Jayne Osgood - Postdevelopmental Approaches to Childhood Art

Postdevelopmental Approaches
to Childhood Art

Also available from Bloomsbury

Early Childhood Theories and Contemporary Issues, Mine Conkbayir and Christine Pascal

Digital Technologies in Early Childhood Art, Mona Sakr

Postdevelopmental Approaches
to Childhood Art

Edited by
Mona Sakr and Jayne Osgood

Paul Duncum

Paul Duncum is Professor of Art and Visual Culture Education, School of Art and Design, University of Illinois, Champaign. His 1987 doctorate was entitled Middle Childhood Spontaneous Drawing from a Cultural Perspective. His work has been translated into nine languages.

Lisa-Marie Gagliardi

Lisa-Marie is an early childhood educator, teacher educator and PhD candidate at Western University. In her PhD research, Lisa-Marie is experimenting with creative feminist new-materialist research methodologies. Applying post-foundational theories to early childhood education contexts, this research stays with the complexities and the ethical tensions of our relations with other species and materials.

Rachel Heydon

Rachel Heydon is Professor, Faculty of Education, Western University, Canada. Her work focuses on intergenerational learning, multimodal literacy and pedagogy, art as literacy and early childhood curriculum. Her books include the forthcoming Why Multimodal Literacy Matters: (Re)conceptualizing Literacy and Wellbeing through Singing-infused Multimodal, Intergenerational Curricula (with Susan ONeill) (Sense Publishers).

Anna Keune

Anna Keune is Graduate Research Assistant in the Creativity Labs at Indiana University. With a background in design, Anna has experience with pan-European research projects and participatory design of digital learning tools with educators and youth across Europe and India. Her interests are maker culture and materials for learning.

Linda Knight

Social activism underpins Lindas work on pedagogic sites, radical pedagogies and feminist investigations of the academy. Linda creates art as a social practice to explore affect, movement and power and the ways that art, philosophy and theory help establish critical, pedagogic and methodologic practices. Linda has exhibited in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United States and the UK, and her work is held in private collections globally. Linda is currently thinking with feminist materialist perspectives to create and experiment with counter-logics in early childhood education. Linda is in the School of Early Childhood at Queensland University of Technology.

Heather Malin

Heather Malin holds a PhD in art education from Stanford University, where her research focused on the role of art-making in childrens learning and development. Prior to her current career in research, she taught art, managed arts education programmes and trained new teachers to integrate art into their curriculum.

Jayne Osgood

Jayne Osgood is Professor of Education and has recently joined the Centre for Education Research and Scholarship at Middlesex University. Her present methodologies and research practices are framed by new material feminism and post-humanism. She is developing transdisciplinary theoretical approaches that maintain a concern with issues of social justice and which critically engage with early childhood policy, curricular frameworks and pedagogical approaches. Through her work she seeks to trouble and extend understandings of the workforce, families, the child and childhood in early years contexts.

Kylie Peppler

Kylie Peppler is Associate Professor of Learning Sciences and Director of the Creativity Labs at Indiana University. An artist by training, she engages in research that focuses on the intersection of arts, media, new technologies and out-of-school learning. Find out more at kpeppler.com.

Victoria de Rijke

Victoria de Rijke is Associate Professor and CERS Research Director in the Department of Education at Middlesex University, London. She has over twenty years experience working with primary school teachers and children, including active engagement with artist residencies, consultancies and research projects in the creative arts, producing teaching and learning resources online. Victoria writes and presents on the visual or performing arts and childrens literature and is co-chief editor of the international research journal Childrens Literature in Education.

Mona Sakr

Mona Sakr is Senior Lecturer in Education and Early Childhood at Middlesex University. Her research focuses on digital technologies in childhood, with a particular focus on how the digital reshapes creative, playful and art-making experiences for young children. Currently, she is researching Early Years (EY) practitioners use of video to engage in reflective interpretations of childrens art-making and how they perceive their role in facilitating creativity and playfulness among children. Previous research projects include a phenomenological analysis of childrens experiences of digital augmentation during history learning, observation studies of collective digital art-making in the EY classroom and a case study of parentchild art-making with different technologies in the home.

Christine Marm Thompson

Christine Marm Thompson is Professor of Art Education at Penn State University where she teaches graduate courses on childrens art and cultures of childhood and supervises beginning art teachers in Saturday Art Classes for children. Her research focuses on early childhood art education in the social contexts of classrooms and the assemblage of influences that shape drawing events. Recent publications appear in the journals Qualitative Inquiry, Arts Education Policy Review, Visual Inquiry and Studies in Art Education, and two NAEA anthologies, Teaching and Learning Emergent Research Methodologies in Art Education and Inquiry in Action: Paradigms, Methodologies, and Perspectives in Art Education Research.

Laura Traf-Prats

Laura Traf-Prats is Senior Lecturer at the School of Childhood, Youth and Education Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University, former Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, and Lecturer at Universitat Autnoma de Barcelona. She is a member of the Children and Childhood Research Group at MMUs Education and Social Research Institute. Her research interests are diverse and include the ecologies of childrens art, proximal ethnographies in contexts of parenting, and young peoples cultural and activist practices in the city. Some publications have appeared in journals like Studies in Art Education, Qualitative Inquiry, Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy and Cultural Studies <-> Critical Methodologies.

Karen Wohlwend

Karen E. Wohlwend is Associate Professor of Literacy, Culture and Language Education at Indiana University, Bloomington. She re-conceptualizes young childrens play as an embodied literacy, produced with popular media and digital technologies in online spaces and childhood cultures.

Mona Sakr and Jayne Osgood

Welcome

In this chapter, we offer an overview of what to expect from this edited collection. Firstly, we outline the overarching aims of the book, explaining why postdevelopmental approaches are needed to challenge the dominance of the developmental paradigm in studies of childhood art. We grapple with the term postdevelopmental and consider how it might remain meaningful despite bringing together a wide range of disparate perspectives on childhood art, sometimes constituting opposing epistemological commitments. Secondly, we offer a brief overview of the individual chapters in the book and the contribution they make. Finally, we consider how the chapters relate to each other, the forces and flows that reverberate across the book and present generative strands of enquiry. Together, these chapters invite the reader to consider the expansive possibilities that are available to (re-)conceptualize childhood art and which therefore hold the potential for adults (educators, parents, carers) to engage with children and art differently.