More representations of childhood

I’m a bit late with this little bit of prompting – you’re masters of this topic by now, and my links below date back to 2006.  But it’s a fascinating area for children’s literature.

Trying to identify how authors imagine or represent childhood can involve scrutinising texts for their Puritan, Enlightenment, Romantic, gendered, socially stratified, imperial, colonial, and no doubt all sorts of other, ideologies. Including – delightfully and most productively – some ambiguous and even subversive views of those ideologies.

But it’s a bit harder to see what’s going on in relation to our own times. What are modern times doing to our view of childhood?

Is our culture toxic to childhood, as 110 experts claimed in a letter to The Telegraph? Or is that just typical older generation panic?*

*My thanks to the OUSA EA300 student forum for these links.

Anticipation

Excited. A bit nervous. Buying books, dipping into the hard ones, zipping through the soft ones…

And I expect some of the students are just the same. None of us have seen the course materials yet for this brand new course.

Information is seeping out through a student forum. All Open University (OU) staff and students have access to an email conferencing system and within that there is a forum called ‘OUSA EA300′.  A folder of ‘useful stuff’ is helpfully being created which at the moment has for instance:

• ISBNs for set books
• links giving some access to the course readers
• provisional dates for assignments.

While I don’t have a contract yet (and won’t at least until student numbers are clearer) I have been told there will be 6 two-hour face-to-face tutorials and one hour of online support*. This of course is apart from all other support and the marking of assignments.

I’m expecting to receive the course materials in the next few weeks. And the cherry on the celebration cake at the moment is the prospect of a course briefing in early September. I expect this to be the chance to meet some of the course team, other tutors, and really get in the swing of things.

Meanwhile, I read today that Biggles story saved crash pilot

* Later edit: These are the tutorial arrangements in my Region (R05); other Regions may vary.