Play, Making, and Pedagogical
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The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School College of Arts and Architecture BUILDING THEORIES: PLAY, MAKING, AND PEDAGOGICAL DOCUMENTATION IN EARLY CHILDHOOD ART EDUCATION A Dissertation in Art Education by Marissa A. McClure © 2008 Marissa A. McClure Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 2008 ii The dissertation of Marissa A. McClure was reviewed and approved* by the following: Christine Marmé Thompson Professor of Art Education Art Education Graduate Program Coordinator Dissertation Advisor Chair of Committee Yvonne Gaudelius Assistant Vice President and Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education Brent Wilson Professor Emeritus of Art Education Sarah K. Rich Associate Professor of Art History *Signatures are on file in the Graduate School iii Abstract The study is theoretical and narrative—anchored in my own subjectivity and in my experiences as a teacher working with young children in an urban elementary school and in a new early childhood program. My participation in a year-long researcher-teacher collaboration in the studio of a Reggio-inspired school for young children and my observations in Reggio Emilia inform the processes through which I have generated data through pedagogical documentation in each of these contexts. In Chapter One, I interrogate images of children to illustrate how constructions of who children are (and who they could become) produce and sustain educational institutions and relationships. It is my intent to place the image of the rich, historical child in a relationship of positive tension with the eternal child. In Chapter Two, I present pedagogical documentation as a form of ethnographic research through which educators generate, test, and refine theories as they co-construct knowledge with young children. Here, I trace how the small theories that teachers develop through practice can contribute richness and complexity to the larger body of theory in educational research. In Chapter Three, I situate children’s visual productions as cognitive and socio-cultural processes that are socially distributed to investigate how children make meanings through making as individual and group learners. I consider children’s making in various media and use theory from contemporary literacy educators to support a construction of children’s visual productions as making in visual languages. I assert that in their making, children strive for communicative fluency. In Chapter Four, I contribute to current theories of child art in early childhood education by positioning children’s visual productions as making—a iv social practice that performs social work in multiple social worlds—and by extending the theoretical assumptions about children’s making to include ways in which children make with new media. In the Epilogue, I review the theoretical contributions that I make in the study. Those include the idea of unacceptable children, the portability of the Reggio Emilia approach and site-specific pedagogy, the idea of making, and the process of finding voice in research and writing. v Table of Contents List of Figures..............................................................................................................vii Acknowledgements......................................................................................................xi Prologue: Teaching and Research: Identity versus Role Confusion............................1 The Study: Subjectivity, Scope, and Serendipity .................................................15 Chapter One: The Image of the Child: Multiple Metaphors, Desires, and a Metatheory............................................................................................................30 Acceptable and Unacceptable Children in the Complexities of the Classroom ...30 Teaching and Research Problems.........................................................................37 Children and Childhoods in Reggio Emilia: A Common Image..........................40 Constructing Childhoods and Children: Theory and Discourse...........................46 Positive Tensions and Dichotomies in Reggio Emilia: Specific Sites .................51 Adults Producing Children: Children Producing Educational Relationships.......55 Discourse in Reggio Emilia..................................................................................62 Site-Specific Pedagogy: We’re Doing Us ............................................................67 Site-specific Pedagogy and Social Constructivism: Knowledge Co- constructed in Context...................................................................................70 Site-specific Childhoods in Compound Social Worlds ........................................82 Chapter Two.................................................................................................................85 Pedagogical Documentation as a Research Methodology...........................................85 Writing to Understanding Mathematical Languages: A Vignette ........................85 Theory and Method in this Study .........................................................................90 Theoretical Implications of Documentation as Research .....................................92 Documentation as Process and Product................................................................100 Documentation and Qualitative Research Methodologies: Building Big-T Theory............................................................................................................105 Documentation and qualitative methods .......................................................107 Documentation, cultural studies, media studies, and literary criticism.........112 Documentation and arts-based research ........................................................115 Ethics and Documentation: Trust and Privacy .....................................................118 Documentation and School-Age Children............................................................124 Conclusions and Implications for Further Research.............................................129 Findings and recommendations.....................................................................129 Trust and abandonment .................................................................................133 Chapter Three...............................................................................................................135 vi Relationships between Play, Multiple Languages, Teaching and Learning ................135 Building Theory through Practice ........................................................................135 Hot Moments: Mythology, Popular Culture, and the Third Site ..........................137 Learning from Contemporary Literacy Theory: Play and Language ...................170 This is tiny foot: drawing as a language in classroom mythologies..............174 Bigfoot’s narrative velocity...........................................................................177 Landscape as site: defamiliarizing everyday experience...............................185 Pirates of the Caribbean Means So Much to me: Sketchbooks and the Third Pedagogical Site in an Elementary School...................................190 Uglydolls and the Stickies: How can Popular Culture Mediate Difference? .......203 Cheesetopia and the Ice Skating Pimp: Coolness, Older Children, and Fantasy Play...................................................................................................212 The TV of All the Nation: Fantasy Play, New Media Play and Learning............224 Children as Makers in New Media................................................................226 Chapter Four ................................................................................................................236 Building a Theory of Visual Language........................................................................236 Positioning Children’s Making as “Social Work” (Dyson, 1993, p.11)...............236 A Short Overview of Some Theories of Child Art...............................................246 A permanent exhibition: Inventing child art .................................................249 Stage or phase theories of artistic development ............................................252 Some Relationships between Child Art and Art Education..................................257 Making in Reggio Emilia: Problems with Multiple Labels and Stages................265 Visual Languages Performing Social Work .........................................................272 Development and Motivation: Mapping more Intricate Relationships ................273 Material and Intellectual Life in Reggio Emilia...................................................276 Griffins: Building a Site-Specific Aesthetic.........................................................282 Sound-making Machines and Materials ...............................................................289 Environmental Transformations: Altering Spaces and Sites................................293 Epilogue .......................................................................................................................296 Questions that Linger............................................................................................296 The Dark Side of Being Cheesy and Puffy...........................................................300 What if All Children are (Can Be) Unacceptable? ...............................................303 Why does Reggio Emilia