Children’s Perspectives on Becoming Absorbed in Stories

The Centre for Research on Children’s and Young Adult Literature at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Wrocław has the honor to invite you to another lecture
in the series “International Voices in Children’s Literature Studies”

The lecture entitled “Children’s Perspectives on Becoming Absorbed in Stories” will be delivered in English by dr Anežka Kuzmičová (Charles University in Prague).

The lecture will take place on 28 November 2022 at 18.00 via the MS Teams platform. If you are interested in attending the lecture, please contact dr hab. Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak, prof. of the UWr, at justyna.deszcz-tryhubczak@uwr.edu.pl.

centrum — What does story reading feel like in the upper primary years, when it is still a relatively new skill? What embodied sensations are involved in becoming absorbed, “lost in a book”? And how does reading compare in this respect to other story activities, such as film watching, listening, art making, playing, or playing out? The intuitive answer is that these things vary from child to child and that it is important to respect such individual differences. In my talk I will present two studies in which my research team investigated these differences systematically via Q methodology, a special technique that combines quantitative and qualitative inquiry and that brings children’s authentic voices and experiences to the fore. Twenty-eight children of diverse backgrounds (age 9-12 years) participated in two card sorting activities combined with interviews exploring what it is like for them when their mind and body are attuned to a story. Each study helped us discern four distinct groups of children for whom different facets of story experience combine in similar ways, a finding of diverse implications for both literacy research and educational practice.

Dr Anežka Kuzmičová (Ph.D. Stockholm University, 2013) studies reading in various forms and guises, currently focusing on how children aged 9–12 become absorbed and bodily engaged in stories in print and other media. Since 2020 she has been running the Integrating Text & Literacy (InT&L) research group at Charles University in Prague, which brings together scholars and methods from across the humanities and social sciences. She has also published widely on digitisation, imagery, immersion, empathy, and reading environments in relation to adults’ reading.

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Children’s Perspectives on Becoming Absorbed in Stories

The Centre for Research on Children’s and Young Adult Literature at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Wrocław

28 November 2022, hour. 18:00 - , hour.

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