The idea is to take a great gob of texts that talk about children and process them in such a way as to extract how they talk about children, the different ways the texts characterize children, and to see if there’s a way to organize those different characterizations. Doing this is called defining the “latent…Continue readingMethods: a first stab
One of the literatures where children are routinely discussed is the literature of the sociology of the family. Many studies in that field offer evidence about impacts on children in assessing family arrangements, processes, and events. But what evidence is chosen, and what is not, speaks to the images of children prevalent in that field.…Continue readingWhat is ‘child well-being’?
This past summer I had the honour of being asked to contribute a reflection on Loris Malaguzzi’s “Your Image of the Child: Where Teaching Begins” to a special section in the North American Reggio Emilia Association’s journal Innovations in Early Education: The International Reggio Emilia Exchange. Malaguzzi argued vociferously for a very definite ‘image of…Continue readingA programmatic statement
To think about ‘Decolonizing the Web’ starts with thinking about the web as a colonial space. One has two immediate, diametrically opposed reactions as soon as one introduces that frame. On the one hand, how could the web be colonized? It’s not like anyone is Indigenous to the internet, much less the web. Given that…Continue readingColonialism and the Web
For the purposes of my current research, I approach the web essentially as a corpus. There is no shortage of materials online about … well, anything … but certainly not about children, childhood, parenting and education. Some of those materials are historic documents, the influences which have shaped the understandings of children and childhood we…Continue readingMy goals for studying “Cultures of the Web”