Earn three elective credits towards your master's degree and/or as continuing education towards renewing your teacher certification.
Who? Morna Flaum is an adjunct professor at Johnson State College since 2009. Morna is a writer and teaches a variety of courses at Johnson State College at the undergraduate and graduate level.
What We Do: Learn how to choose and use picture books, informational books and all varieties of children's literature and/or young adult literature throughout the curriculum, across all content areas. Learn to choose and use literature to enhance and support student motivation. Send me an email and I'll answer all your questions: morna.flaum@jsc.edu.
Personalized Assignments: I want this class to be very useful to you. The main assignments of the course are geared to helping you find the literature you need to teach your best in the year to come. The main assignment is to develop a text set that will be core to your teaching, what you teach, who you teach, where you teach.
Registration is through Johnson State College. Call JSC Johnson State College Registrar's Office - 802-635-1677.
Here are some comments from my previous students from 2013's blog about the class:
ReplyDelete" I took this class as a graduate student a few years ago and I'm still talking about it. I work with children and just love children's literature, so I found this class extremely interesting and relevant to my work. It really trained me to look at children's literature with a more critical eye, and to examine it within the context of political and social commentary. I loved the unit on fairy tales especially! Now, I really consider even more thoughtfully every book I choose for children and am able to better plan the discussions and lessons surrounding the literature. Not to mention, of course, that Morna is an incredibly passionate, interested and engaged professor. I took three of her classes and they were all wonderful!"
"Oh, and can I also add that I took the Young Adult Literature class, and all the same comments stand. It was awesome, and I developed a new appreciation for YA literature. The discussions were amazing, and the assignments were very creative and thought provoking. I still reference the class in resumes and job interviews, and my YA content knowledge has really been an asset in my career."
Here is another comment from a former student:
ReplyDeleteI took Morna’s Young Adult Literature course in my last year of graduate studies, and learned more than I had bargained for. I initially took this course to be able to offer some new and interesting titles to my tweenager son, and was pleasantly surprised by the breadth of literature that is out there for today’s youth. We discussed the variability in themes and subject matter that today’s students have access to, and the importance of a teacher’s connection to literature, so that student’s feel connected to the realities of the world they are growing up into.
I had the opportunity to explore audio books on Gutenberg.org and Booksshouldbefree.com, e-book publication tools, and online presentation platforms to develop text sets and links to author blogs and sites. We talked about finding great books through resources such as ALA, YALSA and the Newbery and Caldecott Award listings on the ALSC page. Morna took us to the school library so that we could learn to source great titles through archive publications, and whole series dedicated to collections of genres and titles organized for easy identification and access. We didn’t only learn about new titles, but also how to find them easily. We learned about how to research authors with ease, and maximize the research library tools at our disposal. She even shared some radical children’s books that have been contested by parents and teachers in certain domains, but have the potential to reach students across cultures, or in environments that we sometimes choose to keep out of mind, such as homeless, foster-placed or incarcerated children. We even delved into the psychology and evolution of fairy tales and classic stories, and talked about the history bridging oral and written stories.
I cannot say enough about how I really got so much more than I had expected to from this class, and would recommend it to anyone who is planning on reading to children, of any age, in any capacity. Thank you, Morna!
Eve Gagne
M.A. Ed. 2013
here's another comment
ReplyDeleteI took the YA course last summer and will be taking the Children's Lit this summer. I very much look forward to taking another class from Morna. This will be the third course I have had with Morna at the helm. She is a wealth of knowledge, which is obvious in the first five minutes when you can barely see her over the pile of books she carries into class. Her passion for every form of language is contagious. She is engaging and understanding. I have always found her expectations to be right on target. I hope I will be joined by many in taking this next unique opportunity in literacy learning!