CALL Vol. 24 No. 48 |

Beyond Childhood. Children’s and Young Adult Literature as Lifelong Reading. Practices, Meanings, and Educational Perspectives.

Children’s literature has long been interpreted as a distinctive yet “minor” form of reading, confined to an initial phase of readers’ development and predominantly associated with preparatory or introductory functions vis-à-vis “adult” literature, or even with moralising purposes and forms of “training” (while nonetheless retaining – especially in some works – features of subversion). In recent decades, however, research from diverse fields – education, the social sciences, reading studies, and cultural studies – has challenged this linear framework, showing that such texts continue to be read, reread, reinterpreted, and reactivated across the entire lifespan.

From this perspective, the emergence of an age-range expansion – made tangible by the gradual growth in the production of stories, novels, and picturebooks for early childhood, preadolescence, adolescence, and young adults – has reconfigured the very idea of children’s literature. Today, it may be understood as a persistent narrative and symbolic repertoire, capable of accompanying individuals across different moments of biographical experience, contributing to processes of lifelong learning and lifewide learning, to identity construction, to cultural memory, and to social participation. This accompanying function up to adulthood – together with the possibility of reading and rereading this literature in adulthood, and the use of these texts within adult education contexts, libraries, universities, educational communities, and professional and civic training pathways – calls for a critical reflection on their educational and cultural status.

This call for papers aims to collect contributions that explore the role of literatures which, from early childhood to young adulthood, accompany development, also considering them as reading practices that remain valid and meaningful throughout the whole course of life, and examining their functions, meanings, educational uses, and implications for reading policies and lifelong education and training.

Contributions addressing the topic from theoretical, historical, empirical, and applied perspectives are welcome, in line with the approach of the journal Lifelong Lifewide Learning.

Indicative thematic areas include:

• the reading and rereading of children’s, adolescent, and young adult literature across different phases of the life cycle;
• children’s, adolescent, and young adult literature as cultural heritage, narrative memory, and a shared symbolic resource;
• educational and training practices involving these texts in formal, non-formal, and informal education contexts (libraries, schools, universities, adult education, prisons, communities, later life), including inclusive approaches (read-aloud practices, the use of picturebooks, and accessibility tools);
• non-instrumental formative functions of reading: orientation, citizenship, critical awareness, imagination, ethics, wellbeing, and participation;
• reading policies, lifelong learning, and cultural access: programmes, strategies, and institutional and territorial models;
• interdisciplinary approaches to the study of children’s, adolescent, and young adult literature within the framework of lifelong education.

The call is open to historical and theoretical contributions, empirical research, case studies, and structured, methodologically grounded analyses of good practices, provided they are consistent with the journal’s scientific framework.

Proposals must be submitted no later than 20 February 2026 via the journal’s platform:

https://www.edaforum.it/ojs/index.php/LLL/about/submissions

 

Publication of the issue is planned for May 2026.