from Inquiry, Volume 4, Number 1, Spring 1999, 5-9
© Copyright 1999 Virginia Community College System
Abstract
The history of, audience for, topics covered and assignments given in a very popular children’s literature course at NVCC are detailed.
Surely everyone who teaches the regular run of
composition courses at a
community college longs for an occasional semester of something different. About ten years
ago, I decided to offer a course in children’s literature. My children were in
elementary school then, and I had been reading bedtime stories for what seemed like an
age, when I noticed that Children’s Literature was listed in the Northern Virginia
Community College catalogue. What would such a course contain? Would we find a student
audience for it?
Over the last decade, I have learned a lot about the answers to these questions. In our busy metropolitan area around Washington, D. C., there is a large audience for children’s literature. The biggest part of this audience is elementary teachers who must take courses to keep their certification current. This is a well-educated and experienced group, and they are a delight to teach. To reach them, we offer the class in the late afternoon or evening, or, better yet, as a distance learning course. Our Extended Learning Institute was happy to sign me up to teach, and we get between 40 and 60 students every semester.
The next largest group of students consists of would-be or soon-to-be teachers who take children’s literature as part of an undergraduate or even graduate teaching degree. Many of these students are also enrolled at other colleges in our area, but they love the distance format, and I am thus able to get students who otherwise would not be enrolled with us at all ¯ and again, these are advanced and sophisticated students.
A third group consists of parents, people who are interested in writing for children, or just people who need a one-semester literature option that looks interesting.
I offer the course on campus about once a year and usually get one good-sized section. I also offer the course in a "distance learning" format. This is largely a "paper and pencil" course; I never meet with the students. After registration, they receive a packet of instructions that guides them through a series of assignments. They do readings, ponder "Study Questions," and send in about half a dozen different written assignments, which I grade promptly with generous written comments. They also take three exams on campus, at our Testing Centers, which require an identity check. Distance education students can reach me through a voicemail system. These students often do a superior job with written work, and I get frequent kind notes at the end about what a good course it was. I don’t think that the distance course is as rich as the classroom course, but it does reach people who otherwise wouldn’t take it at all.
What content does Children’s Literature cover? I have felt very independent in making up my curriculum, with all the blessings and dangers of liberty. Most children’s literature courses are taught in education departments, so their focus is naturally somewhat different from mine. I am an English teacher, and while I necessarily pay attention to the special needs and interests of children, I expect my students to read these works with critical and interpretive attention. I will set out the major topics as I teach them now in the typical order, with various changes every time. The distance students use a textbook, Children and Books by Zena Sutherland, but it is large and expensive. I have done the classroom course without it recently. Instead, I order paperback copies of a number of books for older children and bring in many samples of picture books.
# A brief history of children’s literature
The text has a chapter on the history, and I also use the Yankee Doodle’s Literary Sampler of Prose, Poetry & Pictures, selected by Virginia Haviland and Margaret N.Coughlan (Crowell 1974). The point I try to stress here is how much adult currents of thought have influenced what is written for children; this is no different in our own time. This influence is just harder to see because we are immersed in it. We spend a few minutes being horrified by Puritan stories for children or by the Victorian moralists, but then I might bring out a copy of something like Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax, a fable of environmental Armageddon that we happily read to first graders.
# Didactic stories and romantic stories
When I began teaching, I realized that many students are looking for stories with "good lessons" or "messages" for children, and this troubled me long before I could think what to say to them. Over time, I have in fact been persuaded that many didactic stories, especially those for very young children, are well loved and deserve a place among the classics. But I stole the term "romantic" to describe another kind of story. The romantic movement deeply affected the way we think about children, and romantic stories are inheritors of these changes. In didactic stories, adults are good people with good advice, which will make you safe, happy, and wise. Children, though well-meaning, are people whose impulses need guidance, whose lives will be better when they have submitted to some form of education. But in romantic stories, the roles are almost reversed: children are pure, innocent and good, while adults are frequently foolish, inattentive, or even corrupt. Tom Sawyer is an obvious classic in this mode; Mary Rayner’s Mr. And Mrs. Pig’s Evening Out is a modern example. Didactic stories tend to uphold virtues like obedience, orderliness, and respect for authority. Romantic stories are more likely to show us the glories of courage, independence, integrity, and intelligence, and the triumph of the weak. For a more radical version of this dichotomy, see Alison Lurie’s Don’t Tell the Grownups: Subversive Children’s Literature (Little, Brown, 1990).
# Child Development and Folklore
I put these topics together because of Bruno Bettelheim’s remarkable claims about the efficacy of folk tales in reaching the particular mental problems of children. I don’t ask the students to read The Uses of Enchantment, though I sometimes copy a passage for them. Perhaps more important are the theories of the growth in children’s moral development by Laurence Kohlberg, Erik Erikson, and Carol Gilligan. A text with a clear summary of these theories would be useful. An understanding of moral development has a good deal of bearing on choosing books for children. We learn how egocentric a child really is, how little a young one understands about alternate points of view, and how late true moral thinking develops. It has persuaded me that Aesop’s Fables, for instance, are not at all suitable for young children, though of course kids like the animals and pretty pictures if they are present.
# Illustration
The text directs students to various aspects of good illustrative art, including fidelity to the text, line, texture, depth, and so forth. Students sometimes start by believing that more color and brighter color is all that counts and that "realistic" is a synonym for "good." I try to show some of the great black and white illustrators, like Arthur Rackham or Robert McCloskey. We also discuss whether pictures can get "too good" for children, whether the coffee table favorites of adults are always in a style that appeals to children.
# The
political questions of our time: sex roles, multicultural stories,
censorship
I lump these topics together here, but of course every teacher will make his/her own units. I am also interested in the phenomenon of unabridged honesty for children: a picture book about Anne Frank is one of my exhibits. Here again, I believe that the interests of adults are being visited on the children. This is not necessarily wrong; what else does it mean to grow up in a culture? But what tasks, exactly, are we asking children’s books to do? And how best can we accomplish what we desire? For instance, many teachers want to use books to promote racial harmony. I believe that it’s better to see child characters from all races and groups, in many different stories, than to read a little book ABOUT race, which only draws attention to it.
# Television
If you took seriously the appalling statistics about how much TV children watch, you would do a whole course on television , with one little week for considering stories. But I find that I am on uncertain and shifting ground in presenting any information about children and television. There is not enough research done. We seem to know a little bit about the effects of violence but not much about the effects of TV watching as a whole, the effects of advertising, the tendency of children’s television to run entirely to trite and shallow didacticism, the ugliness of the sounds and pictures, the "educational" shows, and what in the world a parent or teacher can do about it. I try to tape a little of this and that and just talk about what we are seeing. Just to watch carefully is sometimes an eye opener.
Assignments shift from year to year, of course, as I get interested in one thing or another. But here are some assignments that seem to have worked fairly well.
# Icebreaker
I ask students to write a description of a book that they loved as a child. This has been a good ice breaker, whether oral or written. It gets students started in thinking about the point of view of a child.
# An annotated bibliography
Students select ten good books for a child or group of children whose age and characteristics they specify. They must justify their choices. Sometimes I ask for "bad" books also. Or I ask for activities to accompany the books.
# An essay
comparing several versions of the same folk tale, sometimes
where one version is a movie
Students write about what Disney "did" to Cinderella or Beauty and the Beast, and then try to evaluate. From a child’s point of view, what are the strong and weak points of each version?
# An interview with a child about television
The student and the child watch a program together and then discuss what they have seen. I encourage students to listen more than talk. I offer specific questions: Ask the child to summarize the story of the show. Ask the child whether these things could really happen. Ask whether the child would like to be one of the people on the show and why. I ask what was advertised and whether the child wants it. I also try to get students to think about "spillover" social messages. What do people wear? What kind of houses do they live in? Are they all beautiful, or what?
# An essay comparing Little Women and Treasure Island
These Victorian milestones in children’s literature are aimed very distinctly at girls, in one case, and boys, in the other. Since the movie, many students come to class enthusiastic about Little Women, but this study sometimes changes their minds. Even the plot structures are different: girls are not supposed to have triumphant adventures; they are supposed to learn to be good. What do students want for modern children? Should they all have adventures, or should they all be good? Or are they going to pretend that children can have it both ways? Consider Peter Rabbit, too, in this connection. Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottontail were good little bunnies and girls. But Peter is the hero of the story.
I suppose every good course is always in flux, and this one is about to get a major change. My campus intends to have me teach a section live, over cable television. I will have classroom students in front of me and distance students watching from home. I look forward to bringing some of the advantages of class discussion to the distance students.
I try to keep listening to students, especially the teachers who are listening to children and dealing with books every day. In this course, some of the students have a greater experience of children and books than I do, so it is more important than ever that I listen to them.
Susan Sharpe has been a teacher of English at Northern Virginia Community College since 1974. She is the author of four books for school age children, including Waterman’s Boy, which is set on the Chesapeake and is widely used in connection with elementary science programs.