Thesis (Ph. D.)--Columbia University, 1936. / Vita. Bibliography: p. 55-56.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 1998. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 420-427). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

This thesis situates the life and work of Virginia Woolf in a socio-literary history of writing by, and attitudes towards, children. It explores late-Victorian middle-class children's lives, and the relationships between parents and children during the period. Although Darwinian ideals had begun to influence parents earlier in the century, it was not until the 1870s that they seem to have become prevalent in middle-class families. Through an examination of the expansion of evolutionary and developmental stage theories in the late Victorian years, the thesis puts forth the theory that middle-class adults of the period saw children as containing adult potential. It makes a study of how this view affected middle-class family life, child rearing, and children's culture during the period. It particularly investigates linguistic developmental theory and its effect on reading and writing education, and late-Victorian ideas of children's sexual development and the need for sexual education. The thesis examines how such theories led to changes in writing by children during the period, exploring nineteenth-century works by children, and focusing on the home manuscript magazine genre. It questions the late-Victorian belief that children wrote spontaneously and "naturally." It situates the juvenile writings of the Stephen children (of whom Woolf was one), using these texts as typical products of the late-nineteenth-century middle-class familial and cultural context that the thesis examines. This study allows me to propose a critical definition of late-nineteenth-century children's home magazine writing. The thesis goes on to argue that Woolf, while recognizing herself as a product of the late-Victorian middle classes and retaining some of the authorial qualities evident in her family's juvenile works, rebelled against the late- Victorian evolutionist-developmentalist view of childhood, and helped to create a new language in the process.

No description available.

No description available.

This study explores the ways that acts of writing occur and become recognized as “writing” in a kindergarten classroom. Symbolic representations often aligning with the dominance of conventions come to be seen and named as writing as soon as children enter school, therefore influencing how one is seen and named in the classroom space as a “writer.” This often-narrow focus on what it means to be a writer leaves little room for teachers to acknowledge the various acts of writing that occur or might occur across space and time in a given classroom or in out of school contexts. With this naming of particular acts of writing, comes the exclusion of other acts. Drawing on a sociocultural framework with tenets of post structuralism, this case study uses a Foucauldian approach to shed light on the multiple powers/knowledges that are deployed in a classroom. Using ethnographic methods this work highlights the ways that children engage in acts of mark making both within and beyond the designated pedagogical space dedicated to writing. Data were gathered through participant observations, interviews, and the collection of artifacts across the first 4 months of school in a kindergarten classroom situated in a suburban district in the Midwest. The ongoing analysis of data across the study surfaced several discursive patterns suggesting that both the teacher and children were influenced by the larger discourse of accountability and compliance circulating in schools today. With an increased emphasis on early literacy standards and the ensuing accountability attached to such, this analysis has the potential to open up possibilities that may extend how writing might come to be seen and taught in classrooms, therefore influencing the kinds of writing and acts that might be seen as permissible.

University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities / Department of English

The first purpose of the present study was to determine whether the duration of preschool children's drawing and writing activity could be increased by introducing the process of dictation and dramatization of children's own stories. The second purpose of this study was to determine whether taking dictation from preschool children and facilitating the dramatization of children's dictations had an impact on print awareness. Samples of convenience were selected from a child care center in a small midwestern city. Results were based on the participation of 16 3- to 5-year-old children in the intervention group and 21 3- to 5-year-old children in the control group.Each participant's print awareness level was measured at the beginning and end of the study using the Print Awareness Test (Huba & Kontos, 1986). Videorecordings were made of the activity that occurred at a designated writing table. The duration of each child's writing and drawing activity was recorded (in seconds). For three hours a week during the eight weeks of the treatment period, children in the treatment group were encouraged to dictate their own individual stories to an adult who wrote their stories and read the stories back to the children. During the last four weeks of the treatment period, children in the treatment group also were encouraged to dramatize their own stories.The findings of the study were:1. A significant difference in children's print awareness was found in both the treatment and control groups (p<.05). There was no difference in print awareness change scores between the treatment and control groups.2. There was a moderate positive correlation (.471) between the number of stories dictated during the first four weeks of intervention and changes in print awareness scores within the treatment group.3. There was no significant difference between the control and treatment groups in the duration of writing and drawing at the end of the study. However, within the treatment group, during the time children were dictating and dramatizing their own stories, the duration of writing and drawing was significantly greater than either before or after intervention. / Department of Elementary Education

Thesis (Ed.D.) -- Teachers College, Columbia University, 1991. / Typescript; issued also on microfilm. Sponsor: Jo Anne Kleifgen. Dissertation Committee: Lucy McCormick Calkins. Includes bibliographical references: (leaves 181-185).