Working methodologically and theoretically with the hydro-logics of bodies of water, this article addresses the limitations of humanistic perspectives on water play in early childhood classrooms, and proposes pedagogies of watery relations. The article traces the fluid, murky, surging, creative, unpredictable specificities of bodies of water that enter an early childhood classroom during a collaborative ethnographic project with young children and early childhood educators.
This paper explores the possibilities of arts practice in early childhood education. Building on her master's thesis, the author presents both a doing -her experimentation with arts practice in two early childhood centres -and an argument: that art may present an opening onto possible worlds. The author builds these worlds in relation to her theoretical framework: an immanent relational materialist onto-epistemology. Viewed through this lens, art's possible worlds have the potential to traverse, mix, and disrupt binaries that maintain marginalized positions. Art practice from this intersection of rupture is both intensely creative and deeply political. Keywords: art, early childhood education, body, Deleuze and GuattariVanessa Clark is an atelierista (studio educator) for two projects with the
Abstract:In this paper we think with the specificities of paint to tell stories about entanglements of settler colonialism and paint and painting in early childhood art education. We see to become implicated (Razack, 1998) within settler colonialism in the context we now call Canada. We paint a messy non-linear picture of our work with children through a process of storytelling. Through complex pictures of how we are attempting (even if partially and imperfectly) to respond and stay with the trouble our stories bring forward, we gesture toward hope and decolonizing strategies. Our work takes inspiration from contemporary artists and from anti-racist and Indigenous scholars.
The author draws on her own experiences through art, along with her experiences with children, to inform her understanding of art making as nomadic thinking, a means to disrupt the power structures and boundaries that developmental psychology imposes on early childhood practice. The author altered the classrooms of two early childhood centres with an art provocation; through images and text she attempts to draw attention to the encounters between and among herself, materials, children, and environment. This article explores nomadic thought as emerging through these entanglements, interruptions, and connections with the potential to open up developmental psychology and allow for a reimagining of art practice in early childhood. A young child sits at a table in an infant-toddler room in front of a white sheet of paper, drawing scribbles on it with a pencil. On a wall in the room is a corkboard covered in thick black paper. Sheets of white paper very much like the one the child is covering with scribbles are arranged in tidy rows. Each piece of paper is labeled with a child's name. The educator prints the child's name on her paper and it is placed next to all the others. Art practice in the classroom has become inscribed by developmental psychology. Children's artwork is seen to progress from early stages of unintentional mark making to more advanced forms of representation. We approach the child's art object as a means of self-expression by wondering what the child intended to say (Tarr, 1990; Kind, 2006, 2010; MacRae, 2008). The child is therefore seen to act on the materials to translate already-formed ideas into matter. Through this conceptualization of art, materials and the nonhuman world are interpreted as passive tools to represent thinking (Kind, 2010). Developmentally informed art practice is based upon binaries (e.g. subject/object, mind/body, human/nonhuman) that maintain the borders between bodies that regulate power structures. This article uses nomadic thought (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) to explore nomadic thought as a concept with the potential to open up developmental psychology to allow for a reimagining of art practice in early childhood. Nomadic thinking allows us to decentre our focus on the individual child who thinks (Cole et al, 2005) and to focus instead on how thinking emerges from bodied relations (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, pp. 380-383). Through entanglements, interruptions, and relations between and among materials, ideas, artist, and environment, the nomadic thinker emerges and occupies the smooth space of art (MacRae, 2011, p. 105). Deleuze and Guattari (1987) describe the 'nomads' that emerge: wherever there forms a smooth space that gnaws, and tends to grow, in all directions. The nomads inhibit these places; they remain in them, and they themselves make them grow, for it has been established that the nomads make the desert no less then they are made by it. (p. 382) Nomadic thinking actively creates and is created by these places in the very encounters of human and nonhuman bodies in t...
This paper is an effort to explore arts in early childhood education and care. Drawing on the author’s master’s thesis, autoethnography is engaged to open up discussions of the politics and ethics of arts practice. This paper presents some common ways that art making is approached in the classroom and sug-gests some ways to disrupt these approaches. In conclusion, a useful tool is suggested to support this process of disruption.
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