Explores the relationship between children and the culture they inhabit in a particular time and place. Invites students to analyze in detail the image of childhood that emerges from many different media, including novels, children’s literature, drama, film, television, dance, and popular song. Encourages students to take an interdisciplinary “childhood studies” approach to youth culture that incorporates insights from literary and media studies, women’s and gender studies, and the history and philosophy of childhood.
Fall 2026
Same Subject As: CMS.425[J], WGS.258[J]
Prereq: none
Units: 3-0-9 HASS-H, CI-H
Children’s creative contributions to culture are often belittled, ignored, and forgotten, rather than being judged worthy of preservation, sustained study, and critical analysis. This course therefore constitutes a bold experiment in reclamation, whereby we co-investigate the following question: What happens if we try to build a whole class around cultural artifacts that children themselves had a hand in creating?
We will begin by exploring the leading role that Native American, Jewish, and Black children (and their teachers) played in paving the way for a golden decade of youth participation in American culture that stretched from 1965 to 1975. Besides analyzing playground chants, diaries, and picture books based on children’s sayings and stories, we will also study child-crafted films, poetry, and novellas, as well as plays, TV shows, photo books, and dances co-created by children and adults. In addition, contrasting how Holocaust-era children’s artwork was received compared to contemporary Palestinian children’s art will allow us to explore why and how adults appropriate, rewrite, and sometimes even censor children’s creative efforts.
To expand and enrich our understanding of this archive, all students will be required to choose a single cultural artifact created or co-created by a child to do an in-depth oral presentation on, which you will then expand into a final essay. You might choose to dig up and scrutinize a story that you yourself wrote when you were young; or identify and analyze a particularly cool contribution to a new media trend involving children; or deepen your understanding of one of the cultural artifacts that’s already on the syllabus by doing some additional independent research that you use to contextualize and enrich your close reading of it.
Whatever type of cultural artifact we are discussing in this seminar-style class, we will grapple with the following questions: What vision of childhood emerges in this artwork? Does it differ from how childhood tends to get represented in similar material created solely by adults? How is the adult-child relationship depicted? How do power asymmetries related to age, gender, ethnicity, and class affect the creation, content, and reception of this cultural artifact? And finally, what difference does the type of media being employed make, especially in terms of what liberties and rewards, risks and dangers are being afforded to young artists?