Fall 2024 and Spring 2025 Courses

The Children's Literature Program offers an array of classic and contemporary topics in children's literature and young-adult studies.

ECL 306A/W: Children’s Literature and Advanced Composition with Lecturer Tishna Asim

Investigate various themes in children’s literature, spanning multiple time periods, cultures, and schools of thought.  Experience many formats of literature—poetry, novel, short story, film, television show/episode, picture book—and visit many genres (fairy tale, quest/adventure narrative, problem novel, etc.) to pinpoint the purposes and pleasures within children’s literature.

What We're Reading

ECL 306A/W: Children’s Literature and Advanced Composition with Lecturer Sequoia Stone

Read children’s literature that explores the highs and lows of coming-of-age as the protagonists of our texts work to understand and develop their identities apart from, yet still part of, their families, their friends, and their histories. Explore texts where young protagonists use different forms of creative expression— including zines, music, cooking, and witchcraft—to formulate and communicate selfhood.

What We're Reading

 

ECL 401: Literature for Children with Professor Kathleen Shumate

Explore with The Hunger Games by applying Monster Theory, and end the semester with a story of urban black childhood in Ghetto Cowboy. Other texts include fairy tales and picture books. Visit or revisit these stories of our childhoods, the impact of these stories on our lives, and how we continue to view and respond to the world from these stories.

What We're Reading

 

ECL 501: Literature for Children with Professor Phillip Serrato

Meet, analyze, interpret, understand, and appreciate diverse works for children with an unabashed investment in the valuable/necessary ways that literature (and other forms of creative production) inspire, illuminate, and nourish us to become agents for personal and relational change. 

 

ECL 502: Adolescence in Literature with Professor Lashon Daley

Read middle-grade and YA novels, alongside the groundbreaking work of prominent girlhood studies scholars, in order to investigate girlhood as both a political category and a social identity.

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ECL 503: #Kidlit for Researchers and Content Creators with Professor Lashon Daley

Develop research projects that center children's literature, while learning about the basics of social media content creation.

What We're Reading