A Powerful ‘Jumble’: Magazines Assembling the World for Children

Abstract

A literacy assemblage rarely accorded serious attention in literacy education circles is the children’s magazine. This publishing phenomenon has a long and continuous history. It offers a window into a key problematic of children’s education and socialisation across time and space; how societies manage childhood’s relation to the adult world. The chapter surveys historical evidence regarding the emergence of children’s magazines initially as adaptations of the ‘miscellany’, a textual assemblage which curated information and narratives for adults. Their shaping of child subjectivities as learners and citizens is explored in relation to two key examples: The Children’s Miscellany (Boston, United States) and the Children’s Hour (Adelaide, Australia). The racialised exclusion of some children as literate citizens is acknowledged as a serious limitation of this citizenship project, and the depiction of cultural ‘others’ in children’s magazines is examined. However, counter-examples in which magazines were key strategies for cultural identity formation and language maintenance are also considered. When considered as an assemblage over time-space, the magazine’s compilation mode has remained a constant. The shift to digital, by facilitating the sourcing and the incorporation of material into magazine assemblages. The role played by digital children’s magazines in the pandemic is offered as evidence of the mobility and transformability of this literacy assemblage.