Education Publishing Research | Illustration

The second research project is on publishing, this time it was an approach. With my group of three, myself, Snow and Lowri, chose to research educational publishing, as the audience of this publication genre does not mean just for children in Nursery, Primary, Secondary schools but also goes to teachers, special needs, adult learning another languages, older children needing a book with younger contents, poetry, etc.

So then my group researched some possible educational publishing books and websites. After finding some websites, we divided up the research task; the publishers that I researched were Heinemann, Scholastic and Collins.

Also I independently researched some books from one of my family member’s working place, both primary and secondary school resources.

Firstly, Heinemann is an American publisher of professional resources and a provider of educational services for teachers, first year primary through to college. This publisher helps children to become literate, empathetic, knowledgeable citizens. I tried to find some books that have several illustrations in, but found that most illustrations were on book covers and hardly any in the insides. I considered that many of them were poor quality illustrations that did not promote interest.

Secondly, Scholastic is a British publisher and quite well known on some books of education stories such as Horribly Famous collection, Horrible Histories, Horrible Science, and Oxford books. This publisher promotes the basic of a child’s intellectual, personal and cultural growth. This publisher tries to gives all children some education, entertainment and motivatiion. From what I see on these books in Scholastic have many illustrations on book covers, and the inside some have several illustrations, that are only in learning books, some have many illustrations, which are in story books such as Horribly Famous, Horrible Science and Tom Gates’, and are only in black and white. I thought all these books I have seen from Scholastic publishing are in between excellent and poor work on some books.

Finally, Collins is a British publisher and very well known in all schools. This publisher is education publishing for student resources and teacher support. Collins includes Letts and Lonsdale publishers, and market themselves as one of the best-known high street names in revision guides, and Leckie & Leckie, Scotland’s leading educational publisher. Many of these books were quite similar to Heinemann, with illustrations on book covers but very few illustrations inside. When I compared primary learning books and Secondary revision books, primary books have quite poor uninteresting illustrations and have many of the same illustrations, whereas secondary revision books have excellent interesting illustrations but few of them. I thought each of them were suitable illustrations to this audience.

We were quite disappointed in the number of quality illustrations and the lack of acknowledgment of the illustrators.