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Teaching and research synergy: Windows, mirrors and doors in young adult fiction

By Maria Leedham, Sarah Jane Mukherjee and Sally Hunt

A set of books lined up on a shelf

Finding time to develop a new research project amidst the demands of teaching, supervision and admin can be (how to put it) …. challenging. This project was initiated in 2022 when the three of us (Maria, Sarah and Sally) were in the throes of module production for a new, interdisciplinary module at The Open University titled Language, literature and childhood (L301). While we felt at the time we had limited time and headspace for developing new research, a chance conversation in the OU coffee shop led us to consider the possibility of combining teaching and research interests and take a linguistic approach to the study of children’s literature.

OU funding enabled us to bring in former OU PhD student Ernesto Roque-Gutierrez as a research assistant and also buy print and e-copies of 50 books …. So what is the project and what do we hope to achieve in the world of children’s literature?

To answer this, we’d like to bring in a foundational quote on literature from Professor Rudine Sims Bishop:

‘A book can sometimes be a window. […] Usually the window is also a door, and a reader has only to walk through in imagination to become a part of whatever world has been created or recreated in the book. […] a window can also be a mirror, […] Reading then, becomes a means of self-affirmation of reaffirming our place in the world and our society.’ Bishop (1990).

Bishop’s message is that the windows, mirrors and doors onto the world presented through literature reveal powerful messages about who is valued in society and also who is marginalised. For teenage readers, the messages woven through popular young adult (YA) literature are particularly influential as they develop their identities and world views. Our overarching research question is thus:

What worldview is gained from reading popular young adult fiction?

Our pilot project aims to make visible the patterns of meaning in the top 50 best-selling YA books in the UK over a 5-year period (April 2017- May 2022). We’re using a mixed methods approach of corpus linguistics to analyse the texts, and focus groups to gain the views of young readers. We hope the findings will be useful to secondary schools and in particular to librarians in understanding the importance of book choices to reveal the windows, mirrors and doors available to young adults through their reading repertoires.

While time has remained in short supply, we quickly found that the reading and discussions we had around the research project fed in to module production and vice versa. We wrote a short work-in-progress report on the project which features in the module materials – and thus hope to enthuse a new generation of scholars. And we’re working on an external bid to bring in funding to enable us to extend the project. Watch this space!

 

 

Reference
Bishop, R. S. (1990). Windows and Mirrors: Children’s books and parallel cultures. In Margaret Atwell and Adria Klein (eds.)   California State University, San Bernardino Reading Conference 14th Annual Conference Proceedings. “Celebrating Literacy”.  pp. 3 – 20