Shirley Climo Cinderella and Other Comparative Fairy Tales	Martha Saavedra Amma A. B. Oduro Focus on Africa
Frances Ann Day Marianne Halpin Finding and Evaluating Children's Books	Audrey Shabbas Literature from Muslim Countries Tesselations Project
Alan Dundes Comparative Fairy Tales and Folk Tales	Teresa Stojkov Focus on Latin America
Karen Greene Focus on Cambodia	Junko Yokota Using International Literature in the K-5 classroom Focus on East Asia
Meena Khorana Focus on India	Glen Worthey Focus on Russia
Jennifer Jones-Martinez Classroom Experiences With Cinderella	Sharon Zinke Addressing Literacy

Shirley Climo
Cinderella and Other Comparative Fairy Tales (MR)
Author of numerous books of fairy tales for children, Shirley Climo addressed the challenges posed in any effort to retell fairy tales, especially such a well known and beloved favorite as Cinderella. Before she begins any writing she conducts library research to track down different versions of the story.  She is also very aware of which genre she is dealing with.  A folk tale, for example, requires different handling than a fairy tale.  Folk tales typically answer "how come" questions (who put the stars in the sky? where did the giraffe get its spots? why is the sea salty?).  They feature ordinary people engaged in ordinary, real-world actions.  In contrast, fairy tales derive their charm from wondrous and magical events set in an indeterminate time ("once upon a time" is no time at all). The main character lacks agency and cannot determine her/his own fate.  Rather than someone who does things, s/he is someone to whom things are done (think of Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty).  As she writes Ms. Climo is conscious of the fact that children are very attached to the fairy tales they have been told from an early age and will not tolerate any major deviations from the standard tale.

The Cinderella story is widely known across world cultures, from England to Persia to China, with many local variations. For example, "Cinderella" need not be a girl (the Irish version features a boy, as told in Climo's The Irish Cinderlad) and need not be poor.  But the basic tale type always has the following features:

• Cinderella is always a good, attractive and deserving child caught in difficult circumstances over which s/he has no control.
• Cinderella is always very vulnerable since her mother is absent (though not necessarily dead).  The absence of a protecting figure requires the appearance of a fairy godmother and opens the door to magical possibilities.
• Cinderella always has some belonging taken away from her/him, though the missing item is not necessarily a slipper or a shoe. (In retelling the Persian version, Climo had Cinderella lose an ankle bracelet.) The quest to reunite the lost item with its rightful owner holds out hope to the reader that all will be well.

Alan Dundes
Comparative Fairy Tales and Folktales (MR)
Author of numerous studies of fairy tales, including Cinderella: A Casebook (1988) and Little Red Riding Hood: A Casebook (1989), Professor Alan Dundes gave a lively presentation that made clear why he is considered the dean of folklore studies in this country. Dundes argued forcefully that folklore, often dismissed as an inferior form of culture, permeates societies throughout the world.  In fact, folklore forms the hidden foundation of many forms of "high culture," whether Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Bruegel's paintings of Dutch peasants at play, or Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man, which draws on a Southern trickster tale. There are between 200 and 300 types of folklore, depending on how one counts (folk medecine, folk dance, folk costume, folk speech, folk narratives, jokes, riddles, superstitions and on and on).

To situate fairy tales within the field of folklore, Professor Dundes distinguished among different types of folk narratives:

• Myth: a sacred narrative with truth value
• Legends: stories told as true set in the post-creation world
• Folktales: stories told as fiction

Professor Dundes sketched the growth of folkoristics as a scholarly discipline. Since folklore is central to questions of ethnic or national identity, the pioneers in this field have often come from smaller, embattled countries intent on preserving and celebrating their particular distinctiveness as a people and a nation. Finland took the lead in folktale research with the founding in 1831 of the Finnish Literary Society.  On the growth of the discipline, see Alan Dundes, ed. International Folkloristics: Classic Contributions by the Founders of Folklore (1999).

Professor Dundes emphasized that the comparative method is central to folklore studies.  He introduced his audience to the basic tool of all research into folktales: Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson, The Types of Folktales.  Originally published in 1910, it represented Aarne's first attempt to compile an index of all known tale types.  Aarne concentrated on northern Europe.  Subsequent editions, including the second revised edition published in 1961 and still in use today, filled out his list with tales from other regions in Europe and from around the world.  The book is a huge catalog of thousands of different versions of folktales, arranged by plot, numbered and cross-referenced.  For example, Indo-European fairy tales are represented by tale types 300 through 749.  The "Dragonslayer" story familiar from the Disney movie is tale type 300, and Aarne-Thompson records that 168 versions have been found in Finnish archives and 527 versions in Ireland. The Cinderella story is tale type 510A. The oldest version we know of is from China, and there are very many others.

Professor Dundes warned against mistaking fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm and Claude Perrault for authentic folklore.  In fact, the Grimms compiled composites, taking, for example, a piece of a Prussian version and combining it with a Bavarian version.  They also did not hesitate to introduce literary proverbs into the oral tradition. The resulting pastiches seriously corrupt the originals and are not to be trusted.  They belong to literature, not folklore, and are designated by the term Kunstmärchen, or "artistic" fairy tales.  Writing fake fairy tales achieved a certain vogue in Old Regime France. Similarly, the tales of Hans Christian Andersen are carefully crafted literary inventions, while the liberties taken by the Walt Disney Company with authentic fairy tales drive folklorists to despair.

Professor Dundes provided a bibliography and drew attention to a few particularly noteworthy titles. Vladimir Propp pioneered the structural analysis of folktales in his Morphology of the Folktale (first published in the USSR in 1928; English translation 1958).  Drawing on a collection compiled in the nineteenth century by Aleksandr Afanas'ev, Propp broke the tales down into their constituent parts and determined that a mere thirty-one elements accounted for all the stories, and that these elements always recurred in the same sequence.  After its translation into English, Propp's work proved enormously influential in the field.

Among more recent publications, Dundes highlighted two studies: James Taggart, Enchanted Maidens: Gender Relations in Spanish Folktales of Courtship and Marriage (1990); and Ibrahim Muhawi and Sharif Kanaana, Speak Bird, Speak Again: Palestine Arab Folktales (1989). Taggart, an anthropologist, conducted fieldwork in seven Spanish villages and incorporated insights from feminist scholarship to explore the differences between male and female approaches to telling tales.  His work has the unusual merit of linking the content of specific tales to the life experience and gender of the storyteller. Speak Bird is the result of a collaboration between a professor of literature and an anthropologist, both Palestinians. Dundes considers it the single best book he knows on folktales, a wonderful combination of both literary and ethnographic analysis by scholars who are themselves part of the culture they study.  In closing, Dundes urged the teachers present to adopt in their own classrooms the model of Speak Bird: real folktales set in their cultural context and understood as bearers of multiple meanings.

Jennifer Martinez
Classroom Experiences With Cinderella
Jennifer Martinez demonstrated several exercises she has used in her fourth- through sixth-grade classes to encourage careful reading, stimulate creative writing and promote understanding of foreign cultures.

1) A spoonerism exercise, "Prinderella and the Cince." "Twonce upon a wime, there was a gritty little pirl named Prinderella who lived with her two sugly isters": so begins a silly version of Cinderella that students read out loud together.  Breaking into small teams, they then identify and correct the reversed letters.

2) Comparative Cinderella tales. Taking four different versions of Cinderella from around the world, students fill in a chart identifying for each the main character, the evil character(s), the item lost, the magical creature and the happy ending.  They then discuss the similarities and differences to see how the details vary in different cultures.  For example, the fairy godmother familiar to most American readers is in the Chinese version a magical fish.

3) Cinderella Writing Workshop. After reading many different Cinderella stories, teams of three write their own.  They decide whether the Cinderella character is to be male or female, where and when the action takes place, who the fairy godmother character is, what sort of event Cinderella gets invited to, what object is lost, how it is found, and how the happy ending is realized.  Ms. Martinez has her students make their stories look as much like published books as possible, complete with illustrations.  Her students find this exercise to be a lot of fun and throw themselves into it.  They have particularly enjoyed writing a short biography about themselves, like those that appear on book jackets, and blurbs from mock reviews.

Meena Khorana (MR)
Focus on India
Editor of the journal Bookbird and author of The Indian Subcontinent in Literature for Children and Young Adults: An Annotated Bibliography of English-Language Books (1991), Professor Meena Khorana gave a sobering presentation on the perils of biased and ignorant writing for children. Too many of the books for young people on India available in English are riddled with demeaning stereotypes. Sadly, these books have traditionally been, and in some cases still are, an excuse to serve up quaint or exotic practices, painting the subcontinent as a backward world of poverty-stricken villagers, cobras, elephants and performing monkeys. In evaluating books on India Professor Khorana urged the teachers present to pay close attention to the author's qualifications and to check the texts carefully for tone, distortions and omissions.  The best authors guarantee factual accuracy through use of consultants versed in the cultures and history of India.

Professor Khorana distributed a bibliography comprised primarily of recommended titles. However, it also contained books best avoided:

• Stereotypes abound in many of the stories published in the 1960s, which were often heavy handed in their depiction of India as a land of chronic poverty in contrast to the progress of the West. In The Road to Agra (1961), the Norwegian author Aimee Sommerfelt wrote of a boy who must travel 300 miles with his sister to reach a hospital, only to be turned away after an arduous but colorful journey. The children finally receive help from representatives of Western charitable organizations. Shirley Arora's "What Then, Raman?" (1960) is similarly flawed and can leave children with the impression that India is filled only with beggars and lepers. A notable exception in the literature of this period: Pearl Buck's The Big Fight (1964), highly recommended.
• Megan Cifarelli, India: One Nation, Many Traditions (1996). Although Cifarelli used a consultant, numerous oversimplifications and errors of fact mar the text, whether in discussing religion, clothing, history or India's official name in Hindi.
• Fred Marcellino, The Story of Little Babaji (1996). Professor Kharana warned that the illustrations do a disservice to the text by introducing jarring details and a hero who does not in fact look Indian.

Among folktales, Professor Khorana especially recommended Uma Krishnaswami's handsomely produced The Broken Tusk: Stories of the Hindu God Ganesha (1996). Also highly rated is a story with an environmentalist flavor, The People Who Hugged the Trees by Deborah Rose Lee (1990). It tells in charming fashion the true story of villagers three hundred years ago who prevented their king from destroying a forest to build a new palace.  Especially good in the literature from the Indian diaspora is Rachna Gilmore's Lights for Gita (1994).  The story of a little girl in Canada who misses the traditional Divali festival treats the dislocation of the immigrant experience with rare sensitivity.

In closing, Professor Khorana encouraged teachers to seek out books that present India as a rich, multifaceted society.  Although the situation is improving, too many books still leave children with the impression that India is a wholly rural, backward and exotic society instead of a dynamic country

Junko Yokota
Using International Literature in the K-5 classroom (HM)

The keynote address for this year's summer institute was delivered by Junko Yokota.  Drawing on her experience as a classroom teacher, librarian and professor of children's literature, Yokota began her presentation by insisting on the importance of defining the terms "multicultural literature" and "international literature."  Because her own definitions have continued to change and evolve throughout her career, Yokota offered her most "up-to-date" versions.  While the term international literature is often used to refer to books that were originally published outside the United States, Yokota expanded that definition to include books published in the U.S., but primarily concerned with people and cultures abroad.  She defined multicultural literature as literature by and about people of cultural diversity, primarily as defined by ethnicity.

Historically, there has been a gap between the real cultural diversity that young readers may be familiar with from their daily lives and representations of cultural diversity that were found in children's books.  For many years, fairy tales and folklore were central to what little material was available, reinforcing the perception of the "exotic other."  More recently, publishing has moved away from folklore to an interest in representations of the contemporary world.  Today, teachers and librarians should be able to find children's books that are culturally conscious and represent a wide variety of experiences.

Yokota distinguished between two kinds of books, both of which are important and necessary to children.  Mirror books are those in which children see their own lives and experiences reflected.  A mirror book offers the young reader the opportunity to identify and even bond with its characters.  On the other hand, window books provide children with a chance to see outside their own experiences.  The key to creating the intense experience of identification in a mirror book or the growth in cultural awareness of a window book, according to Yokota, is the cultural authenticity of the representations presented.  Cultural authenticity, Yokota argued, implies something both broader and less specific than merely the accuracy of any cultural representation.  Cultural authenticity means that the experiences or thoughts written about in the book could plausibly happen to someone from the culture represented, and the hallmark of authenticity is to be found in the attention to the details of the representation, whether in image or text.  Yokota insisted on the importance of clearing classrooms and library shelves of outdated materials.  Because children may not be able to distinguish on their own contemporary and authentic representations of other cultures from those that are outdated or erroneous, educators and librarians need to be vigilant in presenting the most current materials available and helping students to evaluate the images with which they are confronted.

When considering cultural representations in international or multicultural children's literature, it is necessary to consider who is telling the story.  Is the author an insider or outsider to the culture being represented?  Yokota pointed out some of the dangers inherent to each perspective.  For the outsider, a great deal of research and thought is necessary in order to achieve real cultural authenticity; imagination and creativity must be carefully balanced with attention to minute details and a heightened sense of responsibility.  Representations from the insider perspective, however, might not be the best ones to create a strong resonance with an outsider audience, precisely because so much cultural knowledge might be taken for granted and left unsaid.

On a more practical level, Yukota encouraged participants to be diligent in searching for literature told from an insider perspective and offered suggestions of where to begin the search.  The United States Board on Books for Young People (USBBY) and its parent organization, the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY), regularly organize sessions at professional conferences that feature international authors and illustrators.  Bookbird: Journal of International Children's Literature is another valuable resource, as is the reference book Children's Books from Other Countries.  The Mildred Batchelder Award for best children's book in translation is awarded annually by the American Library Association, based principally on the criteria of whether the translated book connects with American children, and the list of past recipients of the award is an excellent starting place for seeking out quality international children's literature.  Yukota also suggested using publishers' catalogues and web sites to look for books that might not otherwise be available in the United States.

Finally, Yokota offered suggestions on how to make international and multicultural literature more palatable to young readers.  The farther the literature being presented is from their own experiences and comfort zone, Yukota insisted, the more necessary it is for teachers and librarians to provide children with a scaffolding to make the books accessible.  Children need to have parallels with their own experiences and familiar schema pointed out to them.  Discussion and feedback are necessary along the way, but it is important that the teacher or librarian have the last word, not to shut down the discussion, but rather to help children reach a broader understanding than they might be able to reach on their own.

Junko Yokota
Focus on East Asia (HM)

Yokota began her session focusing on East Asia by considering the role of illustrations on cultural representations in children's literature.  Illustrations have a big impact on what people remember, and a great deal of information can be gleaned from images. For that reason, it is important that the details of illustrations be well-researched and accurate.  Yokota cited Allan Say and Ed Young as two illustrators whose work is exemplary in this regard.

Yokota raised a number of unusual points about roles that illustrations can play in contributing to an authentic cultural representation.  For instance, she mentioned Tejima's books, all of which are illustrated with woodcuts, a medium that is important to the history of Japanese art.  She also drew attention to the visual role played by the inclusion of bilingual text. The genre of the photo essay, Yokota pointed out, is uniquely well-suited to capturing the here-and-now experience that is too often lacking in international children's literature.

Yokota shared a large number of titles with the audience and provided a bibliography of recommended materials on East Asia. She also went over a list of what to avoid when selecting children's literature on East Asia, including cultural ambiguity or confusion, illustrations that reflect art styles from museums rather than those from the world of children's literature, and representations of experiences that are not truly Asian.  One way to evaluate the authenticity of the representations in children's literature is to pay close attention to the information provided by authors and illustrators about how they created their work and where they've done their homework.  In some instances, that information may be found in the books themselves, in "notes to the reader" or "about this book" pages, but professional journals such as Book Links, Bookbird and New Advocate also feature such essays from authors and illustrators.
 

Frances Ann Day
Marianne Halpin
Finding and Evaluating Children's Books (HM)

Marianne Halpin and Frances Ann Day, both Bay Area specialists in children's literature, devoted their session to introducing the resources that librarians and teachers can use to evaluate and select quality international and multicultural children's literature.

Halpin insisted on the importance of not buying books only from catalogues; instead, she suggested, selectors should rely on the essays and reviews found in many professional journals, such as Horn Book, Multicultural Review, The Lion and the Unicorn, Riverbank Review, School Library Journal, Booklist and the Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, which also maintains a web site where book discussions take place.  Book Links was mentioned as a particularly valuable resource for educators because it matches curriculum to extensive lists of both new and older books.  Halpin also reminded participants not to overlook more mainstream resources, such as Amazon, which features reviews culled from many of the professional journals as well as amateur reviews, often submitted by librarians.

Day introduced the class to her own annotated bibliographies, Multicultural Voices in Contemporary Literature: A Resource for Teachers; Latina and Latino Voices in Literature for Children and Teenagers; and Lesbian and Gay Voices: An Annotated Bibliography and Guide to Literature for Children and Young Adults.

Halpin and Day encouraged teachers to organize author's visits to their schools and classrooms and offered practical suggestions on how to go about it.  To save money, it is best to take advantage of local authors or those that are already in town for conferences.  Publisher's catalogues are a good way to make contact with authors, and can be a valuable reference tool. They often include something about the author and an address that teachers or students can use to write to any author.

Halpin also addressed the issue of having books challenged by parents or community members.  In the event of a challenge, having several quality reviews to back up your selection is invaluable, as are allies among colleagues and parents.

Sharon Zinke
Addressing Literacy (HM)

Zinke began her presentation by stressing that literacy is not something that can be found in a teacher's manual, but can only come from exposing kids to a love of books and love of reading.  She stressed a simple approach to literacy acquisition including reading to children, reading with children, and giving children ample opportunity for independent reading.

Zinke insisted on the importance of reading aloud to children at all levels, including children with independent reading skills.  Reading to kids exposes them to the language of books, which is fundamentally different from spoken language, and thereby increases the predictability of the reading experience in terms of language structure and vocabulary.

Equally important, Zinke said, is shared reading, which she defined as a reading experience in which everyone involved can see the print and with voice support from a fluent reader.  She suggested using overheads to enable shared reading in a classroom setting, but also pointed out that shared reading can also happen in a one-on-one setting between parent and child, or even between fellow students if one is a more proficient reader than the other.  Shared reading is an opportunity to encourage children to guess words from context and work on their comprehension skills.

Independent reading is just as important, but is often neglected in a classroom setting because it demands a lot of time.  In order to make independent reading work for all the kids in a class, Zinke recommended offering students a lot of choice in reading material and not limiting too much by grade level or prior judgements of suitability.  Books need to be both physically accessible and on a level for everyone to read independently.  Because it is through reading material that is too easy that students attain fluency, it is important that picture books and easy reading books be available, even in a upper grade level.  While stressing the importance of independent reading, Zinke also stressed the importance of one-on-one intervention during periods of independent reading.  By sitting down with students and listening to them read, educators can teach students reading skills and strategies in context.

An extended discussion followed concerning the challenge of teaching children to love books and of incorporating literature into the classroom within the confines of a phonics-based curriculum.  Although no easy solutions were reached, Zinke pointed to research that shows that silent, self-selected reading rather than detracting from the time spent teaching content actually helps learning in all fields.
 
 

Karen Greene
Focus on Cambodia (HM)

 Karen Greene constructed her session focusing on childhood in South East Asia around a series of questions.  The first question she posed was, what is South East Asia?  There are ongoing debates over whether there is an ethnographic coherence to the region that has been known as "South East Asia" only since the 1950s.  Greene argued that the commonalties of the region are due in part to overlapping histories and in part to a shared view of an invisible world inhabited by spirits that affects the world of humans.

The next question that Greene asked was, what is a child?  The question has only been asked in a serious way by anthropologists and sociologists since the 1920s and 1930s.  Greene discussed the work of Margaret Mead on this question in some detail.  Mead took the position that we can learn about the universalistic category of "childhood" by looking comparatively at the particularities of other cultures.  Greene showed segments of a film that Mead produced during her work in Samoa to demonstrate that Mead's apparently progressive position, which valued the contributions of other cultures, in fact masked a number of preconceptions about the definition of childhood that profoundly affected the results of her anthropological research and her presentation of them in the film.

Once we embrace a truly relative understanding of what defines a child, we need to ask ourselves, what is a child within the culture of "the West," or the culture of western Europe and the United States?  Greene argued that the contemporary definition of a child is in fact a product of the history of the West.  That contemporary definition contains a tension between the need for dependency and protection of the child on one hand and the demand for autonomy and individualism on the other.

Turning to the subject of her own doctoral research in Cambodia, Greene next posed the question, is there such a thing as a Cambodian child?  In order to answer the question, she looked at the category of childhood in Cambodia through the prism of theories of children's rights.  Greene described caring for offspring in Cambodia as an intense exchange relationship between parent and child.  The concept of "kun," which Greene defined as virtue worthy of gratitude, demands that offspring offer their parents gratitude, deference and respect.  Parents, on the other hand, have ethical obligations to their offspring, including mercy, compassion, love, happiness and justice.  The autonomous, independent child so valued in Western definitions of childhood is perceived in Cambodia as a threat to a carefully developed system of interdependence between parent and child, a relationship that is perceived to continue even beyond death.
 

Martha Saavedra
Amma A. B. Oduro
Focus on Africa (HM)

Martha Saavedra defined the goal of her session focusing on Africa as highlighting specific issues affecting cultural representations of Africa in children's literature and giving resources and materials to help avoid misconceptions in dealing with the African continent.  Among the resources presented during the session was a short video exploring commonly-held stereotypes about African culture.  Entitled "What We Know About Africa," the video was produced by  the Boston University Center for African Studies.

The first concern in correcting stereotypes of Africa is stressing the continent's enormous cultural and linguistic diversity, which has often been ignored or understated in representations of African cultures.  The roles of modernity and tradition are also important issues.  Saavedra stressed the extent to which that which we perceive as "tradition" or "custom" may be an invention of relatively recent times.  Even tribal identities, so often perceived as ancient or timeless, have been mostly constructed in the last hundred years, often as responses to the pressures of colonialism.  Saavedra also urged teachers to help students understand that everything in Africa is modern.  By this, she meant that there is nothing in African life or culture that is not in some way affected by modernity.  Even traditional practices of farming, for instance, are taking place in an economy with international and corporate connections, and are therefore part of the "modern world."  Lastly, Saavedra stressed that Americans are prone to look at Africa through the lens of United States history and race relations, and that bias is often reflected in the cultural representations in children's literature.

Amma Oduro offered some common-sense suggestions for selecting books about Africa.  Find out who wrote the book, and what experience or background the author has with Africa.  Where did the author or illustrator do the research for the book?  What topics are discussed in the book?  Can the book be used across a variety of curricula? Oduro also went over five important considerations to keep in mind when selecting children's books about Africa, adapted from Barbara Brown.  The first recommendation is to avoid the atypical.  For instance, Oduro pointed to Margaret Musgrove's award-winning picture book Ashanti to Zulu as an example of a book that unintentionally perpetuates stereotypes because it focuses on the atypical and "exotic."  To correct this problem, and to do justice to the diversity of Africa, Brown recommends focusing on a single country.  Brown also suggests limiting the number of folk tales and fables used, and instead looking for books that represent the contemporary experience of Africa, including urban culture.  Similarly, Brown recommends books in which animals play only a small role.  Most Africans have no more personal contact with elephants or giraffes than do Americans, as large animals in Africa are generally to be found in game preserves visited primarily by wealthy, non-African tourists.  Instead, Brown suggests looking for books that have a child at the center of the story.
 

Audrey Shabbas
Literature from Muslim Countries (HM)

Audrey Shabbas, like many of the speakers at this year's conference, opened with a note of caution about speaking of the "culture" of any particular world region.  There isn't a single Muslim or Islamic culture, Shabbas explained; we need always to speak of Islamic cultures in the plural.  Turning her attention specifically to the cultures of the Middle East, Shabbas insisted on the importance of not defining Middle Eastern cultures in terms of "good guys" and "bad guys," but rather in terms of how these cultures define themselves.

To that end, Shabbas introduced the "P.A.T.I.O." matrix which she helped to develop.  This acronym stands for the major cultural groups of the Middle East: Persians, Arabs, Turks, Israelis and, for lack of a better term, other Middle Eastern cultures, including Kurds, Berbers, Armenians and Aramaics.  These groups' cultural identities are derived from shared languages and, consequently, shared historical experiences, sets of cultural values and world views.

Shabbas reviewed population figures for the various groups, in part to demonstrate that the 240 million Arabs represent only a fraction of the 370 million people in the Middle East, and an even smaller fraction of the 1.2 billion Muslims in the world.  Most Muslims, Shabbas explained, are not Arabs and do not even live in the Middle East, but rather in Indonesia, Pakistan, the United States, and across the world.  Furthermore, Shabbas pointed out that the other monotheistic religions, Judaism and Christianity, are represented throughout the Middle East, as are other religions, such as Zoroastrianism. In short, it is important when considering cultural representations in children's literature to remember that Islam and the Middle East are not coextensive, and that enormous diversity exists within both of those umbrella terms.  Outside the Middle East, Islam has not come to replace indigenous cultures, but rather was incorporated into and accommodated to them.  Thus, Islam looks different all over the Muslim world.  People throughout the Muslim world are unified, however, by the use of Arabic as the language of prayers and of the Koran.

Tesselations Project
During the second part of her presentation, Audrey Shabbas introduced a curriculum that she helped to develop called "Doorways to Islamic Art."  Islamic art provides a unifying thread that connects the diverse cultures of the Muslim world.  In this curriculum Shabbas identifies five characteristics of Islamic art, each characteristic introduced through photographs of doorways from all over the Islamic world.

Shabbas defined the first characteristic, tesselation, as the infinitely repeating pattern of geometric shapes fitted together like pieces of a puzzle on a flat plane.  There are three geometric shapes that will tesselate alone: the square, triangle and hexagon. All other shapes need to be combined with one or more other shapes in order to tesselate.  The patterns formed by these complex geometric combinations are found everywhere in Islamic art and architecture, and have acquired traditional names, such as "step and shoulder" and "fluttering about."  M.C. Escher, influenced by the tesselations he saw at the Alhambra, invented new patterns of his own, often featuring anthropomorphic or animal forms.  The second characteristic, complex star polygons,  also relies on the manipulation of simple geometric forms.

The third characteristic is linear repeat pattern.  In one common form, reciprocal linear repeat patterns, dark areas are mirrored by light areas. Bands of linear repeat patterns are often used sandwiched together or as a framing device for the other characteristics.  Similarly, the fourth characteristic, the arabesque, or highly stylized vegetal design, is often used as embellishment in or around other forms.

The fifth characteristic is, according to Shabbas, the most important.  Because of the Islamic prohibition against figural representation in sacred art or architecture, calligraphy has become one of the most widespread forms of sacred decoration. The calligraphy can be highly stylized, made either geometric or organic, and is often used to form a linear repeat pattern. Mirror calligraphy, in which calligraphy is combined with its mirror image in a complex overlapping design, is also popular. Throughout the Islamic world, Arabic, the language of the Koran, is used in calligraphy.

All of the characteristics discussed in the curriculum are represented both in slides, overheads of diagrams of the various patterns that explain the underlying geometry, and descriptive text.  Photographs also show artisans at work creating the mosaics, tiles and carvings that are characteristic of Islamic art.
 

Teresa Stojkov
Focus on Latin America (HM)

Teresa Stojkov began her presentation by enumerating the challenges to be faced when dealing with Latin American literatures and cultures.  How do we present the subject matter without condescending to its subjects?  How do we avoid trivializing the profound differences among Latin American cultures?  How do we identify our own biases and those of the communities we are trying to reach?

Even the term "Latin America" is overlaid with multiple meanings; first used by Europeans to describe a colonized region seen as a single and undifferentiated entity, the term was later adopted by leftist Latin American thinkers to differentiate Central and South America and the Caribbean from the other America north of the Rio Grande.  Latin America seems to offer an example of the power of a shared language to overpower other forms of cultural identification, but Stojkov cautioned that the apparent linguistic unity masks a far greater diversity than is usually recognized.

Stojkov stressed the importance of the legacy of the colonial opposition between civilization and barbarism to post-independence Latin American thought.  Magical realism has become central to many contemporary Latin American literatures, Stojkov explained, because it offers a means of coming to terms with and inverting the racial biases that were part of the colonial and post-colonial world.  By employing magical realist strategies, writers attempt to make credible that which goes beyond the cultural assumptions of the dominant culture.

In their attempts to banish preconceived notions of what constitutes Latin American culture, some well-known authors have also become interested in children's literature.  Stojkov mentioned poetry for children written by two Chilean poets, Pablo Neruda and Gabriela Mistral, both winners of the Nobel Prize for literature.  A more recent work in this tradition is Antonio Skarmeta's 2000 children's book The Composition, winner of the Americas' Prize.  This book, written in exile and dealing with the subject matter of a repressive regime, offers a certain challenge for educators, and Stojkov pointed out that not all the information necessary to introduce this work to children in the United States in a responsible way is to be found within the covers of the book.  Nonetheless, Stojkov insisted on the importance of including more difficult and challenging books such as The Composition in order to present collectively a more honest view of Latin American culture.

In order to further round out a comprehensive view of Latin American culture, Stojkov offered some further suggestions for titles, some of which deal explicitly with Latino culture in the United States.  One book that Stojkov highlighted was Gloria Anzaldua's bilingual Prietita and the Ghost Woman,  a version of the folk tale of la llorona, a legend that can also be presented to students through song.  Rosario Ferré's retellings of traditional Latin American children's stories were also recommended.  For older readers, Stojkov highly recommended The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros.  Among many books that are semi-bilingual, in that they incorporate Spanish words directly into the text, this book stands out because its use of Spanish is not gratuitous or gimmicky.  Instead, Cisneros captures what it means to move through the world in a bilingual and bicultural way, in part by recreating the rhythm and syntax of spoken Spanish in the English-language text.

Glen Worthey
Focus on Russia (SB)
Glen Worthey began his focus on Russia with an excellent example of a lesson plan for teaching young students about world cultures. After showing his own passport to the class, Glen had given each student a passport-like booklet in which to record their sessions "visiting" countries around the world. The end result, an example of which we saw, was a writing exercise, an outlet for creative expression, and a record about the countries that could later be reviewed. The passport project, which is simple and inexpensive to create, is now posted on the ORIAS Web site in PDF format and can be downloaded and photocopied.

Taking up Russian culture as it is reflected in children's literature, Glen introduced common figures in Russian folklore as things to look out for: Prince Ivan and the Firebird; Vasilisa, a girl who may also be called "The Brave," "The Wise," or "The Beautiful"; Baba Yaga, a witch who lives in a house that walks on chicken legs and who rides around in a mortar and pestle; Ivan the Fool, who triumphs in spite of his foolishness; "Kolobok," the Little Bun whose provenance and fate are similar to the Gingerbread Man; and the Turnip, a vegetable that grows so large that it requires a group effort to pick it. Images of many of these characters were shown from the illustrations of Russian artist Ivan Bilibin, enabling the group to better comprehend how a witch might ride through the air in a mortar, paddling with a pestle. (Head of the Humanities Digital Information Service in the Stanford University Libraries, Glen had scanned many of the books he described so that everyone present could see the projected images as he spoke.)

Such figures from Russian folklore may be found in children's literature either in the repetition of traditional tales or in the introduction of the characters into new stories. For example, the turnip's tale has been retold numerous times in American books, although it usually changes to a more familiar vegetable, say a carrot, and the cast of characters trying to pull it varies. A good source for traditional Russian folklore is Russian Fairy Tales, collected by Aleksandr Afanas'ev in the ninteenth century. The volume translated into English by Norbert Gutterman was published in 1945 by Pantheon Books (subsequently reissued by them) and by Random House in 1976; it can still be found in print. After reading the tales in this book, it is easy to see why some of them might be adapted before being presented to children, though it is also apparent why these powerful tales endure.

Moving on to literature written for Russian children, Glen began in the nineteenth century with Alexander Pushkin, the first important author of children's literature in Russia. (During the eighteenth century there was not much children's literature published.) Leo Tolstoy also wrote children's literature. In fact, at one time, Tolstoy started a school for peasants, wrote a journal about his pedagogy, and published his students' stories in this journal. Fyodor Dostoevsky, however, never wrote literature intended for children.

The October 1917 revolution ideologically created a time for childhood in Russia, though this was greatly contradicted by the reality of orphans. (Of course, Russians became Soviets, and we must remember that people of numerous ethnicities contributed to Soviet culture.) Emphasizing ideology, there were many books about Vladimir Ilyich Lenin for Soviet children. Lenin's widow, Nadezhda Krupskaya, believed strongly in the power of children's book and wrote many (dull) books about Lenin. Although dull stories may not become popular, Mikhail Zoshchenko wrote many popular stories, but was expelled for his irony from the Soviet Writers Union, and suffered the banning of his books.

Through a strong emphasis on ideology, Soviet children's literature sought to overturn old ways and beliefs and to create a new culture. Pavlik Morozov's story is emblematic of this movement. During the early 1930s, when peasants were joining collective farms, often under force, Pavlik denounced his father to the authorities for hoarding grain and selling it for a profit. When Pavlik was killed in revenge, he became a martyr for the cause and a mascot of the Young Pioneers, the Soviet scouting group that all children were expected to join. Though it failed to show how "good" behavior would be rewarded, Morozov's gruesome story showed how the state had supplanted the traditional role of the family.

Children's literature was so highly esteemed in Soviet times that major authors wrote for children. The poet and great translator Kornei Chukovsky wrote poetry for children and translated other works into Russian, including Mother Goose rhymes. While much of Russian children's literature remains inaccessible to English speakers, some of Chukovsky's work has been translated. Listening carefully to children and collecting what they said, his ideas about writing for children were published in English as From Two to Five, though now out of print (Berkeley: UC Press, 1966). He wrote funny poems that chose delighting children over propagandizing, such as the story of a crocodile named Krokodil Krokodilovich. Although Krupskaya took offense at his anthropomorphic animals, starting a debate about whether children's literature should be realistic, Chukovsky's work endured. His wacky story Telephone (translated by Jamey Gambrell; New York: North-South Books, 1996) is now out of print.
 Another great Soviet writer, Samuel Marshak, known for translating Shakepeare's sonnets and other English poetry, also wrote for children. Second in command of the Soviet Writer's Union, he wrote propagandizing stories such as Mister Twister (Mister Tvister). Mister Twister is an evil American capitalist who travels to the Soviet Union to amuse his bored and spoiled daughter. Upon entering the hotel at which they intend to stay, Mister Twister sees a black man and refuses to stay at an establishment that is not segregated. Extolling the equality of all people in the Soviet Union, the book follows his fruitless search to find a hotel he deems proper. Though a classic of Soviet children's literature, this work has not been published in English. Marshak's titles in English include: The Absentminded Fellow (translated by Richard Pevear; New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1999), the story of a scatterbrained professor who simply tries to get dressed and catch a train; and Hail to Mail! (translated by Richard Pevear; New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1990; out of print), the story of a letter that travels around the world as it just keeps missing its recipient. No doubt, these books have been valued for their timeless humor.

A contemporary of Marshak, Daniil Kharms wrote nonsense poems and absurdist stories, in addition to his popular children's literature. In 1941, Kharms was arrested for his unconventional writing; he was too strange to tolerate any longer, and his work-and soon thereafter, his life-ended. He was republished in the USSR in the 1960s and again in the 1980s. A number of his stories are now translated into English: First Second (translated by Richard Pevear; New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1996), an account of two boys who encounter an extraordinary assortment of companions while going for a walk; and The Story of a Boy Named Will, Who Went Sledding Down the Hill (New York: North-South Books, 1993; out of print), the story of a boy who cumulatively picks up a number of characters while sledding. Still other stories by Kharms have been retold by Mirra Ginsburg: Across the Stream (New York: Mulberry Books, 1991) and Four Brave Sailors (New York: Greenwillow Books, 1987). But while Ginsburg's books are charming, these adaptations have lost some of the quirkiness of the original Kharms texts. An anthology of Kharms' poetry, It Happened Like This (translated by Ian Frazier; New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1998) is currently available as a children's book, but it is neither well-translated nor well-illustrated and contains some of Kharms' work intended for an adult audience.

Finally, Glen showed some late Soviet/early Post-Soviet literature for children, all of which were only in Russian. The work of Grigorii Oster, an extremely popular author of cartoon scripts, contrasts strongly and deliberately with the propaganda in Soviet literature. His Book of Problems (Zadachnik), for example, gives word problems for children, but in one arithmetic problem, readers are asked to calculate the number of Young Pioneers who must turn in their parents to emulate Pavlik Morozov. The illustration of a smiling Pioneer with an axe stuck in his head tops off the scathing irony. Another work by Oster, whose title translates to Dangerous Advice (Vrednye sovety), proclaims itself to be a book for disobedient children. It's message is clearly meant to be reverse psychology, but under the surface, the author relishes disobedience just a little too much, benefiting from the freedom that people such as Kharms never had.

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