The Geniuses Behind the Scribbles

Advocating for early learners is my life’s work and everyday honor. In any space, I find myself constantly elevating their voices as valuable, driven, and as capable as any other learner. While it is often trivialized, the insight and depth our youngest students bring to learning is something even PhDs should take note of. The reward of teaching them something for the first time is seeing them make connections to learning, to the world, and to themselves, laying the groundwork for a creative-minded life.

Instilling Creativity
Early childhood is the most important time to introduce art. It is a perfect setting to establish the possibility and essential necessity of being creative. Art offers endless opportunities for reflection, insight, and introspection in students who are at an age when they are receptive to creative thinking and multifaceted perspectives, collaborative approaches, and inquiry. They are new to learning in a school setting, but have been learners for years. Their individual thought processes and lived experiences are already complex but still malleable, with the capacity to sustain a creative mindset indefinitely.

Sharing Their Work
Sharing studentsʼ visual work and documenting their process through hallway exhibits, social media, digital slideshows in community spaces, and school web pages is an easy and far-reaching way to share these successes. Video artist statements accessed through QR codes attached to tangible work is another method that will reinforce the capabilities of early learners.

Collaborating with colleagues, whether during the art-making process or to install and document the finished works, can shift the way others perceive art from seeing it as “free-time fun” to recognizing it as a cultivated discipline.

Connecting through Culturally Responsive Learning
Art can help children move from self-awareness to social awareness at their own pace. Art exemplifies culturally responsive learning, and studying artists’ lives allows students to connect to shared cultural characteristics in defining genres and media, and to recognize and reflect on inequity and injustices. Early learners are capable of recognizing these concepts as they equate them to their own experiences, which are grounded in fairness and unfairness, sharing, kindness, and the Golden Rule.

Self-Reflecting
My young artists are insightful beyond their years. They show up, enjoy learning, and openly display insatiable curiosity. They are great conversationalists. Their unique perspectives—especially of what they think you said, offer insight into who they are. These everyday indirect invitations to slip into their world offer plenty of material to build learning experiences around and prompts my own self-reflection. They remind me to slow down, simplify, breathe, and imagine. Teaching early learners offers me the precious gift of maintaining my creativity and artistic mindset.

While learning about my students, I have come to know myself better. I realize what I don’t know, need to better understand, and reassess approaches that may not best represent my students. Through looking into their expectant, sparkly eyes every day to holding and looking at their work after the hallways are quiet, I reflect on my part. I realize the precious opportunity at hand and smile at the industry, thought, perspective, and joy that permeates every page. I encourage you to share the realities and genius of your three- to eight-year-old art students everywhere you go. The more we invest in studentsʼ beginnings, the better the outcome in the end.