Coloniality

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 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 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?

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.

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.

This book was submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Literature at the University of Chicago by the candidate Lilla Estelle Appleton to obtain the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. As the title makes evident, the study is made through the equivalence of the child with the ‘savage’, simultaneously making those so-called ‘adult savages’ comparable to the child.

From the 1870s onwards, children’s drawings started to be systematically collected and analyzed by child psychologists to study the child’s mental growth process. Drawing as an instrument to study the child’s mind soon created an equivalence between what the child was (the drawings mirroring her mental processes) and what she should become. By the end of the 19th century, Corrado Ricci, in Italy, collected more than one thousand drawings.