Sample Assignment #2

by Joseph T. Thomas, Jr.

Overview of the Course

In the spring of 2013 I led a graduate seminar at San Diego State University called Keywords in Children’s Literature (ENGL 727). The course centered on Philip Nel and Lissa Paul’s first edition of Keywords in Children’s Literature (New York UP, 2011). Keywords was our only required text. SDSU’s Department of English and Comparative Literature is the home of the National Center for the Study of Children’s Literature, and it has a robust undergraduate and graduate program of study in children’s literature (three contributors to Keywords are SDSU professors of children’s and young adult literature). Therefore, the group of graduate students enrolled in this seminar had already taken at least one undergraduate- and one graduate-level course in literature for young people. For professors at an institution with students less familiar with children’s literature, I would recommend supplementing Keywords with an array of primary texts discussed in the volume. However, given our students’ background in children’s literature, I felt comfortable focusing almost exclusively on Keywords, using the volume as a primary text to explore and—eventually—to generate a new list of the key terms and concepts around which the discourse of children’s literary studies has crystalized. We did employ some supplementary texts, however, reading key articles and book chapters authored by selected scholars featured in the volume (such as Richard Flynn’s “The Intersection of Children’s Literature and Childhood Studies”; Charles Hatfield’s “Comic Art, Children’s Literature, and the New Comics Studies”; Kenneth Kidd’s “Children’s Culture, Children’s Studies, and the Ethnographic Imaginary”; and Nathalie op de Beeck’s “On Comics-Style Picture Books and Picture-Bookish Comics”).

Our studies were also informed by physical and virtual visits by a handful of major figures in the field. With one exception (Jerry Griswold), each visiting scholar was a contributor to Keywords in Children’s Literature: editors Lissa Paul and Philip Nel visited class to discuss the Keywords project from the perspective of active participants in the discipline and as co-editors of Keywords itself, and contributors June Cummins, Richard Flynn, Charles Hatfield, Michael Joseph, Kenneth Kidd, Nathalie op de Beeck, and Phillip Serrato joined us to discuss their individual keyword essays. In addition to weekly response papers (which students debated online), seminar participants also collaborated on an annotated bibliography and produced individual keyword-style essays focusing on a keyword not found in the first edition (Adventure, Animation, Book, Maturity, Poetry, Space, and Subversion among the keywords students generated).

Keyword Entries

Using the entries in Keywords in Children’s Literature as our model, each student prepared their own keyword essay on a term or concept not found in the first edition of Keywords. In conversation with their classmates, students chose their keywords around the midpoint of the semester (since each student was required to choose a unique keyword, some negotiation was required if two or more students selected the same term). The entries were between 2,500 to 3,000 words in length. Every source cited in the keyword essays was included in an annotated bibliography collectively written by the class.

Annotated Bibliography

Our annotated bibliography was modeled on the editors’ decision to have one, collective bibliography at the end of Keywords in Children’s Literature rather than individual bibliographies after each keyword essay. Thus, we collaboratively produced a single annotated bibliography featuring scholarly and critical texts prominently featuring the keywords generated by our class. As each student researched their keyword, they would note sources useful not only for their keyword, but also for the keywords selected by their classmates. The annotated bibliography was posted online to a password protected platform accessible only to our class (we used Blackboard, but Google Docs or a similar platform would work just as well). I regularly updated the bibliography with student submissions and revisions (since some sources were cited in multiple keyword essays, those annotations were written collaboratively). Each bibliographic entry was tailored to explain its source’s relevance to a variety of keywords. Therefore the class created an ever-evolving archive of sources illustrating how our various keywords structured debates central to children’s literature and childhood studies. Keywords were rendered in bold and italics within the prose of the annotation and listed alphabetically below each entry.

Final Presentations

As a contributor to the first edition of Keywords in Children’s Literature who knew and had collaborated with the editors and many of the contributors, I was able to arrange virtual and (occasionally) in-class visits by many of the Keyword authors. Among our visitors were June Cummins, Michael Joseph, Nathalie op de Beeck, and Phillip Serrato. The students, then, performed a final presentation for their classmates modeled on the authors’ visits. The final weeks of class were in essence a keywords mini-conference. Before each presentation, the students read their colleagues’ entries (then in rough draft form), and the author of each entry gave a short presentation about their keyword and led a conversation based on their research. After that presentation/conversation, each student used their colleagues’ suggestions and comments to perfect their keyword essay, the final version submitted to me during final examination week. I collected these essays into one master document, in essence creating our own keyword mini-anthology, and shared it with the seminar’s participants.