Anežka Kuzmičová is a cross-disciplinary reading researcher working at Charles University, Prague. Her research group investigates children’s lived experiences of literacy in different modalities, especially in their embodied and imaginative nature. Anežka also has an extensive publication record on the topic of mental imagery. In 2023, she was awarded a 5-year ERC Starting Grant for Ways of Imagining in Children’s Lives with Information Texts (WONDRE).
A post by Anežka Kuzmičová
This is a research story, or the beginning of one, from a field other than most of the Junkyard. The field is literacy research – if we define literacy broadly enough. In the centre of this field is children’s imagining with varied texts and other stimuli (videos, spoken words, material objects), but studied differently from how it is studied in experimental research. My cross-disciplinary research group and I invite children to introspect, in the first person and their own words, rather than perform controlled tasks. The children’s introspection is supported with specially designed tangible props – picture cards, toys, colour-coded cutouts but also books. The idea behind such work is to deepen general understanding of children’s everyday experiences. We point out preexisting differences and groupings among children who otherwise tend to be treated as an experientially homogeneous population. We also revisit biases in the discourse and practice that affect children’s lives. One such bias is the general neglect of nonfiction as a springboard for imaginative activity, and the perception of young nonfiction readers as unimaginative individuals (Mar et al., 2006) or even non-readers (Mackey, 2020).
My work with children, too, used to focus on fictional stories. Anecdotally though I kept noticing that nonfiction can be as stimulating to imagination as fiction. In a study of memories and imaginings prompted by children’s favourite books (Kuzmičová & Cremin, 2022), for instance, one nine-year-old would bring a football (soccer) player biography and report that it made him imagine himself “playing professional football and getting transferred to the best team in the world.” A peer of his reported that an illustrated science encyclopedia made him imagine “flying above space and looking down on Earth.” Such reader responses as I see them testify to more than mental imagery. They cast the children in protagonist roles, giving away the possible selves (Richardson & Eccles, 2007) that may form part of their personal identities also in the longer term. In Kind and Kung’s (2016) terms, perhaps they qualify as both ‘transcendent’ uses of imagination, insofar as they aim beyond the world as is (the child’s current life), and ‘instructive’ uses insofar as they teach the children things about aspects of the world as is: about what it is like to see the Earth from out in space, or even about themselves.
The above study, conducted in England more than four years ago, involved 148 children. Only ten of them chose to bring nonfiction rather than fiction as their favourite book, though in retrospect the one-in-fifteen proportion must have been skewed by the research taking place on school premises where literacy discourse is dominated by fiction. Shortly after collecting this data, I moved countries to start my current research group in Czechia and carry out more fiction-centred work (Kuzmičová et al., 2022a,b). Again, we soon began noticing children whose relationship to fiction was tepid but whose imagination seemed to be stimulated by nonfiction. Therefore, I have now officially launched systematic inquiry into imagining as afforded to children by nonfiction texts – and by factual engagements beyond reading. After all, children’s nonfiction has skyrocketed worldwide over the past two decades, offering aesthetically elaborate alternatives to fingertip knowledge off online searches; clearly, nonfiction is somehow present in the lives of more than one in fifteen young readers.
So, what initial expectations go into an empirical project like this? We expect that fact-based imaginings in some respects resemble those prompted by fiction; for most children, imagining oneself as a professional footballer is no less transcendent than daydreaming of becoming a wizard of the Hogwarts. On the other hand, there are many more real things a child can do, or engage with, to fuel the former kind of imagining than the latter. In some sense one can do precisely as the professional footballer does: practice football daily. One can further enlist a variety of props and activities: collect trading cards, have conversations with other fans, monitor league tables, jot up game strategies, and so forth. With fantastic aspirations, such possibilities strike me as more narrow (but I could be wrong). My group and I are curious to learn about these everyday practices and about what motivates children to engage in them. But we also expect that there will be imaginative experience structures that are even more categorically specific to facts, and that they may be worth fleshing out using the instructive vs. transcendent dyad.
As our first step, we spent the spring of this year designing and conducting in-depth interviews (N = 20) with 9-11-year-olds; overall analyses of this data set are currently underway. First, the children made visual collages of their real-world interests and then reflected on the different imaginative activities (e.g., reading, viewing, talking, playing) through which they nurture these interests. Second, they engaged in the design of an imaginary nonfiction book, a process that involved laying out a double page, leafing through a sample of nonfiction books about the human body, and sorting picture cards representing different book design features. It is important to note that when wording our probe questions to the children, we did not expressly refer to imagining, beyond the invitation to imagine their bespoke book. Instead, we mostly waited for descriptions of imagining to emerge bottom-up in the conversations. As a result, we learned more about some participants’ mental habits and preferences than others, but this is always the case in qualitative fieldwork.
Ten-year-old Vincent (pseudonym) offered particularly rich descriptions of his fact-based imaginings. Vincent is a space geek who owns a tall bookcase of encyclopedias and other nonfiction on the subject. In the interview he says he has read up enough, and singles out other space-related activities as currently more important (“creating”) or immersive (“thinking”) than reading. Judging from the reams of specialist knowledge that permeate his accounts (when there is a storm on Jupiter, it rains diamonds), his being “past” reading up is easy to believe. In nonfiction books, Vincent strongly prefers bare facts, numeric ones with captioned 3D images whenever possible, to embellishments such as jokes, fun facts (records) or narrative features. This, we know already, distinguishes him from most other participants and might be interpreted to suggest that Vincent’s imagining about space is quite literal and clearly instructive rather than transcendent. But when Vincent says his ideal book should feature suggestions for “things I can do” (selecting our eponymous flashcard, illustrated with a lab beaker and computer screen), he also adds in a deadpan voice: “yeah, tips for building an interstellar freight ship … to transport maggots that are twelve meters long.”
Here is what Vincent’s vast knowledge on space does for him: it creates a private space (both meanings) for his mind to go to. He is serious about the spatial qualities proper of these ventures (“it’s good to map your terrain”) but also repeatedly uses the word “made-up” for them. Vincent says he enters this space at will to try out ideas: “I take a piece of information and roll it around in my mind, how things might go or not go, how we might end up in a thousand years from now, maybe destroyed by a meteorite.” He also engages in storied play there, becoming an armoured bear-like creature fighting off his opponents with laser swords and enjoying the proprioceptive and other sensory imagery this entails. In his mind he thus stages the various extra moves he prefers not to encounter in books. Note however that the objects of Vincent’s imagining also tend to have hard data attached to them in SI units (like the maggots above) and that they obey the basic laws of physics. The extremely hypersaline seas Vincent “projects” onto an undiscovered twin planet, for instance, can only carry ships made of titan because steel would not hold.
There is much more to be said about Vincent’s habitual imagining. Its core qualities will become even clearer once we have systematically compared his data to that of remaining participants. At the end of this post, my interview with him leaves me awed and puzzled: at what strikes me as a combination of transcendent (pretence) vs. instructive imagining (rehearsing, but perhaps also developing one’s factual knowledge), and at the pervasive educational reality where children’s reading about facts is seriously thought of as devoid of imagination. I look forward to unpacking this reality in the years to come.
References
Kind, A., & Kung, P. (2016). Introduction: The Puzzle of Imaginative Use. In A. Kind & P. Kung (Eds.), Knowledge Through Imagination, 1–37. Oxford University Press.
Kuzmičová, A., & Cremin, T. (2022). Different fiction genres take children’s memories to different places. Cambridge Journal of Education, 52(1), 37–53.
Kuzmičová, A., Supa, M., & Nekola, M. (2022a). Children’s perspectives on being absorbed when reading fiction: a Q methodology study. Frontiers in Psychology, 13:966820.
Kuzmičová, A., Supa, M., Segi Lukavská, J., & Novák, F. (2022b). Exploring children’s embodied story experiences: a toolkit for research and practice. Literacy, 56(4), 288-298.
Mackey, M. (2020). Who Reads What, in Which Formats, and Why?. In E. Birr Moje et al. (Eds.), Handbook of Reading Research, Volume V (pp. 99-115). Routledge.
Mar, R. A., Oatley, K., Hirsh, J., Dela Paz, J., & Peterson, J. B. (2006). Bookworms versus nerds: Exposure to fiction versus non-fiction, divergent associations with social ability, and the simulation of fictional social worlds. Journal of Research in Personality, 40(5), 694–712.
Richardson, P. W., & Eccles, J. S. (2007). Rewards of reading: Toward the development of possible selves and identities. International Journal of Educational Research, 46(6), 341-356.