Children's Voices: Making Children's Perspectives Visible in Gallery Spaces

Authors: Lilly Blue¹, Sue Girak
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¹ Art Gallery of Western Australia
Source: Propositions for Museum Education , pp 187-197
Publication Date: June 2024
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1386/9781789389135_17
Language: English

Children's Voices is a partnership between the Art Gallery of Western Australia (AGWA) and a local primary school developed to harness higher-order thinking skills and amplify children's voices in public gallery spaces in response to the exhibition The Botanical: Beauty and Peril. Years 2-3 students visited AGWA to engage in artist-led studio workshops that extended beyond a traditional school excursion model. They enabled students to engage more deeply and develop meaningful relationships with the Gallery and staff. At school, students in Years 2–6 considered five key questions responding emotionally and critically to reproductions of 13 artworks from the exhibition. The responses were edited to become labels exhibited alongside the original works and traditional curatorial labels. The project saw traditional hierarchies disrupted by the presence and contribution of child voices in the exhibition space, impacting artists and viewers by offering new and unexpected perspectives.

Keywords: a/r/tography ; aesthetic learning ; Art Gallery of Western Australia ; arts-based learning ; co-creating knowledge ; curatorial perspectives ; elementary education ; museum education ; primary education ; visual arts education

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References

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References

Autry, L. T. S. , & Mirawski, M. (2017). Museums are not neutral. https://www.museumsarenotneutral.com
Banks, J. A. , Au, K. H. , Ball, A. F. , Bell, P. , Gordon, E. W. , Gutiérrez, K. D. , Health, S. B. , Lee, C. D. , Lee, Y. , Mahiri, J. , Nasir, N. S. , Valdés, G. , & Zhou, M. (2007). Learning in and out of school in diverse environments: Life-long, life-wide, life-deep. LIFE Center.197
[Google Scholar]
Birch, J. (2018). Museum spaces and experiences for children – Ambiguity and uncertainty in defining space, the child and experience. Children's Geographies, 16(5), 516–528. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2018.1447088
[Google Scholar]
Blue, L. , & Pollit, J. (2021). Child artist response project. Big Kids Magazine. http://bigkidsmagazine.com/about/child-artist-response-project
Dewey, J. (1980). Art as experience. Perigee. (Original work published 1934)
Greene, M. (1993). The passions of pluralism: Multiculturalism and the expanding community. Educational Researcher, 22(1), 13–18. https://doi.org/10.2307/7/1177301
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Greene, M. (2001). Variations on a blue guitar: The Lincoln Center Institute Lectures on aesthetic education. Teachers College Press.
[Google Scholar]
Jefferson, M. , & Anderson, M. (2017). Transforming schools: Creativity, critical reflection, communication and collaboration. Bloomsbury.
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Lucas, B. , & Spencer, E. (2017). Teaching creative thinking: Developing learners who generate ideas and can think critically. Crown House.
[Google Scholar]
Proctor, A. (2021). The whole picture: The colonial story of the art in our museums and why we need to talk about it. Cassell.
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Reid, N. S. , Cinequemani, S. , & Farrar, C. (2016). “Kids know about art”: Amplifying under-represented voices in art museums through mentorship. Visual Inquiry: Learning and Teaching Art, 5(3), 379–392.
[Google Scholar]
Simon, N. (2010). About. The participatory museum. http://www.participatorymuseum.org/

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