Young Children Visit Museums

Bringing different cultural perspectives on creativity with them teachers and children in two early childhood education sites in Aotearoa New Zealand were using museum visits as jumping off places to hone their creative capacity building. As a contribution to Tim Ingoldâs discussion of anthropology and/as education and also finding John Deweyâs writing valuable (specifically his framing of âenduring attitudesâ) the authors employ a navigation metaphor throughout the discussion. They describe a coming together of four Cultural Anchors (thinking from materials) with four Coordinates (creative capacity builders) to describe ways in which the children were making creative sense of the museum exhibits while at the same time gathering information about them. They take these travel metaphors from a star cluster in the southern hemisphere night sky Matariki which provided early sea-going MÄori with guidance as they navigated wide stretches of ocean in their sea-going canoes to reach Aotearoa New Zealand. A MÄori immersion early childhood centre and school and a New Zealand kindergarten provided lively examples of childrenâs and teachersâ responses to the treasured artefacts (taonga) in their local museums. The book describes an ecosocial framing from âlittle to bigâ and illustrates the different cultural perspectives on creativity. The Mana Tamariki kaiako (teachers) gifted us a titleâHe taonga he rerenga arorangi (Where there are treasured objects the spirit is nurtured and creativity will be inspired). . Language: English