III The Spaces and Materialities

You can read here about the seminar.

“Contrastes” (Contrasts) is one of the games that make up the “Jogos Visuais” collection, published in 1974 by Edições ASA in Porto. It was designed by the painter Elvira Leite and the architect Manuela Malpique, both teachers in the Portuguese public education system in disciplines related to the arts.

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.

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.

This is a workshop in which we will introduce the Project The Historicization of the Creative Child in Education. We will focus on the archive that is being constructed and strategies to work with and against this archive. We will mobilize archival materialities and work through some questions with the participants: How was the creative child constructed within western arts educational discourses at the intersection of discourses on race, class, gender, and ableism? Which subject positions are being mobilized? What are the colonialities we can name and deconstruct?

The Visual Games are a collection of materials made up of books, games, book-games, worksheets, modules and equipment, aimed at the visual education of children and young people. They were conceived by the painter Elvira Leite and the architect Manuela Malpique, both arts teachers in Portuguese public education.

Bruno Munari’s concept of creativity encompassed ideas such as dexterity & acquaintance, experimentation & investigation, collectivity, relatedness and problem-solving. In his book Fantasia, the author expands the significance attributed to creativity, noting on how to stimulate creativity correctly, and simultaneously making clear how erroneous albeit usual some individual and educational habits are in terms of triggering creative practices.

First published in 1875/6 in Switzerland, Johannes Staub’s picture book series A instrucção da creança was translated and published in Portugal in 1904/5. Staub was a teacher and author, committed to progressive and reform education. His picture book series was thought as part of the pedagogical method of the object lesson.

In 1924, Sidney L. Pressey, professor of psychology at Ohio State University, developed what is considered by many to be the first teaching machine. In practice it was a box with typed questions, with 4 multiple choice numbered answers. The box allowed the "test" model that added the correct answers, or the "teach" model that did not allow to advance until the answer was correct.