ABSTRACT
As I have shown, children write well both to and about people and objects in photographs and other artworks. Children use writing – poetry, reportage, story, description or whatever – to help themselves to come to terms with an apparently contradictory couplet of concepts that they sense when they are babies: first, how wide the variety of human beings is, and, second, how close to each other, as well, all human beings essentially are. This is true in a general way, and children learn more about this when they look at, for example, Hopper’s paintings. More particularly, writing can assist our work in multicultural and anti-racist education; in our understanding of both that closeness and that distance that we perceive in terms of race.
