Visual Encounters in the Study of Rural Childhoods

APRIL MANDRONA is an assistant professor at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Canada. She is the editor of Canadian Art Teacher.   CLAUDIA MITCHELL is a James McGill Professor at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. She is the editor-in-chief of Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and the author or coeditor of numerous books.  

Contents

Preface

Forward 

1.    Introduction: Beginnings

Part I

Images and Imaginings in the Study of Rural Childhoods

2.    Pastoral Visions of Childhood: Selling Suburbia as Home in the American Countryside

Holley Wlodarczyk

3.    Educating for the World Beyond: Challenging Idyllic Images of the Rural School

Jonathan Kresmer

4.    Nature Lovers as Nation Lovers in Canadian TV’s The Forest Rangers (1963–1965)

Jennifer VanderBurgh

5.    Video Game Depictions of Rural Childhoods in the Global South: Get Water! and Ayiti: 

The Cost of Life 

Renee Jackson & April Mandrona

6.    Patriot Boys and Pioneer Girls: Christian Homeschool Texts, Gender, and the American Rural Idyll

Elizabeth Shively

7.    Rural Girlhoods in Picturebooks: Visual Constructions of Social Practices  

Karen Eppley

Part II

Acts of Memory and Imagination

8.    The Place of Girls? Collective Memory Work in the Study of Portrayals of Rural Girlhood in Swedish Child and Youth Literature

Eva Söderberg, Sara Nyhlén, Katja Gillander Gådin, & Katarina Giritli Nygren

9.    I Am a Child of Back-to-the-Landers

Sheilah Wilson

10.    Pekupatikut Innuat Akunikana / “Pictures Woke the People Up”: Revisiting Inuit Childhoods through Facebook

Wendy Ewald & Eric Gottesman

Part III

How We See It: Children’s Participation in Studying Rural Childhoods

11.    A Tale of Two Kindergartens: Visual Representations of Slovenian Children’s Daily Lives in a Rural and an Urban Setting 

Barbara Turk Niskač

12.    The Story of Peter Both-in-One: Using Visual Storytelling Methods to Understand Resilience among Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Young Children in Rural New England

Sally Campbell Galman

13.    Growing up Rural in South Africa: On Using Cellphilms to Engage Children’s Ideas of Social Spaces 

Naydene de Lange

14.    Image-Based Research: What Does Childhood Look Like in a Small Village? 

Irina Kosterina

15.    Reimagining Rural Childhoods through Participatory Video and Global Education  

Kelly Royds

16.    The Perfect Computer? Children’s Experiences with ICT in Rural Colombia 

Diana Carolina Garcia Gomez and Helle Strandgaard Jensen

Index

Acknowledgements

Notes on Contributors