The arts in children's lives : context, culture, and curriculum

The Arts in Children's Lives: Context, Culture, and Curriculum Bresler, L. , & Thompson, C. (2002). Dordrecht, Boston, & London: Kluwer Academic Publishers. 250 pages. ISBN 1-4020-0471-0Liora Bresler and Christine Marme Thompson have edited an eye-opening anthology about the role and significance of arts education in early childhood. Scholars and teacher educators from different parts of the world present thought-provoking results of projects in visual arts, music, dance and drama in 15 well-chosen, if very different, articles. There is also a strong emphasis on critical issues in educational and developmental theories prevalent in general education, which seldom are debated in the context of arts education. My overview is written from a point of view of a visual arts teacher, teacher educator, and researcher of play in arts.The articles are grouped under three titles: context, culture, and curriculum. This is not necessarily logical according to the content of the articles, but the bridging texts in between by the editors inspire educational conversation. To begin with, Bresler and Thompson point out that early childhood arts education is still considered and taught as a means of expression. What this means to teacher training is reflected in many of the articles. When depicting the context of children's learning environments, the writers define the many possible kinds of skills of a 3-year-old child. She has a personal history; she knows stories, songs, and dance steps that she has learned from TV; and she has visual likings. However, these visual preferences are not only formed by illustrations in children's books and home decorations, as the writers say, but in visual culture in general. The toy industry, TV entertainment programs, computer games, and above all advertisements that small children are keen to follow make appealing elements of the learning environment outside of school.The basis of expression in arts education is well exemplified in the chapter by Donna Grace and Joseph Tobin, who have worked out an insightful, but also controversial, report of a video film project in Hawaii. To begin with, the students of two third-grade classes were asked to make a film of a familiar story. According to the writers, the well-known Disney versions of stories proved hindrances to creativity. The children's use of these stories was interpreted by the researchers as a sign of the children seeking security because the medium of video was unfamiliar. However, the results of the narrative research projects that followed were very similar: Very few children devised creative new stories-they mostly produced versions of the well-known ones. Unknown to readers is what was actually taught to the children as they were guided to make scripts, storyboards, and handle the video equipment: Did the learning process have a creative orientation? Due to the results of the first video project, Grace and Tobin decided to give children free choice in content and genre in expressing themselves in the video films made for the actual research. Most of the video productions by the students in Hawaii were of "questionable taste including depictions of drool, burps, blood, dripping mucus, butt jokes, aggressions, violence and occasional severed body parts" (p. 200). The results are similar with what one observes during free play. As we all know, this is one of the main myths in arts education: No adults interfering in the expressive process leads to peak performances. Apparently, this was a surprise to the researchers, but to use the categories of carnivalesque1 by Bakhtin (1968) was an excellent step in their interpretation of the results. What I do not agree with is the conclusion the authors have made: the results of the video project were a consequence of the child-centered curriculum (see p. 188). The main objective of arts education is not to give students the possibility of free expression, but to guide them in recognizing, distinguishing, and producing artistic qualities and to find personal meaning in the arts. …