The articulation between children and nature does something within arts education, particularly when it comes to the apology of the senses, following the premises pointed out by the ‘sensualist philosophers’ of the late seventeenth and eighteenth-centuries (Jütte 2005). The apologists of the senses believed that thinking depended on sense impressions and those were rooted in the body.

Not only this view of nature was seen as ‘natural’ and universal, as it also neglected other views. The positioning of the child close to nature, was also the necessary fiction to naturalize and assume a universal development of the child. The education of the child as part of the civilizational project of modernity was premised upon the construction of the ‘nature of the child’ as an object of study.

The notion of nature associated with the child tends to naturalize the child and a series of expected behaviors in terms of her development. Too often, argues Jenkins, childhood is imagined “as a utopian space, separate from adult cares and worries, free from sexuality, outside social divisions, closer to nature and the primitive world, more fluid in its identity and its access to the realms of imagination” (Jenkins 1998, 3).

Imagination appeared as one of the strongest threats to the development of a moral healthy temper and disposition, and, therefore, it was a ‘problem’ within the educational field. Through the powers of imagination, the child could create a world of its own, livelier than the real world. The problem was not far from complex as if imagination was natural to childhood, and if education should follow the child’s nature, then, which and where were the limits?

The Child Study movement, in the United States and Europe, was based on intensive observations of children and their performances (drawings being used as raw material to be interpreted and analyzed) in psychological laboratories, in classrooms, at home, in the playground, or in questionnaires that generated data about who was the child and who should the child become. 

I couldn't find this publication. Maybe this exhibition was meant: 

https://journals.openedition.org/gradhiva/1411?lang=en