The sketchy school

Abstract

This paper is aimed to describe an art education project conducted with children between the ages of 3 and 5 years old. 

The setting of the research is a school called DPDB, based in Naples (Italy), which has been using various art forms as a pedagogical tool for more than thirty years, believing that the child is not only a reflective subject but also and mostly an active and participative one.

Specifically, the researcher in charge of the educational project followed a group of 5-year-old children, in a period clearly marked by the material and immaterial consequences caused by the current health emergency, which affected not only the daily life of families and schools but also social relations in general.

Within this complex framework, characterized by the important issues of presence and absence, of beginning and end, the educators outlined a didactic project that can change according to the possibilities and that, at the same time, can remain solid and substantial in its pedagogical aim. 

During this delicate phase of growth, children use an increasingly complex way of thinking, largely subdivided into concepts, increasingly wider categories, and not necessarily concretely perceptible.

They start to be interested in the process of searching for solutions, the discovery of different constants that regulate different processes, action planning, and formulating hypotheses about possible outcomes. 

Their attention becomes more and more refined and its focus is considerably lengthened so that the categories of time and space begin to have a real meaning in the everyday experience. 

The didactic project was thus developed around the great theme of time and its dimensions, and then focused on the concept of space and all its possible declinations.

Space was considered both in its most intimate meaning of individual space, meaning space for oneself in which to write one's own personal history, and in its topological meaning linked to orientation, distances, measurements, explorations, and understood as space-world, that is, from an ecological point of view. 

Thus, a project based on the use of maps was planned. Specifically, it started from a map of the school itself, which was studied in all its directions and then divided into geographical groups, and transposed to a larger scale. This process of translation to scale is something that trains cognitive reasoning to the possibilities of writing: small letters that form words, which then form sentences in a given space sheet. 

The following step was to explore the open spaces within the school perimeter, in particular the courtyards, the stairs, the terraces; the children were then trained to follow the arrows and the numbers leading to the different environments, which are carriers of messages and directions to be read and deciphered, like a treasure map leading to knowledge. 

Once at the top, the children found themselves surrounded by the many wonders of the city, staring ad the open horizon around them: the Vesuvius, San Martino hill, the Spanish quarters, and the great dome.