This project provides middle school teachers with instructional direction and hands-on methods to incorporate an environmentally-oriented trade book, Bird Watch (1990) by Jane Yolen, into their language arts curriculum. Bird Watch is a collection of sixteen poems which describe a variety of birds, their habitats, and activities.

The Grimm Brothers’ Little Briar-Rose is a beloved fairytale, which is more commonly known as Sleeping Beauty. What began as a Volksmärchen, is now a world famous and beloved Kunstmärchen. The Brothers collected and adapted the tale, incorporating their own literary style, helping to develop a literary Germanic cultural history. In this thesis I analyze how the tale evolves from the original oral tale to the literary story, and how various perspectives of culture and authors, with particular audiences in mind, adapt their versions. Historical background of the Grimms and their influences, an analysis of how the story was revised by the Grimms in the 1812 and 1857 editions, how American children’s versions compare to the Grimms’ version and how Jane Yolen’s version of Sleeping Beauty meets the structural and cultural expectations of the Grimms’ tale are examined.

This dissertation presents a holistic framework for approaching fantastic school stories: that is, narratives which feature the protagonist’s education in magic. This three-part framework attends to the ways in which the fantastic school story subgenre draws upon the characteristics and possibilities of the school story genre, fantastic literature, and representations of education – in which a hidden curriculum is always inherently present – to create unique opportunities for representing and foregrounding issues and structures within educational institutions and the relationship between education and power. Employing this lens allows for a more nuanced and complex consideration of the impact of fantastic elements in these narratives, examining the ways in which such elements exaggerate, embody, or enforce underlying ideologies and norms and offer encouragement to readers to interrogate these aspects of the text and the mundane educational experiences they encounter. This framework is then used to analyse representative texts in the subgenre and explicate the hidden curriculum of each: ideologies of immutable gender and identity in Jane Yolen’s Wizard’s Hall; the use of testing as a gatekeeping measure to reinforce Pureblood supremacy in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series; the prerequisite of economic capital to access education, undermining the myth of post-secondary studies as social mobility, in Patrick Rothfuss’s Kingkiller Chronicles; the violence of imperial educational institutions in Lev Grossman’s Magicians trilogy; and the vocational habitus of witchcraft, including gendered divisions and expectations of personal sacrifice, on the Discworld in Terry Pratchett’s “Tiffany Aching” quintet. This framework and these illustrative analyses, by explicating the structures underlying the protagonists’ education and the ways in which they are thereby limited, participate in the projects of developing an emancipatory approach to children’s literature and in consciousness-raising regarding hidden curricula in education. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / Texts in the fantastic school story subgenre – that is, narratives about a young person learning how to use magic, often at a school – are a valuable opportunity to explore the relationship between power and education. Here, I present a three-part approach for reading these texts which looks at how these narratives combine elements of the school story genre, fantasy literature, and representations of education to create a unique format. This unique format makes it easier for readers to see underlying structures and issues in education by making familiar elements feel unfamiliar through the addition of magic. I then use this three-part approach to analyse fantastic school stories by Lev Grossman, Terry Pratchett, Patrick Rothfuss, J.K. Rowling, and Jane Yolen. Reading the texts through this lens brings forward issues related to education like gate-keeping, socioeconomic status, imperialism, and gendered norms and divisions.