The Arts and Meaning-Making with Children

Editor

• Susan Wright, University of Melbourne

  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.