Call for papers
The 2nd International Online Conference Fostering Dialogue: Teaching Children’s Literature and Culture at University is aimed at reopening the international forum for perspectives on teaching children’s literature at universities, which was established at the 1st Fostering Dialogue conference, organized in 2020 by the University of Padova in collaboration with the University of Waikato and the University of Arizona. Now we hope to expand the conversation about teaching literary texts for young readers by inviting you to share approaches and practices aimed at teaching children’s culture. We suggest that children’s culture should be understood both as cultural materials created by adults for child audiences and as children’s (co-)creation and appropriation of cultural texts. It also includes diverse institutions regulating and facilitating cultural production. We think that such an inclusive focus reflects the intensifying interdisciplinarity of children’s literature scholarship we are witnessing nowadays (e.g. Miskec and Wannamaker 2016, Harde and Kokkola 2018, Conrad and Kennedy 2020, op de Beeck 2020).
We would like to open the conference to students’ voices and experiences regarding pedagogies of children’s literature and culture. Therefore, we intend to provide room in the programme for students’ sessions or panels. We would appreciate it if you could disseminate this call for papers among your students and contact us for further details if they would like to share and contribute.
Finally, as our work continues to be affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, we invite papers reflecting critically on challenges and opportunities that appear when emergency remote teaching and learning has turned into deliberately designed online practices. We hope that the 2nd Fostering Dialogue conference creates new spaces for discussion and collaboration on teaching children’s literature and culture in university settings.
We invite papers related to the overall theme of the conference. Possible areas for investigation include but are not restricted to:
1) Teaching methods and practices in children’s literature and culture courses for students
2) Designing reading lists/syllabi/assignments
3) Strategies for students’ active engagement in classes
4) Assessment in children’s literature and culture courses
5) Teaching and including children’s literature and culture in other disciplines (e.g. arts, design, architecture, library sciences, history, sociology, geography, mathematics, biology)
6) Students’ perspectives on teaching children’s literature and culture
7) National and international programmes for studying children’s literature and culture
8) Institutional possibilities and limitations
9) Local, national or global frameworks, guidelines, and standards
Please send an abstract of 300 words maximum and a short biography of 100 words as a single Word document to fosteringd@hvl.no
Please apply this subject line: Teaching Children’s Literature and Culture Conference
Abstracts should include the following information:
- Author(s)
- Affiliation as you would like to appear in the programme
- E-mail address
- Title of proposal
- Text of proposal (including research question, methodology, research context)
- Selected bibliography with academic sources (3-5 references)
- Areas of interest referring to the topics listed above (1-11)
- Five keywords
Deadline for abstract submission: 30th April, 2022
Notification of acceptance: 15th June, 2022
All submissions are reviewed by the members of the Organizing and Scientific Committee. All abstracts and papers accepted for and presented at the conference must be in English and copyedited. Papers will be 20 minutes maximum followed by a 10 minutes discussion.