The Green Dialogues: Ecocritical Pathways to Children's Literature in Education

This open access book offers an array of educational perspectives aimed at fostering inclusive, multicultural, critical, dialogical, and sustainable approaches to developing children’s literature in university classrooms. Its core pillars—environmental children’s literature, ecocritical thinking, sustainable development, collaboration, and dialogic skills—lay the foundation for future professionals to be involved with literature in multiple and interdisciplinary ways. This book illustrates and encourages educational practices fostering critical, relational, and collaborative encounters and entanglements with multiple environments, materials, and matter.

The many examples in this book are developed through various forms of collaboration between teacher educators and student teachers, between students and children’s literature, and in collaboration with different materials, spaces, bodies, sounds, and smells.

It provides educators with a methodology for teaching children’s literature to students with a focus on topics related to sustainability, critical citizenship, and inclusion.

Marnie Campagnaro is an associate professor of Children's Literature at the University of Padova. She directs the postgraduate Children’s Literature program and leads the LETIN Unipd research group. Her main research fields include picturebooks, reader-response theory, ecocriticism, biographies, and visual and arts-based educational approaches. She is also an advocate for climate literacy. She has published over 100 works in leading peer-reviewed journals, edited volumes, and monographs.

Lea Ferrari is an associate professor in psychology at the University of Padova, Italy. Her teaching and research efforts concern the field of positive development and social and emotional learning from early ages with a focus on nurturing resources and talents to promote flourishing in career and life. Attention is devoted to variables, processes, and programs that promote full participation and well-being, especially in children and adults who experience vulnerable conditions.

Nina Goga is a professor of Children’s Literature at Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, Norway, and PI of the mobility project Green Dialogues (2022-2025). Her main research field is children’s literature, ecocritical literacy, material ecocriticism, and post-qualitative research. She has published monographies on ants and maps and several edited volumes on topics related to children’s literature.

Mariona Graell is an associate professor at the Faculty of Education Sciences at the Universitat Internacional de Catalunya, Spain. Her main areas of study focus on moral education, service-learning, children’s literature, pedagogical training, and innovation in higher education. She has published more than 30 scientific articles and 20 chapters of books. She is a member of the Sustainability and Integral Education (SEI) research group of the same faculty and the inter-faculty Teaching Innovation Classroom.

Maria Pujol-Valls is an associate professor at the Faculty of Education Sciences at Universitat Internacional de Catalunya, Spain. Her main research interests revolve around different aspects of children’s literature, such as didactics, children’s rights, agency, ecocriticism, sustainable development goals, translating paratexts, citizenship, and Catalan literature.

Elin Stengrundet is an associate professor of literature at the Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, Norway. Her main research interests include 19th- and 20th-century Norwegian literature, with a particular focus on poetry and on the youth motif in literature.

Gro Ulland is an associate professor of literature didactics at the Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, Norway. Her main research interests are literature conversations, literature didactics and children’s literature. She is particularly interested in, and has written several articles about how the meeting between children´s literature and readers take place in schools and classrooms.