Education (Critical Approaches to Children's Literature)

Entry requirements

Applicants for this course should have achieved a UK 2:1 Honours Degree.

Months of entry

October

Course content

This thematic route concentrates on a wide range of fiction for children, including the "classics", texts for very young readers, international literature and novels for young adults. Close textual study and the history of children's literature are embedded within the route, on which students will also be expected to engage with some of the key debates in the field and to consider a range of theoretical perspectives – from Romanticism to reader-response theory; gender issues to posthumanism; historical studies to new historicism; sociocultural viewpoints to semiotics – as well as examining critically views of young readers and their reading choices.

The course is organised to include four modules: Texts, Contexts and Childhood; Perspectives on Children's Literature; Visual Texts; and Texts and Readers. It is assessed through two essays and a dissertation, each designed to be personally rewarding as well as professionally enlightening and intellectually challenging: a theorised reading autobiography, focusing on texts for children with particular reference to changing constructions of childhood; an empirical study of children responding to a selected visual text; and a dissertation on a topic of the student's own choosing, which may be either a purely literary study or a small empirical research project.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of the programme, students will have:

• a comprehensive understanding of research techniques, and a thorough knowledge of the literature applicable to their specific educational domain;
• demonstrated originality in the application of knowledge, together with a practical understanding of how research and enquiry are used to create and interpret knowledge in their field;
• shown abilities in the critical evaluation of current research and research techniques and methodologies; and
• demonstrated self-direction and originality in tackling and solving problems, and acted autonomously in the planning and implementation of research.