Education (Critical Approaches to Children's Literature)

Entry requirements

Applicants for this course should have achieved a UK High II.i Honours Degree.

If your degree is not from the UK, please check International Qualifications to find the equivalent in your country.

Months of entry

October

Course content

This thematic route concentrates on a wide range of writing for children, including the "classics", texts for very young readers, international literature and literature 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 case study of children's texts that makes use of library-based research (from archival to digital), 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.

Information for international students

Language Requirement

IELTS (Academic)

Element Score

Listening 7.0

Writing 7.0

Reading 7.0

Speaking 7.0

Total 7.5

TOEFL Internet Score

Element Score

Listening 25

Writing 25

Reading 25

Speaking 25

Total 110

CAE

Score: Grade A & B (overall score of 193, with no element lower than 185 plus a Language Centre assessment)

CPE

Score: Grade A, B, or C (with at least 200 with no element lower than 185).