The Invention of Childhood Creativity

Colonialities and the Production of Difference

Catarina Martins, Cat Martins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN:
  9780367503642
• eBook ISBN:
  9781040227831
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Early Childhood Education

This text offers a comprehensive analysis of the concept of the modern creative and imaginative child in Western education. Drawing on archived sources and historical works, it reframes childhood creativity as a social, cultural, and scientific construction, asking how our thinking and acting toward the creative child have been produced historically. The text dissects the discursive construction of creativity as a natural and developmental attribute of the child. It argues that the idea of the White creative child, constructed through comparative reasoning, shaped by primitivism, and illustrated through botanical metaphors as close to nature and the senses, is a notion embedded with colonialities, forming part of a Western civilizing project and entrenched power-knowledge relations. A compelling and original account of childhood creativity, this text will appeal to researchers in arts education, early childhood education, curriculum studies, and the history of education.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series foreword: Critique, Agency and Coloniality
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: an image of the creative child
• 1 ‘Child-as-primitive’ and the naturalization of imagination in childhood
• 2 The seduction of nature in arts education
• 3 Playing the child as an artist, or the government of the child’s soul
• 4 The normalization of children’s creativity: developmentalism as a style of reasoning through children’s drawings
• 5 The historical ambiguities surrounding imagination: the government of the hopes and fears of the child’s imaginative mind
• Looking back … and looking forward
• References
• Index