What is Virtual Exchange?

Virtual Exchange is an accessible, groundbreaking international experience, which leverages on new technologies and a common lingua franca, and does not entail physical mobility.

Organised jointly between at least two international universities, Virtual Exchange is a training activity consisting of little traditional/lecture-based teaching so to encourage a student-centred and leaner-led collaborative experience aimed at developing a common project and/or discussing interdisciplinary topics with a challenged-based approach.

The groups of international students meet remotely on collaborative platforms (e.g. Zoom, WhatsApp, Google Meets etc.) either autonomously or with a facilitator, who encourages active participation of group members and helps create a positive and collaborative debate without interfering with the contents of the course.

Exploring Child-centred & Ecocritical Perspectives on Children’s Literature

This digital course is organized by three children’s literature scholars teaching at the three university taking part in the project:

• Maria Pujol-Valls, Universitat Internacional de Catalunya (Spain)
• Marnie Campagnaro, University of Padova (Italy)
• Nina Goga, Western Norway University of Applied Sciences (Norway)

Through lectures, workshops and dialogues, the main purpose is to apply and exchange theoretical and didactic perspectives on child-centred approaches in children’s literature (from 1959 to the present) with a particular emphasis on children’s literature as an arena for transmitting children’s rights, responding to UN’s 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs).

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Theoretical Framework

The didactic approach to both lessons and workshops builds on theoretical ideas about dialogic teaching with a special focus on literature conversations and critical and collaborative competency.
These ideas correspond with the child-centered critical approach (CCA) to the literary examples studied in the course. CCA acknowledges children’s heterogeneity and unique ways of creating meaning, it rests more specifically on the idea of children as individuals with rights and responsibilities. The main aim of a CCA is to disrupt childism in children’s literature (as, for example, feminist literary theory
disrupts sexism).

Schedule

Each lesson will concentrate on a few selected children’s rights and a selected corpus of influential and/or significant children’s literature from the geographical areas of the organising Universities.

1. The theoretical framework is be presented and applied to children’s literature by the three scholars at the first part of the lessons.
2. In the second part the students collaborate in groups to prepare a video
   assignment to analyse a children’s book selected by the group. The selected book should be analysed within the theoretical framework presented in the lessons.