re: Participation marks

Everyone should now have their participation marks. If you gave me your preferred email address when I passed the sheet around near the beginning of the course, I sent it there; if you did not, then I used you address as listed in York's directory.

To reiterate about the remaining park of your participation marks: the other half of the participation grade (it's 20% of your final mark, and what I've given you constitutes only half of that) will not be substantially different unless you substantially change your own participation. For example:
*If you're happy with your 6.5/10 and don't post any more frequently to the blog and don't come to chat about the class with me at my office hour, you can expect another 6.5 for the other half.
*If you've been posting to the blog regularly and suddenly stop, you can expect your mark to drop slightly. (ie. That 6.5 may have actually been a 5.5, which I increased to 6.5 because you've posted a few thoughtful things to the blog and you submitted two questions for the mock-exam.)
*Conversely, if you're unhappy with that 6.5 and start posting once or twice with really smart stuff every week or starting coming to talk to me during my office hour, you can reasonably expect your grade to increase.

I'm also considering putting together exercises specifically for our tutorial that would count toward the participation grade (which is an approach that the other tutorial leaders use), but won't do so unless it's something that the class is actually interested in.

"Three Wishes"

Since we didn't get any class-time to talk about Three Wishes, feel free to post some comments or discussion in response to this posting.

Exam review

Use this thread to toss out any questions you might have or discuss topics in preparation for the review. If someone wants to post the themes/binaries from tutorial and add or invite others to add to them, that would probably make an excellent starting point.

Mock-exam: multiple-choice questions

Here's the sample multiple choice exam questions. I've pulled one question from each person that submitted them (14 people in total). Some are good examples of what you will get on the exam and some are not. The reason I've chosen 'good' questions should be obvious. But I've included the 'bad' ones as well because these questions are still instructive, since they actually look much more like good essay questions.

So print this off or simply write down your answers and bring them to tutorial - and also take note of any questions that seem too open or interpretive, and perhaps require short essay style answers.

1. Which of the following is an example of how adult assumptions about childhood can lead to self-fulfilling prophecies?
a) if adults believe children should not read fairy-tales, they will let them watch Disney films instead
b) if parents refuse to read books to their children, the children will likely find another adult to read to them
c) if adults allow children to choose their own books to read, they may choose books that they find entertaining and interesting
d) if adults believe children are innocent, they will keep them away from interesting books because of potentially dangerous content

2. According to Dyer, how does the mainstream media treat gay characters unfairly or inappropriately in films?
a) By making all gay men flamboyantly so.
b) By inserting a masculine/feminine binary into homosexual couples. (I.E: even if they're both women, one of them obviously wears the pants)
c) By primarily using gay characters in comedy and horror films.
d) All of the above.

3. According to Marx & Engels, the class which is the ruling material force of
society is at the same time its ruling:
a) social force
b) artistic force
c) intellectual force
d) dominant force

4. How can childhood researchers, according to James, listen to the authentic
voice of the child?
a) Literally - listen to them
b) Researchers can explore the nature of the voice with which children are
attributed
c) Researchers can study documents relating to childhood (diaries, children's
literature, etc) and draw conclusions about childhood from these.
d) None of the above

5. What is David Jefferess concern in his article?
a) Western children go to school rather than work, and are expected to play rather than fulfil responsibilities to the household.
b) Western notion of childhood may not have existed prior to the eighteenth century
c) The dominant concept of the child in this discourse is dependent upon notions of work, education and the romantic construction of “childhood”.
d) The child in the CRC and child rights discourse is dependent upon the dominant, yet historically recent, conception of the “child” and to suggest how dependence on this concept of the “child” perpetuates structures of domination rather than contributes to the positive social change the child rights movement advocates.

6. When looking at the analysis of Deborah Ellis’ books that we have read this term, who is seen as the strongest character in terms of dealing with social values in labour?
a) Parvana
b) Diego
c) Binti
d) Jay

7. What author states: “the category of the subject is only constitutive of all ideology insofar as all ideology has the function (which defines it) of ‘constituting’ concrete individuals as subjects.”
a) Antonio Gramsci
b) Louis Althussier
c) Karl Marx
d) Ellen Riordan

8. During the 18th century, western children was thought of as
a) little devils
b) equivalent to adults
c) totally innocent
d) as imperfect adults

9. What is the name of the organiztion that Eshan Khan was the leader of?
a) bonded labor liberation front
b) children's liberation group
c) free the children
d) stop child exploitation

10. One of the best way to deal with bias is to
a) accept it and move on
b) report it to the proper authority
c) blame it on dominant ideology
d) to treat everyone equally regardless of race, class, nationality or sexual orientation

11. When Jenkins describes Hillary Clinton's "village" mentality, there is a particular idea or state that the child embodies. What is this state?
a) The embodiment of nostalgic remorse, or of an innocence that has been violated.
b) The embodiment of a dream for the future which must be built in the present.
c) The embodiment of change, its threat and its potential.
d) The embodiment of a temporary state, an emblem for our anxieties about the passing of time.

12. What major element is heavily emphasized throughout the novel of Bifocal?
a) Class
b) Sexuality
c) Stereotypes
d) Individuality

13. What does discursive matrix mean?
a) a representation of one whole text in the same areas within it.
b) a meaning is getting made and represented in lots of different arenas.
c) discourse of ideas and representations.
d) none of the above.

14. Why did Prof. Jeffrey Canton mention that the notion of children literature is stupid?
a) Because its never authentic enough.
b) Because its adult literature created for children.
c) Because all children books are all similar.
d) Because their too young to write books.

Open Discussion Thread

This post is open for anyone to ask a question relating to tutorial conversations or any of our course readings.

Notes

*A reminder that the 'Voice' assignment (on the main class site), which is due on Wednesday, is 3-4 pages if you choose the email option, 6-8 pages if you choose the transcript. Double-spaced, of course. And worth double the normal value of these projects - it will be out of 6 instead of 3.

*The exam outline is posted to the class website, under the 'What's New' link.

*Presentation marks will be emailed to all of you in the latter half of next week. Remember that i'm only going to be assigning half of your total participation marks, which means that you'll still be able to affect the other half. The remaining marks will be assigned at the end of the year.

Review questions...

To remind everyone: you need to create 2 multiple-choice questions for the in-tutorial review on Wednesday and either email them to me or post them as a response to this message. (I would prefer it if you just posted them here - York email is painfully slow. But don't tell us/me which answer is correct. We'll figure that out when we take it up in tutorial.) You have until midnight on Monday (yes, after the next tutorial) to submit something, after which I'll pull it all together and repost it in mock-exam form on Tuesday (possibly as late as the afternoon) for the whole class to try and answer. (There's no specific penalty for not participating, but joining in on the review and contributing - like any discussion - is connected to the participation mark.) And then we'll discuss the answers in tutorial.

If you were in tutorial on Wednesday, then you should know which week you were assigned to cover. If you were not, then I'd suggest that you refer to May 21, 26, and June 2's articles and choose something from among those, since they have the most material to cover. If you're struggling to come up with something, definitions (supplying the definition and four possible terms) or identification (describing a place/person/thing and four options) questions are always the easiest. I won't tell you to avoid making it too easy or too hard because we all have different ideas of what's hard or easy - just try to make sure that all of the possible answers, even the wrong ones, sound at least somewhat plausible. (For example: If the correct answer is 'Louis Althusser', it would make no sense for you to include 'Magic Johnson' as an option. Try Marx, Gramsci, Jenkins, Jefferess, etc.)

So in summary:
-2 questions of your own design, drawn from your week of readings/lecture
-4 possible answers for each (with no indication of which is correct)
-emailed or posted here by midnight on Monday (although earlier is always better)

The Heaven Shop - Discussion Questions

1. The reporter who interviews Binti in the opening chapter asks "Which do you think is more important...jobs or free speech?" to which Binti replies "It depends on how poor you are." Is Binti's answer consistent with the argument of the book? How so? Do you personally agree with her answer?

2. Talking about her radio show character, Binti explains that "Mr. Waijiru says my character is so awful because she teaches people how not to be." Are there other examples of such characters in this book? Do you think that this is an effective strategy to employ in children's entertainment?

3. Gogo has a long speech about her family and society's denial of AIDS at Binti's father's funeral, which leads to the marginalization of Binti and her siblings at the hands of their relatives. Later, Jeremiah argues that "The truth can hurt sometimes, but lies hurt even more." Is this argument consistent with the events of the book? Drawing from the book, devise some arguments both in defense of lying and in defense of telling the truth in the context of Malawi and the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

4. The book features a budding romance between Junie and Jeremiah, both of whom have HIV. Is this an empowering representation of life with HIV, since it shows they can still love and be loved? Or, given that they do not fall in love with people who are HIV-free, could it be a problematic representation? Can we imagine how differently the relationship might be represented or received if one of the characters was not HIV positive?

Open Discussion Thread

This post is open for anyone to ask a question relating to tutorial conversations or any of our course readings.

Barbies of the World

Barbie's "Dolls of the World":
The Princess Collection
Festivals of the World
Africa
Asia
Australia
Europe
North America
South America

All of the standard critiques of Barbie's inability to represent real people apply. Additionally, if you have the time to look these over then be sure to ask yourself who isn't represented at all. I suspect that a large number of people in the class will discover that they don't even exist in the world of Barbie.

Information/knowledge and childhood

As a follow-up to the Wednesday discussion, in case you were interested.

Information: Information consists of observations that are recorded or gathered, but which don't mean anything until they are related to a system of knowledge. Think of Professor Steve's favorite example of the images on the York homepage - there's a picture of a windmill and one line of text says 'An environmentalist sees zero emissions' while another says 'A literature student sees Don Quixote'. The windmill is the information that has the potential to mean many different things. However, that potential is only realized in relation to a body of knowledge - like environmentalism or literature.

Knowledge: Knowledge is created within a system of discourse. For the purposes of our course discussion, knowledge should be understood as an ideological system that organizes the otherwise unintelligible information into something that is 1) meaningful and 2) always hegemonic. For example: Look at Hendrick's different periods of in the historical understanding of childhood. Each era used information about children (their ages, their ability to comprehend, their sexual and physical maturity, etc.) and made sense of that information by relating those observations to a pre-existing ideological system (Protestantism, Puritanism, psychoanalysis, science, etc.) in order to create a knowledge about children and childhood.

In summary:

*Information is never neutral because it's always embedded in a system of knowledge. However, it can reevaluated in relation to another system of knowledge. So while it is not neutral its value can change: we can't make the category of childhood meaningless, but we can change what childhood represents.

*Knowledge makes information meaningful, but systems of knowledge are always hegemonic. The cost of meaningfulness is that meaning is unequal: children are made to represent 'innocence' and 'purity' at the cost of their own agency and to the benefit of adults.

Open Discussion Thread

This post is open for anyone to ask a question relating to tutorial conversations or any of our course readings.

Assignment Reminders

1) If the assignment says one page, it means one page, double-spaced, 12-pt font, 1 inch margins. It does not mean 1 and 1/2 pages, or 1 page single-spaced. Being able to express everything that you need to concisely in 250-300 words is part of the assignment. (Though, as I said in tutorial, I'll let the 1 page single-spaced/2 pages double-spaced thing slide for the Barbie assignment, only because it wasn't absolutely clear.)

2) The lateness policy, again: Once tutorial starts, any assignments that haven't been turned in get a zero. I've made a habit of being a couple minutes late whenever an assignment is due, so there's really no good excuse for turning it in 5 or 10 minutes late - give yourself enough time to fit in washroom breaks or account for the possibility of a printer error. (In all seriousness: I didn't appreciate being put on the spot in front of the class on Monday when people sheepishly tried to hand in their assignments late. If it's late, just sit down and move on - I don't want to see or hear about the assignment.)