This week’s guest is Professor Susan Wright who is chair of arts education at the University of Melbourne and author of ‘Understanding creativity in early Childhood’. She is going to talk to us today about her research regarding young children’s meaning-making and communication using symbol systems and multi-modal forms of expression and why she feels the arts deserve a pre-eminent place in education and culture.
In the second half of the interview we look at and discuss some children’s drawings that formed part of her research. The children were asked to draw ‘What the future might be like’.
MWS Podcast 35: Susan Wright as audio only:
Download audio: MWS_Podcast_35_Susan_Wright
A highly engaging podcast! The pictures were very interesting. We could relate all this to Lakoff and Johnson’s account of embodied meaning, and the ways that metaphors develop out of image schemas that are directly experienced in the body. The ‘backhoe’ picture particularly illustrates that. The ‘dual parks’ picture is also a great example of ethics as experience, where good and bad are directly related to experience as living and dead trees (in some contrast to the picnic picture, where, as Susan said, the view of evil seems to be more metaphysical, based on the unconscious projection of the Shadow).
Hi Barry,
As you mentioned at the retreat, this podcast would interest me, it did. I have a collection of drawings and paintings by my grandchildren, expressing the place where they were and who was important to them, they were not in response to a particular question put to them as far as I know, such as the examples shown in the podcast about pollution, but are revealing all the same.
Robert, I had a persistent nightmare when small which I know realise was probably a projection of the Shadow, I was chased by a dark figure along the streets, as it began to catch up on me I found I could fly, but then so could it, still chasing me over rooftops, I made myself wake up!