Aesthetic Responses of Young Children to the Visual Arts: A Review of the Literature

Abstract

Educators interested in the engagement of young children with the visual arts will in all likelihood have observed preschoolers in a variety of settings involving art activities. These observations show youngsters to be intent, zealous, rambunctious, and persistent as they learn and invent various methods of representation and expression; as they consider, reconsider, state, and change opinions; and as they listen to and argue with peers and adults about art, the environment, and artifacts. Their participation in the arts is wide-ranging and inclusive of a responsive dimension, but little interest in responsive behavior is evident in the studio-oriented pedagogical literature concerned with preschoolers. What attention there is often concentrates on the limitations of the children's rather than on its potentialities. An attempt to develop a comprehensive view of young children as responsive participants in the arts for educational or research purposes thus causes a dilemma. The purpose of this paper' is to review and summarize the pertinent literature on the aesthetic responses of young children to the visual arts. The survey will attempt to illustrate that, regardless of the discrepancies and the neglected areas in the literature, a view of young children as having definite, albeit emergent, responsive capabilities in the arts is surfacing and needs acknowledgment. Support for this view is found in the emphasis on young children's capabilities for responsive behaviors such as preferring, contrasting, and sorting. To make the task manageable, this review centers on the literature about aesthetic responses to the visual arts primarily among children four to six years of age. Aesthetic response has been afforded a wide interpretation and includes those responses in which the

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