Robin Redbreast

Robin Redbreast
Birds can represent the fluttering, darting thoughts of intuition. This is why little birds helped Cinderella help herself.

Tuesday, October 4, 2011

Cinderella #273 Thoughts from Glenna Sloan


Cinderella #273 Thoughts from Glenna Sloan 
A pumpkin flower. September, 2011
 Once upon a time, there was a professor of Early Childhood Education. She thought, and researched, and wrote a lot about how children learn.  She especially investigated how they learn to read. One of her most famous books is The Child as Critic: Developing Literacy Through Literature K-8. This is what she says about Cinderella: "With guidance in developing critical literacy, students who have encountered the genuine form of the myth in literature will be less likely to fall prey to its perverted form in the advertisement.  They will know as questioning, critical readers that an advertisement showing the plain, unpopular girl suddenly made beautiful by use of the right face cream is nothing more than a version of the Cinderella story."  (p.14) She also said,"The old tale of Cinderella is a prime example of the comic structure, its pattern ending in displacements old and new and yet to come. It exemplifies comedy in the phase closest to romance, for it involves magical manifestations and metamorphoses.  The worthy Cinderella endures against impossible odds...the character of Cinderella is the embodiment of wish fulfillment: Virtue and goodness are rewarded; things turn out "as they should". (88) She concludes that early exposure to fairy tales helps children with later literary analysis, describing a "reading of Higgledy-Piggledy Pop!" by Maurice Sendak. She transcribes one students analysis of it: "Well, that makes it like folk-tales.  Lots of times the stuff in them couldn't really happen.  Things change shape, just like they do here. In Cinderella, the pumpkin turns into a coach, and mice into horses. Here, Baby turns into Mother Goose." (p.169)
From: Sloan, G. (2003)The Child as Critic: Developing Literacy Through Literature K-8. Teacher's College, Columbia