Examining disability awareness in children's literature in the light of values

In addition to the aims of supporting the child's language development, developing the world of thought, and providing aesthetic pleasure, children's literature also aims to open new horizons in the child's world through intuition. Creating awareness about various realities of society can also be counted among these aims. The role of values education is mentioned in the individual's awareness of the rules of the society he/she is in and in the best way to continue his/her individual development in harmony with society. The unpredictable change of the individual and society in the developing and changing world has revealed the importance of values education and has created the need for children to encounter values in every area they deal with. The intuition of individual differences, the existence and rights of disabled individuals to children can be realized with the contribution of children's literature works. For this purpose, how works written for children handle this subject has been the subject of research. In the study, books that deal with the lives of disabled people and include disabled individuals were examined in the light of values. In the selection of works, works that appeal to the 8-12+ age groups and were published in 2008-2009 and later were preferred. In the examination of the works, the document scanning technique, one of the qualitative research methods, was used. In this scanning technique, it was based on reading books, articles, theses and reviews that were thought to support the study and benefiting from the relevant points. In the study, firstly, children's literature, children's literature and disability, value education were focused on, and then studies that included this subject were mentioned. The main purpose of this study is to determine how works written for children and including disability create awareness in child readers about disability and to what extent values are used while doing this. As a result, it was seen that works including disability were not sufficient, the disability treated did not show variety and no purpose such as transferring values was pursued while writing the works.