Undergraduate Research

Underpinned by many children's studies concepts and frameworks, this study closely examines the influences of Disney characters and story archetypes on my participants' relationship with their bodies and selves.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll first published in 1865 has paved the way for numerous publishers, authors, and illustrators to take part in continuing the legacy of Carroll’s most well-known creation.

The Nancy Drew books have influenced the shaping of children reading these novels within society.

Through the use of resources from the 1900s-1930s, today’s kindergarten curriculum resources and scholarly papers, this paper aims to discover how the early 1900s emergent literacy program of Ontario helped to shape today’s kindergarten literacy program.

After conducting some research on the education curriculum of Ontario, Canada during  the 1920s and 1930s, I found my interests laid with these specific notebooks that are located at the Clara Thomas Archives and Special Collections.

In a time of youth censorship, restriction, and shame, Riot Grrrl Press provided an avenue for teenage girls to speak on issues that impacted their own lives and the lives of those around them.

Hornbooks were the first books written for children, and they were produced in England to teach children how to read, write, learn math, and provide religious instruction.

Through the works of Mother Shipton by Robert Sayer, Little Folk’s Peep Show by Ernest Nister and Comic Actors: a new moveable toybook by Lothar Meggendorfer, this essay will examine and analyze how 18th-century novelty books were constructed over time and how novelty literature integrated into children’s literary culture.

Children’s books and novels are a popular commodity in modern times, but it was not always like this. Children’s novels were not seen as important one-hundred to two-hundred years ago.

The author uses a child-centric view to explore Celia Rivera as she experiences puberty, changes to her body, and her first crush on a boy.

As this research paper unfolds, it should become clear that it was essentially the domestication of Perrault’s “Bluebeard” in Marion Adams’ Bluebeard: A Nursery Tale Play for Boys and Girls, which paved the way for more feminist retellings, interpretations, and manifestations of this fairy tale.

Children who act in accordance with the minority world’s definition of childhood often practice agency by challenging the status quo and through mass consumption.

Lady Ellenor Fenn’s work amalgamates popular theories of education (the Evangelical and Romantic models of childhood) into practice by creating a child-directed methodology for Language Arts education that emphasizes the salience of experiential learning, family literacy, home-based education, cultivating children’s emergent literacy, and parent-engagement.

Through their narratives, Ellis and Satrapi demonstrate that young people have the capacity to voice insightful opinions, exercise agency by challenging authority and the potential to act as agents of change through resistance to oppression.

Queer fiction (like The Moon Within) allows us as readers to see diverse characters and their lived realities, no matter their sexuality.

“Queer” functions as an umbrella word that can be used to describe a diversity of individuals whose sexual orientation and gender identity and/or expression operate outside of heteronormativity—that is, the sexual and gender norms that govern white, middle-class, North American communities.