Hello lovely followers,
I am excited to announce that I have a new website! I have been working on this for a while and am so happy to FINALLY be able to share it with everyone. Here is the link:
If you are following me on WordPress.com or subscribed to my old site, you will have to visit the new site and sign up to the email list to receive the latest art, play, children and learning updates into your inbox.
Check it out and let me know what you think.
Love Louisa
This is a follow up to my recent post on the role of materials in children’s learning through art. If you have not read this already, I recommend checking it out before reading on.
Here I present four different organisations – a university research centre, a design consultancy, a creative recycle centre and a children’s art studio – who are all exploring materiality in new and experimental ways. I selected these organisations as I am interested in thinking about how materials are being researched and considered in a collective way, among groups of people with diverse interests, skills and expertise.
MIT Media Lab: Mediating Matter group (USA)
I am a massive fan girl of the MIT Media Lab. For those of you who are not unfamiliar with this university research centre, it is an interdisciplinary lab ‘that encourages the unconventional mixing and matching of seemingly disparate research areas’ (MIT website, 2018). I have always seen the Media Lab as an epicentre for innovative and ground-breaking work across a myriad of disciplines such as art, technology, design and education.
The Lab has numerous research groups, including the Mediated Matter team. This team of scientists and designers explore ‘material ecologies’ – a research area at the intersection of material science, digital fabrication, computational design, biology and design. Their week particularly focuses on how biology and nature can be used to inspire the creation and use of materials. This can then be used to then generate new forms of design and innovative material practices and processes that can then be applied in many different ways from 3D printed death masks to digitally created molten glass that transmits media to Bjork’s Rottlace mask.
Neri Oxman leads the Mediating Matter team. She has a great TED talk on the design at the intersection of technology and biology where she discusses how digital fabrication can come together and interact with the natural world.
The Cooper Hewitt collection contains numerous objects made by the Mediating Matter group. The museum also featured this video on their work as part of their Design Triennial. Please watch this – it beautiful and interesting as hell:
Material Driven (UK)
Material Driven is a platform that brings together artists, designers and architects that are producing new materials or working with pre-existing materials in experimental ways. The organisation aims to highlight ‘innovative materials, their processes of making, and the creators behind them.’ The Material Driven blog features really interesting articles and interviews with creative professionals exploring material fabrication in creative ways. I particularly enjoyed this article on Hannah Elizabeth Jones’ BioMarble material that brings together processes and practices from textiles, recycling and biodegradable matter. Last year Material Driven also put together a travelling material library called ‘Materials in Motion’ that aims to further showcase and share innovative ways creative work with materials.
ReMida Bologna (Italy)
ReMida centres are creative recycle centres that support the idea that waste such as recycled materials and industry cut-offs like plastic, wood and cardboard can be used as creative and artistic resources in communities. There are numerous ReMida centres located around the globe, including this one in Reggio Emilia:
ReMida Bologna is a part of this international network. The centre has an exceptional education programme for children, teachers and adults that allows people from different communities to creatively play and learn through the recycled materials. ReMida Bologna also has a great Instagram account (pictured below) where they post documentation from their various recycled material projects.
I love ReMida centres, or any place that promotes creative learning through recycled materials. When I scroll through the Instagram feed of ReMida Bologna I find it so inspiring to see how people are using familiar materials in unfamiliar ways. Like being creative with the combination of materials that are presented together and how they are placed and situated in a space. Loose part materials provide a special way of encouraging new processes of exploring and connecting with the world. All of these things can be used to ignite children’s imagination in new ways, generating interesting entry points for experimentation and learning.
Atelier M (Japan)
Some of the most interesting artists and educators that I ever met are renegade souls doing their own innovative things in their little corner of the world. This is how I would describe Atelier M. The organisation is essentially a children’s atelier, or art studio, located in Naha, Okinawa in Japan. I love their experimental approach to working with materials and children. It feels so fresh and creative. Atelier M also have great YouTube and Instagram pages – check these out. They speak for themselves.
I hope you find these groups as inspiring as I do. I am sure there are many more organisations out there that are doing amazing work with materials so please comment below!
Have an awesome week.
Louisa xx
This post discusses the possibilities of artworks in facilitating learning and alternate ways of imagining the world. I draw upon the work of Maxine Greene and John Dewey to explore the proposition that children’s learning through artworks has the potential to challenge dominant discourses, opening up new ways of thinking and being. There is also a resource list for educators and parents interested in incorporating artworks into children’s learning.
“It is not that the artist offers solutions or gives directions. He nudges; he renders us uneasy; he makes us (if we are lucky) see what we would not have seen without him. He moves us to imagine, to look beyond” Maxine Greene (2000, p. 276).
Artworks can be used in many ways for many different reasons in learning contexts. They offer rich possibilities for experiencing and imagining the world from new and multiple perspectives. Visual art as well as the arts more generally, have the ability to make people aware of different ways of thinking and being in the world, working against reductionist and singular ways of thinking.
Maxine Greene (2000) extends upon the word of John Dewey (1916, 1934, 1954) to argue that imagination and the arts play a critical role in the making of democratic communities. She suggests that school curriculum should aim to prioritise the ‘releasing of the imagination’ through providing rich aesthetic experiences for children. These then provide new modalities for children to sense, experience and learn through the world.
However, the mere presence of artworks in a learning environment does not guarantee that a child is encountering or imagining the world in new ways. Greene argues that if school curriculum is to support imagination through the arts, children’s encounters need to be aesthetically varied, rich and reflective. Through this, learning through artworks has the potential to challenge dominant discourses and ways of thinking. This may then encourage children to question their understandings and assumptions about the world, to think critically about what is and what could be.
Below is a list of resources for educators and parents who may be interested in incorporating artworks in children’s learning at home or in the classroom.
Resource list
Many of the major modern and contemporary art museums have online digital archives for their collections. Here are some links to my favorites:
Online art museum collections
The Museum of Modern Art has made 77,000 works from 25,000 different artists available online. The search engine is easy to use and you can refine your hits using different classifications and time periods.
Tate also have an extensive online collection featuring artworks, exhibitions, videos and artist journals. The digital archive is well referenced and has many tags that are great for getting lost in amazing artwork worm-holes. The search engine is easy to use and has lots of search filter options. Tate’s most famous artworks feature extensive summaries, a copy of the artwork’s display caption as well as the techniques used to produce the artwork, for example Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’ page.
Video Channels
Online courses
Article
References
Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and Education. New York, Macmillan.
Dewey, J. (1934). Art as Experience. New York, Minton, Balch.
Dewey, J. (1954). The Public and Its Problems. Chicago, IL: Swallow Press.
Greene, M (2000). ‘Imagining futures: the public school and possibility,’ Journal of Curriculum Studies, vol 32(2). P.267-280.
In this post I talk about my photographic art practice and how this has allowed me to produce new relationships between myself, other people and the world. I then discuss the role of visual images in artistic experimentation and how this interconnects with the use of visual imagery in pedagogical documentation or inquiry-led learning practices in early childhood education.
Experimention and learning through images has been a huge part of my life for as long as I can remember. Since I was first taught photography at school (thank you Georgina Campbell) I have experimented with a myriad of photographic processes including medium format cameras, scanners and digital photography. My photos have focused on the relationship between landscape and the subject matter’s psychological world. Creating and thinking through images has allowed me to experience things and learn in a way that could not be done with words. Learning new artistic skills, techniques and concepts has also been important in opening up new creative possibilities for further exploration. Over the years, this process has led to the emergence of new thought processes, feelings, understandings and artistic skills, generating new starting points for further experimentation.
I think that my love of image making and my love of children’s education stems from the same place: a relentless enthusiasm to continuously think and learn through the world in new and different ways. Art has been one of the greatest forces for producing deep thinking and feelings in my life. I would love children to have this opportunity too.
Experimentation and learning through visual imagery is also a huge part of pedagogical documentation. When I take a photo or video of a child’s research process in an art museum, I always consider the lighting, the colours, the composition and wait for just the right moment to press the shutter to try and capture a particular energy, emotion or idea. To me, documenting through visual imagery is an aesthetic process. At other times, it does feel more ethnographic or slightly more removed. Recording. Logging. Taking field notes. Archiving pictures to look back on later. I guess that both artistic experimentation and pedagogical documentation are creative and analytical processes.
I often get asked if I use my own art practice with children. I always say yes and no. The inquiry-led process that drives artistic experimentation is a non-negotiable component of any children’s activity I am a part of. At the same time, I am not interested in doing photography workshops with children. I don’t really know why.
I am not exactly sure how my photographic practice and my work with children is connected but I know that it is. I guess they are related in a way that all things that are incredibly important to an individual are connected. I recently read a quote by the artist and poet Etel Adnan that said, “… my writing and my paintings do not have a direct connection in my mind. But I am sure they influence each other in the measure that everything we do is linked to whatever we are, which includes whatever we have done or are doing.” I totally get that.
This post discusses the possibilities of materials and material play in children’s learning through art. I draw on the theories of loose parts and new materialism to argue that materials, including artworks, play an active and participatory role in opening-up divergent thinking and inquiry-led learning in schools, home and informal learning contexts such as art museums.
Why do materials matter?
Materials and material exploration have long been a part of artistic inquiry. Since Frobel’s development of the kindergarten in the late 1700’s, they have also held an important place in early childhood settings. In the 1970’s Simon Nicholson presented the theory of loose parts – the proposition that young children’s creative empowerment comes from the presence of open-ended materials that can be constructed, manipulated and transformed through self-directed play. It is fair to say that material content, including artworks and art materials, hold tremendous possibilities for facilitating children’s inquiry-led learning in new and divergent ways. I consider materials to be one of multiple forces that learning can emerge from in an art museums. Others may include social interaction between people, spatial layout of things and the delivery of curatorial content such as through audio guides or information resources.
As reading and writing are often privileged in school curriculum, experimentation with different materials can provide new opportunities for alternate and aesthetically-driven pedagogies to be produced (check out this blog for how I define pedagogy). This is to say that different materials may encourage different ways of thinking, learning and being. For example, in a previous posts on ‘suggesting as a technique for facilitating children’s learning through art’ I talk about the different cognitive, social, emotional and aesthetic learning pathways that two different materials: plastic cylinders and large paper sheets may present. Whilst the cylinders may provoke explorations around stacking, placing, dismantling, balancing, arrangement and construction, the large paper sheet may suggest gentle movements, swaying, rolling, folding, hiding and enveloping. Through experimentation, the properties and abilities of a material may change, creating new starting points for further inquiry and experimentation.
The active role of materials in art practices and learning
In the arts, different materials such as paint, clay, paper, resin, fabric, wood or plastic can be experimented with in a myriad of ways. In art forms such as dance, live art and socially engaged practices, materials may be slightly more abstract such as the human body, sound, participants and society. I believe that art materials are not just a tool for self-expression or a thing for children to manipulate; they are an active and participatory force in the production of learning and knowledge. For example, check out this lovely video by visual artist Shirazeh Houshiary in which she talks about the active role of materials in her practice:
I really connect with this, especially the comment: “… they are not representation of the form but a pulsation of the form. I am not interested in painting. I am not interested in the processes of making in the conventional sense of representation. I am trying to get into how something works. This process has taught me a huge amount about who I am, which is surprising. It a process of learning for me more than anything else.” The paint and paintings are active, participatory and dynamic in the artist’s creative experimentation.
Art materials as an invitation to experiment
Material play has the ability to encourage emergent thinking processes, allowing children to produce new understandings as well as experiencing the world from multiple perspectives. However, materials also have the ability to be used in static and predictable ways that shut down creativity and divergent thinking. Whilst I do love Instagram feeds and craft blogs that share ideas for children’s art activities, I am cautious that these may unintentionally encourage imitation and fixed ways of using materials with children. This may then reduce the ability for experimental thinking and practices to emerge.
The challenge to me – and everyone working in learning settings with children – is to keep experimenting, keep questioning, keep venturing into the unknown and the yet-to-be-discovered of art, play, materiality and pedagogy.
I am sure many of you have really interesting insights on this topic and it would be lovely to hear them. Why is children’s play with materials important to you? What are your favorite materials to experiment with?
Further links
The Institute of Making at the University College of London has a great online material library – perfect for anyone who likes to nerd out about different material forms: http://www.instituteofmaking.org.uk/materials-library
My friend Nina Odegard has written a brilliant article on children’s learning with recycled ‘junk’ materials. Nina formally ran a creative recycle centre in Norway: http://www.academia.edu/14201590/When_matter_comes_to_matter_working_pedagogically_with_junk_materials
Professor Pat Thomson, Nina Odegard and I recently did a conference symposium on children’s material play. Check it out: https://louisapenfold.com/2017/12/06/childrens-learning-with-new-found-and-recycled-stuff-symposium-at-aare/
Here is the link to my blog post on Simon Nicholson’s theory of loose parts: https://louisapenfold.com/2016/05/23/simon-nicholson-on-the-theory-of-loose-parts/
I also love the book ‘Encounters with Materials in Early Childhood Education’ by Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, Sylvia Kind and Laurie Kocher.
This post looks at the Slow Art Collective’s ‘Children’s Sensory Lab’ (January 8-21, 2017) at C3 Gallery in Melbourne, Australia.
Last week I visited the Children’s Sensory Art Lab at C3 Gallery in Melbourne, Australia. The lab was created Dylan Martorell and Chaco Kato from the Slow Art Collective – an interdisciplinary artistic group dedicated to exploring creative practices and the ethics of environmental sustainability, materiality, DIY culture and participation. The collective describe ‘slow art’ as:
“… the slow exchanges of value rather than the fast, monetary exchange of value. It is about the slow absorption of culture through community links by creating something together and blurring the boundary between the artists and viewer. It is a sustainable arts practice, not an extreme solution; a reasonable alternative to deal with real problems in contemporary art practice.” (Slow Art Collective website)
The Sensory Art Lab featured six different material environments spread out over the C3 Gallery space. These included a dedicated room for babies and toddlers, a giant loom and an archery area where children could shoot arrows at drum symbols (pics below)! A commonality between the activities was a focus on art making or aesthetic exploration through art. The Lab had an endearingly D.I.Y feel to it. Many of the materials were either recycled or everyday items being used in unfamiliar ways, giving a slightly eclectic and ingenious atmosphere to the show.
My favourite activity was the loom, a simple concept with high creative potential. The design of the weaving apparatus encouraged social interaction between people making textiles, opening up the possibility for new connections between people, materials and things.
Below are some pictures from the show. The collective also have a great website featuring all of their projects. Check it out: https://www.slowartcollective.com
The ‘audible touch space’ – an area designed especially for children aged 1-2 years and their carers. Babies and toddlers were able to touch the silver triangles that had motion sensors connected to them with pre-programmed sounds
I loved this giant ‘archi-loom.’ The Slow Art Collective did a spectacular version of this at Art Play a few years ago.
A bucket of material off-cuts, ribbons, wool and thread 
The archery area – children could fire arrows at the drum symbols, making loud bangs of sound
In this activity, children could make paper basketballs then throw them at the drum kits. Each snare drum (I think this is what they are called?!) was set at a different pitch, making different bass notes as the balls hit them.
This post looks at the National Gallery of Victoria’s slick new ‘Triennal’ blockbuster exhibition, including the gallery’s dedicated children’s space ‘Hands on: We make carpet for kids.’
I have spent the past few weeks in my hometown of Melbourne, Australia escaping the bleak English winter. During this time I have been fortunate enough to break up my thesis writing with beach swims and time with family and friends.
Last week I headed into Southbank to checked out the National Gallery of Victoria’s new contemporary art exhibition, Triennial. The exhibition is the first of what I presume will be a series of exhibitions held every three years that aim to showcase ‘the world of art and design now.’ The day I visited, the gallery was absolutely heaving with visitors young and old. I had actually never seen so many people inside an Australian art museum before. It was great to see the gallery so full of life.
The Triennial features an array of new modern and contemporary artwork from around the globe. There are also a bunch of newly commissioned, super slick, very Instagram-able installations including Kusama’s ‘Flower obsession,’ Ron Mueck’s ‘Mass,’ teamLab’s “Moving creates vortices and vortices create movement’ and Alexandra Kehayoglou’s beautiful ‘Santa Cruz River.’ The show is ambitious, polished and lively.
Pictured: teamLab ‘Moving creates vortices and vortices create movement’ (2017)
Yayoi Kusama ‘Flower Obsession’ (2017)
Ron Mueck ‘Mass’ (2016-2017)
The Triennial’s dedicated children’s space, ‘Hands on: We make carpet for kids’ (2017) was comprised of four parts: a colourful wall where children could stick on triangular velcro pieces, a ‘maze challenge’ where children could poke pieces of rope through a plywood wall, an area where children could stick styrofoam pool noodles onto wooden knobs and a floor activity where children could make patterns using colourful wooden triangles (pics below). At first glance, the space looked immaculate. Lots of colours, beautiful wall-mounted installations for children to look at. The space was packed with young families who all seemed to be having lots of fun. It was also really inspiring to see the gallery making such significant financial investments in children’s activities. There appeared to be a gallery staff member stationed at each section greeting people and sorting materials.
At the same time I felt like something fundamental was missing from the children’s activities. While in the space I began to consider what exactly it is I love about art and learning. To me, the arts and education have allowed me to continuously think about and connect with the world in new and different ways. Artistic experimentation has allowed me to produce new relationships between myself, other people, ideas and the world around me. Looking at the children’s activities, I felt like there were limited opportunities for children to engage in deep artistic and creative experimentation. For example, in the rope activity, children were presented with small pieces of the material all cut to the same length. An instruction sign told people to put the rope into the holes. What children can and cannot do is nearly entirely pre-constructed and fixed.
I am really interested in children’s learning environments that are designed to encourage creative experimentation and are responsive to what emerges from this. For example, selecting materials based on their ability to transform (for example, clay has the ability to change form through adding or removing water), introducing art tools, equipment, artistic techniques or different conceptual resources that could encourage people to extend, challenge and complexify their thinking through art over time.
At the same time, everyone seemed to be having fun and perhaps that is the most important thing. Also, due to the sheer volume of visitors, the gallery may not have been able to cope with children spending more than two minutes on each activity.
The NGV Triennial is a fun museum experience. There are also some incredible artworks in the exhibition. High-brow theme park or contemporary art show – you decide!
This post features reflections on my recent visit to The Museum of Old and New Art or MONA in Hobart, Australia. I discuss the ‘O,’ a custom-designed mobile experience for museum visitors that replaces traditional wall-mounted interpretation texts.
Last month I travelled to Tasmania to checkout MONA’s latest exhibition, The Museum of Everything. The show features an array of works by artists who ‘fall outside the confines of the art world proper, the work of ordinary people, working far from the cultural metropolis’ (MONA website, 2017). After visiting MONA for the first time in 2014 and LOVING IT, I was super excited to return to see their new stuff.
MONA is the lovechild of David Walsh, a professional gambler and art lover who opened the museum in 2011. Built underneath a cliff-face that overlooks the River Derwent, the museum has exhibited an array of controversial and thought-provoking art including Patricia Puccini’s Skywhale, Egyptian mummies and a giant cloaca (poop) machine. Yes, you read that correctly.
The MONA building was also designed to naturally flood as the River Derwent rises over the next 50 years. When questioned about this in a 2014 Guardian article, Walsh said:
“It will be an evaluation of whether it has actually achieved anything. If everyone says, ‘Ah f*%$ it, let’s leave it – let’s just let the ground floor flood,’ that would be a good result because it would mean whatever the structure or system that makes choices – which I assume will be someway democratic in 50 years – has expressed its opinion.”
I feel like this quote somehow embodies the museum’s ethos. Regardless, MONA has been a monumental success for the Tasmanian tourism and the Australian art world.
At the museum, there are no wall-mounted texts in the galleries. Instead visitors are given a mobile iPod devise containing a custom-designed audio-visual app called The O. As people walk through the galleries, the O uses a wireless positioning system to locate artworks in close proximity. The app features content such as curator’s discussion of works, artist interview, music and David Walsh’s rambling thoughts. Each artwork features three levels of content which can be grouped into:
“Art wank’ (look for the cock-and-balls icon, you can’t miss it); ‘Gonzo’ (Walsh and curators go Hunter S. Thompson on yo’ ass); ‘Ideas’ (little chunks of info, for those with a short attention span); and interviews with artists… Once you’ve visited the museum, you’ll be able to continue using the O app at home. Like Tinder, but with more art and stuff.” From the MONA website.
Visitors can also select whether they ‘love’ or ‘hate’ a particular artwork (check out the pic above). Whilst walking through The Museum of Everything I used the O continuously. I tried out the object summaries, curator’s wank, Gonzo and ideas. I found the title ‘curator’s wank’ kind of misleading as the content was pretty standard and straight forward curatorial information. There were certainly more personal references and a much more conversational tone to what you would normally have on wall-mounted exhibition texts but overall, I wouldn’t say the ‘curator’s wank’ was fundamentally different to anything I had experienced previously. Or maybe this is because ‘wank’ is the standard talk in galleries, lolz.
I really enjoyed the ‘ideas’ option on The O, especially the music tracks. I always listen to music while walking through exhibitions and it was cool to have someone else’s thoughtful selection of beats to guide thinking in new directions. I also found the music encouraged me to connect more emotionally with the art.
The thing I loved most MONA was that it encouraged me to make and explore relations between myself and art from outside the traditional thinking of major institutions. As I live in England, a country that seems to have such a class system and establishment, it felt refreshing to experience art from a new and fundamentally different perspective.
Further Links
The Art Processor website goes into the geeky technical make-up of The O here: http://artprocessors.net/projects/mona/
Now that I have finally recovered from my New Year’s Eve hangover, I am getting excited thinking about the year ahead. I have been musing about different conferences to attend, what projects to kick off, where I will travel to and of course, the plan of attack for writing my PhD thesis.
‘A handful of dust’ at Whitechapel Gallery, August 2017.
2017 was a huge year for me. I spent the majority of it in London undertaking my PhD fieldwork in partnership with the Early Years & Family team at Tate. During this time, we were investigating the possibilities of using pedagogical documentation as a mode of curatorial inquiry in the learning department at the art museum. This research extended on results of fieldwork undertaken at the Whitworth Art Gallery in 2016 that looked at the same processes in their early year’s Atelier programme. So many new ideas and results emerged throughout this time. The action research methodology that I drew upon was fabulous but also demanded a lot of continuous hard work to keep the inquiry moving. But I made it!! And I am so happy to now have such interesting data to think through in the final thesis. I am also grateful to have worked with such a creative bunch of learning curators, artists, teachers, children and families on this. Stay tuned for the sharing and disseminating of results later in 2018.
Looking forward to the year ahead, I am in the process of re-vamping this website. Once this is done, I aim to write a weekly blog post. Since I started this website in February 2016, I have been somewhat inconsistent in delivering content. There are aspects of blogging that I have struggled to navigate. Mainly around what content I should post publically and immediately, what content I should use for journal articles, what content I should try to save for a book and what content I should just keep to myself… fellow motor-mouth readers I know you feel my pain on this last one. I have also found writing pretty difficult over the past couple of years which is also something that influences my enthusiasm to blog. I am totally confident and comfortable in my skills making art and working with young children however there are times where I have found writing quite boring and lonely. I also occasionally find it a bit wimpy too. As in, someone can intellectually think about something but they do not necessarily need to embody and live it. However, the more I begin to approach it as a creative process, as a way of philosophically thinking about the world, the more it grows on me and the more I want to do it. So, I am pleased to say that I will endeavour to update this website weekly throughout 2018, every Thursday at 9am GMT.
I also hope to continue to connect with others that share my relentless enthusiasm towards art, play, children and pedagogy. I am particularly interested in artists, educators and people working with children in art museums that are exploring practices around emergent curriculum, relational pedagogy and experiential learning. I have also started a new Instagram account! You can follow along at @louisa.penfold for even more art, play, children, pedagogy action.
Woop!
Beyond this, I am also beginning to think what lies ahead for me once I complete my doctorate. What country this may be in, what sort of institution I would like to work for. No definitive answers have made themselves known to me yet. I think I will always toe the line between researcher, learning curator and artist. I am sure what happens next will again be a hybrid of these things. I am not sure if full-time academia is right for me just yet. I miss being around children on a day to day basis, making art and working as a part of a creative team. I guess we will see what 2018 brings.
Happy New Year to you all. I think it is going to be a great one.
Love Louisa xx
This post discusses the symposium presentation ‘Material play: children’s learning with new, found and recycled ‘stuff’ given by Professor Pat Thomson, Nina Odegard and Louisa Penfold at the Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE) in Canberra, Australia.
On November 27, 2017 Pat Thomson (University of Nottingham), Nina Odegard (University College of Oslo and Akershus) and myself (University of Nottingham) presented at the AARE conference on young children’s learning with materials through play. Julianne Moss from Deakin University was the session discussant. The symposium was put together as a result of our common research interest in material-led play in early childhood education.
The symposium was built upon the proposition that many educators and artists working with young children are committed to play-based practices and understand this as critical to individual and social learning. The session focused specifically on early years arts-orientated play through asking: when children are ‘doing art’ play what are they learning with the materials they choose? The presentations explored the idea that when children are playing with materials they are simultaneously:
Why is this important? Academics and education practitioners are becoming increasingly interested in ways that humans can and need to be de-centred in order to take account of the importance the material, both organic and inorganic, worlds in which we live. This is essential in creating discourses and practices that offer hopeful action in an ecologically and ethically challenged world. This also comes at a time when policy makers around the world increasingly position play-based early childhood curriculum as trivial and not sufficiently focused on knowledge and skills. Consequentially, we identify an urgent need to push further with discussion on why materials matter in early childhood play-based arts programmes and projects. Our concern was to not only explore and explain the importance of play in early childhood and to promote the value of the arts, but also to broaden our explanations of what this is.
Young children’s thinking with natural materials in art museums
Louisa’s presentation explored the invitations natural materials such as logs, leaves, sticks, stones and clay offer in young children’s play in art museums. Data generated in an early year’s art studio session at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, was used to consider the encounters (Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2017) between children, artists, curators, artworks, materials and the museum space. Lenz-Taguchi’s notion of intra-active pedagogies (2010) – where one’s attention shifts from interpersonal relationships to the relations between humans and non-human entities – was drawn upon to consider children’s learning with and through artworks and materials in the art museum.
Descriptive examples of visual documentation including photography and video footage was discussed in relation to how the ‘stuff’ curated for the art studio provoked open-ended possibilities for children’s thinking and learning. The presentation concluded with the suggestion that through thinking with materials, new pedagogies are able to be constructed that allow artists, learning curators, children and their families to continuously produce and reconsider the relations between themselves, others, artworks, materials and the natural world.
Imagining immanent didactics
Nina’s paper focused on the concepts of aesthetics and aesthetic explorations, ethics and how these open possibilities for creative thinking, doing and being. Concepts of new materialism were discussed in relation to the potential they bring for expanded discourses and practices relating to recycling, sustainability and consumption.
The presentation drew upon data generated in a ReMida creative recycle centre in Norway. Results suggested that children were ‘rhizomatic thinkers’ (Dahlberg, 2016, p. 131) in their aesthetic explorations of recycled materials in which children’s learning shifted between disciplines to make use of the ‘vibrant matter’ (Bennet, 2010) and ‘how matter comes to matter’ (Barad, 2008). Nina also focused on pedagogical practice in which children’s process itself is valued, and there is a reduced or no focus on the result (Dahlberg, 2016). This builds on previous research out of the ReMida centre (Odegard, 2016) that argued that recycled materials can open up to the discovery of new ‘hidden’ pedagogical spaces, that produce meeting places for the emergence of new ideas (Odegard, 2012). The children´s exploration with vibrant matter like recycled materials seems to evoke creativity, curiosity, problem-solving and narrate stories. Through this, the paper argued for a paradigm shift away from the neoliberal way of measuring and categorizing learning and towards an emphasis on the collective and creative pedagogical processes.
What can rope do with us? Agency/power and freedom/captivity in art play.
Pat’s paper, co-written with Anton Franks, discussed an ongoing ethnographic study conducted within the ‘World without walls’ programme run by Serpentine Galleries in London. The programme supports artists undertaking residencies in one early childhood centre in central London. The residencies focus on different kinds of art/play that draw upon the artist’s practice and selection of materials for the programme. The presentation discussed data generated from Albert Potrony’s residency in which the artist elected to use large material objects such as card, plastic, foam and rope.
Throughout the sessions, numerous children were drawn to/called by the rope (Bennett, 2010). Perhaps unexpectedly, the children wrapped/tied up their teachers and the learning curator with the rope. The data suggested an explicit exploration of the kinds of power-laden relationships that exist between adults and children in educational settings. Drawing on field notes, photographs and interviews, the paper presented an analysis of the materials on offer and their affordances. The presentation concluded considering the material differences made by, with and through the rope, and probe further the ways in which it co-produced caring and ethical experimentations with power, agency, captivity and freedom.
Following the presentations, attendees had an opportunity to play with an array of materials arranged in the symposium space. As a group we then asked and explored questions such as why were particular materials chosen and not others? What was possible with the materials and what wasn’t? What about the play experience can be put into words and what can’t? Did you feel a desire/need to name, categorize or define your installation? What senses were used, and what feelings were evoked through playing with the materials?
Overall, we hoped that the symposium shared thinking and opened up new discussions around early childhood education, play, the arts and materialism. We were inspired by the questions and discussion amongst the group throughout the presentation and hope to build upon this in the future.
References
Barad, K. (2008). Posthumanist performativity: toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. In S. Alaimo & S. J. Hekman (Eds.), Material feminisms (pp. 120-157). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Bennet, J. (2010). Vibrant matter, a poltical ecology of things: Duke University Press.
Dahlberg, G. (2016). An ethico- aesthetic paradigm as an alternative discourse to the quality assurance discourse. 17(1), 124-133. doi:10.1177/1463949115627910
Lenz Taguchi, H. (2010). Going beyond the theory/practice divide in early childhood education: Introducing an intra-active pedagogy. New York, NY: Routledge.
Odegard, N. (2012). When matter comes to matter – Working pedagogically with junk materials. Education Inquiry, 3(3), 387-400.
Odegard, Nina, & Rossholt, Nina. (2016). In-between spaces. Tales from a Remida. In Ann Beate Reinertsen (Ed.), Becoming Earth. A Post Human Turn in Educational Discourse Collapsing Nature/Culture Divides. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.
Pacini-Ketchabaw, V; Kind, S; & Kocher, L. (2017). Encounters with materials in early childhood education. New York, NY: Routledge.
Art. Play. Children. Pedagogy. 