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Children's Literature in Education

, Volume 46, Issue 4, pp 378–393 | Cite as

Almost Astronauts and the Pursuit of Reliability in Children’s Nonfiction

  • Joe Sutliff Sanders
Original Paper
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Abstract

A recent surge of conversation about children’s nonfiction reveals a conflict between two positions that do not at first appear to be opposed: modeling inquiry and presenting authoritative facts. Tanya Lee Stone, the author of the Sibert Award-winning Almost Astronauts (2009), has recently alluded to that tension and expressed a preference for nonfiction that is reliable. This essay takes Almost Astronauts as a test case, focusing especially on how it portrays its original research and its two key characters: Jerrie Cobb and Jackie Cochran. The essay uses these examples to argue that in pursuing reliability, Almost Astronauts suppresses complexity and opportunities to model inquiry, thereby sacrificing both critical engagement and accuracy.

Keywords

Nonfiction Almost Astronauts Critical engagement Critical literacy Childhood of famous Americans Marc Aronson Paulo Freire Tanya Lee Stone 
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Notes

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the generous, anonymous reviewers of this essay, whose advice has improved this essay enormously.

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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Department of EnglishKansas State UniversityManhattanUSA

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