BUILDING THEORIES: PLAY, MAKING, AND PEDAGOGICAL DOCUMENTATION IN EARLY CHILDHOOD ART EDUCATION
Open Access
- Author:
- McClure, Marissa Ann
- Graduate Program:
- Art Education
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- December 03, 2007
- Committee Members:
- Christine Marme Thompson, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Brent Guy Wilson, Committee Member
Yvonne Madelaine Gaudelius, Committee Member
Sarah K Rich, Committee Member - Keywords:
- art education
early childhood education
pedagogical documentation
art making
play art - Abstract:
- The study is theoretical and narrative—anchored in my own subjectivity and in my experiences as a teacher working with young children in an urban elementary school and in a new early childhood program. My participation in a year-long researcher-teacher collaboration in the studio of a Reggio-inspired school for young children and my observations in Reggio Emilia inform the processes through which I have generated data through pedagogical documentation in each of these contexts. In Chapter One, I interrogate images of children to illustrate how constructions of who children are (and who they could become) produce and sustain educational institutions and relationships. It is my intent to place the image of the rich, historical child in a relationship of positive tension with the eternal child. In Chapter Two, I present pedagogical documentation as a form of ethnographic research through which educators generate, test, and refine theories as they co-construct knowledge with young children. Here, I trace how the small theories that teachers develop through practice can contribute richness and complexity to the larger body of theory in educational research. In Chapter Three, I situate children’s visual productions as cognitive and socio-cultural processes that are socially distributed to investigate how children make meanings through making as individual and group learners. I consider children’s making in various media and use theory from contemporary literacy educators to support a construction of children’s visual productions as making in visual languages. I assert that in their making, children strive for communicative fluency. In Chapter Four, I contribute to current theories of child art in early childhood education by positioning children’s visual productions as making—a social practice that performs social work in multiple social worlds—and by extending the theoretical assumptions about children’s making to include ways in which children make with new media. In the Epilogue, I review the theoretical contributions that I make in the study. Those include the idea of unacceptable children, the portability of the Reggio Emilia approach and site-specific pedagogy, the idea of making, and the process of finding voice in research and writing.