Understanding Childhood through Children¿s Literature: Books, Media, Toys

Catalog description

This course is transdisciplinary in nature, looking at the multiple ways children's cultures are constructed in contemporary and canonical literature for children, transmitted through films, games, and toys. It blends approaches that consider art, history, politics, popular culture, and technology, as bases of inquiry into children's cultures and childhood. It also considers other classic and contemporary texts for young people. The course opens with students' initial understanding of childhood in their unique cultural spaces and settings. It then proceeds to discuss the dominant perceptions of childhood and their possible implications for how society considers the roles of children and their cultures. It recommends critical multiculturalism as a possible theoretical lens to examine how creators of children's texts construct and imagine children, children's cultures and/or childhood. The course also offers a brief history of children¿s literature. The last half of the semester explores other texts side-by-side children's books from various cultures to enable students to ponder myriad childhood and children's cultures under exploration in the different texts. What patterns do they notice? How might this enable them to further understand the complex nature of children's cultures? Course assignments include designing an artifact that is representative of an aspect of children's culture from course materials.