PHD, Kent State University, 2015, College of Education, Health and Human Services / School of Teaching, Learning and Curriculum Studies

The purpose of this study was to investigate the availability and accessibility of multicultural children's and young adult literature as represented by winners of ethnic-specific youth literature awards in selected public libraries in Northeast Ohio. The researcher searched Online Public Access Catalogs for winners and honor books of the American Indian Youth Literature Award, Americas Award, Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, Carter G. Woodson Book Award, Coretta Scott King Book Awards, Pura Belpre Award, and Tomas Rivera Mexican American Children's Book Award. The data were analyzed for the frequency of occurrence of each title in the holdings of 36 library systems and 172 central libraries, branches, and mobile units within those systems. The results show that only six of the 172 library outlets in the study had more than 50% of the 449 books in the study, while 148 outlets had fewer than 30% of the titles. The average number of books held by library outlets was 85.4 titles, or 19% of the books in the study. This information should be of interest to teachers, librarians, teacher and librarian educators and their students, and others who are interested in multicultural youth literature, as it calls attention to the current availability and accessibility of multicultural youth literature in public libraries, and advocates for all children in this increasingly diverse country to have access to books that reflect their own culture and ethnicity, and other cultures and ethnicities, as well.

Committee: William Bintz PhD (Committee Chair); Lori Wilfong PhD (Committee Member); Marianne Martens PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Library Science; Literature; Multicultural Education; Teacher Education

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2017, EDU Teaching and Learning

Developing from my own interest in the geographic and cultural defamiliarization found in the Hunger Games series, this dissertation explores the ways in which the Hunger Games novels and film adaptations reflect U.S. cultural geographies and identities and how fan response extends narratives of U.S. identity, particularly analyzing these fan responses through a lens of restorying (Thomas and Stornaiuolo, 2016). Cultural geographies of colonialism in the United States, Black history in the United States, Appalachian culture, and US military tactics are reflected in Panem, and the familiar is made strange to the reader. These parallels between the fictional world of Panem and the real world of the United States provide historical referents and cultural contexts that enrich the reading of both the series and the world in which we live. Following these assertions, I examine identities within the Hunger Games series as performances contextualized by the cultural geographies in which the characters interact. The major characters of the Hunger Games interact with narratives of inequality, marginalization, and racism, illuminating the ways in which they develop and perform identity over the course of the novels and films. I then explore fan response, via a framework of restorying, as a form of social activism, particularly as fans creatively contribute to conversations on the visibility of marginalized identities in young adult literature. Four modes of restorying (mode, perspective, identity, and time) relate to the ways in which fans extend the narratives of the Hunger Games in a variety of subversive and revolutionary ways, writing themselves into the text, finding avenues for increasing racial diversity in the series, and imagining narratives outside the texts of the films and novels. The fan response examined in this dissertation is both liberatory and culturally transformative, expanding the domain of the Hunger Games to be more detailed, more inclusive, and more equ (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Mollie Blackburn (Advisor); Michelle Abate (Committee Member); Barbara Kiefer (Committee Member) Subjects: Education; Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1982, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1975, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Education

Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, 2016, English

Black children have had to contend with myriad visual representations of their bodies in popular media, from photographs in newspapers of young black children marching for civil rights to cartoons in popular picture books of grotesquely caricatured black children killing themselves. For several centuries, authors and illustrators of African American children's literature have recognized the power of these images and have subsequently created their own picture books that establish black children as political agents deserving rights. With a particular interest in picture books authored by canonical African American writers, including Langston Hughes, Alice Walker, Gwendolyn Brooks, and James Baldwin, this dissertation examines visual representations of black children in African American children's literature from 1836 to 2015. In order to investigate how images communicate belief systems, function in a different rhetorical framework than works created chiefly for adult audiences, and redefine previously constructed visual statements, this study is framed by a chronologically-ordered investigation of African American children's literature. I argue that picture books carry messages about the frailty or strength of the black child's body, ultimately affecting larger assumptions about black childhood and racial identity.

Committee: Thrity Umrigar (Advisor); T. Kenny Fountain (Committee Member); Mary Grimm (Committee Member); Renee Sentilles (Committee Member) Subjects: African American Studies; American Literature; Black History; Black Studies; Gender Studies; Literature; Rhetoric

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2015, English

Early children's literature took the forms of complex, distinct genres that, much more than the novels being published contemporaneously with them, were employed in the didactic effect of literary structures. These works, published roughly from 1750-1850, do not assume a simple, one-to-one relationship between fictional worlds and the real world. They are aware of the complexities of representation, and, written and read predominantly by women and girls, they are especially aware of representation's effects on gender. Early children's fiction, I argue, treats literary and social forms alike as structure-at-work in the world, and this treatment had a substantive impact on fiction that shares its interest in the subtleties of gender formation and the disparate treatment of gendered beings in fiction and in fact: the nineteenth-century realist novel. From one perspective, this project is a straightforward, genre-study of early children's fiction and its influence on the Victorian realist novel. I focus on four major genres, selected for their numerousness and their continued though adapted use in fiction, and I think carefully about the bids they made on readers. Rather than teach simple morals, I argue that these works teach people to analyze in culturally-prescribed ways: to see a situation in the world, understand what it means, and react to it accordingly. By emphasizing analysis as a response to structure, this fiction signals the construction of social categories. By adopting and adapting these forms, novelists like Dickens and the Brontes engage children's fictions' educational goals and emphasize the degree to which reality is defined by social, material, embodied, and familial forms. Ultimately, I demonstrate that that the didacticism which we have for so long assumed was simple and straightforward is, in fact, a kind of formalism, one that codifies structures of response and embodiment that belie its reputation as pure content.

Committee: Robyn Warhol (Advisor); Jill Galvin (Committee Member); Sandra Macpherson (Committee Member); Simmons Clare (Committee Member) Subjects: British and Irish Literature; Early Childhood Education; Gender; Gender Studies; Literature; Womens Studies

MAE, Otterbein University, 2021, Education

The purpose of this capstone project is to present a curriculum that utilizes children's books to teach the first competency of social-emotional learning: self-awareness. The curriculum was developed based on the following research question: How can we create a literacy curriculum that utilizes children's literature to support students' social-emotional development in the domain of self-awareness? The question was answered after examining Vygotsky's sociocultural learning theory and research associated with bibliotherapy and text selection, as well as structure developed for bibliotherapy lessons. The curriculum includes sample lessons that support literacy and social-emotional learning instruction with alignment to Ohio's Social-Emotional Learning and English Language Arts Standards.

Committee: Allison McGrath (Advisor); Sue Constable (Committee Member); Ross Diane (Committee Member) Subjects: Curricula; Curriculum Development; Education; Literacy

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2018, EDU Teaching and Learning

This dissertation is a study of how American sociocultural ideas of childhood overlap with changes in the publication of children's literature, as seen through the Highlights for Children magazine, first published in 1946. The first chapter is a genealogy of the magazine founders, their work promoting Americanism and literacy in the early 20th century, and their creation of the publication. Chapter two explores the moral development goals of the magazine, the emphasis on turning children into good citizens, and the juxtaposition of adult-created content within child-centered spaces. Chapter three is a review of the relevant scholarship of childhood studies. Chapter four is an analysis of the changing landscape of children's literature, as seen through Highlights for Children when placed in its historical and social context. Chapter five features three critical snapshots of additional research on Highlights. Overall the dissertation examines historical contexts of American childhood inside and outside of the magazine, and how that has influenced the production of children's literature during 20th century American history.

Committee: Michelle Abate (Advisor); Mollie Blackburn (Committee Member); Caroline Clark (Committee Member); Deidra Herring (Committee Member) Subjects: Education

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2017, EDU Teaching and Learning

Children with disabilities began to appear with increasing frequency as characters in children's books following the United States Congress's passage in 1975 of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, the precursor to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Researchers have done important work over the past forty years by examining these books while thinking about the effects that this literature can have on its readers and their understanding of disability and disabled people, addressing elements including characters, plot, and representations of specific disabilities, pointing out problematic tropes and titles. In this dissertation, I built on this research and brought together concepts in rhetorical narrative theory, specifically narrative progression, and disability studies in order to offer an even more in-depth analysis of the designs and effects of this corpus of children's books. By engaging in a close reading of 178 picturebooks featuring disabled characters from a rhetorical narrative theory approach, my research illuminated how the rhetorical choices that an author makes in both her text and illustrations have consequences for the way that disability is presented to her readers. Specifically, my dissertation undertook a two-step analysis of those rhetorical choices. The first step was to read the books on their own terms and the second was to assess those terms through the lens of disability studies. Each of my five chapters examined the use of one kind of narrative progression, centered around one or more disabled characters—and occasionally non-disabled characters— attending to how this progression situated its readers ethically and affectively. Each chapter also assessed the potential effects, positive and negative, on the reader's understanding of disability, its contexts, and its consequences. I argued that readers need to be more cognizant of authorial purpose, because while many authors attempt to create narratives about (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Barbara Kiefer (Advisor); James Phelan (Committee Member); Amy Shuman (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature; Asian Literature; British and Irish Literature; Canadian Literature; Early Childhood Education; Education; Language Arts; Literature; Special Education; Teaching

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1997, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1986, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Education

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1984, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1981, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Education

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1980, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Education

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1979, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Education

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1975, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Education

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1975, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Education

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1975, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Education

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1968, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Education

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1963, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Education