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Antonio Damasio:We Feel, Therefore We Learn:The Relevance of Affective and Social Neuroscience to Education

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Antonio Damasio:We Feel, Therefore We Learn:The Relevance of Affective and Social Neuroscience to Education

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We Feel, Therefore We Learn: The Relevance of Affective and Social Neuroscience to Education

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ABSTRACT- Recent advances in neuroscience are highlighting connections between emotion, social functioning, and decision making that have the potential to revolutionize our understanding of the role ...

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Vygotsky: Imagination and creativity in childhood

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Vygotsky: Imagination and creativity in childhood

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Through the Rhodascope: How Rhoda Kellogg Taught the World to Leave Teaching to the Children

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with artist Brian Belott and educator Jennifer DiGioia

Organized in conjunction with the exhibition Brian Belott’s RHODASCOPE: Scribbles, Smears, and the Universal Language of Children According to Rhoda Kellogg on view in San Francisco City Hall from June 06, 2019-March 13, 2020. Curated by Jordan Stein and Lindsey White.

Tuesday, October 15, 2019

Rhoda Kellogg (1898–1987) was an early childhood scholar, educator, author, and activist who was in a near-continual state of processing child art for six decades, most significantly as the designer and director of the Phoebe A. Hearst Preschool, which still operates in San Francisco. In this illustrated lecture, artist, curator, and archivist Brian Belott and early childhood educator Jennifer DiGioia reflect on Kellogg's pioneering research in early visual learning, with a focus on the significance of scribbles and finger paintings. 

RHODASCOPE brings together nearly 200 such works from the Rhoda Kellogg International Child Art Collection, alongside Belott’s own child art “forgery” paintings and several of Kellogg’s original artworks, produced during her final years and never before seen in San Francisco. The exhibition marks a homecoming for the visionary Bay Area figure and her extraordinarily vast, yet profoundly singular collection.

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I was fortunate to view this in February 2020 in San Francisco

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The fame adhered to such artists for their emotional immediacy begins to feel arbitrary within the context of this exhibition. Kellogg undercuts the art market with fine-toothed grace, once declaring in a Psychology Today article: "What the great artist struggles to achieve, the child creates naturally." An oversized plastic stroller, molded into an ersatz sedan, full of children from City Hall's preschool program, drives through the exhibition several times a day. Each kid is an abstract modernist.

The exhibited finger paintings swirl in an aura of anti-staleness. The hand movements of toddlers, fossilized in pigment, graph their own vocabulary of propellent freedom. Spirals and grids expertly fill canvases and color is embraced without apprehension.

"Reality is over-emphasized in kid art," co-curator Lindsey White observes. "Parents want to control their kid's drawings. They say, 'Is that your mom? Is that your dad?' instead of just letting them have a free space." The show pushes back against adult ideas of reality, privileging abstraction as a legitimate style.

A selection of Kellogg's original collages, which Belott discovered while digitizing her collection, are included in the show. It's hard not to compare her pieces, composed of monotone, pleasingly round, abstract shapes, with the work of Ellsworth Kelly. Wall text in Rhodascope anticipates this and reminds visitors that her inspiration came from the spontaneous abstraction of children-not a great male minimalist.

Kellogg's Scholarship: A Taxonomy of Smudges

Kellogg assembled her collection with scientific fervor. As the director of Phoebe Hearst Preschool from 1966 until her death in 1989, she took home thousands of drawings. She diversified her sample by traveling internationally and soliciting work from other teachers. Each archival piece is annotated with a careful sticker, in which Kellogg scrawled descriptors like "roving enclosing line" or "multiple-line overlaid circle" in gentle cursive. Where most people might have seen nothing, Kellogg saw a physiognomy of abstraction. She cataloged the 20 or more hand techniques children use to spread paint and create texture, among them "hand twirl" and "whole palm spread." It's a dadaist taxonomy of smudges.

At City Hall, between the scribbles and the finger paintings, a selection of Belott's self-described "forgeries," inspired reproductions of favorite pieces from Kellogg's collection, are also on display. This enclave of the exhibition overflows with color and anatomically incorrect figures, like a distorted children's hospital. White points out a favorite painting: shades of blue seem to depict two people in gas masks vacuuming a field.

Rhodascope, a funny word Belott made up, is a near homonym of rotoscope, a device used by animators to trace frames of film. It points to Kellogg's style of analysis. She traced thousands of child drawings, translating their work into thicker lines so that she could develop graphs that conveyed the information she was gathering. Perhaps like Belott, Kellogg enjoyed tracing the work of children because it temporarily allowed her to inhabit their instinctual and spontaneous mark-making.

A Plexiglas mandala sits at the end of the City Hall show as a kind of pinnacle. The mandala, organized by Kellogg, is meant to be read center to circumference. It shows the evolvement of simple pictorial utterances into circles divided by symmetrical crosses (mandalas themselves), and from there, essential shapes like ships, flowers, humanoids and snakes. With dozens of traced and rearranged drawings, Kellogg presents her greatest finding-a graphic representation of pictorial development in child art. After decades of research, and millions of specimens, the mandala proves her essential claim: art making is biological.

"I chant 'biological art' to myself all the time," stresses Belott, "Rhoda Kellogg's collection is a hurricane, it's a force of nature, it's easy to get overwhelmed, but biological art-that's the most important thing she gave us." Biological art is the idea that certain aesthetic forms are native to the world of children. And, that art is a universal language-everyone starts off with the same spontaneous shapes until pictures become words.

Jennifer DiGioia, who taught at Phoebe Hearst for over a decade, stresses the importance of letting kids just do their things. "Hands off!" She pantomimes throwing her hands up. Kellogg emphasized the importance of looking, really looking, at children's art before trying to exercise control. The Phoebe Hearst Preschool still sports signs warning adults to "resist interrupting children's explorations unless safety is at risk."

A contemporary of Carl Jung, Kellogg saw him speak about the mandala symbol, which he viewed as an archetypical shape. He argued that it indicated the "unity of the psyche with the collective unconscious." She noticed that the mandala was nestled everywhere in the scribbles of children, and sought to share this revelation. Now, with the help a few others, Kellogg's scholarship, her most powerful legacy, is on display: an invitation to unlearn conventional languages and recognize the brilliance of a scribble.

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In Rhoda Kellogg's World, Every Child is an Artist | KQED

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The fame adhered to such artists for their emotional immediacy begins to feel arbitrary within the context of this exhibition. Kellogg undercuts the art market with fine-toothed grace, once declaring in a Psychology Today article: "What the great artist struggles to achieve, the child creates naturally."

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Digital Reedition: Dieter Maurer, Claudia Riboni, Birute Gujer
Technique and Design: Christian d'Heureuse, Jürgen Ragaller
Image Editing: Karin Wälchli

Introduction

In 1967, Rhoda Kellogg published an archive of c. 8000 drawings of children ages 24-40 months. (See Kellogg, R.: Rhoda Kellogg Child Art Collection. Washington, DC., Microcard Editions, Inc., 1967; now available at LexisNexis, Reed Elsevier, Inc..) Up to now, as far as we know, no other archive of early graphic expressions was ever published, including a large sample of pictures and presented according to a classification system. Thus, the archive has a historical status.

Rhoda Kellogg was a psychologist and a nursery school educator. Here investigations focused on the art of young children, that is, on early graphic expressions. From 1948 to 1966, she collected approximately one million drawings of young children of ages two to eight. More than half a million of these drawings are filed in the "Rhoda Kellogg Child Art Collection of the Golden Gate Kindergarten Association" in San Francisco, U.S.A.. Of these half-million and more drawings, some 8000 are available, in microfiche form (see above). Some 250 paintings and drawings, selected as outstanding examples of children's work, are reproduced in full color. (See Kellogg, R. and O'Dell, S.: The Psychology of Children's Art. Del Mar, California, 1967.)

Kellogg describes the very first development of children's drawings as a sequence of basic shapes or forms and their configurations: starting from twenty "basic scribbles", which can be observed at the age of two, children develop placement patterns, emergent diagram shapes, diagrams, combines, aggregates, mandalas, suns, radials, before humans and early pictorialism appear. Kellogg understands this sequence as a manifestation of "Gestalts", according to the Gestalt theory.

Kellogg is one of the rare authors who emphasizes the role of formal design, which emerges before pictorialism and then plays a role in relation to pictorialism or is developed as a distinct type of pictures.

Kellogg is also one of the rare authors who presents an extensive classification system related to early graphic expressions, combined with an attempt to give empirical evidence for the picture attributes of the system and their role in the development of drawing and painting.

For more details, please look at "Introduction to the Rhoda Kellogg Child Art Collection" (PDF, 52KB).

For a digital reproduction of the handbook, download "Rhoda Kellogg Child Art Collection - Handbook" (PDF, 42MB).

Please Note

This reedition is a part of our research on early graphic expressions (often assigned as "scribblings"). For our homepage, please look at www.early-pictures.ch. For our publication of early pictures of European children, see www.early-pictures.ch/eu (electronic book and picture archive, in German). For an overview, see the two articles "Early Pictures in Ontogeny" and "Picture Genesis and Picture Concept".

Rhoda Kellogg Child Art Collection - The Archive - The Reproduction

As mentioned above, the archive includes some 8000 drawings and paintings of children ages 24-40 months. (Indication according to Kellogg, R.: Analyzing Childrens Art. Mountain View, California, 1969, p. 294.) The main purpose of the archive is to illustrate the classification system Kellogg has developed. Thus, in the archive, most of the cards address a single picture attribute, a single category and illustrate it by a selection of drawings and paintings. In addition, some cards explain and illustrate specific topics of early graphic expressions not covered by the categories of the classification system.

Several reasons have led us to digitally reproduce the archive and to make it accessible over the Internet: today, only very few libraries possess the archive; the use of the microfiches is very laborious, and a digital version is more appropriate to search and view pictures and picture series according to their classification; because of the historical status of the archive, it should be reedited to guarantee its future access. But most importantly, early graphic expression as a subject matter must be revisited. Existing theories as well as existing empirical evidences are far from being satisfying and robust, and the early development of pictures should be given strong attention within recent attempts at a picture theory.

In general, each of the 255 microfiche cards includes 29 drawings plus an identifying label (1 pages). When reproducing the archive, first, the entire card was digitized, and second, all 30 single pages the card contains were extracted (with the exception of a few cases). Thus, the digital archive consists of 7900 reproductions.

All cards and single pictures were classified according to the identifying label. In addition, written indications on the pictures were edited, if they could be identified. Thus, for each of the pictures, the microfiche card it belongs to, its position on the card, the category (picture attribute) according to the classification system and the information written on the paper are given.

For details of the archive structure as well as for the first steps to use the archive, please refer to the Assistant in the Help menu. For search specific indications, please refer to How to Search in the Help menu.

Acknowledgement

The Golden Gate Kindergarten Association (San Francisco U.S.A.) kindly permitted this digital version of the Rhoda Kellogg Child Art Collection and its free access over the Internet.

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1967 The Golden Gate Kindergarten Association, San Francisco U.S.A

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Digital Reedition: Dieter Maurer, Claudia Riboni, Birute Gujer Technique and Design: Christian d'Heureuse, Jürgen Ragaller Image Editing: Karin Wälchli In 1967, Rhoda Kellogg published an archive of c. 8000 drawings of children ages 24-40 months. (See Kellogg, R.: Rhoda Kellogg Child Art Collection. Washington, DC., Microcard Editions, Inc., 1967; now available at LexisNexis, Reed Elsevier, Inc..)

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Nel Noddings: Relational Care and the Curriculum

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Nel Noddings: Relational Care and the Curriculum

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Eric Kandel: Multi-sensory Learning Experience and Memory Formation

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Eric Kandel: Multi-sensory Learning Experience and Memory Formation

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The fundamental importance of multi-sensory experience in the act of learning.

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Stuart Brown: Consequences of Play Deprivation

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Stuart Brown: Consequences of Play Deprivation

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Established in June 1991, Intuit is one of the premier museums in the world dedicated to presenting outsider and self-taught art.

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Liz Elsby

WHEN the Jews were deported to Theresienstadt ghetto from Prague and environs in 1942, they were instructed to bring with them only 50 kilos. The dilemma of how to pack into a suitcase one's entire past life for an unknown future life must have been a daunting one. What to bring? Most deportees packed clothing, household articles, valuables, photo albums and the like. However, artist and teacher Friedl Dicker-Brandeis used her weight allowance in a different way. After packing a few necessary items of clothing, she chose to fill the rest of her weight quota with art supplies. Her purpose was not to only have material for her own artistic needs, but to ensure that she would have the necessary art supplies on hand to teach art to the hundreds of traumatized children whom she anticipated meeting at journey's end. This decision was a natural part of who Friedl Dicker-Brandeis was. While most of us can relate to the very human survival instinct of self preservation, of providing first and foremost for oneself and one's family, her choice to give of herself to others - to donate her time, her talents and her indomitable spirit - is a much rarer quality, one that still has the power to captivate and inspire us 70 years later.

Friedl was born in 1898 in Vienna, Austria. She was a little girl who lost her mother at a very early age, a loss which she felt keenly her entire life. Although she and her husband, Pavel Brandeis, never had any children of their own, in Theresienstadt Friedl was finally able to give free rein to her maternal instincts, and to nurture, and teach hundreds of children who saw her as a surrogate mother.

From an early age, Friedl pursued a life of art and creativity. She studied in the Weimar Bauhaus under such luminaries as Johannes Itten and Paul Klee. The Bauhaus was not merely a design academy, but an entire philosophy, based on the aesthetics of empathy. Its students were encouraged not to approach an object or subject as if they were a camera, aiming to merely depict the shallow outer shell, but rather to seek the subject's essence, to see it both inside and out, to become one with their subject, to empathize with it. This philosophy would become the core of Friedl's own artwork and her guiding principle for teaching art to children, a calling that would come into its own in Theresienstadt.

In mid 1938, Friedl had obtained Czech citizenship and she and her husband, Pavel Brandeis were living in Harnov, Czechoslovakia. It was from there that they were deported to Theresienstadt, on Dec 17th, 1942.

Conditions in Theresienstadt were appalling, and even more so for children who had to first cope with the enormous trauma and life-changing upheaval that deportation wreaked upon their young lives. The Czech children who were deported to Theresienstadt had slept in their beds until the day they were deported, and were together with their immediate families until the moment they arrived. Children were ripped away from the familiarity of their homes, families, communities and routines and thrust into a terrifying new reality which they could not understand. Upon arrival in Theresienstadt, children were forcefully separated from their parents and family and sent to live alone in overcrowded children's houses; even brothers and sisters were separated because boys had to live separately from girls. The starvation, illness and brutality of Theresienstadt, along with lack of stability and structure, put an enormous strain on the coping mechanisms of these children. They desperately needed direction and purpose, and Friedl was there to give them that.

Realizing that art could be a therapeutic tool to help children to deal with their feelings of loss, sorrow, fear, and uncertainty, Friedl set about teaching over 600 children with the enormous enthusiasm and energy that her friends, colleagues and students remember as being so typical for her. Using the limited art supplies she had brought with her to the ghetto, she had her students explore various mediums such as collage, watercolor painting, paper weaving, and drawing. But her lessons were not designed merely to teach her students technique. Rather, these different techniques became the means through which she taught her young students to dig below the facile to the deep well-spring of their feelings and emotions, and from that intimate place, to create. Through this intuitive method, a drawing of a flower vase on a windowsill, or the portrait of a child, would become something truly absorbed, deeply felt, sublime. It would reflect the child's inner feelings - a window into their soul. In a lecture she gave in the ghetto in 1943 to explain her teaching methods, she declared that her purpose was not to train the children as artists, but rather to "unlock and preserve for all the creative spirit as a source of energy to stimulate fantasy and imagination and strengthen children's ability to judge, appreciate, observe, [and] endure" by helping children choose and elaborate their own forms." 1

Friedl respected the boundless imagination of children, and did not try to curb her students with adult restrictions, but tried rather to harness that imagination and let it move them. For Friedl, artwork represented freedom, and that freedom could take her students outside the boundaries of their prison, outside of the horror and oppression that was their daily reality. One of Friedl's few students that survived the Holocaust, Helga Kinsky (nee Pollak), recalls how under Friedl's tutelage, the children did not depict the misery and horror that surrounded them, but rather that Friedl "transported us to a different world.... She painted flowers in windows, a view out of a window. She had a totally different approach.... She didn't make us draw Terezin." 2

Another surviving student, Eva Dorian said of her beloved teacher: "I believe that what she wanted from us was not directly linked to drawing, but rather to the expression of different feelings, to the liberation from our fears...these were not normal lessons, but lessons in emancipated meditation" 3.

None of these attempts of art as therapy, of spiritual freedom through paints and paper, could change the dreadful reality that awaited the majority of the Jews of Theresienstadt. When Friedl's husband Pavel was deported from Theresienstadt in late September 1944, she voluntarily signed up for the next transport, desperate to reunite with him. But what was to become of her collection of the children's precious artwork and her own beautiful drawings and paintings? Hoping that eyes more sympathetic than the Nazis' would one day see them, she packed 5,000 pieces of artwork into the same 2 suitcases they had arrived in as raw materials in 1942, and hid them, to be found after the war. Although Friedl herself did not sign most of the work she produced in Theresienstadt, she made sure that the children signed their creations with their name and age, a testimony to their identity, a document of their existence. These drawings and signatures are all that remains of most of Friedl's 600 students. Apart from their ages and names, the overall majority will remain forever unknown, murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz Birkenau, starved to death in Theresienstadt or killed by the inhuman conditions of other camps.

On October 6th, 1944, Friedl Dicker Brandeis and 60 of her students were sent on transport number EO 167 to Auschwitz Birkenau, where most of them were probably murdered upon arrival. Until the very end, Friedl did not resign herself to despair or allow her young students to become engulfed by hopelessness. Rather, as one of the first practioners of art therapy, she gave them the gift of expression, artistic freedom and beauty and helped give meaning to their young lives, for as long as they still had to live. One of her former students sums up succinctly what Friedl meant to her:

"Friedl's teaching, the times spent drawing with her, are among the fondest memories of my life. The fact that it was Terezin made it more poignant but it would have been the same anywhere in the world... I think Friedl was the only one who taught without ever asking for anything in return. She just gave of herself."

Through her solidarity with those in need, the giving of herself to help others to cope, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis - artist, teacher, and spiritual mother - inspires us as much today as she did her own students 70 years ago.

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"Coping through Art - Friedl Dicker-Brandeis and the children of Theresienstadt"

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Liz Elsby WHEN the Jews were deported to Theresienstadt ghetto from Prague and environs in 1942, they were instructed to bring with them only 50 kilos. The dilemma of how to pack into a suitcase one's entire past life for an unknown future life must have been a daunting one.

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Piaget: The Language and Thought of the Child

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Piaget: The Language and Thought of the Child