Children's Literature in Action
30 credits
This Module will enable students to carry out a piece of ‘action research’, investigating a learning environment, in which an intervention based on literature is made by the student.
At the onset of this module students will set up participant-observer, ‘action research’ projects involving themselves and child or young adult readers. Through seminar discussion, students will learn how to adapt and change the project; how to report on ‘work in progress’, how to analyse process within the progression of the project, how to use learning theory, talk analysis, reader-response theory. As the project progresses the students will learn how to analyse and evaluate the data they are collecting in terms of use of language, social interactions around literary texts, psychological indications given by how children speak and behave in relation to literary texts, the importance of the role of intertextuality, social class, race and gender in how or why the children are responding in particular ways.
By the end of their projects, the students will be able to produce lucid accounts of this original research, evaluating both their ‘intervention’ in the learning environment and the children’s progress through the project, showing how the account was informed by theory and by the seminar discussions so that the project may a) be reproduced by others attempting similar projects; b) inform the debates around literacy, oracy and children’s literature; c) affect and improve the students’ own practice in whatever learning environment they work.