LETIN Reading and Literature for Children and Adolescents (0-18 years of age)

The educational offer of the LETIN Course is grounded in a solid theoretical framework and an interdisciplinary perspective that brings together children’s and young adult literature, cultural and imaginary history, visual literacy, and poetic languages. The programme explores highly relevant research areas such as ideologies and representations of childhood, reader-response theory, emergent literacy, climate literacy, gender studies, and social justice, across various genres and forms, including fiction, nonfiction, graphic novels, fairy tales, and contemporary retellings. Teaching is delivered in a blended format, combining interactive lectures, workshops, action-research practices, field trips, and project-based activities, promoting active and participatory learning.

This structure is complemented by a rich and stimulating international environment, featuring conferences, seminars, and contributions from scholars affiliated with Italian and international universities and research centres. It also includes project work, conceived as a guided pathway for project development, research, and creative experimentation, carried out in groups through collaborative sessions, discussion, and critical feedback, as well as a curricular internship of 100 hours (80 direct and 20 indirect), intended as an opportunity for hands-on experience in educational and cultural settings aligned with the course content.

The LETIN Course is aimed at those who work, or intend to work, in the fields of education, cultural mediation, and reading promotion. In particular, the programme is designed for professionals working in schools, early childhood services, libraries, bookstores, publishing, museums, festivals, associations, and educational and cultural services, as well as in areas such as writing, illustration, translation, training, and project design for children and young people.

Its career opportunities extend to school and extracurricular settings, community-based and care contexts, including situations of vulnerability, marginalisation, and educational poverty, as well as hospital settings and other environments where literature can play an educational, cultural, relational, and social role.

The programme enables participants to develop skills in the critical analysis of children’s and young adult literature, in designing reading education interventions for ages 0–18, in creating educational pathways across different contexts, and in navigating the main research trends in the field.

The LETIN Course programme is structured into integrated modules that progressively address the main theoretical, critical, and design-related issues in children’s literature and reading education for ages 0–18.

The initial modules focus on the theoretical and methodological frameworks of the field, on reading as an experience of literary education and pedagogical complexity, on ideologies and the construction of childhood imaginaries, and on classics, genres, settings, and topoi that connect historical and contemporary perspectives.

A central part of the programme explores the contemporary picturebook, picturebook theory, visual literacy, the materiality of the book, and the relationships between words, images, and graphic spaces. This area is complemented by modules devoted to storytelling as both an aesthetic experience and a social practice, to early aesthetic and narrative experiences (ages 0–6) through to graphic novels for adolescents, and to poetry and poetic language, understood as key forms for developing perception, listening, imagination, and linguistic sensitivity.

Another core area of the programme addresses gender studies, women’s writing, and childhood and adolescence biographies, approached as crucial fields for examining representations, cultural models, identities, and processes of subject formation. From this perspective, literature is also read as a critical space for observing stereotypes, differences, possibilities of rewriting, and new forms of self-expression.

A distinctive feature of the programme is the inclusion of environmental humanities, understood as a field of research that explores the relationships between humans, nature, landscapes, and other species through texts, images, and educational practices. In this perspective, literature becomes a space for interrogating contemporary ecological imaginaries, forms of coexistence between human and non-human, and the ways in which living beings, matter, and landscapes take shape in texts and images.

The LETIN Course also incorporates innovative research methodologies and art-based approaches, which value forms of inquiry grounded in attention to detail, embodied and situated experience, engagement with places, and the production of knowledge through practices of “estrangement” and the use of metaphorical thinking.

The course offers optional learning activities. Among them, the field trip represents a particularly meaningful experience, as it allows participants to extend academic discussion beyond the classroom and to connect study, direct observation, and situated experience.

It provides an opportunity to explore places, practices, tools, and strategies for knowledge and reflection through engagement with cultural and educational settings such as museums, exhibitions, libraries, and specialist bookstores, as well as with landscapes, nature, and their elements. Direct observation and interaction with these contexts enable participants to gain new perspectives, assess educational processes and projects, consolidate the knowledge acquired in the course, develop relationships with professionals in the field, and strengthen the classroom as a learning community.

The pedagogical vision of the LETIN Course is grounded in the idea that childhood and adolescence are subjects with rights, endowed with agency and a distinctive way of seeing the world. From this perspective, literature is understood as a privileged space for interpretation, imagination, judgment, and cultural participation.

At the core of the programme is the idea of literature as a transformative practice: not merely an object of study, but a cultural device capable of generating possibilities, social imagination, and new forms of thinking. The LETIN Course recognizes reading and storytelling as essential resources for the development of the self, for building relationships, and for the critical processing of experience.

Social and environmental justice represent a fundamental value framework. The programme promotes the development of ecological and inclusive imaginaries, attentive to marginalized voices, non-stereotypical representations, and a plurality of perspectives. In this context, literature is conceived as a space of ethical, cultural, and political possibility, capable of challenging oppressive models and fostering equity, diversity, and respect for differences.

Each participant is supported throughout the entire learning pathway by a tutor, following a model grounded in educational care, continuous presence, and attentive, informed listening. This is not merely an organizational support role, but an active educational framework designed to accompany personal and professional development, enhance individual strengths, and support the processing of critical issues that may arise during the programme.

Continuity of guidance is also ensured through online meetings, which provide regular opportunities for dialogue, discussion, clarification, monitoring, and adjustment of the work. In this way, tutoring contributes to building a strong, participatory educational relationship, attentive to the quality of the learning experience.

The general ranking of merit for the academic year 2026/27 will be published on the Italian page of this Master according to the timing provided in the Call.