Professor of Literacy recognised with storytelling fellowship

Natalia Kucirkova, Professor of Reading and Children’s Development at The Open University, has been awarded a Jacobs Foundation Fellowship 2021-2023 in recognition of her research into the impact of multimedia personalised stories made by and aimed at young children.

The fellowships, announced on 23 November, are awarded to highly talented and innovative early career researchers who have received their PhD within the past 10 years. An award of 150,000 Swiss Francs will allow Professor Kucirkova to expand her work combining innovative technologies with traditional research methods to enhance children’s literacy in three countries: Malawi, Norway and England. She will draw on insights from psychology, education, human-computer interaction and literary theories to develop optimal approaches to young children’s engagement with digital texts. Such texts can appear in various forms, and she will focus on those that can be created by children on tablets.

Natalia, who is also a Professor at the University of Stavanger, says,

“This fellowship will allow me to work closely with teachers, developers of apps, designers of algorithms and most importantly, with the children themselves. The more involved children can be in the process of research, development and use of new digital stories, the more they can be part of the change that is urgently needed in this area.”

Professor Kucirkova received her PhD from the OU before being appointed as Professor within the OU’s School of Education, Childhood, Youth and Sport earlier this year. In a recent article for OpenLearn, she considers the pros and cons of personalised children’s books and their impact on a child’s view of themselves in the world.