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Wilson, B. (2004). Child art after Modernism: Visual culture and new narratives. In
E. W. Eisner & M. D. Day (Eds.) Handbook of research and policy in art
education (pp. 299 – 328). Reston: National Art Education Association.
The adoption of images from child art may have resulted from artists' desire, in the spirit
of Rousseau, to free themselves from societal norms and academic rules, but in so doing
they merely adopted another set of "rules" or conventional schemata found in the images
of children. There is a simple way to think about the child and artistic creativity. It has to
do with states that I refer to as pre-conventionality, conventionality, and post-
conventionality. Art educators should encourage idiosyncratic behavior, the minor
breaking of artistic rules and conventions, inventive and imaginative combining of
images, and a stretching from the known to the unknown at any phase of a young person's
development. Every visual artifact produced by a young person is a product pervaded by
culture. The very possibility that children might engage in art-like behavior is a cultural
construct, and children's early mark making, modeling, and constructing activities are
frequently initiated by adults and then viewed by and classified by them through cultural
lenses. Feldman (1980) has offered a brilliant theoretical and empirical critique of
developmental stage theory in which he demonstrates that even with Piaget's cognitively
grounded levels of map drawing children perform in several levels simultaneously. In
short, the levels do not exist; nor do stages of artistic development. Moreover, young
peoples' development in the realm of visual culture is nonlinear, nonhierarchical,
multidimensional, and multi-purposeful (Kindler & Darras, 1997).