MPhil in Education (Critical Approaches to Children's Literature)

This thematic route concentrates on a wide range of writing for children, including the "classics", texts for very young readers, international literature and literature for young adults. Close textual study and the history of children's literature are embedded within the route, on which students will also be expected to engage with some of the key debates in the field and to consider a range of theoretical perspectives – from Romanticism to reader-response theory; gender issues to posthumanism; historical studies to new historicism; sociocultural viewpoints to semiotics – as well as examining critically views of young readers and their reading choices.
The course is organised to include four modules: Texts, Contexts and Childhood; Perspectives on Children's Literature; Visual Texts; and Texts and Readers. It is assessed through two essays and a dissertation, each designed to be personally rewarding as well as professionally enlightening and intellectually challenging: a case study of children's texts that makes use of library-based research (from archival to digital), focusing on texts for children with particular reference to changing constructions of childhood; an empirical study of children responding to a selected visual text; and a dissertation on a topic of the student's own choosing, which may be either a purely literary study or a small empirical research project. 
The main educational aims are:

• to examine the theoretical frameworks used in the study of education and its constituent disciplines;
• provide training in research methods appropriate to education;
• advance students’ capacity for professional reflection and judgement;
• cater to a range of specialists interested within the field of education or one of its constituent disciplines.