+Readers in Action

LCN617—Children’s Literature: Criticism and Practice. 2015.

Erica Hateley – erica.hateley@qut.edu.au

Theresa Bernstein, The Readers (1914)

+From Module 1 to Module 2…

Thus far, we have taken a textually-focussed approach to children’s literature Types of stories (narratives) Means of storytelling (narration) Implications of valued or desirable ways of being and behaving How readers are positioned to align themselves with particular

perspectives and textual values

Now, we move into thinking about children’s literature as a social object Reading communities – professional and personal How school / libraries shape and serve different groups of readers

Groups of readers / groups of texts Popular genres – publishing, narrative, and modal

+Books AND Readers – Individuals AND Groups – Professional AND Personal

“Where once reading was an intensely private experience—it happened in response to a printed text in an individual reader’s head at that reader’s pace, and the kind of responses it generated owed much to the reader’s personal life and history—those growing up in a multimedia environment increasingly expect reading to involve other people and versions of texts which variously position them as viewers, players, readers, and producers of text” (Reynolds 69)

Walter (and others) remind us that individual readers are always already socially located and engaged. One challenge faced by librarians is how to engage readers socially within and through the library.

There are immediate physical / material communities, but also symbolic / virtual communities (online, but also across time and demographics)

+

“Using the term ‘community’ gets to the heart of the notion that social formations can shape themselves around a text. It

helps us recognize the factors at play as community members search for meaning within a text, sort out power structures, and, ultimately, gain the knowledge that comes from exposure to, and discussion of, new and unfamiliar concepts.” (Sedo

11)

+Walter, “The Children We Serve”:

“Which child will we target as we plan and deliver library services in our communities?” (Walter 76)

The Child as Reader

The Child of the Information Age

The Child in the Community

The Global Child

The Empowered Child

+Francois, “Reading in the Crawl Space”:

Constructing a community within one school (which nonetheless respects and builds on the communities within which the school and its people are already embedded)

“Sociocultural perspectives on reading research have increased our awareness of the ways in which youth perform literacy events on their own, fuse it with their identity, and develop a sense of agency through their literacy practices.” (Francois 4)

+(Reading) Communities of Practice

“Inherent in communities of practice are mutual commitments toward the same interests, explicit and implicit opportunities for apprenticeship, a shared repertoire of resources, relationships around practice, and identity development through engagement with the community.” (Francois 5)

“truly only inanimate structural elements—did not make Grant Street a reading school. Rather, data suggest that these were the resources through which reading with others, conversations about books, and exposure to reading practice could occur” (Francois 20)

+“Professional” Interpretive Communities

“interpretive community

Stanley Fish developed this concept to explain how diverse readers consistently produce similar readings of certain types of texts. His argument, which borrows Noam Chomsky’s distinction between competence and performance, is that readers in a particular country at a particular time internalize a set of expectations about how texts work and what counts as a text, amounting to a kind of literary competence, such that whenever they encounter a new text they already know how to respond to it.” (Buchanan)

In Fish’s own words: “Interpretive communities are made up of those who share interpretive strategies not for reading (in the conventional sense) but for writing texts, for constituting their properties and assigning their intentions. In other words, these strategies exist prior to the act of reading and therefore determine the shape of what is read rather than, as is usually assumed, the other way around” (Fish 171).

+CATCF and the effects of popular and professional reception

“The fact that this book [Charlie] has achieved the status of a modern classic provides evidence that children’s collective voices can sometimes cause the walls erected by the field’s adult gatekeepers to come tumbling down.” (West 18)

“tiny people who live and work in the factory. In the book’s 1964 version, the Oompa-Loompas have black skin and are said to be pygmies from Africa.” (West 20)

“When Dahl first heard about his book coming under attack for being racist, he was a bit taken aback. He did not, however, dismiss the charges or become defensive. Instead, he gave the matter much thought and concluded that the charges were reasonable and warranted a response.” (West 21)

+Active Communities of Readers…

Nerdfighters Project 4 Awesome

See Dean, “A Note on Nerdfighters” at: http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/a-note-on-nerdfighters

Think also of the many reading and associated groups in schools – the ‘official’ as in English class; the less official, such as lunchtime Manga clubs

+Discussion Prompts:

This week, we’re dealing with a set of related but somewhat abstractor theoretical concepts. Allow yourself some time to think about the following, and the similarities and differences between them: Reading community Interpretive community Community of practice

What do these concepts have to offer in terms of thinking about children’s literature?

What do these concepts have to offer in terms of thinking about school/library practice?

What are the connections between the ‘types’ of child outlined by Walter, and concepts of reading communities?

Think about a library you’re familiar with (as a patron, librarian, or other capacity). What kind/s of child does the library target? What kind/s of communities does the library serve, represent, exclude?

What kinds of textually-organised social formations can you see or imagine as relevant to school/library practice?

+Works Cited:

Buchanan, Ian. “Interpretive Community.” A Dictionary of Critical Theory. Oxford: OUP, 2010.

Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text in this Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Harvard: Harvard University Press,1980.

Francois, Chantal. “Reading in the Crawl Space: A Study of an Urban School’s Literacy-Focused Community of Practice.” Teachers College Record 115.5 (2013): 1-35.

Reynolds, Kimberley. Children’s Literature: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: OUP, 2011.

Sedo, DeNel Rehberg. “An Introduction to Reading Communities: Processes and Formations.” Reading Communities from Salons to Cyberspace. Ed. DeNel Rehberg Sedo. New York: Palgrave, 2011. 1-24.

Walter, Virginia A. Twenty-First-Century Kids, Twenty-First-Century Librarians. Chicago: American Library Association, 2009.

West, Mark I. “Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: A Classic That Slipped by the Gatekeepers.” Journal of Children’s Literature 25.2 (1999): 18-23.