Kinderculture in the Art Classroom: Early Childhood Art and the Mediation of Culture

Abstract

Contemporary children encounter far more unfiltered information than did children of previous generations, whose unmediated and direct experiences with people, places, and things served as primary sources of knowledge. Thus, when children are given the choice of what they will draw, the full range of influences shaping their knowledge of the world materializes on the drawing page, as images supplied by commercial culture vie for space with the traditional subjects of child art. Children's choice of imagery determines the form and content of their drawings from the time they begin to produce graphic symbols. The choices made by young children, influenced by media and peer culture, produce idiosyncratic developmental trajectories that differ markedly from classic descriptions of child art that emphasized the developmental priority of autobiographical images based upon the directly experienced. The increasing complexity of young children's lives, evidenced by changes in the everyday contexts of schooling and friendship and in the ready appropriation of images and ideas from popular culture, suggests the need for critical reassessment of the developmental and cultural assumptions that continue to guide early art education.