Child Art Research Brief There are many reasons young children create art. Some kids make art because they want to and enjoy it while others do so because a teacher has told them to. Regardless of the situation, when children are creating art they are creating stories in their minds that is the basis for the art they create (Duncum, 1985). These stories are a key part to understand why a child creates what they create. According to Duncum (1985), it is also vital to teach students art based skills so that their ideas and stories will be able to be more visually complex while also being able to more accurately portray the child’s fantasy world. There are stories in the minds of children when creating their artwork. According to Thompson (2005), it is not simply enough to look at a small child’s artwork and determine meaning behind it, but you must first understand the fantasy based story behind it. As an art educator or as someone interested in youth art, to better understand the arts context a relationship with the artist and conversation about the arts story must take place. The relationship building includes contexts of the students’ home life, geographical location, and other aspects relating to that students’ interests and outside of school activities. Art is a way for students to learn to be creative. Creativity is a kind of problem solving. According to Jaquith (2011), students are intrinsically motivated by their interests which help to motivate them to be creative and construct problems they can then solve. In the art classroom it is important to teach students skills relating to art so they can effectively communicate their creative ideas with others. The challenge becomes getting students motivated. One way to do this is by allowing students the freedom to chose the content for their artwork. Children are inherently affected by images they see. This imagery also tends to change over time. According to Wilson (1981), children are exposed to different things and interact with
their own visual cultures differently. This can lead to differences between children and their creative development. This is another challenge to overcome in the art classroom. Since no to child experiences the same things and sees the world a little differently from another, looking at how children develop needs to be seen through the eyes of not just a single developmental model but through the lens of multiple models (Wilson, 1981). When different developmental models are looked at for a particular student, it becomes more clear to which model that student may relate closest to which can aid in teaching. Student Artwork I have curated several of my student’s artworks to look at as it relates to their creative development. I have collected images of several drawings and paintings that show how students progressed through the projects that were assigned and how they added things into the art that interested them. I have spent close to two years getting to know the students who made the artwork I collected. Building these relationships allows me to have conversations with my students about things they are interested in that sometimes populates in the imagery they use in their art. Some of this imagery I would otherwise not had made a connection on why they included what they did. One example of this is a fifth grades student’s inclusion of a bright red cardinal in her landscape painting as seen in figure 1. After talking with the student and understanding that she lives near northern Kentucky, it is clear that the cardinal represents the University of Louisville. Since the student is from an area close to the university she has been influenced by seeing this kind of imagery often by family and friends. Without getting to know the student and realizing the context of where she is from, the cardinal would have been just a pretty bird she liked and would have seemed relatively insignificant.
Figure 1: Untitled painting of nature by fifth grade girl
Another image that stands out to me is a first grade students’ drawing of a made up superhero. This is an imagined character that the student created with a red costume and a yellow letter I in the middle of the chest. With me being somewhat familiar with The Incredibles movie franchise, I decided to ask the student if the letter in the middle of the costume was related to the movie. It turns out the student had just watched one of the movies over the weekend prior to the drawing and was inspired to create his own character from the same universe as the movie took place that he watched. This example is another example of how influential visual culture can be in the lives of students and in what they chose to include in their artwork.
Figure 2: Untitled drawing of superhero by first grade boy
The last example I would like to talk about is a self-portrait drawing of a fourth grade girl where she decided to only draw half of her face. This student had told me that she wasn’t very good at drawing things showing symmetry and was frustrated so much that she didn’t even want to complete the self-portrait assignment at all. Knowing that this student didn’t like symmetry, I proposed the idea to only draw half of her face and she took that idea and drew only the top right corner of her face. When I spoke with her again I found out that she also did not like drawing mouths which is why she decided to also exclude it from the drawing witch also makes the drawing very visually interesting. These interactions and conversations allowed the student to feel free to make her own decisions about her art. These decisions and ideas gave her confidence to start making her own creative ideas based on the desire to maker her drawing look good and understanding her own troubles in creating facial features.
Figure 3: Untitled self-portrait drawing by fourth grade girl
Figure 4: Untitled drawing of winter landscape by second grade boy
Figure 5: Untitled drawing of eye by fourth grade girl
Figure 6: Untitled drawing of face by second grade boy
Conclusion In conclusion the research suggests that in order to teach students and to have them want to learn and try new things, there needs to be conversations about their interests and freedom to create what they want. With this being said there can also be too much freedom to the point to where the student doesn’t know what to create and they waste time. When reading through the research it became even more clear to me that no two students learn the same way which means the teacher must get to know his or her students in order to better understand each students’ current abilities. This give the art teacher an opportunity to differentiate the learning for each student which promotes better learning.
References Duncum, P. (1985). The fantasy embeddedness of girls' horse drawings, Art Education, 38(6), 42-46. Jaquith, D. B. (2011). When is creativity? Art Education, 64(1), 14-19. Thompson, C. M. (2005). Under construction: Images of the child in art teacher education. Art Education, 58(2), 18-23. Untitled drawing of superhero by first grade boy. 2019. Author Grant Bridges Untitled painting of nature by fifth grade girl. 2019. Author Grant Bridges Untitled self-portrait drawing by fourth grade girl. 2018. Author Grant Bridges Untitled drawing of winter landscape by second grade boy. 2019. Author Grant Bridges Untitled drawing of eye by fourth grade girl. 2019. Author Grant Bridges Untitled drawing of face by second grade boy. 2019. Author Grant Bridges Wilson, B., & Wilson, M. (1981). The use and uselessness of developmental stages. Art Education, 34(5), 4-5.