Kerry M. Mallan

New World Orders in Contemporary Children's Literature

New World Orders shows how texts fro children and young people have responded to the cultural, economic, and political movements of the last 15 years. With a focus on international childrens texts produced between 1988 and 2006, the authors discuss how utopian and dystopian tropes are pressed into service to project possible futures for child readers. The book considers what these texts have to say about globalisation, neocolonialism, environmental issues, pressures on families and communities, and the idea of the posthuman.

Exploring young children's web searching and technoliteracy

– This paper aims to report findings from an exploratory study investigating the web interactions and technoliteracy of children in the early childhood years. Previous research has studied aspects of older childrens technoliteracy and web searching; however, few studies have analyzed web search data from children younger than six years of age., – The study explored the Google web searching and technoliteracy of young children who are enrolled in a “preparatory classroom” or kindergarten (the year before young children begin compulsory schooling in Queensland, Australia). Young children were video‐ and audio‐taped while conducting Google web searches in the classroom. The data were qualitatively analysed to understand the young childrens web search behaviour., – The findings show that young children engage in complex web searches, including keyword searching and browsing, query formulation and reformulation, relevance judgments, successive searches, information multitasking and collaborative behaviours. The study results provide significant initial insights into young childrens web searching and technoliteracy., – The use of web search engines by young children is an important research area with implications for educators and web technologies developers., – This is the first study of young childrens interaction with a web search engine.

Serious playground: using Second Life to engage high school students in urban planning

Virtual world platforms such as Second Life have been successfully used in educational contexts to motivate and engage learners. This article reports on an exploratory workshop involving a group of high school students using Second Life for an urban planning project. Young people are traditionally an under‐represented demographic when it comes to participating in urban planning and decision‐making processes. The research team developed activities that combined technology with a constructivist approach to learning. Real‐world experiences and purposes ensured that the workshop enabled students to see the relevance of their learning. Our design also ensured that play remained an important part of the learning. By conceiving of the workshop as a ‘serious playground’, we investigated the ludic potential of learning in a virtual world.

Empathy: Narrative Empathy and Children’s Literature

The term empathy has only existed in English for a little over a hundred years, but the idea of feeling with another person is an old one. Because of its perceived connection to moral behaviour, empathy and its development are of great interest to educators, policy makers, psychologists, and philosophers. Reading children’s literature is often considered important for developing (among other things) children’s ethical and empathic understandings of society and its people. However, claims as to the impact of reading on readers’ ability to become more empathic, tolerant, and better people are divided. While many readers may attribute positive influences that authors and texts have had on shaping their attitudes and actions, there is no guarantee that a desirable affective and cognitive response will follow the reading experience. The complexity of readers and texts refuses to be reduced to simple universal statements about the capacity of narrative empathy to create a particular kind of empathic reader or person: fiction that engages a reader with the emotional plight of a character does not necessarily translate into actions in the real world towards people who are similarly suffering, marginalized, or victimized. This chapter asks: Does children’s literature foster empathy? There are two implicit features of this question: one concerns narrative empathy; the other concerns empathic reader response. The discussion will focus on how a selection of ‘multicultural’ picture books attempts to create narrative empathy by focussing on cultural and spatial differences.

Strolling Through the (Post)modern City: Modes of Being a Flâneur in Picture Books

The city and the urban condition, popular subjects of art, literature, and film, have been commonly represented as fragmented, isolating, violent, with silent crowds moving through the hustle and bustle of a noisy, polluted cityspace. Included in this diverse artistic field is children’s literature—an area of creative and critical inquiry that continues to play a central role in illuminating and shaping perceptions of the city, of city lifestyles, and of the people who traverse the urban landscape. Fiction’s textual representations of cities, its sites and sights, lifestyles and characters have drawn on traditions of realist, satirical, and fantastic writing to produce the protean urban story—utopian, dystopian, visionary, satirical—with the goal of offering an account or critique of the contemporary city and the urban condition. In writing about cities and urban life, children’s literature variously locates the child in relation to the social (urban) space. This dialogic relation between subject and social space has been at the heart of writings about/of the flâneur: a figure who experiences modes of being in the city as it transforms under the influences of modernism and postmodernism. Within this context of a changing urban ontology brought about by (post)modern styles and practices, this article examines five contemporary picture books: The Cows Are Going to Paris by David Kirby and Allen Woodman; Ooh-la-la (Max in love) by Maira Kalman; Mr Chicken Goes to Paris and Old Tom’s Holiday by Leigh Hobbs; and The Empty City by David Megarrity. I investigate the possibility of these texts reviving the act of flânerie, but in a way that enables different modes of being a flâneur, a neo-flâneur. I suggest that the neo-flâneur retains some of the characteristics of the original flâneur, but incorporates others that take account of the changes wrought by postmodernity and globalization, particularly tourism and consumption. The dual issue at the heart of the discussion is that tourism and consumption as agents of cultural globalization offer a different way of thinking about the phenomenon of flânerie. While the flâneur can be regarded as the precursor to the tourist, the discussion considers how different modes of flânerie, such as the tourist-flâneur, are an inevitable outcome of commodification of the activities that accompany strolling through the (post)modern urban space.

Secrets, lies and children's fiction

INTRODUCTION: THE BURDEN OF TRUTH PART I: TRUTH, LIES, AND SURVIVAL 1. Unveiling the truth 2. Lies of Necessity 3. The scapegoat PART II: SECRETS AND SECRECY 4. Secrets of State 5. Secret Societies 6. Our Secret Selves PART III: TANGLED WEBS 7. Mendacious Animals 8. Artful Deception Conclusion

Fostering digital participation and communication through social living labs: a qualitative case study from regional Australia

ABSTRACT This qualitative case study explores the potential of social living labs to foster digital participation and communication among regional and rural communities. The context is Townsville, North Queensland (Australia) – one of the first communities connected to Australia’s National Broadband. The study focuses on two cases: inaugural social living lab events related to social interests identified by local residents. Drawing on interview and observation data, the study’s findings present a snapshot of digital participation and associated learning needs among this community. It also models a novel social living labs approach whose emphasis on informal learning differentiates it from more established living labs models that have a technological or product focus. This social living labs approach could be of interest to community developers, educators and residents. Addressing digital divide, it supports digital capacity building in Townsville and other regional and remote communities around Australia and the world.

The Struggle to be Human in a Posthuman World

Over the preceding chapters, we have discussed many possibilities for new world orders, some utopian but more often dystopian. One of the possibilities facing the world at the beginning of the twenty-first century is the prospect that we are entering a posthuman era in which many of the binary concepts used to make sense of experience in the past will no longer function. Western culture, dominated as it has been by liberal humanist principles, has traditionally been underpinned ideologically by binary oppositions between concepts such as natural and artificial, organic and technological, subject and object, body and mind, body and embodiment, real and virtual, presence and absence, and so on. Such binarisms have been increasingly critiqued, first by post-modernist deconstruction of how they function within Western culture as strategies of inclusion and exclusion, and second, through posthumanist reconceptualisations of the oppositional boundaries underpinning dominant conceptual paradigms. Thus, during the last few years a new range of concepts has begun increasingly to enter children’s literature — the cyborg, virtual reality, technoculture, cloning, and genetic engineering. In short, children’s books and films have begun responding to the posthuman, the focus of this chapter.

Between a Frock and a Hard Place: Camp Aesthetics and Children's Culture

Camp is associated with a particular kind of performance in which the overt meaning of what is performed is subverted or inverted by drawing attention to the fact that it is a performance, and thus a kind of lie (drag being a perfect example). Thomas 103 French: Se Camper.To Posture or Flaunt In exploring camp and children’s culture, we raise the following contrasting viewpoints. The conventionally accepted view, derived from Susan Sontag’s Notes on Camp, is that ‘‘camp’’ is a style or a sensibility (275–7). More recent queer accounts of camp see it as an oppositional critique (of gender and sexuality) embodied in a ‘‘queer’’ performative identity (Butler 233–6). Camp is also a social practice for many, and a style and an identity performed in many types of entertainment (for example: film, cabaret, and pantomime). In this respect, it is indicative of the competing and conflicting cultural elements within Western societies. Such conflict heightens the visibility of ‘‘difference’’ particularly with respect...

Secret Spaces: Creating an Aesthetic of Imaginative Play in Australian Picture Books

It would seem, at least to the adult mind, that childhood is a time of secrets. Children’s secrets are not necessarily the kind that adults harbor. A particular kind of childhood secret involves those ubiquitous private places that Patricia Wrightson recalls in the above epigraph: places in which to hide, bury treasure, engage in storytelling and imaginative play. There are also other secluded places that offer spaces for quiet reflection, a social space for meeting with friends, or a refuge and shelter from the pressures of life. Cubby holes, treehouses, tunnels, caves, hideouts, even wardrobes are the kinds of secret spaces children seek or create. Other seemingly ordinary objects contain secret compartments – a box with a false bottom, a chest with a secret drawer. Or, they may provide the means for making a hiding place – the cave-like enclosure created by a blanket strung between trees or flung over a table, the dark space under a bed, a cool underworld that beckons from under a house perched on high stumps.