The pedagogical context of women in children's services and literature scholarship - includes a table containing survey data - Imagination and Scholarship: The Contributions of Women to American Youth Services and Literature

Library Trends, Spring, 1996 by Anne Lundin

Abstract

This article discusses the persistence of children's book pioneers in the current practice of children's literature and services curriculum in library and information science programs. The article draws on the theoretical work of the feminist philosopher Elizabeth Minnich (1990) who, in her book Transforming Knowledge, explores why it matters who is, and who is not, included in the curriculum and presents the necessary tasks of critique, re-membering, and creation. These conceptual functions are applied to the place of women pioneers in children's librarianship within the library and information science curriculum. The results of a survey taken of current children's literature faculty of library and information science programs reveal the quandary of those interested in critique, remembering, and creation of women's history while simultaneously communicating current literature and services to children. The article offers suggestions for incorporating the contributions of women pioneers in the children's book field within the curriculum of library and information science programs. The reconstruction of a children's literature and services curriculum would embody what Jane Anne Hannigan calls "a feminist paradigm for library and information science" (Hannigan & Crew, 1993).

Introduction

Minnich (1990), in her provocative book Transforming Knowledge, argues broadly for the transformation of culture by the inclusion - i.e., the incorporation - of gender issues into the curriculum of higher education. Minnich is professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies at the Union Graduate School of the Union Institute and is distinguished in the field of women's studies and education. Minnich is passionately and persuasively involved in the task of recovering women's stories within the complex intellectual traditions of higher education. In her words: "The tellers of our tale have not had the advantage of 'standing on the shoulders of giants' who preceded them" (p. 1). While a brave few tell women's stories, these accounts are often erased by discontinuity and disruption.

Minnich's book not only challenges the question of gender as part of curriculum but as essential to epistemology - i.e., not only what but how we think. The distortions in the telling of women's stories limit our thinking and thus knowledge of ourselves and the larger world. Her view is that the feminist movement has so radicalized education-indeed, the whole perception of knowledge and truth - that it is imperative that gender be part of the fabric of curriculum. Minnich passionately states the significance of the curriculum: "It is in and through education that culture, and polity, not only tries to perpetuate but enacts the kinds of thinking it welcomes, and discards and/or discredits the kinds of thinking it fears" (p. 5). The curriculum becomes a "text" from which the constructions of a whole culture could be read in all of its errors of thinking and logic. Because the few are taken to be the inclusive term, the ideal whole fields of knowledge are defined as universal and not particular in terms of subject and object.

Women and their contributions are most conspicuously absent from the curriculum. The curriculum in higher education has not only omitted but excluded the voices of women congruent with similar practice in other institutional expressions in political, economic, and legal systems. Bounded disciplines result in only partial knowledge that defines the field. What is invisible in the curriculum continues to be devalued by the culture. Minnich writes:

Our educational institutions - those inspiring, impossible, frustrating, appealing, appalling systems within which we usually try simply to find the space and time to do our work of teaching and learning - are, not alone but preeminently, the shapers and guardians of cultural memory and hence of cultural meanings. Here too, then, we must do our work of critique, re-membering, creation. (p. 12)

Critique, re-membering, and creation are the work of the curriculum of children's literature pedagogy, a transforming of the knowledge of the larger field of librarianship as well as children's literature and services.

Critique

The task of critique involves the radical examination of a tradition that is premised on the exclusion of its history, especially the history of women in librarianship. As Suzanne Hildenbrand (1985) states succinctly: "Women library leaders and library women generally have received unsatisfactory treatment in library history" (p. 185). Many of the notable women library, leaders have been concerned with children's literature and services. Children's literature and the whole field of children's services have been handicapped by their specialization, Which, in addition to its subject matter and audience, have diminished its status. As Minnich notes, the existence of curricular particularly - the prefixing of studies such as Children's Literature or Women's History, instead of Literature or History - has distanced these fields from what is perceived as essential and ideal. As Minnich writes: "The more prefixes, the further from the real, the significant, the best" (p. 42). So, at best, children's literature and services suffer from a perceived sense of irrelevance, which further isolates the history of the significant women pioneers within the field.