Learning with children, trees and art: Towards a compositionist visual art-based research

Trafi-Prats, L (2017) Learning with children, trees and art: Towards a compositionist visual art-based research. Studies in Art Education, 58 (4). pp. 325-334. ISSN 0039-3541

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Abstract

In this article, I discuss the concept of compositionism as an onto-epistemology of being and knowing that questions human exceptionalism. Compositionism suggests that humans exist in interdependence with complex bio-social systems that need to be assembled together with an ethics of response-ability toward threatened places and beings. I propose compositionism as a concept to inform the field of art education. I do this by devising correspondences between compositionist theory, childhood studies, and visual art‐based research. I direct the implications of this discussion into selected passages of data from a study developed in collaboration with two classes of 5th-graders attending public school in a large city from the American Midwest. In this study, children used visual art-based methods, including drawing, video, print, and narrative to develop attentiveness and intimacy with a group of trees and tall grasses on the school block.