I took this class for the honors requirement, but a strong majority of students in this class were education majors because it also covered and extra requirement for them. Although this course was geared toward education and included a lot of important information for future teachers, I feel like I gained a lot from this class all the same. First, it was interesting to be a part of the class where I was in the minority and was looking in with an outside perspective. Until that point I had not strayed too far from my department when it came to the courses I chose to take. Second, through this class I ended up looking at the genre of children’s literature in a different light. I had to relearn so many things I thought I already knew, such as how choose-your-own-adventure books don’t actually grant children any kind of agency of their own and children’s books shouldn’t be labeled with a reading “level”. Finally, I have always had a love of reading, but this class made me begin to seriously consider getting my Master of Library and Information Science. Since then, I have begun to research graduate programs and it seems very likely that that is the path I will go down once I graduate.

Agency and Ideology in “The Magic Half” by Rachel Boch was created on September 24, 2020. This paper had me relook at one of my favorite books from my childhood and view children’s literature in a different light, taking agency and ideology into account.