The Gruffalo's child as a model learner

Although I enjoy picturebooks, I have not read The Gruffalo’s Child so, over Christmas, I did exactly what I advise my pupils not to do and watched the televised adaptation.

Displaying my teacherly inability to switch off, as I watched I was struck by the character of the Gruffalo’s child as she displays many elements of the learning dispositions which Guy Claxton has identified as part of his Building Learning Power (BLP) programme.

I understand the core values of BLP as being to encourage students’ lifelong learning habits and to make them independent learners who are not reliant on their teachers. To do this, Claxton has identified the four learning dispositions, or characteristics, which students need to be able to demonstrate. These are resilience, resourcefulness, reflection and reciprocity, and the Gruffalo’s child is an exemplary exponent of many of these.

In terms of her resilience, or emotional engagement, she notices details, spotting and following the animals’ trails, and is wholly absorbed in the task. Most importantly, she shows her perseverance as, despite set backs when she nearly drowns, has uncomfortable encounters with the snake, owl and fox, and is lied to by the mouse, she persists with her search for the Big Bad Mouse.

Her resourcefulness, or cognitive range, is seen in her question asking throughout the story, and the use of her imagination when drawing the image of the mouse. More advanced resourcefulness is shown by her making links between the trails of the animals and the search for her goal, and her reasoning as she uses her logic to deduce how each animal could be the Big Bad Mouse.

One of the characteristics of a successful learner which I stress as most important to my pupils is that of reflection and again the Gruffalo’s child is a good role model. She shows her ability to plan through her escape, and the revision of her ideas as she encounters the snake, owl and fox, and the distillation of her ideas through her identification of key details of each animal she meets.

The final learning disposition, reciprocity, is one which develops with age as pupils become less egocentric, and it is the area in which the Gruffalo’s child is weakest. Nevertheless, she does collaborate with the mouse (even though it is to her disadvantage), and she does listen attentively to the Gruffalo’s story and to the mouse’s ideas.

Adults, and especially teachers and parents, will recognise the importance of Claxton’s learning dispositions to a child’s development but, just as the Grufflo tries to protect their child, having the confidence to allow and encourage active and student-directed learning is sometimes a difficult boundary to overstep. It is, however, one which adults need to have the confidence to overstep for those in their care. Interestingly, these positive characteristics often seem to disappear as pupils move into secondary school and become more self-conscious, and it is at this age that teachers need to be explicitly encouraging children to use a wider range of learning techniques.

Yes, the Gruffalo’s child is ultimately terrified by her encounter, but having a daughter who is able to get things wrong and learn from testing her ideas and theories should make the Gruffalo very proud. Parents and teachers could do worse than to look at the Gruffalo’s child and think how they could make their children and pupils more like her.

Originally written for the Children's Literature at Cambridge blog and first posted there earlier today, and with many thanks to Kristina Shakeshaft for mentioning BLP as we watched 'The Gruffalo's Child' together and thereby summarising the teacherly comments we were making about the Gruffalo's child's progress.

Technology, Dystopia and Young Adults

This list has been updated: a newer, expanded version can be found at  http://richardshakeshaft.blogspot.co.uk/2017/02/young-adult-fiction-technology-reading.html 17 February, 2017

I was recently asked about the young adult (YA) novels I have been reading as part of my academic work in Children's Literature. To that end, this is a list of the relevant novels  (in no particular order) I have read recently with the briefest of descriptions against each one. The common thread is the incorporation of technology within the novels and this frequently means they portray dystopian visions of a possible future.

There is a range of labels which could be applied to the texts (including, but not limited to, speculative science fiction, science faction, magical realism) but this is not the place for an academic discussion about that or the concept of dystopia. Rather I hope it might be a glimpse of books written in the past decade that are all worth discovering in their own ways.

All of the images link to Amazon where fuller descriptions and reviews can be found (along with the obvious ability to do some shopping!)

	Be More Chill - Ned Vizzini (2004) A teenager ingests a squip - a new organic supercomputer purchased on the black market - which advises him how to behave in order to win the girl of his dreams.
	Little Brother - Cory Doctorow (2008) Set in contemporary San Francisco, the teenager protagonist stands up for civil liberties having been falsely accused of a terrorist offence and plays a game of cat and mouse with the government in which both sides are using technology to their advantage.
	iBoy - Kevin Brooks (2010) An accident leaves the teenage protagonist with an iPhone embedded in his brain but rather than it killing him, he harnesses the iPhone's capabilities.
	Dangerous Reality - Malorie Blackman (1999) The Virtual Mobile Interactive System developed by the hero's mum is the subject of industrial espionage and people's obsession with technology is shown through their actions.
	Feed - M T Anderson (2002) In a dystopian vision of the future, everyone who's anyone is connected to the feed. The typical rich boy/poor girl story follows a teenage couple's relationship when their feeds are hacked.
	Hybrids - David Thorpe (2007) A virus infects humans causing them to fuse with an item of technology they use a lot and the resultant hybrids are feared by the uninfected humans.
	Metagame - Sam Landstrom (2010) Computer gaming becomes a way of life and the players' limits are explored in the virtual world where the winner takes all.
	Dot.Robot - Jason Bradbury (2009) Technologically proficient children are recruited to use the latest technology in a classic tale of good versus evil.
	The Game of Sunken Places - M T Anderson (2004) Two boys visit the mansion of a distant relative and their discovery of a board game leads to an adventure which takes place beyond the confines of the board.
	Skinned - Robin Wasserman (2009) A popular teenage girl is involved in a near fatal traffic accident, and her brain is downloaded and installed into a new body and she has to discover her new identity.
	ttyl - Lauren Myracle (2004) Written entirely in instant messages, the lives and loves of three girls are shown through their conversations over a few weeks.
	The Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins (2008) Twenty-four teenagers are selected at random and are placed into a reality TV game in which the winner is the last person alive.
	Uglies - Scott Westerfield (2005) When teenagers reach the age of sixteen they are made Pretty and they are told this is their lives' purpose. Not everyone agrees and this novel follows the story of a girl deciding to follow the rebels.
	So yesterday - Scott Westerfield (2004) This novel explores the world of following fashions and the creation of new trends in contemporary New York.

Twenty-first century implications for the implied author

Imagine the scene: as a teenage reader in 1991 you are particularly taken by a particular contemporary writer’s work. Having diligently paid attention in your library lesson at the start of Year 7, you turn to an encyclopaedia to try and find out more about them. Unsurprisingly, you draw a blank. Where else do you turn? Beyond the briefest of biographical information on the dust jacket or – if you are lucky – a magazine interview with the author that a friend of a friend of your grandparents’ neighbour remembered seeing some time last year, you can find nothing else out about your newest idol. You return to the books, scouring them for clues as to who the author, the implied author is.

Now, bring yourself twenty years forward: back to the present. You are particularly taken by a writer’s work and you sadly reach the final page of the book. As the finished book lays closed on your lap, you take out your smartphone and either google the author’s name or visit the web address printed on the book's back cover. Within seconds, you have accessed articles, interviews, blog posts, tweets, and Facebook pages which can give you a CSI Cambridge-like forensic insight into your newest idol. The book falls from your lap; you know who the author is, the real author, and their feelings about and motivations behind their writing.

In an age when books live beyond the page and authors are in a position to interact directly – both out of choice and necessity – with their readership through new media, new opportunities are afforded the reader to gain a deeper understanding of the text as texts’ boundaries and authors’ roles become less clearly defined. I believe that the changing concept of the implied author (and the question of for how much longer it can remain a valid concept through the real author’s increasing use of epitextual material) make consideration of an author’s intentions important.

For example, in Ned Vizzini’s Be More Chill (2004), the protagonist buys and ingests a black market 'squip'. This is a piece of nanotechnology, a quantum computer which, he is told, will help him achieve his aim of finding a girl friend by telling him what to do and how to behave. It is sold to him as a ‘cool pill’. The implant fails and the novel’s conclusion is ambiguous, but the impression the reader is left with is that messing with nature is not cool. However, in an interview reproduced on Vizzini’s website, he says that ‘in high school I would have tried out a squip. I was a pretty big dork. I would’ve tried almost anything’, and his FAQ says that as a teenager he was aware of ‘so many products advertised around me that promised to make people cool’. While he identifies recognisable social concerns of the stereotypical teenager in his novel, these admissions (and his collection of articles relating to implanted technology) show his belief that the human – especially the dork – can be improved – or made ‘cooler’ – by playing with untried and untested technology. The epitextual material guides the reader to a clear reading of the text and the real author can clearly be seen in his protagonist.

While Vizzini exemplifies the effect of epitextual material, peritextual inclusions (not only saving the reader the need to google) reveal much about authors too. Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother (2008) is concerned with the ways in which technology can be used to control people’s lives, and the reader is left feeling wary about the prevalence of CCTV and records of electronic transactions in today’s society. If the reader goes beyond the final page of the novel they are presented with two Afterwords: one by the Chief Security Technology Officer at BT, Bruce Schneier, and the other by Xbox hacker Andrew Huang (to whom the protagonist refers in the course of the novel as a hero). Both Afterwords exhort the reader to question the world around them, but having the same idea repeated from two opposing ideological perspectives adds weight to Doctorow’s implicit warnings throughout the text. The exhortation to do further research is supported by a bibliography which provides a few lines’ explanation of why each text might (and should) appeal to an adolescent reader. Doctorow’s intentions in writing the novel are clear. Indeed, should the reader’s interest be piqued, a quick google reveals he describes himself as a ‘technology activist’, confirming his call to examine the ways in which technologies are used.

These are two brief examples from a particular genre of YA texts, but as critics continue to debate the concept of the implied author and the validity of considering an author’s intentions, it is now possible for the reader to consider the real author's authorial intentions in an informed manner. Indeed, in a time when books and authors blur the boundaries between media, and information is so readily available, it is difficult for the reader not to allow the way in which they read to be influenced by peritextual and epitextual information.


originally written for the Children's Literature at Cambridge blog and first posted there earlier today

Pottering through Pottermore

For some people the name ‘Pottermore’ signifies the most exciting development of 2011, to others it means nothing. To cater for those people for whom it means nothing, it is J K Rowling’s latest extension of the Harry Potter series and is a website described as a ‘unique online reading experience’ where users can ‘share and participate in the stories […] and discover additional information about the world of Harry Potter’.

While I have enjoyed being read all of the Harry Potter books by Stephen Fry on long car journeys and seen most of the films, I would – by no stretch of the imagination – count myself as an obsessive fan. I am, however, interested in technology and children’s literature so signing up for one of the million beta tester accounts took me about three minutes earlier this summer.

Having seen my friends receiving their ‘Welcome to Pottermore’ e-mails over the past few weeks, I was getting increasingly frustrated that I was still not privy to the new world until I received my e-mail yesterday morning.

In short, the user navigates through the first book and is obliged to carry out a few simple tasks before they can move on to the next section. The structure matches the original text chapter for chapter but while the book’s reader is allied with Harry, Pottermore confuses this as the narrative is the same as the book, but the user gets to go shopping in Diagon Alley, explore graphical representations of settings in the book, and get given their own wand and sorted into one of the Hogwarts houses as if they are a character in the text but just much less significant than the protagonists.

The allocation of wand and house are possibly the two most significant elements of Pottermore as it stands. In the wizarding world, these are two things which are key to a person’s identity and to have your own (virtual) wand and membership of a house make you feel part of Hogwarts, if not one of the heroes. Both are allocated based on a series of questions some of which are straightforward, but others were more thought-provoking and one genuinely made me ask myself what I would like to be remembered for post mortem.

Users are also able to make potions and cast spells. Sadly the much vaunted wizard duelling (casting spells against your opponent) is currently unavailable as more work is done on the site, so I have been unable to turn someone’s legs to jelly or make their nose run incessantly; such is the hardship of being a beta tester.

Technically the site works well and is quite impressive but, as an aside, as much of it is Flash based I assume that it will not work on iPads. The graphics are good but, in a world where people are used to their Nintendo Wii or PS3 and 3D TVs are starting to appear on the shelves of high street stores, they are limited. While this is a trade off for having an Internet based product at no cost, rather than having the seemingly unlimited worlds of Zelda or Mario to explore on dedicated gaming machines, I can see users getting a little tired of the limiting three level zoom from a fixed position on each scene.

When going through the story I was most put in mind of the interactive fiction computer games of the 1980s where players were given a text description of what they could see and had to type commands such as ‘look north’ or ‘pickup key’ to progress through the game. While these were new thirty years ago and building upon the ‘choose your own adventure’ books of the age, I feel that the twenty-first century computer user expects a little more.

The networked nature of the site means that there are social networking aspects and you can make friends, but (presumably for child protection reasons) as everyone has a ‘magical’ pseudonym this is only useful if you know that your real friend is called CrimsonAsh85 in Pottermore. You can (when it’s working) duel against real people rather than battling an end of level monster, and your collection of house points (earned for duelling and making potions as far as I can tell) engender teamwork by going towards you house’s total. How seriously people are taking this is something about which I am yet to be convinced: with just 41 points, I am currently 13,100^th out of 36,030 and while the leader (with 6,459 points) is clearly making an effort the same clearly cannot be said for a significant proportion of the house.

One of the biggest claims for Pottermore is the new material that is featured. For the fan of any book there is always the desire to know more about familiar places and characters, and a comprehensive back story is provided for Professor McGonagall along with some interesting trivia about things like characters’ names and Rowlings’s inspiration. The cynic in me wonders whether much of this material will be things that were cut out of the manuscript for book one: anyone with all seven books on their bookshelf can readily see how much superfluous material made it into the later books once the series took off. Regardless of this, wherever the additional material has – and will – come from, I did not feel that there was enough to add much more to the series as it stands in its printed form. As unofficial encyclopaedias already exist, an official guide with links to a simpler, but informative, website may have been a more lucrative solution.

It is possibly unfair of me to write this after just twenty-four hours on the site, but having had the ‘unique online reading experience’ of the first novel on Pottermore I do not feel that I have really participated in the story much more than did while listening to it being read. While I am pleased that I made it into Gryffindor and have a hard 14.5” chestnut wand with phoenix feather core I could have written an online script to allocate wands and people to houses. But that’s just the point: it was J K Rowling who gave me my wand and put me in Gryffindor and as she created Harry Potter it is – by default – momentous, and the site will duly be perceived as successful.

Yes, I have gone back into Pottermore and revisited sections of the story to find galleons and chocolate frog cards. Yes, I have waited the 85 minutes to brew a potion only to have it fail and then waited a further 85 minutes to get it right. Yes, I will keep logging back in in the hope I can trying duelling, and yes, I will (probably) go through the other books when they arrive online. However, before it goes live to the rest of the world in October, I hope the creators will have a clearer idea of the purpose of the site: users will get bored of re-reading the novels they have already read multiple times with such limited interactivity in a digital medium. The site is neither a game nor a novel but an awkward hybrid: when users reach the end of the final novel on Pottermore they are likely to feel cheated when they realise they knew how it was going to turn out all along.

The Missing Days

Having left East Midlands Airport on Monday morning to fly to Malaga and then drive to Granada, I left Internet access behind until Thursday evening. However, trying to keep my Facebook status up to date means that I regularly find myself thinking in terms of status updates. I therefore collected my thoughts about our three days in Granada:

• Richard is unsure how people with such little knowledge of Spanish driving laws can be allowed to hire cars. He is nevertheless going to get into the driver’s seat with confidence and aplomb. When he remembers which side of the car it is on.
• Richard feels that six forward gears on a hire car is at least one too many.
• Richard has a bruised left hand from hitting it against the car door every time he tried to change gear.
• Richard thinks that roadworks, an outdated satnav, and black and white copies of Google maps are not an ideal solution to navigating around Granada.
• Richard has now calmed down enough to appreciate a lovely hotel.
• Richard realises that he knows no Spanish words.
• Richard now believes what the guidebooks say about nowhere opening until 8pm to serve food.
• Richard has fallen foul of the tourist trapping terrace and is paying an additional 10% for the privilege of sitting next to a smoker and having a stray dog run around his feet.
• Richard found his dinner unsatisfactory, but has learnt the hard way what ‘raciones’ meant when he just wanted a supplementary snack.
• Richard never ceases to be amazed at the vulgarity of the decoration of Catholic cathedrals around Europe.
• Richard enjoyed watching unsuspecting people having rosemary foisted upon them outside the Cathedral as it made him feel smug for reading the back of the local map.
• Richard feels very virtuous for having walked so far up hill in the sweltering heat, but – unlike his wife – is not entirely convinced the views are worth it.
• Richard is embracing the concept of a siesta.
• Richard was impressed by the barman’s spatial ability allowing him to write the entire order upside down on the bar in order to work out the total.
• Richard feels that sitting inside at the bar of last night’s restaurant getting served free tapas with every drink is the way in which Spanish food should be enjoyed.
• Richard has been asked to record his wife’s delight at discovering Prosecco is served on the tap next to the beer pump.
• Richard has now added the word ‘cerveza’ to his collection of Spanish.
• Richard feels that getting a different tapas dish with each drink is akin to completing the levels of a computer game.
• Richard has been tricked into visiting an Arabic bath by his wife. He will report back later.
• Richard is pleased to report that warm and hot baths, a steam room, a somewhat terrifying exfoliation and massage made up a very enjoyable couple of hours.
• Richard thinks that hookahs on the table distance Moorish tea shops from English tea shops.
• Richard thinks the Moroccan tea his wife chose from would be more suited to a roast leg of lamb. He hopes she is regretting pooh-poohing his choice of Pakistani tea with milk.
• Richard has been forced to admit that Pakistani tea with milk is not really Earl Grey.
• Richard has enjoyed another siesta: only this time lying on a bench like a tramp while his wife went shopping.
• Richard feels that trying to find bars which give free tapas by ordering a beer in each one is a dangerous game when there is no free tapas.
• Richard is pleased to have found free tapas, but is a little disappointed that having no seats inside makes it a short visit.
• Richard has changed bars and is unimpressed by the claims of ‘traditional homemade tapas’ on a chalk board outside.
• Richard has fallen back on the safety of yesterday’s bar for free tapas as he’s getting hungry. He is, however, a little saddened to have started at level one again.
• Richard can now count the words of Spanish he knows on the fingers of one hand.
• Richard is pleased to have avoided the lengthy queues at the Alhambra having picked up his tickets from a cash point yesterday.
• Richard thinks the Alhambra is very pretty, but tessellation can get a little repetitive.
• Richard is pleased he remembered which side the driver’s door was when leaving the hotel car park to embark on the drive to Sotogrande after a glorious few days in Granada.

The Online and Offline Self

Cyberspace is viewed by many critics as a utopian, consequence-free playground where people can experiment with their identity, and the recent case of Tom MacMaster, the male, married, mature American student at Edinburgh University who was posing as the young, lesbian, Syrian blogger, Amina Abdullah Arraf al-Omari, demonstrates this to a certain extent.

One of the earliest academics writing about technology and self identity, Sherry Turkle, published a book in 1995 in which she explored the psychology behind creating different lives online; the practice behind her ideas is perhaps best demonstrated by the interest the virtual world, Second Life, received when it was launched in 2003.

However, Turkle has now abandoned her 1995 position and she takes a far less utopian position as the boundary between the online and offline lives of the permanently connected individual has become increasingly blurred. We are no longer in a position to create the online identity we want by choosing only the best pictures or only making the wittiest comments in a public forum, and gone are the pre-digital camera and webcam days when the response to the chatroom’s opening question ‘a/s/l?’ would determine the course of the conversation.

Beyond what we chose to share, our online identity now is shaped for us by other people posting pictures of us (which do not always show our best side), and commenting on what we post; it is important to note that this is a reliable shaping as the online connections we make on social networks today are primarily with people with whom we have genuine offline relationships. The ability of our online persona to influence our offline character is reflected in a line I heard recently (and I cannot remember where) thinking about the night before the morning after: ‘If it’s not on YouTube, it didn’t happen’.

The academic and Guardian columnist Aleks Krotoski wrote recently that she adheres to Turkle’s original 1995 view; while I agree that it is still possible to create an experimental online identity, I cannot subscribe to it being consequence-free. With the quantity of publicly available personal data that exists, and is continually being generated, and the connections that are made, keeping genuine and playful online identities separate is not straightforward.

I have been reading Turkle and Krotoski’s work recently as part of my own studying, but it was made more personal for me this week when I signed up for Google+. I dutifully filled in the basic details required by profile and found a couple of friends; then standing (metaphorically) surveying the website I realised how empty it was. For a moment, I felt like an explorer coming upon a new land and standing on the shore looking around somewhat bewildered. And then I felt a shudder of fear.

The fear was not of an attack from a extended metaphorical native, but from the realisation that I have spent the past four years creating my online identity on Facebook and the prospect of starting in a new land was too onerous. Before that moment, I had not realised the time or unconscious effort that has gone into making my online Facebook presence reflect the reality of my life and suddenly the thought of the status updates which I have mentally composed but not posted made me wonder how far my online identity is shaping my offline identity.

Let nothing ever grieve thee

When asked what type of music I enjoy, my favourite conversation-stopping answer is ‘Renaissance choral polyphony’, and the majority of my CD collection (despite being an iPod user, I still have to purchase any tracks electronically) will bear testament to this. As with any rule, the glorious moment is finding an exception to it, and that is how I see Johannes Brahms’s Geistliches Lied.

For want of a generalisation, I object to the music of the Romantic era (not least because the label suggests anything written before about 1830 is free of emotion which is anything but true when much Renaissance music is considered) but this small scale sacred work for a mixed choir and organ cannot be overlooked. If you know it, I hope you will understand why I am choosing to write about it, if you don’t, I hope you soon will.

The text was written by the little-know German poet and medical doctor Paul Fleming (1609-1640) and is simple but moving.

Laß dich nur nichts nicht dauren
mit Trauren,
sei stille,
wie Gott es fügt,
so sei vergnügt mein Wille.

Was willst du heute sorgen
auf morgen?
Der Eine
steht allem für,
der gibt auch dir,das Deine.

Sei nur in allem Handel
ohn’ Wandel,
steh’ feste,
was Gott beschleußt,
das ist und heißt das Beste. Amen

While I am not a German speaker, a comparison of printed editions of the music, a little judicious Googling and poetic licence gives this translation for which I do, if necessary, apologise.

Let nothing ever grieve thee or oppress thee:
Be still and trust God’s good will.

Why brood all day in sorrow, worrying about tomorrow?
God stands for all and will give you grace and mercy.

Be steadfast in all that you do and stand firm;
What God decrees brings peace. Amen.

I feel Fleming offers words of hope and reassurance in what is a beautiful prayer. The sentiment is simple, but effectively moving and it struck me during Evensong this week how suitable it would be for a funeral.

Brahms (1833-1897) wrote the song in 1856 and, as might befit the earlier years of a composer’s career, it could be seen as a technical exercise as it combines, in the Grove dictionary’s words, ‘chorale-like melodies with strict canonic procedures’. However, for something that is so technically precise it retains a lyric beauty that belies its complexity.

It is the use of the canon that makes it so impressive. Non-musicians may remember singing Row, row, row your boat as a child and being delighted to discover that if one singer starts the nursery rhyme, a second singer can start singing the same tune from the beginning a bar later, a third singer can start another bar later and the parts fit together. This simplest form of canon is called a round.

Clearly writing a tune which fits with itself is a technical challenge, but in a canon this is made more difficult as the second voice comes in at a different pitch. In Geistliches Lied, the distance in pitch (or interval) between the starting notes of the two voices is an octave and one note (a ninth). Imagine playing two notes next to each other on the piano: it is always a dissonance and this is the challenge that Brahms sets himself.

However, not content with overcoming the problems of writing something musical as a canon at the ninth, Brahms writes two independent canons – both at the ninth and following the strict rules – which are sung at the same time. This means that

• Voice 1 (soprano) starts singing tune 1 on an F, then
• Voice 2 (tenor) starts singing tune 1 on an E flat four beats later.
• Voice 3 (alto) then starts singing tune 2 stating on an F two beats later, and finally
• Voice 4 (bass) starts singing tune 2 starting on an E flat four beats later

This pattern then continues for the entire piece with all four voices singing in their double canon at the ninth throughout and fitting together perfectly.

Writing a canon could be viewed as a mathematical puzzle and Brahams has given himself difficult constraints in which to solve the problem. But to solve it and in doing so write something so beautiful, blurs the boundaries between – for want of a better description – scientific precision and art.

A two hundred year old prayer, a mathematical challenge and a dash of genius: I am only sorry that after the (hopefully intelligible) description, I have to direct you to a tinny recording on YouTube of King’s College Cambridge singing it.