Contextual Studies: Task Two

During my second contextual studies lecture, we discussed the roles and importance of inclusion and diversity within illustrations and how it is important to consider within our own work. We discussed the use of stereotypes and how they are so strongly integrated into particular areas of culture, they can be hard to avoid as they become so commonly known, for example we were shown the use of the Disney witch from ‘Snow White’ and everyone was able to identify the character and their behaviours simply by the way they had been portrayed in this particular imagery.

An area which really interested me during this presentation was the exploration and development of children’s books across time and how they are now beginning to incorporate much broader range of equality and diversity within their character designs. Due to this I have chosen to look further into the question "Explore the importance of diversity in children's book illustration" as I feel it is an important development in our education of culture and diversity, as the younger the audience it begins with the more likely it is to develop into the new natural norm of society.

This opinion was supported by my findings from the article ‘Why Diversity is so important in Children’s Books’ which discussed the impact of early learning and how essential it is to instill morals of diversity and acceptance during these early years of development, during their most important time of learning about the rules and ways of the world. By incorporating these important messages from as early as possible it becomes so much more likely that these young minds will grow up with the concept of diversity and acceptance being the normal behaviour and response to everyday situations. Not only this but by incorporating these themes into childhood books it helps develop self-acceptance and self-love within children who may feel overlooked by typical illustrations they see which leads to a lack of representation which may cause them to grow feeling their abilities or culture is lacking compared to other children and can cause issues with confidence and development.

For instance when looking at a website of the ‘125 Best Children’s Books of All Time’ which was created in March 2020, so this list thankfully incorporated characters of different cultures although was still predominantly focused around the inclusion of characters which appeared Caucasian. However, regardless of the slow improvement to include different cultures it was still evident that children who may suffer from disabilities remained a highly unrepresented statistic as there were no books within this list which focused on the development of a disabled character which is unfortunate. I would love the opportunity to focus my own personal work on this subject matter in the future, I am keen to develop my own series of children’s illustrated books and I feel this is an area which would be extremely important to focus on in order to provide those with long-term health conditions relatable characters during their early years of development. As someone with multiple disabilities myself I never considered what having access to such books could have done for me as a child as it was sometimes tough being ‘different’ from those around you, even with hidden disabilities so I would love to dive deeper into this world for children with both hidden and visible disabilities.

I chose to look at this site originally as I felt it would give me an overview of the particular trends which are currently active as well as those from previous years. I’m glad I chose to look at this site as regardless of whether the list was created by an individual’s personal opinion, like I discussed previously it still forgets to represent a large community of new ideals and societal concepts. For instance there are two books which focus on challenging the typical gender roles of young girls, called ‘Ellie, Engineer’ and ‘Girls Who Code’ however there is no representation for challenging these similar gender typical roles for young boys?

These stories work to break the typical views and constructs around young girls having interest in these typically male dominated roles although there are no stories within this list which for instance have a male main character who dreams of being a fashion designer. Although these may be available elsewhere I felt it important to discuss as all of the books discussed on this website have links to their Amazon site so they can be purchased immediately and I feel for parents who may be using this to help decide on new books for their children are being immediately redirected to accept these structures and are unfortunately limiting their children to new ideas and concepts due to this.