c i t s i Art t n e m p o l e Dev
Artistic Development Our courses examine the roles of the senses, emotions and intellect in shaping artistic-aesthetic development, and of the layered integrations these form over time. We interweave the journey of development with a concern for personal factors, experiences with materials, processes and visual ideas, and engagements with the larger cultural world of images within which young people often find their inspiration. We also work towards helping teachers understand their own centrality to the “developmental story� of those they teach and be able to differentiate yet envision the connections between their individual aesthetic inclinations and the questions young people bring to their artistry. Above all, teachers need to know that development, while continuous, is not neatly linear and consists of many radiating threads and directions, is open to a range of interests and sometimes contends with difficult content.
A brief picture of artistic development can only capture the highlights of a complex story. Ultimately, development is very personal and idiosyncratic and each person will exemplify the story in different and diverse ways. Thus, while there is much to be gained from becoming insightful about development in general, nothing replaces careful and thoughtful observation of individuals as they work and engage with materials. To sensitive observers and knowledgeable teachers young people will always “tell� what it is they are interested in and make clear the dilemmas and problems they have as they work with materials. Teachers at all levels should also be reminded that social, cultural and gender issues thread their ways through artistic development protruding more clearly and insistently at some times rather than others and these need to be respected. Young people grow and develop within a matrix of different cultures and these frame many of the practices of art and the values that surround them. For young people in schools where art is little valued they might find their nurturance and support in outside community provisions, and here too they will need knowledgeable practitioners if they are to flourish in the acquisition of visual voices in and through which they speak to what concerns them most.
Pre-school-K
K- Grade 1
Very early learning is invested in exploration and discovery across a variety of materials and combinations of materials. Young children are active learners who through invention and play first learn to make their generative marks upon the world. These marks include interweavings of lines and patches of great variety which, sooner or later, find organized forms in enclosures and complex designs. This very early learning constitutes a foundational phase in young children’s development, for here they are constructing basic repertoires of actions with materials and exploring the possibilities for imaginative expression these hold for them personally.
Usually between preschool and grade 1, young children begin offering names for their work. Naming usually begins almost as an afterthought when a work/design is completed; later, naming occurs while a work is in progress and, finally, a name is announced at the start of action with a material. The subjects of these early works are very fluid and changeable as young children are making their first connection between ideas about materials and their experiences in the world. Early images in paint, crayon, clay and collage call attention to the people, animals, places, activities and events that color young children’s emotional lives.
Grades I-2
Grades 2-4
In the natural course of development children’s curiosities about human relationships emerge more fully as they grow older and begin to experience a variety of people, actions, and everyday happenings beyond their homes. Works of this phase often give priority to single objects, wholes, parts, and details and the presence of ground lines on which images of people and objects can be placed. Size and relative position of images continue to represent the emotional salience of their referents in the lives and experiences of children at this age. The events that emerge in young children’s art works at this phase interweave experiences from imagination, memory and direct observation and capture highly personal and often idiosyncratic interpretations and may take ideas directly from the media or famous works of art.
The middle years of childhood bring with them expanding views of the world of experience that incorporate changing ideas about the self, the world and human relationships. Children at this phase are both concrete thinkers and highly imaginative and over time develop growing appreciation for and understanding of the social rules, requirements and skills expected of them as participating members of society. They are curious about and very good observers of events in the real world both in their immediate environment, and far away and fascinated with what makes things work in the way that they do. They develop their own social and aesthetic value systems and an expanding world-view informs the art they create; they draw upon observation, memory, imagination, investigation and inquiry centered on events and happenings with multiple and complex parts.
Grades 5-6
Grades 6-8
As children grow and change so they acquire more reflective views of the world and these are revealed in their art works. They ask questions about morality, truth, and value and grapple more intensely with the rules and conventions governing the society within which they live. While they continue to be wonderfully curious, imaginative and inventive, they also take a much more reflective and self-conscious view of their art, often testing their own efforts for accuracy and truth. They continue to explore social themes either close to home or from other times and places, yet there emerges a new more critical slant to their observations and interpretations, and they will often compare their work to admired adult models or to that of other pupils in their classes. Grappling with the many, different and divergent ways in which the world can be experienced, conceptualized and re-presented becomes a major developmental task for young people growing up in Western cultures.
This is the time of sometimes dramatic and uneven changes in young people’s lives that conspire to unbalance their experiences of a stable reality and consistent and enduring sense of self. In light of this, they begin a search for new and more nuanced ideas about materials and their potential, and they test their uses as vehicles for constructing and expressing their changing views of the relationships between themselves and their worlds. Young people quite naturally engage in a great deal of exploratory learning involving doodling, cartooning and construction that bring into being new types of images combining parts and actions from often divergent sources. Within the creation of such images and also in their more formal artwork in painting, collage and clay, we find adolescent preoccupations with narratives that explore multi-layered ideas about the self and a concern to acquire more formal skills in drawing, painting, collage and sculpture.
Grades 9-12
Adulthood
Themes relating to identity, fragmentation, feeling exposed, fear, violence as well as romantic love are often explored in the context of invented worlds and re-explored throughout later adolescence. New forms of mastery, such as in drawing, emerge from interests in exploration, investigation and awareness of contemporary cultural models and form the basis of emergent personal styles. The imagination is now fully harnessed in the development of the capacity to construct visual metaphors and also makes accessible a rich array of possible ideas for all forms of design. Continuity in creative practice is well within the capacity of all adolescents if thoughtfully and knowledgeably taught and provided with the kind of vernacular for encounters with the history of art, design and craft that help contextualize their own art practice.
Two development routes tend to characterize adulthood into old age. The first is marked by the choice to enter the professional world of the artist necessitating specialized training, the other in which artistic practice takes a more variable role in personal lives. Both routes fall under the shaping influence of a network of socio-cultural influences that are variously influential. For those individuals following a professional path the emergence of a distinctive identity as artist involves interplay between individual creativity and skill and the tensions of contemporary culture. Identity as reflected in style becomes an iterative process and subject to change throughout professional life. For those individuals following a more variable route, art practice often undergoes more subtle and slower change; in late adulthood, however, development may take on a second life in which individual creativity calls upon phases of art practice characteristic of earlier repertoires as a spur to moving forward.
Teachers College in New York, New York Engage with some of the most renowned and exciting practitioners, philosophers, psychologists, educators and researchers in the arts, cultural studies, and humanities anywhere in the world. Program: • Five degree programs: MA, MA with Teacher Certification, Ed.M., Ed.D., and the Ed.D. in the College Teaching of Art • Specializations in: Museum Education, Community Arts, Studio Practice and Leadership • A summer intensive MA • International experiences overseas Opportunities for… • Serious scholarship and intellectual debate • Art practice and research • Individually designed independent study projects • Engagement with schools in diverse neighborhoods • Internships in museums • Professional employment in arts venues • Macy Gallery Art Exhibitions • Exciting conversations across cultures We are… A community of faculty and students: artists, teachers, museum educators, art historians, thinkers, movers and doers who come together to address critical issues of our time.
Judith M. Burton, Director 525 West 120th Street, New York, NY 10027 Tel: (212) 678-3360 • www.tc.edu/a%26ah/ArtEd