Courses

Students who participate in WISE consortium courses will be given special permission to register for this course in order to receive credit for their work.

New courses developed in response to emerging areas of interest, and courses in traditional areas given occasionally as student demand dictates.

May be pursued by a student interested in a specialized topic of library/information practice not covered in the curriculum.

Prior to registering, students write a proposal for the study, specifying rationale and outcome, and seek the approval of a faculty member who will supervise the investigation. Usually pursued near the end of a student's program of study.

Requires a minimum of 150 hours of supervised professional work in a library or other information organization, attendance at meetings with the faculty adviser and other students, keeping a journal, and a brief summary paper. Placement is based on the student's background and career objectives.

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

• Synthesize theory and practice.
• Analyze the sponsoring agency’s program of service in terms of its goals and objectives and its clientele.
• Re-examine career goals in light of the experience.

Requires a minimum of 150 hours of supervised professional work in a school library. This course is required for state certification for school library media specialists and must be taken concurrently with 17:610:575 - Management of School Library Programs. Students maintain a journal and their assignments in 575 relate to the Field Experience.

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

• Understand general principles and concepts.
• Understand the mission, administrative organization, policies and procedures, resources and services, and clientele of a particular school library media center which can serve as an example of its kind and also as a general reference model.
• Make contacts with individual professional school library media specialists; to facilitate the assimilation of professional attitudes and work habits; to acquaint the student with different points of view and a variety of approaches in dealing with problems and responding to service needs.

May be pursued by a student interested in a specialized topic of library/information practice not covered in the curriculum.

Prior to registering, students write a proposal for the study, specifying rationale and outcome, and seek the approval of a faculty member who will supervise the investigation. Usually pursued near the end of a student's program of study.

New courses developed in response to emerging areas of interest, and courses in traditional areas given occasionally as student demand dictates.

New courses developed in response to emerging areas of interest, and courses in traditional areas given occasionally as student demand dictates.

New courses developed in response to emerging areas of interest, and courses in traditional areas given occasionally as student demand dictates.

New courses developed in response to emerging areas of interest, and courses in traditional areas given occasionally as student demand dictates.

New courses developed in response to emerging areas of interest, and courses in traditional areas given occasionally as student demand dictates.

Students who must interrupt their studies may, with the approval of a program director, register for Matriculation Continued (leave of absence). There is no tuition fee for this registration, although a student fee is charged. Students who do not register for Matriculation Continued will be charged a reactivation fee upon their return to the program. (Students on temporary visas who interrupt their studies must in most cases leave the United States during such periods.) Matriculation Continued is available only to students not enrolled in any coursework and not using faculty time and university facilities, except to complete previous coursework from classes with incomplete or temporary grades. Students may enroll in Matriculation Continued for a maximum of two consecutive semesters.

This course is open only by special permission in unique cases for MI students.  May be 3 or 6 credits; credits do not count towards the MI degree.

This course is open only by special permission in unique cases for MI students. May be 3 or 6 credits; credits do not count towards the MI degree.

Librarians and teachers are often called upon to select and recommend websites, CD-ROMs, and other electronic information resources for young people, a task that can be very difficult without an understanding of what aspects of these resources appeal to and repel young users. This course is intended to facilitate that evaluation and recommendation process by helping you to understand how young people interact with and evaluate digital information.  This is largely a reading course, requiring you to read the foundational works and core research in youth electronic information behaviors and preferences, including works from library science, information science, and gender studies.  Major assignments will include a related research project and a Web-based annotated bibliography of recommended websites for young people.

In Search of Cupid and Psyche uses the celebrated story of love and sacrifice as the starting point for examining the function of myth in creating and enhancing meaning in children's and young adult literature. In this course you will learn to analyze children's books that borrow heavily from myths and archaic legend, and to recognize and describe mythological elements within a broad range of books for children and young adults.  You will learn to recognize mythic elements in text and illustrations, discover commonalities among culturally diverse literatures, and explore how contemporary myths operate in specific literary works.

From picture books to teen novels, from history to folktale, this course will examine the voices of women and girls as they tell their own stories and as stories are told about them. We will work from a list of titles, most published within the past five years, and will read and discuss some of them together and some of them as individual projects. The emphasis in the course will be on reading widely and on intense engagement with the texts. Students will have the opportunity to create book lists, booktalks, and/or Web pages to explore their interpretations of this literature.

This course will study the development of children's book illustration in the work of three masters of the twentieth century.  You will explore the picture books of Dr. Seuss, Maurice Sendak, and Peter Sis, considering issues such as the use of history made by each illustrator and his concern for social context, the relationship of image to text and of illustration to a linear narrative, and repeating motifs and symbols that join individual publications into an organic whole. Students in the course will be divided into groups which will explore the three illustrators; this exploration will include a look at work by other important 20th century contemporaries such as Hillary Knight, Mitsumasa Anno, and Quentin Blake. The final weeks of the semester will be a conference period during which the groups will share some of the papers they have written and together discover how different perceptions, research, and group dynamics led to alternate hypotheses about these three masters.

This course is designed to assist teachers and librarians in selecting, evaluating, and encouraging the informed enjoyment of poetry written for children and young adults in the twentieth century. The semester will cover a variety of poetic forms, including ballads, haiku, and lyrics, a comparison of anthologies published in the past three decades, African-American poetry, the children's poetry by noted poets such as Richard Wilbur, Randall Jarell, Theodore Roethke and Robert Graves, among other aspects of poetry.  Assignments will include readings, developing lesson plans and/or web pages to support poetry in the curriculum, illustrating a poem and significant participation in a web-based discussion. While the coursework will not privilege any specific ideological/critical methodology, it will teach and require familiarity with a broad vocabulary of basic terms and poetic devices.

Biographies, autobiographies, diaries, and personal narratives are all ways of telling the narrative of a life. In this course, we will examine how writers take a life lived and turn it into a story. We will read picture books, chapter books, collective biographies, autobiographies, and biographical narratives for young people of all ages. Most titles will be recent (within the past five years). The focus will be on reading widely, and on intense engagement with the texts. Students will have the opportunity to create book lists, booktalks, and/or Web pages to explore their interpretations of biography materials for young people.

Students will develop an understanding and appreciation of the processes of the creation of the visual aspects of children's books, including the development process from preliminary sketches and/or storyboard to the published book; relationships to verbal texts; format and layout; various media and techniques; case studies of individual artists and works.

This course examines the interpretive structures of American children's movies that are based on children's literature with a focus on how themes, storytelling, and characters are translated from one medium to another. Discussions will center on a variety of contemporary issues, including how literal fidelity relates to creative license (i.e., adaptation versus translation); how the technical differences between film and literature impose directorial choices; how evolving understandings of race, gender, ethnicity and age affect filmic interpretation and presentation; and whether a book's theme or core narrative can be divided from the vast body of cultural, ideological and political influences that constitute its identity. While the primary focus of the course will fall on the process of inter-media translation, significant attention will be paid to questions of intra-generic translation as well: To what extent do the conventions of the children's film dictate a director's interpretive decisions? How do successful children's films of the past, whether recent hits or old classics, impose upon the presentation of new works?  What, if any, are the generic paradigms to which new movies must conform? Finally, Children's Literature Goes To The Movies will ask students to decide whether knowledge of the original book enriches the experience of going to the movies (and if the movie enriches one's understanding of the original book), or whether movie and book are essentially separate, and knowledge of one does not meaningfully translate into a deeper knowledge or a richer experience of the other. Films we will study will include: The Little Mermaid, Snow White, Cinderella, Aladdin, Pinocchio, I Am the Cheese, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, Matilda, Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, The Fellowship of the Ring, and several versions of Little Women. Genres that we will consider in relationship to these films will include: the bildungsroman, the fairy tale, enchanted realism, and the quest.

In this seminar you will read works by and about six children's authors, paying special attention to the authors' own statements about the creative process. The authors and illustrators will change semester to semester; in previous years we considered the works of Eric Carle, Leo Lionni, Katherine Paterson, Jane Kurtz, Julius Lester, Philip Pullman, Jane Yolen, to name some. During the semester, three of the authors studied will enter the online discussion with the class for one week each.   

An examination of children's picture books from a feminist standpoint and various cultural perspectives. Emphasis on the identification of books that use powerful verbal and visual images to promote self esteem and cultural awareness.

New courses developed in response to emerging areas of interest, and courses in traditional areas given occasionally as student demand dictates.