Inside and Outside Schemes. Stereotypes and Creativity in Childrens’ Images

This research is aimed at investigating the development of creativity and the divergent thought in the child’s drawing, by studying unstructured stimuli contrasting with the mental frames and models of the representation of reality. When a child begins to draw, he needs a baggage of mental images which enables him to symbolically represent reality on a blank sheet of paper. These models seem to be necessary not only to learn and draw, but also because they work as instruments of social and cultural belonging to a specific context. These models, when they become stereotypes, are ambivalent since they appear reassuring but also restrictive, because they limit the creative thought and the imagination. The educational and school context show - through the adults - the same structured interpretative scheme. This experimentation intends to create contexts of experience where children can creatively handle their own representations. The purpose of these educational and didactic methods is to make the adult’s scaffolding function (Bruner 1992) capable of promoting and welcoming a different, multiple vision of reality. This research is based on the investigations that have involved photography, nature and its colours as free expressive tools. The aim is to reveal the state-of-the-art, the analysis and the dialogue with the literature of reference and the research operational proposal. Experience will lead the vision towards welcoming wonders (Mancino 2014), errors, contradictions and diversity.