'An alienating city street gradually becomes a place to call home. Little by little, baby Tracy grows. She and her neighbours begin to rescue their street. Together, children and adults plant grass and trees and bushes in the empty spaces. They paint murals over old graffiti. They stop the cars. Everything begins to blossom. Belonging explores the re-greening of the city: the role of community, the empowerment of people and the significance of children, family and neighbourhood in changing their urban environment. The streets gradually become places for safe children's play, and community activity and places for nature and wonder.'
(Source: Author's website, http://www.jeanniebaker.com/picture_books_index.htm)
Teacher's notes from publisher's website.
This is affiliated with Dr Laurel Cohn's Picture Book Diet because it contains representations of food and/or food practices.
| Food depiction |
|
| Food types |
|
| Food practices |
|
| Gender | n/a |
| Signage |
|
| Positive/negative value | n/a |
| Food as sense of place |
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| Setting |
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| Food as social cohesion |
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| Food as cultural identity |
|
| Food as character identity | n/a |
| Food as language | n/a |
Other formats: Also large format
Window
Jeannie Baker
(illustrator),
London
:
Julia MacRae Books
,
1991
Z834244
1991
single work
picture book
children's
(taught in 5 units)
Through a house window the view gradually changes over the passage of time to show how the environment changes, not necessarily for the better.
'Jeannie Baker uses mixed materials, including real plants, to illustrate relationships between nature, humans and suburban and urban development in her textless collage picturebooks Window (1991) and Belonging (2004). These popular texts are read and studied in the classroom to raise environmental awareness and explore themes of sustainable development and community action. How can a reading of these two books through the lens of Indigenous writer and academic Ambelin Kwaymullina’s verse manifesto, Living on Stolen Land, reveal and disturb the mechanisms of settler-colonialism as they appear in Baker’s work? Placing these texts in juxtaposition with each other generates new understandings and new narrative possibilities.' (Publication abstract)
Reading The Environment : Narrative Constructions Of Ecological Subjectivities In Australian Children's Literature
Kelvin Grove
:
2009
Z1792849
2009
single work
thesis
Ways in which humans engage with the environment have always provided a rich source of material for writers and illustrators of Australian children's literature. Currently, readers are confronted with a multiplicity of complex, competing and/or complementing networks of ideas, theories and emotions that provide narratives about human engagement with the environment at a particular historical moment. This study examines how a representative sample of Australian texts (19 picture books and 4 novels for children and young adults published between 1995 and 2006) constructs fictional ecological subjects in the texts, and offers readers ecological subject positions inscribed with contemporary environmental ideologies. The conceptual framework developed in this study identifies three ideologically grounded positions that humans may assume when engaging with the environment. None of these positions clearly exists independently of any other, nor are they internally homogeneous. Nevertheless they can be categorised as: (i) human dominion over the environment with little regard for environmental degradation (unrestrained anthropocentrism); (ii) human consideration for the environment driven by understandings that humans need the environment to survive (restrained anthropocentrism); and (iii) human deference towards the environment guided by understandings that humans are no more important than the environment (ecocentrism). iv The transdisciplinary methodological approach to textual analysis used in this thesis draws on ecocriticism, narrative theories, visual semiotics, ecofeminism and postcolonialism to discuss the difficulties and contradictions in the construction of the positions offered. Each chapter of textual analysis focuses on the construction of subjectivities in relation to one of the positions identified in the conceptual framework. According to the analysis undertaken, the focus texts convey the subtleties and complexities of human engagement with the environment and advocate ways of viewing and responding to contemporary unease about the environment. The study concludes that these ways of viewing and responding conform to and/or challenge dominant socio-cultural and political-economic opinions regarding the environment. This study, the first extended work of its kind, makes an original contribution to ecocritical study of Australian children's literature. By undertaking a comprehensive analysis of how texts for children represent human engagement with the environment at a time when important environmental concerns pose significant threats to human existence, Massey contributes new knowledge to an area of children's literature research that to date has been significantly under-represented.
New World Orders in Contemporary Children's Literature : Utopian Transformations
Houndmills
:
Palgrave Macmillan
,
2008
Z1559477
2008
selected work
criticism
'New World Orders shows how texts for children and young people have responded to the cultural, economic, and political movements of the last 15 years. With a focus on international children's texts produced between 1988 and 2006, the authors discuss how utopian and dystopian tropes are pressed into service to project possible futures to 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.' - Back cover.
