CFP. Issue 23. Сhildren's creativity

Dear Colleagues,

We invite you to participate in the 23rd issue of Children’s Readings, which will be devoted to children’s creativity. By focusing on “children’s creativity,” we propose to understand both the processes and the results of children’s creative efforts that adults consider aesthetically valuable. Since the New Age, there has been a gradual recognition of the autonomy of childhood, and adult attention to children’s drawings, poems, diaries, and plays is evident and growing. In the second half of the nineteenth century, educators first asked questions about what should be considered children’s literature—works created by children themselves or works created by adults for children? Children’s points of view and experiences revealed in works created by children began to be evaluated as aesthetically valuable and to contribute to the education of the aesthetic sense in children.

This view of children’s art has spread among European and American educators. Discussions of aesthetic education began to appear in pedagogical publications, as educators from different countries became familiar with different approaches to the aesthetic education of children and began to record the diversity of individual and collective creative expressions of children, including school and home performances, handwritten newspapers and magazines, drawings, and albums, poetry, and prose of different genres.

By the early 1920s, the position that literature for children should be written by children themselves had become prominent in the Soviet Union. One of the most famous proponents of this idea was Maxim Gorky. From the point of view of its apologists, adults were incapable of understanding children and responding to their aesthetic needs. The view that children are the best creators of children’s literature was linked to modernist and avant-garde conceptions of childhood and child subjectivity. This view also reflected the internal dynamics of literary production and the search for authors of a new type, as well as the renewal of the professional system of literary work. At the same time, the pedagogical community was cautious about this idea, restricting itself to broadly developing programs and methodologies of aesthetic education and viewing children’s creative productions as primitive art rather than art per se (e.g., projects by Anatoly Bakushinsky and others).

It is evident that the content and forms of children’s creativity over the last three centuries have remained somewhat conservative. However, in some respects, they have been open to external influences; for example, in the postmodern era, children have become active producers of new forms of creative expression, such as fanfiction and cosplay.

We propose to discuss the following range of topics related to children’s creativity:

• The child as a subject of creative activity.

• Anthropological, sociological, and psychological discussions of child subjectivity and creative expression.

• Children’s artistic endowment (Lev Vygotsky) and the historical variability of the concepts of gift, giftedness, talent, and genius.

• Children’s literary creativity; genre and stylistic features; home poetry; teenage prose; parodies; fanfiction; marginal genre forms.

• Children’s amateurism—the history of the concept and the phenomenon.

• The history of the study of children’s creativity (Konstantin Wentzel and the theory of “free education” and the Primitive Art Cabinet of the Russian Academy of Arts, etc.).

• Forms of children’s collective creativity (club work, wall newspapers, school magazines, amateur plays, school theatre, etc.).

• Institutional histories of children’s literary clubs and associations.

• Children's folklore.

• Children’s journalism and decors.

• Children’s personal writing, including diaries, poems, and sketchbooks.

 

 In addition to articles submitted to the main block, we welcome submissions to the following sections of the magazine: Reviews, Archives, and Interviews.

Recommended length: up to 40,000 characters.

Submission deadline: February 1, 2023.

Submission deadline for the final version of articles after passing the blind double-review process: March 30, 2023.

This issue is scheduled to appear in June 2023.

Please email submissions to the editorial board: detskie.chtenia@gmail.com.

 

We are grateful for your cooperation,

DCh Editorial Board