We need to understand our culture to create new values for the age of globalization and information in the 21st century. Thus, it is desirable to teach children from their infancy to understand Korean traditional culture and take pride in it. However,...
We need to understand our culture to create new values for the age of globalization and information in the 21st century. Thus, it is desirable to teach children from their infancy to understand Korean traditional culture and take pride in it. However, Western culture has had many significant effects on education and, as a consequence, art education also came to be focused on Western paintings rather than traditional Korean art. In particular, there is a strong fixed idea that Korean painting as an area of Korean traditional art is a difficult old art.
The subjects of the present study were 36 children in their preschematic stage at E Kindergarten at Seongbuk-gu, Seoul and the research was performed for six weeks from September 1 2005 to October 8 2005 through a pre-test, experiment (Korean painting program) and a post-test. E Kindergarten is educating activities selected inclusively by area according to the themes of life in the 6th Preschool Education Curriculum. Following the education programs for September, we prepared and applied a teaching plan for Korean painting expression activities using a project approach on the theme of “Chuseok, Our National Festive Day.”
The Korean painting program was designed to help children understand the formative characteristics of Korean paintings through the expression and appreciation of Korean paintings and, aiming at the goals of learning defined, children had Korean painting activities focused on the understanding of materials and tools and the expression of line, color, space and themes. In order to examine changes in children’s Korean paining expression abilities after the Korean painting activities, we analyzed their paintings drawn before and after the experiment using a scale for evaluating children’s art expression abilities. We used SPSS 13.0 for statistical processing, and carried out t‐test to analyze children’s improvement in Korean painting expression abilities after the experiment.
From the results of this study were drawn conclusions as follows.
According to the result of analyzing differences between before and after experiment, t=8.765 in line, showing a significance difference at significance level of 0.1%, t=-8.400 in color, showing a significance difference at significance level of 0.1%, and t=-9.653 in composition, showing a significance difference at significance level of 0.1%. As a whole, the average score was higher after the experiment than before, suggesting that children’s art expression abilities were improved in line, color and composition and as a whole. However, no difference was observed in form and thematic expression.
It was proved that the Korean painting program using a project approach affected improvement in children’s Korean painting expression abilities. Accordingly, Korean painting education is applicable to early childhood education, and preschool teachers need to take interest in Korean painting education. It is because, as mentioned earlier, it provides children with opportunities to understand and appreciate Korean traditional beauty.