This post looks at Daiga Grantina’s installation ‘Toll,’ to consider how the sculpture could be used to design a children’s material-play environment. I am still recovering from the awesomeness of…
“It is so important to make every day. The discovery comes in the making.” Sheila Hicks Sheila Hicks is an American textile artist whose colourful, soft sculptures bring together material traditions from…
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…
‘We play because we are human, and we need to understand what makes us human, not in an evolutionary or cognitive way but in a humanistic way. Play is the…
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…
I was fortunate enough to recently spend a month in California, mainly in and around San Francisco. During this time I visited a handful of children’s learning spaces and met…
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…
In this post I explore the question of 'what is a children's creative learning environment in an art museums?' I use my understandings of this question to consider how these interconnect and transform through the meanings of other terms such as 'space' and 'relational learning.'
