Tara Callaghan's guest appearances

Tara Callaghan

Your Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive

Diana Winston

Ross Greene

Iris Chen

Mahzarin Banaji

Betsy DeVos

Beverly Daniel Tatum

Kristy Goodwin

Dina Rose

Vanessa Merten

Roberta Golinkoff

John Wall

Annie Murphy

Sarah Jaffe

Nadine Thornhill

Chris Winter

OwlTail

I’m so excited to welcome my first guest on the Your Parenting Mojo podcast: Professor Tara Callaghan of St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia.   Professor Callaghan has spent a great number of years studying the emergence of artistic ability in young children and she shares some of her insights with us.  This is a rather longer episode than usual so here are some places you might want to skip ahead to if you have specific interest:[3:55]: The connection between individuality and creativity, especially in Western cultures[9:00]: What is “symbolic representation” and why is the development of symbolic representation an important milestone for young children?[12:10]: Is it helpful for parents to ask a child “What are you drawing?”[15:25]: When do children understand symbols?[31:15]: What can parents do to support children’s development of symbolic representation in particular and artistic ability in general?Dr. Tara Callaghan's Book Early social cognition in three cultural contexts - Affiliate linkReferencesBrownlee, P. (2016). Magic Places. Good Egg Books: Thames, NZ (must be ordered directly from the publisher in New Zealand; see: http://penniebrownlee.weebly.com/books.html)Callaghan, T.C., Rackozy, H., Behne, T., Moll, H, Lizkowski, U., Warneken, F., &amp; Tomasello, (2011). Early social cognition in three cultural contexts. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 76(2), Serial Number 299. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/mono.2011.76.issue-2/issuetocCallaghan, T. &amp; Corbit, J. (2015). The development of symbolic representation. In Vol. 2 (L. Liben &amp; U. Muller, Vol. Eds.) of the 7th Edition (R. Lerner, Series Ed) of the Handbook of Child Psychology and Developmental Science (pp. 250-294). New York: Wiley.Callaghan, T., &amp; M. Rankin (2002). Emergence of graphic symbol functioning and the question of domain specificity: A longitudinal training study. Child Development, March/April 2002, 73:2, 359-376.Callaghan, T., P. Rochat &amp; J. Corbit (2012). Young children’s knowledge of the representational function of pictoral symbols: Development across the preschool years in three cultures.  Journal of Cognition and Development, 13:3, 320-353. Available at: http://www.psychology.emory.edu/cognition/rochat/lab/CALLAGHAN,%20ROCHAT,%20&amp;%20CORBIT,%202012.pdfDeLoache, J. S., (2004).  Becoming symbol-minded. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 8, 66-70. Retrieved from: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364661303003346Frith, C., &amp; Frith, U. (2005). Theory of mind. Current Biology 15(17), R644.R645. Full article available at: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982205009607Ganea, P.A., M.A. Preissler, L. Butler, S. Carey, and J.S. DeLoache (2009). Toddlers’ referential understanding of pictures. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 104(3):283-295. Full article available at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2865246/Golomb, C. (2003). The child’s creation of a pictoral world. London: Psychology Press.Jolley, R.P. (2010). Children and pictures: Drawing and understanding. Wiley-Blackwell, Cichester, England.Jolley, R. P. &amp; S. Rose (2008). The relationship between production and comprehension of representational drawing. In Children’s understanding and production of pictures, drawings, and art (C. Milbrath &amp; H.M. Trautner (Eds)). Boston, MA, Hogrefe Publishing.  Chapter available at: http://www.staffs.ac.uk/personal/sciences/rj2/publications/Jolley%20and%20Rose%20chapter.pdfKellogg, R. (1970). Analyzing Children’s Art. Mayfield Publishing Company, Mountain View, CA.Preissler, M.A., and P. Bloom. Two-year-olds use artist intention to understand drawings. Cognition 1[06:51]2-518. Full article available at: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.522.4017&amp;rep=rep1&amp;type=pdfRochat, P. &amp; T. Callaghan (2005). What drives symbolic development? The case of pictoral comprehension and production. In L. Namy (Ed.) Symbol use and symbolic representation. Mahwah, NJ, Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc. Chapter available at: http://www.psychology.emory.edu/cognition/rochat/lab/WhatDrivesSymbolicDevelopment.pdfWinner, E. (1985). Invented worlds: The psychology of the arts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard.Read Full Transcript TranscriptJen:                                      [00:35]                   Hello! This is Jen Lumanlan of Your Parenting Mojo and I’m here with episode four on Creativity and Artistic Ability in Young Children. So the question that’s lovely, what is it seems to be one of the most asked by parents of children related related to young children’s drawings, but she’ll do children even know what IT is? I’m really excited to welcome my first guest on the Your Parenting Mojo podcast today, Professor Tara Callaghan. I went to start by introducing her by telling you a little bit about how we met. So I visited Reggio Emilia Italy in April 2016 because I wanted to learn more about the approach to early childhood education that was founded in that city. And before I went, I read a book called Magic Places by Penny Brownlee, which says that a parent shouldn’t ask what a scribbling child is drawing because they’re not drawing anything, they’re just scribbling. But in contrast, the people in Reggio Emilia, I believe that the children are “fully aware of the representative process” and that’s actually a quote from one of the practitioners there after I witnessed a group of under two year olds, I think they were about 18 months who had been given in a real orange and a set of orange paints and the toddler is we’re making orange paint marks on the paper because that was the only color that was available to them.Jen:                                      [01:45]                   And based on my reading of Magic Places, I queried whether the toddlers could possibly understand that they were being asked to represent the orange on the paper and clearly the director thought that they could. Her position was that even if the marks don’t look like an orange to us, the toddlers understand the marks as a representation of an orange. When I returned home, I started digging into the research on this topic and ultimately found a chapter that Professor Callahan authored a book called Children’s Understanding and Production of Pictures, Drawings and Art, and it was the most comprehensive, really insightful piece I’d read on that topic and she expressed a view that was quite different from what the Reggio practitioners believe. So I reached out to her and she was kind enough to actually spend quite a bit of time patiently answering my questions so I could write a very long blog post about it on my personal blog, which was actually the thing that made me realize that I should start a podcast.Jen:                                      [02:33]                   So it’s a formally introduce her: Professor Callaghan is Professor of Psychology at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia. She’s a developmental scientist working in the fields of symbolic and pro-social development from a cultural perspective. She received her Ph.D in psychology from Brown University and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Yale University and she served as consulting editor for the journal Child Development, and she also coauthored a chapter on symbolic development in the new 2015 edition of the Handbook of Child Psychology and Developmental Science, which if you don’t happen to be familiar with, it is a pretty seminal work on the psychological development of young children. So thank you so much for joining us Dr Callaghan.Dr. Callaghan:                   [03:11]                   Oh my pleasure, Jen. My pleasure. So, thanks for the introduction. I might add to that that I am also very interested in cultural developmental psychology and so maybe some of that will come up as we talk a little bit more today, but one of the things that I’ve been doing for about the past decade is, is looking across cultures to help understand what children know, uh, as a result of the socialization that they get from parents and others in their culture compared to what, how we are built as humans, I guess. What is our human nature?Jen:                                      [03:54]                   Yeah. I’m actually very interested in that as well so do feel free to sprinkle that in as it comes up. Awesome. Okay. Well the first thing I wanted to ask you about is something that I hadn’t even considered until you kind of mentioned it as an offhand comment, as part of a larger discussion that we were having when we were emailing and you said that “creativity is highly valued in our society and is part of our individualistic orientation. Creativity that makes a difference in art, depends on the ability to do and see things differently and also have a command of the medium.” And it was the first part of that that, that really blew my mind. I really hadn’t considered the possibility that not all cultures value creativity equally. I just figured that if everybody had access to crayons and paper, everybody would give their child crayons and paper and we pretty much do the same thing as I do with my child. So I wonder if you could tell me a bit more about this.Dr. Callaghan:                   [04:44]                   Yeah, I think that what, what I was focused on was, was thinking about how we define creativity in our own society and by our own, I’m talking about a kind of middle class, North American, European, Euro-centric kind of um, uh, what is typically called the Western orientation. So in the West we’re well known for valuing independence and independent thought and if you are in a society that values that, then a lot of different things including creativity, get defined in a way that meets those societal goals. And then if you’re a parent, you’re trying to, without really even being aware of this, you are instilling the cultural values in your children as you parent them. So I think in different art forms it’s maybe more or less true, but I, my observation of, of art and my experience with art in our culture is that to get ahead, you have to be different from somebody else.Dr. Callaghan:                   [05:52]                   You have to be contributing a new perspective or a new discovery, that sort of thing. And that’s also the case in science really, that we really are pushing to individuals to contribute something that’s brand new. So when I say that it’s highly valued, I think creativity is highly valued in probably every culture, but it may be defined and what, what constitutes or how the process of creativity may be seen to be a different. Back to your issue about creativity and crayons and giving. It really comes down to what the parents’ goals are in that society. And India is not a society, it’s a multitude of societies. Canada, likewise; U.S. likewise. So when you try to think about a parent helping a child become creative, you’ve got to know what that parents’ aims are, what are their parenting goals there? And part of that, uh, those goals will be shaped by the society they find themselves in and you may find more of a, um, a goal in, in the US and Canada in counteracting the larger society goals. So you might want to do things differently than you feel the larger society may hold children back or or whatever. And so you see a lot of that kind of independence in Canada and I, and I think that’s, that’s really valuable, but probably becoming aware of your own goals, how they’re influenced by society, the society we live in and as a parent we want our children, uh, I would say to become contributing members to the society that they find themselves in and so shaping our child to fit in well with an individualist society where that’s going to bring them the most success in their lives in terms of happiness, and feeling that they are valued and making a contribution I think is probably behind a lot of the shaping or parenting practices that we do.Dr. Callaghan:                   [08:00]                   Like how do you prepare your child if you want to foster creativity, which I think is a really great thing to do, in any individual, regardless of culture, then how do you go about that and how do you predict what your society is going to be like in, you know, when your child is becoming an adult and a launching off to make their contribution to life. And so I think keeping tabs on what’s going on in other cultures is a really good way to keep a handle on what your child’s going to need and creativity I think is a great way because the more adaptive we are to change and to new things and to seeing things from different perspectives, I think that that’s where I’d put my money – the better able we will be to adapt to whatever’s coming down the road.Jen:                                      [08:58]                   Great. So let’s start digging a little bit into your research. Can you tell us about what symbolic representation means and why it’s important?Dr. Callaghan:                   [09:06]                   A symbol is something that stands for something else and as a symbol can be, as you know, many forms that can be a child, a naive kind of drawing of a person, what we call the tadpole, which is a little head body with a couple of stick legs coming out of it. And sometimes, an eye, and a smile as my grandson called the mouth…Dr. Callaghan:                   [09:30]                   Just one eye?Dr. Callaghan:                   [09:31]                   Yeah, sometimes sometimes multiple eyes, when he really gets into that form! So that visual or very simple graphic can be a shorthand if you like, or, or an image that stands for something else. So a symbol is something that stands in for or represent something else. And representation…when you put those together, symbolic representation is really about a process that you are intentionally creating, a symbol in order to stand for something else.Dr. Callaghan:                   [10:13]                   Now, why would humans even want to do that? Well, the ultimate goal of all symbols is to communicate with other humans. So that’s it. Symbolic representation is at the very basic foundation, it’s about communication. And I, I, I said intentionally, forming that because of the scribbles. And you talked about the book that you had read, Magic Places where she said no, these scribbles don’t mean anything. They very likely don’t. And they very likely are… Sometimes children happen upon something that looks like it and can recognize a shape; their form perception is excellent for sure. And their color perception is excellent by the time they’re two. But their cognitive ability to understand such an abstract concept as ‘stand for,’ ‘stand in for’ or ‘represent’ is not there yet. And that’s a very strict criteria.Dr. Callaghan:                   [11:24]                   So somebody will say, well, my two year old drew something as you know, and said this is a dog. And then when I looked at it, it really looked like a dog and sure… Those kinds of perceptual similarities labeled after the fact precede genuine symbolic understanding. And it’s all part of that process of how we help children and how we scaffold them to this understanding of these very complex terms. So if a child brings you a picture and you say, what is it? Then right away the child’s getting the message that there’s meaning here. So you know, you’re helping them to understand by that question, that meaning is involved when we do these kinds of things.Jen:                                      [12:10]                   So do you think it is helpful for parents to ask the child “what is it?” Does it, does it scaffold that knowledge? And if you, if parents are listening to and...

004: How to encourage creativity and artistic ability in young children – Interview with Dr. Tara Callaghan