In the current climate of state-mandated education standards and assessment that prioritize math and language arts in U.S. schools, drawing, an accessible and/or pleasurable endeavor for a wide variety of children, is undervalued. Although research in art education over the past four decades has shown children's drawing and drawings to be rich…

Author Howard Gardner offers his reflections on his book, "Artful Scribbles" which he wrote in 1980 and ponders the ways "Artful Scribble" if written today, might resemble or differ from the 1980 model.

In this article, I discuss the concept of compositionism as an onto-epistemology of being and knowing that questions human exceptionalism. Compositionism suggests that humans exist in interdependence with complex bio-social systems that need to be assembled together with an ethics of response-ability toward threatened places and beings. I propose…

The author of this article creates a semblance between Deleuze and Guattari's conception of a politics of desire and the four realities, as outlined by Brent and Marjorie Wilson. By making this theoretical move, the author advances the idea that children's drawing unfolds from one moment to the next through the assemblages of desire that are most…

In this article, I consider the changing landscape of art education and explore potential directions for the field to situate itself within the spaces of early childhood education. I position that current understandings of child art and its use in both research and practice in the early childhood classroom are limited by a lack of connection to…

Invoking Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's configuration of minor literature, the author of this case study theorizes the drawing practice of a young boy (Carter) as a process of becoming-minor. Critical to this theorization is the creation and activation of a semblance between Brent and Marjorie Wilson's (1977) treatment of the…

In order to co-construct a better understanding of the nature of children's art experiences at home and in educational settings, I interacted with four young children who photographed and discussed their art experiences over the course of one year. As a result of these research processes, and considering John Dewey's (1934/2005) "Art as…

In this article, I propose that research which focuses on young children's experiences with the interactivity of new media not only furthers findings about young children's digital lives but also enriches the conclusion that children's engagement with artmaking--in general and in traditional ways--is richly complex, affective, and…

In this article, I present a reexamination of the myth of inherent creativity in early childhood to elucidate how still-dominant discourses of optimization such as child development, individualism, expression, creativity, and visual realism exert limiting pressures on understandings of the art and visual culture that children consume and create.…

What did art education look like within the confines of the Japanese American Internment Camp classrooms? Did the art education in the camps reflect the same curriculum that was being taught outside the camps and what other factors may have played a part in the students' experience? I propose that there were at least three significant…

Reconceptualizing the relationship between a child/subject and the adult/researcher is necessary in order to begin unraveling the possibilities entangled in children's learning practices, particularly those articulated by/through children's drawing performances. This article seeks to expand upon the complexities of researcher/subject…

This study describes the effects of a yearlong, multivisit teen program in a contemporary art museum on adolescents' reflections about art. Our purpose was to discover whether this program, focused on experiences with contemporary art and artists with its metacognitive approach, affected students' thinking about their own artmaking. The…

Volume 1, No. 2, of "Studies in Art Education," appearing in spring 1960, included an article by Viktor Lowenfeld titled "Creative Intelligence." Here, he highlighted his belief in the importance of creative intelligence to human functioning, linking it to creative practice as represented most purely in the artworks of children and untutored…

Historically, the majority of studies on children's image making have emphasized the appraisal of children's graphic development and/or the artistic qualities of children's pictures, thereby assigning them the status of self-contained visual artifacts and objects of analysis in their own right. However, such a product-oriented paradigm of inquiry…

Research has shown that the study of children's drawings can shed light on certain problems, allowing many invisible sides of children's school life to emerge. Based on the results of that research, this article will study whether the use of drawings, and art in general, could lead to the reduction of social and academic marginalization and to the…