Early Childhood Visual Arts Curriculum: Freeing Spaces to Express Developmental and Cultural Palettes of Mind (Report‪)‬

Currently, the field of early childhood education is greatly focused on literacy, numeracy, and assessment, much to young children's detriment. Policymakers further set the stage for early childhood learners to become formally engaged in academic instruction and often direct administrators and teachers to do the same. Teachers become de-professionalized by this push to hasten children's learning (Aldridge & Goldman, 2006; Katz, 1993; Kohn, 2001; Ohanian, 1999), which concentrates on cognitive functioning at lower levels, such as emphasizing memorization and fact recall. Placing such pressure on young children solely for academic success results in stifling the vital experience of creative, critical verbal reflection that naturally occurs with youngsters. Such pressures also lead to a movement to create a one-size-fits-all national curriculum (Association for Childhood Education International [ACEI], 2001; Novinger & O'Brien, 2003). As these pressures on academics persist, young learners lose vital opportunities to effectively construct meaning and concepts through a developmentally appropriate curriculum of discovery. Developing language and interpreting experiences through social verbal emotional and cognitive interactions within a caring community of learners are characteristics of a young child's natural experience (ACEL 2002; National Association for the Education of Young Children [NAEYC], 1996). Children seldom have opportunities to pursue their own interests in activities that allow thought and language development to occur within naturalistic and developmentally appropriate environments (ACEI, 2001; Kohn, 2004). Because aesthetic education, particularly in the visual arts, are commonly absent in early childhood educational settings, the "push-down" curriculum intensifies.