Growing Up With Literature

This focused, must-have text provides early childhood instructors and students with a comprehensive understanding of children's literature and how to use it effectively with young children from birth to age eight. It clearly explains the importance of introducing books to young children, how to plan successful literacy experiences, how to get children excited about literature, and how to select the best literature. Users of this comprehensive text will become experts at storytelling, addressing the concerns of young children, and involving parents in the literacy development process. This text is unlike others of its kind!

A multicultural anthology of writing on poverty--including stories, essays, poetry, and biographical excerpts--features the work of Sherman Alexie, Dorothy Allison, Raymond Carver, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, and William Carlos Williams.

“[An] enchanting journey through Ann Hood’s early fascination with reading.… Book lovers will find Morningstar irresistible.”—Lynn Sharon Schwartz, author of Ruined by Reading Growing up in a mill town in Rhode Island, in a household that didn’t foster a love of reading, novelist Ann Hood discovered nonetheless the transformative power of literature. She learned to channel her imagination, ambitions, and curiosity by devouring ever-growing stacks of books. In Morningstar, Hood recollects with warmth and honesty how The Bell Jar, Marjorie Morningstar, The Harrad Experiment, and The Outsiders influenced her teen psyche and introduced her to topics that could not be discussed at home: desire, fear, sexuality, and madness. Later, Johnny Got His Gun and Grapes of Wrath dramatically influenced her political thinking while the Vietnam War and Kent State shootings became headline news, and classics such as Dr. Zhivago and Les Misérables stoked her ambitions to travel the world. With characteristic insight and charm, Hood showcases the ways in which books gave her life and can transform—even save—our own lives.

“[R]ecommended to anyone interested in multiculturalism and migration....[and] food for thought also for scholars studying migration in less privileged contexts.”—Social Anthropology In this compelling study of the children of serial migrants, Danau Tanu argues that the international schools they attend promote an ideology of being “international” that is Eurocentric. Despite the cosmopolitan rhetoric, hierarchies of race, culture and class shape popularity, friendships, and romance on campus. By going back to high school for a year, Tanu befriended transnational youth, often called “Third Culture Kids”, to present their struggles with identity, belonging and internalized racism in their own words. The result is the first engaging, anthropological critique of the way Western-style cosmopolitanism is institutionalized as cultural capital to reproduce global socio-cultural inequalities. From the introduction: When I first went back to high school at thirty-something, I wanted to write a book about people who live in multiple countries as children and grow up into adults addicted to migrating. I wanted to write about people like Anne-Sophie Bolon who are popularly referred to as “Third Culture Kids” or “global nomads.” ... I wanted to probe the contradiction between the celebrated image of “global citizens” and the economic privilege that makes their mobile lifestyle possible. From a personal angle, I was interested in exploring the voices among this population that had yet to be heard (particularly the voices of those of Asian descent) by documenting the persistence of culture, race, and language in defining social relations even among self-proclaimed cosmopolitan youth.

Poetry. Fiction. Pacific Island Studies. The anthology is the product of the combined vision of three organizations dedicated to the enhancement of education in Hawaii: Bamboo Ridge Press, Curriculum Research and Development Group, and Hawaii Education Association.

We Heard It When We Were Young tells the story of a young boy, first-generation Mexican American, who is torn between cultures: between immigrant parents trying to acclimate to midwestern life and a town that is, by turns, supportive and disturbingly antagonistic.

Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd was a runaway best seller when it was first published in 1960, and it became one of the defining texts of the New Left. Goodman was a writer and thinker who broke every mold and did it brilliantly—he was a novelist, poet, and a social theorist, among a host of other things—and the book’s surprise success established him as one of America’s most unusual and trenchant critics, combining vast learning, an astute mind, utopian sympathies, and a wonderfully hands-on way with words. For Goodman, the unhappiness of young people was a concentrated form of the unhappiness of American society as a whole, run by corporations that provide employment (if and when they do) but not the kind of meaningful work that engages body and soul. Goodman saw the young as the first casualties of a humanly re­pressive social and economic system and, as such, the front line of potential resistance. Noam Chomsky has said, “Paul Goodman’s impact is all about us,” and certainly it can be felt in the powerful localism of today’s renascent left. A classic of anarchist thought, Growing Up Absurd not only offers a penetrating indictment of the human costs of corporate capitalism but points the way forward. It is a tale of yesterday’s youth that speaks directly to our common future.

What does it mean to be young and transgender today? Growing Up Trans shares stories, essays, art and poetry created by trans youth aged 11 to 18. In their own words, the works illustrate the trans experience through childhood, family and daily life, school, their bodies and mental health. Together the collection is a story of the challenges, big and small, of being a young trans person. At the same time, it’s a toolkit for all young people, transgender or not, about what understanding, acceptance and support for the trans community looks like. In addition to the contributed works, there are questions and tips from experts in the field of transgender studies to challenge the reader on how to be a trans ally. Growing Up Trans came out of a series of workshops held in Victoria, British Columbia, to bring together trans youth from across the country with mentors in the community.