From Rags to “Rich as Rockefeller”: Portrayals of Class Mobility in Newbery Titles

Abstract

Several scholars have noted the prevalence of the discourse of upward class mobility in the United States, particularly within K-12 education settings. "Rags-to-riches" stories, an extreme form of upward mobility discourse, have been embedded in American culture for generations. However, the prevalence of upward mobility discourse in recently published books for children has not been widely studied. Children's literature merits scholarly attention because it has the potential to influence the perceptions and worldviews of young people, and books for youth reflect the values that adults in a society want to pass on to young people. This qualitative content analysis, grounded in assumptions of the sociology of school knowledge and critical literacy, investigates representations of upward class mobility in 22 titles given the Newbery Medal or Honor between 2009 and 2013. The findings indicate 7 out of 22 books include poor and working-class characters experiencing class ascendency. Characters became upwardly mobile by receiving a large sum of money unexpectedly, being adopted by a more affluent person, and gaining recognition from royalty or nobility. The presence of poor and workingclass characters in these titles is positive: American children, who belong to a range of class groups, can find characters like themselves in literature. Yet the portrayals of upward mobility in Newbery titles may reinforce dominant ideologies that value economic success and blame the poor for their circumstances.For some time, children's literature has been regarded as a means of shaping how children perceive the world. Books for youth are a "form of education and socialization"

The Sydney Taylor Book Award at Fifty: Trends in Canonized Jewish Children’s Literature (1968–2020)

“…Our quantitative study of 102 gold medal-winning is neither engaged in making value judgments on what content authentically portrays the Jewish experience nor in evaluating the STBA selection criteria or their interpretation (see the committee's "How to Submit" page on AJL n.d.). Like other studies that have examined patterns in corpora of award-winning children's books-such as winners of the Newbery (Martin 1990;Bones 2010;Forest 2014), 5 the Caldecott (Koss, John-son, and Martinez 2018), the National Book Award (Bickmore, Xu, and Sheridan 2017), and the American Library Association (ALA) diversity awards (Rowland-Storm 2018)-our project employed content analysis methods to illuminate trends in 52 years' worth of awarded Jewish children's literature. 6 Regardless of the problematic interconnections among award committee members, authors, and publishers (Kidd and Thomas 2017), the seal of excellence carried by the STBA books ascribes to them canonical status.…”