NEWSLETTER

Society for the History of Children and Youth

Course on Historical Aspects of Children's Literature
Margot Hillel, Australian Catholic University

ENGL 212 Historical Aspects of Children’s Literature was taught at Australian Catholic University, Melbourne, in 2007 by Margot Hillel, Shurlee Swain, and Belinda Sweeney.  As team-taught course, the class offered students a cross-disciplinary perspective on the topic.

Children’s literature has played its part both in establishing and reflecting society’s views of children and childhood. This interdisciplinary course is designed to develop in students an understanding of key debates in the history of childhood and the history of children’s literature; the social constructions of key concepts of childhood and the way in which sources are used to construct arguments within both disciplines. The course draws on a range of literary and historical sources to explore specific issues in the history of children’s literature and childhood. It develops an understanding of the importance of the value of literature as a way of considering constructions of childhood. In addition to the written representations of childhood, the course also gives attention to visual representations and how these manipulate the viewer in order to provoke a particular response and construct particular views of childhood.

The course runs for 12 weeks with lectures, tutorials and WebCT discussion boards. The topics covered are: What is a child? The Child in the Family; The Child at School; The Child as Redeemer; The Vulnerable Child; The Eroticised Child; The Body of the Child;The Heroic Child; The Racialised Child; Childhood and Politics; The Death of Childhood and The Child in Contemporary Society.

Each week, students are required to read the work of relevant literary critics and  historians, as well as a novel, from a set list, on that week’s topic. Questions are given to guide students’ discussion on each topic. For the week on the family, for example, the questions are:

How is the family story used by writers to reinforce gender roles and social ideas of the times?
How is the family portrayed in such books?
What is the importance of the family to the child?
What is being constructed as the ideal family?
How do such books reflect dominant ideologies?
Discuss changes in these ideologies which might reflect changes in societal ideologies.
Is the bourgeois family ideal attainable across class lines?

The final assessment task is designed to draw together the threads of the unit and asks students to:  ‘choose a historical piece of children’s literature, initially published at least sixty years ago, and write a critical, fully-referenced evaluation of the work. In the discussion, students must pay particular attention to the images of childhood represented in the book, the ideological underpinnings of these images and the social and cultural mores of the time in which the book is set.’ In order to complete this task, students had access to the University’s historical collection of children’s books.