A New Year and Spring Semester

And here we are in a new year!

It was good to have a break and briefly visit family and friends for Christmas, and now we are at the start of a fresh new year, still having beautiful sunny days here in Tucson, although it is rather cold at night.

The Spring Semester starts for students next week, so it is still quiet at the university. I am spending my time preparing to begin data collection next week. My colleague, Kathy, and I are preparing to work with a group of 8-11 year old children and a group of pre-service teachers across a 6 week period using bilingual picturebooks. After many years of analysing language use within bilingual picturebooks, this is the next step- seeing what children and pre-service teachers learn about language from bilingual books.

Meanwhile in the Worlds of Words Library, Kathy and Rebecca (director and manager of the library) are preparing a new exhibition of the work of two Caldecott Honor illustrators - Juana Martinez-Neal and Molly Idle. These two illustrators work together as critical friends, and the exhibition pairs their work in interesting ways.

Martinez-Neal is an author illustrator whose most recent book My name is Alma about how a little girl got her name was a Caldecott Honor book in 2019.

Molly Idle’s worldess picturebook Flora and the Flamingo is a worldess pictrebook about the friendship between a girl and a flamingo won the 2013 Caldecott Medal.

There is lots else to look forward to in this second half of my Fulbright experience, including a trip to Athens Georgia to give a workshop, a visit to the Tohono O'odam College to give a talk and a workshop, and the visit of my lovely friend Jane. We are hoping to take a weekend trip to the Grand Canyon. More posts to follow.....

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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 ...

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 ...

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...

Nicola on Fulbright in Arizona

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