British Educational Research Journal, Vol. 20, No. 4, 1994 485 Gender Differences in Young Children's Artwork IRENEUSZ KAWECKI, State Higher School of Fine Arts and Design, Lodz ABSTRACT On the basis of theoretical concepts of symbolic interactionism, re- searchers endeavoured to capture possible differences in the way children perceive and construe the image of their surroundings, resulting from socially conditioned patterns of behaviour but determined by the individual's gender. For this purpose reference was made to children's artwork in order to locate meaningful differences, as much in content as in composition, which would reflect approaches determined by the artist's gender. The results are presented in this paper. Contemporary interactionism underlines in its considerations the relation between the genesis of 'humanness' and the patterns of interaction. What makes humans exceptional as a species and what endows every individual with specific characteristics is the result of interactions in a society. These occur through 'deciphering' and 'interpreting' other persons' gestures: that is, the symbols they emit. Of course, symbolic communication is extremely complex because people use not only verbal or linguistic symbols in the process, but also apply imitative gestures, tones of voice, body movements and other forms that have a familiar meaning and thus are comprehensible to all. At the same time, researchers such as Blumer, draw particular attention to human ability in making use of symbols and developing capabilities of thought, definition and auto-reflection. Blumer (1969) argues that people are able to see themselves as objects and can place each object in an interactional situation. The consequence of this premise is an image of people who, in spite of acquiring specific individual abilities in the process of growing up and maturing socially, remain capable of spontaneous behaviour. In this picture, we also see a lack of deterministic interdependency, since people are themselves active creators of the world to which they react. So, interactions and resulting models of social order may be understood through focusing our attention on the capacity of individuals to create a symbolic world of objects. Because people can introduce some objects into a situation, they can also change—sometimes quite radically—their definitions of it: thus they can modify both their behaviour and its elements in a given situation.