WONDRE: 2025 in Review
As we look back on the first full year of WONDRE, we are proud to recap new research outputs, international events, and growing collaborations across academic and practitioner communities. None of these achievements would have been possible without all the children who continue to participate in our research. First and foremost, we therefore wish to thank our young research participants from 2025 for their generosity and patience when teaching us how they engage with facts and what it means for them to wonder.
Below is a summary of our key milestones from the past year.
In 2025, our published outputs spanned a diverse range of genres:
Children’s Embodied Repertoires When Engaging with Fiction: Mixed-Methods Insights from Czechia, published in the Journal of Children and Media. (Authored by Markéta Supa, Anežka Kuzmičová, Martin Nekola). Read here
The Decline in Volitional Reading: Evidence-Informed Ways Forward. (Co-authored by Chin Ee Loh, Teresa Cremin, Anežka Kuzmičová, Sarah McGeown, and Laura Scholes). Read here
The IRSCL Conference Comic, an innovative visual report by Sarah Caré. View here
We organized two international events that brought together scholars from around the globe:
The 2nd International Children and Youth Perspectives Conference: This event hosted specialists from 20 countries, featuring keynote lectures by John Potter, Sarah McGeown, and Macarena García González. Read more
The Children’s Reading Experiences Workshop: A specialized seminar featuring contributions from Magda Garguláková, Louise Couceiro, Macarena García González, Chin Ee Loh, Sarah McGeown, and Sarah Bro Trasmundi. Read more
We have also had the privilege of hosting three visiting fellows: Marc Kudlowski (University of Cologne), Michelle David (University of Southern Denmark), and Chin Ee Loh (National Institute of Education, Singapore).
Furthermore, our team members presented findings at numerous institutions and conferences, including Tilburg University, Stockholm University, the University of Bristol, and the ČteFest Festival at Třinec Library. At the UKLA International Conference (Liverpool John Moores University), Anežka Kuzmičová became the first keynote speaker from a non-Anglophone country in the conference’s 60-year history. At the IRSCL Conference (University of Salamanca), Sarah Caré was honoured with the Visual Conference Reporter Award.
We gratefully acknowledge the support of the European Research Council (ERC), the Institute of Communication Studies and Journalism, and the Faculty of Social Sciences at Charles University, and look forward to continuing our research into 2026.
