ELAN 3500 - Literacies and Literature for Adolescent Readers

3 Credit Hours
Prerequisite: EDUC 2110 or Permission of the Instructor
This course, designed for Middle Grades Education majors will explore a wide variety of genres of children's and adolescent literature. Through close readings of picture books for older readers, historical and realistic fiction novels, as well as nonfiction texts, the primary goal of this course is to gain familiarity with the literary characteristics of those genres, and to explore and discuss the practice of reading and responding to literature in the middle grades classroom. Candidates will asses their personal reading practice and histories, evaluate texts that reflect diverse genres, interpret and analyze those texts from various theoretical perspectives with special attention to the ways in which literature is related to class, culture, ethnicity, gender race exceptionalities and sexuality. Candidates will use a variety of technological and information sources, pedagogical approaches and strategies to write and speak about literature.