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This issue of the Australian Journal of Early Childhood focuses on the arts and young children. Anyone who has engaged in the arts with young children can attest to the sheer joy children gain from participating in the arts and, for many of us, 'art for art's sake' is reason enough!
Ironically, while creativity is currently enjoying star status at the top end of education, those of us who work with young children are finding the arts increasingly squeezed out in favour of the more academic outcomes for teaching and learning. While we refuse the binary logic of separating the arts and the academics, it is useful to be able to access both sides of the coin. Rather than seeing the arts as a frill to learning and development, we see the arts as a powerful source of joy, pleasure and a form of intellectual challenge, cognition, communication and learning and emotional, cultural and spiritual understanding. The task is to convince others, and share our ways of seeing.
Thankfully, there is a growing body of evidence demonstrating that children have higher levels of achievement in the so-called academic skills when engaged in arts rich programs. This was the dominant message of the widely publicised Champions of Change: The Impact of the Arts on Learning report (Fiske, 1999). However, this document did not specifically address arts engagement and arts learning prior to formal schooling. Likewise, Australia's National Review of School Music Education (DEST, 2005) examined music education only from children's commencement at primary school. Many of the most recent syllabus documents and curriculum guidelines for early childhood education—in Australia at least—have pushed out the arts, or they are concealed under broader labels, such as communication or ways of learning. This neglect of the arts in early childhood strengthens the importance of this issue of the Australian Journal of Early Childhood, where research is presented alongside practical implications for practitioners to further our understanding and application of the arts in early childhood.
Deans, Brown and Young present an evocative case study of a drama teacher's process drama session centred around 'The Possum Story'. The authors provide a vivid description and analysis of the teacher's reflection in action, and reflection on action, in a drama session with four-to-five-year-olds in a long day early learning centre. They remind us of the power of drama to promote creative problem-solving through responsive questioning using relevant child-centred content.
Just as Deans, Brown and Young demonstrate how drama can be seamlessly integrated with other arts areas, Niland demonstrates the way literature can be integrated with music, movement and dance. The author outlines a variety of strategies for integrating music and literature in particular, and provides a wide array of suggested children's storybooks that can be used to do this in a rich, authentic way.
The effectiveness of music-appreciation activities, as part of early childhood television programming in Hong Kong, is the focus of Yim's article. Interviews with preschool children and their teachers point to the effectiveness of these programs in engaging them both in world-music activities. In doing this, children were exposed to styles of music they may not hear in daily popular culture. The children's and teachers' responses to the programs demonstrate active student engagement in a variety of different music activities, something which is frequently absent in early childhood television programming.
de Vries also examines young children's use of media, as seen through the eyes of parents. He found that parents value their children engaging in music; but, due to time constraints and lack of parental musical skills, this frequently occurred through CDs and DVDs for their children to listen to and watch without adults being present. Although parents point to perceived benefits of children engaging with these media, such as providing quiet time for children and helping to develop listening skills and numeracy, de Vries points to many areas that parents and educators need to be aware of if relying on these media to provide musical experiences for young children.
Richards provides us with a careful account of the history of beliefs and attitudes about children's art, and raises thoughtful questions that take us beyond the taken-for-granted claims around children's 'natural' development. She makes visible how the long-held, and mainly western, beliefs about child art have been shaped, and how they shape our practices. Her article finishes with a call to include children's own voices in the conversation about the arts, and this call is answered in this edition by Yim, Wong and Wright.
Wong asked young children in Hong Kong about their views of art. The questions explored children's perceptions of why they do art, how they learn it, and what they like about it. Their responses are surprising, and provide us all with much food for thought. A favourite [particularly insightful/impressive -?] concept that Wong explores is the idea that children consider art a 'mystery', and the children articulate some of the paradoxes they experience as a result of the arts activities provided for them in their programs. The research methodology employed here is one that would be usefully applied to scrutinise many of our practices with young children—not just in the arts.
In Wright's article, we hear more of the children's voices, and this fascinating research is impressive for its rigour, as well as the insights provided through such close scrutiny of the children's processes. Here is a complex reading of children's artistic engagement, and Wright unpacks for us the children's use of symbols, signs, body, emotion and thought—giving us a new way of seeing the many languages of children. She makes it clear why we need new understandings of literacies, and shows how children actively work across the boundaries between words, images, texts and other forms of communication. Like de Vries, Wright's research reinforces the importance of 'being there' while children are creating meaning.
McArdle and Spina report on a project involving recently arrived refugee children from Africa, and suggest a model for the understanding and teaching of the arts as a powerful language for communication, as well as for capacity building. The paper documents one artist's way of working with young children: a seamless approach that includes art appreciation and understanding, along with the 'doing' of art. Here is one way of seeing art for art's sake and art for life's sake. The arts provide a perfect space for working with young children, recognising and catering for difference, and all the while building knowledge, communication and social skills, as well as social capital.
We see this special edition of AJEC as a valuable resource for those of us who seek to advocate for the arts—when the pure pleasure of the arts no longer stands as reason enough—in the current climate of outcomes and accountability. Each of the authors makes a strong case for the arts, and their passion, rigour and weight of evidence should help us all as we continue to advocate for the arts in early childhood.
Peter de Vries
Monash Univeristy
Felicity McArdle
Queensland University of Technology
References
DEST (Department of Education, Science and Training) (2005). National review of school music education. Canberra: Australian Government.
Fiske, E. B. (Ed.) (1999). Champions of change: The impact of the arts on learning. Washington, DC: The Arts Education Partnership and The President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities.
Australian Journal of Early Childhood Volume 32 No 4 December 2007, pp. ii-iii.
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