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From: Smithhemb at aol.com <Smithhemb>
Date: Thu, 2 Jan 2003 19:17:31 EST
In a message dated 1/2/2003 6:03:32 PM Eastern Standard Time, ltillotson at ala.org writes:
Notes (and bibliographies) always/inherently involve processes of selection and omission. The real question is "what is/should be the principle of selection?" In academia, for example, many claims are considered commonly accepted facts and thus don't need to be documented. (What these facts are varies from discipline to discipline, as any liberal arts person who has ever written for a law journal will tell you, LOL!) And certain sources, even though they may have been the actual place that the author first learned something, aren't considered appropriate for quotation in scholarly writing. They aren't the *authoritative* sources, even if they are accurate -- and this makes a certain kind of sense because the goal of academic footnotes generally is not to enable the reader to follow in the author's footsteps, but to make certain kinds of claims credible while treating them as "givens"
(i.e. not argued for in -- or established by -- the text at hand).
I am emphatically *not* arguing that kid-friendliness justifies eliminating/minimizing references to sources (or research methodology) in childrens' non-fiction. I am arguing that which sources we identify and how we describe our research methods are alway context-specific (and relate both to the assumptions that readers make about an author and that an author makes about prospective readers). I don't think that insisting that the authors of non-fiction written for children follow a set of formal conventions that scholars have developed to write to each other will necessarily improve the quality of children's non-fiction (or even give children a better understanding of how to do responsible research/what good scholarship looks like). And I sure wouldn't want a kid to think that a book with footnotes is inherently more reliable than a book without footnotes (and/or that one can establish that a book is credible simply on the basis of how it represents itself).
I think that developing childrens' judgment about the credibility of different kinds of sources and about how/whether certain types of claims could be verified is a difficult and important project. But I don't assume that there's one right way for authors to further that project. My sense is that this kind of judgment develops cumulatively when people read a bunch of different books that raise these issues in various ways/contexts and when they encounter at least one class or teacher who requires them to think critically about how they know what they think they know.
Sue Hemberger
Oh yeah and the thought that non-fiction written for children should resemble non-fiction written by children scares me! And isn't that the logic behind the hypocrisy and/or set-a-good-example argument? Third-graders have to show their work when they do division and that makes sense if you want to make sure they are paying attention to what they are doing when they are first learning something and/or if you want more info to help diagnose why they are making the mistakes they are making. But we wouldn't say that people who divided accurately without showing their work were lowering standards, engaging in sloppy mathematics, or setting a bad example, would we? Obviously, there's more consensus about arithmatic than about history, but I can't help wondering if part of this issue here is that writers and/or editors of childrens' non-fiction doubt their own/each others' competence wrt the subjects they are writing about/publishing on. If that's the case, good footnotes wouldn't reassure me (for reasons I've already indicated).
Received on Thu 02 Jan 2003 06:17:31 PM CST
Date: Thu, 2 Jan 2003 19:17:31 EST
In a message dated 1/2/2003 6:03:32 PM Eastern Standard Time, ltillotson at ala.org writes:
Notes (and bibliographies) always/inherently involve processes of selection and omission. The real question is "what is/should be the principle of selection?" In academia, for example, many claims are considered commonly accepted facts and thus don't need to be documented. (What these facts are varies from discipline to discipline, as any liberal arts person who has ever written for a law journal will tell you, LOL!) And certain sources, even though they may have been the actual place that the author first learned something, aren't considered appropriate for quotation in scholarly writing. They aren't the *authoritative* sources, even if they are accurate -- and this makes a certain kind of sense because the goal of academic footnotes generally is not to enable the reader to follow in the author's footsteps, but to make certain kinds of claims credible while treating them as "givens"
(i.e. not argued for in -- or established by -- the text at hand).
I am emphatically *not* arguing that kid-friendliness justifies eliminating/minimizing references to sources (or research methodology) in childrens' non-fiction. I am arguing that which sources we identify and how we describe our research methods are alway context-specific (and relate both to the assumptions that readers make about an author and that an author makes about prospective readers). I don't think that insisting that the authors of non-fiction written for children follow a set of formal conventions that scholars have developed to write to each other will necessarily improve the quality of children's non-fiction (or even give children a better understanding of how to do responsible research/what good scholarship looks like). And I sure wouldn't want a kid to think that a book with footnotes is inherently more reliable than a book without footnotes (and/or that one can establish that a book is credible simply on the basis of how it represents itself).
I think that developing childrens' judgment about the credibility of different kinds of sources and about how/whether certain types of claims could be verified is a difficult and important project. But I don't assume that there's one right way for authors to further that project. My sense is that this kind of judgment develops cumulatively when people read a bunch of different books that raise these issues in various ways/contexts and when they encounter at least one class or teacher who requires them to think critically about how they know what they think they know.
Sue Hemberger
Oh yeah and the thought that non-fiction written for children should resemble non-fiction written by children scares me! And isn't that the logic behind the hypocrisy and/or set-a-good-example argument? Third-graders have to show their work when they do division and that makes sense if you want to make sure they are paying attention to what they are doing when they are first learning something and/or if you want more info to help diagnose why they are making the mistakes they are making. But we wouldn't say that people who divided accurately without showing their work were lowering standards, engaging in sloppy mathematics, or setting a bad example, would we? Obviously, there's more consensus about arithmatic than about history, but I can't help wondering if part of this issue here is that writers and/or editors of childrens' non-fiction doubt their own/each others' competence wrt the subjects they are writing about/publishing on. If that's the case, good footnotes wouldn't reassure me (for reasons I've already indicated).
Received on Thu 02 Jan 2003 06:17:31 PM CST
