Considering Discourse with Children through Animations

Abstract

Children’s literature and art activities are not only useful for creativity but also quite functional for education through new understanding in the contemporary perspectives about learning. For instance, philosophy for children is a wide-spread methodology to reveal children’s potentials by building a “community of inquiry” at classrooms. Children’s books and animations can provide a magnificent starting point for those philosophical discussions. However, in many societies, children and young people are still underestimated that the usual point of view about children’s literature used to include ‘softer’ topics, which is likewise to be ‘censored’ compared to literature in general. All products for children have usually function to cultivate new generations according to traditional discourse underlying in society. The essential purpose of this paper is to reveal possibilities to shape traditional discourse into an expanded perspective with children utilizing discussion and critical thinking. It is supposed to analyze the artworks for children in variable ways, by embodying discourse within. In between education and entertainment, cultural products also expected to be age-appropriate. Besides the relation between adult-children distinction and all cultural products, specifically produced ‘for’ children, how children see themselves is directly related to how they interpret cultural products. In this paper, two short animations, Alike, and Ian which were watched together with a group of children in a private secondary school in Istanbul, Turkey, will be analyzed through children’s perspectives, with their expressions.