Learning with Children, Trees, and Art: For a Compositionist Visual Art-Based Research

In this article, I discuss the concept of compositionism as an onto-epistemology of being and knowing that questions human exceptionalism. Compositionism suggests that humans exist in interdependence with complex bio-social systems that need to be assembled together with an ethics of response-ability toward threatened places and beings. I propose compositionism as a concept to inform the field of art education. I do this by devising correspondences between compositionist theory, childhood studies, and visual art-based research. I direct the implications of this discussion into selected passages of data from a study developed in collaboration with two classes of 5th-graders attending public school in a large city from the American Midwest. In this study, children used visual art-based methods, including drawing, video, print, and narrative to develop attentiveness and intimacy with a group of trees and tall grasses on the school block.