Postdevelopmental Approaches to Childhood Art

Jayne Osgood, Mona Sakr, Jayne Osgood, Mona Sakr

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350042551
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Children's Studies in Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In childhood research, children's art-making has typically been viewed and understood through a lens of developmental psychology and the notion that children's art-making progresses through a linear series of stages continues to dominate how we design and implement art-making experiences for young children. Postdevelopmental Approaches to Childhood Art brings together the work of theorists from around the world who have presented postdevelopmental approaches to childhood art, thereby playing a vital part in unsettling the dominance of the developmental paradigm and offering worked examples of alternative models. Drawing on sociocultural theory, Deleuzian philosophy, posthumanism and postmodernism each chapter offers a theoretical basis that challenges developmentalism, as well as an application of that theoretical basis. The contributors also consider what this shift in our perspective means for the design and implementation of art-making experiences for young children.

1

Art-making as Activity: How Children Make Meaning through Art

Heather Malin

Children making art are, very simply put, engaging in an activity. To get beyond the traditional understanding of childhood artistic development, we can unpack this simple idea: What does it mean to engage in activity? What sort of activity is art-making? How does this activity relate to child development? In psychological theory, activity is a sociocultural concept – it is how individuals interact with and connect to the physical and social world, how they learn and change through that interaction, and how the world is transformed through the individual’s participation. This chapter delves into these questions about art-making as a sociocultural activity to explore what can be learned about children’s artistic development by observing the act of art-making rather than looking at completed art objects. The specific framework I will be using in this chapter is a family of theories that go under the umbrella name of sociocultural learning theory (SCL). By looking at children’s art-making through the SCL frame, we see how children make meaning and become participants in the creation of culture and society, and how adults can support them as they do.

These theories as applied to studying children’s art-making are a departure from developmental perspectives, which track changes in children’s artworks as evidence of the individual child’s cognitive development (e.g. Golomb, 1999, 2004; Lowenfeld, 1947). This development is observed in how children use marks to represent the world, from pre-representational scribbles in early childhood to schematic shapes and increasingly differentiated details such as articulated limbs and decorated clothing. The developmental research shows that children use art to represent their experiences in the world and do so with greater detail as they grow older. What is not examined in this line of research is the role that art-making plays as an interaction between the individual child and the social and cultural world. Art-making is a way to make meaning; it is a way that we can make sense of our experiences and make connections between our inner lives and the world around us. By using a sociocultural, rather than developmental, theoretical framework to examine children’s art-making, we can have greater insight into questions about what art-making means to children and how it relates to their developing capacity to connect with and contribute to their world.

Sociocultural learning theories

The origin of SLT is generally attributed to Vygotsky (1978), who argued that learning is a social process, and cognitive development occurs in children’s active and inquisitive interaction with their environment. Vygotsky’s work was driven by the desire to liberate human cognitive processes from the confines of the individual’s mind and place them in a social context. He observed children engaged in activity and noticed how they construct knowledge and meaning through their active engagement with the social and physical world. In addition to his work on SCL, Vygotsky also developed theory about imagination, creativity and the arts that reflect his social development theories. He argued that art-making is a social activity in that it reflects society. He also argued that art-making offers a way for people to contribute to human progress through imaginative activity, which draws on lived experiences but expands on reality by combining disparate experiences. By creating objects based on imaginative activity, he argued, artists further expand on the experiences and perspective of others as they introduce new ideas into the world (Lindqvist, 2003; Vygotsky, 1971, 2004).

Numerous theorists branched off from Vygotsky’s theories of sociocultural development. Here, I discuss two of these branches: activity theory and the theory of communities of practice because these are most relevant to informing our observations of children’s art-making (e.g. Engeström, 1993; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998). These theories put the focus on how the individual’s participation in social and cultural activity shapes both the individual and the context. These two theories explain how activity, such as art-making, occurs in a context, such as the art world or an elementary school classroom, and in a transformative relationship with the context, such as when an artist changes how we understand something in the world by making art about it.

Learning as participation in cultural practice and activity

Sociocultural learning theories do not isolate learning in formal educational settings, arguing instead that it is the process of engaging in everyday activities (Lave, 1993). These theories define learning as participation in social or cultural practice that results in change to both the participant and the context (Lave & Wenger, 1991). This learning occurs in ‘communities of practice’ (CoP) in which people engage in a shared practice (such as art-making) and learn from each other. In this sense, both the community and the individual are learners, as both the individual participant and the practice of the community are transformed through the participation of each member. This indicates a shift in the meaning of knowledge as well as learning. It is the difference ‘between a view of knowledge as a collection of real entities, located in heads, and of learning as a process of internalizing them, versus a view of knowing and learning as engagement in changing processes of human activity’ (Lave, 1993, p. 12). Newcomers to a community of practice learn the existing ideas and practices of the community but also become participants in its ongoing negotiation and evolution.

When learning refers to participation in a cultural practice or activity, the learner alters the practice and the context through their participation. The second SCL theory examined in this chapter is activity theory, as it is described by Engeström (1993). Activity theory is similar to CoP theory but focuses on the activity that occurs in the context of an activity system. In an activity system, the learner is a person who uses instruments or artefacts (tools, language, media) to act upon some object of interest, for example, by trying to solve a problem, reflect on an experience or elaborate an idea (Engeström, 1993). The model of an activity system is a triangle (based on Vygotsky’s mediated action triangle model; (Vygotsky, 1978), with subject, tools and object at the corners of the triangle, and the activity of the subject on the object using the tools is in the centre of the triangle. In this chapter, this model is applied to children’s art-making so that instead of looking at children’s art products as the ‘object’, we examine a system of activity with children as the ‘subjects’, art media and products as the ‘tools’, and the social/cultural world as the ‘object’ that children act on through their art-making. The activity takes place in a ‘community,’ or social context, which is defined by ‘rules’ or ‘conventions’ of participation (Engeström, 2014). The unit of analysis in this model is the activity in the system and how young artists (the ‘subjects’) act on the social/cultural world through their art-making.

Through the lenses of CoP and activity theory, people engaged in activity are participating in the creation and negotiation of meaning and knowledge in a social or cultural context. When a new member enters a community of practice, they not only learn the existing knowledge, structures and practices but also understand that the knowledge, structures and practices can be changed. Earlier constructivist theories argue that knowledge is constructed by the individual learner; however, these more recent SLTs place learners in a social and cultural context, where they not only construct knowledge in their own minds but contribute to the construction of new social and cultural knowledge. These theoretical perspectives, therefore, see the learner as transforming the social and cultural world.

Through this theoretical lens, learning is engagement in activity that creates new social and cultural knowledge. This way of learning is not currently valued or applied in schools, yet it is critical to children’s success in and beyond the classroom. It is the way of learning that makes the difference between children who become consumers of culture and victims of their social and cultural circumstances and children who become people who can create or transform their communities, society and the world, by identifying the problems or issues that should be addressed and recognizing themselves as the people who can and should address them.

A framework for research on art making as a sociocultural learning activity

In the next section I describe a framework that emerges when art-making is considered through the theoretical lenses of activity theory and CoP. This framework can be used to investigate children’s art-making as a social learning process, through which both the child and the social context are changed. It is made up of several related processes: forming and transforming ideas using mediums, finding and solving problems, enquiry and construction and co-construction of meaning. By observing these processes, researchers can see how children learn and develop through their art-making and how they become full contributing participants in the creation and transformation of their world.

Concept formation and transformation. Artists form and transform ideas by using art media to give shape to what is in their imagination. By giving ideas physical form in the world, they can be manipulated and altered, and the artist can see an idea in new ways as it physically changes shape. As Vygotsky said about the role of language in shaping ideas, art objects are symbolic forms that give structure to ideas ‘just as a mold gives shape to a substance’ (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 28). When artists give physical form to their imaginings, they can transform the idea in their imagination by changing the form, and in doing so, alter how they think and what they know. Without this process of giving ideas physical form, concepts are intangible and elusive. Learning occurs when the concepts are made sufficiently structured to retain but are still flexible enough to be transformed.

Problem-seeking. In an activity system, the subject (in this case, an artist) uses tools (art materials and art products) to act on an object (ideas and experiences from their interactions in the world). That activity begins when artists problematize their interactions in, experiences with, and perceptions of the world (Mace, 1997; Mace & Ward, 2004). When they address the problem through activity with art materials, artists will typically delay closure even when they reach a solution by re-problematizing the resulting art object. Problem-seeking and problematization not only occur at the beginning of an art project but also continue throughout the artistic process. Artists are learners in this sense because they do not accept given problems and solutions, and do not settle on first solutions, but continue to seek problems and, in doing so, create new knowledge and ideas through their art-making.

Enquiry. Art-making is an enquiry process used to figure out how things work in the world and to think about solutions to artistic problems. Whether they are exploring the qualities of different materials to discover their expressive potential, examining the impact of light on a surface or the effect of war on children, artists often make art to research an idea that captivates them. Artists work like researchers in the social sciences, problematizing ideas, theorizing and then engaging in art-making activity to gain new understanding about the ideas they are exploring. Artistic enquiry is the process of using art materials and media to find solutions to artistic problems. Artists conduct enquiry by making art, using materials and media to generate possible solutions and then manipulating them to develop new ways of thinking about their ideas.

Meaning-making. Meaning is defined in several ways, but generally when we talk about ‘making meaning’ we refer to the process of making sense of our experiences in the world in such a way that they give our lives coherence and significance. Something is meaningful if it enables us to see ourselves as connected to or significant in the larger context that we live in. The act of making meaning through art is both personal, in the sense that artists make things that use and share what they find meaningful, as well as cultural, in that artists give new meaning to things, experiences and ideas that make up our shared culture.

Sociocultural learning theory as a research tool

The SCL theoretical frame can be applied to questions about children’s art-making and artistic development that offer new insights beyond what has been learned with traditional developmental theories. For over a decade, art education researchers and theorists have been calling for this shift from developmental investigations of children’s art projects to research that looks at children’s art-making as a social and cultural activity (e.g. Anning & Ring, 2004; Braswell, 2016; Ivashkevich, 2009; Pearson, 2001; Wilson, 2005). Research conducted with an SCL framework requires looking not only at finished art products but also at the activity of art-making with particular attention to the ways that the activity is an interaction between the individual child and the world. Rather than outlining a stage-by-age developmental path, or providing explanation of what children are representing in their artwork and estimating what it tells us about their development, we can examine the activity of art-making. By observing the activity, we can learn what causes children to engage in art-making and see how it unfolds over time; we can examine the interaction between children and their social context as they make art; and we can investigate cognitive development in art-making by examining the cognitive activity that occurs in the interaction between the child and the environment during art-making. Cognitive development, from this perspective, is the process of children making sense of the world and understanding how they impact the world through their art-making.

Children’s art making observed through the SCL lens

The sociocultural learning framework described in this chapter was used for a study of children’s art-making in an elementary school art room in Oakland, California. The children were aged six to eleven (first through fifth grade in US schools). I observed art classes every week for a school year, talking with students as they worked on class projects and listening to them interact with each other while they worked. I conducted focus groups with four students from each class and, from these focus groups, selected fourteen students to interview individually. In the interviews and focus groups, I asked them to describe their own art-making process and talk about what art means to them, where they make art, what kind of art they like to make and what kind of things they use to make art. Interviewees showed me their own artworks and described their process and motivation in creating them. Finally, I offered interviewees a selection of art materials and asked them to think aloud while creating something.

The resulting data was analysed three different ways using the SLT framework described above. In the first analysis, I explored children’s social interactions while making art to learn about children’s art-making as an act of engaging with the social and cultural world. For the second analysis, I investigated the question ‘why do children make art?’. The third analysis focused on the cognitive activities children engaged in as they made art. Interviews and observations were coded with four codes developed to capture the socially and culturally relevant aspects of the children’s art-making: social interactions, context of art-making, indicators that art is a meaning-making activity and indicators that art-making causes social and/or cultural transformation. I also developed new codes during the analysis, based on ideas that emerged from the interviews and observation notes. The emergent codes fell into two broad categories: children’s perceptions of art and art-making (when they talked about art) and children engaging in art-making (when they were making art).

Community of practice in the art room. To learn more about how students engaged in the practice of art-making in their school community, I applied the theoretical lens of CoP to observation notes taken in the art room. I watched children while they made art and listened to their interactions with each other. In the observation notes, I looked for indicators that they were forming a community of practice. A community of children’s art practice is an activity space (in this case it is an actual space: the art room at their school) in which children are full participants; that is, they participate in the activity and learn how to do the activity according to the expectations of the community. At the same time, each child in the class also contributes to shaping how the activity is done in their community. When classroom learning occurs as a community of practice, children can have a sense of ownership because they can see their own contributions and ideas shape how the activity is done in their community. The art practice of their class ‘learns’ from each student art maker and students learn how to make art that is appreciated and meaningful in their community of young artists.

By observing student art-making through the framework of SLT, the activity and interactions of the group came into focus. In each class, I could see how students interacted as they made art, how they influenced each other’s art-making and how each student evolved their art-making in response to the influence of the group. The art teacher had specific learning goals for her students and was firm in her instruction. In a study that analysed these observations of children’s interactions in the art room, I found that children not only followed the teacher’s instruction themselves but also tried to get others to stay within the boundaries as well, either by enforcing the rules or critiquing another student’s artwork (Malin, 2012). Enforcemen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1. Art-making as Activity: How Children Make Meaning through Art
• 2. Childhood Art in Community Education: Postdevelopmental Learning through Feminist Leadership, Diversity and Pedagogic Invention
• 3. Children’s Photography as Sense-making
• 4. Holly Banister: A Social Incentive Account of Exceptional Drawing Ability
• 5. Reconceptualizing Early Childhood Art: The Lessons of Intergenerational Art Curricula and Postdevelopmental Theorizing
• 6. ‘You Can’t Separate It from Anything’: Glitter’s Doings as Materialized Figurations of Childhood (and) Art
• 7. ‘So You Will Remember Me as an Artist’: Art-making as a Way of Being in Early Childhood
• 8. ‘It Might Get Messy, or Not Be Right’: Scribble as Postdevelopmental Art
• 9. ‘We Need It Loud!’: Listening to Preschool Making from Mediated and Materialist Perspectives
• 10. Thinking Childhood Art with Care in an Ecology of Practices
• Index
• Imprint