ABSTRACT

Arts education is justified through broad claims about creativity, expression, and child development, yet such claims often under-specify the mechanisms through which particular artistic experiences support learning. Responding to calls for more differentiated theories of action in arts education research, this structured narrative integrative review synthesizes interdisciplinary scholarship on embodied cognition, affordance theory, and arts learning. Relevant literature published between 2000 and 2025 was reviewed and synthesized to address the following three questions: (1) What conceptual themes emerge across the literature on embodiment, affordances, and the arts?; (2) How do these perspectives reframe artistic learning for children?; and (3) What design principles follow for curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment? Across the corpus, four recurrent themes were identified: artistic action functions as thinking-in-action; materials and tools participate in cognition through relational affordances and externalized representations; sociocultural norms function as social affordances that shape which possibilities for action become salient and usable; and arts learning is cognitive in a broad sense that includes imagination, affect, reflection, and concept formation. From this synthesis, nine design principles were proposed. This review contributes a mechanism-oriented framework for rethinking children’s arts education as embodied, material, relational, and culturally situated meaning-making rather than as the production of predetermined products.

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