Mediating Children’s Reading
How should children read, and what, and why? The benefits of reading, for the individual child and for society, have at various points in history been bound up with the dangers that reading has been seen to potentially pose.
This workshop will reflect on how children’s reading has been mediated historically, and in contemporary society – by parents, teachers, librarians, writers, publishers, medical professionals, governments, and others – and on the assumptions and convictions about how the child reader is affected by reading which underpin this mediation. In addition to assessing historical perspectives on ‘mediation’, the workshop will also consider recent developments in the current landscape of reading research and the possible future practices of ‘the history of reading’. To that end, the workshop will also address questions regarding assumptions made about child readers and the relationship between the reader and the book that inform and influence our own research. In particular, the workshop will ask how we can develop and apply methodologies for interdisciplinary research on children’s reading.
Lunch, tea and coffee will be provided, and the workshop will conclude with a plenary discussion and a wine reception.
The workshop is free to attend, and students and researchers of all career stages and across academic disciplines are warmly invited. There is limited space, so do register soon to avoid disappointment.
Programme
10.00-18.30, 21 June 2016
10.00 Registration
10.15 Introduction
10.30 Keynote
Dr Evelyn Arizpe (Glasgow): ‘Real and Imaginary Readers in Research: Mediating Reading through Children’s Literature’
11.30 Panel 1: Engaging with Texts
Dr Susan Elsley (Susan Elsley Policy Research & Development): ‘Storytime: Mediating children’s views of childhood through books’
Dr Sarah McGeown (Edinburgh): ‘Understanding the factors that predict children’s choice of reading activities’
Dr Shari Sabeti (Edinburgh): ‘Remediating Shakespeare for teenagers: comic books, schooling and the process of adaptation’
13.15 Lunch (provided)
14.15 Panel 2: Socialization through Reading
Jennifer Farrar (Glasgow): ‘Parents mediating picturebooks: An exploration of “what counts” when reading words and pictures’
Tracy Cooper (Scottish Book Trust) and Dr Emma Davidson (Edinburgh): ‘Bookbug: Mediating children’s reading in Scotland?’
15.20 Break
15.30 Panel 3: Politics and the Print Market
Dr Katherine Inglis (Edinburgh): ‘From the censorship of Jenny to Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988’
Dr Elspeth Jajdelska (Strathclyde): ‘The eighteenth-century print market and the changing conceptualization of children’s speech’
16.45 Break
17.00 Plenary discussion
17.30 End workshop; wine reception
Please register here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/mediating-childrens-reading-tickets-25611611018.
If you have any questions, please contact the organiser, Dr Anne Marie Hagen: ahagen@exseed.ed.ac.uk
This workshop is kindly supported by funding from the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities.