Awards

• Winner of Alberta Book Publishing Awards, Scholarly and Academic 2017 (Canada)
• Winner of Ewart-Daveluy Indexing Award, Indexing Society of Canada 2017 (Canada)

Overview

""The miracle of the preserved word, in whatever medium—print, audio text, video recording, digital exchange—means that it may transfer into new times and new places."" —From the Introduction Margaret Mackey draws together memory, textual criticism, social analysis, and reading theory in an extraordinary act of self-study. In One Child Reading, she makes a singular contribution to our understanding of reading and literacy development. Seeking a deeper sense of what happens when we read, Mackey revisited the texts she read, viewed, listened to, and wrote as she became literate in the 1950s and 1960s in St. John’s, Newfoundland. This tremendous sweep of reading included school texts, knitting patterns, musical scores, and games, as well as hundreds of books. The result is not a memoir, but rather a deftly theorized exploration of how a reader is constructed. One Child Reading is an essential book for librarians, classroom teachers, those involved in literacy development in both scholarly and practical ways, and all serious readers. Foreword by Roberta Seelinger Trites.

Full Product Details

9781772120394

Table of Contents

Reviews

The habit of reading is most frequently acquired in childhood: it is as children that we first acquire our love of losing ourselves in other worlds and other lives, and our imaginative capacity to respond emotionally to the abstract symbols that make up a text-based narrative. .. [In Margaret Mackey's] new volume, she turns inward to recall her own formative experiences as a child reader growing up in Newfoundland during the 1950s and '60s. * Quill & Quire * One Child Reading [is] the remarkable Margaret Mackey's exhaustive but far from exhausting study of the development of literacy. [Full blog post at http://bit.ly/2aecVwx] -- Peter Hunt * Archive Child blog * I know that One Child Reading is meant to be more than just a walk down memory lane, and it is much more than that, most certainly. And yet, while I know that scholarship and literacy will be richer for the extensive and careful research represented here, I still want to thank Ms. Mackey for taking me on that walk. It was a pure pleasure. I will recommend this book highly, and not just for library collections, but for any child of the fifties who loves books and reading. Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER -- Tim Bazzett * Amazon Review * One Child Reading, in which a professor becomes a geographer of her own literacy, is hyper-local, yet there's something about the way Margaret Mackey describes the forces that affected her early reading as a white, middle-class girl in 1950s and 60s St. John's that will speak to readers across identity lines.... [T]his book marks an expert in her field bringing a career's worth of knowledge to material she knows best. A thorough and lucid examination of the self, aided by prolific illustrations and great page design. -- Jade Colbert * The Globe and Mail *

The habit of reading is most frequently acquired in childhood: it is as children that we first acquire our love of losing ourselves in other worlds and other lives, and our imaginative capacity to respond emotionally to the abstract symbols that make up a text-based narrative. .. [In Margaret Mackey's] new volume, she turns inward to recall her own formative experiences as a child reader growing up in Newfoundland during the 1950s and '60s. Quill & Quire

The habit of reading is most frequently acquired in childhood: it is as children that we first acquire our love of losing ourselves in other worlds and other lives, and our imaginative capacity to respond emotionally to the abstract symbols that make up a text-based narrative. .. [In Margaret Mackey's] new volume, she turns inward to recall her own formative experiences as a child reader growing up in Newfoundland during the 1950s and '60s. Quill & Quire One Child Reading [is] the remarkable Margaret Mackey's exhaustive but far from exhausting study of the development of literacy. [Full blog post at http://bit.ly/2aecVwx] -- Peter Hunt Archive Child blog I know that One Child Reading is meant to be more than just a walk down memory lane, and it is much more than that, most certainly. And yet, while I know that scholarship and literacy will be richer for the extensive and careful research represented here, I still want to thank Ms. Mackey for taking me on that walk. It was a pure pleasure. I will recommend this book highly, and not just for library collections, but for any child of the fifties who loves books and reading. Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER -- Tim Bazzett Amazon Review One Child Reading, in which a professor becomes a geographer of her own literacy, is hyper-local, yet there's something about the way Margaret Mackey describes the forces that affected her early reading as a white, middle-class girl in 1950s and 60s St. John's that will speak to readers across identity lines... [T]his book marks an expert in her field bringing a career's worth of knowledge to material she knows best. A thorough and lucid examination of the self, aided by prolific illustrations and great page design. -- Jade Colbert The Globe and Mail

Author Information

Margaret Mackey is Professor in the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Alberta. She has published widely on the subject of young people's reading and their multimedia and digital literacies. A voracious reader, she lives in Edmonton.

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