Alma Idea Grant
In the framework of the Alma Idea Grant call for funding, the Children’s Literature Research Centre, together with scholars of History of Education and History of Science, submitted a two-year research project that turned out third in the ranking of the University of Bologna for its originality and significance.
Description of the Alma Idea research project
The Alma Idea Grant winning project aimed at carrying out a first mapping and analysis of the more interesting, innovative and original non-fiction picturebooks for children which had been published worldwide since 2010. Indeed, it is right from that moment that the publication of this new kind of books for children becomes a real ever-expanding editorial phenomenon, increasingly attractive in terms of innovation and experimentation. Since a systematic critical-theoretical survey on this phenomenon was missing in Italy, the Alma Idea research project aimed at bridging the gap. Providing information about the world (the natural, geographic, physical, anthropic, technological, social, linguistic, emotional world) represents a creative challenge in these picturebooks for children, where format, graphics, paper elements, illustrations and their aesthetic, stylistic and composition quality contribute to make them products combining transmission of knowledge and artistic research. As such, these books seem to be able to recompose the typical divide of western culture between the knowledge derived from hard and natural sciences and the one related to ‘humanities’, in which intuition, emotion, research of beauty and sensorial involvement also are of value. By using both verbal and visual codes programmatically, and giving priority to a form in which the text – although accurate in terms of information – is reduced to minimum as compared to majestic and ‘authorial’ images, e.g. performed with a subjective view that is the result of a specific mental and/or stylistic exercise, these picturebooks undermine the traditional way of carrying out disclosure, working as valuable tools for an innovative approach to knowledge both in an extracurricular setting and at school, where they can enrich and complement the more traditional teaching material, as well as help overcome the traditional discipline barriers.
Thanks to the partnership of the Bologna Children’s Book Fair, which allowed the Children’s Literature Research Centre to involve publishers for children from all over the world and receive many of the non-fiction picturebooks from their catalogues directly from them (more than 2000 volumes arrived), scholars could actually take into consideration the objects of their study, analyse their typologies, order them into sections, and create a bibliography of over 600 titles, which are particularly interesting in terms of both transmission of knowledge and aesthetic experimentation. These books, sorted in an ‘annotated bibliography’, are also part of what has become the first wideranging international exhibition of non-fiction picturebooks to be held on the days of the Bologna Children’s Book Fair, but actually postponed until a later date due to the outbreak of Sars Covid-19.
Another result of this research – achieved also thanks to the contribution of the Bologna Children’s Book Fair – is the publication of an imposing theoretical volume enriched with many full-coloured illustrations from the picturebooks mentioned in it, to which the international scholars involved in this project have contributed. The volume, entitled Non-Fiction Picturebooks. Sharing Knowledge as an Aesthetic Experience, edited by Giorgia Grilli and published by ETS (Pisa) in the ‘Bagheera’ collection, comprises 12 essays by authors belonging to universities in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Canada, England and Italy; these essays investigate both general and particular aspects of these new books for children. The volume also provides a final interview with five internationally acclaimed authors/illustrators of non-fiction picturebooks, who explain their poetic in creating books performing the task of providing information and deal with the topics that emerged from the research.
The book can be purchased from the following link: Non-fiction Picturebooks - Aa. Vv. - Giorgia Grilli | Ed. ETS | 9788846757012 (edizioniets.com)
Conference presentations and publications related to the AlmaIdea research project
The project produced other publications as a result. Listed below are all the public events in which the members of the research group reported about the research topics, and all the publications related to the AlmaIdea project published to date.
Conferences:
2019 (26-28 September) Giorgia Grilli gave the presentation “Nonfiction and Imagination. Picturebooks that make children think, feel, wonder, grasp, connect, as opposed to simply accept a given explanation of the world” during the 7th international conference of the European Network of Picturebook Research entitled ‘Verbal and Visual Strategies in Non-Fiction Picturebooks’, Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, Bergen, Norway.
2020 (3 September) Giorgia Grilli gave a presentation on the new Non-Fiction Picturebooks and participated in the roundtable entitled “Popular Science: Who is the Author?” at the Zoom Conference organized by Moscow International Book Fair (Russia).
2020 (9 November) Rossella Raimondo gave a presentation entitled “Educazione cosmica in Maria Montessori. Arti e scienze come risorse per lo sviluppo umano” within the series of seminars “Maria Montessori. Una pedagogia profetica per un mondo nuovo” organized by the University of Catania.
2020 (14 November) Giorgia Grilli gave the keynote speech at the Zoom Conference ‘Smart and Beautiful. The Great Renewal of Non Fiction in Children’s Books’, organized by the China Children’s Book Fair of Shanghai.
2020 (16 December) Rossella Raimondo gave the presentation “Per cominciare diamogli il mondo” at the national conference “150 anni dalla nascita di Montessori” organized by the University LUMSA of Rome.
Publications:
- Grilli, Giorgia, Per un superamento delle due culture. I nuovi albi illustrati di divulgazione per l’infanzia e l’intreccio possibile e fecondo tra scienza e arte, in “STUDI SULLA FORMAZIONE”, 2018, V. 2, pp. 2017-230 [article]
- Raimondo Rossella, Cosmic Education in Maria Montessori: Arts and Sciences as resources for human development, “STUDI SULLA FORMAZIONE”, 2018, 2, pp. 249 - 260 [article]
- Grilli, Giorgia, ‘L’utopia realizzata. Gli albi illustrati non fiction per l’infanzia e l’intreccio esemplare tra scienza e arte’, in S. Barsotti, L. Cantatore (a cura di), Letteratura per l’infanzia. Forme, temi e simboli del contemporaneo, Roma, Carocci, 2019, pp. 185-202 [chapter of a book]
- Raimondo, Rossella, Origini, caratterizzazioni e sviluppi dell'educazione cosmica in Maria Montessori, “RIVISTA DI STORIA DELL'EDUCAZIONE”, 2019, 1, pp. 69 - 79 [article]
- Grilli, Giorgia, The New Non-Fiction Picturebook: Mending the Rift Between Science and Art, in “Libri & Liberi. Journal of research on Children Literature and Culture”, 2020, 9 (1): 75-89 [article]
- Grilli, Giorgia, Non-fiction Picturebooks. Sharing Knowledge as an Aesthetic Experience, ETS, Pisa [editorship]
- Grilli, Giorgia, ‘Re-Enchanting the World. The New Non-Fiction Picturebook’, in Non-fiction Picturebooks. Sharing Knowledge as an Aesthetic Experience, ETS, Pisa, pp. 17-50 [chapter of a book]
- Grilli, Giorgia, ‘Beauty and the World’, in Non-fiction Picturebooks. Sharing Knowledge as an Aesthetic Experience, ETS, Pisa, pp. 267-293 [chapter of a book]
- Grandi William, ‘The Game of Gears. Technology in Non-fiction Picturebooks’ in Non-fiction Picturebooks. Sharing Knowledge as an Aesthetic Experience, ETS, Pisa, pp. 163-182 [chapter of a book]
- Govoni, Paola, ‘Drawing Nature, Building Knowledge: Between Beauty and ‘Gut Feelings’ in the Sciences’ in Non-fiction Picturebooks. Sharing Knowledge as an Aesthetic Experience, ETS, Pisa, pp. 205-222 [chapter of a book]
- Dindelli, Ilaria, ‘Non-fiction Picturebooks: Annotated Bibliography’, in Non-fiction Picturebooks. Sharing Knowledge as an Aesthetic Experience, ETS, Pisa, pp. 223-258 [chapter of a book]
- Grilli, Giorgia, ‘The Artistic Non-Fiction Picturebook’, in Goga, N., Iversen, S.H., Verbal and Visual Strategies in Nonfiction Picturebooks, Oslo, Scandinavian University Press, 2021 [chapter of a book]