The National Volunteer Week is on in Canada, and we would like to add our voice in celebrating the amazing contributions that volunteers are making every day to enrich our collective experience. We could not do without their commitment and generosity.
If boating makes waves, at CDIC we know how to preserve children’s take on boating fun. The Red and Green Boat below was drawn nearly sixty years ago in a school notebook. The young artist made sure the whole boat was visible, propeller included.
You have a research report to publish? Children and Society : The International Journal of Childhood and Children’s Services is calling you. Published by the National Children’s Bureau (UK), there are only three weeks left to submit your abstract for the Children in the archives issue.
It is encouraging to see journal publishers paying more attention to and joining the conversation about the urgent need to preserve children’s artifacts.
This call for abstracts comes a few months only after the publication of an issue of Archives and Records (Volume 45, issue 3, 2024) dedicated to the role of archives in engaging children and preserving their social and historical contributions.
Less than a year after we asked parents and grand-parents how they go about preserving their children’s art, we are now asking everyone to tell us if their working life is related to children’s art and its preservation, in any shape or form.
At Children Design International Collection, we celebrate the powerful stories and creative voices of children’s meaningful and creative expressions. We are dedicated to making our content more impactful and accessible—and your insights can help us get there!
Our organization speaks to a broad range of a diverse audience. Help us tailor our communication tools around specific interests.
You will see our call to action on our social media, please share with your peers, colleagues, and friends.
We are happy to welcome Ishita Bisht as our new Events & Communications Volunteer. Full of enthusiasm for our mission, Ishita is already working on updating our communication plan and preparing a global survey which will be available in a few weeks.
Upon joining our organization she said: “I personally love being around kids and enjoy painting with them. Through these experiences, I’ve realized that children’s art is more than just art—it is their entire being speaking through shapes and strokes. I’m thrilled to volunteer for CDIC! With my skills and experience, I hope to contribute to increasing public understanding of the importance of children’s artifacts.”
Ishita holds a post-graduate degree in Public Relations and Corporate Communication from the Xavier Institute of Communications (Mumbai), a graduate certificate in Global Business Management from Conestoga College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning (Kitchener, ON). Her creative outlets include storytelling and strategy for communication. She has had the opportunity to work across various industries like healthcare, international relations, retail, and quick service restaurants, gaining valuable insights along the way.
You will not let kids play with raw meat and make a meat dress for a doll (hello Jana Sterbak and Lady gaga). You will however provide dry noodles for safely making playful jewelry.
Noodle jewels have been around for generations. It is fun and combined with other materials, like beads, fabric, dye, and pompoms, it can get wildly creative.
Interestingly, while children have been emulating grown ups’ jewelry, a jeweler has in turn emulated children’s love for noodle art. Check out this commercial collection of “real” jewels: Al Dente – Delicacies Jewelry. This company runs a philanthropic program for the fight against hunger.
Most of our collection items were made before personal computers or Internet were a thing. This alone is a good reason to celebrate the fact that our website received 30k unique visitors from several countries, who left well over 600k hits in 2024.
Our blog entries often include reference links for further reading. Leave your comment. We love to share what you have to say on the subject.
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We do our best to expand the conversation about the preservation of children’s expression, regardless if it is artistically motivated or otherwise. We welcome volunteers, donors, and items contributors.
It took an artist to first say that every child is an artist. It is easy to imagine an athlete saying that every child is an athlete because they love to run, or a civil engineer saying that every child is an engineer because they build dikes after rainfalls. Why don’t we agree that a child, is a child, is a child, is just about anything a child cares to be at play?
This blog post is about children making drawings while learning about natural science. It is about 23 children 3-6 year old in an early childhood class that participated in a study led by three researchers: Sabela F. Monteira, Maria Pilar Jiménez-Aleixandre, and Isabel Martins. The project resulted in a detailed article published in Cultural Studies of Science Education (Vol. 19, pp. 295-315) and available on Springer Nature: Cultural semiotic resources in young children’s science drawings.
The researchers examined two series of drawings of snails made a month apart during three years. They asked “which meanings do young children communicate with visual cultural semiotic resources available in the science classroom?” The authors deserve credit for recognizing “the need for expanding the borders of the object of research and examining the full social situation where learning takes place, considering the specific culture as well as the dynamics of children’s thinking.” They provide an excellent conceptual and historical context for their project, giving children, their teachers, and their interactions enough space for a solid input in the results. They understand drawing as a “social process” whose contents are “culturally mediated.”
Their observations are many and valuable. They documented the evolution from anthropomorphic, often influenced by the media or children’s literature, to more realistic representations, based on experience. They describe the strategies children use to highlight body parts or elements of importance to them. The positive impact of verbal exchanges with their teachers on the drawing experience is also underlined. Another valuable insight from this study is the influence of writing skills on the drawing tasks. The children learn to write and read parallel to the project, and this development is integrated to their drawing activity and how they frame specific elements of their images.
The research team did not say that every child is a malacologist. Two thumbs up to that.
Helix pomatia or Burgundy snail. Photo: Waugsberg. Source: Wikimedia, 2024.
They had been asked by to draw their family, their pet, an endangered species, a war, a politician, a scientists, their solution to save the planet, and much more. Two Polish researchers asked them to draw artists, and they did not like what they saw.
Małgorzata Karczmarzyk is assistant professor at the Faculty of Social Science, University of Gdańsk (Poland). Dominika Szelągowska teaches visual arts at a high school in the same city. They are both practicing visual artists and art educators.
Their article Artists in the Eyes of Children – Semiotic Analysis of the Meanings about Artists Constructed by Children was published in Kultura i Edukacja in 2018 (No.2, pp. 131-141). The study was very small in scope with only 13 seven year old students taking part, from a few Polish towns. Favorably, each drawing was accompanied by an individual interview with the child. It would be nice to see all the drawings, and not only two.
What is so interesting about this endeavor are the questions it investigates:
What meanings do seven-year-old children give to the term “artist”?
What distinguishing features, according to children, should an artist have?
How can the media influence the shaping of the meanings of children about the artist?
How can the aestheticization influence the shaping of the meanings of children about the artist?
Not many researchers have asked children how they see art and artists. It is surprising considering that we keep hearing the carelessly overused phrase “every child is an artist.” So, this article is a precious addition to the literature.
It turns out though that the authors seem less interested in seeing and hearing what the children have to show and say, than blaming educators for children’s narrow views on art. It is as if the participants were used, rather than engaged, as to make a point about the deplorable state of art education in their schools. The beret a boy drew on the head of a painter is received as stereotypical. So is the easel a girl provides the painter she drew. They tell us that “the poor visual art awareness of tutors is to blame, no knowledge of art, their own prejudices and limitations in its reception, their own negative educational experiences.”
The authors are on a mission when they say “the ultimate purpose of the research is to obtain knowledge which will allow effective changes in education, in this case, in art education.”
The article could have been written a century ago, so much it transpires the ever-lasting tension between teaching art techniques versus free expression, the classics versus the moderns and, artists as educators versus teachers as art educators. When it comes to liking or not their answers, it begs the question, who is asking the children?
Below, a drawing found in our collection. Made by Rishi, it depicts the various formal element of drawing. As a school assignment, I would assume that the authors cited in this blog would say this type of exercise contribute to transmitting a detrimental and narrow notion of art to children.
At the beginning of 2024, CDIC reached out to the McMaster University’s Office of Community Engagement (OCE), requesting support in researching some of the hypothetical factors related to the decision to contribute (or not) to CDIC’s collection. In no time, the OCE had a dynamic team put together under their Research Shop program.
The multidisciplinary team, led by Syed Mahamad, included Hamza Abouiznied, Mia Brufatto, Lily Li, and Lina Mabayyed undertook to identify motivations and barriers influencing the preservation of children’s artwork by families, and contributions to CDIC. Understanding these factors is crucial to increase CDIC’s ability to educate the public on the significance of children’s art and preserve it for future generations.
In total, 113 participants aged between 18 and 64 completed the online survey, and all Canadian provinces plus three territories were represented.
The team produced a report filled with never before documented insights on children’s art conservation as personal, family, or cultural heritage. Ninety (80%) of the survey participants reported that their parents saved their artwork when they were children, is but one such insight.
The study reveals that the main motivations for preserving children’s artwork within the home are:
Tracking the child’s artistic and personal development
Appreciating the artwork’s aesthetic value, and
Maintaining emotional connections to the pieces.
By far, the biggest barriers to preserving artwork in the home were a lack of space to physically store the artwork and time constraints.
Regarding contributing to the CDIC archive, the main motivating factors were:
The opportunity to share and celebrate the artwork with a broader audience,
The child desires to contribute to the archive, and
Receiving incentives, including crediting the child as the artist and/or small giveaways.
Factors that discouraged participants from contributing to the archive included:
A lack of knowledge about the CDIC and its mission,
Perceived logistical challenges with the artwork submission process, and
Reluctance within the family to part with the original artwork.
The research team included recommendations based on their findings. The new knowledge emerging from the study will help CDIC to review its communication tools, as well as its collection development strategies.
At this point, it seems that CDIC should simultaneously address the need of families that seek as much exposure as possible for their images, and the need of families that prefer a restrained access limited only for archival and research purposes.
Stay tuned to see how CDIC will adapt for better serve contributing families, and reach out to other collection users. For the great project partnership, CDIC would like to thank the research team, as well as Evan Gravely and the Office of Community Engagement, at McMaster University.
Reasons why participants were interested in contributing to the CDIC archive. Source: McMaster University, 2024.
Children’s Design International Collection (CDIC) wants to hear from dedicated individuals who will help the organization solidify its base and develop new strategies. Board volunteers commit to a two-year term on our working board of directors. Previous experience with a registered charity is preferred. Both member and officer positions are available:
Treasurer: A passion for budgeting, bookkeeping, risk assessment, reporting, and team work is required. The Treasurer oversees the implementation and review of the Financial Management Policy. The Treasurer chairs the Fundraising Committee. The organization has relied on steady donations, has initiated its corporate sponsorship program, and has yet to receive foundation grants.
Secretary: A passion for record keeping, policy review, contract monitoring, and team work is required. The Secretary oversees the recording of meeting proceedings, as well as the organization’s calendar and notices. The Secretary ensures that the organization’s decisions are reflecting its by-laws, policies and programs.
Director: A passion for education, the arts, the humanities, networking, and team work is required. Board members ensure the sustainable well-being and development of the organization. The board member may chair a standing committee.
The board meetings are held online, two to four times a year. Committee meetings are schedules as needed. The organization has cumulated project partnerships, and aims at long term program partnerships. CDIC is a member of Archivists Association of Ontario and Volunteer Canada. CDIC enjoys a strong presence on the web through the web site, social media and newsletter.
To apply: Use this online form or email resume, with optional LinkedIn link, to info@cdic-cide.org with Board Member in the subject line, by November 15th 2024. Take a step forward with us!
