Girls And Literacy In America

An exploration of the fascinating and controversial history of girls' education in America from the colonial era to the computer age. Girls and Literacy in America offers a tour of opportunities, obstacles, and achievements in girls' education from the limited possibilities of colonial days to the wide-open potential of the Internet generation. Six essays, written by historians and focused on particular historical periods, examine the extensive range of girls' literacies in both educational and extracurricular settings. Girls from various ethnic and racial backgrounds, social classes, religions, and geographic areas of the nation are included. A host of primary documents, including such items as an 18th century hornbook to excerpts from girls' "conversations" in Internet chat rooms allow readers an opportunity to evaluate for themselves some of the materials mentioned in the volume's opening essays. And finally, an extensive bibliography will be invaluable to students expected to conduct more extensive primary research.

This work offers a tour of the opportunities, obstacles and achievements in girls' education from the limited possibilities of colonial days to the wide-open potential of the Internet generation. It features six essays focused on particular historical periods.

"Through thoughtful analysis of girls' historical literacy experiences, their contemporary reading and writing lives, and trends in young adult literature, this book sheds new light on how teachers can better understand and create classroom experiences that make girls visible both to themselves and to others.Historically, the status of girls has evoked much less research than that of boys. Recently emerging scholastic and strategic study concerning the vulnerability of girls is adding a vital missing component to this continually emerging discourse. Looking at many aspects of girls' gendered lives, this text considers the specific perspectives of the social and cultural constructions that script gender, particularly as applies to girls in our classrooms. Prominent scholars in their respective fields examine the myriad forces that shape the lives of American girls, from the earliest didactic records of manuals and books of conduct to current artifacts of contemporary culture. By investigating both the scholarly literature on girls as well as well as the primary sources of a material culture, the authors seek to unravel how adolescent girls learn and seek to compose identities. By closely examining girls' practices, in which are embedded issues of class, race, ethnicity, immigrant status, and sexuality, the text considers some of the values, structures, and trajectories that have come to define teenage girlhood. Its distinctive contribution is to unpack some of the assumptions of girls in English classrooms and to critically examine their experiences as they try to fit preconceived norms while forming their own personhood"-- Provided by publisher.

American Girls and Global Responsibility brings together insights from Cold War culture studies, girls’ studies, and the history of gender and militarization to shed new light on how age and gender work together to form categories of citizenship. Jennifer Helgren argues that a new internationalist girl citizenship took root in the country in the years following World War II in youth organizations such as Camp Fire Girls, Girl Scouts, YWCA Y-Teens, schools, and even magazines like Seventeen. She shows the particular ways that girls’ identities and roles were configured, and reveals the links between internationalist youth culture, mainstream U.S. educational goals, and the U.S. government in creating and marketing that internationalist girl, thus shaping the girls’ sense of responsibilities as citizens.

The definitive encyclopedic resource on literacy, literacy instruction, and literacy assessment in the United States. Once upon a time, the three "R"s sufficed. Not any more—not for students, not for Americans. Gone the way of the little red school house is simple reading and writing instruction. Surveying an increasingly complex discipline, Literacy in America: An Encyclopedia offers a comprehensive overview of all the latest trends in literacy education—conceptual understanding of texts, familiarity with electronic content, and the ability to create meaning from visual imagery and media messages. Educators and academicians call these skills "multiple literacies," shorthand for the kind of literacy skills and abilities needed in an age of information overload, media hype, and Internet connectedness. With its 400 A–Z entries, researched by experts and written in accessible prose, Literacy in America is the only reference tool students, teachers, and parents will need to understand what it means to be—and become—literate in 21st-century America.

Literacy histories, even those seeking to incorporate greater diversity in race and gender, have tended to focus on academic institutions. Circulating Literacy speaks to, and connects, the topics of rural studies, literacy sponsorship and identity, gender, and professionalization, arguing for value in the study of periodicals as education tools.

Literacy in America: A Cultural History of the Past Century is a history of literacy in the United States over the last one hundred years. Told chronologically and supported by hundreds of research studies done over the years as reported in scholarly journals, the work sheds new light on the important role that literacy and reading in general have played in this country since the 1920s. The subject is parsed through the voices of educators, intellectuals, and journalists who have weighed in on its many different dimensions. Literacy is a key site of race, gender, and class, offering insights related to the social and economic inequities that are embedded in our institutions. The primary argument of Literacy in America is that literacy, as a major part of education, has functioned as a means of social control of children, with authority figures dictating which reading material is acceptable and which is not. Literacy has also operated as a vehicle of citizenship for Americans of all ages, and as a symbol of the responsibilities of democracy. With its ambitious scope, the strives to be a seminal guide to literacy in America and add to our understanding of everyday life in the United States. Most interesting, perhaps, is the twisting, unpredictable journey of literacy since the end of World War I, when I argue that the subject’s modern era began. Rather than follow a straight line, both the perception and reality of reading swerved over the years, offering a trajectory that makes for a compelling narrative for anyone interested in American cultural and social history. Controversy of some kind has often surrounded literacy in the United States, this alone making it a fascinating source of interest to explore in detail.