The year gone by and the year ahead

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

The academic/non-academic gap in children’s art education

In this post I consider the gap between academics/non-academics in children’s art education. A contestable claim but something I believe is worthy of further discussion. I reflect upon my experience of moving from working as a full-time learning curator in an art museum to full-time PhD researcher and what I have learnt along the way. 

Before starting my PhD, I thought I knew a reasonable amount about early childhood education theory. I had studied an array of undergraduate education subjects at university, worked with researchers in art museums, attended the occasional conference and regularly read new books and articles that came recommended from colleagues. Upon commencing the PhD I very quickly realised that there was an entire universe of theories and ideas that I had never encountered. I love this part of research, there is something so motivating about seeing the world as a place where so much more can be discovered and created.

At the same time, the more conferences I attended, the more books I read and conversations I had with academics, the more I realised that so much academic research is read and used by other researchers and simply does not make it into a form that other non-academics can use in their everyday practices with children. On the flip side, so much amazing knowledge and expertise produced and held by people working directly with children never makes it into the academy. Instead this sort of knowledge is produced and shared through feelings and non-verbal actions.

Possibly the most pronounced example of the gap between academics and non-academics I have come across is in relation to new materialism. I find the ideas of Karen Barad, Jane Bennett and Deleuze & Guattari really interesting and highly applicable to children’s art education. Especially in relation to the consideration given to the role of matter such as artworks, materials and tools in the production of knowledge. At the same time, it has taken nearly 12 months of continuous reading, thinking and discussions to begin to really understand the key terms underpinning new materialism. Perhaps I am just a slow thinker or perhaps these are really complex ideas that are difficult to explore in everyday practices. I also find it slightly ironic that much of the language used in new materialism (i.e. assemblage theory, intra-activity, affect, onto-epistemology) is quite inaccessible to that vast majority of people working directly with young children. At the same time, what is fundamentally being considered is the production of knowledge that is not solely based on language.

I wonder how such a gap in the knowledge of academics/non-academics has formed. Perhaps the ‘output’ of academic research (journal articles, academics texts) is not in a form that others working directly with children can use? Or when toolkits or resources are produced for practitioners the research has not been intertwined with practice enough to allow it be easily applied.

Without question there are teams of researchers and practitioners working brilliantly together to produce rich, multifaceted ways of thinking and practices with children. There are also people who approach both practice and research as interconnected fields through working as ‘practitioner-researchers’ – a hybrid that offers a myriad of possibilities for universities, practical industries and beyond.

I think I will spend the rest of my career exploring the grey area of being a practitioner, a researcher, an artist, an educator and a curator. I wonder how I will continue to explore and combine these in different professional situations. Something I find so exciting about the process of pedagogical documentation is its ability to intertwine theory and practice in everyday contexts, breaking down the binaries such as teaching/learning, adults/child, individual/group and research/practice. I wonder how this process could be further used in art museums to bring together academics and non-academics.