Interdisciplinary research on picturebooks and comics for museums and cultural heritage sites

Picturebooks and comics are utilized as interactive learning tools for visitors in museums and cultural heritage sites. The museum visit bears various challenges for children, especially in regards to meaning-making, such as grasping the essence of artworks, understanding historical concepts, and orienting themselves in space. Picturebooks and comics can facilitate children's engagements in these cultural places through fiction, nonfiction, or hybrid narrations. While fictional narrations help accustom children to the subject and the environment, non-fiction offers them playful experiences based on knowing through art. The presented research reveals different aspects of children's picturebooks in museums and cultural heritage sites. First, it analyses the image and text relationships in select picturebooks published by museums and cultural heritage sites to map how children benefit from this relationship, in addition to writing, drawing, and designing activities that hone their creative skills. Second, it investigates interactivity in these books to understand how they can bolster children's embodied learning in art through sensory, hands-on, and spatial engagements. Based on this research, a picturebook project for the Pera Museum was developed as a case study to propose novel ways for children to interact with museum content.