“Unstoppable!”: Children as Readers and Researchers of Reading in an Arts‑Based Project

Abstract

Historians of children’s reading highlight how the voices, opinions and ideas of actual children, are missing from most institutional archives. Contemporary scholars have an opportunity to change that situation for the future by co‑producing research with children. This paper examines how a class of ten‑year‑old schoolchildren in England engaged with a multidisciplinary arts project involving creative writing, digital game‑making and reading research activities. The paper builds upon scholarship that emphasizes the importance of conceptualizing research projects about children’s reading with reference to transliteracies, multimodality and creative reading. It argues that, by offering the