Skip to main content

Some cold weather and some great presentations



It has actually been cold here in Arizona the last few days- beautiful blue skies and sunshine, but a cold wind coming from somewhere snowy, I think! I have been wearing layers and wondering if I have enough warm clothes to get me through! I am told these spots of cold come and go, so soon I will be wearing my cotton pants again! The pool at the Recreation Centre is still a beautiful warm temperature so it hasn’t stopped me swimming.

As I mentioned in my last post, it is the time of year when students are handing in their final assignments and I have been lucky enough to hear their presentations, taking copious notes as I go! One doctoral class I have been auditing is taught by my colleague here at Arizona, Professor Kathy Short, and is called ‘ Critical Content Analysis of Text and Image’. Last week the  11 students gave short presentations of their final papers (or assignments) which I have learnt a great deal from. To give you a taste of their work, I’ll present three of the picturebooks discussed and the theoretical frameworks used to analyse them below.


Heartbeat by Evan Turk (2018) is a story of a mother whale and her calf who are separated by death when the mother is harpooned. The text is simple, echoing the slow rhythm of a heartbeat, while the weight of the narrative is in the richly coloured images which encourage the reader to see human’s relationship with nature. The student who presented this used an Ecofeminism theoretical framework to analyse the way in which this book disrupts the false binary between humans and nature.

Another student presented an analysis of around 5 picturebooks presenting stories from the LGBTQ community to see the range of ways in which these stories were told. Julian is a mermaid (by Jessica Love, 2018) , is a book which I had heard of previously, which has been criticised (see here for a review along these lines). A book I hadn’t met before was When Aidan became a brother  (Kyle Lukoff and Kaylani Juanita, 2019) about a transgender child waiting for the arrival of a new sibling, and thinking about what it will be like.




A third student analysed a pair of picturebooks through the lens of postcolonialism, examining how grandparents were represented in two picturebooks featuring grandparents in Indian families. In My Dadima wears a sari (Kashmira Sheth and Yoshiko Jaeggi, 2007), Dadima (grandma) explains to her grand-daughter why she wears a sari and all of the many things she can do with her Sari.




I hope these three examples give you an insight into the richness of the students’ work, and the possibilities in children's literature research. I felt very privileged to be there.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

NCTE Day 2: Native American authors and publishing

Today at the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) conference I went to some really interesting sessions, including a panel of female authors in the evening, including Newbery medal winner Megan Medina who chaired a session of three young female authors, including Brittany Luby, a Canadian writer of Anishinaabe-kwe heritage whose recent picturebook, Encounter , is about a first contact between an indigenous boy and a French boy on a sailing ship. I met Brittany after the session and was interested to hear more about her next book which will be bilingual. This linked to another session I had attended earlier in the day with four Native American authors entitled ‘Bringing indigenous voices into your classroom’. The chair of the panel was not American Indian, but a teacher who works in a school with Native American children. She began by quoting the data on books by and about people of colour and from First/Native Nations published for children and teens compiled ...
Post a Comment
Read more

End of Week 2

At the end of my second week at the University of Arizona, I am starting to settle in. I now have a staff ID number and a Staff ID card which has allowed me email, library and internet access, and I have joined the university recreation centre where I am able to swim and attend yoga classes.  I am really enjoying these facilities! While here I have the opportunity to sit in on a couple of courses. I have already mentioned the one called the   Critical Content Analysis of Text and Image. This last week we used some of the techniques we’ve learned to examine some of the books in the U.S. IBBY Outstanding International Book Awards. This award has been awarded since 2006 in an effort to encourage US publishers to publish books published outside the United States, thus allowing US children to develop global awareness. One of my favourites from last week comes from Tara Press in India. It’s called   Hope is a GirlSelling Fruit by Amriti Das.  Not only is the art ...
Post a Comment
Read more

JoLLE Winter Conference and Atlanta Georgia

One of the highlights of my Fulbright has been the people I’ve met, and the opportunities to present in a variety of settings. I recently attended the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia to present a workshop about bilingual picturebooks as part of the JoLLE (Journal of Language and Literacy Education) Winter conference.  I focused on Māori-English bilingual picturebooks and the participants engaged well. My host while there was Dr. Petros Panaou who took this photo in which I look like I’m talking to Captain Cook as I gave a short history of Aotearoa New Zealand  prior to looking at the picturebooks.   The next day I had the great pleasure of attending a plenary given by Dr. April Baker-Bell (Michigan State University) talking about her framework of an Anti-Racist Black Language Pedagogy. It was inspiring. On the Sunday I was leaving from Atlanta, and Petros and his family took me to do some sightseeing before I left. We visited the National Park dedica...
Post a Comment
Read more