II Child Art Movement and Fabrication of the ‘Other’

You can read here about the seminar.

This text is part of Munro's intervention at a Western Arts Association conference in the United States. He starts addressing the audience with a brief account of the steps made in recent years in American art education. The most important, Munro argues, was the recognition of the arts as a subject in the curriculum. Moreover, with this, a process of transformation of the teaching methods, from the "literal copying of the model, for the right of the artist and the art student to transform what he sees in accordance with some feeling or decorative idea of his own".

In this article, Thomas Munro (curator of Education for the Cleveland Museum of Art from 1931-67) seeks to reflect on the possibilities of education in museums in the face of a new idea of childhood. The child Munro talks about is a curious, creative child who should not be subjected to tedious educational practices, capable of destroying her childlike nature. Munro considers that if it is necessary to think about how to make the child love a museum, then something needs to be fixed with art museums, not with the child.

In a 1937 publication titled The Museum Educates, The Toledo Museum of Art claimed to have been the first in the world to be child-centered. The creative child, who is spontaneous, naive, and curious (the several layers of colonialities in the reactivation of a primitivist view of the child) was said to be not only the most appreciated educational target, but the easiest too.

The text deals with the making of the developmental child through drawing. By the end of the 19th century, psychologists and educators started collecting children's drawings as 'data' that could provide knowledge on the child's mind development. These drawings created a way of reasoning about the productions of children as mirroring their mind, as well as expectations and images about the normal and the 'abnormal' childhood.

download here

Creativity and playfulness seem to be “natural” classifications to think and talk about what childhood is about and what a child is and should be. The making of this articulation goes back, at least, to the end of the 17th century. Names such as John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Johann Pestalozzi, Friedrich Froebel, Maria Montessori, and John Dewey circulated internationally and were assimilated at local levels as "indigenous foreigners" and "traveling libraries" ( Popkewitz, 2000), contributing to the Western notion of the child and childhood as a time of play and imagination.

The texts focuses on the colonialities of arts education practices such as developmentalist rationality, the historical equivalence of the child with the so-called 'primitive', the gardening practices and the straightening devices of education. It starts by analyzing the cover of the 1951 Unesco Courier and asks how this image seems so familiar to us?

The text is in Portuguese and can be downloaded here

The text looks at some metaphors used in arts education discourses, namely the metaphor of the child as a seed and as a plant, and of the educator as a gardener, whose function would be to conduct, without disturbing, the child's growth. These practices are contradictory and carry various types of violence, whether in the ways of imagining a universal child (having the subject European, adult, male, 'white', non-disabled, as a becoming) from developmentalist perspectives, or in the hope of their future.

The paper intends to introduce the research project CREAT_ED: The Historicization of the Creative Child in Education, focusing on its online archive platform. While the project is still in development, its online archive platform already allows us to problematize how a particular theoretical framework cannot be separated from the methodological and ‘practical’ problems and answers concerning the research tools we need in the project.

This workshop intends to work through some selected sources of what we call ‘the archive of the creative child’. This archive is mainly constituted by published materials in Europe and the United States, from the end of the 18th century to the Post Second World War.