|González-Vida, Maria Reyes
|A.42 | Wednesday, 18 July 2007, 12:00 - 12:30, Room A2 |
|Contemporary art and familiar dynamics: a way to enrich children’s identity development.
|This communication puts forward the development of an educational workshop known as Family School: Contemporary Art as an educational tool in children identity development. This was held during March 2006 with parents of “Alquería”, a Preschool and Primary Education School located in Granada (Spain).
The main aim of such workshop was favouring familiar dynamics that could take contemporary art as a reference and therefore could enrich children’s identity development. This way, artistic pieces would become an important tool to condense experiences, as well as knowledge acquisition channels in order to develop the child’s reflexive and critic functions. This objective involved an approach to contemporary art in the family’s everyday life, thus questioning any cultural prejudice that usually stops art’s incorporation in the familiar course.
This workshop started by mentioning the educational approach that stresses the importance of experience as a knowledge acquisition process. Interaction with contemporary art involves an experience that is able to favour children’s affection establishment, emotions generation and reflexive thinking development.
Secondly, families were asked to work with visual culture - understood as the research and decoding field for media-related cultural products -, analyzing the ways upon which it can intervene so that children may know other realities through current artistic representations.
Finally, researchers considered with the families the possible ways of using contemporary art as an educational tool, which moved away from the dogmatic instruction process that, in many cases, is tackled from an artistic point of view.