Listening To Each Other’s Voices, Starting From The Children: The Voice Of The Young Readers

IBBY Congresses, like Regional Conferences and other international initiatives, are milestones in providing insights for expanding an ever-growing vibrant community, capable of facing with renewed passion and effective tools the ongoing challenge of bringing books and children together. Within the wider IBBY network, initiatives and actions promoted by individual sections can find support, extend collaborations, discover opportunities to improve, echo, grow and extensively reach out, develop and share good practices that can be tailored by other sections to address local priorities and children’s needs, as well as inspire new projects.

This is the case of the Young Readers project, launched by IBBY Italy at the 2024 IBBY Congress, when representatives from Italian reading clubs and from IBBY Austria, IBBY Slovenia and IBBY Germany were invited to meet in Trieste on a week-long exchange with peers diverse in language, geographic origin, cultural background and reading experience http://www.ibbycongress2024.org/the-young-readers-have-arrived-in-trieste/.

Since then, the need to listen to the concerns and proposals of those who are at the very heart of the practices, activities and proposals on reading education, but whose voices are almost always excluded from the process, has continued to inspire different initiatives, starting from the groups originally involved, and aiming at opening new collaborations.

The young readers’ ideas on books and reading promotion, and their insights on books and reading as a driver of change that were shared with the delegates during dedicated sessions, continue to find a space in the Young Readers’ Manifesto, a dynamic tool at the disposal of present and future young readers. The Manifesto has undergone regular updates by the Italian group upon discussing it with publishers, educators, reading promoters, librarians and the general public at the Book Fair in Rome and at the Bologna Children's Book Fair and has been the reference framework for the work carried out under an IBBY Germany - IBBY Italy joint action, aiming at exchanging post-congress experiences implemented over the past two years.

At the initiative of the “Back to the Books” reading club at the International Youth Library in Munich, a delegation of young readers from Italy was invited to meet at the IJB last month. The IJB reading club is part of Literanauten, a nationwide reading promotion project of Arbeitskreis für Jugendliteratur, the Association for Children’s and Youth Literature that has been the German Section of the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY) since its founding in 1955, counting among its founding members Erich Kästner and Jella Lepman. Through Literanauten, IBBY Germany promotes and supports young people to actively become reading promoters themselves, focusing on the peer-to-peer approach (https://www.ijb.de/jugendliche/literanauten). It has therefore been particularly enriching for the two groups of Italian and German young readers to be able to meet again and work together in this spirit, warmly and generously welcomed by host families and staff at the IJB.

Lively participated working sessions entirely conducted by the young readers on the differences in reading promotion and reading education between Italy and Germany, discussions on favourite books and the opportunity to meet and interview the German author Johannes Herwig and the Italian author Benedetta Bonfiglioli, also opened new perspectives for the Manifesto, which was presented along with a presentation of their reading experiences in a meeting open to local schools.

To further validate the peer-to-peer approach that lies at the centre of the project, the IBBY young readers learnt, in turn, from the experience of students from the Secondary School in Schrobenhausener Straße, who presented their own reading experiences through a live performance using creative elements such as theatre and videos. In the evening, the talented company of young actors of the Cammerspiele theater in Leipzig performed for the first time “Bis die Sterne zittern” ("Until the Stars Tremble"), a piece based on Johannes Herwig’s novel that was at the core of the joint IJB’s reading club and partner secondary school project in 2026, which addresses urgent issues still resounding today:

What does growing up under such a regime mean for one’s development? How does it feel to live in constant fear?

All working sessions, performances and meetings were significantly hosted in the IJB’s Jella-Lepman-Saal, an additional source of inspiration and guidance throughout the exchange programme, which made everyone experience how each action, as small as it may be, fits within the vision and objectives of IBBY’s wider international community dedicated to books, reading and children, aimed at producing social change.

The outcome of the working sessions in this exchange experience is now being processed by the young participants, and will soon be shared through the 2024 IBBY Congress website, to testify to the development and good practices that continue to evolve from the congress initiatives.

“When I left for Munich, I thought it was going to be a nice trip, but I didn't expect it to become such an important experience for me. At first I was excited to visit a new city and meet the Young Readers from Germany, but after just a few hours I realized that this project was about much more than books…” (READ MORE HERE)

It is hoped that their enthusiastic feedback may encourage and inspire all IBBY sections to increasingly connect, find opportunities to partner and share projects and good practices that may provide insights for continuing to work, plan, and build a world better suited to the needs of young readers in the years to come. Children are not ‘our future’ – they are the protagonists of their own present time, and as adults we have the privilege and responsibility to support and allow them to be the real protagonists and main actors of change.

Let your voice be heard!

Photo Credits: Anne Ballhorn, Paola Calci, Eleonora Costadura, Young Readers and participants