Children's literature in academe and beyond

Where does children’s literature fit? That question has been debated by academics trying to establish its niche in the university curriculum, by classroom teachers tired of relying on textbooks, by parents and activists eager to keep “objectionable” titles off library shelves. Two recent compilations of materials related to children’s literature attempt to enlighten readers about facets of the multidisciplinary field.

Anne Lundin and Carol Cubberley examine the place of children’s literature in higher education. Acknowledging that a variety of disciplines contribute to its study and teaching, they concentrate on three areas which most frequently offer courses about children’s literature: education, library science, and English. Lundin and Cubberley identify academics as their primary audience and establish a goal “to introduce faculty members in diverse disciplines to the rich potential of children’s literature as an academic study” (4). They also stress children’s literature as literature rather than a teaching tool.

The most helpful feature of the volume is the introduction, which cogently summarizes various academic strands and critical approaches that form the history and current state of scholarship in children’s literature. The ability to synthesize and summarize demonstrated in this essay could have added much to the rest of the volume.

The first section consists of five annotated bibliographies. As in all such compilations, the authors stress the selective nature of items included. Yet, some of the omissions are puzzling. The section of reference works, for example, includes two titles of the standard NCTE Bibliography series but provides neither cross references nor the names of the other volumes. Standard sources such as Twentieth-Century Children’s Writers, the Junior Book of Authors and its sequels, and volumes by Alethea Helbig and Agnes Perkins ranging from the 1985 Dictionary of American Children’s Fiction to the recent This Land is Our Land are excluded. The omission of recent multiethnic/multicultural resources and the lack of information about editions issued since 1992 of some cited works call into question the guide’s currency.

Annotations in the section on professional journals about children’s literature are minimal and do little to help a novice distinguish among them. Consistent identification of audience, length of articles, and scholarly focus would have added to the list’s value for potential researchers, who would do better to rely on Kathy Short’s recent guide, Research and Professional Resources in Children’s Literature.

The audience for the bibliographies on “Textbooks for Teaching Children’s Literature” and “Teaching Children’s Literature to Adults” remains the college instructor, who will be well served by the thorough textbook annotations. However, those referring to this section as they peruse the sample syllabi included later in the guide might be frustrated by the lack of entries for some textbooks used in the examples. Materials in the bibliography on teaching represent a wide variety of pedagogical approaches in English, library science, and education. Professors interested in starting or revising children’s literature courses can find potential resources here.

However, the final bibliography departs from the guide’s target audience. “Teaching Children’s Literature to Young People” aims at professionals working with children. Such resources might be integrated into practicum courses designed for future librarians and classroom teachers, but the authors fail to clarify the relationship of these materials to the rest of the volume.

The potential usefulness for college instructors of the sample syllabi is more clear. In keeping with their tripartite emphasis, the authors include examples from education, English, and library science. The syllabi are reproduced without comments from the course instructors or the guide’s authors. While one can infer a good deal about the different emphases of the three disciplines from these selected syllabi, they stimulate as many questions as they answer. Why were these three instructors selected to contribute to the volume? Are their approaches representative of their disciplines? Why...