Children's Writer Research Articles

Fifth Grade Children Write About Picture Books

To investigate the development of visual literacy, data was gathered three times during a year-long study in which fifth grade children talked and wrote about picture books, as part o an experimental course of study which introduced children to visual elements. The paper reports results in terms of differences in quantity of language produced by urban and sub children, as well as differences between boys and girls, diversity of language, and ways the nature of the assignments influenced writing outcomes. Results should interest teachers and f urban curriculum specialists in developing visual literacy curricula in which picture books are used as a way of helping develop children’s written language.

British children's writers, 1800-1880

British children's writers, 1800-1880

Task, Talk, and Text

In this study, we trace the development of ideas explored during reading lessons in children's writings from one transitional bilingual fourth-grade classroom. Using transcripts from audio- and videotaped lessons, we describe the ways in which the reading lessons, designed to facilitate discussions to enhance student reading comprehension, turned into an anchoring activity for the negotiation of joint meaning. They served as a springboard for joint exploration and the generation of intersubjective and co-constructed ideas that bridged the worlds of home and school. We trace the development of these ideas in representative pieces from five student portfolios. Discussions served to display a number of important literacy processes, and ideas and interpretations from these discussions reappeared in the students' writings. This study is of particular interest to educators concerned both with understanding better the influence of classroom discourse on student writing and with finding ways to incorporate students' cultural backgrounds into classroom practices.

INHERITING THE LAND? SOME LITERARY AND ETHICAL ISSUES IN THE USE OF INDIGENOUS MATERIAL BY AN AUSTRALIAN CHILDREN'S WRITER, 1960-1990

Until the mid-century Australian children's writers in the main ignored the country's Aboriginal people just as writers for adults did.When they did not, they depicted Aborigines as the savages to be fought by heroic whites in adventure tales or as childlike servants on homesteads such as Mary Grant Bruce's Billabong. Maurice Saxby suggests that by 1941 the presentation of the Aborigine as savages, noble or corrupt, was disappearing but lingered on vestigially. More frequently authors tended to regard the aborigines as cultural oddities or curiosities although there was a growing tendency to take them seriously (p.l83). During the 1950s several children's writers took them seriously, a decade ahead of writers for adults such as Peter Mathers and Thomas Keneally. Rex Ingamells, of the Jindyworobaks, published a novel of traditional life in the Northern Territory, Aranda Boy, in 1952. Kylie Tennant wrote of the Torres Strait Islanders in All the Proud Tribesmen in 1959, and Nan Chauncy wrote of the attempted extinction of the Tasmanians in Tangara in 1960. But Patricia Wrightson has been most consistent of all in her use of Aboriginal characters and themes. In 1960 she attempted a more diificult task than her colleagues in writing The Rocks of Honey, dealing with characters not distanced by unfamiliarity or time. Instead, she wrote in %0 of a credible, contemporary Europeanized part- Aboriginal child among white children at a primary school on the north coast of N.S.W. and between 1973 and 1989 produced a series of fantasy novels that was to take her through many of the positions occupied in this century by writers wh draw upon indigenous material. Wrightson's Rocks of Honey and her fantasy novels since 1972 offer a useful and extended case study of an Australian author whose use of Aboriginal material has been scrupulous rather than exploitative, but remains problematical.

Shut Up, He Explained; Or, Can the Young Subaltern Speak?

Shut Up, He Explained; Or, Can the Young Subaltern Speak? Judith Plotz (bio) Elizabeth Goodenough, Mark A. Heberle, and Naomi Sokoloff , eds., Infant Tongues: The Voice of the Child in Literature. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1994. "The disappearance of childhood" and "the impossibility of children's literature" by now are familiar refrains in contemporary critical discussion. Those proposed disappearances sometimes seem to portend the impossibility of the children's writer and critic as well. The adult commentator who strives to represent those assumed unable to represent themselves is increasingly seen as orientalizing, eroticizing, or appropriating childhood. In the battlefields of contemporary cultural politics, no issue is more hotly contested than the politics of representation: who can "stand for," speak for, speak about, speak "as if" embodying the experience of the marginalized, the oppressed, the minority, the "muted" (to use Sir Keith Thomas's fine term for early modern women and children)? Is "self-representation" alone legitimate—if indeed such a maneuver can pull any speaker at all, however young, free of an ideologically constructed subject position? It is little wonder that many children's-literature critics of the 1990s have bruised consciences and are troubled by doubts of their own authority and authenticity. Infant Tongues: The Voice of the Child in Literature offers an interesting mix of responses to this crisis of representation: some boldly confident, most troubled, all useful. Of the several unintimidated, vigorous retrievals of historic children's voices from early modern texts, Gillian Avery's is especially convincing. She brings to light a seventeenth-century set of Pueriles Confabulatinuculae (Children's Dialogues) that carries the genuine schoolroom note across the centuries: He hath all to be pist my shoesHe hath bemarred my paperHe will not let me mind my bookeHe jeeres meeHe farts at us. (22) Most of the essays, however, more self-consciously interrogate the editors' announced theme of the possibility and unique necessity of representing childhood. The editors underline issues of representability by stressing that children are virtually defined by speechlessness and thus are a socially submerged and invisible "subaltern" class uniquely requiring "adult construction and mediation in order to be voiced in written representations" (2). The title oxymoron, "infant tongues," emphasizes that the very definition of child in western language links the French enfant (from Latin infans or "speechless") to silence, an explanation perhaps of the cultural suspicion of the articulate child, the infans loquens as a suspect "prodigy." Indeed, Alexandra Johnson's essay "The Drama of Imagination: Marjory Fleming and Her Diaries" demonstrates how much her nineteenth-century editors' transformation of this determined and independent-minded diarist into an adorable "Pet Marjorie" cozying up to a doting Sir Walter Scott was a self-serving Victorian construction assuring "that a child, especially a girl," would not "achieve literary fame alone" (103). The dominant twentieth-century constructs of language development, whether Freudian, Jungian, or Lacanian, suggest an inverse relationship between language mastery and childhood consciousness: the greater the mastery of discourse in the symbolic realm, the less of childhood consciousness in the imaginary. The editors therefore argue the unique distance of the adult fabulist of childhood, consigned to an inevitably reductive translation from a non-linguistic medium: "I decipher," wrote the adult Thomas De Quincey of his autobiographical retrospect in Suspira De Profundis, "what the child only felt in cipher" (113n). Michel Lastinger's essay on Rimbaud as monstrous prodigy, "'Vers l'Une, Vers l'Autre, Verlaine': Rimbaud and the Riddle of the Sphinx," argues that a "child speaking an 'adult' language" will always be a decentered elusive subject whose competent adult discourse ensures that "'JE est un autre.' I is someone else" (144). Such self-alienation suggests that representations of childhood are inevitably linguistically dislocated doublings of the expressible and inexpressible. Doublings offered a tantalizing aesthetic challenge to Romantic writers who, like Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his Biographia Literaria, considered literary genius the ability to have it both ways and to "carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers" of adulthood (40). Indeed, virtually all the contributions in this volume centering on individual nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers are concerned with the connection of childhood and identity, especially the...

British children's writers since 1960. First series

British children's writers since 1960. First series

Newspapers in Education and Children's Writing

AbstractEmphasis upon authenticity in children's writing leads us to consider the possibilities in engaging children in producing authentic texts such as newspapers. In this article David Wray and Jane Medwell discuss their research into the effects of three approaches to this newspaper production, one of which involved the collaboration of a teacher with a worker from the Newspapers in Education scheme. The very positive outcomes of this partnership are stressed.

British children's writers, 1914-1960

British children's writers, 1914-1960

Improving Children's Writing: the construction of a behavioural self‐management package

AbstractIn this study, the effect of self‐management on the quantity and quality of primary school children's writing was examined. Self‐management was used as an intervention technique, because its rationale coincides with that of writing as an interactional process and both of them seek ways to promote independent learning. To serve the aims of the present research, several self‐management procedures were integrated into a package which was constructed especially for the purpose. An attempt was made to include as many as possible of these procedures, in order to maximise the effectiveness of the intervention. Results showed self‐management to be associated not only with increased output, but higher quality of output and higher attentional levels, as well.

Bilingual Children's Writing: Evidence of Active Learning in Social Context

Abstract A bilingual family literacy project was the basis for a descriptive research study, one aspect of which was a study of children's writing. The purpose of this study was to add to the existing data that focus on the relationship between children's literacy development and sociocultural aspects of each child's life. In this study, we identified some cognitive processes in biliteracy acquisition through categorizing the children's work according to Piaget's active learner categories that show learners constructing knowledge for different purposes. We also made the point that in these writing samples and in other data collected, these cognitive processes are interwoven into the sociocultural development of each child; individually and as a member of a family, a school, and a community.

For the Good, the True, and the Beautiful: Northern Children's Magazines and the Civil War

For the Good, the True, and the Beautiful: Northern Children's Magazines and the Civil War James Marten "What has been gained by all the fighting?" young William asks Uncle Rodman in a story from Our Young Folks in the summer of 1865. Uncle Rodman lays aside his newspaper, removes his spectacles, and solemnly tells William and his sister Susie, "I am very glad to hear you express a wish to know more about the conflict that is now closing. It has been the great event ofthis century, and you ought to have a clear general idea of its origin and results." Four years ago, "it was not to be expected that you should understand what so many grown people failed to appreciate. But you are older now, and the terrible meaning of the war is clearer to us all than it was then." The subsequent dialogue explains the folly of Southern secession and the righteousness of the Northern victory. Its certainty in the right of the Union cause, its emphasis on the evils of slavery and slaveholders, and the earnest romanticism of its patriotism reflect the attitudes developed in Civil War-era children's magazines.1 While the editors and writers ofchildren's magazines did take on war-related topics, they continued to utilize formats and embrace assumptions that had shaped children's literature for decades. Stories and articles promoted the principles ofhard work, obedience, generosity, humility, and piety; provided moral guidance and examples ofthe benefits offamily cohesion and the consequences of the absence of such order; and furnished mild adventure stories, innocent entertainment , and instruction. The values thus expressed were valuable anytime, ofcourse, but were absolutely necessary at times ofcrisis—especially during a war being fought to defend exactly those noble traits. Works offiction and nonfiction alike—"the incidental work of leading British and American authors, and the major work of some incidental writers of Victorian prose and poetry," in the words of John Morton Blum—stressed character and framed the world¦J. T. Trowbridge, "The Turning of the Leaf," Our Young Folks 1 (June 1 865): 399. Civil War History, Vol. XLI, No. 1 © 1995 by The Kent State University Press 58CIVIL WAR HISTORY in moral terms. E. Douglas Branch unsympathetically characterized the tone of much of prewar children's literature when he described the story-telling scenarios of Peter Parley (Samuel G. Goodrich) in his books on history, geography , and nature: "a kindly old gentleman, marvelously well-informed, talking to an inquisitive set of little prigs." Authors of stories and novels as well as schoolbooks for children combined a faith in virtue with the confidence in the American political and economic systems; patriotism and good deeds and hard work and unselfishness together would guarantee individual success and national honor.2 Much of the content of wartime children's periodicals reflected these antebellum concerns. Yet they also moved from the antebellum reluctance to discuss politics, military affairs, and race relations in order to rally children to the Union war effort. Anne Scott MacLeod has shown that the "relentless moralizing" in children 's literature between 1 820 and 1 860 tended to focus on self-improvement— especially temperance—and pacifism; the antislavery movement, on the other hand, was controversial. "Children's fiction was seldom chosen as a vehicle for the heavy burden of the national debate over slavery" because publishers simply could not afford to alienate important segments of the book-buying public. The dozens of best-selling books by Jacob Abbott "reflected little of that era's controversy or ferment for reform." When Abbott and others featured African Americans in their stories and novels, even the most sympathetic characters were burdened by stereotypes and by the condescension and patronizing attitudes ofclearly more intelligent white characters. Surprisingly, perhaps, literature distributed by the American Sunday School Union avoided the issue of slavery. Children's magazines, according to John B. Crume, "asked no more of their . . . readers than that they behave themselves."} The same caution applied to military subjects. As The Student and Schoolmate noted in August 1862, most Northerners had "only a few years 2John Morton Blum, ed.. Yesterday's Children: An Authology Compiledfrom the Pages ofOur Young Folks...

Professional Books

Abstract HOW TO GET YOUR TEACHING IDEAS PUBLISHED: A Writer's Guide to Educational Publishing. Jean Stangl. NezvYork: Walker & Co., 1994. 222 pp. $24.95. Reviewed by Robert L. Gilstrap EARLY CHILDHOOD CURRICULUM: Developmental Bases for Learning and Teaching. Sue C. Wortham. New York: Merrill, 1994. 516 pp. $29.40. Reviewed by Michael J. Bell INVESTIGATING MATHEMATICS WITH YOUNG CHILDREN. Rosemary Althouse. New York: Teachers College Press, 1994. 179 pp. $19.95, paper. Reviewed by Barbara J. Bushey WHEN CHILDREN WRITE: Critical Revisions of the Writing Workshop. Timothy J. Lensmire. New York: Teachers College Press, 1994. 179 pp. $17.95, paper. Reviewed by Elizabeth G. Sturtevant COOPERATIVE LEARNING AND STRATEGIES FOR INCLUSION: Celebrating Diversity in the Classroom. JoAnne W. Putnam, Ed. Baltimore, MD: Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co., 1993. 188 pp. $20.00, paper. Reviewed by Lorraine Valdez Pierce

British children's writers, 1880-1914

British children's writers, 1880-1914

Laura Ingalls and Caddie Woodlawn: Daughters of a Border Space

Laura Ingalls and Caddie Woodlawn:Daughters of a Border Space Susan Naramore Maher (bio) Recent scholarship on women's writing has increasingly explored the metaphor of the border. Explaining the ambivalent power of border crossings, Diane Freedman in An Alchemy of Genres writes, "Borders can join and separate. . . . Borders suggest limitations, that which is prohibited and forbidden and in a constant state of transition. . . . It can be risky to try to migrate across a border, whether aesthetic or geographic" (47). Crossing a border both threatens and liberates, silences and opens one up to new expression. In the world of children's literature, growing up itself proves a crossing of borders. Young protagonists negotiating the increasing complexities of life face uncertain thresholds—entries to possible damnation, illumination, or both. Add to this inevitable maturation a move, a displacement, from the known to the unknown; then, children, while gaining through parents the traditions of other places, must still respond to the imperatives of new ground. Amid the uncertainties of growing up and resettlement, "a garbling of messages, the push and shove of conflicting influences" (West 253), American childhoods are shaped. The American West, in particular, has provided children's writers a wealth of border crossings. Its vast reaches are, in Peggy Pascoe's words, "a cultural crossroads" (46), a space defined by ever-shifting borders. The diversity of the lands and the people is only part of the fascination engendered in this literature. Since the early years of this century, children's writers, re-envisioning the West, have focused particularly on the lives of settlers' children. Resettlement, as historian Elliott West has persuasively argued, blurred many boundaries. "To say the least," West comments: social controls were imperfectly enforced, and girls and boys grew up close to the West's famous vices and its sizable population of rakehells and shady [End Page 130] characters. Theirs was no protected, choreographed upbringing. . . . In a dynamic and unsettled America, the child's role was shifting and imprecise. (254-55) Gender roles themselves underwent considerable revision. Settlers' daughters enjoyed the outdoors, contributed to men's work, felt themselves part of a national experiment. These daughters of "first wave women" (Fairbanks 160) questioned their mothers' practices and often identified strongly with the male members of their circles—fathers, brothers, and uncles (West 257). Importantly, many frontier-born and -bred women—followed by their daughters—became writers for both the adult and juvenile markets. Their narratives helped define the settlement experience for an American audience eager to mythologize the Anglo-European migration to the plains states and beyond. Among the most influential of these children's writers are Laura Ingalls Wilder, creator of the autobiographical Little House series, and Carol Ryrie Brink, whose Wisconsin and Idaho tales also reclaim family history. Published amid the disruption of the Great Depression, their fictionalized memoirs—literary border crossings themselves—re-create an earlier period in which children came to grips with conflict and confusion. Countering the simplified popular West, so powerfully articulated in pulp Westerns, boys' magazines, and Hollywood productions, Wilder's and Brink's narratives explore the complexities inherent in any border crossing.1 Little House on the Prairie and Caddie Woodlawn, both published in 1935 and subsequently honored by the Newbery Award committee, share a common narrative: they present heroines trying to negotiate public and private spheres, to redefine gender lines, and to come to terms with the liberating spaces around them. Kathryn Adam claims the "rhythm of the Little House books carries Laura back and forth between town and prairie, civilization and wilderness, 'stay' and 'go,' in a sense she is the living embodiment of the central tension in her parents' marriage" (104). Brink's novel, too, shares this struggle. In attempting to modify the givens of mother-defined femininity, Laura and Caddie frustrate the domestic sphere "reconstructed" by their mothers (Rosenblum 74; Adam 99). These prairie-nurtured girls find their fathers (and, in Caddie's case, brothers) encouraging their attempts to open up the cultural borders that restrict them. Pa Ingalls fosters Laura's explorations—both spatial and intellectual—and Mr. Woodlawn permits Caddie to romp freely with her brothers, instructs her in repairing timepieces, and sanctions her...

The Oxford companion to Australian children's literature

From nursery rhymes to epic fantasy, from picture books to challenging novels for adolescents, reading is a crucial activity in the cultural and psychological formation of children. In The Oxford Companion to Australian Children's Literature, Stella Lees and Pamela Macintyre examine the legacy and contemporary achievement of Australian children's writers. This encyclopaedic reference work covers the earliest writings from the nineteenth century to the remarkable growth in publishing that followed the Second World War. The Companion encompasses the most notable and influential nursery rhymes, illustrations, picture books, novels and Aboriginal stories. Arranged alphabetically, 1600 entries cover authors, publishers, illustrators, famous characters, events, institutions, and awards - from Ned Kelly and the Eureka Stockade to Australian Comics and the work of Evelyn Goode. Longer, essay-length articles examine the nature and importance of key features of Australian children's literature - annuals, animal stories, the Bush, literary criticism, and fairy tales. 'An indispensable work of reference which is also a pleasure to read'. Brenda Niall

Secret Garden II; or Lady Chatterley's Lover as Palimpsest

Secret Garden II; or Lady Chatterley's Lover as Palimpsest Judith Plotz (bio) Juliet Dusinberre's Alice to the Lighthouse convincingly demonstrates that a number of key modern texts are underwritten by 19th-century children's books. Just as a palimpsest reveals an earlier script beneath a later one, so the image of a children's book may lie beneath an exigent and sophisticated modern work. Yet contemporary literary studies still tend to separate children's literature from serious adult texts so that, at first blush, it may even today seem peculiar to juxtapose Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden (1911) with D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928). In terms of popular cliché, The Secret Garden is known as a charming, escapist, and safely canonical book for girls and nostalgic women, while Lady Chatterley's Lover remains notorious as a sexually scandalous and culturally bellicose monument of modernism. In terms of more exigent readings, Burnett's work appears a powerfully feminist and Lawrence's a phallocentrically apocalyptic work. Under neither interpretation, however, do the two novels show much obvious affinity. Though there is some chronological overlap between these two English writers (Burnett lived from 1849 until 1924, Lawrence from 1885 until 1930), they seem to belong to different moral, political, and social universes. Antithetical in every way, the middle-class Burnett yearns after what the working-class Lawrence despises. Burnett's enormously successful Little Lord Fauntleroy romanticizes the very aristocratic glamour Lawrence derides as the evidence of a dying civilization. Most of Burnett's popular children's novels—Little Lord Fauntleroy, A Little Princess, The Lost Prince—axe tales of making good in quite a worldly way, while most of Lawrence's fictions—Women in Love, The Plumed Serpent, The Woman Who Rode Away, The Man Who Died—are tales of breaking out and away from social norms. Burnett is an a-political writer, largely content with the status quo; her "Boy Who Became a Socialist," for example, treats as comedy a child's yearning for social justice. Lawrence, on the contrary, is an apocalyptic writer ready to junk the entire apparatus of human civilization. Burnett is most successfully a children's writer, especially a girls' writer, for whom she writes fables of accommodation to adulthood. Lawrence writes for adults and often even against children in the sense that adult individuation demands an escape from the dreary norms of the child-centered middle-class family. Whereas Burnett writes in a traditionally minor genre, children's fiction, Lawrence writes in the major modern English genre, "the bright book of life." Burnett belongs to the traditionally minor gender; she's a "Lady Novelist" like Annie S. Swan and Mrs. Ewing (Lawrence in Zytaruk 76). Lawrence belongs to the major gender which he inhabits as a self-conscious Prophet and Sage in the tradition of Blake and Carlyle. Despite the antithesis between the two tellers, Burnett's The Secret Garden and Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover show striking resemblances in the configuration of characters, in the individual characters themselves, and in the dominant themes. I will consider patterns common to the two works and speculate on the reasons for the congruence.1 The principal resemblance is obvious. Both The Secret Garden and Lady Chatterley's Lover are organized around triangular relationships of a female character—Mary Lennox or Connie Chatterley—in an intense and formative relationship with two different male figures. Each of the three main characters in each book represents a different social class. The female figure is middle class and deracinated. Mary Lennox, a landless poor relation of the Cravens, is an Indian-born outsider in both Yorkshire and England. Connie Chatterley, of Scottish stock, a daughter of the artistic bourgeoisie, also lacks any real roots (or real estate) in England and has received "an aesthetically unconventional upbringing"(6) in France, Holland, Italy, and Germany. Mary and Connie are also parallel as displaced, rootless beings, literally outsiders in England and metaphorically outsiders alienated from their own bodies. Each, however, is restored to her own body moving from thinness to plumpness, from rigidity to pliancy by means of eroticized touch. Two male figures, one upper-class and...

The cultural values of literary tourism

Literary tourism is defined and its social and cultural meanings explored through a case study of visitors to the Lake District home of English children's writer Beatrix Potter. Johnson's circuits of culture diagram conceptualizes cultural production and consumption theoretically and is applied to literary tourism. Emphasizing consumers of the touristic experience, qualitative methods are used to assess how people were interpreting the literary place. As a form of cultural communication, this kind of tourism is not only about Beatrix Potter. Rather, the author has been appropriated symbolically as an expression of values for childhood, countryside, authenticity, and heritage preservation.

Early childhood mathematics

Early childhood mathematics

How Lack of Confidence in Spelling Affects Children's Written Expression

(1989). How Lack of Confidence in Spelling Affects Children's Written Expression. Educational Psychology in Practice: Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 42-46.

Tweaking a Dragon's Tale: The adjustments made by a children's writer (with an Editor's help)

ReadingVolume 27, Issue 1 p. 2-6 Tweaking a Dragon's Tale: The adjustments made by a children's writer (with an Editor's help) Chris Powling, Chris Powling CONTACT THE AUTHOR: Chris Powling, The Old Chapel, Easton, Nr. Winchester, Hampshire, S021 1EG.Search for more papers by this author Chris Powling, Chris Powling CONTACT THE AUTHOR: Chris Powling, The Old Chapel, Easton, Nr. Winchester, Hampshire, S021 1EG.Search for more papers by this author First published: April 1993 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9345.1993.tb00076.xAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Volume27, Issue1April 1993Pages 2-6 RelatedInformation