Abstract

"Art must take its first original steps." Thomas Hart Benton wrote, "In the drama of things that are$\...$" . ;Through the use of narrative interpretation I present the semester-long artists' bookmaking practices of elementary school children I taught. My historical accounts revolve around children's bookmaking as an interpretative practice which ontologically fused personal meaning into a whole. Particular ways of seeing and knowing the world were shown to influence imagination. At the heart of the narrative interpretations are three themes: fictive imagination, autobiography, and studies. ;My storytelling approach to this dissertation is framed by hermeneutics and in particular by Paul Ricoeur's thinking on narrative and historical composition. I have attempted to arrange the dissertation in such a way that its narrative interpretations clarify for readers an understanding of the children's artists' bookmaking as a practice that began out of particular and personal histories. My thesis throughout is that particular interests, meanings and events, held and remembered by the children are educationally and aesthetically significant because they were the realities which for most, if not all, of the children shaped their artists' books. ;Being, in this instance, not merely a researcher but also the children's teacher meant I was in a position to put to work the insights gathered from the active dialogue between children and myself. There was meaning present in the children's artists' books and it was also potentially present for me to put back to work in the curriculum. I reflect upon the art curriculum and its form, its emerging from and unfolding according to the children's interaction with the content of their artwork. Every classroom situation, comprised of friendships, personal likes and dislikes, procrastination, intensity, wonderment, discovery, lived experience and artists' books grew out of some proceeding class situation, or artwork at home. ;I recognized that the lifeblood of this kind of historical, particularized curriculum depended for its circulation on the children and I poring back over their continual encounters with the history of their own artwork. It was necessary for teaching art to put the children in a position to take stock of the emerging meanings and directionality of their artwork