Landscapes of identity: Young children and the visual arts

Abstract

This research investigated how early childhood teachers responded to young children’s cultural and ethnic diversity through the visual arts. The visual arts are a critical means through which children’s cultural ways of knowing can be communicated and made visible. This was a key discovery from a research project underpinned by the New Zealand early childhood curriculum, Te Whāriki, which cites cultural diversity as a central principle, and motivated by statistics in the 2013 New Zealand Census that showed a strong demographic contrast between the ethnicities of the youthful and adult populations. The research findings presented the teacher participants’ understandings of culture and ethnicity and their interpretation of the multi-faceted and complex ways children’s visual artwork expresses children’s cultural and ethnic identities. Fragments of the artworks were interwoven within a tapestry to visualise these complex and multifaceted findings (Figure 1).