Call for Papers

Intersections of Art & Childhood

Occasional Papers invites contributions to a special issue on art and learning

Children’s artistic explorations have become an area of increasing interest in a contemporary landscape marked by visual saturation and rapidly changing technology. Once viewed as an activity primarily affording emotional release, making art is now also understood as a critical activity that enriches children’s thinking and sense of agency. 

Intersections of Art & Childhood will provide a forum for examining the role that art-making plays in the lives of young children and its potential implications for curriculum and pedagogy. This special issue of Occasional Papers is designed to address the question: How can the visual arts contribute to children’s self-understanding? What role can they play in children’s appreciation of the broader spaces in which they live, learn and play? The issue will will be organized around four interconnected themes:

• art & play
• art & literacy
• art & digital lives
• art & ecological perspectives

Art & Play

Children explore materials and ideas, invent worlds and set them in motion, with blocks, toys, found materials and traditional art media. Their constructions, installations, and performances demonstrate an easy affinity with the practices of contemporary artists, who also improvise with materials not specifically designed for the purpose of making art. The playfulness of children’s art making raises issues about what art is and does, and how it is presented and encountered in educational settings. What is the relationship between art and play? How do the explorations of materials and ideas that characterize children’s independent art making fit within the structure of schooling? Does this playful art making bring children closer to the work of contemporary adult artists? How might children’s work with open-ended materials and “loose parts” inform our teaching and enhance our understanding of the role of art in children’s learning?

Art & Literacy

Contemporary understanding of children’s art recognizes how art-making events enable young people to negotiate and contextualize meaning. Such an approach is germane to those interested in expanded definitions of early childhood literacy. The focus on arts integration and multi-literacies provides openings for re/imagining the affordances of children’s visual productions as fluid, integrated processes that support, extend and reveal the complexities of their thinking and learning. How can we understand children’s visual productions as literacy practices that inform and transform traditional notions of both literacy and art?  How does the inclusion of the visual arts, in the curriculum, capture children’s awareness of their wider world? How can assessment be responsive to integrated practices of constructing meaning? And how does understanding art-making and literacy as social practice open new possibilities for pedagogy in the early childhood classroom? 

Art & Children’s Digital Lives

In recent years, many teachers and researchers working with young children have considered the role of technology and digital media in early childhood education. A variety of websites, mobile apps, and child-specific media platforms are marketed to teachers, children, and families. At the same time, young children are immersed in the adult digital cultures that surround them, and are using digital media in many of the same ways in which previous generations of young children used drawing, blocks, and dramatic play props. Yet, researchers have argued that there is something much more compelling and possibly even troubling about young children’s interactive engagements with the screen. How do children work with digital media? What kinds of media do young children use?  How might educators understand young children’s digital lives and what are the implications for teaching in school?

Art & Ecologic Perspectives

The spaces that we create and maintain, and the materials that we use in our work with young people reflect our own expectations and beliefs about art and education. From schools to classrooms to playgrounds, young people continue to locate and explore the spaces—both public and private—that permit them the creative forays they desire. And, when it comes to making determinations about the potential of these spaces and the “things” composing them, young people know better than most that “material matters.” How are young people making sense of their environments and the materials that are most immediately available to them? What tensions play out between young people and those who supervise these material worlds, and how and why are these particular tensions being maintained, undone, or reinvented? Additionally, how might these queries contribute to the ecological narratives about art in the lives of young people?

We encourage submissions that include audio or video recordings, photography, or graphic art, in addition to traditional texts.

This special edition of Bank Street Occasional Papers is guest edited by:

If you have questions or would like to discuss your ideas, please contact the guest editor most closely associated with the topic of your inquiry.

Due Date: September 1, 2013.

Manuscripts should be double spaced and formatted in APA Style. Text manuscripts may be between 1000-6000 words. Only unpublished manuscripts that are not under review by other publications are eligible for consideration. Send manuscript as Word document, subject line OP Special Issue Submission, to Kristine Sunday at kes150@psu.edu