Artistic representations of young newcomer children: Exploring the personally significant

Description

Young children’s artistic representations or personal art making (i.e., drawing, painting, mark making or constructing 3D artifacts) are important ways they understand and communicate about their world. When young children engage in imaginative and creative activities they frequently echo or closely reproduce situations from their life and sociocultural contexts (Vygotsky, 1978, 2004). By paying attention to children’s artistic processes—in addition to their speech, gestures and body language during these playful encounters—one can foreground the personally significant in their lives (Anning & Ring 2004; Cox, 2005). This paper presents findings from a case study on how young Canadian newcomer children engaged in artistic representations in both the home and classroom to communicate about their everyday lives, experiences and the personally significant from their perspectives. The newly developed RAISED between Cultures model for the early years (Georgis et al., 2017) was used to interpret the case in order to understand the complexities of the children’s lives, and the specific institutions they are a part of and the influence they have. This conceptual model was chosen because it recognizes the importance of newcomer children’s daily culture, their family’s pre-and post-migration experiences, host country conditions, family and community strengths and vulnerabilities, and early socialization environments that are a part of their lives. Using examples from both the children’s processes of art making and created artifacts, along with observations, dialogue and conversations about their perspectives, the personally meaningful people, places, objects, stories and everyday experiences from home and school will be discussed. These processes of artistic representations were significant and an important source of knowledge because they provided an opportunity for the children to construct and represent meanings and understandings about the world, their lives and experiences and to communicate without a reliance on written language skills. Using artistic representations as a catalyst for dialogue is essential because if newcomer children’s perspectives, their specific challenges, needs and experiences at home and school are unheard, ignored or misunderstood they have the potential to become longstanding barriers for their future socialization, well-being, acculturation and settlement, and learning. This knowledge can also provide educators, pre-service educators, curriculum developers and policy makers with important information to help inform meaningful cultural inclusion and responsiveness in early childhood education practices, pedagogies and curricula. This presentation will conclude with an opportunity for participants to dialogue about young newcomer children’s perspectives from their artistic representations and how this understanding can support them in their development, adjustment, well-being and learning.

Period	24 Jan 2019 → 27 Jan 2019
Event title	8th International Art in Early Childhood Conference: Art as Dialogue
Event type	Conference
Location	Wellington, New ZealandShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International