Courses

The Children's Literature Program offers an array of classic and contemporary topics in children's literature and young-adult studies. View our offerings to see which courses are available.

ECL 159: Intro to Children’s Literature Aesthetics with Professor Phillip Serrato

Introduces students to the study of children’s literature aesthetics. Explore children’s literature as an artistic medium that has experienced an amazing array of innovations and developments across time, place, and cultures. Examine conventions and experiments in form, technique, and style, we will consider the effects of, and the reasons for, the evolving features of children’s literature as a medium of creative endeavor. 

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

Read children’s literature with characters who engage, in different ways and forms, with the past. Whether through time travel, ghostly visitations, or even curses, explore the different avenues and reasons for young protagonists to understand history. Consider why the past is so present in literature that is largely concerned with the future as children grow and come of age. Consider intersections of childhood with trauma, race, culture, religion, and gender. 

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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.

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ECL 502: Adapting Girlhood: Taking “Merci Suárez” from the Page to the Stage with Professor Lashon Daley

In the unique course collaboration between the children’s literature program and the theatre department, students will learn how to adapt the middle-grade novel Merci Suárez Changes Gears by Meg Medina for the stage. This interactive course will require students to tap into their research skills as they learn to become theatre dramaturgs. While creativity and performance are a major part of the course, most students will be a part of the adaptation process, rather than performing on stage. Students of all levels of creativity are encouraged to join!

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ECL 503: Shel Silverstein: American Iconoclast with Professor Joseph Thomas

A course in textual analysis and both literary and cultural history, explore the life and work of the seemingly contradictory, ever iconoclastic Renaissance man, Shel Silverstein. Read from his poetry, cartoons, short plays, fairy tales, parables, and travel writing, watch his screen plays,
and listen to his music, all the while thinking seriously about his relation to our dominant cultural values and ideology. 

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ECL 581W: Exploring the Craft of Children’s Literature with Professor Lashon Daley

Learn the basics of writing fiction for young and young-adult readers. Develop skills on how to write strong characters, climactic plotlines, and descriptive settings. Learn the skills of creativity, communication, style, and voice. Writers of all levels are welcome.

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ECL 727: Happy Gothic with Professor Phillip Serrato

Explore happy gothic. Eschewing familiar/tired gothic studies approaches that center on fear, dread, and anxiety, see what more lighthearted versions of gothic offer and how doing so might encourage us to go back and re-read the gothic tradition writ large. 

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