Tackling Children's Literature and Childhood Literacy through Service Learning

In these remarks for roundtable session 253 at the 2016 MLA convention--titled "An Interactive Conversation about Service Learning in Literary Studies"--Elizabeth Goodhue examines an undergraduate service learning course on children’s literature and childhood literacy that she taught at UCLA. The paper focuses on how community-engaged pedagogy benefits undergraduates as well as the K-12 students at local schools and educational nonprofits partnering with the course. Goodhue describes assignments that ask undergraduates to connect their experiences tutoring K-12 students in reading and writing with historical and contemporary texts and with current trends in literacy education and publishing, such as the recent #weneeeddiversebooks campaign. Goodhue demonstrates how service learning can yield tangible artifacts that benefit community partners and simultaneously guide undergraduates to think creatively about the complex challenges of living in a globally interconnected world, and encourage them to recognize the importance of respecting cultural diversity in curricula and collections