An Unaddressed Issue in Art Education: Review of a Children's Art Book

Abstract

All oral and written works, which are prepared in accordance with their own developmental characteristics of childhood's phases from early childhood phase to the end of the period of adolescence; fairy tales, stories, novels, memories, biographical works, travel writings, poems, books explaining science and nature events, children art books etc., all of these works are referred as children's literature. In this sense, children's literature has a kind of wide range, has research and study area specific to these kinds. Art books for children, which are among the classification of instructive and informative books are a kind of children's literature, which is increasing rapidly in number, but discussed little in a scientific sense. However, it is of importance and necessity to determine the necessary characteristics of children's art books to be included, to develop the contextual and formal criteria about the review of these books and to produce an example of scientific review in accordance with these criteria in the context of preparing a scientific ground for new children's art books and benefitting in an efficient way from these books. Based on this importance and necessity, in this study, a children's art book about visual arts is reviewed in the contextual and formal aspects in the light of pre-developed scientific criteria.