Democratic Pedagogy: Making Visible the Complexities of Childhood

• In Event: Pedagogy of the Bereft: Reevaluating Arts-Based Research and Learning in a Deprived Society

Abstract

Objectives:
American children are under attack. Regarded primarily as consumers of goods and services, easily manipulated by gadgets and gimmicks, from digital devices to charter schools. The “competent child” assumed by the best of contemporary progressive education is cynically exploited in calls for the privatization of education, the replacement of teachers with minimally-trained volunteers, and the reduction of education to training. Federal education policy abdicates the commitments of democratic education. This paper responds to the contradictions of the present educational climate, reasserting the essential role of children’s choices and life experiences in curriculum and pedagogy.

Perspective(s):
In response to the bereft pedagogy of the present day, we counter with alternatives that demonstrably enrich learning. Early childhood art education, inspired by the dual possibilities of choice-based models and traditions and the social prospects of project-based learning, educates children for participation in democratic society and civic life. Respecting the complexity of young children’s thought and action, recognizing them as capable creators of forms and meanings, and acknowledging that their present value as children overshadows all considerations about their unpredictable future lives, a child-sensitive pedagogy focuses on the goal that has preoccupied American education since the middle of the previous century: learning how to learn.

Modes of inquiry:
Two qualitative studies are invoked in this paper.

Data sources:
The first study is a year-long study of preschool children drawing in sketchbooks in a Head Start center in urban Chicago, documents the interplay of visual and verbal narratives in children’s image-making through photographs, video, and extensive field notes. The second study demonstrates the expansion of children’s thinking that occurs when the interests demonstrated in their self-initiated drawings become the basis for project work, through negotiation between children and adults. Visual artifacts and recorded conversations are the primary data sources for this study as well. A thematic analysis reveals recurrent issues that preoccupy children in these settings, as the verbal, graphic, and performative complexities of their engagement in art making is illuminated.

Conclusions:
In each of these instances, the practice of art making is experienced by children as a social practice, infused with the substance of their life experience, evolving as they improvise upon momentary assemblage of the official and unofficial curricula, children and teachers, tools and materials and ideas, memory and imagination. When children’s art making is viewed as a Deleuzian assemblage, complexities of thought and action involved in the everyday practice of drawing becomes apparent.

Scholarly significance:
The question addressed is: Under what circumstances is young children’s competence most easily recognized? What pedagogical practices allow children to represent their understanding of the world most clearly, in ways that “make learning visible” to the children and their communities? Through a combination of description and reflection on the pedagogical import of the activities represented, I suggest that the opening of arts experiences to all children is fundamental to the pursuit of a democratic pedagogical practice that admits the complexity of children’s lives into the classroom as an irreplaceable resource for personal and social learning.

Author

• Christine M. Thompson, The Pennsylvania State University - University Park