As a visual arts educator in teacher education, the author is aware of the complexity of assessing art at the primary level. Most authorities recommend a formative style of assessment for art, but how can this work in practice in the primary classroom? This paper focuses on the perspectives and experiences of the child. It defines the…

The self-portrait is a reflection of the personality in a visual, physical sense, as a concrete form, a summary of the external characteristics of the artist, but also in a psychological sense, when the self-portrait becomes a mediator of communication with the self, a medium of self-investigation. In this way, the self-portrait exists as a means…

Drawing is one of children's modes of communication which has recently excited academic inquiry in non-Western cultures. It is the means through which children express their fears, desires, anxieties and conception of phenomena. This study investigated drawings by four- to ten-year-old Botswana children in response to the human figure as an…

The COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing stay-at-home orders have shifted family lives worldwide. Government regulations about social distancing and isolation have resulted in parents/carers and children spending most of their time together in private spaces. During the northern hemisphere spring 2020 semester, most childcare and school systems closed…

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…

The present study reports findings on pre-service teachers' thinking during planning and implementing play-based art activities. "Thinking" (in the present study) is informed by discourses emphasising art teaching and learning in relation to play and theoretical assumptions conceptualising planning as "practice of knowing."…

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…

In order to co-construct a better understanding of the nature of children's art experiences at home and in educational settings, I interacted with four young children who photographed and discussed their art experiences over the course of one year. As a result of these research processes, and considering John Dewey's (1934/2005) "Art as…

This report outlines the cognitive accomplishments of young children involved in graphic dialogue with adults. A token of collaborative drawing is examined exhibiting the degree to which adult informed tutoring enabled children in their drawing development, enhanced their motivation and ability in narration and resulted in drawings meaningful to…

The present research focuses on modernising the approach to learning and teaching the visual arts in teaching practice, as well as examining the performance of an interactive approach to learning and teaching in visual arts classes with the use of a combination of general and specific (visual arts) teaching methods. The study uses quantitative…

Despite the numerous benefits art has for children, research suggests that there is a lull in the development of expression in children's drawings during the primary school years and that many children give up on art between the ages of 10 and 12. Research investigating this phenomenon has taken an educational focus and aimed to identify potential…

"Images & Identity" was a two-year curriculum development project in which citizenship and art educators in the Czech Republic, England, Ireland, Germany, Malta and Portugal collaborated on the production of teacher education materials. The article begins with a critical analysis of educational policy for European citizenship and of…

This article considers how primary teachers can learn from the practice of artists in their own teaching of art. Fundamental to artistic practice is the notion of practising with various materials and tools. In the article I look at some children's images, as well as scrutinising some statements made by the painter Francis Bacon. The practices of…

The arguments for, and justification of, the value of teaching art in school have been made previously, but contextually these are often situated in Western affluence. This article explores the issues with a strikingly contrasted setting. The rural school in the study is approximately 30 minutes' drive from the nearest town, and the pupils are…

This article reflects on the significance of a series of encounters with a baby doll in an early years' classroom during an artist residency. The article takes an event when a small group of children encounter a baby doll as its starting point. By connecting this shared lived moment with Deleuze and Guattari's idea of machinic production and…