Defining quality in visual art education for young children: Building on the position statement of the Early Childhood Art Educators

ABSTRACT

This article reflects the collective voices of four early childhood visual arts educators, each of whom is a member of the Early Childhood Art Educators (ECAE) Issues Group of the National Arts Educators Association. The authors frame the article around the ECAE position statement, Art: Essential for Early Learning (2016), which focuses on the central role of art interactions among young children, educators, environments, and materials. The authors describe eight principles that underlie the statement from philosophical viewpoints, and provide practical examples of the principles in action. Amid a varied policy landscape for visual art in early childhood, the authors assert that children need organized, materials-rich environments that invite discovery, interaction, sensory and kinesthetic exploration, wonder, inquiry, and imagination in relationship with responsive educators who value young children's diverse abilities, interests, questions, ideas, and cultural experiences. The authors explore issues and possibilities resulting when educators work to bring visual arts fully and dynamically into the lives of young children in diverse education and care spaces. In closing, the authors explore the realities of visual arts policies in the early childhood education and art education fields while emphasizing the critical need for supportive pedagogical practices in all early childhood classrooms.

KEYWORDS:

• Agency and early childhood
• art education and early childhood
• art materials and young children
• pedagogy of listening
• policy and early childhood visual art

Note

Notes

1. Viktor Lowenfeld (1903–1960), Professor Emeritus of Art Education at Penn State University, is widely considered to be one of the most influential scholars of young people's art in the twentieth century. In Creative and Mental Growth (1949) Lowenfeld outlined not only an age- and stage-based theory of children's art but also an expectation for the kinds of art that children make thematically—especially a preference for scenes that depict daily or natural life.