Proseminar 1 (3 credits) – required for all doctoral students in the first year of study
56:163:501
Monday/Wednesday 4:20-5:40 pm
Dr. Meredith Bak
The proseminar in Childhood Studies is a year-long investigation into some of the important issues, concepts and debates that surround the study of children and childhood today. We will explore various changing and nuanced definitions of “the child,” ethical dilemmas in working with children, the history of western childhood and global childhoods, race, class gender and sexuality, children’s literature, schooling, the manipulation of images of childhood and the children’s agency in helping to form or to combat those images. Although over the year the course will necessarily bring together multiple perspectives, the first half of the proseminar will focus more closely on disciplines from the Humanities.
Literature and Culture of Childhood (3 credits)
56:163:580
Wednesday 6:00-8:40 pm
Dr. Marilisa Jiminez-Garcia
This course examines changing concepts of childhood as reflected in a range of literary and cultural texts from a variety of cultures and periods. We consider the representations of children and childhood throughout literature and culture; the impact of the concept of childhood on intellectual and aesthetic traditions; the role of childhood in imagination and memory as well as in actuality; and the notion of childhood as a discursive category useful for understanding human subjectivity and the human condition.
Quantative Methods (3 credits)
56:163:661
Tuesday 6:00-8:40 pm
Dr. Valerie Bass-Adams
The course is designed to provide graduate students with a solid understanding of quantitative research and statistics through the lens of Childhood Studies. The primary goal of the course is to provide a solid understanding of the logic of social science research. The first half of the semester concentrates on defining research problems, research design (including sampling, measurement, and causal inference), and assessing research quality. The second half of the semester focuses on descriptive and inferential statistics, evaluation of survey measures, the language of data analysis, and interpretation of survey results.