AI, new forms of reading and agential children's literature

This chapter explores the role of children’s literature on Primary age school children with a particular focus on the idea of co-constructed ‘agential reading’; from picturebooks, fiction, non-fiction and literature in the form of new technologies. Over two decades into the twenty-first century, we are well into an era demanding transliteracies, where the ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media from signing and orality through handwriting, print, TV, radio and film, to digital social networks is transforming reading. Beginning with a short contextualising history, this piece will explore questions of how and whether children’s literature and reading is already ‘coded’, what the challenges – such as AI – are, and how these are linked to literary and cultural metaphors of real/not real. The piece concludes with how feminist new materialist readings can view reading in modernity as groups of ‘reader gatherers’ rather than hunter-gatherers, allowing for children’s critical thinking, judgement and emotional intelligence to be developed through narratives as quests for agency through new interfaces, new forms of reading and new forms of children’s literature.