590YL

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Seminar in Youth, Literature, and Culture

Course #: LIS 590 YL
Instructors: Betsy Hearne and Christine Jenkins
Semester: Spring 2006
Time: Tuesday, 12:00-2:50 p.m.
Place: 131 LISB (officially) and 24 LISB (really, most days)
Credit: 4 hours

Description: The goal of this interdisciplinary course is to acculturate doctoral students into research careers related to youth, defined as birth through adolescence; literature, defined broadly as oral, print, and electronic; and culture, including historical, contemporary, educational, and popular. The focus is on scholarship in children's and young adult literature; storytelling and folklore in the oral tradition; text and young reader interactions in multiple literacies; and the roles of youth professionals in libraries, schools, families, and other settings. Questions that we will consider include the following: How does knowledge in the form of oral, print, and electronic texts shape, reflect, and enrich the lives of children and young adults? How do stories, books, visual media, and popular culture cross boundaries of age level, culture, class, history, time, place, format, and meaning? How do we understand connections between young readers/users and texts/information? How is literacy affected in the transitions between traditional and electronic environments? How have youth specialists, both individually and as a community, influenced the history of writing, illustrating, and publishing for children and young adults?

Practically speaking, the course aims to prepare students for field exams, dissertation proposal defenses, conference presentations, research publications, grant proposals, job interviews, and teaching/mentoring/collaborating. To this end, there are three requirements:

Each student will prepare a list of readings for a field exam, either independently or in collaboration with others;
Each student will explore and present the methodologies primary to an identified research agenda, either independently or collaboratively;
Each student will draft and defend a dissertation proposal, or draft and present a paper intended for a conference or publication.
In addition, students will read six scholarly texts and familiarize themselves with a list of canonical literature for youth, which will serve as common reference points for interdisciplinary study.