Program Overview

The Master of Arts in Children’s Literature may be taken on a full-time or part-time basis. Students begin the program in term one of the Winter Session (September).

MACL is a 30-credit program: twenty-four credits of course work and a six-credit thesis. Approved courses include graduate seminars offered by the program’s four supporting units on children’s and young adult literature and media, writing and publishing for children, and creative writing. With the program chair’s permission, MACL students may also count courses offered by other academic units to their degree, as long as those courses are germane to the study children’s literature and the student’s research interests.

The six-credit thesis may be developed according to a variety of disciplinary perspectives (e.g., the thesis may be a literary study, a creative writing thesis, a research project involving children and books in the classroom or library, or a hybrid consisting of both creative and scholarly work).

The thesis committee includes the supervisor and committee members representing at least two the four academic units that support MACL. Most recent MACL theses have taken the form of a literary study or a hybrid creative project (e.g., a documentary film or the draft of a young adult novel, supplemented by an article-length research paper). Learn more about the thesis here.