“OUT OF THE LINES”: HAUNTINGS, POLITICS, AND AESTHETICS IN CHILDREN’S ART
Open Access
- Author:
- Park, Hayon
- Graduate Program:
- Art Education
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- June 10, 2019
- Committee Members:
- Christopher M Schulte, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Christopher M Schulte, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Christine M Thompson, Committee Member
Charles R Garoian, Committee Member
Allison Sterling Henward, Outside Member - Keywords:
- Chrildren's Art
Art Education
Early Childhood Art Education
Rancière
Derrida
Haunting
Politics
Aesthetics
Aesthetico-ethnography
Dissensus
Ignorance
Equality - Abstract:
- This dissertation research takes a post-structural, reconceptualist approach to the study of art education to examine children’s art practices that dissociate from socially constructed accounts of children’s art and lives, especially those which seek to compartmentalize the child, children, and children’s art making. The theoretical orientation of this study is grounded in the work of French philosopher Jacques Rancière—namely, the distribution of the sensible, ignorance, politics, and aesthetics—among others, to explore what kinds of knowledge and values related to children’s art gets to be visible or invisible, sayable or unsayable, audible or inaudible, legible or illegible, to the extent that such existing frameworks police children’s everyday practices. These partitions are, in fact, perceivable through children’s demonstration of what they assume adults expect of their works and behavior, which exist as haunting ghosts, continuously visiting and revisiting the social lives of children thus reminding us of what is expected from and assigned to their bodies. In this regard, one of the main questions my dissertation raises is: How do adults understand children’s art making, and in what ways have these understandings partitioned (or not) children and their art making experiences? Based on an ethnographic case study in the arts-integrated kindergarten classroom of a university-affiliated childcare center, I bring in my observation of how children also display their capability to disagree with and overturn the existing rules and roles imposed on them by constituting a political scene, despite the struggle that might follow. The methodological approach, too, draws from a Rancièrian concept of aesthetics that demands the researcher disrupt her preconceived notions about the subject and thus constitute effects of equality with the informants by the presumption and practice of equality. This method required the adult researcher to consider her positionality and membership at the site, as well as to take seriously a relational ethics toward researching with children. As such, this dissertation centers on the following questions on children’s politics and aesthetics: In what ways do children make themselves visible and legible as social actors that disagrees with adults’ expectations? And, how do they negotiate the circumstances that surround their art making? Moreover, and most importantly, what role (if any) does art making have in the political process? However, rather than having answers set forth, my dissertation aims to invoke (re)considerations toward new and different approaches to the works and theories of early childhood art education: to reconceptualize habitual theories and practices, hierarchical adult-child relationships, and ghostly assumptions of rules and roles in early childhood art education; to think and do art with children through different perspectives and pedagogical practices, seeing young artists as political and social agents; and to embrace relational ethics in researching with young children.