- Margaret Mackey
Space, Place, and Children’s Reading Development: Mapping the Connections
Children learn about the organization of the world from a local point of view. Just as our early sense of landscape arises out of a particular topography, so do our initial schemas and scripts that are often rooted in very restricted or parochial customs. David Malouf says that our “first place” shapes how we see the world, and says: “The place you get is always, in the real sense, fortunate, in that it constitutes your fortune, your fate, and is your only entry into the world” (1985, 3).
How does this initial “entry into the world” shape how we read? This question fuelled my most recent research project. To explore how readers think about the impact of personally important landscapes on their reading capacities and choices, I recruited undergraduates on my home campus of the University of Alberta. I invited them to make a digital map of a place (real or fictional) that had been important to their childhood literacies, and to participate in two interviews with me, to discuss this map and the reading associated with the chosen place. The findings appear in my new book, Space, Place, and Children’s Reading Development: Mapping the Connections, which was published in the summer of 2022 by Bloomsbury Academic.
A dozen undergraduates, aged between 19 and 24, completed this exercise with me. Since the pool was small, I was not expecting a particularly international representation, but the volunteers surprised me. Only four of these twelve students described purely local connections; if these participants mentioned other countries at all, it was in terms of their remote ancestry or their experiences as travellers and tourists. Four of the pool had themselves immigrated to Canada as children (from China and Iraq), two were the children of immigrants with strong ties to the originating community (from China and Somalia), and two were international students who came to Canada to go to university (from India and Pakistan). Their maps were as distinctive as their childhood settings, even though they sometimes drew on similar themes. Amy, for example, provided a 3-D digital walkthrough of her grandmother’s house in western Canada, while Riya outlined her tea valley bungalow in India via a pencilled floor plan on lined paper (with links).Yet their reflections on the affordances of a home setting resonated strongly with each other, even though, as readers, they have different tastes and they respond in different ways.
Out of a pool of twelve, eight participants brought a variety of global perspectives to bear on our discussions about place and reading. One of the four local students had moved frequently within the city throughout her childhood, and she offered valuable insight into the impact of such smaller-scale changes. We had many examples of what I came to think of as “doubled” childhoods, youthful experiences in multiple locations that offered more than one way of looking at the world. In Malouf’s terms, their “fortune,” their “fate,” included knowledge that the “first conditions” of life can be plural. Lily went so far as to supply a double map, of a city in China and one in Ontario, and she commented that, apart from the difference in language, they fostered a similar kind of child life experience.
Many of these children, whether growing up in a singular environment or moving from place to place, also chose to “double” their childhood experience with reading. They imported fictions into their own world, imagining ordinary basements as populated with monsters or magic doors to new worlds. They considered how to think about the “otherness” of some fictional characters. For example, Riya, growing up in India marvelled at the absolute freedom of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five and assumed that White children all lived radically autonomous and liberated lives, far less restricted than her own. Liang, in contrast, reading Western stories in China, peopled them in her mind with characters who were White but spoke Chinese and otherwise fitted in with the social norms she took for granted. Suleman, in Pakistan, was an inveterate viewer of cartoons from the United States, Japan, Great Britain, and elsewhere, all dubbed into Urdu. He simply assumed that his repertoire of about forty shows all originated in his home country, or, at the most exotic remove, came from India. Rahina, the daughter of Somali immigrants, deliberately drew on her extensive reading of English-language children’s and young adult fiction as a way of better understanding her Canadian environment and classmates.
For many of the participants in this study, their sense of place was hybrid, composed from diverse source material. Some, like Ying Yu, chose to blend mental imagery from different ingredients of her past life, merging Western movie images with real-life experiences of her visits to family in China, in order to create mental scenery for her reading. Others, like Roman, instead developed a strong sense of place through specific and located childhood activities and then infused this awareness into their reading in ways that made thematic sense out of very local settings.
It was a privilege to see the digital maps these participants created, and the book includes many of the images they created. It was fascinating to talk to them about their very diverse childhoods, and to explore the impact of different life experiences on their reading lives. What came through very clearly was the repeated observation that their inherent preferences and capacities as individual private readers were at least as varied as their childhood backgrounds. Personal reading predilections and default processes did not tie directly to any kind of youthful experience; they seemed innate. Some readers saw mental pictures as they read; others were emphatic that they saw nothing of the kind. Some heard voices and, in at least one case, a background soundtrack; others did not. The distinctiveness of the personal maps and the broad variety of childhood experiences are matched and even surpassed by evidence of the profound individual variability of reading itself that is showcased in these stories. Reading causes marks on a page or a screen to ignite events and ideas in a mind, but how the words are internally activated seems to be a process as distinct and idiosyncratic as a fingerprint. The important impact of a “first place” is only one element in a complex and individual process.
Mackey, Margaret. Space, Place, and Children’s Reading Development: Mapping the Connections. Bloomsbury Academic, 2022.
Malouf, David. “A First Place: The Mapping of a World.” Southerly: A Review of Australian Literature, 45 (1), 1985, 3–10.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Margaret Mackey is Professor Emerita in the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Alberta in Canada. She researches and publishes widely on young people’s literacies and literatures in print, media, and digital formats.