Gender and Geocultural Diffrences in Children’s Appreciation of Art

Abstract

Art has always fascinated humans and the way people experience its beauty is different in different cultures. Children acquire the language of art through a richness of creative visual content. This makes training children to understand and experience art at a young age becoming important. The objective of the present study is to investigate how boys and girls from different geographical backgrounds (cultural values, social practices, life styles, discursive and material expressions, artefacts, human relationships, etc) appreciate art. The quantitative study explores how boys and girls respond to artworks from different artistic genres. Sixty children studying in grade IX participated in the study. The sample included thirty boys and thirty girls from rural and urban backgrounds, and they are in the age group of 13-15 years. The schools are situated in and around Hyderabad city, South India. Children’s expressions of art appreciation are elicited by showing images of nine famous artworks from Western, Middle Eastern and Oriental paintings depicting landscapes. The artworks belonged to representational, semi-representational and abstract genres and are shown randomly to children to obtain their responses. The results of the study showed differences in the appreciation of the three genres of artworks by gender, but no statistically significant differences were observed in the appreciation of representational and semi-representational artworks by boys and girls. On the other hand, there exists a statistically significant difference in the appreciation of abstract artworks by boys and girls. The analysis of appreciation of three genres of artworks with respect to geographical background of children shows statistically significant differences among rural and urban children. The findings of this study can be used by teachers and teacher educators in the designing the right kind of learning experiences in schools.