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Discover the stories of major natural science expeditions, as depicted in award-winning children's non-fiction. Examples include Robert Siebert award winner, Parrots over Puerto Rico, and Orbis Pictus winner, Quest for the Tree Kangaroo. While sharing Common Core correlations and reading promotion activities, participants explore how literature encurages children to care for and consider the natural world of which they are part.

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This Education Resource Guide includes discussion questions, as well as activities regarding the following three topics related to Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Long Haul.

This Education Resource Guide includes activities regarding the following three topics related to P.S. Be Eleven, followed by discussion questions, and a list of books for further reading: Motown Vietnam War and PTSD Senator Robert F. Kennedy

This paper introduces the American Library Association’s award (Batchelder) for most outstanding children’s book originally published in a language other than English in a country other than the United States, and subsequently translated into English for publication in the United States, to encourage American publishers, librarians, and booksellers to seek out superior children’s books abroad and to promote communication among the peoples of the world. The purpose of the introduction is to share our philosophy, supported by theory, as to the need for young people to read and respond to intimate, literary, and thematic stories from other cultures and countries in order to develop into empathetic international citizens. Such philosophy relates to the scholarly contentions of Carl Tomlinson, author of “Children’s Books From Other Countries”; Mildred Batchelder, the consummate former director of the American Library Services for Children division of the ALA, after whom the award is named; and Louise Rosenblatt, well-known reader response theorist. Specifically, a discussion of these theorists’ perspectives will reveal sharing Batchelder books, rather than just factual websites or textbook information about the peoples and places on our globe, helps young people build a foundation of international understanding; brings the experiences of young people in other countries to life, revealing “living, breathing” individuals and diminishing stereotypes; and assists in raising awareness as to how each member of the international community may benefit, one from the other. The authors’ method will be to discuss and summarize several significant Batchelder titles, also providing suggestions for curricular, reader-response tie-ins associated with each title, presenting librarians with myriad means by which these treasured books may be shared with young people. The activities suggested will heavily consider Rosenblatt’s “mirror to window” and aesthetic reader response assertions. Hopefully, both librarians and booksellers will become knowledgeable of the award titles and work to collect and stock, respectively, these international treasures in libraries and stores, right along with Newbery and Caldecott titles, hence adopting the role of creating internationally aware readers and citizens within our diverse and multicultural world. The implications of such awareness are significant at both a micro and macro level. First, at the micro level, engaged students, reading about and connecting to “exotic” children from cultures other than their own, will strengthen reading fluency and language arts skills. The distinctive, differing styles and points-of-view in these texts will assist in the understanding of literary elements, while also, on a human rather than textbook level, disclosing major world issues of both the past and present. Additionally, the internationalization of curricula will be enhanced if librarians are aware of the proposed methods. At the macro level, the titles serve to nurture the value of international understanding and respect amongst peoples of the world, develop humane and supportive world citizens, and confirm humanity’s universal experiences, overshadowing differences and conflicts.

Prominent within various scientific journals, news media outlets, and online publications are conversations surrounding what is dubbed “climate anxiety.” This wide-stemmed social unrest is caused, in large part, by the unrelenting, consistent data from the scientific community reporting rising sea levels, species extinction, and “record-breaking” heatwaves as well as an increasing average of global temperatures, that seem to top the next every year for the past decade. However, an underlying thread to these reports remains largely consistent. Unless serious regard is given to our natural surroundings and how we have come to interact within it, regions of the Earth considered desirable for human life will likely become uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable to humans and other species. When addressed so simply and plainly, it seems that the response to such life-altering implications ought to be simple: do whatever it takes to ensure that a diversity of life, including that of humankind, can continue on the planet Earth. Voices of the scientific community have decreed that a driving force behind the lackadaisical approach to deterring such dire climatological circumstances, is the inability to grasp the immense scope of climate change issues. This thesis, then, aims at proposing a directive to correct this problematic mentality, and a specific generation to combat this nature. Using the lens of ecocriticism, the study of literature and the environment, combined with cutting-edge theoretical findings in the field, I will focus on the literary portrayal of climate change within young-adult dystopian fiction. While regarding the scholarship on the recent increase of YA fiction that takes a critical approach to human ethics and the portrayal of the demise of the natural environment in those texts, I will examine how this trend responds to my ideas of young-adult fiction functioning within Ecocriticism. Moreover, you will see a pattern charting how literature can revolutionize and evolve the mind frame of human ethics on a planetary scale, starting with the young adult readers. Further, I will highlight how these ideologies could and ought to be incorporated into a composition classroom. Composition already has a strong history of grounding itself in the notion of identity, and how contingent factors (social, political, economic, ecological, etc.) are integrated into the construction of that identity. This thesis poses that if we can introduce a sense of how those factors affect our ability to act in the natural world and potential consequences of these actions by way of pop culture outlets like YA Climate Fiction, readers can begin to re-shape our identities and actions, individually and collectively, towards Ecocritical ethics and awareness.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Illinois State University, 2003. / Title from title page screen, viewed October 17, 2005. Dissertation Committee: Jan C. Susina (chair), C. Anita Tarr, Cynthia A. Huff. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 171-184) and abstract. Also available in print.

This study analyzes Lloyd Alexander's The Prydain Chronicles through a Jungian lens. Previous scholarship on Alexander's works has briefly considered archetypal criticism, but not extensively. Bruno Bettelheim's thoughts are used intermittently throughout the thesis. This study concentrates on Taran's individuation process, the discovery of true selfhood, and his consequent development of a whole psyche.