Influences on children's aesthetic responses: The role of prior knowledge, contexts, and social experiences during interactions with the visual arts

This study explores young children's aesthetic appreciation within a museum education program. The study used traditional ethnographic methodologies to examine four week-long art camps for young children. The population of this study consisted of 63 children ranging in age from four-to eleven-years-old. Additionally, the study's population included three museum educators who designed and taught the art camps. The primary intended outcome of this study was to produce a descriptive account of how children produce, view, and talk about art within the context of an art education class. The focus on young children in this research differs from the life-span view of aesthetic stage theories and offered an opportunity to explore the aesthetic and cognitive responses of young children within an educational environment, which is essential to understanding developing aesthetic appreciation from an experiential perspective. The inclusion of social and cultural influences in this research project allowed me to investigate how aesthetic appreciation is influenced by environmental, social, and cultural factors, and provides additional theoretical and methodological approaches to studying young children's understandings and interpretations of the visual arts. The descriptive account developed in this research was also used to explore the connections that exist between the children's understandings of the visual arts and influences in the educational environment. This classroom-based approach to the study of children's understandings of art is a useful medium to further our knowledge of how aspects of cognition develop through social and cultural influences.