Ways of imagining in children's lives with information texts

Introduction

What makes a piece of information personally engaging, and what does it even mean when it is experienced as such? Adopting a child-centred view on an emergent form of literate life, I will investigate what imaginative experiences fuel the current boom of children’s nonfiction picturebooks (CNPs).

Research Questions

How do these books make children imagine, that is, shift their perception of the sensory world and oneself? What niche may they come to occupy in children’s day-to-day dealings with information?

Context

Contemporary society’s ‘strong reader’ is a fiction lover; a child who indulges in formal learning materials is a ‘prolific student.’ Most readers aged 9-11 are neither, but many occasionally devour fun facts, sometimes on highly specialist topics. CNPs have skyrocketed recently, but in contrast to fiction, we have no conceptual tools for grasping the imaginative and generally affective experiences nonfiction elicits. Engaging children, parents, authors, and other actors, WONDRE will redress the gap.

Methodology

I will lead a team of social science (literacy, media literacy, childhood) and humanities (literature) scholars, straddling both worlds myself and drawing on my further expertise in imagining and cognition. We will combine:

1. Focus groups
2. Interviews
3. Surveys
4. Text-image analyses
5. Q studies

This approach will radically enhance a method mix that I have begun developing in my prior work on children’s embodied experiences of fiction. This research showed a fiction bias in children’s construal of ‘being a reader.’ It hinted that nonfiction can prompt imaginings as compelling as fiction, but also that children who prefer nonfiction may differ from fiction fans in how they sustain their imagining via other texts, props, and activities.

Outcomes

WONDRE will also yield a multilingual digital CNP on reading that will be co-created by participants and art students, aiming to empower diverse young readers and collectively unravel how information relates to imagining in the most vulnerable stages of literacy development.