The Configuration of Meaning: Learner-Centered Art Education Revisited

Abstract

This paper offers a picture of children's minds engaged in the arts as makers and appraisers, by centering them within their lived experiences of self, world and relationship. Young minds, it argues, are inextricable mixtures of personal and cultural dimensions; engagements in the arts offer possibilities for making a complex world meaningful. In their aesthetic presence and the demands they make upon imagination, visual images open the mind to new corners of reality. Placing children at the center of their own lived experiences, it is argued, presupposes that these experiences are, themselves, culturally formed.