Drawing and Painting: Children and Visual Representation: Second Edition

This book has been revised to reflect recent developments in early childhood education, in developmental psychology and in our understanding of children's development in the arts.The author shows how this new model of children's development in visual representation has important implications for education. The author examines children's development in visual expression and suggests how this development might be supported. The book takes issue with the inherited wisdom about children's development in visual representation. The traditional approach describes children's development in terms of supposed deficits in which children progress from 'primitive' earlier stages to 'superior' ones, until the 'defects' in their representational thinking are overcome and they arrive at an endpoint of 'visual realism'. This approach is the pervasive influence on curricular planning, in arts education and in early years education. The author explains recent different models of development in visual expression. Instead of measuring children's efforts against an adult paradigm, the new models identify the modes of representation used by children as consequences of children's own intentions, motivations and priorities. The writing is accessible and assumes no specialist knowledge of psychological theory, art, its history or interpretation.This book is essential reading for early childhood educators, at nursery and pre-school level, for other professionals who work with very young children and parents, as well as students and tutors on early years courses.