An Ethnography of Children’s Making Activities

—A Case Study of an Elementary School Boy at Creative Art Lab—

Abstract

Children’s making activities are central to art education and share similarities with tinkering, which is gaining attention in programming learning and manufacturing in science education. The author created a space at a university where children can regularly interact with various materials and has been conducting participating observation of the process of children’s making activities. The purpose of this study was to examine the process of a child’s making activities with a focus on the materials which he used. This research was based on the case of an elementary school boy participating in the Creative Art Lab set up at the university. The methodology of this study was ethnographic participating observation and interview over two years. The results revealed that the making activities involved two different approaches: either realizing ideas by finding available materials or generating ideas by drawing inspiration from the materials. These making activities were observed to diverge into two ways of how to use materials: one leading to art and the other to science. And this ethnography suggested the importance of focus time and continuous time for children’s making activities.