Wikipedia:Ambassadors/Courses/Children's Literature Fall11 (Adrianne Wadewitz)/Course description

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.

Assignment
In this semester-long assignment, you will select an item from the collections of The Children's Museum of Indianapolis and write an article on it for the Simple English Wikipedia, a version of Wikipedia aimed at child readers. In this assignment, you will gain several skills:
 * Learn to write for an audience of children, some of whom will react to your writing in real time
 * Learn to write collaboratively and to negotiate
 * Understand the difference between summary and persuasive writing
 * Learn how the construction of information changes knowledge
 * Contribute to the largest reference work in the world
 * Improve research skills
 * Gain media literacy, such as how Wikipedia’s legitimacy differs from that of other reference works

Unlike many papers you have written in the past, your Wikipedia article will not argue for a particular position. The aim is for you to do research on a topic and summarize the reliable, published material on that topic. We will talk more in-depth about what it means to write an encyclopedia article, but you should be aware that the writing I am asking for in this assignment is much different than the writing I am asking for in the short responses or essay—for Wikipedia, you must summarize other people’s points of view. In your persuasive essays, you must present a debatable thesis. We will work at differentiating these two over the course of the semester.

While many of you probably use the English Wikipedia every day to look up plots for movies or background material for your papers, we will be writing for the Simple English Wikipedia. While the Simple English Wikipedia has many audiences—children, those who are learning English, students, and many more—we will primarily be thinking of our audience as children. We will adhere to the rules of writing in Basic English as laid out by the Simple English Wikipedia and challenge ourselves to communicate with a young audience--as the Simple English Wikipedia emphasizes, although the words used are basic, the information conveyed is not. We will also be working with staff from the Indianapolis Children’s Museum, who will instruct us on how best to write for children and how to present their materials in an encyclopedic form.

Editing a wiki is often a demanding experience the first time. I have structured this assignment to slowly introduce you to wikicode and wikiculture—it is imperative that you keep up with the timeline and turn in the small assignments on time. You cannot catch up at the end of the semester in a mad rush. Much help is available—from myself, from our Campus Ambassador and Online Ambassadors, and from Wikipedians in general. Take advantage of it!

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