New Framework Shows How Visual Arts Power Children’s Thinking in Early Inquiry

A multi-year study conducted across six early childhood settings in Aotearoa New Zealand has produced one of the most detailed accounts yet of how young children think through art. The research, published in the Early Childhood Education Journal, argues that the visual arts are not decorative add-ons to inquiry-based learning but central modes of thinking through which infants, toddlers, and young children theorise, reflect, and connect with their communities. Drawing on findings from the project, a team of seven early childhood academics led by Sarah Probine of Auckland University of Technology has proposed a new conceptual framework, Thinking Through Visual Inquiry, that names the recurring artistic processes sustaining children’s investigations over time.

The study responds to a long-standing paradox in early childhood education. Although the visual arts are widely celebrated for fostering creativity and self-expression, they are frequently enacted in product-focused ways, with little attention paid to the thinking developed through the process. When art is positioned as decorative or as an end point, its capacity to support inquiry, dialogue, and sustained thought is obscured. Prior research has also shown that teachers, particularly those new to inquiry approaches, can struggle to know when and how to integrate the arts meaningfully, a difficulty often compounded by limited confidence rooted in their own experiences of art education. The new framework is designed to give educators a conceptual language for recognising artistic processes as genuine epistemic activity rather than filler activities or display material.

The evidence base was built in two phases. Phase One involved a nationwide qualitative questionnaire sent to all 2,139 early childhood settings registered on the national database of education settings, comprising seven open-ended questions about pedagogical influences, practices, benefits, and challenges of inquiry-based approaches; sixty-three settings responded. From those expressing interest, six settings were purposively selected for Phase Two to provide variation in service type, geography, size, age groupings, cultural demographics, and philosophy. Thirty-eight teachers and leaders participated, alongside children aged six months to six years, who took part through naturally occurring inquiries. Researchers spent roughly a week at each site, gathering group interviews, field notes, photographs, video recordings, observations, and pedagogical documentation, including children’s visual representations.

Methodologically, the study adopted a qualitative, interpretivist design guided by narrative inquiry and informed by sociocultural and bioecological theories of learning. Kaupapa Māori theory shaped the research praxis, emphasising whakawhanaungatanga, the ongoing enactment of relational accountability, and ako, a reciprocal ethic in which teaching and learning are shared, dialogic processes. Analysis was iterative and dialogic: researchers reviewed site data individually, then brought interpretations to regular online wānanga for collective discussion and refinement, re-storying episodes of practice and comparing interpretations across sources. Emerging accounts were checked with participating teachers, who were also invited to write their own narratives of the inquiries, strengthening their position as research partners. The framework itself was developed after the formal conclusion of the wider project through a further cross-site analysis, with successive versions refined by the team and checked against the data.

Theoretically, the framework weaves together Dewey’s experiential learning, Vygotsky’s sociocultural account of mediated thought, Māori onto-epistemologies, and the Reggio Emilia tradition associated with Loris Malaguzzi. Within this synthesis, the visual arts function as languages through which children externalise, test, and refine ideas. Vea Vecchi’s description of art-making as poetic thinking is central: sensory experience is integral to knowledge construction, and drawing, painting, sculpting, and constructing act as cultural tools that mediate cognition. Because visual representations are tangible artefacts, they render thinking visible and available for shared interpretation, allowing ideas to be revisited, contested, and extended over time. In co-constructivist classrooms, these artefacts become shared cognitive resources; as researcher Margaret Brooks has argued, drawing allows knowledge to exist in a shared state before being assimilated into new perspectives.

Materials themselves are treated as active participants in inquiry rather than neutral instruments. Building on work by Sylvia Kind, the study describes children’s encounters with clay, wood, charcoal, or acorns as vibrant social-ecological assemblages in which humans and non-humans are in constant relation. For infants and toddlers, whose investigations are primarily sensorimotor, this matters enormously: their inquiry may centre not on symbolic representation but on discovering what materials can do, their affordances, resistances, and transformations. Neuroscience supports this picture, showing that embodied encounters with materials activate attentional and feedback systems that sustain curiosity. The bicultural context adds further depth, with Māori concepts such as āta, deliberate care and attentiveness, and whanaungatanga, relationships of connection and reciprocal responsibility, framing material exploration as an ethical, place-responsive practice aligned with the national curriculum, Te Whāriki.

The resulting framework is deliberately not linear. It identifies recurring, interconnected processes through which children and teachers move as ideas, materials, and relationships evolve, and it is articulated in two age-responsive versions. For infants and toddlers, the processes are ignite, explore, revisit, and re-ignite, emphasising embodied engagement and meaning made through repetition. For young children, two further processes, plan and consolidate, are added, reflecting growing capacities for anticipation, representation, and collaboration. Crucially, the authors stress that this is not a simplified version of inquiry for the youngest learners but a challenge to assumptions about their capabilities, foregrounding their capacity to think with materials, peers, and adults in sustained cycles of sense-making.

Vignettes from the participating centres illustrate each process vividly. Ignition is captured in an infant-toddler inquiry where, following children’s fascination with painted rocks found in the neighbourhood, teachers introduced mosaic as a shared art form; toddlers gathered fragments, arranged them, applied grout, and the finished tile was placed near the entrance for families, making visible the Te Whāriki strand of contribution. Exploration appears in a toddler inquiry centred on acorns collected beneath an oak tree, where children compared sizes, sorted baby and mummy acorns, and later drew them, with marks, gestures, sounds, and narratives intertwining as movement became twirly whirly or rolling away to see the world. Revisiting is exemplified by children who, after discovering a mystery garden, theorised about a caretaker they named Nature Man, returning repeatedly to drawings and conversations until a shared narrative, papier-mâché figures, and eventually a book and theme song emerged, each return transforming earlier thinking rather than merely repeating it.

Planning and consolidation are shown to be equally material. In one kindergarten, children drew their ideas of what a taniwha, the guardian being of a local pūrākau, might look like; when construction moved to the carpentry area, the square and rectangular wood available forced them to adapt curved designs, demonstrating how planning unfolds through interaction between imagination and material conditions. Consolidation was embodied in a textile artwork inspired by tīvaevae, Cook Islands appliqué quilts, made at the conclusion of an inquiry into community and belonging. Early responses to the question of what community is included not sure and watering the plants; after months of shared making, children offered answers such as everyone together and looking after people, changes the authors read as evidence of collectively consolidated meaning, publicly displayed to families and the wider community.

The discussion repositions the visual arts as a generative space in which thinking is slowed down, made visible, and opened to reinterpretation. Materials produced moments of cognitive tension that one scholar terms cognitive knots, launching points for further investigation, while the pedagogical conditions that sustained inquiry included protected time, collegial dialogue, attentive listening, documentation that kept ideas in circulation, and deliberate re-offering of materials. The authors acknowledge the study’s grounding in a small number of New Zealand settings and offer the framework as a flexible conceptual resource requiring critical adaptation to local cultural and curriculum contexts rather than a universal model. Even so, the message is pointed: positioning the arts at the centre of inquiry means rethinking how knowledge itself is constructed, shared, and sustained, treating young children as capable participants whose ideas can be made visible, revisited, and taken seriously within a learning community.

Subject of Research: How visual arts and material exploration support inquiry-based learning and children's thinking in early childhood education.

Article Title: Thinking Through Making: Supporting Children’s Inquiry Through Visual Arts in Early Childhood Education

Article References: Thinking Through Making: Supporting Children’s Inquiry Through Visual Arts in Early Childhood Education. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10643-026-02341-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10643-026-02341-2

Keywords: early childhood education, visual arts, inquiry-based learning, Thinking Through Visual Inquiry, Te Whāriki, Kaupapa Māori, working theories, multimodal representation, pedagogical documentation, Reggio Emilia, materials, teacher pedagogy