Children’s literature sensitizing to situations of exclusion threat – selection and pedagogical implications

Children’s literature of the last decade of the 21st century presents a number of narratives that show the need to be attentive to numerous situations that threaten to exclude a person from certain social groups. These books can be described as particularly sensitive to harm of the neighbour. The aim of the article is to show the fate of literary heroes in selected children’s books, in which they directly or indirectly face the problem of discrimination and social exclusion. The situations that I would like to draw attention to are: homelessness of another person, poverty, exile. My goal is achieved by analyzing selected children’s literature of both Polish and foreign (mainly Swedish) writers. The text is composed of two parts. In the first, I present the existing state of knowledge in social sciences and humanities on social exclusion and the process of non-existence, in the second part of the text, I present conclusions from the content analysis of selected children’s literature. Each of the books selected for analysis can function in the early school readership as close to the ideas of intercultural education and philosophy of dialogue.