Early Childhood Education

In my Early Childhood Education class this week, we discussed the article Lively Entanglements: The Doings, Movements, and Enactments of Photography  by Sylvia Kind. In this article she discusses the inherent violence behind photography with its voyeuristic language and focus on objectification. She explores these themes of photography, playing with this inherently violent viewpoint and shifting it by suggesting that when we improvise with cameras, instead of using a camera as a tool to capture objects, we engage with the world and its materialities differently (Kind, 2013). In exploring this shifted viewpoint, she discusses haptic perspectives and optic perspectives in photography. A haptic perspective means engaging with photography in a hands-on, close range and bodied manner. This means engaging in photography as if nothing separates you, the land and the materials around you.  An optic perspective means engaging in photography in a manner that separates you from the mat...

This week in our Early Childhood Education class we discussed the reading   Child as Totem: Redressing the Myth of Inherent Creativity in Early Childhood  by Marissa Mcclure. She discusses the myth of inherent creativity in children, how it is imposed and limited by adults, and how we can move away from the myth of inherent creativity by adjusting our image of the child and seeing them as meaning makers rather than innocent individuals who exist outside the realm of modern adult culture. Mcclure states that the myth of children's inherent creativity is something that is both created and limited by adults in society, even reaching the realm of education, and is not based on historical accounts of children's experiences in childhood (Mcclure, 2011). As the myth that children are inherently creative grew over time, so did the belief that as children grow up, they lose that inherent creativity. Mcclure believes that this view of inherent creativity being lost over time is cre...