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Beowulf as Children's Literature brings together a group of scholars and creators to address important issues of adapting the Old English poem into textual and pictorial forms that appeal to children, past and present.

This book focuses on the importance of reading for pleasure and the difference that it can make to a person's life chances, with a focus upon how libraries and librarians help reluctant and struggling readers.

“What sets this book apart is its wonderful demonstration of the dynamic nature of the reading field. Resisting the rhetoric that our understandings of reading and reading education are complete and realized in current research, policies, and programs, Flippo’s experts articulate the possibilities of the different ways in which we define and pursue our consensus around many concepts. As well as identifying common ground, this book helps us to define our differences, to identify their origins, and to learn how we can live and work together. Read it. It’s powerful!” Patrick Shannon, Penn State University, USA; Author of The Main Danger: Reading Toward Democracy “This volume’s power comes from Rona Flippo’s approach to the convergence of knowledge and experience in reading education by leading theorists, researchers, and practitioners. Rona Flippo does not dismiss the national reports based upon syntheses of research; her work’s credibility surpasses them. The earnest discussion of reading development by each contributor puts reading practices on trial in a more critical and constructive way than a SIMPLE mass of disembodied research findings. Readers interested in American education will learn a great deal that will contribute to a better road map for improving the teaching of reading.” Robert J. Tierney, University of Sydney, Australia “This book provides a valuable set of thoughtful perspectives on the complexities of reading and language arts instruction. Readers will explore a history of contrasting views from experienced, top thinkers in the field. Importantly, shared goals clearly emerge. From these varied perspectives readers can develop their own rich theoretical and philosophical understanding.” Alan E. Farstrup, Executive Director of the International Reading Association (1992–2009) In Reading Researchers in Search of Common Ground, Second Edition, Rona F. Flippo revisits her groundbreaking Expert Study, in which she set out to find common ground among experts in the much-fragmented field of reading research. The original edition, published in 2001, has become a classic in the field. The Expert Study’s findings and discussions related to it remain provocative, viable, and highly relevant. Taking a fresh look at it, and its current implications for literacy education and common ground in light of the newest thinking and research of today, the Second Edition includes four new chapters from leaders in the field who discuss the study from their unique vantage points (literacy trends, emergent writing development, a comprehensive literacy curriculum, and a comparative analysis of the study’s findings and recommendations).

Concurrent with increasing scholarly attention toward national children’s literatures, Contemporary English-language Indian Children’s Literature explores an emerging body of work that has thus far garnered little serious critical attention. Superle critically examines the ways Indian children’s writers have represented childhood in relation to the Indian nation, Indian cultural identity, and Indian girlhood. From a framework of postcolonial and feminist theories, children’s novels published between 1988 and 2008 in India are compared with those from the United Kingdom and North America from the same period, considering the differing ideologies and the current textual constructions of childhood at play in each. Broadly, Superle contends that over the past twenty years an aspirational view of childhood has developed in this literature—a view that positions children as powerful participants in the project of enabling positive social transformation. Her main argument, formed after recognizing several overarching thematic and structural patterns in more than one hundred texts, is that the novels comprise an aspirational literature with a transformative agenda: they imagine apparently empowered child characters who perform in diverse ways in the process of successfully creating and shaping the ideal Indian nation, their own well-adjusted bicultural identities in the diaspora, and/or their own empowered girlhoods. Michelle Superle is a Professor in the department of Communications at Okanagan College. She has taught children’s literature, composition, and creative writing courses at various Canadian universities and has published articles in Papers and IRCL . Michelle Superle is a Professor in the department of Communications at Okanagan College. She has taught children’s literature, composition, and creative writing courses at various Canadian universities and has published articles in Papers and IRCL . Introduction: Contemporary, English-Language Indian Children's Novels as Aspirational Literature 1. The Development of Contemporary, English-Language Indian Children's Novels 2. Indian Women Writers: Imagining the New Indian Girl 3. Imagining Unity in Diversity through Cooperation and Friendship 4. Imagining and Performing the Indian Nation 5. Imagining \"Indianness\" 6. Imagining Identity in the Diaspora: Performing a \"masala\" Self 7. Performing New Indian Girlhood 8. Conclusion: Old and New Boundaries \"This benchmark book makes way for a conversation on how children’s literature registers the paradoxes inherent in any society on the threshold of change.\" -- Manika Subi Lakshmanan, UM St. Louis and Webster University in St. Louis, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly \"Superle’s thorough study is a marked contribution to existing scholarship on Indian children’s literature, and a welcome addition to the critical corpus.\" -- Poushali Bhadury, University of Florida, The Lion and the Unicorn

How did Ichabod Crane and other characters from children's literature shape the ideal of American citizenship? 2015 Honor Book Award, Children's Literature Association From the colonial period to the end of the Civil War, children's books taught young Americans how to be good citizens and gave them the freedom, autonomy, and possibility to imagine themselves as such, despite the actual limitations of the law concerning child citizenship. Imaginary Citizens argues that the origin and evolution of the concept of citizenship in the United States centrally involved struggles over the meaning and boundaries of childhood. Children were thought of as more than witnesses to American history and governance—they were representatives of \"the people\" in general. Early on, the parent-child relationship was used as an analogy for the relationship between England and America, and later, the president was equated to a father and the people to his children. There was a backlash, however. In order to contest the patriarchal idea that all individuals owed childlike submission to their rulers, Americans looked to new theories of human development that limited political responsibility to those with a mature ability to reason. Yet Americans also based their concept of citizenship on the idea that all people are free and accountable at every age. Courtney Weikle-Mills discusses such characters as Goody Two-Shoes, Ichabod Crane, and Tom Sawyer in terms of how they reflect these conflicting ideals.

On Reading Books to Children: Parents and Teachers brings together in one volume current research on adult book reading to children. The authors, drawn from around the world, are key researchers and eminent scholars from the fields of reading and literacy, child language, speech pathology, and psychology, representing multiple perspectives within these disciplines. Chapters on the effects and limitations of book sharing are integrated with chapters discussing promising programs on storybook research. The reality of reading to children is more complex than it appears on the surface. The authors discuss some effects of and suggestions for reading to children that have emerged from the research. The ideas set forth in this volume will stimulate new lines of research on the effects of storybook reading, as well as refinements of current methods, yielding findings that enrich our understanding of this important arena of literacy development. Contents: A. van Kleeck, S.A. Stahl, Preface. Part I: Book Sharing in Families. A.G. Bus, Social-Emotional Requisites for Learning to Read. J. De Temple, C.E. Snow, Learning Words From Books. E. Reese, A. Cox, D. Harte, H. McAnally, Diversity in Adults' Styles of Reading Books to Children. A. van Kleeck, J. Vander Woude, Book Sharing With Preschoolers With Language Delays. Part II: Storybook Reading in the Classroom. D.K. Dickinson, A. McCabe, L. Anastasopoulos, A Framework for Examining Book Reading in Early Childhood Classrooms. W.H. Teale, Reading Aloud to Young Children as a Classroom Instructional Activity: Insights From Research and Practice. L.M. Morrow, R. Brittain, The Nature of Storybook Reading in the Elementary School: Current Practices. M.G. McKeown, I.L. Beck, Taking Advantage of Read-Alouds to Help Children Make Sense of Decontextualized Language. A.A. Zevenbergen, G.J. Whitehurst, Dialogic Reading: A Shared Picture Book Reading Intervention for Preschoolers. Part III: Storybook Sharing as Cultural Practice. J. Anderson, A. Anderson, J. Lynch, J. Shapiro, Storybook Reading in a Multicultural Society: Critical Perspectives. V. Carrington, A. Luke, Reading, Homes, and Families: From Postmodern to Modern? R.B. Barrera, E.B. Bauer, Storybook Reading and Young Bilingual Children: A Review of the Literature. Part IV: Where Do We Go From Here? A. van Kleeck, Research on Book Sharing: Another Critical Look. A.D. Pellegrini, L. Galda, Joint Reading as a Context: Explicating the Ways Context Is Created by Participants. D.B. Yaden, Jr., Parent-Child Storybook Reading as a Complex Adaptive System: Or \"An Igloo Is a House for Bears.\" S.A. Stahl, What Do We Expect Storybook Reading to Do? How Storybook Reading Impacts Word Recognition.

Bringing together leading scholars and teacher educators from across the world, from Europe and the USA to Asia, this book presents the latest research and new perspectives into the uses of children's literature in second language teaching for children and young adults. Children's Literature in Second Language Education covers such topics as extensive reading, creative writing in the language classroom, the use of picturebooks and graphic novels in second language teaching and the potential of children's literature in promoting intercultural education. The focus throughout the book is on creative approaches to language teaching, from early years through to young adult learners, making this book an essential read for those studying or embarking on second language teaching at all levels.

In Book Smart: How to Support Successful, Motivated Readers, the experience of reading together is used as a vehicle for discussing the varied yet interconnected language and literacy skills that jumpstart the career of a successful reader. Authored by two passionate psychologists and educators, this book is a how-to guide rich with stories, lessons, activities, and ideas aimed at addressing the broad range of interpersonal, social, emotional, and motivational skills that must be fostered in young children.

In The Children’s Book Business , Lissa Paul constructs a new kind of book biography. By focusing on Eliza Fenwick’s1805 product-placement novel, Visits to the Juvenile Library , in the context of Marjorie Moon’s 1990 bibliography, Benjamin Tabart’s Juvenile Library , Paul explains how twenty-first century cultural sensibilities are informed by late eighteenth-century attitudes towards children, reading, knowledge, and publishing. The thinking, knowing children of the Enlightenment, she argues, are models for present day technologically-connected, socially-conscious children; the increasingly obsolete images of Romantic innocent and ignorant children are bracketed between the two periods. By drawing on recent scholarship in several fields including book history, cultural studies, and educational theory, The Children’s Book Business provides a detailed historical picture of the landscape of some of the trade practices of early publishers, and explains how they developed in concert with the progressive pedagogies of several female authors, including Eliza Fenwick, Mary Wollstonecraft, Anna Barbauld, Maria Edgeworth, and Ann and Jane Taylor. Paul’s revisionist reading of the history of children’s literature will be of interest to scholars working in eighteenth-century studies, book history, childhood studies, cultural studies, educational history, and children’s literature. Introduction: And in this Book There Are Many Houses. Chapter 1: This is the House that Ben Built. Chapter 2: These are the Books that Lived in the House that Ben Built. Chapter 3: These are the Lessons Taught from the Books that Lived in the House that Ben Built. Chapter 4: These are the Women Who Wrote the Books that Lived in the House that Ben Built. Chapter 5: These are (Not) the Children who Read the Books that Lived in the House that Ben Built. Chapter 6: In the End Lissa Paul, a professor in the Faculty of Education at Brock University in Canada, publishes and speaks internationally. She is the author of Reading Otherways (Thimble 1998), an Associate General Editor of The Norton Anthology of Children’s Literature (Norton 2005), and co-editor, with Phil Nel, of Keywords for Children’s Literature (New York UP 2011) . She is currently working on a biography of Eliza Fenwick (1767-1840). \"While this is definitely a scholar's book drawing on scholarly contexts, readers familiar with standard histories of children's literature will find food for thought in Paul's championing of figures earlier historians have dismissed.\" -- The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, 2011 \"An image-rich and engaging work of scholarship…Paul’s book includes much that will be of interest to those in book history, women’s writings, and children’s literature, particularly in its study of the importance and reach of Talbart’s collection of books. Paul also provides important jumping-off points for future, much-needed research into the careers of Fenwick and Ann and Jane Taylor.\" – Studies in English Literature , 2011