Postdevelopmental Approaches to Challenging Myths and Misconceptions in Early Childhood Art

Heather G. Kaplan, Christine Marmé Thompson

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2026
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350539303
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

This book examines the role that adults play in shaping children's earliest experiences of art making and challenges common myths and misconceptions around early childhood art.

Written from a postdevelopmentalist position, it offers new approaches to teaching that foster children's agency and participation with art. Drawing on the works of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Jacques Ranciére, Lauren Berlant and Elizabeth Grosz, the authors explore a range of theoretical perspectives, including childism/adultism, epistemic injustice, postdevelopmentalism, posthumanism, motherscholarship and new materialism to present an alternative vision of young children. The book includes chapters from academics and practitioners based in Canada, Finland, the UK and the US, and makes use of rich photographic documentations and vivid case studies of practice to illustrate different approaches and teaching of art in early childhood. By sharing artmaking experiences from different cultures and contexts the contributors reconceptualise the art studio as somewhere to reimagine the cultural identity of young learners.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Dedication Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Series Editors’ Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Considering Postdevelopmental Identities of Competence: A Story of Teacher Education from Rural Pennsylvania, United States
• 2 Ugly Bitches Will Save Your Life
• 3 The Myth of the Art Studio/Atelier in Early Childhood Education
• 4 Listening to Nonsense: Children Making Sense
• 5 “I Don’t Want to Haunt You, but I Will.”: The Work of Fantasy and Erasure in Childhood Art
• 6 The Transparent Black Ghost in a Contemporary Art Photograph: Encountering Otherness through Ethical Dialogue between the Child and the Adult
• 7 The Hospitalities and Generosities of Young Children’s Drawing
• 8 The Story of Complexity and Enchantment: The Rhythm of the Easels
• 9 Toward an Enchanted Education
• 10 “No-Kids Zones”: Exclusion and Inclusion of Children in Art Museums
• 11 Little Polly Flinders: Transgressing the Myth That Children Should Be Seen and Not Heard
• 12 Potty Talk Is Not Allowed at School: Children’s Art and the Myth of Children as Innocent
• Index