Welcome to Postcolonial Young Adult Literature
In my research, the closest I could find to an existing young adult literature course consisted of multicultural literature courses. I propose that these courses could be taken one step further to include voices from post-colonial nations. Adolescent students often struggle with their identity and find solace in books that illustrate similar struggles. By introducing post-colonial themes to this age group, students can make personal connections to the characters in the literature while also learning about historical and world culture. The titles selected for this course are from a literature list I created for my comprehensive exams. A few of the titles will be required reading by the whole class, while others will be read in a literature circle/book club format. I also will require my students to search for literature not on the list but that meets the criteria of being post-colonial and young adult literature. This allows for an increase in student autonomy while providing me with the opportunity to learn from my students.