Have you signed up for the Early Childhood Art Education Interest Group?
If you are an artist, early childhood art educator, elementary school teacher(from Kindergarten to grade 3), and emerging or established scholar who provides and is passionate about art curricula for young children, please come and join us.
After you sign up for the form, Mitsy will send you a follow-up message closer to the end of February.Hello CSEA/SCÉA Community,
My name is Mitsy Chung. I am the Director of Social Media at CSEA/SCÉA and a PhD candidate at the University of Western Ontario. With over two decades of experience as an early childhood educator, I am passionate about advocating for young children’s art—both through making art with children and through my undergraduate and graduate research. As an early childhood art educator and researcher, I hope to create a community for and with educators, practitioners, and artists working with young children (from birth to grade 3) within the Canadian context.
The art of young children younger than preschool age has yet to be recognized as art in formal visual arts education settings in Canada. This may be because early childhood visual arts are typically associated with educator-directed crafts, production-oriented activities, or free play. In such contexts, educators often disengage from children’s artistic processes. As such, young children’s art is frequently dismissed as meaningless scribbles and messy rather than recognized as art (McClure et al., 2017).
What truly matters in early childhood visual arts education is embracing young children’s wonder and imagination, trusting their capabilities, and respecting alternative ways of being and making art (Chung, 2021). A material-rich environment can further empower young children to express and explore their own thinking. Moreover, pedagogical spaces where educators, children, families, communities and materials come together to meet, attend, dialogue, and create collaboratively can support young children’s artistic engagements (McClure et al., 2017). Such engagement can form the foundation of a meaningful early childhood art education curriculum.
If you are an artist, early childhood (art) educator, elementary school art teacher (from kindergarten to grade 3), and emerging or established scholar who teaches, provides and is passionate about art curricula for young children and are seeking a like-minded community, I invite you to join this emerging Early Childhood Art Education Interest Group. By joining this group, I hope we will find meaningful connections and opportunities to exchange strategies with each other. Together, we can cultivate a space that celebrates the depth and creativity of young children’s art while sharing practices that inspire and support one another.
To get involved, please submit a response to this form. Once we gather names, we will contact you with details about our first online meeting.
I look forward to connecting and helping grow this community with you!
Reference
Chung, K.D. (2021). Early childhood educators’ dialogical engagement in an artmaking space. University of British Columbia. Retrieved from open.library.ubc.ca/collections/ubctheses/24/items/1.0396925
McClure, M., Tarr, P., Thompson, C. M., & Eckhoff, A. (2017). Defining quality in visual art education for young children: Building on the position statement of the early childhood art educators. Arts Education Policy Review, 118(3), 154-163.
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