Cultural participation for, with and by children – Enhancing children’s agency through art pedagogy, visual knowledge-building and learning

Tarja Karlsson Häikiö

doi:10.7577/information.v7i1.2630

Abstract

This article focuses on how children's rights in society can be manifested with cultural tools and through cultural participation. The article discusses cultural participation for, with and by children based on the core ideas of a Swedish governmentally initiated strategy implemented in the 1970s. The right for children to take part in cultural activities, to be culturally active and to express themselves is based on the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989). Art education and visual activities for children in formal and informal cultural environments and the use of contemporary art will be discussed. An art-based project in collaboration between a cultural institution and preschool and younger children is described. The main purpose of the article is to analyse what impact the use of cultural participation and cultural tools has on children's collective experience and learning, as well as to discuss and contextualise the relationship between culture, preschool and school as it is influenced by global and societal changes, particularly the increasing visual impact in society through the use of digital media and multimodality. The results show how an art gallery visit and the use of cultural narratives, such as art educational activities at a preschool based on work with a picture book, create visual knowledge and contribute to children’s agency and understanding of equity as one of the aims in the early childhood education curriculum.

Highlights

Children’s engagement in arts and culture is mentioned in the national curriculum as part of the institutional educational practice in preschool and school in Sweden
The early childhood education curriculum emphasises that children ‘should be encouraged to feel trust in their own ability to think autonomously, to be active, move, learn and to be educated from different perspectives, such as intellectual, linguistic, ethical, practical, sensual and aesthetic’
Apart from preschool and school, is the child culture arena, which consists of different cultural activities, affordances and possibilities, such as museums, art education programmes, visits and tutorials

Summary

Introduction

Children’s engagement in arts and culture is mentioned in the national curriculum as part of the institutional educational practice in preschool and school in Sweden. I described methods to promote the development of visual knowledge-building and learning through visual and multimodal tools These studies describe children’s activities in different creative projects, both within and outside of preschool and primary school that give children access to learning environments and monitor meaningful activities through the use of art as a cultural tool (Rusanen et al, 2011). Due to my interest in how materiality affects art activities, new materialist and posthuman perspectives complement the analysis of how art education activities constitute agency through cultural participation for, with and by children These perspectives share a view of children as empowered, but with differences in the perception of knowledge as socially and relationally constructed (Dahlberg, Moss & Pence, 1999), and knowledge as created in intra-active relationships between childchild/child-things (Lenz Taguchi, 2012). Artistic experiences complement the often one-sided impressions from media culture and offer alternative experiences through children’s expression of their own thoughts of reality with different ways of using both analogue and digital media (Danielsson & Sommansson, 2014; Rusanen et al, 2014)

This strategy was part of a renewed cultural strategy

Final conclusions and further comments