The LéA PelMel (Associated Education Site – Engaging Practices in Reading and Book Mediation) is actively committed to creating mediation spaces designed to foster students’ engagement with children’s and young adult literature. Its aim is to cultivate a taste for reading among young readers by promoting a dynamic and intercultural approach to text mediation. Through its commitment to engaging mediation practices, it invites us to redefine and rethink the very act of mediation. In this context, through this symposium, the LéA PelMel stakeholders wish to share the outcomes of their experience while opening debate on several issues related to the design of innovative mechanisms. These aim not only to engage readers but also to encourage intercultural and cross-sector encounters between readers and various mediators.

The objective of this symposium is therefore to explore the different forms that book mediation takes today and to examine its role in the development of reading among young people, both in school and in out-of-school settings. It seeks to initiate a collective reflection on current and future practices of book mediation. The challenge is to make reading ever more engaging, inclusive, and accessible, taking into account the social, cultural, and technological changes of our time (Labbé, 2015; Laborderie, 2021; Paredes, 2013). This mediation work is conceived from a dynamic perspective that connects school and extracurricular contexts, educational and cultural stakeholders, and young readers (Sandri, Boutevin, Dillaerts, 2023). In this way, mediation can help envision a true culture of reading—open to all and grounded in exchange, diversity, and engagement—within a continuum of practices across various cultural institutions (including schools) (Dias-Chiaruttini, 2025).

The production of children’s and young adult literature remains vibrant and continues to bring children and adults together around reading practices in a variety of spaces such as the home, the school library, the classroom, or even the museum (Dias-Chiaruttini, 2023). Yet in the school context, the place of children’s literature—which experienced remarkable growth in the early 2000s (Butlen & Marcoin, 2005), constituting a disciplinary field that reshaped the subject of “French” and becoming the focus of an examination component in the competitive recruitment of primary school teachers (Bishop, 2014)—now seems more often reduced to a vehicle for learning French. This situation contrasts with its potential as a lived, affective experience (Brillant-Rannou, Sauvaire & Le Goff, 2023), capable of stimulating the imagination (Psaume, 2023), encouraging aesthetic appropriation of the text (Gabathuler & Schneuwly, 2014), and developing understanding of the world (Quet, 2015).

This symposium aims to bring together mediators of literary culture and of written media—librarians, publishers, parents, teachers, educators, and children, who may on certain occasions become mediators themselves (Dias-Chiaruttini, 2018). It offers different formats for contributions: practice-sharing sessions, mediation experiences, as well as analyses grounded in empirical research. Interdisciplinary dialogue across education sciences, information and communication sciences, literary studies, sociology, and psychology can only enrich the discussion.

These different formats for proposed contributions may be included within three thematic strands.