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InThe Rope Trick by Lloyd Alexander, Lidi learns that the secret to magic is love. When you love your art and love your audience, real magic happens. Let's see if we can create that in this classroom and carry it out into the world! :)
The purpose of this course is to develop strategies for introducing students to the wonder of reading! To work that kind of magic, we'll need to immerse ourselves in the world of children and young adult's literature. Each of you will create a portfolio of texts and assignments that you will carry with you.
I have been studying fairy tales and children's literature for more two decades, and I am excited to make this journey together with you, because every semester is full of new joys and surprises. We'll adjust things as needed along the way! :)
Beth Krommes
Children's Lit and You
Let's go around the (VIRTUAL) room! Introduce yourself by telling me about a book you read and re-read as a kid. What do you think you liked about it?
Unit 1 Discussion #1:
Do you remember when you LIKED to sit and read books (or have them read to you)? Let's try to recover that feeling in this class. That is the beginning of SHARING the joy of reading with young readers.
Describe your most memorable experience with children's or YA literature as a young reader. What was the book? Why do you think it made an impact on you? Was it an engaging plot? Did it speak to your life circumstances (or let you escape them)? What do you want to do with Children's and YA literature in the future?
Topics in Children's and Young Adult's Literature. Explores topics in children’s and young adult (YA) literature, emphasizing significant authors, major themes, cultural contexts, and children's literacy.
Course Objectives
1. critical reading of children's and YA lit tradition
2. identify significant authors and major literary themes
3. analyze texts through cultural contexts and children's literacy
Assignment #1: CHALK DAY!!!!!!
This week, we read Journey where the protagonists create their own fantastic world with chalk. Come to Dr. H's office to get some chalk and write a line from your FAVORITE children's or YA book in CHALK on the sidewalk in the quad WEDNESDAY, 16 AUGUST 2023, 12:00 - 1:00pm!!! THERE WILL BE PIZZA!!!
Purpose: Practice and experience different ways to engage young readers with literature!! This is ALSO a chance to MEET me and your classmates (which I think can make group work easier)!
Tasks:
Find a QUOTE from your favorite children's or YA book (appropriate for all audiences).
Come to the QUAD behind Avery Hall on Wednesday, 16 August 2023, 12-1pm.
Write quote in chalk on the sidewalk!
Take a picture and post it here for credit! If you are not on campus, you can take a picture of yourself drawing a quote with chalk somewhere else and post it.
Criteria: participation.
Learning About Story and Engaging Children
Essentials of Children's Literature (ECL) 2023:
This is our text book for this class. It provides useful strategies and theories for evaluating, analyzing, and selecting literature for young people. However, this is not a text that needs to be studied intensely or memorized. It's a REFERENCE tool that you can use to help guide and support your OWN evaluations, analysis, and selection of texts!
Essentials of Children's Literature Chapter 1 "Connecting to the Value of Story" Highlights:
Skim for an introduction to Children's Literature
Essentials of Children's Literature Chapter 2 "Connecting Children with Literature" Highlights:
Begin reading for next week: Flora and Ulysses (Newberry 2014)
Since this is an ONLINE class, we will be VIEWING a lot of texts online (in order to keep costs reasonable). Our fiction texts for this week are all YouTube read-aloud texts.
Watch this recording of the Caldacott-winning children's book Journey and think about the way that the illustrator creates access to imaginary worlds.
The shift from beige and brown scenes to vibrant watercolor landscapes reminds me of the magical moment when Dorothy enters Oz in the 1939 film "The Wizard of Oz" - for many viewers (like my Mom), it was their first experience of film beyond black and white.
How does this image from Journey create a sense of wonder?
Both Becker and De La Pena use illustration styles to differentiate between the external reality and internal reality of the child protagonist.
We Don't Eat Out Classmates
Caldecott picture books Journey and Milo Imagines the World deal with heavy topics that many children face! By contrast, Caldecott winning author and illustrator RYAN HIGGINS works through HUMOR with his topic and illustrations.
How do RYAN HIGGINS' illustrations create humor for the child-reader?
HUMOR AS BENIGN VIOLATION
Dr. Peter McGraw’s Benign Violation Theory of humor is the most useful analytical tool for humor I have found as a literary scholar because of it’s WIDE application (and it’s ability to explain both HUMOR and OFFENSE at humor).
Here is the FULL LENGTH TEDTalk - I highly recommend watching this if you haven’t seen it already!
Unit 1 Discussion #2: EVALUATING TEXTS
Chapter 2 includes several important lists as well as an introduction to award-winning literature for young readers (i.e children's and YA literature):
Appealing Formats and Structures
High Interest Content
Discovering the Reading Interests of Children (2 lists)
Dimensions of Text Complexity
Let's apply these lists to our texts today!
Choose ONE text for elementary-age children from this week's readings, and use either "Appealing Formats and Structures" or "High Interest Content" to evaluate the book. Reflect on this is 100 words or less.
Unit 1 Analysis EXAMPLE
This is Table 2.1 from ECL for evaluating the complexity of a text. Let's use this to evaluate Milo Imagines the World.
An article by NPR quotes de la Peña's single-sentence summary of the book: "It's about a boy who is a budding artist and he's looking at all the interesting people around him on the subway ride, and he's imagining their lives as a way to pass the time."
However, illustrator Christian Robinson adds a layer of complexity to this story with his illustrations, showing Milo's internal reality, which is different from the external glimpse of reality Milo experiences on the subway ride.
This story is a reflection of Robinson's own childhood, growing up in his grandmother's a one-bedroom Los Angeles apartment, and visiting his mother at the penitentiary. Like Milo, he took control of his own chaotic world through drawings: expressing his fear or illustrating a new reality for himself.
Milo Imagines the World
Levels of Purpose and Meaning
The plot is a child traveling on the subway to the last stop at the women's penitentiary.
Milo, the protagonist, imagines the lives of the other passengers as he travels.
Complex reading of images.
CHANGE in Milo's world view.
When he reaches the penitentiary to meet his mother, he realizes the stories he imagined for the other passengers may have been wrong.
Complex change in world views.
Structure
The structure is more complex than stories like We Don't Eat Our Classmates.
Knowledge Demands
Interpret bias and depression in Milo's original drawings as well as the visual coding of the later images.
Reader and Text Considerations
The potentially sensitive nature of the subject matter requires a knowledge of the audience to determine the fitness of the text.
Experiences and Strategies of a Reader
The experience of readers will dramatically shape how the child reader understands and interprets the text.
A chart like this just visualizes ONE approach to evaluating the complexities that Christian Robinson describes in the article.
THE NEXT STEP IS ANALYSIS!
What is the MEANING/significance/purpose of the complexities in Milo Imagines the World??
THESIS: The interior thought-world of child protagonist, Milo, in Milo Imagines the World (2021), is coded in images. The images allow the child-reader to symbolically interpret Milo's complex and emotionally fraught experience through their own knowledge and experiences.
Example:
Milo imagines the prejudice and suspicion that the break dancers experience once they get off the train. The images imply this is a racialized class prejudice: the dancers unwelcome in expensive stores and "fancy" neighborhoods. The scribble on the page as Milo puts his journal away implies his emotional turmoil: he identifies with the dancers and their experience of bias. While a child reader can understand that the dancers are not treated fairly, their ability to understand the layers of prejudice illustrated in Milo's picture as well as Milo's psychological state, would be shaped by their knowledge and experience.
By coding complex social realities in a child's drawings, Robinson and de la Peña allow their diverse child audience to interpret this book at different levels based on their own knowledge and experience.
This is the US report on minors with incarcerated parents: Parents in Prison with Minor Children - Christian Robinson's experience is shared more than 2% of young readers.
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