David Pariser

Normal and unusual aspects of juvenile artistic development in Klee, Lautrec, and Picasso

This article integrates material from the biographies of three world‐class artists and material from current social‐science research on the development of creative individuals. The author examined the juvenile drawings of Klee, Lautrec, and Picasso. In this article he describes the ways in which these childrens drawings are both “unusual”; and ordinary. Reproductions of drawings are included with the text in order to illustrate and support the observations about the development and quality of the three childrens work. The concluding section of this article uses Csiks‐zentmihalys systems approach to giftedness and proposes that more research is needed to examine the drawing development of children from a variety of cultures and backgrounds. Children to be included in such an investigation range from autistic child artists to children from nonwestern cultures in which the visual arts are singled out for support. In developing a broad collection of case studies, such as the ones proposed, the significant ...

Teaching art versus teaching taste: what art teachers can learn from looking at a cross-cultural evaluation of children's art

Abstract In this article we extend our work on the limitations of the Gardner and Winner U-curved artistic development hypothesis [Gardner, Howard, Winner, Ellen, 1982. First intimations of artistry. In: Strauss, S. (Ed.), U-shaped Development. Academic Press, New York, pp. 147–168]. In our previous work we have cast serious doubt on the supposed universal validity of that thesis by showing that non-Western judges do not necessarily assess the aesthetic merits of a given set of drawings in the same way as do the Western judges used in the research allegedly supporting the U-curve hypothesis. While we were able almost perfectly to replicate the characteristic U-curve using Western judges—with drawings made by very young children ranked almost as highly as those of mature artists—Chinese-educated judges assessing the same sample of drawings produced an upward-sloping curve in which the drawings of the youngest children ranked lowest. In this article we begin to explore the reasons behind this apparent inter-cultural difference in aesthetic judgement. On the basis of hints from a recent pilot study as well as from what is known about characteristic differences between Western and Chinese cultural standards, we hypothesize that the difference between the Western and Chinese judges’ evaluations in our earlier study might be due to differences in their appreciation of the degree of graphic skill displayed in the drawings they were asked to assess. Whereas Westerners with an art-education background are likely to be steeped in a Modernist aesthetic which values unspoilt originality above all else and which tends to downgrade technical skill, Chinese culture reputedly values skill and technique as necessary pre-conditions for artistic expression. In order to test this hypothesis we had independent judges score each drawing in the sample according to the relative amount of graphic skill it displayed. We then correlated the skill scores with the aesthetic evaluations of our initial Western and Chinese-educated judges. The results provide moderate support for our hypothesis. The Chinese-educated judges’ assessments are consistently more strongly correlated with level of graphic skill than those of the Western judges. While the Western judges did appear to appreciate skill as a part of the aesthetic value of a drawing, they did so only for the drawings produced by adolescent and adult artists. Their assessment of the work of non-artists did not appear to have anything to do with the skill level shown. The Chinese-educated judges, by contrast, seemed to hold skill in higher esteem than the Western judges and did so across all age/skill groups.

Not under the lamppost : piagetian and neo-piagetian research in the arts. A review and critique

The A.s purpose in this essay are threefold : to identify some shortcomings in a generally fruitful method for the study of artistic development, that is, the cognitive-developmental approach ; to underscore the problematic relationship between childrens art and the childs cognitive functioning ; to expand the link between cognition and artistic representation to include all dimensions of graphic representation which become more differentiated with age and experience

Understanding the (Im)mobilities of Engaging At-Risk Youth Through Art and Mobile Media

Teens in high school who have or are at-risk of dropping out of school confront a number of educational challenges. One of these challenges is the restricted mobility students face in school. Mobile media offers the potential to engage with art curricula inside or outside of the classroom. It also offers new ways of thinking about the role of mobility in learning and improving students’ sense of agency. In this study, we present our research with at-risk youth, who typically associated traditional schooling with a low sense of personal agency and spatial constraints. To judge by their responses (visual and verbal) to our mobile media visual art curriculum, the physical mobility afforded by mobile technology heightened their sense of agency and opened them to the possibility that learning might be a positive experience, and that they might want to be at school.

A Woman of Valor Freidl Dicker-Brandeis, Art Teacher in Theresienstadt Concentration Camp

I n 1945, a holocaust survivornamed Willy Groag brought two suitcasesfull ofdrawings to theJewish Museum in Prague (Cook, 2004).These drawings were theworkof Theresienstadt concentration camp children underthe tutelage ofa remarkableart teacher: Freidl Dicker-Brandeis. She was theirteacher and, once she decided to follow herhusband Pavel to Auschwitz, she packedas manyof thedrawings andpaintings as she could into two suitcases-and hid them. The drawings, paintings and collages area testimony to thechildrens resilience and to the extraordinary courage, dedication, and pedagogical abilityof theirteachers.

Coping with Flying Sandwiches: Where's the Educational Theory?.

Frank McCourt’s Teacher Man illustrates, among many things, one teacher’s perception of the gap between educational theory and practice. A premise of this article is that McCourt’s narrative of his 30 years as a high school English teacher is the record of a gifted reflective practitioner and, as such, has practical and theoretical relevance to prospective art teachers. For McCourt and other educators, the common denominator of teaching has been managing “critical moments” in the classroom. McCourt felt that educational theories were not helpful for navigating such moments. However, he recorded how he engaged his students with intuitive, quirky, and imaginative lessons, and these dramatized moments of reflection and success may be inspirational for anyone thinking of a teaching career. Throughout this article, connections are made to key art educators and educational psychologists, some of whose theories have positively impacted teaching. Given that teaching frequently requires quick responses to, and reflections on, critical moments, McCourt’s vivid narrative provides future teachers a striking and visceral introduction to this aspect of practice.

“This Allowed Us to See What Others Were Thinking”: Curriculum for Collective Learning in Art

Learning in Art rt educators can harness the collective intelligence and creativity of a class by focusing on the knowledge that emerges from the everyday connections and interactions among students (Davis & Sumara, 2006; Rolling, 2013). In this article, we argue for the importance and value of collective learning in the art classroom by presenting a lesson from our mobile media visual art curriculum entitled MonCoin (My Corner in French). MonCoin is a curricular research project that utilizes the mobility of mobile devices and the connectivity of social media to engage youth in their education (Castro, Lalonde, & Pariser, 2016; Lalonde, Castro, & Pariser, 2016; Pariser, Castro, & Lalonde, 2016). A key objective of our curriculum is to amplify the already existing peer learning networks and harness the collective intelligence of the class to expand the space of possibility in creative ideation. As such, our curriculum is not centred only on the teacher nor students, but rather the collective learning that emerges from interactions among students within the conditions established by the teacher. Ehsan Akbari, Juan Carlos Castro, Martin Lalonde, Lina Moreno, and David Pariser “This Allowed Us to See What Others Were Thinking”: Curriculum for Collective Learning in Art