Children’s play with materials is important as it allows them to think and learn in different ways. As a child’s creativity is always limited by what they do and do…
This post looks at Serpentine Galleries' 'Play as Radical Practice' toolkit, a creative resource produced between the Gallery's learning team, artist Albert Potrony and the Portman Early Childhood Centre (UK).
Documenting children’s learning is a brilliant way to make creative and critical thinking processes visible. Documenting is also a great way to debate the assumptions, ethics and politics that shape education…
In 1972 Simon Nicholson, the son of artists Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, presented the idea that young children’s cultural participation comes from the presence of open-ended ‘loose part’ materials that can be…
Artworks can support children in imagining the world differently. I draw upon the work of Maxine Greene and John Dewey to explore the proposition that children’s learning through artworks has the potential…
This post discusses the symposium presentation ‘Material play: children’s learning with new, found and recycled ‘stuff’ given by Professor Pat Thomson, Nina Odegard and Louisa Penfold at the Australian Association for Research…
In this post I consider the gap between academics/non-academics in children's art education. A contestable claim but something I believe is worthy of further discussion. I reflect upon my experience of moving from working as a full-time learning curator in an art museum to full-time PhD researcher and what I have learnt along the way.
This post explores the work of the late Italian artist, Bruno Munari (1907-1998). Munari was a self-proclaimed 'inventor artist writer designer architect illustrator player-with-children' (The Independent, 1998) whose creative practice intertwined with the education philosophies of Jean Piaget and Maria Montessori.
In 1968 the Moderna Museet, Stockholm and artist Palle Nielsen created The Model – a social experiment involving 20,000 children, an indoor playground and no rules. The Model positioned children’s play as…
