Published on Wednesday, 10 December 2025 at 12:50:16 PM

Written by Ron Gorman

Children and young people enjoy and benefit from big questions and big ideas. Morris
Gleitzman, Children’s Laureate in 2018 and 2019, puts story at the heart of our human
condition and reminds us that “stories help us understand ourselves and others better”.
Valerie Hannon (2017 p12) from the Innovation Unit says that “Today, education has to be
about learning to thrive in a transforming world”. One way to support children and young
people to develop dispositions for today’s world is to engage critically with literary texts
through the lens of the general capabilities of ethical understanding and critical and creative
thinking.

What we want from the reading process and access to quality children’s literature is for
students to:

• develop a wide repertoire of meaning-making strategies that they can use
  independently;
• question and make critical responses to what and how they read;
•  use texts as a way of ‘knowing’ themselves, the world and the multiple perspectives
  of others and
• learn new things that will inform how they grow, behave and take action in their lives
  out of school, and which will help them become responsible and active citizens.

What are the essential elements needed in order to expose students to powerful texts?
Rosenblatt (1978) uses the term ”aesthetic reading” to describe the context in which the
reader’s attention is centred on the feelings associated with the lived experience of reading
powerful text. This is found when reading a compelling story.

So, the quest is to source texts that will prompt the big questions to be asked as a means of
expanding students’ thoughts and understanding of others, as well as to provide them with
contexts in which they can consider and respond to complex issues.

References;

Edwards, D., Gorman, R., Grellier, W & Lawrence, K. (2014). The Places You Could Go.
Association of Independent Schools of WA.

Gleitzman, M. Australian Children’s Laureate 2018-2019. www.childrenslaureate.org.au/
morris-gleitzman

Hannon, V. & Peterson, A. (2017). Thrive – Schools Reinvented for the Real Challenges We
Face. Innovation Unit Press.

Rosenblatt, L.M. (1978). The Reader, The Text, the poem: The Transactional Theory of the
Literary Work, Southern Illinois University Press.

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