four year olds

classroom and teacher philoshopy

I believe in skill development in all areas.
I believe in a room that is child-oriented.
I believe in the need for structure which still allows room for child participation.
I emphasize the development of independence by setting expectations for responsibility and accountability.
I believe that learning can and should be a motivating and stimulating experience.

--
ainda em torno do ensino da arte, ou menos pomposamente, ainda à procura de porquês e de comos ou de como uma professora disse o que eu gostei de ouvir. para além do produzir e do tal desenvolver da criatividade, procuro ainda o ver. o ver, tão importante como o fazer. ["O modelo DBAE tem tido uma notável influência em grande parte dos Estados Unidos. Tem feito evoluir o ensino das Artes de uma forma de auto-expressão, ao fazer arte, para uma forma de estudar as obras de arte, de aprender História da Arte, Crítica de Arte e Filoso-fia da Arte" Michael Parsons]

"For more than a century, the practices of art education have been based on the notion that children’s creations have artistic/aesthetic claims and can therefore justifiably be described as child art. Although children are creative in ways different from those of adults, they are said to enjoy inherent artistic potential, which parallels that of the most celebrated modern artists, mainly of Western tradition.

The basic assumptions of child art are that the child is a natural artist who needs only encouragement and not formal instruction. Since children’s art comes from individual and innate sources, adult influence is understood as disrupting the natural flowering of their artistic creative expression. Art is a way for children to express feelings about themselves and their worlds disregarding realistic considerations of depiction."

(...) e um pouco fora do contexto, mas também daqui:

"Some like Gabrielle Munter, Kandinsky’s companion, transferred the child’s model unchanged to their canvas. For example, she made exact copies of children’s houses using dark outlines, bold colors and flattened forms. On the other hand, for Kandinsky child art had a spiritual meaning in that the child ignores external reality and expresses an internal state of mind. He therefore found inspiration not in specific features, but in the general simplification of form and composition, the deliberate disregarding of scale and space, the lack of gravity and the discontinuities of viewpoint.

In his turn, Klee adopted specific features of children’s drawings, such as whirls and scribbles, tadpoles, huge heads and stick figures. We could argue that in the case of Klee and Kandinsky the elements borrowed should not be understood as copies of children’s drawings. They were an effort of the artists to reenter the mental state of their younger self and draw on its mood for their adult creations. Perhaps using Freud’s terminology one could talk of a controlled regression to recapture the intensity of the child’s perceptions by an artist who was otherwise an expert in his field.

The influences of child art were most pronounced on the members of the two organizations of expressionist artists, the "The Bridge" and "Blue Rider" in Germany. (In the "Blue Rider" journal, children’s drawings figured among works of Van Gogh, Gauguin and Medieval artists). The artists of these two groups favored the flatness of pictorial space, simplification and distortion of forms and the use of primary contrasting colors.

A similar concern with stylistic features of child art we find in Henri Matisse and the "Fauves" who concentrated on the primitive and child-like style: unmodeled forms, flat contours and undifferentiated use of color.

Pablo Picasso, too, was immensely interested in child art. Childlike images appear relatively early in his sketchbooks and continue to play an important role in the sketches for paintings and sculptures made in his later years. Here we refer to the childlike sketches for his horse in his famous painting of Guernica, the two-eyed profiles in cubistic portraits etc. Incidentally, the cubists introduced the notion of "conceptual realism", i.e. perception of space from more than one vantage points at a time, which bears interesting similarities with Lucquet’s notion of "intellectual realism" in children’s work examined earlier.

Artists in the years following WWII continued to be influenced more or less consciously, by child art. For example, Jean Dubuffet in France, guided by the surrealistic fascination with the unconscious, was inspired by the primitive, psychic force of children’s work. His images are graffiti-like and crude, sometime verging to the violent.

In the States, the abstract expressionists Mark Rothko, Arshile Gorky and Jackson Pollock, found resort in yet another type of regression to the infantile. With their emphasis on gesture and touch they found inspiration in the preverbal kinesthetic stage of child development."

Para continuar a ler: aqui e aqui. E aqui (em .pdf).
A minha chave, por enquanto: "pleasant sensory experiences, which is the beginning of aesthetic development." Actually, o desenho é de há um ano atrás.