Dr Lisa Terreni, a senior lecturer in the University’s School of Education, graduates with a PhD in Education this month. In the first New Zealand study of its kind, she found that ECE teachers were often afraid to take young children into what they perceived as an unfriendly environment for young children with a high level of surveillance. This, combined with a lack of funding for museums and galleries to provide appropriate visual arts education for ECE services, prevents many ECE teachers from taking their students there.
Dr Terreni’s research explore the ways in which the early childhood sector uses the institutions to enhance young children’s learning. It includes recommendations about how existing barriers can be removed to open up these spaces up for young children. “Art museums and galleries exhibit and celebrate the work of significant national and international artists, which makes them important venues for informal learning for young children attending ECE services,” she says.
Dr Terreni says there are many cognitive benefits of exposing young children to art at an early age. “Young children have to think carefully about what they are seeing in order to interpret work. This interpretation often involves moving physically to mirror what they see in an artwork. Children’s emotional response is also an important part of viewing art works and learning about the work,” she says. “There’s also the fact that when you visit an art museum of gallery you’re exposing them to a completely different architectural space from what they are used to.”
Dr Terreni laments the fact there is no longer professional development available for ECE teachers around early learning experiences in art museums and galleries. “Numeracy and literacy have become such a dominant focus in professional development provision for ECE over the past ten years that any form of visual arts education for ECE teachers is virtually non-existent,” she says.
“I think children need to be exposed to lots of different kinds of learning contexts. ECE teachers are quite happy to take children into libraries and take them to the zoo, but equally I think places like art galleries should be used too. After all, the taxpayer funds many of these institutions, and they should not be seen as adult-only spaces.
“There is a lot of work to be done about children’s rights as cultural citizens, which is part of what my research is about.”
In keeping with her own arts practice and teaching which focuses heavily on sustainability, Dr Terreni has woven a korowai—inspired by traditional Māori cloak designs—out of the discarded drafts of her PhD thesis, which she will wear at her graduation this month.