Ways of imagining in children’s lives with information texts (WONDRE)

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). 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?
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.
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 focus groups, interviews, surveys, text-image
analyses, and Q studies, radically enhancing 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, activities.
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.

Project team of FSV UK (2)

Mgr. Anežka Kuzmičová, Ph.D.

Principal investigator

+420 222 112 296

anezka.kuzmicova@fsv.cuni.cz

Mgr. Markéta Supa, M.A., Ph.D.

Team member

+420 222 112 296  |  +420 608 828 053

marketa.supa@fsv.cuni.cz  |  marketa.zezulkova@fsv.cuni.cz