Child Development

1927 - Modern Ideas in Art and Art Education (Thomas Munro)

csmartins — Tue, 30 May 2023 06:58:23 +0000

1927 - Modern Ideas in Art and Art Education (Thomas Munro) csmartins Tue, 05/30/2023 - 07:58

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". Saying this did not mean that Thomas Munro considered that the battle was won.
On the contrary, he argued that art teaching was still "too standardized". The battle was too hard, he admitted. There were pressures from the directions of the schools, the cities, and the families. It was a battle of 'tastes'. The frightening question for teachers: "Is that what you are teaching our children?"
However, Munro was confident of the approach: to develop the child's creativity and make contact with works of art possible. How many art teachers had contact with various original art works? "How many teachers are really familiar with the work of Cézanne, Renoir, Picasso, and Matisse?"
His purpose was not to blame the teachers but to ask for better materials, images and reproductions in schools. He gave the examples of Austria and Germany, whose better machine printing methods he praised. Nevertheless, it also put a responsibility on teachers to ask the companies to print works with aesthetically quality.
"There should be a demand expressed to these companies for better prints, and then we could make much more use of them"
Munro ends the talk underlining the need to put the child in touch with the artworks of the old masters. Only then, he said, "creativeness can be developed".

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Child Art

Child Development

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Creativity

II Child Art Movement and Fabrication of the ‘Other’

Date

Sat, 01/01/1927 - 12:00

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1936 - Art Museum Work with Children (Thomas Munro)

csmartins — Sun, 28 May 2023 07:33:01 +0000

1936 - Art Museum Work with Children (Thomas Munro) csmartins Sun, 05/28/2023 - 08:33

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.
"We don't have to popularize Charlie Chaplin or Mickey Mouse with children, and they are excellent Art at the same time. There are children's rooms in most public libraries, where they come and feel at home without urging. [...] Like the schools of yesterday, the museum is hampered by the dismal tradition of being a dark, cold, and austere abode of great Art, forbidding and incomprehensible to the young"
The question, then, was how to change this situation and prepare the museum to receive the child. Firstly, according to Munro, it would be necessary to change museum policy. For museum directors, children were seen as "an unmitigated nuisance, whose presence in a museum could only mean dirt and disorder, noise, grubby finger-prints and pencil marks". Well, the experience was telling him that self-government was the point. It was giving children a sense of responsibility. Regarding which art was more appropriate to children, it would be "simple story situations, familiar objects, types of person, animal and fairy-tale which the child can understand, and they do so in Art forms which are simple, direct and vivacious". The developmental rationale is present in his words. The child was seen as progressing from the simple to the complex, and in this progression, also progress in terms of good taste, i.e., developing her "powers of appreciation". Moreover, this art, should be exhibited according to the children's standpoint.
"Children like to handle things, to turn them over and look at them from all sides. [...] So far as possible, children should be able to see, handle and use Art objects under comfortable, informal, and happy conditions"
And the adult, as it was also becoming a common sense within arts education progressive practices, should almost be invisible, in order to preserve the children's natural powers intact. Indeed, he argued, the function of a museum 'guide' or 'instructor' should be "to point out" and be "forbidden to speak except to say, at rare intervals, "Look at that!"
The text ends by talking about the spaces for active doing that the museum of the future should invest in, the playroom and studio space.

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II Child Art Movement and Fabrication of the ‘Other’

III The Spaces and Materialities

Date

Wed, 01/01/1936 - 12:00

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2018 - Time, Drawing, Testing: The making up of the developmental child and the measuring of the nation’s development (Cat Martins)

csmartins — Sat, 27 May 2023 06:53:52 +0000

2018 - Time, Drawing, Testing: The making up of the developmental child and the measuring of the nation’s development (Cat Martins) csmartins Sat, 05/27/2023 - 07:53

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

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II Child Art Movement and Fabrication of the ‘Other’

Date

Mon, 01/01/2018 - 12:00

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2022 - The colonialities of arts education: seeds, plants and the gardening practices of education in the making of the nature of the child (Cat Martins)

csmartins — Fri, 26 May 2023 17:16:06 +0000

2022 - The colonialities of arts education: seeds, plants and the gardening practices of education in the making of the nature of the child (Cat Martins) csmartins Fri, 05/26/2023 - 18:16

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 idea of child's nature is a powerful ally for maintaining these powers, as the way in which modernity has conceived nature, and the child as a metaphor for nature, naturalizes this same idea of a childish nature as true and universal. Gardening metaphors in education are profoundly moral and colonizing. Like tutors in the world of botany, these gardening metaphors of education are starightening devices.

The original text is in Portuguese and can be downloaded here

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Child Art

Coloniality

Child Development

Gardening Practices of Education

Straightening Devices

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Creativity

II Child Art Movement and Fabrication of the ‘Other’

Date

Sat, 01/01/2022 - 12:00

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1899 - Notes on Eskimo Drawings (L. Maitland)

csmartins — Wed, 24 May 2023 13:54:18 +0000

1899 - Notes on Eskimo Drawings (L. Maitland) csmartins Wed, 05/24/2023 - 14:54

This article from Louise Maitland is based on comparing the western child with the ‘primitive’. The illustrations in the article are “traced copies of the original drawings”. Maitland affirms what, by the end of the 19th century, became a common argument among western ‘white’ educators, psychologists, and art educators: “On comparing the drawings of primitive races with those of children, we find that they possess many points of interest in common. While some of these relate to likenesses, and some to differences, the drawings of both, upon investigation, prove themselves to be a comparable product”. It was not rare, by the times, to compare the ‘white’ western child with the so-called primitive adult. Visual affinities became essential in constructing an epistemology of the eye that sees and categorizes the western white child and the ‘Other’ in a scale of development. The comparison is made to differentiate and produce hierarchies. The comparison of the western ‘white’ child with the ‘Other’ was a form of power in which both the ‘white’ western child and the ‘Other’ were considered as minor subjects. However, while the ‘white’ western child would develop, the ‘Other’ would always be frozen in a scale of development.

“Comparing the ~~Eskimo~~ with the civilized children’s drawings, we find:

The children up to about ten or eleven years, like the ~~Eskimo~~, use drawings as a language, and choose much the same classes of subjects for illustration, though in varying proportions. […] In the composition or arrangement of their drawings, the children in their younger years show a correspondence with the ~~Eskimo~~; at an older age they pass more frequently to a higher artistic development”.

In our text, we cut the word ~~Eskimo~~ because it is a western depreciative term to designate the Inuit people, in this case, from Alaska. We use the word ‘primitive’ between commas to accentuate its construction as part of the colonialities of thought.

Why do we consider the child a developing being, going from the simple to the complex in terms of thought? How are art education practices in the present reactivating this developmental perspective on children?

Have you ever thought about the role of comparisons and metaphors in education?

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II Child Art Movement and Fabrication of the ‘Other’

Date

Sun, 01/01/1899 - 12:00

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1904 - A instrucção da creança

melina — Thu, 20 Apr 2023 12:24:28 +0000

1904 - A instrucção da creança melina Thu, 04/20/2023 - 13:24

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. This method was popular amongst progressive educators during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Underlying logics were that the child would develop ‘naturally’ by being exposed to the world, by learning from ‘nature’. Through sensory perception – mainly seeing – the objects presented to the child could be categorized and described. The developmental learning path led from the simple to the complex, the near to the far, the concrete to the abstract. ‘Learning to see’ could be the slogan of this method that was quite concretely concerned with controlling the visual sense and how it was employed to create knowledge about the world.

Picture books like Staub’s became important educational tools as images were believed to create sensory imprints on the child’s mind and simultaneously images could be employed to initiate the inputs that were desired by the teachers, or rather, society at large. The cover image of A instrucção da creança reproduces an idea about who the imagined or desired child was: white, middle-class, gender binary conforming, sighted and with a centre stage for the male child. Those lines of representation can be easily traced throughout the entire picture book series. Beyond the representational level, the constitution of a white gaze can be traced that constitutes itself while erasing or disguising itself as invisible (Dyer, Richard (1997): White).

“There is power in looking” (hooks, bell (2003): The Oppositional Gaze, p. 207) and within white cultures it is the white subject who is constituted as the seeing subject, the subject who can visualize the world (hooks, bell (2003): The Oppositional Gaze; Mirzoeff, Nicholas (2011): The Right to Look). Questioning how the white gaze is at play in educational practices, theories and materials gives insight into the construction of the figure of the child. ‘Learning to see’ then erases the white positionality from which the subject is looking at the world, naturalising whiteness as the norm.

What are the challenges in identifying white representations?

Going beyond representation, how is a white gaze at play in the cover picture of A instrucção da creança?

How does whiteness figure in your educational practices or your context?

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Child Development

Nature

Whiteness

Education of the Senses

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Creativity

III The Spaces and Materialities

Date

Fri, 01/01/1904 - 12:00

End Date

Sun, 01/01/1905 - 12:00

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1906 - Essay on the Creative Imagination (Theodule Ribot)

melina — Thu, 30 Jun 2022 11:43:12 +0000

1906 - Essay on the Creative Imagination (Theodule Ribot) melina Thu, 06/30/2022 - 12:43

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Mon, 01/01/1906 - 12:00

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1908 - The Human Figure as Rendered by Savages and Children (Ernest-Théodore Hamy)

melina — Tue, 26 Apr 2022 16:45:08 +0000

1908 - The Human Figure as Rendered by Savages and Children (Ernest-Théodore Hamy) melina Tue, 04/26/2022 - 17:45

This is a text from a conference given at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris by Ernest Hamy, who was the first director of the Ethnographic Museum of Trocadéro. Hamy's thought dwells on the comparison of children's drawings and 'savage' drawings.

“From the point of view of the arts of drawing, in fact, as from so many other points of view, savages are real children; they draw, they daub, they model like children. And in the absence of the savages themselves, whose aesthetic evolution in space and time we cannot easily follow, it is the children who will inform us, and provide us, from an early age, with the terms of comparison, the most satisfactory and the most close. Let us examine the spontaneous works they perform before our eyes, we will find there all the elements of savage art and, what is more, the series of ages will reproduce the ascending scale of elementary civilizations”.

The affinities that are constructed among children and the 'Other' follow a developmental and stadial sequence in historical development. These affinities are based on the epistemologies of the eye. Not only they are constructed according to the principle of modern science of objectivity as visual evidence, as they construct these visual approximations through the notion of a 'family' of scribbles and shapes. The children's 'childish iconography', says Hamy, can be found among 'primitives and savages'. The way of describing the performances across the age of the child, in terms of their aesthetical equivalents, also obeys to the rationale of development. The early ages are characterised by a lack the capacity to reason properly:

"The child in the state of nature will always refuse, like the primitive, and like the savage, to this figuration which he will only understand later"

The affinities eradicate difference through the codifications mobilized to represent the ‘primitive’ and the child. Both are said to share a stage within the timeline of development and progress, although the 'white' child will continuously move until achieving the time of reason.

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II Child Art Movement and Fabrication of the ‘Other’

Date

Fri, 05/01/1908 - 12:00

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1883 - The Contents of Children's Minds (G. Stanley Hall)

raquel — Mon, 21 Mar 2022 19:57:13 +0000

1883 - The Contents of Children's Minds (G. Stanley Hall) raquel Mon, 03/21/2022 - 19:57

This book reports a study inspired by a survey that had taken place in Berlin, in 1869, about what children knew when entering schools. Stanley Hall, the North American educationalist of the Child Study Movement, decided to apply the same experiment in Boston, USA, in 1880. For that, “a list of questions suitable for obtaining an inventory of the contents of the minds of children of average intelligence on entering the primary schools of that city” was prepared. The study aligns with the emergence and proliferation of statistical reasoning to produce knowledge about several objects, children included. The drawing was one of the instruments mobilized for fabricating ‘data.’ From several hundred drawings, it was possible to establish some patterns and provide the readers with knowledge about children's minds and their development. This study provides one of the first descriptions of child development according to an idea of stages of development through graphic registers. To the American educationalist, the earliest and simplest representation made by the child was

“a round head, two eyes and legs. Later comes mouth, then nose, then hair, then ears. Arms like legs first grow directly from the head, rarely from the legs, and are seldom fingerless, though sometimes it is doubtful whether several arms or fingers from head and legs without arms are meant. Of 44 human heads only 9 are in profile. This is one of the main analogies with the rock and cave drawings. […] Last, as least mobile and thus attracting least attention, comes the body; first round like the head, then elongated, sometimes prodigiously, and sometimes articulated into several compartments, and in three cases divided, the upper part of the figure being in one place and the lower in another. The mind, and not the eye alone, is addressed, for the body is drawn and then the clothes are drawn on it (as the child dresses), diaphanous and only in outline. Most draw living objects except the kindergarten children, who draw their patterns. […] The very earliest pencillings, commonly of three-year-old children, are mere marks to and fro, often nearly in the same line”.

A particular image of how the ‘right’ child would develop is traced from here. This was one of the first conceptualizations of the child’s stages of development in drawing through the linearity of time. It provided a ‘map’ that ordered, through psychological lenses, the well-developed child and her stair-case progress.

Annotations

G. S. Hall's paper is an important early contribution to both child psychology and educational psychology. The article first appeared in the Princeton Review, 1883, pp. 249-272.

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Child Development

Children's Drawings

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Creativity

II Child Art Movement and Fabrication of the ‘Other’

Date

Mon, 01/01/1883 - 12:00

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1933 - "Mês das Crianças e dos Loucos", exhibition organized by Flávio de Carvalho and Osório César

csmartins — Wed, 20 Nov 2019 15:11:21 +0000

1933 - "Mês das Crianças e dos Loucos", exhibition organized by Flávio de Carvalho and Osório César csmartins Wed, 11/20/2019 - 15:11

This exhibition, 'Month of Children and Madmen', was organized in 1933 by Osório César and Flávio de Carvalho at the Club of Modern Art in São Paulo, Brazil. In an article published in the magazine Rumo, Flávio de Carvalho stated that "children's drawings, when teachers do not stupidly control them, have an importance that we still do not know in all its scope. They bring to our reflection the force of the primitive man [...]. The drawings of mad persons give us the path to find the genesis of the torture that shakes the soul of the insane. [....] The drawings of children [...] when they get rid of the influence of teachers, have great psychological importance because they are a free association of ideas, bringing a sequence of ancestral facts of evolution, some of them close to a panorama of species".
The equivalences between children and madmen were articulated by equivalence with the 'primitive'. This equivalence allowed the association with an idea of nature and strength that the recapitulationist ideology deposited in child development. Thus, we see children trapped in an idea of evolutionary development and the naturalization and universalization of a child's idea.

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Exhibition organized by…

Exhibition organized by Flávio de Carvalho and Osório César in 1933, in S. Paulo, at the Clube dos Artistas Modernos(CAM), with a program of conferences by artists, doctors, intellectuals and educators.

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II Child Art Movement and Fabrication of the ‘Other’

Date

Sun, 01/01/1933 - 12:00

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