004: How to encourage creativity and artistic ability in young children – Interview with Dr. Tara Callaghan

I’m so excited to welcome my first guest on the Your Parenting Mojo podcast: Professor Tara Callaghan of St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia.   Professor Callaghan has spent a great number of years studying the emergence of artistic ability in young children and she shares some of her insights with us.  This is a rather longer episode than usual so here are some places you might want to skip ahead to if you have specific interest: [03:55]: The connection between individuality and creativity, especially in Western cultures [09:00]: What is “symbolic representation” and why is the development of symbolic representation an important milestone for young children? [12:10]: Is it helpful for parents to ask a child “What are you drawing?” [15:25]: When do children understand symbols? [31:15]: What can parents do to support children’s development of symbolic representation in particular and artistic ability in general?   Dr. Tara Callaghan's Book Early social cognition in three cultural contexts - Affiliate link   References Brownlee, P. (2016). Magic Places. Good Egg Books: Thames, NZ (must be ordered directly from the publisher in New Zealand; see: http://penniebrownlee.weebly.com/books.html) Callaghan, T.C., Rackozy, H., Behne, T., Moll, H, Lizkowski, U., Warneken, F., & Tomasello, (2011). Early social cognition in three cultural contexts. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 76(2), Serial Number 299. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/mono.2011.76.issue-2/issuetoc Callaghan, T. & Corbit, J. (2015). The development of symbolic representation. In Vol. 2 (L. Liben & U. Muller, Vol. Eds.) of the 7th Edition (R. Lerner, Series Ed) of the Handbook of Child Psychology and Developmental Science (pp. 250-294). New York: Wiley. Callaghan, T., & M. Rankin (2002). Emergence of graphic symbol functioning and the question of domain specificity: A longitudinal training study. Child Development, March/April 2002, 73:2, 359-376. Callaghan, T., P. Rochat & J. Corbit (2012). Young children’s knowledge of the representational function of pictoral symbols: Development across the preschool years in three cultures.  Journal of Cognition and Development, 13:3, 320-353. Available at: http://www.psychology.emory.edu/cognition/rochat/lab/CALLAGHAN,%20ROCHAT,%20&%20CORBIT,%202012.pdf DeLoache, J. S., (2004).  Becoming symbol-minded. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 8, 66-70. Retrieved from: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364661303003346 Frith, C., & Frith, U. (2005). Theory of mind. Current Biology 15(17), R644.R645. Full article available at: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982205009607 Ganea, P.A., M.A. Preissler, L. Butler, S. Carey, and J.S. DeLoache (2009). Toddlers’ referential understanding of pictures. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 104(3):283-295. Full article available at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2865246/ Golomb, C. (2003). The child’s creation of a pictoral world. London: Psychology Press. Jolley, R.P. (2010). Children and pictures: Drawing and understanding. Wiley-Blackwell, Cichester, England. Jolley, R. P. & S. Rose (2008). The relationship between production and comprehension of representational drawing. In Children’s understanding and production of pictures, drawings, and art (C. Milbrath & H.M. Trautner (Eds)). Boston, MA, Hogrefe Publishing.  Chapter available at: http://www.staffs.ac.uk/personal/sciences/rj2/publications/Jolley%20and%20Rose%20chapter.pdf Kellogg, R. (1970). Analyzing Children’s Art. Mayfield Publishing Company, Mountain View, CA. Preissler, M.A., and P. Bloom. Two-year-olds use artist intention to understand drawings. Cognition 1[06:51]2-518. Full article available at: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.522.4017&rep=rep1&type=pdf Rochat, P. & T. Callaghan (2005). What drives symbolic development? The case of pictoral comprehension and production. In L. Namy (Ed.) Symbol use and symbolic representation. Mahwah, NJ, Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc. Chapter available at: http://www.psychology.emory.edu/cognition/rochat/lab/WhatDrivesSymbolicDevelopment.pdf Winner, E. (1985). Invented worlds: The psychology of the arts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard.   [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"]   Jen: 00:35 Hello! This is Jen Lumanlan of Your Parenting Mojo and I’m here with episode four on Creativity and Artistic Ability in Young Children. So the question that’s lovely, what is it seems to be one of the most asked by parents of children related related to young children’s drawings, but she’ll do children even know what IT is? I’m really excited to welcome my first guest on the Your Parenting Mojo podcast today, Professor Tara Callaghan. I went to start by introducing her by telling you a little bit about how we met. So I visited Reggio Emilia Italy in April 2016 because I wanted to learn more about the approach to early childhood education that was founded in that city. And before I went, I read a book called Magic Places by Penny Brownlee, which says that a parent shouldn’t ask what a scribbling child is drawing because they’re not drawing anything, they’re just scribbling. But in contrast, the people in Reggio Emilia, I believe that the children are “fully aware of the representative process” and that’s actually a quote from one of the practitioners there after I witnessed a group of under two year olds, I think they were about 18 months who had been given in a real orange and a set of orange paints and the toddler is we’re making orange paint marks on the paper because that was the only color that was available to them. Jen: 01:45 And based on my reading of Magic Places, I queried whether the toddlers could possibly understand that they were being asked to represent the orange on the paper and clearly the director thought that they could. Her position was that even if the marks don’t look like an orange to us, the toddlers understand the marks as a representation of an orange. When I returned home, I started digging into the research on this topic and ultimately found a chapter that Professor Callahan authored a book called Children’s Understanding and Production of Pictures, Drawings and Art, and it was the most comprehensive, really insightful piece I’d read on that topic and she expressed a view that was quite different from what the Reggio practitioners believe. So I reached out to her and she was kind enough to actually spend quite a bit of time patiently answering my questions so I could write a very long blog post about it on my personal blog, which was actually the thing that made me realize that I should start a podcast. Jen: 02:33 So it’s a formally introduce her: Professor Callaghan is Professor of Psychology at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia. She’s a developmental scientist working in the fields of symbolic and pro-social development from a cultural perspective. She received her Ph.D in psychology from Brown University and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Yale University and she served as consulting editor for the journal Child Development, and she also coauthored a chapter on symbolic development in the new 2015 edition of the Handbook of Child Psychology and Developmental Science, which if you don’t happen to be familiar with, it is a pretty seminal work on the psychological development of young children. So thank you so much for joining us Dr Callaghan.   Dr. Callaghan: 03:11 Oh my pleasure, Jen. My pleasure. So, thanks for the introduction. I might add to that that I am also very interested in cultural developmental psychology and so maybe some of that will come up as we talk a little bit more today, but one of the things that I’ve been doing for about the past decade is, is looking across cultures to help understand what children know, uh, as a result of the socialization that they get from parents and others in their culture compared to what, how we are built as humans, I guess. What is our human nature? Jen: 03:54 Yeah. I’m actually very interested in that as well so do feel free to sprinkle that in as it comes up. Awesome. Okay. Well the first thing I wanted to ask you about is something that I hadn’t even considered until you kind of mentioned it as an offhand comment, as part of a larger discussion that we were having when we were emailing and you said that “creativity is highly valued in our society and is part of our individualistic orientation. Creativity that makes a difference in art, depends on the ability to do and see things differently and also have a command of the medium.” And it was the first part of that that, that really blew my mind. I really hadn’t considered the possibility that not all cultures value creativity equally. I just figured that if...