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In this book, Johnston and Mangat consider ways in which particular postcolonial and multicultural literary texts are able to provide a space of cultural mediation for readers from various backgrounds. The studies described in the five chapters of the book explore the spaces of convergence of identity, culture and literature with students and teachers in high school contexts and undergraduates in university settings. In each study, readers are responding to texts that are culturally distant from their own literary and experiential histories. An objective of each study was to consider the nature of the cultural locations of the reader and the text, and the interstitial spaces between these locations. The book interrogates readers’ attempts to negotiate cultural difference in literary contexts and questions how this negotiation requires reading practices traditionally ignored in North American classrooms. The book will offer educators at the secondary and post-secondary levels rich material to draw upon for a rethinking of the school curriculum and will be of interest to scholars of postcolonial and literary studies.
Given the substantial impact of feminism on children’s literature and culture during the last quarter century, it comes as no surprise that gender studies have focused predominantly on issues of female representation. The question of how the same patriarchal ideology structured representations of male bodies and behaviors was until very recently a marginal discussion. Now that masculinity has emerges as an overt theme in children’s literature and film, critical consideration of the subject is timely, if not long overdue Ways of Being Male addresses this new concern in an unprecedented collection of essays examining how contemporary debates about masculinity are reflected in fiction and f...
Boys in Children’s Literature and Popular Culture proposes new theoretical frameworks for understanding the contradictory ways masculinity is represented in popular texts consumed by boys in the United States. The popular texts boys like are often ignored by educators and scholars, or are simply dismissed as garbage that boys should be discouraged from enjoying. However, examining and making visible the ways masculinity functions in these texts is vital to understanding the broad array of works that make up children’s culture and form dominant versions of masculinity. Such popular texts as Harry Potter, Captain Underpants, and Japanese manga and anime often perform rituals of subject formation in overtly grotesque ways that repulse adult readers and attract boys. They often use depictions of the abject – threats to bodily borders – to blur the distinctions between what is outside the body and what is inside, between what is "I" and what is "not I." Because of their reliance on depictions of the abject, those popular texts that most vigorously perform exaggerated versions of masculinity also create opportunities to make dominant masculinity visible as a social construct.
The contemporary young reader learns from a very early age to read and interpret through a broad range of media. Literacies Across Media explores how a group of boys and girls, aged from ten to fourteen, make sense of narratives in a variety of formats, including print, electronic book, video, DVD, computer game and CD-ROM. This book records these young people over a period of eighteen months as they read, view and play different texts, demonstrating variations and consistencies of interpretative behaviour across different media. Margaret Mackey analyses how the activities of reading, viewing and playing intertwine and affect each other's development. Her in-depth research shows young reader...
How much say should students have in shaping their schools' disciplinary cultures? Should they have the power to weigh in on contentious issues like favouritism, discrimination, ‘no hats’ rules, and zero tolerance? What if pupils disagree with their teachers and administrators on certain rules? Rebecca Raby reflects on how regulations are made, applied, and negotiated in educational settings in the accessibly written School Rules. Through an in-depth analysis of original data, including interviews with teachers, administrators, and students, and codes of conduct, School Rules reveals what rules mean to different participants, and where it is that they becoming a challenge. Raby investigates students' acceptance or contestation of disciplinary regulations, and examines how school rules reflect and perpetuate existing inequalities and students' beliefs about young people. Illustrating the practical challenges and political and theoretical concerns of involving students in rule-making, School Rules can help teachers and administrators facilitate more meaningful rules and student participation in their own schools.
Preliminary Material -- National Identity-Formation -- The Canadian Situation -- Canadian Cultural Policy with Regard to Children's Culture and Literature -- The Immigrant Experience as Depicted in Anglo-Canadian Youth Fiction 1950-1994 -- The Development of Canadian Multicultural Children's Literature Conclusion and Outlook for the Future -- Bibliography -- Index.
What is the value of picture books in educating a diverse society? This collection of original essays explores how preservice teachers from faculties of education across Canada engage with issues of diversity and national identity as represented in children’s picture books. Based on research drawn from education courses and student teaching experiences, the book illustrates new and culturally relevant approaches to curricula that meet the needs of increasingly diverse student bodies. The volume focuses on picture books as a central body of texts, drawing on recent reading theory and exploring the implications of bringing the works into school classrooms. Together, the essays offer a unique cross-Canada perspective on how picture books can help students and teachers explore identities, uncover personal and national histories, and locate a sense of place.
"Precisely titled, this powerful collection constitutes a “chronotope,” an erudite enactment of interstices within and among historical time, spiritual place, and political culture, a recollection focused forward to those “hybrid” generations (in Canadian classrooms) whose frontier is haunted by forts populated by not always their ancestors, inscribed in their national, regional, aboriginal identities. Homophobic, hygienic, the curriculum is always already inhabited by the language of the Other, propelling us toward “post-post” being, forested in difference, rooted in images, refracted through mirrors and windows. In constructing this crucial collage of decolonization, the contributors summon us to study with them the place we inhabit." WILLIAM F. PINAR, Professor and Canada Research Chair, Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy, University Of British Columbia, Canada
The discourse of civic education privileges liberal democratic understandings of citizenship. Yet we know that such understandings do not accurately represent the complex, plural, and problematic nature of citizenship in contemporary society. To stimulate discussion about new possibilities for teaching citizenship, this volume brings together the work of Canadian and American curriculum scholars to «trouble» the existing canon of citizenship education. Addressing themes as diverse as gender, sexual orientation, globalization, agency, ontology, and interdisciplinarity, the essays that make up this collection seek to enlarge and expand upon the ways educators, curriculum developers, and policymakers might approach teaching citizenship.
The essays in Home Words explore the complexity of the idea of home through various theoretical lenses and groupings of texts. One focus of this collection is the relation between the discourses of nation, which often represent the nation as home, and the discourses of home in children’s literature, which variously picture home as a dwelling, family, town or region, psychological comfort, and a place to start from and return to. These essays consider the myriad ways in which discourses of home underwrite both children’s and national literatures. Home Words reconfigures the field of Canadian children’s literature as it is usually represented by setting the study of English- and French-language texts side by side, and by paying sustained attention to the diversity of work by Canadian writers for children, including both Aboriginal peoples and racialized Canadians. It builds on the literary histories, bibliographical essays, and biographical criticism that have dominated the scholarship to date and sets out to determine and establish new directions for the study of Canadian children’s literature.