Introduction to Children's Literature Studies

Lesson Overview

Contrary to what many outsiders might assume, children's literature studies has a rich and varied body of research that is growing at a phenomenal rate world-wide. Historically, we've looked at research in children's literature studies as coming from the three disciplines most commonly associated with children's literature: Education, English Literature, and Library Science. Broadly, research in education has looked at some matter relating to pedagogy, English Literature to literary criticism, and Library Science to bibliography. As our understandings of literature and children have broadened since 1975, so has research on children's literature. Nowadays, children's literature research can be informed by many disciplines including: pedagogy, literary criticism, bibliography, linguistics, psychoanalysis, spirituality, sociology, anthropology, economics, child development, ethnography, and cultural studies. In this lesson you will get three overviews of research in children's literature studies. Notice the kinds of questions different disciplines ask and where they look to find data.

Lesson Objectives

After successfully completing this lesson, you should be able to:

• Recognize the possibilities of children's literature research.
• Explain what makes research research.

What Is Research?

For some of you the word research may evoke images of scientists in lab coats using sophisticated equipment and complicated statistics to discover knowledge that no one knew before. True, that is research, but it is not the only kind of research.

The Wikipedia <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research> defines research as an active, diligent and systematic process of inquiry in order to discover, interpret or revise facts, events, behaviors, or theories, or to make practical applications with the help of such facts, laws or theories. The term research is also used to describe the collection of information about a particular subject.

The key ideas in this definition are that research is "a process of inquiry" in order to learn some new idea or application, the collection of information. In this sense we are all researchers as we are commonly involved in inquiry. Why does he do that? What would happen if I did this? What is the rest of the story? How can I learn more about this? How can I make this happen? We problem solve our way through each day, using our innate curiosity, storing up little epiphanies that we incorporate unconsciously into our theories of the world.

If we do this in some kind of systematic fashion, this inquiry becomes research. In this course we will consider research from two angles — one is the theoretical foundation upon which we ask and answer questions about children's literature, the other is the more practical concern of devising methods to guide systematically our inquiry.

What Is Research in Children's Literature Studies?

What is research in children's literature studies? First, a word about the term children's literature studies. The range of inquiry into aspects of children's literature is astonishing. Children's literature has been approached through literary theory, child development, cultural history, childhood studies, gender studies, queer theory, critical multiculturalism, linguistics, literacy, pedagogy, reader response, interest surveys, human cognition, narratology, psychoanalysis, bibliotherapy, sociology, anthropology, historical and archival studies. In order to account for this range, these interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches, scholars have recently taken to using the term children's literature studies to include all of the varied perspectives and approaches to doing research around some aspect of children's literature. This is an exciting time for children's literature.

To give you an idea of the range of research that is available, you will be reading three different reviews of the research that attempt to pull this wide-ranging research into some kind of coherent statement:

• Margaret Meek is a well-known scholar of language, literacy, and children's literature and writes from a view of literacy as a cultural construct. She is perhaps best known for looking at children's literature as lessons authors give children on how to read their stories.
• Peter Hunt is now retired from Cardiff University in Wales, where he taught children's literature in the English department. Literary and Cultural theory lay at the foundation of his thinking about children's literature.
• Lee Galda, Gwynne Ash, and Bea Cullinan are well-known proponents of literature-based reading. When they think about children's literature, their concerns tend toward classrooms. Though each scholar is attempting to accomplish a similar project, their visions are quite different.

Meek - Discussions on Children's Literature

Meek's essay, What Counts as Evidence in Theories of Children's Literature? was written in 1982, yet it still serves as a marker in attempts to understand how we might understand children's literature. Margaret Meek is one of the most influential thinkers in the fields of literacy and children's literature and is well known for asking questions that push these fields into new and exciting terrain. She begins her essay with a reminder of past attempts to theorize children's literature. John Newbery, the 18th century children's book publisher and bookseller, held as his motto "Trade and Plumb Cake for Ever, Hurrah!" a succinct statement that his purpose was to offer children something they would find pleasurable (plum cake) and that he would make a good profit from the selling of these pleasures (trade). This is a statement that could describe most publishers of children's books today.

Newbery's motto also points towards how we might frame inquiry into matters of children's literature. If creating pleasure is a prime motivation for producing children's books, then what counts as pleasure? Who gets to decide what pleasure is? Is pleasure always good? Is pleasure always happy? What kinds of books induce pleasure in children and why? You begin to see how questions of creating books and critiquing books begin to arise. How do we use books with children so that they might experience pleasure?

Then we could bring the matter of trade into question. What kinds of material sell well? Are pleasure and profit always harmonious partners? Are there cases where one overrides the other? So we see that a simple statement of purpose "Trade and Plum Cake for Ever" can drive a series of questions we might wish to research.

Meek goes on to posit that any theory about children's literature begins with ourselves and that our understandings of "literature, children, reading, writing, language, linguistics, politics, sociology, history, education, sex, psychology, art or combination of some or all of these, to say nothing of joy or sadness, pleasure or pain" serve as frames for us to being able to think about children's literature. In other words, it is possible to think about children's literature in an almost infinite number of ways, all of which will say something about ourselves. Research, Meek seems to be saying, is personal.

The bulk of Meek's essay is a discussion of three areas that could inform our thinking about children's literature: literacy, the culture of childhood, and narrative.

Literacy

Meek's thinking about literacy is radical. She is not thinking about acquiring proficiency, but rather how the literature children encounter shapes their expectations for literature as adults. She argues that children's literature is an ever-changing set of reading lessons, that children's literature is the first literary experience youngsters have, and that it should point towards the kinds of literary experiences they will have as adults.

The Culture of Childhood

Meek believes that children's literature is the literature actual children do read. Studies of children's literature have shown an ambivalent feeling towards the popular culture of children, in part because a significant portion of the field sees their task as identifying what is good. Culture is sometimes defined as "shared knowledge." From this viewpoint, children's culture would surely include the stories children hold in common. Where these stories come from isn't a constant. Meek notes that when she was a young girl, she got her stories from books. At the time she wrote the piece, she noted that television is where children get the majority of their stories from. Today, television is still a major source of stories, but we also need to look at electronic media and perhaps new forms of paper-based storytelling such as graphic novels.

Narrative

It's a short jump from here to a discussion of the importance of narrative. Meek was among a handful of scholars in the late 1970s and early 1980s that argued that narrative was a primary mode of thinking that stories are how our brains organize and understand sensory information. This invites closer examinations of how authors organize their narratives and how children interact with their stories.

Hunt — Complexity and Diversity in Children's Literature Studies

Hunt, in his introduction chapter, The Expanding World of Children's Literature Studies, in Understanding Children's Literature, states that "children's books are complex and the study of them infinitely varied" (p.2). That sentence could serve as a summary statement for this course.

Hunt begins his essay with a discussion on how complex and problematic the terms literature and children are, and what consequences the theorizing around these two ideas can have for children's literature. From there he moves to looking at historical studies of children's literature, noting that it is impossible to separate this history from politics and ideology. Oftentimes we view politics and ideology as negatives, something dirty from the adult world that pollutes children's literature studies. What Hunt argues is that we cannot "see" without first having an ideological point of view.

The relationship between reader and text is a recurrent theme in children's literature studies. Implicit in any discussion of children's books is a theory of reading, and of how readers interpret and understand text. Where does the meaning reside? Is it in the text? Is it in the reader? Is it somewhere else? Hunt lays out the complexity and ideology involved when addressing these kinds of questions toward children's literature.

Hunt makes a provocative point on pages 9 & 10 about the importance that children's literature be useful. A good book is a book that is "good for" children. Implicit in most discussions of children's books is notion that a children's book ought to do something positive for the reader and books that potentially could cause harm ought to be avoided. Of course what counts as "good" and as "harm" will shift across groups and time.

Galda et al. — Children's Literature

[Notes: There are many useful databases via Penn State Network Access for doing research in children's literature, which will be discussed more in detail later in the Research Basics lesson. Please go to NetLibrary via PSU LIAS system <http://www.libraries.psu.edu/> in order to locate the following article, "Children's Literature," Chapter 22 in M.L. Kamil, P.B. Mosenthal, P.D. Pearson, & R. Barr (Eds.), Handbook of Reading Research Volume 3 (pp. 361-379). If you have any questions, follow the tutorial here. Also, check out the NetLiberary Guide if you would like to know more about this particular service and its access information.

The authors of this article, Children's Literature in Handbook of Reading Research chose to organize their review of the research around the conventional categories of "text," "reader," and "context."Of course any reading of a children's book will necessarily have a text that is read by a reader in some kind of social situation that shapes the purpose the reader has in reading. They note, pointedly, that previous editions of the Handbook of Reading Research have no discussion of children's literature, a nod to reading scholars' increased interest in what children read. Interestingly, the editors of this recent edition of the handbook chose to put this chapter in the section "Reading Processes."

In the "Children's Literature as Text" section, Galda, et al. distinguish between content analysis and literary analysis. By content analysis they seem to mean criticism that looks at the authenticity of multicultural children's literature. They note that there are too many flavors of literary analysis for them to elucidate, giving just three examples Neumeyer's close reading and historical study of Charlotte's Web, Nodelman's investigation of the semiotics of picture books, and Stephens' work on ideology and children's books.

The authors then go into a much longer section on readers. They first note the early research on children's interests and then follow that into more detailed studies of how children demonstrate their understandings of the books they read.

The final section discusses literature in the classroom and what kinds of classrooms seem to encourage deeper understanding of literature.

Activities & Assignments

General Discussions

1. Participate in the Lesson 1 Readings discussion forum. To access this discussion forum, go to your Team Discussion Space folder (e.g Team A Discussion Space , or Team B Discussion Space ) under the Lessons tab.
   • Post on the discussion forum what captured your attention in each of the three articles.
     
2. Participate in the Lesson 1 Study Report discussion forum. To access this discussion forum, go to your Team Discussion Space folder under the Lessons tab.
   • Look up one of the studies mentioned in one of the articles, read it, and report on it to the group.

Identify Your Interest in Children's Literature

1. Make a list of five things you'd like to know more about in children's literature. These should be topics that would be appropriate for your master's paper. Don't worry about being committed to a topic just yet. Your possible topics will no doubt change between now and when you work on your problem statement. We will be using this list throughout the course to compose research questions according to different theoretical frameworks.
2. Submit it to the Lesson 1 Research Topics drop box. To access this drop box, go to the Course Drop Box folder under the Lesson tab.