This research investigated Punjabi children’s meaning-making processes as they engaged with culturally relevant literature, and presents a critical evaluation of Punjabi and Sikh representation in children’s literature. The Punjabi community in Canada is growing rapidly, with Punjabi being the third most commonly spoken non-official language in Canada. Yet, this minority group remains underrepresented in educational research. Past research has shown the numerous benefits minority children experience when engaging with literature that authentically represents their cultural background (see Cunard, 1996; Goldblatt, 1999; Goo, 2018; Steiner, Nash & Chase, 2008; Zhang & Morrison, 2010). This study gave Punjabi children the opportunity to interact with culturally-relevant stories in multimodal ways, and express their understandings through multiple literacies. The children constructed and shared meanings through verbal discussions, multimodal artwork and the inclusion of movement and dramatizations. They drew on a variety of lived experiences to make meaning from the stories. Their meaning-making processes were further enhanced by the collaborative experience of reading, constructing and sharing meanings. This study opens the door to future research into ways of using literature to foster engagement in the classroom and support children’s meaning-making processes.

The purpose of this study was to describe the nature of reading instruction in a program using children's trade books instead of basal readers, and to identify patterns resulting in hypotheses regarding the nature of instruction. The study informs practitioners by providing descriptions of actual instruction, enabling readers to envision how reading instruction is accomplished using children's trade books, and it informs the research community by developing grounded theory concerning the nature of instruction in one literature-based reading program. The study can help bridge the polarization between traditionalists and whole language advocates through the descriptions of how traditionally accepted academic domains of reading instruction were accomplished. Also, it provides a model of a successful way to structure instructional time so that students spend more time actually reading, and it documents the social dimensions of instruction as important domain of reading instruction.

Writing the history of children's literature in the postcolonial era remains important, because it serves as the counter-assertion to the history of the child and the history of children's literature dominated by the West. The once-silenced voice of the postcolonial child must resurface in in literary criticism, because it asserts the strangeness and otherness that the West and of which it has remained largely ignorant. The present study offers a postcolonial reading of children's literature in the Philippines in the context of succeeding waves of Spanish and American colonization. In making close-readings of selected works, I analyze the dynamic between metropolitan Manila and provincial Bicol, in the effort to reconfigure operative binaries of city and country still shaping the economic, historical and cultural realities in everyday Filipino/a life. Philippine children's literature remains "Manila -centric"not only because the capital city retains the monopoly of cultural production nationally, but because it perpetuates the legacy of colonialism in language and educational policy required by elites in the center. By contrast, Bicol represents the power, voice, and authority of the once -marginalized periphery, whereby an alternative to Manila in children's literary disc ourse has emerged, born out of (as I argue here) a specifically and culturally situated local discourse: that of the bukid or mountain.Bukid is the Bicol term for the rice field, mountain, and volcano. The iconic mountain-volcano of our region, the Mayon Volcano, represents the power of bukid now appearing on the horizon of the metropolitan imaginary. The mountain is speaking back. Historically, bukid has served as a shelter for the marginalized. It also has provided refuge for revolutionaries rebelling against the colonizers based in the center. As an as -yet under-theorized voice linking local landscape to history, the voice of bukid is crucial to the study of Filipino/a children's literature, because its very solidity and monumentality are integral to Filipino/a consciousness everywhere. (Every region has its own mountain.) The voice of the bukid not only challenges the binarism between the city and the country, but makes a critique of the current centralized system of production impoverishing the regional capacity for children's literature in the Philippines. My personal experience as a Filipina -Chinese woman writing on behalf of our children remains connected to these marginalized spaces seemingly so distant from the metropolitan imagination. According to Gloria Anzaldua, "The work of the mestiza consciousness is to break down the subject-object duality that keeps her a prisoner and to show in the flesh and through the images of her work how duality is transcended" (80)

"This study has been undertaken to determine if the World Landmark Books are of the high quality claimed by the publishing house and if therefore they are worthy of inclusion in the libraries serving the twelve-to-fourteen-year-old groups. Since it is planned as a companion study to U. S. Landmarks, An Analysis and Evaluation, a paper done in 1957 by Mrs. Ethel Mestayer Huff, the same general outline and procedure will be followed. This will make possible the comparison and future unification of these two studies, should it seem desirable"--Introduction. / Typescript. / "August, 1959." / "Submitted to the Graduate Council of Florida State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts." / Advisor: Agnes Gregory, Professor Directing Paper. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 57-59).

It is a common intuition that we can learn something of moral importance from literature, and one of the ways in which we teach our children about morality is through stories. In selecting books for children to read a primary concern is often the effect that the moral content of the story will have on the morality of the child reader. In this thesis I argue in order to take advantage of the contribution that literature can make to moral development, we need to teach children to read in a particular way. As a basis for this argument I use an account of moral agency that places emphasis on the development of moral skills - the ability to critically assess moral rules and systems, and the capacity to perceive and respond to the particulars of individual situations and to choose the right course of action in each - rather than on any particular kind of moral content. In order to make the most of the contribution that literature can make to the development of these skills, we need to teach children to immerse themselves in the story, rather than focusing on literary criticism. I argue that, contrary to the standard view of literary criticism as the only form of protection against possible negative effects, an immersed reading will help to prevent the child reader from taking any moral claims made in the story out of context, and so provide some measure of protection against possible negative moral effects of the story. Finally I argue that there are certain kinds of stories - recognisable by features that contribute to a high literary quality - that will enrich the experience of an immersed reading, and will therefore make a greater contribution to moral development than others.

Please read the abstract in the section 00front of this document / Dissertation (MA (Literary Theory))--University of Pretoria, 2002. / Afrikaans / unrestricted

"The rise of Protestantism in the seventeenth century was responsible for a deep gloom in the scanty literature which was produced for children during that period. Children were given instruction concerning religion and preparedness for death. But then, as now, children appropriated adult books that interested them. It is pleasant to remember that children at this time found enjoyment in three books not intended for them: Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, and Pilgrim's Progress. It was into this scene that John Newbery came--he who was destined to be called The Father of Children's Literature. Publisher and writer of about two hundred children's books, he was the first man to realize that children had no stories of their own and to attempt to remedy that deficiency. Newbery brought to children pleasure and happiness in books that had been almost entirely lacking before his time and his contribution marks a milestone in the development of a special literature for children. In the following chapters an attempt has been made to draw together information concerning the life, character, and works of this unusual man and to evaluate his contribution to children's literature"--Introduction. / Typescript. / "August, 1950." / "Submitted to the Graduate Council of Florida State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts." / Advisor: Louis Shores, Professor Directing Paper. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 34-35).

Children experience life crisis and normal developmental problems. This study is aimed at highlighting the role fiction can play in assisting children in coping with certain normal life crisis and developmental problems. A discussion on the nature of the bibliotherapeutic process indicated that fiction plays a major role in the success thereof. A model was designed for the selection process of fiction for the bibliotherapeutic process. Selection criteria were established for both the reader and the reading matter. Tables were designed consisting of selection criteria for both the reader and the reading matter. Stories about life crisis relating to death and divorce, as well as normal developmental problems about fear of peer group rejection and fear of the acquirement of skills, were evaluated against these criteria. This indicates that it is possible to select the right book for the bibliotherapeutic process with children. / Information Science / M.Inf.

published_or_final_version / English Studies / Master / Master of Arts

The "conflict thesis" that science and religious are inherently incompatible was by no means taken for granted by nineteenth-century scientists, religious thinkers, or cultural commentators. In fact, scientific exploration and religion happily coexisted for years, partially through the efforts of science writers who framed their potentially incendiary claims with narrative acknowledgements of a Great Creator. This paper examines the late-nineteenth century tension between scientific and religious epistemologies through the lens of children's religious education, claiming that children's Bible adaptations can be read as a lexicon of coping strategies through which religious adults attempted to gain control of the scientific threat to their faith. In short, by employing the techniques of fiction, writers of children's Bibles encouraged their child readers to engage with fiction in an imaginative register, diverting cosmological questions by encouraging children to see themselves and their relationship with God as porous, open, and accessible to a fantastical hyperreality. / text