From: Barbara Tobin <barbarat>
Date: Sun, 07 Jul 2002 23:43:39 +0800

I'd like to join Judith as a fellow Aussie, albeit an expatriate who has been living in the US for the last 15 years (though currently in Perth spending the summer with my family). I am usually a busy lurker, but I can't resist this topic that is so dear to my heart, especially now that the conversation has turned towards our grand dame of children's literature, Patricia Wrightson (four time winner of our national book award, if my memory serves me correctly).

I did my dissertation (about 12 years ago) on the responses of pre?olescent (seventh grade) Australian readers to two of her contemporary fantasies. I wanted to try to get inside the heads of the sorts of readers who consistently were voting Wrightson's (adult) award winning books near the bottom of our state's children's choice book awards (from a list of 50 nominees), even though they did choose some relatively 'literary' winners at times.

This discrepancy intrigued me, so I wanted to follow one class through the reading of one of her slimmer, less complex books (A Little Fear, which deals with only one spirit being of limited powers); and then from this baseline, work with three individual readers on the more complex The Nargun and the Stars, where she flirts with the dangerously powerful, almost primordial spirit, (the Nargun), the sort she didn't usually like to mess with, because she felt they weren't hers (as a non?original person) for the taking. Having spent much of her earlier life in country towns among Aboriginal persons, she has an enormous respect for them, and in writing these books she was wanting to bring to light some of what she found to be the richly poetic beauty of this mythology with white readers in particular. She was very articulate in expressing her beliefs and methods of working with this material, which at the time was somewhat of a breakthrough for representing Aboriginal culture in children's books --but has since become more controversial with today's concerns about 'who can tell this story' issues.

For someone whose works have been examined by many scholars, I thought Patricia was very kind and generous in corresponding with me about the ongoing results of my research, expressing a very gracious interest in my young readers' responses, granting them full liberty to construct their own meanings from her work, and permitting me to record her own responses to their responses in the dissertation.

I guess one of my main conclusions was that multi-layered, multi-cultural works like this really benefit from teacher facilitated discussion to help students begin to unravel some of those layers, and bring to bear some of the resources they already possess to utilize the textual cues to bring meaning to the work. This is a clumsy, foggy attempt at paraphrasing something that was once more elegantly expressed but has been pushed to the back of my mind--even more so as I try to compose this whilst listening with one ear to our national hero, Lleyton Hewitt, attempting to win his first Wimbledon crown.

Sorry for the length of this post...starting to relive the memories....

Barbara Tobin Graduate School of Education University of Pennsylvania barbarat at gse.upenn.edu
Received on Sun 07 Jul 2002 10:43:39 AM CDT