ART AND YOUNG CHILDREN

Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1999

COLLOQUIUM

Art and Young Children:

doing it properly

FELICITY McARDLE
Queensland University of Technology, Kelvin Grove, Australia

ABSTRACT This short article discusses the ways in which teachers and artists
may work with young children, particularly in the visual arts. It considers how
their views of the child and art shape, and are shaped by, the various competing
texts available to them.

My own ‘uneasy’ reading (Luke & Gore, 1992) of an exhibition of paintings

by very young children in China prompted a troubling of the discourses
which define young children, and how to teach art properly. I looked at a
painting which showed a surprising degree of technical skill and artistry, and
the label informed me that it was by a four-year-old child. My previously
unquestioned beliefs about early childhood, developmental expectations and
benchmarks, creativity and self-expression, were shaken. This
uncomfortable moment raised for me the question of what is the proper way
to teach art. My current reading of the arts in early childhood left me unable
to understand or articulate the variations in Chinese and Australian
children’s achievements, capabilities and desires, the contradictions within
and across cultures. ‘Who’s got it right? Who is doing it properly?’
It was only a couple of years ago that I encountered the teacher who
made a lasting impression on me. I was a student in his life-drawing classes,
in a large warehouse studio, down by the river, in a seedy part of town. The
romance of the setting contributed partly to the lasting impression, but
mostly it was the teacher and his methods. As we drew the numerous poses
of the model, he would prowl around amongst the easels, stopping
occasionally to make loud, generally derogatory remarks about individual’s
work, for the entertainment of all present. All students including me,
dreaded his approach. I feared becoming the momentary sport of this terrible
tyrant … he once queried a little old lady’s ability to drive to the classes

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since she was ‘obviously blind’! He walked all over another student’s
drawings that she had been placing carefully on the floor beside her as she
completed them. And he also once threw a student’s work out the third
storey window!
Why did I, like the others, keep returning to his classes, and indeed
paying money for the experience? Because in his presence I felt I learned a
lot about art. When he did actually turn his glare on you and your drawing,
he could add a single line, or alter a shape ever so subtly on your page, and
then leave you to see your drawing in a completely new and improved light.
You learned from him. Your drawing skills improved. And you learned to
see differently. The fact that he would arrive at the class literally falling out
of a taxi sometimes ‘after a very long lunch’, and pace around the studio
pontificating about anything and everything, was of course not everyone’s
‘cup of tea’, but many students returned, some for years.

What Makes a Proper Art Teacher?

In the context of mainstream schooling, with its mainstream humanistic
ethos, ‘proper teachers’ do not behave this way. In other times, when the
master painters of the classical Academy took in apprentices, such an
approach was allowed, perhaps spoken of as ‘artistic temperament’. In
contemporary times however, it would seem a callous disregard for the
self-esteem of students. ‘Proper teachers’ are loving and nurturing. They
might be passionate, but not in a chaotic and unpredictable way which would
disturb their students. All should be calm and logical. In any case, a good art
teacher does not touch the students’ work! Hands off!
To challenge universalising claims of truth about what makes a good
teacher, new ways of reading pedagogical practice must be brought to the
conversation, such as McWilliam’s (1999) departure from conventional texts
about the nature of teaching and the nature of pleasure, and Walkerdine’s
(1992) rejection of the ‘impossible fiction’ of the progressive teacher. Such
accounts view claims of what is proper in teaching as discursive
construction, allowing certain positions as acceptable, and others as
un-speakable. My art teacher, for instance, was considered improper by
many. He was described variously as: crazy; an awful teacher; a dinosaur;
out of line; dangerous; and even a disgrace. Indeed, he was dismissed from a
number of education institutions over his professional years. His methods
and ideas did not fit with the current discursive construction of a proper art
teacher.
Of course, the question of what makes a good student also arises in this
consideration. In this context my own position as a student again was
troubled. The idea of being a freely-choosing autonomous individual,
desiring the opportunity for self-expression and creativity, has irresistible
appeal. It would seem obvious that the life-drawing teacher held no such
view of his students as freely choosing individuals, and had little or no time
for that pedagogy which is tied to an ethic about ‘raising self-esteem’. The
progressive and liberal humanist teacher views children as autonomous

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individuals, developing to their potential, either through nature or nurture.
Simultaneously, psychology stresses the importance of self-esteem and
individual self-expression. While sociology draws attention to the child’s
interactions and cultural environment. There is no single discourse here.
Discourses intersect, compete and contradict, and their organisation and
hierarchy constitute the ‘rules’, the orthodoxy of what makes a proper
teacher. Discursive constructions of the student/child can be viewed as part
of the regime of truth, what is accepted and functions as true in each society
(Foucault, 1980). Teachers shape and are shaped by the texts which
prescribe how they work within this discursively organised field.
In addition, the discursive construction of art situates the possibilities
for those who aim to teach it to others. Historically, art can be considered as
a contested site across academic and non-academic contexts. Gablik (1991)
argues for the ‘re-enchantment of art’. Sontag (1990) appeals for greater
objectivity in art scholarship. Hughes (1991) is nothing if not critical. And
Giles Auty (Weekend Australian, 1999) laments the fact that art students are
no longer taught how to draw. Contradiction is not surprising, but rather, can
be the object of analysis.
What a teacher says to a young child who is painting is influenced by
the teacher’s view of the child, and more broadly, children, and how they
conceptualise art (education). This in turn is constituted from available texts
for ‘thinking’ childhood. In educational literature, the definition of
childhood, from the time of Froebel (1782-1852) through to Montessori
(1870-1952) was considered as universal, and unproblematic. It was defined
according to age and embodied physiological signs. Ideas of freedom, and
the inherent goodness in the pure and natural child have their groundings in
these discourses (Popkewitz & Brennan, 1998). More recently, cultural
considerations have been included to provide a fuller picture of children, or
further explain the differences observed in children (Rogoff, 1990;
Bronfenbrenner, 1993). An alternative critical position is that the child and
childhood are intrinsically problematic notions (Stainton Rogers & Stainton
Rogers, 1992), that there are culturally dominant ways of being a child, and
that these are not a natural, univeral occurrence. ‘Being a child’ has been
produced as a restricted competence (Tyler, 1993).
My current research involves conversations with a number of teachers,
artists, and parents, who were all invited to comment on one of the paintings
from the Chinese children’s exhibition, and a painting by a 4-year-old child
in a preschool in Australia. I then filmed a preschool teacher, a primary
school teacher, and an artist, all recognised by their peers as exemplary
practitioners, as they worked with young children, engaged in artistic
activity. A second round of conversations will record the groups’ reactions
to these films. The purpose is not to determine the proper way to teach art
with young children. All such prescriptive texts have their dangers. My
interest is in mapping and reporting what is happening now – identifying the
competing and conflicting discourses in the texts which shape and are
shaped by teachers’ work, and how this works in teaching art with young
children. If we understand what is possible, what discourses are available,

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what is the regime of truth, then we can see what are the limiting situations,
and what it might mean to teach art differently but effectively.

Correspondence
Felicity McArdle, Centre for Applied Studies in Early Childhood,
Queensland University of Technology, Victoria Park Road, Kelvin Grove,
Queensland 4059, Australia (f.mcardle@qut.edu.au).

Citations
References to this article should take the form: McArdle, F. (1999) Art and
young people: doing it properly, Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood,
1(1), pp. 102-105, www.triangle.co.uk/ciec

References
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