Institutionally Situated Creatures : Reading and Writing Young Adult Fiction in a Higher Education Setting

Caldecott, Elen (2026) Institutionally Situated Creatures : Reading and Writing Young Adult Fiction in a Higher Education Setting. In: Teaching Young Adult Literature :. Teaching the New English (TENEEN) . Palgrave McMillan, Cham. ISBN 9783032269836 (In Press)

Abstract

This chapter offers a creative-critical exploration of the tensions and conflicts which arise from being an author and teacher of Young Adult literature in UK Higher Education. Written during a university-wide overhaul of all curricula, it considers what students might want from their Creative Writing degrees and how well those needs might align with the Higher Education frameworks. The chapter draws on a range of materials: auto-fictive elements offering a fly-on-the-wall classroom view, elements drawn from my own reflective teaching practice, extracts and snippets from formal documents – the maelstrom of guidance, frameworks and metrics within which the marketized university nests. While the university aims for ‘academic and professional excellence’ and the Office for Students highly values post-qualification employability, the discussions I have with my students concerning Young Adult literature reveal more fundamental imperatives. In the classroom, we return again and again to questions of ‘attentive adults’ and ‘hope’ which emerge as ideals and expectations for adolescence and new adulthood. These ideals are emergent from discussions on four coming-of-age novels and from the students’ own works-in-progress. I conclude with a reflection on how and whether a teacher should meet those ideals.