Handbook of Research on Children's and Young Adult Literature

Shelby Wolf, Karen Coats, Patricia Enciso, Christine Jenkins, Shelby Wolf, Karen Coats, Patricia A. Enciso, Christine Jenkins, Patricia Enciso, Shelby Wolf, Karen Coats, Patricia A. Enciso, Christine Jenkins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780415965057
• eBook ISBN: 9781136913563
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This landmark volume is the first to bring together 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 figurations of reading and interpreting children's literature.

• Part one considers perspectives on readers and reading literature in home, school, library, and community settings.
• Part two introduces analytic frames for studying young adult novels, picturebooks, indigenous literature, graphic novels, and other genres. Chapters include commentary on literary experiences and creative production from renowned authors and illustrators.
• Part three focuses on the social contexts of literary study, with chapters on censorship, awards, marketing, and literary museums.

The singular contribution of this Handbook is to lay the groundwork for colleagues across disciplines to redraw the map of their separately figured worlds, thus to enlarge the scope of scholarship and dialogue as well as push ahead into uncharted territory.

Part 1 THE READER

DOI: 10.4324/9780203843543-1

The book may be at rest when found on a shelf, in an adult’s hands, at home, or in a classroom, but young readers 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 dominated 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 film stars happily looking up from their favorite novel, suggests that the child will grow beyond 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 film 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 perspective 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 identification, comprehension skills, fluency). 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, nonfiction 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 first generation immigrant teachers who find the poetry and literary legacy of the Puerto Rican diaspora in the online archives of El Centro; and the second generation Filipino fifth graders in Los Angeles, who return to their family’s oral narratives of migration and education to reconstruct a story of dignity for themselves and their classmates.

Vital places for reading, whether in community centers, online, or in classrooms, are usually structured by an emphasis on emergent understanding over finalized, predetermined meaning. Social psychologist, Lev Vygotsky (1987) suggested that two forms of sense-making are important to learning: the first, 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 unified idea or concept (Smagorinsky, 2001, p. 145). Given opportunities to engage in what Ricoeur (1983) calls “configurational 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 finding 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’ willingness 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 find this configurational 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 literary 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 finalized 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 experience of intense conversation and oral storytelling. When reading and readers are regulated by implicit and sometimes explicit beliefs about what and how a reader should sound, sit, move, and even look, such losses multiply and categories of deficiency, illiteracy, and “at risk” become a taken for granted part of life with books.

Perhaps it is not surprising to find, then, that the most promising responses to disengagement in reading are those pedagogies that get everyone moving again—through image-making, dramatization, film-making, social advocacy, 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 questions, 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 settings. 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 stories they care about and create their own book reviews, blogs, and fanfictions (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 enjoyed 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 caregivers, 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.

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 The collected works of L.S. Vygotsky. Vol 1. Problems of general psychology (pp. 339–349). New York, NY: Plenum.

1 Children Reading at Home

An Historical Overview

Evelyn Arizpe and Morag Styles

University of Glasgow and University of Cambridge

DOI: 10.4324/9780203843543-2

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 finding 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, pictures 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 influence 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 influence of this good and wise man that his household became a school to itself, and neighbours who came into the farm at mealtime would find 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 field, we have had to be selective in the accounts discussed here. However, we were guided by the fact that there are relatively few longitudinal studies of children’s development 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 artifacts, 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 ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Other
• Table Of Contents
• Preface
• Part 1 The Reader
• Part 2 The Book
• Part 3 The World Around
• Coda
• List of Contributors
• Author Index
• Subject Index