Dissonant Voices has a twofold aspiration. First, it is a philosophical treatment of everyday pedagogical interactions between children and their elders, between teachers and pupils. More specifically it is an exploration of the possibilities to go on with dissonant voices that interrupt established practices – our attunement – in behaviour, practice and thinking. Voices that are incomprehensible or expressions that are unacceptable, morally or otherwise. The text works on a tension between two inclinations: an inclination to wave off, discourage, or change an expression that is unacceptable or unintelligible; and an inclination to be tolerant and accept the dissonant expression as doing something worthwhile, but different. The second aspiration is a philosophical engagement with children’s literature. Reading children’s literature becomes a form of philosophising, a way to explore the complexity of a range of philosophical issues. This turn to literature marks a dissatisfaction with what philosophy can accomplish through argumentation and what philosophy can do with a particular and limited set of concepts for a subject, such as ethics. It is a way to go beyond philosophising as the founding of theories that justify particular responses. The philosophy of dissonance and children’s literature becomes a way to destabilise justifications of our established practices and ways of interacting. The philosophical investigations of dissonance are meant to make manifest the possibilities and risks of engaging in interactions beyond established agreement or attunements. Thinking of the dissonant voice as an expression beyond established practices calls for improvisation. Such improvisations become a perfectionist education where both the child and the elder, the teacher and the student, search for as yet unattained forms of interaction and take responsibility for every word and action of the interaction. The investigation goes through a number of picture books and novels for children such as Harry Potter, Garmann’s Summer, and books by Shaun Tan, Astrid Lindgren and Dr. Seuss as well narratives by J.R.R. Tolkien, Henrik Ibsen, Jane Austen and Henry David Thoreau. These works of fiction are read in conversation with philosophical works of, and inspired by, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Stanley Cavell, their moral perfectionism and ordinary language philosophy.

Oscar Wilde’s fairytales have been read to children for more than a century. Nevertheless, since the time of their publication in 1888 and 1891, the target audience of The Happy Prince and Other Tales and A House of Pomegranates have been the concern of critics. Delving into the context behind the rich and colourful imagery, one can find implications of homosexuality, the Paterian aesthetic and religious connotations. According to Carol Tattersall, The Happy Prince and Other Tales successfully mislead the public that it is innocent of any intention to undermine established standards of living or writing. Tattersall’s argument is based on comparing the first collection to Wilde’s second, A House of Pomegranates, which was perceived as “offensive and immoral” (136). On the other hand, William Butler Yeats states in his introduction to The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde that overall the reviewers of The Happy Prince and Other Tales were hostile because of Wilde’s aesthetic views (ixxvi). But Yeats overlooks the fact that Wilde was very pleased and proud, dashing notes to friends and reviewers and signing copies to many people (Tattersall 129). In general, the reception of Wilde’s first collection was more positive than that of the second because it was milder and more subtle in its controversial themes.

"Girlhood Geographies: Mapping Gendered Spaces in Victorian Literature for Children," analyzes Victorian literature for girls and contemporary discourses on girlhood through the lens of cultural geography in order to examine the importance of place in the Victorian girl's identity work and negotiation of social responsibilities, pressures, and anxieties. The premise of my project is that one of the pressing cultural concerns in Victorian England, which greatly valued the stability of gender and class identities, was to teach children to know their place—not simply their proper position in society but how their position in society dictated the physical spaces in which they belonged and those in which they did not. Girls' virtue, in particular, was evinced in their ability to determine and engage in behavior appropriate to the spaces in which they lived. I argue that, by portraying girls' negotiation of the spaces of the home, outdoors, school, and street, Victorian children's literature sought to organize for the girl reader both the places in which she lived and her ability to define these places in relation to her own subjectivity. Each of my chapters considers a genre or body of children's literature that centers on place, including domestic fiction such as Charlotte Yonge's The Daisy Chain and Catherine Sinclair's Holiday House, literature set in the garden and outdoors, including Christina Rossetti's Speaking Likenesses and Kate Greenaway's Under the Window, and school stories by such writers as L.T. Meade, Geraldine Mockler, and Evelyn Sharp. In analyzing these texts, this dissertation illuminates the manner in which girl characters' relationships with nuanced physical spaces affect their negotiation of personal interests and social responsibilities, and their development into Victorian women.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2003. / Supervisor: Shelley Fisher Fishkin. Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Also available from UMI.

Dissonant Voices has a twofold aspiration. First, it is a philosophical treatment of everyday pedagogical interactions between children and their elders, between teachers and pupils. More specifically it is an exploration of the possibilities to go on with dissonant voices that interrupt established practices – our attunement – in behaviour, practice and thinking. Voices that are incomprehensible or expressions that are unacceptable, morally or otherwise. The text works on a tension between two inclinations: an inclination to wave off, discourage, or change an expression that is unacceptable or unintelligible; and an inclination to be tolerant and accept the dissonant expression as doing something worthwhile, but different. The second aspiration is a philosophical engagement with children’s literature. Reading children’s literature becomes a form of philosophising, a way to explore the complexity of a range of philosophical issues. This turn to literature marks a dissatisfaction with what philosophy can accomplish through argumentation and what philosophy can do with a particular and limited set of concepts for a subject, such as ethics. It is a way to go beyond philosophising as the founding of theories that justify particular responses. The philosophy of dissonance and children’s literature becomes a way to destabilise justifications of our established practices and ways of interacting. The philosophical investigations of dissonance are meant to make manifest the possibilities and risks of engaging in interactions beyond established agreement or attunements. Thinking of the dissonant voice as an expression beyond established practices calls for improvisation. Such improvisations become a perfectionist education where both the child and the elder, the teacher and the student, search for as yet unattained forms of interaction and take responsibility for every word and action of the interaction. The investigation goes through a number of picture books and novels for children such as Harry Potter, Garmann’s Summer, and books by Shaun Tan, Astrid Lindgren and Dr. Seuss as well narratives by J.R.R. Tolkien, Henrik Ibsen, Jane Austen and Henry David Thoreau. These works of fiction are read in conversation with philosophical works of, and inspired by, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Stanley Cavell, their moral perfectionism and ordinary language philosophy.

No description available.

No description available.

Teacher read aloud is perceived as a long-standing, common classroom practice. The purpose of this study was to examine this educational tradition in a framework of literacy as social practice that supports the ideas of apprenticeship, discourse communities, and specific contextual-discipline literacies. Using mixed-methods, data was gathered on three major components of teacher read aloud practice: (1) time spent on read aloud, (2) purpose and text choice of read aloud, (3) and practices that focused on developing literary understanding through read aloud. Through these components, the knowledge and beliefs of teachers regarding teacher read aloud, literacy and literary development, and children’s literature were examined. Data was gathered through an online survey, logbooks, and interviews. Statistical and deductive analysis of the data’s quantitative components was conducted; and interview and open-survey responses were qualitatively analyzed. Analysis of the data on purpose and text choice suggests children’s literature is being read aloud in classrooms in ways that may conflate the literacy and literary development of students, and these ways may model particular types of values and behaviours when reading. Multiple purposes were identified for read alouds, with informative purposes being the most common. While the purpose of the read alouds was to inform, fiction texts were dominant with minimal non-fiction, or discipline-specific texts being used in the content areas. The use of fiction for informative purposes resulted in limited evidence that teacher read aloud was used to develop literary understandings. Teachers reported having limited resources for professional development and limited infrastructure to support effective read aloud. Findings of this study can be used to inform us that teacher read aloud may be a common practice in terms of taking place in most classrooms; however, the time invested, both in frequency and duration, is limited, giving children minimal opportunities to apprentice into a reading community. Findings from this study also provide evidence that traditional practices can continue to be effective, but these practices should be renewed to support better the current and evolving understandings of literacy and literary exposure. Professional development and opportunities to reflect on practice could ameliorate this renewal for in-service and pre-service teachers.

Typescript. / Thesis (Ed. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1982. / Bibliography: leaves [230]-238. / Photocopy. / x, 238 leaves, bound 29 cm

Research Doctorate - PhD English / This thesis challenges the idea that children’s literature is an inherently colonising act. By applying Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories of dialogism and the carnivalesque to the nonsense literature of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll, I show that children’s texts can be read as non-colonising. A dialogic reading of Edward Lear’s limericks and Lewis Carroll’s Alice books shows that these texts are non-colonising and emancipatory because they do not promote one worldview or impose a concept of the essentialised child onto the reader. Instead, they challenge the arbitrary boundaries established and maintained by tools such as language and threats of social judgement that support imperial dichotomies of self and other. I also show how the discourse surrounding children’s literature perpetuates a “politics of innocence” concerning a dominant social concept of the child. This discourse encourages purposive adaptations of children’s books, in this case, Lear’s and Carroll’s nonsense texts, that are more colonising than the original texts.