There are several approaches to the arts in U.S. Schools. First, in the nurture natural approach (see McArdle 2001), arts practice is based on the belief that the child is the centre of the program and that most learning should occur through free, playful, spontaneous, and unstructured experiences. Art is valued because it provides opportunities for the child’s self-expression of

thoughts and feelings, and although it is deemed appropriate for adults to observe children’s processes of expression and to gently discuss a child’s at work in order to grasp a deeper understanding and appreciation of the child, to teach the child in the arts would be seen in appropriate, as it could potentially stifle his or her creativity and sense of self, the teacher’s role in one of simply providing developmentally appropriate materials and then essentially standing back and letting children’s creativity unfold. However, the program can have a tendency to become laissez-faire, and anything that the child creates in considered beautiful, charming, spontaneous, and unique. The negative aspect of this is that children do not learn how to discern and strive for quality within their own arts experiences and are not given any guidance to go beyond their current level of competence.

Second, in the polish the product approach (Gardner, 1997; Wright 1997), it is believed that development of technique and skill is more important than free expression and that creativity and self-expression cannot develop if children don’t have adequate mastery of the discipline (i.e, music, dance, drama, art). The ease of full-group instruction can lead to mass-production arts activities, such as stencils (e.g., egg, carton, caterpillars), and gimmicks (e.g., painting with feather dusters). Music, dance, and drama can become focused almost exclusively on events such as an end-of-year performance, where it is expected that the teacher and children present a product that is a polished as possible. The message to children can be that the works produced by children are not as values as those provided by adults and that children should look to adults for artistic inspiration rather than find it from within.

Finally, an approach that takes  the best from those presented above is the free the discipline approach, which brings together both the child’s freedom of expression and creativity and his or her artistic mastery and refinement of the discipline. In other words, arts education should integrate both Nature and Polish. What a child is born with should be more than simply nurtured, it should be cultivated. Clearly, children cannot learn without assistance in any of the disciplines, including the arts. Just how much and what type of assistance is the key to good early childhood arts education.

Through the arts, children participate in meaning making through visual-spatial imagery and the use of the body, and they turn action into representation using the unique symbols system of the arts-skill and moving 2-D and 3-D images; movement, gesture, dance and dramatization; and the use of the voice, musical instruments, words, and sound effects (Wright 2003).

In a free the discipline approach, adult assist young children to develop the “grammars” of the arts and the ability to not only create but also “read” or interpret a range of texts-visual, aural, bodily-kinesthetic, spatial, intrapersonal.
An Expert Speaks: Art in the Curriculum

Susan Wright, Queensland University of Technology
Reference: Brewer Jo An (2007), Introduction to Early Childhood Education; Preschool Through Primary Grades, USA: Pearson. P-418

 

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