The visual culture of childhood: International Child Art After Modernism
CULTUUR + EDUCATIE 15 (2006)

Study presented at the conference Visual Culture of Childhood: Child Art after Modernism (2004). The key topic was the extent to which works labelled as 'child art' are actually produced by children and are not joint productions of adults and children.

Children have their own visual culture, based on popular expressions of culture such as comics, cartoons, films, illustrations and advertising. The authors discuss how this visual culture can find a niche in education and how collaboration between adults and children emerges in a pedagogical context.

Introduction
In the introduction, arts education professors Brent Wilson and Christine Thompson (Penn State University) examine the concept of child art and discuss the views on the topic.
In the next article, Thompson takes a closer look at the personal visual culture that children create. She researched the choices children make in their visual culture, and the ways in which they appropriate and reinterpret commercial images in their own creative expressions.

Photos
Photography is the main focus of two articles. Lisa Liben (Penn State University) and Lisa Szechter (Tulane University) researched how children increasingly view photos as versions of structured worlds as they grow older. After taking photos with children for years, Wendy Ewald looks back on the nature and power of these collaborative efforts.

Reggio Emilia
In Reggio Emilia, children and adults engage in an exceptional form of pedagogical cooperation in creating child art. In her article, Rebecca S. New (Tufts University) researched this approach and its cultural foundation.

Comics
In Korea, comics have a huge impact on the visual culture of childhood. For three years, Miriam Kim followed the creative development of a young boy who was inspired by the popular comic book Manwha. His learning process was significantly different from the process in drawing class at school, where the teacher determined what he had to learn.

Early history
In the final article, Mary Ann Stankiewicz (Pennsylvania State University) outlines the early history of child art. She links drawings by young people in the early nineteenth century to changing societal values, new educational institutions and technological innovations.
Dutch overview