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  • Curriculum Planning in Literature for Children:Ways to Go
  • Alethea Helbig (bio)

Our children's literature program at Eastern Michigan University is an example of how one English Department has responded to the need for more children's literature classes. It consists of a Minor in English with a specialty in Children's Literature, an Interdepartmental Major in Literature and Drama for the Young, and a Master of Arts in English with a Concentration in Children's Literature. Our program is based on the firm conviction that a knowledge and appreciation of imaginative literature are among the most valuable assets that those who work with children and young people can have, both for their own education and for that of the boys and girls with whom they will come into contact.

Our children's literature program rose out of our perceptions of the needs of our students, and also out of our students' own perceptions of their needs. We sought to accomplish two main objectives. First, we wanted to broaden the education of our students, particularly of those going into teaching, so that they would have greater knowledge and appreciation of literature. Many of our students, like students generally, have read very little, and many come from homes where little reading is done. Their literary backgrounds are impoverished. Second, we wanted to help our students become more familiar with the great variety of books published for children and young people, and to prepare them to evaluate books so that they would be able to use the best of the old and the new with discrimination. Our traditional English majors and minors helped to meet these needs for some of our students, but many on the elementary, middle school, special education, or library programs found our period courses too specialized and the English curricula generally too restrictive for their purposes and interests. As our English programs were set up, there was no way for students to learn more about books for children and young people. And besides, many students had become interested in the subject area of children's literature as a discipline in its own right. So it was to expand the literary backgrounds of our students, as well as to offer new combinations of classes that would apply toward degrees, that our children's literature program was developed.

Historically, our English Department program in literature for children and young people, although small in terms of number of courses, was a strong one. For years, we had been offering two courses. One was an undergraduate survey of books for children and young people in various genres; the other was a graduate course in methods of teaching children's literature. Once primarily a teacher training institution, Eastern Michigan University has traditionally required that all undergraduates on the elementary curriculum complete a course in children's literature, and, to the best of my knowledge, the undergraduate course which has satisfied that requirement has always been offered by our English Department. It has been staffed by English Department faculty who have treated the books as literature, not as the core of material for preparing bibliographies or methods projects. Because the undergraduate class has been required for the elementary curriculum, enrollment has been consistently high. The graduate class, on the other hand, has always been an elective; but enrollment has also been steadily high. This class has been made up mainly of teachers taking it for continuing certification or for an advanced degree through the School of Education, although other disciplines have been consistently represented too. While the undergraduate course has always had a literary perspective, in recent years the thrust of the graduate methods course has changed somewhat. Because growing numbers of students entered the class knowing less and less about literature in general and about children's books in particular, the approach gradually began to emphasize literature rather than method. Those teaching the class found that they needed to acquaint their students with important books for children and young people before they could begin to deal intelligently and effectively with methods of teaching the literature.

In the late 1960s, we began planning our undergraduate English Minor with a Specialty in Children's...

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