UNIVERSITY OF NEW ENGLAND The Impacts in Australia of Children’s Literature Book Awards Heather Fisher The objective of this research project is to determine the short term and long term impacts in Australia of book awards for children’s literature. The interest in this topic arose from personal experience as a NSW State Judge for the Children’s Book Council’s ‘Books of the Year’ awards. It was an exhilarating, stimulating, totally exhausting two years of reading and reviewing 720 books ranging from early childhood to young adult novels and it was an experience that was a deeply satisfying in terms of personal development. In this all- consuming environment, there niggled some questions – was all this effort for a lasting purpose? Did it make any difference? The completion of the two year term of office allowed the questions to be pursued. To the above questions were added others. Who exactly is affected by book awards? How are they affected by book awards? What children’s book awards exert influence in Australia? What timeframe could be put around the influence of book awards? In investigating these issues further methodological questions have arisen. What literature is available about children’s book awards? What paradigms would apply? What assumptions are made about children’s book awards? What methodology would be necessary to investigate these issues? For each of these questions there were ramifications which opened the field to more questions. The purpose of this paper is to show the development of a research design which addressed this cluster of issues. This is the beginning of the journey towards a dissertation within the Professional Doctorate program at The University of New England. In consultation with supervisors, various research designs have undergone refinement, alteration, adjustment and debate. A research design is rather like a map which the researcher draws to show the intended direction. It is a rough sketch map at first but as more knowledge is acquired, more methodical thinking is applied, more choices made about what is manageable and what is not, a firm pathway is gradually devised. Alongside this, some reading about thesis writing (Evans & Gruba 2nd edn 2004, Wolfe 1996, Yeo 2001, UNE Research Guide 2005) has assisted and observation of completed theses offered signposts to the conventions of writing and investigative research. This paper sets out the most recent research design agreed upon. It should be understood that this research design is a work in progress. Introduction This section is intended to position the perspectives of the project within a larger world and to explain the significance of the issues which are being investigated. It sets out a brief history of the project, its origins and its significance. It reflects the epistemologies and from that standpoint, the paradigms which are the 67 2006 POSTGRADUATE CONFERENCE framework of the project. For this project, it was important to explain the relevance of impacts of book awards to the Australian literary environment. It is not only Australian book awards which affect the Australian literary community (e.g. Children’s Book Council of Australia awards, seventeen other major awards, Premier’s Awards for children’s literature in at least four states, and children’s choice awards in every state) but also internationally recognised awards (at least four) and awards from UK, USA, NZ and Canada (totalling in excess of 26 awards). The impacts of international and overseas awards are probably stronger in the public library and academic library system than in other sectors but certainly the impacts of Australian awards are strongly felt by parents, teachers, school librarians, public and academic libraries, children and teenagers. Relating all book awards and their impact in terms of an educational/passionate/interest response, the cohort includes parents, teachers, teacher-librarians, public librarians and their child audiences. Most public libraries would acquire Australian winning titles and promote them to the various age groups to which they apply (Judd 1997, Taylor 1997, Joseph 1997, McKinnon 1997, Drayton 1997, White 1997, Threlfall 1997, Smith 1997). Evidence suggests that there is an awareness of the Caldecott and Newbery Medal winning titles and these will be acquired and promoted by the larger public libraries (Judd 1997, Joseph 1997, Morley 2006) but on the whole, school libraries do not embrace these titles in particular or routinely acquire them (Harris 2005, Murray 2006, Reid 2006). Australian titles often ‘travel’ overseas and conversely the Australian market is familiar with the continual, eclectic mix of local titles and other titles from NZ, USA, Canada and UK and translations from elsewhere. Most school libraries would acquire Australian award winning books which seem age-appropriate and many base story reading, classroom activities and Book Week promotions on them (Andrews 2003, McCormack 1999, Daniels 2005, Reid 2006, Murray 2006, Cooper 2006, Harris 2005). Parents seek the winning titles from bookshops and libraries. For a variety of reasons overseas award winning titles are not commonly acquired. Significant questions will be asked of major stakeholders, through questionnaires and interviews (see methodology below) to reveal the nature of their children’s book award responses from the point of the announcement of the children’s book award onwards and the longevity of this response. This will uncover a variety of possible impacts possibly including collection development decisions in libraries, personal reading responses, use of awards in library programs, financial rewards for some and the use of the awards as pointers to quality children’s literature. Specifically for authors the impacts may include increased exposure to the market with ramifications for earnings, future career opportunities, increased media attention and a diversity of speaking appearances. Collectively the research will fill a gap in the knowledge base of the children’s literature world despite book awards being a common part of literary life in USA since 1922 and in Australia since 1946. 68 UNIVERSITY OF NEW ENGLAND Timeframes are an important consideration. Generally book awards are an annual event and the impacts in the short term flow from the short list announcement or the winner’s announcement and multiplier effects could take a year to complete. This was established as the short term framework. After some consideration it was considered that five years would make a useful and valid comparison as a longer term framework. Theoretical Framework This section highlights both the theorists who underpin the project and the overall framework within which the project operates. It is understood that decisions have been made about critical cohorts in the project and critical influences on these cohorts. It sets the scene with regard to parameters and the way in which theorists offer distinct and supported perspectives within these parameters which possibly have significance. In the social sciences the activities within these parameters are dynamic and qualitative research in the constructivist, post-modern mode best describes the diverse outcomes at a particular moment. For this project, the cohorts who were impacted upon, were divided into two: producers where the chief impact is an economic one and it includes publishers, booksellers and to some extent authors and the consuming sector which reads, enjoys, feels passionate about and shares literature and this includes librarians, teachers, teacher-librarians, parents and through all of these, children. Straddling these two groups are authors. For authors to sustain their production of literary texts there will necessarily be the need for the creation of economic capital. This is not to deny that authors often write because they have a passion to write. There is also a recursive flow of impacts from the consuming sector to the producing sector. This reflects the dynamics of the process. Very simply, if there is an award winning title then the producing sector will immediately benefit in the economic sense as libraries, schools and parents buy the product. The consuming sector consumes the product but in a second timeframe promotion, generates a second round of demands for the product, and so the impact of the consuming sector recourses to cause a secondary impact on the producing sector. This can occur several times for a multiplier effect. This research will be qualitative with a constructivist, post-modernist perspective. It is not expected that critical evidence will be accessible in quantified form even though part of the enquiry will be focusing on economic impacts, simply because responses will be limited by privacy and confidentiality within organisations and by authors. Realistically, the impacts are expected to be couched in terms which identify trends, changes, positive and negative impacts and perhaps an educated assessment in a percentage figure at best. 69 2006 POSTGRADUATE CONFERENCE As a result, even for the economic impacts, evidence will be qualitative. In the consuming sector, the impacts will lend themselves to qualitative analysis with an examination of variables such as interest in winning titles, increased borrowing, likelihood of purchase for personal ownership, use in educational activities, bases for promotion of literature to children, use in storytimes, interest in borrowing by children, children’s responses and so on. Gerber’s (2000 pp.17-24) theoretical framework is useful because it outlined some essential considerations for any theoretical framework – these are essentially decisions about paradigms. For this project, Gerber’s criteria demanded a clear definition of subject, object and context. In the project being undertaken, the subjects are the adults/children who are consumers and the adults/organisations who are the producers. The object is the Book Award system and the context is that part of the Australian reading community which has an interest in contemporary Australian children’s literature and awareness of children’s literature awards. There is a multi-faceted relationship between these three variables which ranges from strongly dependent to independent or serendipitous. A second criteria is the clear positioning of the project between positivist constructs at one end of the spectrum to constructivist at the other. In this project there is a strong belief that the process of discovery (a constructivist view) underpins the research enterprise. Added to this will be the individual experiences of individuals and organisations. Glesne and Peshkin (1992 p.19) assert that interpretive researchers, in constructivist mode, consider that ‘… every human situation is novel, emergent and filled with multiple, often conflicting, meanings and interpretations.’ Innovation, intuition and creativity have a place in the understandings which may be reached (Kelly 1985 p.36, Kemmis & McTaggart in Denzin & Lincoln 2000 2nd ed. P.573, Gerger & Gerger ibid p.1026, Gubrium & Holstein ibid p.483, Schwandt ibid p.189 and Marton 1988 in Gerber 2000, p.30). In a phenomenological approach these more contemporary views will be considered. The elements of individual experience of each of the stakeholders will reflect this diversity. Another criteria Gerber referred to was the ability to generate generalisations. Both Gerber (2000 p.21) and Kaplin (1964 p.91) had strong views about how generalisations would evolve and Lincoln and Guba (1985) went to an even higher level, stating … ‘Generalisations are assertions of enduring value that are context- free.’ In the project under study, it is not likely that results will be able to satisfy these credentials. However, even as early as 1978, Stake (1978 pp.2-5) had written that generalisations could be developed, particularly in partnership with the case study method, through the reader’s own interpretation of the data. He saw a personal blending of all the data and experience of a research project naturally resulting in cohesion of results for some generalised conclusions. Though the responses may be diverse and idiosyncratic there may well be some elements of common experience and these will be categorised and examined. A final Gerber hallmark relates to openness in research which has values of objectivity, horizontality, doing justice to the object of the research and the subjects within the field, avoiding dogma or the too narrow perspective and 70 UNIVERSITY OF NEW ENGLAND acting with integrity, sensitivity and personal skill (Maso 1995 p.15-17, Smaling 1995 pp.23-28). These values will inform the project as it is undertaken. Literature Review There are gaps in this field of knowledge and a belief in a body of assumed knowledge and these two perspectives will be examined in the project. By dissecting the field of interest into smaller parts it has been found that there are bodies of literature which apply to at least part of the project. Two theorists have been chosen to highlight the cultural processes which take place. The development of cultural capital is most famously associated with the research of Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron in the 1960s and 1970s (Bourdieu & Passeron 1973). Bourdieu talked of fields of interaction which is the context within which the cultural capital is generated and ‘habitus’ which is the disposition which functions as perceptions, appreciations and actions (Bourdieu 1986 p.243, Lareau & Horvath 1999, p39). To Bourdieu cultural capital did not depend on an action or an object being utilitarian and this distinguishes this form of capital from the economic sense. The use of the word ‘capital’ itself aroused some debate (Berkes & Folke 1993, Beasley-Murray 2000, Throsby 2001) as the term had been used in a more quantified context in economics. As well, even with others who embraced the term, there was debate about what should be included in the term – the concept has become widely accepted with a very diverse, evolutionary and dynamic application to incorporate those parts of our cultural life which involve how people view the world, philosophy, ethics and religion insofar as they influence the kind of society we live in, the interactions of socio-political institutions and the social and cultural influences which shape the lives we lead (Grenfell & James 1998, Leopold 1949, Naess 1989, Ostrom 1990, Gadgil 1987, Constanza et al 1991). Devine-Eller offers a refinement to Bourdieu’s concept, separating cultural capital (things people have including material cultural capital such as books and art and embodied cultural capital such as appreciation and knowledge) from habitus (things people do as part of their behaviour) (Devine-Eller 2005). Lareau extends the understanding as well, talking of the interactions which lead to activation of that cultural capital (habitus) in a person’s life and the structural and institutional contexts where this interaction takes place (Lareau 2003 p.277). This obviously can have a strong relevance to this project, focusing as it does on the impact of high quality literature within a society or part of a society. If we accept that children’s book awards publicly acknowledge publications which are widely recognised as high quality literature, then this will add to the cultural capital of a society and the responses will be the habitus of the process. This habitus will be central to the research. 71 2006 POSTGRADUATE CONFERENCE A second line of literature has been explored to understand more about the personal, individual responses to reading quality literature. One of the best known texts on this subject is Barthes’s ‘The pleasure of the text’ (1976). This launched a widespread debate about the aesthetic response to text. Barthes gave credence to pleasure when he spoke of ‘ … the pleasures of reading and the reader’s right to read idiosyncratrically” (Culler 1983 p.10), adding that because the reader holds the key, each text possesses a plurality of meanings both as understood by different readers and as understood at different times by the same reader. Contrary to the general focus on authorship and interpretations of what authors thought, meant or alluded to, Barthes championed the reader and put the reader-response at centre stage in an active, creative role. Thus Barthes was seen as an agent of the ‘death of the author’ (Culler 1983 p.11). Barthes goes so far as to say ‘What is at stake in literary work … is making the reader, no longer a consumer but a producer of the text’ (Barthes 1975 p.4). This interpretation of the reading process is central to an understanding of reader- responses to book titles which are winners of book awards – in the case of this project, this refers to the responses of children and their custodial adults. Research Model For clarity it is useful to create a model which establishes the relationships between the variables. This is not essential but an important element in research is the process of communication and this visual format assists that. The model (Figure 1) presents in visual form, the fields of impact of generally accepted children’s book awards. 72 UNIVERSITY OF NEW ENGLAND Figure 1 The starting point of the model begins with the initial book awards. For convenience the book awards have been divided into three. In Australia, Australian book awards are the best known and so they are likely to have the biggest impact. These have been divided into book awards which are judged by adult professionals in the fields as distinguished from those awards which have been decided by a children’s vote (children’s choice awards). The third segment includes all the overseas book awards – these encompass world-wide international awards as well as awards from NZ, USA, Canada and UK. These are usually quite well known to public library communities but may be less well known to school communities. There are awards from other countries beyond those above, as well, but experience shows that these have a minimal impact. The outer circle represents the major players in the process who will experience impacts which may last for a year (or more). For producers, impact elements will include changes in the expected volume of sales, the strength of prestige, the estimation of an enlarged customer base, increased activities in author visits/promotions/sponsorships, the increased possibilities for merchandising and film/TV screen rights, an enhancement of the author’s chances of getting another novel published, increase in the incidence of book reviews and exposure in magazines and newspapers and easier justification of the expense of advertising the author’s work. As well as looking into these, research into the parties in this group may well reveal other variables not so far considered. 73 2006 POSTGRADUATE CONFERENCE On the other hand, the consuming group is not focused on economic results from the announcement of a winning book title. Children’s book awards for this cohort create cultural capital with impact elements of passion, interest, curiosity and appreciation of the value of quality literature. This may be reflected in actions like changed expenditure on titles, increased enjoyment of winning titles by children, parents, teachers and librarians handling a children’s library service, increased borrowing rates in libraries, use of the winning titles for public library promotions and school based activities and events, increased reviewing coverage, a wider readership of quality titles, increased awareness of the winning author and personal development for adults handling a children’s service where the winning title is featured. It can be seen that creation of cultural capital is quite a different impact from the creation of economic capital. Authors are shown straddling both groups with their unique combination of economic and cultural impacts. The outer rim of the model shows a recursive flow of impacts from the consuming sector to the producing sector. This represents the delayed repercussions following the announcement of winning book titles – the multiplied impacts of sustained consumer activity past the initial response. Direct children’s responses have been left out from the model. With a view firmly fixed on the overall discernment of the critical threads, it was decided to evaluate the impacts on adult consuming environments where children were the clear focus of adults’ attention and where the mission of those adults was to educate, promote and offer encouragement for children’s appreciation of best literature. This is not to say that children’s tastes and preferences are to be disregarded – it is simply to say that parents, public librarians, teachers and teacher librarians, the ‘gatekeepers’, will be aware of the responses of children. Research Methodology This section contains an outline of the way in which relevant, original information will be collected. It describes how issues are investigated and why the researcher does it that way. It has to be rigorously constructed in the first place, applied with professional and methodical care, analysed and synthesised in defensible ways with outcomes which are accurate. At any point along this spectrum, critical evaluation is to be expected. The research on the impacts of children’s book awards will be a qualitative project. There will be constructivist elements and the project will be participatory to the extent that some respondents will be dynamically involved in the business of children’s book awards before, during and after the time of the research in varying degrees. These paradigms will encompass the post-modernist view which allows a breadth of research acknowledging the individual responses of affected people or organisations. Postmodernism allows that truth, knowledge and meaning are social constructs which shift and adjust over time and are encountered through all kinds of discourse both formal and informal. It allows a contextual 74 UNIVERSITY OF NEW ENGLAND customisation of research methodologies with some researchers speaking of the ‘blurring of the genres’ (e.g. Geetz 1988, 1993). It is particularly useful to have such a broad approach in the desire to deconstruct given assumptions – a questioning of privileged identity. A set of questionnaires will be constructed which seek to ask relevant questions as succinctly as possible to elicit answers which allow recognition of some patterns. For each of the groups of questions there will be invitations for free comments and these will reflect the diversity within all the groups. As well as submitting a questionnaire to as many potential respondents as possible, there will be a second stage investigation. This will take the form of a selection of a few examples from each of the major players in the field, for an interview in the case study genre allowing for dialogic encounter. This kind of investigation will be seeking the authentic voice of the respondent. The particular strategies of interviewing, that active interaction leading to a negotiated, contextually based result have been explored by many researchers ‘ … to encompass the hows of people’s lives … as well as the traditional whats’ (Fontana & Frey in Denzin & Lincoln 2000) (Cicourel 1964, Dingwall 1997, Gubrium & Holstein 1997, Kvale 1996, Sarup 1996, Holstein & Gubrium 1995). In the interpreting and synthesising of the ensuing conversations, discourse analysis will be applied, adhering to the general principles of Heritage (1984) who saw the structure based on a sequential organisation of the conversation, a contextual orientation and an inclusiveness that permits all the offerings to be seen as possibly relevant. Dialogical understandings will necessarily be interpretive in the quest for meaning (Potter 1997, Potter & Wetherell 1987). It is hoped that some trends will be discernible. Even if the responses have no common elements, the understanding of the responses of each will add a new dimension to knowledge, moving the process of judging winners of children’s literature to find a winner, past the point of the winner’s announcement. Even a diversity of responses will be a meaningful addition to the body of knowledge. Results Evans and Gruba (2004 p.103) quote the dictum ‘Data is not information, information is not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom’. In this context, the significant data comes in the form of raw responses to primary research: it may be as a result of personal interaction (e.g. questionnaire, interview) or be the result of gathering facts and responses from reliable, impeccable sources (e.g. Bureau of Statistics, publisher’s own websites). When this is systematically organised and presented it becomes information and the stage of wisdom involves the processing of this information to integrate it into a way of seeing new insights, new theories, new paradigms. This last stage carries the body of knowledge further than existed before. The process of presenting this new knowledge is the communicating of the significance, the nature and the dynamics to others. 75 2006 POSTGRADUATE CONFERENCE Raw data will mostly be contained in the Appendix. The presentation of this will be as clear as possible with the use of tables, diagrams and the like to communicate the responses and the gathered facts and to make the results accessible to the reader. Conclusions will be drawn which hopefully answer the questions asked. In an untried field there is always the risk that evidence cannot be generalised and this result would have to be explained with arguments presented which justify this conclusion. The exposition then has to be contextualised by the theoretical field which has been adopted so that not only are new results revealed but that these are viewed against the background of existing theory as expounded in earlier work. Conclusion This section finalises the body of work. It draws the threads together and summarises the major trends, generalisations or grouped findings. In the case of the book awards project, it will also discuss the future of book awards, basing the views on the conversations from the case studies as well as from contemporary literature. No institution, no book award system, no matter how worthy and respected, should be immune from evaluation and in a sense that is a function of this project. In that evaluation, it is up to the stakeholders to reassess validity, relevance and worthwhileness and these interpretations will then inform decision makers as to the future of book awards. New kinds of reading experiences are exploding on to the literary market. This challenges the notion of what literature is and in time this will challenge the criteria of children’s literature awards. Some of this ‘new’ literature is in the form of multi-media digital storytelling while others involve CD-ROMs, internet stories, complex computer game narratives, theatre and performance, all of them involving narrative yet none of them presented in the conventional form of the book. Many of the new forms of narrative involve image, audio, hypertext and interaction. Not only does this imply a different kind of reading and analysis but for the purpose of the above study, it would involve either an enlargement of the current parameters for children’s literary awards or alternatively, require a new kind of literary award. Information and communication technology (ICT) activity already operates in a web-based context but electronic delivery of literary narrative is still debatable territory. Unsworth describes this world as an ‘electronically enhanced ecology’ (Unsworth 2006 p.37). It is beyond the scope of this project to enter this debate, exciting and seductive as this form of literature may be to children and young adults, but it is firmly on the margins of the book award system and needs to be acknowledged as a field of the near future. 76 UNIVERSITY OF NEW ENGLAND REFERENCES Andrews, D. 2003, Teacher Librarian, Gosford City Public School, Gosford, NSW. Personal Communication. Barthes, R. 1975, S/Z (translated by Richard Miller), Jonathon Cape, London. Barthes, R. 1976, The pleasure of the text (translated by Richard Miller), Jonathon Cape, London. Beasley-Murray, J. 2000, 'Value and capital in Bourdieu and Marx', in Pierre Bourdieu: Fieldwork in culture, eds N. Brown & I. Szeman, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, pp.100-119. 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