Research in the Community

One of my favorite places to be is a bookstore. No matter where or what store, I could spend hours and hours just going through the shelves of books. So when I went to Barnes & Noble, I could practically find the children’s section in my sleep since I spend so much time there. It was interesting though, because there were so many things I noticed this time versus all the other times I have been there. First off, the children’s section is somewhat blocked off from the rest of the store by tall bookshelves with a gap in the middle for people to walk through. However, the first thing I noticed was the type of books displayed on these outer shelves which are meant to attract the most attention and interest. I saw lots of books for young teens…most of which had covers showing young girls in skimpy clothing or being scandalous with boys. Either that or Twilight or Harry Potter. It was really rather depressing to see that these are the types of books that attract the most people now. Walking further in, I was comforted by the sight of books from my own childhood, like Magic Tree House, Animorphs, and The Berenstein Bears. However, when I looked through the shelves, I noticed that a majority of the books I read as a young child had primarily Caucasian characters. The books for children now tend to have a larger variety of people. Another observation I had was the books on special display. When you walk into the children’s section, there is a wall with children’s books displayed for everyone to see (the display is out of reach, but copies of the book are on the shelves under the display). At least half, possibly more, of these special display books were about animals rather than people. I guess kids really love animals!

Three times a week, I tutor a 5^th grader in Bethesda, and on the way I pass a small local library which is also next to an elementary school.  I actually really enjoyed going to this library because it reminded me of one that is near my house back in Texas. It is small and most of the books looked old and somewhat worn. While it did include newer/more recently published books, I was glad to see older books (just like in the bookstore!). This is rather random, but I think the main reason I like books more than TV is that books just last longer. While new books are always coming out, the old ones do not lose value. But with TV, once new shows come out, the old shows stop playing and people forget about them. Anyways, the one thing I disliked was the lack of diversity. Diversity seemed to be based around Caucasian and African American. There was a lack of cultural diversity as well as many other social issues.

For representations in the media, I actually looked online for advertisements. I found someone else’s blog post about health ads using fairy tales and I thought they were really interesting. The usage of fairy tales to advertise health-related issues like smoking and immunizations makes sense to me…because everyone wants a happy ending, right? So the usage of happy-ending-fairytales is logical. Here’s an example from the blog and the link to the blog with all the other ones.

http://alanagkelly.blogspot.com/2009/11/health-ads-that-use-fairy-tales.html

http://bookstore.globalfundforchildren.org/index.php?gclid=CO7o3Y6GmqUCFRhO5QodozgwHA&vmcchk=1&option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=41
I liked this online bookstore website because it has a large focus on global books that tell children about cultures from all over the world. Not to be biased toward my own culture (:D) but I love books about Asian culture, whether it is Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, or any other Asian culture. It makes sense that my favorite version of Cinderella is Yeh-Shen, right?