EL-108-WEEK-1-LESSON.pdf

An Introduction to Children’s Literature Defining Children’s Literature As Hintz and Tribunella (2019) point out, the concept of children's literature has undergone significant transformation over time. Initially, there was no distinct category for works aimed at children. Man...

An Introduction to Children’s Literature Defining Children’s Literature As Hintz and Tribunella (2019) point out, the concept of children's literature has undergone significant transformation over time. Initially, there was no distinct category for works aimed at children. Many texts, including religious, philosophical, and historical works, were shared across age groups. The emergence of children as a specific target audience in the 18th century led to a gradual differentiation of children's literature. However, even today, the boundaries remain fluid. The challenge of defining audience A central issue in defining children's literature is determining the target audience. Is it based on the author's intent, the publisher's marketing, or the actual readers? Many works initially intended for adults have found a readership among children (e.g., Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland), while others written for children have appealed to adults (e.g., A.A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh). The role of purpose and context The definition of children's literature is also influenced by the purpose of the analysis. A literary critic, a librarian, a parent, and a child might have different perspectives and criteria. For example, a critic might focus on the literary merit of a text, while a librarian might consider its suitability for different age groups. The impact of social and cultural factors Societal attitudes towards childhood, education, and leisure have shaped the development of children's literature. For instance, the emphasis on moral instruction in earlier eras led to a predominance of didactic texts, while later periods saw a shift towards entertainment and imagination. Children's literature as a genre While some scholars argue that children's literature is a distinct genre with shared characteristics, others contend that it encompasses a wide range of literary forms and styles. As Hintz and Tribunella (2019) suggest, the idea of children's literature as a genre is useful for identifying common patterns and themes, but it can also be overly restrictive. The definition of children's literature remains a complex and multifaceted issue. It is essential to approach the topic with a critical and nuanced perspective, considering the historical, cultural, and social contexts in which children's literature has evolved. The definition of children's literature is a multifaceted concept influenced by various factors, including historical, cultural, and societal elements. As Hintz and Tribunella (2019) argue, the field has evolved significantly over time, expanding from a limited range of texts to a vast and diverse body of works. Lynch-Brown, Tomlinson, and Short (2014) offer a practical definition of children's literature as high-quality trade books that resonate with children's interests and developmental stages. This definition emphasizes the importance of selecting books that are both engaging and appropriate for specific age groups. However, as noted earlier, determining the exact boundaries of children's literature remains challenging. While some works are explicitly created for young audiences, others find an unexpected readership among children. Additionally, the rapid growth of the publishing industry has resulted in a vast array of titles, making it difficult to navigate the landscape without a solid foundation in the field. Ultimately, the definition of children's literature depends on various perspectives, including those of authors, publishers, librarians, educators, and most importantly, children themselves. A comprehensive understanding of this complex field requires considering multiple factors and recognizing the evolving nature of children's reading experiences. Hintz, C., & Tribunella, E. L. (2019). Reading children’s literature: A critical introduction (2nd ed.). Broadview Press. Lynch-Brown, C. G., Tomlinson, C. M., & Short, K. G. (2014). Essentials of children's literature (7th ed.). Pearson Education Limited. Content Children’s books are about the experiences of childhood, both good and bad. Whether these experiences are set in the past, present, or future, they should still be relevant to the child of today. The content of children’s books includes amazingly diverse topics that are of interest to children, such as dinosaurs, Egyptian mummies, world records, and fighter planes. The manner in which content is treated also helps to define children’s books. Childhood stories told in a forthright, humorous, or suspenseful manner are appropriate for young readers; stories about childhood told in nostalgic or overly sentimental terms are inappropriate. Likewise, when stories show children as victims of natural and human-made disasters, the stories should emphasize the hope for a better future rather than the hopelessness and utter despair of the moment. The subject matter of children’s literature can be expressed in prose or poetry. If the literary work is prose, it must be presented as fiction (a product of the imagination, an invented story), nonfiction (factual), or a combination of the two. Teachers and librarians distinguish between the terms textbook and trade book. A textbook, by design and content, is for the purpose of instruction. The basal reader used in many classrooms for reading instruction is an example of a textbook. In contrast, a trade book, by design and content, is primarily for the purposes of entertainment and information. Trade books are often referred to as library books and storybooks. The books that we will be discussing in this text will be trade books, not textbooks. Quality Not all trade books aimed at young readers are worth attention. Books ranging in quality from excellent to poor are now readily available to parents, teachers, and children through bookstores and libraries as well as online. Look around and you will see racks of children’s books in department stores, drugstores, and even grocery stores. But the question is: Are they good children’s books? Quality in writing has to do with originality and importance of ideas, imaginative use of language, and beauty of literary and artistic style that enable a work to remain fresh, interesting, and meaningful for many years. The best children’s books offer readers enjoyment as well as memorable characters and situations and valuable insights into the human condition. These books have permanent value. This is not to say that books of good-but-not-great quality, such as series books, have no value. These works win no literary prizes, but many young readers enjoy them, and because books such as these encourage newly independent readers to read more, they have worth. However, you will probably not want to select books of this calibre to read aloud to your students. Why deprive them of the pleasure of reading such easy and enjoyable books independently? Many so-called children’s books today are nothing more than advertisements for film and television characters and associated products, such as candy, clothing, and toys. These books represent the low end of the quality spectrum. The Personal Value of Literature for Children Literature for children leads to personal fulfillment and academic gains. Separating the values into personal and academic is an intellectual distinction, because both types benefit the child and are proper parts of a child’s schooling. The distinction is useful, however, because teachers and librarians must often justify the benefits of literature in the classroom and find the academic benefits to be the most convincing ones for administrators and parents. Enjoyment The most important personal gain that good books offer to children is the most obvious one—enjoyment. Those of you who read widely as children will never forget the stories that were so funny that you laughed out loud, the poem that was so lilting that you never forgot it, or the mystery that was so scary that your heart thumped with apprehension. Such positive early experiences often lead to a lifetime of reading enjoyment. Imagination and Inspiration By seeing the world around them in new ways and by considering ways of living other than their own, children increase their ability to think divergently. Stories often map the divergent paths that our ancestors might have taken or that our descendants might someday take. Through the vicarious experience of entering a world different from the present one, children develop their imaginations. In addition, stories about people, both real and imaginary, can inspire children to overcome obstacles, accept different perspectives, and formulate personal goals. Knowledge and Insights Good books offer both information and wisdom. Informational books provide factual knowledge, whereas realistic fiction, fantasy, and poetry offer insights into life, and historical fiction and biography offer both. When a story is so convincingly written that readers feel as though they have lived through an experience or have actually been in the place and time where the story is set, the book has given them a valuable personal experience. Experiences such as these are broadening for children because they, as readers, are taken to places and times that they could never actually visit—and might not want to! Such experiences can also be good mental exercises for children, because they are asked to view situations from perspectives other than their own. Understanding and Empathy Literature helps young people gain an appreciation of the universality of human needs across history, which makes it possible for them to understand that all humans are, to some degree, alike. Walking in someone else’s shoes often helps children develop a sense of social justice and a greater capacity to empathize with others. All children can benefit from stories that explain what life is like for people who are restricted by disabilities, politics, or circumstance or whose lives are different from theirs because of culture or geography. Likewise, young people can relate on a more personal level with the events and people of history when reading works of historical fiction told from the point of view of a person their own age. Heritage and Cultural Identity Stories that are handed down from one generation to the next connect us to our past, to the roots of our specific cultures, national heritage, and general human condition. Stories are the repositories of culture. Knowing the tales, characters, expressions, and adages that are part of our cultural heritage is part of being culturally literate. In addition, stories based on actual events in the past help young people gain a greater appreciation for what history is and for the people, both ordinary and extraordinary, who made history. Moral Reasoning Often, story characters are placed in situations that require them to make moral decisions. Young readers naturally consider what they themselves would do in such a situation. As the story unfolds and the character’s decision and the consequences of that choice are disclosed, readers discover whether their own decisions would have had positive outcomes. Regular experience with these types of stories can help young people formulate their own concepts of right and wrong. Moral reasoning is an integral part of character education , a strand in the social studies curricula of many elementary schools today that deals with the principles by which one lives. Character education programs such as “Character Counts” are available for purchase, but reading and discussing well-selected works of literature can serve the same purpose. Literary and Artistic Preferences Another valuable result of children’s interacting with literature is that they quickly come to recognize the literary and artistic styles of many authors and illustrators. Children who read regularly from a wide variety of children’s books soon develop their own personal preferences for types of books and select favorite authors and illustrators. Personal preference and interest as expressed through self-selection of reading materials are powerful reading motivators. The more children know about their world, the more they discover about themselves—who they are, what they value, and what they stand for. These personal insights alone are sufficient to warrant making good books an essential part of any child’s home and school experiences. But literature is also valuable for its academic benefits, as will be discussed in the following section. The Academic Value of Literature for Children In addition to the personal benefits of literature for young readers, there are important academic benefits. Reading Many of you already may have reached the commonsense deduction that reading ability, like any other skill, improves with practice. Many teachers and librarians believe that regular involvement with excellent and appropriate literature can foster language development in young children and can help them learn to read and value reading. This belief was supported in the landmark study Becoming a Nation of Readers (Anderson, Hiebert, Scott, & Wilkinson, 1985), which concludes, “The single most important activity for building the knowledge required for eventual success in reading is reading aloud to children” (p. 23). In 1997, the National Reading Panel (NRP) was formed, at the request of Congress, to assess the status of research-based knowledge about reading, including the effectiveness of various approaches to teaching children to read. The Report of the National Reading Panel (National Reading Panel, 2000) was met with great controversy and skepticism because of its narrow definition of scientific research studies. In this report, the NRP identified the following components of instruction considered to be essential to the teaching of reading: phonemic awareness (teaching how to break apart and manipulate the sounds in words); phonics (teaching that sounds are represented by letters of the alphabet that blend to form words); and reading comprehension (teaching strategies to develop text recall, question generation, and summarizing of information read), including fluency (teaching how to read orally with speed, accuracy, and proper expression) and vocabulary instruction (teaching the spelling and meaning of new words). Literaturebased research studies that support reading aloud to students and independent silent reading by students were not included because they did not meet the NRP’s narrow definition of scientific research. In 2002, the Reading First program was established by the U.S. Department of Education to implement the components of reading instruction approved by the NRP. By 2007, states had awarded subgrants to 1,809 school districts, which had provided funds to 5,880 schools (Institute of Education Sciences National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, 2008). In 2008, the Institute of Education Sciences issued an interim report on the impacts of Reading First on classroom reading instruction and student reading comprehension during the 2004–2005 and 2005–2006 school years. The report compared students’ reading comprehension scores to estimates of what they would have scored with no Reading First intervention. Evaluators found that, on average, Reading First did not have statistically significant impacts on student reading comprehension test scores in grades 1–3 across the 18 study sites. This finding calls into question Reading First and NRP’s prediction that a phonics-based approach to reading instruction would produce better readers than other approaches. Based on our personal and professional experience with children, we contend that reading aloud to children by parents and caregivers and sharing literature with students in the classroom greatly benefit children’s acquisition of reading skills and their attitudes toward reading. In addition, we contend that literature-based studies support not only the reading instruction strategies endorsed by the NRP but also the important instructional practices that the NRP report ignores. Trends in research can be influenced by policy. Following the NRP report and the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, research in the areas of literature-based reading, literature across the curriculum, and literature and writing decreased considerably from the pace established in the two prior decades. As educators, you should be aware of research findings about the worth of literature for children. Research studies summarized in Tables 1.1 and 1.2 show that in teaching children to read, two procedures seem especially important: reading excellent literature aloud to children and silent independent reading of free-choice material by children, both on a daily basis, if possible. Writing By listening to and reading excellent literature, children are exposed to rich vocabulary and excellent writing styles, which serve as good models for their own speaking and writing voices. The acquisition of a larger vocabulary through reading offers young writers better word choices for their own stories. Devices found in books such as the use of dialect, dialogue, and precise description are often assimilated into students’ own writing. Research studies summarized in Table 1.3 show that skill in reading and skill in writing go hand in hand. As stated in the previous section, government policies established in the early twenty-first century discouraged research in some literacy-related areas. Scharer, Freeman, and Lehman (2008) found almost no research on the influence of quality children’s books on children’s writing in their analysis of articles published from 2000 to 2005 in ten scholarly literature-related journals. This finding is supported by Cassidy and Cassidy (2009, 2005), whose annual surveys of literacy leaders have identified writing in general as one of the research topics of least interest to researchers in recent years. We, too, have found no recent notable research studies in this area. Content-Area Subjects In reading about and discussing children’s literature, you will often hear the phrase literature across the curriculum. This means using works of literature as teaching materials in the content areas of social studies and history, science, health, and mathematics. Good teachers have always used literature across the curriculum. The logic for this practice is sound. Many trade books contain information that is relevant to the topics studied in school. Moreover, this information is often presented through captivating, sometimes beautifully illustrated, narratives that are interesting to students and therefore are more comprehensible and memorable. When using literature across the curriculum, teachers and students are not confined to the textbook as the sole resource. Using several sources of information has always been considered prudent both in and out of school, because doing so usually provides fuller factual coverage of topics and leads to wiser, more informed decisions on issues. Using literature across the curriculum is particularly appropriate today, given the abundance of masterfully written, information-relevant children’s trade books available to teachers and librarians. Scharer and colleagues (2008), despite finding few research studies focusing on literature in the content areas in the years 2000 to 2005, found much evidence in their analysis of classroom experience and conceptual articles that teachers are involved in using literature in the content areas. The articles indicated that teachers are using literature to support the teaching of mathematics and science, using nonfiction with primary-age children, and pairing fiction with informational texts.  Art Appreciation Illustration in children’s picture books can be appreciated for its ability to help tell the story (cognitive value) and for its value as art (aesthetic value).The point to be emphasized here is that if you appreciate art for its own sake, there is much that you can do in your classroom to instill in your students a similar appreciation. For example, call to your students’ attention particularly striking and unusual picture book illustrations. By doing so, you show them that you value art. Discuss the artist’s style, the medium used (watercolor, oils, pastels, etc.), the palette (range of colors), and how the artist’s style compares to the styles of other artists. Suggest using picture book art as a model for applied art lessons. By encouraging your students to use media, techniques, and topics suggested by picture book illustrations in their own artwork, you make good use of a handy, valuable resource and in yet another way show that you value this art. From the foregoing discussion, it should be clear that students are not the only ones in schools who can benefit from children’s literature. As a teacher or librarian, you will find that excellent literature is rich in social, historical, and scientific information about the world and its people and that it has great potential for developing the entire elementary and middle-school curriculum. Lynch-Brown, C. G., Tomlinson, C. M., & Short, K. G. (2014). Essentials of children's literature (7th ed.). Pearson Education Limited. Children’s Literature and the University To date, attempts to ban queer and race-conscious literature from schools have not extended to higher education. This is not to say that those of us who work in the academy are immune to accusations of indoctrinating students and making grades dependent upon a student’s ability to parrot their professor’s political and social rhetoric. Many states have seen the appointment of conservative governing boards who use their position to shape syllabi and the nature and subjects of classroom debate; in Florida, in May of 2022, Governor Ron DeSantis introduced a bill which requires that all tenured faculty be subject to a five-year review by the Board of Governors (Roberts, 2022). Such measures pressure academics to avoid topics which might not align with conservative values. One often encounters within such arguments, rhetoric concerning the need for “diversity of thought” in classroom debates; the belief that university classrooms need to acknowledge socially conservative perspectives to balance left-leaning teaching. To entertain such arguments would be, once again, to presume that every position in a debate has an equally valid perspective – an assumption which quickly unravels when one considers that certain perspectives deny the experience or even right to existence of others (one is reminded of Stephen Colbert at the 2006 White House Correspondents’ Dinner: “reality has a well-known liberal bias”). While the term “diversity of thought” borrows from the language of equity, it conflates mutable aspects of one’s identity with the immutable; unlike one’s skin colour, ancestry, or to whom one is attracted, one’s beliefs can (and indeed should) change as one encounters new experiences and new information. Arguments concerning the politicisation of the university classroom unduly centre upon the professor: as Derek Bok (2015) convincingly argues, departments in the humanities tend to lean left, but it is often the students, rather than professors, who lead this trend: a desire to enter into higher education tends to correlate with left-leaning politics while more conservative high-schoolers are often more inclined to skip college and go directly into industry. Bok further argues, despite right-wing fears that universities produce left-leaning political conformity, that higher education, in practice, rarely produces fundamental changes in students’ world-views. The environment which those working in higher education face, then, is fraught with challenges. We must teach in ways which avoid the perception of politicisation (and thus must be hyper-conscious of what others construe as “political”) while still telling the truth and accurately representing the practices of our disciplines. We must protect our students. Often, we must protect our students from one another; we must prevent any student from feeling alienated or attacked for expressing their ideas, but we also must recognise that certain language and ideas can be harmful and know to cut a debate short before harm can be done. We must communicate the damage of misogyny, homophobia, and racism without reproducing it. We must keep ourselves safe. We must avoid complaints. We must, in a time when tenured positions are vanishing and contingent work is the norm, keep our jobs. The teaching of children’s literature unavoidably requires that we face these challenges – how can we teach Peter Pan without acknowledging Barrie’s racist depictions of Native Americans and imperialist rhetoric? How can we teach the Harry Potter books without discussing Rowling’s interventions in debates on trans rights? How can we discuss Paddington Bear without discussing the politics of immigration? To read any text from the “Golden Age” of children’s literature is, as Clare Bradford (2001) asserts, to encounter “a pattern of imperial culture” (p. 196). If we leave these topics unaddressed, then we fail to serve our students and misrepresent our discipline and yet if we address these topics without forethought and care, we risk harming our students who are of historically marginalised identities, and inviting the ire of those who imagine us as agents of “left-wing indoctrination.” As noted by librarians and teachers, reading is often reduced to a skillset in early childhood education, and, perhaps at the secondary level as well. Reading is often coded as a competency, and fluency in reading is a performance indicator for the overall success of the school itself. Reading for skill in this paradigm is very different from narrative reading for pleasure, for thought, and for personal and societal evolution. In the latter framework, narrative reading plays a crucial function of enabling self-discovery amongst students. It answers a critical need in helping all demographics of students feel personally vested in their education as a means of personal growth. The power of narrative reading, of stories, storytelling and storytellers for literacy cannot be overstated. Its argument in America is as old as the literacy narratives of Frederick Douglass or Harriet Jacobs and scores of other marginalised voices who had to fight to earn the right for voice and visibility. Children’s literature in contemporary times claims this transformative individual and sociocultural potential by intentionally seeking to provide a mirror to all students where they might see their own lives and experiences reflected back to them. Often reading becomes meaningful when the text reflects the context of the students. Reading as a skill will thrive when reading for pleasure and thought opens the portal to self-discovery. The essays in this book underscore the importance of this transformative potential of narrative reading in children’s and young adult literature. Not surprisingly, more than a few of our authors speak to their own personal awareness of reading as a deeply transformative act; their efforts to widen the canon of children’s literature in their own respective contexts stem from their personal conviction of the power of the narrative to seize the imagination at the right time and the right place for personal growth and productive and empowered citizenhood. As author and educator Gholdy Muhammad notes in her interview with edweek.org, “We have a growing population of culturally, racially, and linguistically diverse youths and families. It’s time for the course of education to change. Indeed, the genius for this transformation is at hand. We need only to properly respond” (Ferlazzo, 2020). The essays in this anthology heed Muhammad’s call for a proper response to the current historical moment. In conventional discourses about children and reading, when we speak about the difficulties involved in reading, we often mean reading as a cognitive skill, a certain milestone to be met in clinical terms for the biological development of the child, on the one hand, and as a learning objective, on the other. Remediation in reading addresses such difficulties with the end goal of increasing fluency in reading. However, the current backlash against what is perceived as social justice content in children’s literature – the statesponsored ban against LGBTQ+ content in Texas and Florida, for instance, and similar bills in the making in other states – frames “difficulty” in children’s literature in a radically disruptive manner. In the new context, children’s literature is tendentiously deemed “difficult” since it carries content that goes against the heteronormative and eurocentric bias of canonical texts. The essays included in this volume address this “difficulty” with tentative and thoughtful deliberations with the authors discussing their own measured experiments and interventions in unpacking race, gender, and sexuality in their classrooms through the conscious use of narrative texts that foreground such seeming “difficulties.” We, the editors, did not start this project because we had solutions to the challenges of our time and occupations. Quite the opposite, we issued a call for papers because we have questions; because we, ourselves, have struggled to serve every constituent of our classrooms; and because we have made mistakes. It would be too much, of course, for us to expect any of our contributors to offer a final or absolute answer to the challenges faced by those of us who teach children’s literature. Indeed, it is gratifying to see that many of our contributors are comfortable with and recognise the impossibility of getting everything right. Why Assign Children’s and Young Adult Literature? Reason One: The Content’s “Simple” Surface Construction The difficulty of defining “children’s literature” has long been discussed in children’s literature scholarship, but as a starting point, one encyclopedia entry includes the brief definition of “[comprising] those texts that have been written specifically for children and those texts that children have selected to read on their own” (Susina, 2004, p. 178). The first half of this description grounds the first characteristic that makes these texts so well suited as pedagogical tools across English Studies courses. As children’s literature is defined by a target audience with actual or assumed lower reading levels than adults, these texts commonly provide straightforward narratives in comparison to texts written for adult audiences. As Stevenson states, “by the genre’s very nature, it should be accessible to and appreciable by nonprofessionals” (2009, p.113). As accessibility is a high-value concern when designing equitable course content, instructors assigning these texts provide students with a strong foundation for their learning experiences, whether students are developing knowledge and skills tied to basic concepts or advanced course objectives. When exploring different scholars’ understanding of children’s literature, Reynolds cites Wall’s conclusion that “the way adult writers address child readers is analogous to the way adults speak to children, and affects tone of voice, lexis, register, and the amount of detail contained in descriptions and explanations” (2001, p. 25). These audience considerations therefore often lead to narratives that, according to McDowell, “tend to favor an active rather than a passive treatment, with dialogue and incident rather than description and introspection … conventions are much used … plots [that] are of a distinctive order” (as cited in Reynolds, 2001, p. 26). However, while these common characteristics of children’s texts can cause readers and scholars outside of the children’s literature field to discount these works as simple and therefore not worthy of academic study, as Nodelman explains, “the simple surface sublimates—hides but still manages to imply the presence of—something less simple” (2008, p. 206). This sublimation of meaning is only one example of how children’s texts are written in styles worthy of rigorous study in higher education classrooms. The straightforward nature of many children’s texts creates in them the potential for teaching college students concepts and theories tied not just to literary studies, but also to areas like rhetoric, composition, and creative writing. Rather than requiring these students to read texts that might first necessitate much time and energy simply to understand the basic level of the narrative, instructors can assign a children’s text that can be quickly read and understood in terms of plot and characters, allowing more time to spend on learning the intended concept or theoretical framework. Significantly, these narratives can greatly assist students learning English as an additional language and students from households where reading or being read to as a child or teenager were rare due to financial or educational constraints. Students from all types of backgrounds can benefit from starting their course lessons with these children’s texts. As “many a deceptively ‘simple’ book for children encodes adult modes of signification” (Sadler, 1992, p. 6), the basic level of understanding of a text’s plot need only be the starting point of interpreting the text’s many layers and its connections to course concepts. Student assumptions about the simplicity of children’s literature versus adult literature can make them more willing to complete reading assignments, as well, as they are less likely to enter the reading experience with the mindset that it will be an intellectually challenging experience. The lessons and discussions that follow reading the texts can prove that this content is not as conceptually simple as anticipated, but at this point, students will have accomplished the essential step of actually reading the assigned text. Furthermore, adult-targeted texts can follow these lessons, and students can enter these reading experiences with a better grasp of the terminology, theories, or concepts taught through the prior children’s texts. This foundation can also improve students’ mindsets when required to read an adult text, as they already have experience with prior lessons, terminology usage, and conceptual discussions. Using a children’s text with a straightforward narrative first allows students to save most of their focus on studying the particular element(s) of the text that will lead to a greater grasp of the course learning objectives. Note, I intentionally use the adjective “straightforward” when discussing the best children’s texts for this educational goal because not all children’s literature is written in this manner. As Hunt explains, “The assumption that children’s literature is in any way homogeneous is to underestimate its variety and vitality” (1991, p. 21). There are numerous children’s books that feature complex narrative structures and characterizations, but the variety in children’s literature leaves instructors with plenty of potential texts to choose from when searching for narratives characterized by the “simplicity of its diction and the straightforward nature of its style” (Nodelman, 2008, p. 8). E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web, for example, is a classic children’s book often taught to elementary school students. College instructors, however, can use this text to ground lessons in literary terminology such as anthropomorphism and symbolism, as well as discussions about more complex concepts such as gender and mortality. If college instructors prefer to assign literature targeted to an older audience, much YA literature can also match this first aspect of what makes children’s literature pedagogically valuable at the college level. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, for example, follows the common plot structure of Freytag’s pyramid. In addition to teaching relevant literary concepts, instructors can teach lessons on social, psychological, and political representations in literature through this popular YA novel. While YA texts are often (1) much longer than children’s texts and (2) contain more complex representations of human experiences, many of these texts still qualify as displaying a straightforward narrative structure. For example, J.K. Rowling’s later Harry Potter novels—targeted to young adults rather than children—follow a hero’s journey structure very similar to the earlier novels. But, even in texts like The Vampire Diaries by L.J. Smith, where the narrative structure includes features like flashbacks and changing points of view, the narratives still often remain more accessible than texts targeted solely to adults. This accessibility is in large part due to the familiarity college students often have with major plot elements and settings in YA literature: first loves, friendship and family issues, and high school experiences, to name a few. Trites describes YA novels as texts that “tend to interrogate social constructions, foregrounding the relationship between the society and the individual rather than focusing on Self and self-discovery as children’s literature does” (2000, p. 20). As with children’s literature, then, English Studies instructors can create rigorous and thought-provoking assignments for their students using YA texts. Reason Two: The Likelihood of Familiarity As I began discussing at the end of the prior section, the second element of children’s and YA literature that makes these texts particularly suited for educational purposes at the college level is the familiarity undergraduate students are more likely to have when reading or viewing children’s or YA texts. A primary concern most English instructors face when designing their courses is how to increase student interest in their reading and writing assignments. This issue is particularly prominent in cases where an English course is required for general education or for a major closely tied to English; students often enter these situations feeling forced rather than excited to learn. But it also exists for professors teaching courses specifically for English majors, as even these students often resist the amount of reading and writing required per course. Since all college students were once children and likely learned how to read using children’s texts, there is often a level of familiarity with these texts that can increase student interest in reading them. E ven if students have not experienced reading these texts as children, popular children’s texts are often adapted in movies, television shows, graphic novels, video games, and other forms. This trend can also create a sense of familiarity with students who have not read the source texts of these adaptations. O’Malley (2013) explains:We are drawn to stories we can connect with, and people of all ages find something in Harry Potter that strikes a chord of familiarity, allowing those connections. My students have told me they find it easier to write about things they understand or things that make them care, and Harry allows for both.(p. 150) Presenting familiar children’s texts as ones that students can be confident in understanding and potentially even enjoying—while also achieving the learning outcomes of the course—can help college students overcome their uncertainty in analyzing a required class text. Although “valuing literature for its instructive capacity seems to leave its potential for delight in a subordinate role” (Bruns, 2011, p. 13), I support Bruns own counterclaim that “intense emotional engagement with a text is not a distraction from careful analysis and critique, but is the central vehicle for obtaining a key benefit of literary reading” (2011, p. 35). Children’s texts are often long remembered by teenagers and adults due to their “memorable set of characters” (Cadden, 2010, p. 305), and these memories can create a comfortable foundation for a student’s learning experience in an English college course. C.S. Lewis stated, “I am almost inclined to set up a canon that a children’s story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children’s story” (1982, p. 33). With the many “good” children’s stories to choose from, English instructors can help students achieve the goals of their courses while using texts that their students can also enjoy. Furthermore, if a professor chooses to assign a commonly read children’s text rather than a more obscure one, their students’ familiarity with it can increase their ability to perceive the complexities not just of the text, but also of the reading experience. Research on the effects of re-reading suggests that: the rereading of texts alters a reader’s experience of a text … rereading thus shifts the reader’s attention from ‘what will happen’ to ‘how things happen’, to questions of character relations, narrative themes, the production of social knowledge and discourses (Storey, 2014, p. 154). This shift into analytically reading a literary narrative is often the hardest step for students to achieve when reading any text in the college English Studies classroom. But when assigning a commonly read children’s text, “the new reading amends, complicates, and even disturbs the memory of earlier perceptions” (Sadler, 1992, p. 1), creating a more dynamic reading experience that can inspire animated engagement with the text during class discussions and written assignments. For example, many college students have a passing (or extreme) familiarity with the Harry Potter series through experience with reading books, watching movies, or taking part in its fandom’s practices. By assigning one of these texts in the classroom, students with this prior knowledge have the opportunity to deepen their understanding of the story as well as their perception of the text and its effects on themselves and on society more widely. In regard to YA literature, as traditional undergraduate students already fall into the target audience of many texts in this category, the students who are not familiar with specific YA texts chosen by their college instructors will still often feel a familiarity with the topics commonly of focus, such as high school and college experiences, romantic relationships, and changing familial relationships and friendships. For college students, this familiarity takes on a form not obtainable when studying children’s literature, as, “because [works of young adult literature] are about adolescents and for adolescents, they put students at the center of the learning experience we devise” (Salvner, 2000, pp. 96–97). Many young adult college students can feel like outsiders to academia for various reasons, including being first generation or international students. But if college students can at least have familiar texts (like The Hate U Give or The Outsiders) or textual representations of familiar experiences (like Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda or I am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter) to work within their courses—if they can learn from texts that directly connect to their own circumstances and history—then perhaps their sense of belonging in academia can increase, as well. The potential similarities in age and in experiences are two ways that college students can feel a familiarity with YA texts, even if they have not previously read or watched the specific one in question. And this focus on experience is not intended to suggest that only realism texts can provide this feeling in students. In the case of series like the Twilight Saga, The Vampire Diaries, and Vampire Academy, supernatural creatures and witchcraft are prevalent enough in our popular culture that a feeling of familiarity will likely emerge from this aspect of the text, as well. This connection can be used to bolster analytical discussions of the texts, as well as written assignments that require students to delve past the superficial and into the metaphorical or symbolic. How can the tension between Edward and Jacob’s supernatural communities be interpreted as a metaphor for real-world societal tensions? How can the ideas of sires and bloodlines in The Vampire Diaries and Vampire Academy be analyzed as allusions to real-world ideologies? Aiming for familiarity in personal experiences is not without its limitations, however, as some “young readers may never encounter a character that they can relate to and may thus miss the opportunity to ‘try on’ the subjectivities of characters not like themselves” (Hill, 2014, p. 14). This specific limitation can be countered through fanfiction, however, which will be discussed in more detail in the final two sections of this chapter. Reason Three: The Intertextual New Media Adaptations While familiarity with popular children’s and YA texts might stem from prior experiences of reading them, it is often likely that college students’ prior knowledge of these texts derives from their experiences watching a new media adaptation. This element can provide the most powerful incentive for (1) instructors to assign children’s and YA texts in the English Studies college classroom and (2) undergraduate students to devote high levels of their attention to these texts. While the creation of new media adaptations of literary works is not limited to children’s and YA literature, these texts have inspired many of the more popular transmedial franchises in recent history. The literary examples referenced throughout this chapter (with the exception of I am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, which has a movie adaptation in development) are only a few popular adaptation examples out of dozens, if not hundreds. Harry Potter, for example, is often given credit for inspiring a whole generation of readers; and, considering its overwhelming amount of online fanfiction, writers as well. The Vampire Diaries inspired not only a nine-season television show with two television spin-offs, but also novel spin-offs and much fanfiction. Note, fantasy texts are particularly wellsuited to meet the call of assigning children’s and YA texts, as “fantasy readers are famously unconcerned with distinctions between age groups, as opposed to readers of realism” (Cadden, 2010, p. 310). This prevalent willingness to cross targeted age demographics—and the popularity of adapting fantasy literature in mainstream media—makes assigning fantasy texts a particularly viable option for increasing student acceptance and interest in course materials. The prevalence of media adaptations is not alone a reason to include these texts in the classroom. However, college instructors attempting to motivate their students to engage with assigned texts should consider including new media texts, as, in today’s media-saturated culture, students need to improve not just their linguistic literacy skills, but also their visual, multimodal, and critical media literacy skills. Requiring students to critically engage with new media texts creates an opportunity for a multiliteracies approach to teaching and learning, as texts with adaptations can “be imagined as suspended in an intertextual web of incarnations. Such plurality affects all versions, even the originating version that once existed as a singular story” (Mackey, 2012, p. 113). When college students analyze the dynamic connections between these texts along with their multimodal forms, they can better understand why literature is considered “alive,” to be written about in present tense.Furthermore, including not just a standalone new media text, but an adaptation, will also create an avenue for exploring how, “in the act of adapting, choices are made based on many factors … including genre or medium conventions, political engagement, and personal as well as public history” (Hutcheon, 2014, p. 108). Making clear to college students that “these decisions are made in a creative as well as an interpretive context that is ideological, social, historical, cultural, personal, and aesthetic” will provide them with an opportunity to see that adaptations are not only creative products, but critical ones (Hutcheon, 2014, p. 108). This aspect of adaptations means “reading” these texts becomes an even more demanding multiliteracies experience. Furthermore, writing their own adaptations can give students another layer of literary and analytical skills, as well as the chance to imbue the popular media around them with their own voices. Reason Four: The Power of Fanfiction While assigning a children’s or YA text can be the first step in helping increase student learning, and including a new media adaptation of this text is a further step to creating a multidimensional critical experience, a third step might be to give college students an opportunity to create their own adaptations. Henry Jenkins, a well-known media and fandom scholar, expressed some uncertainty in bringing the creation of fanfiction into the classroom, explaining, “it is not clear that the successes of affinity spaces can be duplicated by simply incorporating similar activities in the classroom … pulling such activities into schools is apt to deaden them because school culture generates a different mindset” (2006, p. 218). This fear of potentially “deadening” this experience, however, is reminiscent of the arguments against critically engaging with children’s and popular texts in the college classroom. Just as these arguments have been addressed by many children’s literature and popular culture scholars, including this creative practice in the classroom has also been supported by literary and fandom scholars. Bruns suggests including an adaptation creation activity in the English Studies classroom, arguing that “producing creative projects [based on their readings] … requires of students a more thorough engagement with a literary work” (2011, p. 151). Alexander brings attention to the fact that fans are already voluntarily engaging in critical practices similar to what would be asked for in a classroom setting, stating “what they [young fan writers] offer often shows them grappling in complex ways with the connections between literacy, self-understanding, and even larger sociocultural and political issues” (2017, p. 7). Though children’s and YA texts are not the only ones adapted into new media products or reimagined in fanworks like fanart, fanvideos, and fanfiction, my argument’s first three elements—the benefits of straightforward narratives, the familiarity students often have with children’s and YA texts, and the pedagogical possibilities of studying new media adaptations of these texts—ground this final element: the creation of their own adaptations of these texts can increase student understanding of and engagement with the course material and learning outcomes. Assigning an adaptation writing project also provides students with opportunities to creatively and critically counter the lack of diverse representations in today’s popular culture, as fanfiction “shows the capacity of ordinary people to use the media as a resource which can be actively reshaped in order to meet their own specific means or interest” (Duffett, 2013, p. 171). One interest often explored by writers of fanfiction, for example, is increasing LGBTQIA+ representation in literary and popular media stories, as they create fanfiction where characters can “explore an emotional terrain somewhere beyond the heteronormative horizon of the straight world” (Duffett, 2013, p. 177). This and other interests can be engaged with via an assignment that gives students the opportunity to write a piece of fanfiction based on a class text. For example, in one of my literature undergraduate courses, students read the first The Vampire Diaries book, watched the first six episodes of the TV adaptation, and read some examples of online fanfiction. In the first novel, the primary and secondary characters are white; in the television series adaptation, only one of the secondary characters, Bonnie, is Black; in the fanfiction students were assigned to read, the stories centered on the primary canonical characters. When writing her The Vampire Diaries fanfiction, one of my Black students directly pushed back against this lack of diverse racial representation in this series. In Corine’s fanfiction reflection, she explained her reasoning behind making her The Vampire Diaries fanfiction characters Black American, going so far as to change their names from “Elena” to “Endia” and “Stefan” to “Sebastian:” The YA genre is flooded with white people experiencing life in all possible imaginable ways. Yet, the African American genre depicts African American life in two ways; poor or recently reach [rich]. I would like to see more diversity and depth in those diverse lives (2016). Through this assignment, this student was able to critically respond to the texts we read and watched in class and also with a larger issue present in YA literature. This type of critical response is not unusual among fanfiction writers, many of whom are of the same age as the young adults that commonly make up a traditional undergraduate classroom. Fanfiction archives are full of stories with diverse representations of race, sexuality, gender, religion, family structure, and more; representations that are often not present in the source material. Through assigning a project that requires adaptation of another text, English Studies students can improve not just their close reading and creative writing skills, but also experience creating literary texts that include representations of their own lived experiences. Conclusion As is evident by the many citations included above, to an extent, each element of my argument for including these texts in college courses has already been explored, analyzed, and published on by various scholars. In demonstrating the collegiate pedagogical potential of children’s and YA texts and their new media and fan adaptations, I am not attempting to claim that these texts have been overlooked or not considered with enough critical depth by many educators or scholars. However, it should be noted that Bruns and Hutcheon are just two scholars cited above that do not specifically consider these texts in-depth when supporting their arguments. As such, my goal for this chapter is to create a call for action. A call to action for English Studies college instructors outside of the children’s and YA literature specialization. A call to seriously consider making their undergraduate courses more engaging and equitable by including children’s and/or YA texts and their adaptations in their curriculum. Children’s Literature in the 21st Century Devi, G., Smith, P., & Weaver, S. J. (Eds.). (2024). Teaching equity through children’s literature in undergraduate classrooms. Routledge. (Devi, Smith, & Weaver, 2024) Children’s Literature and Theory At first sight, children’s literature and what is broadly called “theory” are often assumed to be at opposite ends of the spectrum, with children’s literature being seen as accessible, simple, easy, and clear and theory as inaccessible, complex, difficult, and obscure. But as this chapter will explain, this first impression is deceiving, as from its earliest origins children’s literature has in fact been the topic of extensive theoretical discussion and debate, while theory in turn has been affected by the issues raised by children’s literature. The key reason for this interconnection is that children’s literature is a genre almost always written, published, marketed, and sold by adults for and often about children. This means that issues of power and of “otherness” are intrinsically embedded in this field: how and why do adults write for child readers? Usually, this is asserted to happen through adult authors either remembering their own childhoods or gathering a knowledge of children from experience and observation. But such “common sense” assertions often turn out to lead after all to different ideas of childhood and literature, resulting in different ways of writing, marketing, and selling – and researching and teaching – children’s literature, as this chapter will explore. Our consideration, then, will be what “theory” is for or about, especially but not only in relation to children’s literature. In this sense, “theory” in this chapter is understood from the perspective of literary and critical theory, not from the perspective of some social scientists who would rather define it as a set of universalizing tenets based on empirical evidence that have passed critical experimenting and testing. The reason for choosing to focus on “theory” from the literary and critical perspectives is that these perspectives have specific relevance for issues in children’s literature (criticism), including in fact in relation to social science research in these areas, as this chapter will also explain further. “Criticism” and “Theory” A first issue that can be considered is that not all children’s books are judged to be children’s literature: the question of the “literary” is one that has been raised from the very start of all literary criticism, with its roots in the West in classical Greek and Roman literary criticism and theory and in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic (the three monotheistic “religions of the book”) theological debates around interpretations of religious texts. Aristotle’s famous writings on tragedy are concerned with the question of why some plays are judged more successful than others. For the theological scholars, questions of the authenticity of religious texts as well as questions of interpretation are at the center of their thinking. Drawing a distinction, then, between “children’s books” and “children’s literature” has to do with judgment and evaluation: making decisions about what books are better written than others and why or drawing distinctions between genres. These decisions are made on an everyday basis by parents, carers, teachers, librarians, publishers, and booksellers as well as by academics as they engage in writing, producing, selecting, recommending, selling, or analyzing books for children; as with the books themselves, children’s literature criticism too is almost always made by adults for –on behalf of – children.If making such judgments is what children’s literature criticism does, then “theory” is that which can help us to think about the grounds on which the criticism does this. In this sense, as eminent British children’s literature theorist Peter Hunt writes, Theory [...] by seeking to explain what we might otherwise have thought was obvious, [...] draws attention to hidden problems. We usually get along quite well by assuming things to be true that we really know to be quite untrue; for example, that we know how people read, and what happens when they do; [...] that we know how and why stories work. Theory may not solve any of those problems directly, but it forces us to confront them. Children’s literature, as Hunt argues, raises theoretical issues from the very basic level of how and why people read. This is because children’s literature cannot assume reading in the way that much literary study in wider terms often can and does: in relation to adult literature, questions of the author, text, reader, and reading can be (and are) certainly also raised, but they are not as fundamental and necessary as in relation to children’s literature, where the inherent difference between books’ producers (adults) and their readers (children) must be negotiated one way or another. The prominent Canadian children’s literature theorist Perry Nodelman explains this difference as follows: “what theorists often call the other – of that which is opposite to the person doing the talking or thinking or studying” and adds, importantly, that “what defines them as outside of their subject [the other] is, exactly, their ability to study it” (29). In other words, theory helps us to understand that adults and children are not just different from each other because people perceive differences between them – for instance of knowledge, experience, or abilities – but also because it is adults who come first and then decide who and how and why to study. As a consequence, even when a difference is not seen to be the case (where it is believed that the adult producers and the child readers are the same), that presumed similarity must also still be somehow established and stated. Theory in relation to wider literary studies is often assumed primarily to be about different approaches to literary texts, such as Marxism, feminism, stylistics, psychoanalytic theory, queer theory, race theory, dis/ability theory, postcolonialism, posthumanism, or ecocriticism (to name just a few). But for children’s literature the issues of the adult producer and the child reader remain fundamental even though all these approaches can also be drawn on, with questions always remaining too about how and why each of the approaches is actually constituted and implemented in relation to author, text, and reader as the three core concepts of all literary criticism and theory. This has led British writer Aidan Chambers, among other important children’s literature theorists, even to “wonde[r] why literary theorists haven’t yet realised that the best demonstration of all they say when they talk about phenomenology or structuralism or deconstruction or any other critical approach can be most clearly and easily demonstrated in children’s literature” (qtd. in Hunt 5). In other words, by falling outside of “literature” as it is generally understood, children’s literature can raise questions about that wider literature too, while by being after all children’s literature, the field nevertheless also partakes of the issues of literature in general. In being in this position, children’s literature benefits from thinking about and through theory and in turn reshapes and redirects that theory. Because theory in children’s literature helps us to understand the basis for critical judgments –how and why they are made – it does not remain an abstract area only for academic researchers, but instead has everyday, practical consequences for how people make decisions about, for instance, how and why to write, edit, publish, market, and sell children’s literature or how to use children’s literature at home and in the classroom: how and why to make and use good books for children to somehow educate, develop, shape,and amuse them. The Origins of Writing for Children: What Is a Child? Another aspect of the distinction between children’s books and children’s literature is the question of when writing for children developed in the first place. This matter will be discussed in more detail in other chapters in this volume, but here I focus specifically on the theoretical issues that underpin such historical claims and ideas. Broadly speaking, most historians of children’s literature point to two sources: first, writing for children is seen to develop from the oral traditions of folk and fairy tales, including myths and legends, which were originally not specifically for children at all, but for any parts of the population that were not literate or – even if literate – that participated in these cultural traditions. This source is also often seen to be global, in the sense that all cultures either have an oral tradition or are continuously orally based. The second source is writing that was either read by anyone regardless of age, or is seen to be primarily so didactic and moralistic that in that sense it is often judged not to be a children’s book: here, the split between children’s books and children’s literature is rooted in a difference perceived between books that teach and books that amuse children specifically. In any case, both oral and didactic sources are considered to have developed into children’s literature through the discovery or invention of childhood. I write “discovery or invention” because in fact the difference between these ideas points to a major, long-standing, and ongoing theoretical debate around not just children’s literature, but also all aspects of childhood, including education, history, philosophy, psychology, law, and medicine. For the key question is: did adults start producing children’s literature because they finally discovered what children were really like? And what children therefore really prefer to read? Or because childhood was invented as a cultural and historical identity, leading to changes to how children were treated and shaped? The origin of this debate is often located in the French historian Philippe Ariès’s 1957 book Centuries of Childhood, in which he famously proposed that childhood is not a biological category but a cultural and historical construction of identity, linked to wider developments in Europe such as the eighteenth-century agricultural revolution and the nineteenth-century industrial revolution, which led to changes in labor conditions and practices and schooling. Ariès argues that the childhood formed by ever-more specific roles – in relation to schooling and specific clothing, foods, and toys – is invested by adults with value, so that childhood can be seen by adults as either innocent or wise, either obedient or rebellious, either kind or cruel, either original or imitative, among other dichotomies. This discussion also raises the important question of whether childhood can be seen as transcultural or whether it was invented in different cultures at different times and perhaps in some cultures and times not at all: whether in such places children are seen as smaller adults, as Ariès argues was also the case in medieval Europe. Leading Chinese children’s literature theorist Zhu Ziqiang, for example, traces “the discovery of children” in China in the work of Chinese scholar Zhou Zuoren (1885–1967), whom Zhu reads as in turn influenced by the ideas of Western scholars such as psychologist G. Stanley Hall and psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud and Charles Baudouin (71–72). Zhu’s account alerts us also to the fact that children’s literature and childhood more widely are often understood to be Western discoveries or inventions (just as the agricultural and industrial revolutions are often seen as originating in Europe and primarily in Britain) that were then spread to other parts of the world either by a voluntary engagement with Western ideas, as with Zhou for instance, or by colonial or imperialist imposition, as with the forced implementation of certain Western political, economic, religious, and educational systems and beliefs. European historical writings that are credited with the invention or discovery of childhood famously include the English philosopher John Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile, or Treatise on Education (1762), and the Romantic poetry of English poets such as William Blake (Songs of Innocence and Experience ) and William Wordsworth (The Prelude ).In countries that were subject to Western colonialization and imperialism to a much greater extent than China, including other Asian countries and most of the global south, the history of children’s literature is that of the importation and domination of British children’s literature (whether or not in translation) until at least the early twentieth century, followed by the development of an indigenous children’s literature that, even where it draws for instance on an indigenous oral tradition of storytelling, nevertheless is also pre-shaped in complex ways by the very nature of the conventions of writing. This is the area of postcolonial theory, as articulated by the famous postcolonial theorist Homi K. Bhabha: “It becomes crucial to distinguish between the semblance and similitude of the symbols across diverse cultural experiences – literature, art, music, ritual, life, death – and the social specificity of each of these productions of meaning as it circulates as a sign within specific contextual locations and social systems of value” (47). We could add to Bhabha’s list of such “diverse cultural experiences”: childhood. As much as this debate about either the invention or the discovery of childhood rests on important theoretical questions and issues, it also has such vital practical consequences because very often people’s engagement with children and childhood rests on their conviction that they know what children are really like and, therefore, what the best book is for them (or what education, or what psychological or medical treatment, and so on). Simultaneously, thinking of childhood as invented or constructed brings with it the possibility for also thinking about why and how childhood is constructed in that way and by whom and whether it could be considered differently. However, it could equally be argued that the division between childhood seen as “discovered” and childhood seen as “invented” has more overlap than might initially be thought: those who assume that knowledge of the child is self-evident from observation or from certain psychological, scientific, or biological evidence nevertheless may find themselves – perhaps surprisingly – disagreeing with each other, no matter how commonsensical or scientifically based their evidence may seem to them. Conversely, those who see the child as a specifically political, economic, religious, historical, or cultural construction that may change as those conditions change nevertheless often still rely on ideas of an ultimate consistency and continuity in the traits assigned to childhood, which after all are not seen to be changeable no matter what cultural or historical changes may take place. Somewhere on the scale between these positions is where almost all critics and theorists of children’s literature can be found, one way or another, but there is a small group of theorists who position themselves at the far end of the spectrum in following the arguments of British theorist Jacqueline Rose in considering childhood never to have essential traits or properties at all, but instead to be always defined from the perspective of the other: in other words, that there is no child other than that claimed from the memory or the observation of the adult. Nodelman named this group of critics the “Reading School,”2 although for some children’s literature critics this kind of work by definition falls outside of children’s literature criticism altogether in reading children’s literature not at all in terms of a child readership (not even indirectly), but in terms of perspectives on the child. Authorship: The J. K. Rowling Phenomenon With the invention or discovery of childhood comes also the idea of an author who writes specifically for children. Although there have long been internationally famous and culturally highprofile children’s writers such as Lewis Carroll of the Alice books, Frances Hodgson Burnett of Little Lord Fauntleroy, L. M. Montgomery of Anne of Green Gables, Enid Blyton, Roald Dahl, and Jacqueline Wilson, thanks to J. K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter series, the status of the children’s author has in past decades been heightened globally to an unprecedented level: the author as world-famous celebrity and what is more, an enormously wealthy celebrity. However, theory here too enables us to examine many of the taken-forgranted ideas about children’s authors. It is commonplace for most people involved in children’s literature to attribute the success of certain works either to the authors having an exceptional memory of their own childhoods or to their having an exceptional knowledge of children on which to draw for their writing. As we saw Chambers arguing earlier, in this sense issues around authorship can be taken to be magnified in relation to children’s literature compared even to their importance in wider literary criticism and theory, precisely because the author in children’s literature is the one seen to be writing for and about children. Even when some children’s authors claim to be writing not for the child at all, but for themselves or actually for adults, their knowledge of childhood is attributed to them in the judgments of the critics about why the books are after all successful children’s literature: the aesthetic or thematic aspects of their texts, for instance, are then judged to be specifically suitable for or appealing to children. Nevertheless, the fact that some books that are claimed to be written for adults end up being read by children (famous examples include Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels) and vice versa (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and the Harry Potter series, as well as Nielsen book sales’ data reporting in 2015 that fifty-five percent of young adult books are bought by adults and seventy-eight percent of those are buying them for themselves) does destabilize the assumption that authors’ intentions dictate which readers end up reading their texts. Furthermore, even if the reception of the texts ends up with the readers for whom the author claims to write, the fact that the texts may be read differently than the authors claim to intend disrupts the supposed “control” of the authors’ intentions even further: even ideas of “obvious” moral or didactic “messages” are disputed among different readers and critics. In wider literary theory, this questioning of the role and extent of authorial intentions and their control of readership and interpretation again draws on a very long history and is grounded in the debates in the theologies of the three monotheistic religions “of the book” around the authority (etymologically linked to the very term “author”) and interpretation of the religious texts. Here too, the key issue is the ways in which the interpretations of the texts are seen to differ and to what extent they are permitted to differ: what to one critic or theologian is a different interpretation is to another simply wrong. This spectrum of views remains the case to the present day, also in children’s literature criticism and theory. If the Rowling phenomenon has endorsed the status of the all-mighty children’s author, then this formulation is destabilized in turn by the theological endorsement of the Divine Being as the ultimate and only “Author/authority”: in this view, no mere human can replicate the authority of the original and only Author. It also remains central to this issue that before the commercialization of texts through the printing press and the wider spread of literacy in the early modern period in Europe, handwritten manuscripts were often circulated anonymously and that in this sense the author did not have the same function or status as in later periods, as argued in the French historian and theorist Michel Foucault’s famous 1969 article “What Is an Author?” Foucault further points out that such manuscripts were not conceived of as owned by their author and therefore not seen as sources of potential personal profit in the days before copyright laws came into force in Britain in the eighteenth century. It may be noted in relation to this point that even today, the ideal of the genius (children’s) author whose works make large sums of money and are adapted into films and merchandise (much aspired to by enrollees in present-day creative writing courses) is something of a chimera: some of the key outcomes of research that the British Society of Authors commissioned in 2018 include that the “median annual income of a professional author is £10,500 (US$11,300), which is well below the minimum wage,” and that “just 13.7 percent of authors earn their income solely from writing. In 2005 this was 40 percent” (Anderson). The idea of children’s literature as distinct from the wider category of children’s books also obscures, therefore, how many children’s books are not considered as written by someone with the status of an “author” at all but by “writers” who either work together on a series under one pseudonym (popular American series such as Nancy Drew or Goosebumps are examples of this phenomenon) or by writers working on children’s learning-to-read series, educational textbooks, or nonfiction books. Theory in relation to authorship, then, helps us to understand that a person writing is not necessarily an “author,” or an entity who controls the reception of a text, but instead a value attached to specific kinds of writers who have specific powers attributed to them. This perspective helps us also to understand the practical consequences of the attribution of the status and powers of authorship to such as Rowling in terms of ideas of knowledge and talent and access to publishing and marketing and pay. Knowing Children: Observation, Memory, Psychology, and Neuroscience If the authors of children’s literature are often widely credited with having an exceptional knowledge of childhood, many children’s literature critics and theorists also rely on claiming knowledge of at least some “core” attributes of childhood deemed “essential” or inherent and continuous and therefore judge children’s literature directly or indirectly by the standards of that knowledge about children. In the first instance, the initial, commonplace step is usually to propose to ask children themselves what they would like to read and why or to claim that this information is already known from observing or having experience of children. But as many children’s literature critics and theorists have long pointed out, this starting point encounters several difficulties in relation to what has already been discussed previously here too: as British psychologist and children’s literature critic Nicholas Tucker argues, One [...] approach to the problem has always been to ask children themselves through various questionnaires and surveys, what exactly their books mean to them. Turning a powerful searchlight of this sort onto complex, sometimes diffuse patterns of reaction is a clumsy way of going about things, however, and children can be particularly elusive when interrogated like this, with laconic comments like “Not bad” or “The story’s good” adding little to any researcher’s understanding. But even if instruments for assessing children’s tastes could somehow be improved, making this effort cannot change what Tucker is pointing out. Much as we already saw Nodelman argue in relation to the study of the “other,” the questionnaires and surveys will still necessarily be designed in the service of the researcher’s understanding and will still necessarily draw on books and ideas about reading already created by adults for children. The same factors also come into play in well-known book prizes claimed to be awarded “by children,” such as the Nestlé Smarties book prize, a British award that ran from 1985 to 2007, where “eligible books were written by UK citizens and residents and published during the preceding year. The shortlists were selected by a panel of adult judges. [...] First, second, and third places were determined by British schoolchildren, at least finally, by vote of ‘selected school classes’” (“Nestlé”). Many children’s literature critics and theorists who work with ideas of knowledge gained through the observation and experience of children foreground in their work the importance of children’s “voice” and “agency.” The idea that children have voice and agency was first theorized in the work of the so-called “new sociology” of childhood, leading exponents of which, Norwegian sociologist Jens Qvortrup, American sociologist William Corsaro, and German sociologist Michael-Sebastian Honig, explain how and why they see these characteristics as central to childhood studies: Agency and voice for children: Among those who embarked on the study of children within the framework of the new paradigm of childhood it was a common observation that children were largely appreciated as people who were on the receiving end in terms of provision and knowledge. Children were reduced to vulnerable people to be protected without being seen also as participants – in any case, not participants in the larger social fabric, which was an adult privilege and prerogative. Therefore it became imperative for social studies of childhood to look into these charges or prejudices. The opposition that Qvortrup, Corsaro, and Honig note here between the child as agent and the child as victim is used widely. American children’s literature critic Marah Gubar, for one, critiques what she sees as an “unfortunate tendency to characterize young people as artless beings devoid of agency [… which] suggests that children are invariably exploited and oppressed by adult attention [… such] generalizations [...] about children’s fiction repeatedly characterize children as helpless pawns in the hands of all-powerful adults” (32). While many critics and theorists continue to work on the basis of such ideas, then, theory can raise further questions for us to think about regarding how “voice” and “agency” are not natural terms but themselves rooted in certain political and ideological positions and beliefs. British critical psychologists Pam Alldred and Erica Burman, for instance, explain that they emphasize “the active and subjective involvement of researchers in hearing, interpreting and representing children’s ‘voices’” (175). Memories of childhood run into similar issues: first, memories are necessarily retrospective and different individually as well as culturally and historically. Many people remember having had a childhood that is quite different from others, while some don’t remember having had a childhood at all. In this way, two of the most commonsense and widely used ways of dealing with children’s literature, whether popularly or academically, quickly run up against key theoretical questions, even in the practice of working with children: authors, publishers, or teachers who assume that at least some children have the same kinds of characteristics, lives, and experiences and (therefore) will be interested in the same kinds of books can cause problems, including around equal access to opportunities or dis/ability, for instance. Aside from observation and memory, the most common source of knowledge of children has been claimed to be drawn from the field of developmental psychology. But here too, however commonsensical it may seem that a knowledge of the psychological stages of development will inform judgment of how to write and evaluate children’s literature, several theoretical issues already discussed immediately reveal why relying on developmental psychology is and remains much more complicated than it may appear at first sight. First, psychology as a discipline actually has little bearing on the evaluation of literature as compared to books. That is to say, the key differentiation between children’s literature and children’s books introduces factors that are not primarily part of the domain of psychology, but lie more within the domain of cultural and aesthetic judgments, values, and tastes. But further than this, psychology too has always had and still has many different views and debates even around the basics of learning to read, for instance, or the processes of literacy. Both historically and nationally, different educational systems deploy different methods for teaching children to read. Moreover, as Etti Gordon Ginzburg discusses elsewhere in this volume, the achieving of literacy is in fact rarely considered in relation to children’s literature, and the books through which literacy is taught are less or differently taught in children’s literature courses, whether in educational (teacher training) or in literary-critical contexts. These issues are reflected in the history of developmental psychology itself: one of the founders of the field, the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, did very little research into reading, and when he was once asked about reading by a fellow attendee at a conference, he apparently replied that he had no opinion on it (Wadsworth 133). The American psychologist Jerome Bruner, one of Piaget’s most eminent successors, rejects the invocation of “psychological processes or mechanisms that operate in ‘real life’” to “discover how and in what ways the text affects the reader,” arguing that “such proposals explain so much that they explain very little. They fail to tell why some stories succeed and some fail to engage the reader [...] above all, they fail to provide an account of the processes of reading and entering a story” (4). We can note how close Bruner’s points here are to those of Hunt cited previously. Similar issues arise in relation to other psychological theories of stages: the wellknown work of American psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg on moral stages of development in children, for instance, necessarily relies on relating his theory to interpretations of children’s literature in terms of how and why the stages are thought to be somehow present in the texts. Kohlberg’s theories (or any psychological theories) necessarily and inherently rely on a set of theoretical assumptions and models in turn, as American psychologist Carol Gilligan demonstrated when her 1982 work famously questioned Kohlberg’s implicit reliance on certain ideas of morality and proposed that these ideas were gendered and not “neutral.” More recently, some children’s literature criticism has turned to another source than psychology as its preferred area of knowledge about children: neuroscience and its accompanying brain-imaging (“brain scans”). Eminent Russian children’s literature theorist Maria Nikolajeva, for instance, argues that a “child’s sense of space and place, direction and dimensionality, scale and proportion, is different from an adult’s. [...] This is not due exclusively to the fact that a child is physically smaller than an adult, but also [reflects] that these aspects of perception are primarily performed by the left cerebral hemisphere” (30). Even in this area, seen by some as being irrefutable “hard science,” there are fundamental theoretical questions to be raised, however. Leading Belgian critical psychologist Jan De Vos writes in relation to “thought experiments” about digitally uploading the brain that “in devising the very algorithms through which one would be uploaded, would there not also be the choice of which psychology (Freudian, Pavlovian, etc.) you would prefer to be uploaded?” (8). In other words, the ways in which the brain and brain scans are read and interpreted already incorporate pre-existing psychological models, including some related to reading models about “identification” and “empathy.” “Book People” and “Child People”: Representation, Identification, and Empathy The grounds on which criticism judges the difference between children’s books and children’s literature can also be roughly divided up into ideas about texts and ideas about child readers, or in terms of what British historian and theorist of children’s literature John Rowe Townsend, in a well-known formulation, has called “book people” and “child people” (199). “Book people” focus on aspects of texts such as style, themes, story, plot, and characterization, while “child people” focus on the expected responses from and effects on the child readers. Yet, as Townsend points out himself, there is as much overlap as distinction between these two groups, for ideas about the one rely on ideas from the other; for instance, judging style, themes, story, plot, and characterization almost always turns out to draw in turn on judgments about how well such textual elements represent children and children’s lives and experiences, while judgments based on the child draw on ideas of what kinds of styles, themes, story, plot, and characterization appeal to the child. These ostensibly different groups are therefore in fact bound by two of the most widely shared assumptions about reading in children’s literature (and in wider literary studies too): that texts are about “representation” and that reading is about “identification.” In recent decades, the concept of “empathy” has come to join or sometimes even replace “identification” and, like identification, is widely accepted (not just in children’s literature) as a natural process. Indeed, these ideas are assumed to be so natural that even in much theory they continue to be relatively little discussed or challenged. Yet, as we saw Hunt argue earlier in this chapter, the ability of theory to question what is taken for granted or seen as unquestionable is crucial here too. Assuming that reading “works” (as Hunt puts it) through representation and identification or empathy again leads to many different critical judgments with many different practical outcomes in terms of what parents, carers, teachers, librarians, and academics think are good books for children – because in such criticism, the representation has to be judged to be “right” in order for the child to identify or empathize with it. Lesnik-Oberstein, K. (2024). Children’s literature and theory. In C. Nelson, E. Wesseling, & A. M.-Y. Wu (Eds.), The Routledge companion to children’s literature and culture (pp. 9-19). Routledge. Lesnik-Oberstein (2024) Understanding reading and writing as multimodal literacies: Mapping literary and literacy pathways through text This chapter explores literary and literacy aspects of strategic reading and writing practices for learning about literacy and literature through a focus on multimodal literacies and the reconceptualisation of reading, writing and mode as strategic and personal tools for literacy practice. Understanding reading as the active mapping of unique literary and literacy pathways through text readers and writers work together to cocreate meaning based on alternative perspectives and varied experiences. Multimodality is defined and explained, and pedagogies and activities that focus on multimodal literacy are exemplified through selected children’s and young adult literature texts and author interviews. These multimodal (textual, aural, linguistic, spatial and visual) texts are discussed through the lens of multimodal, new and emotional literacies. Opportunities for multimodal reading and writing projects with learners that focus on understanding the complex relationships between reader, writer and text; and interpretation, knowledge and imagination are outlined. Picture books, as an example of multimodal text, are discussed, with a dual focus on potential author and illustrator literary and literacy pathways available within for strategicnarrative development. Reading and writing pedagogies for engaging with picture books with younger and older learners in the classroom are also explored. The last century has seen significant shifts in the understanding and practice of literacy in our daily lives. More and more frequently images rather than words are used as a mode to communicate meaning with the screen replacing the page as the dominant medium for this communication to a wide variety of private and more public audiences (Kress, 2003). As a result in our everyday experiences multimodal and collaborative literacy practices enable individuals to develop and represent their knowledge in a wide variety of different ways. These developments in our everyday literacy practices posit learners as active and agentive literacy users, developers and creators with the purpose of meaningful communication at the core of literacy practice. Thinking about how younger learners may be supported in the development of these new literacies through literature Myers (2014) explains that: [Children] see books less as mirrors and more as maps. They are indeed searching for their place in the world, but they are also deciding where they want to go. They create, through the stories they’re given, an atlas of their world, of their relationships to others, of their possible destinations… When kids today face the realities of our world, our global economies, our integrations and overlappings, they all do so without a proper map. They are navigating the streets and avenues of their lives with an inadequate, outdated chart, and we wonder why they feel lost.(Myers, 2014, p. 2) These new literacies challenge classroom contexts to reinvent traditional school-based modal conventions to include new, multimodal and collaborative literacy practices, and suggest that classroom literacy emphases on language and words alone are incomplete. Wohlwend (2017), for example, evidences how formal school literacy practices result in some materials, modes and meanings becoming unavailable to learners in classrooms. She suggests instead that a pedagogical focus on collaborative play and exploration involving multiple modes, materials, spaces and textual forms affords learners opportunities to actively engage in authentic study of communication and, more specifically, the intertextual and intermodal relationships between texts, thoughts and experiences in the world. Understanding literacy as strategic and successful engagement in meaningful, varied and diverse multimodal communication in our everyday lives is a central aspect of the conceptualisation of literacy developed in this text. Through the metaphor of maps this chapter explores experiential (literary and literacy) pathways through text, suggesting that a multimodal literacy focus in the classroom encourages learners to read, write and communicate authentically and differently, using a variety of unique modes, media and meanings. Building on Short’s (2011) first purpose for children’s and young adult literature in the context of literacy, the first two chapters of this text explore reading and writing strategically to learn about literacy and literature, focusing closely on the intertwined literary knowledge of narrative forms (such as understanding of story, themes and language) and literacy knowledge of textual structures and reading and writing processes (such as understanding comprehension, decoding skills and vocabulary). Understanding literary and literacy knowledge as interdependent and mutually constituting this chapter focuses more closely on literary knowledge and related pedagogical approaches and activities involving mapping literary (but necessarily also literacy) story pathways through text while the next chapter foregrounds literacy knowledge in our exploration of strategic reading and writing practices across a wide range of arts-based literacies in the classroom. Strategic readers and writers reflect closely and collaboratively on their textual knowledge, using both cognitive and social processes for constructing meaning. As learners share stories and experiences in this way in classroom contexts, they choose their own pathways, drawing their own semantic maps and multimodal understandings of literature, literacy and learning through literature relevant to and made from their own life experiences, previous histories and imagination. This active and authentic engagement with multimodal literacies is essential for learners if they are to be able to create the kinds of multi-layered maps (and develop the kinds of multimodal literacies) they will need to navigate their worlds beyond the classroom in the future. Worlds within texts are neither real or imaginary, they are representations offering ways of seeing and thinking about experience that can be remade from alternative perspectives. Engaging with multimodal literacies learners and teachers work together to identify new literary and literacy paths and opportunities for learning rather than meandering down old ones, using familiar texts and experiences to imagine new trajectories for learning and experience. Designing related pedagogies for learning teachers first need to understand that sharing a text in the classroom really means sharing a wide variety of different and unique literary and literacy story paths, as not all learners will experience the text in the same way. This chapter uses multimodality to explore some of these many different possible experiential pathways offered by texts and considers related pedagogies and activities for classroom practice.Interrogating the complex and entangled relationships between texts, readers and authors, a recurring theme in this text, a multimodal literacy focus supports learners in understanding the many voices (including their own) present in text as well as imagining how they might voice their own stories in the future. As Shaun Tan, one of the children’s and young adult literature authors contributing to this chapter tells us, “artists, writers, and readers are all thing-finders. We have some sense of direction but don’t really know what’s at the end of the journey; we walk beside our readers, not in front of them” (Tan, 2015, p. 112). Multimodal pathways through the intuitions of childhood and young adulthood: Understanding text as a visual object, multimodal event and sociocultural artefact Jewitt’s (2008) multimodal understanding of reading across a variety of different cultural forms including textbooks, computer games and online websites, highlights the many different ways in which readers remake a text as they journey through it. As Jewitt (2008) explains: students need to learn how to recognise what is salient in a complex multimodal text, how to read across the modal elements in a textbook, how to move from the representation of a phenomenon in an animation to a static image or written paragraph, and how to navigate through the multiple paths of a text… Along with the choice of what mode to read, the structure of many [digital] texts opens up options about where to start reading a text – what reading path to take (Jewitt, 2008, p. 259). The understanding of multimodality as a theoretical and analytic lens for making sense of communication in terms of the many different and complex ways (or modes) individuals convey a particular message to others offers an active and reader centred starting point for developing multimodal literacy focused pedagogies in the classroom. Multimodal texts experienced in our daily lives employ more than one mode (socioculturally shaped resources for meaning making, e.g. poetry, sculpture, photography, painting, dance) to make meaning (Kress, 2010) and require an understanding of multimodal or multiple literacies to interpret their intricate and interconnected messages. The concept of mutiliteracies was first developed by the New London Group (1996) as a response to multimodal understandings of communication and meaning making in changing cultural, physical, spatial and technological contexts for lit