“I Would Like to See How They Got Poor and See What It's Like to Be Poor”: An Analysis of Young Children's Responses to a Critical Literacy Text About Poverty
Sixty-four 8-year-old children listened to a reading of a critical literacy text about poverty and then responded to interview questions about the story. The content on which the children focused their attention, the processes that they employed to engage with the text, and the particular stance(s) taken varied significantly by ecological setting or socioeconomic status for some categories of response. These findings are consistent with Rosenblatt's (1994) theory and have important implications for practice. Mindful of variations in response, practitioners can become more sensitive to children's constructed meanings about poverty and scaffold accordingly.
Problem-posing with Multicultural Children’s Literature: Developing Critical Early Childhood Curricula
Problem-posing with Multicultural Children's Literature documents an ongoing qualitative study of early childhood teachers using a problem-posing method with multicultural children's literature. Grounded in critical theory, the text has been written for use in upper-division undergraduate- and graduate-level classes that study infants, toddlers, preschoolers, kindergartners, and students in grades one and two. The book uses examples from both early childhood and elementary teacher education students, and practicing teachers' work as they study critical literacy, multicultural children's literature, and integrated early childhood curriculum. This structure provides insights into guided research in child development, cultural and linguistic contexts, learning theory, strategies for teaching young children, family advocacy, and all related aspects of early childhood teacher education as the learners move through the activities.
Changes in Transport Behavior by Fragmentation of Activities
An empirical study was made with the aim of revealing the relationship and interaction between use of information and communications technology (ICT) and travel behavior. To this end, a concept is developed built around the basic idea that technological developments, both in the travel and especially in the communications sector, increase flexibility and thus enable a fundamental reorganization of activities. A major feature of the interplay between ICT and travel is the spatial-temporal fragmentation of activities, which can cause both quantitative and qualitative changes in traffic volume. Questions about changes in such routine behavior can only be answered by a long-term study. For this reason, the study presented here is set up as a representative panel investigation, allowing further studies in the future. With the results of the first set of data, the relationship is described between communication and mobility patterns and individual characteristics of people with varying affinities to ICT and what activity-specific ICT use is typical for groups of varying affinity. The initial evaluation of an extensive set of data allows a clear description of the relationship among ICT use, communications behavior, and mobility behavior, while providing evidence that such questions are legitimate.