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This field report tells the story of a critical pedagogy of place educational program that was implemented with primary school children in Athens, Greece, during a period of economic, political, and social crisis. This program, entitled "Creating the Environment Where I Would Like to Live," was designed to develop children's critical thought and imagination and to empower their self-confidence and action-competence regarding their ideas for the city. The program focused on transforming children's low self-esteem and passiveness into a powerful creative process of critical reflection, collaboration, and action. Art was the tool that was used in the empowering pedagogical process. The program treated children as artists and urban designers with the ability to analyze their environment, synthesize their thoughts, and propose new ideas for the improvement of the city. The children who participated in the program asked for political change, solidarity, and a stronger connection with nature in the city. They were also involved in the improvement of their school environment. The research explores the dynamic role of art in a critical pedagogy of place and the benefits that it can confer to children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The work we describe here concerns children's developing appreciation for photographs as expressive, aesthetic images, and their developing skills at manipulating qualities of photographs for specific effects. We describe a sample of empirical work relevant to two broad arguments. The first concerns normative processes of development. The argument is that developmental processes in general contribute to aesthetic development in particular, and, simultaneously, that aesthetic development in particular contributes to development in general. The second concerns individuating processes of aesthetic development. The argument is that even as there are developmental phenomena that have fairly universal effects in supporting children's aesthetic development, there are also factors tied to child qualities and experiences that result in significant individual differences in aesthetic outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the action, representation and transformation of children's art as symbolic language. It examines the social underpinnings that lie beneath Reggio Emilia's "hundred languages of children." The important role played by artistic activity in children's lives and in exploring and expressing their experiences in the world are discussed. The article also discusses an interpretation of children's art that suggest alternative images of teaching-learning processes related to art education.

The article focuses on child art, the visual culture of childhood, and some collaborative images between children and adults. It talks about the historical, philosophical and pedagogical aspects relating to this visual culture. Two distinct types of childhood visual culture, which includes the self-initiated story-laden drawings for enjoyment and images that are initiated and directed by adults, are discussed. The article also offers information on school art that is questionable child art and adult visual cultural production.

This article reports on findings from a research project designed to explore ways in which creativity can be fostered through interactions between selected children, particular environments, materials, techniques and key adults. The Young Designers on Location (YDoL) project was funded by the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA), and brought together selected groups of 11 year-olds with‘design-related professionals’ (DRPs) to work together intensively for a week in two locations (Bath Spa University College and Ironbridge Gorge Museum, Shropshire) then subsequently in participants' schools. The findings from case studies of selected individuals within the Bath location include key messages about the quality of environment and relationships in unlocking children's creativity. The study has exemplified aspects of Harrington's model of a‘creative ecosystem’ [1]. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children's drawings are researched and theorized for many reasons and through a variety of methods. The results present a variety of ways in which children's drawing is understood. This paper challenges the time-honored order of things in producing knowledge of children's drawing by rejecting the belief that a theory of children's drawing must be extrapolated from a theory of drawings made by children. It argues that conditions apply to thinking about children's drawing as an entity in its own right that cannot be satisfied through explaining or understanding the drawings it produces and that the only satisfactory way to accommodate all the conditions pertinent to knowing children's drawing is to accept that it exists as social practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This drawing study examines the relationship between children's preferences for subject content, their use of formal characteristics, and their gender. Elementary students were read a narrative designed to highlight stereotypical gender interests and attitudes. They were then asked to create a titled illustration based on an episode of the story. Two hundred and fifty drawings were scored with reference to 20 conceptual content domains related to gender-based subject preferences and 22 formal characteristics of art. Findings revealed gendered art preferences influence the formation of gendered styles in children's drawing. Female drawings incorporated more humanistic and social content than male drawings, and feminine content domains employed greater variety of color, harmonious color, organic qualities of shape, and more detailed features. Male drawings communicated aggression and adventure in their content, and masculine content domains employed more expressive and symptomatic lines and fewer colors. Recommendations are made to guard against gender stereotyping in the practice of art education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to provide a broad historical framework in which to examine the emergence of interest in child art, and the evolution of attitudes toward it through the early twentieth century. The evolution of attitudes toward children that allowed childhood itself to become an object of serious study in the nineteenth century, and the revolution in aesthetic standards that allowed child art to be taken seriously as an aesthetic expression, are both examined. Examples from the writings of nineteenth century students of child art, and statements from early twentieth century avant-garde artists who studied the art of children are used to explore and illustrate these new attitudes, Values and attitudes implicit in current controversies in art education are examined briefly in light of the above historical background. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the nature of creative activity as applied to children's art. A concept of creative activity is required in children's art that is expressed in terms of the child. In creating pictures, children paint what they like or wish to express and then select the symbols which will most faithfully transmit their expression. A child artist does not deal with expressing the future other than the immediate tangible one, and his source of references for creative activity are his past and his immediate present.