Equipping Space Cadets: Primary Science Fiction for Young Children

Description

Equipping Space Cadets: Primary Science Fiction for Young Children argues for the benefits and potential of “primary science fiction,” or science fiction for children under twelve years old. Science fiction for children is often disregarded due to common misconceptions of childhood. When children are culturally portrayed as natural and simple, they seem like a poor audience for the complex scientific questions brought up by the best science fiction. The books and the children who read them tell another story. Using three empirical studies and over 350 children’s books including If I Had a Robot Dog, Bugs in Space, and Commander Toad in Space, Equipping Space Cadets presents interdisciplinary evidence that science fiction and children are compatible after all. Primary science fiction literature includes many high-quality books that cleverly utilize the features of children’s literature formats in order to fit large science fiction questions into small packages. In the best of these books, authors make science fiction questions accessible and relevant to children of various reading levels and from diverse backgrounds and identities. Equipping Space Cadets does not stop with literary analysis, but also presents the voices of real children and practitioners. The book features three studies: a survey of teachers and librarians, quantitative analysis of lending records from school libraries across the United States, and coded read-aloud sessions with elementary school students. The results reveal how children are interested in and capable of reading science fiction, but it is the adults, including the most well-intentioned librarians and teachers, who hinder children's engagement with the genre due to their own preconceptions about the genre and children.

Get the book

Amazon.com

Search the book

eBay.com

Search the book

Other editions

• 

  Equipping Space Cadets: Primary Science Fiction for Young Children

  • 2022-04-19
  • 218 pages
  • Ebook
  • Univ. Press of Mississippi

Similar books

• 

  Virginia Woolf and the Great War

  By Karen L. Levenback

  I owe special thanks to Bruce Martin and Evelyn Timberlake ( at the Library of Congress ) ; Philip Milato and Steve Crook ( at the Berg Collection ) ...

• 

  In Search of Elena Ferrante: The Novels and the Question of Authorship

  By Karen Bojar

  ... Alice: “In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens” 157 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 38 Wertenbaker, Timberlake 21 Wilson, Emily (trans.

• 

  Native American Verbal Art: Texts and Contexts

  By William M. Clements

  HENRY TIMBERLAKE'S CHEROKEE WAR SONG 1. That Timberlake's memoir contains the first English translation of the words of a Native American song seems to have ...

• 

  Playing in the Shadows: Fictions of Race and Blackness in Postwar Japanese Literature

  By William H Bridges

  “Justin Timberlake, 'The 20/20 Experience': Is There a Visual Preference for Whiteness?” Interview with Marc Lamont Hill. HuffPost Live, 27 March 2013.

• 

  Shakespeare's Edward III

  By William Shakespeare

  Thompson , E . in Pollard 1923 . Thompson , J . Shakespeare and the Classics , 1952 . Tillyard , E . Shakespeare ' s History Plays , 1944 . Timberlake , P ...

• 

  The Problem with Pleasure: Modernism and Its Discontents

  By Laura Frost

  In The Problem with Pleasure, Frost draws upon a wide variety of materials, linking interwar amusements, such as the talkies, romance novels, the Parisian fragrance Chanel no. 5, and the exotic confection Turkish Delight, to the artistic ...

• 

  The Alice Books and the Contested Ground of the Natural World

  By Laura White

  Similarly, he deplored the picturestories of A. B. Frost in his Stuff and Nonsense ... When he'd eaten eighteen, He turned perfectly green, Upon which he ...

• 

  Fables of Modernity: Literature and Culture in the English Eighteenth Century

  By Laura Brown

  Renew'd by ordure's sympathetic force, As oil'd with magic juices for the course, ... William Frost (1953; reprint, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, ...

• 

  Questions of Authority: Italian and Australian Travel Narratives of the Long Nineteenth Century

  By Laura Olcelli

  D'Albertis, Luigi. New Guinea: What I Did and What I Saw. 2 vols. London: S. Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1881. First published 1880.

• 

  A Concordance to Conrad's The Arrow of Gold

  By Paul L. Gaston, Todd K. Bender

  ... i ge 3 let S deal ing ge a lings ge at t Joe a f J & at n ce at h-ced ge at hly ue to 3 sec ge is a te debit de cap it a t e u ge c e it ful ge c e i ve ...