Beyond Still Life: Collection The World In Small Handfuls

This study uses portraiture methodology to understand how ideas travel among preschool children in an art studio. The researcher, also the art teacher, is watchful of the children's feelings, perspectives, and experiences, and analyzes her data through the writing. The researcher sees children co-constructing knowledge, negotiating truth, and redefining themselves while their relationships deepen. Buber and Husserl's reflections concerning our search for an identical other are layered in with anecdotal episodes of the researcher and the children. Relationships, influenced by the cultural and practical world, are in constant flux. External needs and desires impact subjective experiences, and pairs -- once engaged in shared consciousness -- rebound, searching for a mirror more in focus. In the preschool art studio, intersubjectivity, married somehow to repetition, sets forth the proliferation of ideas.