After recognizing a lack of children’s voices in the debate about the children’s book Kivi och monsterhund and the gender-neutral pronoun hen that occurred in the beginning of the year of 2012, I decided to interview pre-school children about the same book. My purpose with the study was, using semi-structured group interviews, to examine how 6-year olds talked about the main character Kivi. With the help of Judith Butler’s theory of performativity, I have studied how the children constructed Kivi’s gender in their speech. I have looked at how they recall the appearance of Kivi to establish their gender, and detected insecurity when the normative gender attribute was questioned. I have also studied which pronouns the children used, and in which contexts they used them. I found that they mixed pronouns during the interviews, which I noted as a possible sign of gender insecurity or a consequence of grammatical immaturity. Lastly I looked at how the children spoke about Kivi in relation to activity and characteristics. My conclusion is that Swedish language as it is now makes it hard to speak about more than two genders, and therefore the word hen could be useful. The incapacity to speak about Kivi as neither a boy nor a girl, or maybe both, generates a need among the children to “decide” their “proper” gender. With hen comes the opportunity to speak beyond these language barriers, and therefore also make it a possible existence.

In this exam paper, a text analysis has been conducted in the context of ethnicity, examining the most popular library books borrowed by children between the ages of 9-12 years old. The bookshave been selected at two different libraries, located in two different socioeconomic areas. The aim is to examine whether ethnicity plays a role in the choice and content of literature in the two areas. The analysis takes into account class, sex and gender, all of which combine in the context of ethnicity. The framework within which I have based my questions are; In the context of ethnicity, is there a difference in the content of the most borrowed children's books at the two libraries located in areas of diverse socioeconomic background, is the choice of literature affected by the area in which library visitors live and is the content of the most borrowed books specific to what children is each particular area can identify with ? Having analysed the most popular books at both libraries, it has been concluded that there are differences in the two areas when it comes to children's choice of literature. In my analysis, I have also concluded that the content and stories in the books differ in that children living in the two areas choose to read books that they can personally identify with.

Thesis (M.Ed.)--Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2000. / Bibliography: leaf 87.

published_or_final_version / Chinese / Master / Master of Philosophy

While American Girl markets itself as a brand that teaches girls about our nation’s history and empowers girls to "stand tall, reach high, and dream big," this dissertation, "Mis(s) Education: Narrative Construction and Closure in American Girl" challenges this widely held belief. The American Girl Historical Character Series (hereafter AGHC series) is a textual site that writes a history that relies more on national myths of freedom, independence, and the pursuit of the American Dream through struggle. To dig deeper into this book series, I analyze how intersections of power in particular, nation, gender, race, and consumerism are constructed within the pages of the AGHC series. I assert that these books create a narrative construction and closure within the series. In place of a dialogic history that allows the reader to question historical and/or contemporary issues of power, a dominant narrative of history-one that relies on national myths prevails. While AG prides itself as a brand that first and foremost celebrates and empowers girls to become their very best, the historical series also imposes traditional gender roles for girls. It is this "rhetoric of empowerment" that this dissertation uncovers. Such an imagined empowerment is infused with ambivalence. AGHC series readers are also constructed as consumers who are being taught to celebrate consumerism and the Almighty Dollar.

This study examines representations of intercultural learning in global children’s literature through critical content analysis. Cosmopolitanism provides a vision to connect individuals to the global communities through a critical lens. According to Rizvi (2009), intercultural learning should bridge the local and the global, move between cultures and communities, and develop transnational compassion and collaboration. Intercultural learning involves explorations of culture, active participation in the world, and critical thinking on issues that are normally taken for granted. Intercultural learning is not just learning about other cultures but focuses on individuals’ awareness of their roles in the world and collaboration with people from global communities to make the world a better place. With this idea in mind, global children’s literature is a useful resource to introduce readers to the global community and to their responsibility in the world. This study is based on the importance of engaging with high quality global children’s literature to widen and deepen readers’ worldviews. Because readers are influenced by what they read and share, how books depict cross cultural experiences and international communities is crucial. Therefore, how books portray intercultural learning experiences in a global context is important to examine. This study provides a new lens on global children’s literature because limited research has been done to understand how the idea of intercultural learning through international travel is portrayed in books at a time when many readers have the opportunity to travel across the continents. The theoretical framework of this study consists of intercultural theories, global competency and critical literacy. This study looks at culture as ways of living that involve people’s thoughts, values and engagements in daily life. In addition, two intercultural learning theories are used to examine the protagonists’ learning including a continuum of intercultural learning by David Hoopes (1979) and a developmental model of intercultural sensitivity by Milton Bennett (1986, 1993, 2004, 2009). Theories relate to global education such as global competence by Hanvey (2000) and Case (1993), intercultural communicative competence by Michael Byram (1997), and cosmopolitanism by Rizvi (2005, 2006,2007, 2008, 2009 ) and Calhoun (2002). These theories inform my notion of intercultural learning in different ways. In addition, critical literacy is crucial to this study because it focuses on the characteristics that allow individuals to discover their role, relationship and responsibility with others in the world. Nine children and young adult’s realistic fiction novels were selected for this study. The books all involved protagonists’ explorations of new cultures, places, and people as they traveled to another country for short term visits. All of them have close relationships with at least one local friend. Critical content analysis is used to examine the text from a critical point of view to understand whether the international journey enables the protagonists to critically examine their privileges and responsibility in the world. In this study, critical literacy supports my concept of intercultural learning and it is also used to develop useful thinking tools (adapted from Jones, 2006) to examine the texts from a deeper perspective. First, the findings indicate that intercultural learning is portrayed with exoticism in this text set. In several of the books, international travel is associated with romance and exotic cultural icons. Secondly, insider authors and the authors who have close relationships with the groups they write about are more careful about cultural authenticity than outsider authors. Many of the insider authors care about the cultures they wrote about; therefore, they embed social messages in the stories. Additionally, several writers employ a writing formula to depict international travelers’ intercultural learning process. The formula does not reflect readers’ diverse cultural backgrounds in the current world. Lastly, throughout the journey, only a few protagonists develop critical consciousness regarding their roles in the global community. Conclusions from the analysis suggest the need for more sophisticated global children’s literature that highlights international travel and cross cultural relationships. The implication section provides recommendations to educators, teacher educators, and publishers and suggestions for further research.

This study explores cultural representations and cultural adaptations made by translators in translated children's picture books. This study has two focuses. In the first part of this study, which is a critical content analysis, I examine the cultural representations depicted in Korean-to-English and English-to-Korean translated picture books, using cultural studies as a theoretical framework. In the second part of this study, I compare original and translated editions of Caldecott and popular Korean picture books to find out how the translators adapt cultural, ideological, and linguistic conflicts in the process of translation, using translation as a dialogic process. For the first part of this study, I found four categories related to the cultural representations: (1) a sense of belonging and societal membership; (2) constructing and challenging gender stereotypes; (3) constructing images of childhood; and (4) dominant visual images of South Korea/the United States. These findings indicate that the insider authors of Korean culture try to show authentic images of South Korea, using contemporary fiction stories. The Korean translated books also deal with various images of American culture authentically from historical fiction to contemporary fiction. However, a small number of books do not show broad cultural representations of both cultures. In the second focus of this study on cultural adaptations, the analysis directly compared original and translated editions of the same texts. The themes of cultural familiarity, adaptations regarding illustrations, completely different translations, omissions, additions, and changes of titles or book jackets were identified. These findings indicate that most American and Korean translators purposely made cultural adaptations in the process of translation in order to help target readers to have better understanding of these international books. Additionally, they did not change essential authentic features, such as the characters' names and geographic names. I also found mistranslations between the original and translated editions of books. These changes could have occured because the translators lacked knowledge of both cultures or of the deep structures of the stories. The implication section provides recommendations to publishers, translators, educators, parents, teacher educators, and researchers and suggestions for further research.

This study explores the cultural dimension of translating children's and adolescent literature. Framed within the theories of cultural studies, translation studies, Baktinian dialogism, and reader response theories, this study is three-fold: (1) a content analysis is conducted to identify the cultural and linguistic shifts in the translated books and the strategies utilized by the translators for making those shifts, (2) the responses of the source-text (ST) and the target-text (TT) readers are compared; (3) the potential relationship between the translation strategies and the reader responses are inferred based on the findings from (1) and (2). The expected findings are: (1) adept use of various translation strategies helps the TT readers recognize themes as similar as the ST readers; (2) some interventions may create deviating responses in the TT readers as compared with the ST readers; (3) some unique responses by either the ST or the TT readers may be as a direct result of cultural differences more than the translation strategies. The implication section provides recommendations to publishers, translators, educators, parents, teacher educators, and researchers, and suggestions for further research.

This study is based on 72 children's and young adult books that met the criteria of being about Muslims and published and circulated here in the U.S. They can be divided into the varied genres as 49 contemporary realistic fiction, 6 historical fiction, and 17 autobiographies, biographies, and memoirs. In-depth reading and coding were used to identify patterns based on a theoretical frame of postcolonial theory and the lens of cultural authenticity.The exploration of ideas focus on the following research questions related to children's and adolescent literature published and distributed in the US that depict Muslim cultures: What are the overall characteristics of the books? What are the background experiences of the authors, illustrators, and translators who write and distribute literature within the U.S. that reflect Muslim Cultures? How do the genres of contemporary realistic fiction, historical fiction, and biographies published for adolescents and children within the U.S. represent and frame the varied Muslim cultures? What are the relationships between the background experiences of the authors and the representations of Muslim cultures in their books?This work is grounded in the assumption that Muslims are presented in a certain manner in popular culture and literature in the U.S., and thus, postcolonial theory is relevant in unpacking issues within the literature about these people. This theory draws on these suppositions to unveil how knowledge is constructed and circulated in dealing with global power relations. It also sheds light on how the identities of natives become hybrids as the process of colonization in certain cases impacts the psyche of inhabitants of these regions.This study is a `critical content analysis' in comprehending how texts are based in the social, cultural, and political contexts in which they are created and read. Content analyses examine what texts are about, considering the content from a particular perspective. This method scaffolds and explained my research to support my analysis of the texts through postcolonial perspectives to observe how Muslims are portrayed within adolescent and children's literature in the U.S.

This study explores the connections between childhood and children's literature. In this connection there is an inherent tension between writing and reading "real" childhood, as it is being lived by children now, and interacting with an adult-normative, adult-reconstructed childhood that may or may not have existed in the past. The purpose of this study was to address this tension by analyzing fifteen recently published award-winning children's novels, from the United States, The United Kingdom, and Australia, in order to ferret out how present-day childhood is constructed within this text set. Using a hybrid methodology called critical discourse analysis, buttressed by the frameworks of postmodern childhood studies and critical children's literature studies, the novels were analyzed in a hermeneutic, reader-response oriented approach in order to excavate themes that addressed childhood in the narratives. Findings are presented as a meta-plot, wherein the child protagonists leave a failed home, set out on a journey of knowledge and experience gaining a sense of agency, and, at the end of the novel, construct a new home replete with the child protagonists' personal meaning. This meta-plot includes instances of the child protagonist performing parrhesiatic acts (Foucault) as well as developing non-hierarchical relationships as conceptualized by an I/You relationship (Buber). Other findings include the construction of childhood as a time of "becoming" and a time of "is-ness," childhood as a time of resilience, and childhood as a time of difficult decisions. Conclusions of the analysis speak to the idea of the child serving as a Modern bringer of hope, who manages to create moral order from within an adult-created postmodern milieu. Implications relate to the fields of literacy education, replications of the study with an interpretative community of children, and continuing to define the burgeoning methodology of critical content analysis.