Anežka Kuzmičová was the first ever keynote from a non-Anglophone country at the United Kingdom Literacy Association International Conference

Anežka Kuzmičová became the first speaker from a non-Anglophone country to deliver a keynote at the United Kingdom Literacy Association International Conference. The conference has been running annually for 60 years, gathering literacy researchers alongside teachers and other practitioners. This year’s iteration was also the most international one so far, with a quarter of the approximately 300 delegates coming from outside the United Kingdom.

In her keynote, Anežka talked about what it takes to study children’s informational (compared to fiction) reading experiences and revealed as yet unpublished key findings from an interview study with children living in diverse socioeconomic settings in Czechia. She also offered a sneak peek of our recently completed focus groups which included over 100 children from across the country, exploring how nonfiction stimulates the imagination.

WONDRE’s presence at the conference was further supported by Markéta Supa with whom Anežka presented a paper as part of a well-attended symposium she convened on ‘child-reader-centred’ research techniques that foster young people’s ownership and reflection. Their co-speakers in the symposium were Louise Couceiro of University of Oxford, who shared a creative reflexive toolkit used in remote research with primary-aged children, and Chin Ee Loh of the National Institute of Education (NIE OfR) and Nanyang Technological University Singapore, who shared a mobile ethnography study conducted with teenagers.