Art at the Heart
of Early Learning

Amid a growing movement of early childhood educators seeking a shift away from overly structured learning experiences across all areas of curriculum, the Early Childhood Art Education Issues Group (ECAE) created a position paper on what constitutes quality visual arts education for young children.

Art: Essential for Early Learning describes eight principles that support the development of art programming and visual arts practice for young children. These principles cover children’s development and expression in visual art, and how to support specific early childhood visual art intentions.

Children’s  development and expression in visual art

Principle 1: A child needs an organised, materials-rich environment that invites discovery, interaction, sensory and kinesthetic exploration, wonder, inquiry, and imagination

Art experiences take place in many different physical settings. In some instances, the spaces and materials are dismantled and put away until the next session. Given these diverse conditions and the understanding that children learn through direct experiences with materials and can be supported to develop skills through the use of materials, educators should consider the following in creating the physical environment for art experiences:

• The aesthetic qualities of space and materials encompass the classroom as a whole and is not specific to the art area or room.
• An intentionally created, aesthetically pleasing environment encourages exploration and discovery of materials and ideas in ways that support inquiry and learning.
• Aesthetic organisation, where materials are organised so their qualities are apparent and accessible, help children to value these materials.
• Intentional inclusion of light can increase the visibility of materials and complex possibilities of an art activity.

Principle 2: A child needs access to a wide variety of art media that support two- and three-dimensional expression

In early childhood art, sensory exploration and play are important means by which young children build vocabulary, both verbal and sensory, and master materials that would later be used to express ideas. When guiding the artistic development of young children who have yet to develop the capacity to set an intention and follow it through, educators should consider the following:

• Variety and assortment of materials support children in discovering sensations and developing perceptual awareness through their actions on these materials.
• The fun of working with materials contribute to the appeal of artmaking.
• Artmaking experiences allow children to construct knowledge about the world and also develop rich sensory vocabularies to describe their impressions.
• A depth of experience with materials enables children to make the artistic decisions needed to communicate what they know and wonder about.

Principle 3: A child needs plenty of unhurried time, both structured and unstructured, to explore the sensory/kinesthetic properties of materials and to develop skills and concepts in re-presenting his or her experiences

Children build aptitude with art media through experience, long and leisurely experimentation, and repeated encounters with responsive materials. Therefore, care must be taken in selecting materials that offer substantial sensory, aesthetic, and conceptual possibilities. The considerations below apply when planning art explorations for young children:

• Children should be allowed to master processes of using materials, so they can focus on ideas and impressions rather than struggle with control of unfamiliar materials.
• Materials ought to contribute to artmaking, understood as focusing on the construction and communication of meaning, and not just sensory learning.
• Sufficient time allows children to savour their art experiences, build complexity in their representations, develop narrative content, and grow ability with media.
• Children are intellectually prepared for rich and multifaceted investigations, as long as their participation and approach to work shifts over time.

How to support specific early childhood visual art intentions

Principle 4: A child needs a responsive educator who values young children’s diverse abilities, interests, questions, ideas, and cultural experiences, including popular culture

When young children gather, they share a culture of childhood often drawn from their experiences of being children in a world of traditional practices and popular media. This shared culture reflects the interests that preoccupy them and fuels their spoken narratives, eventually becoming inscribed in their increasingly complex art. As such, educators should consider these factors in their response to popular culture in art education:

• Censorship restricts the exploration of contemporary myths and realities that are central to children’s reasons for making art.
• Drawing from popular culture allows children to imagine how they might negotiate challenges and respond to real-life concerns of being a young child.
• Popular culture serves social and personal functions for young children, many of whom draw on individual experience of home, family, friends, and community.
• Revelations from art experiences are opportunities to engage with children in ways that enable them to cope with the realities they face and develop their own perspectives.

Principle 5: A child needs a responsive educator who can support appropriate development of skills, use, and care of materials

A responsive educator engaged in a “pedagogy of listening” is able to fully and intentionally listen to children, moving beyond the usual ways of responding in a normal conversation. This extended listening is especially crucial for educators to be able to carefully and thoughtfully intervene in young children’s artmaking, as the points below illustrate:

• Building on listening allows a responsive educator to support young children’s needs, wants, and wishes as they move in multiple visible, audible, olfactory, and spatial directions.
• By considering every movement significant and valid, a responsive educator can intervene in the artmaking space and scaffold the children’s acquisition of skills.
• Responsiveness to media is also a pedagogy of listening; the discovery and understanding of materials and their properties and potentials, when selecting and providing materials that can suggest or extend meanings for young children.

Principle 6: A child needs a responsive educator who understands and supports the unique ways that young children represent their thoughts, feelings, and perceptions through actual, virtual, and experimental media and processes

Principle 7: A child needs a responsive educator who supports the multiple ways that young children create meaning through conversation, storytelling, sensory-kinesthetic exploration, play, dramatics, song, and artmaking

Principles 6 and 7 are an understanding of individual and small groups of children’s specific intentions with multiple media and modes of knowing, unknowing, creating, and re-creating. In a pedagogical space, understanding specific intentions may happen in multi-modal (e.g., singing while drawing) or discrete ways (e.g., making a photographic series). With the belief that children wish and seek to make meaning in multi-modal ways that connect and reconnect while producing and reproducing children’s worlds, responsive educators should factor in the following:

• Responsiveness is not only the understanding and support of young children’s representations in all the forms it may take, but also being able to provide the media and materials necessary for these expressions.
• Intentionally created learning with thoughtful intervention facilitates and supports multi-modal communication; young children are enabled to explore their interests, respond to their environment, develop and express ideas through shared conversation and collaborative artmaking, and experiment with media and materials to represent how they observe the world.

Principle 8: A child needs a responsive educator who carefully observes, listens to, and reflects upon children’s learning, using multiple forms of documentation and assessment

Documentation is integral to a pedagogy of listening in the art education of young children, as it records experiences from the perspectives of multiple participants, including children, educators, leaders, school partners, and families. Responsive educators should take note of the following points in the pursuit of extended and visible listening:

• Documentation takes multiple narrative forms, including but not limited to visual, aural, and experiential.
• Reviewing documentation from previous experiences allows participants to reflect, expand on, retract, and extend what had developed.
• Documentation encourages reflection and intention that form the foundation upon which the previous principles’ scaffolding is erected.
• It is used as a form of participatory assessment, with young children actively involved in a live and dynamic process of determining what has value.
• Documentation is visible listening; making learning visible is what affords the process of assessment, a collaborative expression of value and meaning.

This article was first published in the online journal of Routledge under the title Arts and Education Policy Review.