Competencies Required for Earning the Certificate

The competencies which students must demonstrate by the end of the certificate program include:

• knowledge of the historical development, current trends, and enduring characteristics of youth literature in all media
• use of critical abilities in the online discussion of literary text and images for young people
• ability to integrate the resources of the technology into a curriculum
• recognition of various illustrative media and techniques and their effectiveness in relation to particular texts
• assessment of student search strategies and the success of those strategies in meeting informational and aesthetic needs
• facility in identifying resources for students that include ideas and peoples underrepresented in schools and libraries
• skill in evaluating and selecting materials with positive gender images and representations of various cultures
• recognition of motifs in traditional literature and relating these recurring images to the cultural origins of the tales
• use of the World Wide Web to enhance an appreciation of youth literature and to extend knowledge about young people and their literature
• ability to use electronic communication media to exchange viewpoints with others in a professional community
• creation of a website that explores an issue, an idea, specific works, variants of a traditional text, or the works of a particular author/illustrator

If you have no experience with creating webpages, we recommend that you take a workshop on webpage development while you are enrolled in the certificate program.

Return to the Youth Literature Online Certificate Program page