Students of this course will:
1) Learn to examine critically the representation of children in
works written for children and/or in works written about 
children for audiences of adults.
2) Practice the application of critical thinking skills to what
they read and hear, and to the social issues raised in such 
texts.
3) Learn to apply contemporary critical theories to works written
for and/or about children and develop a critical vocabulary 
relevant to the study of works for and/or about children.
4) Practice sharing, engagingly and incisively, their critical
understandings of the works and issues under consideration in a 
variety of modes: through traditional, scholarly written 
arguments, shorter “microthemes” and journal entries, creative 
pieces, and oral presentations, for example.
5) Have the opportunity to complete for the final project in 
the course either a lengthy critical study of a work of interest 
to them, or a substantial creative piece in emulation of a work 
of interest accompanied by an artist’s statement explaining the 
goals of the emulation.

Children’s literature scholar Jack Zipes once famously wrote that
“there is no such thing as children’s literature, or for that 
matter, children.” With this rather provocative statement, Zipes 
highlights one of the central problems of children’s literature: 
unlike other minority literatures, it is created not by members 
of the minority group, but rather for them by adults, construed 
by Zipes as their colonizers. Thus, it is argued, children have 
even less control than the members of other marginalized groups 
over what literature is available to them or how they are 
represented within it. This course would seek to interrogate 
this claim by reading children’s literature or literature 
depicting childhood accompanied by literary theory relevant to
the field. Likely theoretical lenses to consider would include 
childhood studies, postcolonial studies (particularly as it has 
been applied to children as a colonized people), and gender 
studies, though other theoretical lenses may also prove 
advantageous depending on the specialty area(s) of the 
instructor. Literary readings may be chosen to represent a 
history of children’s literature (e.g., moving from the first 
publisher of children’s literature in the eighteenth century, 
John Newbery, to the present) or to better foreground a 
particular theme or theoretical lens of the instructor’s 
interest (e.g., the evolution of the school story, gender in 
children’s literature, etc.).