Theoretical Perspectives

Since Children’s Literature is written for the child audience, authors and illustrators need to understand how children develop emotionally, mentally, physically and spiritually. Authors and illustrators must cater to children through their use of ideas, language, images, and style. They must also understand how children learn in order to know how to integrate ideas with language, images and style for the child mind. In this section of our course, you will learn about three child development theories, including Piaget’s theory on how children develop cognitively, Kohlberg’s theory on how children learn moral reasoning, and Erikson’s stages on how a child develops psychologically. You will also learn about two educational theories in children’s literature, including Vygotsky’s Social Development Theory and Rosenblatt’s Reader’s Response/Transaction Theory. Having an understanding of how children develop and learn will help you critique the many types of children’s literature you will analyze in this course.