Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

2-2025

Document Type

Capstone Project

Degree Name

M.A.

Program

Liberal Studies

Advisor

Wendy Luttrell

Subject Categories

American Studies

Keywords

critical childhood studies, childhood, children, school

Abstract

Children can come to understand themselves and their lived experience through fiction. Yet writing, reading, and interpreting fiction for children are all projects that challenge society’s commonly-understood beliefs about childhood, literature, and even the category of children’s literature itself.

This capstone project uses a cross-disciplinary approach to examine the notion of what it means to write fictional texts directed at children, and in particular, how fiction presents the deeply-contested American institution of school and the school environment. This project consists of two parts. The first is a critical consideration of how contemporary literary texts directed at children portray conditions of schools and schooling, and how they depict schools as regulated environments in which children struggle to assert their own agency. This portion analyzes the themes and tropes in several contemporary children’s literary texts that center the school experience. The second portion of this capstone is a series of excerpts from my own fictional text, a work-in-progress novel titled Misunderstood Beings, about an elementary school child who questions some of his school’s disciplinary practices, including his teacher’s systems of rewards and punishment.

These two components, working in conversation with each other, pose questions about how fiction can engage children in questions about schools as sites of governance and discipline-making. These two portions of the capstone invite readers, including adults and children, to ask how children can achieve agency in their daily lives, including in institutional settings like school.

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