A comparative study of cultural identity in children’s drawings at the Ridge and K.N.U.S.T. Primary Schools in Kumasi, Ghana.
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Date
July, 2009
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Abstract
Art was not taught at the lower Primary until the Creative Arts programme was introduced. The class teachers has no art background and have not been trained to teach art at the lower levels so they do not teach the subject at all or ask some one to draw on the board for the children to copy into their drawing books. Children sometimes copy and trace from their text books as well. Teachers do not allow children to draw from their memories to represent their cultural identities in their drawings and sometimes choose the medium for the kids to use, for instance they show the children the colours to use and suggest additions when they draw. They also do not allow the children to talk about their works to bring out the meanings within their art works. All these problems mentioned above do not allow children to identify and describe the cultural meanings within their drawings and teachers do not also benefit from understanding such drawings. So there is a need to let children present their cultural identities in their drawings for teachers to understand the drawings made by them. The researcher collected data at first hand from The Ridge and K.N.U.S.T. Primary Schools through observation, interviews, questionnaire, field notes, children’s drawings, and audio recorded personal comments from children, teachers and parents to compare information collected. It was found that, most children presented their cultural identities by drawing artefacts found indoors, their lifestyles, used geometric shapes, revealed their nationalities, male children drew the role of males and girls drew that of girls and especially about themselves and used colours based on reality whiles other kids used colours to distort reality. It is recommended that enough time be allocated for children at the lower primary to draw freely and be able to represent their own identities to re-educate teachers to have a better understanding on cultural diversity in multicultural art education.
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A thesis submitted to the School of Graduate Studies, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Art Education on .