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Valentina Fernandes

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Valentina Fernandes was born in 1985 in São Paulo, Brazil. In 2005 she got an academic degree in Art Education, by Santa Marcelina College (FASM). In 2008 she finished a post-grad in the same field at the University of São Paulo (USP). In this period she taught Art in different Brazilian Schools and Kindergartens. Between 2008 and 2011 she lived in Germany, worked as an artist and obtained a Diplom in Visual Arts from the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts (HfBK). After this period she lived for a couple of years in Brussels, where she worked as an Art teacher and artist in different projects. In 2014 she moved back to São Paulo, starting to work in a school where the curriculum was turned to Creative Learning and Reggio Emilia approaches. She was responsible for the translation from pedagogical material about Creative Learning from English to Portuguese and also provided consultancy about the theme to different Institutions. From  2020 to 2023 Valentina Fernandes worked as a scientific Associate and PhD student at CEDER University of Osnabrück.

Forschung im CEDER

Creative and aesthetic experiences in art pedagogical learning arrangements applied to early childhood education

To understand the environment children deal with experimentation and creation all the time. Creation processes are something inherent in human beings, but during childhood, they are especially present. When children can explore situations that interest them, being free to guide themselves through experimentation, they can build knowledge, starting from their own needs when facing the context they’re inserted, to the development of more complex processes.

Considering the presented ideas, this research aims to clarify how children develop their creative processes and how they come across artistic and aesthetic experiences during early childhood and at the same time to apply approaches and strategies within art education that could potentialize these processes.

Having the focus of observation turned to heterogeneous groups of kindergarten-aged children, within the formal educational systems, the research is going to be divided into four main phases, being bibliographic research, observation of children in kindergartens, application of approaches and strategies, and research's conclusion. All of the steps were planned to provide enough material to enable the compilation of the obtained results and analysis under a qualitative optic influenced by the ethnomethodology and active participant observation.

The bibliographic research is going to work as a starter for the project. It should enlarge the knowledge about early childhood children and their development, about creative thinking, creation processes, and about artistic and aesthetic experiences in early childhood ages. The observation phase should clarify the kind of creative processes the children already have established and it’s particularities. During the application of approaches and strategies, the main idea is to offer the children different arrangements related to creative thinking, artistic practice, and aesthetic experiences, to lead them to go through meaningful situations while they experience their creative processes. Reaching the last phase of the research and having already a large collection of material about the observed groups, the objective is to identify important characteristics about the processes children came through, guiding the researcher to reflections and conclusions.