Children’s Development
For this input we looked at the development of children’s artwork as they go through Lowenfeld and Brittain’s (1987) artistic development stages. A selection of artwork collected over the last 30 years was brought in and slip into 3 sections; lower, middle and upper school. This allowed us to see that as children go through school their artwork becomes more detailed and legible, but much less of their own work. The children in the upper school take inspiration from artists such as Picasso, Andy Warhol, Van Gogh and many other well known artists. There are four staged that children go through as their art develops:
- Identified scribbling stage (2-4 years)
- Pre-schematic stage (4-7 years)
- Schematic stage (7-9 years)
- Gang stage (9-12 years)
As children go through the stages mentioned above, they lose a lot of the ‘messiness’ that can be associated with creativity. They become more and more conscious of detail and perfection, that is not usually associated with real creativity. This happens because they begin to doubt their abilities and lose confidence in their work. This is because they feel like they are not talented enough because their artwork doesn’t look like those of the famous artists they have studied.
I quite enjoyed looking at the art archive as it gave me a visual representation of the stages that children go through in terms of their art development. I think I am now going to be more inclined to encourage 100% creativity when on placement and now I know that the idea of not knowing the result of an activity is not a bad thing and that I should accept that what happens, happens! Thus, I am not fearing the unknown and I am embracing ambiguity.
The skills developed throughout this input are as follows:
- Reading (in the sense of reading the children’s artwork)
- Categorising
Next steps from this input are to look further into the way in which children’s creativity develops as they get older and hoe you can help them keep their confidence in their artistic ability.
Teaching Creativity
“The human species could not survive, either now or in the years to come, if creativity were to run dry” (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996, p.8). Children become creative because of a number of reasons, these factors can be biological or nurture based. Positive experiences with family, having a supportive emotional environment, a rich cultural heritage, exposure to lots of opportunities and high expectations of the individual by themselves and others, all stimulate creativity in children (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996). This shows that so as to inspire children to be creative, teachers can use the classroom environment to influence them. Being emotionally supportive, providing a range of opportunities and having high expectations of the children will inspire them to be more creative.
I hope to inspire the children in my class to be as creative as possible, using the techniques mentioned above.
References
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1996) Creativity Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. [Module Resource] Available: http://moodle.uws.ac.uk/pluginfile.php/109329/mod_resource/content/1/creativity-by-mihaly-csikszentmihalyi.pdf [Accessed: 17 December 2017].
Lowenfeld, V. and Brittain, L. (1987) Creative and Mental Growth. 8th ed. Upper Saddle River N.J. : Prentice Hall.
