From: Monica Edinger <monicaedinger>
Date: Sat, 25 Jul 2009 13:46:39 -0400

One of the reasons I like The Pleasures of Children's Literature so much is I do think kids are very capable of thinking critically and taking the same kind of pleasure in doing so as adults. As I've written here before, in 1990 I did a summer seminar in children's literature at Princeton with scholar U.C. Knoepflmacher and was forever changed by the experience. I had no idea that you could look at children's literature in an academically critical way and I loved it. I wondered if I could lead my 4th grade students in the same grand experience, returned to school, and tried it out with Charlotte's Web. It was absolutely fantastic. I originally called the program "Children as Scholars" and still encourage the kids to think of themselves that way. Not only has it been successful in my classroom, but other teachers have picked up on it too. (I've written about this in books and articles and will be speaking about it at NCTE this fall.) And it isn't just me; others have also written about children younger than those I teach also considering literature critically --- with enormous fun and pleasure.

As for that hidden adult, while I totally understand how uncomfortable it must be for someone to argue that works we thought we'd written without any particular message might nonetheless have deeply buried subtexts, Perry's argument, as presented in the book, is very convincing to me.

Monica Monica Edinger educating alice (medinger.wordpress.com) monicaedinger at gmail.com http://twitter.com/medinger
Received on Sat 25 Jul 2009 12:46:39 PM CDT