Abstract
This article argues that if we paid attention to the local situation of a reader the way we attend to the life story of an author, we might gain a very different understanding of children’s literacy. It explores the literate approaches of a single child exploring a single theme—the settler culture as represented in a variety of materials accessible to her in the 1950s—across the discourses of television cowboy shows, school and recreational texts featuring settlers and indigenous people, and a British children’s novel about claiming the land. The article suggests that this kind of miscellaneous intertextuality is a larger feature of early reading than we sometimes assume.
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Margaret Mackey is a Professor in the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Alberta. She has published widely in the area of young people’s literatures and literacies in print and other media. Her most recent book is Narrative Pleasures in Young Adult Novels, Films, and Video Games (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
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Mackey, M. The Embedded and Embodied Literacies of a Young Reader. Child Lit Educ 42, 289–307 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-011-9141-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-011-9141-4