Intro to Children’s Literature – A Pub Quiz

Week 10 is our “pub quiz”. We look at the essential facts about Children’s Literature with an emphasis on late 20th and 21st Centuries. There is a certain amount of general knowledge students should be expected to have by the end of this course. So, they are presented with a “pub quiz” which they can access before the session. They then work their way through this in class in teams along with fitting a list of children’s writer’s into a series of grids that identifies who wrote what for whom when.
It was a bitter cold day yesterday and some roads were difficult to access because of snow and ice. The class is from 4.00 to 6.00. Many students commute quite a long way. Nevertheless, a committed bunch of seven turned up and worked through the material with gusto. We also spent a little time looking at a picture book text that one of the students had written. It broke all of the rules but still worked.
The answers were given after about one hour. This led to some quite lively discussions about some of the key figures in Children’s Literature. There were many grey areas. A discussion of those bought us to some consideration of what happens in the study of English Literature. Basically if you believe something is true it is up to you to prove it with convincing and extended arguments quoting the texts. Could J.R. Tolkien and J.K. Rowling fit into most of the boxes, in fact, followed closely by Enid Blyton, Rudyard Kipling, C. S. Lewis and Charles Dickens? And did they think to put my name in any of the boxes?

Cross-cultural thinking

Something a student said to me today pulled me up rather sharply. Could she include books form other cultures in her Critical Analysis and Evaluation? Yes, of course yes, oh yes and yes.
After all, the person writing this blog is the one whose Ph D Thesis is subtitled “Towards a Global Definition of the Young Adult Novel.”
I’ve spent considerable time in my “Introduction to Children’s Literature” talking about how books today have to be “politically correct” and in particular how young people should not be left alone or left with dubious adults. This, of course, refers only to texts, written in English, about characters in the Northern Hemisphere, Western World and white South Africa.
There are numerous picture books, for instance, still written in English, but based on other native populations on the African, American, Oceania continents and the Indian subcontinent showing young people operating within other cultures – cultures where the children work with the adults, where they are left alone and where they are in many ways more “street” or “worldly” wise than their first world peers.
What a wake-up call!

The Children’s Collection at Manchester Metropolitan University

The Children’s Collection at Manchester Metropolitan University
I spent a fascinating time viewing this collection this afternoon. It is a very random collection and therefore leaves researchers to make up their own minds. There are modern books and books going back to the nineteenth century. There are collections of magazines for children. I was intrigued to see copies of the encyclopaedias that were my father’s and we have only just, sadly, disposed of. I was also intrigued to find a copy in paperback of a book I own in hardback. It was a Sunday School prize for my grandfather.
There is this strange relationship between trade books and education. Books are sold and produced along commercial principles. Yet they have an educational use, and that is part of their commercial value. Does that all come from the time that books had those two very specific educational purposes – to teach children how to read and also to teach them morals?
It’s also interesting to reflect how over time the child was invented, then the teenager, and now the young adult. Will there be something else?
There are some gaps in the collection. No Enid Blyton. Most of the collection middle class, or at least very moral. The collection is continued by picking just books that have got awards. That worries me. I know I too tend to read the books which have got awards or good reviews. But what of those that are not even reviewed? Thank goodness for Amazon, that great equaliser. I don’t know how it communicates with this collection.
Nevertheless, a fascinating place to browse.
It’s just a five minute ride form here, at Salford University to Oxford Road and a five minute walk at either end. I met my equivalent over there, Sherry Ashworth. We had lunch together in The Eighth Day Café. Fabulous food. Good company. And yet it’s great to get back to Salford which seems quiet after the bustle of Oxford Road.