Wikipedia:Ambassadors/Courses/Children&

Course description
In this course we will explore how writers of children’s literature from the 17th century to the 21st century have molded distinctive gendered, national and religious images of childhood and how these depictions have contributed to the cultures in which they participated. We will be asking questions about how different time periods and cultures defined childhood and how those definitions shape our own understandings of education and childcare. We will take especial care to investigate what children’s literature tells us both about the adult culture that produced this literature and the children (and tweens, teens, and adults) that read it. We will investigate a variety of genres, including the fairy tale, the school story, the picture book, the fantasy novel, and the textbook, as a way to think about various definitions of children’s literature.

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