LLED 442: Trends and Issues in Teaching Environmental Children’s Literature
Winter Term 1 from Sept to Dec 2025
Monday, 4 to 7 PM
Instructor: Dr. Derek Gladwin
What stories are we telling children about the world—and what futures do those stories invite them to imagine? This course explores how teaching children’s literature can engage youth in critically and creatively engaging with the environment, sustainability, and our place within ecological systems. Whether you’re an educator, researcher, librarian, creative writer, or simply curious about storytelling’s connection to ecology, this course offers educational tools and perspectives for understanding how stories shape our collective futures. Using a range of Canadian and international texts often taught in K-12 classrooms—from picture books and fairy tales to graphic novels, short stories, film-poems, and young adult fiction—we will examine key ecological and cultural themes including: the Anthropocene and Symbiocene, climate change, waste and pollution, animal and more-than-human perspectives, energy literacy, techno-utopianism, Indigenous storytelling and futurism, and systems thinking. Participants will engage with both critical and practical approaches to children’s literature, combining theory, pedagogy, and creative inquiry. Along the way, we’ll ask: How can stories help children—and ourselves—make sense of today’s environmental challenges? How might they also inspire action, hope, and more just, livable futures?
Note: Open to all disciplines with no prior knowledge necessary, this course can be taken as both undergraduate and graduate and is well suited for teachers, teacher candidates, librarians, researchers, and other interested learners.