Learning to Listen: Reflections on Children’s Art as Play and Social Practice in a Reggio Emilia Inspired Classroom
Essay , May 5, 2026
“You can change the color by pushing this button,” one of the 3-year-old girls leaned over the table, pointing to the different parts of the drawing app UI on my tablet. She was showing one of the boys who hadn’t gotten a chance to use it before how to use it. She had shown him how to change the brush, how to erase, and how to make the brush bigger. Throughout the semester, I would often get out my personal iPad and allow the kids to draw on it. I had two primary reasons for this: The novelty of the iPad drew children to the art table, and I had the ability to record brushstrokes on the app they were using. I would be able to then look over the video of their drawings and match them to my notes. Eventually, it became such a routine that as soon as I walked through the door, the children would ask me if they could “play on my tablet.” I told them, “Yes, you can draw on my tablet.” In retrospect, I was trying to separate drawing from play, even though the children already understood them as one and the same. This moment reflects one of the most important observations I made during my time at the center: that children’s art is not created in a vacuum, it is a product created by social activity. It is the byproduct of play. In his article Towards a Theory of Children’s Drawing as Social Practice, Phil Pearson argues that children’s drawing and children’s drawings should be differentiated in terms of study. He argues that children’s drawings are only “residue” of the creating process. Pearson argues that past study of children’s art has focused on the art created itself, rather than the sociocultural process that creates that art. Studying only children’s drawings themselves neglects the fact that children’s art is not done in a vacuum, and that in especially young childhood, drawing is done alongside peers and teachers who sway and interact with the art as its created and the child as they create.
Before this experience, I was interested in the field of childhood art for the specific art that only children seemed to be able to make. I was curious about the product that emerged from children’s artmaking. Specifically, I was curious as to what children’s art could tell us about children and childhood. I viewed it as a specific form of language that had the ability to teach adults what children could not say. My initial interest in children’s art was not as a form of anthropology but as a form of archeology. Over the course of my internship, I’ve come to change this view of childhood and art in general. I went into my internship with the idea of analyzing the content of children’s drawings, but the experience deeply impacted the way that I viewed childhood and the culture of children around me.
Important to this realization was the Reggio Emilia inspired environment of the center that I interned at. The Reggio Emilia approach to early childhood education is an educational philosophy that trusts young children as active constructors of knowledge. Instead of children being discussed and acted upon as objects needing instruction, the philosophy treats children as active participants “working alongside others in the discovery and construction of solutions to meaningful questions and problems; learning is not something that is done to the child, but rather something she does.” (Firlik, 1994, as cited in Hewett, 2001) In this way, teachers are not all-knowing arbiters of knowledge, but collaborators who learn alongside the children. The role of the teacher is to provide information, tools, and materials to facilitate and assist children with reaching their personal goals and learning. (Hewett, 2001) The Reggio Emilia approach to early childhood education necessitates a decolonial approach to listening in the classroom. Patricia Tarr discusses the Reggio Emilia “pedagogy of listening” with, "listening that places us in dialogic relationship with children that is neither adult-directed nor child-centered in an abandonment sense where children are left solely to their own devices, but a mutual sharing of understanding and knowledge." (Tarr, 2003) In this way, Reggio Emilia is an approach to early childhood that views children not as "fragile creatures of god who needed to be both safeguarded and reformed,” or as underformed humans needing to be civilized and taught with strict developmental stages, but as people with the right to self expression and exploration.
As I participated in a Reggio Emilia inspired classroom setting with toddlers aged 3-4, the way I viewed art shifted from a puzzle to this form of exploration. At the beginning, I considered that possibly the class I was in was too young, as none of the children had really developed to a point of figures recognizable to me. But, over the course of my internship at the center, I learned that properly understanding children’s art requires that adults listen to children in a way that our world often trains against. Instead of looking at children’s art as an artifact to be examined, listening to children reveals artmaking to be a tool for human play, social activity, and communication. Over the course of the semester, several observations stood out to me that illustrate why focusing on the process of artmaking matters.
Art as Play
It’s important to state what “play” refers to in the context of this paper. The term “play” is broad and difficult to specifically define. This paper will use the following qualities of play described by Bodrova et al.: “it must be pleasurable, process-oriented, intrinsically motivated, meaningful, iterative, and controlled by a child.” (Bodrova et al., 2023) Following this definition, it’s apparent that most forms of art done by young children are done for the purpose of play. It was presented alongside toys, objects, and materials for exploration during the children’s free time in the morning, and the children themselves often referred to the process of art as playing. The most obvious examples of this is when I would temporarily abandon my station at the art table to make sure that one of the kids wasn’t getting into trouble, or a kid would ask me to come read them a book. The children at the table would come up to me and tell me, “Come back and play with us!” Alongside this, when I first arrived at the center, I had an experience where upon asking a child what she was drawing, she told me it was a shield. She and another student then started playing as though they were superheroes, to which I also joined in. One child mimicked blowing bubbles at us, while the other protected us with her drawing turned into a shield.
It’s not that I specifically viewed the process of art as something different from play, but I didn’t see them as such overlapping concepts. In observing and interacting with young children, I began to question where the idea of art as play starts to shift as children age. Viewing art as a skill rather than a leisure activity is certainly not entirely a biological or inherent factor to aging, and I’m curious to further research where children start viewing it that way. I suspect that it’s part of having art be judged, as well as a decrease of overall leisure time as children grow.
Art as Social Practice
Children do not enter the classroom as a “tabula rasa” in which to impose ideas upon. Children enter the classroom with their own experiences, beliefs, values, and interests. Alongside this, children are constantly learning, both in the sense of children learning practical information and curriculum, but also learning where they stand in the social scheme of our world. Children are aware of their own existence as children, and they learn what that means and what roles adults occupy alongside this. For example, the children would often practice playing the role of the adult within their activities. The story of the girl showing the boy how to use the art program is one example of this. One morning, one student was drawing on my iPad, while another student looked on. She asked the girl, “what are you drawing?” in the specific inflection that the teachers often took on when talking to the students. The other student responded, “It kind of looks like an owl,” before scribbling all over it and going, “It’s a crazy owl.”
This conversation sheds light on both children's understanding of their own standing in our social/cultural system and the way in which children move within this system. In the context of daycares as social settings, young children have their own culture that they either choose to share or hide from adults. For example, children have their own ways of speaking amongst each other that are completely different from the ways they speak to adults. Interestingly, children more often speak to adults with an expectation that they will not completely understand them, while they do not have to engage in this with their peers.
One day, during "circle time," one child started crying because she couldn't explain properly to one of the teachers why she was upset with another student, and she ran off to quietly cry in the corner of the classroom. One of her friends stood up and ran off to go speak with her and help calm her down, and the head teacher got onto her for getting up, assuming that she was getting up to go play with something while she was supposed to be sitting down and listening. Immediately, four of the kids shouted, "she's going to go help her friend!" and the teacher then allowed her to do so. Young children exist in terms of constantly being either misunderstood or being asked to explain themselves. Often, at my internship, the children would easily understand each other in conversation, and translate their speech for the teachers to understand. One time, I was asking a student about her drawing, and I didn't understand what she was saying until another student shouted from across the room to tell me what she was saying.
In terms of children “playing adult”, they would also often play games with me in which they switched roles and identities with me. One child in particular took a specific liking to the rusted heart-shaped necklace that I wear every day, and would often request to wear it. She would take this opportunity to state, “Now I’m Exodus, and you’re me!” She would then mimic my actions, like drawing and pretending to take notes on what her peers were drawing. It was specifically interesting to me because I actively attempted to discourage the children from viewing me in the same authority as their teachers. When asked if they could do something, I would tell them that I either wouldn’t encourage it, that I didn’t see why they wouldn’t be allowed to, or that they should ask one of their teachers if I wasn’t sure. When they came up to me upset about something their peer did, I would oftentimes not intervene, and would instead just ask them if they had told their peer if that upset them.
Conversing about art
Young people’s beliefs and conceptions on the process of drawing as a skill suggest that children are acutely aware of both adults and their peers' judgments upon their work. In a 1995 study, when asked about what makes a drawing good, most children answered in some way that good drawings had color within the lines of the drawing and had color covering the entire image. Most young children were confident in their own abilities as artists, stating that they could draw whatever they wanted and that they “knew how to draw.” Children understood that practice and repetition of drawing led to an increase in skills, and that adults were not “better” at art because of age alone. Even young children described lacking aspects of infant art as indications of skill level. (Kindler & Darras, 1995) These ideas become more apparent when engaging in conversation with young children.
As I read more and learned more about ways in which to speak to children, I started becoming more intentional with my word choices. At the beginning of my internship, I would ask the kids specifically “What are you drawing?” with the expectation that they were attempting to draw something, and possibly just didn’t have the knowledge necessary to draw it. When I asked this, it was very obvious when they came up with the answer on the spot. Over time, it became easier to distinguish when the children were trying to draw a specific thing or when they were just making exploratory marks on the paper. For example, one child continuously used the paints to map out the pools at the Jones center in Springdale. When I asked her what she was painting, she would happily exclaim that it was the pools that her dad would take her on the weekends.
While asking children what they were drawing with the expectation that they were drawing something produced results akin to the story about the “crazy owl,” I began to get much more insightful answers when I changed my question entirely. The specific change in my wording that helped my efforts the most was simply changing from asking “What are you drawing,” to “Can you tell me about your drawing?”. Asking what a child is drawing assumes that the drawing is meant to represent a specific object, and it makes the child feel that their drawings should represent specific things. The question turns drawing into a form of production rather than a form of play and exploration. In contrast, asking a child to tell you about their drawing opens space for their own interpretation and exploration. It allows children to define their own relationship to their art rather than responding to an adult’s expectation. This also allows children more space to decline. In one scenario, I asked one of the children to tell me about her drawing, and she told me that it was a secret for her mother.
This shift in conversation changed the role that I occupied in the interaction. Instead of positioning myself as someone attempting to identify or judge a drawing, it allowed me to become a listener to what the child was communicating or working on. In this way, the question shaped the interaction. The difference between these questions suggest that art serves a fundamentally different role for children than it does for adults. For young children, art is not about producing a finished image, but about engaging in a process that is social, exploratory, and meaningful.
Conclusion
Over the course of my internship, my understanding of children’s art shifted from viewing it as a product to interpret to recognizing it as a process deeply embedded in the social atmosphere of childhood. What I initially approached as a form of visual creation became something far more insightful when I learned to view art as a playful activity shaped by exploration and communication. This shift required me to rethink what it means to listen to children. Instead of extracting meaning from a finished drawing, I learned to pay attention to the true process and intention surrounding its creation. This involved recognizing children as active participants in their own learning and craft. If children’s art is understood as a process rather than a project, then the role of the adult changes. Instead of evaluating and/or interpreting children’s work, adults can participate and support the conditions in which children can make art that allows them to best explore and create meaning. In this way, Reggio Emilia has deeply strengthened and changed what I believed about art pedagogy and the role of children in their own learning. In learning to listen in this way, we can not only better understand childhood art, but art in general.
References
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Olga Ivashkevich (2009) Children’s Drawing as a Sociocultural Practice: Remaking Gender and Popular Culture, Studies in Art Education, 51:1, 50-63
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Tarr, P. (2003). Reflections on the Image of the Child: Reproducer or Creator of Culture. Art Education, 56(4), 6–11. https://doi.org/10.1080/00043125.2003.11653504