Reading Reflection 4

This week my reflections focus primarily on Eisner. Perhaps because all of this is still so new to me, I really sunk my teeth into How Children Draw and Why, exploring the different stages of child development and how they manifest themselves in student's artwork. For many of you who have a great deal more classroom experience than myself, this may have all seemed a bit elementary, but for me it was a relief to plant my feet on what felt like some solid, grounded basics.

I found particularly interesting the observation an “action pleasure” motive for young children, between ages two and four and it's relationship to adult abstract expressionism. Although it may be observed that expressionist painters attend to formalist qualities and the expression of complex concepts that are not present in the goals of young children, it is obvious that a core part of their process involves stripping away years of layers of social conditioning and self awareness, as well as overcoming the tendency toward representation and illusion that pervades the western artistic paradigm, in order to uncover “the sheer enjoyment of movement with the material and noticing the visual consequences of those movements”(p. 115)  More and more, I am finding myself drawn to the possibilities of working with younger children, which is something I never would have guessed about myself in a million years.  However, I'm very intrigued by the roles of environment, intuition, and rhythm that are so essential to working with this group.

I was struck by Eisner's reference to Jessica Davis's work and her observation of a “U” curve in the aesthetic interest of children over the course of development.

“According to Davis, middle-school aged children's preoccupation with realism and narrative redirect their attention in ways that thwart the brilliance and spontaneity of preschool children's artwork. She believes that the images preschoolers create suggest that they are making aesthetic decisions and are closer in spirit to adult artists than they are to children nine to twelve years of age.....For Davis the bottom of the 'U' represents the low level of aesthetic interest in middle childhood, while preschoolers and adolescents have a keen interest in aesthetic matters.”(p. 120)

Perhaps this dip in aesthetic interest presents a good time for teachers to focus more on a technical mastery of skills and materials.

As children grow, they naturally progress in the direction of more and more literal and representational images and begin to desire the ability to produce convincing renderings of objects and people. I wonder, however, if the degree to which this is true differs in non-western culture where realistic imagery is not, historically, the ultimate goal of its high art. Furthermore, as conceptions of what art is and should be about transform here in the West, will the aims of children follow suit and broaden, or is this progression hard wired?

According to Eisner, it seems the “stages through which works of art are realized” are directed by a mix of outside influences and internal or biological development.

“The argument I intend to develop here is that the ways in which children express themselves in the visual arts depend upon the cognitive abilities they have acquired and that the cognitive abilities they have acquired are related to both their biologically conferred and their learned abilities as these human features interact with the situation in which they work. Human performance in the arts is the offspring of a dynamic medley of interacting features: development, situation, and the cognitive abilities the child has acquired as a result of this interaction. The process of education, whether in the arts or elsewhere, is promoted by teachers as they design the situations in and through which the growth of such abilities is advanced.”(p. 107)