Every December I wander through the children’s section of my local department store perusing the latest toys and gadgets. While I am not a mother myself, I get great joy…
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…
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…
This post reports on the 'Space, materials, the body: Researching young children's experiences in museum' symposium held at Manchester Metropolitan University on May 23, 2017.
This post features a summary and reflection on the theory, principles and practices of the Reggio Emilia process of pedagogical documentation. The possibilities and challenges of what this reflective methodology holds…
This is a repost from the Centre for Research in Arts, Creativity and Literacies (CRACL) blog. The original post was written by Pat Thomson, Professor of Education within the School of Education,…
