Margaret Baguley

Through ten research projects, this book explores the topic of educational learning and development in order to examine issues that are impacting, either positively or negatively, on current research in this area. The authors explore the capacity building potential of the projects and what factors impacted on or assisted their development.

Education is generally supposed to help learners to develop new capacities and to be able to apply them in work and life - yet we still know very little about how to build useful capacities. This book investigates nine research projects, exploring why particular capacities are successful in some situations but not in others.

This book is grounded in the belief that every nation had its own ‘Great War’, and that children’s picture books are an important barometer of each country’s national approach.To explore the depiction of the Great War in Australian, British, and French modern children’s picture books, where this historical event is reimagined in different ways as a futile conflict, a painful victory, and as part of one country's founding mythology, this book uses the concept of the hero's journey as underlying framework. It claims that this monomythic pattern, as developed by Joseph Campbell and modified by Christopher Vogler, not only informs all picture books selected for this project but can also be used to highlight the extent to which modern children’s picture book authors and illustrators conform to their respective nation’s cultural memory.It further maintains that the specific historical context of the Great War in these children's picture books can be used to identify a variant of the hero's journey: the 'ordinary soldier's journey.’ This analysis of children's picture books about the Great War through the lens of Campbell's hero's journey will be of interest to both students and researchers in the fields of children's literature, literary theory, history, cultural studies and education.

This book explores the portrayal of refugee experiences in children’s picture books using insights from Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Chapter 1 considers this emerging genre of children’s literature within its social and educational context and explains how the narratives embedded within these books were examined. Chapter 2 cites key studies in the field of children’s picture books about refugees to uncover common narrative arcs, characterisations, themes and educative value. Remaining chapters detail the three core elements of Campbell's canonical narrative arc to review how the experience of refugees is presented in modern picture books using this familiar narrative structure as a means of exploring a humanitarian issue with overt political overtones. In so doing, the authors employ an innovative means of analysing picture books that deal with refugees by positioning them within a familiar narrative arc that belies the fear of difference they may otherwise represent.