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Why art is important in children’s learning

Art can play an important part in children’s learning. This post shares five key reasons why. “Every child has the right to relax, play and take part in a wide range of cultural and artistic activities.” Article 31, United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child Many education theorists have argued that art has a central role in children’s learning and development. For example, John Dewey – the founder of American progressive education – argued for the need to integrate art into people’s everyday experiences. Eillot Eisner then talked about the criticality of art in public school curriculum and Maxine Greene wrote about its significance in allowing people to imagine the world from multiple perspectives. All of these amazing thinkers built their arguments on the same issue: that art has been marginalised from school curriculum in place of syllabus focused on maths, English, science and technology. A recent example of this can…

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Vygotsky on collective creativity

This post shares Vygotsky’s idea of collective creativity, a concept presented in his article ‘Imagination and Creativity in Childhood’. I firstly talk about how he defines creativity and imagination. I then use these understandings to consider how children’s creativity emerges through play. Lev Vygotsky (1896 -1934) was a Soviet psychologist who researched children’s learning in social and cultural contexts. In particular, his theory of ‘social constructivism’ discussed the importance of social interactions in children’s cognitive development. Vygotsky was also very interested in creativity and imagination how these were understood in education. What is creativity? Vygotsky believed that creativity arises from any human activity that produces something new. Creative acts could produce anything from physical objects to a music score to a new mental construct. Creativity is therefore present when major artistic, scientific and technical discoveries are made. It is also existent whenever an individual alters, combines, images or makes something new.…

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Children's creative spaces

The Ipswich Art Gallery, Australia

This post features the children’s exhibition program at the Ipswich Art Gallery, Australia. From 2011-2015 I worked as a children’s curator at the Ipswich Art Gallery in Queensland, Australia. The Ipswich Art Gallery is a special place for children’s creative learning with a well established program for young children and their families. The city of Ipswich is home to a very diverse and predominantly low socio-economic community. The art gallery is currently one of the most visited in regional Australia. In my travels around the world, I have never come across anything quite like it. Over the past 15 years, the Ipswich Art Gallery has developed and presented over 40 in-house children’s exhibitions. The children’s program is informed by a set of guiding principles that include: Children’s exhibitions are curated for children not adults and Learning begins with creative play. The Children’s Gallery is open daily from 10am-5pm with almost all activities being…

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Learning

The Nature of Play book review

In our busy and digital-driven world, many children have little opportunity to engage in everyday play in nature. Recent research has also illustrated that technology is significantly affecting how children think and focus their attention, with some screen-based games significantly restricting the use of imagination and creativity. The Nature of Play: A Handbook of Nature-Based Activities for all Seasons offers a remedy to this dilemma. The book features 44 play activities for children and adults in gardens, forests and city parks throughout the four seasons. For example, the Spring section of the book features activities such as ‘Get to know a tree’ and ‘plan a picnic.’ The Winter section then offers more indoor play prompts such as ‘build your own marble run’ and ‘rainy day games.’ Other activities include: Make your own pinhole camera using a recycled Pringles tubeCreative a beautiful seasonal mobile using objects collected from nature Construct a sand volcano…

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Children’s creative learning through the sculptures of Rachel Whiteread

Rachel Whiteread's sculptures and artwork 'Untitled (One hundred spaces) at Tate Britain sculpture sculptor space clay resin

This post looks at the art of Rachel Whiteread, a contemporary British sculptor who creates objects and spaces using different materials such as resin, plaster, concrete, rubber and plastic. Her works range from small-scale moulds of everyday objects such as hot water bottles to gigantic life-sized houses. Tate Britain in London recently exhibited a retrospective of her sculptures. As part of the show, her installation ‘Untitled (one hundred spaces)’ (1995) was displayed in the main entrance hall of the gallery. In this post, I use this artwork as a thinking tool for considering how its materials, tools and processes could be used to produce a children’s creative learning environment. This post is part of a series that aims to share innovative ways that artists are working with materials and how this may be used as a starting point for children’s creative learning. The first post in this series explored the…

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Children’s creative learning through the art of Sheila Hicks

“It is so important to make every day. The discovery comes in the making.” Sheila Hicks Sheila Hicks is an American textile artist whose colourful, soft sculptures bring together material traditions from Western and non-Western cultures. I recently visited her exhibition ‘Lifelines,’ on display at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. I loved learning about her experimentation with colour and how this has been a constant creative force throughout her life-long textile practice. In this post, I draw on works from the exhibition to consider how these could be used as a starting point for children’s creative learning through play with materials. This post is part of a four-part series looking at how artist’s experimentation with materials can be used to support creative learning. If you have not already read the first explored the sculpture practice of César Baldaccini, check it out here. Chapultepec (2018). Linen. 24 components, each component 800 cm. Sheila Hicks…

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Learning

How to use artworks in children’s art activities

Artwork projection at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris

Artworks can support children in imagining the world differently. I draw upon the work of Maxine Greene and John Dewey to explore the proposition that children’s learning through artworks has the potential to challenge dominant discourses, opening up new ways of thinking and being. There is also a resource list for educators and parents interested in incorporating artworks into children’s learning. “It is not that the artist offers solutions or gives directions. He nudges; he renders us uneasy; he makes us (if we are lucky) see what we would not have seen without him. He moves us to imagine, to look beyond” Maxine Greene (2000, p. 276). Artworks can be used in many ways for many different reasons in learning contexts. They offer rich possibilities for experiencing and imagining the world from new and multiple perspectives. Visual art as well as the arts more generally, have the ability to make people aware of…

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Why Play Matters

‘We play because we are human, and we need to understand what makes us human, not in an evolutionary or cognitive way but in a humanistic way. Play is the force that pulls us together.’ Miguel Sicart This post features a book review of Miguel Sicart’s Play Matters. Released as part of MIT’s Playful Thinking series, Sicart proposes a reconceptualisation of play as a universal tool for exploring, understanding and producing relations with the world. Throughout this blog I plan to write around the topics of art, experiential education theory, play, environment design, gallery education and informal learning. This will be done through various forms including discussion of current research, case studies of museums, galleries, libraries and community spaces, topics of currency within the media and reviews from parents and children participating in activities. This post is the first in a series that will review key texts in the field. Miguel Sicart’s…

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Children's creative spaces

5 great children’s spaces in the Bay Area, California

Exploratorium in San Francisco

I was fortunate enough to recently spend a month in California, mainly in and around San Francisco. During this time I visited a handful of children’s learning spaces and met with a bunch of lovely, passionate people working in both formal and informal learning contexts. The places listed below are places that I visited or that came highly recommended. I hope you find these equally as inspiring as I did! The Brightworks School Founded by Gever Tulley who also started The Tinkering School, Brightworks is a project-based learning heaven that ‘weaves learning and life experiences together.’ In the every day runnings of the school, children are put into mixed-aged group teams and encouraged to investigate real-world problems collectively. ‘The Arc’ (I interpret this term to mean the pedagogical principles that drive the learning processes at the school) consists of three phases: exploration, expression and exposition. Learners move through these cycles, allowing for…

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