Chatroom activity: On the eight Fridays, all the members of this course will participate in a 90-minute chatroom exchange on the topic of that week. These chatroom exchanges help to put a human face on the other members of your learning circle, and they result in depths of understanding that go beyond the Exploratory Questions in each Lesson. These chatroom sessions are highly structured, highly engaging, and offer strong elements for feedback as well.

Since participants in your learning circle live in various times zones, I ask that you click here in order to determine the local time for you when it is 10:00 am in New York city. Please arrive in the chatroom 10 minutes early so that everyone can begin together on the designated Fridays. 

If you notice that the local time when the chatroom runs presents a grave difficulty or an impossibility for you, then please send a notice immediately to Moderator@fuse.net describing your difficulty.  If you foresee that prior engagements prevent you from participating in two or more chatrooms, then please describe this in an email as well.

To activate the chatroom, paste this address below into your browser or click here: Please try out this link now so that you can assure yourself that it will work for you when you need it.

http://www.basechat.com/c-files/catherinecollege.net/chat-two.htm

Participants are welcome to meet with other participants in the chatroom at times and for purposes they set for themselves at any time during the course.  If you notice that a class is in session, then please do not login.

Tutor availability: A tutor will be overseeing each session. You may contact your tutor via email anytime (and, in some instances, via phone during limited hours). You will receive regular feedback, encouragement, and challenges from your tutor and other participants of your learning circle each week.

Textbook: none. All readings are supplied online.

Time required each week: 3 to 4 hours at times convenient to yourself plus the 90-minute live chatroom session.

Sample of potentially unfamiliar words or phrases used during the first session

• female socialization
• codes of behavior
• indoctrination of children
• a writer’s unexamined assumptions
• a superior adversary
• he inadvertently began a new literary genre
• the appeal of these narratives to children
• historical authenticity  

Introduction

In the post-modern era, story telling was the normal way that parents socialized their children and prepared them (a) to assume the self-identity and (b) to learn the social messages that would be necessary for them as adults. In your own upbringing, your mother almost certainly used fairy tales to accomplish this task. Her choice of fairy tales was undoubtedly influenced by her own recognition tha those tales delighted her when her own mother (your grandmother) selected stories told from her own mother (your great-grandmother) going back to the time when such stories were oral treasuries not yet printed in books.

Here are a few of the many reasons which might be suggested for this choice of material:

· The fascination of children from all periods for fairy tales, which have the tendency to focus on timelessly relevant symbols rather than everyday settings. This means that they have dated much less than any other form of literature.

· Their use of representative characters identified by their functions or relationships (kings and queens, merchants, hunters, stepmothers, sisters, etc.) rather than by any individual quality other than being good or evil means that children can easily be inducted into the listening to stories through them.

· They tend to use vividly symbolic colors and settings, such as ‘red as blood’, the ‘dark forest’. This again makes them easy to approach for the young child.

· They have been profoundly influential on all subsequent children’s literature, and patterns and characters from them, as well as explicit intertextual allusions, can be identified in virtually every classic children’s text.

· Partly because of their antiquity, they frequently raise questions about gender roles and prejudice against certain groups of people; such questions are perennially relevant.

· They appear in a number of different versions, and are still being rewritten today; children’s experience of literature is still likely to start with these stories, even though the medium of presentation, through video or CD Rom, may differ from the past.

Lifelong Learning

This course will equip you with the skills to discover the rich layer of presuppositions and implied social conditioning that operates, not only in children's literature, but in adult literature, story-telling, Country Western music, graphic novels, television sit-coms, and movies as well.  You will have the capacity to enjoy all of these forms of narrative expression more deeply and, when necessary, to bring others to see what you see and to hear what you hear.  You will never be able to just be a bland listener ever again.  If you aspire to be a story teller or a writer, the skills learned here will go a long way toward enabling you to enrich the story you wish to tell. 

Dierdre Glenn-Paul reveals in her contribution the six year journey of a novice teacher from prescribed curriculum toward interest based, yet challenging reading material with characters who represented the cultures of her middle school students. Her focus on the way specific texts made students feel and toward constructing their own meanings rather than summarizing or relying on teacher-answers brought discussions into personal issues of affect. Yet she balanced her teaching strategies with teaching of skills in meaningful contexts. Her story is lively and filled with student reactions toward her attempts to become an effective teacher of multiethnic literature. (www)