major genres in children’s literature, history of children’s literature, comparative
mythology, literature for adolescents, literature for early childhood and children’s
literature: criticism and response. The MA programme at Simmons College which ran
over two semesters plus one summer was not a professional programme: it conferred ‘an
MA in children’s literature comparable to an MA in English’ (Bloom and Mercier 1992:
207). The first semester consisted of a cycle of history and criticism courses including
criticism of children’s literature, the picture book, and Victorian children’s literature; the
second semester included courses on fantasy and science fiction, and contemporary
realistic fiction. Institutes and symposias were held in alternate summers.
Courses in children’s literature in Britain developed from the beginning of the 1970s
in institutions such as Colleges of Education, and a series of occasional articles which
appeared in the British journal Signal during the 1980s and into the 1990s gave details
of some of the work within initial and in-service teacher education. (For an overview of
some of this work, see Watkins 1987). The picture that emerged was a contradictory one.
On the one hand, universities and colleges had suffered severe restrictions on finance
and resources over the previous years: faculty staff who left were not replaced,
institutions were restricted to training teachers for work in either primary schools or
secondary schools, but not for both, and so on. Within the field of children’s literature,
resource limitations meant that it was very difficult to continue to run some courses,
and therefore contraction rather than expansion was more normal. But, paradoxically,
activity was increasing.
There are two main ways of becoming a teacher in Britain: by taking either a four-year
bachelor of education degree (B.Ed.), or a three-year degree in sciences, arts or
humanities followed by a one-year postgraduate certificate in education (PGCE). In the
B.Ed. programmes of those institutions enthusiastic about children’s literature, faculty
members ran courses for all undergraduates, whatever their specialist subject (see for
example, Watson 1985; Fox 1985; Butts and Watkins 1985). Students specialising in
English within the B.Ed. within such institutions had the chance to study even more
children’s literature: for example, at the University of Exeter, English students devoted a
term in year two of their degree to a course which considered a range of topics from fairy
tales and myths, to poetry, fantasy, series books, and realistic adolescent fiction. (Fox
1985:114–115). At Bulmershe College, English specialists could take courses in
children’s literature for 5 to 8-year-olds, or for 7 to 11-year-olds, nineteenth-century
children’s literature, and a course called children and literature which discussed topics
as various as the nature of story, children’s television, poetry and folk-tales and myths
(Butts and Watkins 1985:178–180). In the 1990s, the main B.Ed. English course at
Westminster College, Oxford, combined the study of children’s literature with aspects of
literary theory. For example, the first year covered such topics as ‘picture books and
their implied readers; codes; intertextuality; narrative modes; metafictive picture books;
text and illustrations; reading children’s novels as adults; the nature of the reader’s
response’. The second year covered topics such as ‘ideology; literature in translation;...
introduction to history of children’s books; classics; literary fairy tales’, and so on
(Sutcliffe 1995:136). The emphasis in the course was on ‘personal response while
developing an appreciation of technical qualities and their effect on meaning’ (Sutcliffe
1995:137).
602 TEACHING CHILDREN’S LITERATURE IN HIGHER EDUCATION