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Children’S Literature At Fifty: Pedagogy Under The Covers, Elisabeth Rose Gruner

English Faculty Publications

Like so many scholars of children’s literature, I came to children’s lit- erature through teaching. Trained as a Victorianist, I saw a gap in my department’s course offerings and somewhat naively offered to fill it with a children’s literature course, banking on my work on childhood in the Victorian novel and my pedagogical skills to carry me through. The Children’s Literature Association and Children’s Literature were my mentors during those years—as they continue to be—teaching me how to teach and think about children’s literature both as a genre and as a course of undergraduate study.

Francelia Butler’s entrée into the …

Education, Elisabeth Rose Gruner

English Faculty Publications

In both Keywords (Williams 1983a) and New Keywords (Bennett, Grossberg, and Morris 2005), "education" (Keywords has "educate") is primarily an institutional practice, which, after the late eighteenth century, is increasingly formalized and universalized in Western countries. Bearing the twin senses of "to lead forth" (from the Latin educare) and "to bring up" (from the Latin educare), "education" appears chiefly as an action practiced by adults on children. The Oxford English Dictionary thus defines the terms as "the systematic instruction, schooling, or training given to the young in preparation for the work of life."

Teach The Children: Education And Knowledge In Recent Children's Fantasy, Elisabeth Rose Gruner

English Faculty Publications

This essay is an investigation into how learning is portrayed in children's books. It starts from two premises: first, that at least one origin of children's literature is in didacticism, and that learning and pedagogy continue to be important in much of the literature we provide for children today. Thus, for example, David Rudd claims that most histories of children's literature on "the tension between instruction and entertainment," and that the genre as we know it develops within, among other things, "an educational system promoting literacy" (29, 34). Seth Lerer's recent Children's Literature: A Reader's History similarly traces the origins …