Abstracts – Session Two
12:20 – 1:20 – 6EN – 514
Chair: Moira Newton
Ruijie Xu: Distributed Creativity and Diversity of Young Children’s Dramatic play
The current study aims to discuss cultural diversity and creativity of young children through their spontaneous dramatic play. Diversity has long been considered to have positive influence on individual creativity. Although creativity in early childhood education is a concept widely recognized, yet few empirical studies had been done in this field. According to the Distributed Creativity Theory (Glăveanu, 2014), away from the most commonly used approach in creativity research of considering creativity as a complex web of personal traits and cognitive processes which were independent from situational factors (Guilford, 1967), creativity is placed at the centre of interaction between self and others, and new and existing artefacts, and being described as simultaneously distributed along three lines, namely, material, social and temporal. Based on this theory, data was collected from two early childhood centres in Auckland through observations on children, interviews with teachers and parents. Findings presented how young children’s creativity distributed along these three lines: materially, artefacts such as play props were used by children to create new dramatic play; socially, creative dramatic play was planned and improvised among children or between children and teachers; temporally, both old artefacts e.g. LEGO and pre-knowledge from adults or media helped creativity distribute among children. The findings also suggested how diversity in children’s background, play materials provided, and the teachers’ and parents’ attitudes play a role in influencing children’s creativity.
Niroshami Randima Rajapaksha: Young children’s agency for learning: An asset to make changes to their lives in early childhood settings
This presentation focuses on sharing preliminary findings of an ethnographic study, which explored young children’s agency for learning in early childhood education (ECE) settings. Agency for learning, in this study, is defined as children’s capacity to act on their own for learning. The study was carried out in a kindergarten and an education and care centre in Auckland with a total of 40 children (2.5 – 5 years old) individually, in pairs, and in small groups using observations and video recordings, photographs, teachers’ and parents’ interviews, and collection of documents and artefacts related to learning. In this presentation, I will share how agency for learning is expressed in two ECE settings, drawing on data primarily from observations, video recordings and photographs of two children. I transcribed the video-recorded episodes and combined similar episodes in a series of experiences. After multiple waves of rereading and coding, I noted the indicators of individual children’s agency expressed over time. The results showed diverse expressions of agency for learning and gradual development of agency over time across similar experiences, which led to improvement in children’s learning. The manifestation of agency varied with the interaction with people, places, and things and when they claimed, ‘I can do it’. The findings provide evidence for children’s agency for learning, which is distinct from their everyday experience of agency and is not only shaped and constructed by the socio-cultural contexts but also fuelled by their self-efficacy. Agency for learning is, therefore, an asset, which needs significant recognition and scaffolding.
Sarah Probine: ‘I feel like making something’: The contextual factors that shape how young children value and use the visual arts
The visual arts have been proven to be a central means through which young children can communicate their ideas, reflect on experience, and construct new knowledge. Despite this, perceptions of, and the degree to which the visual arts are valued within education, vary widely within political, educational, community and family contexts. These differing perceptions informed my doctoral research project, which explores the contextual factors that affect how children come to value and use the visual arts in their learning. The study is positioned within an interpretive qualitative paradigm. The theoretical framework and study design are informed by sociocultural theories and by narrative inquiry. The inclusion of participatory arts-based methods allowed the research participants to have a significant role in the research.
Early childhood settings at which the visual arts were deeply valued as a meaning-making device were purposively selected. I found at each setting, a unique and complex web of influences that shaped how children used the visual arts to mediate their thinking. For many of the children, visual art was the primary means through which they learned. Through the teachers rich and contextualised visual arts pedagogies and families that recognised the importance of the visual arts in their children’s learning, the children in this study used visual art to represent their experiences, relationships, to explore working theories, their interests (including those related to popular culture), to make sense of their own and other cultures, and to enrich their imaginative play. This research demonstrates that teachers have fundamental roles in fostering and disseminating the importance of the visual arts within their educational communities.