Learning through artworks

This post discusses the possibilities of artworks in facilitating learning and alternate ways of imagining the world. I draw upon the work of Maxine Greene and John Dewey to explore the proposition that children’s learning through artworks has the potential to challenge dominant discourses, opening up new ways of thinking and being. There is also a resource list for educators and parents interested in incorporating artworks into children’s learning.

Amalia Pica’s ‘A ∩ B ∩ C’ (2013). © Amalia Pica. I found this bad boy on the Guggenheim online archive.

“It is not that the artist offers solutions or gives directions. He nudges; he renders us uneasy; he makes us (if we are lucky) see what we would not have seen without him. He moves us to imagine, to look beyond” Maxine Greene (2000, p. 276).

Artworks can be used in many ways for many different reasons in learning contexts. They offer rich possibilities for experiencing and imagining the world from new and multiple perspectives. Visual art as well as the arts more generally, have the ability to make people aware of different ways of thinking and being in the world, working against reductionist and singular ways of thinking.

Maxine Greene (2000) extends upon the word of John Dewey (1916, 1934, 1954) to argue that imagination and the arts play a critical role in the making of democratic communities. She suggests that school curriculum should aim to prioritise the ‘releasing of the imagination’ through providing rich aesthetic experiences for children. These then provide new modalities for children to sense, experience and learn through the world.

However, the mere presence of artworks in a learning environment does not guarantee that a child is encountering or imagining the world in new ways. Greene argues that if school curriculum is to support imagination through the arts, children’s encounters need to be aesthetically varied, rich and reflective. Through this, learning through artworks has the potential to challenge dominant discourses and ways of thinking. This may then encourage children to question their understandings and assumptions about the world, to think critically about what is and what could be.

Below is a list of resources for educators and parents who may be interested in incorporating artworks in children’s learning at home or in the classroom.

Resource list 

Many of the major modern and contemporary art museums have online digital archives for their collections. Here are some links to my favorites:

Online art museum collections

• MoMA’s online collection

The Museum of Modern Art has made 77,000 works from 25,000 different artists available online. The search engine is easy to use and you can refine your hits using different classifications and time periods.

• The Tate online collection

Tate also have an extensive online collection featuring artworks, exhibitions, videos and artist journals. The digital archive is well referenced and has many tags that are great for getting lost in amazing artwork worm-holes. The search engine is easy to use and has lots of search filter options. Tate’s most famous artworks feature extensive summaries, a copy of the artwork’s display caption as well as the techniques used to produce the artwork, for example Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’ page. 

• The Guggenheim also has an extensive digital archive.

Video Channels

• TateShots  and TateTalks– Tate have also put together two quite an exceptional collection of video and audio recordings. TateTalks features video footage of talks and events held at the art museum. TateShots comprises of artist interviews, performance pieces (I highly recommend watching Earle Brown’s ‘Calder Piece‘), exhibition films and artist studio visits. If I had a dollar for every minute I spent watching TateShots I would be a millionaire. But I work in children’s education and the arts so maybe I shouldn’t put a monetary value on the amount of time I procrastinate.
• The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark has a constantly growing online collection of videos from different fields such as art, architecture, music, literature and design. I love the Louisiana Channel as it features a lot of Scandinavian and European contemporary artists who I have only discovered through watching these clips.
• The art auction houses of Southeby’s and Christie’s both have YouTube channels featuring short video clips of artist interviews, studio visits and world auction records.

Online courses

• MoMA has developed three online courses that explore inquiry-led learning through artworks. Admittedly I have not had a chance to do any of these courses but I think it worth a look. The first, ‘Art & Ideas: Teaching with Themes’ uses theme-based teaching practices to support educators in incorporating modern and contemporary artworks into curriculum. Then there is Art & Inquiry: Museum Teaching Strategies For Your Classroom looks at museum education strategies for inquiry-based teaching and how these can be used in classrooms. Finally, Art & Activity: Interactive Strategies for Engaging with Art builds on content from courses one and two to explore activity-based strategies for using artworks primary and secondary lesson plans.

Article

• Here is a link to Dr. Emily Pringle’s article on ‘The Artist as Educator: Examining Relationships between Art Practice and Pedagogy in the Gallery Context.’ Emily is Head of Learning Practice & Research at Tate & also my awesome co-PhD supervisor.

References

Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and Education. New York, Macmillan.

Dewey, J. (1934). Art as Experience. New York, Minton, Balch.

Dewey, J. (1954). The Public and Its Problems. Chicago, IL: Swallow Press.

Greene, M (2000). ‘Imagining futures: the public school and possibility,’ Journal of Curriculum Studies, vol 32(2). P.267-280.

The role of materials in children’s learning through art

This post discusses the possibilities of materials and material play in children’s learning through art. I draw on the theories of loose parts and new materialism to argue that materials, including artworks, play an active and participatory role in opening-up divergent thinking and inquiry-led learning in schools, home and informal learning contexts such as art museums.

Why do materials matter?

Materials and material exploration have long been a part of artistic inquiry. Since Frobel’s development of the kindergarten in the late 1700’s, they have also held an important place in early childhood settings. In the 1970’s Simon Nicholson presented the theory of loose parts – the proposition that young children’s creative empowerment comes from the presence of open-ended materials that can be constructed, manipulated and transformed through self-directed play. It is fair to say that material content, including artworks and art materials, hold tremendous possibilities for facilitating children’s inquiry-led learning in new and divergent ways. I consider materials to be one of multiple forces that learning can emerge from in an art museums. Others may include social interaction between people, spatial layout of things and the delivery of curatorial content such as through audio guides or information resources.

As reading and writing are often privileged in school curriculum, experimentation with different materials can provide new opportunities for alternate and aesthetically-driven pedagogies to be produced (check out this blog for how I define pedagogy). This is to say that different materials may encourage different ways of thinking, learning and being. For example, in a previous posts on ‘suggesting as a technique for facilitating children’s learning through art’ I talk about the different cognitive, social, emotional and aesthetic learning pathways that two different materials: plastic cylinders and large paper sheets may present. Whilst the cylinders may provoke explorations around stacking, placing, dismantling, balancing, arrangement and construction, the large paper sheet may suggest gentle movements, swaying, rolling, folding, hiding and enveloping. Through experimentation, the properties and abilities of a material may change, creating new starting points for further inquiry and experimentation.

The active role of materials in art practices and learning

In the arts, different materials such as paint, clay, paper, resin, fabric, wood or plastic can be experimented with in a myriad of ways. In art forms such as dance, live art and socially engaged practices, materials may be slightly more abstract such as the human body, sound, participants and society. I believe that art materials are not just a tool for self-expression or a thing for children to manipulate; they are an active and participatory force in the production of learning and knowledge. For example, check out this lovely video by visual artist Shirazeh Houshiary in which she talks about the active role of materials in her practice:

I really connect with this, especially the comment: “… they are not representation of the form but a pulsation of the form. I am not interested in painting. I am not interested in the processes of making in the conventional sense of representation. I am trying to get into how something works. This process has taught me a huge amount about who I am, which is surprising. It a process of learning for me more than anything else.” The paint and paintings are active, participatory and dynamic in the artist’s creative experimentation.

Art materials as an invitation to experiment

Material play has the ability to encourage emergent thinking processes, allowing children to produce new understandings as well as experiencing the world from multiple perspectives. However, materials also have the ability to be used in static and predictable ways that shut down creativity and divergent thinking. Whilst I do love Instagram feeds and craft blogs that share ideas for children’s art activities, I am cautious that these may unintentionally encourage imitation and fixed ways of using materials with children. This may then reduce the ability for experimental thinking and practices to emerge.

The challenge to me – and everyone working in learning settings with children – is to keep experimenting, keep questioning, keep venturing into the unknown and the yet-to-be-discovered of art, play, materiality and pedagogy.

I am sure many of you have really interesting insights on this topic and it would be lovely to hear them. Why is children’s play with materials important to you? What are your favorite materials to experiment with?

Further links

The Institute of Making at the University College of London has a great online material library – perfect for anyone who likes to nerd out about different material forms: http://www.instituteofmaking.org.uk/materials-library

My friend Nina Odegard has written a brilliant article on children’s learning with recycled ‘junk’ materials. Nina formally ran a creative recycle centre in Norway: http://www.academia.edu/14201590/When_matter_comes_to_matter_working_pedagogically_with_junk_materials

Professor Pat Thomson, Nina Odegard and I recently did a conference symposium on children’s material play. Check it out: https://louisapenfold.com/2017/12/06/childrens-learning-with-new-found-and-recycled-stuff-symposium-at-aare/

Here is the link to my blog post on Simon Nicholson’s theory of loose parts: https://louisapenfold.com/2016/05/23/simon-nicholson-on-the-theory-of-loose-parts/

I also love the book ‘Encounters with Materials in Early Childhood Education’ by Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, Sylvia Kind and Laurie Kocher.

‘Children’s learning with new, found and recycled stuff’ symposium at AARE

This post discusses the symposium presentation ‘Material play: children’s learning with new, found and recycled ‘stuff’ given by Professor Pat Thomson, Nina Odegard and Louisa Penfold at the Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE) in Canberra, Australia.

Image: Bradley Cummings

On November 27, 2017 Pat Thomson (University of Nottingham), Nina Odegard (University College of Oslo and Akershus) and myself (University of Nottingham) presented at the AARE conference on young children’s learning with materials through play. Julianne Moss from Deakin University was the session discussant. The symposium was put together as a result of our common research interest in material-led play in early childhood education.

The symposium was built upon the proposition that many educators and artists working with young children are committed to play-based practices and understand this as critical to individual and social learning. The session focused specifically on early years arts-orientated play through asking: when children are ‘doing art’ play what are they learning with the materials they choose? The presentations explored the idea that when children are playing with materials they are simultaneously:

• learning about concepts such as line, pattern and form;
• learning about the properties and potentials of materials such as how they can be pushed, pilled, stretched and transformed;
• learning what materials are and do in the world;
• being called and directed by the materials, forming possible selves with materials and forming new relations with the world
• being given the possibilities to work with materials without having to name, define or categorize what they are doing

Why is this important? Academics and education practitioners are becoming increasingly interested in ways that humans can and need to be de-centred in order to take account of the importance the material, both organic and inorganic, worlds in which we live. This is essential in creating discourses and practices that offer hopeful action in an ecologically and ethically challenged world. This also comes at a time when policy makers around the world increasingly position play-based early childhood curriculum as trivial and not sufficiently focused on knowledge and skills. Consequentially, we identify an urgent need to push further with discussion on why materials matter in early childhood play-based arts programmes and projects. Our concern was to not only explore and explain the importance of play in early childhood and to promote the value of the arts, but also to broaden our explanations of what this is.

Young children’s thinking with natural materials in art museums

Image: Louisa Penfold

Louisa’s presentation explored the invitations natural materials such as logs, leaves, sticks, stones and clay offer in young children’s play in art museums. Data generated in an early year’s art studio session at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, was used to consider the encounters (Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2017) between children, artists, curators, artworks, materials and the museum space. Lenz-Taguchi’s notion of intra-active pedagogies (2010) – where one’s attention shifts from interpersonal relationships to the relations between humans and non-human entities – was drawn upon to consider children’s learning with and through artworks and materials in the art museum.

Descriptive examples of visual documentation including photography and video footage was discussed in relation to how the ‘stuff’ curated for the art studio provoked open-ended possibilities for children’s thinking and learning. The presentation concluded with the suggestion that through thinking with materials, new pedagogies are able to be constructed that allow artists, learning curators, children and their families to continuously produce and reconsider the relations between themselves, others, artworks, materials and the natural world.

Imagining immanent didactics

Image: Louisa Penfold

Nina’s paper focused on the concepts of aesthetics and aesthetic explorations, ethics and how these open possibilities for creative thinking, doing and being. Concepts of new materialism were discussed in relation to the potential they bring for expanded discourses and practices relating to recycling, sustainability and consumption.

The presentation drew upon data generated in a ReMida creative recycle centre in Norway. Results suggested that children were ‘rhizomatic thinkers’ (Dahlberg, 2016, p. 131) in their aesthetic explorations of recycled materials in which children’s learning shifted between disciplines to make use of the ‘vibrant matter’ (Bennet, 2010) and ‘how matter comes to matter’ (Barad, 2008). Nina also focused on pedagogical practice in which children’s process itself is valued, and there is a reduced or no focus on the result (Dahlberg, 2016). This builds on previous research out of the ReMida centre (Odegard, 2016) that argued that recycled materials can open up to the discovery of new ‘hidden’ pedagogical spaces, that produce meeting places for the emergence of new ideas (Odegard, 2012). The children´s exploration with vibrant matter like recycled materials seems to evoke creativity, curiosity, problem-solving and narrate stories. Through this, the paper argued for a paradigm shift away from the neoliberal way of measuring and categorizing learning and towards an emphasis on the collective and creative pedagogical processes.

What can rope do with us? Agency/power and freedom/captivity in art play.

Image: Bradley Cummings

Pat’s paper, co-written with Anton Franks, discussed an ongoing ethnographic study conducted within the ‘World without walls’ programme run by Serpentine Galleries in London. The programme supports artists undertaking residencies in one early childhood centre in central London. The residencies focus on different kinds of art/play that draw upon the artist’s practice and selection of materials for the programme. The presentation discussed data generated from Albert Potrony’s residency in which the artist elected to use large material objects such as card, plastic, foam and rope.

Throughout the sessions, numerous children were drawn to/called by the rope (Bennett, 2010). Perhaps unexpectedly, the children wrapped/tied up their teachers and the learning curator with the rope. The data suggested an explicit exploration of the kinds of power-laden relationships that exist between adults and children in educational settings. Drawing on field notes, photographs and interviews, the paper presented an analysis of the materials on offer and their affordances. The presentation concluded considering the material differences made by, with and through the rope, and probe further the ways in which it co-produced caring and ethical experimentations with power, agency, captivity and freedom.

Following the presentations, attendees had an opportunity to play with an array of materials arranged in the symposium space. As a group we then asked and explored questions such as why were particular materials chosen and not others? What was possible with the materials and what wasn’t? What about the play experience can be put into words and what can’t? Did you feel a desire/need to name, categorize or define your installation? What senses were used, and what feelings were evoked through playing with the materials?

Overall, we hoped that the symposium shared thinking and opened up new discussions around early childhood education, play, the arts and materialism. We were inspired by the questions and discussion amongst the group throughout the presentation and hope to build upon this in the future.

Image: Bradley Cummings

Image: Bradley Cummings

References

Barad, K. (2008). Posthumanist performativity: toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. In S. Alaimo & S. J. Hekman (Eds.), Material feminisms (pp. 120-157). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Bennet, J. (2010). Vibrant matter, a poltical ecology of things: Duke University Press.

Dahlberg, G. (2016). An ethico- aesthetic paradigm as an alternative discourse to the quality assurance discourse. 17(1), 124-133. doi:10.1177/1463949115627910

Lenz Taguchi, H. (2010). Going beyond the theory/practice divide in early childhood education: Introducing an intra-active pedagogy. New York, NY: Routledge.

Odegard, N. (2012). When matter comes to matter – Working pedagogically with junk materials. Education Inquiry, 3(3), 387-400.

Odegard, Nina, & Rossholt, Nina. (2016). In-between spaces. Tales from a Remida. In Ann Beate Reinertsen (Ed.), Becoming Earth. A Post Human Turn in Educational Discourse Collapsing Nature/Culture Divides. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.

Pacini-Ketchabaw, V; Kind, S; & Kocher, L. (2017). Encounters with materials in early childhood education. New York, NY: Routledge.

Serpentine Galleries’ Play as Radical Practice toolkit

This post looks at Serpentine Galleries’ ‘Play as Radical Practice’ toolkit, a creative resource produced between the Gallery’s learning team, artist Albert Potrony and the Portman Early Childhood Centre (UK).

Image credit: Serpentine Galleries

In 2014, the Serpentine learning team commenced a series of artist residencies with the Portman Early Childhood Centre in Westminster, London (UK) run as part of their Changing Play programme. Changing Play aims to explore the possibilities of play through exploring current practices and alternate re-considerations of early childhood education.

Last year, artist Albert Potrony undertook a 12-week residency at the Portman as part of the programme in which he worked collaboratively with children, staff, parents and Serpentine to explore the potential of free play in the school system. Throughout the residency, Albert created a series of material-led play spaces featuring matter such as recycled tubes, plastic sheets, ropes and reflective plastics. During the sessions, children were encouraged to creatively explore the materials alongisde peers and adults through play. Before, during and after each session, the artist, Portman staff, parents and Gallery team engaged in critically reflective discussions that considered the relationships between the programme’s various components such as the materials, curriculum, people and pedagogical underpinnings. The ‘Play as Radical Practice’ toolkit is a direct product of these collaborative discussions.

The toolkit is comprised of three main parts: a booklet, a 24-piece card game (pictured below) and an accompanying film. These work together to share and further consider the imagery, questions and ideas generated from the residency. The toolkit also seeks to support early educators to form solidarities with the children they work with and to advocate for free play in the state school system. This is done through taking a individuals taking position as well as including thoughts and questions from multiple perspectives.

I really like the way the card game explores the residency’s emergent debates and ideas from multiple perspectives including children, parents, curators, the artist and centre staff. Each of the cards in the game features an image and provocation such as field notes, a quote and/or question. For example, one card combines an image of a child and staff member playing with the artist’s materials in the nursery. A quote from a Portman staff member is then presented alongside the image with four interconnected questions:

” ‘They are different children with different members of staff. It’s really interesting, when you read the school reports you think ‘I don’t see him like that at all.’ He may be really chatty with me and really quiet with someone else and also the children behave differently depending on who is present, which is that thing about stepping away from them and letting them play by themselves as part of that witnessing.’ Staff

What is witnessing? Who does it? What does it mean? Witnessing as assessment?  “

These work together to situate the emergence of the educator’s idea around the standardisation of learning within the specific context that it was produced. Furthermore, the card invites the reader, or ‘player’ of the card game, to extend, challenge or support the teacher’s experience through critically thinking about the questions themselves.

Each card is further divided into key themes such as space, relationships, standardisation and chaos/order. Each one of these themes prompts deeper consideration and re-considerations around the imagery, quotes and questions featured in the toolkit. The accompanying booklet investigates these themes more extensively alongside quotes from key early childhood and play theorists such as Hillevi Lenz-Taguchi, Tim Gill, Simon Nicholson and Arthur Battram. You may also come across the introduction I wrote for the toolkit in the booklet, lol. I do wish to point out that my role on the programme is insignificant in comparison to the amazing educators, curators, artists, children and parents who worked together on an ongoing basis to produce the complex conversations, thinking and practices throughout the residency.

The toolkit booklet can be downloaded from the Serpentine website here. A limited number of printed toolkits are available free of charge from the Serpentine learning team. For a copy, please email: jemmae@serpentinegalleries.org . The Play As Radical Practice film will be available to view on the Serpentine website in the near future. An interim report of Serpentine’s World Without Walls programme, including Changing Play, can also be downloaded from the University of Nottingham’s Centre for Research in Arts, Creativity and Literacies website here: worldwithoutwalls_interimresearchreport_final-copy

5 great children’s learning spaces in the Bay Area, California

I was fortunate enough to recently spend a month in California, mainly in and around San Francisco. During this time I visited a handful of children’s learning spaces and met with a bunch of lovely, passionate people working in both formal and informal learning contexts. The places listed below are places that I visited or that came highly recommended. I hope you find these equally as inspiring as I did!

A crazy drawing/painting machine/printer that appears to be programmed by a Raspberry Pi on display at The Exploratorium.

The Brightworks School

Founded by Gever Tulley who also started The Tinkering School, Brightworks is a project-based learning heaven that ‘weaves learning and life experiences together.’ In the every day runnings of the school, children are put into mixed-aged group teams and encouraged to investigate real-world problems collectively. ‘The Arc’ (I interpret this term to mean the pedagogical principles that drive the learning processes at the school) consists of three phases: exploration, expression and exposition. Learners move through these cycles, allowing for the development, integration and contextualisation of skills and knowledge.

Interested in hearing more about this approach to learning? The Brightworks school run a ‘Brightworks Curious Educators Tour’ approximately once a month that you can book into. Details can be found on their website. Gever also has an awesome TED talk on ‘life lessons through tinkering’ that looks at children’s experiences at The Tinkering School.

AltSchool

Max Ventilla, a former Google executive, created Altschool after he could not find an appropriate school to send his daughter to. Altschools are lab schools that utilise an array of new technologies to create personalised learning environments for its students. Fundamentally opposed to the American government’s standardisation curriculum, AltSchooler’s learning is driven by their interests, passions and skills under a ‘Common Core’ curriculum. Nicknamed ‘Montessori 2.0,’ the schools works closely with entrepreneurs and engineers to develop new technologies that allow students and teachers to grade and document learning in diverse ways. The New Yorker published an extensive article, ‘Learn Differently,’ on the startup last year. I also found this talk by Max Ventilla particularly informative.

Unfortunately I was unable to visit AltSchool while in SF. I was/still am really interested in learning more the relationship between assessment and the development of the apps being used and how these influence one another.

SFMOMA

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art re-opened in 2016 after major renovations. An epicenter for contemporary art in the Bay Area, the art museum is also a sensory-rich environment for young audiences. From my understandings the museum does not run specific programmes or have a dedicated area for children but there is an array of artworks that may capture the curiosities and imaginations of children. These include Dan Flavin’s luminous installation on level 5, Richard Serra’s ‘Sequence’ and Morris Lewis’ technicolour ‘Untitled’ painting (pictured below). With such an incredibly diverse and amazing mix of modern and contemporary art, it seems like the museum has great potential to further develop children’s learning programmes in the future. The Gallery has also put together an online museum guide for visiting with the little-ies.

Morris Louis, Untitled. 1959-1960. Magna on canvas. 98 in. x 140 1/2 in. © Estate of Morris Louis

The Children’s Creativity Museum 

Deep in the heart of SOMA’s Yerba Buena Gardens sits the Children’s Creativity Museum. The museum features an array of different ‘labs’ such as an animation studio, a tech lab, a music studio and community lab that aim ‘to nurture creativity and collaboration in all children and families.’ The day I visited, the museum was pumping. It is clearly a popular destination for young families living in San Francisco with lots of activities for children to play and make in. The museum certainly has a slightly commercial feel to it, as I often find in American children’s museums. An additional after thought I had was in relation to the separation of the different labs. I wonder what would happen if the tech lab, music studio and community lab became one big space for making and exploring across disciplines and art forms? Check it out: https://creativity.org

The Tinkering Studio at the Exploratorium

You might notice I write a lot about the Tinkering Studio on this blog but it is just because I truly believe in inquiry-based learning through play, which is what they do so brilliantly. Housed in The Exploratorium and overlooking the sparkling Bay, the museum’s mission is “to create inquiry-based experiences that transform learning worldwide” through explorations of science, art and human perception. The Tinkering Studio is not just for young children, it is a space for everyone to play, make, construct and deconstruct ideas and understandings about the world.

A pic taken in a light play/Scratch Jnr activity in The Tinkering Studio. 

I really connect with The Tinkering Studio’s emphasis on curiosity as the driver for learning. This manifests itself in numerous ways including visitor’s learning during drop-in activities, teacher’s learning at professional development workshops and also (and maybe most importantly) in relation to the learning of the museum team. As an outsider I see it as a continuous process of learning together and that is inspiring. At the same time, the understanding of learning underpinning the practice seems so much more complex than just giving children agency. The activities on offer such as the marble machines, wind tubes and paper circuits are well-considered ‘problem spaces’ where explorations of interconnecting concepts happens through material experimentation. I saw a great quote on the wall of the museum by the American artist Jasper Johns:

“When something is new to us, we treat it as an experience. We feel that our senses are awake and clear. We are alive.”

I related to this concept that new experiences and ideas keep our minds and bodies awake. Also that one’s desire to continuously strive for what is yet to come into existence or be discovered is a life force. The Tinkering Studio also has a great blog that the team use to share projects and ideas.

There is an array of other innovative startups/play/learning spaces in and from the Bay Area not mentioned above. To name a few: the Bay Area Discovery Museum, Wonderful Idea Co., the Khan Lab School, GCE Lab School, the Berkeley Adventure Playground and the Museum of Children’s Arts. I also highly recommend the Prelinger library for their ‘how to’ and ‘maker’ sections. The library is also a great place to get some general life inspiration. Can’t wait to visit California again!

P.S. Thank you Ryan Jenkins for the awesome recommendations!

Bruno Munari: “inventor, artist, writer designer, architect, illustrator and player-with-children”

This post explores the work of Italian artist, Bruno Munari (1907-1998). Munari was a self-proclaimed ‘inventor artist writer designer architect illustrator player-with-children’ (The Independent, 1998) whose creative practice intertwined with the educational philosophies of Jean Piaget and Maria Montessori. 

“It hasn’t always been easy for me to make people take me seriously. I play with children. And, in a society such as ours, anyone who plays or works with children runs the risk of being thought eccentric.” Munari

“Understanding what art is, is a (useless) concern of the adult. Understanding how you do it instead, is a genuine interest in the child.” Munari

Bruno Munari was a man whose work could never be defined. He created and invented prolifically across mediums and methods diverse as paper, painting, sculpture, toys, photography, film, education, fine art and graphic design. The quirky objects, furniture, books, pictures and workshops he created encouraged learning through tactile, physical and kinaesthetic play. Whilst Munari’s work is often associated with the Italian Futurist movement of the 1920’s, he also drew heavily from Surrealism’s vibrant pallets and the Bauhaus’ geometric forms. Munari’s uncontrolable inventiveness led him to create outlandish bodies of work including an entire series of useless machines and an equally brilliant succession of ‘useless’ unreadable books.

Munari encouraged children to learn about the world through touching and playing with materials and things. Possibly one of his most well-known interventions was his Tactile Workshop series. In these Murani in worked with groups of young children to experiment with touch as an exploration of material’s properties and artistic concepts. Documentation of these workshops can be found in his appropriately named publication, The Tactile Workshops.

Below is a selection of Munari’s experiments run with children. These clips are in Italian but are quite straight forward even with a limited understanding of the language… and are visually rich and interesting to watch. Divertiti!

Further links

MunArt A website (official or unofficial, I am unsure!) dedicated to the work of Bruno Munari

MEF Museo Ettore Fico’s ‘Bruno Munari; Total Artist’ exhibition website. The exhibition was presented from February 16 – June 11, 2017. Scroll down the webpage to view installation images from the show.

Isamu Noguchi’s whimsicle playscapes at SFMOMA

This post is coming to you from sunny California! I absolutely love this part of the world. Yesterday I visited a very fun ‘Noguchi Playscapes’ exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition explores the sculptural playscapes of Japanese-American artist Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988). This post presents some of the key artworks and themes from the show including the role of public sculpture in bringing art and creativity to everyday living.

An image from the exhibition at SFMOMA

“Noguchi’s desire was to bring fine art into the context of everyday living. His lifelong involvement in the design of playgrounds and “play sculpture” stemmed from this ideology and belief in the educational potential of sculptured forms for physical use by children” (Larrivee, 2011).

“The playground, instead of telling the child what to do (swing here, climb there), becomes a place for endless exploration, of endless opportunity for changing play. And it is a thing of beauty as the modern artist has found beauty in the modern world” Isamu Noguchi (1967).

Noguchi Playscapes revisits the work of pioneering artist and landscape architect, Isamu Noguchi. The exhibition presents a myriad of Noguchi’s designs, sketches, models and archival images used to construct his sculptural playscape. These colourful, quirky and even downright wacky works explore his ‘vision for new experiences of art, education, and humanity through play’ (SFMOMA website, 2017).

Noguchi strove to create public spaces that sparked imagination through people’s interactions with different forms, surfaces, textures and shapes. Children’s play served as a creative and experimental process for engaging with these spaces. The role of sculpture in the urban landscape allowed for Noguchi’s playscapes to bring together the powerful combination of aesthetics, functionality and human’s ability play.

Noguchi believed that: “sculpture in the public realm is an aesthetic and cultural tool capable of reconciling social inhibitions and individuality. This shaped his vision for the democratisation of art, leading him to devise outdoor play structures that encourage creative interaction as a way of learning” (Noguchi Playscapes, 2017).

Noguchi also understood “creative play as a way of learning about and participating in the world, emphasising imagination, especially that of children, given that they represented the future that would be rebuilt by the fractured postwar society” (Garcia & Larrivee, 2016).

Isamu Noguchi’s design for the U.S Pavilion Expo from 1970. © The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, NY. Image: sfmoma.org

Playscapes such as ‘The U.S Pavilion Expo” (1970, pictured above) bring together re-moulding of the earth with sculptural play equipment. I found designs that were devoid of equipment such as ‘Play Mountain’ (1933, pictured below) particularly thought-provoking. In the absence of swings, slides and see-saws, the design proposed moulded and hollowed earth that created slopes for rolling, sliding and sledding down.

Noguchi’s ‘Play Mountain’ (1933). Cast 1977. Bronze. Image: noguchi.or

Children’s experience in the playscape would therefore be driven by physical exercise such as running, jumping and climbing over the organic forms and geometric shapes of the earth (Larrivee, 2011). ‘Play Mountain’ was a radical proposition for children’s play in 1930’s New York with nearly all public playgrounds being produced from mass-constructed, pre-designed equipment. The design was unsurprisingly rejected by New York Parks Commission and never realised into an actual playscape.

I was surprised to discover that only two of Noguchi’s public playscapes were actually realised in his lifetime – one in Kodomo No Kuni park in Yokohama (this was torn down one year after it was built) and the second in the Piedmont Park in Atlanta, Georgia (pictured below). Out of all the wacky models and sketches of playscapes featured in the exhibition, ‘Piedmont Park’ seems one of the simplest and least extravagant. Perhaps it was also one of the more straight forward and least risky designs to build. Fed-up with government bureauracy, Noguchi chose to work the rest of his career on largely private commissions liaising with architects, musicians and theatre designers as a way of escaping the restrictive health and safety regulations of creating public play spaces (Larrivee, 2011).

Noguchi Playscapes is on display at SFMOMA from July 15 – November 26, 2017. You can also visit The Noguchi Museum in Long Island City, New York to view a more comprehensive body of work by this amazing artist.

Art. Play. Children. Pedagogy. will be on holidays for the next couple of weeks. The next post will make its appearance on Friday September 1, 2017.

Piedmont Park park, Atlanta. Built 1975-76 from basswood. Image: hermanmiller.com

References

Garcia, M & Larrivee, S (2016). Isamu Noguchi: Playscapes, RM/Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo; Bilingual edition.

Larrivee, S (2011). ‘Playscapes: Isamu Noguchi’s Designs for Play,’Public Art Dialogue, 1:01, pp. 53-80.

Noguchi, I (1967). A Sculptor’s World. Tokyo: Thomas and Hudson. pp.176-177.

Noguchi Playscapes (2017), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, July 15 – November 26, 2017.

SFMOMA website (2017). ‘Noguchi’s Playscapes,’ SFMOMA website. Viewed August 14, 2017.

 

Family learning at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park (UK)

This post features an interview with Emma Spencer, Family Learning Coordinator at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park (UK). 

Image credit: Jane Hewitt

The Yorkshire Sculpture Park sits upon 500 acres of jolly green parkland that an Australian who has never visited rural England may be pitifully excited to see. The open-air gallery won the 2014 Art Fund Prize for Museum of the Year and is also home to the National Arts Education Archive. In 2014 the Park was awarded a three- year grant from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation to conduct an action-research project looking at the development of its family-learning programme. I recently spoke with Emma Spencer about the project’s findings and future plans for early years learning at the gallery.

Could you please give some background on the action research project? What were your initial ideas and motivations?

Starting out, the key focus of the research was around bringing people from the community together with the Park. We wanted to use the project to change how we connect with families. Families come to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park regardless to experience the beautiful natural space, however we really wanted to think about creating a more considered and in-depth offer for families. The focus of the research has changed slightly over time, especially in relation to how we used the early year’s space.

What happens in art galleries is quite distinctly different from what happens in science centres or natural history museums. This was a key consideration entering the research. We also wanted family’s experiences to be centred on the connection between nature and art.

The research project is now entering its third and final year. What have been the key findings to date?

The first year of the action-research project was focused upon looking at school-aged children and their connection with the Park. We wanted to use the first stage of research to understand how the Park can engage with families in new ways. So with these families we tried out various different activities to see what they liked, what they were interested in, how they behaved and different methods of engagement.

Image credit: Jane Hewitt

The family model that we use at YSP is one-on-one approach. So rather than being the whole family coming together, we encourage one parent to bring one child. So therefore the project was not looking at issues between siblings. Instead we wanted it to focus on and encourage really meaningful time between one child and their parent.

Data was collected over four half days at the sculpture park and four half days in the education settings. We worked with eight families from children’s centres and nurseries in Wakefield. All families involved in the initial stage of research had children aged two and up. Over the eight days we trialled different creative activities with the families. We then did in-depth evaluation on each activity that gave us incredible insight into participants experiences. We were then able to build these findings into the subsequent stages of research.

What types of programming have come out of these initial findings?

Coming out of the first stage of research we were able to identify what sorts of workshops we would need to offer, what resources we need to develop and what we need to do as an organization to engage families. Results indicated the following:

1. An enclosed children’s outdoor space is both wanted and needed;
2. Families need to make art in addition to looking at it;
3. Open-ended resources are essential in supporting families connection with art and nature;
4. Children behave better outside then inside and are not worried about the weather.

Leading on from this, the second stage of action research comprised of the development of a series of public events for families. These included drop-in days and school holiday activities. The major outcome of the research is the creation of a new family space for under 5’s called Hidden Forrest.

How did you work with artists on the project?

Bryony Pritchard was the main artist we worked with. Bryony has extensive experience in working in children’s art education and is a very reflective practitioner. A key responsibility of hers was designing the creative activities within Hidden Forrest and facilitating these activities on the day. These activities were essentailly provocations that connected children with nature and art.

When developing children’s  programmes it really helps to be collaborating with people who have have direct experience working with children and understand how they communicate and think. I did this earlier in my career and this gave me great insight which I was able to bring to my  current role that is more focused on research and development.

How has using the action-research process (planning, observing, interpreting and reflecting) benefited the programme’s development?

The difference between everyday practice and action research is that you are constantly thinking, reflecting and making changes. Of course everyone is reflective in this field but having it as a formal research project allowed us to really look at something critically. It un-sticks old patterns of practice and thinking within the organization. This can be particularly useful when working with staff who have been around for a long time – to challenge old ways of thinking.

I have always been a reflective practitioner. I also knew Bryony would be open to trying new things. Using action research allows us to development of an attitude of “if this does not work, this is okay.” This is a really freeing thing for practitioners. When things did not go so well we were able to reflect, discuss and then give ourselves permission to try it again with changes. For example we once tried the same program with a different audience with surprisingly different results.

Sometimes there is a lot of pressure on artists to do it well the first time as they are getting paid a lot of money (and so they should!). However there is an idea that these activties always need to be sparkly and everyone needs to have a fabulous time. The action research enabled us to explore and challenge many ideas around practice. We knew that we would possibly learn a lot of things when it went wrong.

Where do you hope to take the findings from the research? What is your future vision for family learning at YSP?

We are now entering our third year of the research project. The focus is not upon institution-wide training. An interesting thing about action research is that other teams can take findings and re-adjust them to fit with their own context. This training will focus upon things such as how staff talk to families and children who may have very little gallery experience. We hope to also create a regular offer for families.

Family engagement is not just about the learning team. These are institution-wide conversations that need to be had. It takes time to implement such change and to shape how we collectively engage with families.

Learning with Serpentine – Interim Report

This is a repost from the Centre for Research in Arts, Creativity and Literacies (CRACL) blog. The original post was written by Pat Thomson, Professor of Education within the School of Education, University of Nottingham (UK). 

We have been conducting an evaluation of learning in the Serpentine’s World without Walls programme. We have just reported on our interim results from an examination of two projects. One was the first instalment of Changing Play, a project conducted in partnership with the Portman Children’s Centre.

Anton Franks did this first set of research. His investigation of the work that artist Albert Potrony did suggests the following benefits for children:

• awareness and understanding of a range of materials and objects, manipulative skills in handling large and small materials and objects, and ability to conceptualise them in form and use
• imaginative development in the interaction with materials, objects and other children, allowing experimentation in applying and combining of materials.
• linguistic development in the use of words, utterances and in the construction of narratives accompanying play and reflecting on it afterwards is essential in early conceptual development.
• the richness of children’s narratives incorporated their understanding of social relations and responses to immediate and mediated culture – many instances of children making references to familiar media characters (notably Power Rangers) and to their experience of social and cultural life (home life, rockets, putting people in prison)
• the ability to ‘read’ materials and objects – to name things in their playworld and to construct complex narratives ­­adapting them to their imaginative purposes – are powerful precursors of literacy development
• looking at the images the artist had taken of the children in play and then reflecting on them later, interpreting them and making narratives assisted the development of memory
• continuity and consistency in working regularly with a particular group of children – the original plan was to work both with the Nursery and with a drop-in parent and toddler group, ‘Stay and Play’, but after reflection and discussion with staff this was modified to concentrate on working with the Nursery children
• particularly apparent was children’s increasing sense of autonomy in the playworlds they created, affording them a clearer sense of their own developing character and personhood for themselves and in relation to others. Children were able to lead adults into and through their imaginative worlds, involving them in their play

There were also benefits for nursery staff and children. You can read our full interim evaluation report here as a downloadable pdf. worldwithoutwalls_interimresearchreport_final-copy

Simon Nicholson on the theory of loose parts

In 1972 architect Simon Nicholson, the son of artists Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, presented the proposition that young children’s creative empowerment comes from the presence of open-ended materials that can be constructed, manipulated and transformed through self-directed play. These ‘loose parts’ permit children to become co-producers of art, space and culture alongside adult artists and architects.

Children play in an atelier at the Centro Malaguzzi in Reggio Emilia, Italy. Image credit: http://www.reggiochildren.it

According to Nicholson, the cultural elite have created and maintained a social lie. They have convinced us that the construction of any part of an environment or artwork is so complex and difficult that it can only be undertaken by a gifted few people who have university degrees and highly specialised artistic expertise. This misconception has led people to believe that creativity is for a select few ‘geniuses’ and the rest of us are compelled to be mere consumers of the music, art, poems, buildings and ideas that these people create. This is particularly prevalent in the lives of young children.

This idea defies itself in two ways. Firstly, there is no evidence that says that some humans are born creative and some not. Secondly, there is a huge body of evidence that supports the idea that all children enjoy experimenting, discovering and playing with materials. Therefore all humans are creative and are able to be creatively empowered through their connection with open-ended  and flexible variables such as clay, blocks, rocks and flowers. These materials can be adapted, moved, designed, recombined, tinkered with and taken apart allowing for children to partake in the construction of the spaces and activities in which they live and play.  The more flexible the materials are, the more scope for deep creative exploration by children and the more likely they will remain absorbed in creative play. Similar to the Reggio Emilia and Steiner early childhood philosophies, Nicholson’s theory is founded on the belief that children are competent, creative and capable beings who are able to participate in the construction of the ideas, believes and spaces they inhabit.

Children are able to select what materials they use and how they are appropriated, allowing for the development of their own hypothesis around their play which can be tested through self-assessed means, for example when building a robot a child may assess its success against whether or not the robot moves. The crucial element within the environments is the user’s ability to adapt the materials in a large variety of ways, allowing for deep creative experimentation. The emphasis then moves to a more discovery-based learning experience in which inquiry and children’s self-led research are valued over more transmission forms of learning. It is through this that the environment takes on the form of a science laboratory.

‘In any environment, both the degree of inventiveness and creativity, and the possibility of discovery, are directly proportional to the number and kind of variables in it.” Simon Nicholson

The focus of the theory of loose parts is on the material and spatial qualities of space. A crucial aspect of children’s learning which Nicholson does not cover is the social milieu needed to support and deepen creative play. It is not merely a matter of putting a large volume of ‘loose parts’ in a room and letting children go wild, the social system put in place by adults is fundamental in creating successful children’s learning experiences. Educators must guide and challenge children’s thinking and be responsive to new discoveries, new ideas and new collaborative thinking strategies developed by children.

Olafur Eliasson’s The Cubic Structural Evolution Project (2010). Image credit: Queensland Art Gallery

Whilst Nicholson discusses loose parts predominantly in relation to the construction of playgrounds and school environments, this theory can also be applied to the construction of artworks and immersive environments in art galleries. When doing so, it raises fundamental questions about how culture and cultural values are constructed in art galleries. For example, what parts of an environment or an artwork can be done by an artist or curator and what parts can be done by children? Nicholson’s believed that this balance needs to be tipped towards the child however in doing so, is it then undermining the role and expertise of the artist and curator? Does this then also undermine the artist’s ‘authorship’ of the artwork? These key ethical considerations are deserving of critical reflection and debate when developing early years gallery practice. If we forego the presence of loose parts in order to stay true to an artists already developed artist’s process, will this then come at the compromise of meaningful experiences for children?

The beautiful Roma Patel and I have constructed a giant ‘Ball Run’ play space that we will present at the Lakeside International Children’s Theatre and Dance Festival (June 4 & 5 2016). Drawing upon Nicholson’s theory, children will design and construct their own runs using quirky and recycled materials (prototype video below). The space will also feature a dedicated baby and toddler area. Lakeside Arts Centre, University of Nottingham. FREE, recommended for 0-15 year olds, 12.00pm – 5.00pm. Further details here.

Want to read more about loose parts and materials in learning? Check out my latest post on the role of materials in children’s learning through art!

References

Nicholson, S. (1971). How NOT to cheat children – The theory of loose parts. Landscape Architecture, 62, 30-34.