This course incorporates book history, childhood studies, literary analysis, and digital humanities methodologies in its exploration of the social and textual production of children’s literature. Beginning with entrepreneurial printer and children’s bookseller John Newbery’s new methods of marketing to child readers and the “invention” of childhood as a post-Enlightenment project, this course will discuss the […]
This course examines issues of inequality and equity in education from a critical human rights perspective. It engages with literature linking educational rights to human rights, adopting a comparative perspective throughout. Efforts to achieve equity in education are examined.
This course critically examines international children’s rights frameworks and whether and how they translate into practice. We will explore competing conceptualizations of childhood and of Western human rights discourses and consider children’s roles as agents of social change. We will also apply these rights frameworks to analyze contemporary issues impacting children in local and global […]
This course explores the production of media for young people here in Canada. Canada has a long history of producing media texts for children and youth. Our children's television, film, music, magazine and videogame industries are rich and diverse, and are exported around the world. Yet, despite this richness and depth, the story of Canadian […]
This course critically analyzes children's health and quality of life. Students will explore multiple influences on contemporary Canadian children's health. The course ethos is the respect of children and youth as human beings, with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of The Child viewed as the most important social determinant of health for Canadian […]
Each year, the Rainbow Project Committee announces its annual Rainbow List. These titles reflect significant gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans-gendered and queer-questioning (GLBTQ) experience for young people from birth to age 18. This course analyzes some of that literature in addition to other expressions and representations of GLBTQ children and youth (film, television, digital media, music, […]
This third-year seminar takes a cultural studies, visual culture approach to learning about representation, young people and difference. The course’s starting point acknowledges that even the terms “child” and “youth” are representations that obscure embodied, sexed and gendered differences. The course has two main focuses: first, it looks at how young people are represented by […]
In this course, students learn about the intertwining relationships between illustrations and narratives in children’s picturebooks. The course invites students to think about how children, as viewers and listeners/readers, make meaning of what they see and hear and read. For these purposes, the course delves into picturebook theory from the points of view of production […]
This course analyzes changing constructions of childhood and adolescence in children's literature and adaptations of these constructions in film versions. Issues of 'translation' are highlighted both in critical readings and through the pairing of literary and film texts.
In this seminar course, students examine motifs and themes in Holocaust literature about, for, and by children and adolescents: historical fiction, creative non-fiction, short stories, poetry, picturebooks, a graphic novel. The experience is guided by theoretical readings on interrupted child development, as well as interviews, art and reflections of grown-child survivors. Together with peers and […]