Swimming and water competence in children’s books: A pathway to knowledge transfer?

Learning to swim promotes lifelong engagement in aquatic physical activity. Such engagement is defined as one of
the six interventions identified by the World Health Organization (WHO, 2017) and is frequently considered to be
prominent among those (Brenner et al., 2006; Stallman et al., 2014; WHO, 2014). The WHO emphasizes the
importance of swimming and water safety, highlighting the alarming statistics of 320,000 drowning deaths
annually making it the ‘3rd leading cause of unintentional injury death worldwide’ (WHO, 2020a). Experts, in
fact, estimate that the real annual drowning incidence may be 2-3 times greater, or even more i.e., perhaps over
one million (Peden et al., 2008), more than the annual burden of death by HIV related causes (WHO, 2020b) and
nearly the same as the number of traffic deaths (WHO, 2018). Education is an integral part of learn-to-swim.
Children’s books in general share everyday knowledge and can, therefore, help to partly educate our children,
since the connection between learning to swim and reading is greater than expected. Strouse et al. (2018, p. 4)
suggest ‘particular features of picture books […] may influence children’s tendency to learn and to transfer the
educational content to real-world situations’, which will be examined by this study. Learning to swim is a common
subject of children’s books. How the reader is influenced in what should be learned, is objective of this article.
Thus, this pilot study aims (a) to assess to which extent children’s books convey the chosen criterion (i.e., Water
Competence (WC)), (b) to evaluate which of the essential elements are most and least often included in the
selected books, (c) to explore how both text and illustrations are used and (d) an attempt to create a model from
which future research may be more broadly and inclusively conducted. By means of a descriptive analysis, the
content of children’s books is compared with criteria from expert literature. The tentative results suggest that
books show a great variation among criterion, if included, in text, illustrations and added material. The knowledge
about swimming mediated by this genre may not be sufficient to educate safety and prevention to society.