Constructing the Value of Care in Early Childhood Literature Education: The Conceptual Framework
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.65150/EP-jsshrs/V2E8/2026-16Keywords:
care, children’s literature, young childrenAbstract
The central concern of this paper is to explore how the value of care can be meaningfully integrated into early childhood literature education through appropriate pedagogical approaches, enabling young children to gradually internalize care as a meaningful value and translate it into concrete caring attitudes and practices. To this end, the paper proposes a conceptual framework: Literary Reading → Emotional Awareness → Understanding Others → Internalization of Caring Values → Caring Practice. This framework conceptualizes early childhood literature as more than a medium for promoting language and cognitive development; rather, it positions literary experiences as a meaningful context for fostering emotional awareness, empathic understanding, moral and value development, and caring action. Through engagement with literary narratives, characters, and emotional experiences, young children are encouraged to recognize, interpret, and reflect upon emotions, while developing an understanding of the feelings, needs, and perspectives of others. Through this process, caring values can gradually become internalized and subsequently expressed through caring attitudes and practices in children’s everyday social interactions. Accordingly, early childhood literature education can serve not only as a means of supporting children’s linguistic and cognitive development but also as an important pedagogical context for cultivating their capacity to care for themselves, others, and the world around them.
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