During a workshop, I had the opportunity to view a selection of artwork produced by children within a primary school classroom; ranging from early level, first level and second level.

Early Level/ First Level

When a child is introduced to art in the classroom they begin by drawing exploratory scribbles and mark making. I would argue that this is when a child is at the peak of their creative ability as they are able to produce artwork from their own imagination and allowed at this point to make their own connections with concepts such as colour and shape.

Research from (Matthew’s 1997; 1999) highlights that children as young as under four can show development in their representational abilities and have shown a natural fascination with shape, movement and location of objects. For example, in this painting this child shows a clear understanding of location of objects. They have done so by placing the house on the grass near the bottom of the page and painted the sun at the top of the page to show it is in the sky .

Therefore as a future teacher it is important to encourage children’s continuous development and so what may look to an adult as scribbles – to a child may contain emotions and meaning. Thus it is important that artwork produced by a child should not be interfered with the child must always be able to explain their artwork so that they know their work is valued.

This is a model given to show how you can discuss a child’s artwork with them in a positive and encouraging way:

Second Level 

As a child’s creative development progresses Green and Mitchell (1997) explains that children show a deeper understanding of shape modification as well as placement and size of shapes. Also in this stage children’s artwork becomes more detailed and contains more features. However it is believed that children become more self conscious about their artwork and creative ability; this could be due to the fact that the view within education is that the end result of a child’s development is “visual realism” as stated by Matthews (2003) and Cox (2005). I would agree with this view for after looking at the progression of artwork throughout primary education it became apparent to me that there is a greater expectation for detail and specificity from second level artwork. For many art lessons within schools the outcome for the children is not about trying to stimulate creativity and innovativeness. Instead children are encouraged to produce generic pieces of artwork using the same tools and materials and so art becomes less about creativity and more about conformity. Therefore I feel this would deter children who do not possess specific creative skills from participating in art lessons because they then form the opinion that art is a subject only for the “gifted”.  Now having gained this perspective I now have an understanding of the importance of letting children express their creativeness throughout their entire primary education.

It is said that there are many pre-existing obstacles that remain for teachers, when attempting to implement an expressive arts programme. The Australian Society for Education through Arts, (1995) highlights that one of the most common challenges to successful arts teaching within primary schools is a lack of confidence among teachers. This is integrated with (or resulting from) a feeling or attitude that they themselves are not artistic. This causes implications for teachers when they are planning expressive arts programmes for they may feel they lack the imagination to create unique, yet stimulating art lessons. Therefore they are more likely to become reliant on the ideas of other artists and use them as a visual stimulus. This was demonstrated to me during this art workshop as was shown an example of a child’s imitation of Picasso’s “The Weeping Woman”:

Recalling from the previous week, I have began to consider how the integration of the expressive arts can encourage a child’s development throughout their education. For instance, last week we were asked to listen to pieces of music and describe how that made us feel verbally. However emotions can easily be expressed through visual forms as well. Therefore a lesson plan could include placing children in groups and giving each group a piece of music to listen to, then paint the emotion or feeling it captures and paint it onto a canvas.

References

Cox, S. (2005), ‘Intention and Meaning in Young Children’s Drawing’. in international journal of Art and Design Education, 24(2): 115-25

Green, L. and Mitchell, R. (1997), Art 7-11 Developing Primary Teaching Skills. London: Routledge.

The Australian Society for Education through Arts in The Report by the Senate Environment, Recreation, Communications and the Arts References Committee:  Arts Education (October 1995). Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia.

The Integrated Arts module consists of four main aspects which are art, music, drama and dance. However during our introduction to this module, it became apparent to me that the expressive arts are being treated peripherally in order to favour “core” subjects such as literacy and mathematics. Prior to this module as a future teacher I would’ve also ranked other subjects, like literacy and maths, at the forefront of a child’s learning. Although, after reading E, Eisner (2002), it was highlighted to me that the arts enable children to understand the possibility of a problem having more than one solution and questions having more than one right answer; a skill which may be hard to develop in subjects such as maths. As well as this the arts encourage children to embrace the idea that the world can be seen in multiple perspectives and allows them to grow to become more open minded individuals (E, Eisner, 2002).

Upon our introduction to the musical aspect of our integrated arts module we were asked to listen to several pieces of music. We were then asked to describe in one word how each clip of music made us feel to give us an understanding of how music can affect us emotionally. After completing this exercise we listened to a different piece of music and had to create a story board which followed the flow of the music.

Picture 1

The music is soft and pleasant as our story begins with a beautiful princess walking through a forrest.

Picture 2

The music begins to sound deeper and darker as the princess picks flowers from the darker side of the forrest.

Picture 3 

The music suddenly explodes as the princess is confronted by an evil witch whom the flowers belong to.

Picture 4 

The music speeds up as the princess is chased uphill by the evil witch.

Picture 5 

The music calms again as the evil witch gets stuck in a tree and the princess runs free to find the good witches cottage and ask her for help.

Picture 6

The music erupts again as the evil witch returns to attack the princess and the good witch.

Picture 7 

The music bounces back and fourth as the good witch battles the evil witch to protect the princess.

Picture 8

The music becomes pleasant again as the good witch prevails and turns the evil witch good and they live happily ever after.

After completing this task it proved how easily it is to include music in cross curricular learning with other subjects such as literacy. It also would potentially make it a more enjoyable learning experience for children as it enables them to be creative and use images as well as words to create an imaginary story. Furthermore it also educates children in how the use of different tones can create different moods and emotions. Overall it has become apparent to me that the arts is a vital subject that must be taught in the classroom so that children are able to express themselves as individuals.