Researching Children's Literature Otherwise to Decolonise Childhoods in Experimental Curriculum

This article explores children's literature as a tool for decolonising childhood and curriculum through experimental reading practices. Based on post‐qualitative enquiry, and grounded in decolonial, feminist, and posthumanist theories, the study analyses two reading encounters with children using picturebooks from Global South. These experiences gave rise to assemblages in which children's agency emerged through relationality and entanglements with books, bodies, materialities, and spaces. We argue that literature and childhood, which is often subject to adult norms, can facilitate plural and situated readings that affirm children's worldviews and knowledge. This approach interrogates the conventional and universalist conceptualisations of childhood and reveals possibilities for reimagining the experimental curriculum as a relational and co‐creative space. The article promotes an epistemic and ethical reconstruction of research with children that decentres adult frameworks and expand new possibilities for children's subjectivities and knowledges.