work was done within teacher education, but there were also major developments
elsewhere. In the 1980s, Worcester College ran a diploma in professional studies in
education focused on children’s fiction—a two-year part-time course examining the
importance of children’s literature within the professional context of teaching (Croxson
1985). At the University of Birmingham, the developing M.Ed. provided opportunities to
discuss genres of children’s literature alongside general approaches to the theory and
practice of teaching literature, with reader-response criticism as an important element.
Wolfgang Iser’s work was important, too, within a major unit of the University of
Southampton’s MA (Ed.) degree. There, the emphasis was on the role of literature
(including children’s literature) as the central imaginative discipline of English. The unit
examined issues such as the nature of literary experience, criticism and ideology and
elements of reader response, combined with an examination of children’s growth
through picture books, fairy tales, poetry and fiction. At the University of Bristol, one
component of the M.Ed. degree related the close reading of novels written for children
over the past century to three theoretical topics. The first, a theory of narrative, started
from a theory of fiction making as the defining property of the imagination and moved on
to reader-response and reception theory. The second, the social production of children’s
literature, analysed the composition and world views of authors, critics, editors,
teachers and parents who make up the social formation that produces children’s
literature. The third, cultural history and cultural theory was an attempt to study the
‘many ways in which men, women and children create their fictions in order to interpret
experience’ (Inglis quoted in Watkins 1987:46).
The first MA in Britain devoted exclusively to the study of children’s literature was
started at Bulmershe College of Higher Education in 1984. The approach to children’s
literature was from a literary and cultural perspective. The first year of this part-time
degree combined the study of twentieth-century children’s literature (with the main
emphasis on literature published since 1950) with a course on the theory of children’s
literature, drawing upon a variety of literary theories. In the second year, theoretical
problems and issues which had been raised in the first year (for example, the nature of
story, in particular its structural, cultural and developmental aspects; the nature of the
reading process; issues around gender and ethnicity in children’s literature), were
refocused within four courses: ‘Popular forms of children’s fiction’, which studied comics
and television for children as well as popular fiction; ‘The oral tradition and after’, which
covered folk- and fairy tales as well as oral verse and the work of modern poets for
children who draw upon the oral tradition; ‘A brief survey of children’s literature from
1700 to 1850’; and a longer course entitled ‘Genre and period 1850–1914’, which
examined children’s literature in relation to literary and historical developments during
this period (Watkins 1987). After institutional merger, the MA degree was offered in a
new form at the University of Reading and the degree could be taken either full-time or
part-time. There were six taught modules; three core modules: nineteenth-century
children’s literature; twentieth-century children’s literature; and the theory of children’s
literature; and three additional modules drawn from the following list: eighteenth-
century children’s literature, Commonwealth children’s literature; popular forms of
children’s fiction; myth and folk-tale in children’s literature; North American children’s
literature; and children’s radio, film and television.
604 TEACHING CHILDREN’S LITERATURE IN HIGHER EDUCATION