Abstract:
The objective of the research is to study the techniques for presenting picture books for Thai children aged 6-9 years to promote social co-existence skills between 2010-2020 for a total of 46 stories. This is a selection of children’s picture book for the children’s fiction category with a focus on promoting social co-existence skills between the ages of 6-9 years created by Thai writers and illustrators and widely published by recognized publishers. It analyzes both content language and illustration according to the principles of children’s picture books and studies the opinions from these picture books from interviews with people involved in various aspects of children and youth namely: academic groups; including primary education scholars, academic of child and youth media production, teachers educating on building citizenship, children’s picture books users; including administrators, elementary school teachers in both public and private schools, children’s library representative, children’s event organizers, parents of children aged 6-9 years, and children’s picture book makers; including publishing houses, book makers and media for children and youth for a total of 23 children’s book writers and illustrators to analyze the development of picture books for Thai children that promote skills of society co-existence appropriately for modern Thai children. The results of the research revealed that the picture book for Thai children that promotes social co-existence skills has not been presented in various strategies. The content is presented in 9 issues; including interaction with others, respecting the rights of others, knowing how to resolve conflicts, emotional control, self-esteem, honesty, unity, seeing common interests rather that personal ones, and not judging others on the outside. The most common content is interacting with others; including kindness and empathy, etc., while the least common content is emotional control. In addition, the authors also popularized the plot with the opening of the story as a narrative, proceeding with a chronological order, and closing the story with a moral lesson of the story making it easy to understand and find the most realistic character creation, but the characters are good characters according to the social ideologies. The use of language is in a direct manner and illustrations are beautiful using a variety of techniques that is able to communicate stories well. However, the emphasis on the use of phraseology rather than visual language can cause the lack of details which is one of the main charms and functions. In this regard, anyone involved with children and youth in various aspects have presented a variety of opinions that can be analyzed on the approaches to develop the picture book. In other words, picture books for children that promote social skills should develop to be more contemporary to accustom with the nature of children today. It should emphasize on promoting emotional awareness and self-understanding first before learning the skills to further understand others to tell stories with various strategies and tactics, and not presenting ideal ideas or conclusions that are readily available. But it should allow children to think and consider stories by themselves and create children’s characters based on their ages, needs, and nature, to let children learn lessons and experiences appropriately for self-development. They should also use illustrations or visual language rather than straightforward instructive language (Didactic Teaching). In addition to the content of co-existence skills presented through children’s picture books, they can also be used to create other media; such as video clips, short animations, music, board games, and interesting card games. It can be useful, as well as further suggesting that creators of children’s books should spend time with children to understand their nature in order to produce picture books that are truly child-appropriate. In addition, both public and private sectors must cooperate in promoting creation and distribution of children’s picture books to a wider audience. A picture book with stories about co-existence skills in society will benefit the targeted group of children.