Exploring queer pedagogies in the college-level YA literature course

One place to start understanding how pre-service teachers learn about contemporary young adult (YA) literature, especially those works that feature lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning (LGBTQ) and gender identity themes and characters, is through an examination of the YA literature course – a course many pre-service teachers take as part of their teacher certification programs in the USA. In this article, I turn to queer pedagogy to explore the syllabi of 67 college-level YA literature courses in order to address the question: ‘How do young adult literature courses incorporate the growing body of high-quality young adult literature that features LGBTQ and gender variant themes and characters?’ Findings include how the YA literature field might be normalizing, or standardizing through repeated approaches, what it means to teach a text and in turn shape future teachers’ decisions on how a text is incorporated into a curriculum

A Coming or Going of Age?

Children’s literature, as a discrete entity, is commonly traced back to the eighteenth century in England, to a time when the new middle classes began to carve out a protected space for their progeny. Distinct commodities were developed, including games, furniture and clothing — and, of course, books, seen as perfect vehicles to instruct and entertain the future citizenry. The Romantics rounded out and mythologised this new being, the child, as innocent, pure and, therefore, unsullied by adult society. By the end of the Victorian period, the ‘cult of the child’, as it became known, was at its height, with the desirability of remaining a child, a Peter Pan, in the cultural ascendant. However, a century on from the fin de siècle, at the fin de millennium, this image had been severely questioned. The ‘century of the child’, as Ellen Kay (1900/1909) then termed it, had ended, and with it, a growing number of voices proclaimed a new century that foresaw the child’s disappearance, or death, even (Winn 1984; Postman 1994; Buckingham 2000). This chapter explores how this crisis over the child manifests itself in the era of Thatcher’s grandchildren. On the one hand, there are writers who celebrate a new freedom to discuss issues more candidly with children — whether about war, the Holocaust, homelessness, the family, racism, abuse, drugs, ecology, or sex and sexuality — whereas others fear that this very openness is destroying childhood, formerly defined in terms of protection, of relative innocence