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Reading Response Paper
Guidelines

Course readings highlight themes, theories, and particular cases in geographic perspectives on children and childhood. Response papers are intended to focus your attention on these specific data, themes and theory in a personal manner. They should cause you to reflect on the specific readings. Readings should prompt to engage your own ideas in new ways. Response papers are meant to provide a means for you to express your ideas within the framework of the class.

Response papers should present your ideas (not a summary of the reading) in specific reference to the concepts, data, and themes of the chapters and articles. Reflect on what you have read as you read along, and then write about these reflections. For example: what is your own reaction to/reflection on the central idea that our [cultural] understandings of childhood shape the meaning, and therefore, the interactions of children with adults and with other children? Do Qipisa understandings of ‘the child’ shift any of your assumptions about children and childhood? What about the concepts of isummaksaiyuq, niviuq-ing? What of the games Qipisa adult play with [on] children?
Note that as Briggs says, the world of Qipisa children may seem to us, small, simple, and  safe; but to Qipisa parents it is none of those things, it is [to those parents] full of hidden dangers. 
Reflect on the dramas Chubby Maata is engaged in by her mother. What is their meaning? What do they have to tell us about the role of culture in the conceptualization and upbringing of “children”?
In short, key your reflections and commentary to specifics of the reading.

 Response Papers must be:

1) on time & word processed
2) no more than 5 pages
3) free of grammar and spelling errors
4) address specific ideas/concepts/themes of reading

  Where we once belonged is a story of growing up in a rural western Pacific island nation—(Western) Sa’moa. Ethnographer Margaret Mead made this space of growing up internationally renown in 1928 with her cultural account adolescence in Sa’moa. Mead created for anthropology, psychology and education a new imagined cultural space of “growing up”.

           Sia Figiel’s 1996 story is different. It is even assertively different than the Sa’moa we had come to believe in. 
 Reflect on this difference, and what you find to be Figiel’s mainn themes and her personal perspective on “coming of age in Sa’moa”.

 We have been reading about the political and socio-economic contexts of childhood and the issues and ideological assumptions involved in motherhood, child abuse and child death, and “street children”. The chapters by Philippe Bourgeois and  Lynn Morgan in Small Wars, and Nancy Scheper-Hughes’ Death Without Weeping deal directly with these aspects of imagining “childhood”, as does Harriot Baezley’s chapter on Indonesian street children (in Children’s Geographies).  As Diane E. Eyer  and these other authors suggest, mothers are seen as the “prime architects of their children’s lives and are blamed [by us, society] for whatever problems befall them”.
 What did you learn from these readings about the “political economy” of emotions, childhood and motherhood? In spite of our assumptions about “mother love,” bonding, and children’s lives a creative, fun, and playful, what [as Lynn Morgan asks] might we learn from these other voices [Ecuadorian, Brazilian, Puerto Rican, Indonesian]?
 You get extra points for including the video “Children of Rio”.
 
 

 This assignment investigates popular image-making of children in the press. Children as objects of debate and public discussion are quite common in newspapers and other popular press. In our society,  children are objects under scrutiny by society—we have debates about their nature, their behaviors, how  to parent or teach them, what they do or should not be allowed to do, and their responsibilities and those of society toward them. Such debates are found in news, in opinion—editorial pieces, and syndicated advice columns.
 All these print media debates and discussions represent the social or cultural construction of “the child”. Whoever does the writing echoes widely-held views of children. Our task is to elucidate the explicit and implicit social constructions of “children” in these print media pieces.

 Assignment

1) Find an article or editorial piece about children [not a particular child] (e.g., about children and parenting) in a  newspaper or other mainstream popular print [or you may  use the on-line version of a print source, such as a newspaper or magazine]. This must be an article of some 4 paragraphs or more.
2) Read and analyze this as a representation of our ideas about “children” [as a social category, like “women” or “the poor”].
3) Write up your analysis. Re-reading Ch. 1 in Children’s Geographies may help you with this. 2 pages—double-spaced [word processed].