Researching Child Authors: Which Questions (not to) Ask

Abstract

It used to be taken for a given fact that children’s literature is written by adults for children. This assumption is contested by the emergence of “another children’s literature”, namely literature about, for, and by children. Facilitated by digital platforms, this alternative type of children’s literature is gathering momentum, compelling us to rethink the (im)possibilities of children’s creative agency. As research into children’s literature is largely premised upon the asymmetry between adult authorship and juvenile readership, we need to rethink some fundamental tenets of this academic field in order to come to terms with child authorship. This article reviews leading publications on the topic, to address the question of how we can best acknowledge, facilitate, and appreciate children’s creative agency as an indispensable dimension of their emergent citizenship. Methodological deliberations are illustrated with references to primary works by child authors about topical societal issues such as ethnic conflict, homelessness, and migration. Its aim is not so much to provide a complete survey of all available publications on the topic, but rather to stake out representative publications that exemplify more and less fruitful approaches to the problem at hand.

Leer, escribir, jugar. Libros infantiles para la escritura creativa / Reading, writing, playing: children’s books for creative writing

“…Por otra parte, diferentes especialistas han puesto el foco de atención en las producciones de niños y jóvenes, tradicionalmente excluidas de lo que se entiende por literatura infantil y juvenil (LIJ) (Cumming, 2008(Cumming, , 2017Wesseling, 2019). De hecho, la sociedad digital en la que vivimos ofrece a los menores la posibilidad de controlar el proceso de difusión de sus propios textos, como sucede por ejemplo en la literatura fanfiction (Cumming, 2017).…”

“An Evil Text”: Chilean National Writing Plan and Students Becoming Writers with Villainy

“…Such an approach means in turn that childhood (like youth, we could argue) unfolds across time and space. In children's and youth literature and culture studies we find a growing interest in shifting the attention from adult writers to children and young readers and then to children and young authors (see Conrad, 2019;Cumming, 2017;Friedrich et al, 2018;Goebel, 2022;Haverals et al, 2022;Wesseling, 2019). Such an attention to youth authorship is framed in a broader rethinking of the notion of children's agency and how to do research about children.…”

Managing Media. Listening to Young Girls as Producers of Texts and Media in the Nineteenth Century and Today: Ida Thiele’s Letters and Naja Münster’s YouTube Channel

“…A further difficulty is related to the fact that children's writing is rarely published and kept in archives and collections (McGillis, 1991;Sánchez-Eppler, 2013;Appel and Christensen, 2017). A growing interest in children as (co-) producers of texts is reflected in an increasing number of publications focusing on contemporary children producing texts (Wesseling, 2019;van Lierop-Debrauwer and Steels, 2021), and there also seems to be an increasing interest in finding and analysing media content produced by children in collections and archives.…”