Introduction to ‘The Historicization of the Creative Child in Education’
[The Historicization of the Creative Child in Education is an Exploratory Project, funded by the FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I. P., with the reference EXPL/CED-EDG/0824/2021)]
Cat Martins
This publication results from the research done in the last year and a half in the scope of the Exploratory Project The Historicization of the Creative Child in Education (CREAT_ED), funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT). The project aimed to understand, historically, how the idea of the child as a creative being became a problem in education and arts education.
CREAT_ED started from the work we have been developing as a critique of how creativity is instrumentalized within the current Portuguese educational field, mirroring international directives. This work (Assis, 2017, 2019; Martins, 2014, 2020b, 2020a) allowed us to perceive that some complex lines make this ‘present’ possible and that they needed to be historicized (Popkewitz, 2013) from the end of the 18th century to the Post World War II, from a time when imagination and creativity occupied an ambiguous place within the educational discourses, to their commodification and homogenization.
Throughout the project, we look at the creative child as an ‘event’, in order to not take for granted creativity as an essentialist concept. Following a Foucaultian perspective (Foucault, 1972, 1980), the omnipresent question was: How is it possible to think about the child as a creative person, and what are the effects produced in the making of the creative child? Historically, developing the child’s creativity was not always seen as an educational goal. When it turned into an educational problem, the notion of creativity varied in terms of its purposes, practices, and meanings. As an ‘event’ the creative child is also an archive of thoughts and rationalities of times and spaces. The different layers that made up the child, creativity, and the child as a creative being, tend to be forgotten as ‘ingredients’ with specific properties (Martins & Popkewitz, 2015). What remains is the idea: childhood is the space and time for creativity.
However, even if different notions of who the child was, who the child should become, and how the child learned changed throughout history, the context needed to unleash the child's creative nature, or to tame that potential, has been conceived as the field of arts education.
A history of the present of arts education aims at a critical engagement with the present. In the present, creativity appears wrapped in a positivity that makes difficult to scrutinize the different layers that constitute it as a technology of government and as a way of being a person (Martins, 2023). Creativity is not just a word. It is an actor in the world (Hacking, 2006). The invention of the creative child made possible the Western arts education movement and the epistemological construction of the field at an international level. At the same time, it made possible a certain kind of human, that is the child that is seen as naturally creative.
CREAT_ED tried to examine the ideas and pedagogical practices that circulated among American and European arts educational discourses and psycho-educational texts about the development of the creative nature of the child as an object of study, intervention, and development, and how ruptures and continuities were enhanced. The project focused on the rationalities inherent to this ‘making’ and their strategies, such as the comparative reasoning and the processes of ‘Othering’ it entailed.
In considering creativity as a historical event that needed to be dismantled in its different complexities, CREAT_ED aimed to relate to the idea of change, not in terms of providing solutions, recipes or a good view of creativity in education, but trying to intersect the historicity of the articulation of the two constructs: the child and creativity (or imagination, when we refer to the 19th century).
A timeframe was established for the research. The history would start in Geneve, with the publication of Rousseau’s Emile (1762), and arrive in Portugal with an OECD seminar (1973), still during the regime of dictatorship, about creativity in schools. It would travel through Europe and the United States during this time. We compromised to provide a systematic collection about the invention of the creative child from 1762 to 1973 through an online timeline, which would contain materials (texts and images) representative of this construction.
In 2019, before this project and as an antechamber of it, me and Carmen Mörsch initiated a preliminary intensive work, composing a wall timeline of international historical references of arts education discursivities. Although these references were not put together only with the ‘creative child’ in mind, they constituted the first steps of the archive we built at CREAT_ED. The archive is made of documents never meant to be recalled because of their ways of talking about imagination or the relationship between their authors. The documents are placed together, and form an archive through their grids of rationality, in making intelligible the idea of children’s power to imagine and create. The Foucaultian (1972) notion of the archive was mobilized as a theoretical and methodological tool that favored a vision of the archive as the understanding of the historical conditions in which statements are formed. The term archive was not used as the sum of texts that a certain culture decided to preserve, neither the totality of texts produced about a certain topic, nor all the texts produced by a specific author or institution in a particular place. But certainly, the archive is always in a dialogue with power.
Archives are not neutral places to access ‘the’ past. The archive moves and changes according to the paths and the holes we open to enter them. We established four research lines that organized how we tried to make sense of the materials we were dealing with. These lines were initially established ‘intuitively’ because of the work we have been doing in the past, concerning the history of arts education in countries like Portugal (Martins, 2012, 2018, 2019; Ó et al., 2013). These are the lines we established:
1.The hopes and fears of creativity in education;
2.The child as a creative being within the child art movement and the fabrication of the ‘Other’;
3.The spaces and materialities in the making of the creative child;
4.The conceptualization of the mind as both programmed and creative, from the essentialism of calculation to the cybernetic discourse in the programming of creativity in education.
During our research and the construction of ‘the archive of the creative child’, we started to perceive that the child that we were encountering as a universal was a very particular kind of child: a ‘white’, male, heterosexual (or non-sexual), non-disabled, middle-class child. Indeed, the child that had the ‘white’ European man as their model of futurity as a citizen of the nation. The notion of whiteness became a category that we started to deal with and that we tried to mobilize in the analysis. In making the ‘white’ creative child, several violent and exclusionary practices were at play and are still part of the colonialities (Quijano, 1992) that constitute the ‘nature’ of the Western field of arts education.
We also look at these exclusions in how we dealt with history. The ‘archive of the creative child’ that we ended up with, is made up of mostly male and ‘white’ voices. Our initial goal was to understand what was being said about the child and creativity that made it a concern for the child's government. However, throughout the project and the encounters with these voices, the subject positions emerged as a problem that we must consider in future research. As much as this archive delineates what was called a ‘knowledge’ about the child that imagines and creates, it also traces the limits of what is thinkable and can be said, through what is rendered out of our sight. There were many questions that we asked and were asked that we were not yet able to answer. This problem comes with the need to engage with arts education counter-narratives and stories of resistance.
The creative child's archive was thought to be an online archive and timeline that could stay as a research tool after the end of the project. As we explain in the text following this introduction, we established two challenges: on the one side, to create a back-office which is a research tool to be used by researchers interested in continuing the analysis of the materials collected and others to come; on the other side, a public interface of the histories and the work we did in this year and a half, which is also the result of the questions and reflection we did around the notion of timeline and its representations. In Tiago Assis, Cat Martins, Raquel Boavista, Gustavo Magalhães and Ademar Aguiar’s text The Construction Of The CREAT_ED Online Platform: Archiving, Unarchiving, And Interpolating In A Timeline, the construction of this platform is presented, trying to stress how the problems of research intersected with the more ‘pragmatical’ levels of its construction and the desire to create a timeline that could be ‘scattered’.
Cat Martins’ text Learning Through the Senses: Colonialities in the Making of the Western ‘White’ Child discusses children’s learning through the senses as part of the colonialities of arts education practices. Being possible through the split of body/mind and the approach to a certain notion of [[nature]], the child was constructed through processes of ‘Othering’. The text also tries to unpack this making of the ‘white’ child while exploring its colonialities in the [[gardening practices of education]].
Melina’s Scheuermann text (Un-)Learning to see: Images of Whiteness and ‘Nature’ in the picture book series A instrucção de creança (1904/05) aims to relate to this book with some questions in mind: What do the images in the book do, what relations do they allow for, and who are the subjects being produced through these images and acts of seeing? Whiteness appears as the grid of rationality that gave rise to the book and the images themselves while it reproduces whiteness. This book was a ‘traveling’ book that also presented traveling concepts that constructed the western ‘white’ creative child, mainly a specific idea of nature and learning through object lessons as the most appropriate way of [[child development]].
Also touching on the materialities of children’s education, Catarina Almeida, Samuel Guimarães, Amanda Midori, and Raquel Boavista’s text Games in hands, questions in mind: In the flesh of the impossibility of About what's there is a text about an encounter with the archives of the creative child in the present with the worry of re-activation and use of some its materials in arts education. They selected propositions from Elvira Leite, a Portuguese art educator, Bruno Munari, an Italian art educator, Friedrich Froebel, a German pedagogue, and the German art school Bauhaus. These propositions were experimented with in the context of a curricular unit of the Master’s in Visual Arts Teaching, and the text reflects on the desires, seductions, questioning, refusals, contradictions, ambiguities, and so on, present when dealing with the archive and the history of our present.
Tiago Assis and Pedro Ferreira’s text on the Child's Mind and Creativity Machines dialogues with the conceptualization of the mind by the end of the 18th century and around Post World War II. Starting from how the study of the child's mind was the path to the study of the adult's mind, and thus, part of the governmental goal to transform the child into the nation's citizen, the text articulates the field of education and technology. In this articulation the notions of nature and science are mobilized in the ways children are produced as naturally creative; however, what is meant by creativity is being controlled and governed through the web of discourses of psychology and education, as well as the spaces and materialities designed as creative, including machines and computers.
Cat Martins’ text The Historical Ambiguities Surrounding Imagination: The Government Of The Hopes And Fears Of The Child’s Imaginative Mind argues that, historically, children’s power to imagine beyond reality was perceived as dangerous within the Western educational field, particularly echoing some earlier traces of imagination in connection to a female monstrosity and to madness and the need to construct borders between different types of imagination, defining the morals of how to imagine correctly, as a way of governing the creative child. Sometimes welcomed and desired, sometimes feared for the troubles it might cause to the production of the child as a citizen of the future; throughout the text it is possible to observe that the imaginative child praised in Western education was entangled with racial, gender, and ableist grids of thought.
All these texts were presented in the Final Seminar of CREAT_ED and submitted to the gaze of our critical friends and participants. Many questions and problems were raised, and as much as they left crucial questions that the final edition still did not solve, they also left in the team the will to continue this research, knowing that it is important to recognize that we just started to unpack how whiteness and the arts education field were/are entangled.
The team’s texts are followed by a vocabulary/archive. While the vocabulary aims to situate some of the concepts we are mobilizing in our research, the archive material inserted in this booklet tries to introduce some of these historical objects, reading them through our worries in the project. We did not intend to contextualize the materials by markers such as author, place, year, ‘school of thought’ or theories developed; instead, we intended to intersect those materials with the questioning we are making and leave them to dialogue and resonate with the readers—more an invitation to work through, than information to know about. Some of these archival materials contain racist and violent language that can trigger unpleasant feelings in the readers. Some of these materials are also used in the writing of the texts. We tried to use them carefully in order not to reproduce, once again, the matrix of violence they contain. However, we are aware that to work with such problematic historical materials is a difficult and challenging task that makes necessary a continuous learning.
As a history of the present, this historicizing is not neutral. Our initial steps started from a Foucaultian framework, and we chose to accompany us in this path two scientific consultants, which are international recognized experts in the field, Thomas S. Popkewitz and Jorge Ramos do Ó. However, our (re)search and encounter with the decolonial studies and the field of critical whiteness opened for the team a space of displacement and going beyond the initial framework. We are grateful for the questions the two consultants put to our research in a seminar that was held in December 2022, and that were the result of tensions that the postcolonial and critical whiteness that we were bringing to the table put to a Foucaultian framing. The two texts that both Jorge and Thomas prepared in the seminar's scope are part of this publication, as external gazes that intersect the project, and it is important to acknowledge both the points of contact and dialogue as the dissensus.
Our great challenge in CREAT_ED was to articulate the ‘archive of the creative child’ based on the four lines of research, confronting ourselves, for the first time, with the whiteness of our field. We initiated a path that has no return, and we acknowledge the long journey yet to come. We had the great privilege of having on our side incredible people as critical friends and participants in the several events we organized in the last year and a half. Our special thanks go to our critical friends Carmen Mörsch, Simon Nagy, Carine Zaayman, and Lineo Segoete; to our students, and all the seminar and workshop participants. To say thank you will never be enough to express our gratitude for all the learnings with you!
To finish this introduction, we want to say that printing these texts marks the end of this Exploratory Project and obeys to its funding rules. However, constructing this ‘archive of the creative child’ and producing knowledge that takes seriously the implications and the colonial continuities of arts education through figurations, such as the creative child, deserves another time, attention, and a process of transformation of/from each of us. We hope that the readers can find in these texts, in their approximations, in their distinctions, in their contradictions, in their failures, in their potentialities, in their gaps, in their fragmentation, in their questions, spaces for (re)thinking again what do we mean when we refer to the creative child, what did we inherit from this historical construct and what do we want to do with those inheritances.
References
Assis, T. (2017). Docência e investigação em Arte – biopolítica e a operação da criatividade artística e tecnológica na educação: o caso do perfil dos alunos à saída da escolaridade obrigatória. In L. G. Correia, R. Leão, & S. Poças (Eds.), O Tempo dos Professores (pp. 787–793). CIIE.
Assis, T. (2019). Programming Creativity: Technology and Global Politics in the National Curriculum. In L. G. Chova, A. L. Martínez, & I. C. Torres (Eds.), INTED19 Proceedings: 13th annual International Technology, Education and Development Conference (pp. 5542–5551). IATED Academy.
Foucault, M. (1972). The Archeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. Pantheon Books.
Foucault, M. (1980). Nietzsche, Genealogy, History. In D. F. Bouchard (Ed.), Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault (pp. 139–164). Cornell University Press.
Hacking, I. (2006). Kinds of People: Moving Targets. In The Tenth British Academy Lecture.
Martins, C. (2023). Making Creative and Entrepreneurial Selves in Education: The Governing of Life in Contemporary Time. In B. Jörissen, L. Unterberg, & T. Klepacki (Eds.), Yearbook of Arts Education Research for Cultural Diversity and Sustainable Development (pp. 79–95). Springer Singapore.
Martins, C. S. (2012). As narrativas do génio e da salvação: a invenção do olhar e a fabricação da mão na educação e no ensino das artes visuais em Portugal (de finais de XVIII à segunda metade do século XX) [Universidade de Lisboa]. http://repositorio.ul.pt/handle/10451/5733
Martins, C. S. (2014). Disrupting the consensus: Creativity in European educational discourses as a technology of government. Knowledge Cultures, 2(3).
Martins, C. S. (2018). Time, Drawing, Testing: The making up of the developmental child and the measuring of the nation’s development . In S. Lindblad, D. Pettersson, & T. S. Popkewitz (Eds.), Education by the Numbers and the Making of Society. The Expertise of International Assessments (pp. 53–67). Routledge.
Martins, C. S. (2019). Arts Education in Portugal in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: Drawing and the Governing of the Student. In K. F. JHn Baldacchino Emese Hall and Nigel Meager (Ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Art and Design Education. Wiley-Blackwell.
Martins, C. S. (2020a). Post-World War Two Psychology, Education and the Creative Child: Fabricating Differences. In T. S. Popkewitz, D. Pettersson, & K.-J. Hsiao (Eds.), The International Emergence of Educational Sciences in the Post-World War Two Years Quantification, Visualization, and Making Kinds of People (pp. 91–108). Routledge.
Martins, C. S. (2020b). The Fabrication of the Chameleonic Citizen of the Future through the Rhetoric of Creativity: Governmentality, Competition and Human Capital. In C.-P. Buschkühle, D. Atkinson, & R. Vella (Eds.), Art - Ethics - Education (pp. 26–43). Brill Sense.
Martins, C. S., & Popkewitz, T. S. (2015). The ‘Eventualizing’ of Arts Education. Sisyphus - Journal of Education, 3(1), 7–17.
Ó, J. R. do, Martins, C. S., & Paz, A. L. (2013). Genealogy as history: From Pupil to Artist as the Dynamics of Genius, Status, and Inventiveness in Art Education in Portugal. In T. S. Popkewitz (Ed.), Rethinking The History Of Education. Transnational Perspectives on Its Questions, Methods, and Knowledge (pp. 157–178). Palgrave Macmillan.
Popkewitz, T. S. (2013). Styles of Reason: Historicism, Historicizing, and the History of Education. In Rethinking The History Of Education. Transnational Perspectives on Its Questions, Methods, and Knowledge (pp. 1–26). Palgrave Macmillan.
Quijano, A. (1992). Colonialidad Y Modernidad/Racionalidad. Perú Indígena, 13(29), 11–20.
The Construction Of The CREAT_ED Online Platform: Archiving, Unarchiving, And Interpolating In A Timeline
Tiago Assis and Cat Martins
The texts intends to introduce the research project CREAT_ED: The Historicization of the Creative Child in Education, focusing on its online archive platform. The process of construction of this online archive platform allows us to problematize how a particular theoretical framework cannot be separated from the methodological and ‘practical’ problems and answers concerning the research tools we need in the project. With the CREAT_ED project, we intend to understand historically how the idea of the child as a creative subject was produced within modern western discursivities about the child and creativity. We start from a post-structuralist and decolonial theoretical frame to understand how this child was - and still is - the result of a coloniality of thought and being, of power and knowledge relations that produced violence that is still operative in the present. As an essential research tool - and not only as an output of the project - we built an online archive platform where we load different materials that produce this child. This platform intends to provide access to these historical sources, although ‘acting’ on them as the possibility of perceiving the violence and universalism they embody, trying to disrupt their effects. The text is written at multiple hands and brings the problems at the intersection of our different fields: arts education, design and computing engineering.
Learning Through the Senses: Colonialities in the Making of the Western ‘White’ Child
Cat Martins
This text discusses children’s learning through the senses as formed through the power-knowledge relations and colonialities of arts education practices. This articulation is a separation between the child’s body and mind, being the body related to ‘nature’, and the mind to reason. The separation of body and mind, and the idea of the child closer to nature, was made possible through the equivalence of the child and those so-called ‘primitive’. The text tries to unpack this making. From here, it also conceives the education of children's senses as a straightening device related to education as a gardening practice. To point out these colonialities in making the Western ‘white’ child is intended as the questioning of the systems of power-knowledge that configured the field of arts education, some of them still active in the present day.
Games in hands, questions in mind: in the flesh of the impossibility of About what's there
Catarina Almeida, Amanda Midori, Samuel Guimarães, and Raquel Boavista
Our workshop “About what's there" returned a text that is an extensive hybridization of the field notebook, the descriptive memory and the essay, which reflects the troubles of working with and against the archive of the creative child and that of arts education. The workshop was carried out in the context of teacher training. It proposed the reactivation and updating of pedagogical materials, learning assignments, games and playthings from Elvira Leite, Bruno Munari, the Bauhaus, and Friedrich Froebel. Sensuous aspects and the aesthetic features of these were discussed with students for they are nurturing ableism, developmentalism, and paternalism, among other colonialities.Occurred in the middle of the storm and ahead of the conclusion of the workshop, this writing turned out to be a reflexive moment on the achievements, discussions, entropies and other circumstances of the unfolding of the workshop, while also providing a platform for us to critically engage with those materials and to review our own aspirations and difficulties, in view of possible future reactivations of the proposal.
Taken in the impasse of reactivating colonialist materials without reactivating their colonialities, the proposal was eventually met as an impossibility whose only possible response we envisage – right now – is but looking at it as an uncertain pedagogy that requires a time spent, and that asks for the affects of co-dependency in the world.
(Un-)Learning to see: Images of Whiteness and ‘Nature’ in the Picture Book Series A instrucção de creança(1904/05)
Melina Scheuermann
In this essay, I inquire how images and ideas of ‘nature’ and whiteness were constructed in the picture book series A instrucção da creança (1904/05) that was employed in the pedagogical method of the object lesson and travelled from Switzerland to Portugal. I discuss how controlling the visual sense was important to the subjectivation of the child as a ‘white’ child in the teaching through images and in the method of the object lesson. In the second part of the text, I engage with the botanical and zoological illustrations contained in the picture book series and how those produce a white subject; again, hinging on the control of the visual sense and the self-effacement of that white subject from the process of making and seeing images of ‘nature’.
The Historical Ambiguities Surrounding Imagination: Governing the Hopes And Fears of the Child’s Imaginative Mind
Cat Martins
The text deals with the historical ambiguities surrounding imagination as ways of making up the imaginative child. The hopes and fears of the imaginative mind are connected to the threat of imagination in the corruption of what the child should become. It echoes the 18th-century perception of imagination as related to madness in terms of the corruption of reality; and the Renaissance perception of imagination as related to feminine monstrosity. Imagination was also feared because it could create a split in the child’s self. However, even if not trusted, imagination was not avoided in modern Western education. On the contrary, the ‘will to know’ imagination made imagination a prolific site of discursive production. Different types of imagination emerged, and with them, different kinds of children, the ‘right’ child, and the wilful child.
Child's Mind and Creativity Machines
Tiago Assis and Pedro Ferreira
This text follows CREAT_ED exploratory line IV, the conceptualization of the mind as both programmed and creative, from the essentialism of calculation to the cybernetic discourse in the programming of creativity in education. This line comprises a long timeframe, from the end of the 18th century to the Post-World-War II. Without establishing a historical linearity, we try to understand how the conception of the mind in the production of the creative subject was built in a complex web of different discourses in different fields. In this text, we look for clues on how it was possible to articulate and harmonize speeches and practices of psychology and technology in arts education, to the point of imagining machines to teach a child to be creative. We start by contextualizing these desires in the Enlightenment, when calculus began to be thought of as a mechanical task, until the technological materialization of teaching machines. Then, we analyze how different ideas of creativity in psychology were mobilized by figures such as Skinner, Guilford and Vygotsky. In this mobilization, strategies and devices were materialized for constructing the creative subject. Finally, from Ginger Nolan, we try to understand how Charles Leland established an imaginary that articulated mind, machine, and nature. Leland’s thought is important to understand how certain dynamics emerged in arts education. These dynamics not only allowed for a harmonization of psychology and technology discourses in the 20th century, but also give us clues of how its segregating and racializing premises are perpetuated through colonialities in arts education.
