SHCY Bulletin

Society for the History of Children and Youth

Pedagogy . . . . . . Stephen Gennaro, ed.

The Interdisciplinary Nature of Childhood Studies

In the last edition of the newsletter, some of my colleagues from York University’s Children’s Studies Program weighed in on how to get students to “do the readings.”  One of our findings was that since the field is both multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary, students and teachers of Children’s Studies are often asked wear many academic hats.

Building on this theme, Lynne Vallone, Daniel Thomas Cook, and Deb Valentine at the Rutgers-Camden’s Childhood Studies Program weighed on the interdisciplinary nature of teaching in the field.  The program at Rutgers-Camden is interdisciplinary at its core.  

The Department of Childhood Studies puts the issues, concepts and debates that surround the study of children and childhoods at the center of its research and teaching missions. Through a multidisciplinary approach, the Department of Childhood Studies aims both to theorize and historicize the figure of the Child and to situate the study of children and childhoods within contemporary cultural and global contexts.

The curriculum in the Department is multidisciplinary in scope and purpose and provides students with a strong background in both humanistic and social science perspectives on children and their representations. This approach will prepare students for careers in many areas including academics, public policy, social services, youth programming, and education. (http://childhood.camden.rutgers.edu)

As Lynn Vallone, the program Chair, explains in her article, the pedagogy and practise of the new Doctoral Program in Childhood Studies is multidisciplinary and constructed to mesh the many academic approaches in the field.  Of course, being so “interdisciplinary and open” also has its challenges as Daniel T. Cook, the program’s Director of Graduate Studies explores in his piece “Refusing to Scratch the Itch.”  Finally, Deb Valentine, both a graduate student in the program and teacher at the undergraduate level, offers some insight into some of the difficulties (and techniques for overcoming these difficulties) in maintaining an interdisciplinary classroom.

The positives and pitfalls of interdisciplinary studies are exactly as Vallone, Cook, and Valentine express.  And yet, that is precisely what makes the field of Children’s Studies or Childhood Studies so exciting: the many lenses, approaches, and avenues for insight that if offers to teachers, students, and academics alike.  In my own work, it is the mixture of theory and action in studying childhood and children that drives my scholarship and teaching practices.  My courses are structured around the philosophy that each course takes focus on the importance of situating children's familial, local, national, and global histories in larger discussions of power relations by making connections between critical theory of race, class, gender, and sexuality with historical and contemporary studies of children and childhood.  Each course therefore examines children and childhood from a global perspective and compares the real lives of children to representations of childhood in social institutions and the problems raised by the creation of a universal or generic child profile. As with all courses that draw their base from cultural studies, there is a particular interest in whose voice is represented and whose voice is left silent.  And this is backdrop against which I ask my students to read the critical social theory of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Louis Althusser, and Antonio Gramsci.  As I demonstrated in the last edition of the newsletter, I provide the students with reading questions to help guide them through the material and then follow up with a lecture and activity/task designed to reach students in their own spaces.

Here is a copy of the PowerPoint and activity from the accompanying lecture (note that the activity can be found on the last slide).

The Need for Theory in Children’s Studies

However, the interdisciplinary approach did not end there, course readings included novels, short stories, memoirs, ethnographies, television sit-coms, critical theory, primary and secondary historical sources, The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, interviews with real children, and articles from the fields of anthropology, education, law, sociology, geography, and media studies (just to name  few).  And then the question on the final exam asked to engage with all of the material encountered in a way that attempts to deal with the problem of Children’s Studies interdisciplinary nature:

One of the goals of the second module was to posit the need for a critical theory of childhood- that views age in the same fashion as other social variables.  Knowing what you now know about Children’s Studies, what would a theory like this look like?  Be sure to use course texts to help make your point. 

And the results were incredible!

So perhaps we can all learn from the folks at Rutgers-Camden:  take the multidisciplinary approach that emanates from your own scholarship and its connection to Childhood Studies and then pass that on to your students.

Examining the new Childhood Studies Doctoral Program at Rutgers University,Camden

Lynne Vallone

In developing a coherent multidisciplinary Childhood Studies doctoral  program, faculty members-typically trained in Humanities or Social  Science disciplines-will face multiple challenges in crossing or  erasing seemingly inert and forbidding disciplinary boundaries.  Given  the discomfort attendant upon such "border crossing," we have found  that establishing a firm foundation of trust between faculty members  was a crucial precursor to assuaging our concerns over leaving the  known behind.

The compromises we made in creating the examination structure for the doctoral degree provides a good example of solutions to the kinds of challenges to which I am referring.  I will briefly describe one aspect of that exam structure here.  We agreed to retain the conventional two-step examination process of qualifying exam and preliminary exam/proposal hearing.  Yet we knew that a "traditional"  qualifying exam (in any typical disciplinary usage) would neither satisfy the needs of our students who hail from a variety of scholarly  backgrounds, or accomplish our goals of providing an integrative and  interdisciplinary program of study.

Rather than a timed examination linked to a pre-determined set of readings and outcomes, we instituted a more personalized dossier review keyed to each students' developing interests.  The dossier-assembled after 18 hours of Childhood Studies coursework-consists of the transcript, statement of purpose and a substantial writing sample written for a Childhood Studies seminar.  A successful review requires the student to create a pre-professional presentation of self, thoughtful reflection and a demonstration of the growing knowledge base and critical thinking and writing skills necessary for undertaking doctoral-level work in Childhood Studies.  

The dossier is read and voted upon by the entire faculty.  If the student passes the review, he/she is retained in the program and continues coursework. Although this structure is new and has not been fully tested given that we have not had any graduates from our doctoral program to date, we are pleased with the process so far and believe that this non-traditional approach to a qualifying "exam" both adequately reflects a student's progress in the program after one year of full-time study and will predict future success in writing an interdisciplinary dissertation project.

Refusing to Scratch the Itch: Keeping Problems Open
Daniel Thomas Cook

A decisive moment occurred toward the end of the second semester of a two-semester seminar required for entering Ph.D. students in our newly established Childhood Studies program. The Proseminar introduces students to key debates, topics and approaches comprising that somewhat amorphous, multidisciplinary field of “childhood studies.” 

As we were discussing and critiquing yet another approach, a student asked, “When are we going to start tying things up?” I was bit transfixed by the implication that all these approaches and paradigms were to be put into some sort of internal coherence with one another, an expectation apparently shared by others. In the ensuing discussion, I endeavored to articulate what I mistakenly thought had been previously explicated—namely, that the point of multidisciplinary scholarship was not to locate the one overarching framework that incorporates all others. The project of childhood studies, rather, centers on creating and maintaining the “child” and “childhood” as problems to be investigated through multiple means.     

For at least some of these students, studying childhood in a “multidisciplinary” manner did not in itself disrupt their received notion that there must be one underlying truth to be culled from the different perspectives. This presumption of a “best approach”—though not necessarily unique to childhood studies—I believe acquires considerable conceptual heft when children and childhood are at issue because children remain emotionally overdetermined figures in social life, despite the insistence on problematizing them historically and culturally. Students often apply to programs like ours with the idea of finding ways to help children and improve their lives. No doubt necessary and admirable, this impetus can contravene efforts to keep the focus on engaging problems that may be generative of new insights.

Reflections on Creating A Safe Place in Childhood Studies
Deborah Valentine, Rutgers University-Camden

I came to the doctoral program in Childhood Studies at Rutgers-Camden with teaching and administrative experience and an abiding interest in issues of race and education. Working as a teaching assistant for an introductory Childhood Studies course, I found that students' presumptions of, and emotional attachments to, idealized views of "the child" compounded the already morally and emotionally charged landscape of race relations. When presented with the opportunity to teach Amanda Lewis' Race in the Schoolyard to a racially/ethnically diverse lecture class of 100 students, I confronted a familiar problem—namely, how can one enable students to learn material that involves letting go of cherished beliefs, memories or ways of understanding the world?

In order to address this challenge, I began the lecture series with my own story, then asked students to reflect on their personal experiences related to racial identity and diversity in their early school years.  Beginning with these stories allowed students to develop a conscious awareness of their own experiences with and emotions about the topic prior to confronting material that might feel threatening.  I then structured my lectures around the stories of children that were presented in the text.  I finished the series of class sessions by requiring students to fill out a chart answering the question of how race/ethnicity was being constructed in several of the narratives we had discussed.  By making room for student’s personal experiences and emotions first, this method helped diffuse emotional barriers and pre-empt a good deal of defensiveness that had stand in the way of  engaging with the challenges posed by new material.

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