But the boy in the book kept crying!

My little friend, 2 years and 2 months old, chose a book he wanted to read. His mother and I set by his side. It was a picture book where illustrations on each page covered the same theme: play ground, domestic animals, birthday party etc. When reading the symbols on the pages showing food, the young reader pretended that he took the tiny spoon (the drawing of a spoon) between his fingers and brought it to his mouth: “Mmm… good” he said. Than his little hand carefully approached the egg (again: a drawing of an egg), picked it up and when he was just about to feed me, he warned me: “Egg – hot!” He seemed so sure that these drawings were symbols and not the real things, that he even made jokes about that. He was creating stories about the drown items and interacting with them: pushing the cars, lifting spoons, eating blueberries, bringing socks…

There were pages illustrating a visit to a doctor … and a boy in tears … with blood on his knee… The young reader seemed at first surprised, and then his face and body got more and more said while he was observing the drawing. It looked like the painted boy’s pain was slowly transmitted to the young reader’s body. The sad look on his face spoke of deep, deep empathy for the boy in the book.

I got uncomfortable (Was there any age limit for this book?) and tried desperately to find a way to realise my young friend from his (imagined) pain, while he was thinking - trying to find out how to help the boy in the book. Here is what he came up with: He banded over the book with his mouth almost on the page, and started shouting “Mammy! Mammy! Mammy!”. From the colour of his voice we understood that it was not his own mother he was calling, but the boy’s absent (not-illustrated) mother. The reader’s real mother was sitting beside him and understood what she was to do: She “jumped on her fingers” and ran to the boy with the bloody knee, wiped the blood, kissed him, held him in her arms … But the blood was still painted red…

The young reader, the same one who minutes ago made jokes about car symbols crashing into each other, suddenly had forgotten that the sad boy in the book wasn’t real. His mother and I hurried to go further in the book and read about something more present, but he kept finding the page again and again to see if the boy was still crying… And he was…

I was amazed by the enormous empathy of the two-year-old – he seemed to identify himself with the drawing, and suddenly could'n pretend any longer.

This happened yesterday, and I still feel like I should do something to make it up for him… - for the both of the boys! I think I will have to meet them soon again and bring with me some scissors, textiles, small plasters, glue…? We’ll see…

Here is the information about the book:
Grossmann, Kari (1999). Pekeboka mi. Oslo: Gyldendal Norske Forlag

Teaching Visual Art: How and Why?

During a lecture given to early childhood practitioners I was asked a question: “What does “self-expression” actually mean?” While answering, I kept thinking if I will ever be able to explain that to those who can not recall an experience of own creative expression…

May be a child’s expression and creativity are difficult to explain to adults because there is a difference between a child’s and an adult’s creativity (Runco, 2006)? While creativity of adult’s often leads to some product, children’s creativity does not, but rather “takes the form of imaginative play, self-expression, or new understanding of the world” (Runco 2006, p.121). Children gradually socialize into the norms of the environments they take part in. If the environments don’t appreciate creativity and self-expression, the children might learn to forget what creativity is. And such development would be so unfortunate because creativity is, among other things, a source of “intrinsic motivation, openness, curiosity and autonomy” (Runco 2006, p.127).

What Ola Nordmann (an average Norwegian) thinks about visual art education is probably a result of his own experience from education in this subject. The Norwegian early childhood education, for children 0-5, carries the name “kindergarten” symbolizing Froebel’s ideas of children’s natural growth through play and spontaneous expressions (Flanagan, 2006). But surprisingly, visual art activities are traditionally organized as teacher-centered, or “product-centered”, activities where the main goal is sadly often to produce something (especially around Easter end Christmas). Liora Bresler (1994) calls such teaching orientation “imitative” because the students are expected to copy the model their teacher has provided.

The notion of children’s garden fits well with a teacher who sees a child as a growing flower. Teachers with such “complementary” orientation (Bresler, 1994) don’t want to interfere in the children’s growth, but by such attitude they will unfortunately fail support and challenge. One can find teachers with such orientation in Norwegian early childhood centres, and some of them think that they teach the same way “pedagogista” teach in Reggio Emilia’s early childhood centres.

My understanding of educational philosophy in Reggio Emilia, is that is more like the third orientation Liora Bresler’s specifies: “expansive” teacher orientation. This kind of teaching involves “complex procedure drawing on the communication of sophisticated adult’s knowledge while respecting the child’s current experience and interpretations” (Bresler 1994, p.101). Such teacher style is called “expansive” because it incorporates “a variety of intelligences and modes of thinking” (Bresler 1994, p.90) and “promotes the cognitive and cultural aspects of aesthetic learning” (Bresler 1994, p.101).
In their article “Experiencing the visual and visualizing the experience” Rita L. Irwin and F. Greame Chalmers discuss different ways to understand curriculum in visual arts – even going so fare to present the curriculum as “complicated conversation” (Irwin & Chalmers, 2007) (inspired by Piner 2004). The notion of complicated conversation refers to the process of intersubjective meaning making that takes place when a visual art teacher challenge students reflection, and support experimentation, creativity and critical thinking.

I believe that visual art curricula in early childhood, has to emerge from children’s interests and teacher’s deep believe in the importance of arts in children’s lives. Angela Eckhoff refers to Elington 2003 when she writes that a teacher should be “responsible for engaging and motivating children to participate in an arts-based dialog” (Eckhoff, 2008, p.464). Because such dialogs are of intersubjective nature, the teacher’s competence will have strong influence on the child’s experience and construction of meaning. According to Martin Buber idea of dialogic education: “Dialogue requires real listening as well as real talking (…). Responces are not preoriented or predetermined and the teacher’s reaction to the leraner’s contribution cannot be prepared beforehand” (Flanagen 2006). And with the youngest students are involved, one has to have on mind that “complicated conversations” will be highly multimodal!

References:
Bresler, L. (1994). Imitative, Complementary, and Expansive: Three Roles of Visual Arts Curricula. Studies in Art Education, A Journal of Issue and Research, 35(2), 90-104.

Eckhoff, A. (2008). The Importance og Art Viewing Experiences in Early Childhood Visual Arts: The Exploration of a Master Art Teacher's Strategies for Meaningful Early Arts Experience. Early Childhood Education Journal, 35, 463-472.

Flanagan, F. M. (2006). The greatest educators ever. London: Continuum.

Irwin, R. L., & Chalmers, F. G. (2007). Experiencing Visual and Visualizing Experience. In L. Bresler (Ed.), International Handbook og Research in Arts Education. Dordrecht: Springer.

Runco, M. A. (2006). The Development of Children's Creativity. In B. Spodek & O. N. Saracho (Eds.), Handbook of research on the education of young children (pp. 121-131). Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Can children's imagination infect their teachers?

A short text that presents the main points form my presentation on Imaginative Education conference in Vancouver, has be written by Jon Olav Skålid and published on Forskning.no