Goldsmiths online information sessions

Megan Thompson 
Hi, welcome everyone to today’s session, Understanding Human Behaviour, which is going to be exploring our online psychology programme at Goldsmiths.  

So I’m Megan. I work in our marketing team, looking after our online programmes. And I’m joined today with Dr. Bence Palfi, who’s the programme convenor for the Psychology Online MA/MSc here at Goldsmiths. 
 

So I think just going on to some quick housekeeping, if you do have any questions, please type them into the Q&A, which is just at the top of your screen. And if you see any questions that you want the answer to, if you can just press the up arrow, that will help us be able to see it, sort of pop up the screen. 
 

And yeah, like I said, we’ll try and answer all of your questions during the session. My colleague is off screen and will be messaging back with any responses that you have specifically around the application itself.  

And any questions that we have for Bence we’ll save up towards the end of the session and we’ll answer during our Q&A portion. And if we don’t have a chance to get back to you, we will follow up with you after the session. 
 

So on the agenda today, we’re going to run through some quick introductions and discuss why Goldsmiths might be the right choice for you for your online study. We’ll take a look at an overview of our programme and you know, what makes it unique. Take a look through the career opportunities and the pathways that our graduates will be qualified for. And think about what online study is really like and the learning environment that you’ll be using if you join us. And we’ll also go through the admissions process and any entry criteria. So that’s looking at both our English language criteria and the grades that you’ll need to join us. And then we’ll finish that off with some questions. 
 

So, Bence, over to you for introductions, please. 

 
Bence Palfi  
Thank you, Megan. Hi everyone. So I’m Bence Palfi and I’m going to be the programme convenor for the psychology programme. And apart from being a programme convenor, I will be leading some of the core modules you will be learning, especially in phase one.  

So in the beginning, modules called Mind, Brain and Society and Biology and Development of the Mind. These are introductions to psychology for specifically designed for those who have also no background in psychology. And later on, I will be also leading a communicating psychological research that is more or less like a science communication module. And likely I will also be leading a fourth module with a strong focus on applications, which I will talk about later.  

My research background is mostly in decision making research. Currently, I’m more interested in human-AI interactions, how people or how the interaction between people and any sorts of like algorithm or AI interface can be improved to improve human decisions, meta science as well, that is about research, about how people do research essentially, and how we can improve the scientific process.  

And currently I’m working on a large language model-based tool to support rigorous pre-registration and research practices. So this essentially you can see how I’m blending meta science with my other expertise in human interaction and decision making. 
 

Let me also introduce other members of staff. Professor Yan de Fokert will be supporting me in leading the programme. And Karina Linel and Randy Cooper, they are going to lead the research method and statistics modules, which also play a very crucial part of any sort of psychology programme and education. 

As you will see, psychology is very strongly evidence and science based. So these are important parts of your training. And Professor Agnieszka Golez-Desvala and Professor Alice Jones, they will be leading to specialised more applied 
modules. Alice is leading an education psychology and education module. She has a very strong background, both academic and non-academic background in the application of psychology in educational practise and context. And I guess she has a very strong background in social psychology and especially in group conflicts or understanding group conflicts and resolving group conflicts with her through psychological solutions. So her applied module is focusing on that. 
 

Let’s move on to, yeah, thank you. So just a few words on why we believe it’s great to study at Goldsmiths online. So studying online with Goldsmiths mean joining a vibrant and boundary pushing community without pressing pause on your life.  

So essentially, with the part-time solution and online solution, we provide lots of flexibility for you. We provide a platform for self-discovery and social change as well that’s accessible and flexible to fit into your busy schedules. So our courses blend academic rigour with the freedom to think differently, equipping you with critical skills to solve real-world challenges. I will elaborate on these in the later slides. 
 

And some facts about Goldsmith and specifically the psychology subject of psychology at Goldsmith. So 2 core values of whole of Goldsmith is radical creativity and academic rigour. You will see both of these manifesting in our psychology programme. 
 

And our programmes and specifically the modules of this programme, they blend word class teaching with the freedom to think differently, equipping you with critical skills, creative thinking to solve real world challenges. So you will see that these are our core skills that manifest across all of our modules. 
 

Goldsmith is part of the, yeah, sorry, just a few facts, a few more facts as well to promote Goldsmiths being top tech university in London and specifically psychology is being the 18th in the UK was in 2025. 
 

And then let me tell you a few core ideas or important things about studying psychology specifically at Goldsmiths and specifically this online MSC. It focuses on solving real-world problems by using psychology thoughtfully, critically, and creatively. So again, this is a very core part of our programme.  

So it doesn’t only mean that we will have like 1 module called Applied Psychology, but this is something that you will see it’s applied throughout all our modules. So we will prepare you from the beginning. What you see the example on the right side, this is from one of the introduction modules from a section called Cognition and Culture.  

Then we very blend cultural topics of culture as well as topics of the mind of cognition. But essentially what I just wanted to deliver is these core ideas are applied immediately from the introduction module.  

We will be immediately seeing some examples of how real world problems can be applied with psychological solutions. 
 

You are exposed to innovative ideas. Sorry, just a few more words about the other things. You are exposed to innovative ideas and approaches that broaden your thinking and inspire creative problem solving. And you also shape decisions, influence policy, improve wellbeing or support positive change.  

These are partly, again, values of Goldsmiths and psychology department or subject as a whole. But also, you can see how they manifest throughout this programme specifically. 
 

Okay. So our online programme is designed for graduates from any discipline to deepen your understanding of human behaviour and gain career enhancing skills.  

This means that you will likely find our programme exciting even if you have some sort of background in psychology because we have a special focus on 
how to apply in a creative and an ethical manner, psychological knowledge.  

And also, we are also focusing on empowering you as a student to find ways in which you can use psychology to enhance your career or find a pathway in which you can use psychology. 
 

And of course, the programme is perfectly ideal for those as well who have no background in psychology at all. So you will experience, again, these are our main core values, translational and applied focus throughout all the modules, collaboration at the core, meaning that many of your courseworks, some of the marked summative works are also expected to be prepared as part of a collaboration and flexible study pathways, which work especially well for part-time students. But this also means that we will let you explore what you kind of like 
within psychology and then choose even, for instance, between an MSc and an MA pathway.  

For instance, if you prefer more research, then you can go through the MSc pathway. If you prefer policy analysis, you can go through the MA pathway. But it also means that there are other exit degrees, which I can talk about maybe in the next slide more with the examples. 
 

Sorry, then a slightly later, but essentially we also provide exit degrees before MA/MSc, essentially just providing you even more flexibility if you don’t want to go through the whole programme. The full programs, so now the MA/MSc, these are the full programmes.  

These take two years, part-time, 180 total credits, 8 modules in total, and the dissertation on top of that. You can pay by module, which you can see the cost for modules or the dissertation modules, and you can also see the overall cost. 
 

However, there is a summer scholarship, which I wanted to highlight, meaning that you will get an £5,000 tuition fee waiver if you apply for the upcoming intake, which is starting at the end of August, application deadline, which I will highlight later again or Megan, we’ll talk about the application process later. It’s on the 14th of August.  

So essentially, you can imagine that this £5000 waiver applies to the £16,000 total tuition fee, so minus £16,000 pounds, of course.  

Importantly, we have also submitted a BPS accreditation for the MSc pathway. So this will only apply what I’m talking about in terms of the BPS only applies to the MSC pathway, which will, if it is, once it’s accepted, it will act as a conversion programme as well, meaning that this will provide a gateway to training in postgraduate psychology programmes, if you want to transition, for instance, into a professional psychology career, you will need to have a BPS accredited psychology programme.  

And this also means that those of you who don’t have any psychology background, once you finish a programme that was BPS accredited, that’s more than enough to transition into postgraduate psychology training. And this is of course, again, a marker of quality as well, a BPS accredited programme, which has some strong requirements on certain topics and methodology we need to cover, as well as staff student ratio, ensuring that you will have an engaging and high-quality education. 
 

And let me talk a little bit about the specific modules and these phases. 
So just a few words again about the programme. The MSc is designed to turn psychological theory into practical action, as I mentioned previously. And you don’t just study concepts, you will learn how to apply them to real world challenges using evidence-based methods to solve problems in everyday life or also in organisation or even in larger communities. 
 

These modules, unless we indicate otherwise, these will be the modules you will do if you start in the next, at the next starting point at the end of August. The programme is broken down to three phases.  

You can also imagine these as with the exit of awards phase one, if you complete phase one, you can get a certain exit award if you want to finish your training there. And if you complete all phases, then you can either get the MA/MSc, depending on the type of dissertation you choose at the end.  

Phase one, mostly focusing on introduction into the content of psychology or domains or subject of psychology. 
 

There are five big subjects in psychology, the individual differences, cognitive psychology, biological psychology, developmental psychology and social psychology. We will cover these in the first two modules.  

And then there is an introduction into research design and statistics, which is followed up later in phase two. But then immediately in phase one, we will have a module specifically focused on psychology for real world impact, that is translation of psychological theory into practical solutions, where we will provide you with case studies from real world experts who have psychological background, but rather than working at universities, they have their careers outside of academia and they will bring some case studies from their careers, from very different careers, from clinical psychology to forensic psychology and to, for instance, how to create behavioural insights from data, how to support communities and so on. 
 

And then in phase two, we will just continue building on knowledge from phase one, extend methodological knowledge, science communication, which is again an important part of critical thinking and to translating psychological theory into real life applications, and two other very applied focused modules, which I mentioned 
psychology and education and social psychology of social problems.  

And then you will be able to choose between the MA or MSc pathway, depending on your interest, if you are more interested in policy applications or more interested in a research-based, empirical research-based dissertation. 
 

Just a few words about networking opportunities throughout your programme. We will be designing journal clubs, which are designed for online learners to help you strengthen critical thinking skills and stay up to date with cutting edge psychology.  

We understand that reading. I mean, the whole online learning experience can be sometimes isolating, especially reading. But journal clubs are excellent tools to make these as well, collaborative, to understand these very abstract ideas and critical think about evidence.  

It’s always better to have a forum where you can discuss this thing with your peers. 
 

There will be regular research seminars, which will be accessible online. These will expose you to research styles and career paths and showcasing the latest work in the department. 
 

And also one of our modules specifically focuses on, which I mentioned previously, the science communication is specifically focusing on research happening at a time in the psychological or the psychological department. And these will be delivered by members of staff where ideally, if you like one of those topics, maybe you can also connect with members of staff if there is any opportunity for joining some sort of research.  

And finally, professional engagement directly integrated into the curriculum. Students regularly interact with academics, practitioners, policymakers and industry specialists to actively shape the fields they work in.  

This again, something I’ve already mentioned, parts of these are planned as parts of some of our more applied or specifically applied modules like the module, for instance, in the phase one, which is specifically about real world case studies from. 
either policy makers or industry specialists. And then there is the science communication module, where you can meet 10 academics from the department. 
 

And a few words about potential career opportunities. There is always the opportunity to just continue postgraduate study, as in like PhD, if you are interested in research, but we want to empower you to find other routes as well or pathways outside of the traditional academic pathway, because we understand most of the people. 
 

Most of the people are not interested following up a specific very academic style research pathway. And research can be also used outside of academia as well. Of course, these are just some potential career options you can follow up easily. 
with a strong psychology training. For instance, in education and child development, we will, as you have seen, we will have specifically a module about this. There is also health, mental health and social care.  

Many of our modules focuses specifically on mental health. Consulting and behavioural science or user experience. We will have the practical module, one of the case studies in the practical module, focusing on this topic as well. 
 

And if you are also interested in more, you can do, you can follow up that link as well to see what are the sorts of career options or specific jobs advertised for people with psychological MSc. 
So again, these are some of our core skills and slightly values, but more like skills, practical skills as well that you will acquire throughout the study or by the end of the programme that you can translate directly into industry jobs where it is highly needed.  

For instance, ethical and professional data skills are especially needed now with the appearance of big data and also large language models being used for data analysis, understanding privacy, and other very important issues with data handling is important in any of these data related jobs.  

Strong collaborative working is required in almost any industry, of course, as well as a clear communication of complex ideas. 
 

And then there is the very highly specific skill of practical coding skills, which nowadays are expected also within psychology to be able to complete comprehensive analysis of your data. You will need to acquire some sort of data analysis skills and we will support you to do this with coding rather than just in a simple clicking basis like it used to be in the old days of psychology education.  

Here are some potential companies that are looking for people with psychology background. 
 

But it’s not just, I mean, some of them are also not-for-profit, like NHS, for instance. And there are lots of options in the public sector, but there are also a lot of smaller companies. And for the practical module, I’ve also tried to bring in case studies and experts who are from, for instance, who have their own companies. 
 

They have psychology background, for instance, but they managed to create their own companies, funded their own companies where they use psychological insight for specific fields of psychology to resolve real world problems like in music, aesthetic psychology, or behavioural consultancy and so on. 

 
Megan Thompson 
Great, thank you, Bence. So I’m just going to cover some more about online learning here at Goldsmiths. So at Goldsmiths, it’s really important for us that you’re developing the skills that will help you really advance your personal and professional development through online learning, which Bence has covered quite a lot of already. 
 

But our psychology programme is really designed with a real focus on ensuring that you’re gaining analytical skills and the resilience, flexibility and agility, you know, those really valuable competencies to advance in your career. And we believe that online learning is a really good way to help cultivate digitally fluent leaders who can motivate, collaborate and communicate effectively across boundaries, really.  

And then of course, creative thinking is another important value and skill for our students. So not just preparing students to respond to change, but also sort of helping them learn how to shape it as well. And at Goldsmiths, our graduates emerge not just as problem solvers, but also as really socially intelligent leaders with a strong grounding and human understanding.  

And that human centred digital approach to teaching is what’s really important to us and meeting those strong values of care, creativity and connexion that really forms the backbone of Goldsmith’s sort of ethos in teaching.  

And so the online classroom, all of this really feeds into our classroom where you develop those skills. So our learning environment has been built by our goal team to ensure that you can study while maintaining, you know, a strong balance and commitments in your personal life. 
 

And this programme’s delivered across this platform that we have and it will be where all of your interactive learning and assessments and feedback takes place. So everything is all in one place and it’s really very easy and straightforward to use. And there are a lot of benefits to learning online.  

So choosing to do a part-time programme online with Goldsmiths means that you get so much more flexibility, both in terms of where and when you pick up your learning and assessment on a week to week basis.  

And also just with easy access through any browser or any device. And all of these programmes that we have are designed to be sort of accessible throughout. 
 

And so to ensure that you’re really getting the most out of it, we would generally say a commitment of 15 to 20 hours per week is suitable. Is there anything you wanted to add then, say, about online learning and the environment that the psychology programme is hosted on? 

 
Bence Palfi  
Yes, and partly also trying to answer one of the questions there, which you have partly answered with the roughly 15 hours per week, is that there will be only two live events per module, and these will be Q&A sessions like this session right now, which will be recorded. 
 

And those will be mostly focusing on, the first one will be focusing on introducing the module specifically and the module lead. And the second one will be focusing on introducing the summative coursework or exam or whatever you will need to do, which will be marked. So these sessions will give you an option to like ask your questions. 

But if you cannot join, then you can just watch the recording. Other than that, everything else will be asynchronous, so you will not have to join at a specific time. 

 
Megan Thompson 
Brilliant, thank you. 
 

Yeah, and then just sort of following on from that as well, I think there’s lots of opportunities to connect with your faculty and your peers through online learning as well.  

So we’ve got these discussion forums and going through that sort of eight-week module structure really gives you the opportunity to work at that suitable part-time pace, as Bence was just saying. 
 

And we have some great student support services in place as well to ensure that, you know, you’re not feeling like you’re going through it alone.  

And so we’ve got, of course, that online library where there’s loads of extra resources for you as well that you’ll be able to access as a Goldsmith student.  

And we have our module leaders who will be there to help with any questions or give you feedback who you can check in with.  

And then we also have our disability and wellbeing support where we can really help you with, you know, managing things like your mental health or any additional needs that you might have around studying.  

Did you want to add anything in there, Bence, say maybe about speaking with module leaders or anything else on the student support side? 

 
Bence Palfi  
Not on that specifically, but maybe also about how I mentioned that collaboration plays a key role in the programme. And we will support this partly with these discussion forums, which we created on the online platform.  

And then you will have either the option to be just randomly assigned to groups in case when there is a group assessment or a group task, or you will, I think in some cases, you will also be allowed to choose group members or even opt out if you think that you don’t have the capacity for a specific task to work with others. So we will always give you the flexibility to just submit alone if you feel you will not have the time, for instance, to coordinate with others for that specific task. 
 

But we just encourage you to see this as a learning opportunity, because this is a very important skill, which we’ve heard from industry partners that they require. And we just want to essentially provide you a safe space where you can practise collaborating with your peers and creating something together. 

 
Megan Thompson 
Great, thank you. 
And so just looking at entry requirements for joining the programme and our admissions process. So the standard entry route to join the programme is to have a bachelor’s degree with a 2.1 or an equivalent in any subject.  

Or we will accept people with a 2.2 bachelor’s degree with two years worth of relevant work experience. However, I think it’s quite important to note here as well that if you don’t meet the entry criteria, it’s always worth getting in touch with us to see if there’s anything, you know, that we can do or if there’s a suitable fit just based on your individual circumstances.  

So Bence will review applications and you’ll be able to speak with someone in the admissions team who’ll be really helpful for and helping you decide, you know, if this is a good fit for you based on your previous experience or qualifications. So make sure you do get in touch in the first instance when it comes to the entry criteria.  

And similarly, as the programme is taught in English, if English isn’t your first language, we do need a certificate and we accept IELTS with an overall score of 6.5 and no less than 6 in any band.  

However, again, we can consider alternative test certificates and we can make exemptions as well based on individual circumstances. 
 

So again, if you’ve got English as a second language and you want to have a quick discussion with the admissions team about whether you’d be a suitable fit to join this programme, please do get in touch and we’ll speak to you on an individual basis about that as well. 
 

So our application process is really very straightforward. We just need your degree certificate or a transcript confirming your predicted overall grade, a CV or resume and your English language certificate if those are applicable to you. And for anyone who’s applying via that non-standard entry criteria, we would also need a personal statement as well.  

And the deadline is just a few weeks away. So if anyone is interested in joining us from the 31st of August, you’ll need to get your application in to us before the 7th so that we can get that all processed for you. So please do contact our admissions team to discuss. I think that’s everything. So thank you so much. I think we’ll have time to take some questions now. 
 

And so let’s take a look and see if we’ve got anything that’s come through in the Q&A window. 

 
Bence Palfi 
There was another question specifically about human interaction research. And to that, what I wanted to say is we have a very large computer science department here at Goldsmiths. They also run online MScs as well. But what is more important that they have many people who are also doing research and teaching in the human-AI interaction topic.  

But also within the psychology department, there are other colleagues as well who are interested in this topic. So my answer is definitely yes. It’s not just me, a unique person, or doing this research alone here. So you would likely have opportunity, yes, to do if you, for instance, want to do research in this topic as part of your master’s programme, to reach out to these people and work with them. 

 
Megan Thompson   
Brilliant, thank you. So we’ve got another question saying, “what’s the weekly study hours commitment and will we need to join live or in person?”  

So I think we’ve already covered that, but did you want to talk a little bit more around sort of weekly study hours or anything else there, Bence? 

 
Bence Palfi   31:17 
No, I think we covered this, but I can just repeat that it’s roughly 15 hours and we made an attempt to make this quite uniquely, or sorry, uniformly distributed, as in evenly distributed across weeks. So there are no weeks when you have to invest way more time than at other weeks. 
 
Maybe, okay, maybe something we haven’t touched upon is that, so we have 8 weeks for each module, which we mentioned, but we have this structure of five weeks focusing on content and then three weeks focusing on preparation for the final coursework or any sort of assessment that you will have for that specific module. 
 

So we condensed the learning about methods and content into five weeks, and then you will have plenty of time to prepare, either alone or as part of a group, depending on the type of assessment that will happen in that module, with lots of scaffolding as well.  

So we will not leave you alone for three weeks, but we provide you with lots of scaffolding supporting materials on how you can prepare your coursework or prepare for that exam or whatever will be at the end of that module, the best. 

 
Megan Thompson  
Perfect, thank you. And do you complete one module at a time before then progressing on to the other is another question we’ve had come through. 

 
Bence Palfi  
Yes, and the answer is yes. So you will, if you do the part-time, which currently we only offer the part-time, you will have to do one module at a time. 

 
Megan Thompson 
Okay. And another one, “nice to meet you all. Is there supervision for the dissertation?” 

 
Bence Palfi    
Yes, there is supervision for the dissertation. And we will also offer, again, this as a group option as well, depending on obviously the number of students in your cohort.  

But what we hope is that in the future, people will be able to choose between doing dissertation as part of a group or or alone, depending on which pathway they prefer, and there will be supervision offered as well. 

 
Megan Thompson  
Brilliant. And for the group work, if people are sort of our international learners who are maybe based in different time zones, is there a way for people to sort of sync up with people that are local to them or, you know, so that they’re not having to wake up at all hours of the night to get on with work? How does the group work structure? 

 
Bence Palfi    

I think this is something we will have to, yes, pay attention when we assign people to groups, but I think this is also why we will likely leave you with the power of making the decision with whom do you want to get into one group, especially for larger projects.  

Maybe for smaller projects, it’s not an issue when you don’t have to meet 
in a meeting and you can discuss things via e-mail, but certainly for larger projects, we would want to make it possible for you to, yes, collaborate as much as possible. And then obviously it would make it difficult if you come from very different time zones. 

 
Megan Thompson   
Perfect. Okay, it doesn’t look like we’ve had any more questions come in. So unless anyone else has anything, oh, we’ve got one more come in from Sophie. So Sophie’s asked, “can I do a real life work based project for my dissertation?” 

 
Bence Palfi   34:49 
Yes, I think yes, with the ethics application, we were thinking to provide a template projects, but we will definitely leave an option for people to do their own projects.  

These are always depending also on or condition on finding the right supervisor for that project. But real life work based, as far as I understand, what do you mean by that should be possible as long as it can go through an ethics review and it is approved as in the proposed project is meeting the requirements of that, an ethical study. 

 
Megan Thompson 
Okay, and we’ve also, we’ve had another question come in from Marie who said, “is the £5,000 discount available for part-time students who want to start in August 2026?”  

So yes, Marie, the discount is available for anyone who’s applying onto the MA or the MSC for this August.  

So the postgraduate diploma and the postgraduate certificate aren’t applicable. But if you are applying to study on the master’s programmes, either the MA or the MSc pathway, both will be eligible for the £5,000 discount.  

So if you want any more information about our scholarship, you can scan through on the QR code there or e-mail the online admissions team and we’ll be happy to talk to you about that when we’ve got your application in. 

 
So I think those are all the questions that we’ve had so far. We do have a couple more minutes if anyone wants to submit anything else or like I said, please do feel free to follow up with the team and we can direct you as well towards Bence if you have any specific questions about the programme itself and want a bit more 
information from him as well.  

So yeah, thank you so much for your time today, everyone. And thank you, Dr. Bence, for your time as well and presenting the slides. The recording will be available afterwards, so we’ll send that out to everyone so you can review it if there’s anything that you maybe missed or if you didn’t quite catch the start. 

 
And, we look forward to talking with you all soon and hopefully seeing some of you in August. 

 
Bence Palfi  
Thanks everyone for showing up and the great questions. 

 
Megan Thompson  
Thank you. Okay, bye. 

Gethin Jones 
Hi, everybody. Welcome to the session for children’s literature at Goldsmiths, University of London. My name is Gethin. I’ll be hosting the session today. We’re just going to give it a couple of minutes, maybe 30 seconds for people to join. Just to tell you a little bit of housekeeping for the session.  

We should be here for around 45 minutes up to possibly 50 minutes, depending on how many questions we get. And we will be recording the session as well. So don’t worry if you miss anything, you will be sent a link to the recording after the session as well. Looks like we’re getting quite a few people coming in now, which is great. 
 
I think we’re good to make a start. Okay, so welcome everyone. Stories that shape us, children’s literature in a changing world. This is an introduction to the online master’s degree in children’s literature at Goldsmiths.  

I’m Gethin, I manage the student engagement team for the online degrees at Goldsmiths, so I’m here for anything to do with admissions, entry requirements, support through that application process, and all the way up to enrolment, really. And I’m also joined by programme convener Dr Emily Colbert. Do you want to say a quick hello? 

 
Emily Corbett  
Hi everyone, it’s so lovely to be with you all. It’s a great honour of mine to run this programme, so I look forward to talking to you all about it today. 

Gethin Jones 
Thanks, Emily. Okay, so just a quick update in terms of participation. So, you can type questions as you go. You should see a little Q&A function on the portal screen. Post it in there. We might pick up some questions as we go through the session. 
 

And I might answer some in the background as well, depending on the nature of the questions. But we will try and answer all of the questions in the session. And if we don’t manage to do that, we will get back to you after the session on e-mail. My team will follow up with you. There is a little upvote function as well. So if you find that question is useful or something that you were thinking of asking as well, it’s always worth upvoting it and then it’ll be there for others to see at the top of the list then.  

Okay, so agenda for today, we’re going to meet with Dr Emily Corbett, programme convener for the programme, give you some information as to why. Choosing Goldsmiths as a place to study, especially the online version of the course. The course itself, an overview, and then we’re going to have a little bit of a taster lecture from Emily, which will be sort of midway through the session, which will be something to really zoom in on because there’s some insights there into the type of things that you’ll be that you’d be looking at as a student of the programme. And then some career opportunities, some insights into the online study environment, the virtual learning environment, as we call it, and then how to apply and some of the sort of formalities and processes as well.  

Okay, but first of all, I’m going to hand you over to Emily to do a little bit of introduction. 

 
Emily Corbett 
Thanks, Gethin. Yeah, this is a bit interesting. It feels like giving my CV to you all, but it’s always nice to know who you’ll be spending some time with when you join the programme. So yeah, I’m a children’s and young adult literature specialist. I have a PhD in children’s literature specifically.  

I also have the huge privilege of being a general editor for the International Journal of Young Adult Literature, which I’ve been involved with since its inception and just seeing that grow is wonderful. 

And then at the university, I co-lead the children’s and YA literature strand of the Centre for Language, Culture and Learning. I run the online programme, that’s what we’re here to talk about today, but I also run the on-campus version of the programme and supervise PhD students in children’s and young adult literature as well. 
 

And then we’ve also got, if I could just ask you to go to the next slide, please, Gethin. Now, most people know about Professor Michael Rosen before they know about the programme. He needs no introduction, but we shall do it anyway. So Michael has got a career history of children’s literature involvement. You know, he’s one of the most wonderful people I’ve ever had the privilege to meet. 
 

He’s a poet and children’s author with world famous classics such as We’re Going on a Bear Hunt and Chocolate Cake. He was a children’s laureate from 2007 to 2009. And most recently, he’s been the recipient of the Hans Christian Andersen Award, which is a sort of service award for lifetime achievement in children’s literature. And he is one of the tutors alongside myself on the programme. And we also have somebody called Michelle who will be joining us. She doesn’t start at the university until September, so I will save introductions until she’s with us, but she’s also just a wonderful human being. 
 

Thanks, Gethin. 

 
Gethin Jones   
Thanks, Emily. And yeah, we did a great session with Michael quite recently as well. So if anybody wanted to look into that session, there’s a recording that we can follow up with as well. OK, studying at Goldsmiths Online, do you want to give a little bit of an insight into what students could expect? 

 
Emily Corbett  
Yeah, of course. So Goldsmiths, you might already know, has quite a reputation for being a real home for creative and critical thinkers. And we really, we spend our time asking the tough questions. We spend it thinking about how we can do things differently, you know, at the world, in the world at large, but also specifically in children’s literature. 
 

This programme is really an insight into asking those sorts of questions. We’re based in London, which is somewhat of a global hub of children’s literature and publishing, but it also means that we benefit from a global community of learners, so students from around the world. We’re one of the few children’s literature programmes in the UK, so we focus on bringing together lots of different aspects of the field. 
meaning we’re just as good for those who are working in publishing as those who are working in teaching, etc. And the online degree specifically is a bit of an invitation to join a community of students from all different walks of life. You’ll benefit from the same standards of teaching as our on-campus programme. As I’ve mentioned already, it’s the same faculty. 
 

But the big difference for you will be in the level of flexibility we’re able to offer online, both in terms of what you’re studying and when and where you’re doing your work. This really is a version of the programme that’s designed to fit around you and around your life, no matter what else you’ve got going on within it. 

 
Gethin Jones  
And a little bit about university and the kind of profile and brand and identity, I suppose, Emily. 

 
Emily Corbett   
Yeah, of course. So as you can see from the screen, we’re a top 10 university in London. We’ve got over 120 years of experience as an institution. I personally have had the privilege of working at Goldsmiths for four years now.  

But Children’s Literature, specifically at Goldsmiths, has been taught since 2014. It was actually Michael who set up the programme alongside the head of department at the time, Dr. Maggie Pitfield. And they were doing a module on children’s literature as part of their wider MA in education.  

And they decided that that wasn’t enough and that they needed a little bit more. There were more opportunities to study. So that is how children’s literature was sort of born. Michael designed the programme from its infancy all the way up to today where you see the version of the programme that we’ve just taken online. But all of this taps into the reputation that Goldsmiths, I hope, already has around the world for, like I’ve mentioned, the kind of creative critical innovation that we’re so proud of. 

 
Gethin Jones    
And then why children should matters, you know, both as a subject and to study it as a subject as well, I suppose, I think. 

 
Emily Corbett  
Yeah, it’s one of my favourite questions when it’s asked nicely, like Gethin just has, but it’s also one of the most challenging questions that we face in children’s literature sometimes, because children’s literature as a field has long been stigmatised as, you know, less of that, less complicated, less important, less worthy of study in some way. 
 

But I mean, I know I’m biassed when I say this, but it could not be more wrong to think of it in this way, because children’s literature is just fundamentally important socially. It is quite literally what helps us to raise young people. But it’s also a masterclass in form, you know, in technique. It’s worthy of its own theories, its own approaches. And it’s also one of the most dynamic forms of publishing, if that’s something that you’re interested in. 
 

get new trends, new forms, digital innovations. It’s one of the fastest moving types of literature, as well as having it sort of golden age classics. And I mean, again, I’m biased, but I just think it’s jolly old fun to study. Who wouldn’t want to spend their time immersed in the world of children’s books? You get that perfect balance of nostalgia, but critical thinking, thinking about the future, thinking about the way that 
children’s literature can enhance the lives of young people. So yeah, that’s why it matters to me. Everyone has their own personal reasons of why it matters to them.  

On the programme, the first cohort at the moment, we’ve got, you know, people who already work in publishing or people who are wanting to do career shifting. We’ve got people for whom this is a way of connecting to their own children, etc. So 
As much as I can tell you why children’s lit, I also want to throw it back to all of you to have a think about why it matters to you, you know, why you want to be here. 

 
Gethin Jones  
I think it’s fair to say that, you know, like I managed conversations with students over the short while up to the most recent intake, and you know, there’s an intense passion for these, you know, programmes and, you know, there’s a real heartwarming connexion a lot of the time in terms of you know, the reasons for studying and, you know, personal development, but also career development. So that comes across very clear in my dealings with applicants as well, yeah. 

 
Emily Corbett 
Yeah, oh, I’m really glad. My friends always ask me why I’m not part of a book club, because it makes a lot of sense. You can see how many books I’ve got behind me. And I say, well, I am part of a book club. You know, I run 2 MA programmes and we talk about books all the time because it really, it has that opportunity to be incredibly rigorous, whether you want to be a researcher, a creative writer, etc. but also just a community of people who care about something that matters to us personally and also globally. 

 
Gethin Jones  
Yeah. 
Absolutely. Oops, I got too far there in a sec. 
I’m going too far again. There we go. 

 
Emily Corbett  

Yeah, so right, just a little bit about sort of the USPs of the unique selling points of the course, if you like. Quite often people something that somebody called John Rowe Townsend said when he was talking about the study of children’s literature. And he divided it into two different categories of people who are interested in children’s literature, the book people and the child people. So meaning that, you know, the people that approach it as text and the people that approach it as a way of connecting with young people. 
 

But one of the things that I’m most proud of for our programme and that we’ve put a lot of work into is that we are both for the book people and the child people. And we recognise that those people aren’t actually that distinct all of the time.  

So as it says on the slide there, our MA offers a cohesive experience. It covers all facets of children’s literature. So there’s the chance to explore theory and practice, to focus on inclusion and diversity within contemporary children’s literature. 
 

We offer opportunities to apply theoretical ideas to practical and professional contexts, thinking about research and professional application. We also, not that I like to dwell on assessments because I do genuinely think they’re not the most important thing in the world, but we do offer a range of assessment methods and near complete flexibility and choice of topics. 
 

So we offer very practical sort of applied assessments from thinking about marketing, etc, through to the very deeply theoretical research essays, through to creative writing and the application of these ideas through creative practice. And as I mentioned, near complete flexibility and choice of topics. 
 

We don’t set questions to go and explore. You tell us what research project you’re interested in pursuing and we create the environment to enable you to do it, you know, within the sort of boundaries of the programme. Yeah, I think that’s what covers it, Gethin. 
 

Oh, some quick facts. 

 
Gethin Jones   
Thanks, Emily. Yeah, so quick facts, you know, this is, as we’ve kind of touched on already, you know, an online course, you know, completely online. It’s A part-time approach which offers that flexibility around access and managing it around, you know, a busy life and a work schedule, family commitments, etc. 
 

180 total credits, as you’d expect from the full master’s degree, which is split up into eight taught modules and then an additional dissertation. And you can actually, in terms of tuition fees, you can pay as you go, you know, you can pick up from a modular perspective and the total tuition then states here is £12,500 for the whole programme, but we do also have the post-grad certificate and diploma options as well, if you wanted to start off or exit the programme with a certificate or diploma along the way too. I should mention as well, we do have for the August intake, so our deadline is coming up I think the 7th of August for our 31st of August start.  

Okay, so even though it’s August, it’s actually right at the end of August, so it’s like nearly September. And we do have a £1000 scholarship for anybody applying to that August intake. 
 

And then we also have an October intake later in the year as well. Anything you wanted to add there, Emily? 

 
Emily Corbett  
Only one very small note, which is, yeah, Gethin is exactly right on the eight taught modules and then the dissertation.  

But for those of you who are joining us wanting to pursue creative writing particularly, you have the option to choose between a traditional research dissertation and also an extended portfolio of creative writing. 
 

So all of the students across the modules, and we’ll go into this in a little bit more detail in just a second, cover both critical and creative practice, but then you have that option to specialise as a creative writer for the final sustained project. 

 
Gethin Jones  
Brilliant, thanks Emily. Oh yeah, we’re going to a bit more detail on that content now. 

 
Emily Corbett   
Yeah, precisely that. So here on the screen, you’ve got a list of the modules that we are currently offering. They’re broken into phases.  

So you can see in phase 1, we’ve got form and genre, inclusion and diversity, publishing histories and writing childhoods.  

Phase 2 contemporary publishing, writing futures, methods, methodology. And then phase three is that final project that I was just talking about. So either the research dissertation or for the creative writing portfolio.  

I don’t really have time to go into the detail of every single module, but we do have all of the module specs published online, so you’ll be able to have a look in detail. But just to give you a little bit of insight into form and genre as a bit of a taster.  

So within that module, we think about, as it says on the tin, we think about genres and forms, but we also think about conventions across historical and cultural contexts.  

We examine how genre conventions intersect with ideologies and literary traditions. We critique theoretical approaches to genre and form and really focus on situating texts within broader literary and cultural debates. 
 

So you’d be studying books like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, alongside more contemporary verse novels like Dean Atter’s The Black Flamingo, plus poetry, of course, including Michael’s, alongside picture books, comics, etc. It’s worth noting, just for those of you who would be joining the August intake, that you will start with the module inclusion and diversity. And it’s from that module that I’ve developed a little bit of a taster lecture so you’ll get a sense of what some of that will involve in just a minute. 

 
Gethin Jones  
Brilliant, thank you, Emily. Okay, some info on career pathways and opportunities. Do you want to give a little bit of insights from your perspective, Emily? 

 
Emily Corbett    

Yeah, of course. So I think, as I mentioned earlier, the MA in Children’s Literature for some people can be about shifting careers.  

It can be about giving you this creative editorial and critical insight that can help you pivot something that has been maybe a lifelong interest or maybe even a new interest into something that you’re wanting to take into a professional space. 

  
So we particularly think about roles that would require this sort of deeper insight, whether that be into children’s literature or literature in the arts more generally.  

So you have the opportunity to build the research led editorial skills, develop your analytical thinking, craft a career grounded in creativity. And we’ve pulled together just a few of the organisations that we have. 

People have gone on to work in or that we have internship opportunities with, etc. So we’ve got Book Trust, Usborne, which is one of the largest independent children’s publishers in the UK, Bloomsbury, the Centre for Literacy and Primary Education.  

Really is sort of a myriad of opportunities of direct and indirect careers and specifically from the programme as well. 
 

Well, you know, I often have potential students say, well, are you actually going to help me get a job? And I won’t lie to you. The world is difficult at the minute. We know that. We know that the job market is difficult. But I do promise that we do our utmost to support people into the next phase of life that they want to enter.  

So I’ve had students go on to be literally agents. I’ve had students go on to work at Book Trust. I’ve also had students who career wasn’t their focus particularly, or they’re already well-established teachers and they’re just wanting to upskill themselves, etc.  

So what I’m offering you is a little bit of bespoke attention in the sense of you tell us what your ambitions are and we will do our utmost to help you get there in whatever way we possibly can. 

 
Gethin Jones  
Yeah, I think that’s a good point. Is that, you know, you tend to get out of it where you put in as well. So, you know, definitely engage as much as you possibly can.  

If you’ve got any specific questions, then just make sure you’re in contact with Emily and the team. And yeah, I think, is it worth pointing out as well, like, you know, from a creative writing perspective.  

There are elements, Emily, but this is more like a kind of holistic combination of critical elements as well as it’s not like a creative writing degree per se, is it?  

 
Emily Corbett  
No, exactly that. It’s really thinking holistically. That’s a great word for it. So you can come into this as a creative writer and we already have multiple students who are creative writers on the programme. And you can use this as an opportunity to hone your creative writing modules and there’s that extended portfolio.  

But really, we’re interested in getting these conversations going between all of these different facets of children’s literature so that you are sort of developing a rounded interest. And when it comes to writing for children, you already have that knowledge of the market, the publishing and of what matters within children’s books. 

 
Emily Corbett 
So we’re absolutely a space for creative writers to flourish, but we do that by enabling all of you to engage with all different sorts of study within children’s literature. 

 
Gethin Jones   
Excellent, thanks, Emily. Okay, I think now is your little section where you’re going to do a little taster element. So I shall leave it to it. 

 
Emily Corbett  
Thank you very much. I wanted to start, actually, I know that you’re all on mute. I know that you can’t speak to me, but I just wanted to give you a second to dwell on who recognises these images and more importantly, who recognises what they mean in the context of children’s literature.  

And I will stare awkwardly at the screen for a second now whilst you have time to think. 
 

OK, I’ll tell you. So these images represent the idea that literature can offer children mirrors, windows and sliding glass doors. These metaphors were introduced in the early 1990s by Dr. Rudy Sims Bishop, who’s a scholar of African American children’s literature. 
 

And they were introduced really to capture why inclusion and diversity is so important. So if we work through the metaphors, mirrors allow children to see their own lives and their own experiences reflected in what they read.  

Windows let them look into the lives and experiences of others who may be different from them. And sliding glass doors provide a way to sort of step into these worlds. 
to foster empathy and to foster understanding by sort of metaphorically walking in somebody else’s shoes. So as you might imagine, when children’s identities, experiences and lives aren’t represented in the books they read, it can tell them a lot about their world and their place within it. 
 

And just to give you a very sobering example, a researcher called Dr. Darren Chetty did a little bit of a project with children of colour where he invited them to draw children’s books. And they all drew them with pink sort of flesh, pink flesh skin with that colouring, as opposed to the tones that match their own skin tones.  

And when he asked them why, they essentially said, oh, because it’s white children that are in children’s books. They really didn’t see themselves within it. And today I’m going to focus our discussion on that lens of race specifically, though we could also consider lots of other forms of of identity and indeed we do in the inclusion and diversity module from sexuality to ability, etc. But I want to ask this question, which is what mirrors do children have available to them? 
 

So if we look backwards, in 1965, Nancy Laric published this groundbreaking article called The All White World of Children’s Books, and it highlighted the severe, very severe underrepresentation of people of colour in children’s literature in the United States of America. And her study found that only 6.7% of children’s books published between, I think it was 1962 in 1964 actually included any black characters. And while progress has been made since then, change has been really slow.  

So in 2014, which, you know, 12 years ago is still a little while ago, but not that long ago, the We Need Diverse Books movement came about and it was in response to a situation where was this all-white, all-male panel of children’s authors at BookCon. 
 

And Ellen O and Melinda Lowe, who are authors in their own right, expressed their frustration on Twitter. And it sparked this viral conversation using the hashtag, we need diverse books. And what began as this social media activism evolved into now a formal nonprofit organisation. But importantly, it really re-sparked this conversation about representation and lack thereof. So in 2018, what you’ll see on the screen there, the Cooperative Children’s Book Centre publish annual statistics, which show the racial diversity of US children’s literature.  

And we can see that as recently as 2018, 50% of children’s books featured white main characters. And you’ll note the way the illustrator has used the concept of mirrors there to really illustrate that, even down to the disco ball. So 50% of children’s books featured white main characters. 27% featured animals or other, so cars, pencils, whatever it might be. 
 

10% featured African or African American characters, 7% featured Asian Pacific Islander or Asian Pacific American characters, 5% Latinx characters, and only 1% featured American Indians and First Nations characters.  

And I’m really sad to say that the situation is not too dissimilar in the UK children’s publishing context. 
 

Gethin, if you could just pop the next slide on, and then I’ll invite you all again to take a pause and consider these statistics, which are from a recent Reflecting Realities report by the Centre for Literacy and Primary Education. So they’re showing the percentage of children’s books published featuring racially minoritized characters. What do you notice? Other than the fact that it looks like a Christmas tree, which is what I always first notice. But if we look behind that and the more serious stuff, what do you notice? 
 

So in essence, we can see that from 2017 to 2022, there was this steady increase in the percentage of children’s books published that featured racially minoritized characters, rising from 4%, it breaks my heart to say that statistic, 4% in 2017 through to 7% in 2018. 10% in 2019, 15% in 2020, and then 20% in 2021, reaching 30% in 2022. 
 

However, when we come to 2023, there’s this significant decline back down to 17%, which marked the first decrease in representation over the period. And while the overall trend is good, you know, it shows notable progress from 4% in 2017 up to 
The recent decline does raise questions about the sustainability of the gains in diverse representation. And Ellen Oh, one of the authors I mentioned, is the founder of We Need Diverse Books. She says, you know, diversity isn’t a trend, it’s a fact of life. And yet we seem in danger of the recent gains in diverse representation really being treated as just that, you know, a trend, when they should be consistent and they should be sustainable.  

And I will say, if anyone’s joining us from outside of the UK today, you might want to have a look at your own national context to see if you can think of any sort of similar research. You know, are there any comparable studies to that of the CCBC or the Centre for Literacy and Primary Education? 
 

If not, what information can you gather for yourself? 
 

And taking stock of the quantity and proportion of representation is important because it allows us to recognise the need for this drastic change in publishing. But looking only at these high level statistics, we aren’t always able to understand another important factor, which is the quality of representation available. 
 

Next slide, I think, please Gethin. So I therefore want to introduce you to another way of thinking about reading Sims Bishop’s metaphor of children’s literature as a mirror. Professor Karen Coates points out, and she’s looking at realism as a mode of writing, that when we think about mirrors.  
 

We think of them as reflecting what’s in front of us in that straightforward way. You know, we look at a mirror and we see ourselves, or we see whatever it is that the mirror is reflecting, and therefore it’s an accurate imitation of the real world. But reflections aren’t always like that. They can be deceiving. So Coates’s work invites us to think more carefully about the quality of the mirror itself. Rather than only for what it reflects.  

And for Coates, it’s about recognising that mirrors can have different properties that change a reflection. Take, for example, a broken mirror that splits and duplicates the image in all sorts of different ways, or one of those funhouse mirrors that distorts everything, even changing room mirrors, you know how they make you look tall and thin, so you’re more likely to buy the clothes. 
 

Those sorts of things, those sorts of mirrors can help us understand that mirrors don’t just reflect in this straightforward way. They actually work to frame, to focus, or sometimes even distort what we see. Now, as I mentioned, Coates talking about to what extent realistic fiction is a reflection of the world, while Sims Bishop is focusing on representation specifically. 
 

But I think that these two ideas can usefully be brought together as an invitation to think about the quality of the mirror or the window or the sliding glass door and how that’s included in children’s literature.  

So just as a mirror has edges that limit what can be seen, what’s in and outside of the frame, books that aim to represent certain identities or experiences may focus on particular aspects while excluding others. 
 

Or they may present those sort of distorted views that don’t capture the nuance of lived experiences. And through this lens, we can see how authenticity and representation is also so crucial. Stories about marginalised or underrepresented groups written by authors from those groups have become increasingly recognised to be vital to inclusive literature. Where previously identities and experiences, I’m sorry to say, have largely been co-opted by majority groups without really the space being left for marginalised authors to tell their own stories.  

So in the module then when we talk about diversity and inclusion, we’re addressing 
multiple interconnected ideas. Fundamentally, diversity is key to inclusive literature. If there’s not a range of identities represented, it’s not diverse. But inclusion goes beyond whether someone is represented or not, and it’s about how diverse identities and experiences are represented. There are characters from marginalised groups relegated to stereotypes or to secondary positions. 
 

Are their identities presented as valid and valuable to the story? Are they complex and intersectional? Are their stories told with respect? And who is voicing that story and what knowledge and lived experience do they have? Inclusive literature means 
you know, meaningful representation that celebrates diversity rather than merely just acknowledging it. 
 

And next slide, please, Gethin. We can begin to see how much these questions matter when we turn our attention to young readers themselves. So as you’ll see on the screen, recent research from the National Literacy Trust in 2022 revealed that 38.9% of children and young people said that they found it difficult to locate books with characters who reflect their own experiences and identities. And the impact of representation can be hugely significant. And those children are missing out on it. 

You know, it can validate children’s experiences and identities. It can develop empathy and cross-cultural understanding. It can challenge prejudices and stereotypes. And importantly, it can foster an enjoyment of reading. We regularly see that children whose identities aren’t represented in books find it harder in cases to engage and to enjoy reading for pleasure.  

So this is where it comes down to our role then, and I’m using our to mean all of us as scholars and practitioners in the field. Our job is to ask these difficult questions of the texts that we encounter. How are the diverse characters and experiences portrayed? What explicit or implicit messages might there be? Whose perspectives are centred or marginalised? How is publishing affecting representation? 
 

And then of course, how do these diverse texts do the stuff of literature? You know, how do they employ literary devices? How do they employ different techniques, etc.? So on the programme, we explore these questions and themes in depth through close reading of texts, engagement with critical theory and consideration of how we can apply them to our own research, or creative writing.  

And we examine how children’s literature can either essentially reinforce or challenge these dominant narratives about identity and difference. We think about the role of publishers, educators and other gatekeepers in shaping the landscape of children’s literature. And we think about how we can contribute to making children’s literature more inclusive and representative of all readers. 
 

I’m going to leave it there. It’s only a taster. I don’t want to go sort of too far into it.  

But I would invite you to take away a bit of a question as you consider whether you’d like to take your study of children’s literature further. And that is, what mirrors, windows and sliding glass doors did you find or maybe wish that you’d found in books of your childhood? 
 

How have these representations and early experiences with stories shaped your understanding? And how do you think children’s literature can grow to not only shape our changing world, you know, the topic of our sort of focus today, but also to better reflect the diverse world that has been here all along. 
And I will hand back to you Gethin. 

 
Gethin Jones  
Thank you so much, Emily. I always really enjoy listening to you speak and your taster elements as well. Thank you so much. That was brilliant. Okay, we’ve got a couple of questions coming in whilst you were going through that section. I’m going to post them here. 

 
Emily Corbett   
Well, thank you, that’s so kind. 

 
Gethin Jones 
One second, so thank you to Natasha and to Ebony I think it is. Yep. So what I’m going to do, let me just check to see what’s coming up next. 
 

Yeah, what we’ll do, we might, let’s take these questions now, because one of them is around, so a question from Natasha around the on-campus version. So online she’s noticed that the MA Children’s Literature Theory and Practice is listed. Besides being online, the question is, is there a difference between these courses? 
 

Oh, you’re on mute. Yeah, yeah. That’s okay. No worries. 

 
Emily Corbett 
I realised I was on mute because my dog’s barking, so I was trying to protect you from that. No, no, I apologise for the dog. You will get used to her if you join the programme.  

So there are some differences, but they are minimal. One of the biggest differences is in the way that we’ve carved up the modules. So because we want the online version, to be more accessible, to be worked asynchronously around people’s lives. We have 8 15 credit modules, whereas on campus we have 4 30 credit modules.  

So the content is still there, the content is still the same, but you just come at it in a slightly different order, but in a slightly different grouping. And yes, you know, we sort of say besides being online, but there are differences then embedded in 
being online or not, such as the mode of study.  

The on campus version has weekly seminars, for example, and is very discussion based, whereas the online version far more invests itself in being project based and task based alongside some really nice forum discussions. Faculty is the same across both of the versions. Like I mentioned, I run both. 
 

I think that really sort of is the gist of it, but I’m very happy to take more specific questions about the differences as well if there’s something particularly you’re interested in knowing. 

 
Gethin Jones  
Thanks, Emily. And yeah, I would say to Natasha as well, we can connect after the session. If you’ve got any specific questions, you can speak with my team, you speak with Emily and the team as well.  

Great, great question. And then Emily, you’ve got a similar question in terms of, but Emily’s background is in illustration and is seeing that the on-campus version has the illustration pathway. So just wondering, is that an option for the online version or is it what is it likely to be developed in any way, do you think? 

 
Emily Corbett 
So the illustration pathway unfortunately isn’t currently an option. That is an open question that we’re thinking about as we develop. We’re in our first year of the online programme at all and it is an open question as to whether children’s illustration also is added online.  

But I cannot offer you any certainty on that at the minute because there’s all sorts of factors around practicalities etc of transitioning something that’s very studio based  
into an online version. Would it be possible to take the online courses? It’s currently structured with a little occasional personalised support guidance from the children’s illustration team. 
 

So the children’s illustration team, the illustrator part of the illustrations team aren’t currently involved because this is a, the on-campus programme is a collaboration between education where I’m based and media where the illustration portion of the programme is based. 
 

I also am involved with working with the illustrators because they take modules across education, etc. But in terms of would you be getting support with your illustration? No, sadly not at this time.  

But there’s nothing to stop you starting this programme as a PG cert and then possibly thinking about transferring to on campus. But I appreciate with the circumstances you’ve outlined there, that would be quite difficult.  

So it might be a case of getting started if you want this sort of foundation and waiting and seeing, but I just, I wish I could promise you better news, but I can’t guarantee it and I wouldn’t want to missell you. 

 
Gethin Jones  
Okay. Thanks, Emily. No, that makes sense.  

And again, Emily, you are the other Emily who’s asked the question. You are welcome to get in touch after the session. We can have a more detailed conversation.  

Okay, keep questions coming in. I’m going to move on with some couple of information on slides, and then we’ll pick up the questions again. So yeah, so the online environment and, you know, what we’ve done a lot of work on is developing 
the platforms and the framework for you to succeed in an online environment.  

So, you know, we really want to make sure you’re comfortable and you are both, you know, have the resources and the support you need, but also a challenge and, you know, thinking critically and analytically and developing those skills for 
either career progression or personal development as well.  

So there’s a really supportive team that wraps around the online classroom environment, the GOAL team, the Goldsmiths online and adaptable learning team, they’ve created a lot of the virtual interactive elements and the assessments and personalised feedback loops and stuff. This is an example of what it might look like in terms of like a taster lecture from Michael. Is there anything that you wanted to add there, Emily, in terms of student experience from the online perspective? 

 
Emily Corbett   
No, I think you’ve captured it beautifully, although I’d be happy to answer any specific questions that students have around what week to week would look like, etc. 

 
Gethin Jones    

Perfect. Thanks, Emily. And yeah, some of the benefits, obviously, in terms of accessibility and flexibility, you know, it’s designed to fit around your busy schedule, whether you’ve got, excuse me, full-time work or family commitments. You know, that’s the audience that these programmes are designed for. 
 

Do you want to add like expectations around the hours commitment in terms of study time? And that’s a question that we get quite a lot, Emily. 

 
Emily Corbett  
Yeah, of course. So as he’s got there 15 to 20 hours, we technically try to aim for 18, but that feels too precise to be useful sometimes. So essentially there’s a mix of engaging with the readings and some of the content that’s available online, but also formative activities that we set to support you going away and doing your own research in your own time. 
 

Whether that be, you know, looking at resources that are available more widely, exploring the Aunt Thompson Uther Index, for example, which is a nice little catalogue of fairy tales, has been something that the students have been doing recently. So it’s, yeah, between 15 and 20 hours, but whenever that suits you, whether that’s the middle of the night or first thing in the morning, etc. 

 
Gethin Jones  
And we’ve mentioned there the just in time element where you won’t take on loads of modules at the same time. You’ll actually progress through one at a time as you go through the course then as well. Yeah. Okay. In terms of that digital resource, then you’ll have full access to the online library at Goldsmiths. 

 
You know, you wouldn’t necessarily need to purchase any books or anything like that, but you can do if you want to. Sometimes it’s good to have physical copies of things. But there is an extensive collection that you’ll get closer to the enrolment stage.  

And then the module leaders are on hand in terms of support, you know, supervision for dissertation is a good example of that as well. And then there’s disability and wellbeing support. If you do have any additional needs, then we can obviously talk about any adjustments that are needed as well. Contact time with academics, Emily, is that something, because we do get asked that from time to time in terms of the synchronous versus the asynchronous approach. 

 
Emily Corbett  
Yeah, so the majority of the teaching is asynchronous. You know, a lot of my investment into the learning goes in before you even join the module, because it’s all sort of laid out there for you with recordings and with written pieces and a collation of materials. But there are two optional live webinars per module, so that’s opportunities to come together as a group, as a cohort and have a chat about everything.  

We’ve actually got one coming up tomorrow for the current students to talk a little bit more about their assessment. And then I’m also just available, or module leaders are available if you want to send us an e-mail, if there’s anything that’s worrying you, very, very happy to support you with any of the academic sort of side in addition to Gethin’s brilliant team who deal with everything with the student experience. 

 
Gethin Jones 
Thanks, Emily. Admission, so some of the formalities around the application process. So it’s very easy to apply, you know, in terms of the system and the functionality. It’s, I’ll come on to the documentation required, but essentially in terms of your undergraduate degree, if you’ve already studied a relevant subject like literature, humanities, education, childhood studies, etc, then a 2-1 or equivalent is absolutely fine. And then if you don’t have it in that discipline and you’ve got some relevant work experience, we will accept other subject areas as well. 
 

It’s also worth noting for non-standard applicants, so if you don’t satisfy those and you’ve got maybe a slightly different qualification or you’ve got considerable work experience, yeah, so we would look at the whole profile. So we would consider non-standard applications with a CV, and a personal statement as well.  

For anybody that’s not, that doesn’t have English language as their first language, we may need some evidence of English language standards as well, so information on the screen, but again, my team will advise on that. And yeah, we’ve got the postgrad certificate as an entry point. 

 
For anybody that’s maybe returning to education and maybe got a more of a less, sort of a less of a standard in terms of academic undergraduate profile and may need to just do that first before progressing on to the rest of the course. We’ve got a question on that element from Nicola, I think as well, Emily, around. She says, “sounds fantastic. Thanks. How long does the certificate take? And what’s the difference between a certificate and a diploma?” 

 
Emily Corbett   44:19 
Okay, so the postgraduate certificate is the smallest award available. The postgraduate diploma is the medium and then the full MA is the large. The postgraduate certificate is 60 credits, which for this programme means taking four of the modules.  

There are some breaks built in, so I’m not going to be able to calculate 
for you this sort of precise length of time, but each module is 8 weeks long. So you can think of it as having four lots of eight weeks of study will go into the postgraduate certificate.  

And then the diploma is 120 credits, if I’m remembering correctly. So that is all of the taught modules without taking that final project to the independent study or the independent creative portfolio. 

 
Gethin Jones 
Excellent. Thanks, Emily. 

 
Emily Corbett   
Is the October intake an option for these two? Yes, the postgraduate certificate and the postgraduate diploma are just a standard part of the programme. So you would be able to take them if you wanted to join in October.  

Instead, you could equally start now and pause if you needed to with a little bit of flexibility. In terms of what it costs, it changes a little bit with inflation each year, so I can’t give you the sort of precise amount. 

 
Gethin Jones   
Yeah. 

 
Emily Corbett   
But it is just timesing that module amount by the number of modules required. So for the certificate, that’s times by 4. 

 
Gethin Jones  
Yeah, exactly. So it’s on a modular basis, as covered earlier in the slides. So you’ll get some information around that specific cost as well. So for certificate and diploma, it’s just proportionately less modules, but the price per module is the same.  

OK, thanks, Nicola. Great questions. And then I’ve got a couple of other things coming in. So we’ve got, oh, what I’m going to do first, let me just cover this. So yeah, the application process, as I mentioned earlier, degree certificate, if you’ve got your transcript, you’re going to need that recent up-to-date CV.  

If you do need evidence of English language, that will be needed as well. And if you’re applying without the standard kind of degree level, then a personal statement is optional too. Deadline 7th of August for the 31st of August start date, and that includes that 1000 pound scholarship discount as well. So just to bear that in mind.  

And there’s a QR code here as well if anybody wants to go straight to that page and have a bit more of a nose around now, that’s fine.  

Martina’s got a great question. So going back to your taster element, Emily, so she’s asking, “looking at the decline in diversity reflected in the published books in 2022, I’d be fascinated to know your thoughts on the causes of that backlash?” 

 
Emily Corbett  
Yeah, so this is an hour long question in itself, but I’ll give you my sort of shortened answer. First of all, I think all of us are aware of the political climate that we’re in globally and the fact that with the increase of banned books and the increase of penalties around publishers who publish diverse materials, I think that’s contributing. 
 

I also have a particular theory about why there was that peak in 2022 that then declined in 2023. And I hypothesise that it is partly to do with the very sad murder of George Floyd, because if you think about the publishing cycle, there tends to be around a two year delay from commissioning through to publication just because of how long things take to put together.  

So I think 2020 when there was the proliferation in the Black Lives Matter movement and all of those conversations were very sort of urgent. Two years later, we see the effect of that in publishing because all of those books that were commissioned at that time get published in 2022. 
 

But then very sadly, the fact that those conversations didn’t have such a sustained importance as I believe they should have had means that there is then a lull again in that form of publishing. 

 
Gethin Jones 
Thanks, Emily. Great question. And yeah, it could be quite a lengthy discussion, I suppose, if we had more time. But yeah, it’s good to have some insights. A couple of other questions. So one from Sylvia. “Thanks for the presentation. I’m curious to understand if there’s a difference in the depth of the discussions between the online 
and the on-campus programs. What are your thoughts on that, Emily?” 

 
Emily Corbett 
So Sylvia, yes, to be quite frank, I think there is, but I think that’s because the priorities of the activities are slightly different and it will depend on what you personally want as a form of learning. There are rich discussions in both places, particularly when we think about some of the meatier topics that get people really interested. 
 

But the on-campus programme sits people in a room together for three hours where discussion is the primary focus. So there’s inevitably going to be lots of discussion. Whereas the online programme really focuses on facilitating you becoming a sort of researcher and a project manager, etc, within your own right, within your own study. 
 

So by comparison, we get a lot more depth through that side of things, a lot more depth of the applied action based learning. So if you are somebody who wants to sit and discuss, then I will be honest, I think the on campus programme would be better suited.  

But if you want the more holistic approach where you’re sort of guided through, curating your own learning, then the online programme has lots to offer. And discussion is as good as the people sort of who are engaging in it.  

So if you are someone who’s really chatty, you will probably find that if you get chatty on the forum, there’ll always be people who want to take you up on that invitation. So yeah, I guess that’s kind of a bit of a high-level answer, but that’s what I would say. 

 
Gethin Jones   
That’s great. Thanks, Emily. That’s a really great question as well and useful for others, I’m sure, as well. We’re thinking about on campus and online versions.  

Another follow up question from Natasha. So she says, “thanks for the earlier answer.” She’s working as a teacher interested in creative writing, and on the on-campus assessment criteria, there’s mention of a portfolio of your own writing if you’re interested in the creative writing pathway. So the question is, “does the online course have the same creative writing pathway?” 

 
Emily Corbett 
So the online course doesn’t currently have a dedicated pathway of creative writing, but instead creative writing is embedded into the programme. Whereas the on-campus programme, you can choose to completely forego creative writing and do the theoretical element.  

So for the online version of the programme, you still have two modules in creative writing. You still have the bespoke creative writing final project. So you can think of it, if you like, of taking a creative writing pathway. It just doesn’t exist in that sort of separated form.  

But I will say that there is change for the on-campus programme this year as well, and we’re moving to a creative and critical pathway because we’re recognising that students actually really benefit from doing both of these things in tandem and then they can sort of shift their focus through assessment and through kind of personalization, how much creative writing versus theoretical work that they want.  

So it’s a bit of a messy, complicated answer that no, there isn’t a specific creative writing pathway, but that will not stop you thriving as a creative writer because the programme is designed for you as well. 

 
Gethin Jones  
Thanks, Emily. Another great question again. And yeah, thanks so much everybody for questions. You seem really super engaged a bunch and be great to catch up with you after the session at some point. We’re going to probably wrap up there if there’s no more questions. Just a comment from Matina saying “thank you.” You’re very welcome, Matina. 
 

Yeah, so thanks so much to everybody.  

So a couple of points on next steps. So we will follow up with a link to the recording of today’s session so you can watch back in your own time, including the taste of element from Emily too.  

The QR code is on the screen. If you did want to go through to the application pages, have a little look around. But my team are on hand as well. So when you follow up emails, you’ll get the links to the recording and information on how to connect with us as well.  

You do have, if you did want to start at the end of August, there is time, depends what you’ve got, you know, in your kind of life in terms of commitments and making that happen. But you can take advantage of that £1,000 scholarship as well, don’t forget. And Emily, is there any closing comments you want to make for today’s guests? 

 
Emily Corbett   
I just want to thank everyone so much for coming. I know it’s an hour of your life and I really appreciate you giving it to us. And I just also secretly having a look through the attendees and I can see we’ve got a couple of current students and also people I know that are already applied to join the programme and it’s just lovely to be able to connect with you in this way. And I hope to get to know a lot more of you very soon. 

 
Gethin Jones    
Fantastic. And thanks again, Emily. Always really enjoy these sessions. Appreciate that. We’ll catch up soon. And thanks, everybody. Have a great day and hopefully we’ll catch up again soon. Thanks. 

Emily Corbett    
Thanks everyone and thanks Gethin. 

Gethin Jones: Okay, hi everyone. Yes, looks like we’ve got a lot of people coming in now. So we’re going to say hello and welcome to everybody. So 5 o’clock start. We’ll leave it for just a minute or so for anybody to join and then we’ll make a start on the session proper. My name is Gethin Jones. I’m the student engagement manager at Goldsmiths University of London Online and we will be joined by very, very special guests. Professor Michael Rosen and Dr. Emily Corbett from the Children’s Literature MA programme online. So bear with us a second and then we’ll get everything ready and we’ll make a start.

Michael Rosen: Okay.

Gethin Jones: OK, Emily and Michael, you ready?

Michael Rosen: Yep.

Emily Corbett: Yes, ready.

Gethin Jones: We’ve got voices and we’ve got video. Brilliant. Welcome. Thank you so much for joining us. Okay, I’m going to do a quick introduction and take you through some housekeeping. But just to make sure we’ve got the right session for everybody, this is Shaping the Future of Storytelling, an Introduction to the Children’s Literature MA at Goldsmiths, the online version as well.
And, you can participate in the session. So if you’d like to ask questions, you can do so in the Q&A. At the top of your screen, you should be able to see a little Q&A function and then that should pop up with a pane for you to ask your questions on the side. So post those in there. We might leave them towards the end of the session, depending on how many we get. But if there’s something that we’re talking about and a question related to that, we might do that as we go. So just to let you know that. And you can upvote the questions. So if there’s one that you’ve already thought about and it’s popped up or you liked it, you think it’s relevant, please do interact to the questions in that way. And, we’ll try and answer as many questions as we can in the live situation for both Michael and Emily. If you’ve got any questions for the process for admissions, for applications, you can get in touch with my team at the online admissions e-mail address that’s on the screen, but we’ll cover a lot of that stuff. Later, as well. OK, so… agenda for this evening, this afternoon. We’re going to try and aim for about 45 minutes. We’ll see how things go, but that’s roughly what we’ve got planned for today in terms of everyone’s time. We’ll meet with the faculty, with Michael and Emily. We’ll talk about why Goldsmiths. We’ll talk about the programme itself. The highlights, I’m absolutely certain, is going to be the taster lecture element from Michael. No pressure, Michael. I think that’s what everybody’s here for. And then we’ll talk about what you’ll study, the online learning environment for the Goldsmiths online programmes. And then how to apply and then we’ll have some Q&A at the end as well. Okay, right. I am going to pass you on now to Dr. Emily Corbett.

Emily Corbett: Thank you and hello everyone. It’s so lovely to be here. I’ve just been having a look through the names of people in attendance and I recognise quite a few of you who I’ve either been emailing with or have read your applications. So it’s great to be here and to meet you all. My name is Emily and I am the head of the Children’s Literature MA programme, both the online one that we’re going to be talking about today, but also the on-campus one as well. Outside of my teaching responsibilities, I am a specialist researcher of children’s and young adult literature. Particularly my research interests are on British young adult literature and the paratextual materials of children’s books. So paratextual materials are things like book covers, blurbs, titles, through to author’s notes and other kind of extra materials that go around a book. I’m quite interested in what they can tell us about who the book was intended for or what the book was sort of supposed to be achieving. I also am very lucky to serve as the general editor for the International Journal of Young Adult Literature. So that means that in addition to reading fabulous work from students, I also have the privilege of reading.

Michael Rosen: Yeah.

Emily Corbett: New articles that are submitted and supporting scholars to develop those for publication. And then I co-lead the children’s and YA literature strand of the Centre for Language, Culture and Learning here at Goldsmiths. So I have such a wonderful job, but the online programme is a new but absolutely wonderful part of it. And I’m so excited to talk to you more about that today. And I’ll hand over to Michael to introduce himself.

Michael Rosen: Hi there. I hope you can see and hear me. I don’t look anything like that anymore, but that’s another matter. So I’m Michael, Michael Rosen. I seem to be identified here with two books. “We’re Going on a Bear Hunt” and “Chocolate Cake”, which I was performing this morning to about 800 children in Ally Pally, Alexandra Palace. So I’m a performer, I’m a writer. I write poems and stories, write some non-fiction for adults. And I’ve been teaching children’s literature, one way or another, on university campuses since about, I was just trying to work it out, since about 1993. I started off at what was the University of North London that became London Met. I taught for a bit at Birkbeck at the London Institute of Education, as it used to be, and is now a part or part of the University College, and then came to Goldsmiths in 2014, the end of 2013 into 2014, when we devised the MA in Children’s Literature here. There’s some other nice things being said about me there, which you can read, so I won’t repeat them. All right, lovely. Thanks very much.

Emily Corbett: Thanks, Michael. It’s one of the things I love most about Michael is that he is absolutely a national treasure, but also the most modest person you will ever meet in the world. So it’s great to be able to work together on this programme. So what does it mean to study at Goldsmiths online? I don’t know who’s already studied at Goldsmiths or who’s already familiar with the university, but we have quite a reputation for being creative and for thinking critically, for nurturing critical thinkers who are asking the kind of tough questions about how to do things differently, you know, how to build a better world, how to change the future. And you would become part of that community where we’re asking these sorts of questions. We’re based in London, which for those of you particularly who are international applicants, it’s somewhat of a global hub of children’s literature and publishing. A lot of our publishing houses in the UK are based in London and we have a long history of authors being based in London. But we also benefit from quite a global community of learners. We’ve got students from around the world, both on our on-campus programme and also already amongst our online applicants. We’re one of the few children’s lit programmes that runs in the UK, and we’re particularly known for bringing together lots of different aspects of the field. Meaning that we’re just as good for those of you who work in publishing as those who work in teaching, you know, for those who are coming because you have a particular interest in children’s books, maybe because you want to learn how to connect more with your children or your grandchildren, for example. So our online programmes are really an invitation to join this community of like-minded students from all different walks of life. You’ll benefit from the same standard of teaching as the on-campus programme and also from the same faculty. Michael and I teach most of the on-campus programme and we also teach the majority of the online programme. The big difference really that sets it apart is that studying with us online offers a level of flexibility that we’re not able to offer on campus. And that’s both in terms of where you’re studying, whether that’s within or beyond the UK, but also when you’re doing your work. Because so many of our students are working full time or have caring responsibilities, they might have other things in their life that prevent them from keeping a more regular schedule. So an online programme will allow you to join in when you can and fit it around your working life or your personal life. We’ll talk a little bit more about that later. But I think the kind of thing to take away from this is that we’re here to offer a little bit of a platform for discovery, whether that be self-discovery or discovery of different ways of thinking. But we’re doing all of this with a huge prioritisation of accessibility so that we can meet you where you are. Yeah. Next slide, please, Gethin. Thank you. Oh, yes, so the numbers speak for themselves on here. But I will just say that I’ve had the privilege of working at Goldsmiths and the children’s lit programme for four years now. And like I mentioned in my intro, I oversee both this online programme and also the on campus programme. I also have the privilege of supervising a number of PhD students who are studying various projects on children’s literature. But I thought it’d be lovely, considering that Michael has been here since the beginning, for you, Michael, just to tell everybody a little bit about the history of children’s literature at Goldsmiths.

Michael Rosen: Yeah, okay, so the MA that I was teaching at Birkbeck, ground to a standstill, and I was bleating about it online. And basically I was headhunted, which was really rather lovely and flattering. So I arrived at Goldsmiths, partly because it was already partly being taught within the education department. So children’s literature courses can find themselves in various places around the world in different departments, sometimes in an English department, sometimes in children’s studies. And in Goldsmiths, it was within education. There was already a module or two in place. And so I came in and then along with Dr. Margaret Pitfield, Maggie Pitfield, was a wonderful expert in drama teaching, particularly in the middle school years. We sat down and devised an MA in children’s literature at Goldsmiths in 2013 to 14. And it included some elements from previous MAs that I’d worked on and also brand new elements. And so we thought that to fit in with other MAs around the country because you’re supposed to work with comparability as it’s called. We had a theoretical aspect, a historical aspect. There was a creative aspect which was already in place. We brought in the English department. So we brought in a creative aspect if people wanted to study how to write children’s books. And then also possibly a unique element, certainly within the UK, possibly in the world as well, what we call children’s literature in action. That’s to say participants on this course, who could be teachers, librarians, youth workers or any other interested party, to take works of children’s literature books to a group of children or young people and study how those children or young people responded to those books. So we were trying to create a situation to reverse the old model of the critic looking at a children’s book and trying to, if you like, anticipate how children feel about books, but trying to find out actually more closely and more attentively how children themselves feel, respond, react across a period of a module, which is traditionally about 10 weeks. And so we set up our Children’s Literature in Action module, which has been going ever since then. We’ve actually published a book of some of those. So, you can see those online for free. We’ve put it up there online, Children’s Literature in Action, from at least about 17 or 18 of our former students, and we’ll probably produce another one soon as well. So that was a unique element that we brought in. And then as the course has developed, it’s developed pathways with an illustration pathway, which is terribly important, and also publishing. So it has several pathways, the one on campus, and that’s where we’re at. So it first came into being in 2014 and I’ve been teaching on it ever since.

Emily Corbett: Thanks Michael. So I think we can see that we’re combining here not only the sort of power of Goldsmiths and the reputation that Goldsmiths has, but also a particular reputation that Michael and colleagues and most recently me joining the team have built over the years for taking children’s literature seriously as a subject of inquiry and taking young people’s voices seriously as well. Next slide, please. And this sort of fundamentally underpins the ethos of the course. You know, why does children’s literature matter? I think we all recognise that postgraduate study is a lot of work, it’s expensive. So you have to understand why you’re doing it. You know, what are you going to get from it? Why does it matter? How is it going to enrich your life? And for a lot of people, that will be a professional reason, but not for everybody. You know, for many of our students, it’s about really taking the time to give attention to something that is so fundamentally part of all of us as human beings. I think children’s literature as a field has long been stigmatised as lesser than, you know, less complicated or less important or less worthy of study. But just quite frankly, this could not be more wrong. You know, children’s literature is fundamentally important to our society. It quite literally helps us to raise our young people. But it’s also a masterclass in form, you know, in technique. It’s worthy of its own theories and its own approaches. And it’s also one of the most dynamic forms of publishing. We’ve got new trends, we’ve got new form genres, digital innovations, all of those sort of things have a little bit of a test case space in children’s literature quite often. And it’s also a brilliant way of seeing how stories circulate around the world, because I think children’s books come with such a sort of warmth and reputation for communicating the big ideas to young people in forms that will enable them to think and to develop their own perspectives. And really, well, it’s just jolly old fun to study. I mean, who doesn’t want to spend their time immersed in the world of children’s books? Michael and I, you know, Michael more than any, have made a career of doing it. And this really is an invitation to come along with us and to think about children’s literature as something that really deserves our energy. You know, is there anything you want to add, Michael, before we hand over to you for a bit of a history of children’s literature?

Michael Rosen: Just to say, you can always approach children’s literature from a variety of angles. That’s one of the interesting things about it. You can treat it as a piece of literature very much in the way that you might do it almost at GCSE, A level, degree level, thinking of texts. But you can also look at it in a very sociological way, because after all, we’re very interested in child behaviour, child development we talk about, and how children’s literature fits within that. And then as I’ll be talking about in just a moment, the borderlines of what is literature, we can always debate those as well. So that’s a very interesting area. And then also, at the core of children’s literature, all sorts of very interesting ideological questions about who’s it for and why are we doing it? And are we controlling children, containing them? Are we making them into, are we creative, do we have a model in our mind as to what we’re doing? Or are we trying to pretend that we’re not and setting them free? All these debates have been going on in children’s literature for many, many years, if not hundreds of years. So all that, for me, I find very interesting, and it is a form of popular culture. You know, we study, after all, we study film, we study TV, and children’s literature sells millions and millions of books worldwide. You only have to think of something like…
Dave Pilkey, Dog Man, his latest series, or Captain Underpants. I mean, these sell millions and millions of books. You can think of many other examples, Harry Potter, obviously. So, you know, these are worth a study on their own because of their place in popular culture.

Emily Corbett: Thanks, Michael. Right, I shall disappear from the screen then and hand over to Michael for a little bit of a taster lecture, just to sort of situate this for everybody. Quite a lot of our content, and I’ll go into this in more detail, but quite a lot of our content is propositions for you to have a think about. And we are incredibly lucky that Michael has distilled his wisdom into a series of recorded lectures that you’ll be able to listen to and re-listen to over your time with us. And he’s going to give us a little bit of a taster now. So I will hand over to Michael.

Michael Rosen: Okay, so there in that phrase, the history of children’s literature, it immediately poses several problems as to kind of which end of the telescope we start. So I mentioned there, for example, Dave Pilkey, Harry Potter, obviously J.K. Rowling there. You can start at this end and work backwards. And some people find that the most attractive way, to be honest, and look at the diversity of children’s literature, whether worldwide or focused on the UK or UK America or Anglophone world, however people want to look at it and look across and then go back wondering about the origins of these different forms that we’ve got. So if you just take, for example, Harry Potter, those Harry Potter books combine two elements, two strong elements, the one of the school story, but also the other of the fantasy book, the fantasy book of witches and dragons and all that. And not many that has not really ever happened before. So was Harry Potter the first book of its kind? Well, not quite. And we could tease that out and then you could go back. But when did, well, who wrote the first school story? Now, that’s an interesting thought. When was it? And you can then tease that out. And then who wrote the first stories for children about witches? Why did witches, you know, after all, these, this was a form of persecution in the 17th century in America. So how come witches suddenly became funny or strange or interesting for children? So as I say, you can study history of children’s literature from this end backwards, or you can go back to the beginning and study it forward. So I’m going to give a little idea of that. But before I do that, we’ve got that little phrase there, children’s literature. We just say it, we keep saying it, children’s literature, children’s books, as if it’s not problematic, you’ll often come across that word, not problematic, but the moment you poke it, you find that it is a bit problematic. So how do we define it? What are its edges? Well, to start off with, you know, there’s one very simple thing we say, children’s literature is literature written for children. There we go, we’ve solved it. And then you go, well, hang on a minute. You know, right from the very beginning that Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, you may know the silly little rhyme that goes, Daniel Defoe lived a long time ago. He had nothing to do so. He wrote Robinson Crusoe. Yeah, there we are. Nice little funny, Clerihew as it’s called. So there was this book that was written for adults, Robinson Crusoe. They’re all adults in the book and it’s got a very interesting and not very savoury colonial origins to it, for those of you who know it. But very quickly it got absorbed into children’s literature. In other words, versions of it. Very, very soon, within a decade, as I remember rightly, there were versions of it produced for children to read.
So wait a minute, now we’ve got our first problem. So were those children’s versions of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, were they children’s literature? So suddenly we have a problem, and you can multiply that problem many times over as you go through the world of children’s books and children’s literature. Particularly in poetry, the way in which poems written for adults are incorporated into anthologies for children, no matter how young or old and so on. So, then the other problem with that children’s literature phrase there that seems so nice and easy is the word literature. What is literature? Well, the old and simple version of that was to say, well, poetry, plays and fiction or novels or stories. There we are, we’ve solved that. And then suddenly you find, oh, no, hang on a minute. So one of our students on the Children’s Literature in Action course has been studying a lovely dramatization, or we might call it a docudrama type book, of the climbing of Mount Everest by Sherpa Ten Singh, as he was known in my day. I can remember the climbing of Mount Everest, 1953, didn’t do it myself. I was 7 at the time. Mount Everest with an Edmund Hillary, Sir Edmund Hillary. It’s a lovely dramatisation of the book, not as a play, but as a dramatised telling. So if you pick up that book, it’s obviously for children, but is it literature? Well, yes and no. Do we need to get hung up about it? Do we need to have, do we need to think of literature as a kind of genre of writing that is separate from memoir, documentary, non-fiction, or can we just have nice, blurred edges to it? So these are some of the kinds of ways in which on a course like this we take phrases that are sort of seemingly unproblematic and then we disturb them and provoke questions about them and wonder what’s in and what’s out and how it came about. So the question we often ask about children’s issues, well, when did it all start? And one of the ways in which we can look at that is to say that obviously children were entertained with stories, even if they weren’t specifically for them. So most of you listening, I guess, are familiar with Aesop’s fables, as they’re called. Aesop is a partly mythological figure from ancient Greece. And down through the centuries since ancient Greek times, various people have produced versions of Aesop’s fables, sometimes illustrated, sometimes very simplified, sometimes with the morals, sometimes without. Well, it’s quite interesting that in the history of the printing press, in this country, and Emily was mentioning how children’s literature can sometimes be a pioneering area of literature as a whole. Well, one of the first books produced by William Caxton, the first printer, a real printer in this country, in England, in Britain as we call it now, was William Caxton. And one of his first books was Aesop’s Fables, 1484. You can look at any of these titles, by the way. You can these days look at them online. So if you put in Caxton and Aesop’s Fables, you can see. So instead of having to go to obscure libraries and not being able to find them, these days you can go to the Internet Archive or just put it in, or Gutenberg, all right, and find them. So if you just put that in or go to Google Images, you can see that the wood cuts. So it’s an illustrated story, very attractive to children of that time. And then by the time you get to the 17th century, those of you who know French will know that there was this guy called Perrault who collected together European stories, what we now call fairy stories and folk stories. Which he called Tales of Mother Goose, Comte de Merlois, and he collected those towards the end of the 17th century. So you have that idea of popular literature appearing and not directly for children. It would be for combined audiences. Directly for children, where we start with religious in Europe, we start with religious literature, very specifically didactic with a very Christian intent. And believe it or not, you can start here in around the year 1000. So not a name familiar within the world of children’s literature is a man by the name of Aelfric. All right. And he wrote colloquies. He was trying to teach Latin to people who spoke what some people call Anglo-Saxon. We call it Old English. And they’re actually quite jolly. They’re little dialogues, imaginary dialogues between the teacher and the novice who’s come to become a monk in a monastery. So when you go around derelict monasteries, for example, they’re all over the British Isles, you can see them, because a man called Henry VIII, who you may have heard of, destroyed most of them. Well, there was Aelfric in several of these and his manuscripts, teaching young people how to learn Latin with these jolly little dialogues. All right, but again, you say, well, that’s not really literature. Okay, so where do we find literature beginning? Well, you may have heard of the Puritans. Those of you who know Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare will know there’s a character in there called Malvolio, and Shakespeare is basically taking the mickey out of Malvolio, who is somebody who’s very censorious and complaining about this or that, but he’s a hypocrite because really he’s rather sexually attracted to the lady of the house and so they played tricks on him. Well, Puritans at the time, whether they were hypocrites or not, were also very, very interested in providing stories for children that showed them that, well, if you like, that Christianity was the right way, but in particular baptism. Not that children baptised themselves as babies then or even now, but they produced book. So famously, there’s one by a man called Janeway, which a rather extraordinary story of the terrible fate that you would meet if you weren’t baptised. And apparently this was a very popular book in the mid to late 17th century, A Token for Children by James Janeway. Again, you can look this up. And there are these horrific stories of what would happen to you if you hadn’t been baptised. A little bit like kind of modern horror stories for children, but in this case with a sort of biblical and Christian aspect to it. So some of you may remember those horror stories that produced by L. What was the middle initial? L.F. Stein? L.L. Stein? I’ve forgot anyway, Goosebumps. So these are the kind of goosebumps of the 17th century. Very, very attractive in their own way. And slightly more attractive, John Bunyan, who you may have heard of, who wrote A Pilgrim’s Progress, also an adult book incorporated into children’s literature. He wrote a poetry book called A Book for Boys and Girls. Couldn’t be more explicit than that. Came out in 1686. And the little poems about things that boys and girls do, followed by a little moral verse, which I suspect boys and girls didn’t read that bit, and instead enjoyed the bits about like a boy chasing a butterfly or watching a snail and that sort of thing. And also very famous from the 17th century, from what was then Bohemia, then became Czechoslovakia and is now called the Czech Republic, or Czechia, I think it’s now called. In Prague, a man by the name of Jan Kamensky, Latinized into Comenius, produced a book which is some way regarded as really one of the first children’s books directly at children with pictures for children.
We might look at it now and think it’s rather a dull textbook just for teaching Latin, but actually was based on a core idea. And you notice it was actually called Orbis Picto Sensualum, in other words to do with the senses. And what Kamensky said was that what should come before understanding are the senses. The reason why I’m slowing down on that is that is a moment in history of humankind where people said, look, in order to understand things, rather than just teaching them in theory, what we need to do is perceive them. Sadly, the present curriculum as it is taught in English schools, has forgotten this. So, you know, I can remember my son coming home from school learning about electrolysis, and he had never touched a piece of rock or a piece of ore or done any electrolysis. He was just learning it off the page. So there was dear old Comenius in 1658 saying, sense comes before understanding. And here was my son in the 21st century doing understanding, not only before sense, but actually without any sense. Sense in the sense of touch and feel and taste, the senses, yes? So there was a big breakthrough there. But the key breakthrough for some of us is the 18th century, and in the 18th century you had and a very famous book for me at any rate, which is called Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Songbook. And you think, why am I making a fuss about that? Because that is the world’s first nursery rhyme book. So without any form of didacticism at all, we find in there all sorts of rhymes that, you know, will be familiar to you. And the first time in a book, Baa Baa Black Sheep, I made the note here, Oranges and Lemons, London Bridge is falling down, Sing a Song of Sixpence. Again, you can look these up. Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Songbook, 1744. And very interestingly, in the back, what is called an advertisement. And you can see this, you look it up on Google Images. The child’s plaything I recommend for cheating children into learning without any beating and it’s nominally signed by N Lovechild, Nurse Lovechild. So suddenly here is a historic moment where the child has become the centre. We have the child at the child centred learning and instead of beating the child we’re going to cheat the child into learning. I’ll say the rhyme once more. The child’s plaything, in other words this book, I recommend for cheating children into learning without any beating. I Nurse Lovechild, N Lovechild as it says. And so you have this moment and alongside it another little book called A Little Pretty Book intended for the amusement of Little Master Tommy and Pretty Miss Polly. So 1744 was a kind of breakthrough moment in children’s books. And then five years later, the first fiction for children, the first novel for children comes out. Those of you who’ve seen the film Tom Jones, you may have seen that with Albert Finney and one or two others. That was by Henry Fielding. And this was Sarah Fielding, who was his sister, as I remember. And she wrote a book called The Governess, or The Little Female Academy. And that is the first children’s novel. At least that’s one way of saying that. So here was a breakthrough moment in the 18th century. I could go on. So at the same time as this, you had street literature, which is the people quite often overlook. So these were vendors in the street, flogging stories, ballads, and so on. So this was popular literacy, telling stories, nursery rhymes, ballads. If you have seen the play by Shakespeare, As You Like It, there’s somebody called Autolica selling ballads selling them to Phoebe and the Clown called Touchstone. And you can get an image of that right from the 16th century. People selling street literature, which runs alongside. And that is the origin of our comics industry, running all the way through, if you like, to Dave Pilkey, there am I mentioning him again, Dog Man and Captain Underpants. That idea of the popular, quite earthy story with lots of cartoons and jokes, they owe their origins to street literature, if you like. And then by the time we come to the 19th century, pretty well most of the genres are laid down in the 19th century. So you have the famous fairy tale collection of all. The Brothers Grimm, Kinder und Haus Mechen in Germany. In German that means children’s and household tales, which to start off with the Grimms didn’t think was for children. But then they peeked around and noticed some other books going on, particularly one from this country, and thought, oh, well, actually we’ll start publishing these for children. And they produced children’s editions. Changed the stories after they’d collected them for very interesting ideological reasons. And so you had them starting with in 1812, going through right the way through for about another 50 years or so, changing and adapting and growing those stories. And then you have the growth of fantasy literature, which we often think is almost unique to children’s books. One of the first examples is what’s called the Butterfly’s Ball and the Grasshopper’s Feast by William Roscoe, came out in 1802. You have Edward Lear and the Book of Nonsense, 1846. You’ve got the King of Golden River by William, by John Ruskin in 1841. And then what is really some of us think of it as almost like the crown jewel amongst children’s books, because it’s a pioneer in so many ways. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which comes in 1865, which is a fantasy, it’s surreal, it’s extraordinary, it has a young person defying adulthood, defying authority. There’s lots of parody within it. There’s lots of subtext and sub sub subtext, lots of inner jokes, things that are being quoted ever since about meaning and words and logic and all the rest of it. And it’s follow up, of course, through the Looking Glass, which came six years later. And also off the back of that, or at the same time, of that street literature. We have the comic industry, which blew, absolutely expanded like crazy in the last decades of the 19th century, both here in America and France, beautiful ones in France with full colour. And so we have the tradition of comics for children, which survives to this day. In various forms, and laying down of the main genres of children’s literature that you will know, the school story, the domestic story, the one that’s based in the home, science fiction stories of course, and the picture book, which I’ve already mentioned with Orbis Pictures, but took its huge lift from someone called Randolph Caldicott. Do look him up, who devised double page spreads of picture books in a way that had never been done before. He’s the father of the picture book, if you like. And ghost stories and horror stories, of course, we have those. And the interesting genre that has emerged, which is in the expertise of Emily, who you’re talking to there, the young adult story. So those of us who had some young adults a long time ago, we were very, you know, found very curious, you know, who is this Judy Bloom? What is this stuff? Is this an adult book? Is this, she’s writing about sex. Good Lord, that must be for adults. No, it’s teenage. What? This is not possible. What’s it called? Forever? Forbidden or forever? What should we call it? Yes, and I’ve interviewed Judy a couple of times, been very lucky to interview her, and I think she’s incredible. I think she did wonderful things and for a while was a kind of agony aunt as well. So we had the beginning of all these other social media that have grown up, fan fiction. And if you ask me what was I doing yesterday, I was sitting down with a guy called MC Grammar, would you believe? Oh yes, recording Ridiculous Raps and Rhymes, a new book that we’ve just done, for audio, but at the same time he was recording it on his phone to put on Insta. And at the same time, we’ve then got to go next week while he then lays, I think you say, lays down beats, but you know, I am 80, so don’t laugh at me. All right. So we’re going to be doing that. And so here’s a book, I haven’t actually got a copy of it here, but a book, but of course, it’s actually going to be a multimedia intermediate object. In other words, it’s got various identities. And so in a way, children’s literature is expanding into the digital. Is it competing? Is the digital competing with the book? Or are there these interesting hybrids that are emerging like this book is that I’m just talking about. There we go. I will stop now. I hope you’ve found that interesting.

Emily Corbett: Thanks so much, Michael. I learned something from you every time I listened to you, and I’m sure people in the audience will have felt the same. And also, I cannot recommend more highly the work that Michael was doing with MC Grammar because it just, it brings joy to everyone and everything. And you opened the Nibbies, didn’t you, this week, together as a double act.

Michael Rosen: We did. So you’ve got another bit of the media, you’ve got live shows, which we all do, which MC and I do and others do. And that’s why I was doing a live show this morning. So that’s all part of it. Some people just engage with the live show, not necessarily with the book. So the book is changing its identity.

Emily Corbett: So that’s very cool.

Michael Rosen: You know, it’s absolutely crucial to take on board. So you go all the way back to those things in the beginning, Aelfric and trying to teach a monk how to read Latin, and you come right the way forward, 1000, how is it, yes, more than 1000 years later, and there we are in this intermediate world.

Emily Corbett: Yeah, thanks, Michael. So, yeah, just to kind of build from that, then thinking about some of the other unique selling points, if you like, of the programme and what we offer. I think I can’t put enough kind of emphasis in Spangly Stars and Jazz Hands around Michael’s involvement with the programme, because you do genuinely get the opportunity to learn from Michael himself. He’s been fundamentally involved in the curriculum development, but also, like I say, has recorded some wonderful lectures for us. I’ve just been editing down one on children’s poetry, which will be a treat in the first module. But then we also have additional sort of things, themes and things running throughout the programme. You have the chance to explore theory and practise together. And I think that’s really important to say because Michael already mentioned and we talked about already this idea that there are different approaches to children’s books and the study of children’s books. And somebody called John Rowe Townsend who kind of differentiated between book people and child people and those who are interested in the book for the book’s sake and those who are interested from the child’s point of view. But I can genuinely say the programme embodies both. You know, we think very seriously about the written form or the oral form, but we also think about the way that it is read through studying reader response, for example. And there is also a brilliant aspect of creative practise that runs as a thread through the programme. For those of you who might be interested in pursuing creative writing specifically, we have modules dedicated to creative writing and we also have various activities and assessments that are dedicated to creative writing. And for those of you who think, oh no, I can’t write creatively, for you opportunities to write creatively can be a way to experiment with ideas in practice.

Michael Rosen: Yeah.

Emily Corbett: You never have to publish this work, but it’s a way of you kind of thinking, well, how does this particular technique work in practise when I try to apply it? We’re incredibly proud that we’ve got a particular focus on inclusion and diversity that runs through the programme. This is something that runs across all of our children’s literature provision at Goldsmiths, where we really think, what does it mean to be part of an increasingly inclusive children’s publishing landscape. And with that, there’s the opportunity to apply theoretical ideas to practical and professional contexts, whether that be publishing, whether that be literacy advocacy, for example, charity work, whether it be teaching, librarianship. Michael’s already given a bit of a taster of this, but we cover a wide range of genres and forms from picture books to poetry to YA. And I don’t want to spend too long talking about assessments. I appreciate that they can make people feel uncomfortable. But I do want to say that we have taken a lot of care in making sure that our assessments are as applied and as useful as possible for you. So there’s a range of different assessment methods. There’ll be some essays, but there’s also opportunities to create publishing packs or those sorts of things. And there is near complete flexibility in the choice of topics. We don’t set you an assignment question. We instead invite you to set your own question, to choose your own text that you want to explore and will support you and scaffold you in doing that. Next slide, please, Gethin, but it’s also disappeared from my screen entirely. I don’t know whether that will come back.

Gethin Jones: I’m just thinking now, Emily, where it’s worth looking at this one scene as you’re talking about some of that stuff. Is that worth looking at the detail of the content?

Emily Corbett: Oh yeah, I can do. And then I can jump back to the structure. That’s a good idea. Okay, so on the screen there, you’ve got a little bit of information about the curriculum specifically. So you’ll see there that we have 8 15 credit modules and a 60 credit final project. And you will work through those modules sequentially.

Gethin Jones: Yeah.

Emily Corbett: And we’re going to start with form and genre. And in essence, in that module, we’re going to analyse key genres and forms and think about conventions across historical and cultural contexts. And then as Michael sort of started to showcase, we’re going to examine how the conventions of children’s literature broadly, also genres and forms more specifically, intersect with different ideologies and literary traditions. And we’re going to critique the theoretical approaches to genre and form, thinking about how we can situate texts within their broader literary and cultural debates. So in that first module, we’ll study books like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, alongside contemporary verse novels like Dean Atta’s The Black Flamingo. I don’t know if anybody’s read it already, but it’s just a wonderful book. And Dean is actually an alumni from Goldsmith. So it feels like an extra pleasure to be able to come full circle and study his literature, which is hugely popular in the UK publishing market. Plus, we’ll also look at things like picture books and comics and poetry, including some of Michael’s own poetry. So that kind of gives you a little bit of a taste of the first module. Inclusion and diversity, we move on to thinking about who is represented, how are they represented, and why does that matter. We go through then publishing histories, building on what Michael’s already been talking about and thinking about the way that the industry sort of intersects with what stories are told and shared. In writing childhoods, we think about the techniques and approaches to narrating what it means to be a child and how much that varies around the world as well, intersecting with different sort of cultural ideas about being a child.

Emily Corbett: Moving on to phase two, which is the second phase of the programme, although it’s continuous, we move from one to two and then into phase three for the final project. We’ll look at more contemporary publishing practices. We’ll think about writing for young adults in writing futures. And then we’ll think about the different methods and methodologies behind the study of children’s literature or the creation of children’s literature, all of which is going to scaffold you into a final project where you can choose to either take a theoretical path where you will write an extended research dissertation or to take a creative path where you will work on developing your own sustained piece of creative writing with a critical commentary. And the aim of that really is to support you to develop a piece of work that you might then be able to take to literary agents and editors. And then Gethin, if we could just jump back the slide then, so I can explain the structure. Yeah, thank you. So we’ve already talked a little bit about the flexibility of the programme and the sort of benefit for working around your life. But just to fill you in then with a little bit of the pragmatic stuff, and we can take questions on this if anyone has any. But we’re looking at two years part time, you’ll take one module at a time. So 180 total credits will give you the full MA qualification. As we’ve seen, there were eight taught modules and then the one final project, which is either your dissertation or your creative output. Because we know that studying is expensive, although I am proud to say we’ve been really sort of competitive with our pricing for this programme. You can pay a modular cost of £1,300 British pounds per module, and you can take an estimated £12,500 for the total tuition, which is very near comparable to our on-campus programme. There’s also for those of you who might be wanting a little bit more flexibility in terms of your duration of study with us, you can enter or exit at PG Dip, PG Cert, or you can stay on for the full MA. So in practice, that means you can sign up just to do a few modules with us if you want to walk away with a PG Cert. You can always then choose to add on if you want to go through to the PG Dip and then finally to the MA. But equally, if you think, ah, this is all I need, you know, this was my bit of continuing professional development, then you’re very welcome to take the more condensed qualification.
But across all of the modules, you’re going to benefit from asynchronous content. So things like readings and activities that are planned for you by Michael and myself and other members of the team. There’s going to be supported forums for discussion. There’s going to be a lot of peer learning, peer interaction. And then a lot of scaffolded support in terms of opportunities for feedback. We’re fully aware that not everyone keeps the same schedule and not everyone lives in the same time zone, so you might have different requirements for interactivity. But we’re also looking forward to putting on a couple of live webinars across the modules as well, so that we get a chance to all sit in a virtual room and and talk about things together. Okay, then through to, yeah, careers. Thank you, Gethin. So careers are, well, they’re very important to me, I have to say. I’m the careers representative for the school that the programme sits within. So I have a personal sort of interest in making sure that our children’s lit programme is meaningfully embedded within the careers landscape. But we’re also particularly thinking about the skills that you can learn, soft skills, transferable skills across the programme to really equip you for whatever opportunities that you might want once you’ve graduated from the programme. Here are just a few of the organisations that we either have people working in from the programme or that you might consider wanting to work with. Just the other day, I was chatting to one of our wonderful students from my first year of teaching the programme, who’s now doing wonderful things at Book Trust. And we’re proud to have a relationship with the Centre for Literacy and Primary Education as well, where they support some of our students to do work experience placements there as well. So the idea is that from this programme, you may continue in your particular thread of professional development. Perhaps you’re looking to move from a teacher to into senior leadership, for example, but it might also offer you an entry point into a new career, whether that be publishing, media, literacy, cultural organisations, etc. etc. And children’s literature is a growing market in an increasingly troublesome world. So I think now is a prime opportunity to equip yourself with the skills and the qualification to knock on the doors of the organisations that are there to make a difference. OK. So, I think over to you, Gethin, for a little bit, if that’s alright.

Gethin Jones: Thanks, Emily, and great to hear your session as well, Michael. I really enjoyed that. I was reading about MC Grammar yesterday, so I’ll be checking out later. Okay, power skills. So yeah, part of the online experience at Goldsmiths, you know, we want you to be challenged and to also be resilient. You know, you’re all trying to balance a busy working life and family and lots of commitments. So we want to prepare you for success in that environment to give you everything that you need to do it in the time that you’ve got. So yeah, leadership, social influence, resilience, analytical and critical thinking, but also having that sort of human centred digital approach. Just because it’s online doesn’t mean that it’s not going to be personal and sensitive to the needs of you and your sort of daily routine as well, okay. And part of that environment and experience will be within that online classroom. So our GOAL team, the Goldsmiths Online and Adaptable Learning team, will create the spaces as an example here of one of the lecture spaces from Michael Rosen from that environment. And we will have assessments, personalised feedback and interactive learning as well. Obviously, this is a new course, Emily, so is there anything that you wanted to add in terms of like, what’s planned throughout the process for the MA?

Emily Corbett: Yeah, I can give you just a little bit of a sense of some of the activities that we’ve got coming up. So we do everything from really taking it slowly and interrogating a book through some structured close reading through to more kind of dynamic activities like curating children’s literature collections, etc. Building digital and analogue resources to support learning and sharing it on the peer forum. We are very good at sort of posing the provocative questions and getting people talking about things, because Michael and I see firsthand sitting in a room of people that we all care about the same thing, but our opinions can be so different because they’re so informed by the different spaces that we work in. So the online classroom is really there a space that Michael and I have created for you to bring as much of the sort of sitting in a room feel to the online platform, but also giving you lots of content and lots of nourishment that you can work around your daily life.

Gethin Jones: Thanks, everybody. And some of the benefits then, obviously, when we alluded to the fact that trying to juggle stuff that you’ve got day in, day out and junior week. The mobility, you know, you have it to learn within your own time. You’ll have the tools and support and the workflows to help that happen as well. The just in time elements, you know, in terms of you will be given everything in one go. You know, we will do it at a good pace, and we’ll help you digest stuff in line with the amount of time that you’ve got to work around things. And do you want to talk a little bit, Emily, around that expectation, because we did have a question, I think, from Sarah in the Q&A about how many hours a week and the expectations for study?

Emily Corbett: Yeah, of course. So we would anticipate roughly 15 to 20 hours per week, which is 1 module’s worth of learning. But within that, that’s a mix of different things. So we as a children’s literature programme set children’s books for you to read and sometimes they’re short picture books, sometimes they’re longer books, like a YA novel. So you would be expected to read a set children’s or young adult text. You’d also be expected to read an academic piece, usually an article or a book chapter. And then the rest of your time is spent engaging with the activities and speaking to your peers. So that’s pretty much of an average, sometimes a little bit more, sometimes a little bit less, but that’s roughly what you can expect.

Gethin Jones: Brilliant, thanks Emily. Okay, and obviously support, so that’s super important for the online experience as well. So you have access to the online library, you have time and connexions with the module leaders, and there will be additional support for those that need it as well in terms of additional needs or additional time for assessments, etc.
So it’s just a quick run through in terms of the types and methods of support. Emily, did you want to add anything there before I go into the application process?

Emily Corbett: No, I think you’ve captured it pretty beautifully. The thing to say is just we’re there for you. So it can be as customised as we can make feasible. But I’ll let you move on.

Gethin Jones: Okay. Thanks, Emily. Okay, in terms of admissions, so essentially, if you’ve studied literature, humanities, education, childhood studies, creative arts, social sciences, along those lines, then an undergraduate degree at a 2.1 or equivalent is what we’d be looking for. If you haven’t studied in those areas, don’t worry too much. We will accept a 2.2 with relevant work experience of around two years. And if you don’t meet those standard requirements, we will still consider applications, but we will be looking at additional work experience then as well. And we also have the postgraduate certificate entry that might have a slightly more flexible and accessible route then as well. If you need an English language requirements, if it’s not your first language, then IELTS equivalent of 6.5 with no less than 6 in any of the categories or the equivalent as well. But if you’ve got any questions on any of this, my team is on hand. We will follow up actually after this session with specific information and you’ll be able to book a call with us as well and speak to one of my brilliant advisors next week. Okay. For the specifics and what you’re going to need. So it’s an online application portal. We will need your degree certificates, transcripts, grades, etc. A CV, which is an important part of the application process. And if you’re not doing the standard route, so if you haven’t quite got the entry criteria for the degree, then we will request a personal statement as well, just to supplement and complement the application. Anything, Emily, in terms of application specifics, recommendations in terms of what you’d be looking for from an admissions perspective, especially for non-standard applicants?

Emily Corbett: I think it’s about evidencing that you have the willingness and the drive to study this sort of literature. We’re not looking to exclude people. We’re just looking to make sure that you are going to get the most out of the programme. So if you can demonstrate that you’ve got particular interests, and that doesn’t have to be incredibly formalised sort of interest. It could be that you have experience of volunteering reading with children and all those sorts of things. So just put yourself onto the paper and if we’ve got any questions as well, we’ll be able to have a bit of a dialogue with you as well.

Gethin Jones: Brilliant, thanks Emily. Okay, there is a QR code there. If you wanted to have a quick look now, you’re welcome to scan that and go through to the web pages, but we will be in touch ASAP next week with a bit more information. Now is the time to pick up some questions. I know we’ve kind of gone a little bit over the 45 minutes than we anticipated, but we still have a little bit of time for some questions. So we’ve got a great question here from Susanna. It says, my interest lies in the history of children’s picture books and early illustrated books. Is there a pathway within the MA to study this?

Emily Corbett: So I think the thing to say with this is to draw everyone back to this flexibility that we have in terms of the topics. We will cover some of the history of children’s literature and picture books, but all of our modules are bespoke in terms of you can choose that as something that you’d like to focus in on your assignment. So in the form of genre module, for example, if you wanted to look at the form of early illustrated books, you write yourself a research question around that and we’ll support you to conduct that project. So there isn’t a specific pathway as such within the MA, but rather it’s embedded across everything that we do that you’d be able to pursue your own research interests, whether like you Susanna, that’s early illustrated books or whether for somebody else that’s poetry or the sort of representation of animals or whatever it might be.

Gethin Jones: Fantastic. We do have another question here. Hang on a second. Oh, it’s a compliment actually from Sarah for you, Michael. Might make you blush a little bit. So, so wonderful hearing you talk, Michael. It’s so interesting to think of our literature as being changed for the better by the different mediums. I think on the back of that, I was going to ask you a question as well in terms of, you know, the modern day stuff. You talked about the MC Grammar and the ridiculous rhymes and raps and stuff. And then we talked about the history of children’s literature as well. Like what are your thoughts on like how are we going to maintain that storytelling, reading books to our kids, you know, with the advent of social media and everybody with screens and stuff, you know, how do you feel about that?

Michael Rosen: Well, as far as we can tell, the human race has been telling stories for as long as they’ve been human beings. And these stories have come in various forms. We assume that cave painting was a form of storytelling. If you go back to most early religious walls, you can take the famous Jakata tales from the Buddhist tradition – all paintings, telling stories from way back, several thousand years. The Odyssey and the stories from Iran, Gilgamesh, you know, these stories are 3000 years old. Now, some of these are in oral storytelling form and others in book form. So my own feeling is I don’t think we have to worry about storytelling or indeed story writing. You know, if you think of the huge popularity and explosion of fan fiction and collabs and all this other area, there’s no problem. I think it’s possible that the book.

Gethin Jones: Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Michael Rosen: What is that? What have we done when we do that? We’re saying that there’s a flow between the oral and the written. And the whole of my life, 50 years in business, just a bit more now, has been about keeping the oral and the written in contact with each other. And we can see that’s going on. You know, you think of film adaptation of books into TV dramas.
I’m working on one myself right now, all right, which is based on a book. Someone else is making a cartoon of one of my books. So, I mean, if you like, that’s going on all the time. The object of the book may to a certain extent be not totally threatened because, you know, I see people reading books, but they may be reading them electronically, of course. So, you know, it’s a rapidly changing moment, but I think people want and need stories. And what we’re doing is we’re, to a certain extent, interrogating why that is and how that is.

Gethin Jones: Absolutely.

Emily Corbett: May I just jump in Gethin, if that’s all right, with a couple of the quickfire ones? I know we’re 2 minutes over, so if you need to go, I appreciate that. But you know, for anyone who wants to stay. So somebody had asked, do people find the course useful in finding jobs that are connected to children’s literature? We’re very realistic about the world at the minute and, you know, the industry. So I make no promises.

Gethin Jones: Of course, of course you can. Yeah.

Emily Corbett: But I will say that we actually have such a brilliant track record of supporting students into employment. I have the privilege of writing lots of reference letters for people and we’ve got people working across different sectors. One of my students recently has just got a job as a literary agent in the States. I mentioned the student who’s working with Book Trust. Students have gone into working for National Literary Trust, publishers, editors, etc. So I think that we will do our very best to support you and there are brilliant case studies of success in the programme. We’ve covered how many hours a week. Tamsin’s asked, how often does the course run a year? It does run multiple times per year. I think we’ve got 4 intakes per year, Gethin, if I’m correct. We’re talking about the first at the minute, so I’m getting used to the schedule.

Gethin Jones: Yeah, we got June followed by August and then to be confirmed then in terms of what happens at that then, yeah.

Emily Corbett: Yeah, perfect. So somebody said I’ve got a full concept for a children’s book that I’d like to work on within the course. This might be relevant for lots of people. If you’re coming into it with an idea of a children’s book that you want to write, please do, you know, bring it. That’s brilliant. And particularly when it comes to the final project, you’ll have one-to-one support to help you develop a piece of literature for young people. For those of you who live close to campus, we’ve got a question about, I live in the UK but not in London, would it be possible to attend a live lecture on campus? Yes, in short, if you’re a student at Goldsmiths, you have the benefit of being able to audit other modules, which means that you can attend without completing the assessments or anything. It is subject to the module leader agreeing, but I’m sure Michael and I would be very happy to welcome anyone for ad hoc lectures, etc. So just make sure that you talk to us in advance so we can make sure that there’s a seat for you in the room.

Michael Rosen: And we also have a programme, we also have a programme of author interviews. So we’ve interviewed people like Philip Pullman or the great critic Jack Zipes. You may not know him, but American critic, world expert on folk and fairy tales and the evolution of them. So we’ve spoken to various people.

Emily Corbett: Yeah.

Michael Rosen: So we have kind of on-campus events, a programme going on that comes out of our children’s literature department.

Emily Corbett: Yeah, and you’d be welcome to attend any of those as well and anything else going on within the school. Finally, if you’re applying without a degree, do you need to submit samples of writing? No is the short answer because we’re looking at the personal statement for the exceptional submissions to the programme. But if you feel that your writing is a fundamental part of why you are appropriate for the programme, then I’d be very happy to look through small bits of writing that you want to share. And then just to end with a compliment, because I’ve enjoyed it, to say that Annabelle has loved the webinar and feels pretty sure that this is the course for them. So I’m very pleased to hear that, Annabelle, and come aboard. We’re very glad to have you.

Gethin Jones: Thanks, Annabelle. That’s brilliant. Okay, thanks, Emily. Thanks so much, Michael. I’ve really enjoyed this as well. It’s been an absolute pleasure and really appreciate everybody’s time as well. I probably have gone up a little bit, but hopefully it was worth it. We’ll follow up after the session with additional information. You can get in touch with my team anytime now from Monday and then hopefully we’ll see everybody soon and have a lovely weekend.

Emily Corbett: Thanks everyone and thanks Gethin for running on this as well. Much appreciated.

Gethin Jones: Thanks, everyone. See you soon. Cheers. Thanks, Michael. Bye bye now. No worries. Bye bye now.