eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780307482532 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 12/10/2008 |
| Sold by: | Random House |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Ellen Handler Spitz is a professor in the Honors College and Department of Visual Arts at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. The author of Inside Picture Books, she has written and lectured extensively on children’s aesthetic and psychological development. A visual artist and former dancer, she has taught at Columbia, Stanford, and New York University, among other academic institutions. She lives in Baltimore and New York City.
Read an Excerpt
The Brightening Glance
By Ellen Handler Spitz
Random House
Ellen Handler SpitzAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0375420584
Chapter One
The Magnifying Gaze of Children
It is hardly worth the effort to try to grow up into--and live fully within--a world that is not full of wonder.
--Bruno Bettelheim, "Children and Museums"
Brooding, she changed the pool into the sea, and made the minnows into sharks and whales, and cast vast clouds over this tiny world by holding her hand against the sun, and so brought darkness and desolation, like God himself, to millions of ignorant and innocent creatures, and then took her hand away suddenly and let the sun stream down.
--Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
Spaceman Spiff and Rapunzel at the Ballet
As childhood recedes in time, it steals in closer and feels more palpable. Like a lost toy that has slipped into a cranny, it suddenly turns up. You want to hold on to it again. Thus, my own childhood intrudes sometimes into these pages. Because of this stealing back of memory, you will find, in this book, impressions, recollections, even an occasional bit of exhortation. My wish is to take you back to moments in your own childhood as well as to invite you to consider matters that confront young children today. For childhood is, after all, not only the start of life; it stays with us, follows us, and continues to survive as a realm to which we return. Perhaps, moreover, the artists are right, and returning purposefully to it from time to time can inspire us to continue to grow.
Throughout my life as artist, dancer, writer, parent, and scholar, a deep undertow has always pulled me back to childhood. Not only to my own but to all manner of stories, objects, images, plays, songs, films, and even theories that touch on childhood. I want to consider the ways in which children grow and learn in the realms of the aesthetic or, to put it more precisely, in their sensory, perceptual, and imaginative lives, and the ways in which this growing and learning intersects with their emotional lives and with the feelings of those dear to them. Although we tend conventionally to make a distinction between the notions of imagination and perception, I shall, in these pages, treat these terms as very close, rather like an intimate dyad, because this is the way they function in early childhood. Normally, we conceive of imagination as an inner, mental activity (daydreaming in the dark, for example) quite separable from perception, which we take to be directed toward outward stimuli (listening to sounds, discriminating between colors, inhaling fragrances); yet, in early childhood, these modes work in close harmony. Children's wishes, dreams, and fantasies feed into their immediate sensory perceptions, and their aesthetic lives in turn shape the contours of their fantasies. This interdependence is so pronounced in early childhood because during those brief years the aggressively occupying armies of compartmentalization have not yet fully colonized our mental landscapes.
Other authors have challenged the dichotomy between aesthetics and imagination. The scientist Alan Lightman, for example, in A Sense of the Mysterious, wonders how we can possibly picture what we have never, in some sense, seen, and he reminds us of how helpful and even necessary it is to form mental pictures to accompany abstract ideas so that, to understand scientific discoveries, one reverts to terms and images familiar "from daily life--spinning balls, waves in water, pendulums, weights on springs," and he quotes Einstein's poetic statement that " 'the universe of ideas is just as little independent of the nature of our experiences as clothes are of the form of the human body.' " Italo Calvino, too, coming at it from the other side in his bewitching Mr. Palomar, reveals the lunacy of our quixotic attempts to make our abstractions, our maps, match living experiences that always exceed them. I especially treasure his memory of waiting on a long queue in a busy fromagerie, where each aromatic cheese on display evokes, as he gazes at it and whiffs it, a different bucolic landscape dotted with cows or sheep or goats so that by the time he has reached the counter, he has become so engrossed in his fantasies that he cannot decide which cheese he wants to buy. Children dwell in just such a universe, and they disclose it to us moment by moment when we watch and listen to them.
Our discussion in these pages will range far beyond any traditionally limited view of children's aesthetic lives. Although I started out with the idea of writing a book about first experiences in the traditional arts such as dance, theater, music, literature, and visual art (and you will find traces of that agenda still), I quickly came to see that children do not separate these out subjectively from other aspects of their lives--from their ordinary excursions, their living and play spaces, their holidays. We will not be principally concerned, for example, with teaching the practice of any of the conventional arts to young children, nor will we focus exclusively on the subject of taking them to museums and concerts. This is because, just as perceiving and imagining go hand in hand in early childhood, so do the various aspects of their aesthetic lives. To a child, these realms feel seamless. After all, it is not they but we who have been trained to think in categories. What I want to urge is that we stop and reconsider these boxes; for only when we broaden our horizons on the artistic and imaginative possibilities in children's lives can we begin to perceive the aesthetic potential in myriad aspects of their daily routines. Thus, although I am passionately interested in the complexities of teaching and learning in the arts, my principal focus here is on the aesthetic dimensions of children's everyday lives. I will ask you to reconsider the ordinary and the apparently mundane: looking out at and listening attentively to the world, playing imaginatively, living in an assigned space, celebrating a birthday, waiting for a parent in an international airport, feeling lost, being found, seeming different from others and misunderstood, as well as occasions when a child's experience does intersect with the arts (attending a music class for toddlers and mothers, getting ready for an opera, becoming afraid during a movie, watching a television show, peering curiously at works of visual art in a museum or gallery). In each instance, I invite you to ask yourself how such formative experiences proliferate and feed into later encounters with the arts and life. Likewise, how do the arts--visual (including film, television, video), musical, dramatic, and poetic--serve to determine the forms of children's imaginative lives, their play, symbols, ideals, and dreams? The arts exert a powerful force not only directly but also indirectly, for they portray childhood in ways that influence our adult views of children, which we then pass along to them. Above all, I am fascinated by the close mingling of psychological and aesthetic factors. This mingling will serve as a constant leitmotiv throughout these pages.
Several large questions have intrigued me and serve as a continuing springboard for my work: What can we learn about beauty and aesthetic pleasure from young children? How do children's aesthetic and emotional lives intersect? Can we as adults enhance young children's aesthetic experiences without imposing our own prejudicial templates and classifications?
I want to give priority to the fluidity of children's inner and outer lives. Few have illustrated this flow more tellingly than the brilliant graphic artist Bill Watterson in his delightful Calvin and Hobbes comic strips. With charm, wit, and wisdom, he reveals how young children slip back and forth between their private worlds of imagination and the domain of shared cultural experience. In one strip, Watterson draws six-year-old spikey-haired Calvin, with goggles on, thoroughly absorbed in one of his favorite daydreams, in which he assumes the role of the intrepid commander Spaceman Spiff. We don't know it right away, but Calvin is actually in school. As Spiff, with his rocket ship hurling toward destruction, he counts down backward, in terror, from ten. His second-grade teacher, Mrs. Wormwood, quietly approaches his desk and sets him an arithmetic problem. "SEVEN!" Calvin blurts out, lost in his fantasy countdown; that turns out to be the right answer to his teacher's question. It is this exchange I am after: namely, the many- splendored ways in which individual children come to experience their worlds imaginatively and aesthetically--an exchange that also, importantly, involves their hearts. In a scene from ordinary life, I recently observed the following: At the Lyric Opera House in Baltimore, a well-dressed lady with her six-year-old grandson emerged in a crush of children and adults after a fanciful holiday performance of The Nutcracker ballet. Suddenly, from an adjoining staircase, there appeared in front of them a woman with shimmering blond hair that cascaded down her back practically to her knees. The boy clutched his grandmother's hand and announced in a stage whisper: "Look, Nana! That lady looks just like Rapunzel."
A word about my methodology. In no way do I mean all the anecdotes and illustrations in these pages to be generalized into overarching principles. Each story is offered to indicate a strand in the web of children's aesthetic lives--a strand that seems valuable in and of itself and worth pondering--but I have no wish to claim any part for them in a universal theory of aesthetic development. Nor do I attempt exhaustive analyses or believe that any amount of statistical research could accomplish such a goal. My chapters intersect and overlap. To get at the origins of imaginative and aesthetic experience, I have used the testimonies of adults as well as my own and others' direct observation of and interactive engagement with young children. Children, even passing by quickly, "like a bird, bullet, or arrow," as Virginia Woolf once put it, appear as main characters here; yet they have supporting casts and have not been divided into categories of age and stage, as is routine for texts in psychology and education. Their ages are offered only in passing in most instances, and although my focus is on the early years, my examples include children ranging from less than two years up through early adolescence. When a story has seemed helpful, I have adopted it. I have drawn freely on my own life and on the lives of my colleagues, friends, and family, on oral communications as well as published works, and on the theoretical and empirical studies of others, all of which are acknowledged directly in the body of this text or in its references. In many instances the names of children and parents--who hail from many parts of the globe, not solely from the United States--have been altered to protect their privacy. Perhaps, in fact, the stories themselves, like the experiences of which they speak, should be treated as ends in themselves. Moments in the woods . . .
Excerpted from The Brightening Glance by Ellen Handler Spitz Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.