There are two major factors which are going to keep driving change. The first one is technology… In the past, children’s literature served the purpose of an adult reading with a child. If the children’s literature allowed that to happen and encouraged communication between the adult and the child, then it was useful for education and reading enjoyment in some way.

The vision is that technology, the internet, mobile phones, Ipads have revolutionised children’s literature. Having technology at hand creates a different interface from the adult talking directly to the child. So the child now is getting stories, images, ideas, from a different interface, instead of the adult-child relationship. Nevertheless, there will still be children’s literature written by adults for children, but technology is not going to stop, and that creates a different narrative and structure, and a different interface. The children are learning so much more from technology that the children’s literature has to take account of that in some way. Exactly how, and why and what works, no-one knows. However, it cannot be ignored. Therefore, educators need to find innovative, interesting ways to use these mediums, use these interfaces to still keep doing good intellectual and educational work, such as using elements from gaming, from popular apps and different things that the children use on the Internet and integrating that into real stories, narratives that can be told between generations, rather than just assuming that this child-adult book way is going to be the main way in which stories get transmitted, and education gets built around them, like language learning or ideas.

The other driver of change is the children themselves, as productive of new ways of seeing the world, as being more in charge of the literature or in charge in a novel way. If there is an adult-child relationship, and the story is written by the adults, it is the adults’ perspective and the adult’s assumptions and the adult’s values and worldview that will be portrayed in the literature, but with children more and more getting these things from the Internet, not from adults, from these sites and apps that they find interesting, that starts to change the way they see and tell stories. However, a story is a story, yet the content, the language, the speed in which it is said, using images instead of language or using video will change the rendering of a story. All of these factors tend towards more user-driven content. Are the children being productive of the literature, being productive of different ways of seeing the world?

These are the two bigger drivers of change.