Technologies have become an essential part of the daily life of our children. Consequently, artifacts that imply the early adoption of abstract thinking affect the imagination of children and young people in relation to the world of technology, now much more than they did in the past. With the emerging importance of robots in many aspects of our…

This article explores the potential of the idea of 'research-creation' when working with children making films in the context of a project that explored children's experience of school. The proposition of the article is that rather than see children's work as something to be discussed or extracted from, if it is seen as 'the work' it is…

One afternoon during the early days of the COVID-19 lockdown, as I was retooling my in-person courses for online instruction, I took a break to see how the educators and artists I follow on Instagram were faring. As I scrolled through a variety of posts, I happened upon an image showing a page torn from the 1940 children's book "Lentil"…

This article explores how the notion of a serendipitous curriculum relates to young children's artmaking events in an early childhood center in the Midwest. A new materialist theoretical lens is used that not only considers the agency and action of children, but also enables ALL matter within a relation to act. In doing so, it offers a way to…

Facilitating collaborative creativity among children involves offering material resources that support collaborative and creative interactions. Popular views of tablets, such as the iPad, suggest that they are better suited to solitary game-playing or video-watching than to collaborative open-ended tasks. I explore this further through a social…

Author Howard Gardner offers his reflections on his book, "Artful Scribbles" which he wrote in 1980 and ponders the ways "Artful Scribble" if written today, might resemble or differ from the 1980 model.

Dewey's philosophy of experience has aesthetic experience at its core as he melds artificial dualities between thinking and experiencing [Dewey, J. 1934. "Art as Experience." In "John Dewey the Later Works," 1925-1953, Vol. 10. 1988, edited by J. Boydston, 1-352. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press]. This deeply…

Picasso once famously said "All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up." This visual inquiry is engaged through a community of creative practice in two rural children's centers where the researchers along with 4- and 5-year-old children collaborated to create a large-scale canvas and several smaller…

Invoking Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's configuration of minor literature, the author of this case study theorizes the drawing practice of a young boy (Carter) as a process of becoming-minor. Critical to this theorization is the creation and activation of a semblance between Brent and Marjorie Wilson's (1977) treatment of the…

This article explores the potential of heterotopia as a way to prompt us to think differently about children's art-making. Foucault uses the term to describe a space of difference. As something that is not easily located within a system of representation, a heterotopia is not amenable to interpretation. It is this resistance to interpretation that…

This article takes as its starting point the assertion that the purpose of primary education is to value every child in the moment. The author examines one particular story by a six-year-old girl as an example of what this assertion implies, and of its significance for teaching and learning within the primary school.

In this article, I propose that research which focuses on young children's experiences with the interactivity of new media not only furthers findings about young children's digital lives but also enriches the conclusion that children's engagement with artmaking--in general and in traditional ways--is richly complex, affective, and…

This article explores the dynamics of orphaned children's engagement with art therapy in a group of preadolescent children living in a Russian orphanage. The phenomenon of repetition compulsion (i.e., origins in past traumatic experiences, destructive consequences, and protective psychic function) is discussed with respect to the children's…

This article explores contemporary forms of creative practices and their survival under siege from what Stuart Hall (2011) describes as the neoliberal revolution, in the context of the tightly policed education system in the United Kingdom. The fragility and importance of the democratic struggle is discussed with reference to Chantal Mouffe's work…

In this article, I present a reexamination of the myth of inherent creativity in early childhood to elucidate how still-dominant discourses of optimization such as child development, individualism, expression, creativity, and visual realism exert limiting pressures on understandings of the art and visual culture that children consume and create.…