Aesthetic Education in the Early Years: Exploring Familiar and Unfamiliar Personal-Cultural Landscapes

This article explores a double-bind in early schooling: a persistent value placed upon presenting multicultural art forms to a child constructed as incapable of grasping what is not familiar. The author argues that this bind is situated within dominant developmental discourses that emphasize the appropriateness of concrete and sequential activities and within dominant school art discourses that have constructed early school art as 'process over product' and that have understood culture as heritage. Suggesting that all novices - adults and children - make meaning from complex cultural values intertwined with the arts in some similar ways, she presents a description of a personal encounter with a Japanese tea garden and ceremony in order to (a) explore notions of art, development, and school art as cultural sensibilities, and (b) illustrate a cyclical process of direct perception, personal-contextual meaning-making, and discursive analysis. She concludes by arguing that encounters with the unfamiliar present unrealized educative possibilities for aesthetic experience in early schooling and by discussing new directions for an aesthetic early childhood education. Broaching the subject of young children's aesthetic capabilities is a delicate matter, partly due to deeply rooted developmental discourses that have constructed children as concrete and sequential learners and school discourses that have constructed school art with an emphasis either on the process of making artworks or on art content as canonical heritage. Although a strand of powerful arts advocacy arguments has positioned the arts as central to schooling in terms of their educative potential in the humanities (e.g. Broudy, 1972) and multicultural education (e.g. Chalmers, 2002), less is understood about what this means in early schooling. Still, the persistence of the notion that young children should have 'exposure' to the unfamiliar - evident in traditions that typify early schooling such as field trips to museums and cultural centres and the celebration of cultural 'heroes and holidays' - reflects an intuitive sense that these experiences are of value. Perhaps this is because, as Greene (2000) asserted, 'With aesthetic experiences a possibility in school, education will be less likely merely to transmit dominant (usually middle class and sometimes usually patriotic) traditions' (p. 277). This claim aligns aesthetic response with a transformative multicultural education agenda. Yet in framing these kinds of artistic encounters, educators may actually construct differences that situate diverse cultures as 'other'. Despite strong critique, such 'tourist approaches' persist (Ramsey, 2004), often reducing the child's place in the world to a Disney ride through caricatures of the exotic. This embodiment of aesthetic education as exposure or enrichment keeps it on the periphery of the educational landscape. More needs to be understood about encountering the unfamiliar. I argue that the powerful educative value of such encounters is not in their potential to provide ways of knowing the unfamiliar (too easily situated as 'other'), but rather is in their potential to provoke a heightened awareness of what is closest.