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Teaching Children’s Literature in Higher
Education
Tony Watkins
Children’s literature is taught at all levels of education, from kindergarten to doctoral
level. However, this article is concerned solely with the teaching of children’s literature
at university undergraduate and graduate (or postgraduate) level.
At one time, children’s literature would have been dismissed in university
departments, particularly some English departments, as ‘kiddie lit’ and unworthy of
academic study, research and teaching. However, with the radical changes in the nature
of English studies during the 1970s and 1980s, including the increasing influence of
literary theory, the situation has changed. For example, the growth of feminist literary
theory and the realisation that many children’s books are forms of women’s writing, has
contributed to the serious study of children’s literature and makes it possible to explore
more thoroughly the ‘important role played by women in shaping the two major
traditions of Anglo-American children’s literature’ (Knoepflmacher 1992:4).
By the mid-1990s, a variety of courses in children’s literature had developed in the
USA, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and the number of such courses
continued to grow. Some of them were specifically literary in nature and taught
children’s literature as another form of literature, although with an awareness of the
dual nature of the child/adult readership. Others were literary within the context of an
education degree course, or part of multi-disciplinary courses on, say, the history and
construction of ‘childhood’.
Those involved with constructing and teaching courses on children’s literature
obviously face a number of problems. Above all, perhaps, which books to teach and,
which critical and theoretical approaches to adopt in the teaching? Other literary critical
issues which the teacher of children’s literature must come to terms with include: issues
related to particular genres or forms (for example, to realism, fantasy or folktales); the
relationship between children’s books and adult books written by the same author and,
above all, the nature of children’s literature itself and its relationship to childhood (see
for example, Rose 1984; Hunt 1991; Myers 1992). The Modern Language Association of
America’s survey of courses in children’s literature also includes problems such as ‘the
student’s frequent sentimental distrust of taking any critical approach at all to the
subject’, ethnocentrism in children’s literature; the question of censorship; and ‘the
child-adult response to classic children’s books’ (Sadler 1992:145). The last involves
getting students to recognise a potential conflict in the positions taken by adult readers
of books written for children, especially with books which students may have read when