Between the book and the screen: children’s literature production in school and the mediation of literary reading practices

Abstract

Children’s literature has historically developed in dialogue with educational, cultural, and artistic expectations, accompanying changes in how childhood and reading are understood. This study is grounded in the contributions of Zilberman (2003), particularly regarding the relationship between literature and schooling, and Colomer (2007), who conceives literary reading as a mediated cultural practice, a perspective that guides the discussion on the production and circulation of texts in the contemporary school context. In the current scenario, the expansion of production and circulation formats, especially in digital environments, reconfigures practices of authorship, reading, and literary mediation, requiring schools to adopt new approaches to the construction of literary experience. This article analyzes a pedagogical practice developed with fifth-grade elementary school students, in which the production of children’s e-books was adopted as a strategy to bring children closer to literature, understanding the book as a cultural practice and an object of language, including its digital materiality. The qualitative and descriptive investigation is organized as a case study conducted with 25 students from a public municipal school in Novo Hamburgo (RS), based on participant observation and analysis of textual and visual productions. The results indicate that literary writing, articulated with reading and teacher mediation, fosters the development of students as reader-authors and promotes reflections on authorship, singularity, and the critical use of digital technologies. The public circulation of the works expanded the social meaning of writing, strengthening students’ sense of belonging to a reading community and their understanding of literature as a cultural practice in the school context.