Children's Literatures, Cultures, and Pedagogies in the Anthropocene - by Terri Doughty & Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak & Janet Grafton (Hardcover)

About the Book

"This open access book explores how children's literature and cultures allow them to navigate environmental crises. With chapters from global researchers working in literary, cultural, childhood and education studies, it provides multidisciplinary perspectives on, and models for, how children might embrace hope over fear. It examines various forms of storytelling, learning, thinking, and teaching, asking what children can learn from each other, from intergenerational and interspecies engagement and from human and more-than-human teachers. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Wroclaw University, Poland"--

Book Synopsis

Bringing together scholars from a diverse range of disciplines, this open access book explores how children's literature, and cultural experiences tailored to them, afford young people new ways of navigating a world facing impending environmental crisis. With chapters from researchers in Europe, North America, Australasia and Asia, and working in fields such as literary, cultural, childhood and education studies, it provides multidisciplinary perspectives, visions and practices on, and models for, how children might embrace hope rather than fear as they confront today's environmental issues. Starting and then moving out from stories to imagining and putting into practice more ethical ways of engaging with and being in the world, Children's Literature, Cultures and Pedagogies in the Anthropocene examines various forms of storytelling, learning, thinking, and teaching that ask what children can learn from each other, from intergenerational and interspecies engagement, from human and more-than-human teachers.

The chapters cover a huge variety of topics including: eco-pedagogy; depictions of food and malnutrition; engaging nature through graphic narratives; using indigenous children's stories to navigate the Anthropocene; how children's literature can enable eco-literate young people; social and environmental justice in Latinx literature; and how (re)reading popular dystopian works can help youth readers identify eco-critical hope in seemingly end-of-the-world narratives.

A model for how humanities scholarship can have an impact greater than itself, Children's Literature, Cultures and Pedagogies in the Anthropocene demonstrates how children's texts and cultures might encourage ways of living more ethically in a world constantly changing.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Wroclaw University, Poland

Review Quotes

"This wide-ranging collection of papers brings together children's literature scholars, ecopedagogical theorists and practitioners, early childhood educators, anthropologists, and arts educators to generate a fascinating dialogue on childhood in the Anthropocene. Analyzing materials drawn from five continents, the collection presents a generous overview of current thoughts on more-than-human entanglements in the current moment. The collection tackles complex questions concerning matters such as the ethics of consumption and of hope. It draws heavily on Indigenous knowledge to build understandings of how humans might live response-ably alongside the rest of the living world." --Lydia Kokkola, University of Oulu, Finland

About the Author

Terri Doughty was Professor of English literature at Vancouver Island University, Canada, for many years and is now a VIU Honorary Research Associate. She has published articles and book chapters on girl culture, intergenerational collaboration, and critical plant studies approaches to children's multimodal texts. She is co-editor of Knowing Their Place? Identity and Space in Children's Literature (2011).

Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak is Associate Professor of Literature at the Institute of English Studies, the University of Wroclaw, Poland. She has published on child-led research, posthumanism, and new materialism and co-edited Rulers of Literary Playgrounds Politics of Intergenerational Play in Children's Literature (2021), Intergenerational Solidarity in Children's Literature and Film (2021), Children's Literature and Intergenerational Relationships: Encounters of the Playful Kind (2021), and Children's Cultures after Childhood (2023).

Janet Grafton holds a PhD in Environmental Studies and teaches in the English Department at Vancouver Island University, Canada.Her teaching and research interests include the environmental humanities, food literacy, and children's literature, and she has published a number of articles in these fields.