Fostering Child Art Agency and Collaboration in the Home Learning Environment

Fostering Child Art Agency and Collaboration in the Home Learning Environment

This thesis, entitled Fostering Child Art Agency and Collaboration in the Home Learning Environment addresses a research project that is inextricably linked to the conditions of the Covid-19 pandemic. As an American public artist and educator residing in China, my doctoral practice was altered in early 2020, causing me to design questions that considered the domestic environment as the site of artmaking with my young child. The resulting Practice-led project (Haseman 2006) primarily implements Grounded Theory (Charmaz 2008) as well as Reflection-in-Action (Schön 1983) to examine my interrogative hunches about the emerging identities of child and parent artists within, and as a response to, this home-bound context. I reflect on the work of contemporary artists who work with their children at different capacities including Linda Clark (b.1977) and Courtney Kessel (b.1974) as well as researching art education pedagogies and theories pertaining to artist agency. To explore whether this co-artmaking relationship between parent and child during the COVID-19 lockdown is useful to other child-parents, I collected data from a 17-week research study that I designed and implemented across 2022 consisting of myself and my child, along with three other pairings of parent and child(ren). Participants were given artmaking prompts to work progressively closer in contact with each other; individually, tandemly, and collaboratively. Interviews, journals, and artistic artifacts all contributed to my findings that analysed how participants experienced a recalibration of art practices, increased bonding, meaning through process and developed artistic agency/ownership. A key and insightful practice emerged, which I call “Creative Conferring”, to describe the process of two artist participants communicating about their art through thoughtful questions and comments, drawing artistic inspiration from each other and (at times) collaborating on artwork together. This helped me develop a model of practice, the Parent-Child Artmaking Model, which I believe can be used to promote artistic discoveries and bonding amongst parents and children in the domestic and home school setting.