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.