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.
An image illustrating the generation of one of Bjork’s ‘Rottlace’ masks – a collaboration between the musician and the MIT Media Lab’s Mediating Matter group. Image credit: http://www.creativeapplications.net
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 Bolognais 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.
ReMida Bologna’s Instagram feed
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.
Children play in an activity at Atelier M. Image credit: atelier-m.tumblr.com
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!
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’slearning 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:
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.
TateShots and TateTalks– Tate have also put together two quite an exceptional collection of video and audio recordings. TateTalks features video footage of talks and events held at the art museum. TateShots comprises of artist interviews, performance pieces (I highly recommend watching Earle Brown’s ‘Calder Piece‘), exhibition films and artist studio visits. If I had a dollar for every minute I spent watching TateShots I would be a millionaire. But I work in children’s education and the arts so maybe I shouldn’t put a monetary value on the amount of time I procrastinate.
The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark has a constantly growing online collection of videos from different fields such as art, architecture, music, literature and design. I love the Louisiana Channel as it features a lot of Scandinavian and European contemporary artists who I have only discovered through watching these clips.
The art auction houses of Southeby’sand Christie’sboth have YouTube channels featuring short video clips of artist interviews, studio visits and world auction records.
Online courses
MoMA has developed three online courses that explore inquiry-led learning through artworks. Admittedly I have not had a chance to do any of these courses but I think it worth a look. The first, ‘Art & Ideas: Teaching with Themes’ uses theme-based teaching practices to support educators in incorporating modern and contemporary artworks into curriculum. Then there is Art & Inquiry: Museum Teaching Strategies For Your Classroom looks at museum education strategies for inquiry-based teaching and how these can be used in classrooms. Finally, Art & Activity: Interactive Strategies for Engaging with Art builds on content from courses one and two to explore activity-based strategies for using artworks primary and secondary lesson plans.
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
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
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 is the second post in a series on techniques for facilitating children’s learning with and through art in museums. The first presented broader ideas and debates underpinning facilitated learning. Each post will include a description of a technique in addition to how and when it may be useful. These should not be seen as all-conclusive methods of teaching and learning but more as different options to experiment with. I see these posts as thinking snapshots and hope they might generate deeper consideration around how others understand and implement methods in their context. So, let’s hear it for….
Suggesting
To suggest something means to present an idea for consideration (Cambridge Dictionary online, 2017). Suggestions give children a choice as to how their learning path may proceed (Mac Naughton & Williams, 2009). Suggestions can be made verbally through language or non-verbally through actions such as selecting materials, the positioning of equipment or physical gestures. Like other facilitated learning techniques such as questioning, modelling and giving feedback, suggestions can encourage children to explore their learning processes in a new or deeper way, leading to more complex thinking over time.
Image one credit: Centro Internazionale Loris Malaguzzi
Suggesting differs from direct instruction in that it implies there are options. If a suggestion is being used, it is important to consider that a child may not want to act upon it. If a child does not have an option, for example if an artwork cannot be touched due to conservation requirements then direct instruction may be a more appropriate means of communicating information. This could also be accompanied by an explanation as to why there is no choice. For example, “we cannot touch this picture as we have special oils on our hands that are good for keeping our skin soft but if we touch the artwork these can damage it.” If this information was delivered as a suggestion such as “perhaps you could try not touching the artwork” it might be unclear and confusing as to what the child can and cannot do.
Image two credit: Centro Internazionale Loris Malaguzzi
Suggestions can also be made without human intervention. The selection and arrangement of artworks, materials, concepts and resources could propose particular ways of thinking and physically experiencing a gallery space. For example, the plastic cylinders in Image One (top) and the large paper sheets in Image Two (bottom) may prompt significantly different cognitive, social, emotional and aesthetic learning processes. The cylinders may provoke explorations around stacking, placing, dismantling, balancing, arrangement and construction. Alternatively, the large paper sheet may suggest gentle movements, swaying, rolling, folding, hiding and enveloping. These ways of experiencing art and gallery spaces may then catalyse or restrict particular meaning-making and thought processes. An immersive art installation such as Yayoi Kusama’s Obliteration Room could also make various suggestions towards people’s engagement that changes over time as the materials, spatial arrangement and meanings associated with the artwork also transform.
Extending upon this, here are some possibilities for how suggesting could be implemented in an art museum learning programme. Some of the questions have been adapted from Glenda Mac Naughton & Gillian Williams’ book ‘Teaching Young Children’ (2009):
Verbal
“You could have a go at… drawing the sculpture from different angles.“
“This printing tool might work better if… you push harder on the handle so that the paint stamps onto the fabric.”
“Maybe you could… have a look at different artworks that are made out of clay… to think about how you could approach… making your vase using different sculptural techniques.”
“How about we see if we can find… some artworks that explore the concept of infinity.”
“Perhaps you could think about how… this artwork relates to your experience of being in a family?”
Non-verbal
Using body language to demonstrate or model different behaviours or techniques.
Altering the aesthetic arrangement of a space so that it stimualtes the construction of new thought processes and relations. REmida centres often do this through presenting familiar recycled materials in unfamiliar ways.
Carefully considering the grouping of artworks, concepts and materials. What ways of thinking might a particular arrangement provoke?
Considering how the placement of things (artworks, materials, resources, furniture) allows for people to physically interact and move in a space.
If an artwork cannot be touched then consider putting a barrier around it or asking floor staff to politely let children know they they cannot touch it as they enter the space. This may fall under ‘direct instruction’ but I had to sneak it in somewhere (#1 pet peeve when it does not happen).
I would love to hear your insights and feedback on using suggestions to facilitate children’s learning in art museum. Coming up as an exciting sequel to ‘facilitation’ and ‘suggesting,’ the next post will discuss the technique of ‘questioning.’
References
Cambridge Dictionary online, 2017. Cambridge Dictionary website.Cambridge University Press.
Mac Naughton, G & Williams, G 2009. Teaching young children: Choices in theory and practice. Second edition. Maidenhead: Open University Press.
This post discusses collective creativity, its interconnection with imagination and the potential both of these offer in relation to a pursuit towards empathy and understanding.
These concepts are not new. Maxine Greene, John Dewey and Elliot Eisner have all discussed them extensively. In this post I will focus upon an article written by the late social constructivist Lev Vygotsky titled ‘Imagination and Creativity in Childhood’ [1]. It is the first of four articles he wrote on imagination and creativity – a topic that he is rarely associated with. In the paper Vygotsky discusses the definition, complexity and origins of creativity and what this can teach us about ourselves and others. I have selected the article as it presents many interesting suggestions on creative imagination and offers a reflective viewpoint for how it could be applied to my own research. These concepts are complex with many nuances, debates and tangents that can be built on. My intention is to introduce and define some key concepts that will then be elaborated upon in future posts.
A Definition of Creativity
According to Vygotsky creativity encompasses ‘any human act that gives rise to something new… regardless of whether what is created is a physical object or some mental or emotional construct that lives within the person who created it and is known only to him [2].’ Drawing upon this definition, creativity is present both when major scientific discoveries and famous artworks are made and also ‘whenever a person imagines, combines, alters and creates something new, no matter how small a drop in the bucket this new thing appears compared to the works of geniuses [3].’ He elaborates on this as follows:
‘…imagination is the basis of any creative activity and is equally part of all cultural life, including artistic, scientific , and technical creativity. In this sense all that is the work of the human hand, the whole world of culture, is distinguished from the natural world because it is a product of human imagination and creativity based on imagination [4].’
Imagination is a tool used to construct new combinations that developed into an artwork, invention or scientific discovery. If we have this understanding of creativity, it is can be concluded that creativity is already fully developed in very young children. Creativity and imagination are also interdependent as imagination allows for the ability to recombine elements to produce creative acts. At the same time, the expression of these creative acts, for example a song or artwork or piece of literature, opens the possibility for an individual to imagine alternate realities of other people.
Collective Creativity
Creativity is frequently inaccuratly perceived as a gift of an elite few artists, architects, musicians and designers who individually produce artworks, operas and buildings which all non-creative people merely act as consumers of. Drawing on this notion, it is easy to associate creativity with famous artists and designers such as Georgia O’Keefe, Louise Bourgeois or Zaha Hadid. However this perception is also untrue. Applying Vygotsky’s definition, creativity exists when an individual recombines, transforms or merges preexisting elements, feelings and ideas to create a new expressive combination. This allows it to live deeply in the everyday lives of all people.
Extending upon this definition, collective creativity can be recognised as an understanding that the construction of any major artwork or invention, no matter how small or large, is the result of the shared labor of other people’s work and discoveries throughout history. Vygotsky articulates this as follows:
‘When we consider the phenomenon of collective creativity, which combines all these drops of individual creativity that frequently are insignificant in themselves, we readily understand what an enormous percentage of what has been created by humanity is a product of the anonymous collective creative work of unknown inventors [5].’
For example, take Gordon Bennett’s Triptych (1989) pictured below. The artist has drawn on a combination of pre-existing concepts and techniques such as the use of oil in canvas, the image of ‘Truganini’ Tasmania’s last Aborigine, Western art’s tradition of triptych panel painting, imagery of the vast Australian dessert, the inclusion of Renaissance symbols, spatial arrangement, perspectives and grids. Bennett has combined these factors, in addition to more that I have not identified, with his personal experience, feelings and emotions of growing up in Australia with both Indigenous and Scottish/English ancestry. The expression of the complex and unique recombination of these elements has been presented in the form of an oil painting. Whilst the final product may initially appear to have been done in isolation, according to Vygotsky it is actually the result of a collective, cumulative, transformative and interconnected process.
Gordon Bennett (1989). Triptych: Requiem, Of grandeur, Empire. Oil and photography on canvas. Collection: Queensland Art Gallery.
A second example of collective creativity can be seen in the Atelier van Licht, the Dutch children’s art/science creative laboratory. It is evident within both the creative development of the Atelier and in the qualities of space. The Atelier has and continues to be creativity developed by an interdisciplinary team consisting of an education specialist, a physicist, an industrial designer and an artist. It is therefore an excellent example of how individual’s collective creativity can be expanded and enhanced when utilised as part of a collaborative team environment (also see Linda Hill’s awesome TED Talk on collective creativity within corporate environments). Each member of the team brings their unique expertise, experience and creativity to the construction of projects, allowing for diverse and innovative creative ideas to be explored. The environment also draws upon discoveries made in early childhood education, physics (for example the reflection, refraction and absorption of light on different surfaces) as well as the development of similar projects such as Reggio Emilia’s ‘Ray of Light’ and the Exploratorium’s ‘Light Play’. The Atelier simultaneously exists as its own unique construction and site of collaborative knowledge building. Combined, the collective and collaborative nature of creativity within the space raises complex questions around authorship as it is impossible to credit the development and what is produced within the space to a sole individual.
Atelier van Licht at Stedelijk Museum 2013, Amsterdam. Image credit: Atelier van Licht
Creativity: Meaning, Freedom & Imagination
Vygotsky believed that the origin of creative imagination lies in children’s play. Play is not simply an infantile act where experiences are reproduced but a deeply creative one that brings together different experiences to reconstruct, appropriate and transform them to create new realities. A clear distinction is made between reproductive imagination, where an individual reproduces behaviour and ideas from previous experiences and combinatory imagination where an individual reproduces previous experiences in combination with new elements, feelings and thoughts. Both of these definitions of imagination can be linked to Vygotsky’s well-known concepts of scaffolding, social constructivism and the zone of proximal development. I will discuss this further in another post.
Like Dewey, Vygotsky advocated for the belief that a child’s creativity is directly connected to their lived and imagined experience and the feelings and emotions associated with this. Experiencing art contains a strong internal, as opposed to external, truth. This is due to the connection the arts make with an individual’s internal world of emotions, feelings, concepts and thoughts. It is this internal logic that allow artworks to have an effect on individuals. The principles of personal meaning and freedom are key within this connection. Vygotsky believed that children cannot be forced to partake in creative activities; doing so must arise out of their own interests. Doing so allows for an individual to apply their creativity to a topic that is intrinsically meaningful to their emotions and encourages them to express the complexities of their ideas, feelings and ideas through creative acts.
Creativity is therefore an incredibly complex process dependent upon the diversity and richness of one’s experience. Such experience becomes the fuel that drives fantasy, imagination and therefore creative acts. Thus ‘the richer the experience, the richer the act of imagination’ [6]. We must broaden the experiences provided to children as the more they hear, taste, feel and experience, the more experience they accumulate and the more fuel they have to drive their creative capacity. The greater their creative thinking process, the stronger their ability is to solve unexpected problems in a world that is rapidly changing.
Imagination takes on a crucial role in human development by means of expanding a person’s understanding of the world through the ability to envision what they have not directly experienced themselves and conceptualise an idea or reality from alternative and multiple perspectives. This allows the possibility for an individual to connect and empathise with realities that they never knew existed. Bakhtin termed this realisation ‘heteroglossia’ [7] where a collective group of people become aware of the diversity and value of diverse perspectives in discourse.
Maxine Greene wrote extensively on the topic of social imagination, a term she defined as ‘the capacity to invent visions of what should be and what might be in our deficient society, on the streets where we live, in our schools’ [8]. In her books The Dialectic of Freedom and Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education, the Arts and Social Change she explores the possibilities of how encounters with the arts can be used as a vessel for disintegrating misconceptions and judgments between people through imagining unfamiliar feelings and realities of others. Within this, the arts or artists do not necessarily provide solutions to the challenges of multiculturalism. Rather, as Greene articulates, ‘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 [9].’ An individual’s ability to develop their imaginative capacity requires them to be more than a passive onlooker of art -they need to be willing to critically engage, reflect and imagine with the arts. Such critical engagement is enhanced by social interaction with others where concepts, ideas and beliefs can be explored, expressed and integrated into new collective forms through the creative process. To be continued!
Below is a selection of five key texts which underpin both my practice as a children’s curator and current PhD research. There are many other books and papers that could have made it onto the list. I have written more detailed descriptions of the theories explored in Tools for Conviviality and Simon Nicholson’s Loose Parts within previous blog posts.
Reggio Children & Harvard Project Zero (2005). Making Learning Visible: Children as Individual and Group Learners, Reggio Children Publications.
This text introduced me to the tool of pedagogical documentation – a process that seeks to make children’s and adult’s learning visible – and how this can be used as a tool for learning and change in education settings. Reggio Children & Project Zero demonstrate how theory and practice are not opposites but two mechanisms that are in need of being in continuous dialogue with one another. The application of this approach to gallery learning can be used to support equitable and dialogic conversations between curators, artists and wider communities through processes that allows for young children to participate in the construction of the spaces, activities and beliefs that shape their lives.
John Dewey (1934). Art as Experience, Minton, Balch & Company.
Art as Experience articulates and explores the deep and enduring connection between art and lived human experience. Art is understood as an intense expression and meaningful transfiguration of life, rather than the reduction of artworks to commodities and objects. Art needs to be perceived as both an expression of the human who created it and within the personal experience of the viewer. This text taught me about the necessity to view art as a process, and not just a product when constructing learning experiences for children in art museums.
Hillevi Lenz Taguchi (2010). Going Beyond the Theory/Practice Divide in Early Childhood Education: Introducing an Intra-Active Pedagogy. Oxon:Routledge.
Lenz Taguchi applies Karan Barad’s theory of ‘intra-action’ along with Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas of multiplicity, potentiality and immanence to early childhood education. This taught me two key ideas. Firstly, that agency emerges from children’s meeting with non-human entities such as materials, the gallery space and curatorial discourse. The agency of human and the agency of things do not exist independently but rather materialises from their coming-together. Secondly, this text discusses the criticality of non-hierarchical practices that break down the divide between matter/discourse, theory/practice and adult/child.
Ivan Illich (1973). Tools for Conviviality, Harper & Row Publishers.
In this epilogue to the industrial age, Illich critiques the advancement of mass industrial and mechanical production as having removed people’s free use of their natural abilities. This has come at the expense of human connection with themselves and others in the community. Illich iterates the need for people to utilise ‘convival’ tools that allow people the ability to express meaning through making and action. The question this then poses gallery educators is: how we can design experiences for children that allow for a balance of collaborative knowledge production alongside the transmission of existent cultural knowledge and values? Both individual creative knowledge production and the transmission of existent knowledge are important and the equilibrium between them is continuously changing. Continuous critical reflection is needed to evaluate this balance in different contexts.
Simon Nicholson (1971). ‘How NOT to cheat children – The theory of loose parts.’Landscape Architecture, 62, 30-34.
According to Nicholson, the cultural elite have fed us a social lie in convincing us that the construction of any part of an environment or artwork is so complex and difficult that it can only be undertaken by a gifted few people who have university degrees and artistic expertise. This misconception has led people to believe that creativity is for a select few ‘geniuses’ and the rest of us are compelled to be mere consumers of the music, art, poems, buildings and ideas that these people create.
In this article Nicholson presents 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. These ‘loose parts’ permit children, alongside adult artists and architects, to co-produce art, space and culture. Loose parts theory articulates the need to incorporate flexibility in early year’s gallery education practice that allows children to have meaningful experiences that are in alignment with their beliefs, interests and curiosities. The theory does raise complex ethical questions around authorship and what part of an environment or artwork can be constructed by artists/curators and what parts can be done by children.
In 1972 architect Simon Nicholson, the son of artists Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, presented 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. These ‘loose parts’ permit children to become co-producers of art, space and culture alongside adult artists and architects.
Children play in an atelier at the Centro Malaguzzi in Reggio Emilia, Italy. Image credit: http://www.reggiochildren.it
According to Nicholson, the cultural elite have created and maintained a social lie. They have convinced us that the construction of any part of an environment or artwork is so complex and difficult that it can only be undertaken by a gifted few people who have university degrees and highly specialised artistic expertise. This misconception has led people to believe that creativity is for a select few ‘geniuses’ and the rest of us are compelled to be mere consumers of the music, art, poems, buildings and ideas that these people create. This is particularly prevalent in the lives of young children.
This idea defies itself in two ways. Firstly, there is no evidence that says that some humans are born creative and some not. Secondly, there is a huge body of evidence that supports the idea that all children enjoy experimenting, discovering and playing with materials. Therefore all humans are creative and are able to be creatively empowered through their connection with open-ended and flexible variables such as clay, blocks, rocks and flowers. These materials can be adapted, moved, designed, recombined, tinkered with and taken apart allowing for children to partake in the construction of the spaces and activities in which they live and play. The more flexible the materials are, the more scope for deep creative exploration by children and the more likely they will remain absorbed in creative play. Similar to the Reggio Emilia and Steiner early childhood philosophies, Nicholson’s theory is founded on the belief that children are competent, creative and capable beings who are able to participate in the construction of the ideas, believes and spaces they inhabit.
Children are able to select what materials they use and how they are appropriated, allowing for the development of their own hypothesis around their play which can be tested through self-assessed means, for example when building a robot a child may assess its success against whether or not the robot moves. The crucial element within the environments is the user’s ability to adapt the materials in a large variety of ways, allowing for deep creative experimentation. The emphasis then moves to a more discovery-based learning experience in which inquiry and children’s self-led research are valued over more transmission forms of learning. It is through this that the environment takes on the form of a science laboratory.
‘In any environment, both the degree of inventiveness and creativity, and the possibility of discovery, are directly proportional to the number and kind of variables in it.” Simon Nicholson
The focus of the theory of loose parts is on the material and spatial qualities of space. A crucial aspect of children’s learning which Nicholson does not cover is the social milieu needed to support and deepen creative play. It is not merely a matter of putting a large volume of ‘loose parts’ in a room and letting children go wild, the social system put in place by adults is fundamental in creating successful children’s learning experiences. Educators must guide and challenge children’s thinking and be responsive to new discoveries, new ideas and new collaborative thinking strategies developed by children.
Olafur Eliasson’s The Cubic Structural Evolution Project (2010). Image credit: Queensland Art Gallery
Whilst Nicholson discusses loose parts predominantly in relation to the construction of playgrounds and school environments, this theory can also be applied to the construction of artworks and immersive environments in art galleries. When doing so, it raises fundamental questions about how culture and cultural values are constructed in art galleries. For example, what parts of an environment or an artwork can be done by an artist or curator and what parts can be done by children? Nicholson’s believed that this balance needs to be tipped towards the child however in doing so, is it then undermining the role and expertise of the artist and curator? Does this then also undermine the artist’s ‘authorship’ of the artwork? These key ethical considerations are deserving of critical reflection and debate when developing early years gallery practice. If we forego the presence of loose parts in order to stay true to an artists already developed artist’s process, will this then come at the compromise of meaningful experiences for children?
The beautiful Roma Patel and I have constructed a giant ‘Ball Run’ play space that we will present at the Lakeside International Children’s Theatre and Dance Festival (June 4 & 5 2016). Drawing upon Nicholson’s theory, children will design and construct their own runs using quirky and recycled materials (prototype video below). The space will also feature a dedicated baby and toddler area. Lakeside Arts Centre, University of Nottingham. FREE, recommended for 0-15 year olds, 12.00pm – 5.00pm. Further details here.
Art. Play. Children. Pedagogy. 