Using Literature to Help Troubled Teenagers Cope with Abuse Issues (The Greenwood Press Using Literature to Help Troubled Teenagers Series) - Hardcover

Kaywell, Joan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0313307156 ISBN 13: 9780313307157

Publisher: Greenwood, 2004

Synopsis

This book deals with four types of abuse: neglect, emotional abuse, physical abuse, and sexual abuse. For each type of abuse, selected works of fiction, literary, and professional perspectives are juxtaposed along with applications for utilizing the stories in a hypothetical therapy setting. In addition, reports of mental health workers, organizations, agencies, statistics, cases studies, and important research findings regarding each type of abuse are summarized. Web links are provided as well as information on finding the professional print resources cited. Suggestions for additional fiction suitable for bibliotherapy are provided. This is an invaluable resource for teachers, parents, and any adults interested in helping teens battling with the damage of abuse.

About this title

About the Author

JOAN F. KAYWELL is Interim Department Chair of Secondary Education and Professor of English Education at the University of South Florida. She is Past-President of the Assembly on Literature for Adolescents of NCTE (ALAN). She has written reviews and artilces for English Journal, The ALAN Review, and The New Advocate. She is also the author of six books including Adolescent Literature as a Complement to the Classics, and Adolescents at Risk: A Guide to Fiction and Nonfiction for Young Adults, Parents, and Professionals (Greenwood, 1993). She is the series advisor for the Greenwood series Using Literature to Help Troubled Teens.

Reviews

This volume appears to have been compiled some years ago, with no apparent effort taken to update either its underpinning references or the books highlighted. The introduction posits a relationship between literacy and mental health and asserts that a quarter of "today's teenagers are unteachable by today's standards." Without providing compelling - or even current - data to support these two conjectures, the body of the book is comprised of essays by various members of teaching and administrative staffs in Florida and Ohio school districts. Each piece makes use of a YA book as the talking point to address various and specific abuse issues, including neglect, physical battering, and sexual abuse. The majority of these essays don't - as the book's title might suggest - provide teaching tools for use with teen readers, but rather use each book under discussion as a proxy for possible analytical and therapeutic concerns about the main characters. Such a collection might be of interest to student teachers and beginning school librarians interested in how school-based counselors might work with teenagers who have similar issues. Of the 10 works discussed (nine of which are novels), Chris Crutcher, himself a therapist, is the author of three. Given the problems with the book, librarians would do better to read Crutcher's oeuvre and analyses that he and others provide on the topic. - Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley Public Library, CA
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Edition details

• Publisher: Greenwood
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0313307156
• ISBN 13: 9780313307157
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 280