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Envisioning Possibility: Schooling and Student Agency in Children’s and Young Adult Literature

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This article provides a rationale for using literature in the classroom to explore conceptions of curriculum and teaching. We discuss a number of exemplars from children’s and young adult fiction, both mainstream and less well known; offer a taxonomy for categorizing the range of visions of curriculum and teaching in the literature; and describe the responses of a group of middle school students to a unit that examined schooling in literature. We argue that reading literature which addresses student experiences in school can help students make sense of those experiences and, more importantly, open their minds to ideas about teaching and schooling that they otherwise might never have considered.

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Authors
  1. John Kornfeld
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  2. Laurie Prothro
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Additional information

John Kornfeld is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the School of Education at Sonoma State University. His research in curriculum, children’s literature, school/ university collaboration, and the politics of schooling has been published in such journals as Theory into Practice, Social Education, and Theory and Research in Social Education.

Laurie Prothro is a school library consultant and children’s librarian in Sonoma County, California. She specializes in collection development and young adult literature. Her most recent publication with John Kornfeld, entitled “Comedy, Conflict, and Community: Home and Family in Harry Potter,” appears in Elizabeth Heilman’s Harry Potter’s World: Multidisciplinary Critical Perspectives.

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Kornfeld, J., Prothro, L. Envisioning Possibility: Schooling and Student Agency in Children’s and Young Adult Literature. Child Lit Educ 36, 217–239 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-005-5971-2

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