The Significance of Visual and Media Arts in Early Childhood and Schools
Discuss about the Visual And Media Arts Importantly In Early Childhood And School Curricula In Australia.
The visual and media arts are important in early childhood and school curricula. This topic is elaborated in the coming paragraphs. The visual and media arts are creating and expressing arts through technologies. The visual and media arts are important in early childhood and schools in Australia due to development of problem solving skills and building concepts. Thus this contributes in the development of children towards cognitive and art concepts. The visual and media art are not recognized as a profound area which parents and school think should be important and can be taken as a career interest (Flood, Heath & Lapp, 2015). In spite of, dearth in visual and media art introduction in school and early childhood, children are not bound to only academic performances. The perfect example of visual and media artist is Walt Disney, who is known as the pioneer of the entertainment industry. He discovered art lately but later made it his career and now people recognize him as a creator of world famous cartoon among children that is Mickey Mouse (Wright, 2015). There are other examples also who excelled in the field of visual and media arts despite of hurdles in their way. Hence, visual and media arts have been shown the importance to children over the world from several aspects as discussed in the paragraph however, people do not value art in early years learning of children.
The importance of visual and media arts can be seen through the following skills that are developed in the early years of childhood in school and home. Visual and media art can support children in stimulating many development skills such as motor skills, language development, decision making, visual learning, inventiveness, cultural awareness and improved academic performance. The first skill is motor skills that helps in children to identify and understand how to approach something and do tasks. The skills involve holding a brush for painting or using crayon to portray their imagination on paper (Spodek & Saracho, 2014). The children at different ages in school or home identify variety of things and they perceive it in many ways and hence the development of motor skill helps children to react towards them. The second skill is children are also developing language skills through visual and media art learning. The ELYF (Early Years Learning Framework) helps to develop children through development theories, socio-cultural theories, socio-behaviourist theory, critical theories and post-structuralist theories (Ko & Chou, 2014). The shapes, actions and colours help children to convey their thoughts. They create their own ways to do the tasks through art. The children understand the language through visual representations more than the languages that they hear such as linguistic learning, musical leaning, kinaesthetic learning, logical learning and interpersonal learning.
Development Skills Enhanced by Visual and Media Arts
The third skill is decision making that helps children to strengthen their thinking skills in terms of critical and problem solving skills. The visual and media arts help to develop identification of real world experiences and aspects that children depict in their art work (Spodek & Saracho, 2014). Therefore, visual and media arts support children with shaping their own perspectives and philosophies. The decision making also helps to develop new ideas, concepts and creativity. The fourth skill is visual learning which is learned by utilizing graphs and diagrams to interact with other people that helps children to develop a visual aspects of outside environment. The visual learning is interaction through graphs and diagrams where they communicate effectively. They learn how to interact with people, how to interpret and criticize things and making choices based on creativity (Hartle, Pinciotti & Gorton, 2015). The children become more enthusiasts through visual and media arts that help them to explore world. The fifth skill is inventiveness which helps children in their early childhood to develop innovative thinking. The children develop skills to express their views and taking risks in creation of art (Spodek & Saracho, 2014). This helps children to develop innovating minds that will them in future. The sixth skill is cultural awareness that helps children to get an understanding of society and its aspects. The visual and media art helps children in their early childhood to determine the cultural awareness through depiction of arts, graphics and visual representations (Hartle, Pinciotti & Gorton, 2015). The example of a child playing with a toy helps the child to understand that the toy may depict racisms or sexism. This depiction is due the structure of toy such as colure, hair texture and shape. The seventh skill is academic performance is improved which means that visual and media arts helps children to improve academically. According to Derewianka & Jones, (2016), the visual and media art when conjointly used with academic performances yield an impressive result for children. This is because visual and media art helps to improve understanding of academic subjects. Therefore, skills are developed to nurture the child development with emphasis on future impacts.
The visual and media arts play a major role in the cultural lives of children and families. However, the parents and school authorities fail to understand that only technical learning is not sufficient to accomplish a successful career (Hartle, Pinciotti & Gorton, 2015). The technical aspects helps to develop only theoretical knowledge and career oriented (Gaggi, 2015). The visual and media arts exist from early days, only the change that has occurred perceives the art, its implementation and its orientation. Since earliest days, when people drew images on the walls, the arts made its way into the world that helped present world to get understanding of the world (Fleming, Bresler & O’Toole, 2014). Thus the role of visual and media arts is thus important in the cultural lives of children and families and they are described as follows. The visual and media arts have the role to simulate children’s curiosity and creativity. The curiosity is the way to learn something new and improve skills. The curiosity helps to children and families to not only learn and get success but also learn from the failures (Cahnmann-Taylor & Siegesmund, 2017). Furthermore, the curiosity allows awaking the inner creativity and focusing on more problem solving. The curiosity and creativity both helps children to become better observers, learners, problem solvers and creators.
The Importance of Visual and Media Arts in Cultural Lives of Children and Families
The children use visual and media arts to express their thoughts and opinions to depict their way of thinking (Fleming, Bresler & O’Toole, 2014). This helps them to not only express their thinking but also help them to express their feelings, emotions and imaginations (Yilmaz, 2016). Therefore families and children thus get to know each other in a better way to share and cooperate with each other. The social development helps children to develop self-esteem and bonding with family is strengthened. The impactful learning is another role played by visual and media arts in the cultural lives of children and families. The visual and media arts help to bring out inner self of children (Banks & Zeitlyn, 2015). The interaction with visual and media arts are important to recognize and connect with real world object, scenarios and concepts. They learn these things and they try to visualize implementing it through visual and media arts. The confidence level boosts in children when they participate in visual and media arts. These help them to come out from their comfort zone and show their imaginations to the world. The role of confidence that visual and media arts provide are important as they provide children to believe in themselves. The families also bond with children to help children boost their confidence (Derewianka & Jones, (2016). The role of visual and media arts in the culture lives of children and families are to explain them about the traditions and religions through arts. This helps to express and record culture in specific features such as different perceptions of God. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander’s people are the original inhabitants of the island (Funston & Herring, 2016). They have strong connection with the culture and languages that can be expressed through visual and media arts.
The visual and media arts help to develop focus through painting and visualizing (Kucirkova, Littleton & Cremin, 2017). The focus is needed by the children in their childhood to not only study academically but also excel in future with complete focus on work. The children must learn to take responsibility and this can only happen if they learn from childhood (Hanna, 2014). The visual and media arts help to make children accountable for their responsibilities. This is explained as when children mess up with paints drop a ball then they realize to resolve the mistake. Children will learn to take increasing responsibilities for what mistake they did while doing any activity (Lummis, Morris & Paolino, 2014). This process will help them to accept their mistakes, enhance their sense of resilience where children develop socio-cultural and behavioural development, and learn from them in their growing years with families support (Yilmaz, 2016). The visual and media arts help children to work in a group and cooperate and collaborate to achieve the required goal. The result of this will be that they will be successful in delivering goals while working a group.
How Visual and Media Arts Can Develop Focus in Children
The children’s work in visual and media arts and treat them as producers rather than consumers can better facilitate their self-concept learning. The above paragraphs describe the importance of visual and media arts in nurturing and developing children for future ready. The early childhood is an initial phase of life and developing phase where children observe and learn a lot of things (Banks & Zeitlyn, 2015). This observing and learning method helps children to become independent and self-confident. The children in their early childhood are delicate minds that fill up with many imaginations and concepts that they see around them. This is because being as a producer of media arts will help them to become more expressive (Kucirkova, Littleton & Cremin, 2017). There are various forms of visual and media arts through which children can express their thoughts and imagination. The visual and media arts support children to learn and build ideas, cognitively, concepts, socially, physically and emotionally. However, visual and media arts are not limited to any teaching or depth knowledge (Roskos, 2017). It is inner creativity of children that they develop from their surroundings. Hence, children should be developed as producers of art culture and not as a consumer of art culture.
The visual and media arts are way through which they express their thoughts and hence they develop early skills of arts. However, the current trends of technological environment have led to diminish the value of visual and media arts (Gaggi, 2015). The parents, school and national curricula has focused majorly on subjects such as science, maths and technologies rather than visual and media arts. The visual and media arts are increasingly taking back stage due to present National curriculum focusing to promote the other subjects. Thus there is a need to introduce the visual and media arts in the current curricula in schools and early childhood. The visual and media arts provide development of critical thinking, problem solving skills, creativity and innovative ideas (Roskos, 2017). These skills are important to make children to develop holistically at early stage as it also benefits children future life. Therefore, visual and media arts are as important as other academic subjects in early childhood and schools.
References
Banks, M., & Zeitlyn, D. (2015). Visual methods in social research. Sage.
Cahnmann-Taylor, M., & Siegesmund, R. (Eds.). (2017). Arts-based research in education: Foundations for practice. Routledge.
Derewianka, B., & Jones, P. (2016). Teaching language in context. Oxford University Press. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016.
Fleming, M., Bresler, L., & O’Toole, J. (Eds.). (2014). The Routledge international handbook of the arts and education. Routledge.
Flood, J., Heath, S. B., & Lapp, D. (2015). Handbook of research on teaching literacy through the communicative and visual arts, volume II: A project of the International Reading Association. Routledge.
Funston, L., & Herring, S. (2016). When Will the Stolen Generations End? A Qualitative Critical Exploration of Contemporary’Child Protection’Practices in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Communities. Sexual Abuse in Australia and New Zealand, 7(1), 51.
Gaggi, S. (2015). From text to hypertext: decentering the subject in fiction, film, the visual arts, and electronic media. University of Pennsylvania Press.
Hanna, W. (2014). A Reggio-inspired music atelier: Opening the door between visual arts and music. Early Childhood Education Journal, 42(4), 287-294.
Hartle, L. C., Pinciotti, P., & Gorton, R. L. (2015). ArtsIN: Arts integration and infusion framework.
Ko, C. H., & Chou, M. J. (2014). Aesthetics in early childhood education: The combination of technology instruments in children’s music, visual arts and pretend play. Journal of Social Sciences, 10(1), 39.
Kucirkova, N., Littleton, K., & Cremin, T. (2017). Young children’s reading for pleasure with digital books: six key facets of engagement. Cambridge Journal of Education, 47(1), 67-84.
Lummis, G. W., Morris, J., & Paolino, A. (2014). An investigation of Western Australian pre-service primary teachers’ experiences and self-efficacy in the arts. Australian Journal of Teacher Education, 39(5), 4.
Nolan, A., & Raban, B. (2015). Theories into practice: understanding and rethinking our work with young children and the EYLF. Teaching Solutions.
Roskos, K. A. (Ed.). (2017). Play and literacy in early childhood: Research from multiple perspectives. Routledge.
Roy, D., Baker, W., & Hamilton, A. (2015). Teaching the Arts: Early Childhood & Primary Education: Early Childhood and Primary Education. Cambridge University Press.
Spodek, B., & Saracho, O. N. (2014). Handbook of research on the education of young children. Routledge.
Wright, S. (2015). Children, meaning-making and the arts. Pearson Higher Education AU.
Yilmaz, R. M. (2016). Educational magic toys developed with augmented reality technology for early childhood education. Computers in Human Behavior, 54, 240-248.
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