years later had over 1,200 members (Sadler 1992:144). In 1992, an MLA survey claimed
that courses in children’s literature in higher education reflected the
eclectic nature of the subject both for instruction and research. The range is very
widespread in orientation and in methodology. One finds under-graduate
introductory courses, studies of myth and folklore, and historical approaches to the
classics, as well as genre courses on fantasy and fairy tales, the picture book, and
related studies, such as the linking of children’s literature to composition, Third
World literature, and feminist criticism.
Sadler 1992:144The wide range of courses is best illustrated by some examples. A course at the
University of Massachusetts, Amherst, on ‘Myth, folktale and children’s literature’ drew
upon narrative, semiotic, and reader-response theories of literature combined with
models drawn from cognitive psychology, cultural anthropology and folklore studies.
Each of the twenty-eight sessions involved a lecture and discussion of four to six
traditional tales or myths and seven or eight children’s books related to the tales in
theme, structure, or character (Moebius 1992). The course at the University of
Pittsburgh, ‘Children’s literature: great books’, one of the three core courses in an
interdisciplinary children’s literature programme involving the English department and
the School of Library and Information Science, covered a range of books from myths and
legends to picture books, fantasy, fiction and poetry. The Fantasy unit, for example,
involved study of the Alice books, The Wizard of Oz, The Wind in the Willows, and
Charlotte’s Web (Meek 1992).
Some of the courses described were in the form of seminars and workshops, linking
the study of children’s literature to the practice of learning to write it. The Graduate
Seminar in Children’s Literature in the English Department, Iowa State University, for
example, was a two-week seminar in which the mornings were devoted to the history of
children’s literature and the afternoons were devoted to writing an original piece of
children’s fiction (Mendelson 1992). The history strand ran from the work of John
Newbery, Maria Edgeworth and Mrs Barbauld via nineteenth-century fairy tales, Lewis
Carroll, Louisa May Alcott, Frances Hodgson Burnett, R.L.Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling,
Beatrix Potter and Kenneth Grahame to E.B.White, C.S.Lewis and Maurice Sendak. The
creative writing strand took students from the initial plan of the narrative, through
characters, point of view, to sharing their manuscripts with other members of the class.
Graduate study programmes in children’s literature (that is, those involving study and
research at master’s and doctoral level) expanded considerably in the USA from the
mid-1980s to the early 1990s. (Such programmes are called ‘postgraduate courses’ in
Britain.) The Children’s Literature Association’s Directory of Graduate Studies in
Children’s Literature, published in 1992, listed 200 graduate schools in the fields of
Education, English and Library Science which offered courses in children’s literature.
They ranged from those who offered only one course to those, like Eastern Michigan
University, which offered eight courses and Simmons College, Boston, Massachusetts,
which offered nine courses for their MA in children’s literature. The Eastern Michigan
MA in English with concentration in children’s literature consisted of courses such as
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