ABOUT DR GAI LINDSAY
Dr. Gai Lindsay lectures in the Early Years Degree at the University of Wollongong.
She recently completed a PhD that explored the visual arts beliefs and pedagogy of early childhood
educators. Before entering academia, Gai worked as a preschool teacher, director and early childhood
consultant for 23 years. Her desire is to be a “pracademic” and to link research and practice in ways that
will support early childhood teachers and educators to confidently speak the language of art with children.
To visit Gai’s blog regarding early childhood visual arts pedagogy go to www.ecartoz.com
To read Gai’s academic articles go to https://scholars.uow.edu.au/display/gai_lindsay
benefits of messy arts experiences, yet ironically
avoided mess-making activities in practice.
Other participants noted the tensions created
between staff and parents about mess-making,
concurrently explaining the need to advocate
for children’s right to free expression through
messy play, while admitting the demands of child
supervision sometimes restricted the types of
experiences offered in order to avoid the need
to clean up messes. Additionally, educators who
romanticised messy arts play as a therapeutic
experience tended to be those who defined a
child-focused curriculum as one where all choices
made by children are accepted, regardless of
whether the choices were wasteful or destructive
with materials or had questionable educative
value. This confusion about how to define quality
in relation to artistic and creative experiences
suggests that there is a great deal of confusion
regarding the types of pedagogical approaches
that best support visual arts related learning
and development. Perhaps you experience such
contradictions in your own workplace?
To support theoretical reflection about the issue of
messy art-play, it is interesting that well-respected
scholars suggest the belief that messy visual
arts activities build creativity is a long held early
childhood myth (Eisner, 1973-74; Jalongo, 1999).
Eisner (1973-1974) clarified that while visual arts
engagement can foster pre-dispositions for creativity,
it should not be positioned as the therapeutic key
that exclusively unlocks the child’s innate creativity.
My own research suggests that educators hold very
tightly to a range of visual arts myths when then
they lack confidence and knowledge with visual arts
processes (Lindsay, 2016).
APRIL 2019
John Dewey challenged the romantic belief that
children’s choices should always determine the
curriculum, suggesting such beliefs potentially
substitute chaos for education and restrict
children’s access to meaningful learning
experiences and subject content knowledge (Weiss
et al., 2005). Dewey (1938, p.13) challenges us,
stating:
“The belief that all genuine education
comes about through experience does not
mean that all experiences are genuinely or
equally educative. Experience and education
cannot be directly equated to each other. For
some experiences are mis-educative. Any
experience is mis-educative that has the effect
of arresting or distorting the growth of further
experience.”
This idea, that the experiences presented
to children may not always be valuable
in educational terms, reminds me of
Csikszentmihalyi’s (1996, p. 28) assertion that
genuine creativity (defined as “any act, idea, or
product that changes an existing domain, or
that transforms an existing domain into a new
one”) is only possible when a person has gained
mastery within a domain. I therefore wonder,
whether instead of automatically describing
children’s early play and exploration with arts
materials as creative, we might instead describe
them as being inventive, experimental, focussed
and curious – all characteristics that potentially
foster a sense of wonder and a joyful attitude to
learning? Choosing to position creativity in these
terms removes it from the realm of prodigy and
giftedness and places it firmly in the everyday
practices we employ in early childhood settings.
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