A Job and a Curriculum

2021 held many surprises for me, the topper being that after close to 2 decades of being self-employed, I found myself working for a large ed-tech firm.

Having explored ECE ecosystems in-depth over the years and having tried to build a couple of my own, my curiosity on how large, commercial ed-tech firms build for ECE eventually won out. I accepted the offer.

My specific interest here was to try and build an art pedagogy to be delivered at scale, with an emphasis on developing higher-order skills. This is easier said than done, with decades of personal, societal and academic biases layered thick, blunting all attempts at presenting art as a way to build visual-perceptual skills in children, especially in early childhood.

After my work on Pencilplay and Playjam, I was convinced that the visual arts were one of the quickest ways to boost learning skills, especially between the formative years of 3 to 8. The problem I faced was that visual-thinking is such an obvious skill, so apparent in daily life that I had trouble convincing people of the efficacy of visual ways of thinking and learning. It’s counterintuitive. Like telling people taking more walks will make them more creative.

“Some things you miss because they’re so tiny you overlook them. But some things you don’t see because they’re so huge.”

Robert M. Pirsig
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Some notes on the need to teach visual-thinking.

1. Over the centuries, mankind has invented symbols as a way to both represent the world, and communicate with each other.

2. We do this by drawing pictures, one of the most important ways in which we communicate. Even letters of the alphabet are first learned as individual drawings, long before we learn to construct words and sentences from them.

3. We participate in society by understanding and communicating the conceptual messages embedded in such pictures.

4. Children begin to draw long before they learn to speak or sometimes even walk. Drawings are, as such, one of the most important ways by which the child learns to deconstruct and synthesize knowledge about the world.

5. Indeed, the old adage that younger children draw what they know, and older children draw what they see holds true, in my experience. I surmise this is because older children have now grasped letters, and are fluent in verbal language as well as the myriad bodily gestures we use to communicate.

6. The art cliff, which seems to occur roughly around the ages of 10 and upwards, may simply mean that the child no longer needs to use drawing as a means to codify the world, when there are more efficient methods that will do it. Literacy and numeracy, for instance.

7. If we layer Piagetian and Lowenfeldian development stages alongside our understanding of brain development during these early stages of life, we can begin to evolve a meaningful perspective of the role of visual-art in early childhood.

8. For instance, we may ask – why does synaptic pruning in the visual cortex continue till about 6 years of age, which is roughly around when the child enters the schematic stage of drawing. In what ways may we change stimuli to correspond with this stage shift? What additional factors have now become accessible to the child, whether it is greater motor control, or a firmer grasp of logic, that can now be exercised with the right pedagogic approach… and so on.

So the challenge of building an Art Pedagogy that is designed to enhance a child’s ability to learn, is contingent on also understanding the role of art across the developmental continuum. I quickly learned that my new commercial environs neither had the patience nor the inclination for academic blather, ed-tech or not, so I chose a different tack.

Could I use the endless resources of a venture funded firm to build on my past work in this space? How much operational freedom would I have to put together the kind of team I needed for this?

And most importantly – would it be possible to build a course that felt like a creative and fun hobby class on the front end, (not rocking the societal boat on art as a perceived hobby-activity) while quietly building solid higher-order skills in children.

The product is finally out in the market, so perhaps you will be able to decide for yourself soon.

2021 has been an exhausting but rewarding year. Being involved in building a category from scratch, putting together the curriculum, the team and all our attendant processes from ground up was an education in and of itself. This has allowed me to implement my ideas at a massive scale. With my earlier projects, the number of children I could impact were in the hundreds and low thousands. A project like this has the potential to reach millions, and worldwide to boot! How often does an educator get to do that?

Epilogue

This was a fantastic experience, and I got to work alongside some world-class educators and curriculum developers, though not everything was as smooth as I would have liked.