Apply and consolidate
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Have a go at some art making for yourself. You might take Sarah’s suggestion to try out ephemeral art. Mark out a space for your art, and begin to explore and position materials in the space. These might be things you have gathered from nature, or from your recycling box! Alternatively you might like to try permanent marker pens and watercolour paints, and explore drawing and filling shapes.
We’d love for you to share your art with us!
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Summary
The important points to take away from this introductory part are:
- There are a variety of beliefs and perspectives on the nature and importance of the visual arts.
- The visual arts provide powerful support for children’s learning, helping them to develop creativity and imagination, cultural identity and knowledge, awareness of diverse points of view, and critical visual literacy skills.
- The visual arts also facilitate children’s ability to communicate ideas and feelings. Children develop important learning dispositions and have opportunities to construct and modify their working theories through the visual arts.
- Teachers’ own art experiences and their beliefs around art teaching will impact their practice, so it is important to be highly reflective about these.
Further reading
Learn more about working theories in this resource.
This paper describes research into teachers’ common beliefs about art education for young children and makes a case for more intentional teaching roles in the visual arts. It explains the approach to visual arts teaching we will promote later in the course, and briefly discusses the pedagogies of Reggio Emilia, which we will introduce in Part 5 of the course.