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John McKenzie has had a passion for children's literature for over thirty years as a primary school teacher, teacher educator and most recently as Qualifications Coordinator at the College of Education.
He recalls the public library of his childhood: an old Edwardian villa, standing on a hill in the suburb of Roslyn, Palmerston North. Stories like A Rutgers van der Loeff Avalanche Penguin, 1957 introduced him to an imagined world that was so different to his own that he became hooked into the secondary worlds of literature (and avoided doing a lot of the chores required of a responsible childhood)!
John L. McKenzie is a Principal Lecturer at the College of Education, responsible for the development, certification and delivery of the Certificate in Children's Literature and the Diploma in Children's Literature. He developed this qualification in response to the need for the academic study of children's literature in New Zealand, ensuring that it met the requirements of the New Zealand Qualifications Authority (NZQA).
He has written over twenty-six study guides in distance education format for this qualification; ranging from picture books, children's poetry, myth, legend and folktale, the Victorian period, the use of children's literature in the curriculum, book selection and performance. He is supported in this endeavour by a team of part-time and contract course writers, directors and tutors.
He is a founding member of the Australasian Children's Literature Association for Research (ACLAR), having represented New Zealand on the governing Board. In 2001 he hosted the fifth biennial ACLAR conference and with the able help of his colleagues, Drs. Doreen Darnell and Anna Smith, published the proceedings entitled Cinderella Transformed: Multiple voices and diverse dialogues in children's literature (2003).
He has, for many years, co-ordinated and written reviews of New Zealand materials for the Australian Children's Book Council's journal Reading Time.
He is currently negotiating a collaboration with one American university and one university in South Africa.
His current PHD research interest is the representation of suicide in teenage fiction. His experience as a primary school teacher, parent and lecturer in the fields of language education, communications skills and children's literature have combined to create this passion for the book.