CSP 74 Teaching Social Justice Through Children's Literature

Traditionally, we often think of children's literature as offering young readers a rosy, almost naive portrait of the world they live in. Yet modern and contemporary writers of children's fiction have innovated substantially on this model, using children's literature as a platform for drawing attention to social injustice and for galvanizing children to recognize and resist these inequities. In both historical fiction and texts set in today's world, authors ranging from Mildred Taylor and Louise Erdrich to Laurie Halse Anderson and Sherman Alexie have written texts intended for junior high and high school readers that nevertheless tackle issues ranging from racial injustice and settler colonialism to rape culture and socioeconomic inequality. Even picture books written for elementary schoolers can broach similar topics, as examples by famed authors Ntozake Shange and Chinua Achebe have shown. Students in this course will examine some of these boundary-pushing representations by writers living in the United States from the 1970s through the present, considering them alongside earlier, less revolutionary children's novels by Laura Ingalls Wilder and Frances Hodgson Burnett. Theories of children's literature and research on its potential effects on young readers will also form a foundation for our analyses.