The Arts and Meaning-Making with Children

Susan Wright (Ph.D.) is Honorary Professor at the University of Melbourne, where she was formerly the Chair of Arts Education, Director of studioFive UNESCO Observatory of Arts Education and member of the UNITWIN international consortium of arts education research. She also previously held positions at the National Institute of Education (Singapore) and Queensland University of Technology (Brisbane). Susan's research and teaching interests are in early childhood arts education, with a particular focus on semiosis, multimodality and arts-based praxis. Her desire to foreground the voices of young children underpins her evidence-based exemplars of quality arts-based research, pedagogy and learning. Through video documentation and multimodal transcripts, she illustrates how children create, communicate and interpret signs using six broad meaning-making modes: linguistic, audio, spatial, oral, visual and gestural. Children's visual-spatial imagery, embodiment, narration and theorising often include metaphor, analogy, allegory and symbolism. Susan advocates for the nurturance of such creative expression throughout lifelong learning.

• 1. A First Nations art pedagogy in Australian early childhood education Hope O'Chin; 2. Embodied music-making, singing, and song-making: young children's agency, identity and world-making through music Margaret S. Barrett; 3. Transformative learning through dance-play and drawing-telling Susan Wright and Jan Deans; 4. Teaching the arts: am I doing it 'properly'? Felicity McArdle; 5. Meaning expression through music in teacher-child interactions Lynn Lee-Pang; 6. Culturally responsive dance in the early years Kerrin Rowlands, Jeff Meiners and Wendy Schiller; 7. Young children's semiosis with artworks in residence Julie Wren; 8. Meaning-making with children: semiotics, learning and communicating Susan Wright; 9. Teachers as co-players: creating with children in play Sarah Young and Rebecca Lewis; 10. Media arts and meaning making with children in S.P.A.C.E: a living inquiry storied through place and technology SWISP (Speculative Wonderings in Space and Place) Lab Kathryn Coleman, Sarah Healy and Angela Molloy Murphy.

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