in one’s own writing. Thus, the issue of equity includes

access to quality reading and writing materials within and

outside of schools, as well as knowledge of the variety

of literacy communities available, subtle ways in which

communities exclude and include potential participants,

and exposure to the modes of communication necessary

to engage with desired literacy communities. Although

we do not contend that the presence of disparities should

foreclose research into the technology-dependent literacies

in which economically privileged youth engage, we do

argue that the complexities surrounding issues of access

and equity should be more often considered in this body

of research.

Although a vast research literature exists on fostering a

range of writing practices for children and youth, scholar-

ship that speci cally examines the connections between

published literature and the writing of children and youth

is much more limited. Although the idea of literature as

mentor texts for young writers has gained momentum in

recent years, the focus of the reading-writing connection

has been primarily on the modeling of form and conven-

tions. Our approach to this topic revealed that published

texts do provide mentoring that extends far beyond skills,

conventions, literary devices, voice, or genre, and such

mentoring could be made much more explicitly available

to children and youth. Provided with access to literature,

the freedom and time to engage with favorite authors

and, crucially, supportive communities of fellow readers/

writers, young authors seize the opportunities literature

provides to engage in critical dialogue with their mentors,

appropriating, reforming and reshaping the texts they have

encountered as readers. Like Jo March, young writers can

write their paeans to their favorite authors and genres, see-

ing visions of their authorial selves re ected in the pages

of published literature. And, like Jo, their writing can push

back on those literary worlds, crafting stories that better

re ect their own identities, social realities, imaginations,

desires, and visions for a more just society. But always,

as they write, the traces of all they have read are present

in every keystroke, in each scratch of the pen.

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Teaching Latina/o Children’s Literature

in Multicultural Contexts1

Theoretical and Pedagogical Possibilities

María E. Fránquiz, Carmen Martínez-Roldán

University of Texas – Austin

Carmen I. Mercado

City University of New York – Hunter College

Teachers, librarians, and community members have their favorite stories to share with young people; but many

adults must  nd the stories that might matter most to them. Fránquiz, Martínez-Roldán, and Mercado describe

the work they do with preservice and inservice teachers, whose identities as Latina and immigrant have been

silenced or misrepresented during their school years. Now, as adults, they are asked to look back, to seek stories,

poetry, and images in the words of their comadres, in archives, and in recently published children’s literature

that will return them to literacies and literature they had lost or forgotten. While deepening and expanding

their literary heritage, teachers also learn that literacy development is not located in schools alone, but in all

the places where adults create a sense of “us” for themselves and their children’s futures.

Schools of Education in the United States prepare teachers

for working with increasingly diverse student populations

and thus have a responsibility for providing a coherent

approach to educating culturally responsive teachers (Vill-

egas & Lucas, 2002). One way to better prepare preservice

and inservice teachers is to create spaces for discussing

literary themes that address the authentic challenges, big or

small, faced by persons of color in and outside the formal

parameters of schools.

Building on the theoretical perspectives of caring, com-

munity, and cultural resources, we describe the ways identi-

ties of literary belonging can be developed in classrooms,

especially among teachers who work with Latina/o students

in the United States. Through the research we conducted in

108

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TEACHING LATINA/O CHILDREN’S LITERATURE IN MULTICULTURAL CONTEXTS

our teacher education courses, across three settings—Frán-

quiz in Texas, Martínez-Roldán in Arizona, and Mercado in

New York—we show how it is possible to value students’

hidden literacies, by showing the literary legacies and lived

experiences of our undergraduate and graduate students.

Fránquiz describes the written and creative work of under-

graduate students in her course, Latino Children’s Literature

for the Bilingual Learner, taken by students interested in

becoming bilingual elementary teachers; Martínez-Roldán

draws on data from a graduate course, Latino Literature for

Children and Adolescents; and Mercado draws on student

writing and interviews from an undergraduate course on

Literacy in the Content Areas, grades 1–6. We conclude

by highlighting literary education practices that enable

teachers to reveal, narrate, and renew their understandings

of Latina/o students, families, and communities.

The Need for Resilient Student and Teacher

Literacy Identities

Currently, over 40% of U.S. school-age youth are chil-

dren of color, the majority of whom are Latinas/os. This

diversity will continue to increase with a 2020 estimate

of approximately 56% White, 23% Latina/o, 14% African

American, 6% Asian/Paci c Islander, and 1% American

Indian/Alaskan Native (United States Census Bureau,

2004). The bulk of the growth in the age 5 to 18 population

can be attributed to students who are either immigrants or

the children of immigrants; most of whom are presented

with a less challenging literacy curriculum because of

educators’ beliefs about the students’ heritage language,

socioeconomic class, parents’ educational attainment, and

academic abilities. Studies show that English Language

Learners (ELLs), in particular,  nd that teachers expect

little of them academically (Cammarota, 2004; Olsen, 1997;

Suárez-Orozco & Suárez-Orozco, 1995; Valenzuela, 1999;

Vélez & Antrop-González, 2007), and their high school

completion rates attest that “when little is expected, little is

produced” (Callahan, 2005, p. 311). This persisting de cit

view of students extends to U.S. citizens born in Puerto

Rico whose parents migrate to the U.S. mainland. The chal-

lenge for activist scholars, then, is to demystify views held

by some policy makers and educators regarding students

from working-class immigrant families as emerging from

households devoid of rich intellectual and social resources

(González et al., 2005). Instead, students’ resilient literacy

identities must be nurtured in order to overcome negative ex-

periences they may develop when viewed as a “nonreader”

or “nonlearner” of school-based ways with words.

As demographic shifts impact our social worlds, teach-

ers and policy makers must also address the pervasive

view held by the U.S. public at large that children from

Latina/o, African American, Asian/Paci c Islander and

Native American homes need to be deculturalized. By

deculturalization, Spring (1994) refers to a process of

“stripping away of a people’s culture and replacing it with

a new culture” (p. 1). When beliefs from their primary

cultures are effectively silenced and ignored, children of

color may believe it is best to adopt middle-class, Anglo-

Protestant beliefs (Macedo, 1994; Spring, 1994). In con-

trast, researchers studying families’ funds of knowledge

or community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005) propose that

hidden funds of family knowledge and “nonacademic”

literacies be used as resources for learning in schools

from preschool to university, in libraries, in churches, in

community-based organizations and in other educational

settings. Because family and “nonacademic” literacies are

for the most part hidden (Martínez-Roldán & Fránquiz,

2009), it is imperative to bring to light these funds of

hidden literacies and make recommendations for ways to

mobilize them for further learning.

Working within three distinct contexts and geographi-

cal locations, we have come to understand different, but

related ways we can work with adults to recover hidden

knowledge, narrate latent counterstories, and validate fam-

ily and “nonacademic” literacies. These pedagogies are

intended to support the personal liberation of our teachers,

rather than their standardization, or domestication (Freire,

1970; Shor & Freire, 1987), into the broader teacher

culture. By addressing teachers’ reading, remembering,

and writing, we hope to reverse the practices in literacy

and literature education that continue to fail so many of

today’s Latina/o students.

Critical Caring, Cultural Resources, and Communities

Our review of the research literature and the examples

from our classrooms are grounded in and interpreted

from our personal and professional experiences as Puerto

Rican/DiaspoRican scholars. The term DiaspoRican was

popularized by Nuyorican poet Mariposa (a.k.a. María

Teresa Fernández2) and refers to the increasingly diverse

and dynamically evolving nature of Puerto Rican identity

within the United States (Antrop-González & DeJesús,

2006; Torres-Padilla & Rivera, 2008; Valldejuli & Flores,

2000). We share combined experiences of teaching and

researching in diverse settings from preschool through

university, and we align ourselves with sociocultural

theorists (Vygotsky, 1978) and critically caring theorists

(Antrop-González & DeJesús, 2006; Valenzuela, 1999).

Sociocultural theorists such as Moll (1990) show how

cultural resources play an important role in the develop-

ment of thinking and highlight the social mediation of

learning that takes place in and through classroom social

activity mediated by cultural artifacts or tools (Cole, 1990;

Cole & Engeström, 1993). Initiated by Noddings (1992),

caring theorists value an ethos of caring in and through

social activity and are concerned when the curriculum and

school do not actively promote a search for meaningful

connections between teacher and student, between stu-

dent and family, and among students themselves. These

interpersonal connections are the ones that have profound

consequences for Latina/o students’ identity development

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MARÍA E. FRÁNQUIZ, CARMEN MARTÍNEZ-ROLDÁN, AND CARMEN I. MERCADO

in elementary through college and for their academic

resiliency in meeting personal and communal learning

objectives (Fránquiz & Salazar, 2004).

We base our teaching practice on the premise that when

interpersonal relationships, curricular, and institutional

structures do not place value on the native languages,

histories and cultures of students, literacy resources for

learning are subtracted (Nieto, 2002; Valenzuela, 1999)

and academic resiliency suffers (Salazar, 2004). This has

been one of the most consistent  ndings in research on

Latina/o educational experience. As Thompson (1998)

explains, educators working from this position, as we do,

do not equate caring with emotionally laden practices of

feeling pity for students’ circumstances and lowering aca-

demic expectations. Rather, the goal is to build on educa-

tional scholarship on caring (Antrop-González & DeJesús,

2006; McKamey, 2004; Thompson, 1998; Valenzuela,

1999) because it seeks to uncover the existing knowledge

base of students who are not academically validated in

schools. We also operate on the premise that uncovering

students’ knowledge base means viewing learning not as a

progression through predetermined standards of learning,

but through the experiences and insights people acquire

as they participate and communicate in a broad range of

events and cultural worlds.

Locating Research and Directions for Literary Study

As Diasporican scholars of color, we are speci cally

acquainted with studies that show how the various waves

of the Puerto Rican diaspora produced very important

communities in the United States (Acosta-Belén et al.,

2000; Whalen & Vázquez-Hernández, 2005) as well as the

emergence of remarkable Puerto Rican literature (Flores,

1988; Torres-Padilla & Rivera, 2008). Our shared vision

commits us to contribute to a body of promising scholarship

in teacher education whose aim is to Ricanstruct (Irizarry &

Antrop González, 2007) de cit myths about the capacities

of Latina/o students, their families, and their communities.

We aim to elevate the resilient writing within our own

diasporic community while also defying colonial pedago-

gies that historically constrained the success of Latinas/os

in the United States. To be clear, we do not offer mono-

lithic views of Latinas/os nor advocate “best practices” for

them. Instead, we highlight social science frameworks that

identify and document the promising funds of knowledge

(Moll, Amanti, Neff, & González, 1992; Vélez-Ibañez &

Greenberg, 1992) in Latina/o students’ homes, kinship

networks, and locally situated communities.

The purpose of this chapter, then, is to describe re-

search that makes visible some of the promising literacy

experiences that can assist teacher engagement with is-

sues of language, culture, literature, and literacy. We pay

particular attention to the uses of languages and literacy

practices that demonstrate potential for academic success

but remain neglected and misunderstood hidden literacies

(Villalva, 2006).

Literary Study and the Beginning of an Us:

Discourse Matters

The following story offers an ideal, yet achievable model

for the literary learning we aspire to in our teaching. Vivian

Gussin Paley’s (2001) main character, from the book, In

Mrs. Tully’s Room: A Childcare Portrait, reports, “When

my babies do their stories, that’s when they really see

each other. That’s what we need to go after in school, the

seeing and the listening to each other” (pp. 10–11). The

book’s heroine explains that when two-year-old Alex told

his classmates his one-word “Mama” story, they repeated

it. “And then he returned the favor. Amazing, isn’t it? The

beginning of an us. A real community [where] everything

eventually gets included” (p. 11). This literary network that

comprised Mrs. Tully’s classroom community was full of

personal connections that emerged from the stories the

class read such as A Chair for my Mother (Williams, 1982),

and the stories repeated, retold, and dictated to an adult

writer, such as Alex’s story. In the space created for story

a new child in the classroom, Allegra, shared, “Once upon

a time there was a girl and no one noticed. Then someone

noticed” (p. 18). Thea soon borrowed this opening line for

her own version of A Chair for my Mother. Through the

repetition of Allegra’s story lines, Thea ensured that class

members noticed the new girl, Allegra.

In Mrs. Tully’s cultural group, children learned to read

and produce stories through shared ways of participating

in reading events. The texts produced in these events can

be viewed as composed cultural artifacts that represent

symbolic systems imbued with a potential for individual

and community meaning. As the children talked about

story, they developed more than the expression of ideas.

They created discourses, de ned by Gee (1990) as “ways

of being in the world, or forms of life which integrate

words, acts, values, beliefs, attitudes, social identities” (p.

142). Our identity, then, is shaped in and through discourse

and the most advantageous course for learners is discourse

that is inclusive and participatory as the us emerges. Thea’s

story functioned as a discourse that recognized Allegra as

a member of us in Mrs. Tully’s room.

Identity Matters

An identity of belonging matters whether one is two

years old in Mrs. Tully’s room, or an adolescent of color

needing access to dominant discourses in order to speak

and write forms of English recognized by many as a

language of power (Delpit, 1988). Identity even matters

to a teacher in training who is examining the in uence of

dominant discourse on her familial, cultural, ideological,

and educational histories. Yes, identity matters and it is

dynamically changing as social contexts provide opportu-

nities to access participation in different situations. In the

following section we describe three distinct educational

contexts and the literacy practices that promoted the de-

velopment of core and  uid identities via participation

in literacy projects.

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TEACHING LATINA/O CHILDREN’S LITERATURE IN MULTICULTURAL CONTEXTS

Three Cases: Literary Journeys in Teacher

Education

As bilingual, bicultural, and biliterate educators, we are

invested in assisting the teachers in our undergraduate and

graduate classrooms as they talk back to tools of oppres-

sion that strip students of their self worth. For this reason

our work heeds the call of Darling-Hammond, French,

and Garcia-Lopez (2002) and Darling-Hammond and

Baratz-Snowden (2005) who argue that teacher educa-

tion must assist all teachers in acquiring the necessary

knowledge and skills to teach for social justice. In the

 rst case, Fránquiz taught an undergraduate course in

Latina/o Children’s Literature for the Bilingual Learner

that introduced preservice teachers to the literary works

of Latina/o authors appropriate for use in elementary

schools and libraries. In this course she and her students

co-constructed a community that discloses, reflects,

conceptualizes, and transforms former monocultural and

monolingual ways of being. In the second case, Martínez-

Roldán provides examples that demonstrate the impact of

teachers’ new experiences with literature at the university

on their elementary school students. In the third case,

Mercado demonstrates how archival research on writers

and their work enlightens teachers’ perspectives on what

constitutes a culturally responsive author study, whereby

students’ personal and cultural values are central to the

assignments and goals for learning.

Memorias, Literacy Journey Boxes, and

Deconstructing Dominant Discourses

With the goal in mind of assisting her majority preservice

Latina students in developing consciousness of a new

bilingual teacher identity (in Spanish, a maestra identity),

Fránquiz believes that before teachers can build a posi-

tive sense of self in relation to ethnicity, race, class and

gender, they must  rst identify and critique dominant

assimilationist tales (Hurtado & Gurín, 2004). As such

tales are analyzed, signi cance and value can be attached

to newly found identities. Hurtado and Gurín argue for a

new consciousness of personal identity which, “…refers to

whether individuals are aware that the groups they belong

to hold a certain status (either powerful or not powerful)

in society and whether they will take action to change this

status, not just for themselves, but for other members of

the group as well” (p. xvii).

Fránquiz planned activities that presented her students

with opportunities to exhibit consciousness of their grow-

ing identity. This goal was addressed by providing an as-

signment early in the semester that served as an exercise

to “trigger both negative and positive memories” (Tello

1994, p. 59). The act of eliciting memorias/memories

about oppressive moments in personal and collective

educational histories served at least two purposes: (a)

becoming conscious of cultural and linguistic oppres-

sion makes visible dominant assimilationist tales such

as “Forget your native language and culture, and become

part of the great American melting pot” and, (b) raising

questions such as, “Does the American dream have to be

dreamt in English-only?”

Eliciting consciousness through memorias (the mother

of the muses according to Villanueva, 2004), can be under-

stood as a scaffold offered to future teachers in a course

on children’s literature for the bilingual learner. A scaf-

fold as a teaching strategy originates from sociocultural

theory and proposes that social interaction with more

knowledgeable or capable others signi cantly impacts

ways of thinking and interpreting situations. In this case,

the “more knowledgeable other” is located in memory, in

the narratives of relatives, and in the literary and archival

reading available to students. This scaffold was intended

to deconstruct tales the teachers may have internalized

and brought to their preservice educational experience

regarding a single path to Americanization and also begins

a libratory journey toward the construction of a bilingual

maestra (respected teacher) identity.

Memorias were elicited from 56 Mexican American and

4 South American women enrolled in a children’s literature

course in a Hispanic Serving Institution. These memorias

were the product of an assignment called, The Literacy

Journey Box. In the research literature a journey box is

“literally a box (e.g., suitcase, trunk, chest, cardboard con-

tainer) that contains a themed set of photographs, selected

artifacts, texts, journal entries, and an index that together

tell a  rst-hand story of time and place” (Labbo & Field,

1999, p. 177). It is typical in the  eld of social studies to

understand events or historical  gures through the study of

primary documents. For example, to construct the life of a

heroine such as Emma Tenayuca who led a pecan shellers’

strike in Texas in 1938, students have access to photos and

articles from newspaper archives to learn more about her

activism for better pay and working conditions. As an ac-

tivist of color and survivor of oppressive conditions, there

are many records of her statements both oral and written in

libraries, museums, archives, etc. The heroine’s biography

is synthesized in an excellent rendition of her life in the

children’s book, That’s Not Fair!/No es justo! Emma Tena-

yuca’s Struggle for Justice/La Lucha de Emma Tenayuca

for Justice by Carmen Tafolla and Sharyll Teneyuca (2008).

As valuable as a journey box on Emma Tenayuca can be,

in the class project that Fránquiz assigned for her class, the

heroine is not Emma Tenayuca but the preservice teachers

themselves, and the memoria (remembrance) is the story

of their subordinated knowledge  rst represented in the

literacy journey box (Figure 8.1), then in a timeline, and

 nally in their own autobiographies.

Spanish, English, or both languages appear in or on the

completed literacy journey boxes that also include an index

regarding the relics and artifacts placed inside or out. The

lid, sides, and bottom are resplendent with cultural mark-

ers of life and death, children and parents, quinceañeras

and weddings. There are personal literacy artifacts such

112

MARÍA E. FRÁNQUIZ, CARMEN MARTÍNEZ-ROLDÁN, AND CARMEN I. MERCADO

as letters from Dad who was stationed in Kuwait or from

abuelita (grandmother) in Jalisco, Mexico. They include

primary documents of the self as a child, an adolescent,

and an adult. Some students include artifacts that sym-

bolize lessons learned with lotería cards and  ash cards,

of lessons acknowledged with school pins, awards, and

certi cates, of social memberships represented by library

cards, prayer cards, employment identi cation cards, and

obituaries of family members. They recreate and illustrate

segments of dichos, proverbs, quotes, poems, and prayers

and strategically paste them on the inside and outside of

the journey box. Literacy memorias are also represented

with sheets of music, books, and CDs.

As we share what is in the literacy journey box and dis-

cuss the process of putting it together, insights of students’

similar and dissimilar material resources during the tender

young years of childhood and adolescence bring the class

community to tears, laughter, and applause. Our sharing,

discussing, and discovering also marks the beginning of

an us, a class community of future teachers. This begin-

ning of an us is a critical moment because the professional

development sequence known locally as “The Block”

follows after the course is completed. As is customary

in many U.S. teacher education programs for bilingual

teachers, the literacy demands on each individual preser-

vice teacher shift from majority English before The Block

or Pre-PDS (pre-professional development sequence) to

majority Spanish during The Block or PDS. Because

most U.S. schooling is in English during middle and high

school as well as in college, preservice teachers’ academic

Spanish language pro ciency is rarely at par with English

pro ciency; consequently, bilingual linguistic identities

among the teachers I work with are often quite fragile.

This is why establishing a safe environment for taking

risks is signi cant for creating an us.

Once the literacy journey boxes are shared, the stu-

dents make personal timelines and graphic organizers

to gather ideas for writing their autobiographies. During

these activities the preservice teachers reveal and examine

personal literacy events such as listening to Canciones de

Cri-Cri (Cri-Cri songs) that are important for honoring a

history and heritage that for many had been subordinated.

When students complain of uncertainties, failures or

gaps in memories, they are encouraged to contact their

parents, aunts, uncles, godparents, grandparents, close

family friends, even former teachers in order to inquire

deeply about their  rst reading and writing memories, their

memories of language acquisition, the places and people

that made them feel smart or dumb. In order to have a

healthy us in the classroom, invitations for remembering

and reclaiming are honored and respected by all.

Through the creation of literacy journey boxes, the

timelines, graphic organizers, and auto-narratives, domi-

nant assimilationist tales emerge in the consciousness of

the class. For example, one student wrote in her autobi-

ography: “On most nights my mother would read a story

to my brother and me. Our favorite books were The Little

Engine that Could, Little Golden Books, Bible stories, and

most were read in English.” Another student wrote, “My

mother would read books in Spanish to me such as, La

Cenisienta, Pinocho, Blanca Nieve, and La Caperucita

Roja (Cinderella, Pinochio, Snow White, and Red Riding

Hood).” While these stories have been popular for genera-

tions, they are normative in their praise of individualism,

Figure 8.1 Examples of literacy journey boxes

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TEACHING LATINA/O CHILDREN’S LITERATURE IN MULTICULTURAL CONTEXTS

heterosexual mores, ingeniously passive roles for girls, and

unambiguous in their presentation of issues of power and

class (Nodelman & Reimer, 2003). Whether in Spanish or

English, these stories are essentially monocultural. This

realization prompted some students to question why their

parents did not read culturally relevant books with them.

For example, one student wrote:

As I reﬂ ect back on my childhood reading experiences,

some are positive and others are negative. I think back at

different reading assignments and ask myself “Why wasn’t I

ever introduced to any literature in Spanish or assignments

relating to my culture”? Reading the church missalettes

and the prayers on holy cards were the only readings I did

in Spanish. As a matter a fact, it wasn’t until I began taking

classes in my major that I became informed of the many

books available in Spanish and relating to my culture. Our

elementary school was predominately Latinos, so why wasn’t

our background enriched with these readings? I want to do

for my students what my teachers didn’t do for me and that

is to introduce them to many books in Spanish that relate

to our Latino culture.

While this student made a commitment to reclaim her

heritage language and culture by immersing herself and fu-

ture students in culturally relevant literature, other students

included different memories in their autobiographies: “My

beloved grandmother from Mexico was my inspirational

model, known for her traditional storytelling like stories of

‘La Llorona.’ She encouraged me to learn words through

games like ‘La Lotería’.” And another student wrote, “My

parents read to me in Spanish—stories about brujería, oro,

y muerte (witchcraft, gold, and death).”

Together the journey box, timeline, graphic organiz-

ers, and autobiography assignments served as scaffolds

for future teachers to uncover layers of assimilation in

some families and resilient ways of keeping oral traditions

alive in others. One Mexican American aspiring teacher

revealed a remarkable memory of liberating herself from

an assimilative tale:

In 2005 I took a Mexican-American course. This course was

a challenge to me because many of the books were in Span-

ish and it had been so long since I had read Spanish. This is

when I decided to change my degree plan from generalist

to bilingual. I changed my mind because I realized that I

had lost something that was very important to my heritage,

and it was the ability to read and write in Spanish. I realized

that I did not want my children and other peoples’ children

to grow up that way too.

Through her renewed commitment to the preserva-

tion of her heritage language for herself and others

she challenged a common myth that, “if we focus on

teaching the English language, learning in all areas will

occur faster” (Samway & McKeon, 2007, p. 32). In a

rebuttal to this myth, the young teacher clearly outlines

and recognizes the price she paid by having to acquire

English quickly.

Although the teachers in the class acknowledged the

importance of learning English, they began to understand

that erasure of the native language might not have been

necessary in order for them to gain access to higher educa-

tion. While many had experienced the shame associated

with the home language with reprimands such as, “Speak

Spanish correctly and cut out that Tex Mex language

—that border talk!” other students remembered resist-

ing English-only education by learning Spanish in after

school or weekend activities. For example, one student

wrote “Cantos espirituales (spirituals) in hymnals are

divided by hyphens so I used English decoding skills to

learn Spanish at church.”

As they shared about their lives, in uenced by domi-

nant discourses, students learned about complying with

language rules in certain contexts such as school and

resisting these constraints in other social contexts of

their lives. Such awakenings about language were also

pertinent to the children’s literature we read in class. For

example, The Tequila Worm by Viola Canales (2005) was

the touchstone text (Wolf, 2004) assigned to the class.

The Tequila Worm is realistic  ction based on the author’s

memoirs of her youth in the border town of McAllen in

South Texas. The main character, So a, lives on the poor

side of town and aspires to be like the caring comadres

(godmother,  ctive kin) in her Mexican American com-

munity. When she is offered a scholarship to attend an

elite boarding school away from her family and commu-

nity, she must learn to make the people around her into

a family as any good comadre would do. Crafting her

comadre identity is at the heart of the narrative. Fránquiz

selected this narrative to be studied closely in literature

circles because the author is from South Texas as were

90% of the future teachers enrolled in the course. One

student was so motivated to read a culturally relevant book

about a girl from her hometown, McAllen, Texas, that she

read the book ahead of the class schedule and did so in

one sitting. She wrote in her autobiography, “I never liked

reading and rarely read for pleasure. When I bought The

Tequila Worm at the bookstore before classes started, I

had to read it and I couldn’t stop. I called my mom and

we talked for hours about comadres, sobremesa (time

spent talking during/after a meal), canicula (extremely

hot weather/dog days of summer), and homesickness. I

plan to translate the book for my mother.” Clearly, the

short chapters in this young adult novel facilitated pro-

found connections with this student’s core identity as a

Mexican American woman from the borderlands and a

future bilingual teacher.

Literature and the Mediation of Teachers’

Learning, Pedagogical Practices, and

Identities

Most of the teachers in Martínez-Roldán’s seminar class

had been exposed to children’s literature in their under-

graduate program not through a focused class on literature,

114

MARÍA E. FRÁNQUIZ, CARMEN MARTÍNEZ-ROLDÁN, AND CARMEN I. MERCADO

but as integrated into their language arts classes. They

were not so familiar, though, with Latino literature and

were impressed, especially the Latina/o teachers, with

the repertoire of Latino literature presented in the course.

Approximately 40 teachers took the class across two years

and Martínez-Roldán documented their responses to the

literature. One group of six teachers discussed the novel

Before We Were Free by Julia Alvarez (2002). The text

addresses the topics of war, freedom, and immigration

from the perspective of a girl who lived during the times

of Rafael Trujillo’s brutal dictatorship in the Dominican

Republic and her eventual migration with family members

to the United States. The teachers found themselves posi-

tioned by the text as insiders or outsiders in different and

complex ways and yet all of them engaged in a transaction

with the story of the protagonist, Anita de la Torre.

The diversity within the small group of six teachers

was important to the mediation of their interrelated and

recursive movement from exploratory to critical discus-

sion. Across literature discussion during the semester,

the more linguistically and culturally diverse the small

discussion groups in the classroom were, the deeper they

delved into a critical reading of the text and a negotia-

tion of meanings and identities. Because of this pattern,

Martínez-Roldán invited the small groups of teachers to

come together to share their interpretations as a whole

class group. The shift from small to whole group invited

more learning and negotiation of meanings. In the whole

class group, White, middle-class teachers typically stepped

back to listen attentively to the insights of three immigrant

peers—two Mexicans and a Serbo-Croatian. At the same

time, both mainstream teachers and Mexican American

teachers who had not experienced immigration in the same

way as Bojana, a recent emigrant from Serbo-Croatian,

asked for information and clari cation of aspects taken

for granted by U.S. cultural “insiders.” For example,

Bojana had experienced war in her native land. Thus she

responded to Before We Were Free with a strong connection

to the protagonist in this book as well as the protagonist

of a book she read as a child:

For me this book has a huge meaning because I could totally

identify with the character because I also went through the

war in my country and I also read the The Diary of Anne

Frank when I was in fourth grade and that was when the

war started in my country.

These intertextual connections between lived experi-

ences in the text of her life and those of characters in the

books led Bojana to respond to the historical novel with

the composition of an identity poem:

Inspiration

I am not a white, middle class, female,

in a dominant culture of the USA.

I am a “Woman of the World”!

My roots that of indigenous mother, with my own culture,

language, art, and ancestry.

I have my own folk tales and idols — a full cofﬁ n without

the lid;

my own experiences of discrimination and religious

separation,

in fact, I drag the whole civil war behind my feet.

I carry this culture’s class division, imposed on my mother

and father,

but don’t underestimate the power of my nation,

and ability to move through the freedom of expression.

I am a child of the world. I demand a proper position!

No piece of ﬂ esh will dumb me down.

I move through my own literary expression,

reminded to always ﬂ y up high like the butterﬂ ies.

The historical  ction novel, Before We Were Free, af-

forded teachers with many opportunities to learn about

themselves, about others, and about their own students.

For example, during a different session of the course made

up of a very diverse group of 18 students, most of them

practicing teachers, they discussed The Tequila Worm.

Across the chapters there are descriptions of many cultural

experiences speci c to South Texas that resonated with

the lived experiences of students in the class. Interestingly,

a teacher who identi ed as Yaqui3 sought to understand

the quest of the story’s protagonist, So a, to become a

good comadre. This teacher was speci cally moved by

the account of a Mexican American peer who talked at

length about the profound link to a core ethnic identity

she had experienced within a community of comadres.

She connected with the Mexican teacher as she shared

her understanding that to become a person you need your

comadre; she is sacred. The Mexican teacher explained

that in Mexico, the comadre is the child’s Godmother and,

in case the mother dies, the Godmother will automatically

take her place for important decisions, especially those

related to the education of the child.

The Yaqui teacher was impressed by the idea that

although one may be asked to be a comadre in a very

distinct us, there is also a personal responsibility for

insiders to respect and protect each other like kin. Other

teachers also acknowledged that their lived experiences

were authentically depicted in a text used as part of their

schooling experience. A Mexican American teacher,

however, highlighted how the word comadre may have

slightly different meanings as it had for her, and she alerted

the group that as accurate as it can be a description of an

experience by an insider, there would always be variations

to the traditions and customs of all cultures. For the White

European American teachers, the authentic and varied

cultural perspectives validated by their Latina/o teacher

peers had the potential of narrowing the cultural discon-

nect that some had previously reported feeling toward

their Latina/o students.

The course was also designed to in uence teachers’

current classroom literacy practices. Changes in their

practice were re ected in the kinds of reading they chose

to initiate in their own classrooms, which in turn led young

linguistically and culturally diverse students to move from

115

TEACHING LATINA/O CHILDREN’S LITERATURE IN MULTICULTURAL CONTEXTS

exploratory to critical discussions about sensitive issues

such as race. The course assignments provided a repertoire

of reading engagements that the teachers could use to sup-

port their own students’ reading and literacy development.

Antonia, a mainstream teacher wrote:

As a teacher, I am always looking to enhance my lesson

planning. Through the different styles of literature, I have

found ways to use inquiry-based literature discussions,

dramatizations, poetry interpretations, and many other

styles of teaching… Working with the other students in

the class has also given me intriguing thoughts for my next

year’s lessons.

A conundrum that some teachers experienced and

discussed was how to integrate culturally authentic lit-

erature into their curriculum when they were forced to

use a prescriptive phonics-based reading program that

relies on sequential teacher-directed group instruction.

The challenge is very real since “…scripted programs

provide teachers with a script for what they are to say

verbatim during instruction. Non scripted programs de-

scribe activities, provide examples, and expect teachers

to choose activities that they judge to be most helpful to

particular groups of children in their care” (Moustafa &

Land, 2001, p. 10; emphasis in original). One of the teach-

ers, Andrea, decided that although she did not have much

instructional time for literature discussions she wanted

to make Latina/o literature available to her kindergarten

students (see DeNicolo & Fránquiz, 2006, for a case

study of a teacher dealing with this dilemma in a fourth

grade classroom). She decided to give a brief book talk

every day about a new piece of Latina/o literature. After

the talk she put the new book in a special basket to see if

during Independent Reading the students would choose

to “read” the books placed in this basket, which they did.

This experiment opened up more opportunities for her

students to see their lives re ected in books.

Once in a while Andrea also used the independent

reading time in her classroom to organize literature circles

(Short, 1997; Short & Pierce, 1998). In one of those lit-

erature circles, her students were discussing the book The

Subway Sparrow by Leyla Torres (1997). It tells the story

of a small group of passengers who, in spite of speaking

different languages, managed to save a sparrow that was

trapped inside the train. The teacher was surprised at the

topics of racial and linguistic identities that engaged her

kindergarteners during discussion. The following excerpt

illustrates how the students engaged in a discussion of

identity and language, trying to  gure out what makes

a person bilingual and in the process negotiating their

identities and af liations, while learning to participate in

literacy events. In this excerpt the teacher posed a question

about students’ bilingualism:

Teacher: Do all of you know Spanish and English?

Mili, Iván, Bea: Yes!!!

Teacher: Why do you know Spanish and English?

Mili: Because we learn.

Bea: We learn at school.

Iván: Because we are Mexican.

The students made connections to issues of identity and

to the teacher’s surprise, began to negotiate what it means

to be Mexican in terms of race and language. The children

seemed to not only be re ecting on their own identities but

they also positioned others in the group in particular ways,

generating an intense discussion of identities. In response

to Iván’s former statement, the children responded:

Mili: We are not Mexican!

Bea: Yes!!!

Teacher: Why not, Mili?

Bea: Yes we are!

Mili: Some people is black, some is white.

Iván: I’m black.

Mili: You’re brown.

Bea: I’m Mexican.

Mili: You’re Mexican?

Bea: Yeah.

Mili: I remember someone told me I was Mexican, but

I’m not.

Iván: You’re a Mexican girl.

Mili: I’m not a Mexican girl!

Bea: What are you?

Iván: Or [maybe you are] just a kinder.

Mili: I’m not just a kinder!

Martínez-Roldán and Malavé (2004) have documented

how very young children develop “embryonic ideological

discourses” (p. 177) or cultural models about language

and gender (Martínez-Roldán & Malaué, 2004). The

children’s responses here suggest that there was a sense of

classroom belonging like in Mrs. Tully’s classroom where

the young children could safely discuss their developing

understanding of racialized identities based on what they

could see. Mili, who saw herself neither as Mexican nor

Black, seemed perplexed with Iván’s self-identi cation

as Black Mexican. Her peers saw Mili differently than

she saw herself and asked Mili to de ne herself. If she

was not Mexican and was not Black, in what other terms

could she be identi ed? What these youngsters saw was

the obvious identity that she could claim—the schooling

identity. Mili was a member of the us that comprised

the kindergarten class, but her peers knew she had other

social identities that she was not claiming. She certainly

claimed to also see herself as something in addition to

“just a kinder” student.

The teacher then prompted the students to continue

thinking about the identity issues they had raised by ex-

panding the meaning of Mexican:

Teacher: Mili, if you are not Mexican, what are you?

Mili: (Thought about it but provided no answer)

Teacher: What is a Mexican?

Bea: That means they talk Spanish.

116

MARÍA E. FRÁNQUIZ, CARMEN MARTÍNEZ-ROLDÁN, AND CARMEN I. MERCADO

Iván: Mexicans speak Spanish and English.

Teacher: So is Nurse Lynn Mexican? She speaks Spanish

and English.

Iván: Yes [overlapping]

Bea: Yes [overlapping]

Mili: I’m white.

Iván: Your brown, I’m black.

Mili: You’re not black, you’re Mexican.

Iván: I’m a black Mexican.

Mili: No, you’re not.

Iván: That’s me, a black Mexican.

Mili: Okay, Iván, so are you a black, a white or a

brown?

Iván: Black Mexican.

Mili: Stop acting like that, you’re a brown Mexican.

Teacher: Mili, why do you say Iván is a brown

Mexican?

Mili: Because of the color of his skin.

Teacher: So what am I? (she is a Mexican American

white teacher)

Mili: You’re white.

Iván: You’re Mexican.

Bea: That means she speaks English and Spanish.

As this transcript shows, even very young children are

curious about differences and are trying to  gure out how

they are an insider or outsider to a particular identi able

sociocultural group. Having the opportunity to  nd them-

selves represented in the literature, the kindergarteners

produced language about real issues that affected their

lives. The fact that there was an established us identity

in Ms. Andrea’s kindergarten class and that an argument

could challenge the cohesion of the group made Bea

ask Mili, “What are you?” Mili insisted, “I’m not just a

kinder!” but also insisted she is not Mexican but White and

that Iván was not Black but Brown. The challenges elicited

in the discussion provided a space for children to weave

together their understandings of racialized identities and

to bring their questions and emerging connections among

race, ethnicity, language, and phenotype.

While identity as a kindergartener was clear, a racial-

ized identity was less clear. However, Ms. Andrea created

a space for children to contest identity labels by recogniz-

ing “the students’ experiences as a source of knowledge

and a point from which to theorize practice” (Campano,

2007, p. 18). In this way, she invited students to inscribe

their own individual experiences into the collective text

about us in the kindergarten class. Encouraged by the

thoughtfulness of students’ responses to literature, Ms.

Andrea decided to keep introducing Latina/o literature to

her students every year.

Losing Ourselves and Finding Ourselves

in the Archives

In this study, students were invited to examine the us that

is shaped, not only by literature, but by author studies of

local writers in New York. Mercado used an interdisci-

plinary approach to literacy in the content areas in which

undergraduates who are preparing to be elementary school

teachers engage in archival research as a way to learn about

writers from their local communities while also developing

curricular applications. Teacher candidates in Mercado’s

classes were asked to transform information derived from

historical documents that reside in the archives of the

Center for Puerto Rican Studies of the City University of

New York (El Centro http://centropr.org). They created

original author studies of award winning writers from the

literary renaissance known as the Nuyorican Movement

inspired by Jesús Colón, and that  ourished in the 1970s

and 80s in New York City. Although Puerto Ricans have

been migrating north from their Caribbean island to large

urban centers such as New York since the post-Civil War

period (late 1860s), and making important contributions

to the economic, social, and cultural life of U.S. cities,

educators in the United States and in Puerto Rico know

little about the literary production inspired by this experi-

ence. Moreover, these literary legacies remain relatively

invisible in the school curriculum and in commercially

published texts produced for schools. Not surprisingly, La-

tino and non-Latino teacher candidates who enter teacher

preparation programs in New York and across the nation

have little, if any, knowledge of the historical experiences

and literary contributions of Puerto Rican American writ-

ers. Addressing this serious gap is important because

apprentice and novice teachers need support in meeting

rigorous content area standards that challenge students to

demonstrate competence in applying research methods

in studying local communities and their writers. These

competencies include using oral histories and memoirs

as well as reading, interpreting, and synthesizing written

information across multiple sources. While complex, the

process of handling archival documents is a powerful

educational experience precisely because it can bring the

past to life. El Centro is just the place to both lose and

 nd one’s self.

El Centro, the leading research center on educational,

language, and economic issues affecting U.S. Puerto

Rican communities, houses a growing archival collec-

tion--a repository of historical documents that includes

photographs, letters, newspaper articles, recordings, and

manuscripts that encode the experiences and intellectual

(including literary) contributions of U.S. Puerto Ricans

since the 1900s. The archives of El Centro’s collection,

re ect the wisdom of their archive and library staff, who

have deliberately sought out the voices and points of view

of ordinary people, many early pioneers who ventured

north seeking artistic freedom, and more recent migrants

who came seeking a better life. From the very begin-

ning, many of these migrants were intellectuals, writers,

and musicians, from working-class backgrounds, such

as the tobacco workers in Puerto Rico who inspired the

intellectual development of a young writer, Jesús Colón

(1961, 1993).

117

TEACHING LATINA/O CHILDREN’S LITERATURE IN MULTICULTURAL CONTEXTS

Although the wealth of information available in El

Centro’s collection is frequently used by social scientists

nationally and internationally, it is rarely used by educa-

tors. Even educators from East Harlem, until recently the

largest of the Puerto Rican communities in New York City,

make infrequent use of the collection. For this reason col-

laborations with archivists and historians are especially

promising so that educators—preservice and inservice

alike—can understand the literary production of Puerto

Rican writers and incorporate this knowledge into the

literary experiences they share with students.

By involving her teacher candidates in what she calls

the Local Writer’s Project, Mercado invites future teachers

to read about people and events to create an author study.

The project has gone through distinct phases. However, the

common purpose remains making accessible and creating

resources for preservice and in-service teachers and faculty

in schools of education. Although Puerto Rican writers

are presented front and center, the course that includes

this project does not focus exclusively on Puerto Ricans.

Across the years students worked in teams or individually

to create author studies in power point format, some of

which are available on El Centro’s website. All the power

points include:

A timeline of the writer’s life showing key events that •

in uenced her/his writing;

A map showing where the writer lived/wrote, and how •

location and history in uenced what the writer wrote

about;

Excerpts from and summaries of major writings/publi-•

cations organized by dominant themes and values;

Key quotes showing distinctive qualities of the writer, •

e.g., what compels her or him to write, the genres/styles/

medium the author favors;

Music capturing the mood and spirit of the writer;•

A summary of two lessons based on the New York •

standards for student performance in the language

arts, one for primary grades (1–3) and one for upper

elementary (4–6).

Though most of the works accessible through El

Centro’s archival collection are more appropriate and

adaptable for children in upper elementary grades, two

particular Puerto Rican authors address younger children

directly—Pura Belpré and Nicholasa Mohr. The former

was a talented storyteller who wrote and re-interpreted

Puerto Rican folk tales. She was the  rst Puerto Rican

librarian in the New York Public Library system. Belpré’s

life story was remarkably captured in the historical ac-

count, The Storyteller’s Candle/La Velita de los Cuentos

by Lucía González (2008). Her life’s contributions are

memorialized in the Pura Belpré Award, presented annu-

ally to a Latina/o writer and illustrator whose work best

portrays, af rms, and celebrates the Latino cultural experi-

ence in an outstanding work of literature for children and

youth. The award is co-sponsored by the Association of

Library Services to Children, a division of the American

Library Association (ALA), and the National Association

of Library Science to the Spanish Speaking, an ALA af li-

ate. Nicholasa Mohr is an author of short story collections,

novels, plays, essays, and numerous books for children,

young adults and adults. Some of her young adult novels

are published in both English and Spanish editions and are

based on autobiographical details of ordinary life experi-

ences of Puerto Rican immigrants in New York barrios

such as Nilda (1973), which won the Jane Addams Chil-

dren’s Book Award, cited as a Best Book of 1973 by the

American Library Association, and noted for the New York

Times Outstanding Book of the Year Award in 1974.

Upon completion of her archival work on Nicholasa

Mohr for the Local Writer’s Project one of the preservice

teachers in Mercado’s class wrote, “Learning about Nicho-

lasa Mohr…was a new experience. You should de nitely

continue to use this project in your classes. It is great to

learn about minorities like us making such great contribu-

tions.” These words acknowledge the authenticity of the

writer’s work while at the same time displaying the fact

that in the 21st century many Puerto Ricans such as this

teacher candidate are still being denied reading of and re-

sponding to culturally speci c (Bishop, 1992) multiethnic

literature (Harris, 1997) in their K–12 education.

Preservice teachers were also inspired by Pedro Pietri,

one of the founders of the Nuyorican Poets Café. They

reported that Pietri’s poetry was “awesome,” speci cally

his 1973 poem, Puerto Rican Obituary, a deceptively

simple and powerful poem about social inequalities. From

the study of the poem emerged an us among Puerto Ricans

and non-Puerto Ricans in the university class and the poem

was collaboratively adapted for 10- to 12-year-old children.

Regarding the experience, students re ected, “My group

fell in love with Pedro Pietri and his passion. It amazed

us to even think we had not heard of him before.” Another

student wrote, “The writer’s project was very powerful be-

cause I gained so much from it. Since I did the biographical

information on Pietri, I learned so much about him that it

was dif cult to…keep it simple. I was fascinated by all the

things I learned.” As a group, the students formed an us in

relation to the Puerto Rican artists and writers who had long

been forgotten, but who were enlivened through inquiry as

a vibrant resource for their own and their students’ literary

experiences. Through their author studies and archival ad-

aptations for educational settings, preservice and inservice

teachers discovered that although identities may be hidden,

they are not lost. Indeed, identities in literary form must

be recovered in order for youth and their communities to

recognize and, when necessary, struggle and  ght for, their

right to be seen and heard—and read.

Conclusion

Téllez (2004/2005) points out, scholarship regarding

the education and professional development of Latina/o

118

MARÍA E. FRÁNQUIZ, CARMEN MARTÍNEZ-ROLDÁN, AND CARMEN I. MERCADO

university students is scarce and initiatives designed

to scaffold the professional development of bilingual

teachers who will or do engage in teaching students

in Spanish and English is lacking. We highlighted the

literary practices/assignments used in our own teacher

professional development courses in Texas, Arizona, and

New York that effectively assisted bilingual teachers to

reveal, narrate, and renew prior and new understand-

ings about Latina/o students, their families, and their

histories. While previous studies have shown how cultur-

ally speci c Latina/o literature can bridge cultural gaps

that mainstream teachers may have about their student

constituents (Nathenson-Mejia & Escamilla, 2003), we

showed how Latina/o teachers themselves also needed

Latina/o children’s literature as a tool for examining

closely their own language and literacy (mis)understand-

ings as well as for considering changes in pedagogy.

Specific methods that had promising results in our

teacher education classes were literacy journey boxes

and autobiographies, poetry and literature discussion,

archival research and author studies. It should be noted

that for students with bilingual abilities, or desiring to

improve bilingual abilities, Spanish and English were

encouraged in our classrooms for engagement with read-

ing, archival work, and writing. A common goal in our

classes, then, was to encourage risk taking in classroom

discourse participation and in individual or collaborative

response-based projects.

We argued that reading, researching, and responding to

the works of writers in local communities is invigorating

and can be effectively accomplished through the follow-

ing practices:

co-constructing with students a safe learning space for •

risk-taking;

employing inquiry methods with childrens’ and ado-•

lescent literature to problematize of cial discourses

and policies;

inviting re-examination of one’s own lived experience •

and underlying cultural assumptions;

providing culturally engaged assignments where class •

members approach learning with profound respect

for subjugated knowledge in their own and other’s

lives;

practice becoming a • comadre/compadre in and across

groups so that all cultures, languages, and experiences

are valued and included.

Ultimately, we concur that the quantity and quality of

available literary resources in our local contexts can be

improved. Such improvement ensures that students in the

United States are exposed to culturally relevant books in

their pre-k- to 12th-grade education. This improvement

will have signi cant impact on the learning of all our stu-

dents, Latina/o and non Latina/o alike, and is dependent

on the continual re nement of the art of teaching, a task

the three authors embrace.

Notes

1. The authors wish to express sincere thanks to the teachers

who graciously shared their lived experiences in the classes

reported in this chapter. The research in Texas was funded by

the Academy for Teacher Excellence (ATE) in the College of

Education and Human Development at the University of Texas

in San Antonio.

2. Mariposa was born Maria Teresa Fernandez and is an award-

winning Nuyorican poet from the Bronx. She is the author of

Born Bronxeña: Poems on Identity, Love & Survival.

3. From  rst contact with the Spanish in 1533 to the present day,

the Yaqui nation of Sonora, Mexico, has struggled successfully

to maintain themselves as a distinct people in their homeland

along the Rio Yaqui. Many Yaquis migrated from Sonora to

the state of Arizona in the late 19th century.

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School Libraries and the Transformation

of Readers and Reading

Eliza T. Dresang

University of Washington

M. Bowie Kotrla

Florida State University

To transform means to change signi cantly for the better. How can school libraries transform readers and read-

ing? What unique opportunities or perspectives does the school library provide for students that enhance and

complement the students’ classroom experience? What time-honored approaches, programs, and practices are

still effective? What is the role of the school librarian in relation to 21st century literacies? How has technology

modi ed the changes school libraries bring about in readers? Does the changing nature of youths’ approach

to reading and of the children’s and young adult literature itself affect this transformation? In this chapter,

Eliza Dresang and Bowie Kotrla examine these questions and point the way to answers and further questions

for researchers who want to investigate the multiple roles of school libraries and librarianship in connecting

students with children’s and young adult literature.

Prologue

I walk into a brightly lit, inviting space. I’m hurrying to

meet a friend; we’re working on a collaborative project

for our seventh-grade Language Arts class. The goal of

our project, called a Visual Interpretive Analysis, is to

demonstrate how illustrations in a book can convey as

much (or more) information as words. We pull our draft

website onto a large digital monitor, where we see pages

4 and 5 of a picture book, Harlem, written by Walter Dean

Myers (1997) and illustrated by his son Christopher Myers.

We found the book in the International Children’s Digital

Library (ICDL), and we have been studying it carefully

to choose the pages we think will be most interesting to

explore.

As we turn to our next task, we realize we are “stuck”—

we need to  nd some help interpreting the con icting

121

122

ELIZA T. DRESANG AND M. BOWIE KOTRLA

information we’ve found about the Harlem Renaissance.

Quickly we motion to Ms. Odema, one of our librarians,

and request her help in interpreting these opposing points

of view and assessing the trustworthiness of the websites

we’ve located.

Nearby we see other students from our Language Arts

class; they’re building a Visual Interpretive Analysis of

I See the Rhythm, written by Toyomi Igus (1998) and

illustrated with paintings by Michele Wood, which they

also located in the ICDL. We text them to see if they’ve

found any resources we’ve missed and then get back to

work on our project.

Another group of our friends is creating a book trailer

for Suzanne Collins’s (2009) Catching Fire. I liked her

 rst book, The Hunger Games (2008), so I’d probably

read that book without a trailer, but I like turning to these

“quick ads for reading” for new suggestions. Our librar-

ians and their student assistants post them for almost all

new books that come into the library.

Our library is one of the most intensely used places

in our school; it’s de nitely a favorite with students. It

has lots of learning spaces, many different information

technologies, and librarians to help us. We can download

e-books onto our smart phones or other digital devices. If

we don’t own one, we can checkout a playaway. Or we can

borrow an e-book reader and several books to take home.

Our library is a space where students, librarians, and other

teachers gather, learn, explore, and, yes, read together—

even though there are no traditional handheld books in the

collection! OK, now I have to turn this back over to Dr.

Dresang and Dr. Kotrla—they just wanted my input into

what a 21st century school library might be like.

Introduction

Does this scenario by a composite seventh-grade student

sound like a fantasy or even a nightmare? It is neither;

rather it is a 21st century reality, a rare reality that is a

composite of several real life scenarios, but still a reality. It

is a school library without printed books, but it is a school

library with a great deal of emphasis on books and reading.

As I (Dresang) scanned my online New York Times this

morning before settling down to put the  nishing touches

on this chapter, my eye caught the title of an article that

brought me full stop, “Do School Libraries Need Books?”

(The Editors, 2010). The  rst person to respond in this

article was James Tracy, Headmaster of Cushing Academy,

a Massachusetts boarding and day school for 9–12 graders

from the United States and 28 other countries. In the fall

of 2009 his school made national headlines by announcing

it was giving away its collection of 20,000 printed books,

albeit some to classrooms.

Tracy maintains that now, much more than before, the

library is the most vibrant place in the school with ad-

ditional library staff and more reference and circulation

stations. “It is immaterial to us whether students use print

or electronic forms to read Chaucer and Shakespeare,” he

states as he describes the library as a learning commons

that accurately re ects how students learn in the 21st

century. Although few school libraries have followed

Cushing Academy’s lead in entirely eliminating their print

collections, many have reduced its size to make way for the

numerous other forms and formats of reading materials,

the funds to purchase them, and the space to read them.

As Cushing and other schools turn to digital resources,

the motive is not to save money but to transform reading

and information seeking. Leading and implementing this

change in readers and reading are school librarians and

school libraries.

We have chosen the word “transform” for our title.

To transform means to change signi cantly for the bet-

ter. Drawing from our long-term association with school

libraries and librarians, our knowledge of the research

literature, and our own research, we maintain that school

librarians have been a longstanding and signi cant force in

changing readers for the better. This chapter will provide

the evidence for this assertion.

Part 1 of this chapter is the foundation for the other two

parts. We begin by looking at the numbers of school librar-

ians in different types of schools; we trace the development

in the United States of the transformational role from the

end of the 19th century to the second decade of the 21st

century, using national standards as our indicators. In this

foundational part we also look at contemporary national

legislation and policy that has an impact on school librar-

ians and their role in reading transformation.

In Part 2, we take a deeper look at the time-honored

role of the school library and librarians as motivators

in the transformation process. There are hundreds of

motivational activities, but we will focus on some of the

best documented. They include collection development,

providing advice to individuals about reading, and running

school-wide reading events.

In Part 3, we examine the role of the school librarian

as an individual and the school library as a place with re-

sponsibility for students and reading achievement. Despite

the substantial body of research addressing these questions

which we review, we have to ask ourselves, what do we

really know?

Part 1: The Foundation of Transformation

The Presence of Libraries and Librarians in Schools

In the United States, upon which this chapter focuses,

90,760 public schools were in operation during the

2007–2008 school year, the most recent year for which

data are available. Of these schools, 90.3% (81,920) have

school libraries and 62.1% (50,910) of these libraries

have full-time, paid, state-certi ed school librarians.

Libraries in secondary schools are more likely to have

a librarian (75.5%) than those in elementary (59.4%)

or combined elementary/secondary schools (46.1%)

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SCHOOL LIBRARIES AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF READERS AND READING

(Goldring, 2009). Although private schools were not

included in this report, according to an earlier NCES

(2004) report, based on 2000 data, 62.6% of the 27,223

U.S. private schools at the time had libraries.

These data demonstrates that school libraries in the

United States are suf ciently prevalent to have a signi -

cant impact on the transformation of readers and reading.

We will now seek evidence of quality by delving into the

historical evolution of modern school libraries as docu-

mented in the standards of “best practices.” The evolution

of national standards for school libraries documents the

change in function of the school library from warehouse

to reading hot spot to social networking learning center.

School Library Standards and Guidelines

Standards of practice in school librarianship tell a story

that makes Parts 2 and 3—what school librarians do—

make more sense. It is unclear whether national standards

provide a vision for best professional practice or simply

re ect it. The fact remains that leaders at the building,

district, state, and national levels, as well as educators in

higher education, have developed standards that address

school libraries and librarians. These standards provide

the only consistent documentation of what has been con-

sidered to be best professional practice.

Initially, the school library, of cially established in New

York state in 1892 (Wofford, 1940), was not seen as a place

to transform readers but rather as a more passive place

where readers might locate books needed for schoolwork

or for pleasure reading. School library standards go back

to 1918. Both the 1918 standards and the subsequent 1925

standards were created by the National Education Associa-

tion (NEA) during a time when school libraries were com-

monly under the auspices of public libraries. The emphasis

was on the selection, care, and cataloging of books. This is

not the school library we think of today (hopefully).

The next set of standards was drafted by an American

Library Association (ALA) committee in 1945. During

the previous two decades, most school libraries were no

longer under the auspices of the public library system, but

had instead become part of the administrative structure of

schools. These new standards, School Libraries for Today

and Tomorrow (Committees on Post-war Planning of the

American Library Association, 1945), contained the  rst

substantial directive for librarians to take responsibility

for transforming readers. This was also the  rst time that

the school library was described as an integral part of the

educational program. The school library was to “to guide

students in their reading to increase their enjoyment, satis-

faction, critical judgment, and appreciation” (Gann, 1998,

p. 164). We see the recasting of the school librarian’s role

beginning to take place.

After 1945,  ve additional sets of standards or guide-

lines appeared at the national level, and across these de-

cades a marked change in focus occurred, as increasing

emphasis was placed on the librarian’s responsibility to

create information-literate students, meaning students

who could formulate questions, seek,  nd, use, and even

create information. Students needed to be skilled readers

in order to answer their questions, meet their needs, and/

or solve their problems. And the responsibility of school

librarians had become to produce an environment in

which information literacy could  ourish. However, in the

end-of-century guidelines, reading is assumed but only

 eetingly mentioned.

Near the end of the  rst decade of the 21st century,

the story changes dramatically with the publication of a

new set of national standards that brought reading front

and center as a responsibility of the school librarian, and

furthermore, not only as a motivator of reading but also

as a teacher of reading skills. “Reading is a window to the

world” (AASL, 2007, p. 2) is the  rst among nine state-

ments of “common beliefs” upon which these new-century

standards are built. What it means is further explicated:

Reading is a foundational skill for learning, personal growth,

and enjoyment. The degree to which students can read and

understand text in all formats (e.g., picture, video, print) and

all contexts is a key indicator of success in school and in life.

As a lifelong learning skill, reading goes beyond decoding

and comprehension to interpretation and development of

new understandings. (p. 2)

In these 2007 standards, reading is not simply assumed to

occur if the proper resources are provided as was the case

in the early part of the previous century. The skill of read-

ing is no longer left solely to the classroom teacher, but has

moved to become a central focus of the school librarian as

well. This is the transformational role of the 21st century

librarian and library, and this belief is not merely articu-

lated but is given a place of prominence. The challenge

for the school librarian is to be both a teacher of reading

skills and a motivational force for reading pleasure in the

lives of students. In short, the school librarian is to be a

transformational leader in helping young readers achieve

a synergy of cognitive and aesthetics skills.

To achieve this, school librarians expect to teach read-

ing skill development as well as to inspire personal growth

and enjoyment in young readers. Moreover, 21st century

school librarians are often held accountable for student

assessment and achievement in tandem with the class-

room teacher. School library collections re ect the radical

change of literature itself in the digital environment. Ide-

ally, the school library will be the place to  nd literature

that may not yet be fully integrated into or accepted for

classroom instruction. Thus, the commitment to ‘text in all

formats’ as a part of reading refers not only to visual and

audio text, but to notable and noticeable changes in the

print medium as well. Finally, digital technologies and the

digital environment permeate every aspect of librarianship,

including literature and reading. School librarians are

looked to for leadership and expertise in application and

integration of these technologies.

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ELIZA T. DRESANG AND M. BOWIE KOTRLA

National Board Library Media Standards

So far the story of school librarianship and the dramatic

change of the school librarian’s role from passive curator

of collection to reading motivator and teacher of skills

have been told solely from the perspective of the American

Association of School Librarians (AASL) and its af liates.

However, another set of standards that affect the practice

of school librarianship are those of the National Board

for Professional Teaching Standards (2001, 2007, 2008).

National Board Certi cation is the highest credential in

the teaching profession

In the current assessment process, one of the four

portfolios entries for National Board certi cation in

Library Media is Appreciation of Literature. I (Dresang)

conducted a research study in the fall of 2009, results of

which are in the pre-publication stage, that illuminated

a substantial difference in how teachers and school li-

brarians approach the teaching and use of children’s

literature. The seven teachers with whom I worked were

state-certified classroom teachers (K–12) who were

within one semester of earning the Master’s in Library

and Information Studies degree. They were participating

in the National Board’s Take One! Program, which allows

candidates to take one part of the certi cation exam early.

The seven candidates were still classroom teachers when

they prepared their portfolios for the Library Media Ap-

preciation of Literature, and it was a struggle for them

to think about the appreciation of literature from the

perspective of a school librarian.

What I noted from observation and from their portfolios

was their desire to use literature as a vehicle to teach a

concept. They were pleased if children wanted to read the

book or others like it, but that was not their chief concern

when introducing literature to their students. School librar-

ians, on the other hand, might use youth literature to teach

a concept, but their primary concern is to motivate the child

to read the book presented and to link that reading to a wide

array of related literature available in the library. Thus I

came to understand that the teacher perspective saw,  rst,

the text to self relationship, and second, the text (book) to

text (book). In contrast, the school librarian’s perspective

focused  rst on the text to text (this book to other books)

relationship and second, the text to self.

It should be noted that the International Society for

Technology in Education (ISTE) standards are extremely

useful to school librarians in many of their roles but are

not discussed in depth here due to their lack of focus on

reading.

As the  nal topic in this part, we take a look at the

national reading policies that have had a profound effect

on the role of the school librarian and reading.

National Reading Policy Applicable to School

Libraries in the 21st Century

The National Reading Panel. Although the results of the

National Reading Panel (NRP) report have been widely

adopted, many librarians are not aware of their origin.

In 1997 Congress mandated the convening of a national

panel to assess the effectiveness of different approaches

used to teach children to read. The methodology and

recommendations of the NRP Report (2000) have had a

far-ranging effect on public policy in relation to reading

and on the criteria by which the acceptability of research

methodology is assessed. The in uence of the NRP has

set off waves of change that have swept into the school

library as well as into every classroom in America. The

most visible and far reaching effect is the No Child Left

Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), signed into law on January 8,

2002. NCLB reauthorized the Elementary and Secondary

Education Act (ESEA, 1965), which has been the main

federal law affecting education from kindergarten through

high school since it was  rst passed in 1965.

The NRP based its recommendations on research pub-

lished in peer reviewed journals. However, they decided

to narrow their focus to include only (a) studies that were

experimental or quasi-experimental in design and (b)

research related to an earlier NRP report that identi ed

what were believed to be the most critical skills relevant

for gaining beginning reading skills. The result of this

exclusive emphasis on “scienti cally-based research,” a

term by which the experimental and quasi-experimental

designs were known, limited the panel’s scope to only

those aspects of reading that could be quantitatively

measured.

An implication for school librarians was that the

qualitative research most common in school library stud-

ies was not consulted and that motivation to read was

not a factor re ected in most of the research. The narrow

focus on topics from the scienti cally based research, i.e.,

alphabetics, including the issues of phonemic awareness

instruction and phonics instruction;  uency; comprehen-

sion strategies; and vocabulary instruction, left many of

the research studies to which school librarians had turned

for validation of their practices without endorsement or

even recognition. It meant that the essential function of

readers’ advisory work—that is, the librarian’s recom-

mendation of books to meet individual readers’ reading

interests and needs—and many other motivational reading

activities were not supported by the de nition of scienti c

research adhered to by the NRP.

Elementary and Secondary Education Act/No Child Left Be-

hind. No Child Left Behind was due for reauthorization

in 2008, but as of 2010 it had not been reauthorized. If

changes to the legislation proposed by President Obama

are passed, funding conditions for school librarians will

worsen rather than improve. In addition, although the

nature of high-stakes testing will change somewhat, the

lack of emphasis on reading motivation versus skill build-

ing may continue. The good news is that school librarians

do promote the NRP-identi ed skills and are becoming

quite adept at imbedding skill instruction with reading

125

SCHOOL LIBRARIES AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF READERS AND READING

for interest and pleasure activities as we will document in

Parts 2 and 3 of this chapter.

Improving Literacy through School Libraries. The No

Child Left Behind legislation prior to a reauthorization

in the Obama administration included one program di-

rectly related to school librarians and literacy, “Improv-

ing Literacy through School Libraries” (LSL). It was

celebrated as the  rst federally funded program directly

aimed at school libraries in three decades. Even though

the original allocation was to be approximately $300 mil-

lion and it hovered at around $19.5M or less every year

since authorization, it was a step in the right direction.

In addition, only those local education agencies (LEAs,

usually school districts) in which at least 20% of students

served are from families with incomes below the poverty

line are eligible to apply, a stricter standard than families

eligible for free and reduced lunch. And only LEAs, not

individual schools, can apply.

Four years after its initial authorization, the U.S. gov-

ernment evaluated LSL for its effectiveness by surveying

the 400 recipients of grants. The government declared

the results a success because of the positive outputs, e.g.,

more visits to the library by children, more collaboration,

more technology, more after school programs (Whelan,

2006). According to the  nal evaluation report, “the per-

centage of students who met or exceeded the pro ciency

requirements on state reading assessments increased by an

extra 2.7 percentage points among grantees, a statistically

signi cant increase.… In addition, increasing the number

of books was associated with signi cant increases in test

scores. Because of the lack of a true experimental design,

these  ndings cannot support causal inferences” (Michie

& Bradford, 2009, p. 76).

Despite this apparent success, in the Obama administra-

tion’s proposed reauthorization of ESEA/No Child Left

Behind, no funding is designated speci cally for school

libraries. “Improving Literacy through School Libraries”

would be consolidated with 11 other programs into funds

that would go to state education agencies rather than local

education agencies for a wide range of family literacy pro-

grams under the name “Effective Teaching and Learning:

Literacy.” The possibility for widespread positive impact

on school libraries and their role in literacy education from

the reauthorized ESEA is slim.

Having described the foundation upon which school

librarians and libraries operate, we go to Part 2 to examine

the intriguing question of how school librarians and librar-

ies implement the prescribed (and perhaps not prescribed)

roles of transforming students into passionate (or at least

semi-passionate) readers.

Part 2: Motivation and Transformation

Part 2 of our transformation story continues by high-

lighting three key components of the reading motivation

that librarians working with youth provide. All three are

permeated with what has become known as the “library

faith,” the belief in the provision of library service to youth

as a “just cause” that librarians pursue with all the passion

of crusaders. The  rst role is that of school librarian as

developer of collections, a role that has changed over time

as young readers’ interests and needs have changed. The

second is a focus on the individual reader and advice given

to him or her in an attempt to meet speci c interests and

needs. And the third component is the provision of read-

ing motivation, a potpourri of school-based and national

programs of which only a sample can be taken.

The Library Faith

The 1945 Standards stated that the school library was to

“to guide students in their reading to increase their enjoy-

ment, satisfaction, critical judgment, and appreciation”

(Gann, 1998, p. 164). Clearly, the emphasis here was on

motivation. It is not entirely clear what was meant by

“critical judgment,” but in this context, it most likely had

more to do with ‘making good choices’ than with a skill

that would fall under the rubric of today’s expectations for

critical thinking. From then until now, numerous articles

have appeared in professional journals documenting best

professional practices that school librarians have used to

achieve this holy grail.

Such giants in the  eld as Frances Clarke Sayers in

her Summoned by Books (Blinn, 1965) inspired librar-

ians studying to work with children with their ideals of

providing quality literature for young readers. According

to Sayers and many other leaders, if books written for

children were evaluated and selected against established

criteria, the resulting selections were certain to capture the

attention of young readers and motivate them to engage in

reading. This belief was so strong that over time it came

to be known as “the library faith.” Hearne and Jenkins

(1999) have documented this era of high ideals, noting that

“power and glory…radiate from working with children and

literature, especially literature for its own sake, freed of

pedagogical requirements” (p. 536). Aside from historical

accounts, academic studies that document the effect of this

type of motivation on young readers in terms of concrete

outcomes do not exist. At the time, prima facie evidence

was suf ciently convincing that no one considered record-

ing information about the outcomes of reading motivation

activities as a necessary—or even a desirable—activity. For

school librarians, the work of reading motivation was com-

bined with the support for teaching and learning. However,

an emphasis on the motivational factors remained.

Developing Collections Re ecting Societal Change

As soon as there was the profession of librarianship,

librarians were in charge of developing and maintaining

collections. In Umberto Eco’s (1980) The Name of the

Rose set in the 14th century, only librarians had access to

the collections they built and protected. Today, in many

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ELIZA T. DRESANG AND M. BOWIE KOTRLA

large public library systems, a central coordinator does

the collection development for all the system’s libraries,

taking into account the differing demographics, needs,

and interests of the population served by each branch. In

school libraries it is most commonly the local librarians

who make the collection choices.

Representing All Children. As David Loertscher (1996)

has noted, school collections should be what he refers to

as “unbalanced.” He advises school librarians to utilize a

process he calls Collection Mapping to ensure that school

libraries have not only a broad general collection but also

“map” their collections with in-depth areas of emphasis

that re ect current curriculum (Loertscher & Wimberly,

2009).

Another way in which school librarians over the past

four decades have become adept at developing unbal-

anced collections is through their overview of the entire

school population, their recognition of the needs of

changing populations, and their assurance of who their

users will be at any point in time. They have been able

to view and accommodate to the needs and interests of

changing populations and to align them with changes in

the literature itself.

Children and society have changed over time, and their

books and school library collections have also changed.

One much-noted change occurred in “the new realism

of the late sixties” as children’s and young adult  ction

began to re ect the often-harsh realities of the lives of

many young people. There were still plenty of happy

endings, but tidy outcomes and upbeat resolutions were

no longer a requirement for stories for young readers.

Other dramatic changes occurred in the ensuing three

decades  rst in terms of increased gender equality, and in

increasing, although still inadequate, presence of children

of color and children with disabilities. School librarians

were often in the vanguard of transforming their library

collections to better meet the needs of their students by

more accurately re ecting the larger society in which the

students lived. Some librarians who work with youth see

the process of diversifying their collections to represent

the population of the United States, if not the world, as

part of their library faith and their obligation to young

readers. Others are still quite myopic in their vision of

collection development.

Literature for Digital Age Readers. Another change that

has had a huge impact on collections in school libraries

and subsequently on readers and reading can be attributed

to the pervasive nature of the digital environment. Over the

past decade the theory of Radical Change (Dresang, 1999),

which is based on the digital age principles of interactivity,

connectivity, and access, has gained widespread recogni-

tion as a means to understand and explain the transforma-

tion of books as well as information behavior, including

reading, for youth (Dresang, 2005a; 2005b; Whelan,

2007). These digital age principles can be recognized in

books for youth by three sets of indicators that relate to

Changing Forms and Formats, Changing Perspectives,

and Changing Boundaries.

Radical Change was developed when I (Dresang)

sought to explain the Caldecott Award picture book, Black

and White (Macaulay, 1990), which I had helped select

for the Medal as a member of the 1991 Caldecott Award

Committee. Observing that reading hypertext and reading

a handheld book such as Black and White required similar

cognitive processes led to the development of the theory

of Radical Change. Other books, I discovered, exhibited

many of the same characteristics; their form and formats

reflected the hypertextual, multilayered, and graphic

interfaces of the computer and promoted interactive, non-

linear, nonsequential reading. Subsequent re ection on the

digital environment and the changes in literature for youth

brought forth other characteristics. Changing perspec-

tives had begun to appear, perspectives that incorporate

previously marginalized populations, including youth

themselves. Expanded boundaries in content encompassed

new types of communities, characters, and subjects that

had previously been taboo in children’s books.

If you take a quick look through the lists of Newbery

and Caldecott Award books over the past two decades,

you will see many that can be identi ed by their Radical

Change characteristics. For example, the 2008 Caldecott

Medal, awarded to the most outstanding picture book  rst

published in the United States annually, went to Brian

Selznick’s (2007) The Inventions of Hugo Cabret, a book

that was deemed as radical as was Black and White in

1991. In the same year the Newbery Medal, awarded to

the most distinguished contribution to American literature

for children, went to another book with radical change

characteristics, Amy Schlitz’s (2007) Good Masters!

Sweet Ladies! Voices from a Medieval Village, a story told

through poetry re ecting a variety of perspectives from a

13th century village.

Picture books and  ction are not alone in exhibiting

digital age characteristics. A pioneering publishing com-

pany, Dorling-Kindersley, created books that, according

to founder Peter Kindersley, were intended to demonstrate

that reading the pictures could convey as much informa-

tion as reading the words (personal communication,

2001). Information books moved rapidly from sparsely

illustrated linear texts to exciting portrayals of informa-

tion to suit the needs of the rapid scanner as well as of

the deep reader. And midst all of this change in traditional

handheld books, graphic novels, formerly disparaged as

comic books, invaded every genre from picture book to

novel to information book.

School libraries and librarians have always been in

the position of being in the vanguard regarding trends in

children’s literature, re ecting the changes in society and

in children’s interests in their collection; their impact in

guiding the direction of non-textbook reading materials

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SCHOOL LIBRARIES AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF READERS AND READING

has been far broader than that of any single classroom

teacher as they have collected and recommended books

for the entire school population.

Readers’ Advisory Services in a Digital Age. An integral

part of the library faith is readers’ advisory work. The

term “readers’ advisory” typically applied to guiding

users to  ction reading for pleasure, often focused on

certain genres such as mystery, romance, etc. For children,

the component of choosing excellent, inspiring literature

played a part in early readers’ advisory work. In contem-

porary readers’ advisory roles, librarians have moved from

recommending the best books to recommending what best

matches a reader’s interests.

Often readers’ advisory is thought to take place only

in the public library, but literary recommendations occur

also in school libraries (Moyer, 2007), a phenomenon that

emphasizes a commonality between the two places where

children and young adults read. And it is often the school

librarian whom successful adults recall when they speak

of the most important in uence in their lives. Readers’

advisory work is the library faith in action.

For librarians accurately to discern and understand

readers’ interests and advise them on books they might

like, they must be attuned to the changes taking place in

reader preferences. One of my Florida State University

doctoral students, Kyungwon Koh, has developed a pre-

liminary typology of youth information behavior indica-

tors that parallel the changes observed in their literature

(Dresang & Koh, 2009). Pantaleo (2004a, 2004b, 2007a,

2007b, 2009) has conducted a dozen studies in which

she has documented how elementary age youth read and

comprehend radical change books. Hassett (2005, 2006a,

2006b) has developed a theory of non-linear reading and

has observed, like Pantaleo, that reading hypertextually,

that is in a nonlinear manner as one does using hypertext

links on digital device, helps rather than hinders compre-

hension. I have had many librarians over the past decade

tell me that seeing the differences in books and in young

readers through the lens of Radical Change has vastly

improved their readers’ advisory work.

Moreover, reading in the 21st century has moved far

beyond the handheld book to the computer screen and to

the numerous Personal Information Devices. Youth have

delved into social networks in the 2.0 environment, con-

necting to other youth not only to socialize, but also to

exchange information, often in the form of text and often

about reading. Dresang and Kotrla (2009) have suggested

that Rosenblatt’s Reader Response theory not only must

take into account the interaction between the reader and

the book, but also and often, the interaction with online

social network buddies. Social networking around books

has becomes so prevalent that Howard (2010) has devel-

oped a taxonomy to describe the level of involvement of

young readers with others. Because school libraries have

traditionally been ahead of classrooms in incorporating

the newest technologies and may be the only place some

youth encounter them, youth often have the opportunity

to  rst experience the changes in thinking and learning

that are available in their school libraries. When advising

young people about books and reading, the printed book

is not the only or perhaps not even the primary source that

the librarian will offer. This discussion leads to other more

traditional but still social reading experiences.

Schoolwide and National School-based Reading Events. In

their quest to provide motivation for readers, one of the

best professional practices in which school librarians have

provided leadership has been schoolwide events or events

that involve a signi cant number of children across class-

rooms or grade levels. The librarian is, of course, uniquely

positioned to oversee these types of events. Sometimes all

children are involved; other times volunteers are sought

or representatives are selected.

Perhaps one of the best known of these events is called

Battle of the Books (2008), which is a nationally organized

competition the aim of which is to encourage youth to read

quality literature. The competition starts between or among

classroom teams in a local school. Teams including school

librarians select the books. Book fairs are another reading-

related activity that school librarians often orchestrate in

order to provide support for more books for the library

as well as to encourage the ownership of books by youth.

Paperback swaps may be arranged with the same goals.

If I Can Read, I Can Do Anything (2007) is a national

reading club for Native American children. Through spon-

sorship at local schools, the program hopes to encourage

Native American children to read, to use their school li-

braries, and to have access to relevant library collections.

ALA past President Roy, the  rst Native American ALA

President, is Director of this program.

School librarians initiate various con gurations of

book discussion programs. In the United States, these

discussions may range from something as local and un-

complicated as a lunch bunch group to a collaborative

effort by a public and school librarian known as Young

Critics (Clark & McClelland, 1997) to something more

highly organized such as the Junior Great Books program

(Great Books Foundation, 1995–2008), which requires

training and provides a scaffolded program for discus-

sion from Kindergarten through 12th grade. One method

of reading motivation particularly widespread among

secondary school librarians is the short, pithy booktalk. In

“On Beyond Book Clubs,” one librarian shares how she

has built upon the idea of booktalks and traditional book

clubs by encouraging the teens with whom she works to

share what they are reading as well as to give ‘quickie

reviews’ to new books that have not yet publicly circulated

(Honnold, 2008).

Another manner in which school librarians work to

transform U.S. readers is through statewide reading choice

programs. Many states have these, as will be seen in Junko

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ELIZA T. DRESANG AND M. BOWIE KOTRLA

Yokota’s chapter on awards in this Handbook. Typically, a

group of teachers and school librarians choose the books

to be considered for the award and teachers throughout

the state register their classrooms to read and vote for the

winner.

Almost none of these programs typically led by school

librarians are associated with speci c research linked to

the role of the school media specialist or results for young

readers. They are on the surface supported by the library

faith of our foremothers. However, these programs on

which school librarians spend so much time are backed

up by a below-the-surface plethora of research that sup-

ports the principles behind them. For example, it is an

undisputable fact that the more children read, the better

readers they become. “In the United States, fourth-graders

who read for fun every day or almost every day have

higher average scores on the combined reading literacy

scale compared to those who never or almost never read

for fun, or do so once or twice a month” (NCES, 2001,

para. 4).

Many school librarians look to Stephen Krashen (2004)

for the evidence they seek regarding the power of read-

ing per se—not reading for speci c skills, not reading

certain types of “good” literature, but just lots of reading.

Krashen’s review of reading research documents the value

of time spent in free voluntary reading, a program initiated

and supported by many librarians, during which the entire

school sets aside minutes, usually around 15 minutes per

day, for students to read uninterrupted and with minimum

expectation for post-reading check-ups. He notes that

“in-school free reading programs are consistently effec-

tive. In 51 out of 54 comparison studies (94%), readers

do as well as or better than students who were engaged in

traditional programs” (p. 2). He cites research that refutes

the emphasis on direct instruction as more effective than

time spent reading something that the reader chooses to

read. Krashen concludes that “reading is the only way…

we become good readers, develop a good writing style, an

adequate vocabulary, advanced grammatical competence,

and the only way we become good spellers” (p. 37). If

Krashen’s interpretation of research is accurate, it provides

a powerful rationale for the many free, voluntary reading

activities supported by school librarians and suggests that

they do, indeed, transform readers.

But it is time now to examine this new role that we have

alluded to throughout this chapter—the school librarian

and transformation of readers through reading achieve-

ment. Just how does this happen and how do we know?

Part 3: Reading Achievement and

Transformation

In the past, little was said about the librarian engaged in

direct teaching of reading or as an essential direct support

for achievement as measured by standardized tests—or for

that matter as measured in any other manner. However,

the topic is not an entirely new one.

Gaver (1963) conducted a groundbreaking quasi-

experimental study involving 271 schools in 13 states,

looking at the effect of centralized school libraries and

academic achievement; she found that academic achieve-

ment was signi cantly higher when there was a central-

ized library that was well stocked and easily accessible

to students and teachers. A few smaller studies followed

in the wake of Gaver’s. However, over the last decade of

the 20th century and into the 21st century, the question

of what role the school librarian plays in transforming

youth into readers who score well on achievement tests

rose to the forefront.

The School Library Impact Studies

The studies collectively referred to as School Library

Impact Studies are the most extensive set of research

projects to have attempted to associate school library char-

acteristics with students’ academic achievement. Begin-

ning with what has become known as the “ rst Colorado

study” (Lance, Welborn, & Hamilton-Pennell, 1993),

these projects are analyses of survey responses and avail-

able data from individual states, data, including students’

scores on standardized achievement tests, from individual

states. Since the  rst Colorado study, similar studies were

conducted in 18 other states and repeated in Colorado (see

http://www.lrs.org/impact.php for links to these reports).

Of the 20 studies, 14 included student’s scores on read-

ing sections of statewide standardized tests as one of the

response variables. All 14 either were conducted by Keith

Curry Lance and his colleagues at the Colorado State

Library Research Service or were conducted by others

using Lance et al.’s survey and methodology. A summary

of study results through 2007 has been distributed widely

in the pamphlet School Libraries Work! (National Com-

mission on Libraries and Information Science, 2008).

Six of these 14 studies, all performed by Lance’s re-

search group, focused speci cally on identifying predictor

variables of standardized reading test scores of elementary,

middle, and high school students. Variables reported as

having a statistically signi cant positive correlation with

higher reading scores are:

1. school library staff

a. presence of a full-time, certi ed school library

media specialist

b. number of work hours/week/100 students

c. amount of time spent teaching students and engag-

ing in reading motivation activities

d. amount of time spent collaborating with classroom

teachers, individually as well as participation with

them on policy-making groups

2. school library resources and services

a. print volumes/student

b. periodical subscriptions/student

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SCHOOL LIBRARIES AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF READERS AND READING

c. availability of networked resources (e.g., library

catalogs and licensed databases)

d. access to the Internet

e. availability of computer hardware

3. accessibility of school library to students

a. library service hours/week

b. number of library visits by individual students

(distinct from scheduled class visits)

4. school library expenditures/student

A common factor that correlated with high achievement

and was of particular interest to this research review was

the level of reading motivation activities and reading incen-

tives and support for ample resources in the collections.

The conclusions of these 6 and the 14 other School

Library Impact Studies have been used as evidence of

the importance of school libraries in an era of high stakes

testing and funding provided or withheld based on the

results of the tests. States as well as school districts and

individuals have employed a variety of strategies to dis-

seminate and make use of these studies. Among the ques-

tions posed at the outset of this research review was “What

evidence exists, who has produced it, how con dent can

we be in its results, and what difference has it made?”

The latter question was answered by The Colorado State

Library Research in a survey posted to LMNET, a 16,000

member discussion group of school librarians. Eighty-one

percent of the respondents shared this research with their

principals and approximately half shared it with their

superintendents, other administrators and/or parents, and

two-thirds shared it with their teachers. Two-thirds stated

that it improved their relationships with principals (Cal-

lison, 2005).

Although there is no doubt about bene ts that have come

from these studies, the question remains, “how con dent

can we be in the results?” In many of Lance’s studies and

the ones modeled thereon, the results and conclusions are

questionable because of methodology or of omissions in

the reports. For example, in reporting on the  rst Colorado

study, Lance (1994, para. 5) states that “Ideally, schools

included in a sample for a study like this would be selected

on a random, strati ed, or quota basis. None of these sam-

pling designs was possible, however.”

There is no evidence that any of the subsequent stud-

ies were based on random sampling. Without random

sampling, no generalizations can be made, of course.

Because data distributions were not presented and there

were no discussions of the extent to which the data met

the assumptions of the statistical tests used, the results’

validity is questionable. Lance et al. argue in support of a

causal relationship of the predictor variables to academic

achievement on the basis of the consistency of the core

results. Lance states,

The cause-and effect claim associated with these correla-

tions was strengthened by the reliability of the relationships

between key library variables (e.g., stafﬁ ng levels, collec-

tion size, spending) and test scores when other school and

community conditions were taken into account. (Callison,

2005, para 12)

Regardless of the number of data sets in which correlation

is found, correlation alone never demonstrates causality.

Lance acknowledges that “in every Colorado-style

study, the strongest available predictor of test scores

has been socio-economic conditions, as indicated by the

percentage of students eligible for the National School

Lunch Program. This single variable has explained half

to two-thirds of the variation in test scores in states where

studies have been conducted” (Callison, 2005, para. 27).

He concludes “In other words, because the economic vari-

able is so strong, and because it confounds the effects of

so many other variables of interest, it is time to explore

new methodological options” (para. 28). Lance goes on

to note that the U.S. Department of Education’s emphasis

on scienti cally-based research, e.g., randomized samples

with large populations and the trial of an intervention,

makes ‘acceptable’ research dif cult. It is not possible to

intervene by, for example, withholding library services

or funding for some children and not for others. This is a

dilemma that remains to be solved.

Two Technologies and Transformation of Readers

It is impossible to discuss anywhere in this chapter all the

many ways school librarians use technology to both moti-

vate and promote achievement among students. However

we have chosen two uses of technology, one a program

using computers to measure and record results (electronic

reading programs) and the other a digital format for books

(e-books), and we placed the discussion here since the link

to reading achievement is for many the most compelling

reason for the use of these two technologies.

The use of electronic reading programs is one of the

most controversial topics in school librarianship. Because

these programs depend on large collections of literature

in order to succeed, school libraries have become deeply

involved with them. Renaissance Learning (2008) states

that Accelerated Reader™ (AR) is used in 73,000 or

roughly 60% of North American schools. Approximately

100,000 books are now in the AR database. The second

most commonly used electronic reading program, Reading

Counts!™ (Scholastic) does not keep statistics about how

many schools use it.

We have conducted two of the very few library-related

studies of AR. Our study of a random sample of several

hundred grant applications for school library books from a

national foundation found that librarians use the program,

believing it to be transformational for readers, both to

motivate and to create gains in achievement. One librarian

told us that “since implementing Accelerated Reader ™ a

number of years ago we have seen our students’ reading

scores on standardized tests grow steadily” (Dresang

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ELIZA T. DRESANG AND M. BOWIE KOTRLA

& Kotrla, 2003). Another research study we conducted

showed the link between the Accelerated Reader m program

and national reading policy of No Child Left Behind and

the National Reading Panel (Everhart, Dresang, & Kotrla,

2005), the broad implications of which are too complex to

discuss here. One implication is that AR is linked to the

student achievement that NCLB requires.

Counterbalancing the positive acceptance of some

school librarians are the features that raise the ire of many

other librarians, features that focus on the extrinsic rather

than intrinsic motivation to read, the prominent labeling

of books and therefore of readers, and the insistence of

students as well as teachers and parents in some schools

that young readers read nothing but books that will earn

them rewards and are at their reading level as de ned by

the particular program. The measure of reading dif culty

is unconvincing to many, and the separate shelving that

occurs in some libraries, splitting authors’ works from one

another, is tantamount to denying access in the eyes of oth-

ers. In our research, we also found out that the poorer the

school, the more likely they were to use these programs,

which raises another question of equitable access (Dresang

& Kotrla, 2003). Often librarians have no choice but to

administer the program and to participate in applying the

results to students’ grades.

Unfortunately, the questions on the basic Accelerated

Reader™ quizzes are all at the lowest level on Bloom’s

Taxonomy, i.e., remembering. The following question is

taken from a sample Basic quiz for middle readers on The

Adventures of Tom Sawyer:

What did Tom offer to do if Jim would trade jobs with

him?

Give Jim a turkey wishbone•

Tell Jim where to  nd a dead rattlesnake•

Show Jim his sore toe•

Teach Jim how to whistle (http://www.renlearn.com/•

ar/quizzes.aspx)

They do not promote the kind of 21st century thinking,

analyzing, seeking meaning that students need and for

which they should be rewarded. When schools depend en-

tirely on AR or mostly on AR Basic tests for their reading

program, this is a serious downside. Reading Counts! has

a somewhat higher level of questioning. Over dependence

on these programs does not meet the 21st century national

standards or best practices for school libraries.

Another large question looms for the future of tech-

nology and transformational reading—how readily will

e-books be adopted by youth? With many more Personal

Information Devices accommodating the download of

books on the run, the possibility of e-book popularity

replacing that of the paperback is entirely likely. If so,

what will be the role of school libraries in this transforma-

tion? Some libraries, e.g., one of the Gulf Coast libraries

severely damaged by Hurricane Katrina, 2006, rebuilt its

collection, largely for lack of space, through the use of

e-books that can be checked out just as traditional books

have been.

Ultimately, as the Standards for the 21st Century

Learner state, “the degree to which students can read and

understand text in all formats (e.g., picture, video, print)

and all contexts is a key indicator of success in school

and in life” (AASL, 2007). Readers and reading can be

transformed regardless of container of the text.

Teaching Skills for Transformation

The publication of a position paper to interpret and provide

further guidance for the role of the school librarian in read-

ing according to the new 2007 standards is an indicator of

how important the role of the school librarian is in this best

practices document. AASL produced both a position paper

(AASL, 2009a) and a toolkit (AASL, 2009b) that describe

the complexities of the dual role of the school librarian

in relation to reading motivation and skill instruction and

give examples of how to accomplish this. The new part of

these items relates to the direct teaching of reading skills,

although combining this with motivation is clearly part of

the teaching skill.

Since comprehension is one of the National Reading

Panel’s top six skills, it presents a very compatible one for

school librarians to emphasize. Judi Moreillon (2007) has

demonstrated how school librarians can seize upon this

new requirement by focusing on comprehension through

the use of highly motivating literature in a collaborative

relationship with a classroom teacher. Sharon Grimes

(2006) has also written a book, Reading Is Our Business,

that draws upon her experience as an elementary school

librarian in Michigan. Her seven-step reading strategy is il-

lustrated with examples of how to help students understand

what they read. Study of the examples in the Moreillon

and the Grimes books will provide a very concrete vision

of how to combine the motivational and instructional roles

expected of a 21st century school librarian in relation to

changing readers.

The Value of School Libraries for Reading from the

Students’ Point of View

Another substantial body of research, another set of state

studies, has been conducted under the auspices of Ross

Todd (2008), Director of the Center for International

Scholarship in School Libraries (CISSL) at Rutgers Uni-

versity and is in the process of replication by others.

While the Library Impact Studies employ quantitative

methodologies, Todd’s research is qualitative.

His interest in the overall transformative nature of

school libraries includes reading, and in fact, he has identi-

 ed  ndings in relation to readings as perhaps the most

important. No claim for generalizability is made for these

studies because schools were chosen to participate based

on best practices. To date, Todd has conducted studies in

Ohio and in Delaware.

The survey employed by Todd and based on Brenda

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SCHOOL LIBRARIES AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF READERS AND READING

Dervin’s sense-making work contains blocks of questions,

one of which has questions devoted to reading (Todd &

Heinstrom, 2006, pp. 75–79), e.g., “The school library has

helped me become a better reader” (in the Delaware study,

65% of the students said this was a help) and “The school

library has helped me read more” (in the Delaware study,

63% of the students said this was a help). Most telling,

however, were the open-ended comments from students.

Looking at both the Ohio and Delaware study results,

Todd found that “their perceptions of how school librar-

ies support them on their wider reading interests and the

development of reading literacies were lower than other

dimensions in the studies.” He goes on to note that library

reading “initiatives center on book talks, literature dis-

plays, book promotions, and the like, all which seem to be

fairly passive activities,” while the students “valued such

things as availability of latest releases; personalized, tar-

geted, proactive service; identifying interests; developing

self-esteem; using curriculum as link to reading enjoyment

and enrichment; and being shown that academic success

can be achieved through improving reading” (Todd, 2008,

para. 6). In terms of recommendations, Todd concludes

that “This means that school librarians must be much

more astute in assessing the needs of students…reading

environments, and being much more actively engaged in

the literacy and reading policies and frameworks in the

school” (para. 8). In other words, motivation is not enough,

nor is simply providing services. Providing the synergy

of aesthetic and cognitive skills, focusing on pleasure

and skill and bringing the two together is essential if the

21st century librarian is to continue to transform readers

and reading.

Epilogue

Dr. Dresang and Dr. Kotrla gave me their chapter to read

and asked me to comment from a seventh-grader’s point

of view (not on whether it was interesting or boring but

whether it seemed to describe what is important to me

about my school library and librarian in relation to read-

ing). Well, I’m a lot more positive about how much Ms.

Odema helps me than those teens in Ohio. I couldn’t do

without her! I wonder if they are really aware of all the

assistance they get! She did help my friend and me on that

project we were doing—she demonstrated a systematic

way to compare the sources on the Harlem Renaissance

and taught us some strategies for seeing what we could

infer about the contemporary pictures of Harlem we were

analyzing. And she helped us locate a book that is cool in

the ICDL in the  rst place.

What I don’t get is why there is such a big fuss over

whether printed books are important or not. What’s the big

deal? I’m actually reading (if you count comprehending

and relating to a good story or needed information) all the

time. All my friends are reading all the time also—and

we read both words and pictures—that is the point of this

Visual Interpretive Analysis. So I say school librarians are

essential—I’m big on using their help on and off line (as

we can ask a question any time of day or night). School

libraries are also essential—I actually use this place more

than I ever did when it was  lled with printed books.

There’s more space available for us to hang out and talk

about our projects and to learn from others. I don’t nec-

essarily go along with removing ALL the printed books,

though—sometimes it would be a lot easier just to pick

one up and READ and with the important ones scattered

out in classrooms—well isn’t that going back to the early

20th century way of things? And that stuff Dr. Dresang

says about how printed books have changed—right on!

No one I know would read, for example, an information

book that had nothing but dense pages of text—we like

the guiding boxes of extra facts or explanations. Like that

Claudette Colvin book (Hoose, 2009) Ms. Odema recom-

mended last week. I’ve read a whole lot of books about

the Civil Rights days and didn’t know what Jim Crow

meant until I read the little insert clearly explaining it.

So to answer Dr. Dresang’s and Dr. Kotrla’s question, no

way school libraries and librarians or even printed books

are becoming obsolete—both are needed. I’d de nitely

be a much poorer learner without all the help I get from

the librarians and the resources they provide and the skills

they teach me! But don’t take my iPod or e-book reader

away. I am addicted to marking my place and looking up

words, and all the neat things I can do with digital books.

And, hey, don’t take away all my printed books either or

make it harder for me to locate them. And most of all tell

the world that we kids are reading more these days rather

tha less. I’m sure of that. Well, just text me if I can help

you again. Bye.

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Public Libraries in the Lives of Young Readers

Past, Present, and Future

Paulette M. Rothbauer

University of Western Ontario

Virginia A. Walter

University of California, Los Angeles

Kathleen Weibel

Chicago Public Library (Retired)

Youth services in public libraries have always been characterized by good intentions and commitment to

patrons’ personal choice: to select, to question, and to know. The public library has changed and grown since

its Progressive Era beginnings, and the leadership for much of this change has come from youth services

librarians through their work on behalf of young library users, whether this involves summer programming

or digital media development. This chapter’s three scholars bring a wealth of public library experience to this

endeavor, as they describe the past, present, and future of public library service to young people in the United

States and Canada.

For over a century, young people’s literature has been

a central focus of public library service to youth. In the

past, youth services librarians’ leadership in supporting

and facilitating young people’s reading and use of litera-

ture has focused on texts in the traditional print-on-paper

format. The young people of today and tomorrow will

continue to read and connect with texts in traditional

formats. However, with the rapid expansion and growth

of electronic resources in the virtual online environment,

young people are becoming “digital natives” who look

134

135

PUBLIC LIBRARIES IN THE LIVES OF YOUNG READERS

to online resources to meet their informational and rec-

reational reading needs. The public library has taken a

leadership role in facilitating overall public access to the

internet and online resources.

Public library youth services have taken a similar

leadership role in enabling young people to connect with

literature as it exists in the online environment’s virtual

world. Although the actual and virtual worlds are increas-

ingly intertwined, Part 1 of this chapter focuses on the

history and foundational roles that the public library has

played in facilitating young people’s connections with

literature. Part 2 focuses on the present and future worlds

of young people’s literacy and literature as resources in

the virtual world of information-seeking and social net-

working, dubbed the “kidlitosphere,” are used, created,

and directed by youth themselves.

Part I: Public Libraries in the United States

Our discussion of the history and roles of U.S. public

libraries begins with the numbers: There are more public

libraries in the United States than McDonald’s restau-

rants—16,604 public library buildings (Henderson et al.,

2009, p. 4) compared to over 13,000 McDonald’s outlets

(McDonald’s, 2008, p. 34). Managed by 9,214 administra-

tive units, these 16,600 plus public library buildings are

scattered across rural, suburban and urban areas in all 50

states and the District of Columbia. Ninety-eight percent of

all U.S. counties have at least one public library, and 97%

of the American population has access to a public library.

These public libraries are supported primarily through

locally generated tax funds. The average total per capita

(household) operating revenue for all public libraries was

$37.66 in FY 2007, the year for which we have the latest

data. Of that, the majority, $31.68, was from local sources,

$2.52 was from state sources, $0.16 from federal sources,

and $3.29 from other sources such as private foundations

(Henderson et al., 2009, p. 12).

The governance of each public library “takes place

within the interlocking contexts of local, regional, state and

national political jurisdictions” (McCook, 2004, p. 107).

Eighty- ve percent of public libraries are public agencies;

the remainder (15%) is operated by nonpro t associations/

agencies. The latter are privately controlled but meet the

legal de nition of a public library in the states in which

they are located. Typically, public libraries are governed

by elected or appointed citizen boards, commonly known

as trustees, but there are also public libraries which are

municipal departments or are governed by other elected

or appointed boards.

Almost all public libraries offer collections and ser-

vices for youth, and these services and collections are in

continual use. In 2009 the American Library Association

(ALA, 2009) reported “children are among the heaviest

users of public-library resources” (p. 5). In the same report

ALA cited a 2008 Harris Poll that found that 70% of the

respondents saw the public library as a family destina-

tion. The latest US Institute for Museum and Library

Services survey of public libraries reports the circulation

of children’s materials was 739.7 million nationwide, or

34% of total public library circulation (Henderson et al.,

2009). Children’s programs account for 69% of all public

programming offered by public libraries. Approximately

59 million children attended the over 2 billion children’s

programs in 2007. In a 2002 National Center for Education

Statistics study, 66% of the households surveyed with chil-

dren under 18, and 69% of households with a high school

student, used a public library in the past year (Glander &

Dam, 2007). Numbers are telling us that libraries both

de ne their services as and produce the sustainable sup-

port for the literacy access, programming, and community

engagement that youth seek. How did such an extensive

system for literature circulation and literacy development

come into existence?

History and Development of Youth Services

Public library service to children began in the United States

and in England in the 19th century, when both countries

experienced the increased urbanization and industrializa-

tion brought by the Industrial Revolution. In addition, the

United States experienced a large in ux of immigrants

whose labor was essential to the growing economy and

whose assimilation was viewed as crucial to class harmony

and national unity. These shifts led to compulsory public

education, enhanced the value of childhood literacy, and

led to an increase in books and periodicals designed spe-

ci cally for young readers (Jenkins, 1994).

Early U.S. public libraries serving children existed in

isolated instances in New England during the early 19th

century, primarily as the result of gifts from wealthy

individuals. For example, the founding of the Bingham

Library for Youth in Salisbury, Connecticut, in 1803, was

“the  rst instance in which a municipal governing body

contributed active  nancial assistance to public library

service” (Shera, 1949, p. 160). Thus, the  rst American

public library, as the term is currently understood, was a

library created speci cally for young people. Thirty-one

years later in 1834, the Peterborough, New Hampshire,

Town Library was founded and became a far more well-

known claimant to the “earliest public library” designation.

Although the Peterborough library was for residents of

all ages, Shera notes that more than half of its inaugural

collection—approximately 200 books out of 370—were

described as “the Juvenile Library,” or books for young

readers (pp. 64–65). Thus, from the very early years, chil-

dren have been a signi cant constituent group of public

library users.

Public library service to children as we know it today

emerged during the Progressive Era, a time during which

the  rst generation of professional child welfare advo-

cates began supervising children’s physical and moral

136

PAULETTE M. ROTHBAUER, VIRGINIA A. WALTER, AND KATHLEEN WEIBEL

well-being within institutions like settlement houses,

juvenile courts, public playgrounds, public health pro-

grams, and public libraries. Advances in higher education

for women and waged work for middle-class women led

to the development of female-intensive child welfare

professions, including children’s librarianship. The Anglo-

American model of children’s public librarianship, as

created by the “ rst generation” of American children’s

librarians at the turn of the last century, was characterized

by several essential elements: specialized collections,

separate areas or rooms, specially trained personnel, and

services designed to bring children and children’s books

together, all existing in a network of relationships with

other child welfare agencies. This model has proved so

durable it became an international standard for library

service (Thomas, 1982).

However, despite its centrality within American public

librarianship, service to children has been largely ignored

in the profession’s research agenda. Like many other

activities involving children, and carried out primarily

by women, library service to young people has been

simultaneously revered and ignored (Jenkins, 2000, p.

104). Librarians gather and report quantitative data on

youth services (circulation of children’s materials, in-

library use of children’s materials, children’s program

attendance, etc.), but research utilizing qualitative or

mixed methods to investigate research questions is still

less common.

What Happens in Public Libraries?

What happens for children and teens in public libraries?

Pretty much everything from homework help to story hour

to craft programs to video game contests. Authors visit.

Musical groups perform. Parents select books, records,

and DVDs with their children. Or children and teens come

in alone to read magazines, access the Internet, check out

materials, ask questions of staff, meet and work with or

enjoy their friends. Teens put on programs and serve as

Advisory Board members. Librarians and other library

staff advise and assist the children and teens. Through

their collections and all these activities, collectively called

“services,” public libraries encourage children and teens

to connect with books. Both collections and services are

developed in response to one core principle: personal

choice.

Walter (2010) identi es six principles and values de-

rived from over 100 years of the practice of public library

youth services:

1. Reading good books contributes to a good life.

2. Readers’ advisory services, storytelling and booktalks

are the key strategies for promoting reading.

3. The individual child is the primary user of children’s

library service.

4. The library children’s room is an integral element in

library service to children.

5. Children’s librarians are the appropriate specialists

who can best deliver library service to children.

6. Children’s librarians are advocates for library service

to children. (pp. 22–23)

Walter (2010) further identi es two themes that have

emerged more recently: (a) Libraries provide children with

information as well as pleasure, and (b) Library service to

children can be optimized through partnerships and col-

laborations (p. 23). In the same review, she also identi es

two themes that have “waxed and waned” over the years de-

pending on views of the social role of the public library and

current conditions: (a) library use is a civic activity, and (b)

Americans and American libraries have a responsibility to

look beyond their borders and to adopt a global perspective

(p. 23). All of these themes to varying degrees are present

in the six core public library youth services functions we

will discuss for the remainder of this chapter.

An Aside: Public Library and School Library Practices

Before continuing with this section on public libraries,

it is important to clarify the distinction between public

and school library services and practices. Natalie Reif

Ziarnik’s (2003) School & Public Libraries: Developing

the Natural Alliance offers a comparison of the strengths

of both facilities. Ziarnik recognizes, for example, the dif-

ferences in guidance related to youth and adults: School

libraries offer frequent librarian-teacher interaction while

public libraries offer frequent librarian-parent interaction.

The categories of difference most signi cant for under-

standing a youth perspective, we believe, have to do with

the relationship between learning and community engage-

ment that school and public libraries offer.

School libraries tie literacy skills to daily schoolwork

and the library collection and instruction are strongly

connected to a school district’s speci c educational goals.

In contrast to, (and increasingly in concert with) school

libraries, public libraries encourage self-directed learn-

ing and discovery, opportunities to witness modeling of

library use by people of all ages, and a library collection

and programs that are strongly connected to a local com-

munity’s needs.

Six Core Functions of Youth Services Librarianship

There are six core functions common to youth services

librarianship: collection development, readers’ advisory

service, reference service, summer reading program, year-

round programming, and space. At the basis of everything

that youth services librarians do is the evaluation of books

and other materials to provide collections chosen to re-

 ect the community and a particular philosophy about

children’s and teens’ reading. This philosophy is typically

stated in a collection development policy approved by the

library’s board of trustees or other governing body. Librar-

ians generally refer to this process as book selection or

collection development.

The second core youth services function is called read-

137

PUBLIC LIBRARIES IN THE LIVES OF YOUNG READERS

ers’ advisory services. Librarians and other staff members

advise children and teens, their caregivers and other adults,

on books that will meet speci c reading needs or on other

materials that will be of interest to the individual library

user. They may do this through one-on-one encounters, or

by producing reading lists and guides, displays, etc., either

in the library, on the web, or in some community venue.

Youth services librarians and other staff also answer

informational questions, a function termed “reference

service.” This may be done in the library, over the phone

or via the Internet through email or chat. Both advisory

and reference questions may be motivated by the child’s

or teen’s personal interests (self-generated) or come from

an external agent (imposed queries) such as a teacher

(Gross, 2006).

Almost every public library offers a summer reading

program, a series of enrichment activities, often with small

rewards built in, designed to keep children reading dur-

ing the summer vacation from school and thereby lower

“summer learning loss.” In addition to the summer read-

ing program, library staff develop programs throughout

the year that respond to the speci c needs and interests of

the age range they serve. The purpose of these programs,

which include storytelling, craft activities, baby lapsit

programs, booktalks, etc., is to promote reading and en-

courage library use. Finally, the spaces set aside in public

libraries for children and teens are important community

resources for youth in and of themselves.

In addition to these six core functions, many public

libraries develop specialized programs such as homework

assistance, support for home schooling, and parent or

teacher resource centers. More and more public libraries

are also engaged in teaching information literacy, com-

puter and library use. As Walter (2010) notes, this instruc-

tion may take place informally (in contrast with the formal

programs offered by school libraries), but is a conscious

concern for public library youth service librarians.

Collection Development

Children’s literature scholar Anne Pellowski (1968) notes

“the history of U.S. children’s libraries cannot be separated

from that of children’s literature” (p. 391). Collections

predate the other elements of youth services librarian-

ship, and the librarians’ knowledge of the books and other

materials in their collections is the bedrock of expertise

upon which the profession rests.

Young people have varying needs based on age, abil-

ity, educational needs, and reading interests. Building

and maintaining relevant collections to meet the needs of

young library users is one of the key missions of the youth

services librarian. Librarians receive guidance in their

selection decisions from the library’s collection develop-

ment policy which will re ect the mission of the library;

outline the types of materials that will be available and

general selection criteria; and provide guidance for dealing

with challenges to library materials, with materials that are

worn or outdated, with materials that come to the library

as gifts, and so on (Cerny, Markey, & Williams, 2006).

The librarian makes decisions based on reviews, reader

requests, community needs, and other criteria that go into

creating a collection that re ects the information and rec-

reational reading needs and interests. Books are evaluated

for their individual value, their value in relationship to

other materials in the collection, and for their potential for

use by library users. The goal is “a balanced collection”

that includes a range of subjects and a range of points

of view (Walter, 2001, p. 23). As stated in ALA’s (1999)

treatise, “Libraries: An American Value”: “We celebrate

and preserve our democratic society by making avail-

able the widest possible range of viewpoints, opinions

and ideas, so that all individuals have the opportunity to

become lifelong learners—informed, literate, educated,

and culturally enriched.”

Among the many considerations for librarians as they

develop their collections is the age-old debate between

quality and popularity. On the one hand, there are the high-

minded aims of literature for children held by children’s

librarians of the past, as re ected in Walter de la Mare’s

oft-quoted “only the rarest kind of best in anything can

be good enough for the young” (Silvey, 2004, p. xv). On

the other hand, the popularity of mass-market series with

many young readers is undeniable. In earlier days, librar-

ies would have refused to purchase Tom Swift and His

Photo Telephone (Appleton, 1912) or Nancy’s Mysterious

Letter (Keene, 1932). Collection policies have changed

since then, however, and children’s rooms will have whole

shelving units containing full sets of series books arranged

in numbered order.

Researchers have been asking speci c and general

questions about library collections for as long as there

have been libraries. Fortunately, from the card catalogs of

yesterday to the online catalogs of today, many questions

about books and collections may be studied through the

readily-available data found in these catalogs.

A Number of Questions

For example, librarians use book reviews to make selection

decisions. Indeed, at one time it was common for librar-

ies to require at least two positive book reviews before a

book was acquired for the collection. So what impact do

reviews have on the collection development process? One

factor is number of reviews a book receives. But what if

the book receives negative reviews? Are they less likely

to be added to library collections? This question was

investigated by Judith Serebnick (1981), who found that

the more reviews a book received—whether they were

positive or negative—the more likely it was to be added

to the public library collection.

Readers’ Advisory Services

Joyce Saricks’ (2005) de nition of readers’ advisory

services was developed through her work with adults but

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PAULETTE M. ROTHBAUER, VIRGINIA A. WALTER, AND KATHLEEN WEIBEL

is equally applicable to work with children and teens:

“A successful readers’ advisory service is one in which

knowledgeable, nonjudgmental staff help  ction and

non ction readers with their leisure-reading needs” (p.

1). According to Walter (2001), “children’s librarians have

elevated readers’ advisory, or reading guidance, almost to

an art form,” (p. 29) by melding knowledge of children’s

developmental stages and children’s books so that the in-

dividual child  nds a book perfect for him or her, a book

that is engaging and at the right reading level. This may be

a book like another in pacing, plot, underlying emotional

theme, setting, characterization or style, known as a “read

alike.” Or it may be a book on a personal passion like

dinosaurs or Disney princesses (no other princesses will

do) or a “good book,” a “thin book,” or an “easy book” to

meet a school assignment.

Children’s librarians practicing the art of readers’

advisory make the connections between the book and the

child, or the adult acting on behalf of the child. They learn

when to push and when to pull back, when to just

leave a pile of books on the table for a child to examine

with no pressure at all, when to reassure a child that it won’t

hurt their feelings if he or she doesn’t take any of the books

they recommended. They learn to know the “regulars” who

gobble up books like popcorn and which children are still

unsure of their reading skills or unconvinced about the

pleasures of literature. They learn which parents worry

about violence in children’s stories and which ones need

to be weaned from some limited understanding of the

deﬁ nition of a “classic.” They learn which teachers will

take a risk on a controversial new title and which ones

cannot be budged from a very literal-minded, objective

view of the world and the curriculum. They learn, too, if

they are very good at this, to listen for the silent, “unasked”

questions that children sometimes pose. Children don’t

formulate questions well, and they usually aren’t aware of

their own deepest and most important information needs.

(Walter, 2001, p. 31)

Heather Booth (2007), author of the  rst book-length

treatment of readers’ advisory work for teens, sees that

“many of the issues relevant to readers’ advisory for

children are also applicable to working with teens, such

as the need to assess reading level, working with proxies

(parents or caregivers), and the distinction between reading

for recreation and reading for school” (p. 100). Angelina

Benedetti (2001) admonishes that “before a librarian can

become a successful reader’s advisor for teens, he or she

must have some connection to the literature published

for young adults, to what teens actually read, and to the

library’s collection” (p. 239). Benedetti also points out that

many U.S. public libraries have no designated Young Adult

or Teen Librarian, and if they do, that person or persons

are not always available, so readers’ advisory work with

teens is more likely to be done by a librarian with another

age specialty or someone who is a generalist.

Booth (2007) also reminds librarians that:

readers’ advisory for teenagers differs from readers’ advisory

for adults not just in the selection of materials that we of-

fer but also in the manner in which we conduct ourselves.

Whereas an easy rapport may form between two adults

discussing a book, we must remain aware that because

teens most often encounter adults as teachers, parents, or

supervisors, they may be caught off guard or surprised by

our usual manner, be it poised professionalism or more

laid-back joviality. (p. 28)

In readers’ advisory work with both children and

young adults, as in reference service, librarians deal with

the issues of “imposed queries” and “proxy inquiries.” In

her review of children and young adult readers’ advisory

services, Jessica Moyer (2008) notes that librarianship

tends to draw on the literature of education for research

on reading. Because of the high value placed on personal

choice in public librarianship, youth librarians have em-

braced as their own The Power of Reading by Stephen

Krashen (2004). With his emphasis on choice and read-

ing for enjoyment, known in educational circles as “Free

Voluntary Reading,” Krashen justi es and af rms what

public librarians have been doing for years and provides

a guide to understanding and translating the educational

research into public library practice.

Because of the reliance on education research, public

youth services have “only a limited amount of research…

conducted on how youth services and young adult li-

brarians provide readers’ advisory for their patrons”

(Moyer, 2008, p. 77). Ross, McKechnie and Rothbauer

(2006) reviewed the education research from a library

perspective in Reading Matters. They point out that “The

research…indicates that pleasure and free choice are both

key elements in the making of readers….With their large

collections of books and magazines and newspapers that

are free to all, promoting leisure reading for all ages is a

role that public libraries are ideally suited to  ll” (p. 7).

Despite the paucity of research on youth reader advisory

services, youth services librarians have been talking and

writing at the practice level about “getting the right book

for the right reader at the right time” since the beginning

of public libraries and this is a fruitful area for further

examination.

Reference Service

The informational needs of youth were not given much

attention in public library youth services literature and re-

search until the 1990s despite the fact that youth librarians

have been building reference collections and answering

informational questions for years. Reichel’s (1991) book,

Reference Services for Children and Young Adults, marks

a sharpened focus on meeting the informational needs of

children and the articulation of techniques for doing this

akin to those developed in the larger literature of reference

service to adults. In a later analysis of reference services,

Walter (2001) contends that children “ask for more help at

the library reference desk than grownups do” (p. 29) and

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PUBLIC LIBRARIES IN THE LIVES OF YOUNG READERS

further notes that “the conventional wisdom is that most

children making use of public library reference services

today are there for homework purposes” (p. 31). In offer-

ing practical advice for public library staff not trained to

work with children, Steele (2001) posits that the “people

skills” and “professional expertise” needed to work with

youth and adults are the same. “Good reference service to

children differs only slightly in approach and communica-

tion” (p. 12). But these services are more complex than

Steele suggests.

The nature of children and childhood, teens and ado-

lescence, adds complexity to the already complex com-

munication process known as the “reference interview,” the

questioning approach librarians use to assist library users

in person, over the phone or online, and to meeting the

information needs of youth. Working with British youth,

Shenton (2007) found  ve reasons why children and teens

failed to  nd the information they needed: (a) need-source

mismatch or inappropriate source, (b) knowledge de -

ciency or inability to formulate a search based on lack of

knowledge, (c) skill shortcomings, (d) psychological barri-

ers such as being overwhelmed, and (e) social unease and

inhibition that makes it dif cult for the child to approach

an adult (pp. 328–342). Shenton particularly emphasizes

the psychological dimension in developing strategies for

assisting young people to  nd information.

Jones, Gorman, and Suellentrop (2004) take a similar

approach to teens in their practical advice manual: “[D]

evelopmental tasks play a huge role. The self-conscious-

ness of YAs (young adults) is a major barrier; after all, a

reference question is admission of not knowing a particu-

lar element” (p. 78). Focusing on electronic resources,

Druin (2005) notes, “Today’s digital landscape can also

be problematic for young people. Children see the world

differently than adults; they have very different needs for

technology and are quite diverse in their abilities, even in

the age span of a few short years” (p. 173).

Also complicating the youth reference process are what

Gross (2006) terms “imposed queries,” when a child’s in-

formation need is generated externally, typically a school

assignment, and “double imposed inquiries” when a parent

seeks information on behalf of his or her child, again typi-

cally for an assignment. Gross distinguishes these queries

from “self-generated queries” where a child’s or teen’s

personal interests motivate the question. Shenton (2007)

found that for both “older and younger informants when

information was being sought on matters of personal inter-

est” (self-generated queries) the results were “markedly

more effective” than for the imposed queries (p. 352). In

discussing “double imposed inquiries” from a practical

perspective, Jones et al. (2004) acknowledge that

almost universally, the one type of patron loathed by many

librarians, is the parent doing research for their child….

Often the parent will come in with the child, but the parent

will do all the talking. Focus your eyes on the student and

ask him or her the follow-up questions, because that is who

will help you complete the reference transaction. (p. 345)

Youth needs for school related assistance are not new.

Mediavilla (2001) notes that as “early as 1898…Linda

Anne Eastman admonished that (for public librarians) one

of the requisites for working successfully with children

was a thorough knowledge of the school’s curriculum” (p.

vii). Public library youth service literature is full of tips for

working with teachers and school librarians to get informa-

tion about homework assignments. Many public libraries

have set up “homework centers,” programs “dedicated

to meet the curricular needs of students by providing:

staff or volunteers who are trained to assist students with

their homework, space designated for student use during

speci c days and times, and a multiformat collection of

materials related to the curricular needs of students” (p.

x). To this must be added web-based services typically

made available to a public library’s constituency through

a contract with a commercial service such as Tutor.com.

(Tutor.com, 2010). However, as Walter and Mediavilla

(2005) found, there are signi cant limitations in these

contract services when judged using the standards for

effective reference service.

Research in the area of public library youth reference

service and youth information needs has been steadily un-

derway since the publication of Reichel’s (1991) ground-

breaking book on reference service to youth. Chelton and

Cool (2004, 2007) have ably charted this growing research

agenda in their two editions of Youth Information-Seeking

Behavior. The 2005 issue of Library Trends, edited by

Druin, focuses on Children’s Access and Use of Digital

Resources, an important area of research in youth refer-

ence service. This is an area where signi cant work can

be done on the information needs of children and teens at

various developmental stages, effective communication

strategies for helping children and teens articulate those

needs and develop successful search strategies, and ap-

propriate resources and services to meet these needs.

Summer Reading Programs

Summer reading programs have been a core public library

function almost since the inception of youth services

in the late 19th century. Carolyn Hewins, a pioneer of

youth services, for example, began a summer program of

book talks at the Hartford Public Library in 1898 (Locke,

1988). A similar program at the Cleveland Public Library

included a letter to teachers from the library director, lists

of books read during the summer, and bookmarks with

suggested titles (Eastman, 1897; The library in vacation

days, 1898). The purpose of these early programs was

to encourage children to use the library, read during the

summer, and develop a lifelong habit of reading. And this

purpose has remained remarkably consistent over the past

110 years. However, public librarians now emphasize

educational bene ts and cite research on summer learning

140

PAULETTE M. ROTHBAUER, VIRGINIA A. WALTER, AND KATHLEEN WEIBEL

to justify the programs (Wisconsin Department of Public

Instruction, n.d.).

Today 95% of all public libraries offer some sort of

Summer Reading Program (National Center, 1995). This

program is such a hallmark of American public library youth

services and requires such a high level of planning and

commitment from the youth services staff that we believe it

to be a core function separate from the broader year-round

programming function in public libraries. In his handbook

on public library youth services, Sullivan (2005) character-

izes the Summer Reading Program as “the most intensive

period of activity for children’s services, and for the library

as a whole” (p. 166). In many public libraries the Summer

Reading Program has spread from children to teens and in

some libraries includes adults as an audience.

Walter (2001) identi es three typical elements of the

Summer Reading Program: theme, reading incentives,

and programming. We believe that partnerships have also

become a key element of successful summer reading pro-

grams. While many libraries carry out their functions on

their own, partnerships and collaboration are increasingly

essential to serving children and teens in a community

setting. Walter (2010) identi es two reasons that collabo-

ration will continue to be of importance to youth services

librarians: (a) the funding climate and (b) the fact that these

librarians “are still passionate advocates and missionaries

who believe so strongly in the importance of their work

that they will usually leap at any opportunity to develop

alliances to spread the good word” (p. 47).

The Summer Reading Program theme may be locally

generated, developed at the state or consortia level, or

purchased from a commercial outlet. The theme may

generally promote books and reading such as the 1992

state of Missouri theme “Leap into Books” (Fiore, 1998,

p. 150), connected to an event like the Olympics, or ap-

pealing to the current interests of children or teens such as

the 1996 Florida state theme “Rhythm and Books—Feel

the Beat!” (p. 54). A good theme gives a focus to what

otherwise might be unconnected activities and also aids in

publicity that preferably re ects the life of children who

will participate.

The effort it takes to develop and support an annual

Summer Reading Program, including designing and pro-

ducing materials, has led many public libraries to work

together. The Collaborative Summer Reading Program, a

grassroots consortium of states, contracts with a vendor to

produce materials and resources. Their children’s theme

for 2010, with materials designed to prepare “children for

continued success through the development of early lan-

guage skills” is “Make a Splash—Read!” The teen theme

with activities and materials designed to integrate “dif-

ferentiated literacy activities to motivate young adults to

read and discuss books” is “Make Waves at Your Library”

(Collaborative summer reading program, n.d.).

Reading incentives or prizes for completing all or part

of the Summer Reading Program are “a touchy issue” ac-

cording to Sullivan (2005, p. 163). Those opposed to prizes

generally believe that reading should not be competitive.

Some are also opposed to the commercialization of the

Summer Reading Program. Sullivan argues that more

reluctant readers will be attracted by prizes. Fiore (1998)

suggests that “rather than thinking of incentives as prizes,

think of them as another means of promoting” (p. 78) the

Summer Reading Program. And Walter (2001) notes “most

librarians now prefer to avoid the kind of competitive sum-

mer reading program that rewards the children who read

the most books” (p. 34); thus many programs encourage

participants to set their own goals relative to an overall

completion goal. In addition, incentives can be tied to a

community goal such as the “Read a Ton” program Sul-

livan (2005) describes, where books read were weighed

to contribute to a community goal (p. 164).

Programmed activities during the Summer Reading

Program may have several purposes according to Walter

(2001): an end in itself, providing educational or cultural

enrichment, motivation to read, or a means to generate

publicity. Some programs suit all of these purposes. The

2006 Summer Reading Program partnership between the

Chicago Public Library and the Field Museum of Natural

History, called “Wrapped Up In Reading,” celebrated

Ancient Egypt, highlighting the life of King Tut, and

included a free visit to the Tut exhibition for the families

of children who completed the program.

More and more, the successful Summer Reading

Program for youth is characterized by community part-

nerships. Public library staff may visit classrooms or as-

semblies, materials for teachers and school librarians who

will promote the program, work with school librarians and

teachers on reading lists, inform principals of children and

teens who complete the program, and meet with the local

school parent organization (Minkel, 2003). Local business

partners provide  scal support for the program often in the

form of incentives or prizes to motivate reading. Partner-

ships with other community organizations such as parks

may take the program outside of the library building. Part-

nerships with local church and other youth groups provide

readymade programs for these organizations.

Successful Summer Reading Programs for teens partner

with the teens themselves. Jones et al. (2004) advise that

“a summer reading program for YAs should allow partici-

pating teens to be directly involved in the creation of the

program, providing an opportunity for teens to provide

input during the developmental phase as well as during the

program itself” (p. 230). They also identi ed  ve common

characteristics of successful Summer Reading Programs

for teens: (a) keep it simple, (b) make it possible for teens

to get involved on many levels, (c) allow free choice when

it comes to selecting reading materials, (d) incorporate

the Internet in some way, and (e) have great prizes that

teens would enjoy (p. 230). Fiore (2005) also suggests

the incorporation of online participation options in Sum-

mer Reading Programs for all ages of youth with online

141

PUBLIC LIBRARIES IN THE LIVES OF YOUNG READERS

reading logs and reports and online incentives, making it

possible to participate in the Summer Reading Program

without coming to the physical library.

The key research question for all the Summer Reading

Programs is how effective are they? Fiore reviews Summer

Reading Program effectiveness research and public policy

responses to summer learning issues through 2005; Shin

and Krashen (2008) review the research from an education

perspective but do acknowledge public libraries in Summer

Reading: Program and Evidence. All research concludes

that summer reading results in better achievement for

students but there are signi cant differences based on how

readily available reading material is for children and teens

and how much their personal choice enters into reading.

In a frequently cited study of Pennsylvania public

libraries, Celano and Neuman (2001) found that children

who attend library summer programs spend signi cant

amounts of time with books—a  rst step toward reading.

These programs also encourage parents of these children

to play greater roles in their child’s literacy development—

another factor leading to reading achievement. They con-

clude that, “children who attend library summer reading

programs read signi cantly better than those children who

attend a camp program, suggesting that time spent in the

library signi cantly enhances children’s reading achieve-

ment when compared to activities more purely recreational

in nature” (p. 48).

Dominican University Graduate School of Library and

Information Science (Roman, Carran, & Fiore, 2010)

recently completed Institute for Library and Museum

Services funded research focusing on third and fourth

graders addressing the question: “Do public library sum-

mer reading programs impact student achievement?” (p.

1). Preliminary  ndings indicate that Summer Reading

Program participants, who are more likely to be girls, are

engaged and active readers with books in the home and

with parents who are involved in their reading and other

literacy activities. Despite research advances there remains

a myriad of questions to be addressed about Summer

Reading Program impact.

Year-Round Programming

It is safe to say that the majority of the literature of public

library youth services librarianship, whether monograph or

periodical, consists of practical advice on, tips and guides

to, and resources for programming. Unlike services such

as reference and readers’ advisory, which are available to

individuals on demand, programs are typically scheduled

events. Jones et al. (2004), in their essential “how-to-do-

it” manual for teen service de ne programming as “a

library-sponsored activity that takes place outside the

context of reference service (and we would add readers’

advisory service) and is designed to inform, entertain, or

enrich users, as well as promote the use of the library and

its collection. With teen users, put the accent on entertain

and add the word ‘fun’” (p. 219).

Programming Skills is one of the seven Association

for Library Service to Children 1999 Competencies for

Librarians Serving Children and Youth. These skills are

broken down further to address public library children’s

services:

1. Designs, promotes, presents, and evaluates a variety

of programs for children of all ages, based on their

developmental needs and interests and the goals of

the library.

2. Identi es and utilizes skilled resource people to present

programs and information.

3. Provides library outreach programs, which meet com-

munity needs and library goals and objectives.

4. Establishes programs and services for parents, indi-

viduals and agencies providing childcare, and other

professionals in the community who work with chil-

dren.

5. Promotes library programs and services to underserved

children and families. (Association, 1999)

In Outstanding Library Service to Children: Putting

the Core Competencies to Work, the chapter on program-

ming skills opens with this prideful statement: “Children’s

librarians in the public library do more original program-

ming than their colleagues who serve other age groups,

and they are well known both within the profession and

among the general public for the skill sets behind the

programming” (Cerny, Markey, & Williams, 2006, p. 50).

In contrast, there is no speci c set of programming compe-

tencies in the seven recently revised Young Adult Library

Services Association (2010) Competencies for Librarians

Serving Youth. Rather programming, as we have de ned

it, is integrated into: leadership and professionalism, com-

munication, marketing and outreach, administration, and

services. Children’s librarians most often plan and deliver

book programs on their own without signi cant input from

their clientele, while teen librarians often seek to engage

their clientele as programmers or through participation

on advisory boards.

The Concept of Youth Development

Year-round programming is designed to enrich and engage

children and their parents and caregivers, and teens; to

promote reading and library use; to provide free organized

activities for individual teens, children and their families;

and to market the library. This programming is often tied

into cyclical events like holidays and sport seasons; known

interests of children and teens like games, popular culture,

hobbies, or continual areas of fascination like snakes; but

can also be tied to community activities or celebrations, or

current events. Sullivan (2005) divides programming into

two categories: literature based programs that have read-

ing at the core; (a) story hours, book discussion groups,

and booktalking; (b) and non-literature based programs

which “deal with ideas and information not directly tied

to the printed word” (pp. 120–121) such as a  re truck

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PAULETTE M. ROTHBAUER, VIRGINIA A. WALTER, AND KATHLEEN WEIBEL

demonstration or chess games. It should be noted that

children’s librarians will typically try to tie books to all

non-literature based programs through indirect methods

like book displays and reading lists. Because of the scope

of this volume, we will focus on three types of literature-

based programming: storytelling, book discussion pro-

grams, and booktalking. While it is possible to offer all

these three types of programs to teens, it is more likely

that storytelling or story hours are offered for younger

children, and booktalking and book discussion to teens

and tweens.

Walter (2001) notes that “there is probably less story-

telling provided for school-age children than there once

was” despite the fact that story times are conducted in

90% of all libraries. “Most of these are probably story

hours for children under the age of  ve” with the focus

on emergent literacy and infant brain development leading

to an increasing emphasis on programs targeting infants

and children under ages three to four, the traditional pre-

school story hour audience (pp. 36–37). Infant programs,

sometimes known as “baby lapsit programs” include

rhymes, songs, and physical activities and are viewed as

a way of teaching parents how to interact with their babies

as well as stimulating the children. Programs for toddlers

and family groups are short and typically include a variety

of activities: picture-book reading,  annel board stories,

 ngerplays, songs, nursery rhymes, and lots of audience

participation. All of these programs are usually broadly

based on a theme, as much for program promotion as

program continuity.

Book discussion groups are common for school-age

children and teens. Sullivan (2005) cautions that the “com-

position of a book discussion group for children is more

complicated than for adults” (p. 136). Among factors to

consider in forming a group are: age-range, reading-level,

gender, and whether adults are welcome or not. Jones et

al. (2004) identi ed two types of book discussion groups

for teens: (a) everybody reads the same book or (b) ev-

erybody reads what they want and discusses the story or

genre their books share.

Sullivan (2005) de nes booktalking as standing “before

people and telling them why they would want to read a

book…. Booktalking is promotion, and especially with

children, you must remember that you are not just promot-

ing the book but also promoting reading in general” (p.

141). Writing for young adult librarians, Jones et al. (2004)

de ne a booktalk as “a paperback blurb as performance”

and admonish “don’t tell, sell” (p. 167). Common types

of booktalks according to Sullivan (2005) include: plot

summary, character sketch, reading a vignette or dialog,

author or media tie-in, or theme based; whereas Jones et

al. (2004) suggest booktalks that focus on mood, plot,

character and scene.

Walter (2010) notes that booktalks are more typically

part of a program for children or teens rather than the

whole program. She also notes the signi cance of book-

talking titles while working with individuals in the library,

what book sellers call hand selling, a function she sees as

integral to readers advisory service.

As with the questions for Summer Reading Programs,

all of this effort and engagement begs the question of

impact. What works and what does not, according to

what criteria?

Space

Sociologist Ray Oldenburg (1999) devotes a chapter of his

landmark survey The Great Good Place to the problems

of a society that segregates youth and does not provide

appropriate spaces for them. In most communities, the

public library and the parks are the only two public spaces

open year round at little or no cost to all ages. People may

think of the local mall, a favorite teen hangout place, as

public space but it is not––it is privately owned and oper-

ated. Those walking the mall hallways do not necessarily

have the same rights as those walking a sidewalk or park

pathway. As Oldenburg points out, the mall as shared space

also implies a culture of consumerism. While there are

often fees for park programs, especially summer activities,

this is generally not true for use of the public library or

most public library programs. The concept of the public

library as a public space, “a great good place” is an in-

creasingly important concept even in the virtual age. In the

in uential analysis Better Together, Putnam and Feldstein

(2003) characterize public libraries as “third spaces” not

work or school, not home, where people can spend time

together. This is true for all ages but particularly true for

children and teens who do not have the options adults have

for other “third spaces.”

The Harris Interactive Poll of 8- to 18-year-olds (2007)

identi ed two place/space-related variables which impact

public library use: 38% of the respondents said they would

use the public library more often if “it was closer to where

I live,” and, 22% indicated they would use it if “the library

had a comfortable, welcoming atmosphere.” Four of the

nine responses in the same poll to the question “what do

you go to the library for?” were related to space use: 34%

go to the library to read, 26% to study, 20% go for events,

and 18% go to hang out with friends.

Librarians have always attended to space: “From the

beginning, the children’s room was intended to send a

clear message to children: this is your space” (Walter,

2010, p. 32). “The children’s corner of the 1890s, specially

 tted with low tables and chairs, was replaced in theory

and in practice by completely separate reading rooms for

children by 1900” (Van Slyck, 1995, p. 176). This clear

territorial message is also true of any space set aside for

teens after the opening of the  rst room for young adults

at the Cleveland Public Library in 1925. “A teen space

sends a message, if done right, that ‘this is not your father’s

library’ by blowing away the stereotypes of libraries, and

librarians, by presenting a fresh, fun, and  exible environ-

ment” (Jones et al., 2004, p. 254).

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PUBLIC LIBRARIES IN THE LIVES OF YOUNG READERS

For early childhood areas, “size, scale, and access

dominate the discussion of the physical environment

from the perspective of safety and from the way features

communicate encouragement and welcome” (Feinberg,

Kuchner, & Feldman, 1998, p. 31), but this is also true

for all ages. Furniture and shelving appropriate to the age

level and a welcoming atmosphere are essential parts of

the entire children’s room or teen space. Today, this space

must accommodate the solitary reader, computer users,

group study and assignment needs, children with parents

or caregivers or teens with their friends, as well as youth

who are at the library because there is no adult at home

or they have nowhere else to go.

For children, Walter (2010) identi es three trends

that are changing the way we think about library space

for children: homework centers, renewed emphasis on

early literacy and the library as a destination place like

Disneyland. Feinburg et al. (1998) identify the need

for active learning in the public library, especially for

young children, and encourage the development of fam-

ily centered and developmentally appropriate spaces

where children and their caregivers can learn and inter-

act together. Walter and Meyers (2003) suggest the use

of the architect W.G. Clark’s views on physical space,

cultural space, and spiritual space when thinking about

teen places in the public library. Library building design

expert Nolan Lushington (2008) reviews trends in youth

services spaces for children with some reference to teens

and provides an annotated list of readings on the topic in

Libraries Designed for Kids.

In a White Paper for the American Library Associa-

tion’s Young Adult Library Services Association, Bolan

(2008) reports “a transformation in library facility design

for teenagers” with renewed emphasis on teen space be-

cause of increasing use.

This reevaluation of priorities is supported by the fact that

kids are not only using the library, they are visiting frequently.

Seventy-eight percent of children ages 8 to 18 have library

cards…. According to the Public Agenda in June 2006,

three-quarters of Americans believe it is a high priority for

local public libraries to offer a safe place where teenagers

can study and congregate. Equally relevant is the Harris poll

response to the question, “I would use my local public li-

brary more often if…?” Twenty-six percent of the respondents

replied, “If there was a space just for teens.” (p. 136)

Bolan (2008), like Walter and Meyers (2003), advocates

for young adult involvement in all phases of planning and

developing teen space. She argues further “the ratio of

teen area to the overall library should be equal to the ratio

of the teen population of that community to the overall

population of that community” (p. 137). This is not the

case in most American public libraries.

For many children, teens and their parents, the public

library is viewed as a “safe place.” Some children and

teens are routinely told to go to the library after school or

on weekends because there is no adult at home. The needs

of these children or teens may become a major issue for

library staff, but many libraries have developed programs

to meet the needs of these youth and policies to aid staff

in working with them. There is also a creative tension

between keeping order in space for youth and their free

and creative use of this space. Maintaining that balance

through space utilization and appropriate staf ng is es-

sential to the public library as a “safe space.”

Conclusion

In 2001 Virginia A. Walter called for addressing two re-

search needs in public library youth service. “One is the

codi cation of best practices in our  eld. We need more

than anecdotal evidence and common sense to determine

what works and what doesn’t. The second need is for

tangible evidence of the outcome of our work” (p. 120).

Although more progress has been made on the codi ca-

tion agenda than on the outcome agenda, both agendas are

still relevant today. A later summary of research (Walter,

2003) on public library services for children and teens

recognized four “signi cant and unanswered questions:

(a) How have public library services to children and young

adults developed over time? (b) How and why do young

people use the public library? (c) How can we evaluate the

effectiveness of public library service to young people?

(d) Why should policy makers fund public library services

for children and young adults?” (p. 572). Despite some

progress, particularly in the area of historical studies and

youth information seeking, these questions remain relevant

to the development of a research agenda for public library

service to children and young adults. Added to this agenda

will be studies on the changing use of online and digital

media services, which have altered the access, roles, and

guidance youth seek in public libraries.

Part II: Youth, Literature, Public Libraries,

and the KidLitosphere

In recent years, some librarians have moved their advocacy

for young people’s literature and for young readers to a

variety of online venues. In a chapter that examines the

ways that public libraries and librarians support children

and young adults as readers, we would be remiss to ne-

glect the webs of in uence and advocacy that comprise

the “kidlitosphere” (Bird, 2007) on the World Wide Web.

From early awareness of the utility of the multimedia on-

line platforms for promoting children’s and young adults’

literature to “live” play-by-play online updates of major

awards ceremonies, children’s and youth services librar-

ians appear to have been early and ongoing adopters of

interactive internet tools such blogs, wikis, video-hosting

sites, and popular online social networking sites such

Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter. In articles

published in the professional literature, readers were urged

to learn more about these new online tools to investigate

144

PAULETTE M. ROTHBAUER, VIRGINIA A. WALTER, AND KATHLEEN WEIBEL

new opportunities for working with young people and to

promote library materials and services.

Given how ubiquitous and pervasive such tools are

today Agosto and Abbas (2009) remind us that sites like

Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook are quite recent en-

tities, established in 2002, 2003, and 2004, respectively.

Youth services librarians were among the  rst in the

library world to herald the value of online journals and

blogs. For example, Sara Ryan (2002) wrote a short article

in Voice of Youth Advocates (VOYA) about the value of

new online journal and blog hosting sites, allowing teens

to connect with others through public writing. In another

article published in 2002, this time in Teacher-Librarian,

Clyde provided concise de nitions and samples of rel-

evant weblogs as she introduced the technology and its

possibilities to school librarians. It is worth noting that in

2002, Clyde was unable to identify any school libraries that

were using blogging software, however by 2009, Agosto

and Abbas were able to report that “there were more than

 ve hundred Facebook search results with ‘public library’

in the page name” and that a search “using the keywords

‘public library’ did return 62,000 pages with the phrase

included somewhere in the page content” (p. 34). In the

span of just a few years, there would seem to be evidence

of an impressive attempt to embed libraries into the social

networking landscape.

While empirical research on the uptake and effects

of the use of such tools in terms of reading promotion is

scarce, it is, nevertheless, possible to identify four impor-

tant trends in the online world of children’s and young

adult literature and librarianship: an energetic renaissance

in reviewing of and writing about children’s and young

adults’ literature spurring online book discussions that

cross multiple populations including young people, librar-

ians, authors and illustrators and book industry profes-

sionals; digital libraries and the rise of electronic books;

interactive sections of more traditional library websites

for children and teens including digital booktalks, book

trailers, and interactive spaces for youth reviewers and

bloggers; and online awards competitions.

Online Reviewing and Reading Promotion. Perhaps the

most noticeable aspect of online promotion of children’s

and young adult literature concerns the rise of review

websites and blogs that feature a range of library materi-

als although with a clear emphasis on novels and picture

books. There are now a number of bloggers who have

made reputations as discerning writers and reviewers

and who have a wide and growing readership. Publishers

took notice of these renegade, non-af liated reviewers

as concern mounted about the effects that unsolicited,

unedited, non- ltered reviews could have in terms of

marketing and readership (see Bird, 2009, on challenges

and tensions associated with this kind of extra-professional

work). Professional divisions such as the Association for

Library Services to Children (ALSC) also responded to the

growing online reviewing practices among its members by

implementing policies directly related to the online writing

practices of its members: for example, by curtailing re-

views of award nominees and contenders (Bird, 2007).

For librarians responsible for collecting children’s

and young adults literature for library collections and for

promoting it to library users, there are several other online

modes for professional awareness and development aside

from blogs. Interactive and collaborative wikis, designed

for use with multiple writers and editors are another way

that librarians are developing their professional competen-

cies related to children’s and young adult’s literature. For

example, the Child Lit Wiki and Book Recommendation

Engine (Berman, 2010) invites any user to write and sub-

mit book reviews following posted reviewing guidelines.

The Children’s Literature Web Guide, a collaborative proj-

ect of the University of Calgary similarly invites reader-

generated additions to a number of categories related to

children’s literature including awards, other web guides

and book lists, illustrator and author resources and more.

The Association for Library Services to Children and the

Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA), divi-

sions of the American Library Association, both maintain

open wikis for its members and other interested users.

While online fora devoted to children’s literature discus-

sion have grown and diversi ed in recent years to include

blogs and wikis, Facebook and MySpace, notable online

antecedents are still active. To name just two examples,

PUBYAC (Public Libraries Young Adults and Children)

and Child_Lit are listservs that were established in 1997

and 1993, respectively, and for over 15 years, both have

constituted active, informative, and collegial venues for

hundreds of subscribers for discussions about children’s

literature. However, as blogging advocates will point out

(Beaman, 2006), the new online technologies permit a

wider readership, reaching people who may not subscribe

to more esoteric or professional listservs—children, teens,

parents, and those not directly connected to the children’s

book industry.

Digital Collections and E-Books. The International Chil-

dren’s Digital Library (http://childrenslibrary.org) is one

of the most exemplary digital collections of children’s ma-

terials designed for a wide audience of child readers with

ongoing attention to both ease and openness of access (see

Collen, 2006, for a review of a recent study using ICDL

with children). However, digital and multimedia materi-

als for children and teens are being integrated into the

most traditional library collections of printed and bound

books. Public libraries offer a spectrum of multimedia

stories from telephone-based story times for very young

children to streaming story videos. For example, in one

of her regular American Libraries columns Jennifer Burek

Pierce (2007) features Tumblebooks and Tumblereadables

from an electronic children’s book service that sells sub-

scriptions to public libraries, but allows library card-free

145

PUBLIC LIBRARIES IN THE LIVES OF YOUNG READERS

access to young people. Electronic books have been on the

children and young adult’s literature scene for a number

of years but with advances in the design, functioning and

portability of digital readers we can expect continued

interest in developing e-book access for young people

through public library collections.

Interactive Library Websites. As public librarians continue

to explore the viability of electronic and digital collec-

tions for children and teens, there is evidence that library

websites are integrating more and more interactive online

content for young people as well. Online homework help

centers for young people have been offered by public

libraries for several years, sites that guide students to use-

ful library resources and to tutorials on how to use them,

along with online reference services. However, newer

modes of online engagement with children’s and young

adult literature are supported on library websites as well.

Digital booktalks and booktrailers can support multiple

literacy skills and reading enjoyment among young people

who produce and view them.

In fact, researchers Gunter and Kenny (2008) have

found that the production of video booktalks can play a

positive role in changing attitudes towards reading among

reluctant youth readers. Several public librarians now

work with teen patrons on digital booktalks, posting the

products of this kind of programming to video hosting sites

like YouTube and Google Video. YALSA hosts its own

video channel at bliptv (see http://yalsa.blip.tv) featuring

a range of videos including award-winning booktalks of

young adult titles. Digital and audio booktalks are just one

type of interactive online activity; many public libraries

now also dedicate a portion of the their library webpages

to creating interactive spaces for youth patrons giving

them a forum for reviews, feedback, and commentary on

library issues and events of interest to them. These spaces

can be links to Facebook and MySpace pages or to blogs

that feature teen input. For example, Seattle Public Library

maintains a teen-run blog, accessible from their homep-

age called “Push to Talk,” along with online homework

help and an online newsletter for teens (Seattle Public

Library, 2010). Online book discussion groups for young

people are gaining ground as well with invitation for youth

participants announced on library website homepages.

Paulette Stewart (2009) provides a detailed account of

one teacher-librarian’s experience of developing a virtual

reading group with teenagers, reporting on an increased

degree of engagement among participants.

Online Awards. In 2006, the Children’s and Young Adult

Bloggers’ Literary Awards (Cybils) was established; it

is a singular new award for children’s and young adult

materials voted on by children’s literature bloggers

(“There’s a new award” 2008; Cybils). Nominations are

taken from anyone who submits titles, and then a second

round of judging occurs among assigned bloggers who

evaluate the short list of  nalists to arrive at a winner.

Although the Cybils is the only award to date that oper-

ates entirely online, other awards are capitalizing on the

interactive engagement made possible with online tools.

For example, the Forest of Reading and Festival of Trees

comprise the Ontario Library Association’s very popular

literacy initiative and readers’ choice awards. By visiting

the association’s website, young readers are able to interact

with other readers and with authors as well as read online

previews of chapters of nominated titles (Ontario Library

Association, 2010).

The establishment of the Newbery Medal signaled the

arrival of children’s literature as a distinct and identi able

presence within the larger  eld of literature. It also sig-

naled the arrival of children’s librarians as those uniquely

quali ed to determine the year’s “most distinguished

contribution to children’s literature.” Online readers’

choice awards, likewise, signal young people as uniquely

quali ed to judge their own literature. We are currently

witnessing a consolidation of established library prac-

tices in the online world of children’s and young adult’s

literature, strengthening already existing connections and

forging new ones among librarians, authors, illustrators,

publishers and young readers and their advocates.

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Becoming Readers of Literature

with LGBT Themes

In and Out of Classrooms

Mollie V. Blackburn and Caroline T. Clark

The Ohio State University

Who gets to feel safe as a reader in school? What if the selected reading and literature are actually intended to

be for your bene t; and yet you remain invisible, or worse, the subject of disdain? Conversely, what is it like to

be in the company of friends and allies who want to know what it’s like to be you—who seek your insights so

they can learn from you, laugh with you, and live with you? In this groundbreaking chapter, Mollie Blackburn

and Caroline Clark provide a framework for understanding what gets asked of books, readers, and the places

where reading happens—whether the focus of this reading is situated in school or out of school, with LGBTQ

youth, teachers, and allies in mind.

In this chapter, we ask where and how young people be-

come readers of literature with lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/

or transgender (LGBT) themes in and out of classrooms

in contemporary contexts. We begin by discussing the

theoretical framework that guides our interpretations of

LGBT-themed literature and contexts. Then, we consider

where youth read by reviewing scholarship on reading

LGBT-themed texts situated in elementary through sec-

ondary classrooms. However, the primary focus of our

chapter will be on adolescent and young adult readers

of LGBT-themed literature. We next turn to the scholar-

ship documenting readers of LGBT-themed literature

beyond classrooms to review the few studies that focus

on the reading of this literature in out-of-school contexts

intended to support LGBTQ1 people. Then, we focus on

how a particular group of LGBTQ and allied adolescents

and adults, including ourselves, are working together to

become readers of literature with LGBT themes outside

of classrooms.

In asking how readers and texts are de ned in each of

these contexts, we examine what happens in and out of

school spaces that limit or invite students to be particular

kinds of readers with particular allowances and expecta-

tions for engaging with texts. We then analyze how texts

are selected in each context, what readers do with these

texts, and what kinds of work readers ask these texts to

148

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BECOMING READERS OF LITERATURE WITH LGBT THEMES

do. In doing so, we draw on Bishop’s (1992) concept of

literature serving as windows and mirrors for its readers

and Cart and Jenkins’s (2006) heuristic for describing

changes in depictions of LGBTQ characters in young

adult literature: homosexual visibility, gay assimilation,

and queer community. We conclude each section with

questions about the consequences of becoming a reader

across these contexts.

Ultimately, we look across the work being done in and

out-of-schools around LGBT topics and themes in order to

name key practices that teachers, youth service providers,

and librarians can enact and enable in order to help people

become readers of literature with LGBT themes and thus

work against homophobia in and out of schools.

Interpreting LGBTQ Literature and

Contexts

Drawing on Bishop (1992) and Cart and Jenkins (2006)

to examine how readers and texts are de ned in class-

rooms, in LGBTQ-friendly out-of-school communities,

and in our book discussion group for LGBTQ students

and teachers and their allies, is appropriate for several

reasons. Like these scholars, we locate our work in the

 eld of multicultural literature for children and young

adults. Moreover, Sims (Bishop) laid the foundation

for chronological categorizations of characters in such

literature, in her germinal book, Shadow and Substance:

Afro-American Experience in Contemporary Children’s

Fiction (1982). Cart and Jenkins built on this foundation,

and in doing so, focused speci cally on LGBT characters,

instead of African American characters, and literature for

young adults, rather than children. These shifts in foci

brought Sims’s signi cant scholarship even closer to our

foci in this chapter.

Bishop also provides the metaphor of texts as mirrors

and windows as a way of understanding opportunities pro-

vided by multicultural children’s literature for readers both

to see themselves and their own lives re ected in texts as

well as to see through windows into other worlds (Smith,

1997). For example, let’s say a reader of this chapter iden-

ti es as a straight teacher of the English Language Arts

who generally considers herself to be LGBTQ-friendly,

who interrupts homophobia when she encounters it in

her classroom, but who does not use LGBT-inclusive

curricular materials in her work. This reader may experi-

ence this chapter at times as a mirror in which she sees

herself reading texts with students in classrooms and

discussing content that is sometimes quite contentious.

There are other times, however, when she may experience

this chapter as a window into a world where adults read

LGBT-themed texts with young people in ways that add

depth and signi cance to anti-homophobia efforts.

Cart and Jenkins’s (2006) heuristic contributes to what

 ctional texts might accomplish in representing the experi-

ences of LGBTQ people. Stories of homosexual visibility

(HV) typically portray a single character, assumed to be

straight, who comes out or is outed as gay or lesbian. The

responses, or potential responses, of other characters are

the problem that drives the story. For example, in Keeping

You a Secret (Peters, 2003), Holland, the main character,

comes out when she falls in love with an out and proud

lesbian named Cece. After coming out, Holland’s family

and friends ostracize her. As the story unfolds, her familial,

social, and even academic life essentially falls apart. As

she tries to continue her life as a lesbian she encounters

overt homophobia and support through a center for gay

youth. Cart and Jenkins categorize the book as HV, because

Holland’s homosexuality becomes visible in her predomi-

nantly homophobic world. Gay assimilation (GA) stories,

however, present gay/lesbian characters as no different

from straight characters, aside from their sexuality. They

portray sexual identity as just another characteristic, much

like being left handed or having red hair, suggesting that

underneath the super cial differences that distinguish all

people, gay people are just like straight people.

Such a character is central in The Perks of Being a

Wall ower (Chbosky, 1999). Written as a series of letters

from the main character, Charlie, to someone addressed

only as “Friend,” this popular young adult novel chronicles

Charlie’s life in high school, including his friendship with

Patrick, who is out and gay, and his sister, Sam, with whom

Charlie falls in love. The story is told with stunning atten-

tion to the details of high school life and the importance

of music, sex, freedom, and friendship in negotiating

adolescence. The author’s depiction of Patrick as a kind,

loving,  awed character, just like Charlie and Sam, seems

to us to be the reason that Cart and Jenkins place Perks of

Being a Wall ower in the GA category. Cart and Jenkins

call their  nal category queer consciousness/community

(QC), however, their application of this term emphasizes

community over consciousness. QC books portray mul-

tiple LGBTQ characters within supportive communities

and families, including families of their own making. They

show the diversity of LGBTQ characters and dispel the

myth that being gay means being alone.

This is evident in Finding H.F. (Watts, 2001), particu-

larly when the narrator, H.F., and her best friend Bo go on

a road trip from their small, rural community in Kentucky

to Atlanta, where they encounter diverse communities of

LGBTQ people. They meet people in a bookstore and a

park; they meet young and old people, Black and White

people, and even some religious people who embrace

their LGBTQ identities. Thus, they  nd themselves in a

queer community (QC). It should be noted that despite the

important distinctions Cart and Jenkins (2006) identify,

they do not assume that any one book belongs in only

one category; rather, a book can be appropriately placed

in one, two, or even all three categories.

Cart and Jenkins’s analysis (2006) shows that the

majority of LGBT-themed children’s and young adult

literature falls into the HV category. They also point out

150

MOLLIE V. BLACKBURN AND CAROLINE T. CLARK

that there is some, although signi cantly less, LGBT-

themed children’s and young adult literature that falls into

the second category, GA. There is, however, a dearth of

LGBT-themed children’s and young adult literature that

shows queer youth in queer communities, categorized as

QC. Together, Bishop’s metaphor and Cart and Jenkins’s

heuristic are useful in understanding the work that readers

ask texts to do.

Reading LGBT-Themed Literature with

Young People in Classrooms

There is a signi cant body of research documenting the

hostilities that LGBTQ and non-gender-conforming youth

face in U.S. and international school contexts (see, e.g.,

Hillier, Turner, & Mitchell, 2005; Kosciw, Diaz, & Greytak,

2008; Ryan & Rivers, 2003; Wyss, 2004). However,

scholarship focused on reading and becoming readers of

LGBT-themed children’s and young adult texts, whether in

U.S. or international school-settings, is incredibly sparse.

Increasingly, scholars have argued that literature study

can be an important place to counter homophobia and

heterosexism. They argue for expanding text selections in

schools to include LGBT-themed young adult literature and

for increasing the visibility of lesbian and gay readings of

more traditional literature (Blackburn & Buckley, 2005;

Cart & Jenkins, 2006; Gallo, 2004; Reese, 1998).

Scholars have also gone beyond questions of why and

whether or not to include such texts to consider ques-

tions of how these texts might be used in school. They

provide strategies for working in primary and secondary

classrooms through reading, writing, and classroom talk,

and identify curriculum frameworks and detailed multi-

week plans for particular texts (Hammett, 1992; Harris,

1990; King & Schneider, 1999). Despite arguments for

the inclusion of LGBT-themed literature in schools and

efforts to show possibilities for doing this work in K–12

classrooms, detailed descriptions of how readers and texts

are de ned during these engagements are limited.

In this section, we provide a summary of studies that de-

scribe readings of LGBT-themed literature in classrooms.

We highlight this work to show what is (and is not) hap-

pening in classrooms and schools, not to demonize these

classrooms or the important, and even ground breaking,

work that occurs in them. Rather, we aim to trouble this

scholarship, arguing that reading and becoming readers

of LGBT-themed literature in classrooms may be limited

by the very context of school. The contextual framing we

provide for each study, however, is limited, in part due to

the brevity of the contexts provided in the original studies

themselves, and in part due to our framing of this chapter.

Our analytic focus is on classrooms as one of the places

where young people become readers of LGBT-themed

texts.

After summarizing, we treat the studies collectively and

focus on (a) how readers and texts are de ned, (b) what

was done to and with texts by readers, and 3) what texts

were asked to do as windows or mirrors and as HV, GA,

or QC representations. We conclude by considering the

implications of this analysis for young people becoming

readers of LGBT-themed literature in classrooms.

The studies we review take place in elementary, middle,

and high school settings, although mostly in U.S. high

school English classrooms. For example, Carey-Webb

(2001) describes the work of Tisha Pankop, an English

teacher in an ethnically mixed, inner-city, U.S. high school

(students, age 15–18). As part of a short story unit on the

theme of “fear,” Pankop offered her students blue triangles

to wear prior to engaging in a read-aloud of Bruce Coville’s

“Am I Blue?” the title story in a collection of young-adult,

lesbian, and gay-themed stories (Bauer, 1994). As the

meaning of “blue” was revealed in the story (indicat-

ing how “exclusively queer” a character was) several of

Pankop’s students ripped off their taped-on triangles and

threw them across the room, while some of the female

students quietly kept them on, and others proclaimed that

they were “tricked” by their teacher. When Pankop probed

into students’ responses, those who rejected the triangles

expressed: “I’m not gay. I don’t want anybody to think I

am,” and “It’s okay for girls to be gay, but not guys” (p. 45).

In their discussion, students tied their responses back to the

topic of the unit—“fear”—and talked about homophobia,

as well as the fears that a young person who is gay or les-

bian might face. Carey-Webb states that the students came

to no  nal conclusions “except that it was ‘sad about the

way that the kid in the story was treated’” (p. 45).

Athanases (1996) also describes students reading

LGBT-themed texts in a high school English class in the

United States (students age 15–18). He focuses on Reiko

Liu, a teacher in a multi-ethnic, urban high school in the

San Francisco Bay area. As part of Athanases’s multi-year

study of Liu’s use of ethnic literature with her Honors

English class, Athanases documented Liu’s students’

reading of and responses to the essay, “Dear Anita: Late

Night Thoughts of an Irish Catholic Homosexual,” by

Brian McNaught (1988)—a text taken up, in part, because

of the Euro-American ethnicity of its writer.

Greenbaum (1994) and Hoffman (1993) describe

their own work as high school English teachers engag-

ing students (ages 15–18) in LGBT-themes. Greenbaum

sought to challenge the assumed absence and invisibility

of lesbian and gay content, students, and experiences in

schools. As a closeted teacher, she did so through the ex-

amination of gay and lesbian subtexts in canonical works

(e.g., Catcher in the Rye, Julius Caesar, Cat on a Hot

Tin Roof). In contrast, Hoffman (1993) taught a text in

which gay and lesbian themes were prominent. He taught

Harvey Fierstein’s (1988) play Torch Song Trilogy to his

high school creative-writing students in Houston, Texas,

in response to his work with pre-service teachers who felt

that reading gay-themed texts with students in public high

schools was unimaginable.

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BECOMING READERS OF LITERATURE WITH LGBT THEMES

Engaging student readers with LGBT-themed literature,

though, is not limited to high school. Hamilton (1998),

for example, taught the young adult novel, Jack (Homes,

1990), to his New York city middle school students (ages

11–14) in response to an eighth grader’s letter to the fac-

ulty complaining about the problem of homophobia in the

school. Kauffmann, who was a teacher in an elementary,

multi-age, structured English immersion classroom in a

large Tucson, Arizona, school district, introduced literature

with gay and lesbian characters to her students (ages 6–10)

in a one-day literature study that was documented by a

colleague. Like Hoffman, Schall and Kauffmann (2003)

were prompted by their work with pre-service teachers

who argued such books were “inappropriate” and that

children did not and could not know about or understand

issues of homosexuality.

In a more comprehensive study, Epstein (2000) de-

scribes the complicated negotiations of gender and sexual-

ity in a Year 5 (ages 9–10) ethnically-mixed classroom in

a working-class school located in north London. Working

with a popular, out-to-his-colleagues, gay teacher, Mr.

Stuart, Epstein examines Stuart’s teaching on the topic,

“Me, My Family, and My History.” Focal texts for the topic

included Asha’s Mums (Elwin, & Paulse, 2000) and the

photopack, What is a Family? Although selected texts were

important to the study, Epstein (2000) documented, both

in the classroom and on the playground, the role that other

texts played in signifying gender and normalizing het-

erosexuality, including skipping rhymes and playground

games that reinforced strongly dichotomized gender roles

and lines. Hence, while Mr. Stuart worked hard to encour-

age students to see possibilities that were anti-heterosexist

and anti-homophobic, the dominant discourses around

gender and (hetero)sexuality prevailed.

Looking across these classrooms reveals some subtle-

ties relative to how young people as readers of LGBT-

themed texts are positioned in schools. It also helps us see

the possibilities and the limitations for young people as

readers of LGBT-themed young adult literature in these

spaces.

De ning Readers

Within school contexts—whether public or independent,

and regardless of geographic location—students are

invariably positioned as straight and often homophobic.

While many people in schools would acknowledge that

students might have a loving relationship with someone

who is lesbian or gay—an aunt, uncle, sibling, cousin,

or the like—students are addressed by text, teacher, or

institution as presumably straight and often aggressively

homophobic.

For example, in Athanases’s (1996) study, Liu’s

expressed goals were to teach an attitude of sensitivity

toward diversity and help students  nd common ground

across marginalized groups. She wanted “especially some

of the more homophobic members of our class to under-

stand where this [gay] person is coming from” (p. 232).

Despite this goal for homophobic students to understand a

gay person’s perspective and experience, there was still a

tacit suggestion that maintaining a position of homophobia

was acceptable in Liu’s classroom. In starting the unit, for

example, Liu chose a chapter from Martin Luther King

Jr.’s (1958/2010) book, Stride Toward Freedom, in part

because King “brings to life the age-old notions of love

as a unifying force, of hating the sin, but not the sinner”

(Athanases, 1996, p. 237).

This rationale suggests several problematic positionings

of both gay and straight students as readers of LGBT-

themed texts in this classroom. One positioning suggests

that homosexuality is a “sin” and that gay and lesbian

people are sinners; a second positioning suggests that

straight students, who are understood to be homophobic

students, are free to both view their gay peers as sinners

and to “hate” their fundamental sexual orientations and

gender identities. This is not to say that all of Liu’s students

were homophobic or even straight. In fact, one student in

the class came out as a lesbian a year and a half after the

reading, but all students were positioned as straight, and

generally homophobic.

This positioning was not unique to Liu’s classroom.

Hoffman (1993) even went so far as to say, in describing

his students, most of whom were racial minorities identi-

 ed with intellectual gifts, “it is hard to imagine a more

homophobic group” (p. 56).2 In the classroom Schall and

Kauffmann (2003) examined, students were positioned

as straight and were allowed the choice of not engaging

with the texts at all if they felt uncomfortable—a choice

that was made by four of the children in this class of 29.

Thus, students were empowered to maintain a homophobic

position.

Only Epstein (2000) and Greenbaum (1994) complicate

the positioning of students as readers of LGBT-themed

literature in schools. For example, Greenbaum’s aim was

to reach both gay/lesbian and straight-identi ed students,

helping the former hear their voices actively in texts, and

helping the latter see the range of “ways to be sexual

in the world” (p. 71). Even with these expressed goals,

however, Greenbaum’s only gay-identi ed student, who

was not out to his peers, felt he could only enter a class

discussion and raise issues related to homosexuality in

homophobic disguise, asking in a discussion of Conrad’s

(1910/2007) The Secret Sharer, “Is this about faggots?” (p.

72). Similarly, in Epstein’s study, Mr. Stuart encouraged

students to see possibilities that were anti-heterosexist and

anti-homophobic. Even so, as in Greenbaum’s school, the

dominant discourses around gender and (hetero)sexuality

prevailed in positioning the students and urging them to

position themselves as straight and/or homophobic.

Across all of these studies, then, students are ei-

ther positioned, or position themselves, as straight,

homophobic, and lacking any real knowledge of lesbian

or gay issues.

152

MOLLIE V. BLACKBURN AND CAROLINE T. CLARK

De ning Texts

The actual use of LGBT-themed young adult and/or chil-

dren’s literature across these studies was complicated and

limited as well, as was the assumed work that these texts

did in each classroom. How texts were selected and posi-

tioned seems clearly related to the positioning of young

people as readers.

How Texts were Selected. In all of these studies, texts

were selected by adults—generally by teachers, or by

teachers in collaboration with research partners. While

several of the selections were children’s and young

adult literature, many were not. Often a text’s form was

instrumental to legitimizing its uptake in classrooms. For

example, Hoffman’s (1993) use of Torch Song Trilogy—a

play, written for an adult audience—was aimed, in part,

at disguising its LGBT themes and focusing, instead,

on its form. Because of his plans to introduce playwrit-

ing, among other genres, Hoffman felt that Torch Song

Trilogy (Fierstein, 1988), with its innovative structure,

would be an acceptable text in a creative writing class.

Similarly, Reiko Liu’s (Athanases, 1996) use of the essay

“Dear Anita” stemmed in part from its form. McNaught’s

(1988) persuasive essay, like the form of Torch Song

Trilogy, provided a model for subsequent student writing

and positioned the text as a legitimate choice in the high

school English classroom. Finally, Greenbaum’s (1994)

use of canonical texts to explore gay and lesbian subtexts

was legitimized by the form and stature of these texts as

“classics” (p. 72).

Selections of LGBT-themed children’s and young adult

literature included Hamilton’s (1998) use of the young

adult novel Jack, Pankop’s (Carey-Webb, 2001) use of the

short story, “Am I Blue?,” and the children’s picture books

used by Schall and Kauffmann (2003). Epstein (2000)

departed from the usual text mode through her use of the

photopack, What is a Family?, a collection of photographs

of families, including a photo of two women, a baby (and

a cat), which the students steadfastly resisted reading as a

lesbian couple and their child.

What was Done to, and with Texts. When readings of LG-

BT-themed literature happen in schools, they typically oc-

cur behind the closed door of a classroom, where teachers

work quietly alone against the institutional grain in order

to provide students access to texts that they hope will, at

best, challenge heterosexism, homophobia, and oppressive

gender norms, or at least provide exposure to issues and

encourage tolerance among students (Carey-Webb, 2001;

Greenbaum, 1994; Hoffman, 1993). In some instances,

such work is institutionally embraced and supported by

colleagues and/or administrators (Athanases, 1996; Ep-

stein, 2000; Hamilton, 1998; Schall & Kauffmann, 2003).

In all of the classrooms studied, reading LGBT-themed

texts was a singular event. Typically, such readings oc-

curred only once in the school year, and at times on a

single day—as in the case of Schall and Kauffmann (2003)

and Pankop (Carey-Webb, 2001). Indeed, many of these

studies chronicle the single time that an LGBT-themed

text was ever taken up in the course of a student’s K–12

schooling. In Greenbaum’s (1994) case, LGBT-themed

texts were not taken up at all; rather, canonical texts were

read to uncover hidden subtexts, including for the  rst

time, possible homoerotic ones.

In many of these classrooms, the curricular focus was

often the force that shaped how LGBT-themed young

adult and children’s literature was used and to whom it

was addressed. In Epstein’s (2000) study, for example,

Mr. Stuart’s work with LGBT-themed texts was part of a

unit on “Me, My Family, and My History”—a unit spe-

ci cally intended as an opportunity for children to engage

in anti-racist, anti-sexist, and anti-heterosexist work.

Pankop’s (Carey-Webb, 2001) use of Bruce Coville’s “Am

I Blue?” occurs in a unit on “Fear,” a topic that presumes

homophobia in its basest terms (“fear of gay people”),

along with the fear- lled lives that gays and lesbians are

presumed to face (as experienced by Vincent in the story).

Likewise, Schall and Kauffman (2003) embedded their

use of children’s literature with lesbian and gay characters

in a unit on “Survival” with a focus on name-calling on

the playground—a real issue in the lives of the children.

Students were invited to engage with a wide-range of

quality picture books, but the unit framing caused some

confusion as the children were expected to recognize that

calling someone “gay” was an insult; at the same time

the class’s discussion focused on positive portrayals of

gay people required them to use these terms in positive

ways. Positioning the children as straight and possibly

homophobic outsiders to this discourse seemed to make

it dif cult for the children to engage more positively with

the selected texts.

In Hoffman’s (1993) teaching of Torch Song Trilogy,

the focus was on creative writing, and Hoffman described

the play to his students as a “daring” text that “might

shock or upset them” in places, and tried to focus on the

structural aspects of the play. Yet, he also felt this text was

one that could serve as a useful vehicle to change students’

perceptions and attitudes towards gay males and lesbians.

This focus on the text as daring, shocking, and upsetting,

as well as holding the potential to change students’ minds

links directly to the positioning of Hoffman’s students as

overtly and determinedly homophobic.

Reiko Liu’s (Athanases, 1996) choice of the essay

“Dear Anita” was similarly focused on her sense of her

students as homophobic, and the notion that their ho-

mophobia was linked, in part, to their religious beliefs.

Her choice was aimed explicitly to expose her students

to an author, McNaught, who was simultaneously family-

oriented and religious, traits he shared with many of her

students and also gay—an identity that was apparently

at odds with nearly all of her students at the time of the

assignment.

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BECOMING READERS OF LITERATURE WITH LGBT THEMES

In Hamilton’s (1998) case, Jack was taken up spe-

ci cally to address a student-identi ed concern about ho-

mophobia in the middle school. Finally, while Greenbaum

(1994) used canonical texts to explore gay and lesbian

subtexts, she was careful to address “all the subtexts, not

just homoerotic ones” (p. 72) so as to protect herself as

a closeted lesbian teacher and to engage her students in

reading for “racism, sexism, and cultural differences” and

to learn to do these kinds of readings on their own. In all

cases texts were chosen as a means toward a didactic end

of exposing students to issues pertinent to LGBTQ people

so as to provoke empathy, understanding, and a sense of

commonality across differences. While using texts in such

didactic ways in classrooms is neither “bad” nor uncom-

mon, it concerns us that LGBT-themed literature seems to

be used in only these ways. That these texts might provoke

pleasure, humor, or self-recognition in their readers was

rarely, if ever, a consideration.

What Texts were Asked to Do. Since all of the students

were assumed to be or positioned as straight, texts in

these classrooms were typically employed as “windows”

(Bishop, 1992; Smith, 1997) through which students might

peer into a different world, vicariously experience oppres-

sion, and gain empathy for an “other’s” experience. Only

in the case of Hamilton’s (1998) use of Jack were students

asked to see themselves in the story, and then, only in

relation to Jack, the straight adolescent protagonist who

learns that his father is gay after his parents’ divorce. So,

while readings of these texts were sometimes framed as a

“mirror” for straight students, students were rarely asked

to see re ections of themselves in LGBTQ or homophobic

characters (e.g., the bully in “Am I Blue?”). This is par-

ticularly troubling since students across all studies were

regularly positioned as homophobic. In Liu’s (Athanases,

1996) class, students were even allowed to maintain their

homophobia while reading “Dear Anita,” not actively

but silently, by failing to discuss the problems implicit in

“hating the sin and not the sinner.”

Because students were presumed to be straight and/or

homophobic (either by teachers or in Epstein’s case, by

themselves or their peers), the use of texts as windows or

mirrors was particularly problematic for queer or question-

ing youth because they were effectively erased from vis-

ibility in discussions or presumptions about the audience

for the books. In their presumed absence, a teacher could

not mediate students’ gaze through a window at straight

characters or into a mirror at LGBTQ characters. Aside

from Greenbaum’s hope that any lesbian or gay students

might hear their voices in the subtexts of canonical litera-

ture, students were never invited to see themselves or their

possible queer selves in the texts.

Most of the LGBT-themed children’s and young adult

literature in these classrooms, including What is a Fam-

ily?, would fall into Cart and Jenkins’ (2006) category

of HV, homosexual visibility. In other words, almost all

of the texts were asked to make homosexuals visible, but

they were not asked to show either that gay and lesbian

people are just like straight people or to represent queer

communities. The single exception to this is Bauer’s “Am

I Blue?,” which was used in Pankop’s urban high school

class (Carey-Webb, 2001). This short story, we argue, has

a more developed sense of queer consciousness (QC),

because several of the stories in this collection show

“GLBTQ characters in the context of their communities

of GLBTQ people” (Cart & Jenkins, p. xx).

Consequences

School is a signi cant site where young people become

readers, both collectively and individually, and where

readers, acts of reading, and texts themselves are de ned

and rede ned. Scholarship on reading LGBT-themed

literature in schools, however, is sparse. The studies that

do exist suggest that these contexts are severely limited

and limiting in terms of the possibilities they allow for

readers and texts. The homophobic and heterosexist in-

stitution of schooling shapes and limits how readers are

de ned by others and by themselves. In all of the stud-

ies, readers in schools were presumed to be straight and

often homophobic. This positioning, combined with the

limited ways that texts are read—often in isolation from

broader curricula, and typically toward didactic ends—

may lead, at best, to sympathetic responses in straight

student readers who feel sorry for gay people. However,

this response leaves LGBTQ students in the classroom

positioned as pitiable. Moreover, by exposing students to

LGBT-themed literature in schools without an end goal of

actively combating homophobia and heterosexism, teach-

ers fail to hold themselves and their students accountable

for the injustices and inequities experienced by LGBT

youth. Teachers can say they have done their work by

raising issues and making texts available, but that it is not

their job to impose their beliefs on homophobic, hetero-

sexist students (see, e.g., Schneider, 2001). In effect, by

positioning students as straight and even homophobic and

then leaving their beliefs unchallenged, teachers tacitly

af rm and even promote heterosexism and homophobia

in schools.

The severe limitations that currently surround read-

ers and reading of LGBT-themed texts in classrooms, as

documented in recent scholarship, provoke the following

questions:

What would it look like to read LGBTQ-themed litera-•

ture with LGBTQ people, rather than people presumed

to be straight if not homophobic?

What would it look like to do this reading in contexts •

that are more queer-friendly than typical school and

classroom contexts?

The next section addresses these questions by examining

recent scholarship on LGBT-themed reading (and writing)

outside of the institution of schooling.

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MOLLIE V. BLACKBURN AND CAROLINE T. CLARK

Reading LGBT-Themed Literature

in Out-of-School LGBTQ Youth Communities

Contexts in which LGBTQ youth engage with literature

re ecting their experiences are distinctive from in-school

contexts in both positive and negative ways. Although the

opportunity to understand how readers of LGBT-themed

literature are mindful of con icting values among stake-

holders, such as administrators, parents and guardians,

and other community members is lost, the opportunity to

interpret literature while less encumbered by heterosexism

and homophobia is gained. We review several projects that

focus on LGBT themes using literary and non-literary

forms in queer-friendly, out-of-school contexts: Black-

burn’s (2002/2003, 2003a, 2003b, 2005a, 2005b) work at

The Attic (or sometimes named with the pseudonym, The

Loft) a youth-run center for LGBTQ youth; Halverson’s

(2007) work with About Face Youth Theatre (AFYT), a

youth theatre program dedicated to working with LGBTQ

adolescents; and de Castell and Jenson’s (2007) work on

the Pridehouse project, which was a study with street-

involved LGBTQ youth.

The project at The Attic was a three-year literacy

ethnography (Street, 1995) that documented the literacy

performances of youth who identi ed as LGBTQ and

ranged in age from 12 to 23 years old. The youth were

diverse in terms of race, class, and gender, but the major-

ity were African American males who were poor and

working class. The youth were predominantly urban,

being born and raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The

project captures literacy performances in a variety of situ-

ations associated with The Attic: a literacy group called

Story Time (Blackburn, 2002/2003, 2005a), a speakers’

bureau (2003b), and working with individuals outside of

formal groups (2002/2003, 2003a, 2003b). Although the

purposes of the literacy performances varied from situ-

ation to situation, Blackburn was particularly interested

in documenting reading and writing for social change.

Young adult literature was not her focus per se, but this

literature was present and sometimes prominent in the

work of Story Time.

Halverson (2007) documented AFYT’s program in

Chicago, Illinois during a full season, starting with the

initial storytelling workshops—in which LGBTQ youth

talk about the stories of their lives to generate ideas of

what might be scripted, rehearsed, and performed—and

ending with the  nal performance. Of the 60 participants,

ranging in age from 13 to 19 years old, she focuses on six

who were diverse in terms of race and gender, although

predominantly White and female. The stories, scripts, and

performances in this project provided a means for “explor-

ing, understanding, and trying on identities” (p. 171). As

will be discussed later, even though the texts were not

young adult literature the stories and performances pro-

duced in this project further our understanding of readers

of LGBT-themed young adult literature.

The Pridehouse project was a “short-term, ethno-

graphically based, peer-to-peer study to identify the

conditions and assess the needs of street-involved ‘queer

and questioning youth’” (de Castell & Jenson, 2007, p.

131) that took place in Vancouver, British Columbia. The

entirely queer team of researchers comprised a balance of

university-af liates and youth who were or had been liv-

ing on the streets. Over  ve months, they trained together;

developed, distributed, collected, and analyzed surveys;

observed and took  eld notes; conducted and recorded

interviews and focus group discussions; and photographed

and videotaped “sites of safety and danger” (p. 136) and

the people in them. Later, they produced a web page

that features a video presenting their data. Like the other

projects, de Castell and Jenson’s does not include young

adult literature, but the authors make a compelling argu-

ment for what self-produced multimedia and multimodal

texts, rather than more typically schoolish texts, have to

teach us in terms of working with “youth for whom formal

mainstream schooling had been a hostile and exclusionary

environment” (p. 146). In heterosexist and homophobic

societies, it is worth looking at the texts youth produce

outside of school in addition to the texts they consume,

both in and out of school.

De ning Readers

As described above, all of the youth in these three projects

identi ed, at least at the point of data collection, as not-

straight. Some of them identi ed as lesbian or gay, and

others as bisexual. Some of the people who were bisexual

were in heterosexual relationships, but unquestionably

identi ed as not-straight. There were youth who had

transitioned from one gender to the other, and in doing so

went from experiencing same-sex desire to opposite-sex

desire, but these young people did not identify as straight.

Some identi ed as queer, an identity that allows for  uidity

among various sexual identities, behaviors, and desires;

but, again, these youth did not identify as straight.

The researchers in all of these projects acknowledge

the impact of the youth’s non-straight identities on their

social status by including descriptors such as vulner-

able (Blackburn, 2005b), neglected, abused, harassed

(Blackburn, 2005a), marginalized (Blackburn, 2005a; de

Castell & Jenson, 2007), stigmatized, disenfranchised,

traumatized (Halverson, 2007), and at-risk (de Castell

& Jenson, 2007; Halverson, 2007). The researchers do

not, however, let these descriptors stand alone. All three

of the projects are based on the understanding that these

young people are knowledgeable about themselves,

their experiences, and their worlds, and are, therefore,

described as powerful, educated, and artistic. Blackburn

even recognizes the privileges these young people have

and sometime assume by performing straightness and,

sadly, homophobia. Moreover, these researchers portray

the young people as leaders and valued employees. De

Castell and Jenson (2007) even position the youth as co-

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BECOMING READERS OF LITERATURE WITH LGBT THEMES

researchers, and Blackburn (e.g., 2005a) portrays them

as agents for change or activists.

Their complicated positionalities had implications for

their status as students. Although the youth in Halver-

son’s project were predominantly students, those in both

Blackburn and de Castell and Jenson’s projects were

sometimes students, sometimes not students, but almost

always had troubling relationships with schools. Student

status is important to consider in thinking about readers

of LGBT-themed young adult literature because even

though the theme is not sanctioned at school, the genre

is recognized and valued. Some teachers may consider

young adult literature to be barely-school texts, but the

young people in these projects understand young adult

literature as decidedly school texts, and, as such, are not

drawn to them.

This tension between teachers and students’ understand-

ings of young adult literature in classrooms is signi cant

since many teachers use young adult literature primarily

to engage students who are less interested in school. Still,

De Castell and Jenson (2007) found that “school-based

discourses and text-based literacy practices,” including but

not limited to young adult literature, can “be powerfully

disenfranchising for a population already marginalized”

(p. 132). They explain that traditional academic literacies

“have worked less for than against” (p. 137) the young

people in their project. With this in mind, we shift our focus

from de ning youth in these projects to de ning texts.

De ning Texts

The texts used in the Attic, AFYT, and Pridehouse do not

 t neatly within those categories typically understood as

children’s and young adult literature. These alternative

texts are related to the negative school experiences of the

young people and the consequences of these experiences

on youths’ perceptions of schoolish texts. Here, we ex-

amine how texts were selected, what was done with them,

and what the texts were asked to do across the three con-

texts. We conclude this section on out-of-school reading,

by considering the consequences of these practices for

LGBTQ youth and their reading.

How Texts were Selected. In the Story Time project, both

the adult facilitator, Blackburn, and the participating

youth selected texts to share at Story Time, generally,

independently of one another. Blackburn documented

their weekly meetings over the course of a year, during

which the facilitator shared texts at 82% of the meetings,

and youth shared at 47% of the meetings. Of the texts the

facilitator shared, 80% were texts that would generally

be considered literature. These texts included poems,

short stories, picture books, excerpts from novels, and

excerpts from graphic novels, among others. Although the

intended audience of this literature ranged from children to

adolescents to adults, a good portion of it came from the

anthology for young adults entitled Am I Blue? Coming

out from the Silence (Bauer, 1994). Of the texts the youth

shared, 67% were authored by those sharing them. These

texts included journal entries, poems, short stories, videos,

art, and photographs, among other things. The texts chosen

by the youth included a broader range of texts, including

journal entries, for example, and other text forms, such

as art and photographs.

Texts in the other two projects were even further

removed from what is traditionally conceptualized as

children’s and young adult literature. AFYT worked from

stories told by youth, mostly orally, although some were

submitted on-line and via email. These stories were then

synthesized and organized thematically and preliminary

scripts were created and revised. Later, scenes were

rehearsed and ultimately performed as the theatrical pro-

duction Up Until Now. The AFYT process was a drama-

turgical one. In contrast, the Pridehouse process was an

ethnographic one in that youth stories were gathered via

surveys, photographs, interviews, and focus groups and

then transformed into a video on a webpage representing

the lives of these street-involved queer youth.

Across these three projects, texts authored by others

were replaced by performative, multimodal, and multi-

medial ones authored by youth themselves. The transition

from written to alternative texts can be understood in the

context of youth working to distance themselves from

school, an institution they have come to know as hateful.

The shift in authorship, in our view, can be understood as

a move toward the pleasurable, as we discuss in the next

section; as well as a shift toward self-portraiture and queer

consciousness and communities (Cart & Jenkins, 2006).

What was Done to and with Texts. Reading LGBT-themed

texts in schools was framed as an isolated event, something

that happened once during the school year and perhaps

only once during the students’ K–12 lives. This is quite

distinct from the reading of LGBT-themed texts in out-of-

schools contexts, where such texts were taken up across

the span of the project. LGBT-themed texts were framed,

in these contexts, as a part of everyday life.

Moreover, the framing of LGBT-themed texts in

out-of-schools projects was built around entertainment

and pragmatic political action. This is not to stay that

political action was not an implicit goal of the teachers

and researchers conducting in-school work. However,

the explicit framing in the out-of-school projects stands

in stark contrast to the framing of fear, bullying, and

survival, which is how LGBT-themed texts have been

framed in schools. In Story Time at The Attic, texts were

framed as entertainment. They were selected and shared

with the pleasure of the participants in mind. Of course,

what was pleasurable to some was not pleasurable to

others, so not all texts pleased all participants, but the

primary criteria for selection was pleasure. The AFYT

project also centered around pleasure, but rather than

the pleasure of its participants, the participants aimed

156

MOLLIE V. BLACKBURN AND CAROLINE T. CLARK

to create a pleasurable text for the audience members of

their play, Up Until Now.

The explicit goal of political action is most clearly

articulated in the texts produced by The Attic’s speakers’

bureau and the Pridehouse project. The Attic’s speakers’

bureau created documents designed to educate youth and

youth service providers about the experiences of LGBTQ

youth. The Pridehouse documentary was designed “to

better inform a community-based housing development

organization about the conditions, needs, and expressed

desires of the speci c population for whom they sought

to improve existing housing support” (http://www.sfu.

ca/pridehouse/) ,which was street-involved queer and

questioning youth. Thus, LGBT-themed texts taken up in

these out-of-school projects were framed both in terms of

pleasure and political action.

What Texts were Asked to Do. LGBT-themed literature

read and discussed in classrooms seemed mostly to offer

a window through which to observe LGBTQ people, since

the readers were de ned as straight and even homophobic.

In these out-of-school settings, though, the readers were

de ned as LGBTQ, and the literature read tended to serve

as a mirror, a way of seeing themselves, as LGBTQ youth,

in literature. The majority of the texts, however, were

distinctive in that they were produced by those engaging

with them. In other words, most of the LGBT-themed

texts taken up in out-of-school contexts were neither

windows nor mirrors; rather, they were self-portraits. Of

course, these self-portraits could serve as mirrors or even

windows for participants in the groups, but their primary

purpose was more about representing themselves, their

experiences, and their worlds.

The transition from texts written about queer youth

to texts produced by and about queer youth, we argue, is

related to Cart and Jenkins’s (2006) typology of LGBT-

themed children’s and young adult literature. We argue

that the most prominent category of literature, promoting

homosexual visibility and gay assimilation, would not

have been of particular interest to the LGBTQ youth in

the out-of-school projects. Literature that increases ho-

mosexual visibility would not engage these young people

because they were already visible. They knew LGBTQ

people existed, that they were such people, and that there

were other people like them. Likewise, the literature that

does gay assimilationist work would have been of little use

to the young people in these projects, particularly those

in Blackburn and de Castell and Jenson’s work because

they were not, for a variety of reasons, assimilating. The

experiences being captured in these texts were neither

re ective nor informative of their own.

Although literature categorized as queer conscious-

ness and community would have been quite interesting

to LGBTQ youth in these out-of-school projects, Cart

and Jenkins point out that not very much children’s and

young adult literature falls into this category. Therefore, it

seems to us, these LGBTQ youth created their own texts

that incorporated queer consciousness and communities

because they did not  nd much young adult literature that

provides images of LGBTQ people at least connected with,

if not immersed in, communities accepting of them, like

The Attic, AFYT, and Pridehouse.

Consequences

A signi cant impact of the creation of these texts was

that it allows the young people in these projects to de ne

texts rather than being de ned by them. So, for example,

Justine, in Blackburn’s (2002/2003) project at The At-

tic, combined words from a love poem, images from a

non- ction historical text, a photograph of her girlfriend

and her, and a bit of prose she wrote herself to produce

a video in which she was not positioned in stereotypical

ways but in ways that she de ned. She was not a vulner-

able lonely lesbian but an “empowered dyke” among gay

rights activists.

The work that LGBTQ youth have accomplished in

out-of-school LGBTQ youth communities, as represented

by The Attic, AFYT, and Pridehouse, is signi cant, but it

raises a couple of questions:

What would it look like to do this work with readers •

who are both LGBTQ people and their allies?

Is it possible to do such work in ways that foreground •

young adult literature as it is typically conceptualized,

to frame this literature in terms of pleasure and politi-

cal action, while being cognizant of how the reading

is being accomplished?

These questions and those raised by the classroom-based

research will guide the following section.

Reading LGBT-Themed Literature in Queer-Friendly

Contexts among LGBTQ People and Their Allies

We turn, now, to a project that we have been working

on since the spring of 2006. The project is an offshoot

of another in which teachers committed to combating

heterosexism and homophobia in classrooms and schools

through literature and  lm have been meeting monthly

since the fall of 2004 (Blackburn, Clark, Kenney, & Smith,

2010). We have come to call ourselves the Pink TIGers. In

our meetings, we struggle together to  gure out whether

to use LGBT-themed young adult and children’s literature

in our classes, and if so, how to do so. As a part of our

learning, we decided to bring together students from our

various schools to read and discuss LGBT-themed litera-

ture. This chapter examines the seven meetings that we

participated in during 2006 and 2007.

In part, this project is important to consider because it

takes place in a queer-friendly context. Unlike the scholar-

ship located in classrooms and schools but like that located

in out-of-school contexts, this book discussion group takes

place in a context that at least strives to be queer friendly.

Although we considered meeting in the high schools of

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BECOMING READERS OF LITERATURE WITH LGBT THEMES

students and teachers involved and the university with

which several of us are af liated, we opted for the local

queer youth center because it provided some privacy from

classmates who may not approve of involvement in the

group, and it introduced participants to a space speci cally

designed to meet the needs of queer youth.

Still, even this place was not perfectly queer-friendly.

After our  rst meeting a furious, homophobic, and threat-

ening father came to get his daughter away from the “gay

teacher” who gave her a “gay book” and invited her to a

“gay establishment.” We considered relocating after this

meeting, but instead, the center implemented a policy

prohibiting the admittance of adults who are not escorted

by youth af liated with the center. This space with this

policy provided the group with a queer-friendly context

in which to discuss LGBT-themed young adult literature.

Beyond context, this project offers important insights on

becoming readers of LGBT-themed young adult literature

because of the ways that readers and texts are de ned. We

turn to those in the following portions of this section.

De ning Readers

Across seven meetings, a core group of about ten people

attended. The majority of the youth were freshman and

sophomores, with the exception of one eighth-grader and

one senior, both of whom only attended a single meeting.

The adults included three high school English teachers

and facilitators of their schools’ Gay Straight Alliances,

three university faculty members, two doctoral students,

and two pre-service teachers. The English teachers and

faculty members attended regularly.

The majority of the participants were White. There were

two African American youth participants, one of whom

is a boy, and the other who is transgender. One girl self-

identi es as Mexican American and another as African

American and Middle Eastern. One woman identi es

as a person of color, speci cally African American and

German. Of the 21 participants, three boys either stated

or suggested they were gay, three women identi ed as

lesbian, and one girl implied she was a lesbian.3 Another

youth sometimes identi es as male and other times as

female but seems to be consistently attracted to females.

If any of the participants identify as bisexual, they have

not articulated this identi cation in the group. Of the eight

people who are lesbian, gay, or transgender, three are

people of color; two of whom are youth. These two only

attended once during the period being reported here. Of

regularly attending participants, there are four White adult

allies; four White gay or lesbian people, two of whom are

youth; and two youth allies who are people of color.

The readers of LGBT-themed young adult literature

in this group are de ned neither as entirely straight nor

LGBTQ, thus distinguishing this project from those lo-

cated in schools, which overwhelmingly de ne readers as

straight and sometimes homophobic. The project is also

distinguished from those located in out-of-school contexts,

which de ne readers as LGBTQ. Of the ten regular par-

ticipants in this group, four identify as lesbian or gay and

six identify as straight allies for LGBTQ people. None of

them identify as homophobic. This holds true across all

21 participants.

Because the group comprises LGBTQ people and their

allies but not homophobes, it provides a unique opportu-

nity for LGBTQ people to talk about their lives openly and

for allies to gain insights about the ways heterosexism and

homophobia impact the population with whom they are

in alliance. In addition, members of this group are teach-

ers and students but in a non-school setting. People come

together to talk about young adult literature with LGBT-

themes because they want to. Our identities as teachers and

students cannot be dismissed, though, because the ways

we know one another are through our roles as teachers and

students. Although these roles provide the foundation for

our relationships, the dynamics are different.

Teachers were not responsible for designing and/or

implementing particular curricula, syllabi, and lesson

plans; and students were not responsible for completing

assignments or passing assessments. Neither was there

pressure, aside from our own habits, as teachers and

students, to direct conversation toward literature conven-

tions, poetic devices, literary themes, and the like. Our

discussions typically centered on what we liked and didn’t

like about a book and how certain stories in the literature

reminded us of stories in our lives. As a result, we were

all positioned as knowledgeable; that is, knowledgeable

enough to work together to present, select, read, and dis-

cuss LGBT-themed young adult literature in ways that

would allow us to re ect on our lives as LGBTQ people

and their allies.

De ning Texts

Most of the texts we selected as a group re ected conven-

tional understandings of young adult literature; however,

the actual selections, how we engaged with them, and

what we asked texts to do and enable in our group were

often unconventional. Here, we will discuss these issues,

along with the consequences we see for working with

LGBT-themed young adult literature in queer-friendly

out-of-school settings.

How Texts were Selected. Across the 2006–2007 meet-

ings, our group read eight books. Youth and adults selected

texts together, with adults generally deferring to youth’s

choices. Starting in the autumn of 2006, we began with

David Levithan’s (2003) Boy Meets Boy in which Paul, a

gay high school student, attends a school where the quar-

terback and the homecoming queen are the same person

and the town supports the “Joy Scouts” instead of “Boy

Scouts.” Through Levithan’s  ctional world, readers can

imagine what it might be like if homophobic values were

greatly diminished and how Paul’s friendships and roman-

tic relationships unfold in such an imaginary world.

158

MOLLIE V. BLACKBURN AND CAROLINE T. CLARK

At the end of each meeting, we talked together to

determine what we would read for the next meeting. After

Boy Meets Boy, we read Stephen Chbosky’s (1999) Perks

of Being a Wall ower, Julia Watts’s (2001) Finding H.F.,

and Joe Babcock’s (2002) The Tragedy of Miss Geneva

Flowers. The latter book features Erick, a young, gay male

growing up and attending Catholic school in Minneapolis.

His search for identity and acceptance from his family

leads him into a life-changing friendship with Chloe, a

drag queen, and time on the streets where he encounters

drugs, alcohol, and their consequences. He also develops

his own drag personae, Miss Geneva Flowers, and devel-

ops the courage, in the end, to accept himself and demand

acceptance from his parents.

The last book selected at the end of the 2006 school

year was Kim Wallace’s (2004) Erik & Isabelle: Freshman

Year at Foresthill High. This is the  rst of a series of four

books about two best friends, both of whom are gay. Erik

is academic, athletic, and being raised in a homophobic

household. Isabelle’s family, in contrast, is open and ac-

cepting of her lesbian identity. Across the  rst and second

books (Wallace, 2004), Erik and Isabelle support each

other as they endure homophobia and fall in and out of

love. We read Erick & Isabelle over the summer and it

was the  rst book discussed in autumn of 2007, followed

by David Sedaris’s (1997) Holidays on Ice, a collection

of short stories related to Christmas. Many of the stories

are autobiographical accounts by the out gay author with

a presumed adult readership.

The last books selected were Peters’s (2003) Keep-

ing You a Secret and Bauer’s Am I Blue. All books were

selected collaboratively by youth and adults and on the

basis of sincere interest and a desire to share a reading

experience with others. Often, books were suggested

because someone in the group had already read the book

and thought the entire group might enjoy reading it. This

was the case for Boy Meets Boy, The Perks of Being a

Wall ower, Finding H.F., Holidays On Ice, Keeping You a

Secret, and Am I Blue. Of these, Holidays on Ice would not

be categorized as a young adult text, or even LGBT-themed

per se, but as adult short  ction. Likewise, The Tragedy of

Miss Geneva Flowers was written for and marketed to an

adult audience. In the case of Holidays on Ice, many of

the adult participants had read or heard this text read and

thought the humorous essays would be fun to share as a

group, particularly when everyone met in December.

The Tragedy of Miss Geneva Flowers, on the other

hand, was youth-selected. After reading Levithan’s love

story set in a queer-inclusive world, Chbosky’s epistolary

novel, and Watts’s novel based in rural Kentucky, several

youth participants suggested we read a realistic LGBT-

themed book set in a suburban context more re ective

of their own experiences. One of the youth participants

did an online library search and found several titles and

descriptions that sounded appealing to him. He brought

the list to a meeting, read the descriptions to the group,

and together, the group chose Miss Geneva. Similarly,

Kim Wallace’s series was chosen because its title and

description sounded like it would re ect the life-situations

of many of the group participants who, after reading Miss

Geneva, wanted to focus on LGBT issues in schools,

featuring both male and female characters. This time, an

adult participant brought in titles after an online search,

and Wallace’s Erik & Isabelle series was chosen by the

group. Interestingly, while Erik & Isabelle: Freshman Year

was a favorite of many of the youth (and read near the end

of their own freshman year), Erik & Isabelle: Sophomore

Year was received much more critically, and the group,

lead by the youth participants, opted not to read any more

books in the series.

What was Done to/with Texts. Reading and discussing

LGBT-themed literature was the primary purpose of

our group. Unlike classrooms, where reading an LGBT-

themed text might happen only once, if ever, our readings

occurred over time. And, unlike the out-of-school, queer-

centered contexts, where LGBT-themed texts were framed

as part of the everyday lives of the participants, reading

LGBT-themed-literature was a new, but welcome experi-

ence for several of the group participants. David Levia-

than’s Boy Meets Boy, for example, was the  rst piece of

LGBT-themed young adult literature read by many youth

members of the group, either gay or straight. In addition,

our group included queer and straight youth and adult

readers, all of whom were actively non-homophobic. As

a result, texts were never selected for didactic purposes,

as they often are in classrooms. Texts were not actively

read for their form (e.g., play or essay) or their place as

a “classic” in the literary canon. Instead, as in the out-of-

school, queer-centered spaces, LGBT-themed literature

was read, primarily, for entertainment. What entertain-

ment and pleasure came to mean, however, was negotiated

through conversation in the group.

No book was automatically embraced simply because

it was deemed good by either a youth or an adult reader.

Instead, participants typically pointed out what they liked

in the text, often quoting passages that were marked ahead

of time, or reading favorite scenes aloud to others in order

to share what was most appealing—or not. One young

ally, for example, was often drawn to writing style. She

would frequently read particular passages aloud in order

to showcase what she admired in an author’s word choice,

use of imagery, or humor. For example, in the discussion of

Julia Watts’s Finding H.F., this female, youth ally shared,

“There’s just so many little funny parts. On page 66, ‘One

time…’ —talking about her grandma—‘One time she lost

her dentures and we  nally found them in the breadbox.’ I

just did little chuckles out loud,” to which a lesbian, adult

participant replied, “Yeah, you can picture the author

having her own little writer’s notebook and being like,

‘Oh, I’ve got to write this one down. This is going to  t

in somewhere.’”

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BECOMING READERS OF LITERATURE WITH LGBT THEMES

At times, passages were selected for sharing by youth or

adults because they triggered a memory of a similar situ-

ation. In Perks of Being a Wall ower, Chbosky’s frequent

references to song titles elicited discussions of speci c

songs and musical groups (e.g., Pink Floyd, Fleetwood

Mack, the Smiths, Bright Eyes), and events that group

members associated with key songs. Similarly, scenes

from Perks, of characters driving at night and listening

to music with the windows down, triggered pleasurable

memories across the group. A young ally pointed to

one such scene, “The woman driving the car,” to which

an adult, lesbian participant responded, “Another great

scene,” followed by a gay youth replying, “I really like

that part too. Because it’s so real. It’s happened before.

You just  nd yourself sitting in the car with your favorite

people and this song comes on and suddenly your whole

outlook on life just changes.”

While texts could trigger feelings of humor and

pleasure, what was pleasing could also trigger complex

discussions of identity, sexuality, and love. In the discus-

sion of Finding H.F., for example, a gay youth participant

shared,

I really like the part in the movie, too…when they meet Dee

and Shantell, and they see those two guys holding hands

and walking through. And they ﬁ nd themselves following

in shock. And H.F. notices that Bo, once they walk away,

is kind of sad. You can imagine that because when you—I

know this from experience—but when I ﬁ rst came out and

everything and seeing other people together in real life.

A young man who was, at the time, questioning his

sexuality, continued, “It made you so sad.” The gay youth

participant then continued, “Because, you’re like, I’m

alone, so when am I going to  nd someone.” To which

the questioning youth responded, “Yeah.” An adult ally

added, “Actually, I relate to that too because even when

you see straight couples, you’re like, ohh,” and the gay

youth who initiated the discussion stated, “Everyone can

[relate to that].”

Texts, then, were discussed, at times, in schoolish

ways, with participants pointing to speci c page numbers,

chapters, or scenes to substantiate a claim (of humor or

realism, for example) or to highlight a word choice. Un-

like school, however, this kind of talk was not required or

directed towards an academic or pedagogical end. Rather,

the primary purpose for specifying particular passages and

scenes was to revel in the craft of writing and the pleasure

that writing brought to the reader, or to share a feeling—

of joy, humor, or pathos—with other readers. And, unlike

school, both youth and adults took the lead in  nding and

sharing these passages, and in sharing their emotional

responses to these texts. Moreover, these responses were

shaped by explicit references to one’s own identity and

sexuality. Rather than hiding these identities, both youth

and adults could draw on these identities in order to make

meaning from texts and extend one another’s understand-

ings of the texts and the negotiations of similar issues and

situations in life.

Beyond the purposes of entertainment, then, we would

argue that there was a form of political action occurring

in this out-of-school reading group. While reading LGBT-

themed texts in the out-of-school, queer-centered contexts

was clearly oriented towards pragmatic, political action,

as characterized earlier, the political action of this group

was more subtle, but equally important. First, unlike vir-

tually all classroom-settings, young people and adults in

the book discussion group were free to share their sexual

identities openly with one another, if they chose. Doing

so allowed both youth and adults to share experiences and

explore possibilities (both real and imagined) for being in

the world. In the case of responding to Finding H.F., for

example, two young people, one out and gay, the other

questioning his sexuality, could identify with Bo’s longing

to be in a loving relationship, as could the straight, adult

ally who responded to the same scene with a similar kind

of longing.

This is not to say that all discussions resulted in

reaching across differences. There were certainly many

conversations that highlighted distinctions between queer

and straight people and a few were even grounded in

homophobia. However, in this case, the fact that all three

could respond openly from a shared place of longing,

created a space for them to see connections across their

situations in that moment, and explore potential mean-

ings in the text more deeply. Such possible connections

are currently prohibited in classroom situations where

heterosexism is the presumed norm, and where naming

of one’s sexuality outside of compulsory heterosexuality

is typically taboo for both students and teachers.

Second, in the current climate of testing and account-

ability in schooling, opportunities for young people—

regardless of sexual and gender identities—to read with

adults in ways that promote pleasure and community are

rare. Unfortunately, out-of-school literacy opportunities at

libraries and elsewhere are, likewise, increasingly justi ed

solely for academic ends. So, in this queer-friendly context

where LBGTQ people and their allies came together fre-

quently to read and talk about books, another signi cant

end was to reconnect around reading for pleasure.

What Texts were Asked to Do. In this mixed group of

readers, where participants were LGBTQ or straight,

and youth or adult, texts were employed in myriad ways.

Across readers, texts served at times as mirrors—re ecting

queer, possible queer, or ally selves for both young people

and adults. At other times the books worked as windows,

allowing queer readers and their allies to see through

windows into the worlds that are (or could be realized)

around them. Aside from Holidays on Ice, which does

not represent either conventional LGBT-themed or young

adult literature, and Perks of Being a Wall ower, which

Cart and Jenkins (2006) categorize, in part, as HV, all of the

160

MOLLIE V. BLACKBURN AND CAROLINE T. CLARK

texts read in the reading group can be classi ed as either

GA or QC. Boy Meets Boy, Perks of Being a Wall ower,

Keeping you a Secret, and Erik and Isabelle: Freshman

Year and Sophomore Year all fall into the GA category,

showing that gay and lesbian people are just like straight

people in most ways. Boy Meets Boy, Finding H.F., The

Tragedy of Miss Geneva Flowers, and Erik and Isabelle:

Sophomore Year can all also be categorized as QC because

all, to varying degrees, show LGBTQ people  nding and

participating in larger, extended queer communities.

As windows and mirrors, these books enabled read-

ers in the group to understand similarities across lines of

difference relative to age, sexuality, and gender. Through

shared responses to texts, or the sharing of memories and

experiences that were provoked by the texts, participants

were able to see that all of us, LGBTQ or straight-ally,

youth or adult, are alike in most ways, re ecting Cart and

Jenkins GA category. But, because this was a group of

LGBTQ and straight allies, where LGBTQ people could

talk openly about their lives and experiences, important

differences could also be highlighted, revealing the sig-

ni cant ways that heterosexism and homophobia impacted

LGBTQ participants, but not allies.

For example, in a discussion of Miss Geneva Flowers,

an adult lesbian participant brought up how queer char-

acters in the book discuss their conscious choice to take

cabs, which cost more and depleted their already limited

incomes, instead of public transportation. She shared,

“Yeah, it was interesting to me when they chose to get

a cab versus public transportation. How they would talk

about was it worth [not] getting their asses kicked.” Two

adult allies responded, “De nitely” and “Right, for safety,”

to which a youth ally added, “Better than walking.” Here,

the adult lesbian participant agreed, but clari ed why her

point is decidedly about people perceived to be lesbian

or gay and gender non-conforming people protecting

themselves from homophobia and/or transphobia that

could lead to physical abuse. She stated, “But I liked, the

thing I appreciated is that it wasn’t just about walking or

not walking. It was about protection. That kind of thing

that I feel like you have to do all the time, deciding when

to be how, where. Just like the everydayness of it.” Her

response helped to show that, what felt common and

understood across readers, LGBTQ and straight, was

distinctly different to her as a lesbian reader. Her response

both validated Babcock’s (2002) rendering of the scene

and revealed to ally-readers how LGBTQ people have to

make many more conscious decisions about how to pres-

ent themselves publicly, all of the time, in order to protect

themselves from possible attacks.

This discussion prompted an adult ally to share a pas-

sage from the book, where an older, gay character shares

with the main character how he came to embrace his sexual

identity. She read,

I remember my childhood, but my memories are tweaked,

you know, it’s like I remember what I did but forgot who

I was. I’d forgotten what it was like to look at boys before

I actually allowed myself to. I forgot what it was like to

control my voice from sounding ﬂ amboyant. Or to make

a conscious effort to sit like a man. I see myself and all my

memories the way I see myself now, super gay. (Babcock,

2002, p. 91)

For another adult ally, this passage and the prior

discussion of protecting oneself caused her to wonder

aloud about what can be hidden or covered: “Seeing the

connections. When to cover, when not to cover, and you

just said, it’s so hard to cover your voice.” A male youth

participant, who at this point may have been questioning

or may have been identifying as gay, responded, in his soft,

high-pitched voice, “The way you talk, yeah. The  amboy-

ancy.” A youth ally then asked, “Is it like, have you talked

like that since you were a kid?” to which he responded,

“Yeah.” He went on to share how he is sometimes quiet

because of his voice, and how he used to feel like he had

to change his speech patterns in some situations:

Yeah, sometimes I don’t even talk. I just let people say

whatever they want. But other than that, I don’t feel I have

to hide my voice, that much. I really don’t. But when I did,

it was the hardest thing to do, like it was just, God, totally

against what I had to do.

Across these discussions, texts as both mirrors and win-

dows enabled important learning and sharing for LGBTQ

and ally participants alike. In her sharing in response to

the passage on taking cabs for safety, the adult lesbian

participant provided a window to ally participants, helping

them understand how seemingly simple decisions have

potentially dire consequences for LGBTQ people, and how

these have to be considered in nearly every situation.

Through her sharing, ally participants could begin to

understand the kinds of complex decisions relative to

identity and presentation of self in a homophobic world

that LGBTQ people have to carry out all of the time in

their daily lives, and consider ways to use this knowledge

to be more informed, supportive allies. Her sharing also

provided a mirror to LGBTQ people in the group, prompt-

ing them to share their own experiences with  guring out

how to navigate a complex, often homophobic world. The

discussion around her response, for example, led one youth

participant to talk about his own experiences of covering

his voice and how very, very dif cult this was. Again,

his sharing provided yet another window through which

ally-participants could see and understand the kinds of

daily work and decisions that LGBTQ do and face in a

homophobic world.

Consequences

Reading LGBT-themed young adult literature with readers

who are both LGBTQ people and allies in an expressly

queer-friendly context revealed opportunities that are

currently missing from both classroom-based settings

and exclusively queer-settings outside of schools. Unlike

161

BECOMING READERS OF LITERATURE WITH LGBT THEMES

in classroom settings in schools and exclusively queer-

settings outside of schools, readers in these discussion

groups were de ned as both LGBTQ people and straight

allies, and no one was positioned as homophobic. Not only

were these identity positions explicitly available in this

group, they were also openly claimed by group members

in ways that were rarely, if ever, allowed in classroom

settings—without negative consequences for both young

people and adults. Because LGBTQ and straight ally

positionings were clearly sanctioned in our group, the pos-

sibilities for reading LGBT-themed texts were expanded,

including what we asked these texts to do and what readers

could do with them.

Our group was a place where readers could engage with

LGBT-themed texts in academic ways, but toward plea-

surable, political ends, distinguishing this group’s aims

from those in classroom and exclusively queer settings.

For example, academic work around texts was certainly

an option in classrooms, and generally the most invited,

if not the only, way to engage with texts—LGBT-themed

or otherwise. In contrast, in the out-of-school settings at

the Attic/Loft, AFYT, and Pridehouse, working with texts

for entertainment and political action was always encour-

aged and often central to the groups’ goals. In our group,

academic ways of taking up texts (e.g., through attention

to language, imagery and writing craft) were common;

however, this was never for the purpose of teaching or

learning about language, imagery or writing craft. Rather,

they were intended to point out lines, passages, or phrases

that brought us pleasure, be it through humor, shared sad-

ness, or connected memories.

Most importantly, because this group allowed par-

ticipants to name explicitly and talk about their sexual

identities, texts could serve as both mirrors and windows

for LGBTQ and straight ally participants. Viewed as

knowledgeable and able to speak about their lives, in-

cluding their sexuality, all participants, youth and adult

alike, could help to mediate textual encounters for other

participants and extend them in ways that could reveal the

commonalities across experiences while making evident

the important ways in which they differed. Unlike in class-

rooms and exclusively queer out-of-school settings, this

group provided a unique opportunity for LGBTQ people to

talk about their lives openly and for allies to gain insights

about the ways heterosexism and homophobia impact the

population with whom they are in alliance.

Conclusion

When we look at the work young readers of LGBT-themed

literature accomplish in and out of classrooms, we notice

several key practices that teachers, youth service providers

and librarians can enact or enable in order to help young

people become readers of literature with LGBT themes

and thus work against homophobia. One key practice that

we notice being enacted is in terms of the range of read-

ing positions that are offered to and/or assumed by young

readers. In classroom spaces, reading positions are limited

and students are uniformly positioned as straight and/or

homophobic. In contrast, both the out-of-school LGBTQ-

only youth communities and the out-of-school queer-

friendly contexts enabled a variety of reading positions.

Readers could assume positions of straight, homophobe,

queer, victim, agent, ally, and activist, among others.

We are struck by the value of this range of reading

positions. Making space for these many reading positions

enabled the diversity of readers to enter the discussion and

expanded the work that could be done with and through

texts. The diversity of readers, whether this diversity is

de ned by sexuality, gender, race, class, age, ability, and/

or religion enhances the experience of the reading and

discussion. The  uidity of reader identities promises more

opportunity for change as it enables queer readers to talk

about both the commonality across reading experiences

with readers positioned as allies, as well as the discontinui-

ties in experience. These opportunities enabled the enact-

ment of queer community within a group of readers, as

well as allowing ally readers to hear and learn about queer

experiences in ways that would inform and enable them to

enact ally identities with greater insight in the future.

Other key practices relate to text selection, the amount

of time spent with LGBT-themed texts, and the uses of

these texts as ways to see into another world and/or re ect

on one’s own. We have come to appreciate the importance

of collaboratively selecting and creating diverse literature,

not only to connect with curriculum, but primarily to expe-

rience pleasure and ultimately to pursue explicitly named

political action. We recognize the importance of engaging

in this work across time so that young readers can re ect

on, and respond thoughtfully to, what they are encounter-

ing. We understand that asking literature to work as both

windows and mirrors allows for, but also demands diver-

sity and  uidity in its readers. We can foster engagement

with these demands by deliberately selecting literature

with an acknowledgement of readers’ identities but not

such that literature always reveals alternative identities

or re ects similar identities; rather, that such literature

sometimes does one and/or the other. For example, by

sometimes but not always selecting LGBT-themed, or

any other identity-themed, literature. Finally, we value

literature that contributes to homosexual visibility and

gay assimilation but recognize the need for literature that

represents queer people in communities.

This review of research and examination of our own

work leads us to encourage teachers, librarians, and other

adults working in queer-inclusive contexts with young

people to be open in allowing a range of  uid reading posi-

tions to be taken up around texts. This means that teach-

ers and other adults will need to be clear and assertive in

making their workplaces safer for participants to assume a

range of reading positions. And, it means that adults doing

this work must be critically self-aware and self-re ective

162

MOLLIE V. BLACKBURN AND CAROLINE T. CLARK

about their own attitudes and deeply held assumptions

around sexuality and gender identity. Opening up spaces—

classrooms, libraries, and queer-inclusive community-

based settings—to this range of reading positions, textual

forms, and work around texts provides a promising range

of possibilities for young people to become readers of

LGBT-themed literature and, by extension, to work with

adults against homophobia and transphobia.

Notes

1. We use the acronym LGBT to describe themes and LGBTQ

to describe people because even when literature includes

characters questioning their sexual and/or gender identities,

LGBT themes are still present. People, however, who are

questioning, are not necessarily more or less likely to identify

as LGBT than they are straight. Also, we recognize that the vast

majority of the children’s and young adult literature represented

in this chapter focuses on gay and lesbian identities. We include

bisexual and transgender identities because a few of the texts

focus on characters who embody these identities. To be clear,

we are not assuming that bisexual and transgender identities

are the same as, or close enough to, each other or lesbian and

gay identities. We recognize the distinctions among these

identities and that all four get taken up to varying degrees in

the literature discussed in this chapter. Moreover, our exclusion

of I, for intersexed, from the acronym represents the absence

of such identities in the literature included here.

2. We recognize that our quoting of Hamilton implies a correlation

between racial minorities and homophobia. This is not a

correlation that we understand to be true.

3. Here we mark people’s identities in overly simplistic ways

to give readers a sense of the diversity of the group. Some of

what gets lost is when participants shifted identities across

time. For example, one participant shifts from questioning his

sexual identity to identifying as gay. Here, we name him as

gay. In our discussion of this participant, later, we sometimes

describe him as questioning and other times as gay, depending

on how he seemed to identify during the time represented.

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Immigrant Students as Cosmopolitan Intellectuals

Gerald Campano

University of Pennsylvania

María Paula Ghiso

Teachers College, Columbia University

As they describe young immigrants in U.S. cities and classrooms, Gerald Campano and María Ghiso recognize

their students’ capacity to savor new words and meanings and their commitment to learn—and record—the

stories of sacri ce, dignity, and resilience passed along through families and communities. For Campano and

Ghiso, these multilingual, transnational, multivoiced stories form the core of a cosmopolitan approach to teach-

ing reading and literature. Through their analysis of Shaun Tan’s The Arrival and a child’s 20-page narrative

of her family’s literacies and activism, a new vision of reading unfolds that places young, emerging voices and

their literary legacies at the center of educational reform.

Genius has no country. It blossoms everywhere. Genius is

like the light, the air. It is the heritage of all.

—José Rizal (1884)

Taking as an inspiration the Filipino writer and activist

José Rizal, this chapter argues that we should regard

immigrant students—and all students—as cosmopoli-

tan intellectuals. José Rizal’s transnational intellectual

odyssey inspires how we might think about the role of

literature and the literary imagination in diverse 21st

century classrooms. In our work with immigrant, migrant,

and refugee populations, we have learned that students’

literacy practices and knowledge are not merely relevant

for their respective communities, but also have value for

the world we share. We understand this capacity to make

claims of universal signi cance as part of what it means

to be a cosmopolitan intellectual.

In his comparative study on the early stages of glo-

balization, Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti

Colonial Imagination, Benedict Anderson (2007) charts

the range of forces—Avant-Gardism, Marxism, trans-

oceanic migrations, imperial repression, independence

movements, etc.—and the “vast rhizomal networks” (p.

4) of people and places that shaped the writings of turn

of the century intellectuals such as Rizal. Two aspects of

Rizal’s life and work have particular salience for helping

164

165

IMMIGRANT STUDENTS AS COSMOPOLITAN INTELLECTUALS

us better understand students and reconceptualize the liter-

ary curriculum. First, Rizal read capaciously and opened

himself up to a wide range of experiences. Although he is

an icon of Philippine nationhood, his work was fertilized

by a range of intellectual in uences and social dynamics

which traverse national boundaries and rei ed genres. For

example, he incorporated oral traditions from his home-

land as well as European literary styles in order to create

one of the  rst great novels of the Eastern hemisphere, the

politically catalytic Noli Me Tangere. Rizal spent signi -

cant portions of his life away from his native land—as a

student, tourist, and political exile. His  exible intellect

both absorbed and transformed what he experienced in

his travels. A polyglot, Rizal wrote in several different

languages, including Spanish, Tagalog, Italian, French,

and English. He also knew Latin, Greek, and Hebrew.

Rizal wrote for multiple audiences through a number of

outlets such as novels, essays, and editorials. Similar to

intellectuals in other colonized contexts, such as the poet

José Martí in Cuba, Rizal was quintessentially a cosmo-

politan intellectual. His concerns and commitments had as

a focus his native land, but his work had global resonance.

The connections he made across contexts only deepened

more local understandings. Anderson (2007) discusses

how Rizal  ctionally transposed political dynamics and

aesthetic sensibilities from what was considered the Eu-

ropean center to the colonial periphery.

The second related issue, also powerfully rendered by

Anderson, has to do with the radically procreative powers

of words. Rizal’s proleptic second novel, El Filibuster-

ismo, went beyond commenting on or re ecting the cor-

ruption of the friars and imperial rule; it gestured toward

an alternative world without Spanish domination. That

is, it helped imagine into existence an ideal of Philippine

independence, which subsequently ignited the anticolonial

aspirations of younger generations of Filipinos. Anderson

(2007) writes: “What Rizal had done in El Filibusterismo

was to imagine the political landscape of this society and

the near-elimination of its ruling powers. Perhaps no

Filipino had ever dreamed of such a possibility till then,

let alone entered the dream into the public domain. It was

as if the genius’s genie was out of the bottle…” (p.165).

Rizal’s writings took on a life of their own beyond even

their creator’s ability to fathom.

The invitation of this chapter is to view immigrant stu-

dents in the current age of “late globalization” (Anderson,

2007, p. 234) as cosmopolitan intellectuals themselves,

geniuses whose literary genies can potentially trans gure

our own educational, aesthetic, and political realities. This

simple proposition goes against the grain of dominant

ways immigrant students are thought of and treated in

language arts curricula, which often involves two seem-

ingly contradictory, yet actually complementary impulses:

The  rst involves a pervasive “discourse of deprivation”

(Campano, 2007, p. 3), which remediates students and

homogenizes their experiences through standardization;

the second approach slots individuals into prefabricated

social and ethnic categories that correspond, often in a

one-to-one reductive relationship, with culturally appro-

priate texts and pedagogies. Both constrain the types of

literacy experiences students are provided, while deny-

ing how their existences and creative forms of literary

and cultural production are not easily contained by our

classi cations.

Many articles on children’s literature and immigrant

students provide lists of books that address the experiences

of Latina/os, Asian Americans, and, more rarely, African

or Middle Eastern immigrants, and often grapple with is-

sues such as the complexity of authenticity. Our approach

in this chapter is a different one: We place the accent on

the creative alchemy of student literary agency, and em-

phasize the ways in which our youth draw on disparate

experiences and texts to imagine worlds and bring these

new conceptions into existence. We begin by reviewing

how the diverse identities in 21st century classrooms are

still invisible to the world of children’s literature and

educational research, despite strides in multiculturalism

and culturally responsive pedagogy. Next, we provide a

rationale for our use of the cosmopolitan intellectual as a

working ideal for a literary curriculum, following Harste

(1992) in de ning curriculum as “a metaphor for the lives

we want to live and the people we want to be” (p. 3). In

the spirit of cosmopolitanism, we suggest that educators

should open up, rather than restrict, textual possibilities,

so that students can draw on and make connections with

books in ways that are not always predictable. We take a

close look at how “writerly texts” (Barthes, 1970/1974),

such as Shaun Tan’s The Arrival (2007), foster cosmo-

politanism by resisting easy identi cation and instead

providing a platform for children to articulate their own

intellectual and physical migrations in order to constantly

“arrive” at new understandings of particular histories and

overlapping experiences. We then build on the notion that

engaging with literature involves not only response, but

also authorship and creation, by focusing on the work of

a  fth-grade student who used reading and writing to both

give shape to and realize a cosmopolitan identity that was

largely invisible to the dominant discourse. We conclude

by offering recommendations for educators as they strive

to co-construct school learning environments that are in

synergy with the budding cosmopolitanism of their im-

migrant student body.

The Context of 21st Century Classrooms

There is a growing consensus about the value of having

students read high-quality literature that speaks to their

identities (e.g., Beach, Thein, & Parks, 2007; DeNicolo &

Fránquiz, 2006; Landt, 2006; Medina, 2006). Multicultural

literature is considered a platform for students to expand

their knowledge of the world, interrogate their social

locations, and challenge discrimination (Cai, 2002). It is

166

GERALD CAMPANO AND MARÍA PAULA GHISO

important to note, however, that the literature doesn’t teach

itself, but must be situated within pedagogical contexts.

As Enciso (1997) emphasizes, teachers have the ability

(and responsibility) to support discussions of equity and

critical examinations of multicultural literature, a stance

that can interrupt whose knowledge is and is not valued in

the classroom. In addition, there have also been signi cant

strides in providing a cultural range of literary representa-

tion for children and young adults, though literature by

and about people of color continues to account for a small

percentage of the number of children’s books published

yearly (Cooperative Children’s Book Center, n.d.) and is

less likely to be widely advertised and available (McNair,

2008).

Despite progress in the publishing  eld, the world of

children’s literature does not re ect the world of many

21st century schools, which increasingly house students

who communicate in numerous languages, claim multiple

identities, and often have ties which extend beyond our

nation’s borders to diaspora communities. How, then, do

teachers create culturally responsive literacy pedagogy

when there are simply very few books which speak to

students who are, for example, of Filipina, Laotian, Ben-

gali, Costa Rican, or Quechua heritage? How do students

who claim mestiza or mixed identities—such as Mexipino

or Korean-Argentinean-American relate to the children’s

literature canon, multicultural or otherwise? What liter-

ary curriculum would address the experiences of, for

instance, a student of Chinese ancestry born in the country

of Jamaica whose family migrated to Jamaica, Queens in

New York City and who now attends public school with

children from over 50 different countries speaking over

30 different home languages? This pro le is, in fact, a

familiar part of life in the borough of Queens, where the

2000 census data indicate that 138 language are spoken,

with many more added since then (Of ce of the State

Deputy Comptroller, 2000).

How do researchers understand the lives and learning

of students who are illegible to conventional research cat-

egories? For example, how do the designations “voluntary”

and “involuntary” minorities (Ogbu & Simmons, 1998)

explain how a Vietnamese family’s ostensibly voluntary

migration shades into an effect of colonialism? What

does it mean to be at once “invisible” within a curricular

context, while at the same time hyper-visible in the current

immigration discourse, which linguistically dehumanizes

(with ascriptions like “illegal”) many who are already

dehumanized by the global economic system?

We offer these questions to underscore the complexi-

ties of teaching and learning in today’s diverse school

contexts. One possible avenue for addressing students’

identities is the continued commitment to providing texts

that echo students’ experiences and portray a multiplic-

ity of cultural, linguistic, and migratory representations

within any given community. The project of expanding the

canon, including what constitutes a literary text, needs to

continue with vigor. At the same time, however, educators

can approach the heterogeneity of 21st century classrooms

through cultivating a stance of cosmopolitanism. This

honors our students as future authors of literature and of

the world we share.

Why Cosmopolitanism?

In her examination of patriotism and cosmopolitanism,

Martha Nussbaum (1996) argues for a notion of global

citizenship rather than for allegiances merely bounded by

historically contingent national borders. The foundation

for this cosmopolitanism is the moral responsibility to the

human community as a whole. Our memberships in a par-

ticular group, while important to individual and collective

identity, are also accidents of birth that do not mitigate the

equality of all people by virtue of their humanity or our

sense of justice for others. Cheah (2008) notes:

Cosmopolitanism is primarily about viewing one-self as

part of a world, a circle of belonging that transcends the

limited ties of kinship and country to embrace the whole

of humanity. However, since one cannot see the universe,

the world, or humanity, the cosmopolitan optic is not one of

perceptual experience but of the imagination. World litera-

ture is an important aspect of cosmopolitanism because it is

a type of world-making activity that enables us to imagine

a world. (p. 26)

For all students, whether recent immigrants or estab-

lished in a context for generations, literature can serve as

a rich source for cultivating a cosmopolitan stance: Engag-

ing with texts that portray ways of being different than our

own local instantiations sensitizes us to global diversity

and well-being, defamiliarizes what is taken as “natural”

and “commonsense,” and assists in the “enact[ment] of the

love of humanity” (Nussbaum, 1996, p. 140). For students

from immigrant experiences, however, cosmopolitanism

is not just an imagined possibility, but often a perceptual

and lived reality as well. By virtue of their diverse vantage

points and transnational negotiations, they are uniquely

positioned to educate their peers and teachers about the

world. If, as Nussbaum contends, the role of education

is to “cultivate the factual and imaginative prerequisites

for recognizing humanity in the stranger and the other”

(p. 133), then multilingual and multicultural students can

lead the way.

The Vantage Point of Epistemic Privilege

Much like Rizal, whose intellectual and political labor

drew from a vast range of transnational in uences and

experiences, immigrant students are themselves cosmo-

politan citizens. Their perspectives, derived from famil-

iarity with multiple and often contrasting settings, offer

understandings of the human condition—including the

suffering of many worldwide—that may not be readily

available to individuals whose frame of reference has never

been unsettled. Because of their identities and life expe-

167

IMMIGRANT STUDENTS AS COSMOPOLITAN INTELLECTUALS

riences, immigrant students have unique vantage points

from which to interpret and generate knowledge about

the world. This knowledge, what theorists have called

“epistemic privilege” (Mohanty, 1997; Moya, 2000), may

be embedded in personal and group legacies and struggles

for human rights and self-determination. Unfortunately,

the current educational climate of standardized curricula

and monolingual practices rei es the insularity of national

experiences, creating increasingly polarized notions of

belonging that work to dichotomize the experiences of

students rather than seek opportunities for fostering nu-

anced mutual understandings and commitment to the

human condition.

There are several reasonable reservations with the idea

of the cosmopolitan intellectual as a working model and

curricular metaphor. One charge might be that a global

point of view potentially devalues local knowledge, privi-

leging an overly abstract notion of humanity over the spec-

i cities of difference. As we hope our examples illustrate,

we believe the literacy curriculum is driven by a dialectic

between the particular and general, and that students’ sub-

jective experiences may contribute to more comprehensive

knowledge about the world we share, which may, in turn,

inform local understandings and identities. In addition, if

individuals at the turn of the century had access to global

phenomena, we can only begin to fathom how technology

increases access to world-wide information. Many young

people, for example, are involved in activist organizations

that employ what scholars have labeled “new literacies”

in order to draw connections between social issues and

injustices at home and abroad.

Equity and Cosmopolitanism

Attention to cosmopolitanism is in no way meant to tran-

scend the particularities of ethnicity or group experience.

Rather, we suggest that the particular and the cosmopolitan

exist in a mutually informing relationship. For example,

many identity-based movements were also about human

rights issues that had more universal resonance (Alcoff,

Hames-García, Mohanty, & Moya, 2006). Likewise, a

phenomenon such as nationalism was the product of

cosmopolitan dynamics. Nussbaum (2008) herself has

recently argued for the need to reconcile a progressive,

“globally sensitive” patriotism with cosmopolitan hu-

man rights commitments, lest we concede patriotism to

the forces of nativism and fear. Cosmopolitanism is also

not intended to prematurely posit a romanticized ideal of

a world where difference has been transcended. On the

contrary, examining issues of inequality and con ict is a

critical aspect of global justice.

There may also be concern that the ideal of the cosmo-

politan intellectual is elitist. We suggest, rather, that it is an

antidote to the pervasive ways children from migrant and

refugee backgrounds are stigmatized by labels and sorted

in schools. Researchers have critiqued how the teaching of

culturally and linguistically diverse students is commonly

viewed as a “problem” (Gutiérrez & Orellana, 2006),

when instead such diversity necessarily improves condi-

tions for inquiry. The idea that our youth are cosmopolitan

intellectuals is a radical break from convention precisely

because it asserts the fundamental universal capacities of

all students to engage in profound intellectual and creative

labor. Our use of cosmopolitanism takes issue with de cit

characterizations of immigrant students. This framing is

not meant to construct another, albeit different, classroom

hierarchy. We believe that cosmopolitanism is a working

ideal for all students. However, cultivating a cosmopolitan

stance in educational contexts can begin from the ground

up: by valuing and learning from the radically hybrid ex-

periences of historically disenfranchised and immigrant

communities.

Cosmopolitanism in Community

Finally, it might be suggested that a cosmopolitan stance

dilutes our obligations to our most immediate communi-

ties. The logic implies that we have a natural af nity with

those with whom we have most in common. However, it

must also be remembered that “commonality” itself is

an ideological construct which often entails processes of

exclusion and scapegoating, that indeed there is nothing

natural about common. One tragic irony with othering

categories such as “the foreigner” is that too often they

prevent us from socially and intellectually bonding with

people with whom we may actually have shared interests

and passions. We believe there is the ethical imperative for

educators to think about all human beings, and equally re-

spect all students who walk through their classroom doors.

Caring and respecting everyone is not just a sentimental

matter. It entails being mindful of one’s own presupposi-

tions and not putting students’ experiences in boxes or

designating a particular literature as exhaustively suited

for their identities. For example, an urban student might

be attracted to Milton’s Paradise Lost and the quote “The

mind is its own place, and in itself, can make heaven of

Hell, and a hell of Heaven” as a way of coping with the

material realities of street life as well as structural forms of

discrimination. This attraction to Milton would not exist in

contradiction to the student’s love of the poet and hip-hop

artist La Bruja. Similarly, an af uent suburban student’s

interest in reggaeton should not necessarily be read merely

as a cynical appropriation of urban culture—although

such impulses ought to be subject to ongoing critical self-

re ection—but may also serve to mark his own feelings of

alienation within a homogenous community and help him

to engage in productive forms of dissent. As educators,

we need to care about all our students and recognize their

profound creative potential to make literature their own as

well as their abilities to broaden their own identities and

epistemic horizons through transactions with other forms

of cultural expression.

There is also a political rationale for a cosmopolitan

stance in the curriculum, articulated by Stew, the author

168

GERALD CAMPANO AND MARÍA PAULA GHISO

and composer of the Tony Award-Winning Passing

Strange. The musical, written with the assumption that

“everyone has a little outsider in them” (Hannaham,

2008, para 5), is a Brecht and Baldwin inspired semiau-

tobiographical bildungsroman about a young man from

South Central Los Angeles who travels to Europe as part

of his aesthetic and political awakening. Stew comments

that his play was inspired by an American president who

“had never been to Europe until he became president…a

guy who actually owns planes who never went outside

his own country.” He goes on to explain, “that incurios-

ity informs our politics …I was comparing my curiosity

about the world, my hunger to know about the world to

him, who had the world at his feet…I wanted to write

about curiosity, about travel, about thinking outside your

neighborhood, your neighborhood of a country” (Good-

man, Lee, & Stew, 2008, para 23). Many schools have

in their mission statements the need to prepare students

for the challenges and possibilities of globalization. We

believe helping to cultivate the curiosity to engage in

productive cross-cultural and transnational exchange is

necessary for educating future critical democratic citizens

of the world.

Cosmopolitanism and Curricular Responsibility

It should not be incumbent on young people to eventually

 nd the intellectual and artistic resources to broaden their

horizons on their own. This should be a curricular respon-

sibility that can begin in elementary grades. Fortunately,

there has been much important work about pedagogy that

encourages the epistemic value of diverse perspectives.

While classrooms are contested spaces with competing

ideologies and practices, Gutiérrez, Baquedano-López,

and Turner (1997) note that “these tensions may be

productive—if they become the means through which

richer linguistic, sociocultural, and content knowledge is

created” (p. 374). Alluding to Bhabha, this postcolonial

“third space” (Gutiérrez, Rymes, & Larson, 1995) is a

site of negotiation and translation that is fundamentally

procreative and cannot merely be reduced to its prior in u-

ences. Guerra (2008) places his emphasis on the agents

that negotiate these tensions through what he terms “tran-

scultural repositioning”: how students from historically

marginalized communities are able to “make use of the

prior knowledge and experiences they have accumulated

and the rhetorical agility they have developed in the course

of negotiating their way across the various communities

of practice to which they currently belong, have belonged

in the past, and will belong in the future” (p. 299). Anne

Haas Dyson (1993, 2003) reminds us that students draw

from and remix their linguistic, cultural, and intertextual

resources, and that school curricula should be “permeable”

to these creative social and intellectual projects.

These educational theorists promote an alchemy be-

tween the curriculum and a community of learners. In this

spirit, while we don’t intend to be prescriptive, we would

like to highlight several texts that may be well-suited

for a hybrid, permeable, and transcultural pedagogical

approach. Following our discussion of these literature

examples, we focus on one student reader and author who

enacts a cosmopolitan ideal.

A Look at The Arrival and Other

Cosmopolitan Books

Shaun Tan’s (2007) The Arrival is a powerful example of

the potential of literature for children and adolescents to

take up the topic of immigration in ways that make visible

its varied characteristics without essentializing the experi-

ence into a single narrative or resolving its contradictions.

Told strictly through a visual medium, and in the absence

of a narrating voice that pulls together any intended inter-

pretation, The Arrival constitutes an invitation for readers

to create meaning through immersion into a world that is

both familiar and strange. The detailed series of pictures

in the  rst opening show a father packing his belongings

to leave his family for a new land—his house, possessions,

and family easily recognizable—but subsequent illustra-

tions portray him entering a futuristic, alien city with

features unknown to the reader. In large part, the power

of Tan’s text lies in this shifting of the reader’s position.

Through a variety of semiotic resources, The Arrival

works to deconstruct the legally sanctioned dichotomy

between individuals already living in a particular country

and newcomers from other nations, critically interrogating

notions of belonging. From the beginning of the text, the

reader is made to identify with the immigrant protagonist

as the character attempts to navigate his new surroundings

and procure basic necessities. For instance, in his search

for something to eat—with the help of a dictionary entry

featuring a loaf of bread—the man only encounters for-

eign, and seemingly unpalatable, food items, many with

a number of protruding tentacles. As readers, we do not

clamor for him to assimilate or disdain him for not desiring

the food of his new home, but understand his unfamiliarity,

hesitation, and yearning for recognizable tastes.

Throughout the images of The Arrival, Tan embeds a

written language of his own invention, which populates

the signs, maps, advertisements, and overall environmen-

tal print of the futuristic setting. As a result, this foreign

world is literally unintelligible to readers; they, like the

protagonist, cannot rely on knowledge of reading and

writing to make sense of the surroundings. One poignant

scenario entails the main character’s search for employ-

ment. After being repeatedly turned down for jobs, he is

hired to af x posters. The textual images track his careful

labor, until his boss’s return alerts both the immigrant man

and readers themselves that the signs have been posted

upside down. In a subsequent job, he cannot decode a

“Danger” sign, which results in a close encounter with a

monstrous creature. Eventually, the protagonist ends up

working in a factory assembly line. Set against prevalent

169

IMMIGRANT STUDENTS AS COSMOPOLITAN INTELLECTUALS

national and international conceptions of immigrants as

uneducated, unwilling to learn the language of a new

country, and especially suited for sweatshop labor, this

characterization instead makes explicit the dif culty of

negotiating and acquiring a new language, the limited

options available to the majority of immigrants, and the

perseverance of many despite adverse—often inhuman—

working conditions.

The Arrival provides an opening to explore immigra-

tion without circumscribing the experience or suggesting

a uniform trajectory, and as such is a departure from much

of children’s literature on this topic. The images in Tan’s

texts work by “recognition, not evocation” (Tan, 2001) and

thus are permeable to the range of circumstances of trans-

national migration. When Tan depicts the homeland of the

main character as a cluster of buildings overpowered by the

giant tails of unseen creatures, the oppressive climate is left

intentionally vague, thus allowing for multiple readings

of his motivation to emigrate. Having journeyed to a new

country, the protagonist encounters other immigrants who

relate their own varied experiences in a similar fashion.

The multivoiced perspectives provide ample testament to

the diversity of immigration as well as identify possible

points of connection across particular histories.

The Arrival underscores how living in uncertainty—

continually negotiating possible opportunities, enduring

hardships, and crossing linguistic, relational, and national

borders—is part of the phenomenology of migration. This

essence is in itself productive. Students from immigrant,

migrant, and refugee backgrounds are cosmopolitan intel-

lectuals well-versed in navigating multiple contexts and

with honed global sensibilities. Educators can learn from

their students to engage in a degree of uncertainty within

the classroom. Fostering school communities based on

students’ epistemic privilege requires the unsettling of

educators’ own identities and of the rigid categorizations

imposed on immigrant students, challenging notions of

English Language Learners as a subgroup in need of “in-

tervention” and of multicultural literature and culturally

responsive pedagogies as solely for students of color. This

stance necessitates advocating for teaching and learning

relationships based on the premise that knowledge does not

travel uni-directionally, and that in many cases students, by

virtue of their lived experiences, may have more nuanced

understandings than educators.

In authoring this cosmopolitan book, Shaun Tan’s

creative process was informed by a multiplicity of textual

and relational resources. Tan (n.d.) notes that The Arrival’s

genesis dates back to his father’s history of immigration

and to grappling with his own identity in the homogenous

and often discriminatory suburbs of Western Australia. The

narratives of immigration his father shared with him reso-

nated with other accounts Tan uncovered while conducting

further research on the topic. In the artist’s note of The

Arrival, and on his website (n.d.) Tan describes some of his

in uences, such as photographs of transatlantic voyages,

inspections at Ellis Island, New York, at the turn of the

century, post-war Europe, and of a newsboy announcing

the sinking of the Titanic;  rst-hand accounts of immigra-

tion in Lowenstein and Loh’s The Immigrants and Davies

and Dal Bosco’s Tales from a Suitcase; the 1886 painting

Going South; and the movie The Bicycle Thief. Additional

in uences on The Arrival include, but are not limited to:

the short story “Won Chu and the Queens Letterbox” by

T.A. Hungerford, which connected to Tan’s interest in

“the somewhat invisible history of the Chinese in West-

ern Australia;” Raymond Brigg’s The Snowman, which

inspired the layout—and in many ways the essence—of

the text; references about graphic novels and comics; and

Tan’s own experiences as a traveler in foreign countries.

These various frames of reference oscillate among local

understandings such as family narratives and the speci-

 city of the Western Australian context, and collective,

transnational experiences of immigration.

Much like the in uences on Tan’s creative process, the

genre and audience of The Arrival disrupt clear character-

izations. Originally begun as a picturebook, the work took

on the shape of a graphic novel. This text is one that can

be accessed by individuals across a range of ages, and the

nature of readers’ interactions is shaped by understand-

ings of immigration and belonging that may result from

personal or family histories, insights gained from the

school context, or perspectives present in media charac-

terizations. Tan has argued that there is nothing inherent

in the picturebook genre that delimits use of such texts to

children or merits their classi cation as strictly children’s

literature. Rather, he contends that “simplicity certainly

does not exclude sophistication or complexity” (2001, p.

2), thus making the genre appropriate for a broad audi-

ence. The layered con guration of The Arrival recognizes

the cosmopolitan resources of students from immigrant

backgrounds and provides an invitation for readers with

less direct transnational experiences to defamiliarize and

interrogate their own understandings.

There are other compelling examples of literature for

children and adolescents that showcase the hybridity of im-

migrant experiences and the phenomenology of migration,

providing openings for fostering a cosmopolitan stance.

American Born Chinese by Gene Yang (2006), another

graphic novel, explores issues of transnational identities

and discriminatory practices by weaving together three

seemingly distinct tales: the Chinese myth of the Monkey

King who wishes to be one of the Gods; the experiences

of Jin Wang, the only Chinese American student in his

school; and the story of Danny, an all-American teen

whose perfect life is only marred by the periodic visit of

his cousin, Chin-Kee, an embodiment of racist stereotypes.

Wildly imaginative, this text interlaces multiple and mul-

tifaceted voices of Asian and “native-born” Americans,

making visible existing implicit and explicit racism and

challenging rigid categories of immigration. Identities

that initially appear dichotomized are actually revealed

383

THE AUTHOR’S PERSPECTIVE

get to our two weeks on Nietzsche, I read the students

Marcus P ster’s (1992) picture book The Rainbow Fish,

and we talk together about how much Nietzsche would

have hated that book. Far from viewing it as a sweet little

story about the virtue of sharing, he would have seen it

as a tale about how the rainbow  sh is pressured by “the

herd” to give up everything that makes him special and

distinctive, so that he ends up being just like everyone

else. For the  nal exam, I have the students read Phyllis

Reynolds Naylor’s (1991) Newbery-winning novel Shiloh

and write an essay examining Marty’s moral dilemma from

the perspective of the philosophers we have read together

in the course. At the university, I sometimes do indepen-

dent studies with students in creative writing or education

who are interested in children’s literature; once I even did

an independent study with a computer engineering major

who was working on the narrative for the video game she

was designing. I have heard stories about professors who

were also writers of genre  ction who had to publish under

a pseudonym because otherwise they wouldn’t be taken

seriously at tenure time by their colleagues. But my col-

leagues have always viewed my children’s book writing

with interest and affection. Philosophers are supposed to

have an eccentric hobby. This is mine.

One important sub eld within ethics is professional

ethics, and I have published two philosophical articles on

the overlooked topic of the professional ethics of authors.

In both articles, I examine the particular question of what

obligations authors have to individuals who are used as

material for their stories. I argue for the importance of

the sharing of stories and conclude that the writing of

 ction would be impossible without the author’s license

to borrow from real life, including the real life stories of

those she knows and loves, of those she knows and hates.

But the more the author’s treatment of her “material” is

in tension with ordinary moral requirements, the harder

it is to justify it. Authors have no special license to harm

others, either by damaging their reputation or by caus-

ing them pain; authors have no special license to invade

others’ privacy or violate their con dentiality; authors,

who are after all  rst and foremost human beings, need

to respect their relationships with those whom they write

about. Although it might seem that the greatness of a work

of literature could justify considerable harm caused in its

production, in actuality, harmful portraits—in virtue of

the very features that make them harmful—fall short of

the kind of greatness needed to justify such harm. So the

formula for justifying harm by greatness turns in upon

itself: The greater the work, the more harm it justi es;

but the more harm it needs to justify, the less its claim to

greatness. The harm, then, remains unjusti ed.

This leads me to the question of how my family reacts to

my need to use our lives together as material for my books.

As I noted above, I change so much when I write that I

really draw from my family only inspiration and ideas;

I don’t write about my boys as characters in my stories,

or take actual events from their lives without signi cant

alteration. Perhaps luckily for me, my boys don’t read my

books! (Although my younger son’s best friend is my big-

gest fan.) Maybe they would rather just not know.

Back in Betsy’s Maple Tree

I want to close with one last anecdote. Several summers

ago, my older son had just gotten his driver’s license and

wanted to take a family road trip. I said,  ne, so long as

I get to pick where we go. I picked a circuit from Boul-

der, Colorado, where we live, to De Smet, South Dakota

(Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little Town on the Prairie), and

then on to Mankato, Minnesota, the Deep Valley of the

Betsy-Tacy books. There, I had the climax of my career

as a children’s book author, and of my entire life, when I

did a book signing at Tacy’s House, maintained as a small

museum by the Betsy-Tacy Society. Earlier in my career,

I had the opportunity to pay homage to Elizabeth Yates’s

(1962) Someday You’ll Write by having my character Cyn-

thia read it in The One and Only Cynthia Jane Thornton

(1986). It was a thrill for me to contact Elizabeth Yates

to ask permission to quote from her book in mine. The

little girl who had read Yates’s book and grown up to be

a writer was now writing a book about another little girl

reading Yates’s book as part of her own journey to be a

writer. And the little girl who had read Betsy and Tacy Go

Downtown (1943) and identi ed with Betsy’s yearnings

to write was now a writer sitting at her own book signing

across the street from Betsy’s house.

Literature References

Burnett, F. H. (1963). A little princess. New York, NY: J. B.

Lippincott. (Original work published 1905)

Creech, S. (1995). Walk two moons. New York, NY:

HarperCollins.

Curtis, C. P. (1995). The Watsons go to Birmingham—1963. New

York, NY: Delacorte.

Curtis, C. P. (1999). Bud, not Buddy. New York, NY: Delacorte.

DiCamillo, K. (2003). The tale of Despereaux. New York, NY:

Candlewick.

Estes, E. (1942). The middle Moffat. New York, NY: Harcourt,

Brace.

Hesse, K. (1997). Out of the dust. New York, NY: Scholastic.

Kadohata, C. (2004). Kira-Kira. New York, NY: Atheneum.

Lovelace, M. H. (1943). Betsy and Tacy go downtown. New York,

NY: Thomas Y. Crowell.

Lowry, L. (1993). The giver. Boston, MA: Houghton Mif in.

Mills, C. (1982). At the back of the woods. New York, NY: Four

Winds Press.

Mills, C. (1986). The one and only Cynthia Jane Thornton. New

York, NY: Macmillan.

Mills, C. (1990). Dynamite Dinah. New York, NY: Macmillan.

Mills, C. (1993). Dinah in love. New York, NY: Macmillan.

Mills, C. (1995). Dinah forever. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus &

Giroux.

Mills, C. (1997). Gus and Grandpa. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus

& Giroux.

Mills, C. (1997). Losers, Inc. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus &

Giroux.

384

CLAUDIA MILLS

Mills, C. (1998). Standing up to Mr. O. New York, NY: Farrar,

Straus & Giroux.

Mills, C. (1999). You’re a brave man, Julius Zimmerman. New York,

NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Mills, C. (2000). Lizzie at last. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus &

Giroux.

Mills, C. (2002). 7 x 9 = trouble! New York, NY: Farrar, Straus

& Giroux.

Mills, C. (2006). Trading places. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus &

Giroux.

Mills, C. (2007). Being Teddy Roosevelt. New York, NY: Farrar,

Straus & Giroux.

Mills, C. (2009). How Oliver Olson changed the world. New York,

NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Mills, C. (2010). One square inch. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus

& Giroux.

Montgomery, L. M. (1908). Anne of Green Gables. Boston, MA:

L. C. Page.

Naylor, P. R. (1991). Shiloh. New York, NY: Atheneum.

P ster, M. (1992). The rainbow  sh. New York, NY: North-South

Books.

Sachar, L. (1998). Holes. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux/

Frances Foster.

Streatfeild, N. (1951). Skating shoes. New York, NY: Dell.

Trollope, A. (1947). An autobiography. Berkeley: University of

California Press. (Original work published 1883)

White, E. B. (1945). Stuart Little. New York, NY: HarperTrophy

Wilder, L. I. (1953). Little town on the prairie. New York, NY:

HarperCollins.

Academic References

Creech, S. (1995, July/August). Newbery Medal acceptance. The

Horn Book Magazine, 418–425.

Curtis, C. P. (2000, July/August). Newbery Medal acceptance. The

Horn Book Magazine, 386–396.

Cushman, K. (1996, July/August). Newbery Medal acceptance. The

Horn Book Magazine, 413–419.

DiCamillo, K. (2004, July/August). Newbery Medal acceptance.

The Horn Book Magazine, 395–99.

Hesse, K. (1998, July/August). Newbery Medal acceptance. The

Horn Book Magazine, 422–427.

Kadohata, C. (2005, July/August). Newbery Medal acceptance. The

Horn Book Magazine, 409–417.

Lowry, L. (1994, July/August). Newbery Medal acceptance. The

Horn Book Magazine, 414–22.

Mills, C. (2000). Appropriating others’ stories: Some questions

about the ethics of writing  ction. Journal of Social Philosophy,

21(2), 195–206.

Mills, C. (2004). Friendship,  ction, and memoir. In P. J. Eakin

(Ed.), The ethics of life writing (pp 101–120). Ithaca, NY: Cornell

University Press.

Rylant, C. (1993, July/August). Newbery Medal acceptance. The

Horn Book Magazine, 416–419.

Park, L. S. (2002, July/August). Newbery Medal acceptance. The

Horn Book Magazine, 377–384.

Patron, S. (2007, July/August). Newbery Medal acceptance. The

Horn Book Magazine, 327–335.

Peck, R. (2001, July/August). Newbery Medal acceptance. The

Horn Book Magazine, 397–401.

Sachar, L. (1999, July/August). Newbery Medal acceptance. The

Horn Book Magazine, 410–417.

Stevenson, D. (1993, December). Review of Dinah in love. Bulletin

of the Center for Children’s Books. Urbana-Champaign, IL:

Center for Children’s Books.

Tharpe, T. (with M. Reiter). (2003). The creative habit. New York,

NY: Simon & Schuster.

Ueland, B. (1987). If you want to write. Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf

Press. (Original work published 1938)

Yates, E. (1962). Someday you’ll write. New York, NY: E. P.

Dutton.

Point of Departure

Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

As I began reading Claudia Mills’s perspective on writing

children’s books, I thought, “How can I add anything to

this? She’s writing about me!” I’m the mother of two boys;

I write novels by hand using the same battered clipboard

on which I began my writing career; I write my non c-

tion stuff on the computer, and I’ll bet that my Danny

the Drainpipe was every bit as good as her Campbell the

Tomato, though she had the better title.

Unlike Claudia, however, I never dreamed, when

I was young, about becoming a writer because I didn’t

know you could make a profession of it. My love of sto-

ries began with my parents, who read aloud to us for an

hour or so every night until long after we had learned to

read ourselves. Mother read the Bible Story book several

times over, Alice in Wonderland, The Wind in the Wil-

lows, Mother West Wind’s Children, but the real treat was

listening to my father read books by Mark Twain. Both

parents read with great drama, and when I was invited to

sleepovers, I longed for story hour—feeding time for the

imagination.

I wrote my own little books on the backs of scratch

paper, stapled them together, put a pocket and index card

in each one, and signed them out to neighbor children. I

wrote about everything that entered my world at that time,

and when Mother explained the facts of life to me, I even

wrote a book titled Manual for Pregnant Women, with

illustrations by the author.

When I was 16, a former Sunday School teacher wrote

to me, saying that she was now editor of a Sunday school

paper for children. She remembered how much I loved

stories in her class, and wondered if I would write one

for her paper. Thrilled, I wrote a baseball story called

385

POINT OF DEPARTURE

“Mike’s Hero,” and received a check for $4.67. For 15 years

I wrote short stories for a variety of publications before I

considered writing a book. And then, afraid to risk it, I

simply collected nine of my short stories—each taking

place in a different country—and sent the manuscript off

to Abingdon Press,  guring that if Methodists sent mis-

sionaries to foreign countries, they might be interested in

publishing it, though most of my stories were “character-

building,” rather than religious. The book was accepted,

and I was ecstatic. The Galloping Goat and Other Stories

was published in 1965.

Claudia’s story of how she was  rst published is so

much more interesting than mine, but both of us learned

our craft primarily by “doing”—over and over again—

getting the feel for con ict in plot, timing in humor, for

suspense, motivation, mood, dialogue, character and all

the other things you think about when writing a novel.

Unlike Claudia, things are going on inside my head all

the time. Waking or sleeping. The only way I know I’ve

been asleep is whether or not I dream. There seems to be

a troop of noisy chattering characters who travel around

with me, each loudly demanding a place in a book. I do not

think a lot about the element of structure, and I do not glory

in the liberating constraint of iambic pentameter. But I do

feel, as Claudia does, that in some way the main character

should change, or why write about him at all?

Most of my books start with a situation. When I came

across the thin, cowering dog which was the inspiration

for my Shiloh trilogy, I asked myself, “What if I knew who

the abusive owner was, and the dog kept running away,

coming to me? What would I do?” Then I think about the

types of characters who would most likely be found in

this situation, and with that comes a decision as to voice.

Since writing is my sole occupation, I have the luxury of

writing for as long as I like, and I usually keep going until

I feel the story becoming dry on the page. The moment

that happens, I stop.

Like most authors, I  nd that friends and even strangers

want to offer me ideas. For an idea to be something I can

use, however, there has to be a connection with me; I must

be able to add something of myself in order for an idea

to take root. Sometimes the original idea may be only a

small part of the story, but it’s like kindling; it’s the thing

that gets the  re, the excitement, going.

Meryl Streep once said that she knows a script is right

for her when she feels a “ping of commonality.” I’ve al-

ways been struck by the similarities between writing and

acting. A  rst draft, to me, is like a director assembling

his characters onstage. Each is merely reading his lines,

though with as much feeling as he can manage, and the

director is  guring out who goes where and what the

stage setting will be. In the second rehearsal, more is

demanded of the characters. The props may be changed.

The scenery may be all wrong, and perhaps an argument

between two boys will be less heated, more a glimpse of

things to come.

Most of my books go through six or seven drafts—Ice

was revised 18 times. And with each new draft (two or

three on my clipboard, before it is typed up on the com-

puter), the dialogue is distilled a bit further, the setting

made more distinct, the characters more vivid. A next

draft may heighten the con ict or make it more subtle.

The writing may be more elegant or the dialogue more

folksy. With each print-out I’m struggling for unity, for

clarity, for making each part a necessary component of

the whole.

I  nd outlines too restrictive, but I do write a summary

of each book and this is my map through the story. There

is no list a writer follows (suspense, check; motivation,

check)—it’s inside a writer’s head. That’s why we read

it again and again as we go along—sometimes silently,

sometimes aloud. If it’s supposed to be sad but brings no

tears to my eyes—if it’s supposed to be funny and I don’t

even smile—how can I expect it of a reader?

For me, the best part about writing occurs when a

character comes alive on the page and I know I’ve got

him; when a place that existed only in my head becomes

real. There are no trumpets playing at this moment, no

audience applauding—a very solitary time, actually—but

it’s what I like most.

Archives and Special Collections Devoted

to Children’s and Young Adult Literature

Karen Nelson Hoyle

Children’s Literature Research Collections (including Kerlan), the University of Minnesota

Archives and special collections provide a physical history of the  eld of children’s and young adult literature.

As curator of the Children’s Literature Research Collections for over 40 years, Karen Nelson Hoyle is well

prepared to explain how such collections enable researchers to seek—and hopefully to  nd—a “story behind the

story” that may be revealed through an examination of the materials held in such collections. These materials

may include draft and  nal manuscripts and artwork; correspondence;  rst and variant editions of published

books; and other materials relevant to the creation and publication of texts for young readers. As a historian of

children’s literature, Leonard Marcus takes his Point of Departure opportunity to describe some of the resources

he has found and assistance he has received at the Kerlan as well as other special collections.

The focus of this chapter is on archives and special collec-

tions devoted to children’s and/or young adult literature.

They go by various institutional names—Archive, Center,

Institute, Library, Society or Special Collection—but each

is devoted to the subject of children’s and young adult lit-

erature. “Archives” hold manuscripts and personal papers

apropos to the writing, illustrating, editing, and produc-

ing of books. The American Library Association (ALA)

de nes a special collection as “a collection of library

materials separated from the general collection because

they are of a certain form, on a certain subject, of a certain

period or geographical area, rare, fragile, or valuable”

(Young, 1983, p. 211). “Special Collections” contain the

books themselves, frequently signed by the author and

acquired in variant editions, along with related artifacts.

Historically, these institutional and material entities have

fuzzy parameters and often gravitate across categories.

And  nally, although the books and other materials were

intended for children and/or young adults, youth archives

and special collections exist for adult researchers of vary-

ing degrees of research experience.

Locating Archives and Special Collections

The Association of Library Service to Children (ALSC),

a division of the American Library Association, has a

long-standing committee, the National Planning of Special

Collections Committee (established in 1965), devoted

386

387

ARCHIVES AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS

to gathering and disseminating information about these

resources. This committee has been responsible for the

three most comprehensive directories of special collections

in children’s and young adult literature. The two earlier

editions were edited by Carolyn Field (1969, 1982), and

the most recent by Delores Blythe Jones (1995). The

number of collections that were included in each edition

grew from 133 in 1962, to 267 in 1982, to 300 in 1995.

Some of this growth is due to the fact that more collections

were reporting their holdings. However, it is clear that the

increase in numbers is also due to an actual increase in

numbers of archives and special collections devoted to

children’s and young adult literature.

The arrangement of the directories re ects the access

points most commonly used by researchers whose work

is conducted in archives and special collections, that is,

the subject (author, illustrator, editor, publisher, etc.) and

the geographic region. A researcher who is writing a bi-

ography of a children’s author or illustrator may visit an

archive to which their subject donated some or all of their

papers: rough drafts, manuscripts, editorial correspon-

dence, royalty statements, and so on. Or the researcher may

visit a special collection that includes original editions,

subsequent editions, translated editions, etc. However, a

researcher’s visit to an archive may also be a sort of “ sh-

ing expedition” for information that might be located in

the collection.

Leonard Marcus’s Point of Departure essay provides

several examples of this type of  shing, which may take

into account the subject’s family, the various places

the subject lived, the organizations they may have be-

longed to, their colleagues and collaborators, friends

and loved ones, editors and publishers they worked

with, and other special insights. For example, Marcus

(1999) used the Kerlan Collection to enhance Margaret

Wise Brown: Awakened by the Moon. He found that

the original story and drawings by Clement Hurd for

Goodnight Moon (Brown, 1947) depicted a boy, not a

rabbit. Marcus (2007) also traced the apocryphal story

that editor Ursula Nordstrom demanded that artist Hurd

remove the udders on the cow jumping over the moon.

In preparing Golden Legacy, Marcus (2007) did research

at the Bank Street School of Education, the Brooklyn

Museum, the Charles M. Schultz Museum and Research

Center, HarperCollins, and the universities of Connecti-

cut, Illinois, Minnesota, Oregon, and Texas Wellesley

College among others. As Marcus will demonstrate, a

thorough—or perhaps simply serendipitous—search

may reveal unexpected resources that shed new light on

hitherto unanswered questions.

Archives and Special Collections—United

States

As noted above, there are over 300 archives and special

collections devoted to children’s and young adult litera-

ture. The collections featured below are located in the

United States, but such collections exist throughout the

world. The largest and most well-known U.S. collections

include the following.

Arne Nixon Center for the Study of Children’s

Literature

The Center was founded in 1995 by Arne John Nixon

(1927–1997), a member of the faculty of California State

University, Fresno, where he taught children’s literature

and storytelling. Nixon donated the initial collection of

22,000 books and left a bequest that supports the Center’s

activities. The Center’s collection focuses on American

and British books published from 1865 to the present.

Strengths of the collection include  ction for young adults,

Nordic and Finnish language books, St. Nicholas Maga-

zine, as well as books about California and the West. The

Center is part of the Henry Madden Library at California

State University, Fresno.

The Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s

Literature

The Baldwin Library was founded in 1977 and began as

the private collection of Ruth Baldwin (1917–1990), a

member of the faculty of Louisiana State University in

Baton Rouge from 1956 to 1977. The collection contains

over 100,000 books published in Great Britain and the

United States from the mid-1600s to the present. Strengths

of the collection include English and American editions of

the same title, 200 editions of Robinson Crusoe, 100 edi-

tions of The Pilgrim’s Progress, Little Golden Books, and

the publications of the American Sunday School Union.

The Baldwin Library is in the Department of Special

Collections of the George A. Smathers Libraries at the

University of Florida in Gainesville.

Cotsen Children’s Library

The Cotsen Library is based on a donation of children’s

books by Lloyd E. Cotsen, former CEO of Neutrogena

Corporation. The over 100,000 items in the Cotsen Library

include rare illustrated children’s books, manuscripts, and

artwork from the 15th century to the present in over 30

languages. Strengths include medieval manuscripts, an

extensive collection of books published by John New-

bery, dime novels, and Soviet picture books. The Cotsen

Children’s Library is a unit within the Department of Rare

Books and Special Collections at the Princeton Univer-

sity Library in Princeton, New Jersey.

De Grummond Children’s Literature Collection

Founded in 1966 by Dr. Lena Y. de Grummond, the

Collection holds the original manuscripts and illustra-

tions of more than 1200 authors and illustrators, as

well as 100,000+ published books dating from 1530 to

the present. The de Grummond Collection is a special

collection of the McCain Library and Archives on the

388

KAREN NELSON HOYLE

campus of The University of Southern Mississippi in

Hattiesburg.

Children’s Literature Center at the Library of

Congress

Founded in 1963, the Children’s Literature Center at the

Library of Congress is ensconced in the Rare Books and

Special Collections. The Children’s Literature Center

assists users in gaining access to all children’s materi-

als dispersed throughout the Library. The Library of

Congress holds approximately 200,000 children’s books

and related items, such as boxed and board games, sound

recordings, maps, and illustrations. Children’s  ction,

poetry, and folklore are classi ed and grouped together.

However, non ction children’s books are shelved in their

respective subject areas. In short, children’s materials are

scattered throughout the Library’s complex collections of

more than 130 million items. The Center is located in the

Thomas Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress in

Washington, D.C.

Children’s Literature Research Collection

The CLRC is an internationally recognized resource in

the  eld of children’s literature, and it contains six core

collections (including Kerlan and Hess) and several

smaller collections. They include collections of comic

books, dime novels, story papers, series books, Paul

Bunyan books, Oziana, and editions of Treasure Island.

The CLRC is housed in the Elmer L. Andersen Library,

located on the campus of the University of Minnesota in

Minneapolis.

The Kerlan Collection of Children’s Literature

The Kerlan Collection is the oldest and most well-known

of the collections within the CLRC. It contains more than

100,000 children’s books as well as original manuscripts,

artwork, galleys, and color proofs for more than 13,000

children’s books. One-eighth of the books are inscribed

by the author or illustrator. The Collection includes books

that are signi cant in the history of children’s literature,

as well as over 300 periodical titles, 1,200 reference titles,

and other items (posters, toys, photographs,  gurines)

related to children’s literature.

The May Massee Collection

In addition to the larger and more comprehensive archives

and special collections, there are also many other special

collections that contain very speci c materials. One of the

most interesting of these in terms of scope and depth is

the May Massee Collection at Emporia State in Kansas,

named for a prominent children’s book editor. The col-

lection holds the 930 books she oversaw over a 40-year

period. Even her New York City of ce was reconstituted.

Moreover, the collection contains extensive correspon-

dence and manuscripts by authors such as Rumer Godden,

art by illustrators such as Kate Seredy, and both art and

manuscripts by Robert McCloskey.

Archives and Special Collections—

International

Archives or special collections exist in many corners of

the world. Public holdings abound in Western nations,

residing primarily in national libraries, institutions of

higher education, and large public libraries. Private col-

lections are scattered internationally, yet lack of language

expertise and communication curtails gathering names and

descriptions of such entities.

Collection sites permeate all corners of the globe. Jella

Lepman founded the largest—the International Youth

Library (IYL)—in Munich, Germany, in 1949, inspiring

a similar library in Osaka, Japan. Each seeks books from

the entire world; subject specialists work with each geo-

graphic or language section. The IYL is the largest library

for international children’s and youth literature in the

world. Its collection is more than a half million volumes

in 130 languages, including reference books. Its program

includes their coined phrase “reading museums,” exhibi-

tions, children’s lending library, adult training courses and

seminars, publications, study library, and scholarships. The

International Institute for Children’s Literature, Osaka,

formally opened in 1984. Incorporating Professor Shin

Torigoe’s 19th-century books and periodicals, it expanded

to approximately 260,000 volumes and 190,000 issues of

4,700 of periodical titles.

Lepman also encouraged the collecting of books by

national sections as part of her vision for the International

Board of Books for Young People (IBBY). Its IBBY chap-

ter headquarters in Mexico and Nigeria possess substantial

numbers of indigenous books.

As a requirement of the law, publishers in most coun-

tries send new titles to their national deposit libraries. In a

few of them—such as Sweden, Singapore, and Japan—the

law directs children’s books as published to a designated

alternate library. In Sweden, the children’s books transfer

to the Swedish Children’s Book Institute, located next

to a university library. An electronic catalog offers im-

mediate access to the world. Singapore also collects the

publisher’s books in the four national languages—Chinese,

English, Malay, and Tamil. Some are exclusive regarding

language.

The National Diet Library in Tokyo incorporated chil-

dren’s books from the Imperial Library. The children’s

section ultimately separated from the national library

and moved to a building located in Ueno Park, Tokyo in

2000. For this section there are two reading rooms—one

for Japanese children’s books and one for those of other

languages. Rules require registration and reader cards. An

exhibit gallery on an upper  oor showcases historic and

contemporary books on subjects such as Canadian Picture

389

ARCHIVES AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS

Books and the sun, moon, and space. A slightly different

approach occurs in France. For each copy of a children’s

book deposited at the Bibliotheque Nationale, another also

is placed at the Centre National de la Littérature Pour la

Jeunesse—La Joie Par les Livres in Paris.

Books may focus on language and even further on time

period of publication. The D. J. Williams Collection at the

National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth holds 500 vol-

umes in Welsh from 1800 to 1949. Centro Internacional del

Libro Infantil y Juvenil in Salamanca collects editions in

all languages spoken in Spain, along with books published

in Latin America. Estonian and Lithuanian collections

limit themselves to those Baltic languages. The National

Library of New Zealand in Wellington owns Maori and

Paci c Island language editions.

The National Library of Ireland in Dublin collects

Irish authors’ books and Irish-themed books, if published

abroad. Displays during the IRSCL conference in 2006

featured 19th-century chapbooks and contemporary manu-

scripts and illustrations. Discussion about an archive and

book collection at a conference in 1995 was the impetus

for the University of South Africa’s “Children’s Literature

Research Unit.” It collects books in all South African

languages and recently sent loans of books for exhibition

to Prague, Mumbai, Jerusalem, Sao Paulo, Lisbon, Hanoi,

and Tunis.

Canadian author Lucy Montgomery’s manuscripts,

journals, scrapbooks, personal papers, and artifacts are

not, as one would expect, on Prince Edward Island, the

setting for her Anne of Green Gables (e.g., Montgomery,

1908) books. Instead, they reside in Ontario at the Uni-

versity of Guelph. That university also holds the largest

collection of Scottish books, including children’s writers,

outside of Scotland.

Tales of Acquisition

Along with collectors, curators shape acquisitions by

reaching out to particular potential donors. Curators hear

the horror stories of work lost in  re and  ood or discarded

after the death of a creator. Passionate about the  eld, staff

members go to great lengths to acquire materials. Each

collection contains not only the stories within children’s

and young adult books, but also the stories behind those

stories—the stories of the journey that the materials took

on their way to the special collection. One such stroy of

my own follows.

In 1970, I visited the recently widowed Mallie Teng-

gren and asked if she would be willing to donate the art

of Gustaf Tenggren’s more than 50 children’s books to the

Kerlan Collection. Among them were Little Golden Books

including The Poky Little Puppy (Lowrey, 1942) and the

larger format of The Night Before Christmas (Moore,

1955). Mrs. Tenggren shared information about her offer

to the University of Maine that the estate, located on Dog’s

Head Bay in Maine, become a Tenggren museum and stu-

dent summer art center. In the course of this discussion, I

gave an account of the many Swedish Americans who had

been and continued to be prominent in Minnesota’s immi-

grant and political history and the fact that the University

of Minnesota’s Scandinavian Department kept language

and literature on the forefront.

A decade passed and the East coast university took no

interest in Mrs. Tenggren’s museum-center proposal. As

a result, Mrs. Tenggren requested that the University of

Minnesota curator serve as the executor of all her hus-

band’s art, and she bequeathed the children’s book art and

paintings to the University of Minnesota. In the mid-1980s,

the executor for the entire estate telephoned to tell me that

the house in Maine needed to be vacated immediately for

impending repairs and eventual sale.

In response, I  ew with my husband to Boston, rented a

car, and headed to the Boothbay Harbor area. Art was scat-

tered throughout the huge house and attached studio, some

formally framed and hung on walls, but others stashed

in the attic, under the beds, and in closets. Meanwhile, a

curator from Sweden wandered about the rooms looking

for the folk art pieces that would be shipped in containers

to a museum in Dalarna to which they had been promised.

A representative of Maine’s university picked up paintings

and prints by Mexican artists such as Rivera. Unaware

of what had transpired years before, he commented that

the property and buildings would make an ideal summer

program setting.

Typical of a short time frame to swing into action, I

retrieved, sorted, and organized the art by title and listed

the images for each book. Thirty-two-paged books with

unique covers predominated. Some fragile illustrations

required hand carrying on the airplane. Others were packed

in 54 boxes by my husband, who drove with them to the

small local post of ce where he lifted each one on the scale

for the postmistress. He built crates for the larger paintings

and transported them to the nearby town’s transport com-

pany. The last crates were shipped from the Boston airport.

On arrival in Minneapolis, the paintings transferred to the

University of Minnesota’s art museum and the children’s

book art to the University’s library. And here the story

ends, happily ever after. The Tenggren art is now available

at the Kerlan Collection for study, reprints, and exhibits,

and royalty checks from Tenggren’s books and reprints

fund the collection’s preservation and promotion.

Tales of Discovery

A wide array of individuals from various fields and

backgrounds come to archival collections with a myriad

of questions, seeking access to materials that may satisfy

their queries. Those who examine and study the collections

include faculty, students, independent scholars, authors,

artists, gallery exhibitors, and many other members of

390

KAREN NELSON HOYLE

the general public. Their interest in particular texts, or the

work of speci c authors and illustrators, often lead them to

surprising and intriguing discoveries, as well as completed

theses, dissertations, and published books.

For example, Frances Trice examines children’s lit-

erature from a design process point of view. Informed by

perspectives from the  eld of Human Ecology, her disser-

tation “Drawing and the Design Process: An Examination

of Design Methods Used by Award-Winning Illustrators of

Children’s Books” (2004) examined the design processes

of Nancy Carlson and Chris Van Allsburg. Data about their

design processes were gathered from interviews, articles

from scholarly and popular magazines, and web sites.

In addition, the illustrators’ original working drawings,

which are housed in the Children’s Literature Research

Collection (CLRC) at the University of Minnesota, were

included in the study.

As the curator of that collection, I had visited author/

illustrator Chris Van Allsburg. During my visit, he told me

I could have the items that he’d created and tossed on the

 oor. I gathered up the wadded tracing papers, ironed them

 at at home, and slipsheeted them with acid free paper. In

time, it became clear that I had preserved the preliminary

drawings for the 1982 Caldecott Medal winner Jumanji

(Van Allsburg, 1981). They are now protected with mat

board for travel on loan. These drawings, among other

documents, were thus available to Frances Trice as she

completed her work.

Sharon McQueen is a cultural historian of youth lit-

erature. Her award-winning dissertation work, The Story

of “The Story of Ferdinand”: The Creation of a Cultural

Icon (2010), is multidisciplinary. The goal of McQueen’s

study is increased insight into the creation and reception

of the picture book, The Story of Ferdinand (Leaf, 1936).

To answer these questions, Sharon McQueen traveled to

well over a dozen research sites in six states and Canada.

Libraries, archives, special collections, rare book de-

partments, and a publishing house provided a wealth of

empirical sources. Over 10,000 documents were digitally

recorded and examined. Archival documents included ver-

sions of The Story of Ferdinand (primarily translations),

manuscripts, visual art works, contracts, correspondence

(letters, notes, greeting cards, and telegrams) photographs,

sound recordings, newspaper and magazine clippings,

Disney animated movie cells, store displays, and realia

(jewelry, fabrics, toys, etc.).

The Kerlan Collection of the CLRC contained a number

of  rst editions of Munro Leaf and Robert Lawson books,

signed to Dr. Irvin Kerlan. These inscriptions revealed that

Kerlan was well-regarded by both men. But McQueen was

most interested in documents that substantiated her  nd-

ings that Munro Leaf and Robert Lawson’s books had been

used by Franklin Publications, a Cold War organization

 nancially aided by the U.S. government, as well as vari-

ous foundations, to assist in the translation and publication

of U.S. books abroad.

The Free Library of Philadelphia holds both the Munro

Leaf and the Robert Lawson collections, the former the au-

thor and the latter the artist of the picture book. McQueen

spent several weeks with these collections, exploring such

items as the original manuscript and the dummy. She trav-

eled to New York to visit the Morgan Library and Museum,

which contained the original art of the book, and to explore

the archives of Viking Children’s Books. McQueen spent

a week at the May Massee Collection at Emporia State

University. May Massee was the book’s editor at Viking.

As a result of this research, McQueen decided that the cre-

ation of The Story of Ferdinand could best be told through

biographies of those most involved in its creation: Munro

Leaf, Robert Lawson, and May Massee. Each comprise a

chapter in McQueen’s dissertation, and each will eventu-

ally be expanded to book-length works.

Sharon McQueen’s research has shed light on myths

surrounding the book’s creation and reception. For exam-

ple, scholars of children’s literature have long believed that

The Story of Ferdinand was written to convey a political

message. McQueen has provided evidence to refute this

through the presentation of papers at several conferences

of the Children’s Literature Association. When Sharon

McQueen was awarded the American Library Associa-

tion’s Jesse H. Shera Award for the Support of Disserta-

tion Research, an award intended to provide recognition

for dissertation research employing exemplary research

design and methods, she was interviewed in an article for

School Library Journal. She said:

I think the notion that the book was written as some sort of

reaction to the Spanish Civil War was an assumption that

was so oft repeated as to now be considered fact… I have

yet to ﬁ nd any evidence that supports the notion. Yet, chil-

dren’s literature scholars have often referred to Ferdinand

as a “political text.” The 2005 ﬁ rst edition of The Norton

Anthology of Children’s Literature states that Ferdinand is

“possibly the most famous example of the picture book as

political text” and goes on to state that “Ferdinand was writ-

ten during the Spanish Civil War.” In the journal, Children

& Libraries, a professor of English states, “Leaf’s book about

the bull who refused to ﬁ ght was prompted by the outbreak

of the Spanish Civil War.”

In fact, Munro Leaf wrote the story in October of 1935.

The Spanish Civil War broke roughly nine months later, in

July of 1936, and The Story of Ferdinand was published in

September of 1936. It was clearly not written during the

Spanish Civil War, and it was not prompted by its outbreak.

The author and illustrator—as well as their wives and chil-

dren—have always denied that the book had any political

origins or intentions. (Whelan, 2008, para 3,4)

Despite the controversy, McQueen’s scholarship demon-

strates that what many take as “givens” can be unmasked

through careful scholarship. Yet, the book’s intended

audience, children, who are often blissfully unaware of

adults’ academic arguments, continues to clamor for the

book. Asked whether the book would maintain its classic

391

ARCHIVES AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS

status, McQueen responded, “…Ferdinand is most de -

nitely alive and well. As Munro Leaf used to say, ‘A little

bit of bull goes a long way!’” (para 8).

As a  nal example, Professor Peter Neumeyer from the

University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) perused the

manuscript drafts and notes of E. B. White for his book

about Charlotte, the spider who was a true friend and a

good writer, and Wilbur, the runt pig. Charlotte’s Web

(White, 1952) won a 1953 Newbery honor and became

a classic of children’s literature. In The Annotated Char-

lotte’s Web, Neumeyer (1994) wrote:

…there is information from White’s eight manuscript drafts

for Charlotte’s Web that are deposited at the Cornell Uni-

versity Library, Division of Rare & Manuscript Collections.

From these, we may obtain insights into the craftsmanship

of a highly conscious and self-aware artist, and gain an

appreciation for the difﬁ culties of writing beautiful prose

ﬁ ction. (p. xvii)

In terms of annotated texts, Neumeyer’s text has now

become a classic in its own right, a model for scholars

intrigued with the possibilities of tracing an author’s steps

through the process of creating a masterpiece.

Preliminary and On-Site Procedures

The more procedures the researcher understands in ad-

vance about research in archives and special collections,

the more ef cient the experience will be. Prior to a visit,

the researcher completes a literature search and identi-

 es the appropriate collection to use. While university

and public libraries in the United States tend to be open

to the public, private libraries tend to be more restrictive.

Land grant universities in the Midwest by law serve the

public. The Huntington in Pasadena, California, and the

Pierpont Morgan in New York City are private libraries that

serve senior scholars. As a result, neophytes in the study

of children’s books gravitate toward land grant universi-

ties. Then the researcher follows the procedures for that

particular institution.

In the exploratory stage, the researcher conducts a

literature search to ascertain what other research has

been published on their topic. Few ongoing projects are

con dential, so the curator might share this proprietary

information.

To  nd the appropriate site, the searcher might con-

sult the paper or electronic copy of Special Collections

in Children’s Literature: An International Directory

(Jones, 1995). Occasionally a donor restricts access for

a designated number of years or until his or her death.

Researchers can explore possible fellowships at the insti-

tution or other sources for research support and request

a lodging list.

On site procedures to use archives and special col-

lections vary and may seem counter intuitive for regular

library users. A delicate balance exists between openness

and protection, so usually there is no access to shelves, no

individual browsing, no checking out books and materials,

and no self-service photocopying. Some special collection

web sites list holdings, procedures for researchers, and

staff information. A few require a letter of introduction

on letterhead, an appointment, and a fee. Finally, many

request that a copy of an article or book resulting from

research in the collection be donated when published.

Some predictable steps follow selection of a site. There

are a myriad of forms to complete, from registering to sign-

ing a statement regarding the understanding of copyright

law to photocopy or digital camera use. Retrieval may take

additional time, so patience on the part of the researcher

is necessary. Most collections require registration on site,

usually supported by a government issued of cial photo

identi cation and a stated purpose for research. For distant

users, electronic registration and requests for reproduction

may be possible.

Second, after registering, the user requests materi-

als. The researcher may request an appointment with a

staff member who may assist with descriptive wording

or holdings. Archives, associated with organization or

personal papers, use terminology such as “ nding aids”

and “processing” to de ne the description of holdings and

procedure for organizing. Special Collections prefer the

words “catalogs” and “cataloging.”

Staff members may know of materials not yet pro-

cessed, which may lead to other collections with similar

subject matter or other researchers with similar research

interests. Unique materials demand original descriptions

for their features such as the notes and correspondence

for Francesca Lia Block’s books. Special collections and

archives handle materials differently; the former may

provide a “catalog record” for books by Karen Cushman

or Lois Lowry and then a “ nding aid” for the manuscript

drafts.

Third, security measures may require placing one’s

personal belongings in a locker and bringing only a pencil

or a laptop computer into the reading room. Only after

hand washing may one proceed to the reading room. Once

there, the researcher works in only one box at a time and

removes one folder from the box at a time, retaining the

order. No food and beverages, cell phones, or conversa-

tions are allowed. Using some materials may necessitate

gloves or special equipment, such as a book cradle or

micro lm reader.

Fourth, each archive has regulations regarding hand

held scanners, digital camera use, and photocopy ma-

chines. Staff may photocopy or digitize for a fee for a

researcher’s personal use, but written permission must

be granted for further rights, such as using a publication

beyond “fair use.” Materials published since a particular

date may be protected by copyright regulations. The re-

searcher may need to show evidence of permission in writ-

ing from an author or publishing company department of

rights and permissions before acquiring a reproduction or

392

KAREN NELSON HOYLE

taking a digital no- ash photograph. Scholarly publishers

may insist that the author provide evidence of permission

and even pay for the rights to reprint a picture. Heirs who

hold literary or artistic rights may insist on substantial

payment.

Conclusion

Researchers in archives and special collections include

academics, graduate students, undergraduate students,

independent scholars, curators of museums and exhibits,

and the general public. Scholars, practitioners, and stu-

dents committed to a career involving children’s books can

help by visiting an archive or special collection devoted

to children’s and young adult literature. The options are

simultaneously historical and contemporary, broad and

narrow, cursory and deep. I would urge scholars of chil-

dren’s and young adult literature in all disciplines to seek

out such opportunities and then share what they learn with

students and the public on all levels. Such communication

should lead to better understanding of the background,

depth and uniqueness of book history, and behind the

scenes in children’s book formulation. In this way, scholars

will ensure that archives and special collections will retain

their relevancy and thrive in the 21st century.

Literature References

Brown, M. W. (1947). Goodnight moon (C. Hurd, Illus.). New York,

NY: Harper & Brothers.

Leaf, M. (1936). The story of Ferdinand (R. Lawson, Illus.). New

York, NY: Viking Penguin.

Lowrey, J. S. (1942). The poky little puppy (G. Tenggren, Illus.).

New York, NY: Simon & Shuster.

Montgomery, L. M. (1908). Anne of Green Gables. Boston, MA:

L.C. Page.

Moore, C. C. (1955). The night before Christmas (G. Tenggren,

Illus.). New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.

Van Allsburg, C. (1981). Jumanji. Boston: Houghton Mif in.

White, E. B. (1952). Charlotte’s web (G. Williams, Illus.). New

York, NY: Harper & Row.

Academic References

Field, C. W. (Ed.). (1969). Subject collections in children’s literature

(1st ed.). National Planning Committee for Special Collections.

Children’s Services Division. American Library Association.

New York, NY: R.R. Bowker.

Field, C. W. (Ed.). (1982). Special collections in children’s literature

(Rev. ed.). National Planning for Special Collections Committee,

Association for Library Service to Children, American Library

Association. Chicago, IL: American Library Association.

Jones, D. B. (Ed.). (1995). Special collections in children’s

literature: An international directory. National Planning for

Special Collections Committee, Association for Library Service

to Children, American Library Association. Chicago, IL:

American Library Association.

Marcus, L. S. (1999). Margaret Wise Brown: Awakened by the moon.

New York, NY: W. Morrow.

Marcus, L. S. (2007). Golden legacy: How Golden Books won

children’s hearts, changed publishing forever, and became an

American icon along the way. New York, NY: Golden Books/

Random House.

McQueen, S. (2010). The story of “The story of Ferdinand”: The

creation of a cultural icon. Unpublished doctoral dissertation,

University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Neumeyer, P. F. (1994). The annotated Charlotte’s web. New York,

NY: HarperCollins.

Trice, F. (2004). Drawing and the design process: An examination

of design methods used by award-winning illustrators of

children’s books. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University

of Minnesota.

Whelan, D. L. (2008, June 11). Sharon McQueen talks about her

fascination with The story of Ferdinand. School Library Journal.

Retrieved March 10, 2010, from http://www.schoollibraryjournal.

com/article/CA6569531.html?nid=2413&rid=88962601

Young, H. (1983). The ALA glossary of library and information

science. Chicago, IL: American Library Association.

393

Point of Departure

Leonard S. Marcus

Brown. I knew from the printed  nding aid that Shaw’s

diaries ran to dozens of volumes—a promising sign, I

thought. It soon became apparent to me, however, that

the author of It Looked Like Spilt Milk was a wholly

pedestrian diarist. Typical entries gave the times of day

he rose and went to bed, a weather report, the number

of hours spent painting, the names of lunch and dinner

companions, but with almost no descriptive detail or

re ective commentary. Shaw was no Anaïs Nin!

My  rst reaction was one of extreme disappointment.

Then I realized that Shaw’s diaries might in fact help

solve a vexing problem I had. A friend of Brown’s had

recently sent me a boxful of her letters. Exasperatingly

(for me), Brown had not dated most of them, and I needed

to know when the letters had been written in order to

know where to place them in her life story. Gradually, by

cross-referencing the letters with Shaw’s matter-of-fact

mentions of Brown’s “new apartment,” impending trips

to Maine, etc., I succeeded in dating much of that treasure

trove of correspondence. I have always been grateful that

Shaw’s “boring” diaries were preserved, and I think my

experience makes the case for saving more rather than less

whenever possible, and for not presuming that the impor-

tance of a document can be judged once and for all.

The  rst years of my career predated the Internet. In

1980, I began my quest for information about Margaret

Wise Brown by publishing an old-fashioned author’s

query in the New York Times Book Review. Nine letters

came back in response: eight from Times readers who

loved Goodnight Moon and wanted to tell somebody; the

ninth, typed on heavy, engraved stationery, was from a

man who introduced himself as a college friend of Clem-

ent Hurd. That last letter, it turned out, was all I needed

to start me on my way, as its author helped arrange a

meeting with Hurd and his wife, who introduced me to

their old friend Leonard Weisgard, who introduced me

to his friend Alvin Tresselt, and on and on, with each

of these friends and colleagues of Brown having much

to tell me that illuminated the Brown materials to be

found at the Kerlan Collection and more than a dozen

other libraries.

Now that special collections have web sites on which

are sometimes posted detailed  nding aids and even virtual

exhibitions, it has become easier to scope out the archival

portion of the research landscape and to decide in advance

whether a trip to a far- ung collection is likely to be worth

the time and expense. The more such information becomes

available online, the better it will be for all concerned.

My work over the last 25 years has taken me to most of

the major American research collections in children’s

literature as well as to many other, less frequented reposi-

tories, both public and private, with holdings of original

source materials of interest to me. I have arrived at some

archives knowing precisely what I wanted to see, but

more often the experience has been more in the nature

of a  shing excursion: a patient trolling through a body

of manuscripts or photographs or letters in hopes either

of simply immersing myself more deeply in my subject

of the moment or of coming away with a sack load of

keepers—elusive answers perhaps to a list of long puz-

zling questions; or fresh insights gleaned from a study of

images or documents that somehow bring my project a

step closer to completion. While writing Golden Legacy,

my history of Golden Books, for example, my editor and

I visited the Kerlan Collection where we pored over the

contents of more than 100 boxes of illustrator Gustav

Tenggren’s artwork. We knew Tenggren’s  nished art

well but were thrilled to discover a series of preliminary

studies for Shy Little Kitten that vividly con rmed the

knowledge of animal anatomy that underpinned even

the more “adorable “ side of Tenggren’s varied and pro-

digious output.

Louise Seaman Bechtel, the founding director of

Macmillan’s Department of Books for Boys and Girls

nearly a century ago, bequeathed a stash of her corre-

spondence to her alma mater, Vassar College. A number

of years ago, as I read through the thick sheaf of let-

ters written to her by her friend and author Elizabeth

Coatsworth, I became keen to  nd the other half of the

correspondence. The pre-Internet search tools then avail-

able to me all came up dry. But knowing that Coatsworth

had lived in Maine, I telephoned a few likely Maine

repositories and on my third try—a call to the Maine

Women Writers’ Archive at the University of New Eng-

land, Portland—I hit pay dirt. Until then, neither archive

knew the whereabouts of the other half of a substantial

50-year-long exchange of letters whose ownership they

shared. More and more such links between collections

are sure to emerge; let’s hope that information about

them will be freely shared.

I have had my share of fruitless searches. Seemingly

useless material, however, can sometimes prove to be of

unexpected value. While researching my biography of

Margaret Wise Brown I visited the Archives of American

Art, in Washington, D.C., to scan the diaries of illustrator

Charles G. Shaw for references to his friendship with

394

While archives will inevitably compete with each other

from time to time for the stewardship of this or that mother

lode of material, ultimately all stand to gain the most from

LEONARD S. MARCUS

cooperation and a commitment to open access that allows

scholars to do the hard but rewarding work of putting the

pieces together.

Part 3

THE WORLD AROUND

Children’s and young adult literature is not simply a

vehicle for helping young people acquire conventional

and cultural literacies, nor is it merely a site for scholarly

cogitation. It is also a major player in popular culture and a

prospering economic concern. In recent years, for instance,

books like the Harry Potter and the Twilight series have

become global points of reference with millions of readers

worldwide, but other books in the past, such as Anne of

Green Gables and Pippi Longstocking, have also found

international audiences and spawned their own industries

of tourism, merchandise, and adaptations. Comprehensive

research into children’s and young adult literature, then,

must examine the contexts in which these books exist and

travel through the larger world.

At the heart of this research are questions surrounding

publishing, marketing, and distribution practices. As with

most products, the end user doesn’t get to decide what gets

produced to meet needs and satisfy desires, but through

clever marketing and manipulation, we are taught to desire

what manufacturers and marketers make available to us. A

feedback loop develops, where what sells gets replicated,

products are re ned or innovated according to market re-

search, and a balance between the new and the familiar is

maintained. A lot of children’s and young adult literature

is like that—variations on familiar plot lines and character

types, often aligned in trends that  are, burn brightly, and

then fade, all packaged to sell.

Children’s and young adult literature, then, is undeni-

ably a commodity. This consequence of robust consumer-

ism both increases its value in certain contexts and limits

its accessibility in others. Actual books in the hands of

children have come to be understood as a fairly undeniable

good, but academics are more mixed in our responses to

the kinds of consumerism that surround the production

of books. What happens when the books become ads for

expensive dolls, plush toys, play sets, movies, UGG boots,

costumes, games, decorating themes, etc.? Doesn’t the

book itself get lost, its value as literature cheapened and

reduced to a brand through  ashy merchandising? Or, on

the other hand, does this resituate the book —meaning its

story, its characters, its setting—at the center of a com-

munity of individuals who enter its world and live in and

through it in creative ways? Whether one considers it a

boon or bane, aggressive cross-marketing of children’s

books and related products is a booming business that

begs for thoughtful research and analysis.

But of course, literature is so much more than a prod-

uct; it is an art form as well. Authors and illustrators have

something important and fresh to say to their audiences,

many work continually to expand the boundaries of their

art form, and editors and publishers are seeking luminous

works to bring to their intended audience. This desire to

produce quality literary art is heightened by the knowl-

edge that these works are speci cally aimed at young

people. Always, always, there is the sense of that end

user, that child or teen who will  nd in the book some

nugget that will open her eyes to the world as possibility

and wonder.

Because this sense of a child audience and our obliga-

tions to it varies across time and culture, levels of access

to children’s and young adult literature vary as well.

Advocates of children’s and young adult literature chafe

against barriers of economic necessities and/or inequities

that prevent widespread publishing of translated books

as well as getting books into the hands of children at all.

Countries without a robust publishing industry for adult

395

396

THE WORLD AROUND

books are even less likely to spend their scant resources on

publishing children’s books, while the dif culty of  nding

skilled, committed translators combines with a concern

for publishers’ bottom lines to mitigate against the avail-

ability of either indigenously produced books or quality

translations for children in many places in the world.

Grassroots efforts, NGOs, and other non-pro t or-

ganizations work tirelessly to improve access to books

and create reading cultures in their countries. The Astrid

Lindgren Memorial Award has supported the efforts of two

such organizations—Banco del Libro in Venezuela and

Tamer Institute for Community Education in Palestine—

while others, such as Ethiopia Reads, the Little Hands

Trust, and Stories Across Africa to name but a few, have

sought through local and online networking to gener-

ate donations and increase awareness and involvement.

Clearly, more work needs to be done to improve access

to books everywhere in the world, and this work is being

undertaken by academics in the  eld who adopt activist

roles to complement their scholarly ones.

In developed countries, questions are more likely to

arise about limiting access to books in the form of cen-

sorship, and exploring the effects and politics of awards

and reviewing on what counts as literature that adults

feel ought to be read by today’s youth. The motivations

for these discussions stem from similar roots—a concern

for children’s vulnerability on the one hand, and for the

kinds of values and taste that we wish to cultivate in our

children on the other. In the midst of this complex swirl

of voices that protest, critique, and/or celebrate books, a

single note emerges: We believe in the power of children’s

and young adult literature to transform lives, for better or

worse, and hence our responses to the literature always

proceed from moral and ideological dimensions as well

as aesthetic ones.

Yet, for many of us, the aesthetic dimension is the

most powerful. We come to the study of children’s and

young adult literature for many reasons and from many

backgrounds, but mostly, we come out of love. Perhaps be-

cause these books contain the stories that have shaped our

imaginary geographies, we want to visit them again and

again, and in various ways. Who among us doesn’t have an

object of some kind—be it a doll, a mug, some stationary,

a puppet, or a plush toy —on our of ce bookshelves that

reminds us of a favorite character? And who among us,

given the chance, wouldn’t go to the spaces that have been

lovingly set aside to honor the authors whose voices echo

in our own voices, whose landscapes feature prominently

in our own inner views? Museums, author’s homes, and

even theme parks can offer us one more layer of experi-

ence, often overlooked, in our scholarly journeys.

Children’s and young adult literature thrives in a vari-

ety of contexts, making interdisciplinary research a rich

venue for study. Tracing a text through its incarnations,

translations, adaptations, and contextualizations can afford

not only fruitful possibilities for publication, but also for

pleasure. And understanding the dif culties that many

have regarding simple access to those sorts of pleasures

can spur us to activism as well.

Where Worlds Meet

Ana Maria Machado

In this chapter, two recipients of the Hans Christian Andersen Award share their views on reaching across

worlds with stories that contribute to our shared humanity.

Ana Maria Machado and Katherine Paterson  rst presented their essays at the 8th IBBY Regional Con-

ference (2009). Through her understanding of translating literature and having her own writing translated,

Machado traces the meeting of ideas and imaginations across the expanse of national borders, the shrinking

time and space of digital worlds, and the artistry of stories. In turn, Paterson expresses the dif culty—and the

ultimate value—of reaching across worlds, and into her own emotional memory, to discover the words and

images that will bring a Kosava refugee family’s experience to life. Both authors asks us to make our passion

for international literature “contagious.”

Where worlds really meet, it makes no difference if

someone is different. Because in such meetings, differ-

ences are part of the fun. They make it possible for one

to complete the other, by mutual supply of what is missed

on each side. They make it possible for one to attract the

other and so, to fall in love. They arouse curiosity and so

they make learning easier and they build understanding.

They show the immense variety of humankind and so

they challenge an inward journey, in search of common

features.

Ideally, every human being, from an early age, should

have the opportunities of crossing frontiers, meeting neigh-

bors, going abroad, getting to know different people and

landscapes, listening to other languages, eating different

food, being in touch with the beautiful diversity of cultures.

But this is not so fully possible, for the whole process is

not as easy as it appears when saying it. So, this need

must be met by other means. That’s where imagination

and symbolic language begin their work.

Throughout history, people have gathered around those

who travelled and, upon their return, told what they had

seen on their journeys, brought souvenirs, showed images

of every kind and shared with them the meetings they

had with others. And even more, travelers began writing

about what they had seen, or painting landscapes that had

impressed them, or singing songs or playing music they

had heard. Later on, with technological developments,

movement and stories between worlds continued, with the

help of photography, slides, prints,  lms, radio, telephone,

television, videos, and audio recordings. Now, in our day,

with the web and the possibility of instant accessing any

point on the planet, with camera and sound, even with

the help of small devices that  t in one’s hands, worlds

can meet more easily than ever. Information now can be

397

398

ANA MARIA MACHADO

shared so completely and so quickly through digital means

that the situation would be perfect for worlds meeting—if

information were enough.

But something else is required in order to get at true

meetings: something that goes beyond hard facts, con-

crete data and rational features; something that touches

emotions, feelings, personal identi cation, longing for

closeness, mutual sympathy or compassion. That’s where

personal expression comes in. Objective data are not

enough. Subjective touches are needed. That’s where a

good story, well told, can bring characters alive, in situ-

ations that make it possible for different worlds to meet.

That’s where literature is needed—the art of words, able

to express ambivalences and alternative experiences, able

to move, to touch one’s heart, or to give pangs and thrills,

by the mere use of language—an everyday resource—in

surprising ways, through an aesthetic approach to words

and clauses.

This is possible because art goes beyond everyday

life. In art, other worlds meet—beginning with inner and

outer worlds. When an author, a painter, a musician, or

any artist creates his or her work, it is always as an inner

response to an outer provocation, directed to an outer

expression. Second, in building this inner response, the

artist mixes different worlds, working at different levels.

In creating, the artist delves into feelings, reasonings,

previous knowledge, new research discoveries, dialogues

with lifelong readings, memories, dreams, fears, intuitions,

intentions, emotions, unconscious factors, conscious writ-

ing devices and so on. This dynamic interplay gives the

work its strength, by means of a series of psychological

mechanisms that involve projection and identi cation and

make it possible for a reader to recognize that work of art

as being also, at least partially, his or her own expression

of inner worlds.

This is also called the appropriation of a work of art by

its reader, spectator, or consumer—who incorporates the

artist’s work as his or her own property, as part of oneself.

When a reader goes through this process and appropriates

a text, for instance, the feeling is that it speaks through the

reader’s voice and, in doing so, it gives shape and sense

to some deep, blurred and unexpressed perceptions that

begged to come to the surface. Some analysts, such as

Roger Chartier (1996), for instance, tend to associate this

quality with the de nition of literature itself, described as

a written piece that deals with language in such a way that

it allows multiple re-appropriations at different readings.

In other words, in the literary process, different worlds

also meet—the writer’s worlds and the multiple readers’

worlds—or different worlds inhabited by the same reader

in different moments of his or her life. It is all part of the

process and mystery of literature.

Another mystery in this writing and reading process

involves an author being able to imagine a different self.

Sometimes this is done with such talent that the story con-

vinces the reader of being the other. In doing so, someone

who has never killed anyone—like Dostoyevsky or Albert

Camus and all of us, the readers of their novels—are able

to have an insight into a murderer’s mind. Or someone who

has never turned into an insect—such as Kafka—can write

a book like The Metamorphosis. Factual realism is not a

prerequisite for literature. But to achieve that excellence

of imagination, art and talent are required. Good intentions

are not enough. And trying to be literal is almost always

a wasted effort.

When we were small children and listened to a story

like Hansel and Gretel, for instance, we could imagine

what it means to face starvation or to be abandoned in

the dark among beasts and all the night dangers, by those

on whom we counted and who should care for us. For a

child living in the streets of an African or Latin American

city, this feeling is fully understood, even though the story

was written in Germany centuries ago. Worlds meet in

a story like Hansel and Gretel. Like its characters, this

story journeys deep into fear, despair and the faint hope

of being able to overcome all that awful and harsh reality

in spite of the adults—be they parents, stepparents, absent

parents, bosses, or rulers … or the witch.

“Meeting the Other” in Art

Lately, in the context of postcolonial studies, it has become

almost an obsession to approach literature with eyes trying

to discover messages, subjects, intentions, and packaged

formula, while only limited concern is given to literary

qualities. Such an attitude may have been very useful in

the deconstruction of a colonial canon imposed on oth-

ers. But it is not enough. Maybe today it runs the risk of

becoming a new kind of enforced imposition, an arti cial

pressure that demands the occurrence of certain cultural

features. It may be time to come to a more balanced view,

that is not concerned only with stressing individual cultural

differences, but may allow our common humanity to blos-

som and to  ow more freely. In doing so, we may even

discover the existence of certain rather naïve assumptions

about what we had been doing, in depicting those cases

where worlds were supposed to meet. Some years ago,

Edward Said (1979) called our attention to the fact that

orientalism managed to build a certain false idea of the

East, through writings by non-Easterners, who tried to

picture the other’s culture and  nally led to views that were

charged with exoticism, Eurocentrism, and patronizing at-

titudes. They might even have been well-intentioned, but

the result did not help worlds to really meet and appreciate

or understand each other.

If our aim is to shift the representation of the other, it

seems to me that the best way to do so would be to listen

to what the other really has to say: Hear, see, feel the

other’s voice in the other’s words. Instead of trying to

write or use different media to create an interpretation of

otherness, why not meet otherness through what otherness

creates? Of course, if one meets different worlds, gets

near them and mixes with others in everyday life, one’s

399

WHERE WORLDS MEET

creation will naturally re ect those meetings; it cannot be

avoided. It is highly desirable and should be promoted—

in life. Any artist who lives under those conditions will

probably bring its re ections to his or her work. But if

it is not the case, the best would be to translate and read

what others are already writing and creating, instead of

trying to speak for them. To be in touch with the other’s

productions can be a richer experience than insisting on

presenting ourselves disguised as the other and projecting

our voices on the other.

An Author’s Worlds

Working from my own experiences as an author, I want

to show how this process of being in the relation with

otherness may make its appearance in a story, even when

we are not thinking about it—just by re ecting the back-

ground of meetings, readings, and feelings from my life

in Brazil, being a Brazilian. Let me introduce my books

translated into English.

Like Nina Bonita (2001), for instance. As described

in the publisher’s catalogue, “enchanted by Nina Bo-

nita’s black skin, a white rabbit determines to  nd a

way to have children as beautiful and black as she is.”

With hints at the worlds of ancestors and descendants,

of black people and white people, the story also deals

with different ideas of beauty in different worlds, with

the meeting of different continents, and of children’s and

adults’ points of view.

Me in the Middle (2003) deals with shifts in time and

makes three different centuries meet, each one with its own

world. But it also weaves a story in which girls’ worlds and

boys’ worlds must meet as they grow up, in times when

gender roles are changing. A certain kind of time shifting

is also present in From Another World (2006), a kind of

ghost story. Contemporary children spend some time in a

country guesthouse, in a former plantation. And they meet

the ghost of a slave girl who lived and died there. This is

not only a meeting between past and present worlds, but

also between our world and another one, a world that con-

sidered it normal to rely on slavery and to treat people as

merchandise. It is also a meeting that shows that, contrary

to what most would like to believe, those two worlds are

not so far apart, even today.

But I would like to take a closer look at another book,

still not available in English. It is a book of mine called

Mas Que Festa!/What a Party! (1999). When I started the

book, I meant to develop a kind of philosophic reasoning,

along the lines of a linguistic challenge, under the cover

of a language play, exploring the richness of if-clauses,

subjunctive clauses, possibilities, risks, and consequences,

etc. In the process of writing, it followed its own path and

became a playful book about worlds meeting. A rough

translation from Portuguese to English would be:

WHAT A PARTY!

Be careful!

If your birthday is near and your mother says:

—I guess I’ll bake a cake. Why don’t you invite some friends

to come and play with you?

You may remember that Bob has a nice brother. Then, you

may ask:

—May my friends bring someone?

If your mother is absent-minded, she may just say:

—Of course! Whatever you want...

And so, if you are not careful, you may write an invitation

just like mine:

Come to my birthday party. On Saturday.

Bring whoever you want. And whatever you want.

If Bob brings his brother Simon, they may want to bring a

football. And their mother may send some coconut candies,

to share at the party.

If Moacir comes with Maíra (who may bring her parakeet),

of course Dona Iracema will take the chance and send a

boxful of cashew cupcakes...

If Miguel brings his sister Fatima, they may bring their dog.

And their mother Munira will certainly send some homus

and kekab for everyone...

If Giovani brings his cousin, maybe they leave the cat at

home, but I am sure Dona Gina will bake at least six big

pizzas for them to bring. And send some ice cream for

dessert...

If Elisa and Frederico come, maybe Frau Hilda doesn’t like

their idea of bringing the canary. So, she may bake a pie

and some biscuits, to apologize...

If Dona Maria knows about it, the least Manuel and his par-

rot are bringing is a bowl of egg sweets and a lot of small

codﬁ sh cakes...

And Mrs. Yoko will insist on preparing some sushis for Toshi-

ro to bring, even if his turtle doesn’t come along also...

And if Doña Carmen has no time to prepare a paella, at least

she will send different kinds of olives, because she thinks

that Pedro and Rosa always miss some olives in the pastry

and spring rolls that Chang’s mother generally cooks...

It may be very difﬁ cult to ﬁ nd some place on the table

with all that, with Dona Nieta’s cheese bread, Dona

Vicentina’s beans, Dona Esther’s couscous, Dona Flor’s

vatapa, Dona Iara’s açai, Dona Rita’s ﬁ sh stew, Dona Sonia’s

strogonoff...

Rodrigo may arrive too early, in order to prepare the bar-

becue...

But Zabele may arrive too late, and bring along a whole

afro-band...

By then, Severino’s friends may already have been dancing

forró for hours...

And Edmond’s gang may be in other room, dancing

funk...

If you are not careful, you will have to provide some room

for two soccer teams to play. And there will still be lots of

people everywhere, laughing and speaking at the same time.

A lot of noise, a lot of eating, a lot of dancing.

400

ANA MARIA MACHADO

It may well happen that the night comes and goes, and a

new day begins, and the party still goes on—if the parents

keep on chatting and having just one more beer before tak-

ing the children home.

So, be careful! Very careful!

Or your birthday party may be the craziest and funniest

party in the world.

A real Brazilian party.

But it is also interesting to see the Spanish and French

translations, adapted to different societies, with different

illustrations and references to different immigrant groups

in each context. I think that, better than anything else I

could say, those different versions show what I mean by

cultural meetings, intercultural approaches, policentric

multiculturalism, the richness of points of view from

different cultures. They stress how much, in children’s

books, there are meetings between the author’s and the

illustrator’s views, or the role an editor may play in those

meetings. For instance, in the Spanish edition, it was set

in a series. So, the book size was reduced to less than half

the size of the French one—the elements in the illustra-

tions (and the meeting of worlds) had to be squeezed to

 t and look almost crammed sometimes, but it works

beautifully.

On the other hand, the French publisher decided that

it should be a big book—to have room for all the worlds

to meet. And when the illustrator brought her  rst works,

each one in a page, beautifully framed, side by side with

the text, I liked them very much. But the editor rejected

them on the grounds that the whole story was about over-

 owing and exaggeration, frontier-crossing, and culture-

mixing. So, we should have text and images together, with

no boundaries, no frames at all. He insisted on not having

a purely French Cartesian viewpoint, with everything in its

right place, but a festive celebration. We can never thank

him enough for that decision: the result seems perfect to

me, and the illustrator was so happy to take up that chal-

lenge. The illustrations are of worlds meeting, in a place

far from Brazil, but very much a party for people who

enjoy one another’s presence.

Point of Departure

Katherine Paterson

There was an article in the New York Times Magazine on

September 10, 2009 (Thompson, 2009), that talked about

social contagion. It seems two researchers are seeking

to prove that not only are colds and  u catching, but so

are things like obesity and smoking and depression. The

good news about social contagion is that thinness and

non-smoking and happiness are also catching. Based

on evidence gathered from participants in the more than

50-year-old Framingham Heart Study, the participants, it

appeared, “in uenced one another’s health just by social-

izing.” The people you hang around with have, in other

words, a lot to do with how you feel and behave. I haven’t

caught thinness yet from my skinny acquaintances, but

the article gave me an additional reason to look forward

to this conference. I  gure that this weekend (during the

2009 Regional International Board on Books for Young

People Conference), I’m catching all kinds of good things

from friends near and far, and when we go home tomor-

row we’ll all be spreading this contagion of enthusiasm

for bringing books to children all over the globe.

None of us would be here today if it were not for chil-

dren’s books. More personally, I would never have had the

opportunity to meet my friends, Carmen Diana Dearden

and Ana Maria Machado if it were not for children’s

books. Carmen Diana and I met in New Delhi where she,

as president of IBBY, handed me the 1998 Hans Chris-

tian Andersen medal. I did not know then that that was to

mark the beginning of a wonderful friendship now more

than 10 years old. Ana Maria’s and my connection goes

back even further when she chose to translate my book

The Master Puppeteer (1976) into Portuguese. Can you

imagine the thrill of that? Having one of Brazil’s leading

writers choose to translate your book so that children in

her own country could read it? And that was only the  rst

of my books that she went on to translate. I was there in

Cartagena, Colombia, when she received her own long

overdue Andersen medal, and it is a joy and honor to be

sharing the stage with her this afternoon.

I think of Carmen Diana and Ana Maria and I look out

at this audience and see more people I have come to know

and love through the world of children’s books, and marvel

today as I often do how one person could be so fortunate.

Writing books for American children gave me an intro-

duction to what was then called, “Friends of IBBY,” and

USBBY, as we are now known, gave me an introduction

to IBBY, and then IBBY awarded me the Andersen Medal,

which, in turn, gave me an entry to the wide and diverse

world of persons united in their desire to give to children

everywhere the gifts of knowledge and understanding that

literature offers. I am forever grateful.

401

POINT OF DEPARTURE

Not long ago my English editor of many years asked me

if I had ever dreamed my life as a writer would turn out as

it has. “I never dreamed that I would ever get published,” I

answered. I have many friends who are very  ne writers,

and it seems to me that all of them knew by the time they

were 10 years old that they had been born to be writers.

When I was 10 years old, I wasn’t sure whether I wanted

to be a movie star or a missionary.

It would be nice to be able to look back and see signs

of early promise. Alas, you would search in vain. When I

won my  rst literary prize at the age of 44, a friend, who

had also lived in China and attended Shanghai American

School during the time I was there, decided to look into

her collection of school newspapers and see if I had writ-

ten anything for the Shanghai American. This is what she

found and gleefully quoted to anyone she heard congratu-

late me for winning the National Book Award:

Pat, pat, pat.

There is the rat.

Where is the cat?

Pat, pat, pat.

Right beside this, my  rst published work, was a letter

from the teacher that read: “The second graders’ work is

not up to our usual standards this week….” So, my  rst

published work was published alongside my  rst critical

review.

I once read a speech by a  ne writer who said that the

thing that quali ed her to be a writer for children was

her photographic memory of childhood. I can hardly

remember what I had for lunch yesterday, much less my

entire childhood, with any kind of precision. But I do

have, I think, a good emotional memory. I remember not

so much the details of the events themselves, but how

they felt to me.

There is one story from my childhood that I both

remember and was told, so that I probably cannot disen-

tangle the two. It was January of 1938. The war between

China and Japan had begun in earnest the previous sum-

mer. We had been caught in the mountains on vacation,

and with battles raging, only my father was allowed to go

home. After  ve frightening months of air raids, news of

battles and atrocities, not knowing what was happening to

our beloved father, he  nally returned. Soon afterwards,

we went down the mountain and, along with many other

foreign families, took a river steamer to Hangzhou where

we boarded a specially designated train covered with

large Red Crosses.

We traveled from Central China all the way south to

British ruled Hong Kong. The seven of us had spent days

on the journey. On the train we were crowded into a single

sleeping compartment where we both ate and slept. My

sister Helen was not quite two and baby Anne was less

than  ve months old. The British authorities had no idea

what to do with this trainload of foreign refugees, so

while the fathers were out scouring the crowded city for

reasonably priced shelter, the mothers and children just sat

on their luggage in the vast lobby of the Peninsula Hotel

which was then and may still be the grandest of all Hong

Kong’s grand hotels.

Naturally, the elegant British, European, and American

tourists who had paid hundreds of pounds for the privilege

of staying in the Peninsula were appalled and offended by

this  lthy lot of women and children who were cluttering

up their lobby.

My mother, who was not a bitter woman, could not

recall that long day without bitterness. “I watched them as

they passed by with sneers on their faces and I wanted to

cry out to them: ‘Do you think I like being here? Do you

think I want my children to be dirty?’” She would shake

her head. “They couldn’t even smile at the baby,” she said.

“What kind of person can’t even smile at a baby?” And

she would always end this story by saying, “I can never

see a picture of refugees in the paper without remember-

ing how it feels.”

I was only  ve, but the years since have not cured me

of the memory of how it feels. I hope they never do. If

you need an explanation of why I write the kind of books

that I do, perhaps it is found, at least in part, in the lobby

of the Peninsula Hotel. I never want to forget that child. I

want to keep her a part of all I write and do.

We had to leave China once more at the end of 1940

and come once again to the country my parents called

home. I was frightened by the war, and I wanted America

to be my home, too. But America was not my home. I

seemed quite as alien to my classmates as they did to me.

They made fun of my clothes, my accent, and the country

I loved best. I realize that the seeds of some of my best

writing go back to miserable days in the fourth grade at

Calvin H. Wiley Elementary School, but I can’t recall

once saying to my forlorn little nine-year-old self, “Buck

up, Old Girl, someday you’re going to make a mint out

of all this misery.”

While the playgrounds and classrooms were largely

places of terror and anxiety for me, the library was a

sanctuary. It was there that the wonderful school librarian

introduced me to dozens of friends who never made fun

of me, never bullied me. The friends I found in books not

only helped me to understand myself better, they made it

possible for me to come to understand and reach out to oth-

ers. I remember how comforted I was, reading The Secret

Garden (Burnett, 2003). Here was another child in exile

from the land in which she had been born. Mary Lennox

was so like me. She was terribly lonely and had a fearful

temper, but imperfect and unlovable as she was, she was

given the key to a secret garden. When I am asked what

my goal as a writer might be, my answer is this: I want

to write a book that will do for a child what The Secret

Garden did for me nearly 70 years ago.

But back to the lobby of the Peninsula Hotel. I think it

may be responsible for my newest book. Over the years

countless people have come up to me and told me they

402

have the perfect idea for me. To which I say: “That’s your

idea. You write it.”

This new book is the single exception. We were taking

off our choir robes after church one Sunday when Steve

Dale said to me: “I think you should write a book about

the Haxhuis.”

The Haxhui family were Albanian refugees whom our

church had sponsored in 1999 after the horrors of 1998–99

in their native Kosovo. I had been out of town on vacation

when they arrived and, since they were nominally Muslim,

they hadn’t been to church, so I had never met them. Steve

and his wife Wendy took me to the apartment the church

had rented for them, and I had a delightful afternoon. They

served tea and showed me pictures of their old home, but

there was not much conversation as their English was poor

and my Albanian non-existent. I knew a little of their story

from Steve—how a Serbian friend that Mr. Haxhui had

served with in the Yugoslav Army with had called him just

before the worst of the troubles began and warned him to

take his family and get out of Kosovo immediately, that

terrible things were about to happen to Albanians. So, the

Haxhuis left their relatives and the furniture store that they

lived above and  ed to Macedonia where they lived in a

refugee camp until coming to Vermont.

Some years ago, Avi came up with the idea that, in

the tradition of Charles Dickens, we writers for children

should begin doing newspaper serial stories. These stories,

known as Breakfast Serials, are now carried in papers

across the United States. I wrote one of the early stories,

and Avi had been asking me to write a new one. So,

after months of intensive research, I was able to write a

newspaper serial not really about the Haxhuis, but about

a  ctitious refugee family from Kosovo. There were 15

chapters. Each chapter was three double-spaced pages

long, the third page ending in a cliff-hanger to make sure

readers would buy the newspaper the following week to

 nd out what had happened. The serial, entitled, “Long

Road Home” (2004), was well received and ran in almost

100 newspapers around the country. It would have ended

there, but my editor of over 30 years, Virginia Buckley,

saw it and wanted me to rewrite the story as a novel.

I didn’t think it was possible. I did not speak Alba-

nian, I had never been to either Kosovo or Macedonia.

The Haxhui family had moved to Michigan, and I was

totally frustrated in my efforts to meet any other Kosovar

refugees.

I was on the verge of throwing up my hands in defeat,

when one day, desperately sur ng the Internet, I came

across nearly 200 gorgeous photographs of Kosovo, taken

by someone calling himself, Kosova Cajun. I emailed the

photographer and told him my problem. I needed someone

who really knew Kosovo to answer my questions, read my

drafts, and help me understand the people, their culture,

and the crisis they’d endured.

Mark Or la did far more than that. He and his family

had lived in Kosovo for seven years and, during the worst

of the war, had worked in a Macedonian refugee camp. He

read every draft and every re-write of every draft, going

through them paragraph by paragraph. If he didn’t know

the answer to a question, he asked an Albanian friend. I

could not have done the book without him.

A bookseller friend asked me if I was as hard on my

characters in The Day of the Pelican (2009) as I usually

am. Well, yes, I am. Blame the Peninsula Hotel if you like

for that. But it isn’t just a tragic tale; it is a tale of new

immigrants  nding their place among us, which I believe,

is a story for our time and our place.

My  rst three novels were set in Japan. I lived there for

four years and I wanted to share my love of Japan with

American children. Ten years after my  rst novel set in

Japan was published, I  nally was able to tell a story set

in China, my literal native land. I’m very happy to say that

this book, Rebels of the Heavenly Kingdom (1983), has

recently been re-issued by Groundwood Books. Now I’m

well aware that I am not Japanese or Chinese much less

Albanian Kosovar. There are those who feel that I have no

right to tell these stories. But neither am I the foundling

son of a slave in 19th-century Vermont or the daughter of

a prison inmate or a child of a striker calling for bread and

roses in 1912. I’m not even a boy of a poor white family

in rural Virginia. I have met and become all these people

through the world of my imagination. Of course, there is

always the danger that I will get it wrong, but believe me,

when I do, there is never any shortage of folks out there

to set me straight.

If 40 years ago I didn’t believe I would ever be pub-

lished, I certainly didn’t dare dream that children across

the world would be reading my stories, but because other

countries believe in translation, and gifted writers like

Ana Maria are willing and able to take on this task, this

miracle has happened. The lament that we in the U.S.

seldom translate and publish stories from other countries

is a constant refrain in IBBY and USBBY gatherings. To

be sure there are a few daring North American publishers,

our own Patsy Aldana at Groundwood Books in Canada

foremost among them, that will take the risk to do this.

But we all know how infrequently this happens. I think

we have to  nd more creative ways to persuade publish-

ers to publish translated books and teachers and librarians

to buy them when they are published. Those of you who

know of books from other cultures that American children

would enjoy as well as pro t from, please bring them to

the attention of sympathetic editors. And those of you

who buy books for libraries and school systems, please

ask the publishers for such books and then buy them and

introduce them to young readers.

When Jimmy Carter was asked the most life changing

experience of his presidency, he said it was his friend-

ship with Anwar Sadat. He, a devout Southern Baptist,

and Sadat, a devout Muslim, spent time at Camp David

KATHERINE PATERSON

403

POINT OF DEPARTURE

talking about faith—not trying to convert each other, but

seeking to know and better understand the mind and heart

of the other.

Not many of our children would have the opportunity

that our former president had, but one way they can have

friends in other countries is by giving them books that

bring children of other lands and cultures alive. Jella Lep-

man, founder of IBBY, dreamed that through books the

children of the world might be able to make peace. It’s not

a pipe dream. Because how could you bear the thought of

bombing the home of a friend?

If you’re not sure where to start  nding these important

books, please consult the USBBY website and sample

something not on your usual read aloud list or list of books

you suggest for children to read (www.USBBY.org). The

USBBY list is important for breaking out of the usual list

of books (good as they are) that U.S. students read year

after year.

The USBBY website also links to an annual listing of

outstanding international books translated and available

in the United States. That’s a good starting point. If those

books sell well, publishers will be encouraged to pub-

lish more translations. Enthusiasm for books from other

cultures is surely as contagious as thinness. We already

have, through USBBY and IBBY a community of sup-

port and caring. All we need to do, friends, is spread the

contagion.

Literature References

Burnett, F. H. (2003). The secret garden. New York, NY: Signet.

(Originally published in 1911)

Machado, A.M. (1999). Mas que festa!/What a party! (G. Lima,

Illus.) Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Editora Nova Fronteira.

Machado, A. M. (2001). Nina Bonita (R. Faria, Illus.). San Diego,

CA: Kane/Miller.

Machado, A.M. (2003). Me in the middle (C. Merola, Illus.).

Toronto, Canada: Groundwood Books.

Machado, A.M. (2003). From another world (L. Brandâo, Illus.).

Toronto, Canada: Groundwood Books.

Paterson, K. (1976). The master puppeteer (H. Wells, Illus.). New

York, NY: HarperTrophey.

Paterson, K. (2004). The long road home (E. A. McCulley, Illus.).

Denver, CO: Breakfast Serials.

Paterson, K. (2008). Rebels of the heavenly kingdom. Toronto,

Canada: Groundwood Books (Originally published in 1983)

Paterson, K. (2009). The day of the pelican. Boston, MA:

Clarion.

Academic References

Chartier, R. (1996). On the edge of the cliff: History, language,

and practices. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University

Press.

Said, E. (1979). Orientalism. New York, NY: Vintage.

Thompson, C. (2009, September 10). Are your friends making

you fat? The New York Times Magazine. Retrieved on

March 8, 2010, from http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/

magazine/13contagion-t.html

Translation and Crosscultural Reception

Maria Nikolajeva

University of Cambridge

The translation of children’s literature is a speci c art form beset with a number of material and ideological

challenges. Proli c literary scholar Maria Nikolajeva sets forth two opposing theories of translation studies to

contextualize some of the particular problems of translating for children. She also defends her own preferences

with regard to the issues of foreignization and domestication of texts. Her extensive bibliography provides an

invaluable resource for scholars in the  eld, canvassing nearly all of available literature on children’s transla-

tion studies. Her essay is followed not only by translator Tara Chace’s Point of Departure, which focuses on

the business aspects of translating for children, but also by Petros Panaou’s and Tasoula Tsilimeni’s essay

on translation and the implied reader, which provides an opposing view of the domestication/foreignization

debate.

Children’s literature is an international phenomenon. Not

only are there books devoted to children in developed

countries all over the world, but also, the most outstand-

ing and successful children’s books usually get translated

into other languages. The Harry Potter books are a recent

and convincing example. Such major children’s classics as

Alice in Wonderland, Winnie-the-Pooh, The Little Prince,

and Pippi Longstocking have been translated into dozens

upon dozens of languages including Latin, Esperanto,

Frisian, Catalonian, Kymrian, and Zulu. Alice in Wonder-

land exists in innumerous translations and adaptations in

French, German, or Russian.

There is, however, no universal agreement among

scholars of children’s literature, or even more speci cally,

among scholars of translations of children’s literature,

concerning what a translation is, what a “good” translation

is, whether there is any radical difference in translating

books for children and for adults (O’Connell, 1999/2006;

Rieken-Gerwing, 1995; Rutschmann & von Stockar,

1996), and not least, whether and why translated chil-

dren’s literature is a valuable part of any child’s reading.

Concerning the last issue, much effort has been recently

taken in the English-speaking world to introduce inter-

national children’s classics and modern works, and these

endeavors stress the importance of making, for instance,

North American children aware of the existence of other

countries and cultures (see Beckett & Nikolajeva, 2006;

Stan, 2002; Tomlinson, 1998).

Although the process of transposing a literary text from

culture to culture may seem independent of the audience,

404

405

TRANSLATION AND CROSSCULTURAL RECEPTION

the difference between translating for children and for

adult readers is strongly governed by the adults’ idea

of the implied reader, which in its turn follows from the

views on the essence and function of children’s literature

at any given time in any given culture, as Petros Panaou

and Tasoula Tsilimeni demonstrate in the chapter fol-

lowing this one. If the premise is that literature must be

adapted to the young audience in terms of its linguistic

competence, life experience, practical and encyclopedic

knowledge, cognitive capacity and psychological maturity,

translation policies will also take these aspects into con-

sideration. Translated texts are also likely to be adjusted

to cultural conditions depending on the concept of the

child and childhood. What is acceptable in one culture

may be offensive in another; what is considered suf cient

literary competence in one culture may be perceived as

far too advanced in another. As a result, some children’s

books can be rejected altogether within another culture,

while others may be subjected to substantial alterations

in the process of translation and publishing. Polysystem

theory (Even-Zohar, 1990) can be used to explain how

participating in different cultural and social systems affects

the value and signi cance of a literary text.

The word “translation” is in children’s literature re-

search (and often otherwise) used to describe two widely

different phenomena. The  eld of analytical, or literary-

oriented, translation studies focuses on the process and

results of transposing a text originally written in one lan-

guage, called the source language, into another, called the

target language. These studies, that might be considered

a branch of comparative literature (O’Sullivan, 2005a),

investigate various translation strategies through close

reading of texts, and, especially in the case of children’s

literature, offer evaluative and normative issues connected

with pedagogical views.

Another area also often referred to as “translation”

involves examination of more general aspects, such as

publishing policies, choice of international books for

translation, and quantitative studies. This area is actually

where studies of translated children’s literature started.

One of the  rst volumes devoted to the subject, Children’s

Books in Translation. The Situation and the Problems

(Klingberg, 1978), emerged from the proceedings of an

international symposium. A more advanced approach is

a semiotically framed study of integration of translated

books into the target culture (Shavit, 1986/2006). I propose

to label this area crosscultural reception, to distinguish

it from translation in the former sense. It can also be

considered as socially oriented translation studies. It is,

however, quite frequent that the two aspects are treated

within the same study.

For obvious reasons, translation and crosscultural re-

ception are mainly studied within smaller cultures, such

as Holland, Sweden, and Finland, but also Germany is

among the leading European countries in the  eld. Sev-

eral investigations have been conducted in the English-

speaking world. The present chapter offers an overview

of this scholarship and highlights its most central issues.

For a similar earlier outline, see Reinbert Tabbert’s essay

(2002/2006). There is also a vast number of unpublished

BA, MA, and PhD theses on the various aspects of transla-

tions, far too many to include here.

Children’s Literature across Borders

The area of crosscultural reception, or sociological transla-

tion studies, is relatively new within children’s literature

criticism, even though the subject appears recurrently

during debates at professional conventions and children’s

literature festivals. The existing empirical studies focus

on the reception of foreign books in a speci c country,

for instance, Australia (Nieuwenhuizen, 1998), Argen-

tina (Alvstad, 2003), the Arab countries (Mdallel, 2003),

former East Germany (Thompson-Wohlgemuth, 2003),

Taiwan (Desmet, 2005), or Poland (Borodo, 2006). They

may also deal with children’s books from a certain country

in another country: English-language (Fernández López,

1996) or Canadian literature in Spain (Pascua, 2003), Aus-

tralian (Frank, 2005) or Swedish (Lindgren, Andersson, &

Renauld, 2007) in France, American in Japan (Kobayashi,

2005), Canadian in Germany (Seifert, 2005). From these

examples it becomes obvious that no comprehensive stud-

ies have been made so far; the examinations are mostly of

a limited scope that nevertheless add substantially to our

knowledge and understanding of the problems.

Moreover, there are studies of the reception of a par-

ticular author, for instance, Astrid Lindgren in Spanish

(Valado, 2002) or Hans Christian Andersen in English

(Hjørnager Pedersen, 2004). Still narrower investigations

may concentrate on one single book, such as Heinrich

Hoffmann’s Slovenly Peter, translated into English by

Mark Twain (Stahl, 1996/2006), Alice in Wonderland

(Weaver, 1964) or Roberto Innocenti’s controversial Rose

Blanche (Stan, 2004; O’Sullivan, 2005b). It may also be

a matter of reception of a certain type of translated litera-

ture, such as crossover books (Cascallana, 2004). It may

further be a question of national identity as expressed in

a certain book and thus its cultural translatability, in this

case Pinocchio (O’Sullivan, 1992/2006a). There are quite

a few studies showing how national children’s literature

in its historical development has been in uenced by other

cultures (e.g., Kuivasmäki, 1995; Li, 2006) or how two

cultures have cross-fertilized each other through transla-

tion (Colin, 1995; Teodorowicz-Hellman, 2004).

Crosscultural reception studies frequently state the

fact that in the English-speaking world less than 1% of

all published children’s books are translations, while in

many European countries, such as Sweden, Denmark, or

the Netherlands, roughly half of children’s books are trans-

lated, mostly from English. In fact, until the 20th century,

the overwhelming majority of children’s books published

in most European countries as well as in North America

406

MARIA NIKOLAJEVA

were translations, often translations of classics such as Ae-

sop’s fables, Tales of the Arabian Nights, Mother Goose,

or Grimms’ fairy tales. Translation and reception of these

works are therefore quite a dominant subject for scholar-

ship (Blamires, 1989/2006; Dollerup, 2003; Grotzfeld,

2004; Inggs, 2004; Kyritsi, 2006; Malarte-Feldman, 1999;

Seago, 1995/2006; Zipes, 2006). Yet still today, many

countries that are just starting to develop their national

children’s literature are  lling gaps with translations.

The studies also notice the random nature of books

chosen for translation and the dominance of mass-market

literature. A closer look at publishing statistics from vari-

ous reading-promotion organizations and reference librar-

ies is revealing (see, for example, the Swedish Children’s

Books Institute homepage). About half of the translated

books are reprints, among which we  nd classics, such as

Robinson Crusoe and Captain Grant’s Children, as well

as series, such as the Famous Five and Nancy Drew and

the newcomers: Sweet Valley books, Sabrina the Teenage

Witch, Animorphs, and Lemony Snicket. Books that are in

their country of origin appraised as innovative and chal-

lenging, both in their subject matter and in artistic form,

have huge problems in establishing themselves on the

international market. Some countries have higher esteem;

for instance, Swedish children’s novels are appreciated in

Germany and Japan.

Considering translated books by category, picturebooks

are by far the most translated type of children’s book. This

may be due to the fact that images are believed to be easily

transposed from culture to culture. Co-publishing is also

frequently practiced. However, the facts behind the statis-

tics are not that satisfactory. The overwhelming majority

of translated picturebooks are internationally adapted

Disney spin-offs and other mass-market books, where

the author of the text is perhaps never mentioned, much

less the translator. Such books are often  at and mediocre,

portraying sweet anthropomorphic animals engaged in

everyday activities, books that do not stimulate children’s

imagination and still less appeal to adult co-readers. For

publishing houses, however, they are safe investments,

since such books are signi cantly cheaper in production,

distributed through book clubs, sold in supermarkets and

at gas stations, and ensure pro ts. Works of high individu-

ality, that perhaps do not  t into the national market, are

seldom selected for translation and publication. Recently,

a whole new category of products have appeared, hybrids

of books and toys, such as Pooh birthday books and Peter

Rabbit counting books, Babar painting books, and Little

Mermaid board books. Negligibly few of these in any

given country are likely to be reviewed, noticed, adopted

by teachers and librarians, or receive awards. This said,

it must be admitted that publishers also bring out foreign

books of the highest quality, with the incentive of  lling

gaps in their own culture, attempting to introduce other

cultures, and provide readers with the best of international

literature.

While in many countries the bulk of translations are

from English, often up to 80–90%, this does not mean

that books from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, or South

Africa appear frequently among these; the overwhelming

majority of translations from English have the United

States as the country of origin. During the last few years,

Japanese has climbed high in all statistics of source lan-

guages, but the secret is the  ood of manga. Likewise,

the steady high  gures for translations from French are

explained by comics such as Tin-Tin and Asterix (with

Belgium as the country of origin). French reprints are

most likely of the Babar franchise.

The proportion of books translated between major

European languages is uneven: Considerably more books

are translated from Swedish into Finnish or Danish than

the other way round. Many Dutch books are translated

into German, but not into French. Books from Iceland,

Greece, Lithuania, Slovenia, and even Spain are almost

as rare in any other European country as they are in the

English world.

Yet another remarkable fact is that, even though a book

may be translated, it often remains unknown in the target

culture. Translated books seldom become part of the canon

in the English-speaking world. On the other hand, a book

or author may become more famous and appreciated in

the target country than in the country of origin, such as

Aidan Chambers in Dutch. Further, as the Astrid Lindgren

Centennial Conference in Stockholm in May 2007 showed,

children’s literature characters often become known and

popular in other countries through  lm and television

rather than through translated books. What books are

translated and achieve international success is often a

matter of serendipity, but factors such as major awards

and world-wide marketing are frequently decisive.

Something rarely pointed out, and where there is no

systematic research at all, is the fact that far from all

translations of children’s books are done from the original

language. A common practice in China from the 1950s

through the 1990s was translating via Russian. Partly this

guaranteed approval by the Communist regime in the So-

viet Union, but most often merely depended on the absence

of quali ed translators from Western languages, while

Russian was mandatory in all secondary schools in China.

The same happened in the Soviet republics and partly in

the Eastern European satellites, where Western children’s

books were translated from Russian, which governed

the selection and created a somewhat distorted canon.

Still today, countries such as Estonia, Lithuania, Poland,

Slovenia, or Croatia are  lling the gaps concerning major

children’s literature classics that have not been translated

before because they were not available in Russian.

Translated books can be dif cult, not to say impossible,

to obtain outside the country of publication. Only the Inter-

national Youth Library in Munich collects children’s books

translated, for instance, from Dutch into French or from

Swedish into Italian; the collection is far from complete

407

TRANSLATION AND CROSSCULTURAL RECEPTION

and quite random. Books in translation published in the

U.K. or even Canada are not always easily available in the

United States. Books translated into Spanish or Portuguese

in Europe do not necessarily reach Latin America and the

other way round. There is no coordinated distribution of

translated books in the Arab world. As a result, there is no

reliable information about books translated from and to

different languages. The Library of Congress, the British

Library, and national databases are good places to start.

Various reference volumes are invaluable (Stan, 2002;

Tomlinson, 1998), yet they frequently only contain a se-

lection and become outdated quickly. Amazon.com and

other Internet bookstores are of great help if you know

what you are looking for, such as the author’s name, but

can be inconvenient for browsing.

Literary Translation Studies

The art of translation is perhaps as old as literature itself,

and the most important translations in the Western world

have been the translations of the Bible. Because the Bible

was supposed to be the true words of God, great importance

has always been attributed to the “correct” translation, and

the debates of what exactly is the most correct translation

have occupied learned men throughout the centuries.

Some of the recent translations of the Bible in a number

of languages reveal signi cant differences from the older

versions not only concerning modernization of language,

but also the interpretation of decisive passages.

As noted above, the central terms used in translation

studies are source language (the language from which the

translation is made) versus target language (the language

into which the text is translated), as well as source reader/

audience/culture and target reader/audience/culture. These

concepts are indispensable in any discussion of translation.

Since words in any language are polysemantic (have sev-

eral different meanings or shades of meaning), the process

of translation does not simply imply substitution of one

word for another. A translator is faced with the necessity

of choosing between several meanings of a word in the

source language and  nding the adequate word in the target

language. Further, translation implies not only conveying

denotation (the literal, dictionary meaning of words), but

also connotation, that is, contextual meaning that may

change from text to text (see e.g., Baker, 1992; Bassnet,

1980; Eco, 2001; Toury, 1995). It is often in this contextual

area that translation for children becomes different from

translation for adults. Adult readers can be assumed to be

familiar with the phenomena of foreign cultures or at least

accept that names, places, ways, and habits described in a

book they read come from another country. Young readers

are supposed to lack both the knowledge and the tolerance

for unfamiliar elements in their reading, but this is far

from proved; reader-oriented research is needed to show

the degree to which children can accommodate cultural

differences in their reading.

Some of the most basic problems of translation, for

adults and children, arise from the difference in the struc-

ture of languages (Baker, 1998), which implies that few

words and expressions in the source language have direct

correspondence in the target language. Subsequently,

word-for-word translation is in many cases impossible

(therefore any attempts to apply computerized translation

to  ction are doomed to fail). However, one of the two

radically different approaches to translation propagates

equivalence, that is, a maximal approximation of the target

text to the source text. A translation, in this view, should be

“faithful” to the original, and no liberties are to be taken.

The opposite view suggests that the translator should take

into consideration the target audience, whereupon changes

may not only be legitimate, but imperative, if the trans-

lated text in its speci c context is to function somewhat

similarly to the way in which the original functions in its

initial situation. This view can be called dialogical, since

it presupposes an active dialogue, or interaction, between

the target text and its readers. The key question in dialogi-

cal translation is “For whom?” as opposed to the question

“What?” in the equivalence theory. Normally, the attitude

of any particular scholar will lie somewhere within the

spectrum of the two polarities; just as the strategies of

a practitioner are likely to combine the two approaches.

Neither are the two theories mutually exclusive. I will,

however, for the sake of clarity, in the following resort

to these two theories to illustrate the extremities of ap-

proaches.

The two views, also elaborated in general translation

theory, acquire special signi cance in connection with

children’s  ction, once again due to the issues of implied

audience. Translation studies within children’s literature

scholarship have grown from two schools, although few

of the recent researchers have strictly adhered to any of

them. Swedish scholar Göte Klingberg (1986) in Chil-

dren’s Literature in the Hands of the Translator condemns

all deviations from source text, including adaptation and

abridgement, puri cation, and similar intrusions. These

corruptions are, according to Klingberg, based on the

idea that young readers lack the ability to understand

phenomena from foreign cultures, such as food, currency,

habits, child/parent relationships, and so on. Omissions

in translated texts are also the result of ideological values

and views on child education, when, for instance, inap-

propriate behavior is altered or deleted. Klingberg and

his followers emphasize instead the use of translations to

support young readers’ understanding of and tolerance

for foreign cultures; that is, they advocate translation as

a pedagogical vehicle.

The opposite view, best represented in the Finnish Riitta

Oittinen’s (1993) I Am Me – I Am Other: On the Dialogics

of Translating for Children and Translating for Children

(2000), has been named dialogical, since it is based on a

creative dialogue between the source and target cultures.

The main goal in dialogical translation is to offer the

408

MARIA NIKOLAJEVA

target-culture readers a similar experience to that which

the source-culture readers meet in texts. This strategy

not only allows but encourages liberties in translation of

children’s books in particular, adapting source-culture

phenomena that may alienate the reader to more familiar

target-culture references. For instance, a certain food or

game might be very prevalent in the source culture, but

completely unheard of in the target culture. If the trans-

lator sticks with the original reference, the target-culture

reader will experience the reference as exotic or foreign,

thus having a completely different experience than the

source-culture reader. Rather than adhering  rmly to the

source text, then, dialogical translations pay attention to

the reference frames of the target-culture readers.

These opposite views can be summarized as the former

being true to the text, and the latter being true to the reader.

It is not coincidental that Klingberg is a pedagogue while

Oittinen is a literary critic and a practicing translator. The

views of the “Klingberg school” (equivalence school) are

normative and prescriptive. Oittinen’s theory is based on

the dynamic relationship between the text, the translator,

the implied audience and the context. In general translation

studies, the dialogic view comes from modern linguistics,

semiotics, literary pragmatics, and communication theory.

Yet, in the children’s literature context, this approach also

becomes rather regulative.

Studies from both directions are often devoted to clas-

sics where many translations exist, often within the same

target culture, such as Alice in Wonderland in German

(Friese, 1995; O’Sullivan, 1998a, 2001), Little Women in

French (Le Brun, 2003), or The Wizard of Oz in Finnish

(Puurtinen, 1994/2006). Many of these studies come with

conclusions about a particular translation being a “suc-

cess” or a “failure.” The evaluation is highly dependent

on the researcher’s adherence to the Klingberg or the

Oittinen school, even when these concrete names are not

mentioned (see Nikolajeva, 2006). At the same time, as

already mentioned, most contemporary scholars go beyond

the polarities and are descriptive rather than prescriptive

and evaluative.

Translation and Adaptation

Many issues raised by the equivalence school result from

the fact that children’s books have to a considerably higher

extent been subjected to adaptation rather than transla-

tion. Adaptation means that a text is adjusted to what the

translator believes to be the needs of the target audience,

and it can include deletions, additions, explanations, pu-

ri cation, simpli cation, modernization, and a number

of other interventions. It is also common to translate a

versi ed text into prose.

Robinson Crusoe, the text perhaps most often subjected

to adaptation, is about 500 pages in the original. It has in

some children’s editions been cut down to 24 pages. The

incentive has naturally been to make the book more acces-

sible to young readers. The nature of the cuts has varied;

most frequently, the self-re exive and religious passages

have been removed from this particular book. In the short-

est versions, only the very gist of the storyline remains.

Quite a few classics, including Alice in Wonderland, have

been subjected to similar surgery. A frequent form of in-

terference involves periphrasis (retelling), abridgment, text

compressions, concisions, and digests. Rather than merely

cutting out pieces of text, the translator retells the story,

often turning direct speech into summaries, focusing on

the central episodes, omitting characterization, and other

more complex dimensions of the original. These adapta-

tions often yield interesting insights into the dominant

views on childhood and children’s literature, as is the case

with the analysis of The Last of the Mohicans in French

(Gouanvic, 2003).

The practice of additions would seem to contradict the

drive to make the story shorter and thus more suitable for

children, but in some cases, translators have added pas-

sages explaining the characters’ actions and other aspects

of the source text. In one of the most famous adaptations

of Robinson Crusoe, made by the German pedagogue

Joachim Heinrich Campe, a frame story is added, in

which a father is telling Robinson’s story to his children.

This enables the narrator to explain, comment and pass

judgment, in accordance with the didactic purpose of the

adaptation.

Alterations can include such instances as changing

the ending to suit the target audience. The ending of

Andersen’s “The Little Match Girl” has been in many

translations changed from the character’s death to her

 nding a good and loving family (Hjørnager Pedersen,

2004). Omissions and alterations for political, cultural, or

religious reasons are called puri cation: the text is puri ed

from passages that are perceived as offensive (another

term is “bowdlerization,” after the 19th-century British

clergyman Thomas Bowdler, who produced The Family

Shakespeare,  t to be read in the presence of families).

It may be a matter of abusive language, the mention of

bodily functions viewed as inappropriate in a children’s

book, or an expression of ideology unacceptable by the

target culture. Studies of translations in, for instance,

totalitarian states or countries with strong fundamentalist

tendencies illustrate puri cation, which often borders on

censorship. While in the original of the Swedish children’s

classic The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, the protagonist’s

parents go to a church, in the Russian translation they go

to a market. Churches and religion were not supposed to

appear in children’s books published in the Soviet Union.

Most translations (as well as English-language abridge-

ments) of Gulliver’s Travels omit the episode in which

Gulliver extinguishes the  re in the royal palace of Lilliput

by passing water.

Simpli cation implies that a foreign notion is sup-

planted by something less speci c, for instance when a

particular dish is simply translated as “food” or the title

409

TRANSLATION AND CROSSCULTURAL RECEPTION

of a newspaper is changed into the general “newspaper.”

In Pippi Longstocking, her little animal companion is a

guenon, a speci c monkey species, while in English it

is referred to simply as monkey. Rewording means that

a metaphor or some other  gure of speech, non-existent

in the target language, is rendered by a circumscription.

Both practices are widely used in children’s literature

translation and are often ascribed to pedagogical reasons

(Stolze, 2003).

Modernization means bringing everyday details, ob-

jects, and concepts up to date in translation, including

changing or deleting what may be perceived as offensive,

such as racism and sexism. Also, purely linguistic modern-

ization is frequent, when, for instance, 19th-century  ction

is translated into a more modern idiom. For instance, a

comparison between older and contemporary translations

from Swedish into English and Finnish demonstrates quite

a number of modi cations (Rossi, 2003).

Harmonization includes changes in children’s behavior,

if considered improper in the target culture, or changes

in adults’ attitudes. For instance, in many cultures adults

in children’s  ction are supposed to be impeccable, thus

any mention of drunkards and the like are eliminated. An

infamous example is the  rst French translation of Pippi

Longstocking where the three most “offensive” chapters

have been deleted, chapters in which Pippi most clearly

shows her superiority over the adults.

Embellishment means any form of beauti cation, from

using more high- own language than the original to add-

ing longish descriptions. In the French Pippi translation,

additions appear frequently in which Pippi regrets her bad

behavior and apologizes. The result is that this French

Pippi is much more tame and compliant than the origi-

nal. Occasionally, the reverse occurs, that is, a possibly

offensive element is emphasized in translation, primarily

for marketing purposes.

In many theoretical discussions of children’s literature,

all these practices are unconditionally condemned, since

they are perceived as censorship. While we may indeed

interrogate the intentions, the practice itself is merely an

extreme form of the dialogical approach to translation

mentioned above, the one that takes into consideration the

target audience. In fact, the use of foul language can be less

offensive in some cultures than in others, and the attitude

toward nakedness varies substantially between countries

and epochs. The practice of adaptation of target texts is

then in no way radically different from adapting originals

to what authors (or publishers) believe to be the needs and

interests of the young audience, which in its turn depends

on the views on childhood and education.

Pippi Longstocking provides an excellent example of

the various manipulations in translation into different

languages (see Blume, 2001; Heldner, 1992; Nikolajeva

2006; Surmatz, 2005). It is a challenging children’s book

that interrogates the adults’ authority and shows a liber-

ated, competent child that may feel alien and threatening

in other cultures. The studies of Pippi translations into

English, German, and French reveal all kinds of interven-

tion, often connected with supposedly offensive behavior,

including not only Pippi’s disrespect toward adults, but

even more innocent things like drinking coffee. Also

the character herself, the strongest girl in the world, ap-

pealing to a child’s imagination, has been toned down in

many translations. Most of the underlying political and

ideological issues in the Pippi books have been lost in

translation into several languages (Surmatz, 2004), either

since they were considered insigni cant or simply because

the translators did not recognize them.

Many examinations of translated children’s books point

out actual mistakes and faults, which apparently are based

on translators’ poor knowledge of the source language and/

or source culture. For instance, in the Russian translation

of Astrid Lindgren’s Karlsson-on-the-Roof, the father’s

Sunday beer has turned into a Sunday tie; the endearment

“my little chap” has become “my little goat”; a lady who

lives in No. 92 is transformed into a lady who is 92 years

old, and so on (Skott, 1977). In many countries such as the

Soviet Union with its East European satellites, or China,

translators had few possibilities to visit the countries from

which the books came to get acquainted with everyday

details. In a Russian translation from English, for instance,

the translator did not know what bubble-gum was and

therefore translated it as a liquid to blow soap-bubbles

with. Such mistakes become less frequent as translators

today travel more freely and as information becomes ac-

cessible on the web.

Translation Strategies: Domestication and

Foreignization

In most empirical translation studies, the scholars focus on

various alterations made in translations and argue whether

the changes are reasonable and justi ed. Two possible

ways of dealing with the elements of source texts that may

hamper the target audience’s understanding are domes-

tication and foreignization, which re ect the dialogical

versus equivalence approaches. In domesticating a trans-

lated text, the translator substitutes familiar phenomena

and concepts for what may be perceived as strange and

hard to understand. It is not uncommon in translations of

children’s books to change foreign food, clothing, weights

and measures, currency,  ora and fauna, feasts, customs

and traditions, to something that the target readers will

more easily understand. In the American translation of

Pippi Longstocking, for instance, dollars, quarters, and

cents are mentioned. In fact, most American translations of

children’s books have a strong tendency toward domestica-

tion. It can be somewhat less signi cant, but still amazing,

when in Sven Nordqvist’s Pancake Pie, “The Star-Spanged

Banner” is played instead of the original Viennese waltzes.

Some more sophisticated elements that lie on the border

between domestication and pure censorship involve the

410

MARIA NIKOLAJEVA

relationship between children and adults, not least between

teachers and students, bodily functions, sexuality and

procreation (Nikolajeva, 1996).

Localization implies a form of domestication through

changing the setting of a book to a more familiar one.

For instance, the German translations of Enid Blyton’s

adventure novels are set in Germany, as is the Swedish

classic The Wonderful Adventures of Nils (Desmidt, 2003).

The Danish translation of Astrid Lindgren’s Mio My Son

has moved the setting from Stockholm to Copenhagen

(Øster, 2003), while the Finnish translation takes place

in Helsinki.

In assessing domestication and localization (universally

condemned by the adherents of the equivalence theory),

we should ask ourselves what the translator’s motivation

might have been. When a novel for adults is translated, the

target audience may be expected to understand that certain

objects and concepts are different in a foreign culture.

Young readers have less knowledge of foreign countries

and cultures. Children are seldom aware that the book they

are reading is a translation. While transposing the setting

of a British novel to Germany may be an unnecessary

interference, some other changes can be fully justi ed, to

make the text more accessible to the target audience.

If a translated text is foreignized, the translator may

decide to keep some words untranslated to preserve the

foreign  avor. The proponents of this approach maintain

that it is essential that young readers become aware of

cultural differences as they read translated books. Admi-

rable as it is, the approach may sometimes be stretched

too far. In the English translation of Pippi Longstocking,

Pippi is shown “busy making pepparkakor—a kind of

Swedish cookie.” The motivation behind this translation

is apparently to show the American readers that Sweden

is a different country with different sorts of cookies. The

cookies are, however, nothing more exotic than the univer-

sally known gingerbread. By using a foreign word in the

English text, the translator focuses the readers’ attention

on the cookies, thus creating a different effect than is the

case with source-text readers. Further, the phrase “a kind of

Swedish cookie” is an addition, the translator’s explanation

of the foreign word, which is unnecessary in the source

text, and which would have been super uous if the word

had been translated as “gingerbread.” On the other hand,

if Pippi were indeed making a cookie that completely

lacked a correspondence in the target language (which is

more likely with a translation into Chinese or Swahili),

would it be motivated to supplant the exotic pepparkakor

with something more familiar? After all, Swedish readers

do not experience a sense of foreignness and exoticism

while meeting this word in a text. Some translators of Pippi

and other Swedish children’s books have been confronted

with the dif culty of translating the common practice of

children drinking coffee, which is acceptable in Sweden,

but less so in other cultures. Retaining coffee makes the

situation more deviant and attracts the target-text readers’

attention to details, which the source-text reader will not

even notice. Many translators have substituted tea or some

other drink for coffee, without in any way distorting the

meaning of the text. The question in each individual case

is whether the cultural detail is indeed signi cant.

In a dialogic translation, the goal is to approximate

the response of the source-text readers, and substituting

a familiar notion for a foreign one would be considered

more adequate. A famous example can be gathered in the

Bible translations: in translating the phrase “God’s lamb”

into Inuit, the translator changed it into “God’s seal cub,”

since a lamb is an animal unknown to the Inuit. In fact, in

a Swahili translation of Astrid Lindgren’s Noisy Village,

spring was changed into the rain season, because spring is

an unknown concept for the target audience, and the Noisy

Village children’s joyful anticipation of spring had to be

translated into a similar experience (Nikolajeva, 2006).

Even when a concept in itself is not perceived as

foreign, too speci c a word in the target text can create

a foreignization effect. In a recent English translation of

Pinocchio, the Blue-Haired Fairy has been changed into

Indigo-Haired Fairy, with the motivation that the correct

translation for the Italian word used in the original is

“indigo” rather than “blue.” This may sound reasonable,

yet there are some possible counter-arguments. Indigo

feels more exotic in English than the neutral blue, and

it is unlikely that the author’s intention was to be exotic.

Further, the character is already known in English as the

Blue-Haired Fairy, and whatever the reason might have

been for a new translation, it is not desirable to change

an established character name, even if the new translation

shows greater  delity to the original. In a recent transla-

tion, the name of Hans Christian Andersen’s tiny heroine

was changed from Thumbelina to Inchelina, which may

be a better solution, but is confusing to a reader already

familiar with the character.

Translating Cultural Context

Translation does not only imply that a book appears in

a new language, but also that it starts functioning within

a new culture (see e.g., Fernández López, 1996). Quite

a few studies show how texts from particular cultures

are adapted to the norms of the target culture. It may be

Roald Dahl in Japanese (Netley, 1992), The Wind in the

Willows in Finland (Hagfors, 2003), Emil and the Detec-

tives in English (Lathey, 2006b), Astrid Lindgren’s novels

in Polish (Liseling-Nilsson, 2006), or Uncle Tom’s Cabin

in Slovenian (Mazi-Leskovar, 2003). Once again, the

most common changes include everyday details that have

speci c connotations in the source culture, but are differ-

ent or absent in the target culture. They can also convey

ideology that is for some reason unacceptable in the target

culture and thus has to be adjusted. Even such a simple

detail as direct address can turn out to be an insurmount-

able problem, if the source and the target language have

411

TRANSLATION AND CROSSCULTURAL RECEPTION

a completely different continuum of polite and informal

address (Hirano, 1999/2006). Further, some languages

lack diminutives or have different values of diminutives

than the source language; for instance, Russian, German,

or Dutch have diminutive suf xes, while in English, ad-

jectives such as little, small, and tiny may convey either

an endearing or a derogative attitude. Since diminutives

are frequently used in children’s literature, the issue is

highly pertinent.

Some examples of the foreignization of culturally

dependent phenomena are also connected to the practice

of explanatory additions, strongly questioned by the

equivalence theory. For instance, for a Swedish reader,

the connotation of “the blue and yellow  ag” is as clear

as “stars and stripes” for an American reader. In two exist-

ing Russian translations of The Wonderful Adventures of

Nils, two strategies have been employed. The equivalence

translator has chosen to write “the blue and yellow  ag,”

providing a footnote with the explanation that the colors

of the Swedish  ag are blue and yellow. While the solution

may seem fortunate, using footnotes in  ction, especially

children’s  ction, is de nitely undesirable. Another trans-

lator has circumvented the problem by adding one single

word: “the blue and yellow Swedish  ag.”

Many children’s novels contain allusions and other lit-

erary and extra-literary references. In translation, it is often

pointless to retain the allusion to a text that is completely

unknown to the target readers. Dialogic translators may

choose to delete the reference or, if it works, to provide

another reference that will create a similar effect. Several

translations of Alice in Wonderland or Winnie-the-Pooh

have followed either of the two strategies. Naturally, if the

text alludes to another text widely known in the target lan-

guage, this available translation should preferably be used,

even if the translator judges it to be poor. For instance,

the title of Philip Pullman’s trilogy His Dark Materials is

translated literally into Swedish, ignoring the fact that the

Milton quotation to which the title alludes is in Swedish

rendered as “the dark element.” The readers of the target

text have no chance to make the connection between the

title and the poem it alludes to. The same goes if a book

is explicitly mentioned in the source text, but the title is

different from what it is known by in the target text. Espe-

cially if the intertext is signi cant for the understanding of

the text itself, the failure to recognize and  nd the exist-

ing title would deny target readers a valuable interpreting

strategy. The international bestseller Sophie’s World by

the Norwegian Jostein Gaarder abounds in references to

Norwegian literature and culture, which in the English

translation have all been changed into more universally

known English names, titles, and quotations.

Quite an unusual cultural dif culty arises when a novel

taking place in a foreign country is translated into the lan-

guage of this country, as Vanessa Joosen (2003) notes in

the case with the Dutch translation of Aidan Chambers’s

Postcards from No Man’s Land. The foreign and “exotic”

elements in the original were no longer that in transla-

tion, which naturally affects the way they are perceived

by the reader. Other interesting issues are translations

within a bilingual country, such as Canada (Le Brun,

2005) or text manipulations within the same language in

different countries, signi cantly East and West Germany

(Thompson-Wohlgemuth, 2004). Similar transformations

of British books in the United States have not been studied

academically (perhaps because the matter is too delicate),

but the differences between the British and American

editions of the Harry Potter books are notorious in their

prompt domestication.

Translation of Proper Names

Yvonne Bertills’s (2003) book, Beyond Identi cation:

Proper Names in Children’s Literature, is wholly focused

on the translation of names in children’s literature and

based on modern onomastics, a part of linguistics dealing

with proper names. Bertills has examined how names in

Winnie-the-Pooh have been translated into Swedish and

Finnish, Tove Jansson’s Moomin books into English and

Finnish, and a Finnish children’s novel into Swedish and

English. The results do not only illustrate the different

strategies, but also demonstrate a speci c aspect of domes-

tication. Similar investigations have been performed with

other children’s books (Yamazaki, 2002). The numerous

French translations of Alice in Wonderland pursue differ-

ent goals in either retaining or changing personal names

(Kibbee, 2003), and translators into different languages

choose a variety of solutions (Nord, 2003). Incidentally,

in the Russian translation of Alice by Vladimir Nabokov

the heroine’s name is russi ed into Anya.

Personal and geographic names in translation indeed

present a special dilemma. The equivalence theory pre-

scribes that names should always be retained as they are

in the original. There may, however, be several reasons

why names are changed. First, the sound of the name may

give undesirable associations in the target language. The

name Pippi, for instance, in a number of languages sug-

gests urinating (in Swedish, the connotation is “crazy”).

The character is therefore renamed Fi in French, Pippa

in Spanish, and Peppi in Russian. Another reason may

be that the name in the target language is already  rmly

connected with a famous literary character. The hero

of Astrid Lindgren’s Emil’s Pranks has been renamed

Michel in the German translation, since the name Emil

is associated with the protagonist of the German classic

Emil and the Detectives (Stolt, 1978/2006). A popular

Swedish picturebook character Max is renamed Sam in

the American translation, obviously to distance him from

Maurice Sendak’s Max. By contrast, when the name of the

title character in Lindgren’s Ronia, the Robber’s Daugh-

ter is changed to Kersti, the only motivation seems to be

foreignization, since Ronia is just as much a non-existing

name in Swedish as in English, or was, before the novel

412

MARIA NIKOLAJEVA

was written. Yet another problem may arise if a name has

a speci c sound in the source language that gives some

associations for the source-text readers. The name Eeyore

is an example of onomatopoeia referring to a donkey’s

neigh. In most translations, it has been changed to match

the corresponding sound in the target language.

Many names in the Harry Potter books carry asso-

ciations that critics have tried to interpret: Dumbledore,

Malfoy, Lupin, and especially Voldemort. The translators

around the world have either retained the names, thus

losing the association (equivalence solution), or invented

new names with similar associations in the target language

(dialogic solution). A controversy between the Swedish

and the Norwegian translators is illuminating (Høverstad,

2002). The Swedish translator has invented new words for

the Quidditch equipment, but not for the game itself or

any other “telling” names. The Norwegian translator has

chosen to translate all proper and geographical names,

including Dumbledore, Malfoy, Lupin, Sirius Black, the

name of the wizard school, Hogwarts, and its houses.

Wyler (2003) considers similar strategies in her translation

of Harry Potter into Portuguese, where she has chosen to

change the names in order to give target readers adequate

associations. In fact, Harry Potter translations have almost

grown into a separate branch of children literature trans-

lation studies (Fries-Gedin, 2002; Inggs, 2003; Jentsch,

2002/2006; Lathey, 2005).

Finally, names may refer to a phenomenon in the

source language known by a different name in the target

language. The name of Andersen’s  gure Ole Lukøje,

which means literally “Ole-close-your-eyes” (Ole is a

personal name), has in some translations been changed

into Willie Winkie. It seems a very sensible solution, since

it connects the name with an English folklore character

similar to that in the Danish tradition to which Andersen

refers. The name of the character in The Lion, the Witch

and the Wardrobe, Father Christmas, has in the Swedish

translation been changed into “jultomten,” literally “the

Christmas gnome,” who performs the function of Father

Christmas in Scandinavia. The target readers are thus of-

fered the same association as the source readers. Applying

the equivalence theory consistently, all such changes are

unacceptable; however, scholars as well as practitioners

are quite permissive.

Narrative and Translation

Some more fundamental changes, motivated as well as

unmotivated, concern the speci c narrative elements of

the source text. Just as implied authors of the source text,

the translators add their voices to the narrative structure

of the target text (O’Sullivan, 2003/2006b). Some signi -

cant narrative changes in translation that radically affect

readers’ perception are the transposition from personal to

impersonal narration (such as the many abridged versions

of Robinson Crusoe retold in the third person, which os-

tensibly makes the text more child-friendly). The change

of second-person narration in the  rst chapter of Winnie-

the-Pooh into third-person, performed, for instance, in

Swedish and Russian translations, destroys the whole

narrative frame of the book. The change of gender can be

inevitable when the systems of grammatical gender in the

source and target language are different, but this can also

have catastrophic results if the gender of the characters

is signi cant for the understanding of their relationship.

For instance, the neutral (“it”) instead of feminine (“she”)

gender of the tree in the Swedish translation of Shel Sil-

verstein’s The Giving Tree affects the interpretation of

the relationship between the characters: in the original,

the tree is clearly a self-sacri cial mother. The change of

tense brings the interaction between the narrator and the

narratee out of balance (Lathey, 2003/2006a) and occa-

sionally deprives the readers of guidelines when complex

temporal switches are involved.

Translating the Untranslatable

There are other dif culties that translators may meet. One

is how to deal with humor, nonsense, puns, and other lin-

guistic games often found in children’s books (Grassegger,

1985; O’Sullivan, 1998b, 1999). Some critics claim that

certain texts are “untranslatable.” It is indeed a challenge

to translate a title such as War and Peas into any language

in which the pun will not be possible. Yet, a skillful transla-

tor can resort to something called compensatory transla-

tion, which implies adding a different pun or word play

to compensate for the lost one (O’Sullivan, 1998b). The

American translator of Pippi Longstocking has basically

lost all puns and Pippi’s witty comments, either because of

incompetence or because dialogical translation, including

compensatory, were believed to be disadvantageous.

In many cases, the difference between approaches

becomes clearly manifest. In Alice in Wonderland, the

Duchess says to Alice, among the many platitudes: “Take

care of the sense, and the sounds will take care of them-

selves.” For a source reader, the statement alludes to the

existing English proverb: “Take care of the pence, and

the pounds will take care of themselves.” If translated

literally, as has been done in many languages, the allusion

and thus the humor is lost. All the nonsensical verses in

Alice in Wonderland are parodies on children’s anthology

pieces from Carroll’s time. The translators of Alice into

different languages have chosen two opposite strategies.

Some have translated the verses literally, which certainly

has kept their nonsensical character, but lost the allusion

to existing verses. The translations are thus super cially

“faithful,” yet they are devoid of a deeper equivalence

based on the allusion. The adherents of the dialogical

theory have chosen to write their own parodies of verses

from their own culture. These verses have nothing to do

with the source text, yet they evoke the same response in

the target-text readers as the original verses evoke in the

413

TRANSLATION AND CROSSCULTURAL RECEPTION

source-text readers. Such translation strategies may be less

faithful to the source text, but instead more loyal toward

the target audience. What is a “good” translation is thus a

matter closely connected with the general views on what

is “good” children’s literature.

Speci cs of Picturebook Translation

The area where general translation studies are of little

use is the translation of picturebooks. With the rapidly

expanding  eld of picturebook theory, constantly grow-

ing attention is nowadays paid to the speci c signi cance

of the dialogical approach to translation of picturebooks

(see Panaou & Tsilimeni, this volume). The characteristic

feature of picturebooks as a medium is the interaction

of word and image, which creates an inseparable whole

where the meaning of the text/image unity, frequently

called iconotext or imagetext, is only revealed through

the synergy of the two levels (see Sipe, this volume). In

countries without a tradition of picturebooks in this sense

(even though the art of children’s books illustration may

be highly sophisticated), a foreign picturebook is often

translated and then illustrated by a different artist. The

picturebook as an entity is thus ruined, or changed so

signi cantly as to be a completely new text. Alternately,

just one or two original images from a picturebook may

accompany the target text, as is done in a Russian transla-

tion of Where the Wild Things Are.

However, even when the target book retains both the

verbal and the visual aspects of the source, the speci c

multimedial nature of the picturebook implies that in

translation, the target text should ideally retain the source

text’s relationship to the illustration (see Nières-Chevrel,

2003; Oittinen, 1995/2006, 2000, 2003, 2004; O’Sullivan,

1999). Unfortunately, presumably because picturebooks

are often regarded as simple, but also because the pub-

lishers are not aware of the text/image signi cance, the

translation violently interferes with the entity. An analysis

of a number of translations of the Swedish Anna-Clara

Tidholm’s picturebook Knacka på (“Knock-knock”) into

different languages demonstrates horrendous liberties that

the Danish, German, French, and some other translators

have allowed themselves; liberties that completely destroy

the poetic language of the text itself: The incomplete sen-

tences such as “Knock-knock” or “Come in” are translated

into conventional “Let us knock on the door” and “Now

let us come in” (Rhedin, 2001). In the  rst place, however,

the balance between the words and images, the iconotext,

has disappeared.

The different approaches to picturebook translation

become especially tangible when comparing two transla-

tions (often a British and an American one) of the same

book, such as The Wild Baby, where, among many other

transformations, additional text explains the actions clearly

understood from the images (Nikolajeva & Scott, 2001).

While in translating verbal texts, intertextual links of the

source text can be dif cult to preserve, the problem be-

comes all the more grave with a picturebook that contains

intervisual connections, as Mieke Desmet (2001/2006)

observes in her analysis of The Jolly Postman. When the

source text is not initially illustrated, the various translated

and illustrated versions can also be revealing, for instance

Spanish illustrations to Hans Christian Andersen’s “The

Emperor’s New Clothes” in connection with nudity (Car-

valho & de Azevedo, 2005). Occasionally, the images

rather than the words are subjected to puri cation when

they do not  t into the target culture. In the American

translation of the nonsense story by the Swedish poet

Lennart Hellsing, The Pirate Book, a striptease dancer

has been changed into a “smashing lady” in the text, and

in the picture she has been given a proper black dress (in

the original she is nude). In another Swedish picturebook,

Else-Marie and Her Seven Daddies, by Pija Lindenbaum,

the American publisher opposed the illustration in which

the protagonist was depicted in a bathtub together with her

mother and her imaginary daddies. By agreement with the

author/illustrator, a different picture was provided, with

the family reading in an armchair.

Other genres and kinds of children’s literature have

received very little scholarly attention. Poetry for children

is highly neglected (some rare exceptions are Bell [1998]

and Kümmerling-Meibauer [2003], who explicitly calls

poetry translation a stepchild), presumably due to the fact

that few works of poetry for children get translated at

all. The reason is most probably the speci c problems of

poetry translation: Poetry should preferably be translated

by poets, yet because translating children’s literature has

such low status this seldom happens. Further, there are few

if any analytical tools for studying translated poetry, since

the conventional notions of faithfulness to the original are

hardly applicable. Yet such attempts have been made, for

instance with A. A. Milne’s poetry in German (Kreller,

2006).

Translation of drama for children has not been studied,

likewise non ction, even though the latter comprises a

signi cant part of publishing.

Translators’ Voices

One of the many paradoxical phenomena in translation is

that theory and praxis seldom go hand in hand. Transla-

tion theorists are not necessarily translators themselves,

while translators are hardly interested in theory and pay

no attention to theoretical debates or even empirical

investigations. Practical translation is often a matter of

individual choices where decisions are made irrespective

of general principles. It is therefore invaluable to partake

of what translators themselves say about their work. The

renowned British translator Anthea Bell (1979, 1987/2006,

1998, 2001) has repeatedly shared her experience in trans-

lating for children, which is revealing considered parallel

with studies of “faithful” and “unfaithful” translations. A

414

MARIA NIKOLAJEVA

Slovenian translator from English also provides valuable

insights (Kenda, 2006). The numerous confessions of

international translators of the Harry Potter books, men-

tioned above, are equally illuminating.

Conclusion

In conclusion, there are many areas and directions open

for future translation studies, in which scholars can both

apply research results from general translation theory and

from children’s literature-speci c theory, the latter often

based on the concept of the implied reader. The problems

delineated above notwithstanding, the art of translating

for children develops and improves, and in many cases

gains status. Similarly, publishers in many countries

become aware of the necessity of translated literature

in the age of globalization. As studies of translated chil-

dren’s literature become less evaluative and more ana-

lytical, they can in their turn inform children’s literature

scholarship at large, since translations are frequently

more explicit in their didactic and artistic purposes than

original texts. Further, translation studies contribute sig-

ni cantly to the area of comparative literature, opening

new perspectives for the mutual knowledge of scholars

from different cultures.

Literature References

Editor’s Note: Because of the many translated texts referred to in

this essay, references to primary works and translations are not

included. Readers interested in particular translations are referred

to the academic sources cited in the text.

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Bell, A. (1979). Children’s books in translation. Signal, 28,

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Bell, A. (1998). Translating verse for children. Signal, 85, 3–14.

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417

Point of Departure

Tara F. Chace

The English-language book market is also highly

professionalized; I know of many European authors and

not a few publishers who think they can get their books

published in the United States without an agent, not un-

derstanding that most U.S. publishers won’t consider blind

submissions because of the volume they receive already.

The literary landscapes in some countries, e.g., the Nordic

countries, are also heavily supported by government arts

funding. Competing in the more cutthroat U.S. market

often comes as a shock.

Ultimately, one of the most signi cant reasons more

books are not translated into English is that English-

language publishers simply don’t have people on staff who

can read manuscripts in various languages. What publisher

wants to purchase rights to a book she can’t read and then

spend money on translating it only to discover it wasn’t

as good as the foreign publisher originally claimed? If

more publishers could read languages other than English,

more foreign books would likely be published in English

translation.

Yet, publishers are remiss if they don’t explore foreign

publishers’ tables at book fairs and develop networks of

trusted sources to tip them off to good candidates. For very

promising books, publishers should commission reader

reports and sample translations—and they should be aware

of the options available to cover the translation costs. Obvi-

ously picking a bestseller is most lucrative, but many U.S.

and U.K. publishers are unaware of subsidies and grants

(e.g., from the governments of the Nordic countries) that

cover most of the translation costs after publication.

Then there is the challenge of  nding a good translator.

A representative of a large German publishing house I

recently spoke with said 30% of the translations she com-

missioned were unusable, largely because the translation

was too close to the source and thus too clunky to read,

even unintelligible in spots. She said her second biggest

problem with translations was that a surprising number of

them are turned in late, sometimes months late, throwing

off the publisher’s lineup. Full-time, experienced transla-

tors average about 2,000 words a day. A book can easily

run 100,000 words, so if you hire a translator who isn’t

working on the project full time, or if the translation is

more dif cult than anticipated, or if the translator can’t

start early enough, it’s not hard to see how publishers’

deadlines (and bottom lines) can suffer.

Why, then, don’t more excellent translators translate

more literature? According to the American Translators

Association, the average full-time, professional translator

Academic studies often completely overlook the business

side of the book industry, as Maria Nikolajeva does in her

otherwise excellent survey of the schools of thought in

translation theory. For example, absurd decisions such as

Nikolajeva cites for adapting Robinson Crusoe from 500

to 24 pages are made by publishers and editors, never

translators.

In fact, translators generally don’t choose the books

they translate and are often subject to editorial whimsy.

At any serious gathering of literary translators, horror

stories abound of ignorant, misguided, and injudicious

editing—I personally know two established translators

who have felt compelled to use pseudonyms on published

translations because of egregious editorial changes made

without their consent.

Translators who translate into English also face the

problem that so many people around the world speak some

English: It happens all too frequently that a publisher or

author, who is not a native speaker of English, will intro-

duce stylistic problems or outright errors into an English

translation. This can lead to agonizing battles and seriously

harm the quality of the translation.

Luckily, I have avoided such pitfalls so far. What I do

suffer from, like most translators, is lack of time. I have

a 400-page novel due back to the publisher in just two

months—but let me set that aside for a moment and pro-

vide a practicing literary translator’s perspective on why

more books aren’t translated into English, followed by

a discussion of why excellent translators don’t do more

literary translations.

The English-language book market dwarves the markets

for other languages. In 2008, the United States published

approximately 500,000 new book titles and editions, the

United Kingdom published over 120,000, and Sweden

published 4,365. Looking speci cally at children’s and

young-adult books, in 2008 the United States published

29,438 new titles, and Sweden 828. Of those 828, 455

were translations from another language; thus, the pool

of Swedish juvenile titles an English-language publisher

might even consider translating is miniscule: 373. And of

that miniscule pool, the number of titles that are as good

as, or better than, what is already available in English is

smaller yet.

Publishers also usually incur extra costs for translation

when they publish foreign-language titles, so such titles

must offer commercial bene t or literary quality beyond

what is already available in English to compensate for the

extra costs of translation.

418

earns between $0.11 and $0.18 per word (depending on

language combination) and has an average income of

$60,423. However, these successful translators tend to be

very busy running their own freelance translation busi-

nesses. They also tend not to do too many literary transla-

tions, in part because they have trouble  nding publishers

who want books translated but also because translating

literature doesn’t pay as well as translating other kinds of

material and is very time consuming. Many translators

who do translate literature actually earn the majority of

their income from another source, e.g., an academic posi-

tion, retirement pension, or from a spouse’s income. In my

case, about 30% of my translation work is literary, and the

rest is medical/pharmaceutical—I couldn’t afford to live

on what I make as a literary translator alone.

So, does anyone make a living translating literature? In

a few countries, yes. However, it is very rare in the U.S. or

U.K. and numerous other countries to  nd anyone, even

the most esteemed translators, who support themselves

entirely by translating literature. The European Council

of Literary Translators Associations published an inter-

national survey in 2008 that spells this out most clearly:

“Literary translators earn much less than workers in the

manufacturing and service sector” (http://www.ceatl.eu/

docs/surveyuk.pdf, p. 69)

Even when a publishing house wants to hire a literary

translator, however, they often don’t know where to  nd

one. They would never solicit 10 sample translations and

choose the best translator to do the job; they almost always

rely on word of mouth, networking, or even bilingual

people in house to do the job.

In view of these factors, I disagree with Nikolajeva’s

assertion that “[p]ractical translation is often a matter of

individual choices where decisions are made irrespective

of general principles.” To the contrary, a good translator

will have a rationale for just about every translation choice

that he or she makes. However, publishers do not always

choose good translators and even the best translators are

affected by economic factors, e.g., tight deadlines or low

pay, forcing them to rush through the translation or, per-

haps even more disastrously, the proofreading. Add to that

editorial considerations entirely outside the translator’s

control and you will  nd many substandard translations

on bookshelves.

The translator is just one cog in the complex machinery

required to bring a book from the author to the reader.

As the translator, I have a great deal in common with the

author: I hold the copyright, I receive an advance, I earn

royalties and subsidiary rights, and I write the book. Well,

sort of. I also have a lot in common with the publisher:

I’m a serious professional in the business of books, I deal

with deadlines, contracts, sales numbers, publicity, and

networking. I also have a lot in common with the reader:

I love books, I love words, I love great works of literature

and some not so great ones, too. You’d be hard pressed

to  nd someone who has read a book as carefully as its

translator.

TARA F. CHACE

The Implied Reader of the Translation

Petros Panaou

University of Nicosia, Cyprus

Tasoula Tsilimeni

University of Thessaly

In this chapter, literary scholars Petros Panaou and Tasoula Tsilimeni approach the translation of children’s

literature from a different perspective than that of the more academic arguments critiqued by Maria Nikolajeva

in the previous chapter. By combining insights from narratology with translation theory and practice, they

discuss how translators, when they move from source texts to target texts, translate cultural expectations and

ideologies regarding childhood along with the actual words, sometimes distorting the originals and seeking

to remove the “foreign” elements that make translated literature so valuable for children in their quest to

understand cultural difference. Kostia Kontoleon, in her Point of Departure essay, focuses more on her com-

mitment to preserve the aesthetic qualities of a text, but she too recognizes the importance of translation as an

intermediary between diverse cultures.

Considering the Implied Reader

Let us consider this: An author is writing a story from a

boy’s perspective about the death of his favorite pet. At

a crucial point of the story, the boy’s father attempts to

explain “death” to him. The author ponders two versions

of this scene:

(1) “Dead,” said Daddy, “is very different from sleeping.

Dead is —“

“— NOT alive!” I shouted.

(2)“When somebody dies,” said Daddy, “it doesn’t mean

that he is asleep.

It means that…”

“…he is not alive?” I asked.

Which version of the scene will she decide to include in the

 nal draft? What effect will this choice have on her story?

A boy protagonist who shouts “NOT alive!” is signi cantly

different from a protagonist who reservedly asks “…he

419

420

PETROS PANAOU AND TASOULA TSILIMENI

is not alive?” The  rst expresses anger, an emotion that

is part of a series of emotions associated with mourning.

The latter avoids expressing intense feelings. How will the

author decide? If she thinks that the child reader is capable

of processing the intense emotions that accompany loss,

then she will probably choose the  rst. If she believes

that children are too innocent and hyper-sensitive to be

asked to empathize with such powerful feelings, she will

choose the latter.

Now let us consider this: Both choices have been

incorporated in published picture books, the  rst one in

the English version of Goodbye Mousie (Harris, 2001),

and the second one in its Greek translation (translated by

Dimitra, 2003, n.p.). Aren’t we justi ed to infer that both

a different protagonist and a different reader are implied

by each text?

In her comparative analysis of translated versions of

Roberto Innocenti’s and Christophe Gallaz’s (1985) Rose

Blanche, a picture book portrayal of a young girl who

discovers a Nazi concentration camp on the outskirts of

her German city, Susan Stan (2004) concludes that

[…] cultural, aesthetic, national, ideological, pedagogical,

and economic issues are all at work in shaping these transla-

tions. The Italian saying traduttóre, traditóre — “to translate

is to betray”— underscores the impossibility of capturing the

whole of the original in a translation, but perhaps more to

the point in a work for children, where ﬁ delity is not always

the main concern, is the Latin motto of the marketplace,

caveat emptor—“let the buyer beware.” (p. 31)

Emer O’Sullivan (2005) asserts that “The implied

reader of the translation will always be a different entity

from the implied reader of the source text” (p. 105). Perry

Nodelman and Mavis Reimer (2003) observe that “All

texts have an implied reader. That is, they suggest in their

subject and their style the characteristics of the reader best

equipped to understand and respond to them” (p. 16). Since

the translation of a text, pragmatically, can never preserve

the exact same subject and style—let alone that these are

often intentionally altered in the case of children’s litera-

ture translation—the reader best equipped to understand

and respond to the new text may be a different reader than

that implied by the original.

Building on Whalen-Levitt’s (1983) ideas, Nodelman

and Reimer describe the implied reader in terms of what

the text asks its reader to know and to do while reading

it. A text, Nodelman and Reimer tell us, implies a reader

with speci c tastes and interests, a reader who possesses

particular knowledge about literature and life, and a

reader who can implement speci c reading strategies

in order to decode the text at hand (p. 17). A translated

children’s text, perhaps because of children’s assumed

inexperience of literature and the world, always assumes

that its child-reader in the target culture will not share

the same knowledges and strategies with the implied

child-reader of the source text. In its anticipation of a

reader who knows and acts differently from the reader

of the source text, the translation constructs a different

implied reader.

Giuliana Schiavi (1996) was perhaps the  rst to focus

on the difference between the implied reader of the source

text and the implied reader of its translation. The process

she describes is quite simple: The implied reader of the

source text is generated by the implied author; likewise,

the implied reader of the translation is generated by the

implied translator. The translator, according to Schiavi,

interprets the original text, follows certain norms, and

adopts speci c strategies and methods, creating in this

manner a new relationship between the translated text and

the reader. By doing this, s/he creates a different implied

reader from the one in the source text.

Communicating across Cultures

In Comparative Children’s Literature, Emer O’Sullivan

(2005) takes this theoretical framework one step further,

presenting a valuable analytical tool, a communicative

model of translation which links the theoretical  elds of

narratology and translation studies. O’Sullivan explains

that the communication between the real author of the

source text and the real reader of the translation is medi-

ated by the real translator. The real translator functions at

 rst as “a receptive agent” (p. 107), an interpreting reader

of the source text. S/he then “transmits the source text via

the intratextual agency of the implied translator” (p. 107).

The implied translator, to one degree or another, generates

a different narrator, narratee, and implied reader within

the target text. O’Sullivan asserts that we should take more

notice of the “second voice” in any translated text, “the

voice of the translator” (pp. 107–108). Thus, we should

persistently ask such questions about translated children’s

books such as “What kind of translator can be perceived

in the text? Where can the translator be located in the act

of communication which is the narrative text? How does

the implied reader of the target text differ from that of the

source text?” (p. 104).

And, of course, the next question is: How have the dif-

ferent cultural contexts in uenced these changes? Literary

critics have long acknowledged the importance of the

cultures and ideologies within which literature is created.

Historical and geographical factors often determine both

the content and the perspective of a story. Peter Hollindale

(1988) claims that a big part of any book is authored, not

by its author, but by the world its author inhabits (p. 15).

What happens, then, when this book is translated into

another world? Shouldn’t we also presume that a big part

of any translated book is translated, not by its translator,

but by the world its translator inhabits?

Critical analysis of translated texts becomes much more

meaningful once we begin asking questions like the ones

listed above. This is evident, for instance, in Viggo Hjør-

nager Pedersen’s (2008) analysis of Victorian translations

of Andersen’s fairytales. Professor at Copenhagen Univer-

421

THE IMPLIED READER OF THE TRANSLATION

sity and a literary translator himself, Hjørnager Pedersen

begins the introduction of his analysis as follows:

Unlike plays, books were not censored in Victorian England,

censorship having been abolished in 1695. But that does not

mean that there were not fairly strict rules governing what

might and might not be published, especially for children.

As Hans Christian Andersen was generally perceived as a

children’s writer pure and simple rather than as a writer for

both adults and children, such rules were also applied to

translations of his stories. (p. 308)

While the source texts produced in Denmark were intended

for a dual audience, the target texts in Victorian England

were intended for children only. By identifying this pivotal

difference regarding the intended audience of each text,

Hjørnager Pedersen has paved the way for a productive

and well-structured analysis of the translations. The ap-

plication of Victorian children’s literature norms to Hans

Christian Andersen’s stories inscribed a different implied

reader in the target texts.

After a brief discussion of Andersen’s own ideas about

censorship and the literary climate in early 19th-century

Britain, Hjørnager Pedersen moves on to “examples from

Andersen’s tales in Victorian translation where there is

clear evidence of departures from the text that must be due

to the publisher’s and/or the translator’s ideas about deco-

rum where children were concerned” (p. 309). Through

these examples, he demonstrates how sexual references,

as well as references to violence, death, and religious

taboos were toned down by Victorian translators. One

such example is found in Caroline Peachey’s translation

of “The Top and the Ball.” A female ball, who had previ-

ously rejected a male top, meets him again in a garbage can

several years later and tells her story about never getting

married and falling into the roof “gutter”:

Hjørnager Pedersen’s

translation of the Danish

text:

Peachey’s translation:

[…] there I have lain ﬁ ve

years, soaking! That is a

long time, believe me, for a

maid!

I fell into the gutter, and

there I have lain ﬁ ve years,

and am now wet through.

Only think, what a weari-

some time for a young lady

to be in such a situation!

(pp. 312–313)

Peachey tones down, of course, the sexual connotations,

connotations that become even more explicit when Hjør-

nager Pedersen explains that in Danish the word “Jomfru,”

which he translates as “maid” and Peachey as “young

lady,” means both “young woman” and “virgin.”

Some Revelatory Differences in English-to-

Greek Picture Book Translations

But let us test O’Sullivan’s (2005) analytical tool in

practice, asking the questions suggested by her model

in relation to picture books translated from English into

Greek, and identifying possible shifts in the constructs

of the implied reader. We have intentionally chosen to

comment on translated books that deal with “sensitive”

issues (i.e., “death” and “difference”) in the hope that these

translations will be more revealing. While we do not claim

that analyzing a few translations will result in broad and

irrefutable conclusions, we do agree with Márta Minier

(2006), when she writes that

A translation as a metatext will speak about how an individu-

al culture (and translator) perceives and constructs within its

own boundaries the foreignness of another culture; hence, it

is determined to reveal a great deal about contemporaneous

discourses in a receiving community. (p. 120)

Translations of children’s books, in particular, are

bound to reveal contemporaneous discourses in the receiv-

ing community regarding “childhood” and “children’s

literature.” O’Sullivan (2005) suggests that “shifts in the

narrative style of the translation provide evidence of the

preferences of translators and their assumptions about their

readers, and also of the norms and conventions dominating

the translation of children’s literature” (p. 118). According

to Michal Borodo (2006), because of their connection to

the child as a speci c type of addressee, norms in child-

oriented translation and translation studies have proceeded

along different lines from mainstream translation.

O’ Sullivan (2005) observes that, in translated texts,

culture-speci c notions of childhood play at least some

part in determining the construction of the implied reader.

She argues that the implied reader in a translated text can

differ substantially from the implied reader in the original,

depending on the manner in which a translator in a given

time and culture will answer such questions such as:

“What do ‘children’ want to read? What are their cogni-

tive and linguistic capabilities? How far can/should they

be stretched? What is suitable for them? What do they

enjoy?” (p. 110).

Answers to such questions are often culture-speci c.

In the Greek translation of Daniela Bunge’s (2006) The

Scarves—translated by Dimitra Simou (2006) from Eng-

lish even though it was originally written in German—dif-

ferent culture-speci c answers about the needs of children

lead to a major change regarding the main characters and

their closeness to the child-reader. Since divorce is still, at

least to some extent, a taboo subject in the Greek speaking

world, the implied translator makes the separation of the

child protagonists’ grandparents less traumatic by turning

them into godparents instead. The implied child-reader

is one who might be shocked or damaged by representa-

tions of disruptions to relations within her/his immediate

family. Grandparents are certainly immediate family for

Greek children; indeed in some cases they are closer to

children than their own parents are. Thus, the implied

translator feels that the distance between implied reader

and protagonists needs to be increased.

422

PETROS PANAOU AND TASOULA TSILIMENI

Translation Norms in Reductive and Amplifying

Narration

Birgit Stolt (2006) identi es educational intentions in

child-oriented translation, which often result in censoring

and didacticism, a tendency to adjust the text according to

the assumptions about children’s needs and capacity, and a

“tendency to sentimentalize and prettify” (p. 77). Isabelle

Desmidt (2003) proposes a typology of translation norms,

distinguishing between:

preliminary norms• (in relation to the selection of texts

to be translated, etc.);

literary and educational norms• (whether ‘literary

entertainment’ or ‘the educational aspect’ is priori-

tized);

pedagogical norms• (the tendency to simplify the

story and to modify elements which are not congruent

with the prevalent pedagogical values in the receiving

culture);

business norms• (the role of the publisher and the

market in general). (pp. 168–172)

In Goodbye Mousie (Harris, 2003), the example

mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, Stolt’s (1978)

“educational intentions” or Desmidt’s (2003) “educational

norms” are prevalent. The priority of this translation is not

so much to entertain and to preserve the literary quality

of the original, but rather to teach the child-reader about

death in a subtle and sensitive manner. A tendency to

adjust the text according to children’s assumed needs and

capacity is also apparent. The implied translator constructs

a different implied reader by smoothing down the edges,

as it were. A more sensitive and gullible child-reader is

implied. Besides substituting the boy’s shouting with

mere questioning, the implied translator also substitutes

the taboo word, “dead” (πεθαμένος), wherever she  nds

it, with a different, smoother word or phrase. Here is an

example:

Source text: Target text translated back

into English:

Mousie did NOT die!

Mousie is NOT dead!

Mousie did NOT die!

Mousie is alive!

The implied translator also views a shoebox as an inap-

propriate cof n for Mousie, so she changes it into “a nice

carton box” (Harris, 2003, n.p.). And since she  nds the

use of past tense in the phrase “You were a good mouse”

(Harris, 2001, n.p.) too disturbing, she chooses to omit the

sentence altogether, minimizing in this manner the boy’s

realization and acceptance of Mousie’s death. Finally,

since the implied reader is considered uncritical and eas-

ily confused, some potentially confusing phrases are also

omitted. Before burying Mousie, the boy places food and

toys in the shoebox-cof n, so that Mousie won’t be hun-

gry or bored. The translation does not include the phrase

“‘Now Mousie won’t be hungry!’ I said” (Harris, 2001,

n.p.), keeping only the phrase “‘Now Mousie won’t be

bored!’ I said” (Harris, 2003, n.p.). This is probably due to

the translator’s eagerness to protect the child-reader from

possibly misguiding notions (i.e., that the dead are able to

eat). The Greek translation is characterized, for the most

part, by substitution and omission, the latter pointing to

some extent towards a reductive narration:

…changes in the constitution of the implied reader of the

translation made by the implied translator omitting features,

cutting sections of text, or reducing several readers’ roles

inscribed in the source text to only a few in the target text.

(O’Sullivan, 2005, p. 115)

Substitution and omission also characterize the trans-

lation of Ann De Bode’s (1997) Grandad I’ll Always

Remember You, translated from English into Greek by

Fotini Peramatzeli (2000), even though the original is in

Flemish. This is another text that deals with death. In the

scene where Grandma is describing how Grandad died,

the phrase “You’re an angel, Grandad said” (De Bode,

1997, p. 8) is substituted with the phrase “You’re an angel,

Grandad smiled” (De Bode, 2000, p. 8) even though there

is not a hint of a smile on Grandad’s face in the picture.

The implied translator strives to foreground Grandad’s

tranquility during the last hours of his life. Moreover,

the translation omits some phrases that are emotionally

charged; one such phrase is: “They [the relatives] are

staring into space, and sighing” (De Bode, 1997, p. 5).

Educational intentions, which aim to introduce the subject

of death and loss as gently as possible to children, are once

more prioritized.

The translated picture books analyzed below operate in

a completely different manner, but under the auspices of

similar norms and assumptions about children. What we

have in these target texts is amplifying narration:

Extensive additions to the text, however, can amplify it

to the extent that the explanatory voice of the translator

as narrator of the translation is so different in nature from

that of the narrator of the source text that it drowns out the

original narrative voice. We then have a new constitution

of the implied reader. (O’Sullivan, 2005, p. 114)

Rather than substituting, simplifying, and omitting, the

implied translators of these picture books add, expand,

and explain.

In the translation of David McKee’s (1989) Elmer by

Athina Andritsopoulou (1996), perhaps the most important

difference between source and target text is found in the

title. The English title is a single word, the protagonist’s

name: “Elmer.” The Greek title, on the other hand, consists

of the protagonist’s name “Elmer” followed by the ex-

planatory phrase “the dappled elephant.” This is a twofold

change. To begin with, the addition of explanatory text

after the elephant’s name solidi es his identity, his central

characteristic, his essence: This is Elmer, the dappled

elephant. Thus, the Greek picture book “essentializes”

Elmer even before the story begins. The English version

avoids this “essentializing” notion, using a similar phrase

423

THE IMPLIED READER OF THE TRANSLATION

only in Elmer’s thoughts: “‘Whoever heard of a patchwork

elephant?’ he thought” (McKee, 1989, n.p.).

One suspects the workings of Desmidt’s (2003) “busi-

ness norms” here. Of course, we can only speculate about

the reasons behind this addition. One possible explanation,

however, is marketing-related; one could suggest that the

change in the title announces a spectacle in the form of

an advertisement. From this point of view, the cover calls

for attention by inviting prospective readers/consumers

to read/buy this intriguing picture book about a strange,

dappled elephant. The cover invites readers in; just like in

the old days a circus director would invite customers into

the tent to have a look at a “freak of nature.”

As O’Sullivan (2005) explains, many real people

usually contribute to the agency of the implied transla-

tor. The “‘translator’s consciousness’ is not necessarily

or exclusively that of the real translator” (p. 107). Joel

Taxel (2002) writes that “[w]hile obvious to those within

the industry, the impact of the business side of children’s

literature has not been given the sustained and systematic

scrutiny it deserves by children’s literature scholars and

the educational community in general” (p. 146), which he

will further explore in his own chapter in this volume. The

business impact is observable even in the case of English

source texts that get exported from one English-speaking

country to another. Perhaps it is even more observable in

this case, since the text gets altered in spite of the fact that

there is no signi cant need for linguistic translation. Laura

Atkins (2004), re ecting about her work as an assistant

editor at Orchard Books in New York, describes a process

of “Americanising” British books for children, through

which elements such as unfamiliar spellings, words, and

locations are edited. These changes are based on the as-

sumption that “the North-American child reader is by

and large reluctant, and only wants to read about familiar

experiences in recognisable language” (p. 49). We may

conclude that, even though these texts are not translated

from one language into another, the cultural translation

that takes place does result in a different target text with

a different implied reader. What is even more important is

that Atkins points to market forces that guide the construct

of a different implied child-reader. Children’s books are

usually bought by adults (parents, teachers, and librarians):

“The child’s needs here are constructed according to the

perception of what the majority of teachers and librarians

will accept, as perceived by the publisher whose concern

is selling to that market” (p. 52).

In relation to the Greek translation of Elmer (McKee,

1996), a second market-related issue arises regarding

the extension of the title. The translator avoids a word-

to-word translation of “patchwork” and chooses instead

the Greek word παρδαλός, an adjective that, for lack of

a better word, we have translated back into English as

“dappled.” ∏αρδαλός usually means both dappled and

multicolored, but is also charged with negative or sarcastic

connotations: Someone who is παρδαλός is often viewed

as too  ashy and pretentious. One could claim that this

choice of words was probably made by a publisher, an

editor, and/or a marketer who intentionally marketed the

picture book as “funny” by making fun of Elmer. The new

implied reader is expected to read the picture book as a

funny book and thus view Elmer from an ironic distance

rather than empathize with him.

Yet another noticeable alteration is the employment of

amplifying narration to foreground Elmer’s friendship with

the rest of the elephants. In the same manner that negative

emotions are toned down in the translations of Goodbye

Mousie (Harris, 2003) and Grandad I’ll Always Remember

You (De Bode, 2000), in the translation of Elmer (McKee,

1996) any unpleasant connotations that might stem from

Elmer being different are also toned down. The implied

translator achieves this effect by emphasizing the fact that

Elmer may be different from the other elephants but he is

their friend. Several phrases that point to Elmer’s strong

friendship with the rest of the elephants are added to the

translated text:

Source text: Target text translated back

into English:

[…] and lastly same old

elephants.

…the elephants were also

the same, his old friends.

All elephants must decorate

themselves and Elmer will

decorate himself elephant

colour.

All of us will paint ourselves

like him, dappled and our

Elmer will paint himself in

plain elephant color.

(McKee, 1989, 1996, n.p.)

Amplifying narration is found in the translation of

Susan Laughs (Willis, 1999, translated by Filipos Man-

dilaras, 2001) as well. Both the Greek and the English

text are poems, but the manner in which the Greek poem

relates to the images in the picture book, in terms of space

and meaning, differs signi cantly from the relationship

between the English poem and the pictures. In terms of

space, the English poem is spread out in such a way that

each verse is divided in half and each half is linked to a

separate picture. In this manner, the number of words that

correspond to each picture is kept to a minimum. Also,

since 8 out of the 18 verses take up the entire lower part

of the open book, the reader is often urged to move on to

the next double-spread in order to complete the rhyme;

this achieves a fast and animated rhythm. This feature is

lost in the Greek translation, where a complete verse is

found under each picture and the rhyming verse can be

read on the adjacent page.

In terms of meaning, the text-image relation is altered

by the implied translator’s tendency to allocate more

content and power to the text. Things left unspoken by

the author are spelled out by the translator, altering the

entire viewing and reading process. Regarding the trans-

lation of the speci c genre of picture books, O’Sullivan

(2005) writes:

424

PETROS PANAOU AND TASOULA TSILIMENI

In this genre combining words and pictures, an ideal transla-

tion reﬂ ects an awareness not only of the signiﬁ cance of the

original text but also of the interaction between the visual

and the verbal, what the pictures do in relation to the words;

it does not verbalize the interaction but leaves gaps that

make the interplay possible and exciting. (p. 122)

This translated picture book does the exact opposite.

“Susan waves, Susan grins” (Willis, 1999, n.p.), for ex-

ample, is translated as “Argiro waves from the car. Argiro

goes to the museum for a walk” (Willis, 2001, n.p.), de-

scribing the exact actions depicted in the illustrations. We

will comment on the name change later, but what is most

unfortunate here is the loss of the “training” performed

by the source text. The source text seems to be continu-

ally preparing the reader for the work s/he will need to

do in the end to decode the  nal page. By leaving things

unsaid, it forces the reader to switch to a certain mode

of reading, where one has to look for additional mean-

ing in the picture. This is exactly what one needs to do

to understand the ending of the book, where the reader

has to combine the visual and textual signs on the last

page and on all of the preceding pages, in order to realize

that Susan can do all these things even though she is in

a wheelchair. But the implied translator translates both

text and pictures, spelling out almost everything. The

markedly different implied reader of this text would  nd

it hard to decode the last page of the book. The implied

reader of the translation is perceived as either lazy or

incompetent, someone that doesn’t seek out additional

meaning in the images.

Differences in Narrative Style and Voice

O’Sullivan (2005) asserts that shifts in the narrative style

of the translation may be guided by “narrative methods

of children’s literature more familiar to the target culture”

(p. 118). This might be the case here, since the minimal

text in the English version of Susan Laughs (Willis, 1999)

is highly uncommon in children’s literature originally

written in Greek. Zohar Shavit (2006) explains that in the

translation of children’s literature, “If the model of the

original text does not exist in the target system, the text

is changed by deleting or by adding such elements as will

adjust it to the integrating model of the target system” (p.

28). The picture book, as a distinctively different genre

from the illustrated book, is very new in the system of

Greek children’s literature. This may be one of the reasons

behind the addition of text and the resistance to allocate

narrative value and power to the image, observed in the

Greek translation of Susan Laughs (Willis, 2001). Culture-

speci c conventions, such as the narrative style of stories

addressed to very young children, may have in uenced

the last translation we will be discussing as well.

In the translation of Something Else (Cave, 1995,

translated by Tourkolia-Kidoneos, 1997), the implied

translator introduces a certain shift in the voice of the nar-

rator. In this picture book, the shift in the narrative style

is even more evident than in the examples of amplifying

and reductive narration discussed so far. Here, on several

occasions, the translator modi es words to become what

she conceives as more “child-friendly.” What we comment

on in relation to this translation may seem insigni cant,

but, as acclaimed translator Anthea Bell (2006) stresses in

“Translator’s Notebook: Delicate Matters,” small changes

can often be quite important:

By ‘delicate matters’, in the context of translation, I mean

they are ﬁ ddly and may look very minor: choice of tense,

use of pronouns, those matters of everyday occurrence in

translation work which you would think couldn’t possibly

make much difference to actual meaning. And yes, transla-

tors do take them in their stride every day. Only sometimes

one has to stride back again for a second look, and it turns

out that quite tiny things can affect meaning a good deal

after all. (p. 232)

The use of diminutives, a common practice in Greek sto-

ries for very young children, is an illustrative example. The

implied translator of Something Else (Cave, 1997) applies

this convention, inserting diminutives in several parts of

the target text. On the  rst page alone, three diminutives

are added. The Greek diminutives “σπιτάκι” (little house),

“μοναχούλι” (little and alone), and “φιλαράκι” (little

friend) are used:

Source text: Target text translated back

into English:

On a windy hill

alone

with nothing to be

friends with

lived Something

Else.

Up on a windblown

hill,

in a little house,

lived little and

alone

Something Else

without a single not

even a single little

friend.

(Cave, 1995, 1997, n.p.)

Ten more diminutives are found in the rest of the trans-

lation, bringing into effect a certain narrative shift. The

narration is explicitly addressed to very young children

and a sweet, sentimentalizing tone is adopted. Stolt’s

(2006) identi cation of a tendency to “sentimentalize and

prettify” (p. 77) comes to mind. In the above example, the

English text is kept simple, straight-forward and minimal

(only 13 words), matching the bare hill and the emptiness/

loneliness that surrounds it. The Greek text subverts this

atmosphere, by introducing diminutives and by using more

words than necessary.

A few pages later, the voice of the translator is heard

once again. When a second “strange creature” (Cave, 1995,

n.p.) visits the protagonist’s home, the English text strives

to communicate a feeling of alienation, by referring to

the visitor as “the creature.” The translation, on the other

425

THE IMPLIED READER OF THE TRANSLATION

hand, refers to him as “το πλασματάκι” (the little creature)

(Cave, 1997, n.p.):

Source text: Target text translated back

into English:

“You’re welcome,” said the

creature.

“You’re welcome,” said the

little creature.

The creature shook its head. The little creature shook its

head.

(n.p.)

When plain and simple “creature” becomes “little crea-

ture,” it inevitably looks less strange and alien. Another

change that tones down the alienation is that the trans-

lation allocates the name “Something” to the creature

much earlier than in the source text, where the creature

is given a name only after it becomes Something Else’s

friend: “From then on, Something Else had Something

to be friends with.” (Cave, 1995, n.p.) Also, with the

exception of the word “ανεμοδαρμένο” (windblown) on

the  rst page, the implied translator introduces a more

oral-oriented language compared to the source text. For

example, “You don’t belong here” (Cave, 1995, n.p.) is

translated into “Your place is not here” (Cave, 1997, n.p.).

In this manner, a new implied reader is constructed, one

who uses and understands a limited number of words and

is closer to the oral than to the written word.

The Translation of Culture-speci c Items

The last issue we would like to discuss is the treatment of

culture-speci c items. These are items that, according to

Göte Klingberg (1986), belong in certain categories:

literary references•

foreign languages in the source text•

references to mythology and popular belief•

historical, religious and political background•

building and home furnishing, food •

customs, play and games•

 ora and fauna•

personal names, titles, names of domestic animals, •

names of objects

geographical names•

weights and measures (pp. 17–18)•

Even though interesting conclusions can be drawn from

studies that pay special attention to the treatment of these

items in the translation, for the purposes of this short dis-

cussion, we refer only to personal names. In two of the

picture books we have analyzed, there is “domestication”

(Venuti, 2000, p. 16) of the characters’ names; they are

substituted with Greek names. In the translation of Susan

Laughs (Willis, 2001), Susan is turned into “Αργυρώ,”

while in the translation of Grandad I’ll Always Remember

You (De Bode, 2000), Tom becomes “Νικόλας,” Martin

becomes “∏αύλος,” and Kate becomes “Έλλη.” As Gillian

Lathey (2006) observes, this kind of adaptation “rests on

assumptions that young readers will  nd it dif cult to as-

similate foreign names, coinage, foodstuffs or locations,

and that they may reject a text re ecting a culture that

is unfamiliar” (p. 7). However, Lathey then proceeds to

argue that

Once a narrative engages their interest, young readers will

persevere with names and localities that are well beyond

their ken in myths, legends and fantasy ﬁ ction written in

their native languages, let alone in translations, and they

will certainly never be intrigued and attracted by difference

if it is kept from them. (pp. 7–8)

Stolt (2006) agrees with this opinion and supports it, citing

both her personal experience and examples like Johanna

Spyri’s Heidi (1880/1899), a character who managed to

became internationally renowned even though—and per-

haps because—her name was not domesticated.

Child-oriented translation studies have dealt exhaustive-

ly with issues that pertain to culture-speci c elements and

the dilemma of “domestication” or “foreignization”:

Translators may assume two different positions and on this

basis they will employ a speciﬁ c translation strategy. On

the one hand they may think that reading a book rich in

culture-speciﬁ c elements enables children to learn and

enlarge their knowledge of the world, or on the other they

may believe that children cannot deal with a foreign culture

because they do not yet possess adequate interpretative and

cognitive capacities. (Ippolito, 2006, p. 108)

Göte Klingberg (1986), Márta Minier (2006), Riitta Oit-

tinen (2000), Lawrence Venuti (2000), and many others

have participated in heated discussions of this complicated

issue. It would certainly take much more than a short

chapter to analyze this dilemma in depth. Some scholars

even claim that there is no dilemma, since translation in-

evitably domesticates, at least to some degree, the source

text: “Perhaps we should only speak of different levels

and dimensions of domestication” (Paloposki & Oittinen,

2000, p. 386).

For the purposes of the present discussion, we agree

with scholars like Venuti (2000) and Klingberg (1986), and

Ippolito (2006) that “a translation should preserve the cul-

tural values expressed by the original text, because these

will promote mutual respect, friendship and dialogue,

widen their knowledge of the world and open their minds

to new and original ideas” (Ippolito, p. 109). When the

culturally different is allowed to remain in the translated

text, Helen W. Painter (1968) argues, it can be of charm,

interest, and educational value to the child-reader.

Becoming the Implied Reader

of a Translation

This brings us back to the implied reader of the translation.

It should be stressed that the implied reader has a perfor-

mative effect. Nodelman and Reimer (2003) emphasize

that the implied reader, rather than being just a quality of

426

PETROS PANAOU AND TASOULA TSILIMENI

the text, “is a role a text implies and invites a reader to

take on” (p. 17). Wolfgang Iser (1974), who originally

coined the term of the implied reader, explains that the

term “incorporates both the prestructuring of the potential

meaning by the text, and the reader’s actualization of this

potential through the reading process” (p. xiii). While

reading the text, the real reader is asked to become, at least

to some extent, the implied reader (Nodelman & Reimer,

2003, p. 17). In the same manner, the implied reader of

the translation “pulls” the real reader of the translation

towards a certain direction. We have already explained, at

the beginning of our discussion, that the implied reader is

inscribed in the text’s expectations about what its reader

will know and do. The repeated construction of a particular

implied reader of the translation who does not have the

knowledge or the ability to decode “foreign” (or “for-

eignized”) texts, may become a self-ful lling prophecy;

it may very well create real child-readers who do not

have the knowledge, the ability, or even the willingness

to decode unfamiliar stories.

Our entire discussion so far supports Márta Minier’s

(2006) claim that, “[r]egarding the manner of the transla-

tion, the con ict seems to be between making the outcome

of the translation process a visibly borrowed text, or rather

a familiar sounding one which could have been originally

conceived in the receiving language” (p. 102). We argue

in favor of “visibly borrowed texts,” not so much because

of reverence for the “original,” but because young read-

ers should be allowed to experience other cultures than

their own, through the reading of translated literature. We

acknowledge the fact that a translation’s implied reader

can never—and perhaps should never—be identical to

the implied reader of the source text; but we argue for a

foreignizing construct of the implied reader of the transla-

tion. We argue in favor of implied readers that will have

the opposite performative effect than the one described in

the previous paragraph.

Are we privileging educational norms by taking seri-

ously into account this performative effect? Perhaps, but

at the same time we are also emphasizing the aesthetic

value of a foreignizing translation, and the pleasure it can

bring to a reader in the target culture. We favor translated

texts whose implied readers have the knowledge, the

ability, and the willingness to read and enjoy foreignized

texts. In saying this, we emphasize a third aspect of the

implied reader: An implied reader is not only what the text

asks its reader to know or do, but also, and perhaps most

importantly, what it asks the reader to feel and enjoy. In

Translating for Children, Oittinen (2000) suggests that a

translation should domesticate foreign elements, in order

to stimulate within the target text reader the same feelings

and impressions that are felt by the source text reader; we

are arguing that the target text reader should be allowed to

experience different emotions, emotions which stem from

the very difference of a foreign text.

Our use of O’Sullivan’s communicative model has in-

dicated that, in the Greek translations we have read, there

seems to be an intense effort to bring the text closer to a

child-reader who lives in Greece, belongs to a different

culture than the one in the source text, and—to use Atkins’

(2004) words in a different context—is “by and large reluc-

tant, and only wants to read about familiar experiences in

recognisable language” (p. 49). This is why the ideologies,

narrative style, and literary conventions of these translated

picture books mimic those of children’s books originally

written in Greek. We suggest that the implied reader of a

picture book’s translation from English into Greek should

indeed be a child who lives in Greece and belongs to a

different culture than the one in the source text, but should

also be a child who  nds joy in reading books that seem

“off-key” when compared to other books in her/his mother

tongue, and pursues the pleasure of reading stories that

were produced within and for “other” cultures.

This means, of course, that the implied reader of the

translation will have to work hard to decode the “for-

eignized” text. O’Sullivan (2005) writes about translated

picture books: “The implied reader of the translation

should have to do the same work as the implied reader of

the original to resolve the complex connections between

text and pictures” (p. 122). Perhaps the implied reader of

the translation should have to do more work than the reader

of the original, both in resolving the connections between

foreignized text and image and in resolving the disconnec-

tions between what s/he already knows and routinely does

and what this book is asking her/him to learn or attempt

to do. After all, as described earlier, only then will s/he

experience the special kind of pleasure that differs from

the one experienced by the reader of the original.

A fusion of narratology and translation studies—trans-

lation theories about culture-speci c elements combined

with what narratology says about the construct of the

implied reader—has led to the formation of our argument

for a foreignizing construct of the implied reader of the

translation. Our ideal implied reader would have the fol-

lowing response to a foreignizing translation:

This text was not written for me. It is a translation. It reﬂ ects

another culture and the manner in which children and the

world they live in are viewed in that culture. It is different

and refreshing; this is why I enjoy it. I will pretend to be

part of this culture for a while, just to get a glimpse of how

it would feel to be a child in that culture.

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428

Competent translators face many dif culties while trans-

lating a literary text. I write from the standpoint of an

experienced translator, and also from the standpoint of an

author, since I believe that creative writing and translation

can coexist, without the one working against the other. On

the contrary, I would say that they complete each other. I

am a “literary translator” and what drives me to engage in

this line of work is my love for “beautiful texts.”

I have translated more than 80 books and, in a “mas-

ochistic” manner, I often set goals that challenge my

limits. Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials is perhaps

the most important and challenging text I have translated

to date. Pullman’s ambitious work has been something

like a school for me, a demanding school,  lled with traps

and narrow trails that were dif cult to follow; I believe,

however, that I graduated with distinction. In spite of the

dif culties I faced during its translation, I went so deep

into Pullman’s world that I could not resist the urge to

become part of it, to identify fully with the characters in

it. I believe that the chance to work with such a text is

the dream of every translator. I had to enlist the entirety

of my skills in the art of translation—because transla-

tion is art—while also bringing in all of my imagination

reservoirs to match Pullman’s imagination. It would

not be an exaggeration to say that after completing the

translation of his trilogy, I came out of the process feeling

wiser and having a better sense of the true meaning of

life; feeling overcharged with intense emotions evoked

by a journey into unknown worlds  lled with mystery,

adventure, myth, and fantasy. I consider myself incred-

ibly fortunate to have been given the chance to work with

such a text, the translation of which also brought me a

translation award.

A lot has changed during the past few years in the

 eld of translation. From a subsidiary enterprise with no

particular status, today it seems to be gaining a bigger

and more important place in the intellectual milieu of

a country. My long relationship with the translation of

literature—for adults, as well as for children and young

people—combined with my own work as an author, has led

me to the conclusion that translation is a multifaceted  eld;

one with sides that are not easily seen by outsiders.

The translation of a text, especially of a literary text,

is a peculiar case of “linguistic converging”; it is a chan-

nel of information exchange between peoples who speak

different languages. The term “translation” includes both

the translating process and its result, which is the target

text. This result is, of course, valuable and extremely

important, since it functions as the intermediary between

linguistically diverse peoples or ethnic groups.

The  nal goal of a translation is to relieve its readers

from the harder and more dif cult task of reading the

original text. In theory, translation replaces the source

text with the “same” text in the target language. Transfer-

ring a text from one language into another is catalytic for

both. The language of the translation reveals the hidden

dynamic inscribed in the source text, but it also brings in

its own dynamic. The target text cannot be the same as the

original, but it cannot be something completely different

either. There is a widely known discussion around “un-

faithful beauties”—translations which are not particularly

“faithful” but are “beautiful” precisely because of their

“unfaithfulness.” In practice, however, a translation will

always be considered incomplete, since it is characterized

by a certain loss of information. Thus, the translator is

called upon to distinguish between the essential and the

trivial and to remain focused on the  nal recipient, that

is, the reading public.

Understanding the age group of a text’s readers is also

important, but not easy to do. Let’s take the addresses of

Pullman’s work for an example. Because the protagonists

are children, people tend to consider it children’s literature;

however, its symbolic and scienti c richness raises particu-

larly bold ethical and philosophical questions, requiring

open and unrestrained readings. Thus, one has to wonder

if this text is particularly addressed to children and young

adults, the very question that vexes Pullman, as he notes

in his Point of Departure essay in the this volume. The

question should probably focus elsewhere: We should ask

ourselves whether true literature can come to terms with

an imposed limitation regarding the age of its reader. My

answer is no; when a reader meets a text, the relationship or

con ict to be developed between them should be based on

the reader’s choice. At the same instance, I recognize the

fact that the reader’s will is in uenced both by biological

age and mental maturity.

As well as suf cient knowledge of the ages the text is

targeted to, successful translating also requires an excel-

lent knowledge of both the languages from which, and into

which, s/he is translating. This includes a suf cient grasp

of vocabulary, syntax, style, and of idiomatic forms—too

often the latter are mistranslated because of ignorance. A

competent translator is able to achieve the same level of

linguistic competence in the source language as in her/

his mother tongue. S/he views literature through a mir-

ror that magni es details. However, an overly detailed,

Point of Departure

Kostia Kontoleon

429

POINT OF DEPARTURE

word-to-word translation is a naïve practice which reveals

a translator’s ineptitude. It is only natural that a translator

may view the original text as “holy scripture,” but this

entails the great risk of falling into the trap of word-to-

word translation.

There are two groups of translators. In the  rst group

belong those who attach themselves to the source text

and to the signi ers of its language, focusing their efforts

on preserving within their translation as many elements

as possible from the source language. The second group

includes those who do not pay as much attention to the

signi er as to the meaning and the “aroma” of the text they

are translating, enlisting every available means of expres-

sion from the target language to achieve this. I belong to

this second group of translators; I worship the text’s “pur-

pose” and not its “source.” The translator is a mediator; a

mediator who specializes in the  eld and the authors s/he

is working with. S/he also needs to have extensive general

knowledge and education and to continuously upgrade

her/his expertise in the  eld of translation.

Publishers often complain about the poor quality of

translations and the low competence of translators; how-

ever, they seldom consider the fact that the vast majority

of translators are very poorly-paid by their publishers.

Nor do they take into account the nerve-racking dead-

lines translators are subjected to by binding contracts,

which often force them to neglect the quality of their

work in order to become more productive. Moreover,

the translator’s profession as such does not bring any

particular social recognition to those who practice it.

Nevertheless, a translator should be personally invested

in her/his work.

From the very  rst book I translated, I felt a powerful

attraction to translation; I felt it circulating in my veins,

demanding my complete devotion. It was not long before

I became addicted to translation. It is an excruciating

addiction; one that, even after the completion of an ex-

hausting translation and many sleepless nights, and even

after promises to myself that I would stay away from my

computer for a long time after that, would push me to

throw myself into new translating adventures right away.

In these adventures, time and place acquire different

dimensions; nothing can come in between me and the

text under translation because, without even realizing it,

I quickly spin an isolating cocoon around me.

I have my own translating style; being an author as

well as a translator makes it inevitable for me to bring

in “literariness” in every text I translate. I do not know if

translation theorists would agree with such practice, but

for me it is enough that readers agree with them. From

my perspective, if the  nal recipient, that is the reader,

enjoys what s/he reads, then the purpose of the transla-

tion is achieved. Finally, since a big part of my work is

translating children’s and young adult literature, I always

make sure that it is comprehensible—both linguistically

and stylistically—by these sensitive age groups.

International Communities Building

Places for Youth Reading

Michael Daniel Ambatchew

Ethiopian Educational Consultant

Countries in the developing world face tremendous obstacles when it comes to getting books into the hands

of children. Ethiopian Educational Consultant and children’s author Michael Daniel Ambatchew provides

a comprehensive overview of the complex array of challenges that have so far prevented the development

of literacy-rich environments in developing nations. Although his primary focus is Ethiopia, the problems

he surfaces are all too common in many parts of the world. Fortunately, there are visionary people, such as

Yohannes Gebregeorgis and Jane Kurtz, who are making a difference despite the obstacles. Their stories are

provided here to show how authors, librarians, and educationists are coming together to open the world to

children through books.

Introduction

The choice between a storybook and a basket of bread is

one no child should have to make. Yet with four million

British children living in poverty, such choices are too

near to home anywhere in the world for complacency

(Williams, 2004). One in  ve of the world’s people live

on less than a dollar a day, making the cheapest storybook

an unimaginable luxury to many all over the globe. Yet,

purchasing capacity is not the only constraint; issues such

as awareness, access, and motivation add to the complexi-

ties of the challenge of ensuring that children can and do

become readers. A child orphaned by HIV/AIDS and

responsible for raising her siblings cannot understand that

learning to read today is a surer way of putting bread into

her brothers’ and sisters’ mouths than performing more

immediately remunerative acts.

The question of which language/s should be used

for teaching and learning also remains a highly emotive

and political issue, with theory and practice at times in

direct contradiction with each other. Usually children

in developed countries are in a relatively better position

than those in developing countries, with better access to

a variety of quality reading materials in familiar settings

and languages. Public libraries with trained librarians and

plenty of adult role models, who have the habit of reading,

provide an acquisitionally rich environment for them to

learn to read.

430

431

INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITIES BUILDING PLACES FOR YOUTH READING

However, in the developing countries of Africa, Asia,

and Latin America, weak publishing sectors, inadequate

distribution mechanisms, and poor purchasing power

all contribute to a severe shortage of quality indigenous

reading materials, making the acquisition of reading and

sustaining of reading nigh impossible for all but the elite.

To make matters worse, the lucrative textbook market

is often monopolized by state and government-owned

enterprises, further discouraging private publishers from

producing culturally appropriate materials in local lan-

guages at affordable prices.

This chapter focuses on the position of the young

reader in Africa, with main reference to one of the poor-

est countries on the continent—Ethiopia. The  rst section

describes the state of African children with reference to

their literacy, educational, and socio-economic status.

It raises provocative questions as to whether Africa can

solve its educational problems in isolation from its socio-

economic and political issues. It questions whether world

superpowers really want to see an independent Africa and

why developed countries are not meeting their commit-

ments to the Millennium Development Goals adopted by

UN member states in 2001.

The second section portrays national language poli-

cies regarding the media of education, and the state of

children’s literature, discussing access, affordability and

appropriateness. It queries whether international publish-

ers are more devoted to their pro ts and thus view Africa

as a small export market, rather than as a partner in the

publishing arena whom they should support and mentor,

and with whom they can collaborate.

The last section scrutinizes the effectiveness of ex-

tensive reading projects as well as describing innovative

projects aimed at developing children’s literature and read-

ers. It discusses how educators, donors, and practitioners

have come up with innovative ideas for integrating stories

into textbooks, printing stories in newsprint, creating

mobile donkey-drawn libraries and setting up pan-African

projects that can share stories and illustrations amongst

African publishers.

It concludes that in spite of their shortcomings such

projects are building up a critical mass that will even-

tually burst the restraining dam walls of obstacles and

 ood the near barren plains of the book-drought stricken

continent.

In their Point of Departure essays, author Jane Kurtz

and librarian Yohannes Gebregeorgis describe their in-

volvement with the grass-roots program Ethiopia Reads,

an intervention that emerged out of their personal experi-

ence as readers, and in Jane’s case as a writer, as well as

a commitment to their childhood home. Their stories not

only offer hope but also a practical blueprint for similar

initiatives that might be undertaken by academics, writers,

researchers, librarians, and donors working together to

provide access to books for young people in developing

nations.

Overview: Who Dare Defy Goliath?

The conclusions and recommendations of research and

literature on reading done in developing countries are

fairly predictable: Better trained teachers and librarians,

affordable, accessible and appropriate reading materials,

and enthusiastic and motivated students with effective

learning strategies are the main ingredients lacking in

most places.

However, such recommendations and conclusions have

been on the table for many decades now, yet change is

painfully slow. Azubuike (2007) concludes, “the quality of

library service available to the average African is grossly

inadequate into woefully de cient” (p. 10). He states that

the Structural Adjustment Programmes implemented by

the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and

forced down Africa’s gullet were one of the primary factors

for governments having to cut back on their budgets, which

in turn has led to poor literacy levels. However, others say

that “In African countries the availability of textbooks and

other learning materials deteriorated during the 1980’s,

mainly as a result of economic stagnation, political unrest

and competing priorities for social funding” (UNESCO,

2007). Nevertheless, after the Education for All conference

held in Thailand in 1990, there was a renewed interest in

books and readers.

Greaney (1996) advises, “Persistent, focussed, informed

programs; courageous leadership; good management of

limited resources; and informed enthusiastic teaching are

required if we are to achieve the long-term goal of helping

children in developing countries to read” (p. 34).

Yet the scenario remains the same, demanding us to re-

think our obvious solutions. Therefore, Larson (2001) calls

for a larger vision, citing Wole Soyinka’s call for Africa’s

debt to be abolished as a case in point, and states that a

lack of resolution to free Africa of her historical problems

is the basis of the crises. Indeed this lack of resolution on

behalf of national governments and global superpowers

is a highly signi cant, if not the most signi cant, obstacle

to improving literacy worldwide. Williams (2004) points

out that although rich countries agreed to give 0.7% of

their national income to assist poor countries, most have

not honored their pledges. This is so not because they fear

literacy per se, but rather creating acquisitionally rich read-

ing environments requires changes in the power, prestige,

and position of the status quo, and such countries are not

so eager to relinquish their stronghold and power-grips so

readily. Indeed, it is a question of priorities for them; the

United States alone has been able to raise over 200 billion

U.S. dollars to  ght the war on terror (Williams, 2004),

yet a fraction of that sum could roll back the frontiers of

illiteracy and poverty in developing nations.

The socioeconomic and political reality in most African

countries does not foster a conducive environment for all

children to have adequate access to nutrition, health ser-

vices and education. Needless to say, “Literacy does not

432

MICHAEL DANIEL AMBATCHEW

develop in a vacuum. Reading is taught and learnt within a

social context” (Pretorius & Machet, 2004, p. 45). Yet, not

enough is being done to improve the existing context.

In Ethiopia, for instance, government  gures boast

a gross enrollment ratio of 79.8% in primary school

(MOFED, 2006), but research into reading skills shows

that hardly 2% of Grade 8 students have adequate reading

skills to cope with that level of education (Ambatchew,

2003). National literacy  gures stood at 38% in 2004

with that of females lagging at 27% for the same period

(MOFED, 2006).

Although one may assume more encouraging  gures

in the developed countries of Africa, one tends to  nd

similar pictures across the continent. In South Africa, for

example, apart from the privileged few, the broad majority

are still in a highly disadvantaged position; a UN study

rated South African fourth-grade students as some of the

worst in numeracy, literacy, and life skills even when

compared to other African countries (Mtshweni, 2003).

The basic difference from the apartheid period being that

the privileged few from the middle and upper classes are

no longer distinguishable by the tint of their skin. Pretorius

and Machet (2004) lament:

Despite a decade of democratic rule and widespread

attempts to level the educational playing ﬁ elds, gross in-

equalities still exist within the school system in terms of

physical resources, underqualiﬁ ed teachers, poor school

management and poor delivery of learning materials to

schools. (p. 48)

These educational shortcomings are not isolated, but

rather re ect the state of affairs nationally and globally.

Many African students may be physically present in a

school but are not healthy enough to actually learn en-

thusiastically and effectively. Williams (2004) points out

that although the world produces enough food to feed

every one of its citizens, poor distribution of wealth leads

to eight hundred million people going hungry every day

and two billion people suffering from chronic malnutri-

tion. Such statistics have direct and real effects on the

teaching-learning process. Williams (2007) notes that “of

Malawi’s 1980 university graduates, 25% were dead by

2003” (p. 60).

Other researchers have come across less evident signs

of poverty such as a teacher sleeping on the classroom

 oor at 9 o’clock in the morning (Pretorius & Machet,

2004) and parents tearing out paper from their children’s

textbooks to roll tobacco (Ambatchew, 1999). Even in

developed countries, like South Africa, the poor distribu-

tion of wealth leads to many schools lacking the artefacts

of school literacy such as textbooks, posters, exercise

books, and reading books (Pretorius & Machet, 2004). It

is estimated that less than 20% of South African schools

have functional libraries (Hart, 2006).

Yet how to go about bringing a drastic change to this

dismal picture is open to debate. A shift from individual-

istic, pro t-motivated paradigms to new ones of collec-

tive responsibility emerging from high levels of global

consciousness and morality is not going to come about

in the near or foreseeable future. Noam Chomsky (2003)

notes that a dislike for democracy is the traditional stance

of all who have a share in power and privilege, so even

in the United States there is a severe democratic de cit,

whereby major businesses and powers resort to the eco-

nomic strangulation of competitors.

Such disjunctive relations between Africa and other

parts of the world make innovative solutions hard to come

by. For instance, while there are 300,000 highly quali ed

Africans in the diaspora, of whom 10% have doctorates,

Africa spends four billion U.S. dollars per year to employ

around 100,000 Western experts. Obviously, African gov-

ernments are also to blame for some of the push factors

such as discrimination in appointments and promotions,

social unrest and political con icts, and under-utilization

of quali ed personnel. Nevertheless, when 50% of Ethio-

pians who go abroad for training do not return, and there

are more Ethiopian-trained doctors in Chicago alone than

the whole of Ethiopia, easy solutions such as more train-

ing are going to be far from adequate. The South African

Network of Skills Abroad, a group formed to link highly

skilled South Africans living abroad with local experts

and projects in an effort to contribute to South Africa’s

economic and social development, is just one little step

in the search for innovative remedies to the ills of Africa

in general and those of the African educational arena in

particular.

Whether continental initiatives like New Partnership

for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) can reverse the global

situation in which Japanese cows and European cows are

each subsidised by 7.50 US dollars and 2.50 US dollars

per day respectively, while 75% of Africans live on less

than this amount per day (Williams, 2004), is a question

that only time can answer. The question, “Dare the schools

build a new social order?” is still pertinent today.

A key factor in Africa’s development is thought to be

education and in what language it is delivered. At the

end of evaluating a Malawian project, Williams (2007)

recommends,

For Africans in general, and Malawians in particular an ap-

propriate point of departure in the debate on education and

development may well be to revisit their language educa-

tion policy, and to consider its implications for the reading

behaviours (and for the languages) which they wish to foster

in their primary school. (p. 17)

Language Policies and Media of Instruction

The decades following colonial rule in Africa have brought

serious challenges to governments and their various part-

ners attempting to instill and sustain widespread reading

and writing habits among diverse, largely oral commu-

nities living under harsh political and social conditions

(Triebel, 2001).

433

INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITIES BUILDING PLACES FOR YOUTH READING

Bloch (2007) points out that language policies forcing

the use of ex-colonial languages during and since colonial-

ism have led to a serious neglect and underdevelopment

of African languages for high status purposes, particu-

larly as languages for reading. The oral tradition, with its

great potential to impart knowledge and to function as a

bridge to literacy has been sorely neglected in primary

education systems, presumably to a signi cant extent as

a consequence of the low status of African languages and

the corresponding loss in perceived value to traditional

social and cultural practices that were communicated

through these languages. Debates are taking place about

issues such as the importance of young children learning

in their mother tongue or a familiar language, the bene ts

of reading for enjoyment, and the need for appropriate

storybooks in relevant languages.

Neville Alexander (1996) comments upon the fact

that language policies in Africa tend to come up with

systematically depressing or disastrous results. This prob-

ably emanates from the practice of governments being

too willing to absorb and apply “obvious” theories and

the inability of the intellectuals to adapt such theories to

the practical realities of a certain country and to the felt

needs of the people in that region. African countries have

varying language policies advocating for monolingual and

multilingual media of instruction. Some want a monolin-

gual medium of instruction, most often in an ex-colonial

language or, at times, in a national language. Others prefer

multilingual media of instruction allowing subtractive or

additive bilingualism, where one language gradually takes

over from another as medium of instruction or both run

together side by side.

However, regarding practice on the ground, the elite

often send their children to private schools, where the

medium of instruction is an ex-colonial language, and

the general public send their children to government

schools, where they perceive their children to be getting

an inferior education in a local language. Unfortunately,

their children often are indeed getting an inferior educa-

tion, but this is not due to the medium of instruction but

rather due to other factors such as disenchanted, poorly

trained, and under-paid teachers, inadequate textbooks

of limited supply and of dubious quality, and the lack of

acquisitionally rich environments at home.

A closer look at the language policies of Ethiopia and

South Africa may shed some light on the issue. The Tran-

sitional Government of Ethiopia (MOE, 1994) states:

Cognisant of the pedagogical advantage of the child in

learning in mother tongue and the rights of nationalities

to promote the use of their languages, primary education

will be given in nationality languages.… The language of

teacher training for kindergarten and primary education will

be the nationality language used in the area.… Students can

chose and learn at least one nationality language and one

foreign language for cultural and international relations.

(pp. 10–11)

A territorial principle was adopted, probably based on

the assumption that only such a principle could ensure

the survival of minority languages. Hence, children of all

ethnic groups would have to learn in the language of the

territory in which they dwelled. Although there is men-

tion of “one foreign language” (MOE, 1994, p. 11), only

English is taught in the primary schools at present.

After several years the initial exuberant response is

fading, as has been observed in other countries (Agni-

hotri, 1994), and local governments are taking a second

realistic look at things. In the capital, almost all families

of means are sending their children to English medium

schools, which exist despite policies forbidding them and

the fact that many of the teachers have inadequate mastery

of English to teach effectively in it. Government schools

teach in Amharic and there is a relatively good supply of

textbooks and supplementary reading materials in Am-

haric. Outside the capital, though, there are only very few

textbooks in local languages and hardly any supplementary

teaching materials and storybooks. Therefore, the Afar

region and some ethnic groups in the Southern Nation

and Nationalities People’s Region are retaining Amharic

as the medium of primary education and only introducing

their local languages as school subjects.

In South Africa, after the end of apartheid, all 11 South

African languages were legally given equal status and

children’s right to be educated in their mother tongues

was acknowledged. However, this not only reminded

the populace of the former Bantu policies, but was also

hampered by the lack of adequately trained teachers and

prepared materials in the languages.

The State of Africa’s Children’s Reading

Literature

An abundance of children’s reading material presupposes

the existence of a thriving publishing sector, children who

can and want to read, and parents with adequate purchasing

power to buy books. As discussed at the beginning of this

chapter, this is a far-fetched supposition as the reality on

the ground is rather harsh.

The production of books in African languages has

several challenges. It is estimated that Africa imported

769 million US dollars worth of books from the European

Union alone between 1988 to 1991 (Walter, 1996), apart

from the millions of books donated by organizations like

Book Aid International, International Book Bank, and

Sabre Foundation. Obviously, Africa provides a small

but signi cant market as well as a dumping ground for

international publishers. To make matters worse, Walter

(1996) states that the lucrative textbook markets are often

monopolized by government owned or af liated publish-

ers, further dimming the chances of African publishers to

become economically viable and to produce a sustained

supply of suitable storybooks for developing a lifetime

habit of reading. To add insult to injury, several reading

434

MICHAEL DANIEL AMBATCHEW

projects provide book boxes of imported books in ex-

colonial languages.

In the case of Ethiopia, the vast majority of locally

produced storybooks are in the national language Amharic.

Although this language has a long and illustrious history,

the number of titles of children’s storybooks is barely 300.

A quick visit to any bookstore in the capital and major

towns shows that hardly two dozen storybooks are in

print at any given time. Although most of the books are

fairly priced and cost $1.50 at the most, they still remain

well out of the reach of the average Ethiopian. To make

matters worse, the number of bookstores outside the cities

dwindles to almost nil.

This lack of books obviously places major constraints

on any attempts at allowing children to wallow in books.

The results of extensive reading projects will be examined

hereafter.

Extensive Reading Programmes and Their

Effectiveness

With speci c references to illiteracy and aliteracy, exten-

sive reading programmes are often touted as a panacea

for all the reading ills in Africa. Yet how effective such

programmes have really proven to be is open to debate.

One of the solutions vaunted by many experts to en-

courage the development of reading skills in Africa and

other developing regions is the introduction of extensive

reading projects. Ambatchew (2003) cites several experts,

including Davies (1995), Elley (2000), Krashen (1993),

Lituanas, Jacobs and Renandya (2001), and Nation (1997),

who have proved that the provision of supplementary

readers directly and positively impacts students’ reading

skills in high pro le schemes with catchy names like Book

Flood, Uninterrupted Sustained Silent Reading (USSR),

Drop Everything and Read (DEAR), Silent Reading for

Fun (SURF) and others.

On the other hand, when other researchers evaluated

such projects in Africa, they discover a darker picture.

Bloch (2007) comments, “One of the great tragedies that is

reported repeatedly about reading materials (donations or

otherwise) is that even when books have been distributed,

they often gather dust in school principals’ cupboards or

on classroom shelves” (p. 5).

In Ethiopia a very popular project called the Primary

Reader Scheme donated 124 readers in book boxes initially

to  ve schools in urban and rural areas in its pilot phase.

After positive feedback with requests for more copies of

fewer titles, it donated hundreds of book boxes to schools

all over the country. However, after a few years when

the students’ reading skills were compared with those

of students in schools which did not receive books, there

was no signi cant difference in their reading abilities

(Ambatchew, 2003).

In Guinea, an interesting evaluation project set out to

measure the reading skills of Grade 2 and Grade 4 students,

after the government had implemented several interven-

tions in an attempt to make the “Education for All” slogan

come true. Using 15 Guinean educators and an expatriate

reading recovery expert, they discovered to their dismay

that only 10% of the Grade 2 students were able to identify

more than 50 letters of the alphabet, while most could

only identify 29. Moreover, most students could only

recognize 4 of the words that they had already learned in

class and write 4 out of 14 correctly. Sadly, 9 out of 10

Grade 2 students were unable to read a ‘level 0’ text that

had explicit illustrations and 16 or fewer frequently used

words in it (Diallo & Diallo, 2007).

Similarly, in Malawi, 16,570 book boxes containing 50

books, guidance notes, a record chart, and two dictionaries

were provided to 3,440 Malawian government primary

schools, after a seemingly successful pilot project. Again

when Williams (2007) scrutinized this project with a

time-lapse design he concluded, “… the extensive read-

ing initiative had not been successful in boosting reading

attainment scores.” (p. 14).

So why these disparate results, which show extensive

reading programmes as vastly successful or as miserable

failures?

Possible Reasons for Results

The  rst point to consider is the researchers themselves

and their degree of objectivity and bias in carrying out the

research. Although cynical, many researchers have vested

interest in positive results. Most are expatriates performing

“parachute consultancy” or living in an African country for

a short span of one to three years. Therefore, they transplant

foreign practices that might appear to take in the short term,

but quickly lead to anti-body rejection. This “taking” is

further enhanced by the fact that the project is performed in

a highly controlled environment which is not found in the

real world. The extensive reading schemes could produce

impressive results in experimental situations as they provide

abundant facilities and high motivation, but be insigni cant

when reproduced in the normal schools under everyday

situations (Ambatchew, 2003). Williams (2007) also quotes

a Commission for Africa report: “… the agency of Africans

is key, and that the application of Western-inspired remedies

is not guaranteed to succeed” (p. 17).

However, African government employed researchers

have integrity and subjectivity issues too. In fact, the study

in Guinea (Diallo & Diallo, 2007) openly acknowledges

that the researchers felt pressured to present a positive im-

age of the elementary school system and had to be coaxed

into presenting the true picture by an expatriate researcher

who felt that the purpose of the study was diagnostic and

things had to be presented as they were. Interestingly, when

they  nally presented their study, which gave a negative

image of the situation on the ground, the Guinean govern-

ment forced them to redo the whole evaluation again the

next year, only to  nd the same results. Which country is

435

INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITIES BUILDING PLACES FOR YOUTH READING

willing to hire a foreign expert whose previous interven-

tion has not been successful? Which government seeking

election votes and popularity is going to admit that the

millions spent on a project have not produced the desired

results? Which donor is willing to give funds to partners

who did not succeed in their previous project? Has the

World Bank admitted yet that the Structural Adjustment

Programs in Africa were failures? This is why Martin,

Oksanen, and Takala (2000) point out that there is a need

for independent people outside the whole preparation of

projects to carry out more objective evaluations and ensure

projects are indeed meeting their set objectives.

A second point is the lack of rigorous research meth-

odology in many of the positive image studies. Rosenberg

(2003) notes that “rigorous monitoring and evaluation of

reader development activity in Africa is generally lacking”

(p. iv). One  nds that projects were positively evaluated

by the people who implemented the projects themselves,

and are thus too close for comfort regarding objectivity.

Moreover, several have used subjective qualitative instru-

ments without much concern for the triangulation of their

results. A case in point is an evaluation of a reading habit

and interest development project in Nigeria, where parents

were given questionnaires to  ll out after their children

had participated in a four-week program to develop their

reading skills and attitudes. The researcher discusses

“revealing” results:

All the parents (100%) responded “Yes” to the item, ‘Would

you want your child to participate next time?’ On the item,

‘Has the programme enabled your child to read more

books than before?’ 102 parents (91%) responded “Yes” …

(Udosen, 2007, p. 6)

An even feebler evaluative statement was about a  ve-day

reading clinic for 200 students who could barely read two

letters words in Ghana. One of its aims was to “equip the

children with skills to enable them to read books meaning-

fully” (Apenten, 2003, p. 45). It concluded by saying, “By

the end of the clinic, it was thought that there had been

some improvement.” (p. 49).

One  nds that research which did not come up with

such rosy results often employed highly scienti c and

objective methodology. For instance, in the Guinean study,

separate professional and technical teams were used for

instrument design and data collection, data entry, and data

analysis. Similarly, in Ethiopia a standardized international

reading test was  rst trialled in the context, and then used

(Ambatchew, 2003).

Unfortunately, it is only through carrying out post-

mortems on unsuccessful projects that lessons could be

gleaned for future successes. The concept of “Successful

Failures” will have to get recognition and acceptance by

all involved. It is in light of this that Durand and Deehy

(1996) state:

Conducted properly, evaluations provide valuable feedback

to all involved in the book donation process, from the do-

nating publishers to the donor agencies and the recipients.

The evaluation results, both positive and negative, can be

used to improve the overall process of the book donation

and to meet the speciﬁ c—and changing—needs in each

country. (p. 163)

Finally, the concept of sustainability, replicability,

and continuity must be taken into account by all actors.

Introducing beautifully illustrated, expensive books may

produce improvements in the short-term, but librarians and

teachers simply lock them up as they are deemed price-

less and irreplaceable. Williams (2007) pointed to teacher

morale and piloting and training de ciencies as factors

responsible for the project failures in Malawi, while teacher

empowerment, lack of meritology, overcrowding, and resis-

tance to change were factors raised in the Ethiopian case.

Innovative Reading Promotion Projects

Across the Continent

Since the 1990 Jomtien Conference, which approved the

UN “Education for All” vision, there has been a renewed

push to roll back the frontiers of illiteracy in Africa.

Numerous projects and programs exist all over the con-

tinent, and the following is but a birds-eye view of what

is happening.

Take Books to Children

One of the biggest reasons given for poor reading skills

of African children is the lack of access to good reading

books. Consequently, several projects involve taking books

out into inaccessible areas or poorly served rural areas,

where the majority of African children are.

In Kenya, for instance, the Kenyan National Library

Service raises a  nancial contribution from a local com-

munity, then takes books into these communities using

handcarts, public transport, bicycles and motorcycles

(Ngumo, 2003).

Similar projects have been run in Zimbabwe and Ethio-

pia even using donkeys to pull these “mobile libraries,” as

Yohannes Gebregeorgis describes in his Point of Departure

following this essay.

Bring Children to Books

The opposite approach to taking books to children is

bringing children to the books. When there are libraries

and books that are being under-utilized, this has proved

a common approach to attract the children into using the

libraries.

An interesting example of such a project is the ac-

tivities of the Oyo State Library Board in Nigeria, which

conducts  lm shows and even screens football matches,

like the African Cup of Nations, to attract readers into the

library. Then the librarians try to raise interest in books, at

times even re-packaging information to meet their clients’

needs. They also sensitize the public through book fairs

and handbills (Oyegade, 2003, pp. 62–63).

436

MICHAEL DANIEL AMBATCHEW

In Ethiopia, several schools have “library clubs” where

members try to get other students to use the library as more

than a quiet place to do their homework. As a “reward” the

library club members are given borrowing privileges.

Catch Them Early

Another approach, which is just beginning to get accep-

tance and implementation across the continent, is to target

pre-school children with the aim of giving them emergent

literacy skills and inculcating a love for reading before they

even begin formal education. This is in sharp contrast to

the colonial days, when schools would not accept children

under the age of seven into school and used to ask the

children to touch their left ear by rolling their right arm

over their heads as a rough measure of their age. Reaching

down to pre-primary level and opening kindergarten and

day-care centers has frightening  nancial implications for

many African countries, so it is not surprising to see South

Africa as a leader with this approach.

A noteworthy project of this type in South Africa is

one called “Born to Read.” It is aimed at newborn babies,

toddlers and pre-schoolers (2–6). It trains parents and their

children on how to develop emergent literacy skills and the

newborn and his mother are both rewarded with a book in

a local language at the happy event of birth. This project

boasts several success stories (Mtshweni, 2003).

Catch the Old Ones Too

An opposite yet complementary approach to training

pre-schoolers is to encourage adults, especially parents,

no matter what their age, to start reading. Even if they

are well past their optimum reading age, they can still

be encouraged to read, thereby helping themselves and

providing role models for children.

Again in South Africa, an intervention called “Project

Literacy” set out to help adults become literate and assist

their children in acquiring the reading habit. They used an

interactive, group-oriented methodology to keep the adults

interested in learning to read. But more innovatively, they

used techniques like teaching illiterate parents to “read il-

lustrations” and so enable them to enjoy books with their

children (Chetty, 2003).

In Tanzania, the mass literacy program is considered

to be one of the most extensively studied ones in the de-

veloping world, (Knuth, Perry, & Duces, 1996). Several

organizations such as the Tanzanian Library Services,

The Children’s Book Project, the Book Development

Council, and the Tanzanian Library Association are

working towards catching both children and adults from

falling into and staying in the pit of illiteracy. Recently, a

reading tent was set up in the Bagamayo community and

participants up to the age of 95 came to participate in a

bookfest. Reading competitions and other activities like

playing the board game “bao” were used to stir interest in

the event. Books were available in Kiswahili and attracted

the adults’ attention.

Give Them African Books

Chetty (2003) complains about the South African situa-

tion saying, “Government policy … has had no impact

on the creation or production of books in mother-tongue

languages” (p. 19). However, this problem is felt keenly

all over the continent and in developing countries all

over the globe. Libraries simply do not have culturally

and linguistically appropriate materials in either quantity

or quality, with a very few exceptions. Knuth, Perry, and

Duces (1996) note, “… scarcity of resources has resulted

in outdated, haphazard collections, often supplemented by

donations and discards of dubious value” (p. 175).

The existence of pertinent storybooks in the mother-

tongue of children is not only useful for parents and teach-

ers, but can be effective tools to induce children to learn

to read on their own.

If the child is given rich, diverse and robust texts, the child

according to them [transaction model proponents] has the

innate capacity to develop ﬁ nite strategies with which to

begin to read without the help or assistance of a teacher.

(Onukaogu, 2003, p. 5)

Consequently, it is not surprising to see numerous projects

and programs sprouting across Africa aimed at producing

interesting books in local languages.

In South Africa, the “Culture of Reading” program of

the Project for the Study of Alternative Education in South

Africa (PRAESA) produced a range of reading materials

for children from early childhood to teens in isiXhosa,

English, and Afrikaans, including 16 little books for young

children, called Little Hands. As of May 2010, The Little

Hands books are now potentially available in Arabic, Am-

haric, Kiswahili, English, French, Portuguese, Twi , Ciyao,

Cinyanja, Emakhuw, Makonde, Kimwane, Kinyarwanda,

Mandingue, Xhosa, Zulu, Setswana, Xitsonga, Tshivenda,

Sesotho, Isindebele, Siswati, and Afrikaans, with 14,953

little boxes with 239,248 books in them distributed over

Africa.In Ethiopia, several NGOs and donors have become

involved in the dif cult task of producing storybooks in

local languages. To begin with, CODE-Ethiopia publishes

storybooks and also purchases locally published reading

materials for distribution in its community libraries. Next,

Irish Aid-Ethiopia has been involved in the production of

a local primary reader and the purchase and distribution

of locally published readers to underprivileged schools.

Similarly, the Swedish International Development Agency

was the major supplier of free paper to the government-

owned Educational Materials Production and Distribution

Agency in the past and is now supporting it to become a

commercially viable publishing house through technical

assistance.

Conclusion

Looking at the discrete unit of literacy in Africa would

be misleading. Within the general framework of Africa’s

437

INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITIES BUILDING PLACES FOR YOUTH READING

socio-economic context and her position in the new world

order of the global village, several inter-related factors,

such as national language policies regarding the media

of education, the state of children’s reading literature, the

effectiveness of extensive reading projects and reading

promotion initiatives, must all be viewed to give a holistic

picture of the reality on the ground.

In this chapter, I have argued that Africa’s traditionally

marginalized and disadvantaged position on the world

scene due to colonialism and other historical events con-

tinue to interfere with her current development. Moreover,

developed countries still lack a global village mentality

and continue to see the improvement of people in the

developing world as a secondary priority to their own

material interests.

First and foremost, to improve education in Africa,

national language policies along with their implementa-

tion, acceptance by the public and creation of awareness

about them, need to be scrutinized at the national and

continental levels.

Next, the provision of diverse and rich texts in several

languages with culturally appropriate content must be

provided to suit Africa’s multilingual and unique context.

In relation to this, a vibrant indigenous book market needs

to be nurtured with adequate publishing, marketing, and

distribution networks.

Finally, a battery of reading development and promo-

tion initiatives must be put in place to create a critical

mass to jump-start and sustain the continental reading

machinery. Consequently, the view of extensive reading

programs as a panacea to Africa’s literacy problems needs

to be re-examined, especially as most of them are falsely

being given positive images.

Despite the shortcomings of the projects and programs

described in this chapter, they must be nurtured and

strengthened so that they can create the momentum to

break through the prison walls of illiteracy. If they don’t

however, the repercussions, like those of 9/11, will be

felt across the globe. Therefore, it is both the duty and

the responsibility of all inhabitants of the global village

to ensure our youth can and do read and do their best to

make the world a better place to read.

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Point of Departure

Jane Kurtz

An Icelandic proverb says, “Keen is the eye of the visi-

tor.” As a  ction writer, I’ve found that to be true. But

sharp eyesight doesn’t mean that a person can put a check

mark in the easy-breezy life path column. Usually, quite

the opposite.

My parents moved to Ethiopia when I was two years

old. I accepted without surprise donkeys on streets, chick-

ens in houses, weird hyena cries slicing up the night air.

My parents got busy labeling. Food like an explosion of

meat and spices in the mouth: good. Bugs dropping into

our beds from the grass roof: bad. I labeled everything—as

toddlers do: home.

Five years later, I was a shy second grader walking off a

ship and onto a New York City dock, peering out windows

in the back of the station wagon as our family motored

across the United States, living for one year in borrowed

and impermanent Idaho spaces. Snow. Grandparents.

Brown cows (the slurpy kind). A classroom where I told

my fellow second graders that I had a pet crow, which I

most certainly did not (although I did have a pet monkey).

Everything seemed strange and slightly unreal.

Back in Maji, every day included conversations in at

least three different languages, so I was surrounded by

swirls of words I mostly didn’t understand. Ethiopian girls

came to make mud wat and injera with my sisters and me;

in those days, I picked up lots of words in Amharic and a

few in Deze. Then girls stopped coming. Boys—and even

young men—were seizing the  rst opportunity they’d

ever had to go to school. They arrived every day, sitting

on mud benches to learn the Amharic alphabet, wringing

the necks of my mother’s chickens, and helping my father

raise artichokes and plums to make money necessarily for

pencils and notebooks. But girls were needed at home as

carriers of wood and water, wives in training.

I, although I didn’t know it, was a writer in training. For

most of my childhood, I hung back, dancing uncomfort-

ably on various sharp edges no matter where I was. My

emotions were tangled: Wonder. Yearning. Fear. Observa-

tion was survival. If I could interpret body language and

expressions and situations accurately, I could sometimes

save myself a bit of embarrassment. But I was also learning

to gather vivid details, which are, as John Gardner says,

the life blood of  ction.

When my own children were young, I haunted the

Carnegie Library in my small Colorado town, read out

loud every day, and fell in love with children’s books. I

set goals, dreamed dreams, and spent years  guring out

how to write picture books and novels for young read-

ers while ignoring my own childhood. “Write what you

know,” everyone said. But I was still trying to learn how

to be American. I already had one children’s book pub-

lished before I reached back to  nd the fog and shivery

hyena cries that I needed to create the setting of Fire on

the Mountain, the smell of the emperor’s lions I needed

for tension in Pulling the Lion’s Tail, the cloud of pink

 amingos I needed to show Desta’s change of heart in

Faraway Home.

I had found my voice. My books gave me a way to

talk to those who read to be transported to another time

or place. I was touched to see how many people will look

open-eyed at a world that is full of astonishing beauty

and pummeling pain. A boy who read The Storyteller’s

Beads in a New York City fourth-grade classroom wrote,

“Thank you for your book that helped me understand the

439

suffering in the world. You have the coolest vocabulary

ever.” A Portland sixth grader wrote, “Your book opened

the doors and let a hundred worlds in.”

Gradually, I was drawn back overseas. In 1997, I did

an author presentation in three international schools in

Ethiopia. A few years later, in a similar visit to Nigeria,

parents and teachers asked me, “How can Nigeria grow

a reading culture?” A radio announcer in Uganda, asked

me—as a visiting children’s book author—along with a

Ugandan book publisher and a West African professor

the same question. I began to think about how, exactly, it

was that a country like the United States where, 100 years

ago few households held much printed matter (perhaps a

newspaper, a Bible, or Webster’s speller), grew a lively

reading culture.

If any country in Africa should have a shot at a reading

culture, it would be Ethiopia, the only African country that

developed alphabets still in use today, a country that has

long valued both written and oral texts. But in the period

since the time when my parents spent 22 years working

on educational and health issues in Ethiopia, life had gone

grim for many Ethiopians, their country now statistically

lagging behind even other sub-Saharan African countries

on many measures.

In 1990, Ethiopia, along with 154 other countries of

the world, committed itself to providing universal access

to primary education. The problem has been meager

 nancial resources in the face of many needs, and even

though immense progress has been made in creating more

schools, thousands of children today are learning to read,

only to be faced with the problem of no books to read.

With most of the world’s huge NGOs at work in Ethiopia

for some time, making a fairly small dent, I didn’t think

I’d ever have the chance to see girls like the ones I grew

up around reading books.

That was before I met Yohannes Gebregeorgis, a man

who’d never held a book, outside of school, until he was

19 years old. As he later told me, reading changed his

life forever. He had grown up in the southern Ethiopian

town of Negelle Borena and  rst encountered literature,

shared by U.S. Peace Corps volunteers, in high school.

Then someone handed him the  rst book he read for pure

pleasure—a story that he tells in his own words in the

point of departure essay following this one.

As a young man, Yohannes was marked for arrest by

the Derg, the military committee then in charge of Ethio-

pian government. He  ed to Sudan, spent eight months

at a refugee camp, and was granted political asylum by

the United States. While working full time, he earned a

B.A. in English Literature and Journalism in 1989 from

the University of Buffalo and a Masters degree in Library

Science in 1991 from the University of Texas. He was

offered a job as a children’s book librarian at the San

Francisco Public Library.

In that library, he saw books re ecting cultures and

languages all around the world—but none in any Ethio-

pian language. After a library project introduced him to

one of my published re-told Ethiopian folktales, he wrote

me an email to say how sad he felt when he visited Ad-

dis Ababa and saw children playing in the streets with

balls made from discarded plastic bags. Children with

no books. Children in Ethiopia, he said, need access to

libraries, too.

I thought back to those magical days when I had learned

to read, bent over my  rst Dick and Jane books, in a remote

rural area of southwest Ethiopia. The ability to read and

write has been shown to lead to greater productivity, better

health, longer life, decreased death rates for mothers and

children. But could a freelance children’s book author and

a children’s librarian have any kind of impact in one of

the earth’s poorest countries?

Ethiopia often looks grim even compared to the rest of

sub-Saharan Africa. Half of children under  ve suffer from

effects of malnutrition; 78% of citizens lack access to clean

water; 87% lack access to decent sanitation; and, between

the years 2000 and 2005, 69% of elementary school age

children did not go to school. School fees, uniform fees,

and book fees still are in place in Ethiopia; school systems

either continue to charge tuition for public school, or are

so completely overwhelmed by enrollment that children

 nd themselves in classrooms where the student/teacher

ratio is 100 to one or worse. Often there are no bathrooms,

no running water. (As has been reported in the New York

Times, the absence of sanitation facilities disproportion-

ately excludes girls from attending school.) Most schools

in the country do not own a single book.

Yohannes and I began our efforts with a picture book.

Yohannes wrote his own version of a favorite Ethiopian

folktale—in English and Amharic—and recruited an

Ethiopian illustrator. Some friends (avid readers all) from

First Presbyterian Church in Grand Forks, North Dakota,

and I raised money for printing and then began distributing

and selling what became the  rst color picture book for

Ethiopian children. The San Francisco Public Library and

various volunteers helped Yohannes gather 15,000 chil-

dren’s books. We raised another $10,000 to ship them.

In 2003, when I cut the ribbon of the  rst free library

for children in Addis Ababa, I asked Yohannes, “What if

we did all this work and nobody comes?” In the  rst year,

the Ethiopian staff recorded 40,000 visits. In 2009, a group

of Canadian observers wrote, “We were impressed with

the Shola Children’s Library as a vibrant central children’s

library (which runs Saturday morning story times and

also has a sanitation center for children to bathe and have

their clothes washed). The collection was more balanced

between text and trade books and it ‘felt’ like a children’s

library we might see in North America.”

Yohannes’s efforts had proved how welcome books

and reading spaces would be. Gradually, as we were

ready to think about issues of sustainability and duplica-

tion, I realized the answer to that question from Nigerian

and Ugandan educators about planting a reading culture

POINT OF DEPARTURE

440

probably boils down to three things: books, places to read

books, and people.

Books

With funding from two Bay Area projects—Room to Read

and Christensen Foundation—Yohannes has published

six bilingual children’s books and created two bilingual

anthologies using traditional Ethiopian tales. Grants from

the U.S. Embassy in Ethiopia and the Canadian Book

Council have allowed translations into three additional

local languages. With English as the language of instruc-

tion and textbooks in secondary schools, however, we also

focus efforts on providing English-language books to the

20–30 school libraries we’ve planted.

Places

Ethiopia Reads still sustains Shola Children’s Library

and another community children’s library in the regional

capital of Awassa, but our primary focus has shifted to

planting school libraries, something Yohannes and his

staff are doing at the rate of almost one a month in now

three geographic regions. Under the signed agreements,

schools provide a clean, well-lighted room; Ethiopia Reads

provides furniture, books, and basic training in how to

organize those books; the schools appoint a person to be

library manager. The only library buildings Ethiopia Reads

owns are carts that are pulled by donkeys to several schools

and neighborhoods in the Southern Nations, Nationalities,

and People’s Region. We currently have three donkey

mobile libraries with more on the way.

People

As many another NGO has discovered, daunting as it is

to deal with the concrete aspects of library planting—

building furniture, publishing and gathering and shipping

books, recruiting schools, building donkey carts, housing

and feeding donkeys—an organization can proudly write

check, check, check in those columns and still not have

accomplished lasting change. Local leaders and commu-

nities must embrace, understand, and become competent

with the system demands of innovation. Ethiopia Reads

is now trying to think hard and well (and work with such

partners as the International Reading Association) about

professional development that will share the best literacy

practices of educators around the world and help turn the

 edgling libraries into true literacy centers and models

for other organizations.

In 2008, a panel that included Jane Goodall, Deepak

Chopra, and Desmond Tutu named Yohannes one of the

top ten CNN Heroes. Yohannes is the  rst to say that

this project has showed him how many other readers are

willing to be heroic. Teachers, librarians, school children,

adoptive families, and other volunteers have done book

drives, stored books, and raised money to ship additional

children’s books, 20,000 pounds at a time, to build fur-

niture, to employ 27 staff members in Ethiopia, and to

continue to  nancially support Yohannes’s explorations.

The leadership team in the United States also now includes

three Ethiopian Americans; support has steadily built

within various Ethiopian American communities.

Today, Ethiopia Reads (www.ethiopiareads.org)

reaches at least 100,000 children a year who’ve never

before had access to books. Our literacy efforts are still

experimental—and it remains to be seen whether we can

be an agent for change in the whole country—but we

are sustained by knowing we are changing the world for

individual children who, as the author of Three Cups of

Tea says, want  ercely to learn even though everything has

always been mightily stacked against them. The project

has inexorably changed my world, too. In the past six

years, I’ve spoken all over the United States and in vari-

ous other countries about Ethiopia Reads, raised money,

recruited volunteers, taken educators to Ethiopia. To my

delight, two of my children were among those drawn to

volunteer at Shola Children’s Library in Addis Ababa.

That’s how I ended up with two Ethiopian American

grandchildren. Whether I’m reading to Ellemae Enku and

Noh Iyasu or watching Ethiopian children read books for

the  rst time, I see, over and over, how hungry children

are for ideas, for stories, for opening the doors to let a

hundred worlds in.

JANE KURTZ

441

Where do I start? I cannot tell you what I do now without

telling you some part of my life as a child. I was born

in a small rural village in southern Ethiopia. I grew up

with cows and sheep and goats and camels. When I was

growing up, there was plenty in Ethiopia; we didn’t really

have any hunger or any shortage of milk or meat. I had

the best childhood. We even had an elementary school in

my town, which happened to be a prison house built by

Italians when they invaded Ethiopia in 1935.

But there was something missing at that time, and that

was books and a library. We didn’t even know what a

library was, but, of course, we had textbooks that we had

to learn from. I remember several textbooks that really

impacted me as a young boy. One of these was a British

textbook called The March of Times. In this book there was

one story that has vividly stayed in my mind called “Guy

Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot.” Can you imagine what

that story has done to me? It has made me a rebel later in

my life. You never know when ideas are planted in your

mind: That is the power of books and stories.

In my town, there was no high school. The nearest high

school was 575 kilometers away, so, in order to go there, a

group of kids from the same town would rent a place to live

together. And there, in my high school, I had a wonderful

encounter with a young American Peace Corps teacher

named Douglas. The Peace Corps workers also had to

rent a place to live, so we happened to be neighbors. As

neighbors, Douglas and other Peace Corps teachers taught

us how to play hula hoop and other American games. In

my English classroom, Douglas taught us American lit-

erature, and I still lovingly remember “Rip Van Winkle”

and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and the Headless

Horseman. Can you imagine what these stories would do

to a young mind? They totally opened up a whole new

world of literature.

My encounter with books and stories did not end there,

but there weren’t many books in my life or in the lives of

many young Ethiopian kids at the time. I was 19 years old

when I found the book that really transformed my life. I

was 19, I was in love—you know if you’re 19 and not in

love that’s not a good sign—and this book called Love

Kitten, an American romance book, did wonders for me

because now I had to look for other romance books to read.

I did succeed in  nding some, and that led me to reading

other books also, other novels,  ction books, crime books

from Agatha Christie, and a variety of American authors.

At that time, luckily, we had what we called the American

Library, the USIS (United States Information Services)

library, right in the middle of Addis Ababa. I was one of

the biggest customers of that library. Wherever there were

books, I would go at that young age.

But, also, there was revolution in my country. I was

involved in that revolution. We had an emperor in Ethio-

pia, and we wanted to overthrow this emperor because

we thought he was a tyrant and had to be replaced by a

government of the people, by the people, for the people.

But we did not stop there. I think most young people at

that time became Communists. As young idealists who

wanted change, we wanted to do the best for our coun-

tries, so we found this ideology that was made somewhere

else, but we embraced it. We read the literature and we

ardently fought to dismantle the imperial power of his

majesty Emperor Haile Selassie the First. That ended,

and we had a military dictatorship in Ethiopia, and then

we had to  ght it, because we didn’t think that it was fair

to have a military dictatorship on top of the grave of a

monarch. But the military dictatorship was harsh: Most

of our compatriots were killed or tortured and, eventually,

I had to  ee the country.

I went to the Sudan, and from the Sudan, I went to

Houston, Texas, in the United States. In Ethiopia I had

studied to be a pharmacist, so I was able to get a job in a

hospital in Houston. I also went to school at the University

of Houston. I got my  rst degree in English Literature

and then I went to the University of Texas and did my

Master’s in Library and Information Sciences, because I

had already decided that what I wanted to do had to do

with books. I wanted to be a college librarian, but unfor-

tunately, I could not  nd a job in a college, so I ended up

in the San Francisco Public Library, and that was when I

started thinking about the children of Ethiopia.

I visited Ethiopia in 1991, but it was devastated. The

military was overthrown, but there were no libraries and

no books for children. There were no playgrounds; there

was nothing at all for children. I said, “I have to do some-

thing.” But what can a librarian do? Except collect books

and send books over and try to establish some place for

kids to read. In 1998, I formed this organization called

Ethiopian Books for Children, an international foundation

which we now call Ethiopia Reads. I left my job, and went

back to Ethiopia in 2001 and established the  rst children’s

library there in 2003.

How did we do it? We formed an organization with

board members, and I found an American lady, Jane

Kurtz, who happened to grow up in Ethiopia, and was an

author of children’s books. I thought, I have to ask this

Point of Departure

Yohannes Gebregeorgis

442

lady to help, so I authored an email, and Jane said, yes, I

will help. Ever since, she has been the backbone of this

organization as both fundraiser and spokesperson. With

her support, I was able to establish our  rst library, and

then after that, we also established other libraries in other

parts of the country.

We also established Donkey Mobile Libraries. Ethiopia

has more donkeys than any other country in the world

except for China. Donkeys are everywhere, all over the

countryside, even in cities, in towns, hauling all kinds

of things—wood, stone, food, even people in carts or on

top of donkeys. They are the most hard-working, humble

animals; they will not even kick you when you hurt them.

So we started using donkeys to deliver books for children,

but we wanted to be fair to these donkeys also, so we said

to the kids, these animals are working so hard that they

deserve to be treated with respect and dignity. We created

a queen of donkeys, called her Queen Helena—Helena

means conscience, and she became the conscience of

donkeys, the spokesqueen, of all donkeys in Ethiopia.

Since there are no other queens of donkeys in the world,

I think by extension, she became the queen of all donkeys

in the world, including the Chinese donkeys. We created

some fun and some excitement when we inaugurated the

 rst Donkey Mobile Library. Thousands of kids followed

the procession, including the queen, who was leading the

procession with her crown and with her royal robe. The

kids were chanting, “Queen Helena, give us books! Queen

Helena, give us books!”

Most of these kids had never held a book in their

hands. When we started the Donkey Mobile Library

and the  rst library in Addis Ababa, the capital city,

they were holding books upside down, even though they

were going to school. Some were second graders, third

graders, fourth graders, but they had never touched a

book because there were no books in their schools. We

did a survey in Addis Ababa, and we found that 99%

of the schools have absolutely no libraries. None at all,

and this was in the capital city. What do you think it is

like in the rural areas? One hundred percent or maybe

a little less. How can kids be educated without books?

Without ever reading a book? Without ever touching a

book? What kind of education would that be? I think it is

like eating bland food, food that doesn’t have spice, that

doesn’t have peppers or anything palatable. The spice in

education in Ethiopia is missing. The spice of education

is books, books that kids read outside of school, or in

their classrooms, or in libraries.

So, our organization also started establishing school

libraries. As we speak, we have established 35 school

libraries. It’s not much, but we have functional modern

libraries, with shelves and chairs and tables and books.

Working with sponsors and donations, we have also pub-

lished 11 books for children, illustrated picturebooks and

anthologies of folktales. I have tried to do as much with

all the experience that I’ve gathered as a librarian in this

country and going to different countries to book fairs and

conferences. We have established an annual Ethiopian

Children’s Book Week that is very successful in promot-

ing reading in Ethiopia, and things are changing. Kids are

reading books, and I can see that it’s absolutely inevitable

that kids have books in their schools, in their communities,

and if possible, in their homes. During our Book Week,

we give most of the books that we publish free to children.

We give out thousands of books for children. And this

past April when we celebrated our sixth annual Children’s

Book Week, we were astonished by a presentation from a

nine-year-old girl. She came up to the podium and started

reading, but we didn’t see the book—it was an invisible

book that she was reading. How could someone read an

invisible book? But this nine-year-old girl was reading

word by word, word by word. It was one of the books

that we had given these kids during our last Book Week,

and she had read it so many times, over and over again,

that now she could read it without looking at it, word by

word without any page in front of her. That’s really the

power of having books for our children. It transforms their

imagination, the way they look at the world, the way they

look at themselves. We have a group of brave young kids

who have come to our libraries every single day since we

opened our doors. And where are these kids going to go

to? They are going to reach the stars.

YOHANNES GEBREGEORGIS

Censorship

Book Challenges, Challenging Books, and Young Readers

Christine A. Jenkins

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Educators and librarians have a long history of energetic work on behalf of young people and their reading.

Other people are equally passionate about what children read and what meanings they make but their efforts

may be aimed at limiting access to books. Christine Jenkins explores what we do and do not know about the

beliefs, goals, and strategies of individuals and groups who would censor books for young readers. Her analy-

sis is central to any discussion of the life of a book as it moves from purchase, to review, to public debate, to

bookshelf, and ultimately to young readers; who will, in the end,  nd their own meanings in the literature they

read. Jenkins’ overview of censorship is followed by Cart’s and Yokota’s chapters on book reviews and book

awards, all of which extend our understanding of the relationships between society, books, and reading.

Censorship is the removal, suppression, or restricted cir-

culation of literary, artistic, or educational materials—of

images, ideas and information—on the grounds that these

are morally or otherwise objectionable in light of standards

applied by the censor. Frequently, the single occurrence

of an offending word will arouse protest. In other cases,

objection will be made to the underlying values and basic

message conveyed—or said to be conveyed—by a given

work…. Americans ﬁ nd censorship odious. Few in our

society advocate the banning of all but a tiny handful of

materials from sale, circulation, or display to adults. The

commitment to free expression is not so clear, however,

where minors are concerned.

(Reichman, Censorship and Selection, 2001, pp. 2–4)

The principles of intellectual freedom—the idea that a

democracy is dependent upon free and open access to

ideas—are hallmarks of the library and education profes-

sions. But librarians and teachers sometimes face strong

opinions regarding what material people think is appropri-

ate for children and teenagers to have access to in a school

library, public library, or classroom.

(Cooperative Children’s Book Center, n.d.)

In this chapter, I examine the censorship of young people’s

literature and the published research about it. Many people

are not aware of the prevalence of challenges to the right to

read in contemporary America. Censorship is associated in

the minds of many with dramatic scenes of book burning

443

444

CHRISTINE A. JENKINS

in other countries or in the past. Further, when people do

think of censorship today, they may think  rst of controver-

sies over rap music lyrics, potty-mouthed radio talk show

hosts, or X-rated  lms. Rarely are cases of attempted book

censorship covered as major news stories. The vignettes

offered below indicate, however, that challenges to young

people’s reading options are anything but rare.

Vignettes of Censorship

In 1945, Ilenka, a picture book by Lee Kingman, was

published to some acclaim. The story about a Russian girl

was slight, but the decorative illustrations resembled Mat-

isse’s work. The Horn Book praised Ilenka as an example

of a children’s book that bridged the gap between book

illustration and  ne art. The story aroused no suspicions

because, in 1945, the USSR was one of the Allied Forces,

a valuable partner in World War II. In 1948, however, the

Cold War was underway. The members of a veterans’

group approached the head librarian of the Philadelphia

Free Library to remove Ilenka from the children’s collec-

tion. They objected to its portrayal of a Russian child who

“had everything she needed to make her happy” and who

was struggling to decide, among many options, what she

wants to be when she grows up. The group claimed that

the book was factually inaccurate—a little girl could never

be happy in Russia (C. Field, personal communication,

April 2, 1992).

In 1977, the Illinois Police Association urged librarians

to remove William Steig’s Sylvester and the Magic Pebble,

winner of the 1970 Caldecott Medal, from their shelves.

Sylvester is a donkey and all the other characters are ani-

mals. The policemen are portrayed as pigs. The American

Library Association (ALA) reported similar complaints in

11 other states (Haight & Grannis, 1978, p. 87).

In 1980, a school administrator attended a district meet-

ing held in an elementary school library and came across

a new book on display, Body Words: A Dictionary of the

Human Body, How it Works, and Some of the Things that

Affect It, by Kathleen N. Daly (1980). The book was il-

lustrated with line drawings of children’s bodies and their

various systems and organs. She was alarmed by drawings

illustrating “erection” and “vulva” and deemed the book

more appropriate for a secondary school. However, the

book was obviously written for elementary school-aged

readers, and the drawings depicting young children would

limit its appeal to older students (E. Faye, personal com-

munication, November 18, 1980).

In 1990, a  rst-grade boy brought home a picture book

from his elementary school library. The book, A Woggle

of Witches (1971), tells a slight story about small witches

who  y through the air, sleep in hammocks hung high in

oak trees, and are frightened by children in Halloween cos-

tumes. The boy’s mother testi ed to the school board:

I think it is a threat….The presence of the book in school

libraries may be interpreted by some children as the school

sanctioning the practice of witchcraft. I’m concerned for my

family, but my concern goes for those other children who

are unprotected because their parents are non-functional,

and thus vulnerable to such books’ underlying occult and

satanic messages. (Brown,1990, 1A)

In 1993, a public librarian recommended Are You

There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, by Judy Blume (1970)

to a seven-year old Jewish girl who she thought would

be engaged by Margaret’s struggle to understand her

Jewish heritage. Instead, the girl—who had no previous

knowledge of menstruation—was disturbed by Margaret’s

anticipation of her  rst menstrual period and asked her

parents to explain. They responded by taking the book

out of her hands and reassuring her that she needn’t worry

about this until she was older. Her father, conservative

media critic Michael Medved, related this experience to

emphasize how vigilant parents must be to preserve their

children’s innocence. The girl and her parents devised a

strategy to help her avoid disturbing books: she would read

only books written before 1960. Medved recommended

this strategy to other concerned parents (Medved, 1998,

pp. 12–13).

In 2006, Cuban exiles living in Miami complained that

a bilingual picture book, Vamos a Cuba/A Visit to Cuba,

by Alta Schreier (2001), one of a series of 24 children’s

books about life in other countries, was riddled with “in-

accuracies” for its positive portrayal of life in Cuba. After

a lengthy and politically charged struggle, the school

district ordered the books’ removal, a move that countered

recommendations from the school board attorney, two

school review committees (in 7–1 and 15–1 votes) and

the district’s Superintendent. In November 2009 the U.S.

Supreme Court refused to hear American Civil Liberties

Union of Florida, Inc., Greater Miami Chapter, et. al. v.

Miami-Dade County School Board, a lawsuit  rst  led in

June 2006, and the board’s decision was sustained. Vamos

a Cuba was the only book in the series that received a

complaint, but all 24 books were removed from school

libraries (FLA, 2009).

In 2009, three books with gay/lesbian content in the

West Bend, Wisconsin, public library’s young adult collec-

tion—two  ction and one non ction—were challenged by

a couple who feared that younger children would read the

books. In the ensuing weeks, four school board members

lost their seats, the list of challenged books grew longer,

the couple and their supporters demanded that the library

acquire books that depict homosexuality as a “curable”

condition, and the story was picked up by national and

international wire services. In the end, the books stayed

on the shelf (Hanna, 2009).

Why Are Books Censored?

Book censorship is an act that involves complaints about

speci c texts. That is, the act of censoring or removing

or restricting particular books implies that there are other

445

CENSORSHIP

books that are not censored; or that a book that is under

attack could be rehabilitated by having the offending

portions excised. But the act of censorship implies that

there is some sorting procedure in effect. Human history

includes many such moments, when powerful people

decided that texts written in German (as during WWI in

the U.S.), texts written by Jews and Communists (as in

Nazi Germany), and all books published before 1949 (the

War against the “Four Olds” during the Chinese Cultural

Revolution) should not exist. In 1562 in Mexico, Spanish

friars burned all Mayan texts to “cleanse” the natives of

“devilish” thoughts (and presumably replace them with

Christian books written in Spanish). Censorship can also

be an extension of “ethnic cleansing,” as in 1992, when

the Serbs set  re to the National and University Library

of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo, and destroyed 1.5

million books and manuscripts in a single night (Silvester,

2009).

Indeed, the classic censorship document, the Roman

Catholic Index Librorum Prohibitorum, is simply a (very

long) list of the speci c texts denounced by the Church

since the 1500s. Contemporary lists, such as the annual

Banned Books Resource Guide (Doyle, 2007), although

compiled for a very different purpose, likewise identify

speci c titles and the speci c reason(s) given for challeng-

ing their presence in school and public libraries.

Early censorship attempts, unlike those in more re-

cent times, were rarely based on protecting children.

Throughout history, however, the red  ags for censors

have remained roughly the same: religion, politics, and

sexual content. Typically, controversial texts are those

that in some way disturb (or are perceived as disturbing)

the religious, political, or sexual status quo—from Wil-

liam Tyndale’s English translation of the New Testament

(1526) to Thomas Paine’s Common Sense (1776) to Marie

Stopes’ Married Love (1918). Other texts have been chal-

lenged not for what they said so much as how they said

it. In these cases, the “objectionable language” might be

labeled “blasphemous” (religiously objectionable), “trea-

sonous” (politically objectionable), or “lewd” (sexually

objectionable), or simply lacking the expected respect or

reverence usually accorded these subjects.

Book as Role Model

Books containing words or slurs that demean people on

the basis of race, gender, class, sexual orientation, religion,

or other characteristics are likewise subject to challenges.

Some see the presence of such language in books aimed

at young readers as indicating tacit approval for the use of

such language by those readers. If a community’s laws or

a school’s code of conduct prohibits particular actions and

behaviors on the part of young people, so the reasoning

goes, those actions or behaviors should not appear in the

books of that community’s public or school libraries. By

the same “book as role model” reasoning, books should

not contain profanities that children are punished for utter-

ing, nor depict a young person’s disrespect for authority,

unless such behavior is shown to have clear and negative

consequences. Thus, the argument goes that poor role

models have no place in the institutions devoted to the

education of young people.

Over the last century, most book challenges have

included the complaint that the materials are—or might

be—perceived as “harmful to minors.” Although high-

pro le landmark legal cases have involved books for adult

readers, such as Ulysses, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and The

Tropic of Cancer, the great majority of objections are made

for reasons of the perceived vulnerability of the young

reader to a text’s controversial content and the potential

for harm, whether it is depictions of adults having sex,

rabid dogs terrorizing humans, teens using recreational

drugs, or children playing with matches. Judging from

the most recent Banned Books Resource Guide, it appears

that some version of “harmful to children” is included in

the language of nearly every challenge, regardless of the

possibility that minors might realistically have access to

the book in question. Even when Of Mice and Men, The

Grapes of Wrath, or other books written for adults are

challenged, the original audience is not a concern, but

rather the reading of minors.

Although restricting access to a book through a chal-

lenge or “banning” is an obvious form of censorship,

transforming the original text has also been a prevalent

practice. Throughout the 20th century, high school stu-

dents (including this author) have been assigned bowd-

lerized editions of Shakespeare’s plays. Thomas Bowdler

wrote versions of Shakespeare’s texts entitled The Family

Shakespeare, in Ten Volumes; In Which Nothing is Added

to the Original Text; But Those Words and Expressions

Are Omitted Which Cannot With Propriety Be Read Aloud

in a Family, which include 24 of Shakespeare’s plays,

each preceded by an introduction noting the changes to

the original text. In Hamlet, the death of Ophelia was

pictured as an accidental drowning rather than a suicide.

Lady MacBeth’s cry of “Out, damned spot!” was changed

to “Out, crimson spot!” And so on.

Sexual and Obscene Content: De nitions and

Arguments

Although the  rst U.S. censorship prosecutions on the

basis of sexual content did not occur until the early

1800s, such prosecutions soon became widespread.

Anthony Comstock, the well-known anti-obscenity cru-

sader, spearheaded the YMCA-sponsored Committee for

the Suppression of Vice, which later became the New

York Society for the Suppression of Vice. From 1872 to

1913, Comstock and his organization were instrumental

in over 3,600 arrests for distributing obscene materials,

including books, magazines, pictures, and contraceptive

devices. Although the Society’s concern was not limited to

446

CHRISTINE A. JENKINS

youth and the material it attacked was marketed to adults,

“vulnerable minds” were very much at the center of their

rhetoric. Comstock’s (1883) book, Traps for the Young,

documented and attacked the “evil reading” available to

the young in the form of dime novels, story papers, weekly

newspapers, and other obscene materials. As Comstock put

it, “Who would go to the state prison, the gambling saloon,

or the brothel to  nd a suitable companion for the child?

Yet a more insidious foe is selected when these stories are

allowed to become associates for the child’s mind and to

shape and direct his thoughts” (p. 21).

Former Justice Potter Stewart of the Supreme Court of

the United States, in attempting to classify what material

constituted exactly “what is obscene,” famously wrote, “I

shall not today attempt further to de ne the kinds of mate-

rial I understand to be embraced….[b]ut I know it when

I see it…” (Supreme Court, 1964). However, the 1973

ruling of the Supreme Court of the United States in Miller

v. California established a three-tiered test to determine

what was obscene—and thus not protected– versus what

was merely erotic and thus protected by the First Amend-

ment. Delivering the opinion of the court, Chief Justice

Warren Burger wrote,

The basic guidelines for the trier of fact must be: (a) whether

‘the average person, applying contemporary community

standards would ﬁ nd that the work, taken as a whole, ap-

peals to the prurient interest, (b) whether the work depicts or

describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct spe-

ciﬁ cally deﬁ ned by the applicable state law; and (c) whether

the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic,

political, or scientiﬁ c value. (Supreme Court, 1973)

In fact, “obscenity” in U.S. courts is speech that is by

de nition unprotected by the First Amendment. Thus, the

label of “obscenity” may be applied to texts that contain

no depiction of sexual activity, but, for example, include

an expletive as an expression of anger, surprise, or disgust.

Or Holden Caul eld trying to erase the words “fuck you”

from a wall where children might see it (Salinger, 1951,

p. 201).

By the turn of the 20th century, the charge of obscen-

ity—that is, objections based on sexual content—had

become more common in censorship cases. Among

the factors at work in this trend were an increased

public discourse about sex (ironically fueled in part by

Comstock’s campaign), the appearance of more novels

of social realism—that described, in addition to other

realities, prostitution and out-of-wedlock childbirth—

and an increased public awareness of the signi cant role

of sex and sexuality from the dissemination of Freud’s

theories and the establishment of psychology as a  eld

of study.

Here it must be added that there were also parents, edu-

cators, and other adults who saw a need for sex education

books written speci cally for children to support social

hygiene and prevent the spread of venereal disease. Fi-

nally, technological advances in the paper-making, print-

ing, and publishing industries meant that more books and

other printed matter of all types were being produced. All

of these factors contributed to an increase in the amount

of sexual reading material available to complain about.

And for those who would complain, many did.

Public Response to Censorship

To raise public awareness of all of the possible changes in

and challenges to literature, Banned Book Week was es-

tablished with the express aim of af rming the importance

of the freedom to read (Doyle, 2007, p. 6). This annual

event is now sponsored by a coalition of book industry and

professional groups, including the American Booksellers

Association and the Association of American Publishers.

Many U.S. bookstores, libraries, and schools celebrate

Banned Books Week every September by spotlighting

books that have been challenged at some point(s) in their

histories, from J.D. Salinger’s (1951) The Catcher in the

Rye to Dr. Seuss’ (1971) The Lorax to J.K. Rowling’s

(1997–2007) Harry Potter series.

Such awareness of and activism on behalf of readers

matters to the public, as in the case of Scholastic Publish-

ing, the leading vendor of packaged school-based book

fairs in the United States, that decided against including

one of their recent titles in its book fair offerings. The

book was Lauren Myracle’s (2009) Luv Ya Bunches, the

 rst book in a series that chronicles the unlikely friend-

ship between four elementary age girls, one of whom lives

with her mother and her mother’s female partner. The text

had contained some objectionable language (including

“crap,” “sucks,” and “Oh my God”), which the author was

willing to remove. However, Scholastic also demanded

that all references to that girl’s family be omitted so as

to avoid complaints from parents. Myracle rejected this

demand (“A child having same-sex parents is not offen-

sive, in my mind, and shouldn’t be ‘cleaned up.’… What,

exactly, are children being protected against here?”) and

Scholastic removed Luv Ya Bunches from their book fair

distribution list. . After receiving over 4000 emails from

people objecting to Scholastic’s demand that Myracle turn

two moms into a mom and a dad, the publisher relented

(SCBWI, 2010).

Selection vs. Censorship: Considering

Penguins

Censorship proper is the formal limitation of access to

the text, a decision usually made by a school board or a

public library’s board of trustees. A board or committee

charged with making a determination might decide to

retain the book in the collection but restrict access to it in

some way, or remove the book entirely from the library

or classroom. However, the line between censorship and

what is described in classic works in library science as

selection, are not entirely clear (Asheim, 1953).

447

CENSORSHIP

Librarianship and Selection

Librarians still agonize over the difference between selec-

tion and censorship. Library budgets are rarely suf cient,

so the youth librarian makes hard choices with every book

order. If, for example, the Jaycees sponsor a free showing

of March of the Penguins at a local movie house, the librar-

ian can anticipate a run on penguin books. The librarian

will begin by noting what books on penguins are already

in the collection (several titles, but not suf cient to meet

the anticipated demand) and be glad to see that the movie’s

popularity has inspired publishers to issue several attrac-

tive and well-reviewed titles on penguins. So, let’s say that

there are  ve titles that would be excellent additions to the

collection. One of the  ve is Parnell and Richardson’s And

Tango Makes Three (2005), a picture book that tells the

true story of Roy and Silo, two male chinstrap penguins

in New York City’s Central Park Zoo who become mates,

build a nest together, and  nd and sit on an egg-shaped

stone. When the zookeeper acquires an orphaned penguin

egg, he replaces Roy and Silo’s stone “egg” with the real

one. The two birds successfully hatch and raise a baby

penguin that the zookeeper names Tango.

And Tango Makes Three is an engagingly written and

attractively illustrated picture book that tells a simple and

true story. Originally published by Simon & Schuster

in 2005, the book received favorable reviews. Yet from

2006 to 2008 the book topped the American Library As-

sociation’s list of the year’s most challenged books. To no

one’s surprise, objections focus on the book’s depiction

of a same-sex pair of penguins raising a baby. Complain-

ants denounced the book as anti-ethnic, anti-family, “not

developmentally appropriate,” and as “propaganda for gay

marriage and the right of same-sex couples to adopt and

raise children” (Doyle, 2007, p. 136).

If a librarian or teacher is looking for an attractive, well-

written, and well-reviewed picture book about penguins,

And Tango Makes Three meets all criteria, and many

libraries have acquired it. Librarians who do not acquire

it are not censors per se, but when a librarian  nds posi-

tive reviews, notes the positive qualities of the book—and

has a ready audience of young penguin fans—but  nally

decides against its purchase solely because “someone”

might object to its presence in the library, then the librar-

ian is not selecting, but rather censoring.

The Public Complainant and Censorship

If it is the public, however, who submit a complaint about

a book, another set of de nitions—and related responses

from librarians and school boards—come into play. Be-

cause a book challenge can vary in both intention and

intensity, the American Library Association’s Intellectual

Freedom Committee (n.d.) has developed some standard

de nitions. At the least stressful level, a book may be the

subject of an “expression of concern” by someone who

questions the book’s presence in the library or classroom.

Expressions of concern may have judgmental overtones,

but they can also indicate a simple desire to discuss the

book in question. The second level is an “oral complaint”

regarding the material’s presence in the library. At the third

level, the library or school receives a “written complaint”

that formally challenges the presence and/or appropriate-

ness of the material. Infrequently, there may also be a

“public attack,” that is, a statement disseminated to the

media or others to gain support for the complaint. Since

the complainants lack the authority to actually remove or

restrict access to the book, all of their actions are techni-

cally “challenges” rather than “censorship.”

The Challenged Book: What Happens Next

The challenge process, from initial complaint to  nal

outcome, is generally spelled out in a library’s selection

policy. It can play out like a criminal court case, with the

book as the defendant, accused of endangering a minor

by threatening to harm or assault them, and/or “rob them

of their innocence.” The disposition of the challenge with

regard to the book is likewise similar to the treatment of

a defendant before and after the court’s verdict. Those

accused of crimes are passed through the legal system,

with a hearing, testimony, a trial, verdict, and sentence.

Challenged books go through the library’s reconsidera-

tion process that includes hearings, character witnesses,

a prosecutor and defender, and ultimately a verdict and a

sentence. A “not guilty” verdict means that the defendant

will be released and may return to his or her former life.

The book that is retained in the collection is likewise free

to resume its former position on the library shelves and

thence into the hands of readers.

As noted above, restrictions (or “remedies”) proposed

by the would-be censor can take several forms, just as

a range of sentences, from probation to death, may be

handed down to a guilty criminal. Often challengers argue

for a solution that seems, on the surface, to be a reasonable

compromise. A book could be placed in closed shelving (in

these cases a signed note from a parent or teacher would

be required for a student to gain access to the materials).

It could be moved to the reference collection, where the

book can be examined in-house but not checked out, or

into a “parenting” collection and circulated to adults only.

The book could also be relocated within the library’s pub-

lic collection. This often means that the book is “kicked

upstairs” to a section for more mature readers. In school

libraries this could mean moving a book from an elemen-

tary to a middle school, or from a middle to a high school.

In public libraries, juvenile non ction or  ction can be

reclassi ed as adult non ction or  ction. The good news

is that the book remains in the library’s collection. The

bad news is that the book is no longer located where its

potential readers will  nd it.

Such reclassi cation practices and intentions can be

448

CHRISTINE A. JENKINS

viewed through the prism of Dr. Seuss’s (1954) Horton

Hears a Who. Horton the elephant’s keen ears enable him

to hear calls for help from the Whos–small beings living

on a dust speck—so he carefully places the dust speck into

the shelter of a clover blossom. The clover is maliciously

snatched from him by a family of monkeys and handed off

to a black-bottomed eagle, who  ies off with it and drops

it into an enormous clover  eld. “‘Find that!’ sneered the

bird, ‘but I think you will fail!’/ and he left with a  ip of

his black-bottomed tail.” In a similar manner, teens brows-

ing the young adult  ction shelves might come across a

controversial book like Judy Blume’s (1975) Forever, but

when the book is placed in adult  ction (which has hap-

pened), only the intrepid teens who go looking for that

speci c book will ever  nd it in the midst of thousands

of adult  ction titles.

Of course, the most extreme outcome of a challenge

is removing the book completely. Whether it is burned,

sold, or tossed in the trash, the book is gone. To the cen-

sor, the perceived vector of infection has been banished

and the community returns to its unsullied state. To the

anti-censor, a dissenting voice has been silenced. The book

has been tried, found guilty, and executed. In the past,

some criminals were sentenced to death by  re. Books

too have been burned. It is interesting to note, however,

that in the popular imagination, those sentenced to burn

were likely to be witches. So,  nally the book becomes a

witch, with access to supernatural power to do evil. Such

is the perceived potential for harm in the pages of a book

deemed “forbidden.”

Advocacy Groups and Censorship

Those who track book challenges have found that the

majority of the books with documented challenges are

challenged only once (G.M. Kruse, personal communi-

cation, January 17, 1990). However, a handful of books

have received numerous challenges. Multiple challenges

are generally the result of an organized campaign by an

advocacy group seeking to wield its muscle in a public

venue.

Many intellectual freedom activists within ALA have

stated that all censorship is political. In this context,

“political” is de ned as social relationships involving

authority or power.

According to those who study the history of censor-

ship, there have been various “fashions” in censorship

that re ect changing political conditions. Thus, during

the 1950s, challenges to Garth William’s (1958) The Rab-

bit’s Wedding, about the marriage of a black rabbit and a

white rabbit, were one small piece of a larger campaign

to maintain racial segregation as the Jim Crow laws were

being struck down in the American South. In the late

1960s, Sylvester and the Magic Pebble (Steig, 1969),

a story populated with talking farm animals, provoked

challengers who were disturbed that the police in the story

are portrayed as pigs. Later on, when religious concerns

about witchcraft and the occult were on the rise, Sylvester

was against objected to on account of the magic wishing

pebble that turns Sylvester from a donkey to a rock (and

later turns the rock back into a donkey). As a fear of the

occult grew—particularly, but not exclusively, among con-

servative evangelical Christians—books such as Johanna

Michaelsen’s (1989) Like Lambs to the Slaughter: Your

Child and the Occult warned against pop culture products

aimed at children (My Little Pony, Smurfs, Care Bears),

the possession of which could be the  rst step down the

slippery slope to full- edged satanic involvement. Each

of those toys had books as marketing spin-offs, which

were equally suspect. Another popular focus for book

challengers is LGBTQ (lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgen-

dered/queer or questioning) content. Thus, challenges to

Nancy Garden’s (1982) Annie On My Mind, Leslea New-

man’s (1989) Heather Has Two Mommies, and Michael

Willhoite’s (1990) Daddy’s Roommate demonstrate the

initiators’ opposition to same-sex marriage, gays in the

military, and the perceived “homosexual agenda.”

The various challenges to J.K. Rowling’s (e.g., 1997)

popular Harry Potter books provide an intriguing illustra-

tion of current-day efforts to restrict young people’s access

to books. Those who challenge the presence of Harry

Potter in public and school library collections weigh in

on both sides of the ongoing “fairy tale wars,” a decades-

long debate among librarians and educators as to whether

a child’s development is best supported by reading fantasy

or realistic  ction. Rowling’s books have been attacked on

several fronts. Some argue that depictions of Harry and

company learning spells in order to thwart and conquer evil

tempt children with the dangerous pleasures of the occult.

Others believe that depictions of Harry and his friends

defying authority and disobeying parents and teachers

model misbehavior and disrespect toward adults, further

undermining the traditional roles of the nuclear family and

the authority of those entrusted with the care of children.

Furthermore, argue still others, Harry and his allies engage

in the timeless struggle between good and evil, battling

Lord Voldemort and the death-eaters for control of the

world–all without bene t of any organized religion.

Challengers to Harry Potter have described their efforts

as a “battle for the hearts and minds” of children. Although

the anti-Potter furor has died down since its heyday in the

late 1990s, Focus on the Family, Concerned Women for

America, the American Family Association, and other

Christian Right political groups have made Harry Potter

the focus of their considerable energy as they organize

on behalf of conservative religious and political “family

values.” In a 2005 case in the Cedarville, Arkansas, School

District, a school board placed Harry Potter books in a re-

stricted area and required students to have written parental

permission to check the books out. The school board’s

restrictions were challenged in federal court, and the

court found that the school board had removed the books

449

CENSORSHIP

from its library shelves “for reasons not authorized by the

Constitution” (DeMitchell & Carney, 2005, p. 164).

Research on Book Challenges and Censorship

Chronicling and documenting book challenges is the

most basic type of research on censorship and has many

practical applications. For example, annotated lists of chal-

lenged books are consulted to create displays and other

publicity during Banned Books Week. As noted above,

the foundation for much research on book challenges is

the documentation generated by the organizers of Banned

Books Week. The most recent compilation of the annual

lists describes challenges to over 1,500 titles, gleaned from

news sources and incident reports sent to agencies like the

ALA’s Of ce for Intellectual Freedom and the National

Council of Teachers of English’s Anti-Censorship Cen-

ter (Doyle, 2007). The incident reports are gathered via

surveys, report forms, or brief structured interviews and

emphasize factual details: What book(s) or materials were

challenged? What was the speci c complaint? Who made

the complaint to whom? When and where did this occur?

What happened after the complaint was made?

Each challenge has its own dynamics and trajectory

speci c to the book, the complainant, the institution, the

community, the time and place, and the sociopolitical

milieu. But it must be remembered that although the data

gathered from self-reports can be rich indeed, unreported

book challenges—and there are many—are not included.

Still, these incomplete data provide at least a partial

picture of the who, what, where, when, why, and how”of

book challenges and form the basis for more nuanced

and contextualized narratives. An incident report may

also describe the type of remedy sought by complain-

ants, and it will most likely report the  nal resolution of

the challenge–whether the book was retained, relocated,

restricted, or removed. Rich data of this type were used by

Dianne McAfee Hopkins (1991) in her study of signi cant

variables in book challenge outcomes.

In-depth Censorship Studies

In addition to the broad but succinct evidence presented in

the Banned Books Week guides, there are also a handful

of works that provide more in-depth surveys of banned

books. These texts focus primarily on books that have been

challenged repeatedly and provide a detailed account of

each book’s censorship history. Two of the earliest, Lee

Burress’s (1989) Battle of the Books: Literary Censorship

in the Public Schools, 1950–1985 and Herbert Foerstel’s

(2002) Banned in the U.S.A: A Reference Guide to Book

Censorship in School and Public Libraries cover chil-

dren’s and young adult books, while Karolides, Bald &

Sova’s (2005) 120 Banned Books: Censorship Histories

of World Literature focuses exclusively on books for adult

readers. Four volumes in a set published by Facts on File,

taken together, cover approximately 450 titles of both

children’s and adult literature that have been suppressed

on religious, political, sexual, and social grounds (Bald

2006; Karolides 2006; Sova 2006a, 2006b). Two works

are notably international in scope: Karolides (2006) fo-

cuses entirely on books originating in countries outside

the United States, and the revised edition of The Ency-

clopedia of Censorship, includes over 1,000 entries that

describe censorship issues throughout the world (Green

& Karolides 2005).

Much of the nuts-and-bolts practice-oriented literature

pertaining to censorship of children’s and young adult

literature is written by and published for school and public

youth services librarians. Books speci c to school librar-

ies and library media specialists include those by Scales

(2009), Adams (2008), Kravitz (2002), and Simmons and

Dresang (2001).

Dianne McAfee Hopkins’s (1998) “Toward a Concep-

tual Path of Support for School Library Media Special-

ists” provides a thorough literature review of research on

book challenges. This review is a useful starting point

for scholars interested in a multidisciplinary approach

drawn from research in sociology, psychology, commu-

nications, and library and information science. Hopkins’s

initial questions are practitioner-oriented: “Why do many

library media specialists choose to deal with a challenge

to school library materials without professional support?

What contributions can support make to the library media

specialist during the challenge process? What support

systems are likely to be most bene cial to the school li-

brary media specialist during the challenge? Why? What

is known in support research, generally, that can assist in

understanding the varying responses of the school library

media specialist to a material challenge?”

There are a handful of studies using data gathered from

in-depth interviews, including Marjorie Fiske’s (1959)

classic Book Selection and Censorship: A Study of School

and Public Libraries in California. Fiske selected 26

communities representing the range of populations, eth-

nic compositions, locations, rates of growth, and types of

library service found in California. She interviewed each

community’s public library administrator and librarians,

the head of the county library system, the superintendent

of schools, high school principals, and school librarians,

for a total of 204 interviews. She focused on the factors

her subjects considered most important in choosing books

to add to their libraries; her  ndings reveal the fear of au-

thority and lack of power felt by many school and public

librarians in Cold War era America.

In addition to the literature review described above,

Hopkins (1991) also conducted one of the best-known

and most in uential censorship research studies, by syn-

thesizing  ndings from quantitative and qualitative data.

Hopkins’ data sources included surveys, interviews, and

“critical incident” reporting to examine censorship and the

book challenge process in school libraries. Her research

450

CHRISTINE A. JENKINS

trajectory on censorship and intellectual freedom began

with an investigation (via mail surveys to school librarians

in three midwestern states) that successfully teased out

and examined the factors involved in a book challenge.

These factors include: (a) complaint background—the

challenged text and the context of the complaint; (b) the

initiator of the challenge (parents, other library or school

employees, governing board members, or people outside

of school/community environment); (c) the characteristics

of the librarian (education, years of professional experi-

ence, age, amount of pressure felt, perception of support/

isolation, and self-esteem); (d) the library’s selection

policy and degree of compliance with that policy; (e) the

institutional environment (support of administrators, co-

workers, overall internal support, size of institution); and

(f) the community environment (overall external support

received during the challenge).

Hopkins’ investigations (1991), which culminated in

a federally funded national survey, identi ed the speci c

factors within those six areas that were signi cantly cor-

related to the positive outcome of a book being retained

in the collection. Among the signi cant positive factors

Hopkins found were: the librarian’s perception of support

from colleagues and principal; having a board-approved

selection policy in place; and having a complaint instigator

from outside the school system. Hopkins also found that

a challenge generated by a written complaint was more

likely to have a positive outcome than one generated by an

oral complaint. Hence her advice to librarians facing book

challenges to “get it in writing!” (Hopkins, 1993) .

Research drawn from or aimed toward an LIS audience

will necessarily focus on the librarian’s role in the book

challenge process. Scholars of education, journalism, or

communications history examine other aspects of censor-

ship, such as particular types of complaints or particular

settings. For example, in What Johnny Shouldn’t Read:

Textbook Censorship in America researcher Joan Delfat-

tore (1992) focuses on the pro-censorship activists, such

as Mel and Norma Gabler, who played instrumental roles

in the statewide textbook adoption struggles in Texas and

California during the 1980s. Other scholars examine cen-

sorship by focusing on speci c data sources. For example,

in Alien Ink: The FBI’s War on Freedom of Expression

journalist Natalie Robins (1992) used Freedom of Infor-

mation Act requests to examine F.B.I.  les on over one

hundred U.S. authors and artists who were under F.B.I.

surveillance during the 1950s to determine, among other

things, what aspect(s) of their lives and works brought

them to the attention of the F.B.I.

The most detailed accounts of book censorship are

book-length case studies by sociologists, educators, or

historians. Among the most well-known of these is James

Moffett’s (1988) Storm in the Mountains: A Case Study of

Censorship, Con ict, and Consciousness, an ethnographic

study of the 1974 struggle in Kanawha County, West Vir-

ginia, over innovative/subversive language arts textbooks.

The controversy involved six months of picket lines and

school bus vandalism and ended with the textbooks being

withdrawn. Moffett’s interviews with key players, which

he conducted in 1982, led him to the unsurprising conclu-

sion that the textbooks provided an arena in which rural

working-class community insiders and educated middle-

class outsiders contended for control of the schools.

At the Schoolhouse Gate: Lessons in Intellectual

Freedom takes a more journalistic approach as two high

school teachers, Gloria Pipkin and ReLeah Cossett Lent

(2002), provide a day by day report of the events, conver-

sations, and legal actions they experienced in defending

novels and a school newspaper from administrative cen-

sorship. Historian Paul Boyer’s (2002) Purity in Print:

Book Censorship in America from the Gilded Age to the

Computer Age takes a different approach by focusing on

the activities and campaigns of “vice societies” (an odd

name for societies that clearly positioned themselves as

“anti-vice”) and other pro-censorship movements to trace

“the shifting rhythms of censorship” in American legal

and cultural history.

Jenkins (2001) used historical methods to look at the

years of World War II and the early Cold War to document

the impact of McCarthyism on school and public library

collections—speci cally, the response of youth services

librarians to challenges to their collections. In the process

of addressing book challenges, these leaders instituted

professional practices, such as written book selection

policies, and documents, such as the School Library Bill

of Rights, that would enable librarians to resist book chal-

lenges more effectively.

Youth services library leaders used their status as white

middle class professional women to resist censorship

successfully through “assertive gentility.” Their effec-

tive strategies included “quiet resistance” (deliberately

ignoring and refusing to publicly acknowledge that an

attack has been made); “positive resistance” (countering

an attack by including the challenged book in reading lists

of recommended books); and “active resistance” (using

the attacker’s rhetoric to parry the attack–for example,

countering an accusation of a book’s “treasonous” mes-

sage by suggesting that seeing treason where none exists

is in itself treasonous). As yet, however, there are very few

historical studies that combine censorship, intellectual

freedom, and youth .

Future research in censorship practices could be in-

formed by the area of media effects; in particular the work

of media scholars who have identi ed a phenomenon,

dubbed the “third person effect.” In surveys of people on

the perceived effect of controversial issues, respondents

commonly state that they are not personally disturbed by

a particular movie or television program, but they believe

it is likely to disturb others (Davison, 1983; Paul, Salwen,

& Dupagne, 2000). This way of thinking also seems to be

prevalent in cases where books are challenged and could

be useful in linking the research methods of ethnography,

451

CENSORSHIP

media studies, and social psychology in studies of per-

ceived threat and social change.

Reading-Effects Research

Librarians and teachers generally take the positive ef-

fects of reading as a given. Their task, in the words of the

iconic pioneer of youth services librarianship, Anne Car-

roll Moore, is “to place into the hands of the right child,

the right book at the right time”(Jenkins, 1996, p. 815).

Other people are equally certain that the effect of read-

ing may be negative and that the wrong book can harm

its readers. These opposing viewpoints share a common

assumption that reading books or other print materials

can indeed change the reader’s attitudes, feelings, beliefs,

or self-concept. Works such as Books that Changed Our

Minds, edited by Malcolm Cowley and Bernard Smith

(1939); Caught in the Act: The Decisive Reading of Some

Notable Men and Women and its In uence on their Actions

and Attitudes, by Edwin Castagna (1982); and Voices of

readers: How we come to love books (1988), by G. Robert

Carlsen and Anne Sherrill attest to the commonly held

belief in the power of reading. What, then, are the facts?

Does reading affect people? If so, how? What answers can

researchers provide?

Early quasi-experimental studies of the effects of

reading sought to determine how particular attitudes or be-

havior were affected by reading. A typical study included

a pretest of subjects—often children—about their attitudes

(toward older adults, toward medical settings, etc.). The

subjects would then be exposed to a number of stories or

books that spoke to these attitudes, including a protago-

nist’s successful negotiation of an uncomfortable setting.

This was followed by a post-test. Given what we know

now about the individualistic nature of reading response,

the  aws in this methodology seem glaring. However, it

yielded some interesting results.

A study conducted in 1965 of  fth-graders (ages

10–11 years) in suburban Boston by Joyce Lancaster

(1971) is illustrative of this limited approach to research.

Boston schools were racially segregated by neighbor-

hood. Lancaster aimed to discover what effect voluntary

reading of books with neutral or positive portrayals of

African Americans might have on White children’s racial

attitudes. In this study the pretest/posttest utilized photo-

graphic slides of  fth-grade children engaged in various

activities (playing football, sewing, reading, etc). There

were several photos of each activity, one depicting an all-

Black group, one an all-White group, and one a racially

integrated group. The slides were shown to the children

in pairs, and students were simply asked which of the two

groups they would prefer to join. Some students chose on

the basis of activity, so that, for example, football would

get their vote regardless of the racial composition of the

group. Other students chose on the basis of race, choos-

ing the group with the most White children, regardless of

activity. Students who chose by activity were considered

“low prejudice” and students who chose by race were

considered “high prejudice.”

All of the students had multiple opportunities over

the next six weeks to select and read children’s novels or

biographies that included positive or neutral portrayals of

African Americans. Signi cantly, but not accounted for at

the time of the study, the books were not discussed among

students or by the teacher. Students were simply asked

to  ll out a form for each book read with their name, the

name of the book, and whether they would recommend it

to a friend. At the end of the six weeks the post-test was

administered.

When the data were compiled, Lancaster (1971) found

that for the students with “low prejudice” pretests, the

more books they read, the lower in prejudice their post-test

scores. For the students with “high prejudice” pretests, the

more books they read, the higher in prejudice their post-

test scores. Lancaster concluded that reading “operates as

a booster to one’s attitude rather than as a change agent”

(p. 97). The results of Lancaster’s study would disappoint

those who wish for stories or books guaranteed to make a

positive difference in readers’ attitudes and beliefs.

Lancaster’s (1971) study, while limited, also exposes

assumptions about what it means for a young person to

read a book. In many ways the methods and questions

guiding this study are grounded in the views of would-be

censors and their understanding of print media’s effects

on human behavior. These assumptions include:

1. Reading changes people.

2. Particular content predicts a particular response, and

thus a particular effect.

3. One reader’s response predicts another reader’s re-

sponse.

4. Forbidding reading materials will diminish reader

interest in and desire for the material.

Recent research  nds no support for these beliefs; in

fact, the opposite is true:

Reading by itself changes people very little, if at all.

It may effect small, short-term changes in people’s

behaviors or attitudes, but people are far more in u-

enced by family, peers, home, school, and socializa-

tion than they are by books (Jenkins, 2002).

Textual content does not predict reader response or

reading effect. Readers respond to and are affected

by texts in ways speci c to each individual in the

context of a particular time and place. Different

people react to the same book differently. Further-

more, the same book may have different effects on

the same reader at different times and under differ-

ent circumstances. As noted above, for example,

Steig’s (1969) Sylvester and the Magic Pebble was

read as anti-police propaganda in the 1970s (Haight

& Grannis, 1978, p. 87), but read as endorsing a

452

CHRISTINE A. JENKINS

belief in magic in the 1990s (McDaniel, Dec. 1991/

Jan. 1992).

One reader’s response does not predict another reader’s

response. Instead, each reader brings her or his

own unique perspective to the reading that is in-

formed, but not dictated, by the reader’s personality,

gender, education, age, reading ability, and other

characteristics (Lancaster, 1971). However, even a

relationship between variables does not necessarily

indicate cause and effect.

Forbidding reading materials will not diminish reader

interest in or desire for the material. Barriers to ac-

cess are likely to heighten a young person’s inter-

est in such a text. The “lure” of the forbidden” has

been repeatedly demonstrated by media researchers

observing children’s responses to “PG-13” and “R”

MPAA ratings, who found that perceived age restric-

tions consistently made children more interested

in viewing a program with such a rating (Cantor,

Harrison & Nathanson, 1997).

An End to Censorship—or Reading?

A casual perusal of the 2007 Banned Books Resource

Guide list of 1,724 different books makes it clear that it is

not possible to divine which text might upset or offend an

individual reader. Even much-loved classics like Wilder’s

(1932) Little House in the Big Woods (“promotes racial

epithets”) and Kipling’s (1902/1942) The Elephant’s

Child (“99% violent”)—not to mention newer classics

like Lewis’s (1950) The Lion, the Witch, and the Ward-

robe (“depicts graphic violence, mysticism, and gore”),

Dr. Seuss’ (1971) The Lorax (“criminalizes the forest-

ing industry”), and Roald Dahl’s (1964) Charlie and

the Chocolate Factory (“espouses a poor philosophy of

life”)—have been the objects of challenges. Clearly, adult

readers who are invested in  nding a problem will work

tirelessly to claim evidence for their complaints.

Organizations such as PABBIS (Parents Against Bad

Books in Schools) construct websites devoted to highlight-

ing out-of-context quotes and textual nuance that could

drum up supporters who are concerned about these “bad

books.” The Facts on Fiction website, devoted to  nding

what they perceive to be antisocial or hurtful behavior

depicted in children’s books, includes charts with detailed

reports on several hundred texts, ranging from Cleary’s

(1955) Beezus and Ramona to Huxley’s (1932) Brave

New World. Each book is analyzed in minute detail: “How

prevalent are expressions of bad attitudes, anger, and/or

moodiness, arguing and/or disrespect without consequenc-

es? (Not at all? Brief incident? Multiple brief incidents?

Extended incident? Multiple extended incidents? Theme

of entire book?)” (Facts on Fiction, 2010).

Is it possible to “censor-proof” a library or school?

Librarians or teachers might be tempted to hypervigilance

in this regard, making certain that the books available to

young readers will not upset any parent or other adult who

would act as censor “on behalf of” children. However,

as previously noted, the majority of challenges are made

by a single individual who is disturbed or offended by a

book: Only a book-less library or classroom can be truly

censor-proof (Schrader, 1996)

We cannot reliably predict how someone—even

ourselves—will respond to a book, as there are multiple

factors involved in determining a person’s comfort level

at a particular time and place. It is not the book that is an

active agent, but the reader. The goal of children’s librari-

anship has been stated thus for over a century: “to put the

right book into the hands of the right child at the right

time.” And it is ultimately the child—the reader—who

determines what that right book might be.

Conclusion

Censorship is about preventing access. The multifaceted

nature of this subject has meant that censorship research

can be found in a number of  elds of study, including

communications and media studies, psychology, history,

political science, education, literature, and library and

information science. It has often been noted that history

is written by the winners. In the case of the censorship of

texts, this is doubly true, since the winners—who control

the of cial record—can have the power not only to sup-

press books, but also to suppress accounts of that sup-

pression. This reality is most evident in non-democratic

or totalitarian societies and is a staple of dystopian  ction,

such as Orwell’s (1949) 1984 and Bradbury’s (1953)

Fahrenheit 451. But as the lengthy annual lists of chal-

lenged books prove, the censorious impulse lives in free

and open societies as well—even in the United States,

where the Constitution’s First Amendment protects the

freedom to read.

While much of the literature about censorship centers

on the fates of individual books, censorship involves

causes, beliefs, and goals that are far larger than any

particular text. Instances of book censorship represent

the tensions of society writ small, a struggle for political,

social, and/or cultural power waged in the limited arena of

the pages of a book. Books have been restricted, censored,

and even destroyed for as long as books and the written

record have existed.

In re ecting upon the circuitous and varied paths taken

by those who would censor literature for young readers, the

signi cance of the social and historical contexts in which

these struggles are played out is striking. The model that

is foundational to this volume demonstrates the connection

between reader and text surrounded,  rst, by the speci c

context of the reading, which is in turn surrounded by

the larger world in which that reader, text, and context

are located. In addition, because the reader is growing

and changing, the speci c context in which reader-text

interactions occur is ever-changing, as is the nature of the

453

CENSORSHIP

larger world. The social, cultural, and economic factors

that affect readers are in constant  ux.

When one steps away and considers the dynamic entity

that combines reader, text, context, and larger world, there

is one element that is actually fairly static and unchang-

ing, and that is the book. The book remains the same

and appears motionless within all this activity, like a leaf

 oating—or sinking—in the moving water of a stream or

river. That book, that one static entity, is a mirror. It re ects

the worries, the fears, the anger, and the concerns, of each

individual who looks into it. We look at a book, but what

we see is ourselves.

Author’s Note

This chapter is an expanded version of an article that  rst

appeared in the January 2008 issue of Language Arts as

“Book challenges, challenging books, and young read-

ers: The research picture” (vol. 85, #3, pp. 228–236).

English.

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Reviewing Children’s and Young Adult Literature

Michael Cart

Author and Reviewer, Booklist

From Mrs. Trimmer’s 19-century Guardian of Education to the brave new online world of blogs and social

networking sites, Michael Cart charts the history and evolution of reviewing books for young readers. Himself

a veteran of 40 years of reviewing, Cart focuses on such considerations as the journalistic and cultural contexts

of reviewing, the differences between reviews and literary criticism, the various audiences for reviews and

how these affect their tone and content, and longstanding criticisms of reviews themselves from both authors

and professional librarians. As be ts this consummate educator, Cart concludes with practical advice—and

sample reviews—for would-be reviewers of books for young readers.

Though reviews of children’s and young adult books typi-

cally contain some elements of critical evaluation, they

are nevertheless essentially works of journalism, timely

reports of the publication of new books. In announcing

such publishing events, their function—as Virginia Woolf

(1939) famously observed—is “partly to sort current lit-

erature; partly to advertise the author; partly to inform the

public” (p. 10). And—it must be added—their purpose is

to inform that same “public” of the quality of the book,

thereby assisting its members in deciding whether or not to

purchase or read it. Indeed, this remains the fundamental

purpose of contemporary book reviews, whether they are

targeted at collection-developing librarians or at parents

in search of gifts for children (who are probably hoping

for a video game, instead).

At the time of their beginnings in early 19th century

England, however, the reviews’ “public” was limited almost

entirely to parents, governesses, and others charged with

the care of children. As a result, reviews appeared primar-

ily in deadline-driven, general circulation magazines and

newspapers. With the rise of children’s library service at

the end of the 19th century, professional review journals

also began to appear. Though their target audience was

librarians and—to a lesser degree—teachers (instead of

parents), the reviews’ timeliness remained of paramount

importance, since they, too, were designed as guides to

purchase. This aspect of timeliness and its relationship to

potential purchase are two elements that further distinguish

reviews from literary criticism, which tends to be less utili-

tarian, is more discursive, may appear months or even years

after the publication of the book that is its subject, and deals

more extensively with analysis and interpretation.

And one  nal point: whether reviews or criticism

and whether published in newspapers, general interest

455

456

MICHAEL CART

magazines, professional or literary journals, all such

writing about books for young readers has been—and

remains—targeted at adults, not at the young readers

themselves.

In the Beginning, There Was Mrs. Trimmer

The British children’s author Mrs. (Sarah) Trimmer (Mi-

yake, 2006) is generally credited with having written the

 rst children’s book reviews in her short-lived but in u-

ential magazine The Guardian of Education (1802–1806).

Her review pages—titled “Examination of Books for

Children” or “Examination of Books for Young Persons”

(Miyake, 2006)—were targeted at parents and governesses

and re ected the reviewer’s own strong interest in both

education and religion. This was further evidenced dur-

ing the 1780s by her active and in uential involvement in

the  edgling Sunday School movement, which provided

literacy and religious education to working class children.

Indeed, no less a personage than Queen Victoria would

later invite her to set up a Sunday School at Windsor

(Carpenter & Prichard, 1984).

Given Mrs. Trimmer’s (1803/1973) brisk concern for

morality and books’ ability to mold young minds “sus-

ceptible of every impression,” the reviewer cautioned

parents—regarding the then burgeoning number of chil-

dren’s books—that “much mischief lies hid in many of

them” (p. 4). And accordingly, “The utmost circumspec-

tion is therefore requisite in making a proper selection;

and children should not be permitted to make their own

choice…but should be taught to consider it as a duty, to

consult their parents in this momentous concern” (p. 4).

As her reviews re ect, Mrs. Trimmer was concerned

not only that books offer moral instruction but also, in

an ideological turn, maintain the prevailing social order;

thus, she criticizes Newbery’s (1766) History of Little

Goody Two Shoes for its inclusion of “oppressive squires

and hard-hearted overseers…in these times when such

pains are taken to prejudice the poor against the higher

orders” (Trimmer, 1802/1973, p. 6). Similarly, in her re-

view of another Newbery publication, Renowned History

of Primrose Pretty Face, a tale in which a girl of humble

origins grows up to become lady of the manor, she notes

it “certainly is very wrong…to put into the heads of young

gentlemen, at an early age, an idea that when they grow

up, they may, without impropriety, marry servant-maids”

(Trimmer, 1803/1983, p. 72). In these moral and societal

aspects of her reviews, she approaches a facet of literary

criticism that, since the days of Plato, had assumed “that

art, as a signi cant formative agent in man’s moral and

spiritual development, should be didactic” and that “the

relationship between art and society is organic and indivis-

ible” (Beckson & Ganz, 1989, pp. 51–52).

Happily, Mrs. Trimmer was not universally condem-

natory in her reviews. She did, for example, laud Little

Goody Two Shoes’ “simplicity of style.” “We wish to see

this Book continue in circulation,” she bountifully con-

cluded but couldn’t resist adding, ominously, “as some of

these faults a pair of scissors can rectify” (!) (Trimmer,

1802/1973, p. 6).

No scissors could rectify her aversion to fairy tales and

fantasy, however, and it is for this that Trimmer is best re-

membered. “We cannot approve,” she magisterially wrote

in her review of Mother Bunch’s Fairy Tales (Newbery,

1773), “of those which are only  t to  ll the heads of chil-

dren with confused notions of wonderful and supernatural

events brought about by the agency of imaginary beings”

(Trimmer, 1805/1983, p. 73). Similarly, she condemned

Little Goody Two Shoes for its inclusion of a ghost story

and an element of witchcraft.

Interestingly enough, however, the most popular of her

own stories, The History of the Robins (1818) actually

featured talking birds, which were further anthropomor-

phized by being named, respectively, Robin, Jr., Dicksy,

Pecksy, and Flapsy. (As Haviland [1973] notes, though,

“in her introduction she took pains to explain that the

conversations were not real” [p. 4].)

Mrs. Trimmer was not the only 19th-century author-

publisher whose magazine featured book reviews. Another

was Mrs. (Margaret) Gatty, whose Aunt Judy’s Magazine

was founded in 1866, principally to publish the work of

her more famous daughter Juliana Horatia Gatty, better

known as Mrs. Ewing (“Aunt Judy” was the daughter’s

family nickname). Far more receptive to fantasy than Mrs.

Trimmer, Gatty published, in her magazine, the work of

such well-known fabulists as Lewis Carroll and Hans

Christian Andersen, while praising, in her reviews for

adults, their respective books Alice’s Adventures in Won-

derland (1865) and What the Moon Saw (1866), calling

the former “the exquisitely wild, fantastic, impossible,

yet most natural history of ‘Alice in Wonderland’” (Gatty,

1866/1973, p. 20).

Throughout the 19th century in England occasional

reviews of children’s books also appeared in adult maga-

zines like The Quarterly Review, The British Quarterly

Review, Macmillan’s Magazine, and more. Many of these

were essay or omnibus reviews that gave attention to a

number of titles in the context of the author’s summary

judgment of the prevailing state of children’s books. Thus,

the author Elizabeth Rigby (1844, cited in Haviland,

1973), also known as Lady Eastlake, castigated, in The

British Quarterly, “the excessive ardor for teaching which

prevails throughout” and decried “the interdict laid on the

imagination in this mania for explanation” (p. 9). Instead,

she called for giving children greater liberty in “promis-

cuous reading” and “the power of ranging free over  eld

and pasture,” eschewing “all the little racks of ready-cut

hay that have been so of ciously supplied them” (p. 10).

A similar review, entitled “Juvenile Books of the Past”

and published anonymously in The British Quarterly

Review in 1868, condemned the “didactic and dogmatical

fashion” in which too many children’s books had been

457

REVIEWING CHILDREN’S AND YOUNG ADULT LITERATURE

written, causing them to be “prosy, tedious, and distaste-

ful” (Rigby, 1868, cited in Bator, 1983, p. 77).

“Turn where you would,” the author continued, “it

was always the same dreary, monotonous, never-ending

dirge—‘Naughty, naughty children, you are all utterly

lost and wicked’” (pp. 75–76). As a curative, the author

recommended—almost categorically—fairy tales, which

“afford an endless fund of healthy and hearty amusement”

(p. 82) as well as more contemporary work by Mrs. Gatty,

R. M. Ballantyne, William Kingston, Phillip Freeman,

Edwin Hodder, and others.

Interestingly, this review is also among the  rst to

support the reviewer’s  at declarations with speci c com-

ments about language and tone (praise for their “exceeding

beauty” “yet simplicity”), plot (kudos for “careful com-

position”), imagination, the quali cations of the author

(with the “sound discretion and well-regulated condition

of [his] mind”), and potential popularity with young read-

ers (“any boy may read it with grati cation and pro t to

himself” [p. 77])—all considerations that would become

staple elements of 20th century reviews.

The Rise of Reviewing in America

Though children’s book reviewing may have started in

England, it reached new heights in the post-Civil War

United States, as Richard L. Darling (1968) has demon-

strated in his invaluable book The Rise of Children’s Book

Reviewing in America. Major magazines of politics and

culture as Scribner’s Monthly, The Nation, The Dial, The

Atlantic Monthly, and Harper’s Monthly—along with

the now largely forgotten Literary World—all regularly

published reviews of children’s books. They  ourished in

the second half of the 19th century, though these reviews

were all targeted at adults. Among the most in uential of

these periodicals was The Riverside Magazine for Young

People, edited by Horace E. Scudder (1837–1902) who

was, himself, a children’s book author (Seven Little People

and Their Friends, [1862]). Called by Alice M. Jordan

(1948) “one of the two most discriminating editors a

children’s magazine has ever had” (p. 40), Scudder was

passionately devoted to excellence in writing for children

as he demonstrated in “Books for Young People,” the

monthly editorial letter—targeted at adults—that prefaced

each issue of The Riverside Magazine.

In the inaugural number for January 1867 he wrote,

presciently, “A literature is forming which is destined to act

powerfully upon general letters; hitherto, it has been little

disturbed by critics, but the time must soon come, if it has

not already come, when students of literature must consider

the character and tendency of Children’s Letters” (Scudder,

1867/1973, pp. 21–22). “What shall we give our children to

read? is the constant cry of anxious parents,” he continued.

And, in answer concluded, “We may as well discard at once

all such unnecessary considerations as when a book was

published, or where it was published, and come right at the

gist of the matter, and ask if it is good, good in itself and

adapted to the reader for whom we are buying it” (p. 23).

A decade after Scudder had hailed the formation of a

new literature for children, “the  rst separate children’s

area in a public library” was created, “a corner with

tables designated for children and open shelving, cre-

ated by Minerva Sanders in the Pawtucket (RI) Public

Library” (Jenkins, 1999, p. 547). In her article “Precepts

and Practices,” Christine Jenkins charts the subsequent

development of public library service to children. It is

suf cient here to note that 1890 saw the opening of the

 rst separate children’s reading area (in the Brookline

[MA] Public Library), that 1896 marked the opening of

the  rst architect-designed children’s room (at the Pratt

Institute in Brooklyn), and that “by the end of the century,

library service to children was considered an integral part

of public library service” (p. 547).

Such new youth-serving specialists required guidance

in selecting books for their patrons and more seasoned

professionals, acting individually and in concert, were

quick to respond. Thus, in 1882 Caroline M. Hewins,

administrator of the Hartford (CT) Public Library, com-

piled her  rst booklist “Books for the Young: A Guide for

Parents and Children,” which was printed in the magazine

Publishers Weekly, read then—as it is today—by both

librarians and booksellers (Melcher, 1963). In 1905 the

American Library Association founded its now venerable

Booklist magazine, which—from the  rst—contained

reviews of children’s books recommended for purchase.

Indeed, one of its early editors was May Massee, who

went on to found the  rst children’s departments at both

Doubleday and The Viking Press.

Anne Carroll Moore

It was from this nascent community of children’s librarians

that the woman who quickly became the most in uential

voice in American children’s books emerged: Anne Carroll

Moore, whose career had begun at the Pratt Institute in

1896. In 1901 she became the  rst chair of ALA’s newly

formed Children’s Library Section and  ve years later was

named the New York Public Library’s  rst Superintendent

of Work with Children, a position she held until her retire-

ment in 1941. Meanwhile, her prominence extended from

the professional community to the general public when

she was asked to launch a children’s review page for The

Bookman Magazine in 1918, the same year that Children’s

Book Week was founded and the publisher Macmillan

launched the  rst separate children’s book department.

The Bookman pieces appeared approximately every three

months. According to Moore’s biographer Frances Clarke

Sayers (1972), “The years of ACM’s contribution to The

Bookman are generally designated as the era that inaugu-

rated in America the reviewing of books for children on

a sustained and continuous basis” (p. 211). Moore (1926)

agreed with this assessment.

458

MICHAEL CART

Moore’s association with The Bookman continued until

1924 when she was asked to start a children’s book review

page for Books, the newly launched weekly supplement to

The New York Herald Tribune. This was, coincidentally,

the same year that Bertha Mahoney Miller and Elinor

Whitney, founders of Boston’s Bookshop for Boys and

Girls in 1916, launched The Horn Book Magazine, which

became the  rst American magazine completely devoted

to articles about and reviews of books for young readers.

And it was to The Horn Book that Moore herself came

in 1936 with her column “The Three Owls Notebook”

(the Herald Tribune page, which lasted until 1930, had

been called, simply, “The Three Owls”). In 1932 The

Herald Tribune resumed its coverage of children’s books

under the editorship of the estimable May Lamberton

Becker (1936), whose book First Adventures in Reading:

Introducing Children to Books sprang from her Tribune

reviews. The “Notebook” continued until 1960, the year

before Moore’s death.

In writing of these early years, Jenkins (1999) has said,

“In many ways literary standards have changed very little

from that day to this” (p. 549). In the case of Moore it is

easy enough to validate this assessment, since her work

for that period was not ephemeral but was collected in a

series of volumes (Roads To Childhood [1920], New Roads

To Childhood [1923], Cross-Roads To Childhood [1926],

The Three Owls [1925], The Three Owls. Second Book

[1928], and The Three Owls. Third Book [1931]), while

Sayers (1972), in her biography, also quotes her subject

extensively, in one important instance as follows:

The instant recognition and detachment of a piece of original

work from a mass of ready-made writing and the presenta-

tion of one’s ﬁ ndings and conviction constitute the reviewer’s

main chance. His function is to declare the book’s quality

and give it a place in association with other books. To the

degree that the review stimulates the desire of the reader

to read the book to conﬁ rm or to differ with the critic will

it be contributory to thought, discussion, criticism, fresh

creative work. And this, as I see it, is the true objective for

the reviewer of children’s books no less than for the reviewer

in the general ﬁ eld. (p. 214)

The need for the reviewer to stimulate the reader—

who, remember, has always been an adult—is echoed in

the Foreword to New Roads to Childhood, where Moore

(1923) avers,

In writing of children’s books no less than in personal in-

troduction of them to readers, I feel it more important to

rouse the spirit of curiosity, to send the reader on a voyage

of exploration and discovery—to make books come alive—

than it is to outline the subject or present the static grouping

by age and grade which leads, in my opinion, straight to

the separation of children’s books from life as well as from

literature. (p. ix)

As for that consideration of “grouping,” Moore (1926)

resolutely aimed to focus on readers as individuals; hence,

in her essay “Entering the Teens,” she writes, “There can be

no such generalized term as adolescence without closing a

door upon the individual” (p. 209, emphasis added).

And as for “literature,” Moore regarded children’s books

as being not only a viable part of world literature but also

a continuum of its own with which the reviewer must be

familiar. As she put it, “I believe it was much reading of the

old children’s books in contrast to the new that developed

and strengthened my powers of appraisal” (p. 45).

The New York Times Book Review began publishing a

fortnightly children’s book review page of its own in 1930

under the co-editorship of Anne Thaxter Eaton, librarian

of the Lincoln School, Teacher’s College, and Ellen Lewis

Buell of the Times’ own staff. A number of other major

metropolitan newspapers including The New York Post

and The Chicago Tribune soon followed suit, as did such

popular, general interest magazines as The New Yorker

and The Saturday Review.

There would be many others over the years, most of them

containing reviews of varying quality, since they were often

written by working journalists or free lance writers who

may, themselves, have had little experience of children’s

literature. As Selma G. Lanes (1971) has noted, “Even the

perceptive critic for the newspapers is unlikely to make a

long-time career of reviewing children’s books; it is usually

an occasional pastime” (p. 150). Lanes was herself such

an occasional reviewer for The New York Times, The New

York Herald Tribune, and The Washington Post. Though not

a librarian (neither was May Lamberton Becker, for that

matter), she was quick to acknowledge, “The librarian’s

unquestionable value as a judge is that he or she can honestly

claim to know the tastes of a wide variety of children on a

thoroughly workaday and practical level over a continuous

and extended period of time” (p. 150).

Professional Journals

Both Moore and Eaton were slightly anomalous  gures:

trained librarians who, nevertheless, wrote for a gen-

eral audience. Indeed, Eaton’s two books—Reading with

Children (1940) and Treasure for the Taking (1946)—are

targeted at parents. A third germinal librarian/reviewer,

Zena Sutherland, also bridged the gap between the world

of general and professional readers but in a slightly dif-

ferent way. Although she was, for example, Children’s

Book Editor of the Chicago Tribune from 1972 to 1984

and, from 1966 to 1972, had written the monthly “Books

for Young People” column for the Saturday Review, she

was also, from 1958 until 1985, editor of and sole reviewer

for the University of Chicago’s Bulletin of the Center

for Children’s Books (BCCB), a professional journal de-

voted exclusively to reviews of books for young readers.

Prodigiously productive, she is said to have reviewed more

than 30,000 children’s books during the course of her long

career, while also serving as a member of the faculty of

the University of Chicago’s Graduate Library School from

1972 to 1986 (Harms, 2002).

459

REVIEWING CHILDREN’S AND YOUNG ADULT LITERATURE

As one of the most important  gures in 20-century

children’s literature, Sutherland’s (1986) thoughts on

what “the elements of good children’s books are” remain

fundamental to an understanding of the form, content,

and function of successful book reviews. In that context

she wrote, in part,

In many ways the literary criteria that apply to adult books

and children’s books are the same. The best books have

that most elusive component, a distinctive literary style.

A well-constructed plot; sound characterization with no

stereotypes; dialogue that ﬂ ows naturally and is appropriate

to the speaker’s age, education, and milieu; and a pervasive

theme are equally important in children’s and adult ﬁ ction….

Each book must be judged on its own merits, and each book

should be chosen—whether for an individual child, a library

or a classroom collection—with consideration for its strength

even though it may have some weaknesses. (p. viii)

She was not reluctant to note such weaknesses when they

were evident; thus, while praising Virginia Fox (1984) for

the “brisk and informative style” she employed in her book

Women Astronauts, Sutherland (1986) also allowed “its

tone (was) marred somewhat by a frequent tone of adula-

tion” (p. 136). Similarly, in her starred review of Paula

Fox’s (1984) One-Eyed Cat, Sutherland (1986) wrote,

“Few contemporary writers create their characters with the

depth, nuance, and compassion that Paula Fox does.” That

said, she continued, “and if her story unfolds slowly, it is

worth the patience and concentration it takes to follow the

many-layered development of the characters” (p. 136).

Beginning reviewers can still learn a great deal of what

they need to know about writing exemplary reviews (and

analyzing children’s and young adult literature) simply by

reading Sutherland’s reviews, which are collected in the

three volumes The Best in Children’s Books, 1966–1972,

1973–1978, and 1979–1984 (all published by the Univer-

sity of Chicago Press in 1973, 1980, and 1986).

Back to Britain

At about the same time Sutherland became associated

with the Bulletin, children’s book publishing underwent

a revival in England, as did children’s book reviewing.

Before the Second World War, review attention was largely

con ned to two professional journals, The Junior Book-

shelf (begun in 1936) and The School Librarian (1937).

This began changing in the 1960s when “the reviewing

of children’s books in newspapers and magazines mush-

roomed” (Watson, 2001, p. 605) and such great names

began entering the reviewing arena as Margery Fisher (at

The Sunday Times), Naomi Lewis (at The Observer), John

Rowe Townsend (at The Guardian), David Holloway (at

The Daily Telegraph), and Brian Alderson (at The Times).

In addition, Fisher started her own magazine, Growing

Point, in 1962. It was then, too, that Aidan and Nancy

Chambers (1970) founded their influential magazine

Signal, Approaches to Children’s Books.

While all of these writers became well known and highly

regarded in the United States, it is probably John Rowe

Townsend who has had the greatest in uence here as a

reviewer and historian of literature for young readers. His

history of children’s literature Written for Children has gone

through at least four editions since its  rst U.S. publication

in 1967 and his two collections of essays, A Sense of Story

(1971) and A Sounding of Storytellers (1979), have found

a similarly wide readership among adults. Another measure

of the American regard for Townsend is his having been

selected as the second Arbuthnot Lecturer in 1971 (the  rst

lecture in ALA’s prestigious lecture series was another Brit-

ish writer, Margery Fisher). Of greater relevance to us here,

however, is his 1981 essay, “The Reviewing of Children’s

Books.” In it he de nes reviewing “as critical or appreciative

contemporaneous writing about new books in periodical

publications,” stressing the word “contemporaneous.” “If

it isn’t contemporaneous, if it isn’t about new books, then

whatever it may be, it’s not reviewing” (p. 177).

His fourfold notion of the function of reviewing, which

evokes the spirit of Virginia Woolf, is also instructive. It is,

 rst, he argues, “to recognize new work of merit.” Second,

“it is part of the process by which books are published and

distributed.” By this, he means there is a kind of quid pro

quo relationship between publishers and reviewers, since

“publishers support book pages with their advertising, and

send copies of books for review, because they hope for

publicity, for recommendation, for quotations they can use

in their blurbs and advertisements and promotion” (p. 178).

Third, reviewing “provides a consumer guide for potential

buyers of books” and fourth (“and never to be forgotten”),

reviewing is “a branch of journalism” (p. 179). He echoes

Moore when he then adds, “The reviewer has a function

as a contributor of readable material, as a stimulator of

thought…” (p. 179). And Moore’s spirit is also alive in his

further observation that “Children are individuals, not types

or specimens of an age group. I would prefer a reviewer

to address herself sensitively to the book there in front of

her, rather than crudely to the assessment of its suitability

to some broad notional category of child” (p. 186).

And speaking, again, of the reviewer, here is one  nal

unimpeachable thought from Townsend: “One point on

which I am not in any doubt is that a reviewer, whether a

professional author or not, must be able to write” (p. 184,

emphasis added).

Meanwhile, Back in America

Fortunately, Zena Sutherland could write and under her

stylish and vigorous editorship, the Bulletin became one

of the  ve major professional sources of book reviews

consulted by American librarians; the other four were (and

still are): Booklist and The Horn Book Magazine (founded

as we have seen in 1905 and 1924, respectively); Kirkus

Reviews, founded in 1932 by editor and writer Virginia

Kirkus; and School Library Journal (1955) (spun off from

460

MICHAEL CART

the venerable Library Journal, which had been founded

by no less than Melville Dewey in 1876).

A sixth widely used—but more specialized—magazine,

Voice of Youth Advocates (VOYA), was started in 1978 by

co-founders Dorothy Broderick and Mary K. Chelton to

provide a forum for reviews of young adult literature, which

had begun appearing with the publication of S. E. Hinton’s

(1967) The Outsiders and Robert Lipsyte’s (1967) The

Contender. Two other sources of young adult book reviews

are The ALAN Review—published three times per year for

members of the Assembly on Literature for Adolescents of

the National Council of Teachers of English—and NCTE’s

own English Journal, which is aimed at English teachers

(principally at the secondary level).

Lastly, an eighth, Publishers Weekly, founded in 1872,

is principally targeted at booksellers but, nevertheless,

remains widely read by librarians, since its reviews of

children’s and young adult books generally appear several

months in advance of the publication dates of the books un-

der consideration. Such prepublication notice is invaluable

to librarians whose purchasing and cataloging procedures

are often glacially slow. For this reason a second early

noticer of impending publications—Kirkus Reviews—was

widely read by librarians and booksellers until its apparent

demise at the end of 2009 (about which, more later).

Some Summary Pro les

Of all these professional magazines only The Horn Book

Magazine has been available to a general readership on

newsstands. Published six times per year, its eclectic mix

of reviews and articles about books for young readers of-

fers intrinsic appeal for anyone interested in literature. Its

reviews of children’s and young adult books are written by

a combination of full-time editorial staff and a small cadre

of reviewers from the  eld. Each of its issues also features

a small number of guest reviewers. Though the magazine

follows a positive review only policy and is, thus, highly

selective in the books it chooses to review, its sister pub-

lication, The Horn Book Guide, is much more inclusive,

claiming to review— either positively or negatively—

some 2,000 books in each of its two semi-annual issues,

the lion’s share of these reviews being written by a group

of 60 to 70  eld reviewers.

School Library Journal, published monthly, is even

more ambitious, aiming to review every book (well, nearly

every new book) published for young readers each year.

Its many reviewers (upwards of 350 at any given time)

are all volunteers and almost all are working public and

school librarians. SLJ also includes numerous articles and

columns about library practice.

Also including editorial material about best practice and

also using volunteer reviewers is VOYA, which is published

bi-monthly. Evidencing the magazine’s commitment to

involving youth in developing the library service targeted

at them, VOYA is the only one of the journals to feature

occasional reviews by teenagers themselves. However, the

number of VOYA’s reviews is smaller than SLJ’s, since—

as already noted—the magazine’s coverage is limited to

young adult books (though some adult titles deemed of

interest to YA readers may be included, particularly in the

area of genre  ction, which has traditionally enjoyed a

wide crossover readership). VOYA is further distinguished

by its use of an elaborate book review code that ranks

books on a scale of 1–5 for both quality and popularity and

a letter code indicating grade level interest (M for middle

school, J for junior high school, S for senior high, and A/

YA for adult-marketed books recommended for YAs).

Like Horn Book—but unlike SLJ and VOYA—ALA’s

Booklist is devoted exclusively to book-related content,

principally reviews, though the magazine also includes

such book-related features as author interviews, thematic

bibliographies, and columns. It is one of only two of the

magazines (BCCB being the other) whose reviews are, in

large part, written by full-time editorial staff. However,

like Horn Book, Booklist also utilizes a group of paid

 eld reviewers. Despite its similarities, Booklist differs

from the other magazines in several ways: in addition

to its Books for Youth section it also includes an Adult

Books section and each adult review there is tagged if it

is deemed of interest to YA readers (the tags are somewhat

reminiscent of VOYA’s codes; e.g., “YA” indicates general

YA interest; “YA/C” denotes books with curricular value;

“YA/S” is reserved for titles of special subject interest; and

“YA/M” for titles with appeal to mature teenagers). The

magazine—like Horn Book—follows a ‘positive review

only’ policy; i.e., each book submitted for consideration is

examined either by a staff member or a  eld reviewer and

if—in their judgment—the book cannot be given a positive

review, it is not included. As a result, the number of titles

Booklist covers is smaller than that of SLJ and The Horn

Book Guide. It is published twice monthly September

through June and monthly in July and August.

The Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books (BCCB),

which had its start at the University of Chicago, is housed

at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science

at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and is

published monthly except August by the Johns Hopkins

University Press. Most of its reviews are written by edito-

rial staff and recent graduates or current employees of the

LIS School. Like Booklist and VOYA, BCCB also employs

a coding system for its reviews: “R” is for recommended,

“Ad” for additional books of acceptable quality; “M” for

marginal titles; “NR” is not recommended; “SpC” denotes

books best used in specialized collections; and “SpR”

for books having appeal only for “the unusual reader”

(Booklist boxes its reviews of such titles).

If they use no other symbol, all of the review journals

do at least identify works of unusual merit, usually with a

star, though BCCB uses an asterisk and Kirkus (see below)

used a pointer.

Until it ceased publication in December 2009, Kirkus

reviewed approximately 3,000 books for young readers per

461

REVIEWING CHILDREN’S AND YOUNG ADULT LITERATURE

year (and like Booklist it, too, published an adult books sec-

tion). Though regarded by some as being a trade journal like

PW, since it was widely read by booksellers and book job-

bers, Kirkus also counted many librarians among its readers.

Occasionally controversial, the magazine was regarded with

equal measures of respect and dread, since it was arguably

the only one of the major journals to feature notably nega-

tive reviews, sometimes, it seemed, gratuitously so (the Los

Angeles Times, in reporting its passing, called it “a captious

beast” [Daum, 2009]). Of course, its reviewers—many of

them freelancers—may have felt they had carte blanche to

take off the gloves, since Kirkus published only unsigned

reviews, an inherently controversial practice, though Pub-

lishers Weekly reviews are also unsigned.

Criticisms and Caveats

Editors and Authors. The issue of negative reviews has

long been a contentious one. Speaking on a panel of re-

viewers at the 1992 Allerton Park Institute, Betsy Hearne,

who was then Editor of BCCB, noted,

What I’d like to speak to is the lack of negative reviewing

in this ﬁ eld. Publishers are shocked when they read nega-

tive reviews of children’s books, partly because they’re not

used to it. I know that the publishers in the audience will

probably disagree with that, but compared to adult books,

which get slammed up, down, and sideways by somebody

from way out in left ﬁ eld who has no expertise in the subject

whatsoever, we are dealing very carefully and idealistically

with these books, giving them a lot of time and a lot of space.

(Sutton, 1993, p. 14)

As it happened, another speaker at the Institute was Doro-

thy Briley (1992), then Editor in Chief of Clarion Books,

who expressed particular concern about what she called

the “unfair negative review,” by which, she explained, she

meant “one with an agenda other than assessing a book on

its merits as literature” (p. 111). As an example, she of-

fered Paula Fox’s (1986) novel The Moonlight Man, which

features a girl whose father is an alcoholic and which one

reviewer criticized because “this book does not give accept-

able guidance to work on that problem” (Briley, 1992, p.

111). Such social criticism is not uncommon in professional

reviews that focus on the utility of a book, especially if it

is one of social realism. However, to people who believe

the focus should be on the literary aspects, such reviews

may recall the proscriptive attitude of Mrs. Trimmer vis-

à-vis Little Goody Two Shoes. Such attitudes are more

pronounced—and controversial—when they arise from

a reviewer’s concern with political correctness as was the

case with a second book Briley cited: Russell Freedman’s

(1992) An Indian Winter, a non ction book about the 19th-

century Swiss artist Karl Bodmer’s watercolor pictures of

Native Americans, painted during his 1833–34 expedition

to America with German Prince Maximilian. This led the

author of an otherwise favorable review to conclude with

the words, “though some may question the reliability of

two European dilettantes concerning a culture they visited

only brie y” (Briley, 1992, pp. 111–112).

It is not only editors and publishers who have been criti-

cal of professional reviews, however; authors have also long

had reservations. Writing in 1932, Howard Pease (1946),

the popular author of boys’ adventure books, expressed his

own reservations about agendas in reviewing:

Moreover in criticizing a book, we ﬁ nd it difﬁ cult not to

reveal our prejudices as well as our enthusiasms, and people

who know us well may rightly be skeptical of us on both of

these counts. Not many of us are as commendably candid as

the librarian who faced her colleagues to review a new book.

“I didn’t like this story at all,” she announced, “But then it’s

all about horses, and I never did like horses.” (pp. 96–97)

Instead of prejudice and/or enthusiasm, Pease called for

more criticism in reviews of children’s books. “We must

learn to examine the text itself,” he wrote, sounding a bit

like one of the New Critics, “and we must do so with less

timidity and more discernment” (p. 97).

To that end he advised reviewers to focus on seven ele-

ments: (a) Fictional forms (b) Story (c) Characterization

(d) Content, i.e., theme (e) Craftsmanship (f) Prose, i.e.,

style and (g) Response. Writing 25 years later, another

writer and—this time—occasional reviewer Selma G.

Lanes (1971) observed more succinctly, “That the librar-

ians’ journals provide unsatisfactory and inadequate

literary judgments of children’s books cannot be argued”

(p. 152).

Fifteen years after that, still another author, Avi (1986),

addressed the same perceived inadequacies, noting—in the

case of the review media—“standards for criticism are at

best vague” (p. 114). His particular censure, however, was

reserved for what he termed “the vastly disproportionate

percentage of space… given over to textual [i.e., plot]

summary. Too often the actual critique is squeezed into

one or two sentences” (p. 115). For Avi this practice was

rendered even more egregious by the very “brevity of our

reviews” (p. 115).

These remarks invited response and they got a practical

one from Roger Sutton (1986), who was then working as

a branch librarian for the Chicago Public Library. In his

article “Reviewing Avi,” Sutton suggested the aggrieved

author was con ating reviewing with literary criticism.

“The  rst is not entirely the second, which is what I think

you are really asking for.” Sutton further noted,

Review reading is utilitarian, part of the process of collec-

tion development. In addition to description and evalua-

tion there are other things I like to ﬁ nd in a review: price,

bibliographic data, suggested reading level…. While these

are extra-literary considerations, they further the goal of the

review, to tell librarians about the book. (p. 50)

Sutton would go on a decade later to become Editor of the

Horn Book, about which Lanes (1971) had earlier—and

rather grudgingly—allowed, “The more literary and per-

ceptively written reviews are to be found, on occasion, in

462

MICHAEL CART

Horn Book, the single independent journal totally devoted

to children’s books and their authors” (p. 153).

Perhaps an earlier editor of the Horn Book, Paul Heins

(1970), should, thus, be allowed the last word here. He

argued,

Reviewers do not sift for eternity; they are kept busy select-

ing the best or the most signiﬁ cant of the books available

during a given period of time…. A reviewer does not have

to be a prophet, but merely a sensitive reader who is able

to perceive the quality of a new book. If the reviewer is in

tune with literature, he may often make an uncanny judg-

ment that will be justiﬁ ed by time. (p. 87)

And Librarians. Speaking at the same Allerton Park

Institute as Hearne and Briley, Janice N. Harrington

(1993), then Head of Youth Services for the Champaign

(IL) Public Library, offered a working professional’s ap-

praisal of reviews. Starting with the assertion, “Librarians

want reviews to appear promptly, to be brief and to select

materials assertively,” she went on to explain, “They need

brevity, because professional librarians place value on their

time” (p. 31).

What else do librarians require from reviews? A number

of things, it would seem; among them Harrington listed:

bibliographical information, authority of the author and

publisher, audience, placing the book in context, illustra-

tions, and physical format. In amplifying this, she made

the clearest distinction thus far between the needs and

expectations of authors/editors on the one hand and librar-

ians on the other:

For contemporary librarians literary quality is not the sole

determinant of purchasing decisions, and often it is not even

the major determinant. Perhaps the most valuable part of the

review is the information that places the book in context….

Librarians are not just buying books; they are buying books

to serve readers. They need speciﬁ c information about how

the book might be used by readers and how it can be used

in their own work with children. (p. 31)

What criticisms of reviews do librarians have? Follow-

ing a survey of the literature and her own interviews with

children’s librarians from a variety of different libraries,

Harrington listed the following:

inadequate reviewing of foreign language books•

not enough reviews of new books about minority •

groups

scanty reviewing of books from new or alternative •

presses

too few reviews of books considered for their potential •

use by the visually handicapped

not enough identi cation of high-interest, low-reading •

level books

too few suggestions for and too little comment on use •

of books in the home

the time lag between the publication of books and the •

appearance of reviews

non- ction does not get reviewed as much as  ction. •

Several other less frequent criticisms might also be

mentioned:

reviewers seem out of touch with actual librarians and •

their needs

reviewers need to focus more on how the materials can •

be used (p. 33)

The Present and the (Arguable) Future

Though some of the above observations and criticisms were

made nearly 80 years ago, they are still being discussed

and hotly debated today. What has changed, however, is

the venue in which the dialectic is taking place; for over

the course of the last decade or so it has moved from the

library, classroom, and lecture hall to the Internet, where

it continues, now, on countless electronic discussion lists.

For example: a recent, fortnight-long (November 1–15,

2009) exchange among the usual suspects (librarians,

editors, publishers, and authors) took place at ccbc-net

(the listserv of the Cooperative Children’s Book Center

at the University of Wisconsin, Madison). And many of

the issues discussed and debated did, indeed, have a fa-

miliar ring: negative vs. positive reviews, the audience for

reviews, the (necessary?) brevity of professional reviews;

their lack of context; the elements of a good review, etc.

The two matters that excited the most spirited and

detailed discussion, however, were (a) the treatment

of historically marginalized peoples (especially Native

Americans) in books along with the related questions of

who is quali ed to write the books about Native peoples

and—more pertinent to this discussion – who is quali ed

to review those books? (b) The second—and somewhat

overlapping issue—regarded non ction or informational

books. Discussed here was the lack of review attention

given to such books (at a time when the form is newly

 ourishing), the quali cations of those who review them,

the failure to discuss the aesthetic merits of the form, and

the necessary haste with which deadline-driven reviews

must be written (Carter, 1992).

Surprisingly, another new electronic phenomenon

that is changing the world of book reviews—blogs (a

contraction of the term “web log”)—was little discussed.

Though as recently as  ve years ago, blogs about chil-

dren’s and young adult books were a rarity, the  eld has

since exploded, as a February 2010 search of the website

“Kidlitosphere Central” reveals a strapping total of well

over 300 active blogs on children’s and young adult lit-

erature. While many blogs don’t feature traditional book

reviews, the highly personal, (mostly) unedited, idiosyn-

cratic, sometimes controversial, sometimes ill-informed

commentary they do include is already changing the way

many people would de ne reviews (and reviewers).

This is, however, only one change the ascendant digital

culture is visiting on America’s book reviews. As print has

463

REVIEWING CHILDREN’S AND YOUNG ADULT LITERATURE

increasingly migrated from paper to digital form, many

long-established newspapers have folded while the sur-

vivors have dramatically curtailed staff and content to cut

production costs or created (as yet) unpro table versions

of the newspaper online. As a result, only one weekly book

review section survives in America, that of The New York

Times; all of the others have been discontinued, though in

some cases truncated versions survive online (see The Los

Angeles Times and The Washington Post, for example). A

new feature of all of the online newspaper book coverage

is at least one blog, none of which features reviews but,

instead, a potpourri of book chat, announcements, and

literary gossip.

Next to go under will surely be the various book review

magazines. Perhaps anticipating that, Booklist, School

Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, The Horn Book Maga-

zine, and BCCB have created online incarnations of them-

selves and have struggled to create online-only content,

much of which is presented in the form of—yes—blogs.

To be fair, more—if not all—of these blogs are written by

knowledgeable professionals. To cite only one example, au-

thor/editor Marc Aronson contributes “Non ction Matters”

to School Library Journal’s website. Whether or not any

of these magazines will survive in their traditional paper

format is anybody’s guess but to consider their prospects

is to be irresistibly reminded of the old Agatha Christie

(1939) mystery novel And Then There Were None.

In the meantime the major review sources have all li-

censed their reviews to the two major online bookstores,

amazon.com and bn.com (i.e., Barnes and Noble) for

reprint at their sites. This means that reviews originally

written for professional readers are now being read by the

general public, many of whom are visiting these commer-

cial websites in search of books to purchase. Since it is the

positive review that sparks sales, there is some concern

that these two behemoth sites may ultimately in uence

the nature and content of reviews.

Certainly, they have already introduced another phenom-

enon to the world of book reviewing: the self-posted reader

review. Just as anyone with a computer can start a blog, so

can anyone visit amazon.com or bn.com and post a review

of any book. It almost goes without saying that the quality

and reliability of these reviews varies wildly (since, like

blogs, they are largely unedited) and that many of them are

written by people who either haven’t read the book or are

friends of the author or, indeed, are the authors themselves,

posting pseudonymously. Meanwhile sites like Teenreads.

com and Kidsreads.com—both services of the Book Report

Network—offer more reliable online reviews of new and

forthcoming books for young readers (many of their reviews

being targeted at the young people themselves).

That said, the next major home for book “reviews”

is now predicted to be the various social networking

sites—both generic ones like Facebook and MySpace and

also more subject-speci c ones like goodreads.com and

librarything.com. But here, too, the problem remains one

of reliability. Consider that if you do a Google search for

the phrase “children’s and young adult book reviews,” you

will be overwhelmed with 22,100,000 hits. Learning how

to select from among this surfeit of…stuff and to evaluate

one’s  ndings is, clearly, becoming a fundamental part of

every nascent librarian’s education.

Writing the Book Review and Other

Concluding Remarks

And speaking of fundamentals: the avalanche of book

reviews and other book-related information on the Inter-

net suggests that the single most important aspect of the

book review today has to do with the credentials of the

reviewers themselves. And it’s important to note that aspir-

ing reviewers, instead of rushing to start a blog or begin

posting unedited reviews at unedited websites, would be

well-advised to practice the craft  rst while also estab-

lishing credentials. The simplest way to do this remains

becoming a volunteer reviewer for a magazine like School

Library Journal or VOYA.

Meanwhile the longstanding and often-criticized

problem with reviews—their brevity—may someday be

resolved by the burgeoning presence of blogs, which do

allow for more discursive discussion of individual books.

When these blogs are features of established, creditable

websites like booklistonline.com or publishersweekly.

com, this could represent a positive change. For the mo-

ment, however, most traditional professional reviews re-

main brief (seldom longer than 200 words, if that) and may

be getting briefer as production costs continue to escalate

as the number of books being published also soars. For the

reviewer, this means an endless exercise in economy and

self-discipline. In the world of traditional book reviewing,

less really is more—particularly now when so many books

are being published. Indeed, according to R. R. Bowker

(2009), the number of new juvenile (i.e., children’s and

YA) book titles and editions published in 2008 was nearly

30,000! For older librarians who remember when this total

was closer to 2,500, such a statistic is startling and begs

careful analysis. Nevertheless, there is no question that the

last  ve years have seen more books for young readers

published than ever before in U.S. history, and the growth

rate has been particularly steep in the young adult area.

Since this has come at a time when the resources of

traditional review journals have become increasingly

straitened, the process of selecting which books to review

has become ever more important and is, itself, a de facto

review. Once that  rst decision has been made, another

decision awaits: deciding which of the many categories

the book in hand will fall into. In her indispensable From

Cover to Cover: Evaluating and Reviewing Children’s

Books, K. T. Horning (1997) lists the following categories:

books of information; traditional literature (e.g., fables, folk

tales, myths, etc.); poetry, verse, rhymes and songs; picture

books; easy readers and transitional books, and  ction. To

464

MICHAEL CART

this list we must now add comics and graphic novels, one

of the most expansive areas of contemporary publishing

and one that demands special knowledge and skills on the

part of the reviewer (see Brenner, this volume).

Each book category requires a variety of different evalu-

ative skills and, happily, Horning’s book is an authoritative

source for beginners who need to develop these skills. The

differing skills required of their writers aside, it is widely

agreed that professional reviews do have some things in

common. One is the inclusion of essential bibliographic

information, since reviews remain, fundamentally, a guide

to selection and purchase. Included in the bibliographic

information will be the names of the author, the editor

(if an anthology or collection), the illustrator (if any), the

publisher, the place of publication (sometimes), the year of

publication, the number of pages, the price, and the ISBN

(International Standard Book Number). Also to be included

is the age range for which the book is deemed suitable. This

may be expressed in either age or grade range (and at this

point every observer of the  eld issues a caveat: don’t rely

on the range the publisher identi es on the jacket  ap or in

the book itself, simply because the publisher—anxious to

sell as many copies of the book as possible—will sometimes

unrealistically expand the “suitable” age range). This is

where the experience and expertise of the reviewer will be

called into play, though recommended age ranges for the

same book will still vary to a surprising degree.

As has been indicated, the review that follows the

bibliographic information will be a combination of plot

summary (with which the review typically begins), critical

analysis, and, in some cases, suggestions regarding the

uses of the title. All of the individual journals have their

own selection policies and style sheets that address these

issues, so there is no need to belabor them here.

One thing must be stressed, however: reviews should

always focus on the book in hand and not on the clever-

ness of the reviewer, especially if that is demonstrated at

the expense of the author. This is not to say that reviews

must be universally sober; many books—especially those

with humor—invite a lighthearted touch and many reviews

can bene t from an infusion of the style, tone, and spirit

of the book being reviewed. Sometimes this can be eas-

ily accomplished by quoting a signature line or passage

from the book. Sometimes it is a bit more complicated.

Here are several reviews I’ve written for Booklist that

demonstrate some of these—and other—points we have

been discussing.

Let’s start with a book for middle-age readers about a

British dog named Jack, who tells readers his story in his

own idiosyncratic voice, which I echo in my review.

I, Jack.

Finney, Patricia (author), Illustrated by Peter Bailey.

Feb. 2004. 192 p. HarperCollins, hardcover, $15.99 (0-06-

052207-0); library edition, $16.89 (0-06-052208-9).

Grades 3–6.

First published December 15, 2003 (Booklist).

Meet Jack. Hi, hi. Pant, pant. Wag, wag. May I smell….

Oh, sorry. Jack is a yellow Labrador retriever. He tells us

‘apedogs’ (excuse me, but that’s what he calls humans)

his story in his own words. Well, the three cats sharing his

den (house) help by adding acid commentary in footnotes.

A good thing, too, since Jack is very thick and sometimes

gets things wrong. But he is sweet. Very, very sweet. He

loves Petra, the girl dog next door. They have puppies, and

things get complicated. Jack and Petra run away. Jack’s pack

leader (owner) tries to ﬁ nd them. He has an accident, and

Jack gets to be a hero. Oh, wow. Happy dog. Happy read-

ers. Good, funny book. Show British author Finney much

respect. Tummy rubs all around.

Next is a review of a picture book that echoes the au-

thor/illustrator’s visual voice.

Roller Coaster.

Frazee, Marla (author).

May 2003. 32p. Harcourt, hardcover, $16 (0-15-204554-6).

PreS–Grade 2.

First published June 1, 2003 (Booklist).

A sinuous line of people stretches across two double-page

spreads. Everyone, child and adult alike, is waiting to ride the

roller coaster. Finally it’s time to get into the cars; 12 lucky

folks take their seats (a few people have already fallen out of

line). Then, seatbelts fastened, off they go, with the picture-

book audience brought up close to enjoy the ride. Around

and around and up and down, the cars zip and ﬂ y across a

series of double-page spreads. Frazee does an extraordinary

job of conveying motion by the placement of her images,

her use of white space, bright colors, and swooshing speed

lines. The color of the type changes to red when the ride

begins, returning to black when it ends, and the graphite

and watercolor art is so dynamic that it practically turns the

pages by itself. What will keep children coming back for

extra looks, however, is Franzee’s clever, dramatic depiction

of the 12 riders and their wildly and amusingly different

reactions to the stomach-churning experience—before, dur-

ing, and after. No words are necessary to convey that part

of the story; body language says it all. A rambunctious tour

de force from an abundantly gifted author-artist.

Reviews are serious business but there’s no reason they

shouldn’t be entertaining, as well as informative, though

this obviously requires considerable skill on the part of

the reviewer. And, just as obviously, serious books require

serious reviews, such as this novel featuring a transgender

protagonist.

Parrot sh.

Wittlinger, Ellen (author).

July 2007. 304p. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, $16.99

(1-4169-1622-9). Grades 9–12.

First published April 15, 2007 (Booklist).

Angela McNair is a boy! Oh, to the rest of the world she’s

obviously a girl. But the transgendered high-school junior

knows that she’s a boy. And so, bravely, Angela cuts her hair

short, buys boys’ clothing, and announces that his name is

now Grady and that he is beginning his true new life as a

boy. Of course, it’s not as simple as that; Grady encounters

465

REVIEWING CHILDREN’S AND YOUNG ADULT LITERATURE

an array of reactions ranging from outright hostility to lov-

ing support. To her credit, Wittlinger has managed to avoid

the operatic (no blood is shed, no lives are threatened) but

some readers may wonder if—in so doing—she has made

things a bit too easy for Grady. His initially bewildered

family rallies around him; he ﬁ nds a champion in a female

gym teacher; he loses but then regains a best friend while

falling in love with a beautiful, mixed-race girl. Wittlinger,

who is exploring new, potentially off-putting ground here

(only Julie Anne Peters’ Luna, 2004, has dealt with this

subject before in such detail), manages to create a story

sufﬁ ciently nonthreatening to appeal to—and enlighten—a

broad range of readers, including those at the lower end of

the YA spectrum. She has also done a superb job of untan-

gling the complexities of gender identity and showing the

person behind labels like “gender dysphoria.” Grady turns

out to be a very normal boy who, like every teen, must deal

with vexing issues of self-identity. To his credit, he does this

with courage and grace, managing to discover not only the

“him” in self but, also, the “my.”

The experienced reviewer will know when to employ hu-

mor and when to hold it in reserve. And experience will

also prove that writing a review is an art, just as writing a

book is. Developing artful review writing skills requires a

combination of writing experience and wide reading (and

re-reading)—not only of books but also of book reviews.

And like all writing that of reviews inevitably requires re-

writing and revising, sometimes of the intensive sort. This

is never truer than when one is dealing with a potentially

controversial book, as demonstrated by this review of a

non- ction title for high school age readers.

Does Illegal Immigration Harm Society?

Barbour, Scott (author).

Oct. 2009. 104p. illus. ReferencePoint, library edition, $25.95

(9781601520852). Grades 8–12. 364.1.

First published October 1, 2009 (Booklist).

This title in the In Controversy series examines the vexing

issue of illegal immigration. Barbour starts with context—an

overview of nineteenth and early 20th-century legislative

attempts at regulating immigration—and then examines a

clutch of contentious issues surrounding the current impact

of illegal immigration upon America’s economy, culture,

crime, and national security. His strategy is to offer the

sometimes inﬂ ated, sometimes reasonable views of advo-

cates from both sides of the issue(s). The result is generally

balanced, though his coverage of crime and terrorism does

seem skewed in the conservative direction (could it be the

quote Barbour includes from the magazine New American

without informing readers it’s published by The John Birch

Society?). One also wonders why, of the ﬁ ve Web sites listed

in the appended “For Further Research” section, three are

conservative and two libertarian. To be fair, the unbiased Pew

Hispanic Center is often cited and readers are also referred to

such immigration-friendly sources as La Raza and the Mexi-

can American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Yes, a

controversial issue—and perhaps a controversial book.

No matter how much the  eld of children’s and young

adult books changes, one thing will surely remain con-

stant: the essential importance of reviews—essential not

only to insure that good books never go overlooked but,

in a larger sense, also to insure that by identifying and

analyzing excellence in books for young readers, reviews

and reviewers will stimulate young people to read better

books and publishers to issue more works of enduring

quality.

In his essay “The Reviewing of Children’s Books” the

British reviewer and critic John Rowe Townsend (1981) ob-

serves, “There is not a great deal of informed comment on

the reviewing of children’s books; we could do with more”

(p. 186). To which anyone embarked upon research into this

art (or is it a craft?) can only say, “Hear, hear!” There is,

as students will quickly learn, a great deal of critical work

extant about children’s literature and,  nally, an emerging

body of critical work about young adult literature, too. But,

these nearly 30 years after Townsend wrote his essay, his

observation about reviewing remains largely unchanged,

even though, as I have tried to evidence in the chapter

above, the  eld itself has been visited by well-nigh seismic

changes. One hopes the challenge of these changes might

stimulate a larger body of “informed comment” about this

essential subject, for it remains sorely wanting.

Literature References

Andersen, H. C. (1866/1840). What the moon saw, and other tales

(H. W. Dulcken, Trans.). London, UK: George Routledge and

Sons.

Barbour, S. (2009). Does illegal immigration harm society? San

Diego, CA: Reference Point.

Carroll, L. (1865). Alice’s adventures in wonderland. London, UK:

Macmillan.

Christie, A. (1939). And then there were none. New York, NY:

Pocket Books.

Finney, P. (2003). I, Jack. New York, NY: HarperCollins.

Fox, P. (1984). One-eyed cat. New York, NY: Bradbury.

Fox, P. (1986). The moonlight man. New York, NY: Bradbury.

Fox, V. (1984). Women astronauts. New York, NY: Messner.

Frazee, M. (2003). Roller coaster. San Diego, CA: Harcourt.

Hinton, S. E. (1967). The outsiders. New York, NY: Viking.

History of Little Goody Two Shoes. (1766). London, UK: John

Newbery.

Lipsyte, R. (1967). The contender. New York, NY: Harper & Row.

Mother Bunch’s fairy tales. (1773). London, UK: Francis

Newbery.

Trimmer, S. (1818). History of the robins. London, UK: N. Hailes,

Juvenile Library.

Wittlinger, E. (2007). Parrotfish. New York, NY: Simon &

Schuster.

Academic References

Avi. (1986). Review the reviewers? School Library Journal, 32(3),

114–115.

Bator, R. (1983). Signposts to criticism of children’s literature.

Chicago, IL: American Library Association.

Becker, M. L. (1936). First adventures in reading. Introducing

children to books. New York, NY: Frederick A. Stokes Co.

Beckson, K., & Ganz, A. (1989). Literary terms: A dictionary (3rd

ed.). New York, NY: The Noonday Press.

Bowker, R. R. (2009). New book titles and editions, 2002–2008.

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MICHAEL CART

Retrieved February 18, 2010, from http://www.bowker.com/

bookwire/IndustryStats2009.pdf

Carpenter, H., & Prichard, M. (1984). The Oxford companion to

children’s literature. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Cart, M. (2003). Review of the book Roller coaster, by M. Frazee.

Booklist, 99(19), 1768.

Cart, M. (2003). Review of the book I, Jack, by P. Finney. Booklist,

100(8), 750.

Cart, M. (2007). Review of the book Parrot sh, by E. Wittlinger.

Booklist, 103(16), 40.

Cart, M. (2009). Review of the book Does illegal immigration harm

society? by S. Barbour. Booklist, 106(3), 58.

Carter, B. (1992). Reviewing non ction books for children and

young adults: Stance, scholarship, and structure. In B. Hearne

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(pp. 59–71). Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois.

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1–3, 16–26. In V. Haviland (Ed.). (1973). Children and literature:

Views and reviews (pp. 8–18). New York, NY: Lothrop, Lee &

Shepard.

Darling, R. L. (1968). The rise of children’s book reviewing in

America. New York, NY: R. R. Bowker.

Daum, M. (2009). Kirkus Reviews may have been annoying, but its

successors are inane. Retrieved February 18, 2010, from http://

www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-daum17-

2009dec17,0,2074255.column

Eaton, A. T. (1940). Reading with children. New York, NY: The

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people, 1, 123. In V. Haviland (Ed.), . Children and literature:

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news.uchicago.edu/releases/02/020614.sutherland.shtml

Harrington, J. N. (1993). Children’s librarians, reviews, and

collection development. In B. Hearne & R. Sutton (Eds.),

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Champaign: University of Illinois.

Haviland, V. (1973). Children and literature: Views and reviews.

New York, NY: Lothrop, Lee & Shepard.

Heins, P. (1970/1977). Out on a limb with the critics. In P. Heins

(Ed.), Crosscurrents of criticism. Horn Book essays, 1968–1977

(pp. 72–81). Boston, MA: The Horn Book.

Heins, P. (Ed.). (1977). Crosscurrents of criticism. Horn Book essays

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Jenkins, C. A. (1999). Practices and precepts. The Horn Book

Magazine, 75(5), 547–558.

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Lanes, S. G. (1971). Down the rabbit hole. New York, NY:

Atheneum.

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1947–1962 (pp. 65–66). Boston, MA: The Horn Book.

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H. Doran.

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Awards in Literature for Children and Adolescents

Junko Yokota

National Louis University

A book passes through many hands along its journey to young readers, traveling from author and/or illustrator

to editor and from there to designer, publisher, distributor, and booksellers. As described by Michael Cart, the

completed book then goes through further evaluation by reviewers, which occurs in the months immediately

before and after a book’s publication date. Following publication, the book may again be evaluated as it is

considered for book awards. Such awards re ect both the excellence of particular titles and the maturity and

success of the larger  eld of children’s and young adult literature. In this chapter, book award committee veteran

Junko Yokota examines the research related to book awards for what it tells about award processes, what the

research may or may not reveal, and raises issues related to awards that remain to be examined.

Awards…the word alone conjures images of banners

waving, and celebrations that results in medals, gold stars,

and shiny seals on covers of books, announcing their

importance to the world.

In recent years, book awards have proliferated, and

every year increasing numbers of gold and silver seals are

in evidence on the covers of children’s and young adult

books. Certainly book awards are a meaningful tribute to

excellence in writing and illustration, but what precisely

do they mean? Children are often required to read award-

winning literature in school, adults often view award

winners as credentials determining worth, publishers see

them as moneymakers, and authors and illustrators bask

in the recognition.

Awards engender considerable discussion, debate, and

written text, both before and after winners are declared,

especially in this age of blogging and listservs. Yet with

all that has been talked about and written about, what

constitutes research in the area of awards in literature

for children and adolescents? In this chapter, I review

the research and the issues surrounding awards, and

draw considerably on my own experiences of the past 15

years, having served on award committees of 12 different

types, some more than once. Through those experiences,

I learned many things about how books are considered,

debated, and  nally selected as award winners, and about

the implications of such decisions.

My participation stemmed from volunteering for some

committees to being appointed by the organization’s

president for others, to being nominated and elected by the

organization as a whole. The purposes, the processes, the

books, the outcomes of these committees were so varied

467

468

JUNKO YOKOTA

that the experiences are comparable only in the sense that

their end result was an award of some type. In particular,

the fact is that the award committees I served on span

a range of organizations, each representing a different

segment of the three  elds focused on in this handbook

in which literature for children and young adults serves

related but varied purposes. Each  eld sees literature

through a different lens, and throughout this chapter I

consider those lenses in examining and analyzing the

various experiences in order to make recommendations

for needed research. Within the section on perspectives

on research related to award-winning literature, I delve

more deeply into my own experiences and consider their

implications for future research.

There are a number of aspects related to awards in

literature for children and adolescents that scholars have

examined to date, and others that are worthy of study. This

chapter examines three: (a) a brief history, description, and

process of awarding literature; (b) perspectives on research

related to award-winning literature; and (c) researchable

issues that may offer considerably more insight into the

signi cance of awards in children’s literature.

Part 1: A Brief History and Description

of Selected Major Awards

History

The oldest award in literature for children in the English-

language world is the John Newbery Medal, established in

1921 at a conference of the American Library Association

(ALA) at which publisher Frederick Melcher gave a talk

to a group of children’s librarians and, in analyzing the

response he received, realized that these 300 to 400 people

had enormous ability to impact children through their

encouragement of the joy of reading. But beyond that, he

wanted to go further and elicit librarian interest in the en-

tire process by which books are created for children—how

they are produced and brought to children. Although this

period in the early 20th century was at a time in the United

States when librarians as a group were small in numbers,

it was clear to Melcher why he wanted them to be the ones

to select the award winners: they worked across many age

levels of children (Barker, 1996). The British Library As-

sociation established the Carnegie Medal in 1937. Like

the Newbery, it sought to improve the literary standards

of books for children. And like those in the United States,

British librarians were also rare and not considered to be

at the forefront of literary innovation. Unlike the Newbery,

the Carnegie explicitly states a book’s universal appeal as

a criterion for the award.

In 1938, the American Library Association established

an award for illustration as the Randolph Caldecott Award;

in 1955 the British Library Association established the

Kate Greenaway Medal for illustration. Both are named

in honor of famous Victorian artists. Interestingly, Barker

(1996) concluded that the awards for illustration are less

controversial than the debates over the winners and honor

books of the awards for writing. He describes this as cu-

rious, as if artistic achievement required less intellectual

acumen than imaginary writing. He speculates that perhaps

it is due to the lack of con dence in artistic evaluation that

librarians feel they possess as compared to their con dence

in literary judgment, and that much is based on personal

reaction to the artistic style of the illustrator.

Considered the most prestigious international award

for children’s literature, the Hans Christian Andersen

Award was established by the International Board on

Books for Young People (IBBY) in 1956 for writing, and

in 1966 for illustration. It is given on a biannual basis to

an author and an illustrator, not for a particular book but

for the accumulated body of work created by that person

that contributes to children’s literature.

Donovan (1986) described how the 1960s was a time

of growth in public library services to children and young

adults, as well as a time of tremendous expansion of school

libraries. He credited part of this growth to the U.S. federal

government funding and commitment to materials for

children. The desire for librarians to have shopping lists

of award winning books perhaps was in uential in the

development of the series, Awards & Prizes, published

biennially from 1969 to 1981, and subsequently every  ve

years in 1986, 1992, 1996. Since then, with the excep-

tion of one print version in 2005, it has become an online

subscription, listing 322 awards, referencing 8128 books,

and 6489 authors and illustrators on the Children’s Book

Council’s web site.

Since the 1960s, a notable trend in awards for chil-

dren’s and young adult literature in the United States has

been the establishment of awards that speci cally feature

particular ethnic groups. The oldest of these, the Coretta

Scott King Award, was begun in 1970 and is presented

annually to an African American author and an African

American illustrator (since 1979) for an “outstandingly

inspirational and educational” book. More recently, awards

have been added to honor the “Latino/Latina writer and il-

lustrator whose work best portrays, af rms, and celebrates

the Latino cultural experience in an outstanding work of

literature” (the Pura Belpré Medal, 1996), “to promote

Asian/Paci c American culture and heritage, based on

literary and artistic merit” (Asian/Paci c American Awards

for Literature, 2001), and “to identify and honor the best

writing and illustration by and about American Indians”

(American Indian Youth Literature Award, 2006).

Another recent notable trend has been the sheer prolif-

eration of awards. In addition to the previously described

ethnicity-based awards, over the past two decades at the

national level in the United States, book awards have been

initiated for speci c genres. For example, the American

Library Association has initiated awards such as the

Theodore Seuss Geisel Award (for the author of the most

distinguished American book for beginning readers) and

the Robert F. Sibert Informational Book Medal (for the

469

AWARDS IN LITERATURE FOR CHILDREN AND ADOLESCENTS

author and illustrator of the most distinguished informa-

tional book). The National Council of Teachers of Eng-

lish established the Orbis Pictus Award for Outstanding

Non ction for Children.

Types of Awards

As can be discerned from this discussion, awards that exist

related to children’s and young adult books cover a great

range of territory. The following outline is provided to

give a more complete sense of the different features that

characterize the current landscape of children’s and young

adult book awards:

I. Purpose:

1. Awards bestowed based on popularity

a. State Book Awards

b. Children’s Choices lists by organizations

2. Awards bestowed on the basis of quality

a. Text

b. Illustration

c. Translation

d. Author or illustrator’s lifetime body of work

3. Awards bestowed on the basis of speci c content

goals

a. School subject area: Science, Social Studies,

Math, Language Arts, etc.

b. Peace and social justice

c. Contests—with the award winner getting pub-

lished

II. Range of impact:

1. Local awards

2. State awards

3. National awards

4. International awards

5. Special Interest / Needs Population

III. Outcome of award selection process:

1. A collection or list of books

2. A single book (may or may not include runner-up

“honor books”)

Award Process

The other dimension of importance in this discussion of the

nature of book awards is the process by which award win-

ners are arrived at. There is a range of ways that different

awards consider, nominate, short-list, and eliminate books.

In some cases, all books in a particular time period can

be considered by the committee, and committee members

are responsible for seeking and selecting eligible books.

Other committees only consider books that have  rst been

nominated, vetted, and accepted by a steering committee.

In still other cases, the books eligible for consideration by

the award committee is a limited short-list that is publicly

announced prior to the  nal discussion.

One path toward an award is that used by the ALA for

the Newbery and Caldecott winners: a particular group of

people (for these awards, 15 people) choose a particular

book at that particular time. This means that a different

group of equally quali ed people may have made a different

decision. After all, award decisions are made by a group-

consensus process and human factors and relations enter

into such situations. This is an important point to keep in

mind when considering the decision as one that is relative

to the circumstances, process, and participants and cannot

be considered a de nitive and absolute measure of quality.

Although this chapter is on research in awards in literature

for children and adolescents, what people often want to

know is, “What is it like to serve on these award commit-

tees?” The answer to this question actually does help to

frame the consideration of research by examining what

people do in the process of making decisions about book

awards. I begin with a personal perspective based on my

experiences on the various award committees on which I

have served. The limitation of this self-re ection for analyz-

ing award processes is that in some cases many years have

passed since my actual service on the committee and in

other cases the processes have changed somewhat, largely

due to developments in digital forms of communication and

the resulting possibilities for committee members’ virtual

engagement. What I describe is based on the experiences of

the times on which I served on the various committees.

The International Reading Association’s Children’s

Literature Special Interest Group annually names a set

of books to the Notable Books for a Global Society. The

National Council of Teachers of English annually names

books to the list of Notable Books for Language Arts.

The United States Board on Books for Young People an-

nually names a list of Outstanding International Books

for Children. All three are selected through a somewhat

similar process of having publishers send eligible books

to committee members who have been appointed by the

sponsoring organization’s leadership. In a sense, the pub-

lishers are “nominating” books for the list. Each committee

member reads, studies, and considers the books that have

been sent, and rates them according to the criteria. Then,

committee members nominate titles for the  nal discussion

list of the highest-rated books. Committee members meet

at length to discuss, debate, and determine the  nal slate of

winning books. Some committees meet face-to-face over

an entire day (or two), while others meet in a multi-hour

teleconference. After the discussion, each member votes

on the speci c books that make up the  nal list of 25 to 35

titles. Because the end product is a group of books rather

than a single title, there is less of a sense of high-stakes

singular decision for these awards. Rather, one considers

the goals of the award (which often re ect the purpose of

the organization sponsoring the award), as well as how the

set of winning books would look as a balanced whole.

The ALA Association of Library Service to Children’s

committees such as the Newbery or Caldecott have an

elaborate and secretive consensus-building process. Much

like other committees, members read throughout a year,

and nominate books for  nal discussion; but the face-to-

470

JUNKO YOKOTA

face meetings are over a period of several days, and the

balloting process is a complex formula that re ects the

goal of consensus building (a procedural handbook is

available online from the Association of Library Service

to Children on ALA’s website). The intensity of discussion

among people who have all read the same set of books

makes for lively debate. However, all details regarding the

discussions are kept con dential forever. Although only

one book is named the winner, honor books can also be

named. That group of books (winner and honor books) is

considered the winning set for that year’s award.

Serving on the Hans Christian Andersen Award Jury

was a very different experience for many reasons. First,

it is a lifetime achievement award for the body of work

created by an illustrator or an author, and each member

nation of the International Board on Books for Young

People may nominate candidates. Second, because it is

an international process as well as an international rec-

ognition, jury members are from countries all around the

world. Although the language of of cial communication

is English, jury materials and books are submitted in many

different languages.

What participation on all award committees have in

common is that the initial reading is a fairly solitary act,

and note-taking methods and the assessment process

is somewhat individualized, although examples and

recommendations are often shared by previous commit-

tee members. Some committee members prefer to take

lengthy, narrative notes that capture nuances of response

in journal format, some take very speci c and analytical

notes directly in books or use post-its to mark passages

they are reading, some create forms outlining the criteria

with space for remarks, and some create databases with

coded notations. I put my data in digitized format because,

for me, having searchable  les that can be sorted instantly

is an important part of how I locate, access, and retrieve

information on books that I read. I often assign numerical

values and develop coding systems according to the criteria

for the award. My notes are brief, but have key words and

thoughts that help me remember important points. Others

argue that cryptic coding doesn’t capture the richness of

deep response that should be recalled during discussions.

I also need to physically see and move the books around,

designating spaces to place the categorized and sorted

books by my on-going analysis.

Over the past three years, a signi cant portion of my

award committee work (Hans Christian Andersen, Jane

Addams Book Awards) has taken place in online com-

munities. Whereas in earlier years, the transition to the

digital communication age entailed moving from sending

nominations by postal service to using email, this more

recent step has made enormous movement in creating a

pathway to instant and constant communication. There

are blogs created for the committee that are password pro-

tected, and with comments posted by committee members

and organized by nominees (whether they are people for

lifetime awards or individual books). This online sharing

of information and responses has radically changed the

ef ciency of award committee work. And certainly, it has

changed how conversations about nominees take place.

What has yet to be researched is in what ways electronic

communication has had (or not had) impact on the out-

come of the award winners.

Although some believe that it is the  nal product of

books as award winners that is critically important as a

means of identifying what gets selected by librarians and

teachers to be purchased and read, others believe that it

is the process of selecting books for awards that is an im-

portant lesson by which those on a committee learn more

about how to critique when evaluating books. Establishing

opportunities to practice applying criteria even by those

not on the committee is considered a statement of belief

about quality for that given award. Participating in vari-

ous Mock Newbery and Mock Caldecott meetings is an

important way to learn about the process. How are the

various criteria met, and with what enthusiasm? How are

“fatal  aws” discovered, discussed, and given credence?

How do some books rise to the level of being named as

an award winner?

Part 2: Perspectives on Research on Awards

in Literature

This volume was developed on the premise that there exist

three primary perspectives on research in children’s and

young adult literature (literary, library and information sci-

ences, and educational) and that these perspectives provide

different insights that can pro tably complement each

other (Coats, K., Enciso, P., Jenkins, C. A., Trites, R. S., &

Wolf, S., 2008). So it is also with the topic of research on

awards. Scholars from Literature, Education, and Library

and Information Sciences have all studied award winning

books and, to some degree, the awards/award processes

themselves. To an extent, the topics researched vary across

perspectives, but in other cases they overlap.

Interestingly, when considering the research on award-

winning books, the criteria by which awards are studied

often involves factors outside the range of the award’s

stated purpose. Therefore, these studies are really not

research about awards, but rather, research on topics such

as representation or portrayals of gender, ethnicity, fami-

lies, etc. in ways that only use the award-winning book

as the set of books studied, rather than the reason for the

study. This can be a bene cial way to winnow down the

enormous number of possible books to study and select

a de ned set of books that are recognized for their ex-

cellence. The high pro le of award-winning books also

increases the likelihood of recognition, thereby possibly

deepening the understanding of the analysis by consumers

of the research.

Examination of dissertations studies in the last couple

of decades in Dissertation Abstracts International reveals

471

AWARDS IN LITERATURE FOR CHILDREN AND ADOLESCENTS

that award-winning books were analyzed for their por-

trayal of gender, character traits depicted, race relations,

themes, social class depiction, gender equity, gender rep-

resentation, portrayal of ethnicity, age, etc. Some study

such features as genres that are most popular for certain

awards, or settings most predominant in award-winning

literature. For example, Parravano (1999) wrote that

Newbery winning books tended to portray white, male

boys overcoming obstacles. She also found that historical

 ction is highly favored. Both  ndings are intriguing as

analysis of award-winning books, but they do not represent

research on the award-giving itself. What these kinds of

studies have in common is that they all base their study

of award-winners ex post facto, or after the fact of the

winning books being named.

When researchers decide on the question they ask about

award-winning books, do they  rst consider the criteria

by which books were selected for the award? Although it

seems a logical step, seldom is there any evidence of analy-

sis in terms of assessing whether books  t/didn’t  t the

criteria as well as other books. Instead, when researchers

consider the sociological impact or the emotional impact

of award-winning books, what they study is a completely

different reason for selecting the set of books than the

angle by which they were selected for the award.

Across all of the disciplinary perspectives that conduct

research, studies on awards in literature for children and

adolescents have largely focused on content analyses of

award winners rather than on the awards themselves (e.g.,

the processes involved in the awards or the social, reader-

ship, or publishing impact of the award).

Perhaps one of the most comprehensive published stud-

ies examining a body of award-winning books is Lyn Ellen

Lacy’s (1986) Art and Design in Children’s Picture Books,

in which she analyzed Caldecott Award winning books

from 1938 to 1986, considering the artistic and design

elements of line, color, light/dark, shape, and space and

how they added up together for the overall visual literacy.

After developing an analytical framework, she tested it out

with children to make sure that they, too, could grasp those

concepts in order to further their understanding.

Preference studies also dominate this  eld. For ex-

ample, Flowers (1978) study, “Pupil Preference for Art

Media Used in Illustrations of Caldecott Winning Books,”

showed that  rst and second graders had a positive and

predominant interest in woodcut illustrations. But what

becomes of such studies? Do illustrators then go about cre-

ating more woodcut illustrations? Do art directors solicit

illustrators who are adept at woodcut technique? This is

another example of research with award-winning books as

the set of books studied, but for which the research study

itself was not focused on award-winning at all.

Other types of studies in the  eld of Library and Infor-

mation Sciences often focus on the statistical analysis of

award winners, e.g., impact of award winners on circula-

tion, relation of award winners to popularity, what types of

books are winning awards, etc. For many years, The Coop-

erative Children’s Book Center (CCBC) at the University

of Wisconsin has maintained statistics on approximately

how many books for children and teens are published each

year in the U.S., and how many of those books are by and/

or about people of color. These  gures, plus comments on

the publishing trends they might represent, are included in

the CCBC’s annual publication, CCBC Choices. Because

the librarian  eld is responsible for the oldest and most

highly regarded awards and because the membership is

involved in the awarding processes, there is a sense of

“ownership” of the awards, and many write re ectively

about their own experiences in the process. Some write

anecdotal journal-like entries that capture the experience

of having been involved in the process (Fiore, 1995; Mc-

Neil, 2005). Others write essays that provide information,

instruction, and criticism regarding the criteria and selec-

tion process for book award committees (Banta, 2004;

Erbach, 2008). Although these pieces inform readers about

the book award process, they are considered “essays” or

“critiques” rather than research.

The work on content analyses of award winners emanat-

ing from Literature Departments tends to be analysis of the

classic canon of children’s literature, and award winning

seems to  gure as an identi er of a book rather than as

the purpose of the research. The literary analyses applied

to these older books may not take into consideration the

societal and political changes between the time in which

the award was given and the time of the analysis. Studies

in this area tend to be in such areas as literary elements

as developed in award-winning books or comparisons of

portrayals in award-winning books across the years.

In the  eld of Education, the research focuses in large

part on the readers themselves, utilizing aspects of reader

response to study the ways in which an award-winning

book may (or may not) elicit different types of responses

from child or teen readers. The award-winning status

of books is more a descriptor than a selection factor for

research in this area. For example, in Enciso’s (1994)

research on Spinelli’s (1990) Maniac Magee, the book

seems to have been chosen for speci c criteria as a peda-

gogical tool. The book’s Newbery status is signi cant to

this research because of the widespread use of Newbery

winners in classrooms, but its Newbery status per se is not

the reason or the focus of the research.

Likewise, Ladson-Billings’ (2003) research used

the same book to examine teacher talk and question-

ing strategies. The fact that their research focused on

children reading a Newbery-Award winning book was

not a signi cant factor to their research or their  ndings.

Sipe’s (2008) study of response to literature often features

award-winning books as core material that children read

and to which they respond. For example, Sipe’s research on

postmodern picture books features David Wiesner’s (2001)

Caldecott winner, The Three Pigs. Again, the reason for

the selection is not the award-winning aspect but rather,

472

JUNKO YOKOTA

the ways in which this book  lls the criteria for a central

aspect of research on the “postmodern picture book.” It

is interesting to note that the fact that many of the books

featured in studies of reader response are award-winners

is rarely mentioned in these studies.

Another type of research in the  eld of Education

focuses on features that are considered important to the

teaching of reading. Chamberlain and Leal (1999) ex-

amined the readability level of Caldecott winning books

because of their belief that while teachers sought beauti-

fully illustrated books, they also needed those books that

allowed students “comfortable readability levels.” Clearly,

their study was pedagogically driven, but “readability”

is not included in the determining the Caldecott Award

winner as “the most distinguished American picture book

for children.” Also, as with all readability formulas, the

use of the Fry (1977) readability formula is limited to

uniformly and objectively measurable features such as

sentence length and number of syllables within a passage.

On the one hand, the mechanics of such measures are not

particularly relevant to determining an award to the illus-

trator of the year’s most distinguished picture book. On

the other hand, one can understand this reasoning from a

pedagogical point of view to the researchers and teachers

who seek such information.

Chamberlain and Leal’s (1999) study also evaluated

the Caldecott books for cultural focus in order to meet

the needs of diversity in education; again, this is of no

consideration when awarding a Caldecott Medal. This type

of research can be valuable for a number of pedagogical

reasons, but they rely on a surface level of content analysis

and do not provide much insight for the study of award-

winning children’s literature.

In the  eld of educational publishing, considerable at-

tention is given to books that are award-winners, perhaps

to give credibility to the pedagogical product created

with award-winning books as the basis. Publishers rely

heavily on award-winners when selecting the material to

be included in reading series and for curriculum support,

appreciate the scrutiny given to books that win awards,

and value the attention that awards give to books. There is

much in-house research done by publishing companies on

what awards have been won by the literature they select

for reading texts, but because such research is conducted

speci cally for development and marketing of a single

publisher’s materials, the results are not found outside

the publishing company’s internal or marketing papers.

Some of this information may be gleaned through an ex-

amination of the teacher’s guides to reading curriculum

materials used in schools.

Finally, there is also a body of research conducted

from an historical perspective on award winners. Leonard

Marcus’s (1998, 2008) work is a prime example. He has

studied various aspects of the history of children’s litera-

ture, and discusses the impact of awards on books, trends,

themes, etc. but within the context of the larger picture of

the history of children’s literature, including the people

who played prominent roles within the development of

children’s literature, and the various sociopolitical and

cultural factors that were signi cant to the development

of children’s publishing. Kidd (2007) also provides a

historical overview of “prizing” in children’s literature,

the changes over time, and contexts in which prize-giving

has evolved. Other studies of a narrower span of years also

offer a historical perspective on book awards. For example,

Jenkins’ (1996) study examined the con ict between

librarians and educators regarding children’s reading

as they played out in an ongoing debate over Newbery

Award criteria in the years immediately before and dur-

ing World War II. Do such historical studies of children’s

book awards have an impact on the  eld today? Have such

studies in uenced award process changes over time?

Part 3: Researchable Issues Related

to Children’s Literature Awards

One conclusion from this review of the research literature

is how little actual research has been published related

to the winning of awards in the  elds of children’s and

young adult literature. There have been various analyses

of award-winning literature but little attention given to the

awards themselves. In this section I highlight and address

a number of key issues and questions that could pro tably

be examined in future research on awards in literature for

young readers. I have organized this discussion around

what I see as the key issues and research questions that

could add a great deal of valuable data and insights to our

understanding of awards and children’s literature.

Issue: What does it mean to have won an award? What

is the impact of awards on what is getting published,

noticed, sold, and read?

K. T. Horning (1997) notes the practical signi cance of

awards when she says, “Awards always make a huge dif-

ference because they bring people’s attention to particular

books, no matter what the award is for” (p. x). What

does this mean to the children who read the books? The

librarians who select them and make them available?

The teachers who choose to teach through those books,

therefore making them what all students are required to

read? The parents who buy them as gifts? The impact of

award winning is surely different for creators than it is

for consumers.

What impact do awards have on authors, illustrators, and

the publishers who create the books? Through conversations

and in their talks, authors and illustrators often say that

winning an award means their next book is more likely to

be seriously considered for publication. Others indicate that

winning a major award frees them to try something new—

to reconsider their work. The increased name recognition

and the assured income from the award winning book sales

gives them  nancial support as well as publisher support

473

AWARDS IN LITERATURE FOR CHILDREN AND ADOLESCENTS

in taking some risk to try something different. Winning an

award means having a book that may be more likely to stay

in print longer. As Donovan (1991) noted, a book that wins

a Caldecott Medal can experience a substantial increase in

sales and thus remain in print for a very long time. A Cal-

decott Award can boost book sales by as many as 60,000

additional copies. Other authors and publishers might also

look to award-winning books as guides for their future

works (Weitzman, 1972). Of course, the level of prestige

of the award determines its impact. Publishers consider

ALA’s awards to be the most important in terms of impact-

ing sales. The news media do as well, demonstrated in the

yearly appearance of winners of the Newbery, Caldecott

and the Coretta Scott King Awards on The Today Show the

morning after the awards are announced.

However, Bill Morris, long-time children’s book mar-

keting director for HarperCollins publishing company, was

known to have said that it was better for a Harper book

to be named to the Texas Bluebonnet children’s choice

list than to win a Newbery or Caldecott. For publishers,

winning a Newbery or Caldecott award means hosting

dinners, sending author and illustrators on book tours

and speaking appearances, and other events at publisher

expense. For state awards like the Bluebonnet, children

choose the winner from a predetermined list of titles, and

librarians purchase multiple copies of each title for chil-

dren to read and vote on. Sales of the winning title might

or might not increase signi cantly, but all books on the

list were already winners from the publisher’s perspective

in terms of sales.

What does winning an award mean on a global level?

How do books get attention for international publication

and translation? At the annual Bologna Children’s Book

Fair, the largest of its kind in the world, or at the Frank-

furt Book Fair, or other places where international rights

are bought and sold, books that have won awards in their

home countries do get attention (although the enormous

impact of mass media popularity cannot be overlooked).

An award gives the book a distinguished pedigree. Passing

the test of this scrutiny means that the book is worthy of

international publication possibilities.

Issue: What impact do awards for excellence and

ethnicity have on children’s book selection?

Horning (1997) noted the value of multicultural awards in

helping scholars and teachers get perspectives from cul-

tural insiders as to what constitutes quality and is culturally

authentic in multicultural literature. Some, like editor and

author Marc Aronson (2001) argue that we should change

the ethnic heritage criteria of ethnic-focused awards (i.e.,

Coretta Scott King, Pura Belpré) because we have come to

an era in which the winners of major awards (i.e., Newbery,

Caldecott, Printz) have included people of historically un-

derrepresented groups. But Andrea Davis Pinkney (2001)

and others continue to see the need, contending that such

awards are meant to inspire and lift up the hopes of the

children who need to see “one of their own” as winners;

that it is more than the recognition of a book for its merit

as a creation alone, but a need to recognize the ethnicity

of the creator. One consideration of their debate is to as-

sess whether the purpose of such awards is to honor the

book, the person who created the book, or to point to a

culturally-vetted list of books that are of high quality from

a cultural insider perspective. The Newbery and Caldecott

Award winners have long been criticized—and continue

to be criticized—for lack of diversity in award winning

books. All of the ethnic-based awards have among their

goals the advancement of quality in the literature re ecting

the lives of the people and increasing the visibility of this

literature in children’s publishing overall. Will there be a

future time when the Coretta Scott King Awards are, like

Negro League baseball, a phenomenon of the past?

Contests have been critically important in the develop-

ment of multicultural literature. Such contests are created

to support the publication in focused areas of need and

to discover new authors and illustrators. In perhaps the

most well-known af rmation of the importance of writing

contests, the Council on Interracial Books for Children

(CIBC), was founded in 1965 to facilitate and promote

high-quality multicultural literature for children. The

organization published a journal (the CIBC Bulletin) and

in 1969 it established an annual writing contest open to

“previously unpublished writers in African American, Asian

American, and Native American communities.” Twenty-one

winning manuscripts from the contest’s  rst  ve years were

published by mainstream children’s publishers. Several

winners (e.g., Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve, Mildred D.

Taylor, Sharon Bell Matthis) went on to distinguished

careers as children’s authors. Winner of the 1974 contest,

Taylor’s manuscript was published as Song of the Trees in

1975, and she went on to win the 1976 Newbery Medal for

Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry (Ban eld, 1998).

Despite the example of Taylor’s remarkable career, it

appears that there has been no systematic research on the

impact of prizes and contests on the development of ca-

reers in children’s publishing. How have the winners of the

Coretta Scott King Award fared in their subsequent careers

as authors or illustrators since the award was established

in 1969? What is the career impact of winning the Coretta

Scott King Committee’s John Steptoe New Talent Award,

an award given to authors and illustrators who have previ-

ously published three or fewer works (EMIERT, n.d.).

Issue: What is the historical impact of trends in the

 eld on awards and vice versa?

Kidd’s (2007) research on the Newbery Medal-winning

books notes trends in how the books parallel or re ect

the historical and political times during which they are

awarded. Such research takes a deep look at a phenom-

enon, making connections and drawing conclusions based

on content analysis. Another example of this kind of work

is Leonard Marcus’s (1992) biography of Margaret Wise

474

JUNKO YOKOTA

Brown, in which he notes the ways in which the devel-

opment of her work was in uenced by the educational

politics of the time. His recent book, Minders of Make

Believe: Idealists, Entrepreneurs, and the Shaping of

American Children’s Literature (2008), is not specially

about book awards, but the information he includes about

award-winning in relation to publishing industry history

makes it clear that awards did play a role in this history of

children’s literature in the United States. In Dear Genius:

The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom, Marcus (1998) explores

the correspondence between the famous children’s book

editor Nordstrom and the authors and illustrators with

whom she worked, many of whom won book awards.

Issue: What is the effect of gender in the history of

awards in literature?

Jenkins (1996) traces the roots of the gender-based de-

bate on the proprietary rights of who administers the

major awards in children’s literature. She examines the

early history of children’s librarianship as a  eld deemed

particularly suited to women, whose activities included

creating lists of recommended books for children’s library

collections. By the early 20th century, these recommen-

dations became the basis for critical standards of excel-

lence in children’s literature, which eventually led to the

establishment of the Newbery and Caldecott Awards. The

fact that the  eld consisted primarily of women who had

trained and worked together to establish the key role of

children’s librarians as arbiters of literary merit did not

go unnoticed.

By the late 1930s, the role of children’s librarians in de-

termining book awards was being challenged by those who

expressed doubt that these female librarians were capable

of selecting Newbery and Caldecott winners that would ap-

peal to “the average tousle-headed American boy” (Certain,

1939, p. 828). These challenges to the authority of women

to bestow these prestigious book awards were a re ection

of a larger effort to defend and maintain the overall male-

dominated status quo of the publishing industry. In fact,

children’s librarianship is still a female-intensive  eld and

the Association of Library Service to Children (ALSC) is

still in charge of the Newbery and Caldecott Medals. What

role might gender play in future concerns about these and

other ALSC-selected book awards?

Issue: What research can be conducted on the

awarding process?

Although the basic steps of award processes are clearly

articulated at a procedural level, the speci c details are

strictly con dential. Because the process is not transparent,

except procedurally, the part of the process that could be

most interesting eludes research potential. However, there

are aspects of the award process that are researchable and

have the potential to inform various constituents in inter-

esting and worthwhile ways. Research on the process and

its dissemination might—or might not—lead to calls for

changes in the award process, criteria, or composition of

award committees, depending on what is learned. One po-

tentially interesting area regarding process could be to ana-

lyze the people behind the awards. What is the background

of committee members? What are their reading preferences?

What are their biases? Does the “regional balance” matter

in committee appointments as much as individual prefer-

ences and biases? Committee members could participate

in self-reported studies on their perceptions of the process.

Research could be done on and/or by the very people who

are the decision makers. At present, researchers can only

examine the artifacts and outcomes of book awards.

What about the in uence of the opinions of others?

Committee members have access to published reviews

by professional or volunteer reviewers. They may also

read listserv discussions and blogs, participate in book

discussions, or solicit children’s responses to books under

consideration for awards. To what degree do individual

committee members bring pre-formulated opinions and

responses to award discussions and to what degree do they

remain open to others’ perspectives within award commit-

tee discussions? Are committee members participating on

award committees as individuals or as representatives of

a wider community?

Issue: Why is there a lack of correlation between

awards selected by adults and by children?

Adults select books that they believe children should read.

Awards selected by children are usually selected from a

master reading list that adults create. But determining

popularity with children is as varied a process as with

adults. State awards are typically children’s choice awards.

Depending on the state, children must read 3–5 books

from a list of 10–20 titles in order to vote on the winners.

Thus the proportion of titles read from the full list varies

by state. In Arizona, for example, children must read or

have read to them, at least 5 out of the 10 books (50%)

to vote for the Grand Canyon Reader Award. In Florida,

children must read at least 3 out of 15 books (20%) to

vote for the Sunshine State Young Reader’s Award. In

Illinois, children must read at least 3 out of 20 (15%) to

vote for the Rebecca Caudill Award. What is the process

by which librarians and teachers decide upon the list of

books eligible for each year’s children’s choice award?

What, if any, impact does the variable proportion of titles

read have on voting patterns from state to state?

Issue: What is the relationship between award-

winning books and popular reading material?

Research on the popularity of award-winning books ex-

amines such factors as library circulation and book sales

to determine the popularity of books that win awards or

receive highly favorable reviews in professional journals.

Lamme’s (1976) study found that middle school students

seldom chose to read award winners or even books that

were on lists of high quality literature, but those students

475

AWARDS IN LITERATURE FOR CHILDREN AND ADOLESCENTS

who did read from such lists were no better readers than

those who read books that were not highly recommended

by award committees or adult reviewers. Likewise, when

Nilsen, Peterson, and Searfoss (1980) compiled a list of

books deemed by critics to be of high quality, the books

were usually at the bottom of lists librarians deemed to

be popular with children. This is in line with Ujiie and

Krashen’s (2002) study in which the “home run books”

that stimulated children to want to read more were sel-

dom the same as those that had been prize-winners. Their

analysis of public library acquisition and circulation led

them to conclude that prize winning does not overshadow

popularity in librarian purchases, nor does it impact cir-

culation over popular books, such as series books. In a

later study, Ujiie and Krashen (2006) found that overall,

prize-winning books were not often found on bestseller

lists. Interestingly, they also found that bestsellers were

no easier than prize-winning books when it came to read-

ability, and in fact, were slightly higher. Librarians in their

study reported fewer prizewinners in their collection than

popular bestsellers, an indication that perhaps they valued

the likelihood of circulation over high critical acclaim.

Ujiie and Krashen raised the question whether children

simply don’t recognize high literary quality or whether

judges of Newbery and Caldecott medals have different

standards for their selection than do children.

Issue: How fully do award-winning books match the

criteria for the award(s)?

Researchers could analyze award winners based on

the criteria creating rubrics for which criterion is most

prominently represented in the awarding process. When

books win multiple awards, which criteria cross over

those awards?

Issue: Who de nes excellence in children’s literature

and in what ways? How does a committee de ne

an elusive criterion such as “most distinguished

contribution”?

Netell (1990) describes the defensive de ance of award

selectors who feel insecure in their own critical abilities

and the need to defend their choices as well as the inevi-

table idiosyncrasy of committee members in selecting the

best book. We make different choices, even when criteria

are spelled out. Mock Newbery/Caldecotts are examples

of such. Therefore, Netell, editor of book reviews for The

Guardian and the chair of the Guardian Children’s Fiction

Award, argues that rather than selecting one best book that

he believes is a subjective process, we should be recogniz-

ing quality works and authors more broadly. To that end,

previous winners are disquali ed. Selected books must

be ones that are special: they should push the frontiers of

children’s literature by expanding young imaginations,

widening their world, allowing them to explore new ideas,

emotions, language, and experiences, and perhaps in doing

so demanding something from its readers in return. The

award keeps child readers as the primary audience, but

recognizes that by de nition of special books they will

likely appeal to the more experienced readers.

Miller (1998) raised the issue that authors of New-

bery winners and their books’ protagonists have been the

same race for 21 years. She builds her case on the earlier

statement by Parravano and Adams (1996) on 10 years of

Newbery winners and authors as not showing diversity

(which is not a criteria for the Newbery). But in the con-

text of this discussion, what is interesting to consider is

her point as to whether the cause can be attributed to the

“interpretive nature of deciding what is ‘distinguished’.”

Therein lies the key question: who decides and how is it

decided, and why is it that none of that discussion can

be made public, not for the speci cs of the secret dis-

cussions, but more generally about how “distinction” is

noted. Miller’s background in having a master’s degree

in rhetoric is interesting in how she analyzes the wording

of the Newbery Award’s de nition of “distinguished.”

As individuals who compose a committee, each person

brings his or her biases, agendas, and evaluative lenses.

Miller cites Scales (1996), Atkinson (1996), and Suther-

land (1986), all acknowledging the subjective nature

of de ning “distinguished.” Atkinson (1996) describes

committee members as individuals whose backgrounds

in uence values and priorities and are imperfect people

who collectively make a group decision at a particular time

and place. If this were to be researched, it could result in

recommendations for committee membership.

Arthur Applebee (1993) conducted a study of second-

ary students and how they responded on questions about

literature they had read. Interestingly, African Americans

scored well on questions about African American litera-

ture, and this was especially notable when you consider

that they had done worse on other questions where their

ethnic background did not match the literature. What

might research reveal on how the background of com-

mittee members in uenced the ways in which they dis-

cussed books and expressed examples about what was

“distinguished”? Although there is attempt to balance

committees for representation, the gender imbalance is

particularly noteworthy. Rarely do the award committees

in children’s literature have more than one or two men on

committees of 10 to 15. In what ways are we considering

gender biases in decisions that are made? Speculation

exists and is published on these issues; however, research

has not been published widely.

Part 4: Conclusion

What do we know about award-winning literature for

children and adolescents and what remains to know that is

worth  nding out? What kinds of research can advance our

understanding of awards? Are there cross-disciplinary ways

to cooperate on joint research that extends understanding

of awards in literature for children and adolescents?

476

JUNKO YOKOTA

There is a great deal written about awards in chil-

dren’s literature, the vast majority of which is perhaps

characterized as “informed perspective.” These include

self-re ections and opinion pieces, and they frequently

offer interesting ideas for consideration and insightful

perspectives, especially about what it means to be on

award committees. Many even suggest promising research

questions to be analyzed or even sources of data. But

such pieces are not actual research because the data they

report on have not been gathered or analyzed following

systematic research methodologies.

Part of the reason that the current literature on awards

is largely informed opinion is that the authors of such

pieces do not write with research methodology as their

framework for thinking about analyzing awards. But

perhaps more importantly, their careers and their reason

for writing are not focused on conducting or publishing

research. Rather, they write to participate as profes-

sionals, re ect on their roles, and share what they have

learned as part of the children’s/YA literature community.

It is possible that what has been written as informed per-

spectives may be useful as data for conducting secondary

analysis. One could analyze what various authors have to

say in order to identify interesting future research studies

and/or ways of collecting new data. Some possibilities

include systematically gathering informed perspectives on

the processes of committee members. Another possibility

is to tap into the rich  eld of award acceptance speeches.

They are frequently recorded, published, and made acces-

sible. They could be used as data sources to research the

impact of award winning on the actual creators of the lit-

erature. One caveat as to their usefulness is, as Thompson

(1988) notes, that out of the context of their celebratory

moment of delivery, these speeches alternate between

“charming and gossipy” and “critically insightful.”

Another way to go about conducting research in areas

with topics known to be provocative is to consider what

informed opinions have been stated, but not backed up with

research. For example, Anita Silvey (1986) wrote an edi-

torial in The Horn Book in which she poses the question,

“Could Randolph Caldecott win the Caldecott Medal?”

She explains that for the  rst 50 years of the medal, the

books awarded honored what he stood for.

But in years immediately preceding her editorial, Silvey

notes that “High art, high gloss, decoration, emotionless

embellishment seem to be the most recent standards for

what we are calling distinguished” (Silvey, 1986; online

page), thereby endorsing Bader’s (1986) assessment that

the de nition for what is classi ed as distinguished has

changed.

This is an editorial, and Bader’s statement is an es-

say within for the Newbery/Caldecott volume published

periodically by The Horn Book. A systematic analysis of

the books over the years Silvey referred to would serve

to endorse or refute Silvey’s and Bader’s claims, and that

would be interesting research.

In terms of methodologies, studies might document

the award-giving processes but with the requirements of

reporting data in ways that adhere to triangulation and

the writing of “thick description.” Interviews and case

studies with re exive analysis are among the qualitative

methodologies that may be appropriate for some studies

related to the impact of awards in children’s literature.

Bradford (2009) describes her work in critical analysis of

literature as both an examination of linguistic and narrative

features but also situated in historical context and cultural

forces. This type of research brings together the analyti-

cal lenses of cross-disciplinary analysis, and could richly

contribute to the study of books that have won awards in

children’s literature.

Is award-winning still relevant today? With the prolif-

eration in recent years, does the  eld really need as many

as there are? Many people have an opinion in this debate.

There is considerable speculation and off-the-cuff theoriz-

ing but the thoughts, though adamantly expressed, are not

grounded in research. At present, there are many published

articles on a myriad of topics related to award-winning,

and many are provocatively presented arguments, inviting

response and discussion in ways that engage readers to

think and take a stance, but seldom yield data that can be

considered research (e.g., Aronson, 2001; Grimes, 2009;

Pinkney, 2001; Silvey, 2008). In Lillian Gerhardt’s 1999

Arbuthnot Honor Lecture (interestingly, an award in and of

itself), proposed a study that she described as “needed…

wanted…useful[:] a cross-cultural study of the working re-

lationships of all who are involved with children and their

books” (p. 22). She called for a level of documentation

that ALA has never had for its youth services divisions.

She describes the impact of ALA awards in in uencing

sales. Gerhardt envisions “a cross-disciplinary team of

historians, sociologists, anthropologists, statisticians and

scholars of children’s literature to analyze and evaluate

all the forces—social, economic, political, cultural—that

affect the selection of books for library collections” (p.

23).

Speci cally, there is a need for research that will make

a difference in the future of children’s literature. Hand in

hand with the need for more research is the need for more

readers and digesters and learners from that research. In

other words, what will make the research worthwhile?

I posed this question to editor/author/scholar Marc

Aronson (personal communication, January 25, 2010),

who speculated that publishers would be interested in

research on book awards if it: (a) appeared in accessible

and nonacademic journals; (b) was published in a format

that would enable the reader to quickly identify and read

essential research  ndings; (c) had signi cant implications

for the work of editors and marketing people, particularly

in terms of saving money.

Earlier research on children’s book awards was basi-

cally market research, but Aronson (2010) believes that

we are now in an era of assessment and accountability

477

AWARDS IN LITERATURE FOR CHILDREN AND ADOLESCENTS

that requires more relevant research questions and more

nuanced data analysis. Speaking as an author of highly

regarded non ction, Aronson places a high value on rigor-

ous research. Speaking as an editor of books for children

and teens, Aronson believes that increasing the quality and

rigor of research on book awards could provide better and

more useful information that can help publishers develop

books for future generations of young readers.

One way to consider this is to do research that builds

on earlier studies. In other words, if someone has done

a thorough analysis of the portrayal of schools in award-

winning literature, the next layer might be to do reader-

response research on the impact of such portrayals on

readers’ perceptions of school, based on what they read.

Could such  ndings be of interest to editors and writers

as they consider their work in creating future potential

award-winning literature? Could such  ndings be of in-

terest to teacher educators as they learn how to scaffold

student discussion and student learning through their

questioning strategies?

There is much potential for conducting research focused

on awards in literature for children and adolescents. In ad-

dition to the possibilities discussed earlier in the chapter

the following have especially interesting potential:

Relationship between what reading curriculum recom-•

mends and criteria for awards;

Relationship between what children choose and what •

adults choose;

Response from children after reading what adults have •

chosen and what other children have chosen;

Relationship between awards for traditional books and •

the future of awards for newer formats of digitized

media.

How do awards and lists impact teacher choice for

read aloud, classroom libraries and curriculum study

support?

Clearly, there is need for more research on the awards

in literature for children and adolescents. Perhaps what

should be considered  rst is who the audience is for such

research, and what will matter most for that audience.

What implications will they have once the research is

completed? Will the results of such research impact future

authors and illustrators as they create books? Will it guide

the editor or art director who “shapes” the direction of a

book’s development? Will it inform those who are making

decisions about the awards themselves? Will studying the

process of how award winners are selected demystify the

process? How might a more transparent process help us as

we recommend award winners to readers? Whatever the

answers to these questions, award-winning literature will

continue to be introduced to children and young adults.

And some of those young people will continue to  nd in

those award winners the books that they will read, reread,

and treasure.

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The Economics of Children’s Book

Publishing in the 21st Century

Joel Taxel

The University of Georgia

Joel Taxel has long been for looking at children’s literature with a critical eye—an eye keen to discern the subtle

and not-so-subtle issues surrounding multiculturalism in children’s literature. More recently, he has turned

his gaze to the globalization of children’s literature, questioning the combination of conglomerates and com-

mercialization in literature for the young. From Harry Potter promoting Coca-Cola to Madonna’s foray into

the children’s book world, Taxel reveals the merchandizing emphasis on controlling consumption from birth

to the beyond, with less focus on the aesthetic quality of texts than on the bottom line. Still, Taxel argues that

it would be “an error to examine cultural phenomena without reference to human agency.” A number of editors

and publishers are devoted to producing books of “breathtaking quality” with new and challenging visions for

children, and children, who can be quite discerning themselves, are eager to take them up.

Setting the Stage

The past several decades have witnessed momentous

changes in the global children’s book business. Character-

ized as “an explosion of almost Cambrian proportions,”

these changes are a product of “shifts in the economic

landscape” that have resulted in a fundamental alteration

in publishing practices, including the attraction of “new

and diverse entrants to the sector” (Crandall, 2006a, p.

1). In Children’s Book Publishing in Britain since 1945,

Reynolds and Tucker (1998) observed that “there is

nothing natural about the children’s book scene today,”

and they noted that children’s books are “a product of

historical circumstance, ideology, and market forces” (p.

xi). Since these factors, forces, and circumstances differ

from country to country, the children’s book scene varies

in each locale, although the publishing industry is con-

nected and interconnected in ways that would have been

inconceivable even 50 years ago.

This chapter focuses on how profound changes in

market or economic forces have transformed not only the

book publishing business, but the larger “culture indus-

try” in which it is embedded. Despite this emphasis, it is

necessary to at least point to historical, ideological, and

political forces since they often connect directly to the

479

480

JOEL TAXEL

economic realm. In the United States, for example, passage

of the National Defense Education Act, a response to the

Soviet Union’s launching of the Sputnik satellite in 1957,

provided federal funds for library books and resulted in a

dramatic surge in the school market that brought it to the

forefront of children’s book publication (Epstein, 1996).

The shifting political and ideological landscape that led

to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 decision outlawing

segregation in schools gave impetus to the nascent civil

rights movement, helped focus attention on what Larrick

(1972) famously termed the “all-white world of children’s

books,” and provided the impetus for passage of the 1965

Elementary and Secondary Education Act which infused

money to American school and public libraries. This land-

mark legislation created, for the  rst time, a viable market

for books about Black children (Marcus, 1997).

By 1964, the Labour Government in Britain had in-

creased school and public library funding by 30% (Tucker,

1998), and, while business considerations alone justi ed

this  nancial support, children’s needs clearly were central

considerations in fostering the development of children’s

collections and child-friendly library environments (Reyn-

olds, 1998). The effect of this enhanced support in both

countries helped make librarians a dominant in uence

on the editorial programs at major trade houses (Epstein,

1996), the “arbiters of what children should read” (Eccle-

share, 1991, p. 20), a relationship that began to change in

the late 1960s and 1970s as government money for librar-

ies was radically reduced. It is important to note that in

the United States this was due primarily to the economic

downturn during the Vietnam War (Giblin, 1986).

Similar developments in the political and ideological

sphere were at work in Canada. Prior to the mid-20th

century, Canadian national identity was an amalgam of

French, British, and American values and cultures, and

tensions between them had existed since the 18th century.

In the aftermath of the eclipse of British imperial power

following World War II, a strong national identity began

to develop, although Canada’s continued links to the U.S.

economy led to a “double colonial burden-dependence on

Britain and on the U.S.” (Bainbridge & Wolodko, 2002,

p. 21). Seeking to transcend this history and develop a

distinctive national identity, Canadians in the latter part of

the 20th century created a national canon, a development

fostered by subsidies from the Canadian federal govern-

ment (Bainbridge & Wolodko, 2002; Stan, 1999).

There also are instances around the globe where his-

torical events rapidly and dramatically altered the politi-

cal and economic landscapes of nations and, as a result,

the way children’s literature is conceived, written, and

published. This occurred most notably in countries where

the communist system disintegrated, or was signi cantly

altered. The fall of communism in the former Soviet Union

and Eastern Europe, for example, ushered in a political

revolution and the beginnings of market-based economies

and accordingly paved the way for radically different ap-

proaches to children’s book publishing in Russia (Frenkel,

1994; Kudriavtseva, 1994), Germany (Stottele, 1994), and

Hungary (Lechner, 1994). Likewise, China’s tumultuous

history has had a discernable impact on its children’s

literature industry. From the “Fourth of May” cultural

movement early in the 20th century when China began to

produce a native children’s literature (Allsobrook, 2006;

Chen, 2006), to the turbulent period of the Great Cultural

Revolution (1966–76) when children’s literature stagnated

and little was produced (Chen, 2006; Rui, 2006), to the

current moment when “class struggle” has been supplanted

by the “four modernisations” and “ideological purity has

given way to pragmatism” (Lijun, 2003, p. 71), the impact

of developments in the political sphere has been clear and

demonstrable.

My point is that changes in a nation’s sociocultural and

political arrangements and institutions have a signi cant

impact on cultural institutions, including the manner in

which books for young people are written and published.

Since these matters often are speci c to each country, or

group of countries, there is little doubt that discussions

of this sort could be the subject of a separate chapter. The

focus here instead is on the seismic, world-wide shifts

in the economic realm whereby the book publishing in-

dustry, as well as newspapers, magazines, television and

radio stations,  lm and record companies, etc., have been

absorbed and integrated into giant multinational media

corporations whose business practices are transforming

the production and consumption of children’s literature

and popular culture around the world.

While I seek to provide a global perspective on these de-

velopments, admittedly much of the discussion does have

a distinctly American and British slant. This emphasis is

due both to my own limitations and to the enormity of the

enterprise of providing even a cursory view of children’s

book publication around the world. It also speaks to the

reality that, for better or worse, the United States and the

English language are now dominant cultural forces around

the globe. Contemporary media and cultural industries

are characterized by accelerating competitiveness, a con-

centration of ownership, technological convergence, and

globalization. As a result, publishing and other media in-

dustries increasingly are dominated by a handful of large,

multinational companies (Buckingham & Scanlon, 2005)

who are able to “synergistically” link their various hold-

ings across national borders and reach countless millions

of readers and viewers.

Because many, if not all, of the dominant media corpo-

rations have primarily Anglo-American ownership (e.g.,

the News Corporation, the Walt Disney Company, Viacom)

or enormous presences in the English speaking world (e.g.,

Bertelsmann), many charge that Anglo-American culture

is intruding on the cultures of the world, often threaten-

ing their existence, and that the United Sates especially

is guilty of what is termed cultural imperialism. “Super-

man, Spider-man, and Batman replace local heroes; Pepsi

481

THE ECONOMICS OF CHILDREN’S BOOK PUBLISHING IN THE 21ST CENTURY

and Coke replace local fruit drinks; and ‘trick or treat’

begin[s] to replace Dia de los Muertos” (Sévenier, 2004,

n.p.). Even more menacing to some is that in attempting

to compete with American cultural imports, local products

and varieties seek to mimic American commodities with

the result that “the exportation of goods and information

from the United States to the entire planet contributes

to the exportation of the American culture” (Sévenier,

2004, n.p.). This situation is exacerbated by the rise of

English as the primary international language of politics

and trade, thus further intensifying the transmission of

American culture.

Charges of cultural imperialism are not new and the term

currently is contested, even discredited, in some quarters.

Historically, U.S. culture has been affected by a variety of

social, linguistic, and national in uences, and given the

U.S. demographic makeup, it is hardly surprising that the

country has been very receptive to external cultural in u-

ences that in turn have been incorporated into the fabric of

U.S. culture. Because of the innumerable foreign in uences

on U.S. culture, certain “universalistic” elements have

crystallized within it that resonate among people all over

the world. “Though U.S. popular culture is not alone in

this regard, U.S. culture industries have been at the cutting

edge of the development of a shared language of popular

culture that can, in principle, be communicated without

words, in part because of technological innovations” (van

Elteren, 2003, p. 174). These factors are intensi ed by the

U.S. government’s active support in promoting cultural

exports, both “as a source of export income but also as a

means of exporting beliefs, values, and practices that favor

U.S.-based corporate capitalism” (p. 174). While certainly

this is an oversimpli cation of an exceedingly complex set

of issues, even a cursory glance at cultural forces around the

world point to the dominating in uence of Anglo-American

cultural products and forms. The example to follow is a

telling illustration of this point.

Children’s Literature World Wide: Harry

Potter and the Perfect Storm

It is dif cult to imagine a more ideal convergence of the

forces, a perfect storm, at play in today’s global children’s

culture industry than the remarkable media frenzy that

surrounded the worldwide release of Harry Potter and

the Deathly Hallows (2007), the  nal book in J.K. Rowl-

ings’s phenomenally popular series. The book’s release

was preceded by the worldwide debut of the  fth  lm in

the series—Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

These carefully choreographed events comprised one of

the most signi cant phenomena in popular culture of this,

or any, era. Harry Potter is both a marketing and a liter-

ary phenomenon that illuminates the ways that literature

for the young is being commodi ed and transformed by

conglomerates controlling the mass media (Mackey, 2001;

Nel, 2005). According to Zipes (2001),

Phenomena such as the Harry Potter books are driven by

commodity consumption that at the same time sets the

parameters of reading and aesthetic taste. Today the experi-

ence of reading for the young is mediated through the mass

media and marketing so that the pleasure and meaning of

a book will often be prescripted or dictated by convention.

(p. 172)

New Zealand’s Margaret Mahy (2001) concurs, noting, “It

has become a sort of social necessity to have read them,

just as it might become a social necessity to wear certain

brand names or to listen to certain music” (p. 17). Harry

Potter’s status as an international superstar is evidenced by

the more than 374 million copies of the seven books that

have been sold in at least 64 languages (Glovin, 2008).

In China, the success of Harry Potter not only is credited

with the surge in the sale of children’s books during the

early 21st century, it also has inspired Chinese authors and

publishers to begin thinking about to how to stimulate sales

for domestically produced books. There is little doubt that

Chinese publishing has been profoundly in uenced by

the marketing pattern of the Potter books, resulting in far

more commercial books being published than previously

was the case (Rui, 2006).

The Harry Potter phenomenon is not limited to the

sale of the books or tickets in movie theaters. Nel (2005)

describes the impossibility of discussing Harry Potter

without considering the marketing that feeds off the im-

mense appeal of the Potter brand:

You can see the movies, you can buy the movies, you can

buy Legos, action ﬁ gures, stickers, notebooks, a card game, a

board game, puzzles, address books, calendars, Band Aids®,

toothbrushes, toothpaste, t-shirts, sweatshirts, mugs, trading

cards, greeting cards, Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Beans, a

Nimbus 2000 broomstick, a Harry Potter wallet, wizarding-

world money, and even piña colada–ﬂ avored “Dementor’s

Kisses.” (p. 237)

Prior to the release of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s

Stone, the  rst  lm in the series, experts predicted that the

scale of the marketing of the brand would dwarf anything

seen previously (Bruce, 2001). One of the most remarkable

of these agreements was between the Potter brand and

Coca-Cola, itself one of the world’s most recognizable

brands. The partnership called for Coca-Cola to pay for

everything from a literacy campaign to a hefty share of

the media blitz that preceded the  lm’s opening. Coca-

Cola’s February 2001 press release illustrates the way that

brand identi cation seeks to convince consumers to select

from among the market’s myriad choices, inspire trust,

and contribute to the construction of consumer identity

(Smith, 2007).

Through this relationship, The Coca-Cola Company will

combine its worldwide resources and geographic reach

to bring the specialness of Harry Potter and Coca-Cola to

people and communities around the world. These efforts…

will center on helping people discover the magical world

of their imaginations through reading while reinforcing the

482

JOEL TAXEL

core values and attributes shared by Harry Potter and Coca-

Cola. (quoted by Mackey, 2001, p. 184)

Distressed by this assertion of “shared core values and

attributes” between a soft drink and Rowlings’s boy wiz-

ard, Mackey wonders “if Harry Potter is converted into a

salesman for soft drink, what is gained—and by whom?”

(p. 184).

The Potter books,  lms, and merchandize stand as a

paradigmatic, perhaps impossible to duplicate, example

of a children’s book becoming the subject of the kind of

media orgy previously associated with Disney and Star

Wars  lms and, in 2008, the release of the fourth Indiana

Jones movie. Despite the success of Harry Potter, there

are perhaps only a handful of analogues in children’s

book publishing in which a popular book turned into a

blockbuster  lm (e.g., William Steig’s [1990] Shrek) that

characterize the world of adult publishing. Nevertheless,

by the mid-1990s, the once separate worlds of adult and

children’s book publishing looked increasingly alike as

both were dominated by the quest for blockbuster titles,

large advances, superstar authors, and media tie-ins

(Crandall, 2006a).

Contemporary children’s book publishing under the

control of multinational corporations has settled into the

pattern found throughout our popular culture. A popular

book invariably is followed by a sequel, or a series, which

often leads to a  lm or a television program, that leads

to a seemingly endless constellation of commodities, or

“merch,” that advertise the books, that promote the  lm,

that promote the merch in an endlessly repeating cycle.

The ultimate objective is to “brand” the books and their

characters so that children will return to them to again

and again. Hade (2001) captures the essence of this dy-

namic:

Today’s book publishers look much more like the Walt Dis-

ney Corporation than they look like the publishing houses

that existed in the ‘50s and ‘60s. These publishers understand

that they are not in the book business; rather they sell ideas

they call “brands,” and they market their brands through

“synergized” goods designed to inﬁ ltrate as many aspects

of a child’s life as possible. (p. 159)

The Potter phenomenon illustrates the essential ele-

ments of the transformation that gained momentum in the

last half of the 20th century when a thoroughgoing change

in the structure and ownership of the industry, one that

parallels developments in the wider economy, began in ear-

nest. These changes radically altered the assumptions and

operating procedures that govern the way publishers do

business, and even the way many writers write. Although

obvious to those within the industry, the impact of this

business side of children’s literature publication has only

recently been given the sustained and systematic scrutiny

it deserves (e.g., Reynolds & Tucker, 1998).

To be sure, the publishing industry always has been

a business designed to make a pro t, a point made by

editor Richard Jackson in his response to the assertion

that “publishers only exist to make money.” Jackson’s

deft reply was, “No, publishers make money to exist”

(quoted by Kayden, 1993, p. 265). Although publishing

always has been a business, as most of the historically

independent publishing companies have been absorbed

by giant multinational corporations and become part of

the global economy, there has been a dramatic shift in the

way books are conceived, commissioned, produced, and

sold. While it is essential to recognize that there continue

to be many wonderful, extraordinary books published each

year, and a growing number of smaller, niche publishers,

I am hardly alone in being less than sanguine about the

long-term future of the industry. It is to developments in

the “political economy of publishing” (Taxel, 2002) that

this chapter is devoted.

Global Capitalism in the 21st Century

The new and distinctive form of capitalism spreading

across the globe is based on growing concentrations of

wealth and power in giant, transnational corporations,

and on the ever increasing production of new commodi-

ties for consumption (Agger, 1989; Paterson, 2006). This

consumer-based form of capitalism, referred to as “Post-

Fordism” or as “fast capitalism,” involves new business

and management theories that “stress competition and

markets centered on change,  exibility, quality, and dis-

tinctive niches, not the mass products of the ‘old’ capital-

ism” (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000, p. 10).

Australian magnate Rupert Murdoch’s News Corpo-

ration provides a paradigmatic example of the way that

diverse segments of an area of the economy are integrated

into a single entity. Among the News Corporation’s inter-

national holdings in what is variously called “culture in-

dustry” (Zipes, 1997) or the National Entertainment State

(Miller, 2002) are more than 175 newspapers, including

the Wall Street Journal. The News Corporation also owns

magazines (e.g., The Weekly Standard), Twentieth Century

Fox Films, radio and television networks (e. g., Fox News

and Fox TV), the MySpace web site, and HarperCollins

Publishers (in the U.S.) and HarperCollins Limited (in the

U.K.), which rank among of the world’s leading publish-

ers of children’s books. Ownership of these diverse media

holdings permits the News Corporation and similar con-

glomerates to synergistically link them in order to enhance

and extend the earning power of each element.

This last point relates to “commodi cation,” the pro-

liferation of products or commodities that are “created,

perfected, and changed at ever faster rates,” another de n-

ing characteristic of the “new high-tech-driven capitalism”

(Gee, 2000, p. 40). Today’s Post-Fordism still is concerned

with production, the emphasis of industrial capitalism’s

Fordist order, but the focus now is more re exive and

able to accommodate variations in the production process.

The move away from industrialized capitalism’s focus

483

THE ECONOMICS OF CHILDREN’S BOOK PUBLISHING IN THE 21ST CENTURY

on manufactured products is toward a knowledge-based

economy used to sell goods and ideas. This emphasis is

visible in the marketing of products tailored to consumers’

preferences that re ect the reality that today’s capitalism

is de ned not by a producer mentality but by a consumer

ethos (Paterson, 2006). Ideas and goods that are symbol-

ized and personalized as “brands” epitomize this transi-

tion. Whether considering such global brands as Oprah

Winfrey, Michael Jordon, Coca-Cola, David Beckham,

Nike, or Harry Potter, brand identi cation is designed to

help consumers “limit seemingly endless choices provided

by the market” and “inspire trust while contributing to the

construction of their identities” (Smith, 2007, p. 158). It

surely is one of the more remarkable characteristics of our

age that citizenship in the 21st century is “increasingly

performed through consumption and that people  nd

that identity constructed through consumption is more

empowering than through traditional means” (Paterson,

2006, p. 28).

The importance of the identi cation of young people

as a major market has worked in conjunction with market-

ing and branding “less on the basis of occupation or  xed

social status than on self ascribed notions of identity within

social groups” (p. 31). Langer (2004) further notes:

The intimate entangling of brand and identity is nowhere

more evident than in the experience of childhood in the

last two decades of the 20th century. The colonization of

children’s 1ives by the entertainment product cycle has

woven Disney, Hasbro, Mattel, and McDonald’s into the

fabric of everyday life for urban children across the globe.

(p. 263)

Control of publishing by multinational corporations has

led to the proliferation of branded characters and the

ubiquitous production of merchandize that capitalizes on

children’s fascination with well-known book characters

such as Curious George (who is enormously popular in

Japan), Arthur the Aardvark, or Harry Potter. The well-

established pattern is for these commodi ed characters to

become the subject of television programs or  lms that

not only enhance book sales but help to sell the vast array

of “spin-off” products including toys, clothing, and bed

sheets, etc. These practices speak to the reality of today’s

environment where “media drives media, and if you have

valuable property in one area, like books, you can extend

your brand name into others” (Hade, 2001, p. 48). Chil-

dren’s books have become “idea factories” for  lmmak-

ers and merchandisers and cross-media synergies often

result in books no longer being valued for themselves, but

seen instead as “an essential link in a media food chain”

(Crandall, 2006a, p. 3).

The Global Children’s Culture Industry

The culture industry includes a variety of mass media,

including children’s literature, that produce and distribute

commodities (Pecora, 1998). New markets for these com-

modities constantly are being sought, and childhood has

become a key moment in the formation of consumers as

children have become a primary target market for global

capital. Not only have corporations “in ltrated the core

activities and institutions of childhood,” they have encoun-

tered little resistance from parents or government (Schor,

2004, p. 11). Efforts to sell to the young begin in infancy

as the culture industry “sets the terms of socialization

and education in the western world” (Zipes, 1997, pp.

7–8). During the  nal quarter of the 20th century when

children were proving to be “a particularly pro table

‘frontier’ for global capital,” their incorporation into the

market demonstrated the broader social logic through

which “capitalism reconstitutes life stages as cradle to

grave markets” (Langer, 2004, p. 254). This last point

was illustrated by the Disney Company’s January 2006

introduction of a broadband channel for preschoolers titled

“Playhouse Disney Preschool Time Online.” Focusing on

pre-kindergarten skills, this Internet subscription service

was described as part of Disney’s “age-banded strategy

where we are looking to follow the consumer through

all their age levels and have something for them at every

age” (Harris, 2006, n.p.). Twenty- rst century children

are “becoming well-trained consumers able to associate

Ronald McDonald with good things before they have

learned language” (Pecora, 1998, p. 20).

As the mergers brought previously independent

publishers under the umbrella of such giants as the News

Corporation, Disney, Viacom, and Bertelsmann, the

“articulation of entertainment and product spin-offs,” a

process that began in the late 1970s, moved into a “new

phase of accelerated hyperconsumption” (Langer, 2004, p.

254). Over the past 20 years, the global children’s culture

industry has sought to balance the “ambivalent fusion

of exploitation and enchantment.” These efforts led to

television/ lm/merchandise strategies whose goal is to

construct children as a “lucrative global market embedded

in a culture that holds it to be a universal truth that each

child has the right to the pursuit of fun, excitement, and

consumer durables” (p. 256). Zipes (2001) provides a less

than sanguine appraisal of this state of affairs: “Every-

thing we do to, with, and for our children is in uenced by

capitalist market conditions and the hegemonic interests

of corporate elites. In simple terms, we calculate what is

best for our children by regarding them as investments

and turning them into commodities” (p. ix).

Economic Power and Individual Agency

The pursuit of a political economy of children’s literature

runs the risk of falling into the trap of economic determin-

ism that often is endemic in analyses seeking to determine

the impact of impersonal macroeconomic forces on cul-

tural institutions, be they schools or publishing companies

(e.g., Apple, 1982; Williams, 1977). Among the most

persistent and vexing of these problems is to lose sight

of the agency of the social actors involved. It is easy, for

484

JOEL TAXEL

example, to reduce the women and men working in pub-

lishing to helpless pawns in the face of changes wrought

when transnational conglomerates assume control of the

companies in which they work. This view is both simplistic

and a disservice to those who labor to produce the very best

books for children. In a similar vein, while it is essential

that we be concerned about children being pulled into the

marketplace by age 5 or sooner and shaped by the media

to be consumers before they’ve had a chance become

citizens (Denby, 1996), children are not passive, helpless

recipients of the diverse media messages that pervade their

world. Hagood (2001) spoke of the widely held belief that

“the culture industry socializes people in common ways

by exposing them to mindless drivel” (p. 254). This belief

fosters the notion that “people (and especially children)

lack the ability to interpret for themselves the messages

that mass media produce” and that these messages are

“duping them” and doing “little to improve their minds

or status in society” (Alvermann, 2006, p. 243). Despite

these concerns, we must remember that children actively

construct meaning and do not robotically internalize what-

ever messages are placed in front of them, or that writers

and editors are hapless victims in the face of monolithic

economic forces.

How Did It Come To This?

The story of how an industry historically owned and op-

erated by individuals dedicated to publishing the “best”

books for children while earning enough money to stay

in business was transformed into a big business expected

to contribute signi cantly to the bottom line of media

conglomerates (Chaikin, 1982) has parallels in industries

around the world. Prior to the mergers, publishers sought

to balance the cultural and commercial dimensions of

their enterprise. In this simpli ed formulation, culture and

commerce were viewed as opposing poles around which

the industry was organized. On the one hand were those

who eschewed pro t because of their earnest commitment

to provide “serious” reading and advance culture. On the

other were those who focused exclusively on  nancial

concerns and ignored their cultural responsibility (Haug-

land, 1994). After decades in publishing, Schiffrin (2000)

provided a sobering assessment of the shifting culture-

commerce fulcrum within the industry:

In Europe and in America, publishing has a long history as an

intellectually and politically engaged profession. Publishers

have always prided themselves on their ability to balance

the imperative of making money with that of issuing worth-

while books. In recent years, as ownership of publishing has

changed, the equation has been altered. It is increasingly

the case that the owner’s only interest is in making money

and as much of it as possible. (p. 5)

The sale of trade books has been viewed as “the most

publicly visible of the industry” that brings into sharp

focus “the tensions inherent in publishing’s status as part

of both economic base and cultural production” (Moran,

1997, p. 441). Seeking a balance between these con icting

imperatives is especially dif cult in the children’s book

business since it is “far more complex than the adult book

business and has a pro le out of all proportion to its market

value” (Crandall, 2006a, p. 2). This tension follows from

the belief that children’s books, despite their commercial

dimensions, embody fundamental expressions of society

and play a role in shaping young children’s values and

perceptions. Nevertheless, industry insiders lament the

assault on children’s book publishing as “corporate ac-

quisitiveness further batters what was once a nice, staid

little business” (Roxburgh, 2000, p. 653), while others

consider it naïve to “to think that publishing can stand

outside or above the market system that produces other

commodities” (Stossel, 2001, p. 43).

The inexorable process of integration, consolidation,

and downsizing in the industry has led to the integration

of individual publishing houses into ever-larger corporate

organizations such as The News Corporation. In the 1980s

and 1990s, mergers brought the major book publishers

into the hands of communication conglomerates with

holdings and interests in other highly pro table areas of

mass media (Moran, 1997). Schiffrin (2000) contended

that a small handful of major conglomerates control 80%

of American book sales while their holdings in other sec-

tors of the information and entertainment industries give

them their enormous, additional power.

The Key Players

It is critical to note that the dominant media corporations,

and their holdings, change with startling rapidity. I have

little doubt that the landscape will be altered by the time

this book is printed. Nevertheless, at this moment (early

2009), in addition to the previously discussed News Cor-

poration, other key players in the National Entertainment

State (Miller, 2002) include the Walt Disney Company,

the Pearson Group, Viacom, and Scholastic (an anomaly

among the publishing giants as it remains family-owned).

Publishing’s biggest merger occurred in March 1998 when

German-owned Bertelsmann purchased Random House,

the largest U.S. trade book publisher. The newly combined

company, which retains the name Random House, now is

the dominant U.S. publisher, as well as one of Great Brit-

ain’s (Crandall, 2006b). Speaking of this merger, Alterman

(1998) highlights the danger posed by merger mania.

This big book merger did not tell us anything we didn’t al-

ready know, except that everything is worse than we thought.

The commercial foundations of American culture and its

marketplace of ideas are crumbling to dust. The multina-

tional conglomerates that hold its purse strings care for little

but the bottom line. The “public trust” aspect of publishing

that was once assumed has disappeared. (pp. 5–6)

The search for new and expanded markets is a central

business strategy of the media conglomerates. In recent

years as China has embraced elements of the market

economy, its children’s literature industry has begun to

485

THE ECONOMICS OF CHILDREN’S BOOK PUBLISHING IN THE 21ST CENTURY

merge into the mainstream of international publishing.

In addition to unprecedented development, the industry

enjoys the support of government policies that encourage

development even while it faces the challenges concomi-

tant to the world market of globalized competition. Per-

haps the most signi cant indicator of these developments

after decades of government protection is that the Chinese

market now is open to foreign capital. Among the major

players in this potentially enormous market are the Walt

Disney Company, Bertelsmann, and the Pearson Group

(Hai Fei, 2006).

Although consolidation is the major development in

the evolution of the industry, there are countervailing,

contradictory tendencies that require notice. Writing about

publishing in the U.K., Crandall (2006b) challenges the

conventional wisdom about the state of the independent

publishers, pointing out that they actually have increased in

number (e.g., Barrington Stoke, Chicken House) over the

past decade. She also contends that, “contrary to general

opinion, neither conglomerate nor independent publishers

has the clear upper hand in terms of the quality of their

output, as measured by the success of their authors in win-

ning literary prizes” (p. 215). Reynolds (1998) concurs,

pointing out that since 1995 the number of independent

publishers of children’s  ction has doubled. Candlewick,

Holiday House, and Boyd’s Mill in the United States and

Canada’s Groundwood also are able to compete with the

corporate giants. Founded in 1991, Candlewick is espe-

cially worthy of note. It has won major awards in both the

U.S. and U.K. and was described by Patricia Lee Gauch

(2008, personal correspondence), former editor-in chief

of Philomel Books, as a publisher that creates “aestheti-

cally beautiful books” that dare to “use deckled edges,  ne

paper, [and] careful printing.” She notes as well that this

success has “the giants looking at Candlewick, scratching

their corporate heads, and wondering exactly how they

are accomplishing what they are accomplishing.” I per-

sonally consider Anderson’s (2006) The Astonishing Life

of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, published by

Candlewick, to be among the most remarkable, ground-

breaking books I ever have read.

As was noted earlier, a de ning characteristic of today’s

Post-Fordist, fast capitalist system is the focus on the pro-

duction of new commodities tailored to the consumer’s

preferences or niches (Paterson, 2006). Some believe that

global entertainment conglomerates have made book pub-

lishing a niche industry, and that children’s book publish-

ing occupies a “small nook of that niche” (Roxburgh, 2000,

p. 653). This perspective is in keeping with the notion that

some of the structures of multi-national conglomerates

that swallowed up imprints in the 1980s and 1990s are

becoming anachronistic for the 21st century (Reynolds &

Tucker, 1998). Multicultural literature exempli es the phe-

nomenon of niche publishing that is having an increasing

impact in the United States and elsewhere. In addition to

the multicultural books made available by major publishers

(e.g., Hyperion’s Jump at the Sun Books, HarperCollins’s

Amistad Books), small niche presses devoted exclusively

to multicultural literature have proliferated since the late

1980s. These publishers were made possible, perhaps nec-

essary, when the conservatism of 1980s led to a slowdown

in the publication of authors and illustrators from parallel

cultures. In contrast to the global approach of transnational

corporations, these smaller localized enterprises often are

owned and run by idealistic individuals acting on a com-

mitment to, for example, bilingual (e.g., Children’s Book

Press), multicultural (e.g., Lee and Low, Just US Books),

or Christian themed books (e.g., Zondervan Publishing

House). These companies generally pay authors and il-

lustrators less than major houses and can’t compete with

them in terms of distribution and publicity, which can

result in dif culties for buyers and reviewers obtaining

books or even knowing about them. Whether these smaller

companies can compete in the U.S. and elsewhere over the

long haul, as they seem able to do in the U.K., is a question

critical to the future of children’s literature.

The Impact of Consolidation

While, again, publishing always has been a business

designed to make a pro t, it’s easy to romanticize the

past, to lament the passing of the time when the industry

was in the hands of independent, often family-owned

companies, and to decry its current domination by im-

personal multinational corporations. American children’s

literature’s crassly commercial, courser side included the

dime novels of the 19th century and to the mass market

empire built by Edward Stratameyer whose series included

the Rover Boys, Tom Swift, the Hardy Boys, and Nancy

Drew (Keeline, 1995). While women have long played a

role in children’s book publishing, people of color, until

very recently, have been excluded from positions of power

and responsibility, especially from editorial positions

(Reynolds, 1998), and remain seriously underrepresented.

In addition, the canon of children’s literature, until recent

times, has been governed by a selective tradition that was

racist and sexist by commission and omission (Levine,

1997; Taxel, 1981). Substantive change in these practices

required the protest and activism of the 1960s and 1970s.

Despite some positive changes, publishing has evolved in

ways that are of concern to those who long for the days

when publishing was an enterprise where, as novelist E.

L. Doctorow put it, individuals could “make money and

be proud of their contributions to literature and ideas at

the same time” (quoted by Coser, Kadushin, & Powell,

1982, p. 14).

Prior to the 1980s when the pace of the mergers acceler-

ated, publishing was a stable and disciplined enterprise.

Echoing the culture vs. commerce theme, Crandall (2006a)

suggested that making a pro t was almost secondary to the

stated intention of producing books of the highest quality.

Few today would deny that the new corporate publishers

are primarily concerned with their pro t margins and that

486

JOEL TAXEL

previously there was a far healthier balance between the

desire to contribute to the culture and the imperative to

generate revenue. Revenue generation also is behind the

giant publishers’ emphasis on the downsizing of existing

backlists as publishers began to “asset strip” these lists in

search of characters who could be merchandised (Reyn-

olds & Tucker, 1998, p. xii). At the same time, declining

sales to the under-funded library systems, whose budgets

have been further stretched by the need to purchase com-

puter hardware and software, led to an intensi ed focus on

more commercial, fast-selling books and the cultivation of

new sales outlets such as chain bookstores, drug and toy

stores, and other retail outlets (Crandall, 2006a; Epstein,

1996; Reynolds, 1998).

The 1980s was the era when the boundary between

traditional editorial decision-making and business and

marketing began to blur. Business managers increasingly

assumed the leadership of publishing houses, and deci-

sions about the design of particular books and whether

to publish them no longer were the exclusive province

of editors but increasingly that of marketing people.

At the same time, editors were expected to adhere to

corporate guidelines in the acquisition and shaping of

products (Zipes, 2001). Marketing acquired “a new,

quasi-scienti c—and quasi-mystical—cachet,” and “what

does marketing say?” became the publishers’ mantra as

those within the industry sought to satisfy the wishes of

the new corporate bosses (Marcus, 2001, n.p.). Many in

the business already believe that marketing now in u-

ences publishing decisions in ways that would have been

inconceivable in the past (Auletta, 1997). Every book,

notes British editor Philippa Dickinson, “has to justify

its existence in purely  nancial terms.” Like many, she

mourns the passing of the days when “I would just have

published it because I loved it” where as “now I have to

put my personal selection in terms of money” (quoted by

Reynolds, 1998, p. 34). Crandall (2006a) makes a similar

point when noting, “where editors previously published

a book because they loved it, they must now defend their

choice to an acquisition committee of accountants and

salespeople” (p. 10). Marni Hodgkin, another editor from

Great Britain, bemoaned “the move to make the marketing

tail wag the publishing dog.”

In times past, the selling titles helped to support those that

didn’t: the experimental books or those with minority ap-

peal, or by unknown authors. But when books are marketed

like soap, each one, we are told, must stand on its own feet.

The result is that a title without mass appeal may easily go

out of print within the year of its publication, before the

hard-pressed librarians have had a chance to assess it or

the children are able to have a go. Publishers are less ready

to take risks, and new writers and innovative writing go to

the wall. (quoted by Reynolds, 1998, p. 34)

One critical institutional change was the 1983 creation

at Random House of a  rst-of-its-kind “Merch Group,”

a freestanding unit with its own sales force as well as

editorial and marketing staff. The Merch Group’s exclu-

sive concern was with how the company’s books could

serve as the basis of licensed merchandize and related

spin-offs.

Responding to the decline in government support for

libraries in Great Britain and the United States, publish-

ers reassessed the previous balance between the trade and

institutional sides of the market. Marketing’s ascendant

importance also was re ected in the launch by Publish-

ers Weekly of a “Marketing Front” column to track these

trends (Marcus, 2001). The fact that today’s books now

are important source material for  lms and television,

which in turn feeds the entertainment licensing market,

leads thousands of industry marketers to attend the annual

Licensing International Trade Show held in New York

(Raugust, 2007). These affairs now are essential to the

business of today’s children’s book industry.

Another manifestation of publishing under multination-

al control has been the shift from editorial, with comple-

mentary salescentered philosophies, to  nancial-growth

and marketing-centered ones, “a pure business model that

has never been shown to apply to books” (Simon, 2000,

pp. 25–26). This change is demonstrated by the upward

shift in expectations of the pro ts to be garnered from the

sale of books. Historically, books were expected to return

about 4% after taxes. Such a modest level of return was an

indication that money itself was not the sole reason why

people entered the industry. This is not to say that publish-

ers were not wealthy. However, the emphasis was more on

the steady growth of the  rm than on pro t itself.

As conglomerates took over publishing, they insisted

that each holding generate the same basic rates of pro t. In

February 1996, Bertelsmann made 15% the target for re-

turn on assets for all its new businesses. This  gure would

apply to Random House, as well as Bertelsmann’s hold-

ings in music, television, or computer software (Crandall

2006b). While perhaps not an unreasonable expectation

for these other businesses, 15% is an excessive expectation

for books. A related step was to “rationalize pro ts on a

title-by-title-basis.” In contrast to the long-time practice

whereby best sellers subsidized other books, the new world

of publishing required that each book “pay its own way”

(Schiffrin, 1999, p. 116).

Pantheon’s historically pro table children’s line, for

example, for many years had subsidized its less immedi-

ately pro table adult books. However, once the children’s

department had separate accounting, the practice no longer

was possible. The result was that works such as  rst books

or those that were considered “serious” and required time

to catch on and  nd an audience became increasingly

dif cult to publish. This “logical system” gradually was

imposed and accepted throughout the industry where it

“became a kind of iron mask” (Schiffrin, 1999, p. 117)

that allowed for little variation. “The time when the realm

of ideas that historically were exempted from the usual

expectations of pro t” had passed (p. 103).

487

THE ECONOMICS OF CHILDREN’S BOOK PUBLISHING IN THE 21ST CENTURY

What’s Good about the Mergers?

Media mergers, of course, have their defenders. Greco,

Rodriguez, and Wharton’s (2007) analysis of the culture

and commerce of publishing in the 21st century provides

extensive discussion of the economic bene ts of the merg-

ers. They point out that a basic  duciary responsibility of

managers in capitalist enterprises is to maximize revenues

for stockholders. Further, the capital accumulation and the

ability to grow the company made possible by mergers

are central to this effort. Greco et al.’s data suggest that

acquisitions were a requirement, indeed an obligation,

to support growth and technological advancements and

provide the capital needed to improve book publishing

ef ciency. Mergers also provide publishers with scarce

resources that allow them:

1. to  nd and develop authors and editors;

2. to expand title output and channels of distribution;

3. to bring to the market intriguing and con icting ideas

and opinions;

4. to ensure that the critically important marketplace of

ideas remains a vital component of this nation;

5. to publish genres formerly excluded during the golden

age of publishing (books on feminism or African

American, Hispanic American, and Asian American

themes and issues); and

6. to pay dividends to stockholders, wages to hundreds

of thousands of employees, and taxes to myriad gov-

ernmental agencies. (pp. 31–32)

These achievements seem laudable for an enterprise

seeking to balance the industry’s historic cultural and

commercial orientations. However, a number of these

assertions, especially those that relate to ensuring that

the marketplace of ideas contains con icting ideas and

opinions, are dubious. Some believe that rather than foster-

ing a marketplace for con icting ideas and opinions, the

concentration of power and control of publishing has led

to a decline in the diversity of published material given

that the same books appear in virtually all stores. A related

misgiving is that economic concentration results in only

books of national mainstream interest being available. The

narrowing of distribution lines is bad for consumers and,

when books are concerned, a threat to democracy (Bing,

1999). Finally, when “ideas themselves have become com-

modities whose value can be measured by the number of

potential customers,” a form of market censorship ensues

whereby “dissenting and counter cyclical ideas” are far

less likely to  nd a publisher (Schiffrin, 1999, p. 120).

Marketing and Merchandizing

The concept of the child as a consumer emerged in 18th-

century England and was central to the consumer revolu-

tion that affected all aspects of English life. It was at this

time that John Newbery, widely regarded as one of the

founders of modern children’s literature, initiated practices

to enhance the sale of his books that are the forebears

of those that pervade today’s global children’s culture

industry. While not the  rst to specialize in children’s

books, Newbery is the  rst British publisher to see the

potential for a pro table and permanent market (Dawson,

1998). Newbery used a variety of “gimmicks” to build

and extend his market and his reputation for advertising

acumen became almost as great as the fame of his little

books (p. 177). How ironic it is that the man whose name

graces one of the most prestigious literary awards in

American children’s literature also pioneered techniques

that dominate today’s industry and, to many, threaten to

undermine its integrity

Marketing and merchandizing that exploits the auras

(Zipes, 1997) surrounding fantasy characters is a central

component of the commodi cation process and marketing

to children. In the late 19th century, Palmer Cox (2008),

known as the “Walt Disney of the Victorian age” created

immensely popular books about elf-like Brownies (Estes,

1985) and an array of commodities that capitalized on their

popularity. A neglected aspect of the legacy of Beatrix

Potter (2008) was her interest in merchandizing. She pat-

ented a Peter Rabbit doll and game and designed a jigsaw

puzzle. Potter referred to these items as “merchandising

‘side-shows’” and their success continues to this day. As

the children’s book market expanded at the close of the

19th century, publishers shrewdly began designing book

illustrations and covers in an attempt to attract child and

adult consumers to the book as an enchanted item (Zipes,

2001).

By the mid-20th century, Walt Disney’s prescient

understanding of the potential of children as a market for

merchandizing allowed him to tap into and exploit that

market to unprecedented levels. Disney had an uncanny

genius for pro ting from fantasy and enchantment, and

he re ned and extended the marketing of the myriad toys

derived from his animated features. This commodi cation

led to the licensing of Mickey Mouse, Snow White, and

“every other character turned out by the Disney imagi-

neers to every conceivable advertising outlet” (Giroux,

1999, p. 32).

In 1942, Western Publishing licensed the Little Golden

Book imprint to Simon & Schuster and became the  rst

major publisher to enter into the lucrative licensing and

merchandizing market. In another critical development,

a major new channel for the sale of Golden Books was

opened when Simon & Schuster introduced the 25-cent

books to supermarkets. By 1949, the “Golden juggernaut”

expanded still further as Simon & Schuster licensed the

Little Golden name to manufacturers producing a wide

variety children’s merchandise. The year 1949 also marked

the launch of Les Petits Livres d’Or, French-language edi-

tions of Little Golden Books, and the  nal plans for foreign

editions in Spain, Italy, and Germany (Marcus, 2007).

These forebears of today’s ubiquitous efforts to capi-

talize on and promote the popularity of characters from

488

JOEL TAXEL

popular books make it clear that today’s marketers have

several centuries of precedent and experience to build

on. Their efforts today are doubtless enhanced by the

“hyperconsumption” (Langer, 2004) characteristic of

our age.

Children’s Books as Idea Factories

The pervasive view of children’s books as idea factories

that can foster cross-media synergies is visible in the

dozens of books that have been optioned to  lm com-

panies. Transforming a book into a  lm invariably has

a dramatic impact on book sales. The big screen version

of Tuck Everlasting, while not a blockbuster, provided a

substantial bump to the sales of Natalie Babbitt’s (1975)

classic novel. According to the book’s publisher, the novel

typically sold 10,000 copies for the month of October; after

the release of the  lm, October 2002 sales were 66,000

copies (Maughan, 2002b). Similarly, despite receiving

negative reviews, the  lmed version of The Cat in the Hat

propelled Dr. Seuss’s (1957) ever-popular title to the top

of bestseller lists (Marcus, 2001). Recent book-based  lms

include: Because of Winn Dixie; Curious George (which

also has a television program on PBS); Ella Enchanted;

Charlotte’s Web (the second version); Stuart Little (with

two sequels); Holes; The Lion, the Witch and the Ward-

robe; The Polar Express; Jumanji; Nancy Drew; A Wrinkle

in Time; Bridge to Terabithia; Horton Hears a Who; and

The Tale of Despereaux (Maughan, 2002a).

Other books scheduled for this treatment were on

display at the 2007 Licensing Show. The Sony Pictures’

booth, for example, was draped in spaghetti in honor

of the studio’s 2009 release of Cloudy with a Chance

of Meatballs. Also available for license was Maurice

Sendak’s (1964) classic Where the Wild Things Are (Rau-

gust, 2007).

Authors as Brands

The practice of establishing books and their characters as

brands that will attract readers, viewers, and consumers of

ancillary products extends to authors. Zipes (2001) con-

tends that authors and illustrators themselves have become

commodities as publishers strive to gain for them the name

recognition and celebrity that lead to the automatic review

of their books, wide publicity, and ready availability in

bookstores and other sales outlets. Recent years have

brought this sort of fame and brand-name status to chil-

dren’s authors such as Marc Brown, Jan Brett, Tomie de

Paola, and, of course, J. K. Rowlings (Marcus, 2001).

William Steig’s (1990) Shrek is among the handful of

children’s books that attained the box of ce success so

avidly sought by publishers. After the  rst  lm earned

three-quarters of a billion dollars, Scholastic didn’t need

a crystal ball to predict that Shrek 2 would be one of the

biggest movies of 2004 and would spur the sale of books

and merchandize. The three Shrek  lms have grossed over

$2 billion and two others are planned. Having secured

the rights to publish Shrek 2 books in multiple formats,

Scholastic sought mass-market retailers to capitalize on

their license.

Publishers have learned that licensed books,  lms, and

their ancillary products do best in mass-market stores

such as K-Mart, Wall-Mart, Costco, etc. As a result, these

outlets are increasing space devoted to children’s titles,

improving their in-store displays, and expanding their

selection beyond what were once very narrow parameters

(Holt, 2004). Not surprisingly, sales in these stores often

depend on impulse buying by consumers who recognize

the names of branded authors or  lms.

The importance of cultivating authors as brands is

nowhere more apparent than in the ever-growing trend

toward celebrity authors. While not a new phenomenon,

within the last decade celebrities have sought to capital-

ize on their popularity by writing books for children. The

reverse also is the case as publishers seek to turn media

stars into authors in order to exploit their name recogni-

tion. The list of actors and entertainers who have written

picture books includes Julie Andrews, Bill Cosby, Jamie

Lee Curtis, Whoopi Goldberg, Billy Crystal, Will Smith,

Shaquille O’Neal, Jimmy Carter, Paul McCartney, and

Duchess of York Sarah Ferguson. Since the appeal of

celebrity authors derives from their ability to garner

coveted television airtime,  nding a publisher usually is

rather simple (Marcus, 2001). Unlike the vast majority of

authors, celebrities are not dependent on starred reviews

to command publicity for their books, and even negative

reviews may not affect sales (Austin, 2003).

The September 2003 release of Madonna’s (2003)  rst

book, The English Roses, was among the more remarkable

literary debuts in recent memory. More than 1,000,000

copies in 30 languages were shipped to 50,000 bookstores

in 100 countries and backed by a marketing blitz that took

the author from London to Paris and to the Oprah Winfrey

show. The effect of all of this hype was quickly apparent

as The English Roses became the fastest-selling children’s

picture book of all time. In an article for the Pittsburgh

Post-Gazette, MacPherson (2004, n.p.) explained that

Madonna created controversy when she asserted that her

decision to become an author began when she started read-

ing to her son and “couldn’t believe how vapid and vacant

and empty all the stories were. There’s, like, no lessons….

There’s, like, no books about anything.” MacPherson

continued with several responses by notable authors and

critics. Newbery Medalist Linda Sue Park believes Ma-

donna’s comments expose her “shameful ignorance of the

world of children’s books” and are an “insult not only those

of us who dedicate our lives to writing for young people,

but also those young readers who have discovered good

books and funny books that they love.”

Park is not alone in her disdain for celebrity books that,

with few exceptions are disparaged by critics who decry

their poor writing and frequent didacticism. Book review

editor Trev Jones agrees that “most of these books are

489

THE ECONOMICS OF CHILDREN’S BOOK PUBLISHING IN THE 21ST CENTURY

pretty bad, although it’s hard to pan them all” While not-

ing that some celebrity authors can write, many can’t “and

there is seemingly no connection between whether they

can write and whether they will get published.” Critic Anita

Silvey believes that “celebrity-written children’s books are

the worst kind of disconnect between a parent—who is

attached to a book written by a celebrity they like—and

a child, for whom that celebrity is totally meaningless.”

Jane Yolen points out that despite her many awards and

honorary doctorates, she has never been asked to appear

on Oprah or spoken to Katie Couric (MacPherson, 2004,

n.p.). Other critics fear that if a book sells simply because

its author is a celebrity, the distinction between quality

and popularity is blurred. Such books also perpetuate the

misconception that anyone can write a children’s book.

Regardless of what authors and critics say, it is clear

that publishers’ enthusiasm for celebrity authors only

will grow more ardent. While critics complain about

“catalogues that read like an issue of People magazine,”

publishers are “too busy counting their money to listen”

(Holt, 2004, n.p.). Perhaps the most serious issue raised by

the love affair with celebrity authors is that they ultimately

limit the opportunities for other, often  edgling, writers

to get published. The related problem is that celebrity

authors command an inordinate amount of publishers’

advertising budgets thus denying needed promotional

dollars to less well-known authors. Jane Yolen believes

that “celebrity children’s books eat up all the available

oxygen” (MacPherson, 2004, n.p.).

Series and Sequels

I have discussed some of the ways that publishers seek to

brand their authors in order to exploit their name recogni-

tion and attract steady and repetitive sales. A ubiquitous

strategy toward this end is the publication of sequels to

popular books and their development into series. This

pattern is evident in  lms where the success of an initial

offering makes a sequel a virtual certainty.

As Catherine Sheldrick Ross points out in her chapter

in this volume, children’s book publishing has a long and

quite lucrative mass-market side that includes the dime

novels of the 19th century and later series such as the

Rover Boys, the Hardy Boys, the Bobbsey Twins, and

Nancy Drew, which have been updated for contemporary

audiences (Marcus, 1997). In their heyday, children’s li-

brarians banished many of these series, as well as the Little

Golden Books, from numerous collections. The prejudice

against series was so intense that Wilder’s Little House

books were repeatedly shut out of librarian-administered

award competitions such as the Newbery Medal (Miller,

2008). Nevertheless, these series continue to sell and their

ranks were swelled in the 1970s by teen romance series

such as Sweet Dreams, Sweet Valley High, and the Baby

Sitters Club books for preteens. Popular current series

include those about Junie B. Jones and the Magic School

Bus. Discussing the recent release of the  lmed version

of Kit Kittredge, one of the titles in the American Girls

series, Baker (2008) notes that the series had sold 117

million books in 23 years and succeeded in establishing

an “emotional connection with this brand” (n.p.).

The difference between books that spawn sequels and

those that evolve into series is not easy to discern. While

there long have been series of literary distinction and

popularity, they are qualitatively different from mass-

market romances or popular horror series (e.g., those of

R. L Stine). Examples include Lewis’s Chronicles of Nar-

nia series (e.g., 1994), Alexander’s Prydain series (e.g.,

1999), and Mildred Taylor’s books about the Logan family

(e.g., 1976). Making distinctions between the “quality”

of certain books compared to others, something I have

done throughout this chapter, long has been the province

of literary scholars and critics. Such distinctions are made

explicit by awards such as the Newbery, Caldecott, and

Kate Greenway Medals, the Canadian Library Associa-

tion Book of the Year for Children, and the Australian

Children’s Book Council Awards.

Judgments about quality also are a de ning feature of

most children’s literature textbooks. Jacobs and Tunnell

(2008), for example, state “a good book is one created by

a knowledgeable and skilled author in which the elements

of literature measure up under critical analysis. Quality is

recognized by evaluating different elements of the book

including style and language, character, plot, pacing,” etc.

(p. 11). Referring to the “magni cent texts” discussed

throughout Interpreting Literature with Children, Wolf

(2004) notes that these works have “well drawn characters,

absorbing plots, deeply rendered themes, and jewel-like

craft in terms of language” (p. 37). Nodelman and Reimer

(2003) take a different approach and seek to problematize

“old certainties” by asking “new questions” about the dif-

ference between “good literary texts and bad ones.” For

example, they ask, “if good texts are so different from bad

ones, why do many people, including literary experts, dis-

agree about these matters” (p. 1). They also wonder, “who

decides what is wise and what is beautiful and why should

their judgment be trusted” (p. 3)? Despite the provocative

importance of these questions, Nodelman and Reimer’s

volume is full of discussions of speci c books that are

presented to illustrate literary themes or theoretical issues.

The fact that many if not all of these books are, at least in

this reader’s judgment, “books of quality” points to the

fact that while making literary judgments is unavoidably

subjective, qualitative distinctions among books can and

invariably will be made.

In today’s publishing environment, it is the lack of a

sequel to a popular book that is likely to elicit surprise,

and today’s sequels and series usually become enmeshed

in the synergistic relations between literature and other

media. Sequels to successful high-end trade picture books

now are commonplace. For example, the highly successful

Caldecott Honor Books No David (Shannon, 1998), Click,

Clack, Moo: Cows That Type (Cronin, 2000), and Olivia

490

JOEL TAXEL

(Falconer, 2000) all spawned sequels that are similar in

style, content, and format to the predecessor. While these

books are not without their charms, they re ect clearly

the bottom line imperative and the in uence of marketing

discussed earlier. Not surprisingly, Falconer, like other suc-

cessful authors, has utilized the popularity of his literary

creation to create a merchandizing bonanza that includes

board books, shirts, dolls, umbrellas, paint sets, theatres,

tea sets, etc.

The “relentless drive” toward series books and sequels

intended to “guarantee larger and more predictable sales”

(Crandall, 2006b, p.217) may have a deleterious impact on

the creative processes of writers and illustrators. Speak-

ing of  lms, Ritzer (2000) wonders if the large audiences

attracted by predictable  lm products are offset by the

expense of movies based on new characters, ideas, and

concepts. Engelhardt (1991) argues:

The descent of adult methods into children’s publishing has

also meant the descent of junior versions of distinctly adult

genres—the TV soap opera, the woman’s romance, and the

thriller—deeper and deeper into the world of childhood;

and with them, a certain generic sameness has blanketed

bestsellerdom. (p. 60)

The veracity of this claim is seen in the announcement

that Harlequin, known for its adult romances, has entered

the YA market with a new trade paperback imprint aimed

at African American teenage girls, a group of readers the

publisher says is underserved by commercial  ction.

Looking Ahead

Happily, consideration of the socioeconomic issues related

to children’s literature and culture no longer is a novelty.

These discussions provide us with greater awareness and

understanding of the relation between economic forces

and the books available to our children. This chapter

draws further attention to the escalating pressure that

publishers, editors, and authors feel to produce certain

moneymakers. This tendency is evident in a variety of

factors that comprise the process of commodi cation:

the proliferation of books based on branded characters,

the publication of books written by celebrity authors, the

generation of series, television programs and movie tie-ins,

and the activities of “merch” divisions seeking to parlay a

company’s books into licensed merchandize and related

spin-offs. We can expect more of the same in the future

simply because of the enormous amounts of money to be

made. Twenty years ago, Shepard (1988) commented on

these trends that only have increased with the passage of

time: “When big money moves in, creativity, originality,

and freedom move out. The reason is risk. When a lot of

money is at stake, the investors insist on a safe product.

And they get what they want. Formulas reign. Products are

geared to the mass market meaning, the lowest common

denominator” (n.p.).

It is easy to despair that the market driven impera-

tives discussed in this chapter threaten the existence of

the kinds of literature that parents, educators, and other

book-lovers have come to take for granted. Clearly, the

impact of seemingly impersonal macroeconomic forces

on the full range of cultural institutions must never be

underestimated. However, as was noted earlier, it is an

error to examine cultural phenomena without reference to

human agency. It is essential that we always keep in mind

that while “people operate within the limits of a variety of

constraints, the market being a major example of such con-

straints, there remains a domain of choices that involves

the possibility of “doing otherwise” (Coser, 1984, p. 11).

Writing almost 30 years ago, Whiteside (1980) alluded

to this point when paying tribute to the handful of editors

and publishers “who have shown themselves determined

to maintain their standards of excellence and their encour-

agement of new writing talent.” He retained the belief that

“even within the most seemingly monolithic companies

there are individual editors whose professional skill and

energy and devotion to literature are such that they have

been able to establish, in effect, their own imprints within

these companies” (pp. 121–122).

These editors and writers, along with the publishers of

the smaller niche presses, cling tenaciously to the freedom

and latitude to make publishing decisions and produce that

segment of the many thousands of books published each

year, many of breathtaking quality, that are of wonderfully

varying styles, genres, and formats. A signi cant number

of these books address complex and controversial issues

and themes with an honesty and forthrightness that would

not have been possible 20 or 30 years ago. Editor Patricia

Gauch (2008, personal communication) insists that the

industry still is populated by people who retain the con-

viction that the industry can, recallling Doctorow, “make

money and be proud of their contributions to literature

and ideas at the same time” (quoted by Coser, Kadushin,

& Powell, 1982, p. 14). Gauch maintains that there are

editors, both veteran and novice, who nurture the hope

that the industry can do both. However, she worries as

well that “young administrators tend to be the ones big

business has hunted down and [they] put the sword of the

bottom-line in their hands.”

The primacy of the bottom-line doubtless will continue

to challenge all of those who work in, and care about,

the industry. One source for optimism is offered by the

intriguing notion of the “long tail” promulgated by Ander-

son (2004) who points to the bene cial impact of on-line

vendors. Amazon, for example, unlike chain bookstores

and mass-market outlets, is not restricted by the “tyranny

of space,” the limited amount of shelf space available even

in the largest stores. Anderson claims that on the average

Barnes & Noble carries 130,000 titles. In contrast, more

than half of Amazon’s book sales come from outside its top

130,000 titles. The implication is that the market for books

that are not even sold in the average bookstore (which

typically do not stock books published by the smaller

491

THE ECONOMICS OF CHILDREN’S BOOK PUBLISHING IN THE 21ST CENTURY

niche publishers) is larger than the market for those that

are. As a consequence, online distribution and unlimited

shelf space is leading to a dramatic shift in the book and

entertainment businesses from hit-driven economics to one

dominated by niche-driven economics. This broadening

of the market has occurred largely because content once

considered on the fringe now is  nding a market through

on-line distribution. Whether books from the new niche

publishers get the attention of readers who then go to

on-line vendors, or those bookstores that do stock them,

remains to be seen.

The ability of authors, editors, and publishers to resist

escalating pressures to commodify children’s literature

further and to maintain their independence in the face

of bottom-line imperatives will go a long way in de-

termining the future of children’s literature and have a

momentous impact on the social, cultural, and political

life of our increasingly interconnected world. Books like

The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the

Nation (Anderson, 2006), Alexis’s (2007) provocative

The Absolutely True Story of a Part-Time Indian, and

Selznick’s (2007) Caldecott Award winning graphic novel

The Invention of Hugo Cabret are but a few examples

from among myriad others illustrating that there is much

to celebrate in children’s book publishing today. While

the continued  owering of wonderfully innovative books

in countries around the globe is a cause for optimism, the

catalogues of many of the very houses that produce them

increasingly are dominated by the kinds of commodi ed

books discussed in this chapter. Over a decade ago, Jane

Yolen (1997) confessed to being “appalled” by the “pro-

liferation of pop-up/scratch-and sniff/doll and puppet/

paper engineered products” that gradually are “pushing

out literature” in the catalogues of major publishers (p.

287). My own cursory inspection of current catalogues

suggests that, if anything, the situation has gotten worse,

reinforcing the fear that books of quality will be relegated

to a smaller niche within the children’s literature market.

Yolen’s apprehension that “if bad books continue to outsell

good books, if litter outsells literature, publishers will

eventually stop publishing the good” (p. 287) is one that

we would do well to take seriously. Zipes (2001) provides

a perceptive summary of these con icting tendencies.

Children’s literature is seeing a ﬂ owering of innovative books

and illustrations for readers from two to sixteen that are not

simply economic ventures. Children’s literature needs and

thrives on the work of ﬁ ne writers and artists and fosters

experimentation and challenges to the market. Unfortu-

nately, the corporate structure will appropriate the new

and sometimes highly unique children’s books to quantify

and rationalize these works according to market needs and

calculations. (p. 48)

Despite the daunting challenges posed by these de-

velopments, we are not without power to in uence them.

Consumers, such as library and school communities, do

have power through the sales they generate to in uence

what gets published. These communities can use their

purchasing power to demand that the balance between

books of quality and the spin-offs, gimmick, and other

mass-market books be redressed. Schools that sponsor

book fairs, most now run by Scholastic, can insist that

the steady encroachment of mass market books on the

lists of books offered for sale be reversed. A critical role

also is played by committees who select the Newbery,

Caldecott, the Kate Greenway Medal, and other awards.

In the U.S., committees that nominate books for statewide

awards such as the Georgia Book Award and the Texas

Bluebonnet Award share this responsibility. These awards

generate a signi cant boost to sales of books that win or

are nominated. We must be aggressive in promoting the

kinds of books that receive these awards and appear on

these lists.

Central to the dilemma posed by rampant commercial-

ism is whether children will be able to distinguish between

books that win prestigious literary awards and the spin-offs

and other mass market books I have been criticizing. Like

many, I believe that these books are of marginal quality and

content. In addition, these books are produced primarily

for pro t with little regard for literature itself, and the act of

reading them is more an act of consumerism than engage-

ment with a literary text (Friese, 2008; Hade & Edmonson,

2003). Similarly, one wonders whether children will be

able to differentiate between, for example, Harry Potter

as a brand and Harry Potter as a compelling character

worth reading about. It is easy, as Mackey (2001) points

out, to be so “overwhelmed by the hype and hyperbole”

surrounding the release of the Potter and similar books

to fear that the books themselves “will disappear into

the maw of contemporary publicity and advertising and

spin-offs” (p. 185). We must nurture the “global voices”

 owing out of books that provide “the power to furnish

[children’s] heads with individual images that will connect

them both to the world in general and their own country

in particular” (Mahy, 2001, pp. 18–19).

These voices are an essential counterweight to branded,

commodi ed voices of, to use Mahy’s examples, Pokémon

and the Simpsons. Again, educators, parents, and other

caregivers must do more than simply lament and rail

against the encroachment of products of our commodi ed

culture into all aspects of children’s lives. Fortunately,

there is a growing body of scholarship offering promising

suggestions for the development of a pedagogy that builds

on the understanding that young people “are not passive

dupes in this process; they have considerable agency in the

consumption of these products” (Marsh, quoted by Friese,

2008, p. 78). Alvermann and Xu (2003) and Dyson (1997)

point to ways to capitalize on children’s fascination with

superheroes by using texts found in our popular culture

to foster the development of critical literacy skills. Friese

(2008) points to work that illustrates that the structure and

content of Pokémon texts and cards correspond to many

important curricular goals and provide rich opportunities

492

JOEL TAXEL

for engagement in mathematics, science, social studies,

as well as reading and writing. Children can be taught to

analyze critically the wide range of books and  lms that

dominate popular culture (Apol, 1998; Giroux & Shannon,

1997), encouraged to read multiculturally (Hade, 1997;

Möller, 2002), and to question the construction of gender

in romance novels (Christian-Smith, 1991). Finally, we

need to be more aggressive in promoting books that offer

genuine aesthetic experiences and provide young people

with insight and understanding into the growing diversity

and complexity of our society. Careful examination of the

wide range of books and  lms that dominate our popular

culture and can attune children to the global voices Mar-

garet Mahy spoke of.

Another issue raised by the commodi cation of lit-

erature and all aspects of our culture is the increasing

economic exploitation of children. Roxburgh (2000)

fears that they are being exploited today as consumers

and wonders if pervasive commercialism is altering our

perception of childhood, and even robbing our young of

their childhoods. It is dif cult not to be terri ed that “we

have become a nation which places a lower priority on

teaching its children how to thrive socially, intellectually,

even spiritually, than it does on training them to consume”

(Schor, 2004, p. 11), or fear that media shapes children as

consumers before they’ve developed their souls (Denby,

1996). We must work to ensure that developments in

critical literacy can address and arrest these alarming

developments.

These momentous trends, along with the decline in

reading in many countries (Crandall, 2006a; National

Endowment of the Arts, 2007) due at least in part to the

proliferation of entertainment choices, makes it clear

that there are no easy, facile answers to the issues raised

in this chapter. To think that there are is naïve, perhaps

dangerous. Nevertheless, we are not powerless and can

and must foster the development of critical literacies and

be unyielding in our commitment to promoting the kinds

of books and reading experiences that led us here in the

 rst place.

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Spinning Off

Toys, Television, Tie-Ins, and Technology

Margaret Mackey

University of Alberta

When literature becomes marketable both for its stories and its adaptability across mediums and media, one

outcome is certainly increased pro ts and motivation to secure readers’ interests and loyalty, as Joel Taxel

describes in the preceding chapter. Another outcome, as Margaret Mackey argues, is expanded opportunities

for retelling, reshaping, and revaluing a story’s original form, content, and audience. In a reach across disci-

plines, Mackey outlines the questions raised by the “slipperiness” of stories for authors, publishers, educators,

and researchers, who all want to know how readers—especially the generation of children who know books

as commodities—understand and engage with multiple story forms. While multinational and multimedia

enterprises seek ever-narrower storylines for a predetermined market, readers, artists, and entrepreneurs are

very busy making up their own spin-offs.

In the world of children’s literature, Harry Potter stands

alone as a singular and astonishing exception to many

generalizations. So, perhaps it is reading too much into a

one-off phenomenon to be taken aback by a “Special Col-

lector’s Issue” of the American publication, Entertainment

Weekly, a magazine normally focused on Hollywood press

releases and gossip. “Goodbye, Harry,” reads the headline

of the issue of August 3, 2007, and a  ash promises read-

ers “36 pages of Pottermania!” The image shows a child

with glasses and a scar, immersed in the pages of Harry

Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Rowling, 2007).

The extraordinary saga of how the Harry Potter series

developed from ordinary children’s books into the kind of

pop culture phenomenon that could dominate a whole issue

of Entertainment Weekly is unique. But Harry is not alone

in moving easily between books, movies, Internet sites,

magazines, toys, games, Happy Meals, and fan  ction,

although not many heroes of print  ction will successfully

emulate his total and astonishing  uidity. It is actually

Harry’s readers who join him in inhabiting a multimedia

world, where multiple versions, incarnations, adaptations

and spin-offs are completely taken for granted.

The scale of spin has escalated over the past two gen-

erations of children. But children’s literature and toys

have always been partnered; pioneer children’s publisher

John Newbery (1744) sold balls and pincushions with his

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A Pretty Little Pocket Book in the 18th century. Popular

authors have often explored the “franchise” possibilities

of their successful works; Lewis Carroll approved a Won-

derland Postage-Stamp Case (Watson, 2001), and, in the

early 1900s, Beatrix Potter was an indefatigable marketer

of spin-off commodities (Mackey, 1998). Simultaneously,

L. Frank Baum (1900), in the United States, exploited ad-

aptations in both old and very new media (a stage musical,

toys and games, even hand-colored  lm, a breakthrough

in 1908) to advertise and re-tell The Wonderful Wizard of

Oz and its successors (Hearn, 2000/1973).

So adaptations, tie-ins and commodities are not new to

the world of children’s and young adult literature. Never-

theless, the past few decades, especially in the West, have

seen an exponential increase in the re-spinning of stories

for young people into a variety of versions, back-stories,

and associated objects. The assumption that a story will

exist in a variety of shapes and formats is now common-

place, and Fleckenstein (2003) provides a useful phrase

for describing this phenomenon. She refers to “slippery

texts” (p. 105), a phrase that will serve both as a descriptor

and as a heuristic for investigating the mutating shape of

contemporary materials.

Slippery texts proliferate on all sides. Correspondingly

and appropriately slippery research into this phenomenon

is harder to pin down. Different research traditions—liter-

ary criticism, education, library science, cultural studies,

economics, cognitive narratology—all explore the territory

of textual metamorphosis, each using different conceptual

lenses and different methodologies. Any overview of this

complex challenge is certain to be partial. Nevertheless,

in this chapter, in pursuit of this challenge, I will address

issues of “slipperiness,” focusing on a number of topics:

Adaptations of children’s literature •

Spin-off toys and commodities and services •

The impact on reading of associated forms of con-•

sumption

Consumer-produced adaptations and spin-offs •

Slipperiness makes for a varied and fascinating cultural

landscape but it creates barriers to the development of

manageable yet rigorous methodologies for exploring the

contemporary scene of young people’s literature, broadly

de ned. The ever-ramifying extension of spin-off materi-

als makes it dif cult to assemble any kind of de nitive

text-set for content analysis. The exponential rate of

diversi cation in the formats and interactive potential of

texts that appeal to young people means that reception

studies are often outdated before they can be published.

And as cultural, political, and economic structures struggle

to keep up with the cultural implications of technological

change, the institutional frameworks that support literary

experience are also in  ux.

To a certain extent, slippery research tools are part of the

solution. Digitally updated information, particularly about

popular culture, is accessible through a variety of websites,

listservs, news feeds, blogs, and so forth. Digital forms of

analysis and distribution speed the research process—but

events invariably move even faster.

With a topic as complex as the spiraling proliferation

of adaptations and spin-offs, the research challenges are

formidable. There is a need for analytical tools for the

principled comparison of adapted versions that take into

account both the technical requirements of different media

and also the varying ways in which metaphors, themes,

subtexts, and ideologies may be translated into new forms

(a translation that often must also take account of new

times, when one text is antecedent to its adaptations).

Textual analysis alone, however, runs the danger of lead-

ing to monolithic conclusions unless augmented and con-

tested by reception studies that provide a channel through

which to hear the identities and voices of young readers,

viewers, players, and collectors; and re ned by attention

to the commercial imperatives that very often shape and

direct artistic choices. Furthermore, the whole intellectual

enterprise runs the risk of operating permanently in catch-

up mode, as young people adopt new media possibilities

at an accelerating rate. Livingstone (1998) encapsulates

some of the problem as follows:

The creation of meaning through the interaction of texts

and readers is a struggle, a site of negotiation between two

semi-powerful sources. Each side has different powerful

strategies, each has different points of weakness and each

has different interests. It is this process of negotiation which

is central. And through analysis of this process, traditional

conceptions of both texts and readers may require rethink-

ing, for each has long been theorized in ignorance of the

other. (p. 26)

Livingstone’s warning is true enough even in the relatively

circumscribed world of print reading, where it is relatively

unusual for researchers to combine particular, detailed,

and critical textual analysis with thick, rich description of

readers’ responses to a speci ed individual text. Add the

complications of expanding media versions and the need

to capture the behavior of readers as they move between

one version and another of a particular story, and the chal-

lenge becomes simply gigantic.

Adaptations of Children’s Literature

Literary adaptations come in many guises, sometimes but

not always involving a change of medium. Print adaptations

include stories being abridged, converted into simple Eng-

lish for second language readers or readers younger than the

original market, or published in different formats (a picture

book story republished as a short story, for example, or vice

versa). A shift of medium may involve an audio recording

of a reading or a dramatization; or it may entail a transfor-

mation into  lm; less commonly, a children’s book may

serve as the basis of a digital game. For a short period at the

end of the last century, picture books were converted into

CD-ROMs, but that technology has now faded. Websites

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related to selected book titles, however, continue to  our-

ish. A relatively new development involves “transmedia”

stories, where the narrative is distributed across a variety

of platforms ( lm, book, TV series, website, for example)

and an interpreter needs to follow suit to gain access to the

complete story (Jenkins, 2008/2006).

Much of the theoretical literature about adaptation

involves the transmutation of a novel into a  lm, a televi-

sion series or a stage play (e.g., Cardwell, 2002; Cartmell

& Whelehan, 1999; Chatman, 1978; Giddings, Selby, &

Wensley, 1990; McFarlane, 1996; Reynolds, 1993). These

studies investigate what components of a story are directly

transferable between media and what must be re-expressed

to suit a new medium. A small number of scholars (e.g.,

Morris, 2000; Wojcik-Andrews, 2000) and publications

(e.g., a special issue of The Lion and the Unicorn in June

1996; an edited book of essays [Street, 1983]) look spe-

ci cally at children’s  lm adaptations.

Pluralities and Pleasures

But today’s young people move between many different

media versions of their favorite literature, not just back

and forth between the print page and the moving image.

Not only may they experience and re-experience the

same story in many different incarnations, they also live

in a world where the trailer, the spoiler, and the YouTube

highlight develop an important impact on the concept of

the aesthetic whole as a unit of experience in which frag-

ments of a story repeat ever more endlessly.

Lunenfeld (2000) tackles the never-ending plurality

of the most popular stories directly, talking about an

“aesthetic of un nish” (p. 7) that arises partly out of the

commercial impulse to create successful brands of  ction

and partly out of the plethora of media opportunities to tell

and re-tell. Hutcheon (2006) also explores this impulse to

experience the same  ction over and over again in differ-

ent instantiations across a wide range of media. “[T]here

must,” she argues, “be something particularly appealing

about adaptations as adaptations” (p. 4). She suggests

part of the pleasure,

…comes simply from repetition with variation, from the

comfort of ritual combined with the piquancy of surprise.

Recognition and remembrance are part of the pleasure

(and risk) of experiencing an adaptation; so too is change.

Thematic and narrative persistence combines with material

variation. (p. 4)

Fidelity and Form: Narrative and Enunciation

The question of  delity is important to discussions of

adaptation, and was often foregrounded, for example, in

responses to the  rst three Harry Potter movies. The  rst

two stories were  lmed very faithfully by Chris Columbus,

but the third, directed by Alfonso Cuarón, branched out

into new interpretive territory. A sample critique, drawn

at random from an Internet search for the terms “Harry

Potter faithful” reads as follows:

Columbus’ entries were ﬁ lmed books, whereas Cuarón cre-

ates a ﬁ lm based on a book. That may sound like arguing

semantics, but between the two ideas is a huge artistic differ-

ence. Cuarón’s ﬁ lm is not a reﬂ ection but its own image.

In fact, “Prisoner of Azkaban” would be a better ﬁ lm if

Cuarón and the writer were freed from the book entirely.

The only unsatisfactory portions are the opening and closing

20 minutes, which frantically attempt to keep pace with the

novel’s dense plot. (Westhoff, 2004, n.p.)

Some core components of a story can and should be

transferred between media in order for the story to be

recognizable. Some elements of the story are integrally

related to how it is told and these elements must necessar-

ily transform when the form of telling changes. McFar-

lane (1996) provides one set of working vocabulary for

discussing these fundamentals when he de nes and labels

the distinction between:

(i) those elements of the original novel which are transfer-

able because not tied to one or other semiotic system—that

is, essentially, narrative, and

(ii) those which involve intricate processes of adaptation

because their effects are closely tied to the semiotic system

in which they are manifested – that is, enunciation. (p. 20)

McFarlane is discussing the movement of a novel into

a  lm but contemporary stories migrate among a much

larger range of media, as Hutcheon (2006) points out:

If you think adaptation can be understood by using novels

and ﬁ lms alone, you’re wrong. The Victorians had a habit

of adapting just about everything—and in just about every

possible direction; the stories of poems, novels, plays, op-

eras, paintings, songs, dances, and tableaux vivants were

constantly being adapted from one medium to another and

then back again. We postmoderns have clearly inherited this

same habit, but we have even more new materials at our

disposal – not only ﬁ lm, television, radio, and the various

electronic media, of course, but also theme parks, histori-

cal enactments, and virtual reality experiments. The result?

Adaption has run amok. That’s why we can’t understand its

appeal and even its nature if we only consider novels and

ﬁ lms. (p. xi)

Nevertheless, though Hutcheon is clearly correct in

considering a much broader range of adaptation, the

concepts of narrative and enunciation, derived from the

print- lm nexus, have some general utility in considering

the processes involved. Adaptation has indeed run amok,

and as a result even very young children have at least a

tacit understanding that books can do some things well

and some things less well; that movies can take certain

components out of books to be re-expressed but that other

elements are less readily transferred; that the affordances

of an interactive text work differently from the possibili-

ties inherent in a  xed text and so forth. Even very young

interpreters of text are at least tacitly sophisticated when

it comes to issues of interpreting adaptations. And many

understand that a singular  xation on  delity can unduly

restrict a new telling.

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Interpreting Adaptations

Research into young people’s adaptations explores a

number of issues, including the following:

analysis of speci c examples of adapted and adaptable •

materials for children,

studies of young people and their understanding of •

adaptation processes,

institutional studies of the politics and economics of •

varied forms of adaptation.

Much of the research into adapted materials focuses

on double or multiple instantiations of singular stories.

Studies of young people’s overt and tacit understanding

of adaptation encompass an eclectic disciplinary range

and tackle the development of narrative understanding,

including the relatively new  eld of cognitive narratology

that explores the “mental tools, processes and activities

that make possible our ability to construct and understand

narrative” (Scholes, Phelan, & Kellogg, 2006/1966,

p. 290). Explorations of the politics and economics of

children’s adaptations concentrate on the potential and

the constraints involved in particular media ( lm, tele-

vision, digital games, etc.), the battles over intellectual

freedom and copyright, and the impact of commercial

frameworks. There is, of course, much overlap among

these categories.

Textual Analysis of Adaptations: Bridging the Known

and the New

Adaptation is always a form of interpretation and recon-

textualization. The question of what can be expressed

in which medium raises important issues. To take one

speci c but striking example, a book does not incorporate

a soundtrack, but many other formats use music as part

of the presentation. David Paterson (1998), discussing

his adaptation of Katherine Paterson’s (1978) The Great

Gilly Hopkins for the stage, says, “A song allows for a

whole range of emotions that an audience would prob-

ably not accept if directed toward them as a speech.

Music also allowed us to cover an exposure of time or

location during the play” (p. 33). George Bodmar (1992)

quotes Maurice Sendak on a 1975 television production

of Sendak’s (1962) Nutshell Library and (1960) The Sign

on Rosie’s Door: “He said of Carole King’s music, ‘She

added her own emotional quality and gave my words a

reverberation that they didn’t originally have. They’ve

taken on a new edge and weight’” (p. 168). But in opera

at least, music creates its own demands; as Bodmer (1992)

observes of the opera version of Sendak’s (1963) Where

the Wild Things Are,

The music is stridently modern, and ends with an ascending

phrase, which robs Max’s discovery that his supper is still hot

of any ﬁ nal resolution or triumph. While Sendak made the

decision in the book to present the climax of his story facing

a blank page rather than a picture, in opera no such option

is open; everything must be sung and shown. (p. 172)

Spike Jonze’s 2009  lm version of Where the Wild

Things Are catered for the possibilities and necessities of

a full-length feature  lm, expanding the story radically

with a frame narrative, and exploiting the full potential

of computer graphics. In the lead-up to the  lm’s release,

it was interesting to see the creative marketing use of a

variety of online trailers (themselves an appealing new

text form) to whet appetites and prepare devotees for a

somewhat different telling.

Adaptation often involves ideological changes as well.

Stephens and McCallum (1996), discussing live-action and

animated versions of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s (1911)

The Secret Garden, express it as follows:

The story becomes a site on which the values and assump-

tions central to one particular cultural formation may be

interrogated through the values and assumptions of another

cultural formation, so that both self-reﬂ ectively and implic-

itly a new telling reproduces the existential concerns of

the pre-text(s) even while it contests and transforms their

signiﬁ cance. To put it another way, any particular retelling

becomes, at least potentially, a new negotiation between

what is textually and culturally already given, and what is

new. (p. 357)

The relationship between already given and new may

involve changing political perspectives. The attitudes

of earlier generations towards racial and/or gender dif-

ferences are often silently amended in new adaptations,

though complete erasure of the original biases is not

always straightforward. Diane Carver Sekeres (2005)

presents some of the problems in a fascinating study of

how the 19th-century popular girls’ series Finley’s (1867)

Elsie Dinsmore, set in the slave-owning South, was revised

to meet demand in the contemporary Christian market for

inspirational  ction:

The editors eliminated the slave dialect and also softened

the interactions between master and slave, but the rewritten

edition does nothing to address the racism typical of litera-

ture of the time that assumed slaves were content with their

lot in life. The new edition’s changes only disguised the

deeper structures that created the context for the obvious

degrading language and mannerisms of African American

characters…. While the modern portrayal of the servants

may seem more respectful of the African American char-

acters on the surface, it may also reinforce the impression

that their servitude was willing and inconsequential. (pp.

15-16, 28-29)

Adaptations may carry with them the assumptions and

stereotypes of an earlier text, but the fact that this story

is transferred into a “new bottle” may cause young read-

ers to regard the new incarnation as contemporary, even

radical. The contemporary nature of the enunciation may

camou age old-fashioned elements in the narrative. Matt

Jackson (1997), exploring Marc Brown’s (1986) Arthur’s

Teacher Trouble both as paper book and as CD-ROM

“interactive book” draws attention to the potential for

con icting messages. He points out that

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as a mass-market text Arthur is heavily dependent on ste-

reotypes, which in the case of this particular story lead to

the inclusion of three lessons that might well alarm parents:

society draws gender boundaries that are not to be crossed;

school is no fun; and we are what we consume. (p. 33)

The designers, says Jackson, took a story that was based

on stereotypes and “then added elements that reinforce

the patriarchal worldview inherent in the original story”

(p. 35). The animations that leap to life under the moving

cursor add a veneer of sophisticated playfulness to the

story, but Jackson (1997) is not impressed.

Rather than encouraging meaningful interaction with

the narrative and the computer, these CD-ROMs merely

combine the linear format of a book with the attention-

getting sound effects and pratfalls of a television cartoon.

No attempt is made to use this technology to foster creative

thinking or to explore new methods of constructing a story

(p. 35). Yet, the format of the CD-ROM suggests that the

story represents a contemporary and exciting new take on

the world, a clash that is only partially disguised by the

humor in the interactive version of the story.

Martin and Taylor (2006) suggest that some limitations

of originating stories may actually foster reincarnation in

particular kinds of new media. Looking at digital game

versions of J.M. Barrie’s (1904) Peter Pan, they point

out,

Peter Pan clearly ﬁ ts the basic structure required for adven-

ture and heroism…. Further, Peter Pan provides structural

and character archetypes that are often used in video games,

as well as in oral narratives…. However, Peter Pan also par-

allels video game sensibilities in that both video games and

the Peter Pan play and novel versions fail to adequately ad-

dress female characters even when the female characters are

pivotal or when they offer new possibilities. This is especially

true for video game versions of Peter Pan because many of

the games rely heavily on video game schemas, which often

use only one main male character. (pp. 174–175)

Digital works, suggest Martin and Taylor (2006), “offer

a literate return to oral narratives in their modular format,

nonlinear structures, participatory requirements, and lack

of one de nitive version” (p. 180). The complex case of

Peter Pan, which has always lacked one single de nitive

version (Rose, 1984), serves as a reminder that some

children’s texts are shapeshifters from their inception, and

that exposing them to what Peter Lunenfeld (2000/1999)

calls “the universal solvent of the digital” (p. 14) simply

highlights a protean nature that is built into the narrative’s

speci c history.

Adaptions and New Audiences

Altering the medium makes certain changes possible;

adaptations may also alter the audience, with different

consequences. Davies (2001), exploring movie versions

of The Secret Garden, observes that Burnett’s 1911 book

“treats the topic of sexuality, the great, fascinating taboo of

early childhood, in a way that is ‘safe,’ through a series of

narrative events” (p. 51). The 1993  lm version “discards

this oblique approach and makes the sexual elements more

explicit to the extent of changing many of the author’s

characterizations, narrative events, and descriptions and

adding others” (p. 51).

The stage musical version of The Secret Garden has

similarly been charged with addressing adults more than

children, but Phyllis Bixler (1994), discussing this variant

rendition, suggests that all adaptations must necessarily

“misread” the original text, and that “narratives contain

many secrets for a reader to discover—or buried seeds of

many other stories, which a reader’s imagination can coax

into bloom” (p.114).

Clearly, a child audience does not “own” even its most

beloved classics, a topic worthy of further exploration.

Those who love a book best are often the leeriest of a new

version, and we know too little about what may seduce

them to take the psychological risks of exploring a differ-

ent incarnation of that beloved story.

Research into Young People’s Comprehension

of Adapted Narratives

Studies of how children develop understanding of the

conventions of different media need to keep current with

evolving technologies, a complication underlined by a

poignant comment from Tim Morris (2000) about his own

annual childhood viewing of Peter Pan on his black-and-

white television:

Watching the same show come round year after year in the

cycle of seasons, I did not understand then—as children do

today, with VCRs that show them perfect iterations of dramas

on command—that the story of Peter Pan never changed. So

my memories of watching the show are memories of anxiety:

Would the children be able to ﬂ y? What would Captain Hook

do to Wendy when he kidnapped her? And most distressing,

would Tinker Bell be saved from death this time? Did America

still believe in fairies? I can still feel myself squirming in my

pajamas at the suspense of it all. (p. 108)

The shift caused by the  rst video recordings, which

converted the professionally produced moving image into

something to hold in your hand and control in your own

home, was cultural, economic, and also cognitive. This

change was enormous. Children famously learn how to run

the video cassette recorder and the DVD player at a very

early age (my own children gave me a birthday card which

featured a baby showing its mother how to use the remote

control), and the impact on their understanding of media

affordances is substantial. DVDs with their added extras

contribute to the media literacy of very young viewers as

they explore the constructed nature of video  ctions. Such

instruction is not entirely new; The Wonderful World of

Disney pioneered behind-the-scenes insights into anima-

tion, for example, in the early days of television. But the

ubiquity and repeatability of the DVD extra makes it much

more broadly available.

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Studies of children’s cognitive development as they

master how to interpret both old and new media are not

always based on examples from the best of children’s liter-

ature, nor do they always draw on complex critical analysis

of the given texts as part of developing an understanding

of the issues. Hodge and Tripp’s (1986) excellent work on

how children develop an understanding of the modality

(degree of  ctionality) of television is based on texts such

as Fangface and Yogi Bear rather than literary examples.

Their  ndings about children’s growing awareness of how

 ction works and how  ctionality is marked in televisual

terms, are nevertheless broadly and usefully applicable to

more literary works as well. Robinson’s (1997) study of

children’s growing understanding of print and television

also draws on many popular television texts, not all of

them created explicitly for children. It too provides very

informative examples of children articulating their devel-

oping awareness of such elements as genre constraints

and possibilities that could inform their interpretation

of both media. Similarly, the work of Anne Haas Dyson

(1997, 2003) offers a lens on very young children as they

draw on a huge range of textual experiences to develop

a broad sense of their own capabilities as textual agents.

Lawrence Sipe (2000) explores responses of very young

children to picture books. In a 2000 study, he explores the

range of intertextual connections from a variety of media

upon which these children draw for their interpretation of

a particular story. We need more of such detailed work to

enrich our understanding of how our capacity to interpret

stories in many media develops through childhood and

adolescence.

Much current research into young people’s multiple

responses to variant versions of texts comes from the  elds

of popular culture and/or education and addresses ques-

tions that may be labeled as concerning literacy rather than

literary experiences (e.g., Alvermann, 2002; Buckingham,

1993, 1996, 1998; Davis & Dickinson, 2004; Hilton, 1996;

Kinder, 1991, 1999; Marsh & Millard, 2000; McDonnell,

2001). For example, Karen Wohlwend (2009) provides

detailed insight into little girls negotiating how to combine

the dainty limits of the Disney Princess world with the

cognitive demands and gender politics of the kindergarten

classroom, using skill with adaptable texts as a major tool

for asserting an identity.

The degree of overlap between these works and the  eld

of literary studies is far from clearly delineated, and there

is much work to be done to draw the strands together. Too

often in purely literary studies the idea of the reader is an

abstraction (Littau, 2006); too often in literacy work the

signi cance of how the text is composed is overlooked

or taken for granted. But we will understand the  uidity

of contemporary textual mutations in more sophisticated

ways if we make room for research that combines an aes-

thetic analysis of the text with the individual responses of

particular interpreters.

The importance of researching reception as well as

production is underlined by a study of eighth graders

responding to Anne Frank’s (1952) The Diary of a Young

Girl. Spector and Jones (2007) argue that the stage adap-

tation of this book and the subsequent movie have cre-

ated a version of Anne Frank that focuses unduly on her

optimistic and unquenchable spirit: “the enshrinement of

Anne in American consciousness causes some students

to repel thoughts that may shatter the culturally acquired

uplifting version they have of Anne Frank” (p. 37). They

offer quotes that show readers in action—readers who may

be described as every bit as slippery as any text mentioned

in this chapter.

Even when students were explicitly told of her cruel

death, they still tended to imagine her in hopeful ways.

When students answered a question in their textbook…

that asked how Anne could have been happy in a concen-

tration camp, Charlotte answered, “Knowing Anne, she

was happy in the concentration camps. She didn’t have

to be quiet anymore; she could frolic outside. She could

be in nature. She loved nature. I think this was a welcome

relief for her.” The basis for Charlotte’s version was sim-

ply, “Knowing Anne….” (p. 40). Charlotte’s classmates

unanimously agreed with her prediction, even though they

were studying the Holocaust and presumably had some

schema of concentration camps.

Readers have always been good at seeing what they

want to see in a story, and being able to move between

versions of that story may increase this propensity. Spec-

tor and Jones (2007) provide an illuminating example of

a reader actively imposing meaning on a section of text.

Working in a small group, Brooke and a few classmates are

asked to describe Anne’s most noticeable characteristics.

They decide that she is an optimist who loves talking and

Brooke turns to the book for support:

Brooke: Here it is! [She reads] “It’s utterly impossible for

me to build my life on a foundation of chaos…” Blah, blah,

blah. No, here it is, “… ideals, dreams and cherished hopes

rise within us, only to be crushed.” Blah, blah, blah, “…I

still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly

good at heart”….That’s it! That’s the one. Someone else

write that down.

While trying to ﬁ nd the one line that supersedes all other

statements Anne Frank made in the Diary, Brooke literally

drowned out with “blah, blah, blah” the contradictory ma-

terial. (p. 43)

The line about people being good at heart, as Brooke’s

ruminations demonstrate, is just one perspective among

many contradictions in Anne’s own diary. However, this

line provides the inspirational voice-over that concludes

the stage show and the movie, shifting the moral compass

of the story away from the cruel senselessness of Anne’s

actual end. Brooke’s determination to over-ride those

components of the written text that challenge the simplistic

“misreading” offered by the dramatized version is startling

in its ruthless determination to impose optimism. We need

more reception studies that explore the possibility that

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multiple versions of a demanding story may enable a kind

of “mix ‘n’ match” interpretation in which readers draw

the most pleasing components from different incarnations

of a story. What is the impact of such potential slipperi-

ness on the growth of literary understanding? Do multiple

incarnations of a story add or reduce potential for depth

of understanding?

Political and Economic Study of Media

Affordances and Limits

Media operate within social and institutional frameworks.

The example of television is instructive because different

countries make speci c national arrangements for the

funding of programming, and the range of institutional

structures highlights the fact that television’s possibilities

and constraints are as much socially constructed as inher-

ent in the medium itself. Like most other media, television

itself is also in  ux, with the onset of cable, satellite, and

digital distribution causing substantial change, and such

developments apply differential pressure to particular

national institutions.

An American example offers a window onto the con-

straints of the commercial framework. Willis, adaptor

of Jill Murphy’s (1974) The Worst Witch for HBO, lists

an assortment of considerations that arise directly from

television’s perceived mandate:

What usually makes the adaptation of material for television

difﬁ cult is not the difference in audience but the constraints

that network television puts on the material…. No matter

what the audience or material, there are going to be x num-

ber of commercial breaks, which is one reason why most

movies produced for network television are less effective

dramatically than they might be. They are written to bring

the audience back after each commercial break. (quoted in

Freyer, 1987, p. 81)

Willis is speaking prior to the fragmentation of television

monoliths and before satellite and cable, personal video

recorders, and computer downloads undermined the Big

Three American networks. But the constraints of the com-

mercial break are still dominant in American television,

even today.

More recently, Davies (2005) discussed the organiza-

tion of children’s television in Britain in terms of “the

politics of children’s screen provision,” listing such insti-

tutional conditions as “the legal mandating of the British,

terrestrial commercial channel, ITV, to provide children’s

programming, or the BBFC’s (British Board of Film Clas-

si cation) age-classi cation of  lms” (p. 389). British TV

institutions for decades supported one signi cant form

of literary adaptation: the classic children’s serial. But

in 2007, the United Kingdom media regulator, Ofcom,

warned that the current systems were failing children, and

pointed out that home-grown television accounted for just

17% of children’s programming in the UK. In 2006, invest-

ment in new children’s programs fell from $254 million

to $218 million. Jocelyn Hay, chair of a viewers’ group,

lamented that the corporations supplying entertainment

for children were relying on American content, “much

of it soaps or animation. Unless swift action is taken to

retrieve the situation, future generations will grow up with

a Disney ed view not only of the world, but of their own

language and culture” (Clarke, 2007b).

National identity and cultural priority are complex

categories. The Canadian government has opposed the

illegal importation of ethnic TV programming via satellite,

although “Disney ed” American imports are common in

Canada. Beaty and Sullivan (2007) challenge this position

as protectionist:

[T]he Canadian government has positioned its audience as

passive consumers marshalled in the service of a massive

economic infrastructure…. Under the cloak of cultural sover-

eignty, Canada continues to promote protectionist measures

for the broadcasting industry that undermine diversity and

multiculturalism. It also steadfastly refuses to acknowledge

that the cultural and technological landscape has changed

dramatically since the earlier and still dominant model of

media scarcity and border patrol. (p. 66)

Even as the technologies of television diversify, a

European study of video platforms, conducted in 2007

by Bain & Co. for Liberty Global, concluded that the

popularity of television is likely to be sustained even in

the face of new technological options. They predict that

even by 2012 “only a  fth of viewing will be on-demand

despite the onset of downloaded content via computers

and mobile devices” (Clarke, 2007a).

Venues for children’s programming that were once

stable are manifestly in turmoil, and nobody is entirely

clear how it will all work out in the end. As a result, current

research into television adaptations is even more likely to

be dated by the time it can be published than it has been

in the past. Television offers a single, if particularly con-

voluted and uniquely visible example of a problem that

pervades this whole territory of reworking. The institutions

that govern production, distribution, and assessment (often

in the form of ratings that establish  tness for children)

are all in  ux.

Not only television but also movies and even books are

being recast in the light of commercial pressures. Jennifer

Geer (2007) describes the business models that govern

movie releases, and suggests that scholars, “would do

well…to resist the interpretive paradigms these corpora-

tions offer, including the ways in which they encourage

audiences to equate their marketing with their  lms” (p.

194).

Likewise, Philip Nel (2005), discussing the Harry

Potter marketing phenomenon, warns that when “…the

novels and the hype become intertwined, …analyses [may]

fail to take into account the full complexity of either….

First of all, con ating the books with the marketing fails

to produce a suf ciently sophisticated analysis of the lat-

ter. Second, such critical con ation leads some critics to

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MARGARET MACKEY

overlook the novels’ considerable literary achievements.”

(pp. 236–237)

Scholars need to explore ways of disentangling the

marketing apparatus from the text being sold, in whatever

medium (bearing in mind that books are presented, hyped,

evaluated, and sold within a framework every bit as com-

mercial as that which sponsors mass market products; they

do not exist in some pure high-cultural vacuum). At the

same time, reception studies may help to remind us that

many children consume the entire package, readily using

marketing cues to frame their experience of and response

to the aesthetic text.

Spin-off Toys, Commodities, and Services

Saturation marketing of text-related toys and things is a

familiar phenomenon to Western children. Whereas their

literature strikes adults as an important and benevolent

part of children’s lives, and their  lms (at least the good

ones) provide insights into the world or, at a minimum,

some hours of harmless amusement, the world of toys and

commodities is not as culturally sancti ed. “Stuff,” even

literary-related “stuff,” makes many adults uneasy. The

fact that children in developing countries may actually pro-

duce the playthings their Western counterparts carelessly

consume and discard does not contribute to an attractive

picture. The disposable nature of many commodities (as

opposed to the presumed lasting values of literature) also

provokes unease.

The layering involved in text-based commodities may

be very complex, particularly with those toys that arise

from contemporary adaptations of texts created in earlier

times under earlier value systems. Sekeres (2004) provides

a vivid example of value distortion in her description of

an Elsie Dinsmore doll. Based on the 19th-century novels

discussed above, this slave-owning character (renowned

for her pious and feminine passivity) is advertised to a

largely Christian market as “not just dolls—‘THEY ARE

ROLE MODELS!’” (p. 27). Just as the CD-ROM may

provide a contemporary veneer to the patriarchal values

of Arthur’s Teacher Trouble, so this present-day incarna-

tion of an old story embodies an outdated and unattractive

ideology in ways that are presumably invisible to many

purchasers.

Our current era certainly provides an almost in nite

supply of spin-offs and commodities, many of them as

reductive as the Elsie Dinsmore doll, though in differ-

ent ways. But commodi cation of literature is not new.

The history of The Wizard of Oz supplies an extensive

list of merchandise from its earliest days. Richard Flynn

(1996), in fact, suggests that commodi cation began with

publication of the original book, and draws our attention

to the idea of the book itself as commodity: “Always the

consummate salesman, actor, and window-dresser, Baum

(1900) must have recognized that his and William Wal-

lace Denslow’s investment in the elaborate color plates

and textual illustrations (in effect, a form of packaging)

would pay off handsomely” (p. 122). “The extensive

colorwork in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz revolutionized

the design of American children’s books,” says Michael

Patrick Hearn (2000). “They would never be so wan and

boring again” (p. xlvii).

For nearly 40 years, the print version of The Wizard

of Oz and its many sequels provided the impetus for a

universe of spin-off texts and associated stuff. John Fricke

(1999) has assembled a stunning set of images from Wil-

lard Carroll’s collection of Oz memorabilia; items such

as an engraved collapsible metal cup in a souvenir box

(presented to audience members of the 200th New York

performance of the stage musical in 1903), wallpaper

panels by Baum’s illustrator Denslow, based on the same

musical, the Oz board game of 1921, and so forth.

Certain texts (many of them aimed at children) have

spawned such a spin-off industry of toys and commodities

that they have given rise to books devoted to displaying

and/or analyzing the range of materials available. Such

compilations sometimes veer towards being coffee-table

books (e.g., Fricke, 1999, on The Wizard of Oz); on

other occasions, they serve as vehicles for nostalgia (e.g.,

Liljeblad, 1996, on TV toys and shows); sometimes they

involve a historical overview (e.g., Thwaite, 1992, on

Winnie the Pooh) or an analysis of the implications for

young readers (e.g., Mackey, 1998, on The Tale of Peter

Rabbit). All such publications share at least a moderate

resemblance to a catalogue or bibliography, a distinctive

form of research endeavor even when the level of analysis

is low; but some of these titles are undeniably oriented to

a popular rather than a scholarly audience, and the visual

display of “stuff” is often the chief appeal. Nevertheless,

they provide a vivid reminder that  ction-related com-

modities are not a new phenomenon.

In addition to compendiums of materials related to

speci c texts, more general work addresses some of the

issues of commodi cation in broader terms (see also a

related chapter on commodi cation of children’s literature

by Joel Taxel in this volume). As in so many arenas, Harry

Potter often leads the way, numerically, in terms of scope

of coverage and occasionally in ingenuity. The numbers

themselves are staggering:

AOL Time Warner raked in $1.8 billion in global ticket sales

from the ﬁ rst two movies. Coca-Cola paid US$150 million

for its food license, Lego $100 million for the construction

license. Mattel became the “worldwide master toy licensee

for the literary characters”; games, puzzles, trading cards and

action ﬁ gures abound. There is the Harry Potter Robe with

built-in ﬁ ber optic lights, the Ice Pumpkin Slushie Maker,

Late Night Ride Towel, branded school gear, castles, sorting

hats, and fake forehead scars. Bertie Botts Jelly Beans are

popular with ﬂ avors of ear wax, boogers, grass and vomit …

Hornby, an almost forgotten maker of model trains, proudly

produced a replica Hogwarts Express. Proﬁ ts soared by

forty-ﬁ ve per cent. (Galligan, 2004, p. 37)

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It is a commonplace of text-based commodi cation

that authors themselves sometimes become part of the

marketing blitz (e.g., Beatrix Potter and the Lake District

are promoted as a package deal, as are L.M. Montgomery

and Prince Edward Island, and Louise May Alcott and

Concord, Massachusetts). The British publisher of Harry

Potter, Bloomsbury, has gone one step further.

In a populist gesture, Bloomsbury is splitting seventeen mil-

lion company shares into four, making them more accessible

to parents. At $3.80 each, a few shares might be the next

best-ever birthday present for the kids. The synergies created

by the Potter brand name are working dynamically to create

that extra edge in the marketplace. The consumer can now

read the books, watch the movies and videos, play with the

toys, master the computer games, and then perhaps, buy

into the company. (Galligan, 2004, p. 37)

Waetjen and Gibson (2007) suggest that a disciplinary

pincer movement is necessary to understand the implica-

tions of a phenomenon as large and complicated as the

Harry Potter empire. They ask,

…if popular media texts like the Harry Potter novels are

indeed shot through with ideological ﬁ ssures out of which

a wide variety of social meanings can be “activated,” then

what happens when the reader decoding the text is not an

individual audience member but rather a multinational

media conglomerate? (p. 5)

Pursuing this very interesting line of thought, Waetjen

and Gibson (2007) suggest that “…far from simply ‘com-

mercializing’ Rowling’s texts, AOL Time Warner in fact

activated a reading of the Harry Potter universe that was

already present in the texts themselves, particularly within

Rowling’s complex and often contradictory discussions of

class and material life.” (p. 7)

Furthermore, Waetjen and Gibson (2007) highlight a

contradiction in Rowling’s account of commodities and

consumption. On the one hand, advertisers rise and fall on

their ability to sell the myth that “commodities can change

your life, win you friends, and achieve your dreams”; but in

Rowling’s narrative, commodities have a binary trajectory.

“…Dudley’s muggle commodities bring him nothing but

disappointment…[while] Harry’s magical possessions ful-

 ll their promises exactly as advertised” (p. 14). Without a

Quidditch broom, for example, Harry would not be able to

defeat the aristocratic Malfoys. Although Rowling objects

to inequality in general terms, she also (and in contradic-

tion) offers “a more celebratory discourse on the pleasures

and power of commodity consumption…. [T]his is a

discourse on class and consumption that even AOL Time

Warner can get behind” (p. 16). And, of course, AOL Time

Warner’s interpretation becomes one powerful reading of

the story, distributed widely, buttressed with commodities,

and taken as a source-text for fan materials.

Sometimes the commodity comes  rst and the liter-

ary materials follow. The American Girl empire run by

Pleasant Company (acquired by Mattel in 1998), which

sells linked dolls and historical novels, claims that the

educational power of historical  ction fuels its vast range

of dolls and accessories, but it is clear that the force of

commodity consumption provides the true dynamic of the

project. The impact on the stories is interesting.

Books written about girls who are represented from the

very beginning as dolls have their own constraints. For

example the plain-faced but fascinating heroine is not the

central premise, because as dolls—not just characters—

they must be pretty. Talbot (2005) argues that “Some of

the most memorable children’s book heroines are not

pretty—though it is understood that they may grow up to

be handsome or striking or even, to the discerning eye,

beautiful—which is one reason so many generations of

awkward, intellectual girls have loved them…. In a free-

standing book, a homely or an unkempt heroine is  ne.

In a book that supplies back story for a doll, it won’t do”

(n.p.).

Similarly, American Girl history is focused through

a prism of things to buy, and the poor girls in the series

own as many items (though they may be humbler) as the

richest. Lauren Winner (1998) suggests that this prism also

re ects a certain ideology of girlhood as well:

Pleasant Company relies upon an association of women with

consumption that dates at least back to Felicity’s time [Felic-

ity is the Colonial character/doll]. That Pleasant Company

seeks to undo so many other stereotypes about girls while

relying on this very basic construction of girls and women

as consumers is, to say the least, troubling. (n.p.)

But Austin Booth (2002) suggests that the multiracial

variety of the historical American Girl stories does offer

something positive: “Taken as a whole, the series says that

what it means to be an American girl is signi cantly dif-

ferent than the white upper-middle class Victorian girls we

are all familiar with from children’s literature” (n.p.).

Whatever the impact of the content and the ideologies

represented in this phenomenon, there is no question that

the historical American Girls stories do offer a complex

signifying system, providing book heroines, dolls matched

to those heroines, miniature dolls and matching miniature

story books (to be “owned” by other dolls), a set of his-

torically accurate accessories for each doll,  ctional  lms

featuring some of the main personalities, the obligatory

book of “how we made this movie,” and books of histori-

cal background for each character. The stories themselves

may be limited and closed, but the overall system offers

rather more potential for cognitive challenge.

The Impact on Reading of Associated Forms

of Consumption

In a culture rife with spin-offs, the term connotes the infe-

rior, the second-rate, the commercially meretricious. Even

(or perhaps especially) when high literature is involved,

noses tend to curl. In an essay by Sutherland (2007) in The

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MARGARET MACKEY

Times Literary Supplement some of this disdain, mixed

with perplexity, is expressed in a discussion of the “ex-

traordinary array of loosely attached commodities” based

on Jane Austen’s novels. These games, books, kits, toilet-

ries, and movies, “circulate in [Austen’s] orbit; and their

impact on readers’ expectations of the novels themselves

can neither be precisely gauged nor denied.” ( p. 20).

The impact of commodities and adaptations on “read-

ers’ expectations of the novels themselves” is a subject

of some critical debate. In 1991, Tom Engelhardt wrote

a contentious article for Harper’s Magazine, in which

he asserted that “Reading may be harmful to your kids”

(p. 55). Engelhardt made a strong case against books as

one more commodity. Lamenting the loss of children’s

librarians and the growth of big-box bookshops where

publishers market directly to children and parents, he

posited a boom in a different kind of children’s literature:

“the book designed for the consumer child” (p. 57). From

an inspection of children’s bestseller lists of 1990, he ob-

served, “a signi cant number of the picture books and the

books for young readers were either Product themselves

or enmeshed in a world of Product” (p. 57), concluding

pessimistically that “In this newer world of commercial

planning for children…early brand loyalty means a life-

time adventure in dependence. This…is what the “habit”

of reading is coming to mean in children’s books—and the

only exit increasingly being offered from such a world is

into infantilized best-selling genres for adults” (p. 62). It

is not dif cult to assume that Engelhardt would regard the

commodi cation of Jane Austen as evidence of continuing

infantilization and dependence.

Ten years later, Daniel Hade (2001) took up Engelhar-

dt’s gauntlet and explored the impact of the market on chil-

dren’s reading. In an article about “reading as consuming”

(p. 158), he discussed the risk that “a book becomes one

more kind of product that carries the brand’s meanings”

(p. 162), and raised a series of questions, particularly about

the link between commercialization and education:

Could it be that what seems to be the reading of literature

is really just one of many cross-promotions? The lines be-

tween advertising and entertainment, and advertising and

education are very blurry lines. It seems we are at a point

where we have advertising that thinks it is entertainment or

education, and entertainment and education that are really

advertising in disguise. (p. 163)

A year later, Hade (2002) returned to the same theme

and explored some of the connections between big pub-

lishing corporations, licensed spin-offs, and the major

reviewing journals, describing a narrowing of the channels

that lead to being published and being successfully sold.

Again he raised questions about the impact on reading,

concluding that “ the book and each spin-off piece of

merchandise and each retelling across another medium

becomes a promotion for every other product based upon

that story.… The corporate owners of children’s book

publishing have successfully turned recreational reading

into a commodity” (pp. 514–515). Jack Zipes (2001) of-

fers a similar conclusion that for young people, reading

is mediated through the mass media and marketing “so

that the pleasure and meaning of a book will often by

prescripted or dictated by convention” (p. 172).

This chorus is singing in unison. But Engelhardt (1991),

Hade (2001, 2002), and Zipes (2001) have all based their

claims on textual research, analyzing the bestseller lists

and the lists of products associated with particular titles.

While they make a case that is undoubtedly troubling,

they also reveal a gap in our knowledge that badly needs

to be  lled with serious ethnographic research. What do

young readers make of this clutter of commodities? How

do they perceive themselves as agents of their own read-

ing in the context of a world of synergy and licensing? Is

it possible that as well as (or even instead of) perceiving

themselves as the passive victims of marketing overkill,

they are actually developing sophisticated and contempo-

rary skills in the new territory of transmedia interpretations

and commercial intertexts? We must  nd productive ways

of exploring these questions.

Consumer-Produced Adaptations

and Spin-offs

Young people who grow up in a world of adaptation,

spin, and digital affordances may naturally turn to the

affordances of the computer to help produce their own

kinds of adaptation and spin. In exploring research into fan

productions, we may well gain oblique answers to some

the questions posed at the end of the last section.

It is not long since fan productions were perceived as

belonging to the furthest reaches of cultdom, as the prod-

ucts of obsessive Trekkies or Tolkienites, recasting Star

Trek and Middle-Earth into ever more lurid forms. But

the situation is much more complex than this stereotype

would suggest (see Dutro & McIver and Lewis & Dockter

in this volume for a discussion of literacies and fan  ction).

I cast about for a random example of an orthodox work

of children’s literature that had recently been turned into

a movie and came up with Katherine Paterson’s (1977)

Bridge to Terabithia. Google turned up 105,000 fan  c-

tion sites. It would be an interesting project to establish

whether the intermediary step of adaptation is essential

to the development of a thriving fan base. I suspect the

answer to that question would be af rmative (although

maybe the prospect of a movie is enough; some weeks

before the  lm premiered, Google found 475,000 hits

for The Golden Compass fan  ction). Certainly, when I

conducted searches for fan  ction of well-known young

adult  ction that has not been adapted into  lm, I found

little material available. I would certainly not call my ex-

ercise a de nitive study, but it does raise a question with

interesting research potential.

More disappointingly, in pursuing one children’s lit-

erature reference, what I found was a book title used as

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SPINNING OFF

an imprimatur of sanitization. Anne’s Diary, which takes

its label from Anne of Green Gables, calls itself “the  rst

biometrically-secured social networking site for children

in the world. It offers girls in grades 1 to 8 (ages 6 to 14)

a secure environment in which to keep a private diary and

communicate with their peers around the world. Members

can also enter contests, play games, participate in book

clubs and receive homework help” (Anne’s diary, n.d.). A

 ngerprint reader locks down access to the non-registered,

and a perky, winsome and saccharine “Anne” cartoon

 gure welcomes members. The site encourages a highly

policed and strongly framed forum for productive work

while implicitly creating a highly reductive, rei ed, and

consumption-oriented reading of the character of Anne.

Nevertheless, in those cases where fan responses to

children’s texts are available (and here we return full

circle to Harry Potter, who has spawned an abundance

of fan response), we may have a route into the minds of

contemporary readers that repays considerable attention.

How conventional are fan reactions to the books and

movies themselves? More productively, perhaps, how

conventional are the parodies and satires? Does a YouTube

production like the “Potter Puppet Pals in The Mysterious

Ticking Noise” (n.d.) tell us anything useful about reader

response to the books or the  lms? This foolish two-minute

parody utilizes the musical form of the ostinato (repeti-

tion of brief themes) to create a surprisingly catchy song,

performed by  nger puppets using the names of Hogwarts

characters as musical motifs and involving a brief plot

in which a pipe bomb destroys everyone but Voldemort.

The original video was released in 2007 and has been one

of the most popular videos on YouTube. There are now

hundreds of parodies of the parody on YouTube, using

images ranging from live action Harry Potter movie clips

to Legos.

What do these short videos tell us about conditions of

reception? That playfulness is a legitimate response to a

story, that humor does not have to be critical to be biting,

that commercializing a literary commodity is not the only

way to spread its in uence further. That one proper noun

can yoke a variety of images of a character under a single

name. That sophisticated play with literature can be shared

for pleasure. That the world of adaptation and commodities

is itself open to parody—what could be cheaper and more

accessible than a set of  nger-puppets?

Conclusions

The simplest and most important conclusion from this

collection of research is that we have an enormous amount

yet to learn. Today’s children are at home in a vast world

of mutating and slippery literature. Their skills, tacit and

explicit, are honed on multiple versions of a  ction. Their

understanding encompasses criteria for what makes a good

or an inferior adaptation, internal assessments of the play

value of assorted toys and spin-offs, essential quali ca-

tions for what must survive as a character changes format,

and many other schemata for dealing with variation. Adults

have much to learn from these children about embracing

mutability.

At the same time, there is considerable scope for chil-

dren to develop more critical perspectives on what makes

their media worlds tick. Their implicit understandings

may need external scaffolding in order to blossom into

articulated awareness of questions of importance and

value. Children also have much to learn.

We need more research that explores the tri-fold nature

of literary materials, interpretive responses and institution-

al enablements and constraints, preferably as they all relate

to each other. A complex media world needs complex

research approaches; slippery materials sometimes need

to be pinned down and sometimes need to be respected in

their slipperiness. Much remains to be done.

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Listening for the Scratch of a Pen

Museums Devoted to Children’s and Young Adult Literature

Elizabeth Hammill

Seven Stories: The Centre for Children’s Books

Elizabeth Hammill has long been devoted to children and their literature. As bookseller, literary critic, and

advocate for the preservation and presentation of the artistic making of texts, she takes us on a round-the-globe

visit to the world’s greatest children’s literature museums. She begins with the house museums of Louisa May

Alcott, Lucy Maud Montgomery, and Beatrix Potter, moves to the pioneering work of Dromkeen in Australia

and the Chihiro Art Museum in Japan, and then arrives at the more recent creations of the Eric Carle Museum

of Picture Book Art in America and Seven Stories, which Hammill co-founded in England. Whether invit-

ing us to contemplate the magic and meaning of a beloved author’s home, or the experience of entering the

invented worlds of Tove Jansson’s Moomins, Colin McNaughton’s Preston Pig, or Robert Westall’s Machine

Gunners, Hammill eloquently puts on display the philosophical, political, and playful spaces devoted to chil-

dren’s literature.

Words and pictures on the printed page look  xed, perfect,

immutable—waiting to take our imaginations out into

the world. How did they get there? Where did they come

from? Searching for their origins, we  nd fascinating,

hidden stories coming into view as we uncover the cre-

ative processes that lie behind a book’s making to reveal

how writers write and artists illustrate. Until recently,

such creation stories could only be found, if at all, by

researchers in national archives or university and public

library special collections. Here, on the whole, they have

remained invisible to the world at large as Karen Nelson

Hoyle with Leonard Marcus’s chapter recounts, unless

dedicated exhibition spaces exist where collection trea-

sures can be placed in the public eye. Today, however, in

a small but growing number of museums worldwide, the

words and images of picture books, stories, and poems

for children from  rst preparatory notes and sketches to

 nished text and artwork now  nd themselves not only

being collected, but occupying center stage in purpose-

built galleries, mounted, framed, and presented to us as

independent and meaningful art.

The public role of these new museums in cultivating an

appreciation of children’s books and their artistic making,

and in encouraging reading and scholarship is still in its

508

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LISTENING FOR THE SCRATCH OF A PEN

infancy. Indeed, this chapter is less about research on

such museums (of which there is little) and more about

their appearance on the world stage and the potential for

research within. If Dromkeen (1974) in Australia and

the Chihiro Art Museum (1978) in Japan were early and

inspirational pioneers—particularly in nurturing picture

book cultures in their countries, the past decade has seen

the emergence of museums like The Eric Carle Museum

of Picture Book Art (2002) in the United States and

Seven Stories, the Centre for Children’s Books (2005) in

England, whose very existence signals changing national

perceptions about the artistic and cultural importance

of children’s books. Already, the growing collections of

each and the highly individual, often experimental, ap-

proaches to using the original materials in them (or on

loan) to engross and inspire new audiences, offer rich,

yet to be explored research possibilities. This chapter

sets the scene.

The homes of writers and artists—the Louisa May Al-

cott Orchard House or Beatrix Potter’s Hill Top Farm, for

instance—were the forerunners of today’s museums. Here

we are invited to step into the preserved domestic worlds

of the creators of beloved classics. Such homes have long

been sites of pilgrimage, offering us intimate glimpses

of literary lives and engaging our curiosity, imagination,

and emotions by introducing us to private spaces where

reality and imagination once intersected, pen was  rst put

to paper, and iconic works were created.

If we visit house museums to experience a writer’s

workaday life and to listen, amid threadbare carpets and

homespun heirlooms, for the scratch of a pen, we visit the

new museums to see the artwork, manuscripts, and work

in progress created by the pen. “Nothing,” Philip Pullman

(2002) declares, “gives us such a powerful sense, both

of personal connection and of sheer awe…as seeing the

actual paper on which an author or an illustrator we love

has made the  rst marks, the  rst tentative reaching-out

towards what will later become known all over the world.”

If a writer’s or artist’s home provides us with a domestic

context for those marks, a museum and its collections can

open up this story by  nding insightful new ways of engag-

ing us with how those words and images came into being,

with the creative process itself, with the art and artistry of

story making, and with our own creativity. Like a book, a

museum offers us a portal into the imagination.

Let’s explore—touching brie y on the development of

three world famous house museums in the United States,

Canada and England. Then, as we trace the unfolding

stories of four pioneering museums in Australia, Japan,

America, and England, with a  eeting stop in Europe, let

us consider how the times and each museum’s founding

philosophy have shaped how they present themselves as

learning environments. From “hallowed home” to “literary

playground,” as museums choose how to tell their stories,

their choices inform—even transform—our conversations

about children’s literature and its making.

Beginnings: The Writer’s Home as Museum

Literary house museums offer us the promise of tangible

personal contact with a beloved author or illustrator as we

visit the domestic spaces that witnessed their private life

and colored their voice, imagination, and art. If a home was

also the setting where now classic tales were played out,

we  nd ourselves in a real place, but one that, as readers,

we may already have inhabited in our imaginations, imbu-

ing it with emotional associations and meanings.

Within such historic homes, museum staff act as

guardians, collectors, and curators but also as storytell-

ers, interpreters, and performers of times and lives long

gone—providing us with narratives that are not always

 xed. The home as museum becomes the backdrop and

point of departure for interpretations that transform these

once private spheres into public spaces. As visitors, we

anticipate reading a house as a multi-layered story that

will illuminate the domestic, cultural, and literary life and

legacy of its former inhabitants, both real and  ctional.

Looking brie y at the evolution of three such museums,

however, we discover interpretations initially constructed

by their founders to achieve ends that were not purely lit-

erary but were steeped in the cultural and political issues

of their times, while the re-constructed stories they tell

today re ect changes in motivation and critical consensus

in tune with our times.

The Louisa May Alcott Orchard House: From an

“Agency for Domestic Change” to Living History

The founding of Orchard House in Concord, Massachu-

setts, in the early 1900s demonstrates just how culturally

and ideologically charged creating a house museum can

be. As the century turned, Concord, a community deeply

identi ed with its colonial past, faced profound social

change. Industrial growth, a huge in ux of immigrants,

and its incorporation into Boston’s streetcar suburbs pre-

sented a threat to its traditional way of life. For members

of the exclusive Concord Women’s Club (CWC), estab-

lished in 1895 for study and cultural enlightenment, these

changes, allied to the divisive issues of women’s suffrage

and women’s domestic role in the era of the New Woman,

presented them with “pressing social problems” (West,

1999, p. 56).

Orchard House, the home of Louisa May Alcott and

her family from 1858 to 1877, was to provide a potent,

ideologically driven, means of response. Offered to the

club by Harriet Lothrop, better known as Margaret Sidney,

the successful author of the Five Little Peppers series, the

house and the “little women” who had “lived” there could

be seen as “emblems” of a “virtuous and ostentatiously

traditional American domesticity that could establish

a reassuring stability” at the start of a new uncertain

century (West, 1999, p. 65). If Orchard House became

a museum presenting Alcott’s (2004) life as the story of

Little Women, much could be achieved. The novel, whose

510

ELIZABETH HAMMILL

appeal to Lothrop and the CWC lay in its celebration of

colonial Anglo-American domestic values and home as

“the fountainhead of women’s public moral in uence,”

not only provided the literary foundation upon which a

“new public meaning for the once-private dwelling could

be constructed.” It also offered “a model that could provide

the basis for social reform” (pp. 65–67)—one that could

mold young immigrants into young Americans and de ne

the role of a “proper” (p. 54) home life in achieving this.

This was a legacy for an Orchard House museum to build

on. In 1911, Lothrop and the CWC formed the Louisa May

Alcott Memorial Association (LMAMA) to fundraise, buy,

and repair the decaying property.

The re-invention of Orchard House began in LMAMA’s

emotive fundraising literature. Listen. “The most beloved

house in America (is) falling to ruin…. Long…the retreat

for the imaginations of countless girls and boys…, its

associations are little less than sacred to them…. [It is]

an appropriate act of American girlhood and boyhood

to preserve this house” (pp. 67–68). This image—one

memorializing a nostalgic vision of the traditional Ameri-

can home and the “Alcotts-cum-Marches…[as] the ideal

Anglo-American nuclear family” (p. 85) and lynchpin

of social stability—was well established when the mu-

seum opened in May 1912. Orchard House, re-invented,

answered the CWC’s need for an “agency of domestic

reform” to engage positively with the Anglo-American

crisis confronting Concord (p. 78). As a symbol and “refer-

ence work for anyone wishing to legitimize their domestic

standards” (p. 85), this image would be perpetuated into

the late 20th century (West, 1999).

From the beginning, the presentation of Orchard House

mixed fact and  ction. LMAMA, in its promotion of a

unifying, socializing ideology of American domesticity,

signi cantly ignored parts of the Alcott family history,

much as Alcott herself had done in creating Little Women.

Missing from the interpretative tours carried out by as-

sociation volunteers in period dress were, for instance,

the impoverished childhood of the Alcott girls elsewhere,

and the fact that their father Bronson Alcott, a “wild old

transcendentalist” (West, 1999, p. 91), had once attacked

the ideal single family home now enshrined in Orchard

House. The new mythologizing narrative, echoing Alcott’s

descriptions of family life and home in Little Women, was

so telling that the Christian Science Monitor (August 2,

1913) reported: “Never did a frame surround a picture

with more  tness than does Orchard House surround

Little Women…. It seems like the predestined stage for

the March family to occupy” (quoted in Alberghene &

Clark, 1999, p. 120).

When Orchard House opened, Little Women, published

44 years earlier, was already a best seller. Readers from

Jane Addams to Simone de Beauvoir found personal

meaning in a novel that supported their ambitions of inde-

pendence and achievement. By contrast, many immigrants

“devoured the book to learn how to become Americans…

(and) part of the American family” (Alberghene & Clark,

1999, p. xix). Little Women may have seized the popular

imagination, but it was dismissed by the literary establish-

ment as sentimental. Alcott received little serious academic

attention until the 1970s when her sensational gothic

potboilers, recovered by her biographer Madeleine Stern

and Lena Rosenberg in 1943, began to be anthologized by

Stern and republished, revealing Alcott’s (1975 on) double

literary life and provoking a reassessment of the author

who now became the subject of feminist, historicist, and

children’s literature studies.

Signi cantly, it was in 1975, that LMAMA appointed

the museum’s  rst professional staff, and the interpretation

of the house began to be revised. Ongoing restoration and

preservation programs, initiated in 1979, to save a home

built for domestic use (not tourism) from falling down,

drew increasingly on a growing body of Alcott scholar-

ship, images in the LMAMA archives, journals in the

Alcott Family Archives at Harvard’s Houghton Library,

and the late Stern herself to present a less conservative,

more historically accurate picture of the house, its past,

and the personalities of its actual occupants.

Today, the 315-year-old brown clapboard house, a

shrine for Alcott lovers the world over, is a designated

“National Treasure.” Immaculately preserved and en-

riched, for instance, by the restoration of the pen and ink

angels drawn by May Alcott on her bedroom walls and the

forthcoming recreation of its landscape, based on plans

and observations in Bronson Alcott’s journals, the Alcott

home—perhaps because some 75% of its furnishings

were the family’s—nonetheless feels unchanged. It is in

the ways that the award-winning museum now “brings to

life” the Alcott family legacy in literature, art, education,

philosophy, and social justice through guided tours by

authentically costumed “Alcotts,” living history events, a

range of educational programs, and an imaginative use of

original family furnishings and objects that a new museum

agenda appears. The once domesticated and  ctionalized

interpretation of Alcott’s history has been replaced by

narratives that situate the story of her creativity and liter-

ary contributions within the context of home and of her

own and her family’s wider political, social, and cultural

achievements: the focus now  rmly on personalities and

what actually happened. From participating in period

activities—amateur theatricals, writing, or keeping a daily

journal—enjoyed by the family to learning about their

contributions to various 19th-century reform movements,

to joining in the annual Summer Conversational Series

that echo the lively debates once held in Bronson Alcott’s

School of Philosophy, we are drawn meaningfully into the

house and its inhabitants’ past in ways that link that past

and the Alcott’s legacy to us today.

And yet, as the museum website notes, “a visit to Or-

chard House is like walking through the book” perhaps

with Jo March as our “imaginary and potentially subversive

tour guide” (West, 1999, p. 91). It is a strangely intimate

511

LISTENING FOR THE SCRATCH OF A PEN

experience in spaces that feel familiar but surprise us too

as they reveal the literary potential of domestic life—how

stories and novels can grow “out of baked bread, mended

stockings, and polished silver” (Berne, 1992, p.14).

Green Gables: Tourism and the Creation

of a Home as Fiction

Farther north on Canada’s Prince Edward Island, two

farmhouses, like Orchard House, were to become girls’

book literary shrines, but ones with very different histories:

the family farmhouse immortalized as Green Gables by

Lucy Maud Montgomery (2008) in her  rst novel Anne of

Green Gables and the Cavendish homestead nearby where

Montgomery was raised by her maternal grandparents and

wrote her early work. Within a year of Anne’s publication

in 1908, both homes emerged as sites of pilgrimage—so

thoroughly had the passionate, loquacious, red haired or-

phan Anne Shirley and the rural landscape of Cavendish,

depicted as Avonlea, captured readers’ imaginations.

Designated a Canadian classic by 1924 with over 50

million sales worldwide today, the novel’s appeal, from

the beginning, was linked to national identity. Anne, a

“born Canadian,” but an outsider to Avonlea, success-

fully settles in a “new cultural space” (Devereux, 2001,

p. 12). She makes it hers by renaming it and “capturing

its beauty in language,” thus creating a “myth of belong-

ing” that has resonated with Anglo-Canadians ever since

(Fiamengo, 2002, pp. 232–233). Anne and Avonlea were

to become emblems of a “shared Canadianness,” icons of

a rural, pre-industrial way of life and a “valuable national

cultural commodity” (Devereux, 2001, p. 2)—one that

Montgomery proved adept at promoting.

From publication on, Montgomery carefully nurtured

her public persona as Anne’s alter ego and her identi cation

with Cavendish/Avonlea—a pastoral locale that, as book

reviewers and interviewers repeatedly noted, “she makes

us fall in love with” (Pike, 2002, p. 239). Her journals

record the growing tourist appeal of Green Gables and the

Cavendish farmhouse, noting, for instance, local dismay

when her uncle demolished the dilapidated homestead—

“the only ‘literary shrine’ the Province possessed”—to

curb the intrusion of tourists on his property in 1920 and

protesting in 1929, at the introduction of road signs for

“‘Green Gables’…a purely imaginary place” (De Jonge,

2002, p. 256).

By 1936, the popularity of Green Gables and scenic

Avonlea sites like “Lover’s Lane” was such that the Ca-

nadian National Park Service bought the property and

the surrounding farm and woodlands to establish Prince

Edward Island National Park as a seaside and recreational

resort. Tourism, not conservation, was the Park Services’

remit. Initially, the outbuildings and agricultural landscape

were demolished to create a golf course, but it was Green

Gables that drew visitors.

Montgomery’s years of marketing herself, her books,

and the connection between Cavendish and Avonlea had

“created the conditions that [were to give] her  ctional

world, an independent, commercial existence” (Pike, 2002,

p. 250). The Park Services, responding to consumer de-

mand and the public’s desire to experience Anne’s world,

transformed the farmhouse into the imagined home of

the feisty orphan (De Jonge, 2002) When it opened as a

museum in 1950, the gables had been painted green and

green shutters added. The interior, carefully decorated and

furnished to represent the 1890’s period, was not an exact

reproduction of the  ctional home. But the bedrooms, once

Montgomery’s cousins, were now Anne’s and Marilla’s,

with a room for Matthew by the kitchen. The real historical

life of the farm had been supplanted by the  ctional one.

The museum preserved the story.

This interpretative approach continued into the 1980s

when the acquisition of Montgomery’s diaries and

scrapbooks by the University of Guelph in 1981 and the

subsequent publication of the  rst of  ve edited journals

(1985–2004) initiated a critical and academic reappraisal

of an author whose work, like Alcott’s, was popular but

marginalized. Moves to have her novels included in Can-

ada’s literary canon were furthered by the establishment

of the Lucy Maud Montgomery Institute at the University

of Prince Edward Island in 1993.

The Institute plays a dual role as a centre for Montgom-

ery studies and academic scholarship and for the broader

promotion of the author. A “cultural gatekeeper,” it “care-

fully balances” Montgomery’s promotion as a “valuable

and distinctly Canadian author” with a more populist one.

Rooting Montgomery and its celebration of her work in

her celebration of Prince Edward Island as Avonlea, the

Institute’s activities suggest that “Montgomery’s literary

value is tied to her tourist value” (Cormack & Fawcett,

2002, p. 188).

The two are certainly linked. These developments,

together with the nationwide screening and subsequent

export of the  rst of four televised Anne series in 1985,

signi cantly in uenced the island’s burgeoning Mont-

gomery/Anne tourist industry, fuelling a growing market

for Montgomery and Green Gables merchandise and the

creation of new tourist sites.

Montgomery’s Macneil descendants, for instance, now

realized the importance of the Cavendish homestead. It

was here, during a dif cult and isolated childhood and

youth, that Montgomery “took refuge [in] a world of

fancy and imagination”, in books, writing, and the natu-

ral world, much as her Anne would do (De Jonge, 2002,

p. 259). The ruined site, sympathetically cleared and

excavated, the oldest trees and remnants of the orchard

preserved, and interpreted walking paths laid out along

routes Montgomery once traversed, now sheds moving

light on her life and work. A Canadian National Historical

Site, it tells a powerful story about the effects of time (and

tourism) on her formative home. The relationship of the

ruins and the surrounding setting with its mature trees and

view of the  elds that Montgomery saw daily from her

512

ELIZABETH HAMMILL

bedroom window tells another about the natural world that

she, like Anne, came to possess, and its power to delight

and sustain. Intimately associated with Montgomery’s

real world, the homestead—or rather its absence—is a

grounded counter to Green Gables, inviting us to picture

it for ourselves.

Today, the farmhouse is one of Canada’s best-known

literary landmarks. Redeveloped by Parks Canada in the

1990s, the property and its interpretation now draw on

Montgomery’s journals and the site’s own history, present-

ing farm life as the author (and Anne) might have experi-

enced it. New out buildings, and reclaimed land recreate

some of the farm’s former agricultural character. Exhibits

and audio-visual presentations in the barn and a new visi-

tor centre focus on Montgomery’s life and career and the

history of Green Gables, Cavendish, and island farming.

But fact and  ction continue to co-exist—particularly at

the farmhouse. While the period furnishings re ect the

historic farm, details, drawn from the novel, suggest that

Anne or Marilla may appear momentarily. Here an apple

scented geranium sits on the kitchen windowsill. There an

amethyst brooch is pinned to Marilla’s pincushion and the

slate that Anne broke over Gilbert’s head lies on the  oor.

Crossing the portal, we may wonder who actually lived

here, but, lost in the moment, we respond to the place that

we have long inhabited in our imaginations.

This Anne experience is not museum bound, but ex-

tends to “Avonlea” and “Anne Land” beyond. Whether

we “live the life of the story” at Avonlea Theme Park,

visit Anne’s Lake of Shining Waters or other such sites,

we are invited to experience a commodi ed version of

Montgomery’s imagination, imposed on the community

and landscape that she once knew. Today Anne, Green

Gables, and Avonlea are no longer solely emblems of a

“shared Canadianness,” but instead, of a carefully con-

structed, almost mythological, shared “nationalism that

moves across cultural borders”—even into the global

network of cyberspace—to “figure in other nation’s

iconographies” (Devereux, 2001, p. 12). Shaped by a

complex tourist industry managed by tourist authorities,

Montgomery’s descendants and copyright heirs, and the

Institute—each with differing, sometimes con icting

needs—the presentation of Montgomery and her literary

landscape is continually evolving to meet local, national,

and global ends in which Anne symbolizes nation and

Avonlea is an imagined country transportable anywhere.

We may not hear the scratch of Montgomery’s pen here

but, particularly at Green Gables and the homestead, we

sense the life and landscape that inspired it.

Hill Top Farm: Beatrix Potter’s Self-created Museum

or the Writer as Curator

Hill Top Farm, set in the hills of Near Sawrey in England’s

Lake District, was purchased by Beatrix Potter in 1905

with earnings generated by the phenomenal success of

The Tale of Peter Rabbit, published three years earlier. A

17th-century farm cottage, it was to be her Lakeland home

until she married William Heelis, her local solicitor, in

1913—a home that she retained, nurtured, and developed

for the rest of her life as a place to work and entertain the

increasing number of literary admirers who sought her

out, and, ultimately, as a museum of her life and work in

the countryside (Denyer, 2000).

In 1905, Potter, at 39, was living with her parents in

London. Her engagement to her editor Norman Warne had

just ended most cruelly when he died of leukemia within

months of proposing. Potter’s childhood and adolescence,

while comfortable, had been, like Montgomery’s, cold,

repressed, and lonely. She found companionship with

a wide variety of pets including rabbits, a frog, lizards,

guinea pigs, and hedgehogs whose lives she recorded

scienti cally in her sketchbooks and journals and came to

understand completely. She too took solace in nature and

the countryside, in stories, in her imagination, and in her

art. “I do not remember a time,” she wrote, “when I did

not try to invent pictures and make for myself a fairyland

amongst the wild  owers, the animals, fungi, mosses,

woods and streams…in the countryside; that pleasantly

unchanging world of realism and romance” (Morse, 1982.

p. 147).

This feeling for the natural world laid the foundations

not only for Potter’s children’s books, but also for her

choice of Hill Top Farm as a home, and later, for the land

management skills and environmental awareness that

increasingly shaped her Lakeland life as the farmer Mrs.

Heelis. An early supporter of England’s National Trust,

Potter used the wealth, independence, and freedom that

her books secured for her to preserve the landscapes of the

Lake District that enriched her life and informed her art.

Over the next 38 years, she acquired vulnerable farmland

and forest to save it from plunder by wealthy developers,

and to perpetuate the traditional agrarian way of life that

had shaped it. Her imaginative work, still grounded in

her love of nature, shifted away from her books toward

the land.

The purchase of Hill Top Farm was an early expression

of Potter’s “passion for place” (Lear, 2007, p. 7). Here

her love of country oak and mahogany furniture and her

appreciation of decorative arts and crafts  ourished as she

created her own independent home. She took inspiration

from her memories and sketches of houses that she had

loved as a child, eventually incorporating her “sense of

comfort and of art and craft into the interiors of her little

books.” In many senses, she “furnished Hill Top as a set

on which she played out her imaginative stories” (p. 374).

Nine of her books including The Tale of Jemima Puddle

Duck (1908a) and The Tale of Samuel Whiskers (1908b)

were woven around the farmhouse and the surrounding

Lakeland landscape.

Over the years, Hill Top became “a work in its own

right: a drawing made manifest and part of the way

Beatrix wished to project herself” (Lear, 2007, p. 36).

513

LISTENING FOR THE SCRATCH OF A PEN

Potter, unlike Montgomery, avoided any personal pub-

licity or public acclaim, yet from early on, enthusiastic

admirers—particularly Americans—sought her out. A

young Bostonian, aged 13, visiting her with his mother in

1929, recalled that she “opened the door of the farmhouse

with ‘an enormous key’ and let them into the museum

that was ‘Tom Kitten’s home’” (p. 342). So it was with

other visitors.

Despite this growing attention, Potter remained mysti-

 ed by Peter Rabbit’s success at home and abroad, and

by her own literary status, turning down a request by

Margaret Lane for permission to write a biography in

1941. Her continued mindfulness of Hill Top, however,

suggests that she was concerned about how she would be

remembered.

Prior to a life threatening operation in 1939, she made

her will, adding a list stipulating that “certain favorite

pieces of furniture…be kept at Hill Top (in the event of it

seeming likely that my rooms there are to be preserved)”

(Taylor, 2002, p. 191). Up until her death in 1943, she

arranged and rearranged her china, porcelain, artwork,

and antique furniture as she wanted them viewed, perhaps

imagining sharp-eyed visitors recognizing the hall and its

furnishings immortalized in The Tale of Samuel Whiskers

(Potter, 1908b) and, amongst her treasures in the parlor,

the Edward VII coronation teapot that appears in The Pie

and the Patty Pan (Potter, 1905).

She bequeathed Hill Top Farm and 4,000 acres of land

with its farms and cottages to the National Trust, hoping

that her “ nal work” Hill Top would be opened to the

public exactly as she had left it (Denyer, 2000, p. 46).

When William died in 1945, his will instructed that the

house and its contents, “as arranged by his wife or at her

direction should if possible remain…and be displayed for

all at this permanent memorial” (Lear, 2007, p. 443). Hill

Top was opened to the public in 1946. It remains virtually

unchanged today, although in 1985, Potter’s artwork was

removed for conservation. In 1988, Heelis’s law of ce in

nearby Hawkshead, became the Beatrix Potter Gallery.

Here over 500 of her drawings are displayed on a rotat-

ing basis.

The farmhouse—the “shrine that (Potter) set up for

herself” (Denyer, 2000, p. 46)—draws us in for it feels

familiar. Here, for instance, are the  owered washbasin and

caned chair where Tabitha Twitchett washes her kittens.

There is Tom Thumb and Hunca Munca’s dollhouse. Out-

side is the fern covered wall where Tom Kitten, Moppet,

and Mittens shed their clothes—all recognizable because

Potter rendered them so exactly in pen and wash in her

“little” books. It is a house and garden to play “I Spy”

in—a house with a life both real and imagined.

It is a house that, seen in the light of the stories, displays

the intriguing double vision that makes Potter such an

original as an author and artist. She could introduce Hill

Top to a child as “Tom Kitten’s home” and bequeath it to

the National Trust as her home. Created with the eyes of

owner and literary visitor, it became both a private home

and public museum, the place of comfort that Potter had

long sought but one that she inhabited with a memorable

cast of  ctionalized animals whose apparent human gloss

in the setting of its interiors and gardens invariably slips

off when nature and natural events take over. Here we

enter a carefully constructed domestic world that was

Potter’s dream space—an ideal home and landscape that

today have come to be synonymous with a particular kind

of Britishness.

******

A writer’s home, as we see, can be viewed as a blank sheet

on which its founders and their successors, or indeed an

author herself, can project whatever image or content

meets their personal or public needs. It is a space that spans

time: we are visiting “now” but experiencing a preserved

“then.” We may be surrounded and grounded by authentic

personal objects and furnishings, but we are also entering

the dreaming space of a writer or artist. The house mu-

seum is an intriguingly complex, revelatory, and moving

place—one that takes hold of our imaginations and often,

its country’s historical imagination as a shared emblem of

home, national character, or nationality. Did publicity-shy

Potter imagine, for a minute, that by leaving Hill Top to

the National Trust, she was ensuring a worldwide poster-

ity grounded not only in her tales, but also, by remaining

visible in the farmhouse, in her association with the Lake-

land landscape that she had nurtured and preserved—now

known as “Beatrix Potter country”? In the literary house

museum, creator, created, and visitor/reader are brought

together in once private spaces that witnessed the scratch

of a pen—prompting new imaginings, understandings,

and an appreciation of how a writer’s world shapes the

creation of imagined worlds.

The New Literary Museums

Now let’s explore the possibilities and potential of

children’s literary museums. Collectors, interpreters,

educators, collaborators, and advocates, they are also

catalysts for literary growth, change, and creativity. Their

beginnings reveal a response by founders to the status of

children’s literature in a particular country at a particular

time and its relationship to emerging cultural or national

identities, and to the subsequent valuing, collecting, and

displaying of original material—making them shapers of

culture and of visual and verbal literacy.

Dromkeen: A Pioneering “Home” for Australian

Children’s Literature

Let’s begin with some Australian publishing history to set

the scene. The  rst Australian book for children, Charlotte

Barton’s (1841) A Mother‘s Offering to Her Children, a

primer of Australia’s  ora, fauna, and indigenous people,

514

ELIZABETH HAMMILL

owed much to Victorian didactic works. This is not sur-

prising, as well into the 20th century most reading matter

was imported from England and re ected English tastes

and interests. Nonetheless, from the 1890s on, work ex-

hibiting a distinctive Australian character and imagination

emerged—blossoming after World War II as the special

hold of the new continent’s extreme landscapes on writers’

imaginations found expression, and Australian publishing

houses created children’s departments to develop home-

grown  ction and picture book lists that were indigenous

in every sense. The founding of a Children’s Book Council

in 1945 and Children’s Book of the Year awards in 1946

and the development of school and public libraries and

academic studies saw a growing professional and public

awareness of the crucial role that literacy and literature

play in a child’s education for life.

In this newly energized Australian book environ-

ment, Joyce and Court Oldmeadow, two enterprising and

farsighted educational booksellers, busily expanding a

bookselling venture housed in their garage into a nation-

ally respected business, began to dream. They imagined

 rst, exhibiting preliminary and  nished artwork in their

bookshop to answer the questions that children invari-

ably asked about how books came into being, and then,

creating a small permanent collection of such materials.

On a book buying trip overseas in 1971, they visited the

Osborne Collection at Boys and Girl’s House in Toronto,

Selma Lagerlof’s collection at her home in Sweden, and

Hill Top Farm. The farmhouse “enchanted” them and

took their vision a step further. A home, not a bookshop,

should be the setting for permanent displays of artwork for

children’s books. It would, however, have to be “just the

right kind of home, a place with an aura of history about

it” (Prentice & Bird, 1988, p. 16).

Two years later, during a visit to a publishing house in

Sydney, the Oldmeadows, viewing original artwork for a

contemporary Australian picture book, were struck by a

vividness, spark, and immediacy that seemed absent in the

printed book, an immediacy that children would respond

to. Both were now convinced that the proposed collection

should be a “living” one in the sense that work in it would

not be shut away from public view as in most collections

and archives and only shown on request. Instead, and

this was a radical idea at the time, it would be displayed

to be enjoyed, examined, and discussed. Most important,

it would bring children and books together “‘in a more

intimate way’” by taking them inside the “hidden,” often

unrecognized and unappreciated, side of the creative liter-

ary process, and making “‘their own kind of books’” far

more “meaningful and real” to them (Prentice & Bird,

1988, pp. 10–12).

Through their book trade connections, the Oldmeadows

had also become aware of the fate of much original mate-

rial after publication. Manuscripts, sketches, diagrams, and

dummies of books, initially  led in publishers’ of ces and

then in warehouses and rarely available for public display,

were often lost or destroyed. Artwork for some early clas-

sics was in foreign collections. Irreplaceable materials, the

“result of so much creativity and expertise,” and, as “vital

a part of (Australia’s) cultural heritage as the published

book,” were being lost (Prentice & Bird, 1988, p. 11).

It was with these passionate beliefs in mind, as well as

business needs for a bulk storehouse, that the Oldmeadows

purchased Dromkeen, northwest of Melbourne in rural

Riddell’s Creek in 1973. A handsome late 19th-century

weatherboard homestead, situated on the brow of a hill,

with views of the countryside below, extensive gardens

and grounds, and a wing added by the previous owner to

display his collection of Australian impressionist paint-

ings, Dromkeen was the “right kind of home, a place

with an aura of history about it” that the Oldmeadows

had dreamed of. Within months, they purchased artwork

by Judy Cowell, Peg Maltby, and Ida Rentoul Outhwaite

that would form the nucleus of their collection, exhibited

it in their dining room, adjacent to a new bookshop, and

of cially opened The Dromkeen Collection of Australian

Children’s Literature in October, 1974 to widespread

interest and acclaim.

More original art and visitors arrived simultaneously,

and the Oldmeadows opened their home to both. The din-

ing room walls were soon covered with works hung three

deep, and the collection began to spread into adjoining

rooms. Interest in the collection and curiosity about the

Oldmeadow’s philosophy concerning its uses prompted

groups of children and adults, as well as Australian and

foreign authors and illustrators, to visit the homestead. A

public program of book launches, storytelling sessions,

puppet shows, workshops with authors and illustrators, and

activities in which children investigated the various stages

in the production of a book, using edited manuscripts,

galley proofs, and other pre-publication materials in the

collection followed.

At Dromkeen, the Oldmeadows had initiated a person-

ally funded and innovative project—one whose national

and international importance to children’s literature was

acknowledged within two years when they were awarded

the British Eleanor Farjeon Award. If the couple, at this

early juncture, were inspired amateurs in their approach

to display and interpretation, to demonstrating the

value of original material, to museum making, they were

pragmatic in formalizing their creation and recognizing

the need for sponsorship. In 1975 they established the

Dromkeen Trust to ensure the administration, develop-

ment, and preservation in readily accessible form of the

collection at Dromkeen. After Court’s death in 1977,

the Trust became the Courtney Oldmeadow Children’s

Literature Foundation in 1981, and the maintenance and

furtherance of the Dromkeen Collection and associated

activities were passed to the publisher Ashton Scholastic

which purchased Dromkeen in 1985 and, as Scholastic

Australia, has imaginatively funded it since.

The Oldmeadow’s choice of the Dromkeen setting for

515

LISTENING FOR THE SCRATCH OF A PEN

their enterprise was tied to their approach to children and a

view of home as a natural intimate space in which to bring

children, Australian books, and bookmaking together. An

historic homestead, it was also the Oldmeadow’s spacious

home. Artwork, rare books, an antique printing press and

printer’s blocks, and other material in the growing col-

lection were all displayed informally in rooms furnished

with family antiques. Dromkeen’s grounds, in the coming

years, were enriched by specially commissioned bronze

sculptures of characters from Australian children’s lit-

erature and a Heritage Trail that ties together different

strands of Australian history on fourteen picture boards,

each featuring an Australian picture book illustrator and

their work.

By early 1976, an education program, linked to the

school curriculum and designed to suit different age

groups, was in place. The aim, then as now, is to introduce

students to the range and complexity of work entailed in

the making of a book, the people involved, and the man-

ner in which they work together. The focus is often on the

picture book, seen as “an avenue for learning about cre-

ativity, art and literature…[that] offers philosophical and

theoretical understandings in a very practical and personal

way” (Keck, 2008, personal correspondence). Included in

all exhibitions and accompanying programs are aspects of

the role of author, illustrator, editor, designer, publisher,

and printer in making a book. Typically, students role-play

these various jobs throughout a visit, sometimes creating

illustrations for a set text or a text to support an illustration.

Inspiration and approaches emerge after students explore

exhibitions designed to develop critical and visual literacy

skills by highlighting, for instance, how illustrators view

their creative stages and processes, or by introducing

them to the changing face and perspectives of Australian

picture books and to changing techniques and mediums.

Workshops with artists and authors further illuminate the

creative process. Teacher’s notes and resource papers ac-

company each exhibition.

Early on Joyce, building on previous bookshop work

around picture book selection, developed courses for ter-

tiary students and the professional development of teachers

and librarians. Her daughter Kaye Keck, Director since

1989, has further positioned Dromkeen as an important

educational resource, holding conferences and seminars

in a newly built conference facility. Ever responsive to

the needs of the Australian book community, Dromkeen

is “continually being shaped and developed by those who

are linked to it”—offering courses to schools via SOFNET

live satellite and creating DVDs such as Illustrators at

Work to bring the collection and work of artists to a wider

audience.

Dromkeen continues to offer public programs from

monthly “Meet the Artist” sessions to Dromkeen Drag-

ons for 7 to 12 year olds during the school holidays. The

Foundation has inaugurated two prestigious national

medals to recognize achievement in Australian children’s

literature—the Dromkeen Medal in 1982 in memory of

Courtney Oldmeadow and the Dromkeen Librarian’s

Award in 1994

Dromkeen’s collection of original art and of Australian

children’s and reference books continues to grow, via

the fundraising activities of the The Dromkeen Society

and donations by artists. Now known as the Dromkeen

National Centre for Picture Book Art, it currently com-

prises some 7,000 pieces of pre-publication material with

a focus on acquiring work in progress for contemporary

picture books—in particular, works showing development

and change in a particular illustrator’s approach, works

demonstrating various artistic styles and media, and works

representing the historic development of Australian illus-

tration for children. The collection, open to researchers,

is accredited and catalogued. Small exhibitions, shown

initially at Dromkeen, have traveled to regional galleries

since 1989, making the collection accessible to a wide na-

tional audience, while collaborations abroad have brought

work to a new international audience. An experimental

online exhibition Picture Book Families expanded the

audience further.

Dromkeen’s in uence, from a small operational base

of some  ve staff plus volunteers, has been extraordinary.

It remains a unique repository for a collection known

worldwide and has continually and inventively explored

the possibilities of using original artwork and manuscripts

to bridge the gap between children and books and engage

children with literature through understanding how it

came to be made. Its success has inspired the foundation

of other Australian galleries with interpretative programs

such as The Fremantle Children’s Literature Centre in

Western Australia and the development of Seven Stories

in England. Its collection is of increasing value to re-

searchers exploring the evolution of a national literature.

The Oldmeadow’s vision of a “living” collection and its

realization provided an early model of how a museum

celebrating children’s literature and picture books in

particular might work.

The Chihiro Art Museum: Creating

a “Picture Book Culture”

In Japan in the 1970s, Takeshi Matsumoto, the eldest son

of the internationally renowned picture book illustrator

Chihiro Iwasaki, began to develop a different model.

The post-war Japanese publishing industry, like that in

Australia, was thriving. Talented artists like Mitsumasa

Anno, Shinta Cho, and the sculptor Susumu Shingo were

emerging as illustrators. Few, however, recognized the true

value of picture book originals. Artists, including Chihiro,

formed a union to  ght successfully for copyright protec-

tion and the return of their originals from publishers—

work that was not yet viewed as art and which no museum

would exhibit. After Chihiro’s death in 1974, Matsumoto

(2000), just completing a Fine Arts Degree, determined

to create a museum to commemorate his mother’s life and

516

ELIZABETH HAMMILL

work and, by demonstrating the value of preserving and

displaying original artwork, be instrumental in developing

a critically appreciative picture book culture in Japan—a

culture that accepted the picture book as “a valid form of

artistic expression” (p. 129) and recognized it “as art in

its own right” (p. 151).

The Chihiro Iwasaki Art Museum for Picture Books

opened in 1977, funded by Chihiro’s royalties. Known

for her delicate, watery, near abstract style, Chihiro mar-

ried techniques from Western watercolor painting with

those from Japanese and Chinese traditional India ink

painting, often creating dramatic and emotive effects by

blurring colors. She is best known in the West for her

series about Momoko and her re-visioning of Andersen

(1991a, 1991b) fairytales such as The Red Shoes and The

Little Mermaid.

The museum stands on the site where Chihiro lived and

worked in Tokyo. Designed as an art museum, not a house

museum, it included her reconstructed atelier. Initially,

changing exhibitions drawn from the Chihiro Iwasaki Col-

lection of approximately 9,300 pieces of artwork focused

on her life and work, but soon began to be supplemented

with exhibitions of work from overseas artists. Matsumoto,

on visits to the Biennial of Illustrations Bratislava and

the Bologna Children’s Book Fair, realized that picture

book originals worldwide were often undervalued and

un-conserved. “No matter how historically substantial the

works were, they were [in]…danger of being scattered

away” and lost (Matsumoto, 2000, p. 2). The museum

broadened its collection policy, acquiring work by artists

who had in uenced Chihiro and by modern Japanese and

overseas illustrators. Picture book art crossed borders and

offered a universal shared visual language waiting to be

explored in one place. The museum also began to collect

representative books from various times and places, which

could be exhibited as an introduction to the world of pic-

ture books. Re ecting the museum’s core philosophy and

collection aims, it was renamed the Chihiro Art Museum,

and became, as Matsumoto intended, a beacon for artists

and picture book art as art. It also stimulated the develop-

ment of other picture book museums in Japan.

As the collection grew and with it the need for increased

exhibition space and highly specialized storage facilities to

preserve artwork in a humid climate, Matsumoto and The

Chihiro Iwasaki Memorial Foundation that managed the

Tokyo museum developed plans for a second museum to

be located in Chihiro’s “spiritual hometown” of Azumino,

Nagano Prefecture in the foothills of the Japanese “Alps.”

In this setting of great beauty where, in 1966, Chihiro

had built a cottage and studio, The Chihiro Art Museum

Azumino opened in 1997 on the 20th anniversary of the

founding of the Tokyo museum. The building and its larch

roof subdivided into saddle roofs mirror the surrounding

mountains.

Just as Chihiro sought repose and peace here, so the

architecture and design of the Azumino museum offer us

a relaxed environment in which to explore Chihiro’s work

within the broader context of the history and development

of Japanese and international picture book cultures. Two

galleries invite us to “get acquainted” with Chihiro, the

person, through her belongings, favorite things, sketches,

and works by artists who in uenced her, and Chihiro, the

artist, through changing displays of her sketches, oil paint-

ings, and picture book originals. Two galleries, drawing on

the International Collection of about 12,000 works created

by 168 artists from 28 countries, provide an introduction

to picture book art, while changing exhibits focus on

particular artists and themes. Another offers a history of

the evolution of the picture book as an art form from the

Egyptian Book of the Dead to medieval manuscripts, to

Japanese Edo picture scrolls, to rare picture books from the

19th and early 20th centuries. A library containing copies

of books by artists represented in the collections allows

for extended browsing and exploration and a chance to

compare the art on show with the printed book. The col-

lection itself is available for supervised research. There is

also a program of guided talks, lectures,  lms, workshops,

and a Storyclub for young children.

Recognizing that picture book artists often create

pieces in other mediums, the museum also collects three-

dimensional works, displaying these “here and there” at

Azumino. Hanging from the roof beams, for instance, as

if swimming in an aquarium, are shoals of strange  sh

made of painted tin plate by the Polish artist Josef Wilkon.

Outside in the surrounding Azumino Chihiro Park is a

dramatic and intriguing garden, designed by Czech artist

Kveta Pacovská from two ponds, six halved stones, paint-

ings and mirrors to marry art, nature, and viewers in an

amusing and inventive installation. Nearby is a recreation

of Chihiro’s cottage and atelier.

Back in Tokyo, the Chihiro Art Museum underwent a

complete renovation, reopening in 2002, on its 25th an-

niversary, having doubled its public space. It now re ects

the time that Chihiro actually lived there as well as the

history of the former museum. It, like Azumino, invites

us to listen for the scratch of Chihiro’s pen in her atelier

and in the Chihiro Gallery where changing displays reveal

her artistic concerns, philosophy, development, and idio-

syncratic style. But both museums do more. Here, for the

 rst time, we can contemplate work by the world’s picture

book artists brought together and begin to appreciate and

understand the de ning individual characteristics of each

and of their national cultures, to delight in their similari-

ties and differences, and to enjoy their visual dialogue in

these most democratic of museums. Matsumoto’s vision

and its international scope have brought recognition of the

artistic and historic value of original picture book art and

its place in Japanese and world culture, and of the need

to preserve these cultural treasures for future generations.

They have inspired the opening of more than 30 picture

book museums in Japan. Has their in uence been felt

elsewhere?

517

LISTENING FOR THE SCRATCH OF A PEN

The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art:

A First Fine Art Museum

Across an ocean and a continent in Amherst, Massachu-

setts, the Chihiro Art Museums became models and Mat-

sumoto a mentor for The Eric Carle Museum of Picture

Book Art. In the early 1980s, Carle (1969), creator of The

Very Hungry Caterpillar and other classics, and his wife

had been astonished to discover museums in Japan honor-

ing the picture book—an art form largely unrecognized in

America. A seed was planted. A decade later, they visited

the Chihiro Art Museum Tokyo. The seed began to grow

from a small gallery beneath Carle’s studio to a purpose-

built museum celebrating the art of the picture book and

fostering creativity and the con dence to appreciate and

enjoy art of every kind in visitors of all ages by exploring

the familiar and beloved art of our childhoods. Carle’s

work would sit at its heart. To realize their vision, they

established and endowed The Eric and Barbara Carle

Foundation.

Carle’s work had always been informed by strong

memories of a displaced childhood. Uprooted at six from

his American home and a “sun- lled” introduction to

school, he was traumatized by the harsh approach at his

new school in his parent’s native Germany. He dreamt

often of building a bridge across the ocean to his old home.

Carle’s later life-af rming artistic response to this dark,

early experience and the liberating notion of himself as

a bridge builder were to determine the tenor of his work

as a picture book maker. “I am fascinated,” he wrote, “by

the period in a child’s life when he or she…leaves home

and goes to school. What a gulf a child must cross then:

from home and security, a world of play and the senses,

to a world of reason and abstraction, order and discipline.

I should like my books to bridge that great divide” (Carle,

1996, p. 38). If his books were bridges between home

and school and the new world of literacy, could a picture

book museum, he wondered, bridge the worlds of visual

and verbal literacy and of picture book illustration and

 ne art?

In art historian H. Nichols B. Clark, Carle found a di-

rector who shared his beliefs. Clark had co-curated Myth,

Magic, and Mystery: One Hundred Years of American

Children’s Book Illustration (1996–97), the  rst major

exhibition to survey the history of illustration for children

in America. In this pioneering, perception-changing show,

artwork was removed from its accustomed context as part

of a book and presented on its own with text conspicuously

absent. This  ne art approach was to underpin exhibition

and program design at the planned museum which, as a

bridge builder, was to be a “ rst” art museum for visitors

of all ages—an early “step in a journey of museum experi-

ences” (Heller, 2006).

In the museum’s architects, Carle found an imaginative

 rm which drew on the design language of his books for

that of the museum, and, as at the Chihiro Azumino, on

the “vaulting forms” of the surrounding Holyoke hills.

Set, most appropriately, in an old apple orchard in the

cultural quarter of Hampshire College, the museum’s white

exterior and interior walls echo the white backgrounds in

Carle’s work where they set the stage for his explosive

colored tissue collages of the natural world. Here, they

exist like a “welcoming palette awaiting the artist’s brush,”

providing a stage in the central atrium for four large ab-

stract murals in red, blue, green and yellow by Carle—a

clear statement of the museum’s artistic intent, and in the

three galleries, for rotating exhibitions of Carle’s work,

drawn from the 2,000 pieces in the museum’s collection

and that of guest artists. Externally, as the orchard blos-

soms white in spring, the white museum has a dialogue

with nature similar to Carle’s use of nature in his books,

while the atrium windows invite viewers inside and out

to contemplate art and nature at once. In a museum about

learning to look and looking to learn, this experience be-

gins with the building itself and its relation to the natural

world around it

Inside, Carle’s vision comes to life through a range

of programs built around “hands-on [art studio], eyes-on

[galleries], and ears-on [reading library] approaches”

(Agoglia, 2008, personal correspondence). The framing

focus here is on picture book art, removed from the de n-

ing context of a book, as a  rst experience of  ne art—

one that is enhanced by offering us a portable toolkit of

questions that open up ways of thinking and talking about

what we see and can be taken away with us to heighten

our enjoyment of art elsewhere.

The separation of image and text in any exhibition

gives rise to a curatorial and aesthetic dilemma. The pic-

ture book is a collaborative narrative art form, its impact

arising from the interactive play of words and pictures.

The  nished book is the work of art, as Lawrence Sipe

af rms in his chapter in this volume. If we remove an

image from this frame, what we see on the gallery wall

is a still—a frozen moment—out of its own story and

placed in a new larger canvas. How are we asked to re-

spond to it? As literature? As  ne art? As part of a new

artistic or thematic narrative about the nature of picture

book making?

At the Carle, literally de-constructing a picture book

and re-framing components of it on the gallery walls is

seen as a way of demonstrating that the art on show, like

all  ne art, can invite an aesthetic response on its own.

Text and context have no place here, although the relevant

picture books are available for reference. The invitation,

like that in Carle’s Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do

You See? (Martin, Jr., 1996) is to look, look again, and

respond creatively to what we see. Our engagement is with

the art on show. There are no inter-actives, but videos are

occasionally used to illuminate an artist’s creative process.

Discussion is encouraged, particularly with guided school

groups, as we are asked to consider: “What is going on in

this picture? What do you see that makes you say that?

What more do you see?” There are no labels telling us

518

ELIZABETH HAMMILL

how to look or what to think, but, for self-guided visitors,

there are more speci c questions to ponder: “Think about

the variety of textures in Carle’s work and how they might

have been created.” or, in a Margot and Kaethe Zemach

retrospective: “There are two versions of The Fisherman

and His Wife. Look at the changes in Zemach’s use of

line, color and space, and speculate on why they were

made….” Personal statements by artists give clues to their

approach to their art and the art on show: “The pictures

here are  nished works and points of departure” (Carle,

2004). “Line is a language—something descriptive as

well as functional. You don’t just make marks without a

reason” (Zemach, 2004).

Here, again, the visual world is being opened up for

us, but with a particular slant. What the Carle, as the  rst

full scale museum in America dedicated to the art of the

picture book, recognizes and acts on is an understanding,

as Clark puts it, that for many people “appreciating art is

a very esoteric science…one that makes them nervous….

We provide them with a reassuring entry point…and

strategic, bridging tools” (Heller, 2006). Drawing on

work in the  eld of aesthetic and cognitive development

by Rudolf Arnheim, Jerome Bruner, and Lev Vygotsky

and on the Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) of museum

educator Philip Yenawine and cognitive psychologist

Abigail Housen, the Carle provides us with a “toolbox of

questions,” designed to help us attend to the art on show

and  nd meaning in it. We are encouraged to observe,

speculate, make inferences,  nd evidence for our ideas,

and construct interpretations together—just what we do

when we think and talk about our reading. There are no

right or wrong answers, just different perspectives, differ-

ent possibilities. We  nd ourselves re ecting too on an art-

ist’s use of color, composition, line, texture, and technique.

We are invited to become detectives and compare the art

on the wall with the art in the published book—triggering

discussions about artistic methods and how books are

made as well as introducing us to language to articulate

what we see. With work by Carle and at least two other

artists on show at any given time, we are also invited to

compare very different artistic and national sensibilities,

visions, and methods at work.

In the Art Studio, changing, exhibit-related, hands on

activities encourage us to take our gallery discoveries

about art further by exploring the creative process. In

drop-in sessions and workshops, we are introduced to

media and artistic techniques and disciplines on view

in the galleries and invited to experiment with them

ourselves. Drawing on the child-centered Italian Reg-

gio Emilia approach, the emphasis here is on learning

to “think” with our hands, eyes, and sensibilities as well

as our brain and on problem solving and re ection. As

we make our own “works of art”, our understanding of

how to look at art grows (Agoglia, 2008, personal cor-

respondence).

In the Reading Library housing some 3,000 picture

books, our “eyes-on” and “hands-on” experiences join

with an “ears on” experience in Carle Storytimes. Shaped

by an evolving Whole Book Approach (WBA) that

provides a critical framework and pedagogy for the mu-

seum’s work and draws on whole language instruction,

VTS, and the Reggio Emilia discovery model, Storytimes

are animated conversation times. Here reader and children

share picture book adventures and together uncover how

the ingredients of a picture book—text, pictures, pacing,

design, layout, typeface, and production—interact and

play off each other to create an artistic whole.

The Carle, like Dromkeen, offers on-site, outreach, and

professional development courses. Staff take art studio

workshops and Storytime sessions into regional schools

and undertake extended school residencies. They pro-

vide teachers, librarians, and others keen to build picture

books and visual literacy into their classroom, library,

or community work, with a range of book programs that

draw on the VTS and WBA methodologies and explore

the rich teaching potential of the picture book and its

role in developing visual literacy. In a new collaboration

with The Center for the Study of Children’s Literature at

Simmons College in Boston, the museum offers a Master

in Fine Arts in Writing for Children. Overseas, the Carle

is mentoring staff at the Chihiro Art Museums as they

develop education programs, novel in Japan, using VTS

and WBA as foundations.

Like Dromkeen, the Carle tours exhibitions national-

ly—some developed in museum collaborations—to widen

the audience for picture book art. It too has inaugurated a

set of national awards (2006), The Carle Honors, which

celebrate the vital contribution of artists, mentors or cham-

pions,  nancial supporters of its work, and individuals or

organizations whose imagination, vision, and dedication to

the art of the picture book have furthered art appreciation,

early literacy, and critical thinking.

For researchers, the Carle’s small but growing collec-

tion now contains not only Carle’s archive but work by

artists including Barry Moser, Gennady Spirin, Steven

Kellogg, Robert Ingpen, and Petra Mathers and is available

by appointment. So too is the extensive research library

of Barbara Elleman, gifted by the critic and former editor

of Booklist and Book Links.

Still in its early years, the Carle’s reach and in uence

is ever-widening as it becomes the bridge that its founder

imagined. The museum’s ethos, like Carle’s caterpillar,

is creeping into the American consciousness. Picture

book art, once dismissed as a genre, is now the subject of

revisionist critical thinking that is breaking down the old

walls between art and illustration. “Picture This: Chil-

dren’s Book Art Gains Mainstream Acclaim” announced a

Boston Globe headline (Reitz) in February 2008. Already

then, the Carle is providing us with an important forum

for critical debate, one that is changing and developing

our aesthetic appreciation both of picture book art and of

the picture book as an art form.

519

LISTENING FOR THE SCRATCH OF A PEN

Developments in Europe

Meanwhile in Europe, various models for children’s litera-

ture museums were emerging and injecting a new playful

sensibility into the experiences on offer. In Germany, for

instance, Europe’s  rst (and only) picture book museum

opened at Burg Wissem in Troisdorf in 1982 in an imagi-

natively converted castle with specially commissioned

statues of fairytale characters in its courtyard and fairytale

motifs on its staircase walls. The museum houses, exhibits,

and tours work from its Alsleben and Bruggermann col-

lections of historical books and its growing collection of

modern German picture book art by illustrators including

Josef Wilkon, Helme Heine, Jutta Bauer, and Janosch.

Further north, in Finland, in 1987, a museum dedicated

to the art of Tove Jansson, creator of the endearingly way-

ward, iconic Moomins, was created in Tampere’s elegant

new copper clad library, following her donation of over

2,000 pieces of artwork and an entrancing Moomin House,

crafted with artists Tuulikki Pietila and Pentti Eistola to

the Tampere Art Museum. The Moominvalley Museum,

with its curving galleries hung with a changing selection

of Jansson’s illustrations for her 13 Moomin books, its

enchanting recreation of the  oating theatre from The

Exploits of Moominpappa (Jansson, 1969) where chil-

dren can dress up and perform to an audience seated in

small rowing boats on the “water,” and 40 more Moomin

tableaux, invites us to experience the artistic shaping of a

 ctional world which we can imaginatively step inside.

An entry into imagined worlds and play lie at the heart

of Junibacken, a theatrical “culture house” for children

“full of stories, laughter and mischief” which opened in

Stockholm in 1996. Conceived by the actor, director, and

producer Staffan Götestam whose career has been built

around his interpretations of Astrid Lindgren’s work,

Junibacken celebrates Lindgren and her  ctional worlds

but also, at her request, many contemporary Swedish il-

lustrators and their creations.

For Lindgren, play, imagination, and reading were inex-

tricably entwined. “Only children perform miracles when

they read,” she wrote. Only they, like her young heroes, can

“exceed the boundaries of reality” and “unimpededly…

move between magic and porridge, between total terror

and explosive joy” (Edstrm, 2000, p. 26).

At Junibacken, we are invited to do just that as we

embark on a journey of discovery and adventure through a

series of 3-dimensional  ctional worlds. From Storybook

Square to Pippi Longstocking’s Villa Villekula, we visit

the painstakingly recreated, child-scaled homes of some

of Sweden’s favorite  ctional characters—from urban

pre-schooler Al e Atkins to Old Man Pettson and his cat

Findus—and try on and play out their lives and stories

for a time.

Arriving at Vimmerby Station and an exhibition about

Lindgren’s life, the art of her three best known illustra-

tors, and the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, we board

a small wooden carriage and embark on a breathtakingly

inventive, minutely detailed, dramatic, and moving journey

through landscapes and scenes from six of Lindgren’s

books, traveling from Mardie and Emil’s sunlit Junibacken

to the darker lights of the Brothers Lionhart’s Nangilima.

The journey lingers in the mind long afterwards.

Junibacken offers us a new kind of literary museum

experience. A children’s museum, but not a theme park,

its inspiration comes from Lindgren’s and Götestam’s

own belief in the power of story, drama, and imagina-

tive play to shape young minds and offer creative entries

into other worlds and the world about them. Junibacken

enfolds us like a book and like a book, can be re-played

again and again.

Seven Stories: The Centre for Children’s Books—The

Museum as Literary Playground

In the northeast of England, yet another model for a

museum of children’s literature was emerging in New-

castle upon Tyne. Its roots lay again in a perceived need

to establish a new institution—in this case, one with

national aspirations—that would collect, preserve, and

exhibit a growing collection of the working papers of

Britain’s modern writers and illustrators for children,

and celebrate both the artistry of British children’s books

and the journeys into the imagination that exploring these

original materials and reading itself offer. It was to be

developed locally against the backdrop of the culturally

fuelled regeneration of the once proud Victorian industrial

waterfront of the River Tyne and nationally, against the

politics of a shifting arts and education landscape. While

its genesis, once more, sprang from personal belief and

vision, its realization took place in a political and public

arena in which the British Parliament’s establishment of a

National Lottery (1993) made possible public funding for

new cultural ventures that might otherwise have remained

dreams. Seven Stories, known initially as The Centre for

the Children’s Book (CCB), is one such project.

It is here that my part in these stories begins. As an

American making my career in Britain from the late 1970s

on in the education and book worlds as a children’s book-

seller, lecturer, and critic, I was increasingly surprised at

British reluctance to celebrate their achievements in the

 eld of children‘s literature. Arriving in Newcastle from

New York in 1971, I discovered a rich literary landscape,

with children’s  ction  ourishing in a second “Golden

Age” and the modern picture book as an art form coming

into its own. Two in uential journals—Growing Point and

Signal Approaches to Children’s Books—and Aidan Cham-

bers’s (1983) Introducing Books to Children became my

guides, each signi cantly informing my critical thinking

about children’s books and about engaging children with

books and their making. So too did the philosophy and

work of Kaye Webb, editor of Puf n Books, and founder

of the Puf n Club. A literary Pied Piper, Webb aimed to

turn children into readers by making their relationship with

books a “living” one, creating a community of interest,

520

ELIZABETH HAMMILL

and opening imaginative highways into reading through

the Club’s iconic magazine Puf n Post and activities such

as the annual Puf n Exhibition in London, where our

family  rst experienced the heady excitement of meet-

ing authors, stepping into storybook worlds, and seeing

original artwork on show.

I became aware, early on, of the ways in which meet-

ing an author can bridge the gap between children and

books, and transform their response to reading. Like the

Oldmeadows, I was conscious of children’s curiosity

about how books are made and their fascination with the

creative process as they watched an illustrator conjure up

imaginary creatures on paper or a writer share notebooks

and drafts that were sometimes as untidy as their own.

Increasingly over my 16 years as a bookseller, I developed

school and public programs in which children and young

people could further their development as critically ap-

preciative readers and as apprentice writers learning their

craft by meeting and sharing ideas and work with authors

and illustrators in mutually rewarding sessions. Work in

progress, artists’ and children’s, always sat at the heart of

these programs.

The impetus to develop new approaches and initiatives

was furthered throughout the 1980s and 90s by radical

changes in the culture and economics of publishing, now

multi-national, corporate, commercialized, and prone to

overproduction as Joel Taxel’s chapter in this volume spells

out. The erosion of public and school library services and

of school book budgets combined with the introduction of

a National Curriculum in 1988 with set English Heritage

books prompted controversy. “This government,” averred

poet Michael Rosen (1993), “in spite of all the rhetoric

concerning literacy levels, has declared war on the reading

of books” (p. 108). Two years later, Rosen (1995) asked:

“How can we intervene to keep what we do more thought-

ful, more fun, more useful, more exciting, more dissenting

and nonconformist…an alive, hopeful...questioning place

to be?” (p. 44). That was a key question confronting the

children’s book world as the century turned.

One possible answer was already evolving in New-

castle. Prompted by the near loss of the world famous Opie

Collection to America in 1988 coupled with the realization

that important but neglected parts of our children’s literary

heritage were disappearing into collections abroad in the

absence of any dedicated collection here, and conversa-

tions with writers and illustrators lamenting the lack of a

British home like Dromkeen for their work, I wondered

how this startling gap in Britain’s literary provision could

be  lled. What if a home for a growing collection of books

and the original papers out of which they emerged was

created, a home that was not only a new national and in-

ternational resource but also one that could become a kind

of National Gallery of Children’s Literature?

It was a big, intriguing idea—one that I began to share

and develop with the children’s book world and local

young people. Possible aims, size, scope, activities, and

audiences were debated, as was location. Newcastle, on

the brink of a cultural renaissance, was already recognized

nationally as a champion of children’s books through

pioneering initiatives like the Northern Children’s Book

Festival (from 1984 on). High unemployment and low

literacy levels made it a place where books and literacy

were valued as keys to social, cultural, and economic

change, and public investment in a national center could

make a difference.

By early 1994, I had written a working proposal for

a center whose core vision is realized in Seven Stories

today. It echoed Dromkeen in its emphasis on the creation

of a home for a living collection to be used in exhibitions

and associated school, public, and outreach programs

to engage children with literature through understand-

ing how it came to be made. Its broad aims of changing

public perception about the value and place of children’s

books in British culture, cultivating an appreciation of the

art, craft, and pleasures of book and story making, and

stimulating artistic innovation and creativity within its

audiences were akin to those of its developing museum

counterparts elsewhere. It differed crucially, however, in

its aim to create a national (with a capital N) center to

preserve Britain’s vital literary heritage of childhood and

to transmit it and the reading culture to children. From the

beginning, story, story making, and making readers were

also at CCB’s heart.

The proposal was welcomed by the book world, the

English Arts Council (ACE) and Newcastle City Council

(NCC). Early support came a year before CCB of cially

came into existence as an educational charity, when it

was offered the literary estate of Robert Westall (2001)—

locally born author of The Machine Gunners and other

prize winning books set in the Northeast—plus £100,000

towards a building. I began to form a steering committee,

looked at possible sites, and, by chance, found a local part-

ner for this enterprise—someone who understood politics,

public funding, and strategic and business management.

Mary Briggs, a co-founder, like me, of the Northern

Children’s Book Festival, whose career spanned librar-

ies, arts and most recently education, shared my belief

in the possibilities of the book as a tool for growth, and

recognized the potential of the proposed center to act as a

catalyst for change and creativity. If the new Arts Lottery

could be a source of capital funding, anything seemed

possible. And it was.

But Seven Stories didn’t happen overnight. Ten years

passed from the day when we each put £10 into a CCB

bank account to the day in August 2005 when we opened

the £6.5 million center to the public. The decade long jour-

ney took us on a roller coaster ride in the politics, econom-

ics, and challenges of initiating a new cultural enterprise,

but also obliged us to pilot our vision to demonstrate to

public funders what a center might be and do.

In 1998 in the  rst of seven pre-opening exhibitions, our

experimental, boundary-breaking approach to exhibition

521

LISTENING FOR THE SCRATCH OF A PEN

design and interpretation and associated programming

emerged. Responding to heated debate around a new Na-

tional Literacy Strategy that put tests, targets, and national

school league tables before reading for pleasure, and to

a new Access and Arts for Everyone cultural agenda, we

pondered how to display artwork and manuscripts out of

their picture book context and place them in a meaningful

new gallery frame.

Could a gallery, we wondered, in the spirit of the Puf-

 n Exhibitions of Kaye Webb whose personal archive we

had acquired in 1997, be transformed into a setting for

an exhibition of original words and pictures that might

play to an audience’s sense of wonder and fun and  re

new readers? Could an exhibition take audiences inside

an author or artist’s creative world? Could it recreate that

immersion in a virtual world that occurs when we say we

are “lost in a book”? Could it, in line with funding from

the Arts Lottery’s “New Audiences” initiative, be framed

in such a way that it became a “reassuring entry point” to

a key target audience—families unfamiliar with either art

galleries or literary events?

An exhibition could and did. Taking our cue from

illustrator Colin McNaughton’s belief that creating a

picture book is like creating a piece of theatre, we de-

signed our  rst show Daft as a Bucket: Inside the World

of Colin McNaughton as a giant 3-D picture book—one

that invited audiences to step into the artist’s pictures.

From a Giant’s Library, a pirate ship in harbor, Outer

Space, to Preston Pig’s classroom, theatrical sets pro-

vided a dramatic narrative solution to the question of

how to display original pictures and words out of their

picture book frame—one heightened by an accompany-

ing McNaughton production by a local theatre company.

We discovered drama, now a key element of our educa-

tion, outreach and public programming, as a powerful

pathway into story and story making, and found our own

curatorial voice. Our experiment in exhibition design

and interpretation had generated a literary and artistic

experience that was, at once, infectious, playful, fun, eye

opening and thought provoking. It, like the best books,

was transformational.

Our ensuing pre-opening shows played with design,

form, and interpretation in similar ways—always attending

to what the work to be displayed suggested, to the story

to be told, and to the gallery experience to be offered. We

carefully built on our  rst partnerships—our collabora-

tions ranging from those with local museums, theatre

companies, and university graphic arts/design courses to

ones with publishers, Tate Gallery’s National Programs,

Baika Women’s College in Osaka, Japan, and Dick Bruna’s

Dutch publisher Mercis. We began to tour exhibitions and

developed outreach programs, working to bring books

alive for a variety of new and harder-to-reach audiences

and laying the foundations for future projects that, in the

spirit of Rosen’s query, would be thoughtful, fun, useful,

exciting, dissenting, and nonconformist. The newness and

possibilities of what we were doing energized us and took

us down many revelatory paths.

In 2002, we initiated a community writing project—

Penning People and Place—built around two parallel

residencies in two sharply contrasting communities

linked by walls: Berwick upon Tweed, a walled historic

Northumbrian outpost on the North Sea, and Byker in

East Newcastle, a declining urban community, centered

about a public housing estate known as the Byker Wall.

The year-long project introduced CCB to Byker and its

people. Here, in the Ouseburn Valley within sight of the

Byker Wall, Kate Edwards, now our Chief Executive, had

found a home for our project after our hopes of a new £10

million “book palace” were dashed when the Arts Lot-

tery changed its capital funding plans (1999). Leetham’s

Mill, a listed, semi-derelict seven story Victorian granary

backing onto the Ouseburn, a tributary of the nearby Tyne,

felt right. The valley, shaped by 19th-century manufac-

turing and industry, was developing a new life as one of

Tyneside’s most creative places. Empty warehouses were

being converted into artists’ studios, and a city farm, rid-

ing stables, and regeneration trust had been established.

Stepping onto Lime Street with its aging buildings, pigeon

crees, and old boats moored on the burn, felt like stepping

into another world. We bought the mill and the crisp ware-

house next door (2001). Three years and £6.5 million later,

conversion of the granary into a modern, family-friendly

museum, gallery, performance and workshop space with

a literary focus began.

Today, visitors are greeted by a prize-winning building

that dramatically marries weathered brick with new pol-

ished concrete and glass outside, but retains the integrity

and original cast iron structure, timber joists, and beams

of the old mill inside. Artwork by eight award-winning

illustrators is etched onto the new entrance, shaped like an

open book, and an accompanying text of familiar phrases:

“Once upon a time…into the deep dark woods.” It and the

spiraling stair tower invite visitors to embark on a journey

into the world of books and their makers. On the river

side of the building, a small enchanting boat—Sea Song

Sang—is moored, another invitation to voyage, created by

a community artist whose sculpture grew out of a regional

schools’ project exploring tales of the sea and children’s

ideas for a magical Seven Stories story boat.

Inside, the nature of the journey is revealed: “Some

people say there are only seven stories in the world but a

thousand different ways of telling them. Seven Stories is

about the thousand ways.” And so it is. From the beamed

Artist’s Attic on its seventh  oor with its winged story chair

and children’s theatre to the riverside Creation Station,

Seven Stories is a kind of captivating literary playground

where exhibitions, school programs, drop-in activities,

workshops, dressing up, drama, special events with sto-

rytellers, performers, authors and illustrators, and a café

and bookshop offer visitors of all ages an ever changing

landscape for the imagination—one that awakens them to

522

ELIZABETH HAMMILL

the endless creative possibilities of playing with words and

pictures and the ingredients of stories. Like Browser, the

Seven Stories’ cat, created by illustrator Satoshi Kitamura

as a pictorial guide to the building, visitors can become

writers, artists, explorers, designers, storytellers, readers,

and collectors here as they travel by book.

In the Robert Westall and Sebastian Walker Galleries—

the  rst exhibition spaces in Britain dedicated to children’s

books, we have played with the graphic framing of shows

in different ways to different ends. While words and

pictures  gure in all our exhibitions, two shows about

two North Eastern writers—David Almond and Robert

Westall—challenged us to  nd ways of exploring text-

based worlds. For Westall’s Kingdom (2006), the feel,

atmosphere, and dark undercurrents of wartime Tyneside

and the bleak beauty of the Northumbrian coast—the

landscape of Westall’s youth and his favored setting—were

evoked, using photographic back drops, period artifacts,

and sight, light, and sound effects. At the gallery’s center

stood the “Fortress,” the secret den of the young gang

in The Machine Gunners, where today’s children could

imagine and play out, Junibacken-like, Westall’s story.

Emotive material—photographs, recordings, Westall’s

typewriter—a novelty today, and a motorcycle, like that in

Devil on the Road (1996), written after Westall’s teenage

son died in a biking accident, provided a sometimes gritty

realism that brought the writer’s notes, manuscripts, and

edited typescripts to life.

Winged Tales of the North (2008), a modular touring

exhibition, plays inventively with the size and shape of

graphic reproductions of original material and an over-

arching text by Almond himself as it answers Almond’s

opening questions: “Where does a story come from?

...Where does it all start?” Traveling via “the universe, the

galaxy” to “our house, the kitchen, me…” in his childhood

home in Felling-on-Tyne, Almond reveals how stories

grow from a known landscape, and how real places, real

people, merge with imagined ones to become “living

things.” The trajectory of Skellig from Almond’s (2009)

childhood belief that shoulder blades are “where your

wings were” to a novel, play,  lm, and opera shows how

a story takes  ight. Elsewhere, at a desk with Almond’s

bookshelves reproduced above it, ideas about the writer

as reader, literary in uences, and authorial voice are

introduced and visitors can contribute to a never-ending

story. Thus, how this writer writes is meaningfully but

magically conveyed.

Other exhibition journeys can be taken at Seven Stories

outside the galleries, shows that re ect our commitment

to nurturing new talent—work in progress, for instance,

by members of the Seven Stories Writer’s and Artist’s

Group, a circle of North Eastern writers and illustrators

for children who meet regularly at the center to share work

and practice. Or one can view winning entries by graphic

arts students for an annual illustration competition, created

in partnership with Sunderland University’s Graphic Arts

Department and poet Gillian Allnutt, which is often the

 rst public showcase for these young artists.

In the Storylab gallery, visitors learn about our col-

lection, currently housed in specialist facilities south of

the Tyne, which now contains some 22,000 books and

papers for over 70 authors and illustrators. Here, guided

by Browser, visitors investigate a Heath Robinsonesque

Collection Machine to discover why and what we collect

and what happens to work when it enters our collection.

Doors open to reveal archive gems—a Philip Pullman

manuscript perhaps or a Jan Ormerod rough—and fac-

similes of work damaged by bugs, water, and light, in need

of conservation. Interactive games illuminate the collect-

ing process further and suggest the kinds of information

to be gleaned from a literary collection. The Collection

catalogue and 1,000 digitized images of material in it can

be accessed here online.

Since its inception, Seven Stories has played an im-

portant role in furthering the wider arts, heritage, and

education agendas of local and national government

bodies. Storylab was created as part of Storylines, a pio-

neering project designed to unlock the potential of our

children’s literary archive as a new, unexplored, learning

resource and to widen access to it and an understanding

of its cultural and historical importance School groups,

in this and subsequent projects, uniquely work alongside

our collection and education teams and our writer in resi-

dence. They search works in our collection to discover, for

instance, the creative processes of different authors and

artists, drawing creative inspiration from their  ndings,

and developing their own responses—through  lm, drama,

or perhaps stories with accompanying personal archives

of notes, rough plans, and drafts to document their own

creative processes. The resulting works are displayed in

Storylab and show us children not just looking over the

shoulder of a writer or illustrator but inspired to step into

their shoes. For them, magic and meaning come not only

from their discovery of the knowledge and information

that the collection holds, but also from the self-discovery

that their creative responses to it reveal.

We are currently involved in a government initiative that

is piloting a new partnership model among schools, librar-

ies, and arts and heritage organizations to create sustained

culturally inspiring activities planned with and for young

people. Working with teachers, librarians, schoolchildren,

artists, storytellers, writers, and actors, we are playing with

the possibilities of where different adventures with words

and images might take all of us. Projects have included

an in-depth-over-time exploration of Michael Rosen’s

(1993) We’re Going on a Bear Hunt—its language, sounds,

settings, both real and imagined—as an inspiration for

new work and new understandings. Another project,

Wonderwords, has evolved into a traveling poetry writing

workshop, that marries performance, travel, contemporary

poetry, and writing in ways that are changing children’s

perception of poetry and of themselves as poets. Out of

523

LISTENING FOR THE SCRATCH OF A PEN

this has come Pathways into Poetry, one of our  rst profes-

sional development courses for teachers, a resource pack

and an anthology of participants’ poetry.

Building on our belief that sharing books lies at the

heart of learning to read and reading to learn, we offer

community and public programs designed to engage

families with books and reading together and with Seven

Stories as a place which can further a love of literature.

From school or library based projects to pioneering work

with teenage mothers to weekly in-house early years ses-

sions of Bookworm Babies, Story Party, and Yoga Babies,

we are working to foster family relationships with books

and the next generation of readers.

Researchers are  nding that the papers and books in our

collection offer new pathways and insights into the mak-

ing of modern British children’s literature from the 1930s

on when our collecting period begins. Our holdings, built

from scratch, vary in size from single pieces of artwork

to material relating to one or more representative books

of an author or illustrator, to the comprehensive archives,

including reference and book collections, of writers like

Geoffrey Trease, Peter Dickinson, Eva Ibbotson, and

Ursula Moray Williams, playwright David Wood, and

illustrators Faith Jaques and Judith Kerr.

The academic exploration of this material is an exciting

long-term challenge, one being furthered by our partner-

ship with the Children’s Literature Unit at Newcastle

University, founded in 2004 in response to our creation of

a new resource and research facility. Key to this partner-

ship has been an Arts and Humanities Research Council

funded project, which has seen three doctoral students

basing their research on our Robert Westall and Kaye

Webb archives, and working with our collection team

to develop our research infrastructure and policy. Seven

Stories became an accredited museum in 2008 and aims

for our Collection to be of suf cient depth, breadth, and

signi cance to be eligible for formal Designation as a

National Collection within  ve years.

Since the  rst ideas for a National Gallery of Children’s

Literature were developed 20 years ago, the public pro le

of children’s literature has changed. We have been part of

a movement that has seen children’s books make headline

news with the works of J. K. Rowling, Philip Pullman,

and Jacqueline Wilson. The creation in 1999 of the post

of Children’s Laureate, awarded bi-annually to an eminent

author or illustrator to celebrate outstanding achievement,

has given children’s literature six in uential champions

and Seven Stories key advocates and partners. In Bookstart

(1992), Britain now has the world’s  rst publicly funded

national books-for-babies program. Taken together, these

are beginnings that are lodging children’s literature in

Britain’s consciousness as a vital, no longer overlooked,

aspect of our national heritage and everyday culture.

Seven Stories, starting from a non-traditional base, is

becoming the hub of a new and exciting axis for children’s

literature nationally. Our evolving approach marries criti-

cal re ection with pleasure, new knowledge with question-

ing, interpretation with changing perceptions, and reading

and creativity with adventure, discovery, and growth. We

are still so new that the possibilities of being a museum, of

collecting, of engaging new audiences with story making,

of making books matter, and of being a catalyst of delight,

creativity, and change seem in nite.

“Only Connect”

This has been a story about pioneers and new museums

working with the same basic materials—manuscripts, art-

work, books, and story—but in very distinct ways to place

children’s literature at the heart of their national literary

and artistic cultures. Each has been created in response

to the status of children’s literature in their countries at a

particular moment in time. Each, in its own way, has been

and is an agent of cultural politics and cultural change.

None has been a neutral space.

De ned in spirit by their framing architecture, be it a

home, a traditional art gallery, or a warehouse regener-

ated as a literary playground, each museum has used its

knowledge and the power of the artistic imagination to

create what can be transformative spaces and experiences.

E. M. Forster’s (2002) dictum—“Only connect”—has

taken many shapes and sparked many conversations as

children’s literature comes of age in new museums around

the world—museums now reaching across oceans to share

their experiences and approaches with each other. Here the

politics of art, reading, and pleasure meet and open wide

the world of children’s literature to all of us. For research-

ers, they offer an Aladdin’s Cave of original materials

and original approaches to making those materials matter

beyond academia to explore. And to think that it all began

with someone listening for the scratch of a pen.

Literature References

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Louisa May Alcott (M. Stern, Ed.). New York, NY: William

Morrow.

Alcott, L. M. (2004) Little women. New York, NY: Signet

Classics.

Almond, D. (2009). Skellig. New York, NY: Delacorte.

Andersen, H. C. (1991a). The red shoes (A. Bell, Trans., C. Iwasaki.

Illus.). Natick, MA: Picture Book Studio.

Andersen, H. C. (1991b). The little mermaid (A. Bell, Trans., C.

Iwasaki. Illus.) New York, NY: Scholastic.

Barton, C. (1841). A mother’s offering to her children: By a lady,

long resident in New South Wales. Sydney, Australia: Gazette

Of ce.

Carle, E. (1969). The very hungry caterpillar. New York, NY:

Philomel Books.

Forster, E. M. (2002). Howard’s End. Mineola, NY: Dover.

Jansson, T. (1969) The exploits of Moominpappa. London: Puf n

Books.

Martin, Jr., B. (1996). Brown bear, brown bear, what do you see?

(E. Carle, Illus.). New York, NY: Henry Holt.

Montgomery, L. M. (2008). Anne of Green Gables. New York,

NY: Putnam.

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Potter, B. (1902). The tale of Peter Rabbit. London: Frederick

Warne.

Potter, B. (1905). The pie and the patty pan. London: Frederick

Warne.

Potter, B. (1908a). The tale of Jemima Puddle Duck. London:

Frederick Warne.

Potter, B. (1908b) The tale of Samuel Whiskers. London: Frederick

Warne.

Rosen, M. (1993). We’re going on a bear hunt (H. Oxenbury,

Illus.). London: Walker Books.

Westall, R. (1996). Devil on the road. New York, NY: Macmillan.

Westall, R. (2001). The machine gunners. New York, NY:

Macmillan.

Academic References

Alberghene, J. M., & Clark, B. L. (Eds.). (1999). “Little Women”

and the feminist imagination: Criticism, controversy, personal

essays. New York, NY: Garland.

Berne, S. (1992, August 30). Listening for the scratch of a pen.

The New York Times, p. 14. Retrieved March 12, 2007, from

www.nytimes.com/1992/08/30/travel/listening-for-the-scratch-

of-a-pen.html

Carle, E. (1996). The art of Eric Carle. New York, NY: Philomel

Books.

Carle Exhibition. (2004). The art of Eric Carle. Amherst, MA: The

Eric Clarke Museum of Picture Book Art.

Chambers, A. (1983). Introducing books to children. Boston, MA:

Horn Book.

Cormack, P., & Fawcett, C. (2002). Cultural gatekeepers in the

L. M. Montgomery tourist industry. In M. Robinson & H. C.

Andersen (Eds.), Literature and tourism (pp. 171–190). London:

Thomson.

De Jonge, J. (2002). Through the eyes of memory. In I. Gammell

(Ed.), Making Avonlea: L. M. Montgomery and popular culture

(pp. 252–267). Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Denyer, S. (2000). Beatrix Potter at home in the Lake District.

London: Frances Lincoln.

Devereux, C. (2001). “Canadian classic” and “commodity export”:

The nationalism of “our” Anne of Green Gables. Journal of

Canadian Studies. Retrieved March 12, 2007, from  ndarticles.

com/p/articles/mi_qa3683/is_200104/ai_n8938663/pg_16/

Edstrm, V. (2000). Astrid Lindgren: A critical study (E. Cormack,

Trans.). Stockholm: R & S Books.

Fiamengo, J. (2002). Towards a theory of the popular landscape in

Anne of Green Gables. In I. Gammell (Ed.), Making Avonlea:

L. M. Montgomery and popular culture (pp. 225–237). Toronto:

University of Toronto Press.

Heller, S. (2006). Since when did children’s books have a museum?

Interview with H. Nichols B. Clark. Voice. Retrieved March 15,

2007, from http://journal.aiga.org.content.cfm/

Lear, L. (2007). Beatrix Potter: A life in nature. New York, NY: St.

Martin’s Press.

Matsumoto, T. (2000). Chihiro Art Museum Collection. Tokyo:

Kodansha.

Morse, J. C. (Ed.). (1982). Beatrix Potter’s Americans: Selected

letters. Boston, MA: The Horn Book.

Pike, E. H. (2002). Mass marketing, popular culture, and the

Canadian celebrity author. In I. Gammell (Ed.), Making Avonlea:

L. M. Montgomery and popular culture (pp. 238–251). Toronto:

University of Toronto Press

Prentice, J., & Bird, B. (1988). Dromkeen: A journey into children’s

literature. London: The Bodley Head.

Pullman, P. (2002, May 29). Bank of England speech. Unpublished

manuscript.

Reitz, S. (2008, February 243). Picture this: Children’s book art

gains mainstream acclaim. The Boston Globe. Retrieved June

12, 2009, from http://www.boston.com/news/local/connecticut/

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mainstream_acclaim/

Rosen, M. (1993). Books and schools: Books in schools. Signal,

74, 103–114.

Rosen, M. (1995.) Raising the issues: On politics and children’s

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Taylor, J. (2002). Beatrix Potter: Artist, storyteller and countrywoman.

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West, P. (1999). Domesticating history: The political origins of

America’s house museums. Washington, DC: Smithsonian

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The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art.

Coda

Compiling this volume has taken more than three years and

the efforts of nearly 130 academics, authors, and illustra-

tors. And still there are gaps: Whole sections of the globe

are missing or under-represented, and some of the voices

that we had so wished to include were unable to contribute

for various reasons. But the histories and present accounts

of writing, publishing, marketing, translating, sharing,

teaching, and interpreting literature with children that are

included here bear the echo of hundreds of other voices

who have shaped the research on children’s and young

adult literature. These pioneering voices have worked

against formidable odds to build a scholarly foundation

on which our research depends even as it grows in both

divergent and overlapping directions.

Why has the scholarly work undertaken on behalf of

children’s and young adult literature been such a profes-

sional struggle? In each discipline where it is studied,

many of our colleagues still consider research into books

for young people to be a marginal enterprise. The literature

itself is often viewed as a subsidiary of popular culture

not to be taken all that seriously in terms of theory and

criticism, especially not when we might be studying more

important things like literacy, or information technology,

or literature for adults. Obviously, we believe this attitude

to be naïve, or at least dangerously short-sighted. All of

the literacy, engagement, and access research in the world

means little if young people don’t have something worth

reading, accessing, and engaging with.

Enjoyment and understanding of literature for adults

doesn’t happen as a natural outcome of puberty, either.

We aren’t born with the competencies to sift through the

subtle nuances of metaphor, the manipulation of emotion

through rhetorical  nesse, the complex interplay of the

visual and the verbal, the challenge of dramatic irony.

Nor do we learn these things the  rst time we encounter

adult literary works. Our encounters with the great works

of our literary heritage may be profoundly life-changing

events, but our encounters with children’s books, even the

ones our moms bought us in the grocery store to distract

us and pre-empt tantrums, are foundational and formative.

We learn the pleasures that can inhere in language through

oral stories; we  nd  rst delight in language’s multivalence

and rhetorical force through children’s poetry; we map

the intersection of the verbal and the visual through pic-

turebooks and comics; we trace complex and sometimes

unconscious emotions through novels that introduce us to

characters that are both like and unlike us; and all along

the way, we are learning what it means to be human in

a complex, dynamic world. Examining how texts teach

children how to read them, and then how to read beyond

them, is a key part of the work we do.

But scholarly research into children’s and young adult

literature is also crucial to understanding our current

cultural values and our social and ideological futures.

Along with teaching us the literary competencies neces-

sary to function in our intensely textual world, children’s

and young adult books contain within them ideological

codes that teach children and young adults what matters

in a society, and how they “should” feel about things.

Texts educate on an emotional level, a phenomenon that

is often overlooked in favor of cognitive mastery. Schol-

ars of children’s and young adult literature, particularly

those who work with children, must attend to the variety

of ways that ideologies are communicated through the

literature in order to understand their power, and also to

intervene by equipping children with the critical thinking

525

526

CODA

skills they need to understand what a text may be asking

them to believe about the world they live in.

Given the importance of children’s and young adult

literature in providing these kinds of formative experi-

ences in accessing multiple literacies and ascertaining

cultural value systems, those of us who have and will

dedicate our lives to its study will never be convinced

of its marginality. But it may mean that we need to look

outside of our “ gured worlds” to  nd true kindred spirits.

Reading outside of one’s own discipline isn’t easy. The

jarring, but there are other protocols to consider as well.

What counts as valid evidence, for instance, as well as

the prevalence and use of storytelling, the invocation of

particular critics and methodologies, and the focus on

texts have all developed differently along disciplinary

lines. Whereas an article by an LIS scholar might cite

hundreds of titles on a particular issue, a literary scholar

could quite happily perform an intensely close reading of

just one or two, while an educator might talk about read-

ing experiences in terms of children with little attention

to speci c book titles. Each of these approaches is going

to frustrate somebody. But each offers a crucial piece in a

comprehensive understanding of the research possibilities

that we can pursue in order to understand children’s and

young adult literature in an expansive way.

Our early conversations about what to include in the

volume and how it should be organized revealed to us the

distances between our  gured worlds. We found that we

valued different things, and we valued the same things

differently. The table of contents became a map of our

various territories, with each of us feeling more at home

in some chapters than in others. We deliberately chose

scholars from our own disciplines whom we knew could

write for interdisciplinary audiences, and yet, as we dis-

cussed  rst drafts, we were still surprised by the degree to

which we all depend on the conceptual shorthand of our

respective disciplines. So, we asked authors to illustrate

their ideas and de ne their terms. We don’t all agree with

the premises, conclusions, and emphases of each chapter,

and we found that often those disagreements are as much

a result of our disciplinary commonplaces as they are of

our personal commitments or aesthetic preferences.

Our work as editors thus sharpened our sensitivity to

the way we think and write about literature, and exposed

what we take for granted in our own disciplinary conversa-

tions. As the project developed and we learned where our

interests overlapped and where they remained resolutely

separate, we wondered what we might learn from actual

travel between our worlds. One key reason why children’s

and young adult literature scholars don’t communicate

across disciplines is because we rarely attend the same

professional/scholarly conferences. As every academic

knows, a lot of scholarly ideas are hatched and professional

connections made in restaurants and bars far from home.

So, over the space of two years we presented our collab-

orative work at the annual conferences of the Children’s

Literature Association, the National Reading Conference,

the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), the

American Educational Research Association (AERA), and

the biennial meeting of the U.S National Section of the

International Board on Books for Young People (USBBY).

Presenting our ideas aloud at these conferences forced us

to  nd the common ground in our research. And where

we found it, to no one’s surprise really, was in the books

themselves.

No matter how large the distances are between our

 gured worlds, the book becomes a place where we can

inhabit a shared world. And this is why we felt it so crucial

to include the voices and talents of authors and illustrators

in this volume. These creators of the literature we study

step in and out of all of our worlds—they go to academic

conferences, libraries, bookstores, and schools to share

their work; they are intensely aware of the publishing,

marketing, reviewing and awards processes; their books

 ll library shelves and become the subject of the literary

analyses around which many of our curriculum vitae are

built; their work changes young people’s lives. That so

many of them were willing to step cheerfully into our

world—the world of unpaid academic publishing—attests

to the generosity of spirit that undergirds their commitment

to share their words and worlds with children. But most

importantly, the books these authors and illustrators cre-

ate form the spaces where people, regardless of academic

discipline, theoretical persuasion, or age, can all  nd true

common ground.

List of Contributors

Editors

Shelby A. Wolf is Professor of education and an award-

winning teacher and educational scholar at the University

of Colorado at Boulder. Her research interests center on

children’s engagement in literature, particularly through

alternative modes of expression. In addition to many

research articles, chapters, and monographs, she wrote

The Braid of Literature: Children’s Worlds of Reading

with Shirley Brice Heath, and more recently Interpreting

Literature with Children. Her current work follows young

children’s engagement in the visual arts with artists from

the Tate Modern Museum in London.

Karen Coats is Professor of English and Director of Eng-

lish Education at Illinois State University. She is author

of Looking Glasses and Neverlands: Lacan, Desire, and

Subjectivity in Children’s Literature and co-editor, with

Roderick McGillis and Anna Jackson, of The Gothic in

Children’s Literature: Haunting the Borders. She pub-

lishes widely on the intersections between literary and

cultural theory and children’s and young adult literature.

She is also a reviewer for The Bulletin of the Center for

Children’s Books.

Patricia Enciso is Associate Professor of Literature, Lit-

eracy, and Equity Studies in the School of Teaching and

Learning at The Ohio State University, where she teaches

courses in multicultural literature, sociocultural theory,

and literary understanding. She studies the ways youth and

teachers mediate diverse cultural knowledge and resources,

especially stories, in classrooms and informal settings.

In 2007, Reframing Sociocultural Research on Literacy:

Identity, Agency, and Power (co-edited with Lewis & Moje)

was awarded the National Reading Conference Edward Fry

Book Award. As co-editor of Language Arts and former

Chair of the NCTE Research Foundation, she has promoted

deeper understanding of diversity and equity in language

arts education across the United States.

Christine A. Jenkins is Associate Professor at the Gradu-

ate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS),

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she

teaches courses in youth services librarianship, young

adult literature, and literacy. Her research explores histori-

cal and contemporary connections between readers and

texts, with a focus on 20th-century youth literature; library

history as women’s history; and intellectual freedom

for young readers. Her work has appeared in numerous

venues, and she co-authored The Heart Has Its Reasons:

Young Adult Literature with Gay/Lesbian/Queer Content,

1969–2004. She is former director of The Center for Chil-

dren’s Books at GSLIS.

Chapter Authors

Michael Daniel Ambatchew is an Ethiopian Educational

Consultant who has been working in education in Ethio-

pia for the last two decades. In addition to doing several

pieces of research on reading in Ethiopia, he is one of the

leading children’s writers in the country. Moreover, he is

the advisor to the Stories Across Africa project in South

Africa that is in the process of compiling pan-African

children anthologies for the various age groups.

M. T. Anderson has written picture books, middle-

grade novels, books for teens, and stories for adults.

His dystopian satire Feed was a Finalist for the National

527

528

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Book Award and was the Winner of the L.A. Times Book

Award. The  rst volume of his Gothic historical epic,

Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation won the National

Book Award and the Boston Globe/Horn Book Award.

The second volume was a Printz Honor Book. He lives

outside of Boston.

Laura Apol is an Associate Professor at Michigan State

University, where her scholarship and teaching focus on

children’s literature, issues of diversity in literature, and

creative writing. She is the area editor for Literature, Text

Analysis and Response for the Journal of Literacy Re-

search, and her own poetry has been published in two full-

length collections, Falling Into Grace and Crossing the

Ladder of Sun (winner of the Oklahoma Book Award).

Evelyn Arizpe is a Lecturer at the Faculty of Educa-

tion, University of Glasgow. She has published widely

in the areas of literacies, reader response to picturebooks

and children’s literature. She is co-author, with Morag

Styles, of Children Reading Pictures: Interpreting Visual

Texts and Reading Lessons from the Eighteenth Century:

Mothers, Children and Texts. She is co-editor of Acts of

Reading: Teachers, Texts and Childhood.

Rudine Sims Bishop is Professor Emerita at The Ohio

State University. She is the author of Free Within Our-

selves: The Development of African American Children’s

Literature and numerous other works related to children’s

literature and cultural diversity. Long active in the National

Council of Teachers of English, she was named NCTE’s

2007 Outstanding Elementary Language Arts Educator.

Also an active member of the American Library Associa-

tion, she has served on both Newbery and Caldecott Award

committees.

Mollie V. Blackburn is an Associate Professor in the

School of Teaching and Learning at The Ohio State Uni-

versity. Her research focuses on literacy, language, and

social change, with an emphasis on LGBTQ populations.

Her scholarship received the Ralph C. Preston and Alan C.

Purves Awards and has been published in Teachers College

Record and Research in the Teaching of English, among

others. She co-edited Literacy Research for Political Ac-

tion and Acting Out! Combating Homophobia Through

Teacher Activism.

Clare Bradford is Professor of Literary Studies at Deakin

University in Melbourne, Australia. She has published

widely on children’s literature, with an emphasis on post-

colonial literary theory and its implications for reading

colonial and postcolonial texts. Her book, Reading Race:

Aboriginality in Australian Children’s Literature, won

both the Children’s Literature Association Book Award

and the International Research Society for Children’s

Literature Award. Her most recent books are Unsettling

Narratives: Postcolonial Readings of Children’s Literature

and New World Orders: Utopianism and Contemporary

Children’s Texts (with Mallan, Stephens, & McCallum).

She is the editor of the Australian refereed journal Papers:

Explorations into Children’s Literature, and she is cur-

rently President of the International Research Society for

Children’s Literature (IRSCL).

Robin Brenner is the Reference and Teen Librarian at

the Brookline Public Library in Massachusetts. She was

a judge for the 2007 Will Eisner Awards, was a three-year

member of the ALA/YALSA Great Graphic Novels for

Teens Selection List Committee, serving as Chair in 2008,

and has covered graphic novels, manga, and anime for

Library Journal, School Library Journal, Voice of Youth

Advocates, and GraphicNovelReporter.com. Her guide

Understanding Manga and Anime was nominated for a

2008 Eisner Award. She gives lectures and workshops on

graphic novels, manga, and anime across the country. She

is a contributor to the group blog Good Comics for Kids

hosted at School Library Journal. She is the editor-in-chief

of No Flying No Tights, a graphic novel review site, www.

no yingnotights.com.

Joseph Bruchac’s writing often draws on his American

Indian ancestry and New York’s Adirondack region where

he was raised and still lives with his wife of 46 years,

Carol. His poems, articles and stories have appeared in

many publications, from American Poetry Review to Na-

tional Geographic. Author of over 120 books for adults

and children, his honors include an NEA Poetry Fellow-

ship and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native

Writers Circle of the Americas.

Mike Cadden is Professor of English, Director of Child-

hood Studies, and Chair of the Department of English,

Foreign Languages, and Journalism at Missouri Western

State University where he teaches children’s and young

adult literature. He is the author of Ursula K. Le Guin

Beyond Genre: Fiction for Children and Adults and edi-

tor of Telling Children’s Stories: Narrative Theory and

Children’s Literature.

Gerald Campano has taught  rst,  fth, seventh, eighth,

ninth, and 12th grades and adult ESL. He is an Associ-

ate Professor in the Reading/Writing/Literacy Program

at the Univerisity of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of

Education. His scholarly interests include urban educa-

tion, practitioner research, and immigrant identities in

the contexts of schooling. Gerald is a Carnegie Scholar

and 2009 recipient of the David H. Russell Award for

Distinguished Research from the National Council of the

Teachers of English.

Michael Cart, a reviewer of children’s and young adult

books for 40 years, is also the author or editor of 20 books

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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

and is currently a columnist and reviewer for Booklist

magazine. A revised and expanded edition of his critical

history of young adult literature, From Romance to Real-

ism, will be published in fall 2010. He is the recipient of the

2000 Grolier Award for service to children and literature.

Lucy Shelton Caswell is the founding curator of The

Ohio State University’s Billy Ireland Cartoon Library &

Museum, the largest and most comprehensive academic

research facility documenting printed cartoon art in the

United States. Professor Caswell’s scholarly work focuses

on the history of newspaper comic strips and the history

of American editorial cartoons. She has curated more than

sixty cartoon exhibits and is the author of several articles

and books, the most recent being the revised edition of

Billy Ireland.

Janine L. Certo is an Assistant Professor of Language

and Literacy in the Department of Teacher Education at

Michigan State University’s College of Education. Her

research interests include writing instruction, particularly

creative writing, with a focus on both teacher and student

learning. She is interested in teachers’ and students’ poetic

genre knowledge; teachers’ dispositions toward reading,

writing and teaching poetry; and analyses of children’s

poetic texts. A National Writing Project teacher consultant,

she is also interested, more broadly, in genre instruction

at the elementary level and teachers as writers.

Tara F. Chace translates books from Norwegian, Swed-

ish and Danish. Her translations include both young adult

novels—Jo Nesbø’s Dr. Proctor’s Fart Powder, Klaus

Hagerup’s Markus series, Per Nilsson’s You & You & You,

Sara Kadefors’s Are U 4 Real?, and Gunnar Ardelius’s I

Need You More than I Love You and I Love You to Bits—and

books for grownups—Karen Fastrup’s Beloved of My 27

Senses and Tom Egeland’s Relic: The Quest for the Golden

Shrine. She has a Ph.D. in Scandinavian Literature and

has been a full-time translator for 10 years.

Caroline T. Clark is an Associate Professor in the Ado-

lescent, Post-Secondary, and Community Literacies Area

of Study in the School of Teaching and Learning at The

Ohio State University. Her scholarship focuses on literacy

practices across formal/school and informal settings and

teaching against heterosexism and homophobia through

teacher education and collaborative teacher inquiry. Most

recently she has worked with Mollie Blackburn to facilitate

and document the work of a book discussion group with

high school students who meet to discuss LGBT-themed

literature.

Penny Colman is the author of books, essays, and ar-

ticles, including Rosie the Riveter: Women Working on the

Home Front in World War II, an Orbis Pictus Honor Book,

and Corpses, Cof ns, and Crypts: A History of Burial, one

of the American Library Association’s Top Ten Best Books

for Young Adults. She also does the picture research for her

books, several of which include her photographs. Colman

is a Distinguished Lecturer at Queens College, the City

University of New York.

Thomas P. Crumpler is a Professor of Reading and Lit-

eracy in the Department of Curriculum & Instruction at

Illinois State University. His research interests include the

changing practices of literacy and literature instruction and

assessment in the context of new media. He is a co-author

with Rob Tierney of Interactive Assessment: Teachers,

Students, Parents as Partners and a co-editor with Jennifer

Jasinski Schneider and Theresa Rogers of Process Drama

and Multiple Literacies: Addressing Social, Cultural, and

Ethical Issues. He is currently Director of the Mary and

Jean Borg Center for Reading and Literacy at Illinois

State University.

Jessica Dockter is a Ph.D. candidate in Literacy Educa-

tion in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at

the University of Minnesota. Her research focuses on

how literacy practices shape White racial identities with

an interest in helping White students imagine themselves

as allies in anti-racist and social justice work.

Eliza T. Dresang holds the endowed Beverly Cleary

Professorship for Children and Youth Services at the

University of Washington Information School. Formerly

she was Co-Director/Founder, Florida State University, of

Project LEAD, a federally funded leadership program for

school librarians, and Director, School Libraries and Tech-

nology, Madison, Wisconsin. She is a widely recognized

authority on digital age youth’s resources and information

behavior, including reading. Among numerous scholarly

publications is her award-winning Radical Change: Books

for Youth in a Digital Age.

Elizabeth Dutro is an Associate Professor of literacy

studies in the School of Education at the University of

Colorado at Boulder. Her research interests include the

emotional dimensions of schooling, the intersections of

students’ identities and literacy practices, and how issues

of race, class and gender affect the school experiences

and educational opportunities of children and youth in

K–12 classrooms.

David Filipi is the Curator of Film/Video at the Wexner

Center for the Arts. He is on The Ohio State University

Cartoon Library and Museum Advisory Board and co-

curated Jeff Smith: Bone and Beyond in 2008.

María E. Fránquiz is an Associate Professor at the

University of Texas–Austin where she enjoys teach-

ing courses such as Latin@ Children’s Literature for

the Bilingual Learner. Her scholarship focuses on the

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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

relationship between linguistic and cultural experiences

and teacher and student identities. Her co-edited book,

Inside the Latin@ Experience showcases the work of

Latin@ scholars both senior and early career. Another

co-edited book, Scholars in the Field: The Challenges of

Migrant Education is comprehensive in its coverage of

this underserved group.

Yohannes Gebregeorgis, born in a small cattle town in

Southern Ethiopia, is Founder and Executive Director of

Ethiopia Reads. He came to the United States in 1981 after

he  ed his native Ethiopia from a brutal military dictator-

ship. While in the United States, Gebregeorgis studied

English literature and Library and Information Science

and became a children’s librarian at the San Francisco

Public Library. He has established over 30 school libraries,

several Donkey Mobile Libraries, and has published 12

children’s books. In 2008, Gebregeorgis was nominated

as a CNN Hero and has received several awards for his

work in Ethiopia.

María Paula Ghiso is an Assistant Professor at Teachers

College, Columbia University. She is a recent graduate

from the Reading/Writing/Literacy Program at the Univer-

sity of Pennsylvania and the 2009 recipient of the Morton

Botel Award for Outstanding Scholarship and Practice in

the Literacy Education of Young Children. Formerly a

dual-language kindergarten teacher in New York City, she

now supports educators and school districts in their work

with linguistically diverse students.

Elizabeth Hammill is the initiator and co-founder of

Seven Stories, the Centre for Children’s Books. As Artistic

and Collection Director, she laid the foundations for the

Centre’s novel approach to exhibition design and interpre-

tation and its growing, nationally important, collection of

original papers and artwork by modern British writers and

illustrators for children, drawing on her earlier experiences

as a primary teacher, children’s bookseller, editor, critic,

and university lecturer. She has written distinguished

articles for Signal and other publications, and she was

awarded an OBE in 2007 for services to literature.

Betsy Hearne is former Director of The Center for Chil-

dren’s Books and a Professor Emerita in the Graduate

School of Library and Information Science at the Uni-

versity of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She has taught

children’s literature and storytelling for many years;

researched and written extensively on folklore, fairy tales,

and traditions of children’s literature; and authored picture

books and  ction for young people. In 2009 she co-edited,

with Roberta Seelinger Trites, A Narrative Compass: Sto-

ries That Guide Women’s Lives, an anthology of essays

by scholars who discuss how stories—including folktales,

fairy tales, children’s classics, and family narratives—have

shaped their life’s work.

Shirley Brice Heath is the Margery Bailey Professor of

English and Dramatic Literature and Professor of Linguis-

tics, Emerita, at Stanford University and Professor at Large

at Brown University. She has won many awards for her

studies of language socialization across cultures as well as

her innovative studies of voluntary expertise development

among older learners. She is author of the classic Ways

with Words: Language, Life and Work in Communities and

Classrooms, and with Shelby A. Wolf, co-author of The

Braid of Literature: Children’s Worlds of Reading.

Gareth Hinds is the creator of several critically acclaimed

graphic novels based on literary classics, including Be-

owulf (which Publisher’s Weekly called a “mixed-media

gem”), King Lear (which Booklist named one of the top

10 graphic novels for teens), and The Merchant of Venice

(which Kirkus called “the standard that all others will

strive to meet” for Shakespeare adaptation). He lives in

Massachusetts.

Karen Nelson Hoyle is Professor and curator of the

University of Minnesota’s Children’s Literature Research

Collections (including the Kerlan Collection), which holds

manuscripts and illustrations for 13,000 children’s and YA

titles. She is the 2003 recipient of the Minnesota Humani-

ties Commission’s Kay Sexton award for “outstanding

contributions to Minnesota’s book community.” Past

President of ChLA, she has served on ALA’s Batchelder,

Caldecott, Newbery, and Wilder Award committees. Her

publications include a biography of Wanda Gàg and jour-

nal articles in Bookbird, Children & Literature, Journal of

Children’s Literature, and The Lion & the Unicorn.

Barbara Kiefer is the Charlotte S. Huck Professor of

Children’s Literature at The Ohio State University. She has

served as member (1988) and elected chair (2000) of the

Caldecott Award Committee and has published numerous

articles and chapters about reading and children’s litera-

ture. She is the author of The Potential of Picturebooks:

From Visual Literacy to Aesthetic Understanding, the sixth

through tenth editions of Charlotte Huck’s Children’s

Literature, and co-author (with Pappas & Levstik) of

An Integrated Language Perspective in the Elementary

School: Theory Into Action.

Kostia Kontoleon was born in Athens, Greece. Her life

is full of literature. She is the author of three novels and a

collection of short stories. She has translated over 80 books

of literature, for children, young adults, and adults. In

1991, she was honored with the highest national award for

her translation of Roald Dahl’s Matilda. In 2002, she was

honored with the award of the best translation of the year

for R.K. Narayan’s The English Teacher. Her translations

of Robert Cormier’s I am the Cheese and Philip Pullman’s

The Amber Spyglass have been written in IBBY’s honor

list, in 1996 and in 2003 respectively.

531

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

M. Bowie Kotrla is an Associate Professor in the School

of Library & Information Studies at Florida State Uni-

versity. She has a Ph.D. in Biology and an M.L.I.S. with

a youth services concentration. Her areas of research

and teaching include school librarianship, children’s lit-

erature, statistics, and research methodology. She serves

on the Intellectual Freedom Committee of the American

Library Association and has served on the Research &

Development and Intellectual Freedom committees of the

Association for Library Service to Children.

Jane Kurtz is an award-winning children’s book author,

a faculty member of the Vermont MFA in children’s and

YA literature, and president of the board of directors of

Ethiopia Reads, a nonpro t publishing some of the  rst

children’s books and planting the  rst children’s libraries

in Ethiopia, where she spent most of her childhood.

Julius Lester is the author of more than forty books for

children and adults. These books have garnered many

awards including a Newbery Honor Book, a Boston Globe

Horn Book Award, and the Coretta Scott King Award.

He is professor emeritus in the Judaic and Near Eastern

Studies Department at the University of Massachusetts

at Amherst.

Cynthia Lewis is Professor of Critical Literacy and

English Education at the University of Minnesota. Her

recent research focuses on the relationship between

social identities and learning in English classrooms

in urban schools. Cynthia’s books include Literary

Practices as Social Acts: Power, Status, and Cultural

Norms in the Classroom and Reframing Sociocultural

Research: Identity, Agency, and Power (with Patricia

Enciso & Elizabeth Moje). Both books were awarded the

Edward B. Fry Book Award from the National Reading

Conference.

Lois Lowry, author of more than 35 books for young

people, two of them Newbery Medal winners, is a mother

and grandmother who has worked as a photojournalist as

well as a writer of  ction. She divides her time between

her residence in Cambridge, Massachusetts and an 18th-

century farmhouse in rural Maine.

Ana Maria Machado, novelist, essayist, and children’s

author, is a member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters

and is considered to be one of the most complete and

versatile Brazilian contemporary writers. She has won

over 40 awards, including the Hans Christian Andersen

Medal (2000) and the Machado de Assis prize (2001)—

Brazil’s most prestigious National Award in Literature,

given every year for the whole body of work. Her books

are published in 20 countries and have sold more than

18.5 million copies.

Margaret Mackey is a Professor of Library and Infor-

mation Studies at the University of Alberta. She teaches

courses on young adult literature, theories and practices of

reading, and multimedia literacies. Her most recent books

are Mapping Recreational Literacies: Contemporary

Adults at Play and a revised edition of Literacies Across

Media: Playing the Text. She has also published many

articles on the changing face of young people’s literacies

and literatures.

Leonard S. Marcus is a children’s literature historian and

critic. His books include Margaret Wise Brown: Awakened

by the Moon; Dear Genius; Golden Legacy; and Minders

of Make-Believe. He is a frequent contributor to the New

York Times Book Review and writes a regular column for

The Horn Book Magazine. Marcus is a founding trustee

of the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art and has

curated numerous exhibitions of illustration art. He teaches

children’s books and child development at New York

University and lectures widely throughout the United

States and abroad.

Carmen Martínez-Roldán is an Associate Professor in

the Bilingual Bicultural Education Program at The Uni-

versity of Texas–Austin. Her research addresses bilingual

students’ literacy development in two languages (Spanish/

English) and the use of children’s literature to support

students’ learning. Her work documenting children’s

responses to literature has been published in national and

international journals. Upcoming publications address

her more recent work on immigrant children’s responses

to wordless picture books and teachers’ responses to

Latina/o literature.

Robyn McCallum is a Lecturer in English at Macquarie

University, where she works in children’s literature,

with a particular focus on adolescent  ction and visual

media. Her book Ideologies of Identity in Adolescent

Fiction received the IRSCL Honour Book Award in

2001. She is co-author of Retelling Stories, Framing

Culture and New World Orders in Contemporary Chil-

dren’s Literature.

Roderick McGillis is in the English Department at the

University of Calgary. Recent publications include He

Was Some Kind of a Man: Masculinities in the B Western,

George MacDonald: Literary Heritage and Heirs, and the

novel Les Pieds Devant. Most importantly, he edited with

Karen Coats and Anna Jackson the volume of essays, The

Gothic in Children’s Literature. In spring of 2010, he is

guest editing the new journal, The Journal of Postcolonial

Cultures and Societies.

Monette C. McIver is Assistant Professor in the School

of Education at the University of Colorado at Boulder,

532

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

specializing in literacy. Her research explores the devel-

opment of classroom teachers’ writing identities and the

impact these identities have on instruction and student

achievement. In addition, Dr. McIver is interested in

teacher leadership and how teachers in uence policy

decisions at local and national levels.

Carmen I. Mercado is Professor of language, literacy,

and children’s literature at City University of New York

– Hunter College. She is also af liated faculty to the Ur-

ban Education doctoral program at the Graduate Center.

Her cross-disciplinary collaborations with Latino social

scientists from the Center for Puerto Rican studies (CEN-

TRO) has led to working with a vast archival collection

that houses the literary contributions of U.S. Latino com-

munities.

Claudia Mills is the author of over 40 books for young

readers, including picture books (Ziggy’s Blue Ribbon

Day), easy readers (the Gus and Grandpa series), chapter

books (7 x 9 = Trouble! and How Oliver Olson Changed

the World) and middle-grade novels (The Totally Made-Up

Civil War Diary of Amanda MacLeish and One Square

Inch). She is also an Associate Professor of philosophy at

the University of Colorado at Boulder, teaching and writ-

ing in the area of ethics and children’s literature.

Phyllis Reynolds Naylor’s 136 books include novels for

middle grades, teens, and adults, as well as picture books,

chapter books, and non ction. Shiloh, the  rst book of a

trilogy, was awarded the Newbery Medal in 1992. A num-

ber of her novels have been made into feature-length mov-

ies and  lms for television, and a grant from the National

Endowment for the Arts enabled her to do research and to

travel throughout West Virginia and Kentucky, producing

many of her works. She and her husband, Rex, live in the

Washington, D.C. area, the setting for her long-running

Alice series.

Maria Nikolajeva is a Professor of Education at the

University of Cambridge, UK, previously a Professor of

comparative literature at Stockholm University, Sweden,

where she taught children’s literature and critical theory

for 25 years. She is the author and editor of many books,

the most recent Power, Voice and Subjectivity in Literature

for Young Readers. From 1993–97 she was the President

of the International Research Society for Children’s Lit-

erature. She was also one of the senior editors for The

Oxford Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature and received

the International Grimm Award in 2005.

Petros Panaou is a Lecturer at the University of Nicosia,

Cyprus, where he teaches Children’s Literature and Lan-

guage Arts. His work often focuses on picture book analysis

and comparative children’s literature, while his research

is most often interdisciplinary in nature. He has published

several articles and frequently presents at international

conferences. He is particularly interested in the intersec-

tions between discourses of nation and childhood.

Katherine Paterson is the author of 16 novels, a number

of picture books, retellings, and I-Can-Read books. She

has twice won the Newbery Medal for Bridge to Terabithia

and Jacob Have I Loved. The Master Puppeteer won the

National Book Award and The Great Gilly Hopkins won

the Newbery Honor and National Book Award. For the

body of her work she received the Hans Christian Andersen

Award, the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, and in 2000

was named a Living Legend by the Library of Congress.

Most recently, she was named the National Ambassador

for Young People’s Literature 2010–2011.

Philip Pullman was born in 1946. He graduated from

Oxford University in 1968 and became a middle school

teacher,  nally leaving the classroom at the age of 39 to

enter the lecture room. He taught aspiring teachers for

10 years or so, and then left in order to spend all his time

writing. His books include Clockwork, The Scarecrow

and His Servant, and the trilogy His Dark Materials. He

is interested in every aspect of narrative, and is preparing

a book on the subject, which he hopes will illustrate his

ideas about how stories work.

Candice Ransom is the author of more than 100 books

for children, including her series Time Spies. She has

published picture books to young adult, board books to

biography, historical  ction to non ction. Award-winning

titles include The Big Green Pocketbook, Finding Day’s

Bottom, Seeing Sky-Blue Pink, When the Whippoorwill

Calls, and The Promise Quilt. She holds an MFA in

writing from Vermont College and an MA in children’s

literature from Hollins University and is an Assistant

Professor in Hollins University’s MA/MFA children’s

literature program.

Chris Raschka is an illustrator and writer of picture books

which concern friendship, jazz, life and death and, most

recently, a little black crow.

Catherine Sheldrick Ross is Professor in the Faculty

of Information and Media Studies at The University of

Western Ontario where she teaches in the Library and

Information Science and the Media Studies programs. Her

research interests include leisure-reading, the reference

transaction, readers’ advisory, and children’s literature.

She is currently working on an on-going ethnographic

study of avid readers, based on qualitative interviews.

Recent books include Conducting the Reference Interview

and Reading Matters.

Paulette M. Rothbauer is Assistant Professor in the Fac-

ulty of Information & Media Studies at the University of

533

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Western Ontario where she teaches courses on young adult

literature, media, and library services. Her recent research

has focused on the reading practices of young women

who claim alternative sexual identities and of rural youth.

Currently, she is studying the emergence of the modern

Canadian young adult novel and the rise of the discursive

construction of the teenage reader in Canada.

Kathy G. Short is a Professor at the University of Arizona

in Language, Reading and Culture. Her classroom-based

research focuses on reader response, curriculum as inquiry,

and international children’s literature. Her books include

Creating Classrooms for Authors and Inquirers, Literature

as a Way of Knowing, Talking about Books, and Stories

Matter: The Complexity of Cultural Authenticity in Chil-

dren’s Literature. She is the director of Worlds of Words

(www.wowlit.org), an initiative to encourage dialogue

around children’s literature to build bridges across global

cultures. She is currently President of USBBY, the U.S.

national section of the International Board of Books for

Young People.

Eva-Maria Simms is Associate Professor and direc-

tor of graduate studies in the psychology department at

Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. As a phenomenologist

she studies the psychology of the child in its historical and

existential dimensions, and investigates such philosophi-

cal themes as embodiment, co-existentiality, spatiality,

temporality, and language in light of their appearance in

early childhood. She is the author of the book The Child

in the World: Embodiment, Time, and Language in Early

Childhood, and of numerous articles on Merleau-Ponty,

childhood, Goethean nature phenomenology, Rilke’s

existentialism, and the psychology of place.

Lawrence R. Sipe is a Professor at the University of Penn-

sylvania’s Graduate School of Education. His research

concerns young children’s literary understanding as well

the formal qualities of picturebooks. Sipe has won numer-

ous awards from the International Reading Association, the

National Council of Teachers of English, and the National

Reading Conference. He is the author of Storytime: Young

Children’s Literary Understanding in the Classroom and

has co-edited Postmodern Picturebooks: Play, Parody, and

Self-Referentiality. He is the North American editor of the

journal Children’s Literature in Education.

Jeff Smith, multiple Eisner and Harvey Award winner,

broke out on the comics scene in 1991 with the celebrated

and well-loved fantasy, BONE. U.S. publisher Scholastic

brought this indie comic to a whole new audience with a

full-color version in 2005, now with over 5 million color

graphic novels sold. In 2008, Cartoon Books debuted

Jeff’s newest adventure series, RASL, a sci- , noir thriller

to critical acclaim.

John Stephens is Emeritus Professor in English at Mac-

quarie University. He is author of Language and Ideology

in Children’s Fiction; Retelling Stories, Framing Culture

(with Robyn McCallum); New World Orders in Con-

temporary Children’s Literature (with Clare Bradford,

Kerry Mallan, & Robyn McCallum); editor of Ways of

Being Male; and author of about a hundred articles and

two other books. He is a former IRSCL President, and

currently Editor of International Research in Children’s

Literature. In 2007, he received the 11th International

Brothers Grimm Award.

Deborah Stevenson is the editor of The Bulletin of the

Center for Children’s Books and an Assistant Professor

at the Graduate School of Library and Information Sci-

ence at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. A

contributor to the Cambridge Companion to Children’s

Literature, a senior editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia of

Children’s Literature, and a co-author, with Betsy Hearne,

of Choosing Books for Children: A Commonsense Guide,

she has published reviews and articles in Children’s Lit-

erature, The Children’s Literature Association Quarterly,

and The Lion and the Unicorn, and she has taught in both

English departments and library schools.

Morag Styles is a Reader in Children’s Literature at Cam-

bridge University and a Fellow of Homerton College. She

lectures internationally on children’s literature, poetry, the

history of reading and visual literacy. She is the author of

numerous books and articles including From the Garden

to the Street: 300 Years of Poetry for Children; Advisory

Editor of The Cambridge Guide to Children’s Books in

English; co-author (with Evelyn Arizpe) of Children

Reading Pictures: Interpreting Visual Texts and Reading

Lessons from the Eighteenth Century: Mothers, Children

& Texts; as well as co-editor of Acts of Reading: Teachers,

Texts and Childhood.

Joel Taxel is a Professor in the Department of Language

and Literacy Education at the University of Georgia. He

has written extensively about the sociocultural, political,

and economic issues surrounding children’s literature. The

founding editor of The New Advocate, Joel’s articles have

appeared in Curriculum Inquiry, Research in the Teaching

of English, and Teacher’s College Record. He is co-author,

with Peter Smagorinsky, of Culture Wars in the Classroom:

The Discourse of Character Education.

Raina Telgemeier, graduate of Manhattan’s School of

Visual Arts, is the author of the graphic memoir, SMILE

and adaptor and illustrator of the Baby-sitters Club graphic

novel series, selected by YALSA for their Great Graphic

Novels for Teens list in 2007 as well as ALA’s Top 10

Graphic Novels for Youth list. Her comics have been

nominated for the Ignatz, Cybil, and Eisner Awards, and

534

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

have appeared in publications by Random House, DC

Comics, and Nickelodeon Magazine.

Tasoula Tsilimeni is Assistant Professor at the University

of Thessaly, where she teaches subjects on children’s lit-

erature (narration and  ction). Her interests focus on the

theory and teaching methodology of children’s literature,

with an emphasis on Preschool Education. Her work has

been presented at various conferences and published in

journals, anthologies, but also in books she has authored.

She writes books of children’s literature, and she is the

director of the children’s magazine Delphini, which is

published by the Logos and Culture Workshop of the

University of Thessaly. She is also the director of the

electronic journal KEIMENA.

Virginia A. Walter is Emerita Professor in UCLA’s

Graduate School of Education and Information Studies

(GSEIS). She came to the GSEIS faculty with 20 years

of experience as a public library youth services librarian,

including Children’s Services Coordinator for the Los An-

geles Public Library system. She is the author of Children

& Libraries: Getting It Right, Teens & Libraries: Getting It

Right, and Twenty- rst Century Kids, Twenty- rst Century

Libraries. She also writes  ction for children and teens.

Linda Wedwick is an Assistant Professor and Coordi-

nator of the Reading Masters program at Illinois State

University and former middle school teacher and reading

specialist. She is a co-author, with Jessica Ann Wutz, of

BOOKMATCH: How to Scaffold Student Book Selection

for Independent Reading.

Kathleen Weibel began her career in librarianship in

young adult services at the New York Public Library in

the 1970s. She retired in 2004 from the Chicago Public

Library where she served as Director of Staff Develop-

ment. Throughout her professional career, she has been

involved in public library education and advocacy, both

nationally and internationally. She is currently involved in

a project developing continuing education opportunities

for school and public librarians in the Mekong River delta

region of Vietnam.

David Wiesner is an author and illustrator of picture

books, three of which have been awarded the Caldecott

Medal—Tuesday in 1992, The Three Pigs in 2002, and

Flotsam in 2006. Two other books of his, Sector 7 and

Free Fall, were named Caldecott Honor Books. In 2008,

David was the United States nominee, and a  nalist, for

the Hans Christian Andersen Award.

Melissa I. Wilson is a doctoral student at The Ohio State

University having spent 30 years teaching elementary

school in Columbus Public Schools, Ohio. She is also

a co-director of the Columbus Area Writing Project, an

af liate of the National Writing Project.

Janet S. Wong is the author of 20 books for children and

young adults, mainly picture books and poetry collec-

tions. In her “Meet the Author” autobiography Before It

Wriggles Away, Wong discusses her career switch from

lawyer to children’s author—as well as her accidental

passion for poetry.

Jacqueline Woodson is the author of more than two dozen

books for children and young adults. She has received

many awards including three Newbery Honors, a Coretta

Scott King Award and three Coretta Scott King Honors,

two lifetime achievement awards, a Caldecott and two Na-

tional Book Awards. Her titles include Locomotion, Show

Way, The Other Side, After Tupac and D Foster, Feathers,

Visiting Day, Peace, Locomotion, If You Come Softly, and

Miracle’s Boys which was made into a  lm directed by

Spike Lee. Jacqueline lives with her family in Brooklyn,

NY. Her website is jacquelinewoodson.com.

Junko Yokota is Professor at National-Louis University

in Chicago and directs the Center for Teaching through

Children’s Books with Gail Bush. Her publications in-

clude articles, review columns, editor of Kaleidoscope:

A Multicultural Booklist for Grades K-8 and coauthored

textbook, Children’s Books in Children’s Hands. She has

served on the Caldecott, Newbery, and Batchelder Award

Committees as well as the IBBY Hans Christian Andersen

Award Jury. She was president of USBBY and recipient

of the Virginia Hamilton Award for Contribution to Mul-

ticultural Literature.

Markus Zusak is the author of  ve novels, including

Fighting Ruben Wolfe, I Am The Messenger, and the

international bestseller, The Book Thief. First published

in 2005, The Book Thief has been translated into over 30

languages, and has been on the New York Times bestseller

list for more than three years. He lives in Sydney with his

wife and daughter.

Author Index

535

Aardema, V., 56

Abbas, J., 143, 144

Abbott, J., 197, 199

Abdel-Fattah, R., 318

Abrahams, R., 218

Abrahamson, R. F., 294

Abram, D., 27

Acosta-Belén, E., 110

Adams, A., 444

Adams, H., 449

Adams, J., 41

Adams, L., 475

Adedjouma, D., 284

Adler, L., 41

Adorno, T., 347

Agger, B., 482

Agnihotri, R. K., 433

Agosto, D. E., 143, 144, 242

Aguado, B., 284

Alberghene, J. M., 510

Albers, P., 87

Alcoff, L., 167, 338

Alcott, L. M., 92, 186, 191, 308, 509

Alexander, A., 102

Alexander, J., 285

Alexander, K., 211

Alexander, L., 210, 489

Alexander, N., 433

Alexie, S., 83, 303, 319, 325, 336, 337,

338, 491

Alger, H., 198

Aliki, 240

Allen, M., 351

Alley, R. W., 26

Allsobrook, M., 480

Almasi, J. F., 69

Almond, D., 362, 364, 365, 368, 522

Alter, R., 45

Alterman, E., 484

Althusser, L., 359

Altieri, C., 366

Altland, A. E., 245

Alvarado, J. M., 30

Alvarez, J., 114, 173

Alverman, D. E., 69

Alvermann, D. E., 484, 491, 500

Alvstad, C., 405

Amanti, C., 110

Ambatchew, M. D., 432, 433, 434, 435

Anagnostopoulos, D., 80

Andersen, H. C., 11, 516

Anderson, B., 164

Anderson, C., 294, 490

Anderson, H. C., 456

Anderson, L. H., 325

Anderson, M. T., 72, 304, 307, 317, 323,

324, 327, 485, 491

Andersson, C., 405

Andrade, D., 98, 99

Anstey, M., 250

Antrop-González, R., 109, 110

Anzaldúa, G., 170, 173

Anzaldúa, G., 55, 59

Apenten, A., 435

Apol, L., 281

Apol, L.,80, 283, 285, 492

Apol-Obbink, L., 276, 277

Appadurai, A., 78

Apple, M. W., 79, 483

Applebee, A. N., 475

Applebee, A., 80

Appleman, D., 70, 80–81, 85

Appleyard, J. A., 66, 67, 69

Arizpe, E., 6, 8, 44

Arnett, J. J., 79

Aronson, M., 473, 476

Ascham, R., 182, 184

Ashcroft, B., 336

Asheim, L., 446

Ashliman, D. L., 214

Asimov, I., 308

Athanases, S. Z., 80, 150, 151, 152, 153

Atkins, L., 423

Atkinson, J. L., 475

Atwell, N., 57, 95, 96

Augé, M., 44

Auletta, K., 486

Austin, P., 488

Avery, G., 183, 185, 189, 292

Avi, 461

Azubuike, A., 431.

Babbitt, N., 488

Babcock, J., 150, 155

Bachelard, G., 44

Bader, B., 243, 476

Baghban, M., 13, 15, 16

Bainbridge, J., 480

Baker, H., 99

Baker, J., 489

Baker, M., 407

Bakhtin, M. M., 93, 96, 316

Bald, M., 449

Bamford, R. A., 292, 294

Bang, M., 241, 248

Banks, L. R., 311

Banta, G. J., 471

Baquedano-López, P., 168

Baratz-Snowden, J., 111

Barbour, S., 465

Baring-Gould, C., 277

Baring-Gould, S., 277

Barker, K., 468

Barlow, M., 42

Barnes, D. D., 325

Barnes, J. L., 321

Barr, C., 198, 204

Barr, J., 276

Barrell, B., 87

Barrera, E. S., 65

Barrie, J. M., 348, 499

536

AUTHOR INDEX

Barron, T. A., 249

Barthes, R., 165, 177

Barton, C., 513

Barton, D., 40

Barton, G., 34

Bascove, 45

Bassnet, S., 407

Bauer, M. D., 158, 160

Baum, F., 311, 353

Baum. L. F., 496, 502

Bauman, Z., 44, 77, 78, 79

Beach, R., 69, 70, 71, 78, 82, 83, 165

Bealer, A., 293

Beaman, A., 144

Bean, T. W., 79

Bearse, C. I., 96

Beaty, B., 501

Bechdel, A., 262, 265

Becker, M. L., 458

Becker, S., 259

Beckett, S., 407

Beckman, M., 204

Beckson, K., 456

Beeson, D., 204

Bell, A., 413, 424

Bell-Rehwoldt, S., 363

Benedetti, A., 138

Benedict, 247

Benjamin, W., 239

Bennet-Armisted, V. S., 294

Bennett, B., 198

Benson, M. W., 200

Benton, M., 70, 247

Benway, R., 320

Berman, M., 144

Berne, S., 511

Bertills, Y., 411

Bettelheim, B., 213

Bettmann, O. L., 45

Bhabha, H., 334

Bhagat, V., 42

Bianchi, M. D., 276

Bickers, J., 264

Bierbaum, E. G., 204

Billman, C., 200, 202

Bing, J., 487

Birch, C., 211

Bird, B., 514

Bird, E., 143, 144

Bird, G., 336, 338

Bishop, G., 341

Bishop, N., 293

Bishop, R. S., 94, 117, 149, 153, 228

Bishop, W. H., 198

Bissex, G. L., 13, 15, 16

Bixler, P., 499

Blachowicz, C., 20

Black, H., 311, 349

Black, R. W., 86

Black, R., 102

Blackburn, M. V., 99, 150, 154, 155, 156

Blamires, D., 406

Bleich, D., 51

Blinn, M. J., 125

Bloch, C., 433, 434

Block, F. L., 309, 348

Bloome, D., 73

Blume, J., 315, 444, 448

Blume, S., 409

Blyton, E., 197, 200

Bodmer, G. R., 498

Boehmer, E., 333

Bolan, K., 143

Bolasky, K., 55

Bollmann, S., 41

Bolton, F., 57

Bolton, G., 70

Bontemps, A., 210, 216, 220

Booth, A., 503

Booth, H., 143

Boreman, T., 188

Borodo, M., 405, 421

Borton, W., 27

Bosmajian, H., 348

Boston, L. M., 311

Botzakis, S., 65

Botzakis, S., 65, 66

Bowker, 293

Bowker, R. R., 463

Bowman, I. K., 204

Boyarin, J., 40

Boyer, P., 450

Bradbury, R., 452

Bradford, C., 333, 338, 360, 476

Bradford, W., 125

Braeme, C., 199

Brashares, A., 318

Breakwell, I., 33

Brennan, B., 204

Brennan, M., 20

Brenner, R., 262

Brightman, A. E., 243

Brink, C. R., 305

Brinser, A., 201, 202

Broaddus, K., 64

Broderick, D. M., 226

Brooks, B., 309

Brooks, W. M., 234

Brooks, W., 53, 54, 70

Broughton, M., 70

Brown, B., 444

Brown, F. P., 285

Brown, J., 360

Brown, M. T., 498

Brown, M. W., 387

Brown, M., 173

Brown, R., 97

Brown, S., 226

Browne, A., 243

Browning, D., 327

Brozo, W. G, 65, 66

Bruce, L. S., 481

Bruchac, J., 210, 341

Bruner, J. S., xii, 22

Bryan, A., 241, 243

Buckingham, D., 43, 86-87, 480, 500

Buckley, J. F., 150

Bull, G., 250

Bunge, D., 321

Bunyan, J., 186

Burgess, M., 323

Burman, E., 20

Burnett, F. H., 374, 402, 498, 499

Burress, L., 449

Bury, R., 101

Bush, J., 303

Bushman, J. H., 317

Busse K., 100, 101

Butler, D., 211

Butler, D.,5, 7, 8, 9, 13

Byatt, A. S., 44

Cabot, M., 320

Cadden, M., 306, 325

Cai, M., 165

Cain, C., xi

Caines, J., 231

Calder, J., 11

Calkins, L. M., 57, 95, 96, 97

Callahan, R. M., 109

Callison, D., 129

Calvert, S. L., 98

Cameron, D., 72

Cameron, E., 308

Camey, J. J., 448

Cammarota, J., 109

Campano, G., 86, 116, 165

Campbell, J., 334

Canales, V., 113

Canella, G. S., 20

Cantor, J., 452

Caputo, J., 30

Cardwell, S., 497

Carey, M., 82

Carey-Webb, A., 150, 152, 153

Carey-Webb, A., 80

Carle, E., 58, 248 517

Carlisle, 247

Carlsen, G.R., 251

Carpenter, H., 191, 456

Carrington, V79

Carroll, J., 72

Carroll, L., 187, 191, 241, 311, 348, 456

Cart, M., 149, 150, 153, 155, 156, 159,

234, 265, 462

Carter, B., 294, 462

Carter, D., 248

Carter, J. B., 83

Carter, S., 87

Cartmell, D., 497

Cascallana, B. G., 405

Case, R., 54

Cassidy, J., 65

Castagna, E., 451

Castell, M., 77

Caughlan, S., 77, 78, 81

Cave, K., 424-425

Cech, J., 242

Celano, D., 141

Cerny, R., 137, 141

Certain, C. C., 474

Certo, J. L., 277m 281

Cha, D., 170

Chaikin, M., 484

Chamberlain, J., 472

Chamberlain, K., 204

Chambers, A., 309, 519

Chander, A., 102

Chandler-Olcott, K., 72, 93, 101

Chang, J., 98

537

AUTHOR INDEX

Chartier, R., 398

Chase, R., 220

Chatman, S., 497

Chbosky, S., 149, 158, 308-309

Cheah, P., 166

Chelton, M., 139

Chen, D., 480

Cherland, M. R., 70., 245

Chester, T., 292

Chetty, V., 436

Chick, K., 245

Chomsky, C., 30

Chomsky, N., 22, 30, 432

Christian-Smith, L., 492

Christie, A., 463

Christie, R. G., 284

Church, P. E., 220

Ciardi, J., 281

Cisneros, S., 304, 305, 309

Clark, B. L., 510

Clark, C. D., 363

Clark, L., 277

Clark, M., 127

Clarke, L. W., 70

Clarke, N., 190

Clarke, S., 501

Clarkson, A., 211

Clausen, C., 308

Clay, M., 5

Cleary, B., 196, 305, 452

Clifton, L., 284

Cloitre, M., 360

Clowes, D., 265

Clyde, L. A., 140

Coats, K., 319, 326, 348, 470

Cochran-Smith, M., 5, 172

Cole, J., 291

Cole, M., 40, 109

Coleman, E., 231

Coles, R., 77

Colin, M., 405

Collen, L., 144

Collins, M. A., 265

Collins, S., 122

Collins, T., 100, 103

Collins-Gearing, B., 333, 338

Colman, P., 291, 294, 296, 297

Colón, J., 116

Comenius, J. A., 185, 292

Comstock, A., 445-446

Conrad P., 291

Conrad, J., 85, 151

Considine, D. M., 246

Cook, W. W. [John Milton Edwards,

pseudo.], 196

Cool, C., 139

Cooper, E. J., 66

Cooper, S., 311

Cope, B., 482

Copenhaver, J., 59

Corbeil, J. C., 185

Corcoran, B., 80

Corden, R., 97

Cormack, P., 511

Cormier, R., 315, 319, 321, 322

Cornelius, J. D., 229

Coser, L., 485, 490

Cowley, M., 451

Cox, J. R., 198, 199

Cox, M. R., 211

Crago, H., 13, 16

Crandall, N., 479, 482, 483, 484, 485,

486, 490, 492

Creech, S., 64, 285, 377, 378

Cronin, D., 489

Cross, G. B., 211

Crowe, C., 80

Crumpler, T., 70, 71

Cruz, M., 58

Cuddon, J. A., 291

Cullinan, B. E., 276, 291, 294, 568

Curlee, L., 296

Curtis, C. P., 204, 325, 376, 377, 381

Cushman, K., 309

D’Adamo, F., 54, 55, 56, 59

D’Aulaire, E. P., 293

D’Aulaire, I., 293

Dahl, R., 452

Dal, E., 9

Dalby, C., 320

Daly, K. N., 444

Dam, T., 135

Damico, J., 285

Daniel, K., 204

Darling, R. L., 457

Darling-Hammond, L., 111

Darton, F. J. H., 180, 181, 182, 183, 185,

186, 188, 190 , 191

Dasenbrock, R. W., 76

Daum, M., 461

David, R., 241

Davidoff, L., 7, 8

Davies, B., 245

Davies, M. M., 499, 501

Davis, E., 264

Davis, G., 500

Davis, J., 183

Davis, N., 41

Davison, W. P., 450

Dawson, J., 487

Day, T., 190

De Angeli, M., 229

De Bode, A., 422, 423, 425

De Castell, S., 154, 155

de Jesus, M. L., 202

De Jonge, J., 511

De la Cruz, M., 327

de Paola, T., 52, 59

Deane, P., 204

DeBlase, G., 69

DeCasper, A. J., 25

Deehy, S. M., 435

Defoe, D., 181, 187

DeJesús, A., 109, 110

Del Negro, J. M., 216

Delfattore, J., 450

Delpit, L. D., 110

Demerath, P., 79

DeMitchell, T. A., 448

Denby, D., 484, 492

DeNicolo, C. P., 52, 115, 165

Denning M., 197, 198

Denyer, S., 512, 513

Deresiewicz, W., 345

Derrida, J., 29, 30

Desmet, M. K. T., 405, 413

Desmidt, I., 410, 422, 423

Deutscher, P., 30

Devereux, C., 511, 512

Dewey, J., 50, 245

Diallo, B., 434

Diallo. M., 434

Diaz, E. M., 150

Díaz, J., 174

DiCamillo, K., 305, 307, 377

Dickinson, K., 500

Dickinson, P., 320

Dillard, A., 92

Dillon, L. & D., 249

Disney, W., 212, 213, 215, 219

DiTerlizzi, T., 311, 349

Dixon, B., 359

Dixon, J., 78

Dizer, J. T. Jr., 204

Dizer, J. T., 200

Doherty, T., 43

Dollerup, C., 406

Dominus, S., 174

Donelson, K. L., 316

Donovan, C. A., 294

Donovan, J., 315, 468, 473

Doonan, J., 242

Dorris, M., 304, 305, 341

Dorsey-Gaines, C., 53

Dorson, R., 218

Doubek, M. B., 66

Downey, A., 72

Doyle, R. P., 445, 446, 447, 449

Drazen, P., 261

Dresang, E. T., 79, 126, 127, 129, 449

Druker, P., 291

Du Bois, W.E.B., 234

Duces, B., 436

Ducey, M., 211

Duke, K., 294

Duncan-Andrade, J., 85

Dundes, A., 213

Dupagne, M., 450

Durand, R., 435

Dutro, E., 53

Dyer, R., 81

Dyson, A. H., 53, 98, 168, 491, 500

Dyson, M. E., 95, 99

Eastman, L., 134

Eaton, A. T., 458

Eccleshare, J., 480

Eco, U., 125

Eco, U., 407

Edelsky, C., 52

Edgeworth, M., 190

Edmiston, B., 14, 55, 60, 70, 72, 86

Edmonson, J., 491

Edstrm, V., 519

Edwards, A., 54

Eeds, M., 59, 40

Egan, K., 21

Egan-Robertson, A., 73

538

AUTHOR INDEX

Eisenstein, E., 21, 22

Eisler, B., 9, 10

Eisner, W., 238

Eisner, W., 257, 260 263

Eisner, W., 40

Elder, J., 264

Eleveld, M., 286

Elley, W. B., 434

Ellison, N., 98

Ellison, R., 230

Ellsworth, R. A., 64

Elster, C. A., 276

Elwin, R., 151

Emig, J., 94

Enciso, P. E., 54, 55, 70, 83, 166, 471

Ende, M., 311

Engdahl, S., 309

Engelhardt, T., 490, 504

Engeström, Y., 109

English, K., 231

Enstad, N., 198

Epstein, C., 480, 486

Epstein, D., 151, 152

Erbach, M. M., 471

Erdrich, L., 341

Erikson, E., 327

Escamilla, K., 118

Espinosa, C. M., 97

Estes, E., 374

Estes, G., 487

Evans, E. K., 226

Evans, K., 69

Even-Zohar, I., 405

Fabos, B., 84

Fairbanks, C. M., 70

Falconer, I., 249

Falconer, I., 489

Faulkner, W. J., 216, 220

Fawcett, C., 511

Feinberg, S., 143

Feixa, C., 79

Feldman, S., 143

Feldstein, L., 142

Felton, A. L., 34

Fernández López, M., 405, 410

Fiamengo, J., 511

Fiedler, L., 345, 347

Field, C. W., 387

Field, Mrs. E. F., 180, 182, 183

Fielding, H., 190

Fielding, S., 190

Fierstein, H., 150, 152

Finders, M., 98

Fine, A., 319

Fine, E. H., 42

Finley, M., 36, 200, 498

Finney, P., 464

Fiore, C., 140, 471

Fish, S., 80, 94

Fishel, L. H. Jr., 229

Fisher, D., 87

Fisher, M. T., 98–99

Fisher, M., 85, 86, 286

Fiske, M., 449

Fitzgerald, F. S., 88, 316

Fitzgerald, J., 96

Fleckenstein, K. S., 496

Fleischman, P., 304, 305

Flint, A. S., 52

Flood, J., 43

Flores, J., 109

Flournoy, V., 232, 233

Flower, L., 95

Flowers, C., 303

Flowers, W. J. D., 471

Flynn, R., 277, 278, 283, 282, 285, 502

Foerstel, H. N., 449

Forman, R., 100

Forster, E. M., 523

Foucault, M., 1, 78, 94

Fountas, I., 57

Fox, C., 40

Fox, D., 53

Fox, M., 39

Fox, P., 459

Fox, V., 461

Foxe, J., 185

Francis, C. D., 308

Francis, L., 284

Franco, B., 284

Franco, L., 265

Frank, A., 500

Frank, H. T., 405

Frankland, R. J., 341

Franklin, J. H., 229

Fránquiz, M. E., 52, 109, 110, 115, 165

Franzen, J., 38, 39

Frazee, M., 464

Fredrick, L., 64

Freebody, P., 52, 53, 80

Freedman R., 291

Freedman, K., 69

Freeman E. B., 294

Freeman, E., 53

Freire, P., 50, 109

French, J., 111

Frenkel, P., 480

Freud, S., 348

Frey, N., 887

Freyer, E., 501

Fricke, J., 502

Friese, E., 491

Friese, I., 408

Fries-Gedin, L., 412

Fritz, J., 296

Frost, H., 319

Fry, E., 472

Frye, N., 196, 197, 203

Frye, N., 305

Funke, C., 311

Gadsden, V. L., 246

Gaiman, N., 258, 263

Gaiman, N., 362

Galda, L., 58, 69, 71, 82, 276, 291, 294

Gallagher. K., 70

Gallaz, C., 422

Galligan, A., 502, 503

Gallo, D. R., 150, 316

Gambrell, L., 57, 58

Gamoran, A., 80

Gann, L., 123, 125

Gantos, J., 305

Ganz, A., 456

Garcia-Lopez, S. P., 111

Garden, N., 448

Gardner, J. D., 203

Garis, R., 200

Garner, A., 69

Garrett, S. D., 65

Garver, N., 30

Gaskell, E., 10, 11

Gates, H. L., 94, 99

Gatty, M., 456

Gaver, M. V., 122

Gay, G., 53

Gee, J. P., 79, 82, 110, 482

Geer, J., 501

Genishi, C., 53

Genovese, E., 229

George, J. C., 296-297

Gerber, A., 216

Gerhardt, L. N., 476

Gerrard, P., 291

Gibbons G., 293, 295

Giblin, J. C., 480

Gibson, T. A., 503

Giddings, R., 497

Gilbar, S., 39

Gilbert, A., 64

Gilbert, P., 80

Gilbert, S. M., 190

Girard, R., 318

Giroux, H. A., 347, 353, 487, 492

Glander, M., 135

Glasheen, G., 248

Glazner, G. M., 286

Glenn, C. G., 294

Glenn, M., 310

Glovin, D., 481

Goble, D., 333

Goble, P., 333

Golden, J., 242

Goldring, R., 122

Goldsmith, O., 189

Golinkoff, R. M., 22

González, L., 117

González, N., 109, 110

Goodman, A., 168

Goody, J., 21, 22, 25

Gordon, C., 94

Gordon, I., 41

Gorman, M., 139

Gouanvic, J. M., 408

Gownley, J., 264

Graff, G., 87

Grahame, K., 311

Grannis, C. B., 444, 451

Grassegger, H., 412

Graves, D., 95

Gravett, E., 247

Gravett, P., 260, 261, 262

Gray, R., 280

Greaney, V., 431

Greco, A. N., 487

Green, J., 449

Green, R. L., 191

Greenbaum, V., 150, 151, 152, 153

539

AUTHOR INDEX

Greenberg, D., 64

Greenberg, J., 110

Green eld, E., 231

Greytak, E. A., 150

Grif ths, G., 336

Grimes, N., 309, 476

Grimes, S., 130

Grimm, J., 190, 213

Grimm, W., 190, 213

Griswold, J., 213

Gross, M., 137, 139

Grossberg, L., 322, 347, 353

Grossman, A. J., 204

Grotzfeld, H., 406

Gubar, S., 190

Guerra, J., 168

Gunter, G., 145

Gurín, P., 111

Gurwitsch, A., 21

Gustines, G. G., 265

Gutierrez, E., 243, 244, 249

Gutiérrez, K., 167, 168

Haas, K. P., 317

Hade, D., 482, 483, 491, 492, 504

Hadju, D., 259

Hager, K., 285

Hagfors, I., 410

Hagood, M. C., 484

Hai Fei, 485

Haight, A. L. 444, 451

Hajdu, D., 41, 42

Hale, L., 80

Haley, G. E., 246

Halfmann, J., 260

Hall, C., 7, 8

Hall, D., 276, 278

Hall, K., 60

Hall, N., 20

Halliday, A., 285

Halliday, M. A. K., 86

Halverson, E. R., 154

Hames-García, M., 167

Hamilton, G., 151, 152, 153

Hamilton, M., 40

Hamilton, V., 54, 70, 217, 230, 249

Hamilton-Pennell, C., 128

Hammett, R. F., 87, 150

Hammond, P., 33

Hannaham, J., 168

Hansen, J., 95

Harjo, J., 336, 338

Harms, W., 458

Harnois, C., 367

Harootudian, H., 98

Harper, R., 262

Harris, C., 102

Harris, J., 78, 283, 292

Harris, R. H., 420, 422, 423

Harris, S., 150

Harris, V., 53, 117

Harris, V. J., 215, 227, 228

Harrison, K., 452

Harrison, L., 320

Harste, J. C., 59, 87, 165, 175

Hart, G., 432

Hartinger, B., 67, 68

Harvey, D., 170

Harwayne, S., 95, 96

Haskins, F., 233, 234

Hassett, D. D., 127

Hatkoff, C., 360

Hatkoff, I., 360, 361

Haugland, A., 484

Havelock, E. A., 21, 276, 277

Haven, K., 211

Haviland, V., 456

Hawkins, L., 281

Hayes, G., 264

Hayes, J., 95

Hayhoe, M., 80

Hayles, N. K., 88

Hazard, P., 180, 182, 189

Hearn, M. P., 496, 502

Hearne, B., 33, 45, 125, 210, 211, 213,

215, 218, 220

Heath, S. B., 4, 5, 6, 8, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18,

34, 40, 42, 43, 44, 45, 95, 211

Heathcote, D., 70

Heckler, M., 211

Heidegger, M., 22, 30

Heilbrun, C. G., 202

Heiner, H. A., 214

Heins, P., 461-462

Heinstrom, J., 130

Heiss, A., 341

Helbig, A. K., 282

Held, K., 21

Heldner, C., 409

Hellekson, K., 100, 101

Heller, S., 517, 518

Hempel, M., 82

Henderson, D. L., 235

Henderson, E., 135

Henderson, M. J., 34

Hengst, L., 211

Hentoff, N., 315

Hepler, S., 293, 295

Hergé., 259

Herndon, S., 98

Herrera, V., 30

Herz, S. K., 316

Hesse, H., 87

Hesse, K.

Hesse, K., 378

Hettinga, D. R., 217

Heuscher, J., 220

Hildreth, G., 34, 35

Hillier, L., 150

Hilton, M., 44, 500

Hinchman, K., 65, 72

Hinton, K. M., 234

Hinton, S. E., 309, 315

Hirano, C., 411

Hirsch, E. D., 76, 173

Hirsh-Pasek, K., 22

Hjørnager Pedersen, V., 405, 408,

420–421

Hobbs, R., 43

Hodge, B., 500

Hoffman, H., 183, 185

Hoffman, M., 150, 151, 152

Hogan, I., 229

Holbrook, D., 348

Holland, D., xi

Hollindale, P., 359, 420

Holm, J. L., 264

Holt, K., 488, 489

Homes, A. A., 151

Honnold, R., 127

Hoose, P. M., 131

Hopkins, D. M., 449, 450

Horniman, J., 367

Horning, K. T., 463, 472, 473

Høverstad, T. B., 412

Howard, E. F., 231

Howard, V., 127

Howe, J., 67-68

Huberty, C. J., 295

Hubler, A. E., 367

Huck, C., 49, 50

Hürlimann, B., 182, 185, 187

Huffaker, D. A., 98

Hughes, L., 216, 220, 226

Hughes-Hassell, S., 64

Hull, G., 98

Hunt, B. F., 229

Hunt, C., 316, 317

Hunt, I., 64

Hunt, P., 50, 292, 294

Hunter, I., 78

Hurston, Z. N., 215, 218

Hurtado, A., 111

Husserl, E., 21

Hutcheon, L., 497

Huxley, A., 452

Hyde, M., 5, 7, 8

Hynds, S., 78

Igus, T., 122

Ihde, D., 21

Ikeda, R., 261

Illich, I., 21, 22, 26, 29

Ingarden, R., 28

Inggs, J., 406, 412

Inness, S. A., 201, 203

Ippolito, M., 425

Irizarry, J. G., 110

Isay, D., 82

Iser, W., 28, 70, 94, 243, 425

Ivey, G., 64

Jackson, A., 326

Jackson, M. V., 186, 189

Jackson, M., 498, 499

Jacobs, G. M., 434

James, A., 20

James, W., 36

Jameson, F., 347

Jan, I., 185, 189

Janeway, J., 185

Jansson, T., 519

Jaquith, P., 216, 220

Jarrell, R., 280

Jenkins, C., 125, 149, 150, 153, 155, 156,

159, 234

Jenkins, C. A., 135, 136. 450, 451, 457–

458, 472, 474

540

AUTHOR INDEX

Jenkins, H., 78, 84, 87., 92, 94, 101, 497

Jenks, C., 20

Jennings, L., 56

Jenson, J., 154, 155

Jentsch, N. K., 412

Jewitt, C., 86

Jiménez, F., 173

Jocson, K. M., 85, 86, 98, 99, 100, 105

Johannsen, A., 198

Johnson, A., 231

Johnson, D., 198, 199, 200, 201, 228,

234, 276

Johnson, J., 6

Johnson, N. S., 294

Johnson, S., 189

Johnston, I., 85

Jones, D. B., 387, 391

Jones, D. W., 366

Jones, L., 82

Jones, M., 220

Jones, P., 139, 140, 141, 412

Jones, S., 500

Joosen, V., 411

Jordan, A. M., 457

Jordan, J., 218, 220

Joy, N., 249

Juster, N., 240, 311

Juzwik, M. M., 70

Kadohata, C., 377

Kadushin, C., 485,

Kahn, L., 55

Kahumbu, P., 360

Kalantzis, M., 482

Karolides, N. J., 449

Karpovitch, A., 101

Kaser, S., 59

Kauffman, G., 55

Kauffmann, G., 151, 152

Kayden, M., 482

Kaye, M., 204

Kear, D. J., 64

Keats, E. Z., 38

Keeline, J. D., 200, 485

Keene, C., 137, 202

Keene, E., 57

Kellogg, R., 498

Kelly, J., 59

Kenda, J. J., 414

Kennedy, X. J., 281

Kenny, R., 145

Kerényi, K., 218

Kermode, F., 308

Kernan, A., 40

Kerper, R., 294, 295, 296

Ketter, J., 84

Kibbee, D. A., 411

Kibuishi, K., 264

Kidd, K. B., 244, 245, 364, 472, 473

Kidd, S. M., 322

Kiefer, B. Z., 238, 291, 293, 294, 295

Kinder, M., 348, 500

King, A., 321

King, J., 150

King, M. L., Jr., 151

King, T., 341

Kingman, L., 444

Kinney, J., 257, 303

Kinsella, S., 262

Kipling, R., 452

Kirkland, D., 81

Kishimoto, M., 256

Kitwana, B., 98

Klause, A. C., 311, 327

Klingberg, G., 405, 407, 425

Knobel, M., 105

Knuth, R., 436

Kobayashi, M., 415

Koch, K., 277

Koertge, R., 309

Kogawa, J., 85

Koh, K., 127

Koike, K., 262

Konigsburg, E. L., 187, 306

Korman, G., 71, 325

Kosciw, J. G., 150

Kotrla, B., 127, 129

Krashen, S. D., 128, 138, 141, 434, 475

Kreller, S., 413

Kress, G., 42, 43, 78, 86, 241, 244

Kristeva, J., 320

Kristo, J. V., 291, 294

Kuchner, J., 1413

Kudriavtseva, L., 480

Kümmerling-Meibauer, B., 413

Kuivasmäki, R., 405

Kurtz, S. R., 265

Kustritz, A., 101, 102, 103

Kyritsi, M.-V., 406

L’Engle, M., 308

Lacan, J., 29

Lachicotte, W., xi

Lackner, E., 101

Laclau, E., 76

Lacy, L. E., 471

Ladson-Billings, G., 81, 471

Lamb, B., 92

Lamme, L., 475

Lampe, C., 98

Lancaster, J. W., 451, 452

Lance, K. C., 128, 129

Lancia, P. J., 95, 96

Land, R., 115

Landt, S., 165

Lanes, S. G., 458, 461

Lang, A., 191

Langer, B., 483, 488

Langer, J. A., 80

Langer, S., 363

Langton, M., 338

Langton, R., 10, 11

Lapin, G. S., 200

Lapp, D., 43

Lareau, A., 34

Larrick, N., 244, 480

Larsen, R., 45

Larson, C. R., 431

Larson, J., 20, 56, 168

Lathey, G., 410, 412, 425

Le Brun, C., 408, 411

Le Guin, U. K., 311

Leaf, M., 390

Leal, D., 472

Leander, K., 84

Lear, E., 191

Lear, L., 512, 513

LeBlanc, E. T., 198

Lechner, J. V., 480

Lee, C. D., 81

Lee, H., 71, 80

LeGuin, U. K., 316, 322

Lehman, B., 49, 53, 57, 243, 246

Lehr, S., 245

Leland, C., 49

Lems, K., 20

Lensmire, T. J., 97

Lent, A., 98

Lent, R. C., 450

Lerer, S., 184, 292

Lerer, S., 34

Lesko, N., 79

Leslie, A. R., 220

Lester, J., 217, 218, 219, 220

Levine, G., 212

Levithan, D., 157, 314, 325

Levstik, L. S., 294, 295

Lewis, C. S., 69, 80, 83, 84, 311, 452

Lewis, D., 242, 247

Lewis, E. B., 489

Lewison, M., 49, 52

Li, L., 405

Liedtke, W., 41

Liew, S., 82

Lijun B., 480

Liljeblad, C. B., 502

Limb, S., 325

Lindemann, E., 95

Lindfors, J., 50

Lindgren, C., 405

Linton, P., 334

Liseling-Nilsson, S., 410

Littau, K., 500

Lituanas, P. M., 434

Livingston, M. C., 277, 282

Livingstone, S., 496

Lobel, A., 56

Locke, J., 139, 184, 185

Lockhart, E., 318

Loertscher, D. V., 126

Long, D., 80

Longford, E., 10

Lord, A., 210

Lorde, A., 172

Lounsberry, B., 291–292, 291, 296

Lovelace, M. H., 374, 383

Lovvorn, J., 84

Lowe, V., 13, 14, 15, 16

Lowrey, J. S., 389

Lowry, L., 307, 377, 378

Lucas, B. L., 101

Lucas, E. V., 8

Lucas, T., 108

Luke, A., 52, 53, 79, 80

Luke, A., 80, 94

Luke, C., 79

Lukens, R. A., 294

Lunenfeld, P., 497, 499

Luria, A. R., 21, 23

541

AUTHOR INDEX

Lushington, N., 143

Lyga, A. A.W., 264

Lynch, C., 317

Lynch, J., 79

Lyotard, J. F., 326

Lytle, S. L., 172

Macaulay, D., 126, 247

MacDonald, M. R., 211, 212

Macedo, D., 109

Machado, A. M., 399

Machet, M., 432

Machiko, H., 261

Mack, L., 291

Mackey, M., 87, 195, 201, 246, 481, 482,

491, 496, 502

MacLachlan, P., 304

MacLeod, A. S., 317

MacPherson, K., 488, 489

Macrorie, K., 42

Madhuri, M., 66

Madonna, 488

Maguire, G., 363

Mahar, D., 93, 101

Mahiri, J., 85, 98, 99

Mahy, M., 481, 491

Makowski, S., 197, 200

Malarte-Feldman, C. L., 406

Malavé, G., 115

Mallan, K., 360

Malloy, J. A., 65, 66

Mandel, J., 360, 361

Mandler, J. M., 294

Maney, M., 203

Manguel, A., 40

Maniotes, L. K., 79

Manna, A., 217

Maracle, L., 336, 337

Marantz, K., 239

Marcus, L. S., 387

Marcus, L. S., 472, 474, 480, 486, 487,

488, 489

Markey, P., 137, 141

Markham, L. R., 96

Marriott, S., 244

Marsh, J., 11, 12, 20, 500

Marshall, E., 367

Marshall, J. D., 78, 80

Martin, A. M., 195, 264

Martin, B., 49

Martin, C., 499

Martin, J., 435

Martin, Jr., B., 517

Martin, M., 234, 245

Martinez, R. B., 21, 22

Martínez-Roldán, C., 52, 109, 115

Martinsen, J., 321

Mason, B. A., 201, 202

Mates, B. F., 64

Mathis, S. B., 231, 232

Matsumoto, T., 515, 516

Maughan, S., 488

May, J. P., 235

Mazi-Leskovar, D., 410

Mazzarella, S. R., 101

McCall, L., 367

McCallum, R,, 213, 317, 318, 322, 360,

368, 498

McCarthey, S. J., 105

McClain, L., 59

McClelland, K., 127

McCloud, S., 40, 257, 258

McCluhan, M., 21, 22

McClure, A. A., 294, 296

McCook, K., 135

McCormick, P., 310

McCulloch, G., 59

McDaniel, L., 186, 323

McDaniel, T. R., 451

McDermott, G., 244

McDonald, M., 336, 337, 338

McDonnell, K., 500

McFarlane, B., 497

McFarlane, L., 196, 200

McGillis, R., 326, 346

McGraw, E., 311

McGregor, D., 263

McGuire, C. E., 242, 247

McIver, M. C., 95, 97

McKamey, C., 110

McKechnie, L., 138

McKee, D., 422, 423

McKenna, M. C., 64

McKeon, D., 113

McKeone, G., 14

McKinley, R., 212, 214

McLynn, F., 10

McMillan, S., 211

McNair, J. C., 166, 234, 244

McNaught, B., 150, 152

McNeil, H., 471

McQueen, S., 390

McRobbie, A., 353

Mdallel, S., 405

Means, F. C., 229

Mediavilla, C., 139

Medina, C. L., 70, 72, 86, 165

Medved, D., 444

Medved, M. 444

Meek, M., xi, xii, 34, 201, 242, 250

Meier, R. P., 30

Meighen, A., 34

Meigs, C., 180, 182, 185, 191

Melcher, F. G., 457

Méliès, G., 350

Mellor, B., 80

Meltzoff, A. N., 27

Melville, H., 352

Mendlesohn, F., 308

Merleau-Ponty, M., 22, 23, 24, 27, 28,

29, 30

Meyer, S., 324

Meyers, E., 143

Meyers, J., 69

Miccuci, C., 292

Michaelsen, J., 448

Michie, J., 125

Mikaelsen, B., 339, 340

Millard, E., 500

Miller, B. J. F., 475

Miller, F., 256, 262, 265

Miller, H. L., 296

Miller, J. H., 34, 242

Miller, K., 135

Miller, L., 489

Miller, M. C., 482, 484

Miller, P., 211

Mills, C., 375, 376, 377, 378, 379, 380,

382, 383

Mills, H., 56

Mills, R., 14

Milne, A. A., 311, 349

Minh-Ha, T. T., 84

Minier, M., 421, 425, 425

Minkel, W., 140

Mitchell, A., 150

Mitchell, D., 291

Mitchell, M., 231

Mitchell, W. J. T., 246

Miyake, O., 456

Mo, W., 53

Mobin-Uddin, A., 243

Moebius, W., 241, 243

Moffett, J., 450

Mohanty, S., 167, 172

Mohr, M., 52, 59

Mohr, N., 117

Moje, E. B., 63, 65, 84, 98, 99

Molin, P., 235

Moline. S., 295

Moll, L. C., 109, 110

Möller, K., 492

Monaghan, E. J., 6, 7

Moni, K., 79

Montes, M., 241

Montgomery, L. M., 196, 374, 389, 511

Moore, A. C., 263, 457, 458

Moore, C. C., 389

Moore, D. W., 84

Moore, J. N., 81

Moran, J., 484

Moreillon, J., 57, 130

Morgan, P. E., 369

Morgan, R., 76, 77

Morgan, W., 80

Morrell, E., 81, 85, 98, 99

Morris, K., 63

Morris, P., 367

Morris, T., 497, 499

Morrison, S., 220

Morrison, T., 220, 225

Morrow, L. M., 58

Morse, J. C., 512

Morse, S., 264

Moss, A,, 229

Moss, E., 242

Moto, H., 261

Mott, F. L., 199

Mouffe, C., 76

Moustafa, M., 115

Moya, P., 167, 173

Moyer, J., 138

Moyer, M., 127

Mtshweni, D., 432, 436

Muir, P., 180, 182, 183, 187, 188, 189,

190

Mullett, E., 360

Mumford, L., 29

Munroe, R., 258

Munsch, R., 58, 245

542

AUTHOR INDEX

Murphy, J., 501

Murphy, L., 33

Murpurgo, M., 97

Murray, D. M., 95

Myers, W. D., 54, 70, 121, 231, 317, 321,

325

Myracle, L., 308., 323, 446

Na, A., 368, 369

Napoli, D. J., 214

Nathanson, A., 452

Nathenson-Mejia, S., 118

Nation, P., 434

Natov, R., 303

Naylor, P. R., 383

Neff, D., 110

Nel, P., 481

Nel, P., 501-502

Nell, V., 22

Nelson, M., 284, 309

Nelson, T. B., 316

Netell, S., 475

Netley, N. S., 410

Neuman, S., 141

Neumeyer, P. F., 391

Newbery, J., 495

Newirth, R., 284

Newman, L., 82, 448

Newmeyer, F. C., 350

Ngumo, R. W., 435

Nières-Chevrel, I., 413

Nieto, S., 110

Nieuwenhuizen, A., 405

Nikolajeva, M., 242, 294, 303, 407, 408,

409, 410, 413

Nikola-Lisa, W., 243

Nilan, P., 79

Nilsen, A. P., 316, 475

Nilsson, P., 321, 325

Niven, P., 280

Noddings, N., 109

Nodelman, P.,

Nodelman, P., 113, 178, 241, 242, 248,

276, 291, 296, 303, 346, 348, 420,

425, 426, 489

Nolan, C., 265

Nones, E. J., 245

Nonnekes, P., 348

Nord, C., 411

Norrington, L., 339, 340

Norton, D., 294

Nussbaum, M., 166, 167

Nye, N. S., 284, 285

Nystrand, M., 80

O’Connell, E., 404

O’Connor, M., 174

O’Dell, S., 187

O’Keefe, T., 56

O’Neill, C., 70, 71, 72

O’Neill, M., 80

O’Reilly, B. 303

O’Sullivan, E., 405, 408, 412, 420, 421,

422, 423-424, 426

Ogbu, J., 166

Oittinen, R., 407, 413, 425

Oksanen, R., 435

Oldenburg, R., 142

Olsen, L., 109

Olson, D. R., 25

Ong, W., 21, 22, 23, 26, 277

Onukaogu, C. E., 436

Openshaw, R., 56

Opie, I., 211, 213

Opie, P., 211, 213

Orellana, M. F., 167

Orwell, G., 452

Øster Steffensen, A., 410

Ott, B., 293

Overby, M., 63

Oyegade, E. A., 435

Pace, B., 69

Packard, V., 348

Page, R., 248

Painter, H. W., 425

Pak, S., 173

Paley, V. G., 22, 23, 24, 25, 28, 29, 110

Paloposki, O., 425

Pantaleo, S., 127, 247

Pappas, C. C., 248, 294, 295

Park, B., 204

Park, L. S., 51, 285, 376, 381

Parks, D., 83, 165

Parks, V. D., 217

Parnell, P., 67, 245, 361, 447

Parravano, M. V., 471, 475

Parry, M., 21

Parsons, E. C., 216

Pascal, F., 196, 197

Pascua, I., 405

Paterson, D., 498

Paterson, K., 306, 401, 402, 498, 504

Paterson, M., 482, 483, 485

Patron, S., 377

Patterson, A., 80

Pattou, E., 212

Paul, B., 450

Paul, L., 276, 278

Paulse, M., 151

Paulsen, G., 307

Pearce, P., 346

Pearlman, M., 69

Pearson, E., 199

Pease, H., 461

Peck, R., 378

Pecora, N. O., 483

Peirce, C., 55

Pellowski, A., 137, 211

Penn, I. G., 229

Pennac, D., 13, 16-17, 34

Pennycook, A., 78, 79

Peréz, A., 72

Pernicek, T., 85

Perrault, C., 186, 212

Perry, B., 436

Person, D. G., 294

Peters, J. A., 149, 158

Peterson, R., 49, 50, 475

Pew, 86

P ster, M., 383

Phelan, J., 498

Piaget, J., 27

Pickard, N., 203

Pierce, J. B,, 144

Pierce, K. M., 109

Pietri, P., 117

Pike, E. H., 511

Pilkey, D., 347

Pinker, S., 22

Pinkney, A. D., 473, 476

Pinkney, J. B., 233

Pinnell, G., 57

Pipkin, G., 450

Pirie, B., 80

Planché, J. R., 214

Plunkett-Powell, K., 202

Pollock, K., 58

Popkewitz, T., 20

Portman, F., 325

Postman, N., 21, 27, 29

Potter, B., 512, 513

Poulet, G., 28

Powell, W., 485

Pradl, G., 51

Pradle, G., 80

Prentice, J., 514

Pretorius, E., 432

Price, L. H., 295

Prichard, M., 456

Probst, R., 78

Propp, V., 294

Prout, A., 20

Pryor, B. M., 336, 337, 338

Puenta, A., 30

Pugh, S., 100, 101

Pullman, P., 242, 322, 509

Putnam, R., 142

Puurtinen, T., 408

Quarles, B., 229

Rabelais, F., 350

Radway, J., 77

Raiteri, S., 264

Ramazani, J., 174

Ramsey, E., 214

Ranker, J., 86, 87

Rasinski, T., 20

Raugust, K., 486, 488

Ray, K. W., 58, 96, 97

Readence, J. E., 84

Reese, D., 333

Reese, J., 150

Rehak, M., 200, 202

Reichel, R., 138, 139

Reichman, H., 443

Reid, R. A., 101

Reimer, M., 113, 276, 291, 296, 348, 420,

425, 426, 489

Reinhart, M., 248

Reitz, S., 518

Renandya, W., 434

Renauld, C., 405

Rennison, L., 309, 325

Reynolds, K., 479, 480, 482, 485, 486

543

AUTHOR INDEX

Reynolds, P., 497

Reynolds, Q., 198, 199

Rhedin, U., 413

Richardson, J., 245

Richardson, J., 67, 361, 447

Ricoeur, P., 2

Rieken-Gerwing, I., 404

Ritzer, G., 490

Rivera, C. H., 109, 110

Rivers, I., 150

Rizal, J., 164, 174

Roach, A., 44

Roach, H., 350

Robins, N., 450

Robinson, E., 16

Robinson, M., 11, 12, 500

Rochelle, B., 231

Rodge, P., 64

Rodriguez, C. E., 487

Rodríguez, L., 173

Roethke, T., 281

Rogers, T., 84

Romalov, N. T., 201, 204

Root, M. E. S., 204

Rooth, A. B., 211

Rose, J., 499

Rose, T., 98, 99

Rosen, M., 520, 522

Rosenberg, D., 435

Rosenberg, L., 282

Rosenblatt, L. M., 2, 57, 70, 94

Rosenblatt, L., 50, 51

Roser, N., 56

Ross, C. S., 138, 201, 203, 204

Rossi, P., 409

Rothbauer, P., 138

Rousseau, J-J., 190

Rowling, J. K., 102, 196, 304, 305, 307,

322, 349, 446, 448, 481, 495, 503

Roxburgh, S., 484, 485, 492

Rubin, J. S., 278, 279, 280

Rubinstein-Ávila, E., 86

Rudd, D., 347, 353

Rudiger, H., 258

Ruebens, L., 262

Rugg, J., 33

Rui, J., 320

Rui, T., 480, 481

Runton, A., 256, 263

Rustin, M., 348

Rutschmann, V., 404

Ryan, C., 150

Ryan, S., 144

Rylant, C., 211, 376

Rymes, B., 168

Sabin, R., 257, 259, 260, 263

Sablo, S., 85, 98, 99

Sabuda, R., 248

Sachar, L., 305, 378

Said, E., 398

Salazar, M., 110

Saldívar, R., 173

Sale, R., 186

Salinger, J. D., 309, 446

Salisbury, M., 240, 246, 249

Sallis, J., 368

Salwen, M. B., 450

Samway, K. D., 113

Sanders, B., 21

Saricks, J., 137

Sarroub, L. K., 85

Satrapi, M., 87, 256, 263

Sawyer, R., 211

Say, A., 211

Sayers, F. C., 457, 458

Sayre, A. P., 296, 297

Scales, P., 449, 475

Scanlon, M., 480

Schaefer, L. M., 296

Schall, J., 151, 152., 245

Schiavi, G., 420

Schieffelin, B. B., 5

Schiffrin, A., 484, 486, 487

Schillings, P., 65

Schlitz, L. A., 126

Schmidt, G. D., 217

Schneider, J. J., 70, 150, 153

Schodt, F., 261, 262

Scholes, R., 33, 76, 498

Schor, J. B., 483, 492

Schrader, A. M., 452

Schrag, A., 262

Schreier, A., 444

Schulman, J., 296

Schultz, K., 87, 98

Schur, M. R., 42, 45

Schurman, L. C., 198

Schwartz, A., 86

Schwartz, D. M., 248

Schwartz, L. S., 33

Schwarz, G., 86, 87

Schy, Y., 248

Scieszka, J., 247

Scieszka, J., 347

Scott, C., 242

Scribner, S., 40

Scudder, H. E., 457

Seago, K., 406

Seale, D., 333

Searfoss. L. W., 475

Sebold, A., 322

Sedaris, D., 158

Sefton-Green, J., 86-87

Seifert, M., 405

Sekeres, D. C., 498, 502

Selby, K., 497

Selznick, B., 45, 126, 249, 257, 304, 349-

350, 491

Sen, J., 256

Sendak, M., 97, 241, 488, 498

Sera ni, F., 172

Serebnick, J., 137

Serros, M., 325

Seuss, Dr., 446, 447, 452

Sévenier, G., 481

Shakespeare, W., 316

Shanahan, T., 49

Shannon, D., 489

Shannon, P., 60, 492

Shavit, Z., 303, 349, 405, 424

Shea, P. D., 170

Sheen, D. I., 249

Shen, W., 53

Shenton, A., 139, 490

Shera, J. H., 135

Sherrill, A., 451

Sherry, M. B., 70

Shiel, G., 65, 66

Shin, F., 141

Shklovsky, V., 246

Shor, I., 109

Short, K., 50, 53, 109

Short, K. G., 51, 54, 55

Showalter, E., 94

Shusterman, R., 99

Sidman, J., 2997

Siegel, M., 55, 56, 86

Siegel, S., 54

Sierra, J., 212

Silverman, F., 259

Silvey, A., 137, 476

Simmons, H. D., 166

Simmons, J. S., 449

Simms, E. M., 30

Simms, Z., 262

Simon, D., 486

Simon, S., 293

Sims [Bishop], R., 149

Sims Bishop, R., 83, 244

Sinclair, C., 191

Singer, I. B., 215, 218

Sinnette, E. D. V., 228

Sipe, L. R., 59, 238, 242, 243, 247, 276,

291, 294, 471, 500

Sis, P., 241, 249, 347

Skinner, D., xi

Skott, S., 409

Slater, M., 10,11

Sloan, G., 282

Sluys, K.V., 52

Smagorinsky, P., 2, 80

Smalls, I., 231

Smith, B. K., 481, 483

Smith, B., 451

Smith, C. L., 336

Smith, C. R., 16

Smith, D. E., 36

Smith, D. M., 214

Smith, E. B., 153

Smith, E. S., 181, 182, 185

Smith, F., 96

Smith, H. N., 199

Smith, J., 264, 350, 351, 352

Smith, K. P., 216, 234

Smith, L., 247, 347

Smith, M. A., 95

Smith, M., 69, 80, 286

Smolkin, L. B., 244, 294

Smyth, L., 44

Snowball, D. 57

Snyder, R. C., 367

Sobol, J., 211

Soderbergh, P. A., 201, 204

Soep, E., 44

Soler, J., 56, 60

Soo, K., 264

Sophocles, 316

Sorby, A., 277, 278, 279, 281

544

AUTHOR INDEX

Soter, A., 70, 81, 84

Soter, A. O., 317

Soto, L. D., 20

Sova, D. B., 449

Speare, E. G., 240, 241

Spears-Bunton, L. A., 83

Spector, K., 500

Spence, M. J., 25

Spiegelman, A., 41, 87

Spinelli, J., 54, 471

Spinks, S., 321

Spitz, E. H., 33, 43

Spodek, B., 20

Spring, J., 109

Springhall, J., 204

Spufford, F., 5

Spufford, M., 16, 17, 33

Spyri, J., 172, 191, 425

Stahl, J. D., 405

Stallybrass, P., 42

Stan, S., 404, 405, 407, 420, 480

Stanley, J., 295

Steele, A., 139

Steele, R., 182

Steig, M., 70, 482, 488

Stein, L. E., 101

Stein, N. L., 294

Steiner, W., 243

Stein eld, C., 98

Stephens, J., 213, 244, 339, 359, 360,

365, 498

Steptoe, J., 49, 231

Stern, D. N., 27

Stern, M. B., 197

Stevens, J., 240

Stevenson, D., 380

Stevenson, R. L., 4, 11

Stewart, P., 145

Stewig, J. W., 214

Stieg, W., 444, 448, 451

Stine, R. L., 197, 200, 203

Stine, R. L., 348

Stoddard, A., 216

Stolt, B., 411, 422

Stolze, R., 409

Stone, E., 211

Stone, J. C., 70

Stone, K., 211, 214

Stone, L., 105

Stossel, S., 484

Stott, J. C., 210, 308

Stottele, G., 480

Streatfeild, N., 374

Street, B. V., 40, 154

Street, D., 497

Strommen, L.T., 64

Stroud, J., 30

Sturm, B., 220

Styles, M., 6, 8, 44, 278, 281

Suárez-Orozco, C., 109

Suárez-Orozco, M., 109

Suellentrop, T., 139

Suhor, C., 242

Suina, J. H., 244

Sullivan, M., 140, 141, 142

Sullivan, R., 501

Sumara, D. J., 21, 59, 70, 72, 83

Sunder, M., 102

Surmatz, A., 409

Sutherland, K., 503

Sutherland, Z., 458-459, 475

Sutton, R., 461

Sweeney, T., 85

Swift, J., 181, 187

Tabbert, R., 405

Tadmor, N., 6, 7

Tafolla, C., 111

Takala, T., 435

Takemiya, K., 261

Talbot, M., 503

Talese, G., 291-292

Tan, S., 165, 168, 169, 250, 264

Tarbox, G. A., 201

Tarr A., 277, 282

Tatar, M., 33, 45, 213, 214

Tatham, J. C., 201

Tatum, A. W., 65

Taxel, J., 423, 482, 485

Taylor, D., 40, 53, 66

Taylor, I., 292

Taylor, J., 292, 513

Taylor, L., 499

Taylor, M. D., 70, 473, 489

Taylor, S., 350

Téllez, K., 117

Tello, J., 111

Teneyuca, S., 111

Teodorowicz-Hellman, E., 405

Tezuka, O., 261

Tharpe, T., 379

The New London Group, 69, 71, 72

Thein, A. H., 83, 165

Thomas, A., 101, 102

Thomas, F., 11, 12, 136

Thomas, J. T., Jr., 277, 278, 280, 281,

282, 285

Thompson, A., 110

Thompson, C., 262, 263, 400

Thompson, E. P., 12

Thompson, G., 66

Thompson, J., 264

Thompson, N., 87

Thompson, R. A., 476

Thompson, S., 211

Thomson, S., 197

Thomson-Wohlgemuth, G., 405, 411

Throop, R., 87

Thwaite, A., 502

Thwaite, M. F., 181, 183

Tif n, H., 336

Todd, R. J., 130, 131

Toelken, B., 210, 214

Tolkien, J. R. R., 351

Tomasello, M., 30

Tomlinson, C. M., 404, 407

Tompkins, K., 51

Topping, K., 65, 66

Torrance, N., 25

Torres. L., 115

Torres-Padilla, J. L., 109, 110

Toury, G., 407

Tower, C., 294

Townsend, J. R., 177, 178, 459, 465

Townsend, S., 309

Trager, H., 229

Traill, C. P., 191

Trice, F., 390

Triebel, A., 432

Trimmer, S., 456

Tripp, D., 500

Trites, R. S., 33, 45, 66, 67, 68, 215, 308,

310, 316, 317, 322, 323

Trollope, A., 382

Trousdale, A. M., 211

Tucker, N., 33, 479, 482, 485, 486

Tucker, N., 480

Turnbull, B., 11, 12

Turner, A., 150

Turner, E., 191

Turner, M., 168

Turner, V., 243

Twain, M., 88, 308

Tysvaer, N., 63

Udosen, A. E., 435

Ueland, B., 382

Ujiie, J., 475

Unsworth, L., 82, 295

Updike, J., 31

Urquhart, V., 97

Uther, H., 211

Valado, L., 405

Valdes-Rodriguez, A., 315

Valenzuela, A., 109, 110

Valldejuli, J. M., 109

Vallone L., 292

Van Allsburg, C., 248, 391

Van Dijk, T., 359, 360

van Elteren, M., 481

van Kleek, A., 295

van Leeuwen, T., 241, 244

Van Slyck, A., 142

Vande Velde, V., 214

Vasudevan, L., 87

Vázquez-Hernández, V., 110

Vélez, W., 109

Vélez-Ibañez, C., 110

Venuti, L., 425

Villanueva, V., 111

Villegas, A. M., 108

Vincent, D., 12

Vinz, R., 84

Von Stockar, D., 404

Von Ziegesar, C., 320

Vygotsky, L. S., 2,27, 28, 109

W., T., 188

Waetjen, J., 503

Wagner, B. J., 70

Wagner, J., 264

Walker, A., 218

Wallace, K., 158

Walter, S., 433

Walter, V., 136, 137, 139, 140, 142, 143,

318

545

AUTHOR INDEX

Wang, F., 347

Warlow, A., 34

Warner, M., 214

Warschauer, M., 105

Wasserman, E., 308

Watson, R., 42

Watson, V., 44, 459, 496

Watterson, B., 256, 264

Watts, I., 187

Watts, J., 149, 158

Waugh, P., 247

Weatherill, L., 17

Weaver, W., 405

Webber, T., 229, 232

Webster, A., 22

Webster, J., 3008

Wedwick, L., 66

Weiner, S., 259, 260

Weiss, J., 98

Weitzman, L. J., 473

Welborn, L., 128

Welsh, C., 182

Wensley, C., 497

Werlin, N., 324

Wertham, F., 259, 348

West, K. C., 88

West, P., 509-510

Westall, R., 520, 522

Westerfeld, S., 323, 327

Westhoff, J., 497

Whalen, C. T., 110

Whalen-Levitt, P., 420

Whalley, J. I., 292

Wharton, R. M., 487

Whedon, J., 327

Whelan, D. L., 125, 126, 390

Whelehan, I., 497

White, A., 42

White, D. N., 13, 15

White, E. B., 97, 306, 311, 346, 382, 390

Whiteside, T., 490

Wibbens, E., 281

Wickstrom, C. D., 204

Wiesner, D., 214, 246, 247

Wiesner, D., 472

Wild, M., 59, 247

Wilder, L. I., 452

Wilhelm, J. D., 70

Willems, P., 259

Willhoite, M., 448

Williams, A., 137, 141

Williams, B. T., 64

Williams, E., 432, 434, 435

Williams, G., 448

Williams, J., 430, 431, 432

Williams, R., 345, 483

Williams, V. B., 110

Willis, A. I., 82

Willis, I., 102

Willis, J., 423, 424, 425

Wilson, A., 262

Wilson, G. P., 72

Wilson, S., 291

Wimberly, L. H., 126

Winner, L. F., 503

Winston, S., 325

Wise, B., 66

Wittlinger, E., 464

Wofford, A., 123

Wohlwend, K. E., 500

Wojcik-Andrews, I., 497

Wolf, A., 309

Wolf, S. A., 5, 8, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 34,

44, 45, 58, 70, 79, 95, 113, 211, 489

Wolf, V. L., 308

Wolfe, T., 296

Wolff, V. E., 285

Wolk, D., 260

Wollach, R., 42, 43

Wolodko, 480

Woodson, C. G., 228, 229

Woodson, J., 92, 211, 231

Woolf, V., 455

Wu, L., 80

Wutz, J. A., 66

Wyile, A. S., 362

Wyler, L., 412

Wyn, J., 79

Wyss, S. E., 150

Xie, S., 347

Xu, S. H., 491

Yagelski, R., 81

Yamazaki, A., 411

Yang, G. L., 84, 169., 265

Yashinsky, D., 211

Yates, E., 374, 383

Yenika-Agbaw, V., 54

Yep, L., 92

Ylimaki, R., 59

Yoda, T., 98

Yolen, J., 71, 213, 491

Yosso, T., 109

Young, H., 386

Young, J. P., 84

Zancanella, D., 77

Zeiser, S., 80

Zelinsky, P., 243

Ziarnik, N., 136

Zimmerman, S., 57

Zipes, J. P., 184, 213, 292, 406, 481, 482,

483, 486, 487, 488, 491, 504

Žižek, S., 348

Zusak, M., 319, 321, 327–328, 347

Subject Index

547

Page numbers in italic refer to  gures or

tables.

Abbott, Jacob, 199

series books, 199

Access, 104–105, 177

Access features, non ction literature, 296

Active reader, 94

Adaptations

children’s literature, 496–499

consumer-produced, 504–505

enunciation, 497

form, 497

interpreting, 498

narrative, 497

new audiences, 499

pluralities and pleasures, 497

research into young people’s

comprehension, 499–501

textual analysis, 498–499

translation, 408–409

Adolescents

adolescence de ned, 63

adolescent literature, middle-level

literature, contrasted, 66–68, 67

characterizing, 79–80

constructing contemporary

adolescence, 322–323

engagement, 65–66

identity, 79

middle-level literature

categories for interpreting middle-

level reading engagement, 69–72

drama, 70–72

instructional contexts, 68–69

readers’ response, 70–72

shifting practices, 69–70

motivation, 65–66

new directions for research, 72–73

reading

BOOKMATCH, 66

characteristics of literature by

category, 66–68, 67

de ning middle-level narratives,

66–68, 67

interpretation, 64–65

re-imagining literature education for

young adolescents, 63–73

social worlds, 64–65

Advocacy groups, censorship, 448–449

Aesthetic choices, non ction literature,

296

Africa

children’s reading material, 433–434

developing countries, 432–433

Ethiopia, 432–433

reading programmes, 434–436

African American children’s literature,

225–235, 236–237

within American children’s literature,

226–228

creating historical framework,

228–230

creators, 230–234

development, 228–235

history, 226–235

The Hundred Penny Box (Mathis,

1976), 231–232

need for, 225–226

parent/child reading, 236–237

The Patchwork Quilt (Flournoy, 1985),

232–233

picturebooks, 231–234, 244–245

research process, 228–230

research studies, 227–228

Things I Like About Grandma

(Haskins, 1992), 233–234

African American communities,

sociocultural context, 40

Agency, 364–367

Alcott, Louisa May, Orchard House

museum, 509–511

Alphabetic notation, 25

Alphabetization, 21–22

perception, 27

phenomenological analysis, 27

American Folklore Society, 214

American Library Association, 386–387

Appropriation, 398

Archives, 386–392

acquisition, 389

international, 388–389

Internet, 396–392

locating, 383–394, 386–387

on-site procedures, 391–392

preliminary procedures, 391–392

special collections, 396–392

United States, 387–388

Arne Nixon Center for the Study of

Children’s Literature, 387

The Arrival (Tan, 2007), 168–170

Association of Library Service to

Children, 386–387

Australian children’s literature, 513–515

Authenticity

culture, 244

indigenous texts, 338

Authority, culture, 244

Authors,see Writers

Awards, 467–477

awarding process research, 474

ethnicity, 473

gender, 474

historical impact of trends, 473–474

history, 468–469

impact, 472–473

548

SUBJECT INDEX

Awards (continued)

lack of correlation between awards

selected by adults and by children,

474

process, 469–470

relationship between award-winning

books and popular reading

material, 474–475

research, 470–472

researchable issues related, 472–475

selection, 473, 477

types, 469

who de nes excellence, 475

The Baldwin Library of Historical

Children’s Literature, 387

Bertelsmann, 486

Betsy-Tacy books, 374, 383

Biblical texts, 35, 42

Bilingual teachers

identity, 111–113

multicultural contexts, 108–118

Bisexual, see Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/

or transgender themed literature

Blogs, reviewing, 462–463

Bone (Smith, 2004)

cultural studies, 350–354, 355–358, 356

graphic novels, 350–354, 355–358, 356

BOOKMATCH, 66

Book people, child people, distinction

between, 177

Books, see also Speci c type

as home, 32–45

home reading, 14–15

Borders, picturebooks, 243

Brer Rabbit stories, 215–220, 223–224

Canon wars, English departments, 345

Censorship, 44, 443–453

advocacy groups, 448–449

book as role model, 445

challenge process, 447–448

de ned, 443

history, 445

in-depth censorship studies, 449–451

obscene content

arguments, 445–446

de nitions, 445–446

public complainant, 447

public response, 446

reading-effects research, 451–452

reasons for, 444–445

research, 449

selection, 446

sexual content

arguments, 445–446

de nitions, 445–446

vignettes, 444

vs. selection, 446

Centre for Children’s Books

England, 519–523

museums, 519–523

Chapbooks, 42

Chapter books, length, 303–305

Chihiro Art Museum, 515–516

Childhood, ephemera of, 4

Child people, book people, distinction

between, 177

Children’s book publishing economics,

479–493

children’s books as idea factories, 488

cross-media synergies, 488

dominant media corporations, 484–487

economic power and individual agency,

483–484

future directions, 490–492

global capitalism, 482–483

global children’s culture industry, 483

Harry Potter phenomenon, 481–482

history, 479–481, 484–487

marketing, 487–490

media consolidation, 485–487

merchandizing, 487–490

perfect storm, 481–482

sequels, 489–490

series books, 489–490

writers as brands, 488–489

Children’s literature

18th-century manuscript collection, 44

across borders, 405–407

adaptations, 496–499

African American (See African

American children’s literature)

counter story, 33–45

effects on universities, 345–346

folklore, 209–220, 223–224

American Folklore Society, 214

background, 210–215

brave Cinderellas, 210–215

Brer Rabbit stories, 215–220,

223–224

children as a primary audience, 210

context, 215–220

contradictory relationships, 213

developmentally, 211

foreground, 215–220

non-European, 213–214

oral formation, 211

psychoanalytic approach, 213

storytelling, 210–215

text, 215–220

history, 41, 179–192, 193–194,

345–346

18th-century growth, 190

19th century, 190–191

audience, 181

beginnings of publishing for

children, 188

classical era to Gutenberg, 184

comic books, 194

complications crafting genre history,

179–184

de nition, 179–180

didacticism, 180–181, 193

early print to the Puritans, 184–186

enlightenment-era works, 186–188

fantasy, 190–191

folklore, 186–188

folktales, 190–191

global growth, 191–192

human nature, 182–184

literature vs. entertainment, 193–194

Newbery, John, 188–189

novels, 186–188

poetry, 186–188

practicality, 181–182

literary critics, 177–178

need for scholarly research, 525–526

presence of hidden adult, 178

presence of hidden child, 178

shadow text, 178

storied romance, 34

who de nes excellence, 475

Children’s Literature Association, 178

Children’s Literature Center at the

Library of Congress, 388

Children’s literature museums, Europe,

519–523

Children’s Literature Research

Collection, 388

Children’s novels, 302–312

common genres, 310–311

de ning, 303

epistolary novels, 308–310

length, 303–305

literary mode, 305–308

novels of growth and change, 310

novel subgenera, 305–308

realism, fake realism, 311–312

verse novels, 308–310

writers, 313–314

Children’s reading material, Africa,

433–434

Children’s worlds of reading, 44

Chirographic bias, 20–21

Cinderella, 211–215

Civil Rights movement, 38

Classroom reading, lesbian, gay, bisexual,

and/or transgender themed

literature, 150–153

College, personal narrative, 37–38

Color, picturebooks, 240–241

Comics, 36, 40–41, 42, 256–265, See also

Graphic novels

book challenges, 262–263

collectors vs. readers, 263–264

Comics Code, 259

creating, 272–274

current trends, 264–265

de nitions, 257–258

direct markets, 260

history, 259–260

misconceptions, 262

publishing, 263–264

stereotypes, 262

superheroes, 259–260

terminology, 257–258

underground, 260

Comics Code, 259

Comics literacy, 258–259

Comic strips, 259

Communities, Latina/o children’s

literature, 109–110

Context

loss of, 27–28

Continuing characters, series books, 199

Contra narratives, meta-narratives, 44–45

Cosmopolitan intellectuals, immigrant

students, 164–175

549

SUBJECT INDEX

The Arrival (Tan, 2007), 168–170

cosmopolitanism in community,

167–168

cosmopolitan student writing, 170–

172, 171

cosmopolitan teaching suggestions,

172–174

curricular responsibility, 168

epistemic privilege, 166–167

equity, 167

hybridity, 169–170

identities blend, 172

learner’s stance by teachers, 173

literature from postcolonial south, 173

multilingualism, 173

phenomenology of migration, 169–170

standardization, 173–174

texts, 168–172

texts within inquiry approach, 172–173

why cosmopolitanism, 166–168

Cotsen Children’s Library, 387

Creativity, home reading, 5

Critical caring, Latina/o children’s

literature, 109–110

Critical engagement, 104

Critical readers, 12

Critical social inquiry

gender, 52

literature, 51–52

racism, 52

Critical thinking, 49

Criticism, home reading, 5

Critique groups, 381–382

Crosscultural reception, 404–414

Cross-media synergies, children’s book

publishing economics, 488

Cultural context, translation, 410–411

Cultural historians, 177–178

Cultural identity, 53–54

Cultural modeling, 81

Cultural resources, Latina/o children’s

literature, 109–110

Cultural sites, secondary school, 84

Cultural studies, 345–354

Bone (Smith, 2004), 350–354, 355–

358, 356

curriculum, 346–347

graphic novels, 350–354, 355–358, 356

history, 345–347

unconscious, 347–348

Culture

authenticity, 244

authority, 244

poetry, 285

secondary school, 83–84

Curriculum

cultural studies, 346–347

curricular responsibility, 168

De Grummond Children’s Literature

Collection, 387–388

Detective story, series books, 200

Developing countries

Ethiopia, 432–433

instruction media, 432–433

language policies, 432–433

places for youth reading, 430–437

reading programmes, 434–436

Dialogue

expanding, 52–53

literature, 56

national reading, 56

representation, relationship, 55, 55–56

DiaspoRican, 109

Didacticism, 180–181, 193

Difference, 33

Digital age readers, school library,

126–127

readers’ advisory services, 127

Digital collections, public libraries,

144–145

Digital literacy, home reading, 16

Dime novels, 195–205

attractions of, 195–196

history, 196–199

popular culture, 198

scorned literature and pernicious

reading, 203–205

story types, 199

Disciplinary discourse, secondary school,

80–82

history, 80–81

static nature, 80

Discourse borders, immigrant students,

84, 85

Discrimination, 37

Displacement, 197

Diversity, picturebooks, 244–246

Domestication, translation, 409–410

Dramas, 70–72

Dromkeen Collection of Australian

Children’s Literature, museums,

513–515

E-books, public libraries, 144–145

Education, context of 21st-century

classrooms, 165–166

Elementary school

literature

changing political policies, 49–50

international perspective, 49–50

literature’s place in reading

education, 48–60

reading literature in elementary

classrooms, 48–60

literature circles, 49

personal narrative, 35–36

race, 36

Embodied context, 24

Engagement, 177

adolescents, 65–66

England, Centre for Children’s Books,

519–523

English departments, 345

canon wars, 345

English language

globalization process, 77

outdated representations, 77

as school subject, 76–77

English language learners, secondary

school, 77

Entering a text, phenomenology, 28

Enunciation, adaptations, 497

Ephemera, 4

Epistemic privilege, 166–167

Epistolary novels

children’s novels, 308–310

young adult novels, 308–310

Equity, 104–105, 167

Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art

museums, 517–518

picturebooks, 517–518

Ethics

interpretation, 331–341, 342–344

representation, 331–341, 342–344

Ethiopia

Africa, 432–433

developing countries, 432–433

instruction media, 432–433

language policies, 432–433

reading culture, 439–442

Ethnicity, awards, 473

Europe, children’s literature museums,

519–523

Everyday texts, 52–53

Exclusion, 37

Fan  ction, 100–103

Harry Potter fan  ction, 102–103

slash  ction, 102–103

Fear Street titles, 203

Fifty Cent Juveniles, 201

Folklore

children’s literature, 209–220, 223–224

American Folklore Society, 214

background, 210–215

brave Cinderellas, 210–215

Brer Rabbit stories, 215–220,

223–224

children as a primary audience, 210

context, 215–220

contradictory relationships, 213

developmentally, 211

foreground, 215–220

non-European, 213–214

oral formation, 211

psychoanalytic approach, 213

storytelling, 210–215

text, 215–220

oral tradition, 210

storytelling, 211–215

Foreignization, translation, 409–410

Form

adaptations, 497

non ction literature, continuum, 296–

297, 297

Foster family, 35

Franzen, Johnathan, 38–39

Gay,see Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/or

transgender themed literature

Gender

awards, 474

critical social inquiry, 52

ideology, 364–367

picturebooks, 245

reading

550

SUBJECT INDEX

Gender (continued)

art, 41–42

women who read as dangerous,

41–42

series books, 201–202

Genre, as nexus, 302–312

Ghostwriters, series books, 200–201

Global capitalism, children’s book

publishing economics, 482–483

Global children’s culture industry, 483

Globalization

characterized, 79

comparative study, 164–165

English language in process of, 77

hybrid identities, 79

immigrant students, 165

literature, teaching/learning, 78–80

Graphic novels, 40–41, 256–265, See also

Comics

audiences, 263–264

Bone (Smith, 2004), 350–354, 355–

358, 356

cultural studies, 350–354, 355–358,

356

de nitions, 257–258

hybrid series, 257

production, 268, 268–271, 269, 270,

271

terminology, 257–258

Gutters, picturebooks, 243–244

Harry Potter, 495

children’s book publishing economics,

481–482

fan  ction, 102–103

Hip-hop, 99

Home reading

18th-century family case studies, 5–9

18th to 21st centuries, 4–18

19th century, 9–12

anglocentric scope study, 5

books, 14–15

connections, 5

contemporary case studies, 13–16

counter story, 33–45

creativity, 5

criticism, 5

digital literacy, 16

Johnson, Jane, 6, 7, 8

learning to read, 15–16

literate environments, 7–8

longitudinal studies, 13–14

orality, 15

popular culture, 16

reading environments, 14–15

re-creations, 15

socioeconomic status, 5, 33–45

text-to-life connections, 15

visual image, 16

writers, 9–12

Home-schooled education, 4

The Horn Book Magazine, reviewing,

460

House museums, 509–513

Hybrid formats, picturebooks, 249–250

Hybrid identities, globalization, 79

Hybridity, 169–170

secondary school, 84–86

IBBY, 397, 400

Iconography, non ction literature, 296

Identity, 177

blending, 172

conceptions, 82–84

importance, 110

Latina/o students, need for resilient

literacy identities, 109–110

secondary school, 82–84

formation, 76–88

teachers

mediation of teachers’ learning,

113–117

need for resilient literacy identities,

109–110

pedagogical practices, 113–117

Ideology, 359–370

agency, 364–367

gender, 364–367

grounding assumption, 360

imagination, 363–364

intersubjective relationships, 364–367

non- ction literature, 360–361

picturebooks, 244–246, 360, 361

social norms, 361

subject position, 362–363

textual presences, 361–362

transgression, 367–370

writers, 372–373

Illuminated manuscripts, 42

Illustrated books, 40–41

Imagination

ideology, 363–364

writers, 39

Immigrant students

context of 21st-century classrooms,

165–166

cosmopolitan intellectuals, 164–175

The Arrival (Tan, 2007), 168–170

cosmopolitanism in community,

167–168

cosmopolitan student writing, 170–

172, 171

cosmopolitan teaching suggestions,

172–174

curricular responsibility, 168

epistemic privilege, 166–167

equity, 167

hybridity, 169–170

identities blend, 172

learner’s stance by teachers, 173

literature from postcolonial south, 173

multilingualism, 173

phenomenology of migration,

169–170

standardization, 173–174

texts, 168–172

texts within inquiry approach,

172–173

why cosmopolitanism, 166–168

discourse borders, 84, 85

globalization, 165

student literary agency, 165

Implied reader, translation, 419–426,

428–429

becoming the implied reader, 425–426

communicating across cultures,

420–421

culture-speci c items, 425

English-to-Greek picturebook

translations, 421–425

narrative style, 424–425

voice, 424–425

Independent reading, 58–59

Indigenous texts, 331–341, 342–344

authenticity, 338

Dust Echoes project, 334–336

linguistic features, 338–341

narrative features, 338–341

postcolonial literary theories, 338–341

reading, 334–338

contemporary indigenous  ction,

336–338

representing indigeneity from the

outside, 338–341

retelling, 332–334

settler society historical novels,

340–341

traditional texts, 332–334

writers, 342–344

In uence, young adult literature, 315–316

Informational picturebooks, 248

Innovation, young adult literature, 324

Inquiry, expanding, 52–53

Instruction media

developing countries, 432–433

Ethiopia, 432–433

Instrumental purpose, reading, 37

International literature, 397–403

postcolonial studies, 398

translation, 417–418

where worlds meet, 397–403

writers, 399–403

International texts, writers, 438–440

International Youth Library, 388

Internet

archives, 396–392

special collections, 396–392

Interpretation, ethics, 331–341, 342–344

Intersubjective relationships, ideology,

364–367

Intertextuality, 103–104

picturebooks, 243

writing curricula, 93–94

The Invention of Hugo Cabret (Selznick,

2007), literary polysystem,

349–350

I-search paper, 32

Japanese manga, history, 260–262

Johnson, Jane, 44

home reading, 6, 7, 8

Junie B. Jones books, 204–205

K-12 curriculum, authors as mentors,

94–98

Kerlan Collection of Children’s

Literature, 388

551

SUBJECT INDEX

Kidlitosphere, public libraries, 143–145

Kindergarten, 22–24

Language

disciplining nature of, 94

embodied contexts, 20

generative, 24–25

sociocultural context, 40

Language policies

developing countries, 432–433

Ethiopia, 432–433

Latin American Studies, oral stories, 38

Latina/o children’s literature

communities, 109–110

critical caring, 109–110

cultural resources, 109–110

multicultural contexts, 108–118

author studies of local writers in

New York, 111–113

case studies, 111–113

deconstructing dominant discourses,

111–113

discourse matters, 110

identity matters, 110

literacy journey boxes, 111–113, 112

literary journeys in teacher

education, 111–113

literary study and beginning of an

Us, 110

locating research and directions for

literary study, 110

memorias, 111–113

Latina/o students, need for resilient

literacy identities, 109–110

Latina/o teachers, multicultural contexts,

108–118

Learning to read, home reading, 15–16

Length

chapter books, 303–305

children’s novels, 303–305

picturebooks, 254, 254, 255

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/or transgender

themed literature, 148–152

classroom reading, 150–153

consequences, 153, 156, 160–161

de ning readers, 151, 154, 157

de ning texts, 152–153, 155–156,

157–160

interpreting contexts, 149–150

interpreting literature, 149–150

out-of-school lesbian, gay, bisexual,

transgender and/or queer youth

community readings, 154–156

reading in queer-friendly contexts

among lesbian, gay, bisexual,

transgender and/or queer people

and their allies, 156–161

text selection, 152, 155, 157–158

what texts were asked to do, 153, 156,

159–160

what was done to and with texts, 152–

153, 155–156, 158–160

Librarianship, selection, 447

Libraries, see also Speci c type

Library of Congress, Children’s Literature

Center, 388

Life course, metaphors, 45

Line, picturebooks, 240–241

Linguistic features, indigenous texts,

338–341

Literacy

comics literacy, 258–259

mainstream cultural belief, 21

meaning across cultures and situations,

memory, 21

non-literate cultures, 21–22

personal narrative, 32–45

questioning value of, 20–29

reading strategically, 57

routes to, 32–45

transformation from orality to

literature, 20

Literacy borrowing, 92

Literacy journey boxes, 111–113, 112

Literacy practices, urban youth, 85–86

Literary critics, children’s literature,

177–178

Literary form, meaning, relating, 57–58

Literary historians, 177–178

Literary mode, children’s novels, 305–

308

Literary polysystem, The Invention of

Hugo Cabret (Selznick, 2007),

349–350

Literary studies

beyond the book, 349

traditional, 345

Literary translation studies, 407–408

Literate environments, home reading,

7–8

Literature, see also Children’s literature

critical social inquiry, 51–52

dialogue, 56

elementary school

changing political policies, 49–50

international perspective, 49–50

literature’s place in reading

education, 48–60

reading literature in elementary

classrooms, 48–60

experienced as democratic life, 51

globalization, teaching/learning,

78–80

as inquiry into life, 50

learning to read interculturally, 54–55

limits of knowing through literature,

50–51

multimodality, 86–88

national reading, 56

from postcolonial south, 173

reading education, relationship, 56–59

reading strategically, 57

secondary school, 76–88

primary function, 78

purpose of “English” as school

subject, 76–77

transforming, 88

as way of knowing, 50

Literature circles, elementary school, 49

Little Golden Books, 487

Loneliness, writers, 39

Loss of context, reading, 27–28

Manga

audiences, 261–262

comic strips to magazines, 261

history, 260–262

Marginalization, Nancy Drew, 202–203

Marketing, children’s book publishing

economics, 487–490

May Massee Collection, 388

Meaning, literary form, relating, 57–58

Media

affordances

economic study, 501–502

political study, 501–502

limits

economic study, 501–502

political study, 501–502

Media consolidation, children’s book

publishing economics, 485–487

Memorias, 111–113

Memory, literacy, 21

Mentor texts, 92

Merchandizing, children’s book

publishing economics, 487–490

Merch Group, Random House, 486

Message, writers, 372–373

Meta-narratives, contra narratives, 44–45

Middle-level literature

adolescent literature, contrasted,

66–68, 67

adolescents

categories for interpreting middle-

level reading engagement, 69–72

drama, 70–72

instructional contexts, 68–69

readers’ response, 70–72

shifting practices, 69–70

Middle school, 63–73

Montgomery, Lucy Maud, Green Gables

museum, 511–512

Moore, Anne Carroll, reviewing, 457–458

Motivation, adolescents, 65–66

Multicultural contexts

bilingual teachers, 108–118

Latina/o children’s literature, 108–118

author studies of local writers in

New York, 111–113

case studies, 111–113

deconstructing dominant discourses,

111–113

discourse matters, 110

identity matters, 110

literacy journey boxes, 111–113, 112

literary journeys in teacher

education, 111–113

literary study and beginning of an

Us, 110

locating research and directions for

literary study, 110

memorias, 111–113

Latina/o teachers, 108–118

preservice teachers, 108–118

Multilingualism, 173

Multimodality

literature, 86–88

secondary school, 86–88

Museums, 508–523

552

SUBJECT INDEX

Museums (continued)

Alcott, Louisa May, Orchard House,

509–511

Centre for Children’s Books, 519–523

Chihiro Art Museum, 515–516

Dromkeen Collection of Australian

Children’s Literature, 513–515

Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book

Art, 517–518

Montgomery, Lucy Maud, Green

Gables, 511–512

new literary museums, 513–523

picturebooks, 515–516

Potter, Beatrix, Hill Top Farm, 512–

513

Mysteries

series books, 200

Nancy Drew, 202–203

marginalization, 202–203

Narrative discourse, 360

Narrative features, indigenous texts,

338–341

National Board Library Media Standards,

school library, 123

National identity, 501

National Planning of Special Collections

Committee, 386–387

National reading

dialogue, 56

literature, 56

National Reading Panel, school library,

124

National reading policy, school library,

124–125

Newbery, John, 188–189

New media, picturebooks, 249

No Child Left Behind

school librarians, 124–125

school library, 124–125

Non ction literature, 290–298, 299–301,

301

access features, 296

aesthetic choices, 296

awards, 293–294

de ning, 291–292

form, continuum, 296–297, 297

history of, 292–293

iconography, 296

ideology, 360–361

reviews, 293–294

scholarship, 294

new directions, 294–297

style, 296

continuum, 296–297, 297

textual structures, 294–295, 295

visual elements, 295

meaning-making, 295–296

writers, 299–301

Non-literate cultures, literacy, 21–22

Obscene content, censorship

arguments, 445–446

de nitions, 445–446

Online awards, public libraries, 145

Online reviewing, public libraries, 144

Online venues, public libraries, 143–145

Oral language experience

constituents, 24–25

home reading, 15

key themes, 24–25

transformation from orality to

literature, 20

Oral narratives, 52–53

Oral poetry, 277

Oral stories, Latin American Studies, 38

Oral tradition, folklore, 210

Page breaks/turns, picturebooks, 243

Pantheon, 486

Parent/child reading

African American children’s literature,

236–237

historical account, 4–18

over time, 4–18

reading patterns, 4–18

spiritual convictions, 41

Parents, socioeconomic status, 34

Pathway, metaphors, 45

Perception

alphabetization, 27

reading, 25–27

to be alphabetized, 25

Performance, 11–12

Phenomenology

entering a text, 28

reading, 20–29

speaking, 20–29

speech act, kindergarten, 22–24

Phenomenology of migration, 169–170

Picturebooks (picture books), 40–41,

238–250, 252–255

as aesthetic objects, 240–244

African American children’s literature,

244–245

appeal to wide range of readers, 247

blurring of formats, 249–250

borders, 243

breaking frame, 243

color, 240–241

diversity, 244–246

Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book

Art, 517–518

gender, 245

gutters, 243–244

hybrid formats, 249–250

ideology, 244–246, 360, 361

incorporation of multi-modalities,

248–249

informational picturebooks, 248

intertextuality, 243

length, 254, 254, 255

line, 240–241

literary/visual format, 238

museums, 515–516

new directions, 246–250

new media, 249

overview, 241–242

page breaks/turns, 243

pictorial turn, 246–247

postmodern picturebooks, 247–248

process of producing, 239–240

production, 252–253, 253

qualities, 240–244

relationship of words and pictures,

242–243

shape, 240–241

sociocultural contexts, 245–246

technology, 239–240

texture, 240–241

translations, 413, 421–425

Poetry, 98–100, 100, 275–286, 287–289

18th century, 278

19th century, 278–279

20th century, 278–279

20th-century American culture and

education, 279–280

authorship, 284, 287–289

awards, 283

for children de ned, 276

contemporary, 282–286

culture, 285

domesticated playground poetry,

280–282

forms, 284–285

history in U.S., 278–282

intended audience, 284

in lives of children, 276–278

new form of “school” poetry, 280

oral poetry, 277

origins, 277

presentation, 285–286

recent trends, 283–286

Popular culture

dime novels, 198

home reading, 16

young adult literature, 321–322

Popular  ction, expansion of reading,

196–198

Popular literature, 203–204

scorned literature and pernicious

reading, 203–205

Postcolonial literary theories

indigenous texts, 338–341

international literature, 398

Postcolonial literature, 85

Postmodern picturebooks, 247–248

Potter, Beatrix, Hill Top Farm museum,

512–513

Power, 94

Preservice teachers, multicultural

contexts, 108–118

Problem solving, 95–96

Professional journals, reviewing, 458–459

Proper names, translation, 411–412

Public libraries, 134–145

circulation of children’s materials, 135

collection development, 137

concept of youth development, 141–

142

digital collections, 144–145

e-books, 144–145

functions, 136–143

governance, 135

history, 135

interactive, 145

kidlitosphere, 143–145

lack of, 430–431

553

SUBJECT INDEX

online awards, 145

online reviewing, 144

online venues, 143–145

principles and values, 136

public spaces, 142–143

readers’ advisory services, 137–138

reading promotion, 144

reference service, 138–139

roles, 135

school library, practices compared, 136

summer reading programs, 139–141

year-round programming, 141

youth services development, 135–136

youth services history, 135–136

youth services librarianship core

functions, 136–137

Public spaces, public libraries, 142–143

Puerto Rican/DiaspoRican scholars, 109

Puerto Rican identity, 109

Queer, see Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/or

transgender themed literature

Race

elementary school, 36

secondary school, 83–84

socioeconomic status, 39–40

Racism, 37

critical social inquiry, 52

Random House, Merch Group, 486

Rap, 85, 98, 99

Reader response theories, 94

Readers

modeled-habit variety, 38–39

self-identity as, 39

social isolate, 39

Readers’ advisory services, public

libraries, 137–138

Reading

adolescents

BOOKMATCH, 66

characteristics of literature by

category, 66–68, 67

de ning middle-level narratives,

66–68, 67

interpretation, 64–65

childhood discovery of literature,

38–39

chirographic bias, 20–21

cognitive understanding, 43

counter story, 33–45

gender

art, 41–42

women who read as dangerous,

41–42

instrumental purpose, 37

learning to read interculturally, 54–55

loss of context, 27–28

opportunity and danger, 41–42

in oral world, 26

paths, 32–45

perception, 25–27

to be alphabetized, 25

for personal purposes, 58–59

phenomenology, 20–29

secondary school, 76–88

social worlds, 64–65

stolen time, 34–35

storied romance, 34

symbolic order, 27–29

as technology, 20–21

to transform understanding, 59

work narratives, 34–35

writers

access, 104–105

author-inspired writing outside of

school, 98–100

contexts for explicit engagement

with authorial mentors, 97–98

critical engagement, 104

equity, 104–105

fan  ction, 100–103

Harry Potter fan  ction, 102–103

hip-hop, 99

intertextuality, 103–104

literature as inspiration, 104

literature as “model,” 103–104

performance, 98–100, 100

poetry, 98–100, 100

problem solving, 95–96

rap lyrics, 98, 99

reading like writer, 96–97

relationship between, 92–105

socially engaged writing, 98–100,

100

writing as transformation, 104

writing, intertwined nature, 92–105

written texts undermining authority,

42–43

Reading culture, Ethiopia, 439–442

Reading education

literature, relationship, 56–59

as political act, 59–60

Reading environments, home reading,

14–15

Reading indigeneity, 331–341, 342–344

Reading patterns, parent/child reading,

4–18

Reading programmes

Africa, 434–436

developing regions, 434–436

Reading promotion, public libraries, 144

Reading strategically

literacy, 57

literature, 57

Reading-writing connection, 92–105

Realism, 197

children’s novels, fake realism, 311–

312

young adult adult novels, fake realism,

311–312

Re-creations, home reading, 15

Reference service, public libraries,

138–139

Refugees, writers, 401–402

Repetition, young adult literature,

323–324

Representation

dialogue, relationship, 55, 55–56

ethics, 331–341, 342–344

Retelling, indigenous texts, 332–334

Reviewing, 455–465

America, 459–462

blogs, 462–463

Britain, 459

criticisms, 461–462

history, 456

The Horn Book Magazine, 460

Moore, Anne Carroll, 457–458

present and future directions, 462–463

professional journals, 458–459

rise in America, 457

self-posted reader review, 463

summary pro les, 460–461

technology, 462–463

Trimmer, Mrs. (Sarah), 454, 455–456

writing book reviews, 463–465

Rizal, José, 164–175

Romance, 196–197

School librarians

demographics, 122–123

historical aspects, 122–123

No Child Left Behind, 124–125

numbers of, 122–123

School libraries, 121–131

demographics, 122–123

digital age readers, 126–127

readers’ advisory services, 127

foundation of transformation, 122–125

guidelines, 123

historical aspects, 122–123

impact studies, 128–129

improving literacy through, 125

library faith, 125

National Board Library Media

Standards, 123

National Reading Panel, 124

national reading policy, 124–125

No Child Left Behind, 124–125

numbers of school librarians, 122–123

public libraries, practices compared,

136

representing all children, 126

schoolwide and national school-based

reading events, 127–128

societal change, developing collections

re ecting, 125–128

standards, 123

technology, 129–130

transformation, 121–131

motivation, 125–128

reading achievement, 128–131

teaching skills for transformation,

130

value for reading from students’ point

of view, 130–131

Secondary school

cultural sites, 84

culture, 83–84

disciplinary discourse, 80–82

history, 80–81

static nature, 80

English language learners, 77

hybridity, 84–86

identity, 82–84

identity formation, 76–88

literature, 76–88

554

SUBJECT INDEX

Secondary school (continued)

primary function, 78

purpose of “English” as school

subject, 76–77

transforming, 88

multimodality, 86–88

participatory or exclusionary nature of

classroom practices, 83

race, 83–84

reading, 76–88

testing, 76–88

text selection, 76–88

Selection

awards, 473, 477

censorship, 446

librarianship, 447

Sense, symbol, 24

Sequels, children’s book publishing

economics, 489–490

Sequential art, 238

new directions, 246–250

Series books, 195–205, 207–208

Abbott, Jacob, 199

appeal to children, 201

attractions of, 195–196

children’s book publishing economics,

489–490

continuing characters, 199

detective story, 200

gender, 201–202

ghostwriters, 200–201

history, 196–199, 199–203

hybrids, 200

scorned literature and pernicious

reading, 203–205

Stratemeyer, Edward, 200–203

Sexual content, censorship

arguments, 445–446

de nitions, 445–446

Shape, picturebooks, 240–241

Shared worlds, 24

Slash  ction, fan  ction, 102–103

Social contagion, 400

Socially engaged writing, 98–100, 100

Social norms, ideology, 361

Social worlds

adolescents, 64–65

reading, 64–65

Societal change, school library,

developing collections re ecting,

125–128

Sociocultural contexts

African American communities, 40

language, 40

picturebooks, 245–246

Socioeconomic status

home reading, 5, 33–45

parents, 34

race, 39–40

working-class readers, 12

Spanish literature, 37

Speaking

phenomenology, 20–29

thinking, 24

Special collections, 386–392

acquisition, 389

archives, 396–392

international, 388–389

Internet, 396–392

locating, 383–394, 386–387

on-site procedures, 391–392

preliminary procedures, 391–392

tales of discovery, 389–391, 393–394

technology, 396–392

United States, 387–388

Speech act, phenomenology,

kindergarten, 22–24

Spin-offs

commodities, 502–503

consumer-produced, 495–505

services, 502–503

toys, 502–503

Standardization, 173–174

Stolen time, reading, 34–35

Storytelling, 11–12

folklore, 211–215

Strategic reading, 57

Stratemeyer, Edward, series books,

200–203

Student literary agency, immigrant

students, 165

Style, non ction literature, 296

continuum, 296–297, 297

Subjectivity, 177

Subject position, ideology, 362–363

Summer reading programs, public

libraries, 139–141

Sunday schools, 12

Superheroes, comics, 259–260

Symbol, sense, 24

Symbolic order, reading, 27–29

Synesthesia, 26–27

Teachers, identity

mediation of teachers’ learning,

113–117

need for resilient literacy identities,

109–110

pedagogical practices, 113–117

Technology

picturebooks, 239–240

reviewing, 462–463

school library, 129–130

special collections, 396–392

Television, 501

Testing, secondary school, 76–88

Text-to-life connections, home reading,

Textual critics, 177–178

Textuality, 177

as technology, 21–22

Textual structures, non ction literature,

294–295, 295

Texture, picturebooks, 240–241

Thinking, speaking, relationship, 24

To Kill a Mocking Bird (Lee, 1960), 71

Traditional texts, indigenous texts,

332–334

Trajectory, metaphors, 45

Transformation, school library, 121–131

motivation, 125–128

reading achievement, 128–131

teaching skills for transformation, 130

Transgender, see Lesbian, gay, bisexual,

and/or transgender themed

literature

Transgression, ideology, 367–370

Translation, 404–414

adaptation, 408–409

cultural context, 410–411

domestication, 409–410

foreignization, 409–410

implied reader, 419–426, 428–429

becoming implied reader, 425–426

communicating across cultures,

420–421

culture-speci c items, 425

English-to-Greek picturebook

translations, 421–425

narrative style, 424–425

voice, 424–425

international literature, 417–418

literary translation studies, 407–408

narrative, 412

picturebooks, 413, 421–425

proper names, 411–412

strategies, 409–410

tanslating the untranslatable, 412–413

translators’ voices, 413–414

Translators, 417–418

dif

culties, 428–429

translators’ voices, 413–414

Trimmer, Mrs. (Sarah), reviewing, 454,

455–456

Trixie Belden series, 207–208

Unconscious, cultural studies, 347–348

Urban youth, literacy practices, 85–86

U.S. Puerto Rican communities, archives

of El Centro’s collection, 116–117

USBBY, 400, 403

Verse novels

children’s novels, 308–310

young adult novels, 308–310

Vertical perspective, 45

Visual elements, non ction literature,

295

meaning-making, 295–296

Visual illustration, 39

Visual image, home reading, 16

Working-class readers, 12

Work narratives, reading, 34–35

Writers

African American children’s literature,

230–234

ambiguity, 372–373

author’s perspective, 374–383, 384–

385

becoming children’s writer, 374–383

children’s book publishing economics,

authors as brands, 488–489

children’s novels, 313–314

critique, 381–382

getting idea, 376–378

getting published, 375–376

555

SUBJECT INDEX

home reading, 9–12

ideology, 372–373

imagination, 39

indigenous texts, 342–344

international literature, 399–403

international texts, 438–440

intersecting worlds, 382–383

loneliness, 39

as mentors, K-12 curriculum, 94–98

message, 372–373

non ction literature, 299–301

poetry, 284, 287–289

pseudonyms, 375

reading

access, 104–105

author-inspired writing outside of

school, 98–100

contexts for explicit engagement

with authorial mentors, 97–98

critical engagement, 104

equity, 104–105

fan  ction, 100–103

Harry Potter fan  ction, 102–103

hip-hop, 99

intertextuality, 103–104

literature as inspiration, 104

literature as model, 103–104

performance, 98–100, 100

poetry, 98–100, 100

problem solving, 95–96

rap lyrics, 98, 99

reading like a writer, 96–97

relationship between, 92–105

socially engaged writing, 98–100

writing as transformation, 104

refugees, 401–402

revision, 381–382

writer’s home as museum, 509–513

writing process, 376–382

young adult literature, 324, 330

as young readers, 9–12

Writing

chirographic bias, 20–21

cognitive understanding, 43

reading, intertwined nature, 92

Writing curricula, intertextuality, 93–94

Young adult literature, 315–328, see also

Speci c type

claiming the popular, 321–322

constructing contemporary

adolescence, 322–323

de nition, 322

as destination, 317–318

to grow or not to grow, 320–321

history, 179–192, 193–194

18th-century growth, 190

19th century, 190–191

audience, 181

beginnings of publishing for

children, 188

classical era to Gutenberg, 184

comic books, 194

complications crafting genre history,

179–184

de nition, 179–180

didacticism, 180–181, 193

early print to the Puritans, 184–186

enlightenment-era works, 186–188

fantasy, 190–191

folklore, 186–188

folktales, 190–191

global growth, 191–192

human nature, 182–184

literature vs. entertainment,

193–194

Newbery, John, 188–189

novels, 186–188

poetry, 186–188

practicality, 181–182

in uence, 315–316

innovation, 324

perspective in adolescence, 324–327

popular culture, 321–322

post-secondary contexts, 316–317

repetition, 323–324

secondary contexts, 316–317

what it teaches us about itself,

318–320

writers, 324, 330

Young adult novels, 302–313

common genres, 310–311

epistolary novels, 308–310

fake realism, 311–312

novels of growth and change, 310

verse novels, 308–310

Youth reading, international communities

building places, 430–437

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History of Children’s and Young Adult Literature PDF Free Download

History of Children’s and Young Adult Literature PDF free Download. Think more deeply and widely.

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