Children are immature but have infinite potential. How to develop their potential abilities depends on the quantity and quality of their experiences during infancy. In the past when children grew in natural environment, nature itself provided them wit...
Children are immature but have infinite potential. How to develop their potential abilities depends on the quantity and quality of their experiences during infancy. In the past when children grew in natural environment, nature itself provided them with various living play things and grounds for their sensory experiences.
In contemporary society industrialized and urbanized, however, play things available to children are learning materials and artistic plastic models mass-produced in factory.
Nevertheless, children in the 21st century are demanded to have unrestricted imagination and creativity. In the field of education, on the contrary, the importance of sensory experience is neglected or overshadowed by other needs of learning or must-to-do activities.
Like each person has unique character or appearance, abilities latent in children are also diverse. Therefore, we need education that leads children to display their abilities to the full fittingly for each individual’s characteristics. Currently such education is being executed not in school but in private academies or cultural centers providing cultural education to meet the desires of parents and children such as art education, music education, physical activity education and floral art education. Cultural education aims to dig out children’s latent abilities and develop them sensibly through various learning programs, and floral art education also performs such functions. Through floral art, children handle natural materials and experience various stimuli provided by natural objects.
Furthermore, they have opportunities for comprehensive sensory experiences by actively utilizing not only their vision but also their smell and touch in the process of creation. This study focused on the development of the tactile sense, which has been covered relatively less in previous studies on sensory experiences. The tactile
sense is one of basic senses forming children’s sensation during their childhood, and the balanced development and integrated use of senses can promote rich experiences and insights. Thus, this study developed guidelines for childhood sensory education programs focusing on the tactile sense, one of basic human senses, based on the formative education of floral art as cultural education for
developing children’s latent abilities.
For this purpose, we collected materials for tactile sensory experiences from the Internet, magazines and printed materials, and performed setting analysis based on theme thodology of the grounded theory, in which 9 concepts were derived through
description, categorization, conceptual organization, and theorization by the inductive method. The derived theories were concepts and detailed guidelines related to situation simulation, given phenomena, environmental changes, environment comparison, sensory activation, transfer between senses, difference in sociability, sensory expression, and relation among behaviors, and they suggested a possibility for new directions of education.
By providing guidelines for sensory education programs concentrated on tactile experience in floral arts for creatively children, which can be applied creatively by teachers, instead of a fixed program, this study suggested a ground for further change and development of programs. In the program development process, general objectives and plans of education are made but projects to be performed or detailed goals are not established in advance.
Instead, goals are set flexibly in accordance with children’s desire and interest so that children can learn by themselves. Based on such an emergent curriculum, we designed a tactile sensory education program consisting of floral art activities by applying 9 flexible guidelines that focused on children’s daily experiences surrounding their interests or plays and introduced the diversity and differences of floral art materials. The developed program was executed in a way of respecting children’s needs and plans so that they might learn the importance of cultural education not from knowledge but from experiences through observation. Moreover,
importance was attached to communication between children and the teacher, and the teacher was given much authority over how to lead the class so that he she could execute the program through careful observation of children’s daily experiences surrounding their interests and plays.