Reading to Dogs (RTD) in schools, a form of animal-assisted education (AAE), is growing in popularity and prevalence. RTD involves children reading to a registered dog with benefits to well-being and reading outcomes thought to arise because of the unconditional positive regard and non-critical listening bestowed on the child by the dog. Yet RTD…

Re-imagining Home was a collective immersive story response for children ages 7-12 years during COVID curated by artists from The Story Makers Company. This experience focused on connecting children in new ways through the processes of drama and storying. This paper explores the nuanced responses that children and artists negotiated online/offline…

This article positions rhetoric as a bridge between oracy and citizenship education. The first comparative curricular study of Scotland, Slovenia and Norway, it demonstrates shared policy aims and practical challenges in the delivery of oracy and citizenship education in these three nations. We argue that the study of rhetoric equips young…

In this paper, I draw on two childhood ethnographies to ask basic questions about the foundation of child writing. The first question is, "where does writing come from in young children's lives?" Answering this question will lead us to childhood play as the foundation of writing. The second question is, "how do educators negotiate…

How an author communicates with a reader is a central consideration in the critical examination of any text. When considering the communication of ideas from young people whose voices are seldom heard, the journey from author to audience has particular significance. The construction of children and young people as 'authors' is important,…

In this paper, we demonstrate the relationship between reading and writing for pleasure. Children read a wide range of media as well as books for pleasure and develop strong affective bonds with the artefacts of literacy they encounter. What remains less well understood is the relationship between the array of texts children engage with and the…

Discourses of reading for pleasure have seldom addressed the multiple and complex digital media practices of children and young people or the changing nature of literacy. This article explores the affective encounters that are generated in the relations between readers, digital texts and things by applying Bennett's notion of enchantment. Using…

In this article, I confine myself to the situation in England that offers a paradigm example of one of the fundamental tensions besetting teaching and assessing writing: the stranglehold of an individualistic view of writing development as opposed to a more socio-cultural perspective. Examining the uses of summative assessment for accountability…

This article focuses on a bookmaking project that was conducted with pre-adolescent Serbian and Bosnian girls at a summer camp outside Sarajevo, Bosnia in 2005. During this camp, children from Bosnia, Serbia and Croatia were brought together by the Global Children's Organisation to engage in a variety of activities, including conflict resolution,…

This article presents work undertaken with a class of Scottish Primary Six children (aged 10) to investigate the use of interactive whiteboard technology and interactive talking books in whole-class writing lessons. The paper reports on a research project with three aims: to investigate how the use of an interactive whiteboard to reflect on the…

This article considers the potential for dissonance that one 12-year-old child (Clare) may experience as a text producer using new technologies, when working across a range of contexts. In this ongoing case study, two types of text are explored: a computer-generated text produced as a homework task for school, and texts produced using an…