Teaching Children’s Literature

The last time I’d seen this particular Bob was when we were at the school where I had to pretend not to be good at English and French and where he was a bikie and one of the likeable Bad Boys. I’d admired his audacity in running for school prefect and his campaign posters with their slogan ‘VOTE FOR BOB AND YOU WON’T GET DOBBED’. And here he was at a party almost twenty years later, a taxation officer in a grey suit saying to me ‘And whaddya do for a crust?’ I said, ‘I teach a course in Australian Literature’. ‘Yeah?’ He didn’t sound too surprised. ‘Be a short course, wouldn’t it?’ I mean, I thought we’d been through that. But there have been other reminders since: that the university is a kind of sheltered workshop. Despite all the courses, the conferences, the enthusiasm of the students, the readings revival, the success of our writers internationally, there persists out in the marketplace at home the conviction that, as one young high-salaried advertising executive put it to me recently, ‘Australian Literature is a contradiction in terms.’ The problems facing the lecturer in Children’s Literature are different. There are still the doubts, or fears, of your colleagues. If you propose a further offering in Australian Literature, a few defenders of the faith will immediately brand you as arguing for the abolition of Medieval or Renaissance studies or, worse, Standards. With Children’s Literature, however, the question of Standards scarcely enters the discussion: it’s assumed you must be on some other trip. I was asked in the staff common room once whether we did ‘real assignments’ in Children’s Literature, and noticed how quickly we were onto another topic when I started to talk about the narrative structure of the fairy tale. If such moments ever tempt you to indulge the pleasure of the initiator’s role, you are quickly brought back to earth by a librarian. I’m yet to give the lecture on Patricia Wrightson after which some librarian doesn’t rush up to me, practically tripping over her enthusiasm, to tell me that children never borrow Wrightson’s novels. She tells me this, not with regret or alarm that they may miss out on reading one of Australia’s leading writers for children, but with the smug satisfaction that she knows what children’s literature-is, and I have just wasted an hour of her time. So teaching Children’s Literature can be a lonely and frustrating business. But the pleasures are from contact with children themselves, with the students, and with community groups outside the University. The sharing of a children’s book offers an unparalleled opportunity for instant gratification. You can hear about the book, buy or borrow it, free fall onto a favourite bed or sofa, read it to a child and together be laughing or disgusted or horrified or close to tears, inside an hour. Try that with War and Peace. I’ve been delighted, too, recently to see my three children fighting with their friends over books. Books I’d brought home for them. Almost tearing apart David Greenberg’s wonderful picture book Slugs and Jane Covernton’s anthology Putrid Poems: passions that I thought had been relegated forever to the constant bickering known as the local video shop. Out of the Putrid Poems experience, one eight-year-old boy began to walk around the house reciting poems. ‘Pick it lick it roll it flick it’ may not seem much of a start, but for a boy who was quite determined to show less interest in language and reading as his sisters showed more, it was a mighty significant one. With his sisters, he has begun to read and write more poems, and a new family game has evolved in the car. Someone says ‘The water was running out the door’ or whatever, and the next person has to come up with a line that rhymes; and so the time passes in couplets. The only catch is that when you’re peeling the potatoes back at home, the most literary of the children wants to labour over writing down all three pages of the thing, which you of course have remembered while she has half forgotten. Poetry has been the source as it happens of some of my most satisfying experiences of Children’s Literature with students. The undergraduate course I teach draws students from various disciplines, and it is always after the poetry lectures and tutorials that I get the most requests for further reading. Students tell me repeatedly that they have such bad memories of poetry classes in school that they had sworn off it for good, until rediscovering it in Children’s Literature. There are several reasons for this. Under the mistaken assumption that the inevitable consequence of reading a poem is to talk about or analyse it, for example, secondary and tertiary syllabuses have portrayed poetry as deep and meaningful, or miserable and obscure: they have neglected simple poetry, the poem as a game, comic and nonsense verse. (And who will say that the biggest selling poet for children, Spike Milligan, is shallow and meaningless?) As we learn the relationship between metre and rhythm by banging out the metre of ‘Disobedience’ with fists, felt pens and rolled-up copies of Xpress on the desk tops (only somewhat inhibited by the dour concrete walls of the lecture theatre) there is, too, the pleasure of recapturing our own childhood. The student in a Children’s Literature class can quite safely tell you from the vantage point of adulthood that (s)he used to go to bed with a stuffed giraffe, without having to resort to the ‘A friend of mine’ routine so handy elsewhere. For the teacher of Children’s Literature, the students’ familiarity with the texts can be a great resource. In a series of lectures on the picture book, I would use, say, eighty or more colour slides. There is just one that unfailingly over the years has drawn a spontaneous sigh from the hundred or so students in the lecture theatre: it is E.H. Shephard’s illustration of Christopher Robin tacking on Eeyore’s tail. So much love for the child’s world lies behind that communal response. And that response will get you some of the way, but you have to make sure that the students do reread the texts for study. More wise nodding or vague glowing than is usual in tutorial discussions convinces you that their encounters with Peter Rabbit have not been of the close kind for some time. Bettelheim and Zipes become useful in forcing students to juxtapose an adult reading of some story they had as children with the story they have remembered, and learn something about the significance of context and memory in reading. The common view that we have all been children and are entitled to some authority on the matter is a mixed blessing to lecturers in Children’s Literature as it is to their colleagues in Education. Emotional investment is of course a difficult factor to deal with. The issue of adults as mediators between the reader and the text is nowhere more significant than in Children’s Literature: the closest parallel I suppose would be literature taught in another language. Adults as publishers, booksellers, buyers, librarians, teachers, parents, determine in this case to an unusual degree what is available to the reader. Not so much what is available as what should be. One of the judges at the time told me that although Eleanor Spence’s A Candle for Saint Antony was sensitive and well-written, it could not become Children’s Book of the Year because it would be seen as a homosexual novel for children. More recently, a librarian told me that many Catholic schools including hers had refused to order a shortlisted novel, Eleanor, Elizabeth, because of its use of bad language. I’m not at all against the making of moral judgements, but they should be well-informed. When I read (SMH, July 11) that ‘nuns at a girls’ school near Maitland instructed Year 10 students to fill out a multiple-choice questionnaire which listed swear words they may have used’, I am amazed at the naivety of what was in this case not linguistic research, but a prelude to discipline. Perhaps the list gave the girls some good material that they hadn’t thought of, but I doubt it. That same disturbing combination of the prim and the prurient lies behind the vicious attacks Ivan Southall has had to endure over the year for daring to deal with sex at all in his novels for children. It’s so clear when you read the reviews of Finn’s Folly, or Bread and Honey, that the adult reviewers are repressing their own guiltily remembered pubescent blues that you’re embarrassed for them. If Southall’s treatment of young sexuality errs, it’s on the side of the prim. We have invented childhood as Other, and if Neil Postman is right in The Disappearance of Childhood, we have almost completed the deconstruction of that Otherness now. And though it is quite obviously uncomfortable for many of us to no longer have children and their world cute and manageable, there are aspects of that change that make me optimistic. I have never thought that a special voice or a special language is needed to talk to children. The child says ‘bik’ or ‘bikky’ because (s)he is trying to say ‘biscuit’. (S)he will get there sooner or later. But the bikky-givers among us never give the child a chance. The child’s world is our world too. Or can be. I loathe being told by some sudden colleague that they’ve been interested for some time in ‘Kiddie Lit.’: it always sounds like something the cat messed in. I like talking about Children’s Literature to community groups outside the University because their pleasure at discovering, or is it rediscovering, the complexity of the child’s world and its continuity with their own is so great and so openly expressed. ‘I didn’t know there were books about that,’ or ‘Do you really think children like to read about that?’ The questions keep coming, and I like being asked because it seems I learn more each time I try to answer. There’s so much to learn from the things children say and do and from their responses to what they read. It would not surprise me at all if, as the news bulletins continue to pump effluent into our heads, mainstream literature courses were to draw increasingly on the world of Children’s Literature for their texts. The courses I teach in Australian Literature, for example, are different in several ways from those I studied as an undergraduate. Then it seemed, in a more economically buoyant Australia, that we could take any amount of fragmentation and despair in our reading. Now, my students tell me they want constructive books, books which offer some kind of vision. Books like Facey’s A Fortunate Life, Davidson’s Tracks, Rolls’s Celebration of the Senses, Zwicky’s Journeys, Hewett’s Bobbin Up, Jolley’s Miss Peabody’s Inheritance, Balodis’s Too Young for Ghosts. Not simple books or pretty books. Or funny books necessarily. But books with a strong, positive energy. Children’s Literature has plenty to offer them.

Mark Macleod

From the New Issue

Open Page with Anne Manne

Woven: First Nations poetic conversations from the Fair Trade project edited by Anne-Marie Te Whiu

The Other Side of Daylight: New and selected poems by David Brooks

Until August by Gabriel García Márquez

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