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Thesis (MPhil)--Stellenbsoch University, 2012

The prevailing discourses around refugees often serve to position them as ignorant, incapable, and needing to be assimilated into the dominant culture of receiving societies. The limited research devoted to refugees shows that they struggle in schools and on standardized tests of achievement, are underemployed, and live in poverty. Refugee women, in particular, often contend with multiple linguistic, gendered, and racialized forms of discrimination, as they navigate transnational spaces and lives in resettlement. However, this qualitative study sought to counter deficit discourses around refugee women in resettlement by critically investigating and illuminating their everyday lives and literacy practices. The participants were nine refugee women, aged 16 to 31, who engaged in an out-of-school book club over a six-month period. Sociocultural, dialogic, poststructural, feminist, and transnational theories informed this study. Critical ethnographic approaches and New Literacy Studies perspectives influenced the research process and data gathering. Qualitative data were collected from audio and video recordings of book club meetings, meeting transcripts, and researcher field notes. The data were analyzed using qualitative coding and narrative methods. The themes identified from the analysis were that participants (1) shaped and used the book club as a dialogic, border practice and space; (2) navigated and negotiated shifting and changing subjectivities and took up multi/plural identities; (3) used multiple languages and literacies as practices and resources; and (4) were living here-and-there, transnational and dialogic lives. The findings suggest that educators can foster refugee women’s English language learning and multiple literacies in three key ways: by creating learning spaces that are flexible, contingent, dialogic, and collaborative; by recognizing students’ sociocultural contexts and funds of knowledge; and by affording opportunities for students to position themselves as knowers and teachers.

The purpose of this study was to investigate if and how the picture book about Alfons Åberg express gender stereotypes and sexuality, through its images and texts. That is because it is one of the most borrowed books in Swedish libraries and also there fore could be a book that is especially common i Swedish preschools. The books about Alfons has also played a major role in Swedish cultural history and the Swedish history of literature, and are known as a part of the swedish heritage. Since children books are well used in Swedish preschools and because children often are left alone to read, we wondered what kind of gender norms the books of Alfons could express to the preschool children. There- fore the aim of this study is to investigate how gender norms are expressed in two of the Alfons books in the book series. The survey was conducted through qualitative picture book analysis which is inspired by former text and image analysis. The theoretical method to investigate how gender norms were expressed was gender theory. We also used discourse analysis and social constructivism as a base, which means that the norms are defined as a social construction that are under constant transformation. The results show that sex, gender and sexuality are interacting in the books of Alfons Åberg. The characters in the book expressed that sex and gender norms were expressed by separation of male and female. The separation find out to be a way to show that opposites also expect to attract each other. The conclusion was that sex, gender and heterosexuality were linked together as a normative exclusion of other sexualitys as inpossible.

This thesis examines the book in the nineteenth century by way of an unusual corpus: movable and novelty books for children, drawn from the Opie Collection of Children’s Literature at the Bodleian Library. It argues that these items, which have been either ignored or actively dismissed by scholars of children’s literature, are of two-fold significance for the history of the book: they encourage a sense of the book as a constitutively (rather than an incidentally) material object, and they demand an understanding of reading as not just a mental activity, but a physical one as well. Each of the first five chapters of the thesis centres on a different format. The opening chapter discusses the Regency-era paper doll books produced by Samuel and Joseph Fuller, exposing the tension between form and content in these works. The second chapter looks at Victorian panorama books for children, showing how the panorama format affects space, time, and the structure of any text accompanying the image. The third chapter reads the pop-up book’s key tension—the tension between surface and depth in the pursuit of an illusion of three dimensions—in terms of flat, theatrical, and stereoscopic picture-making, three other nineteenth-century pictorial modes in which an illusion of three-dimensionality is important. The fourth chapter traces self-reflexive accounts of printing, publishing, and the material book in dissolving-view books produced by the German publisher and printer Ernest Nister at the end of the nineteenth century. The fifth chapter positions the late nineteenth-century mechanical books designed and illustrated by Lothar Meggendorfer in terms of two material analogies, the puppet and the mechanical toy or automaton. The final chapter synthesizes evidence as to how the movable book could and should be read from across formats, foregrounding in particular the ways in which the movable embodies reading.

Twenty-four teachers completed questionnaires and demographic data forms to describe the types of books they chose most often, where they got them, how they selected them, and how important they felt it was to expose children to good literature. A criteria sheet was used to describe the types and currency of books in each center. The teachers used a variety of sources to select and obtain books. Most teachers knew how literature aids some aspect of development. Every type of book was represented in all collections, but poetry and wordless picture books were least represented.

This thesis seeks to examine the nature of the intertwined networks of print, patronage and religion that existed within and across England and Scotland between 1580 and 1604, through the career of the English printer Robert Waldegrave. Multifaceted and complex, Waldegrave’s career spanned two countries, four decades and numerous controversies. To date scholars have engaged in a teleological narrative of his career, culminating in his involvement with the Marprelate press between April 1588/9. This focus on Waldegrave as a religious radical has coloured accounts of his English business and resulted in his Scottish career being disregarded by many. This thesis adds to the growing body of scholarship concerning printers and the print trade, illustrating the varied role Waldegrave played, both in relation to the texts he produced and within a broader trans-national context of print There are three major thematic areas of enquiry; whether Waldegrave’s characterization by contemporary commentators and subsequent scholars as a Puritan printer is accurate; what his career in Scotland between 1590 and 1603 reveals about the Scottish print trade, and finally the role and significance of the various networks of print, patronage and religion within which he operated in regards to his own career as well as in the broader context of early modern religious and commercial printing. Challenging the reductive interpretation of Waldegrave’s life and career, this thesis places the Marprelate episode within the wider framework of his English and Scottish careers, enabling traditional assumptions about his motivation and autonomy to be questioned and reevaluated. It will be shown that the accepted image of Waldegrave as a committed Puritan printer, developed and disseminated by his representation within the Marprelate tracts was actually a misrepresentation of his position and that the reality was far more nuanced. His choices were informed by commercial concerns and the various needs of the networks of print, patronage and religion within which he worked, which often limited his ability to promote the religious beliefs he held. The study of Waldegrave and his English contemporaries within the Scottish print trade expands our knowledge of the relationship between the print trades of England and Scotland and highlights how intertwined they were during this period. Waldegrave’s Scottish career, and the significance of his complicated relationship with his royal patron, James VI will be established and the wider impact and significance of Waldegrave’s appointment as Royal printer demonstrated. As he worked as a minor jobbing printer, a fugitive on a clandestine press and as the Royal Printer in Scotland Waldegrave is one of a small number of stationers whose career was extremely varied. Through the study of Waldegrave’s unique and multifaceted career it is therefore possible to trace and analyse the complex networks within which he, and his fellow stationers operated during the late-sixteenth century.

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The starting point of this study is language and narration. The aim is to examine how educators reason by the choice of literature to work with in preschool. In my study I have examined how educators reason for the selection of books for preschool, which factors in the book affects the choice and the children’s influence. The empirical material is based on two focus groups. The participating educators in the examination discussed the subject together. By using three chosen books the educators in my study have reasoned around how the choice of books is done in preschool, what in the book is meaningful by the choice and the influence of the children. The result of the study shows that the educators reason towards a thematic aim by choice of books to work with in preschool. It also shows that the pictures are a central part for the children’s understanding of the book and also that the library is of great importance for the selection of litterateur for preschool. / Utgångspunkten för denna studie är temat språk och berättande. Syftet är att undersöka hur pedagoger resonerar vid val av litteratur att jobba med i förskolan. I min studie har jag undersökt hur pedagoger resonerar vid urval av böcker till förskolan, vilka faktorer i boken som påverkar valet och vilken påverkan barnen har. Det empiriska materialet bygger på två fokusgrupper. Pedagogerna som deltog i undersökningen diskuterade ämnet med varandra. Med hjälp av tre utvalda böcker har pedagogerna i min studie resonerat kring hur urval av böcker sker i förskolan, vad i boken är betydelsefullt vid valet samt barnens påverkan. Resultatet av studien visar att pedagogerna resonerar mot ett tematiskt mål vid val av böcker att arbeta med i förskolan. Det visar också att bilderna är en central del för barnens förståelse av boken samt att biblioteket har en stor betydelse för förskolans urval av litteratur.