Kuosmanen, Sinikka
(Helsingin yliopisto, 2022)
The Art Narrative is a two-part and four-task study of art education in early childhood education within the constructive cultural framework of education and development. My research is guided by Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological systems theory (1979, 1989, 2005) of sociology of education, Bruner’s (1989, 1996, 2003) constructive cultural psychological theories of the development of representative, narrative and practical thinking and dialogic learning and teaching, Vygotsky’s (1978) sociocultural theory of the child´s proximal development zone and play aa the principal focus of research on early achildhood and Räsänen´s constructive multisensory holistic conception of art knowledge. My research seeks to determine how early childhood art education manifests itself in the context of early childhood education and what aspects of the constructive cultural framework guides my work.
The first part of my research utilizes the empirical part of my 1994 licentiate thesis, which is an is an autoethnographic, retrospective and reflective oral history study. The second part of the study continues the results of the first part. It comprises both a theoretical and an analytical study of the literature and my own research experiences with a body-mind-art interactive data set regarding early childhood art education and its functional implementation.
My first research uses Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological systems theory to explore viewa and actions of my own and others’ related to early childhood art education from 1980 to 2020. My second research task focuses on how early childhood art education manifests itself as a narrative model in Bronfenbrenner´s bioecological systems theory, Bruner’s theories of cultural psychological education and representation and Räsänen’s multi-sensory understanding of art knowledge. My third research task explores art pedagogy in early childhood education based on Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological theories and Bruner’s theories of narrative and practical thinking development and dialogic learning, representation theory as well as Vygotsky’s theory of proximal development zone and playfulness. I examine the art activity and skill set of early childhood art education and art learning based on Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological system theory, Brunner’s representation, and Vygotsky’s proximal-zone development theory. My fourth task combines the results of the second and third tasks into two models, an interactive narrative model of early childhood art education and an art pedagogical plot and story art model suitable for early childhood education based on Vygotsky´s views on play.
My 1994 licentiate thesis in education provides the basic material for my autoethnographic research. I used the material compiled, but not processed, for the licentiate thesis statically and content-analytically in my dissertation. The former material includes interviews with children, parents, and employees in the mid- 1980 s and my own notes related to the practical implementation of art education in kindergartens and the views that guide it. I supplement the first research material by interviewing employees and children in kindergarten in the mid- 1980s and their parents in the spring of 2020. The latter material comprises the quantitative and quantitatively elaborated part of my licentiate thesis and an empirical analysis of the theoretical and research literature related to early childhood development and early childhood art education.
In the first part of the research, I engage in a reflective and retrospectively reminiscent dialogue with my research data. I compare my research and the results I obtained with other research literature on early childhood art education completed between 1978 and 2020, either directly or closely related to it. I also examine expert discussion on the topic and the social decisions that influenced pre-school art education such as the day-care system, early and art education, and staff training. I transform the qualitative material I have collected into narrative episodes and place them in the structure of Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological systems theory and timewise between the 1980s and 2020. I study the chronological variation in the narratives. I examine my own actions and those of others’ and my experiential interpretation thereof, comparing them over time and reflecting on them. Although my licentiate thesis (1994) employs bioecological systems theory in macro-, exo-, meso-, and micro-environments and interaction among them, in the dissertion my reasoning focused on the most immediate microenvironment and describes my owing individual characteristics and child development and those of significant adults. By studying these, I was able to verify the various roles of children and adults in an art education event.
Through this qualitative research and by transforming interviews into experiential mini-narratives, I produced a meta-narrative of the starting points and challenges of early childhood art education. It was a paradox narrative of change. While the children’s perspective and the individual’s positive conditions, especially those of their parents, such as attitudes, motivations, and skills regarding engagement in art education, strengthened over the period 1980– 2020, threats from external circumstances increased. These circumstances had a differentiating effect, thereby causing and maintaining inequality in art education in the micro-environment. Children remained on the level of art lovers, art no longer became an integral part of their lives. The planned co-operative roles of early childhood educators, parents and early childhood education workers as immediate art educator became random, depending on the situation.
In the second part, I explore art knowledge and the skills of child´s yearly years. I do so with the help of both my previous research and other philosophical theoretical research literature suitable for my current theoretical frame of reference. With the constructive cultural framework of my research as a starting point, I examine what early childhood art education has to offer and what is worthwhile implemening. Based on Bruner’s theories of cultural psychological education and representation and Räsänen’s holistic conception of art knowledge, I study the child’s body-mind and the art entity. I begin by exploring bodymind personality and art as separate phenomena and knowledge attributes, actions, and skills. From this knowledge and skills, I compile a structure of early childhood art education, an art narrative model based on a constructive cultural frame of reference. Applying the theory of representation, I modify the model of spiral information acquisition and the narrative form realized for it through narrative and dialogical interaction. I place this in the environment of early childhood education and treat it as a everyday pedagogical practice, i.e. artistic play acting in accordance with Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development and concept of play.
My many years of research materialize into the idea of the significant role of art education in early childhood education between home and hobby activities. The specifics of early childhood education are the group of children, play as the main activity of early childhood education, the narrative development of the child’s thinking and the significant role of the guiding adult and other children in the child’s zone of proximal developmental. In kindergarten, a child encounters the same children and adults daily and for several years. The activity includes a wide variety of encounters, short-lived and long-lasting, as well as changing and repeatedly similar.
Key concepts: early education, art education, early education in music, visual arts, literature, word art, drama and theater, mental, motor, social, emotionaland early development of play, autoethnografic oral history research.