The educational role of children's literature and bibliotherapy in primary schooling (towards new beliefs about healing education)

Children's literature educates, nurtures, and heals, and through its interdisciplinary nature, it offers teachers in primary schools rich interdisciplinary and creative approaches that constantly must be researched and improved. This paper wants to draw attention to the fact that the teaching of children's literature in Bosnian and Herzegovinian primary schools must be taught more within the framework of ethical criticism, interculturality, feminist literary criticism, and gender studies, etc., and that all of the above can be done through Gestalt therapy and different bibliotherapy approaches and methods, which are concurrently the methods of research in this paper. Also, this paper offers an original educational questionnaire containing elements of bibliotherapy, which can be used in any mother tongue and children's literature course, and is intended for 3rd-grade primary school students (8–9 years old). Namely, only through creative, relaxing, and healing ways of teaching, children's literature can give its full educational meaning and potential. Keywords: education, children's literature, teaching, bibliotherapy, educational questionnaire