Visual Arts with Young Children

Practices, Pedagogies, and Learning

Hayon Park, Christopher Schulte, Hayon Park, Christopher M. Schulte

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000342024
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Teoria e pratica della didattica

Featuring the work of leading scholar-practitioners, Visual Arts with Young Children raises critical questions about the situated nature of the visual arts and its education in early childhood. Innovative chapters explore the relationship of place to art practice and pedagogy, culturally-responsive and justice-oriented perspectives, as well as critical and reconceptualist approaches to materials, technology and media. Ideal for researchers and students of both early childhood education and arts integration programs, this volume is an essential step towards a deeper understanding of how visual arts are understood, valued and practiced in the early years.

1
Reconceptualizing Early Childhood Art As Entanglement

Playing with chalk in the home

Mona Sakr

Introduction

When we observe children’s art making from a postdevelopmental perspective we move beyond developmental milestones and instead engage with the “muddle~middle” (Sellers, 2013) of experience and action. This chapter is a contribution to that project. It aims to reconceptualize children’s art making as an “entanglement,” in which discursive, material and bodily elements – human and non-human – mutually constitute one another (Barad, 2007). The chapter suggests that by engaging in children’s art making as an entanglement, we can begin to conduct our observations of children’s art making in fresh and curious ways.

The chapter begins with an introduction to the theoretical framing of postdevelopmental pedagogies and the Baradian conceptualisations of “entanglement” and “intra-action.” To explore these concepts further in relation to a particular example of art making, it introduces an observation of children playing in their home with chalk. Exploring the observation as an example of entanglement challenges us to consider three important aspects of children’s art making in more depth. Firstly, we are encouraged to reconsider the traditional parameters of our observational tools and processes, and to look beyond the edges of the camera frame. Secondly, we are prompted to see the significance of affect in entanglement, and the ways in which affect can probe and unsettle the typical categories through which we make sense of children’s art making. Finally, the concept of entanglement offers us an opportunity to reintegrate care and responsiveness into how we think about and do observations of children’s art-making, in turn enabling us to see how care and art-making intra-act.

Postdevelopmental pedagogies

Postdevelopmental approaches to pedagogy ask us to move away from developmental ticklists and instead engage with the messy riches of play, creativity, and learning as they unfold in the moment. Postdevelopmental pedagogies challenge the dominance of developmental psychology as the primary lens for making sense of children’s experiences, including their art making. Children’s art making is typically understood in formal educational contexts in relation to developmental milestones that are thought to unfold predictably, so that children are expected to move along the same trajectory of activity, though at different paces (Duncum, 1999, 2010). Often, the development is understood in relation to other linear trajectories such as “writing-readiness” (Wright, 2015), so that children’s drawings, for example, are made sense of in relation to their emergent capacities for forming symbols. Thus, in early childhood education pedagogies, we tend to approach childhood art making as a phenomenon that follows a predictable and linear trajectory, and is important primarily in relation to other more academic capacities and the ‘next steps’ required for fulfilling these.

Developmentalist paradigms produce normative accounts of what children do. Such paradigms can be seen as contributing to the marginalization and alienation of children who do not fit the norms in the standard account (Burman, 2016; Cannella & Viruru, 2004). Profiles that do not ‘fit’ are seen as deviant, abnormal and as a problem to be identified and solved. In contrast, postdevelopmental approaches are proudly open to differences. They make possible “diverse knowledges and ways of function (not simply those supported by Western interpretations of logic)” and unsettle “what has been believed to be known about those who are younger” (Cannella, 2010, p. 307). Celebrating difference involves paying close attention to what unfolds as part of children’s everyday experiences and not hoping or expecting to make these fit particular trajectories or themes that are common to all. In this perspective, observations are a starting point for curiosity and possibility rather than the completion of ticklists. Observations become a process of “prising and opening and following where it leads” (Ingold, 2013, p. 7).

It should be noted that the term ‘postdevelopmental’ is problematic. The term ‘post’ suggests a neat break between what came before and after. However, ‘before’ and ‘after’ are part of an entanglement that is in constant flux (Osgood & Robinson, 2019). In this case, developmental approaches are not neatly antithetical to postdevelopmental approaches, but can instead act as a starting point for postdevelopmental ways of engaging with children’s art making (Sakr & Osgood, 2019). For example, Vygotsky’s theorizing of children’s play is very much situated in a developmental paradigm, and yet the emphasis on sociocultural mediation can allow for new ways of thinking about play that go well beyond charting play against a linear chart of developmental progress. So postdevelopmental pedagogies should not be seen as discarding altogether the thinking that has been done within developmentalist traditions.

Entanglements

In fathoming how to take experiences and observations of art making as a starting point for curiosity, openness, and difference, Karen Barad’s concept of ‘entanglements’ can be helpful. Barad (2007) describes all phenomena and experience in terms of entanglements, which are taken to be “complex and lively manifold of entangled and changing practices and possibilities” (p. 388), in which myriad, perhaps endless, elements are constantly “intra-acting with and mutually constituting one another” (p. 389). Barad’s conceptualization of entanglement emerges from the scientific discovery of quantum entanglement, which is the way in which one tiny particle’s spin has been found to be linked with the spin of other particles that seem to be physically separate. Quantum entanglement suggests a degree of inseparability that challenges “the presumed ontological separability of seemingly individual particles” (p. 385). Extending outwards from this, thinking about the world in terms of entanglements encourages not just to see the myriad connections that resonate through experience, but also the ways in which seemingly separate elements are mutually constitutive. That is, endless elements in the world – whether visibly connected or not – create each other through their interaction (or ‘intra-action’) and their apparent separateness in fact comes about through the intra-actions.

According to Barad, all phenomena are entanglements of myriad human and non-human elements. The term ‘elements’ suggests a separation that is constituted only through the interaction (or intra-action) between the entities. A child painting is an entanglement of the child, the paint, the paintbrushes, the wider ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• About the Authors
• Acknowledgements
• Visual Arts with Young Children: Practices, Pedagogies, and Learning
• Chapter 1: Reconceptualizing Early Childhood Art As Entanglement: Playing with chalk in the home
• Chapter 2: The “Not-Not” Art of Making “Fuzz”
• Chapter 3: Choreographies of Practice: Mutualities and sympoetic becomings in early childhood teacher education
• Chapter 4: Uncertain Beginnings: An approach to early art teacher education
• Chapter 5: Queering Innocence in Child Art: Our multiple, recurring response-abilities
• Chapter 6: Earthworks in the School Playground: Cultivating an “arts of attentiveness” with children’s (art)making practices
• Chapter 7: Young Children Experimenting with Sound Art: Painting the politics of noise
• Chapter 8: Play Pockets in Kindergartens: On framing blurred practices with art, pedagogy, and play
• Chapter 9: Pedagogical Implications of the Environment on Children’s Drawing
• Chapter 10: Seeing the World to Hear It: A case study of young children learning to listen through visual observation
• Chapter 11: Wow, We’re Stepping on the Weeds: Animation and aliveness in children’s classroom drawing(s)
• Chapter 12: Beyond the Single Story of Childhood: Recognizing childism in art education practice
• Chapter 13: Retrospective: Selections from the Lucero-Sánchez family archive
• Index