Postdevelopmental Approaches to Childhood Art 9781350042544, 9781350042575, 9781350042568

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Postdevelopmental Approaches to Childhood Art

Also available from Bloomsbury Early Childhood Theories and Contemporary Issues, Mine Conkbayir and Christine Pascal Digital Technologies in Early Childhood Art, Mona Sakr

Postdevelopmental Approaches to Childhood Art Edited by Mona Sakr and Jayne Osgood

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 This paperback edition published in 2020 Copyright © Mona Sakr, Jayne Osgood and Contributors, 2019 Mona Sakr, Jayne Osgood and Contributors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work. Cover design: Adriana Brioso Cover image: Portishead1 © Getty Images All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any thirdparty websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 9 78-1-3500-4254-4 PB: 978-1-35 01-8331-5 ePDF: 9 78-1-3500-4256-8 eBook: 9 78-1-3500-4255-1 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of Figures Notes on Contributors Introduction  Mona Sakr and Jayne Osgood 1 Art-making as Activity: How Children Make Meaning through Art  Heather Malin 2 Childhood Art in Community Education: Postdevelopmental Learning through Feminist Leadership, Diversity and Pedagogic Invention  Linda Knight 3 Children’s Photography as Sense-making  Mona Sakr 4 Holly Banister: A Social Incentive Account of Exceptional Drawing Ability  Paul Duncum 5 Reconceptualizing Early Childhood Art: The Lessons of Intergenerational Art Curricula and Postdevelopmental Theorizing  Rachel Heydon and Lisa-Marie Gagliardi 6 ‘You Can’t Separate It from Anything’: Glitter’s Doings as Materialized Figurations of Childhood (and) Art  Jayne Osgood 7 ‘So You Will Remember Me as an Artist’: Art-making as a Way of Being in Early Childhood  Christine Marmé Thompson 8 ‘It Might Get Messy, or Not Be Right’: Scribble as Postdevelopmental Art  Victoria de Rijke 9 ‘We Need It Loud!’: Listening to Preschool Making from Mediated and Materialist Perspectives  Karen Wohlwend, Anna Keune and Kylie Peppler 10 Thinking Childhood Art with Care in an Ecology of Practices  Laura Trafí-Prats Index

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Figures 3.1 Shoes 3.2 Spilling 3.3 Diagonal lines 3.4 Moving through the hallway 3.5 Washing machine 3.6 Sliding down the radiator 3.7 Vacuum cleaner 4.1 Drawn from observation at 8.2 years in pencil 4.2 Drawn from a picture book at 8.7 years in pencil (34 × 41 cms) 4.3 Drawn from life in about one minute at 7.7 years using Conte crayon 4.4 Drawn from imagination in pencil at 8.3 years 4.5 Drawn from imagination with fountain pen with an elaborate narrative element at 8.3 years 4.6 Drawn from imagination at 8 years 4.7 Drawn from a poster with biro at 9 years (25 × 45 cms) 4.8 Drawn from imagination with felt pen at 9 years 5.1 Relief print 5.2 Engraving imported into BookCreator app plus text 5.3 ChatterPix animated collage 5.4 Painting like Georgia O’Keefe 5.5 Stencil print with annotation in portfolio 5.6 Seasick self-portrait 5.7 Still from tissue paper dream painting video 5.8 ChatterPix self-portrait 6.1 Noticing… 6.2 Deep observation… 6.3 Glittering… 6.4. & 6.5 Glittering Stretchmarks by Shakeel 8.1 Scribble by one of Klein’s child patients, dated 25 June 1925 8.2 Example of scribble gifted in the playground. Felt-tip pen. Age nine. February 2018

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8.3 Wall action scribble in chalk. Age five. February 2018 8.4 Spectators in front of Cy Twombly’s Untitled and Bacchus (Museum of Metropolitan Art and Tate Gallery) 8.5 Scribble produced at home. Felt-tip pen. Age two 8.6 Scribble inspired by Big Hero6. Felt-tip pen. Age six 8.7 Scribble/manga-inspired drawing. Pencil and felt-tip pen. Age ten. February 2018 9.1 Illustration of sense-making with buzzers and maintenance of modal possibilities 9.2 After Effects screenshots flattened for print to show the visualization of audio materiality 10.1 Practice with the grass patch. Photo credit: Laura Trafí-Prats 10.2 Material play with dandelions. Photo credit: Laura Trafí-Prats 10.3 The Death-Butterfly by Ingrid Caudill-Trafí (seven years old), April 2017, reproduced with kind permission of the artist 10.4 The life cycle of a dandelion, by Ingrid Caudill-Trafí (seven years old), August 2017, reproduced with kind permission of the artist

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Contributors Paul Duncum Paul Duncum is Professor of Art and Visual Culture Education, School of Art and Design, University of Illinois, Champaign. His 1987 doctorate was entitled ‘Middle Childhood Spontaneous Drawing from a Cultural Perspective’. His work has been translated into nine languages. Lisa-Marie Gagliardi Lisa-Marie is an early childhood educator, teacher educator and PhD candidate at Western University. In her PhD research, Lisa-Marie is experimenting with creative feminist new-materialist research methodologies. Applying postfoundational theories to early childhood education contexts, this research stays with the complexities and the ethical tensions of our relations with other species and materials. Rachel Heydon Rachel Heydon is Professor, Faculty of Education, Western University, Canada. Her work focuses on intergenerational learning, multimodal literacy and pedagogy, art as literacy and early childhood curriculum. Her books include the forthcoming Why Multimodal Literacy Matters: (Re)conceptualizing Literacy and Wellbeing through Singing-infused Multimodal, Intergenerational Curricula (with Susan O’Neill) (Sense Publishers). Anna Keune Anna Keune is Graduate Research Assistant in the Creativity Labs at Indiana University. With a background in design, Anna has experience with panEuropean research projects and participatory design of digital learning tools with educators and youth across Europe and India. Her interests are maker culture and materials for learning. Linda Knight Social activism underpins Linda’s work on pedagogic sites, radical pedagogies and feminist investigations of the academy. Linda creates art as a social practice to explore affect, movement and power and the ways that art, philosophy and theory help establish critical, pedagogic and methodologic practices. Linda has

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exhibited in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United States and the UK, and her work is held in private collections globally. Linda is currently thinking with feminist materialist perspectives to create and experiment with counterlogics in early childhood education. Linda is in the School of Early Childhood at Queensland University of Technology. Heather Malin Heather Malin holds a PhD in art education from Stanford University, where her research focused on the role of art-making in children’s learning and development. Prior to her current career in research, she taught art, managed arts education programmes and trained new teachers to integrate art into their curriculum. Jayne Osgood Jayne Osgood is Professor of Education and has recently joined the Centre for Education Research and Scholarship at Middlesex University. Her present methodologies and research practices are framed by new material feminism and post-humanism. She is developing transdisciplinary theoretical approaches that maintain a concern with issues of social justice and which critically engage with early childhood policy, curricular frameworks and pedagogical approaches. Through her work she seeks to trouble and extend understandings of the workforce, families, ‘the child’ and ‘childhood’ in early years contexts. Kylie Peppler Kylie Peppler is Associate Professor of Learning Sciences and Director of the Creativity Labs at Indiana University. An artist by training, she engages in research that focuses on the intersection of arts, media, new technologies and out-of-school learning. Find out more at kpeppler.com. Victoria de Rijke Victoria de Rijke is Associate Professor and CERS Research Director in the Department of Education at Middlesex University, London. She has over twenty years’ experience working with primary school teachers and children, including active engagement with artist residencies, consultancies and research projects in the creative arts, producing teaching and learning resources online. Victoria writes and presents on the visual or performing arts and children’s literature and is co-chief editor of the international research journal Children’s Literature in Education.

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Mona Sakr Mona Sakr is Senior Lecturer in Education and Early Childhood at Middlesex University. Her research focuses on digital technologies in childhood, with a particular focus on how the digital reshapes creative, playful and art-making experiences for young children. Currently, she is researching Early Years (EY) practitioners’ use of video to engage in reflective interpretations of children’s artmaking and how they perceive their role in facilitating creativity and playfulness among children. Previous research projects include a phenomenological analysis of children’s experiences of digital augmentation during history learning, observation studies of collective digital art-making in the EY classroom and a case study of parent–child art-making with different technologies in the home. Christine Marmé Thompson Christine Marmé Thompson is Professor of Art Education at Penn State University where she teaches graduate courses on children’s art and cultures of childhood and supervises beginning art teachers in Saturday Art Classes for children. Her research focuses on early childhood art education in the social contexts of classrooms and the assemblage of influences that shape drawing events. Recent publications appear in the journals Qualitative Inquiry, Arts Education Policy Review, Visual Inquiry and Studies in Art Education, and two NAEA anthologies, Teaching and Learning Emergent Research Methodologies in Art Education and Inquiry in Action: Paradigms, Methodologies, and Perspectives in Art Education Research. Laura Trafí-Prats Laura Trafí-Prats is Senior Lecturer at the School of Childhood, Youth and Education Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University, former Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, and Lecturer at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She is a member of the Children and Childhood Research Group at MMU’s Education and Social Research Institute. Her research interests are diverse and include the ecologies of children’s art, proximal ethnographies in contexts of parenting, and young people’s cultural and activist practices in the city. Some publications have appeared in journals like Studies in Art Education, Qualitative Inquiry, Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy and Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies. Karen Wohlwend Karen E. Wohlwend is Associate Professor of Literacy, Culture and Language Education at Indiana University, Bloomington. She re-conceptualizes young children’s play as an embodied literacy, produced with popular media and digital technologies in online spaces and childhood cultures.

Introduction Mona Sakr and Jayne Osgood

Welcome In this chapter, we offer an overview of what to expect from this edited collection. Firstly, we outline the overarching aims of the book, explaining why postdevelopmental approaches are needed to challenge the dominance of the developmental paradigm in studies of childhood art. We grapple with the term ‘postdevelopmental’ and consider how it might remain meaningful despite bringing together a wide range of disparate perspectives on childhood art, sometimes constituting opposing epistemological commitments. Secondly, we offer a brief overview of the individual chapters in the book and the contribution they make. Finally, we consider how the chapters relate to each other, the forces and flows that reverberate across the book and present generative strands of enquiry. Together, these chapters invite the reader to consider the expansive possibilities that are available to (re-)conceptualize childhood art and which therefore hold the potential for adults (educators, parents, carers) to engage with children and art differently.

Challenging the dominance of the developmental paradigm Developmental psychology is the dominant lens through which childhood art is understood in educational contexts. While projective drawing measures (that make quantitative links between what children draw and their emotional, social and cognitive development) have been widely discredited, the idea that childhood art unfolds according to a predictable series of stages remains the

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basis for the majority of arts curricula and pedagogical approaches to art-making across the Western world. Within this paradigm, educators see children’s art-making according to a set of developmental milestones that ultimately lead to the achievement of visual realism (Duncum, 1999, 2010). This development is also seen chiefly in relation to other patterns of development thought to be more important in the context of academic outcomes. For example, children’s art-making is often understood in relation to emergent literacy so that a child’s drawing of closed shapes is primarily taken as an indicator of ‘writing-readiness’ (Wright, 2015). In seeing childhood art in this way, educators learn to tick off the developmental milestones that have been achieved and note others that have not yet been achieved and thereby constitute a ready-made set of ‘next steps’ for the child being observed. At the same time as childhood art is judged according to developmental tick lists, the developmental paradigm ensures that children’s art-making retains some of its mystique. As McClure (2011) argues, the paradigm presents children as imbued with ‘inherent creativity’; we hold onto the myth that children are able to access a well of inner creativity and self-expression that is no longer accessible to adults (Hawkins, 2002). Thus, there is a contradiction in how children are positioned within the dominant developmental paradigm; they are simultaneously lacking in skill and, when left to their own devices, capable of some kind of magical creativity. Developmental paradigms contribute to the marginalization of children who do not fit the norms that are inevitable within a developmental model (Burman, 2016; Cannella & Viuru, 2004). The everyday cruelties of the dominant developmental paradigm cannot be underestimated. The separation of children who are developing ‘normally’ from those who show ‘abnormal’ profiles of development reverberates across life courses and contexts. A commitment to social justice asks that we concern ourselves with the ‘everyday lived experiences of the oppressed, the silenced, and the lost and forgotten’ (St. Pierre, 2014, p. 7) rather than allowing these lived experiences to be occluded by normalizing tools and methods imposed from the outside. Taking up this commitment, postdevelopmental approaches focus on ‘diverse knowledges and ways of function (not simply those supported by Western interpretations of logic) and de-familiarizing what has been believed to be known about those who are younger’ (Cannella, 2010, p. 307). We recognize that the term ‘postdevelopmental’ is problematic. Firstly, it should be noted that it is not the same as ‘anti-developmental’. It is not within the remit of the book to argue that developmental categories and standards are incorrect or should not be applied in any context, ever. Secondly, the term ‘post’

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is problematic because it suggests a neat contrast and break between what comes before and what comes after. Of course, there is no single point in time in which there has been a shift from developmental to postdevelopmental thinking. As Osgood and Robsinson (2019) suggest, past, present and future ways of thinking are inevitably entangled and innovations are constantly in debt to what came before and even what will come after. In the postdevelopmental approaches explored in this book, we are aware of the many ways in which concepts that emerge from a developmentalist paradigm are taken as jumping-off points in theorizing alternative ways of exploring childhood art. Perhaps the most common developmentalist jumping-off point is the contribution of Vygotsky’s conceptualizations of childhood learning. Vygotskian perspectives are based on an assumption of the importance of development – and the assumption that development occurs according to a linear timeline – but they have also been fundamental in seeing beyond developmental categories. Vygotskian perspectives highlight the importance of the sociocultural context and the mediation of learning through material artefacts, and in this way they have contributed to the basis of various postdevelopmental ways of seeing, including materialist, multimodal and social incentive accounts. It is not our aim to dismiss all of the work that constitutes ‘developmental theory’ but instead to bring to the forefront other ways of being with children’s art-making and engaging with it. Certainly, ‘postdevelopmental’ in the title of this book does not come with the assumption that other ‘posts’ will be adopted across all chapters (e.g. poststructuralism, postmodernism and post-humanism). While some chapters engender these epistemological commitments, others do not and instead employ humanist qualitative methodologies that flow from their sociocultural theoretical framing in which human activity and agency remains at the centre of the research landscape, and social, cultural and material factors mediate activity, rather than being part of the entanglement of activity. With such diversity in ontology, epistemology and methodology, what is the argument for bringing these perspectives together in the same volume? Perhaps it is appropriate here to borrow Lather and St Pierre’s (2013) description of ‘a refusal space’ – a space ‘to think within and against the weight of such a context’ (p. 629). This book is a ‘refusal space’ positioned in/ against the context of the dominance of the developmental paradigms in early childhood education, but the ways in which the chapters and contributors refuse what is handed to them, the taken-for-granted, are far from singular. All of the chapters refuse, challenge and question the attachment within early childhood education thought, practice and research to the concept of

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‘development’. Chapters adopting a sociocultural theoretical framing do this by demonstrating the importance of context and move us away from a conceptualization of the child as ‘fixed, unilinear and timeless’ (Burman, 2008, p. 82). New materialist and post-humanist accounts do this by experimenting with art-making not as something that unfolds in the inner world of the child but as an unpredictable, rhizomatic network of activity involving non-human as well as human elements. This volume embodies nomad thought in that it ‘does not repose on identity; it rides difference’ (Massumi, 2013, pp. x–xi), experimenting with the generative potentials of inviting different, perhaps opposing, theoretical framings to the party. Ultimately, our aim is to engage with childhood art as an opportunity to open up rather than close down. As we watch children making art, we can attempt to capture or ‘trap’ what they are doing in a system that strongly emphasizes developmental milestones and charts; alternatively we can register the processes that we observe as an opening into other domains, layers and dimensions of existence. In discussing Steiner education – interestingly, a system that places grave importance on the notion of universal developmental sequences – Uhrmacher (1995) suggests that Steiner education is special in its emphasis on forging connections between the cosmic and the mundane. All of the authors in this book engage with childhood art as a portal to the cosmic, and as such, all are truly fascinated by children’s art-making. They engage wholeheartedly in ‘feeling forward’ (Ingold, 2013, p. 2), a process of ‘prising and opening and following where it leads’ (p. 7). Following from this, we engage with the power of little narratives – ‘forms of local knowledge’ (Dahlberg et al., 1999, p. 24) – as a way of unsettling the grand narrative of the developmentalism and its everyday inscription in schooling through developmental checklists and ‘next step’ forms of arts pedagogy. Through our noisy, messy ‘refusal space’ (Lather & St Pierre, 2013, p. 629), we aim to open up opportunities to ‘be-do-live something different’ (St Pierre, 2014, p. 5).

Chapter overview We have decided to present the chapters in this book in no particular order. We did not want to cut off points of connection between different perspectives by organizing the chapters according to broad theoretical perspectives such as sociocultural theory or new materialisms. We hope you agree that the lines of investigation and thought in this book go beyond these categories.

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Malin’s chapter positions art-making as an activity mediated by cultural and social factors. It investigates how children make meaning and become participants in and creators of culture, and how adults can support them to engage through art-making in the wider cultural context. Malin reports on observations of art classes for six- to eleven-year-olds as well as focus groups and individual interviews in which she asks children to describe the art-making process and what it means to them. Through these explorations, she considers how art-making acts as a means through which children (and indeed adults) form and transform conceptual understandings and engage in open-ended enquiry. Knight’s chapter presents community pedagogy as a space in which postdevelopmental ways of seeing can come to the fore and postdevelopmental pedagogy can be enacted. Knight offers accounts of her experiences of working as an artist, community educator and early childhood education scholar across various sites, from a travelling mobile printmaking studio to a large arts festival for babies and young children up to the age of eight years. Through these accounts, she engages with three forces: feminist leadership, diversity and pedagogic invention. By exploring these forces, she suggests that postdevelopmental approaches can manifest and find nourishment in community learning contexts. Sakr engages with a three-year-old child’s photographs of a home environment that is familiar to both the child and Sakr. She engages with these photos through the lens of sense-making (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) so that the photographs are taken as an invitation to make the familiar place of the home strange and new. Particular attention is paid to the sensory, somatic and affective dimensions of the experience of engaging with these photographs. Sakr asks the question ‘what do the photographs do?’ and moves away from the tendency in childhood research to focus instead on ‘what do the photographs tell us?’ or using photographs as a form of visual elicitation for verbal explanation. Duncum’s chapter presents a social incentive account of the drawings of an eight-year-old with exceptional drawing abilities that fall outside of the lines of expected developmental patterns. He shows how the eight-year-old Holly develops her drawing skills in response to the particular family and school context in which she finds herself. He argues that ‘considered in terms of environmental incentives, her development was not at all exceptional’. Through this line of reasoning, Duncum undoes part of the myth-making around inherent creativity and talent that characterizes the developmental paradigm – the idea that while the vast majority of children follow expected patterns of development, a few exceptional children, with innate talent, will be the outliers.

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Heydon and Gagliardi share observations of intergenerational art classes in which preschoolers and elders make art together. They draw on the concepts of ‘funds of knowledge’ and ‘funds of identity’ to understand what the children bring to these art classes. The authors share examples from the digital portfolios created by members of their class, which include photos, artwork, videos and other documents. The portfolios demonstrate the layers of meaning-making at work in the children’s art-making and the importance of the specific relationships in the class. Heydon and Gagliardi argue that in valuing funds of knowledge and funds of identity, we are compelled to develop broader curricula that offer space for children to negotiate what and how they learn. Osgood’s chapter attempts to break free from developmentalism by opening up possibilities within early childhood for adults to be open to the (k)not-known and not-yet-known about childhood entanglements with art. By pursuing diffractive lines of enquiry, the chapter explores some ruptures that allow ideas about children, materials and art to be rethought. Inspired by feminist new materialist philosophy, Osgood offers a conceptual and practical means to rematerialize the social and take seriously the agency of the material. The chapter works with glitter as materialized figuration, which allows for tracing, reconfiguring and generating debates about childhood that bring concerns with contemporary art, gender, capitalism, post-colonialism, the environment and activism into the frame. Osgood concludes by arguing that stretching our encounters with everyday, seemingly habitual and mundane matter, such as glitter, requires a heightened ethics of responsibility in research, pedagogical and world-making practices. Thompson’s chapter more explicitly tackles the project of dissolving the boundaries between child and adult art-making. In her vignettes of children engaged in drawing, she focuses on the drawing as a process, which unfolds through ‘lines of flight’. Children’s art-making is thus presented as a rhizomatic, diffractive and improvisational process that is both ‘unpredictable and astonishing’. The accounts offered by Thompson stem from experiences in pedagogical sites in which children and adults together determine what will be learned and how the learning will unfold. In the chapter by Wohlwend, Keune and Peppler, a moment of playful making, involving experiments with sound at an impromptu art table in a preschool classroom, is explored. Through multimodal and materialist perspectives, the authors examine the ‘complex interplay of purposes, properties and possibilities’ in the children’s art-making. The authors illustrate how to ‘listen and listen again’ when it comes to children’s art-making, to return to a point of fascination and to see a process as a network of human and non-human elements.

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De Rijke’s chapter is an exploration of children’s scribble. She examines what different thinkers from different disciplines and practices, including artists and psychoanalysts, have had to say about the process of scribble. She shares examples of scribble and develops scribble as a metaphor through which we can engage with the open-endedness and complexity of children’s art-making more generally, since ‘scribble escapes through the holes in the sieve’ and remains a ‘riddle’ that we might want to refrain from attempting to solve in order to maintain our fascination with it. Trafi-Prats explores the relationship between art and care in the home through stories of her own family – her daughter Ingrid and her husband Eric. She is inspired by feminist artists who, on becoming mothers, have troubled the exclusivity of the studio space in art-making and sought to investigate the space for art-making in the context of caring in the home. Through stories of Ingrid’s play of a video game with her father, the family’s investigations of a grass patch in the local community and analysis of two of Ingrid’s drawings, Trafi-Prats draws attention to the role of children’s art-making in imagining the Chthulucene, as presented by Donna Haraway – a world in which the non-human stories come to matter and humans are seen as growing and moving with materials rather than exploiting them.

Flows and forces While the chapters are clearly framed by diverse epistemological frameworks, there is nevertheless a set of identifiable ideas that resurface across the volume. Each author engages with the extraordinariness of the everyday and seeks to challenge habitual thoughts and practices and, in doing so, undo some of common-sense logic that frames developmentalism. In different ways the authors share commitments to dismantle, problematize and reimagine ideas about childhood and art. Each author recognizes that knowledge and knowledge production are never objective and that there are no universal truths about children, childhood or art. By investing in projects that question that which seems obvious and reasonable, the authors in this book each ask difficult, unsettling and provocative questions. These questions are addressed in order to explore the generative possibilities that become available when we allow ourselves to think beyond dominant paradigmatic ways of ‘knowing’ the child. We draw attention to the ideas that resurface below in order to begin to draw some rough borders around the contribution that the chapters in this book collectively make.

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Fascination The authors in this book all allow themselves to be fascinated by children’s artmaking and all invite readers to be equally attentive. Fascination means taking a step back from the desire to construct coherent arguments or convincing generalizations and instead to explore the way that children’s art-making affects us. This is not as easy as it sounds. It involves stopping to ‘listen and listen again’ (Wohlwend, Keune and Peppler), to look and look again, and also to feel and feel again. It means pressing a pause button as we observe children’s art-making before the developmental categories and milestones come to our mind, as they are almost sure to if we have been educated and trained within a Western educational system. It means investing in the conscious process of opening up how we think and feel about children’s art-making and being prepared to work with the uncomfortable ruptures (Osgood). Sakr’s chapter demonstrates how we can be deeply affected by children’s artwork and Thompson positions children’s drawing as ‘unpredictable and astonishing’. De Rijke practises refraining from the ‘pursuit of a single, coherent argument’ and Heydon and Gagliardi demonstrate how problem-seeking might be more important than problem-solving. These approaches – the desire to prioritize fascination as we observe – require us to live in the moment, to be in the moment and to think in the moment, and as Taggart (2015) notes, being in the moment and cultivating an ‘intent watchfulness’ can be far more physically and emotionally draining than simply relying on developmental charts and models that we know will have credibility in the wider discourses that surround childhood. Trafi-Prats takes this further by examining the ever-becoming and potentially uncomfortable relationship between art and care that arises in the context of parenting in the home.

Undoing the distinction between child and adult art Some of the chapters in this book explicitly seek to problematize and undo the distinction between child and adult art-making while all others do this implicitly. The developmental paradigm positions children as both de-skilled (and therefore in need of prescriptive curricula that will ensure upskilling) and inherently creative, and therefore needing to be just left ‘to their own devices’ (McClure, 2011). As an alternative to this contradictory framing of childhood art, the sociocultural perspectives presented in this book illustrate how children are cultural participants and producers just as adults are (Duncum, Malin, Heydon and Gagliardi). Duncum in particular shows us that what might look exceptional,

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though fascinating and wonderful, isn’t exceptional at all. Through a careful consideration of context, we can unpick what children are bringing – their funds of knowledge and funds of identity – and in doing this, we challenge ourselves to develop pedagogies that draw children and adults together in negotiating and deciding what and how to learn. Other perspectives, such as Thompson’s conceptualization of the art-making process as rhizomatic and diffractive and Trafi-Prats’s emphasis on human children moving with materials in their artmaking rather than exploiting them, show us how the processes of art-making, whether carried out by children or adults, are a spontaneous dialogue between the child and various other elements in the socio-material landscape. Osgood pursues this further through diffractive lines of enquiry that start with glitter but venture into capitalism, contemporary art, the environment, activism, pedagogy and so on. Collectively, the chapters demonstrate the absurdity of thinking about childhood art as a ‘world apart’; all chapters present childhood art as fully situated, constantly becoming and in ever-changing relationships with the wider world.

Alternative spaces Across the chapters, we see how engaging with art-making in alternative spaces can help us to build postdevelopmental ways of seeing. Knight examines pedagogic invention in the context of community learning, showing how these informal educational contexts can be fertile spaces for the emergence of other pedagogic approaches that do not place developmental milestones at the centre of things. Trafi-Prats explores how the concept of the ‘artist residency in the home’ explored by the contemporary artist Lenka Clayton opens up new ways of being in the moment in relationship to childhood art and remaining curious and experimental when making and interacting with children. Similarly, the portfolios from the intergenerational art class described by Heydon and Gagliardi demonstrate the importance of relationships and identity, beyond developmental categories, perhaps because this art class itself is a prioritization of relationships, while the space of mainstream schooling is too often limited to a place narrowly focused on development. Alternative spaces need not always be particular places. De Rijke shows us how a particular form within children’s art-making – ‘scribble’ – can be its own alternative site and can invoke the need for other ways of seeing. As de Rijke notes, ‘scribble escapes through holes in a sieve’, but as we follow it through the holes, we realize how little can actually be contained in the sieve at all. If we want to explore postdevelopmental approaches,

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a good starting point seems to be to find the places where the norms refuse to apply in a neat way or pedagogical sites where they can be ignored altogether.

Somatic, sensory, multimodal, materialist As we undo the dominance of the developmental paradigm, other grand narratives come unstuck. The chapters in this book displace the dominance of the mind over body, intellectual accounts over sensory experiences, linguistic explanation over multimodal interaction, and human agency over the more than human landscape in which processes unfold. Wohlwend, Keune and Peppler discuss the ‘complex interplay of purposes and possibilities’ at the preschool making table, showing the affective forces invoked through the non-human elements at work in this making table. Sakr discusses ‘thing-power’ in the photographs of a three-year-old child, as does Osgood in her application of feminist new materialist philosophy to explorations of glitter in childhood and art. Trafi-Prats introduces us to the relevance of Donna Haraway’s imagining of the Chthulucene in which non-human stories come to matter; in relation to childhood art, this notion works to decentre the child and draw attention to the entanglements that comprise art-making. This collection invites the reader to imagine other ways in which to encounter children, childhood and art. The aim is to recognize the endless possibilities that are available and that which might act to set children (and for that matter educators and parents) free from the constraints of developmentalist logic. Breaking free from habitual assumptions, and dominant modes of thinking about and doing childhood art, holds enormous generative potential. Bringing together this eclectic collection of postdevelopmental approaches to the study of childhood art demonstrates that other ways of knowing, which are less certain and deterministic than developmentalism, are desperately needed. This book represents an important space for other knowledges about children to be generated, to find expression and so offer other perspectives to inform established debates about contemporary childhood.

References Burman, E. (2008). Developments: Child, image, nation. East Sussex: Routledge. Burman, E. (2016). Deconstructing developmental psychology. East Sussex: Routledge. Cannella, G. (2010). History of early childhood curriculum. In C. Kridel (Ed.), Encyclopedia of curriculum studies (Vol. 1, pp. 306–308). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications Inc.

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Cannella, G., & Viruru, R. (2004). Childhood and postcolonization: Power, education, and contemporary practice. New York, NY: Routledge. Dahlberg, G., Moss, P., & Pence, A. R. (1999). Beyond quality in early childhood education and care: Postmodern perspectives. Levittown, PA: Taylor and Francis. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1980 [1987]). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia, 2. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Duncum, P. (1999). A multiple pathways/multiple endpoints model of graphic development. Visual Arts Research, 25(2), 38–47. Duncum, P. (2010). Seven principles for visual culture education. Art Education, 63(1), 6–10. Hawkins, B. (2002). Children’s drawing, self expression, identity and the imagination. International Journal of Art & Design Education, 21(3), 209–219. Ingold, T. (2013). Making: Anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. London: Routledge. Lather, P., & St. Pierre, E. A. (2013). Post-qualitative research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26(6), 629–633. Massumi, B. (2013). Foreword. In G. Deleuze & F. Guattari (Eds.), A thousand plateaus (originally published 1987). London: Bloomsbury. McClure, M. (2011). Child as totem: Redressing the myth of inherent creativity in early childhood. Studies in Art Education, 52(2), 127–141. Osgood, J., & Robinson, K. (2019). Feminists researching gendered childhoods: Generative entanglements. London: Bloomsbury. St. Pierre, E. A. (2014). A brief and personal history of post qualitative research: Toward ‘post inquiry’. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 30(2), 2–19. Taggart, G. (2015). Sustaining care: Cultivating mindful practice in early years professional development. Early Years, 35(4), 381–393. Uhrmacher, P. B. (1995). Uncommon schooling: A historical look at Rudolf Steiner, anthroposophy, and Waldorf education. Curriculum Inquiry, 25(4), 381–406. Wright, S. (2015). Children, meaning-making and the arts. Frenchs Forest, NSW: Pearson Higher Education AU.

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Art-making as Activity: How Children Make Meaning through Art Heather Malin

Children making art are, very simply put, engaging in an activity. To get beyond the traditional understanding of childhood artistic development, we can unpack this simple idea: What does it mean to engage in activity? What sort of activity is art-making? How does this activity relate to child development? In psychological theory, activity is a sociocultural concept – it is how individuals interact with and connect to the physical and social world, how they learn and change through that interaction, and how the world is transformed through the individual’s participation. This chapter delves into these questions about artmaking as a sociocultural activity to explore what can be learned about children’s artistic development by observing the act of art-making rather than looking at completed art objects. The specific framework I will be using in this chapter is a family of theories that go under the umbrella name of sociocultural learning theory (SCL). By looking at children’s art-making through the SCL frame, we see how children make meaning and become participants in the creation of culture and society, and how adults can support them as they do. These theories as applied to studying children’s art-making are a departure from developmental perspectives, which track changes in children’s artworks as evidence of the individual child’s cognitive development (e.g. Golomb, 1999, 2004; Lowenfeld, 1947). This development is observed in how children use marks to represent the world, from pre-representational scribbles in early childhood to schematic shapes and increasingly differentiated details such as articulated limbs and decorated clothing. The developmental research shows that children use art to represent their experiences in the world and do so with greater detail as they grow older. What is not examined in this line of research is the role that art-making plays as an interaction between the individual child

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and the social and cultural world. Art-making is a way to make meaning; it is a way that we can make sense of our experiences and make connections between our inner lives and the world around us. By using a sociocultural, rather than developmental, theoretical framework to examine children’s art-making, we can have greater insight into questions about what art-making means to children and how it relates to their developing capacity to connect with and contribute to their world.

Sociocultural learning theories The origin of SLT is generally attributed to Vygotsky (1978), who argued that learning is a social process, and cognitive development occurs in children’s active and inquisitive interaction with their environment. Vygotsky’s work was driven by the desire to liberate human cognitive processes from the confines of the individual’s mind and place them in a social context. He observed children engaged in activity and noticed how they construct knowledge and meaning through their active engagement with the social and physical world. In addition to his work on SCL, Vygotsky also developed theory about imagination, creativity and the arts that reflect his social development theories. He argued that art-making is a social activity in that it reflects society. He also argued that art-making offers a way for people to contribute to human progress through imaginative activity, which draws on lived experiences but expands on reality by combining disparate experiences. By creating objects based on imaginative activity, he argued, artists further expand on the experiences and perspective of others as they introduce new ideas into the world (Lindqvist, 2003; Vygotsky, 1971, 2004). Numerous theorists branched off from Vygotsky’s theories of sociocultural development. Here, I discuss two of these branches: activity theory and the theory of communities of practice because these are most relevant to informing our observations of children’s art-making (e.g. Engeström, 1993; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998). These theories put the focus on how the individual’s participation in social and cultural activity shapes both the individual and the context. These two theories explain how activity, such as art-making, occurs in a context, such as the art world or an elementary school classroom, and in a transformative relationship with the context, such as when an artist changes how we understand something in the world by making art about it.

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Learning as participation in cultural practice and activity Sociocultural learning theories do not isolate learning in formal educational settings, arguing instead that it is the process of engaging in everyday activities (Lave, 1993). These theories define learning as participation in social or cultural practice that results in change to both the participant and the context (Lave & Wenger, 1991). This learning occurs in ‘communities of practice’ (CoP) in which people engage in a shared practice (such as art-making) and learn from each other. In this sense, both the community and the individual are learners, as both the individual participant and the practice of the community are transformed through the participation of each member. This indicates a shift in the meaning of knowledge as well as learning. It is the difference ‘between a view of knowledge as a collection of real entities, located in heads, and of learning as a process of internalizing them, versus a view of knowing and learning as engagement in changing processes of human activity’ (Lave, 1993, p. 12). Newcomers to a community of practice learn the existing ideas and practices of the community but also become participants in its ongoing negotiation and evolution. When learning refers to participation in a cultural practice or activity, the learner alters the practice and the context through their participation. The second SCL theory examined in this chapter is activity theory, as it is described by Engeström (1993). Activity theory is similar to CoP theory but focuses on the activity that occurs in the context of an activity system. In an activity system, the learner is a person who uses instruments or artefacts (tools, language, media) to act upon some object of interest, for example, by trying to solve a problem, reflect on an experience or elaborate an idea (Engeström, 1993). The model of an activity system is a triangle (based on Vygotsky’s mediated action triangle model; (Vygotsky, 1978), with subject, tools and object at the corners of the triangle, and the activity of the subject on the object using the tools is in the centre of the triangle. In this chapter, this model is applied to children’s art-making so that instead of looking at children’s art products as the ‘object’, we examine a system of activity with children as the ‘subjects’, art media and products as the ‘tools’, and the social/cultural world as the ‘object’ that children act on through their art-making. The activity takes place in a ‘community,’ or social context, which is defined by ‘rules’ or ‘conventions’ of participation (Engeström, 2014). The unit of analysis in this model is the activity in the system and how young artists (the ‘subjects’) act on the social/cultural world through their art-making.

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Through the lenses of CoP and activity theory, people engaged in activity are participating in the creation and negotiation of meaning and knowledge in a social or cultural context. When a new member enters a community of practice, they not only learn the existing knowledge, structures and practices but also understand that the knowledge, structures and practices can be changed. Earlier constructivist theories argue that knowledge is constructed by the individual learner; however, these more recent SLTs place learners in a social and cultural context, where they not only construct knowledge in their own minds but contribute to the construction of new social and cultural knowledge. These theoretical perspectives, therefore, see the learner as transforming the social and cultural world. Through this theoretical lens, learning is engagement in activity that creates new social and cultural knowledge. This way of learning is not currently valued or applied in schools, yet it is critical to children’s success in and beyond the classroom. It is the way of learning that makes the difference between children who become consumers of culture and victims of their social and cultural circumstances and children who become people who can create or transform their communities, society and the world, by identifying the problems or issues that should be addressed and recognizing themselves as the people who can and should address them.

A framework for research on art making as a sociocultural learning activity In the next section I describe a framework that emerges when art-making is considered through the theoretical lenses of activity theory and CoP. This framework can be used to investigate children’s art-making as a social learning process, through which both the child and the social context are changed. It is made up of several related processes: forming and transforming ideas using mediums, finding and solving problems, enquiry and construction and coconstruction of meaning. By observing these processes, researchers can see how children learn and develop through their art-making and how they become full contributing participants in the creation and transformation of their world. Concept formation and transformation. Artists form and transform ideas by using art media to give shape to what is in their imagination. By giving ideas physical form in the world, they can be manipulated and altered, and the artist

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can see an idea in new ways as it physically changes shape. As Vygotsky said about the role of language in shaping ideas, art objects are symbolic forms that give structure to ideas ‘just as a mold gives shape to a substance’ (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 28). When artists give physical form to their imaginings, they can transform the idea in their imagination by changing the form, and in doing so, alter how they think and what they know. Without this process of giving ideas physical form, concepts are intangible and elusive. Learning occurs when the concepts are made sufficiently structured to retain but are still flexible enough to be transformed. Problem-seeking. In an activity system, the subject (in this case, an artist) uses tools (art materials and art products) to act on an object (ideas and experiences from their interactions in the world). That activity begins when artists problematize their interactions in, experiences with, and perceptions of the world (Mace, 1997; Mace & Ward, 2004). When they address the problem through activity with art materials, artists will typically delay closure even when they reach a solution by re-problematizing the resulting art object. Problemseeking and problematization not only occur at the beginning of an art project but also continue throughout the artistic process. Artists are learners in this sense because they do not accept given problems and solutions, and do not settle on first solutions, but continue to seek problems and, in doing so, create new knowledge and ideas through their art-making. Enquiry. Art-making is an enquiry process used to figure out how things work in the world and to think about solutions to artistic problems. Whether they are exploring the qualities of different materials to discover their expressive potential, examining the impact of light on a surface or the effect of war on children, artists often make art to research an idea that captivates them. Artists work like researchers in the social sciences, problematizing ideas, theorizing and then engaging in art-making activity to gain new understanding about the ideas they are exploring. Artistic enquiry is the process of using art materials and media to find solutions to artistic problems. Artists conduct enquiry by making art, using materials and media to generate possible solutions and then manipulating them to develop new ways of thinking about their ideas. Meaning-making. Meaning is defined in several ways, but generally when we talk about ‘making meaning’ we refer to the process of making sense of our experiences in the world in such a way that they give our lives coherence and significance. Something is meaningful if it enables us to see ourselves as

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connected to or significant in the larger context that we live in. The act of making meaning through art is both personal, in the sense that artists make things that use and share what they find meaningful, as well as cultural, in that artists give new meaning to things, experiences and ideas that make up our shared culture.

Sociocultural learning theory as a research tool The SCL theoretical frame can be applied to questions about children’s art-making and artistic development that offer new insights beyond what has been learned with traditional developmental theories. For over a decade, art education researchers and theorists have been calling for this shift from developmental investigations of children’s art projects to research that looks at children’s art-making as a social and cultural activity (e.g. Anning & Ring, 2004; Braswell, 2016; Ivashkevich, 2009; Pearson, 2001; Wilson, 2005). Research conducted with an SCL framework requires looking not only at finished art products but also at the activity of artmaking with particular attention to the ways that the activity is an interaction between the individual child and the world. Rather than outlining a stage-by-age developmental path, or providing explanation of what children are representing in their artwork and estimating what it tells us about their development, we can examine the activity of art-making. By observing the activity, we can learn what causes children to engage in art-making and see how it unfolds over time; we can examine the interaction between children and their social context as they make art; and we can investigate cognitive development in art-making by examining the cognitive activity that occurs in the interaction between the child and the environment during art-making. Cognitive development, from this perspective, is the process of children making sense of the world and understanding how they impact the world through their art-making.

Children’s art making observed through the SCL lens The sociocultural learning framework described in this chapter was used for a study of children’s art-making in an elementary school art room in Oakland, California. The children were aged six to eleven (first through fifth grade in US schools). I observed art classes every week for a school year, talking with students as they worked on class projects and listening to them interact with each other while they worked. I conducted focus groups with four students from

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each class and, from these focus groups, selected fourteen students to interview individually. In the interviews and focus groups, I asked them to describe their own art-making process and talk about what art means to them, where they make art, what kind of art they like to make and what kind of things they use to make art. Interviewees showed me their own artworks and described their process and motivation in creating them. Finally, I offered interviewees a selection of art materials and asked them to think aloud while creating something. The resulting data was analysed three different ways using the SLT framework described above. In the first analysis, I explored children’s social interactions while making art to learn about children’s art-making as an act of engaging with the social and cultural world. For the second analysis, I investigated the question ‘why do children make art?’. The third analysis focused on the cognitive activities children engaged in as they made art. Interviews and observations were coded with four codes developed to capture the socially and culturally relevant aspects of the children’s art-making: social interactions, context of art-making, indicators that art is a meaning-making activity and indicators that art-making causes social and/or cultural transformation. I also developed new codes during the analysis, based on ideas that emerged from the interviews and observation notes. The emergent codes fell into two broad categories: children’s perceptions of art and art-making (when they talked about art) and children engaging in art-making (when they were making art). Community of practice in the art room. To learn more about how students engaged in the practice of art-making in their school community, I applied the theoretical lens of CoP to observation notes taken in the art room. I watched children while they made art and listened to their interactions with each other. In the observation notes, I looked for indicators that they were forming a community of practice. A community of children’s art practice is an activity space (in this case it is an actual space: the art room at their school) in which children are full participants; that is, they participate in the activity and learn how to do the activity according to the expectations of the community. At the same time, each child in the class also contributes to shaping how the activity is done in their community. When classroom learning occurs as a community of practice, children can have a sense of ownership because they can see their own contributions and ideas shape how the activity is done in their community. The art practice of their class ‘learns’ from each student art maker and students learn how to make art that is appreciated and meaningful in their community of young artists.

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By observing student art-making through the framework of SLT, the activity and interactions of the group came into focus. In each class, I could see how students interacted as they made art, how they influenced each other’s art-making and how each student evolved their art-making in response to the influence of the group. The art teacher had specific learning goals for her students and was firm in her instruction. In a study that analysed these observations of children’s interactions in the art room, I found that children not only followed the teacher’s instruction themselves but also tried to get others to stay within the boundaries as well, either by enforcing the rules or critiquing another student’s artwork (Malin, 2012). Enforcement is a response students use to regulate the activity of the classroom so that everyone around them is working in accordance with social norms and expectations. The children enforced norms using comments that reminded their classmates of the rules. For example, a student used enforcement during a painting lesson on analogous colours when she reminded her classmate, ‘you’re only supposed to work with one color’. Critique is an art world practice in which viewers attempt to get artists to align their work with art world standards through critical commentary (Soep, 2000). A first grader critiqued the painting of a girl sitting next to him when he said, ‘that’s not blue, that’s ugly with yellow in it’. However, the students did not always reinforce the teacher’s rules. At times, they broke the rules or defied the teacher’s expectations so that their art-making would reflect their personal goals, interests and ideas. These new ideas would then be copied or approved by other students, and in that way, they gained acceptance as new norms of art-making for the class. During the analogous colours lesson, students were explicitly told not to use brown because it combines all the colours and therefore does not have analogous colours. One particularly creative third grader accepted the challenge and used shades of brown for her painting. Other students at her table followed her lead, and soon several children were experimenting with brown in their analogous colour paintings. Through these variations on the rules and norms, the children created a community of practice in the art room that reflected what was interesting or meaningful to them. Another method students used to create a community of practice in the art room was by collectively negotiating the boundaries of the teacher’s assignments. When students were asked to create a collage of a person, some pushed against the limits of the assignment by making collages of aliens, monsters and robots. Carter, for example, made his collage to look like an alien character from Star Wars. The teacher reminded him, ‘You’re supposed to be making a person.’ ‘It is a

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person, it’s a ghost!’ he argued. As Carter negotiated with the teacher, a student at his table engaged in another method for developing a community of art practice: he copied Carter’s idea by making his collage of the same Star Wars alien. By copying Carter’s collage, this student validated that Carter’s artistic decisions were acceptable and meaningful for the community of art practice in their class, even as the teacher continued to argue that they were going against the rules. As the children critiqued and enforced each other’s art-making, negotiated the boundaries of assigned art projects and copied each other, they developed a community in which they each could participate by generating new ideas about what is meaningful and relevant art among their members. The children established their identity as knowledgeable and influential artists by enforcing norms, establishing expectations for other students to strive for through critique and negotiating how assigned art projects could be completed. As artists, they played a significant role in shaping a culturally meaningful activity. According to activity theory, identity that develops through participation in an activity endures beyond the context of the activity (Wenger, 1998). This suggests that the children could maintain their identity as people with the capacity to shape and influence cultural practices and carry it over into other areas of their life. Why do children make art? The second question I analysed using a SLT lens was ‘why do children make art?’. Since art-making is a social and cultural activity, it is likely that children’s reasons for engaging in art activity could be investigated by looking at their art-making through the sociocultural lens. I started this analysis by coding interviews and observation notes for reasons that children make art. Through this coding process, I discovered that some reasons were simply reasons, such as ‘the teacher made us do it’ and ‘I didn’t have anything to do’. However, some of the reasons children gave were better described as intentions that drove their art-making, such as ‘I drew this because I was thinking about my brother,’ and ‘I open up and draw … [because] … it shares all my emotions.’ As these two examples show, in describing their intentions for making art, the children often indicated how their art-making connected them to the world beyond themselves. In a study that analysed the children’s art-making activity and descriptions of their own reasons for art-making, the intentions that emerged fell into a few overarching categories: storytelling, experimentation and invention, sharing self, imagination and building relationships (Malin, 2013). Here I briefly describe each of these prominent intentions. They are not mutually exclusive; rather, children can engage multiple intentions in their art-making.

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Storytelling. Children often use art media to tell stories. Storytelling is an important way that we make meaning from our experiences and shape our identity. Through storytelling, we can give order to the jumble of events, ideas and emotions that we experience so that we can find the meaning in them. We can bring together our real experiences with fantasy, and through fantasy we can grapple with complex emotions and psychological themes in ways that make them easier to grasp (Bettelheim, 1976). Elena, a third grader, made all the projects assigned in art class about stories she developed outside of school throughout the year. While painting a still life of yellow flowers on the table in front of her, she said, ‘[This painting] is from another story I’m making …. I’m making a story about a lady named Elena and a prince.’ She painted the flowers on a window sill, with a red curtain billowing around them. The lady in her story looked out the window and saw the prince walk by. For Elena, storytelling through art was a way for her to make sense of difficult abstract ideas and feelings, such as love and power. Sharing self. Art-making is a way to represent and externalize what we know, think, feel and care about. The children in this study often talked about making art to share an important experience they had, describe someone they care about, express their emotions and describe the things they find interesting or meaningful. Oliver, for example, made many drawings of skyscrapers because he was fascinated by them. ‘I like to make skyscrapers. I wanted to live in one … but I’ve never been in the New York City skyscraper.’ Lacking personal experience with his object of fascination, Oliver nevertheless could explore his interest and share it with others through his drawings. Experimentation and invention. For many children, art materials are an invitation to experiment, play with ideas and be inventive. Children often explore the ways that art materials can be transformed into other things, such as how a box can be transformed into a ship or a jagged scrap of paper can become a bat wing. Some experimental young artists use art-making to test the boundaries of materials and imagery to invent something new. Fifth grader Dario was inspired by his favourite comic books when drawing and often drew the characters that fascinated him. However, he also experimented to expand on his characters. While drawing an alien, he turned the drawing upside down when it was nearly finished and started drawing again from the new orientation to see what else it could be. In another drawing, he drew a cute stuffed animal character about twenty times, each demonstrating unusual ways to be killed (e.g. falling off a cliff, drowning in a puddle, getting run over by an ice cream truck). Dario used drawing to create new possibilities and invent things that were not there before.

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Imagination. Art-making is generally thought of as a way to use our imagination. The children I spoke to had a lot of ideas about the relationship between imagination and art-making. Art-making, as described by third grader Celeste, is a way to ‘get my imagination somewhere in reality’. The children understood imagination to be something like creativity, in that it is ideas that you create in your mind that do not exist in reality. As one third grader described, imagination is a way to create ‘a whole new world’ in your mind and ‘make yourself into anything you want to make yourself ’. Art-making is how they get the ideas in their imagination out into the world: ‘I like making art because you can make different imaginations from your head.’ Building relationships. Many children use art-making as a way to relate to others. There are several ways that children build relationships through their art-making. Sometimes they create art that is designed for a specific person, such as a drawing made for a family member that shows important details about that person. Second grader Sophia made a picture for her aunt that was all done in shades of purple, as she said, ‘My auntie, she loves the color purple.’ Others build relationships through art-making by engaging with other people as they make art. In the art room, the children shared materials and ideas with each other, making relational connections as they made art. For example, two firstgrade girls worked on their person collages while sitting next to each other, inspiring and helping each other as they cut and glued shapes. Both created girls in prom dresses and gave each other ideas for improving their collages to make the dresses more elegant and stylish. Doing so, they strengthened their relationship as they made art. What are children doing, cognitively, when they make art? Looking at children’s cognitive activity through the sociocultural learning lens reveals different ways of thinking than those identified through a developmental lens. Whereas a developmental framework reveals stages of representation, such as increasing spatial awareness, attention to detail and evolving understanding of conservation, the SCL lens focuses on indicators that children’s cognitive engagement in art-making aligns with the theoretical framework of seeking artistic problems in the world and trying to solve them, conducting enquiry with materials and shaping ideas and meaning by playing with and altering existing culture through their art-making (Malin, 2009). Problem-finding and problem-solving were central processes that the children engaged in as they made art. They looked for artistic problems by questioning assigned art projects, challenging themselves to come up with more complicated

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or innovative artworks than what they had made previously, seeking possibilities for art-making in the world around them and problematizing existing art ideas. In solving their artistic problems, they used cognitive processes such as noticing and connecting, imagining, enquiry and critique. Noticing refers to the attentive observation of things in the world that children engaged in as they made art, such as attending to the numerous shades of yellow in a sunflower that they never noticed before painting one in a still-life exercise. Through this careful noticing, they also made connections between qualities of things in the world and the unique qualities of the art materials they used. A first grader noticed that a paper shape in his collage looked like a bat, and a fifth grader noticed that the fuzzy white bristles on a cactus he was drawing looked like an old man’s beard. This connecting is a first step in using metaphor, which is ‘the ability to say one thing in terms of another, or to say several things at the same time, thereby creating new meaning’ (Madoc-Jones, 2007, p. 78). Imagination emerged as a thinking process the children used to connect what was in their mind with the real world. They used imagination to create things in their mind that don’t exist in reality. Imagination was also used for finding meaningful and innovative solutions to art projects the teacher assigned. Many students did not want to simply complete assignments as directed without making something new, meaningful or creative, and they employed imagination to envision alternative solutions. One boy said that he ‘watched the T.V. in [his] mind’ to get ideas for his art projects. Third, the children conducted enquiry with art materials to discover new ways of making art, and as a result, they came up with new ideas in their artmaking. They conducted enquiry by thinking in the materials, using the process of manipulating media to think through artistic challenges and come up with new solutions. Often this enquiry involved exploring what they could do to the materials to represent an idea or give them an intended meaning, such as when a first grader twisted together different coloured tissue paper to see if he could make it look like a twig from a redwood tree. In another example of enquiry with art materials, second graders explored with construction paper to figure out how to represent facial features in their self-portraits. They investigated questions such as whether eyes are round or ‘lemon shaped’ and how to show all the colours in their iris. Sometimes enquiry with materials was open-ended and exploratory, with children asking ‘I wonder what I can do with this’, as they tried the different possibilities the materials offered. Finally, the children in this study were found to be making judgements about their own artwork without external criteria. They developed their own criteria

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for their artwork by internalizing a sense of rightness about how art should look (Dewey, 1934; Eisner, 2002; Goodman, 1978). The first grader who experimented with tissue paper to create a redwood twig threw away several versions of this project before making one that passed his own internal criteria. A third grader working on a self-portrait collage decided, without input from others, that her face looked ‘too squished’ and added extra pieces of paper to make it look longer. In art-making, if the teacher does not tell the students whether their artwork is right or wrong, children will develop their own capacity to evaluate their work and change it until it meets their own internal criteria for good art.

Implications for education The SCL framework shows how art-making is an important way for children to develop an identity as a valued creator of the practices, knowledge and meaning in their community. However, this does not happen in every classroom where children are making art. The art teacher in this study made significant decisions that allowed for art-making to shape her students’ identities as artists, creators and people who make important contributions to culture and society. Her lessons were carefully structured to teach art skills and knowledge but sufficiently open for students to negotiate the boundaries of the lesson and bring in what was meaningful to them. Because of this, her students were inclined to seek out and solve problems in and through their art-making, rather than completing assignments strictly according to the teacher’s instruction. Another important decision the art teacher made was allowing for substantial interaction among students during her class. Her students engaged in art-making as a social activity, sharing ideas, helping each other, offering critique and talking about the meaning in their art with each other. By shaping art-making experiences this way, children can be authentically seen in the classroom, and their personal meaning and identity shape the learning context as they learn. Moreover, the resulting community of art practice among the students provided for a learning space that transcended the classroom, as children brought the ideas and experiences they had outside of school into the art room, shared them with their classmates through their social art-making activity and contributed new meaning that each member of the community could then take back to their lives beyond the classroom. This study showed that art-making can be a valuable learning activity if the conditions allow it. First, the students developed ways of thinking that would

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help them learn in and beyond school, such as problem-finding and solving, imagination, enquiry with materials, noticing and making connections between ideas and materials, and evaluating their own work. These ways of thinking are made possible because the children could be learners in another sense, that is, as participants in a community of art practice. As full participants, they were also able to collaborate and negotiate to develop meaningful art practice and to build identity as people who can transform how art is made in their community. The ways of thinking, learning and meaning-making that were found in this study emerged in a context that fully supported students to identify as artists. Art-making was encouraged and considered a valuable learning activity by the teachers and administration. At all times, the school building was a gallery of students’ artwork. The arts-supportive environment empowered children to see themselves as people who could impact, and even create, the social and cultural circumstances in which they and others live. Because they were artists at school, Dario could experiment with his drawings and bring new ideas to the existing culture, Celeste could bring the inventions of her imagination into the real world to share with others and Oliver was able to make sense of the structure of the skyscrapers that fascinate him and share his passion with others. Because they found the opportunity to be artists in an art-making community at school, these children developed the capacity to use art-making as a way of learning. Moreover, they learned to look for problems in the world and seek innovative solutions and developed the capacity to make real the world that they imagine.

References Anning, A., & Ring, K. (2004). Making sense of children’s drawings. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Bettelheim, B. (1976). The uses of enchantment: The meaning and importance of fairytales. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Braswell, G. S. (2016). Sociocultural contexts for the early development of semiotic production. Psychological Bulletin, 132(6), 877–894. Dewey, J. (1934). Art as experience. New York, NY: Perigee Books. Eisner, E. (2002). The arts and the creation of mind. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Engeström, Y. (1993). Developmental studies of work as a test bench of activity theory: The case of primary care medical practice. In S. Chaiklin and J. Lave (Eds.), Understanding practice: Perspectives on activity and context. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

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Engeström, Y. (2014). Learning by expanding: An activity-theoretical approach to developmental research (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Golomb, C. (1999). Art and the young: The many faces of representation. Visual Arts Research, 25(1), 27–50. Golomb, C. (2004). Sculpture: Representational development in a three-dimensional medium. In E. Eisner, & M. Day (Eds.), Handbook of research and policy in art education. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Goodman, N. (1978). Ways of worldmaking. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. Ivashkevich, O. (2009). Children’s drawing as a sociocultural practice: Remaking gender and popular culture. Studies in Art Education, 51(1), 50–63. Lave, J. (1993). The practice of learning. In S. Chaiklin, & J. Lave (Eds.), Understanding practice: Perspectives on activity and context. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Lindqvist, G. (2003). Vygotsky’s theory of creativity. Creativity Journal, 15(2–3), 245–251. Lowenfeld, Viktor (1947). Creative and mental growth. New York, NY: Macmillan Publishing Company. Mace, M. (1997). Toward an understanding of creativity through a qualitative appraisal of contemporary art making. Creativity Research Journal, 10(2&3), 265–278. Mace, M., & Ward, T. (2002). Modeling the creative process: A grounded theory analysis of creativity in the domain of art making. Creativity Research Journal, 14(2), 179–192. Madoc-Jones, G. (2007). Imagination and the teaching of literature: Interpretive and ethical implications. In K. Egan, M. Stout, & K. Takaya (Eds.), Teaching and learning outside the box: inspiring imagination across the curriculum. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Malin, H. (2009). Making meaning: Children’s art making as a way of learning. Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation. Stanford University, Stanford, CA. Malin, H. (2012). Creating a children’s art world: Negotiating participation, identity, and meaning in the elementary school art room. International Journal of Education and the Arts, 13. Retrieved from http://www.ijea.org/v13n6/. Malin, H. (2013). Making meaningful: Intention in children’s art making. International Journal of Art and Design Education, 32(1), 6–17. Pearson, P. (2001). Towards a theory of children’s drawing as social practice. Studies in Art Education, 42(4), 348–365. Soep, E. (2000). To make things with words: Critique and the art of production. Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, Stanford University. Vygotsky, L. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Vygotsky, L. (2004). Imagination and creativity in childhood. Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, 42(1), 7–97. Vygotsky, L. S. (1971). The psychology of art. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Wilson, B. (2005). More lessons from the superheroes of J. C. Holz. Art Education, 58(6), 18–24, 33–34.

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Childhood Art in Community Education: Postdevelopmental Learning through Feminist Leadership, Diversity and Pedagogic Invention Linda Knight

Introduction Community education describes learning outside the formal spaces of school and before school settings such as kindergarten and long day care. Community education is not a recent development; however, a growing curiosity about what, how and where children learn recognizes that meaningful experiences take place in sites where children are treated differently, where children have greater agencies and where children are not managed within the same logics and systems that govern formal education. Children work often in multi-age groupings at community playgroups, specialist after school activities, holiday camps and festivals with adults who identify as community educators: artists, sportspeople, musicians, librarians and cultural elders. Community education has many theorizations and descriptions including community arts and cultural development (CACD) (Meade & Shaw, 2010; Quayle et al., 2016), public pedagogy (Sandlin et al., 2011), playwork (McKendrick et al., 2015), variously, children’s/cultural/education/human geographies (Holloway et al., 2010; Mills & Kraftl 2016; Shillington & Murnaghan, 2016), extracurricular learning (Ivaniushina & Aleksandrov, 2015; Jiang & Peguero, 2017; Pooley 2016) and non-formal/informal education (Datta, 2016; Romi & Schmida, 2009; Shephard, 2014; White & Lorenzi, 2016). This chapter uses community education as an umbrella term to effectively capture these diverse contexts where community pedagogy and learning occur.

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During my career as an artist and community educator, then as an early childhood education scholar, I have observed how the steady creep of regulatory standardization in early childhood education and care means that young children spend significant amounts of time encountering the arts in festivals, weekend workshops, arts-rich holiday clubs and cultural gatherings. In this chapter I draw on my career in community arts education and identify three forces (from many) that form binding meshes through community education, which give substance to the ‘spaces’ where unrestricted arts-making and learning occurs. By unrestricted I mean learning that is not bound by the formalities of curriculum but are exchanges between different educators and different learners, in different learning spaces and for different reasons (Holloway et al., 2010). These aspects of difference open up education in terms of identity, pedagogy, ownership, power and invention and provide a creative and fertile contrast to the regulatory practices and procedures of art-making in formal education contexts. The three forces – feminist leadership, diversity and pedagogic invention – spotlight how childhood art in community education is postdevelopmental pedagogy and learning in action. I use particular incidences of my experiences of working as an artist/community educator/early childhood education scholar in the UK and Australia in sites as diverse as a travelling mobile printmaking studio and a large arts festival dedicated to children aged 0–8 years to formulate accounts of childhood art in community education. I use the incidences to suggest how the learning philosophies informing art in community education exemplify postdevelopmental learning and pedagogic invention, and that this occurs through praxes of fluidity, geography, intersections, politics and hierarchies. The accounts, told through the three forces of feminist leadership, diversity and pedagogic invention, propose that childhood art in community education is perhaps where postdevelopmental theories of learning are operating most clearly. A postdevelopmental reading of art in community extends beyond a focus on child and art materials; it acknowledges that education emerges through multiple and continuous series and clusters of equilateral exchanges between bodies, materials, elements, histories, times and matters, in all manner of spaces that are not always designed and curated for learning. My postdevelopmental reading of childhood art in community education articulates expansive ideas about childhood art, in terms of not just what young children are capable of but also what education pedagogies and conditions are possible in early childhood. My accounts, through the three forces, are three attempts at pausing and describing those chaotic exchanges to suggest that children’s art is complex,

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political and feminist and is created in relational exchange with the human, nonhuman and inhuman world. It is important to state that arts in community education is not presented here as a better form of education or trouble-free. Like any learning context, community education occurs within restricting and exclusionary forces that are generated as much from within as externally. The views and intentions of participants, educators, systems and organizations can generate tensions and blockages that perpetuate prejudice and disadvantage. Community education, as an ‘alternative’ education for example, still has adults placed centrally in the picture. Unlike the regulated formal education classroom (White & Lorenzi, 2016) however, community education is curated to be open access in sites that are familiar and used by diverse groups. These educational sites operate as ‘alternatives to the mainstream sector and situated outside that sector’ (Kraftl, 2014, p. 129) in urban settings as well as in small towns and where people suffer disadvantage due to poverty, economic depression, social dysfunction, location, gender, sexuality, race, culture, age, mental health and/or intellectual and physical disability. Diversity sits at the core of community education; this offers learning experiences to children and communities in respectful and reciprocal ways and with greater connection and relevance to their diverse needs and lives.

Arts in community education as postdevelopmental learning I acknowledge that the term ‘postdevelopmental’ is problematic, especially because I refer, in this chapter, to scholarship and theories that critique layering new alternatives over old ones (Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2011; Stengers, 2008). I acknowledge that the ‘post-’ term upholds structures through the construction of these alternatives. Given this, I take the term ‘postdevelopmental’ as a concept in progress, a rudimentary label that inefficiently describes the complexities and breadth of trying to think differently about education and learning and particularly the presences of the component parts of these (Mills & Kraftl, 2014) in relation to childhood art encounters. Postdevelopmental learning focuses on ‘challenging binary thinking by attempting to make use of difference’ (Blaise & Ryan, 2011, p. 87). In contrast to theories which may attend to a proposition, postdevelopmental readings of education work primarily through theoretical concepts to trouble the assumptions and conventions that often go unnoticed or unquestioned. Postdevelopmental

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early childhood scholars, for example, have worked with Deleuzeguattarian concepts such as assemblage, desire and territories to investigate the ways connections occur and how energies accumulate in learning (Blaise, 2013; Jones et al., 2014; Lenz Taguchi, 2010). The troubling ‘post-’ prefix of postdevelopmentalism implies something chaptered or segmented: the theory next in line or an improved version of what went before (Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2011). As Blaise (2013) points out however, conceptual developments in education theory ‘must be reassembled … [requiring] a new set of concepts that may generate different logics’ (p. 804) – ideas that do not replace but continue to push and work with what is there. Blaise (2013) uses Deleuzeguattarian concepts to head back into the dominant logics of early childhood to build ‘a postdevelopmental style of thinking … to radically rethink relationships between elements within and amongst assemblages’ (p. 806) that include childhood identities, expressions, sexualities, capacities and governances and how dominant narratives have shaped these in specific ways. Blaise explains that, through a postdevelopmental framing, visions of childhood are not renewed as such but are ‘challenged and room is made for something more’ (p. 805), making theorizations more complex and rich. A postdevelopmental thinking about education and childhood art then ‘[challenges] universalism, linearity, progression, and certainty’ (Blaise, 2013, p. 806) of the education/learning nexus and of the ways children encounter and produce art. Similarly, a postdevelopmental reading of community education can turn to critical theories ‘from philosophy, sociology, and cultural studies to examine the politics’ (Blaise & Ryan, 2011, p. 80) of what counts as education in order to pay attention to the multiple ways by which learning occurs, where learning occurs and how education might be defined. Thinking in/with multiplicities sees that learning exceeds a particular kind of formal exchange, and this pushes against common, binaried visions of education as present in only one of the school/leisure and formal/informal pairings. A complex, political and shifting vision of learning productively reinscribes art in community education as vital and a crucial antidote to the increasingly bureaucratized and strangulated state of formal, school-based educations that perpetuate a normalized version of art emerging from entrenched masculinist, colonial and prejudiced thinking. Postdevelopmental theories of education offer ways to think about the times and places where the art education event can ‘mobilise wider political and policybased discourses around participation, citizenship and engagement’ (Mills & Kraftl, 2014, p. 1) in activities that are not overtly political but become so through

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being inclusive and working outside the mainstream. As education research expands and diversifies, the richness of community-based art education, with its resistance to the power structures of a curriculum (Blaise & Ryan, 2011), rises up as a site of powerful energy and agency where children can access art that exists outside the closed circles of art dealers and galleries and where children can produce art that is not bound by developmentalism and the outcomes fixations of school systems. Community education-based childhood art cannot operate by the same rules and conventions to the mainstream because variables are always present (and variables are the convention for community education). The variables emerge through: Pedagogies: these are usually hands-off, casual rather than rigid, not exclusively human. Learning sites: these are often urban buildings but can be outdoor spaces such as river banks, urban parks or playing fields, the community spaces in housing estates. Learners: often multi-age, mixed ability. Educators: community members with diverse languages, from diverse cultures, many ages, with differing education levels. Materials: often the natural resources at the site, or can be large-scale recyclables or play structures, are often low-cost or freely available. Aims, goals and outcomes: these are often loose and flexible and collectively developed on a case-by-case basis.

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Even the regulated times (lessons) for education are variable, so just as Blaise and Ryan (2011) present a postdevelopmental education through a series of troublings, the variables of childhood art in community education are a postdevelopmental learning that trouble power, poverty, marginalization, subjectivities, productions and the human/environment divide. Thinking critically about community education shifts from seeing it as a leisurely casual experience of participants sampling or having a taster of a creative process or as a break from ‘real’ school-based learning. Childhood art in community education becomes a crucial and complex education alongside and in encounters with place, matter, history, culture, animals and more. The rise in ‘post-’ theories means that the methods and pedagogies of community-based art projects and the effects/affects such projects have on participant communities and groups can be understood more expansively than through humanist and emancipatory (Schober & Spiess, 2013; Shephard,

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2014) readings. For Mills and Kraftl (2014), community education has great potency due to the ‘everyday and spontaneous learning experiences that vary across different local, national and global contexts’ (Mills & Kraftl, 2014, p. 1). In recognition of the rich diversity globally, of community education provision, they ask ‘how are young people positioned within philosophies of informal education?’ (Mills & Kraftl, 2014, p. 2). It is this question of positioning and conceptualizing within a postdevelopmental theory that I take on in this chapter. The accounts featured here work through the three forces of feminist leadership, diversity and pedagogic invention to explore the positioning of children, young people and adults as active participants, communicators and learners with and through art, even in challenging circumstances.

Context – art and community education in UK and Australia The city of Leicester, UK, and the city of Brisbane, Australia, provide the contextual settings for this chapter because the chapter draws upon my personal experiences, history and current practice in community education as an artist and as an early childhood education scholar. Although these contextual settings are specific, community education occurs in many contexts across the world. Community education settings are diverse and difficult to typify, but the dynamics and activities occurring in the various iterations of community education have an identifiable difference to the education acts taking place in formal schooling and kindergartens. Irrespective of whether the focus is on Leicester, Brisbane or elsewhere, the community education space, even if it is temporary, indoors or outside, supports the creative potential of the art and community education event (see the research into creative space by White & Lorenzi, 2016). A postdevelopmental reading of community education sites considers how fluid spaces make education regulation difficult but allow intersections between diverse combinations of people to thrive, no matter what site the learning takes place in. Multipurpose spaces that serve different groups of people and for various means – playgroups, mobile drop-ins, voting stations, and for social, political, and educational development – are often used. When purposed for arts events such spaces become dynamic and fertile (White & Lorenzi, 2016) as those participating bring local knowledge, community relationships, culture and identity into their interactions and productions.

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The places I have produced community-based arts education were typically the ‘other spaces’ (Kraftl, 2014, p. 128) that constitute non-formal pedagogic sites: dedicated community buildings belonging to religious and/or cultural groups; community buildings that housed playgroups; school buildings that hosted specialist after-school activities; community halls and neighbourhood centres that hosted holiday camps; dedicated adventure playgrounds; purpose-built drop-in centres and day schools for adults with additional needs; dedicated community arts buildings; cultural institutions; hospitals; purpose-built play centres; and parks that hosted festivals.

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In Leicester I worked alongside adults who identify as community educators, including artists, sportspeople, musicians, librarians, cultural elders and more. Almost all the sites had flexible attendance, which meant that mostly participants came and went from the site of their own accord, including children over five years old. Because the children were often in multi-age groups, they would drop in and out of the activity and the site at their leisure. Children under five attended with parents and carers. I acknowledge that my description of urban and rural communities in the East Midlands, UK, is a very specific context and that even when marginalized or living in poverty, those communities were within reach of infrastructure and social services. My description therefore is certainly a first world view of community that was replete with particular societal and institutional offerings that supported the availability of community opportunities. I carefully use the past tense here however because I am also aware of the social and economic changes that have taken place and the significant reduction of social and community services in the UK over the time that has passed between my accounts of 1980s–1990s and now. In Brisbane I work alongside undergraduate education students, professional performing artists, cultural producers, cultural educators, doctors, nurses and hospital school educators. The two sites I work with are the Lady Cilento Children’s Hospital School (LCCH School) and the Queensland Performing Arts

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Centre (QPAC). Children’s attendance at each site differs: at the hospital children may be short- or long-stay patients, siblings of family members, outpatients, day visitors. At QPAC children are accompanied by adults and may be in family or education groups attending the performances and other events. I acknowledge that each site initiates visits for specific reasons: illness, treatment, performing arts productions; however, within these specifics are childhood art events that occur that bring in children and adults under different circumstances.

The community educator: A personal history I provide accounts of art in community education projects from my professional career. Accounting or giving an account is the term chosen because I am not claiming to provide an accurate memory record or a comprehensive description of the entire event. My accounts are not chosen because they were especially successful or outstanding examples of my work; they contain the types of art projects that are commonly undertaken by community artists/educators/ playworkers. Just as postdevelopmental readings are activated through concepts (Blaise, 2013; Kraftl, 2016), I account through three forces that conceptually attend to significant aspects of community education: feminist leadership, diversity and pedagogic invention. The accounts emerge from critical moments in my career as a community educator and artist that extend on some of the propositions and points made through the chapter. The three forces curate the accounts and work as ‘conceptual tools that are useful for troubling these takenfor-granted … practices’ (Blaise & Ryan, 2011, p. 85) about the arts that young children produce. The three forces help to forge discussion (Ergler et al., 2013) on key issues around beliefs and valorizations of childhood art. My history as an artist and community educator and then as an early childhood education scholar allows me to pay particular attention to community-based arts because it is most familiar to me and it is where my expertise lies. I am familiar with the public pedagogies of community-based arts: often a ‘collaborative process between artists and/or art workers and community members … for communities to express identity, concerns and aspirations’ (Quayle et al., 2016, p. 2) through the ways they might gather to participate in arts projects, play offerings, festivals and out-of-school care provision. I use personal accounts of my work in Leicester and Brisbane and I inscribe and reinscribe my experiences over a thirty-five-year time period to bind together how I saw my experiences then with my vision of them now. My non-

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linear accounts are a postdevelopmental reading of arts in community education because they move back and forth through time and through three forces to generate ‘newer forms of theorizing [which] go beyond examinations of language and discourse to consider the relations between’ (Blaise & Ryan, 2011, p. 86) the complexities and fluidities of the ways childhood art in community education takes place, the spaces in which it takes place, and the support structures that surround and facilitate it. Personal accounts of my work show how pedagogic, creative, social, theoretical resurfacings take place when undertaking community work that attempts to make positive social and community contributions (McKendrick et al., 2015) via exchange and collaboration with diverse groups of local residents.

Account 1: Feminist leadership Over the years I have painted many public art murals. I remember three particular murals I painted at two sites in Leicester. The sites were city-based neighbourhood play centres: located in an inner-city housing estate in the Leicester city zone. The centre buildings were plain and functional however they were quite unappealing in appearance. I was commissioned to produce a mural on exterior and/or interior walls to make the sites more interesting and appealing. Since 2016 I have curated two arts festivals for the LCCH School, Brisbane. I work closely with my undergraduate students to help them devise 45-minute arts activities for children to participate in at the two-day festival. Each mural site in Leicester was managed and staffed predominantly by women. Each centre had a female centre director, each centre also had a management committee that oversaw the legal running of the centre, staffing, and funds/ finances. A majority of the management committee at each centre were women from underserved communities living in the local neighbourhood. The women were from different cultural and ethnic groups and living in diverse family contexts. The LCCH School has a female Principal and a female arts outreach officer who liaises with local organisations who can offer arts experiences for the LCCH School children. A majority of the LCCH School educators are women, all of whom have Higher Education degrees and are in permanent, full-time employment. In each mural site I initially spent time consulting with the children who attended each centre on the subject matter and contents of each mural. Children would gather in multi-age groups to draw out ideas and discuss their ideas for a theme or idea for the mural. All ideas were welcomed and eventually an agreement was reached. I then spent time helping the children draw up a design on small pieces of paper that would be added to the mural. The murals were completed

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These accounts detail the key role feminist leaders play in facilitating postdevelopmental arts experiences for children in community settings. Diverse staff populate the LCCH School and the hospital more generally, and older women had key leadership roles in education and arts programming for the school and hospital, which opened up opportunities for community educators and artists like myself to develop programmes. In the neighbourhood play centres, women worked collectively to ensure their children had good-quality and safe arts-based play provision, also through community education and arts development programmes. In each organization the women promoted different pedagogies by supporting children’s learning through collaborative projects and practice development that were highly protective of the arts. The arts formed the core of the learning programmes, and the programmes were fluid, inclusive and multi-age. In each instance the feminist leaders asserted how children’s arts exposure and learning should thrive, especially in challenging contexts. Community projects exposed me to the ways women living in poverty and/or women from different cultures ‘serve as civic educators … and the unique ways women and people of color conceptualize community’ (Mena & Vaccaro, 2014, p. 53) through their powerful networks and their exceptional organizational competencies. I was also exposed to the impact strong feminist organizational leadership has on children’s exposure to art in healthcare systems to ensure a child’s cultural education continues. Although each site is significantly different, the arts produced in each neighbourhood centre and the hospital were political because the conditions for these arts productions are tied and bound up in governance structures: through routines of campaigning and receiving approvals for projects to take place. Ironically, funding applications, space finding and working within bureaucratic systems regulate what can

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take place as well as prompt innovation. Proposals often have to detail how all children can participate in meaningful ways and in the diverse contexts of each site: such proposals offer solutions by taking up postdevelopmental approaches to arts provision. Feminist leaders are crucial because they are centrally responsible for bringing postdevelopmental arts learning into being in these communities.

Account 2: Diversity In the late 1990s I was commissioned to design and create costumes for the Leicester Caribbean Carnival, a street carnival akin to the famed London Notting Hill carnival, that celebrates Caribbean culture and community. The organisation that commissioned me was a dedicated provider of community arts and services to people with disabilities. The organisation wished to produce a float for the carnival, so they commissioned artists to help design and create the float, compose and perform music, and design and make costumes all to a common theme that I developed around ‘insects’. Each artist worked with groups of young adults who regularly attended the centre, involving them in the design and making process in preparation of them attending the festival and featuring on the float. Every two years QPAC hosts the Out of the Box children’s arts festival. The festival is a combination of workshops, shows and events especially tailored to children 0–8 years and their families and educators. I participate in the festival as a teacher educator, and as a consultant artist: I curate project briefs that interpret the main theme of the festival; I develop education resources for educators and families visiting the festival; and I assist teams of undergraduate students to prepare and deliver arts workshops throughout the festival As the costume designer for the Caribbean Carnival, my challenge was to design costumes that each member of the group could wear. Each young adult had different intellectual and/or physical needs that had to be prioritised in their wearing of a costume. It was also vital to design the project so that the young adults could actively and meaningfully produce the costumes in weekly workshops. The most recent Out of the Box in 2016 attracted 138,000 visitors comprised almost exclusively of young children and their families and educators. The festival audience is diversely abled, diversely aged, diversely cultural, diversely demographic, this presents a challenge for how I curate ideas and devise project briefs. All children must be able to participate and at any time through each of the festival days. My ideas must be flexible across development, growth, culture, language, and time/duration. No activity can have a start or finish point, and must be constantly available throughout the festival.

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Formal education is reliant upon the learning of repetitive routines and habits (Kraftl, 2016). In community festivals the habits are established briefly and reformulate as the project takes place and heads towards a settlement or ‘ending’. These habits constantly reformulate because they are ‘mutable and collective, rather than as stable properties of apparently individuated human subjects’ (Kraftl, 2016, p. 117) that are children attending formal school on a daily basis. Kraftl (2016) sees habit as a conceptual hinge to discuss the structures that regulate not only times for education but the bodies and minds that are to be educated or that are seen to be ‘educatable’. In community-based arts projects, participants take on temporary routines and habits and reinscribe themselves as public citizens on their own terms. The Caribbean Carnival participants transformed into an/other (insect) body and were able to participate with powerful agency in a highly public event through that reinscription. The Out of the Box participants were reinscribed through agencies and visibilities usually enjoyed by adult urban citizens. The young children became sanctioned artists and audiences and their opinions and ideas were taken seriously. Through its focus on ‘participation, creativity, dialogue, communication and consciousness raising’, arts in community education present ‘opportunities for resignifying and resymbolising everyday experiences and the social world’ (Quayle et al., 2016, p. 6). The Caribbean Carnival and Out of the Box reject developmentalism, sequential learning and the pathologized ‘special education’ learner in favour of collaborations that break down subjectifying labels to work across ages, abilities, languages and cultures. The young adults used costumes, music and a decorated float to declare their presence in a popular cultural festival in ways that developed belonging and participation in a social context that they could negotiate on their own terms. The young adults were affectively/effectively declaring their capacities and presence through these arts productions. The young children actively declared their presence and voiced their aesthetic tastes as audience members in a space that predominantly caters to adults, and their bodies and voices created physical and foregrounded presences in spaces children do not usually have power in. Pathologizing and developmental narratives can smother young children and young people with disabilities; these might be temporarily loosened through postdevelopmental learning that critiques ‘how learning processes are produced and function, and what social effects they have’ (Blaise & Ryan, 2011, p. 86). The cultural arts festival is a postdevelopmental arts experience that shifts children away from being the usual objects of spectacle by creating multiple opportunities for agentic participation on the child’s own terms.

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Account 3: Pedagogic invention During the 1980s the city and county councils in Leicestershire made significant investment in community arts and play development for underserved children living in the inner city and in rural villages and towns suffering low employment. The financial support of community arts and play facilitated the growth of innovative programs that took community education to children via outreach work. Artists and community educators could apply to councils to receive funding for projects with experimental approaches to teaching and learning in school and community learning contexts. Over two consecutive years I received funding to run outreach projects. The first was called ‘Where I Live’ and the second was the ‘Environmental Play’ project. Where I Live was an outreach project that took a mobile printmaking studio to different sites in the city and surrounding towns and villages. The studio was transported via a van to schools, after school clubs, neighbourhood centres, traveller sites and playscheme venues to introduce children aged 3–12 years to different printmaking techniques. The children’s thoughts and experiences of their home [were] a common theme for their prints. Children learnt how to create collagraphs, intaglio prints, mono-prints and surface prints that featured images of their homes and lives. At each venue children were invited to donate one of their prints to my collection for an exhibition. After travelling around with the mobile studio for six weeks I curated and mounted an exhibition of the works, this was held in a professional gallery in Leicester city. Children and their families travelled to the opening of the show to see their work in a professional context. Environmental Play was also a mobile outreach project, this time the focus was on learning about the local environment through basic science, play and art activities. With a collaborator we took a mobile studio and workshop to different sites to introduce children to learning about their local environment. Our focus was to provide children with conceptual tools to make sense of their local green spaces, to help them know something about the plant and animal life in those spaces and to give them some intellectual and creative processes for nurturing those spaces. Our pedagogic challenge was to find ways to make those connections with groups of children who were diverse in age, English language skills, physical and intellectual ability, and from diverse cultural backgrounds with different ‘readings’ of nature. On our visits we would take children to the most immediate outdoor spaces, so we often did not know ahead of time what points of reference we would have to work with for the children.

Education is commonly ordered and segmented by age, which delineates abilities and intellects as well as ‘the institutional geographies of educational spaces’ (Mills & Kraftl, 2016, p. 22). The Environmental Play project went to

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indoor and outdoor spaces attended by multi-age groups of children, coming and going from the activity in fluid movements and for various lengths of time. This fluidity remerged maturities, capabilities, intelligencies as well as the learning space. The activities were unbound and stretched notions of the segmentarities and geographies of institutional learning and institutionalized learning content. Working in diverse groupings allows children to explore notions of place and home. Discarding a set nature/science script to quote from changes what responses are possible and encourages randomly emergent ideas from busy, unstructured play. The impartial, distant scientist is not the preferred position; instead, children can ‘interact, move about and think about space in ways that queer space’ (Shillington & Murnaghan, 2016, p. 1027) and queer the nature there. The children participating were born in Leicester, or just arrived, or from a similar place or somewhere completely different. The multiple locations presented the project spaces as unfamiliar, mundane, utterly strange, known to the children and queered the urban ecologies of space and place and resisted a deferment to homogenizing and normative, masculinist, conquering approaches to learning about the environment. Postdevelopmental learning theories do not pitch one approach to learning against others; they work to ‘expose the social, economic, ecological and political processes caught up in producing children’s worlds’ (Shillington & Murnaghan, 2016, p. 1021) by investigating alternatives to common and mainstream education to complicate and dismantle the centralization and privileging of particular voices and identities. A postdevelopmental theory of learning sees the vitality of community education to ‘begin to queer urban natures’ (Shillington & Murnaghan, 2016, p. 1023) and productively question the normative visions of children and nature that pervade early childhood texts, discourses and policies.

Discussion The accounts have suggested, how, in a messy fashion, arts in community education resist a financially austere, stripped-down contemporary life because it works against ‘the managerialist paradigm … that actively stifles the capacity to imagine better and more just alternatives’ (Meade & Shaw, 2010, p. 67). The three forces explain, through their attention to complexity, unpredictability, diversity, collaboration and feminist politics perhaps, why

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it is difficult for policymakers to apply managerial narratives to determine the usefulness of the arts that takes place in community contexts. Without this managerial articulation, community education-based arts are both marginalized and fertile, stricken and productive. This ‘contradictory yet strategic position’ (Meade & Shaw, 2010, p. 68) illustrates how arts provision in community education needs financial and infrastructural support of local authorities while maintaining independence and distance to mainstream education. Community-based arts are a peripheral, marginal type of education that is difficult to regulate and operationalize. It services participants who are regarded predominantly as low status, who are ignored and simultaneously in the spotlight as social problems. Community-based arts are also often the first to suffer financial cuts (McKenrick et al., 2015) during budgetary squeezes. This vulnerability becomes a feminist issue when a significant part of the community education workforce identifies as female and when a large proportion of art participants are young women and/or mothers. Arts and community education scholarship recognizes the importance of stepping away completely from the familiar contexts and meanings of mainstream art education pedagogies and spaces to see how many ways arts projects can actually happen. A postdevelopmental theorization extends out from education as an exchange between a teacher and a learner, in demarcated places and during regulating and segmenting time periods. Postdevelopmental art learning and production acknowledges the crucial importance of other, non-human representatives present: animals, weather, buildings, equipment, food and more, as well as the non-representations present: the histories, affects and habits that shape what art is possible to take place. The different spatial networks (Holloway et al., 2010) and spatialities of community-based art, and the different agencies and affects which rise up or reside around bodies, tools, environments, locations and intentions in relational flows, work around and through the event and identify it as postdevelopmental learning in action. The accounts featured in the chapter show how younger children have and continue to spend significant amounts of time encountering art in community contexts, and many children across social and demographic contexts attend festivals, weekend events, holiday clubs and cultural gatherings in addition to their regular attendance at more formal learning spaces. The importance of having different, postdevelopmental opportunities for an arts experience, in contexts outside of formal schooling, continues to be a vital component of

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community development (Datta, 2016; Romi & Schmida, 2009) for children, families, educators and feminist leaders.

References Blaise, M. (2013). Charting new territories: Re-assembling childhood sexuality in the early years classroom. Gender and Education, 25(7), 801–817. doi: 10.1080/09540253.2013.797070. Blaise, M., & Ryan, S. (2011). Using critical theory to trouble the early childhood curriculum: Is it enough? In N. File, J. J. Mueller, & D. B. Wisneski (Eds.), Curriculum in early childhood education: Re-examined, rediscovered, renewed (pp. 80–92). New York: Routledge. Datta, R. (2016). Community garden: A bridging program between formal and informal learning. Cogent Education 3: 1177154. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2331 186X.2016.1177154. Dolphijn, R., & van der Tuin, I. (2011). Pushing dualism to an extreme: On the philosophical impetus of a new materialism. Continental Philosophy Review, 44, 383–400. doi: 10.1007/s11007-011-9197-2. Ergler, C. R., Kearns, R. A., & Witten, K. (2013). Seasonal and locational variations in children’s play: Implications for wellbeing. Social Science and Medicine, 91, 178–185. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2012.11.034. Holloway, S. L., Hubbard, P., Jons, H., & Pimlott-Wilson, H. (2010). Geographies of education and the significance of children, youth and families. Progress in Human Geography, 34(5), 583–600. doi: 10.1177/0309132510362601. Ivaniushina, V. A., & Aleksandrov, D. A. (2015). Socialization through informal education: The extracurricular activities of Russian schoolchildren. Russian Social Science Review, 56(5), 18–39. doi: 10.1080/10611428.2015.1115290. Jiang, X., & Peguero, A. A. (2017). Immigration, extracurricular activity, and the role of family. Education and Urban Society, 49(3), 314–340. doi: 10.1177/0013124516643759. Jones, L., Osgood, J., Urban, M., Holmes, R., & MacLure, M. (2014). (Re)assembling, (re)casting, and (re)aligning lines of de- and re-territorialisation of early childhood. International Review of Qualitative Research, 7(1), 58–79. doi: 10.1525/ irqr.2014.7.1.58. Kraftl, P. (2014). What are alternative education spaces – and why do they matter? Geography, 99(3), 128–138. Kraftl, P. (2016). The force of habit: Channelling young bodies at alternative education spaces. Critical Studies in Education, 57(1), 116–130. doi: 10.1080/17508487.2016.1102753. Lenz Taguchi, H. (2010). Going beyond the theory/practice divide in early childhood education: Introducing and intra-active pedagogy. New York: Routledge.

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McKendrick, J. H., Kraftl, P., Mills, S., Gregorius, S., & Sykes, G. (2015). Complex geographies of play provision dis/investment across the UK. International Journal of Play, 4(3), 228–235. doi: 10.1080/21594937.2015.1106042. Meade, R., & Shaw, M. (2010). Community development and the arts: Sustaining the democratic imagination in lean and mean times. Journal of Arts and Humanities, 2(1), 65–80. doi: 10.1386/jaac.2.1.65_1. Mena, J., & Vaccaro, A. (2014). Role modelling community engagement for college students: Narratives from women faculty and staff of color. In S. V. D. Iverson, & J. H. James (Eds.), Feminist community engagement: Achieving praxis (pp. 53–74). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Mills, S., & Kraftl, P. (Eds.). (2014). Informal education, childhood and youth: Geographies, histories, practices. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Mills, S., & Kraftl, P. (2016). Cultural geographies of education. Cultural Geographies, 23(1), 19–27. doi: 10.1177/1474474015612717. Pooley, T. M. (2016). Extracurricular arts: Poverty, inequality and indigenous musical arts education in post-apartheid South Africa. Critical Arts, 30(5), 639–654. doi: 10.1080/02560046.2016.1262438. Quayle, A., Sonn, C., & Kasat, P. (2016). Community arts as public pedagogy: Disruptions into public memory through Aboriginal counter-storytelling. International Journal of Inclusive Education, 20(3), 261–277. Romi, S., & Schmida, M. (2009). Non-formal education: A major educational force in the postmodern era. Cambridge Journal of Education, 39(2), 257–273. doi: 10.1080/03057640902904472. Sandlin, J. A., O’Malley, M. P., & Burdick, J. (2011). Mapping the complexity of public pedagogy scholarship: 1894–2010. Review of Educational Research, 81(3), 338–375. Schober, P. S., & Spiess, C. K. (2013). Early childhood education activities and care arrangements of disadvantaged children in Germany. Childhood Industry Research, 6, 709–735. doi: 10.1007/s12187-013-9191-9. Shephard, D. D. (2014). Nonformal education for improving educational outcomes for street children and street youth in developing countries: A systematic review. International Journal of Social Welfare, 23: 349–361. Shillington, L. J., & Murnaghan, A. M. F. (2016). Urban political ecologies and children’s geographies: Queering urban ecologies of childhood. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 40(5), 1017–1035. Stengers, I. (2008). Experimenting with refrains: Subjectivity and the challenge of escaping modern dualism. Subjectivity, 22, 38–59. doi: 10.1057/sub.2008.6. White, I., & Lorenzi, F. (2016). The development of a model of creative space and its potential for transfer from non-formal to formal education. International Review of Education, 62, 771–790. doi: 10.1007/s11159-016-9603-4.

3

Children’s Photography as Sense-making Mona Sakr

Introduction Photographs taken by young children often challenge conventions of photography – in particular, they often contravene the framing, careful positioning and motionlessness we typically find in adult photography. From a developmental approach, children’s photography can be read in terms of the skills which they currently lack but that will likely be acquired over time. From a postdevelopmental approach however, we have the opportunity to consider how children’s photographs productively challenge and unsettle how we think and feel about the world around us. In this chapter, I examine children’s photographs as visual experiments that take us away from a common sense perspective on the world, where we look for and at what we recognize, and towards a sense-making process in which we ‘join with and follow the forces and flows of a material’ (Ingold, 2011, p. 216). I focus on photographs taken by my three-year-old niece around the home in which I grew up and which she regularly visited during the early years of her childhood. Through a careful consideration of my own responses to these photographs, I examine how children’s photography can bring us closer to the sensory, somatic and affective experiences of space and place. I argue that there is a benefit for both children and adults when we refrain from seeing children as not-yet-competent photographers and instead engage fully and openly with how they photograph the world around them. The chapter begins with an overview of research in childhood studies involving children’s photographs. This is followed by a theoretical framing for investigations into children’s photography, through Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction between ‘common sense’ perceptions of the world that ‘domesticate

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difference’ (Poxon & Stivale, 2005, p. 66) and the act of ‘sense-making’ in which we engage fully with the endless differences in our experiences of the world (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). I then introduce the research context in which the photographs which are part of the analysis presented here were taken, as well as the process of analysis that I carried out. The findings are presented as five themes that relate to my responses to the photographs; these are the themes of (1) comfort of containment, (2) desire for orientation, (3) going beyond the edges of the image, (4) evocation of affective dimensions of experience and (5) paying attention to objects. In the final discussion of the chapter, I argue that it is generative to ask different questions of children’s photographs in the context of qualitative research. Rather than asking just ‘what can these photographs tell us?’ and ‘what do they capture?’, we can challenge ourselves to ask ‘what do these photographs do?’ and ‘what entanglements are they implicated in?’. Through these questions we can engage with our embodied responses to children’s photographs and thereby push against the dominance of language in how we make sense of children’s experiences of the world, and this is an essential part of moving beyond a developmentalist paradigm in childhood studies.

Children’s photography There is a rich tradition in childhood research of using children’s photography as a way of gaining access to children’s perceptions and experiences and enhancing children’s voices in research. Many studies with children as participants have asked them to take photographs; these photographs have then typically been used to elicit verbal reflections from the children. For example, Stephenson (2009) asked children aged 2–4 years to take photographs of the early childhood centre that they attended. These photographs were used as a starting point for listening to children’s perceptions and feelings with regard to the environment. Similarly, DeMarie and Ethridge (2006) found that photographs taken by children helped to extend their verbal reflections on their experiences in preschool so that children provided more depth and detail than if they did not use photographs as a starting point for the discussion. While most studies have used children’s photography as an access point to children’s perspectives, some studies have demonstrated that children’s photography cannot always be interpreted as a kind of ‘revelation’ about what children think and feel. Richards (2009) engaged children in collecting photographs as a way of understanding more about their art experiences in

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school and at home. While this enabled Richards to see the themes at work in children’s art-making, she also noted that some photographs did not suit themselves to this type of content-driven interpretation. For example, one of the children in the study took many close-up photographs of objects and appeared to use photography as a way of exploring texture and colour. In this case, photography was an end in itself – a way of exploring the world, rather than a means to collecting and sharing information about experiences of the world. Einarsdottir (2005), in a study of children’s photography of the playschool environment, found differences in how children took photographs when they used digital cameras with adult guidance as opposed to using disposable cameras without adult supervision. Children using the digital cameras with adult guidance typically compiled a ‘photo-tour’ of the playschool environment, capturing images of objects throughout the environment. On the other hand, children using the disposable cameras alone were more playful and experimental in how they took photographs. They gathered photographs more haphazardly in terms of time and place and placed more of an emphasis on images of their friends engaged in everyday activities. They were also more likely to show an interest in images that they thought to be daring or taboo, such as photographs of intimate body parts. Investigations that have attempted to apply a developmental lens to children’s photography have demonstrated the difficulty in creating a linear developmental model of the activity. Sharples et al. (2003) analysed the photographs of 180 children aged 7, 11 and 15. Although the researchers found that the older children appeared to have a greater sense of how their photographs would impact on those looking at them (or at least had a greater capacity to articulate this sense), all of the groups were dismissive of what they saw as adults’ over-emphasis on technical proficiency. They valued authentic and informal photographs, rather than photography carried out according to a rigid set of rules and skills. The researchers concluded from this study that children’s photography cannot be seen as a less competent version of adults’ photography. Children and young people have something new to bring to the way we see photography and how we practise it. This chapter takes that assertion further by looking at how young children’s photographs can unsettle the way we see familiar environments around us. Kind’s (2013) post-human research on photography with children purposefully steers away from the notion of the camera as a tool to ‘capture’ images from the world. She adopted a playful approach working with young children on a photography project in a Canadian early childhood centre.

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The project’s aim was ‘to look for subversive ruptures within the photographic processes’ (p. 429). The photographs were not seen as indicative of children’s voices or even as a starting point for gathering children’s voices. This would have meant seeing the camera as a tool to be used by humans. Instead, Kind notes that the camera itself has ‘thing-power’ (Bennett, 2004, p. 348). In Barad’s (2007) language, the camera is agential and part of intra-actions with the adults and children who purport to ‘use’ the camera. Through the entanglement of people and the photographic process, the distinct existence of the individuals, photography, the photographs and the camera all emerge. None of these elements can be seen as preceding the entanglement in which they exist. Kind notes that children’s reactions to the photographs were supportive of seeing the photographic process in this unconventional way. She suggests that children tended not to ‘look’ at each other’s photographs but instead that their responses were noticeably haptic – they moved in response to the photographs or reached out to touch them. They sought to draw the photographs into their current experiences rather than make sense of the photographs as a record of previous experience.

Children’s photography as sense-making Deleuze and Guattari describe sense-making as a process in which our ideas about the world are in a constant state of flux as a result of our ever-changing experiences (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Lambert, 2005; Surin, 2005). In sensemaking, we are prepared to constantly navigate, negotiate and problematize what we know about the world, rather than attempting to build rigid schemas about the world around us. By valuing sense-making, we move away from the value often placed on ‘common sense’ – a notion which stems from an assumption that the world is knowable. A ‘common sense’ ontology, which characterizes most recognized academic disciplines, will attempt to ‘domesticate difference’ (Poxon & Stivale, 2005, p. 66) through generalizations. On the other hand, sense-making reveals, explores and celebrates the never-ending dimensions of difference that constitute the world around us and our experiences. Sensemaking is particularly pertinent in certain practices and ways of being in the world. The arts, for example, comprise sense-making exercises that help us to deconstruct our knowledge of the world and unsettle our illusions of familiarity. Research involving children’s photography, as outlined above, can be seen in terms of sense-making or common sense. In the studies where children’s

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photographs are used to elicit verbal reflections from children about their everyday experiences and environments, and generalizations are sought based on these reflections, the images in the photographs are understood as components of ‘common sense’. On the other hand, in Kind’s (2013) research, and inadvertently in Richards’s (2009) study, children’s photography is a method of sense-making, through which the world is defamiliarized and ‘subversive ruptures’ (Kind, 2013, p. 429) are sought and enacted. Malin (in this volume) refers to this process as ‘problem-seeking’, drawing on the work of Mace (1997; Mace & Ward, 2002), which suggests that a definitive characteristic of art-making is the willingness to unlearn and problematize our experiences of the world. Sense-making has also been explained in art theory as the process of ‘making strange’, as explained by Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, a professor of dance and philosophy. ‘Making strange’ involves dancers finding new ways to move their body so that their habitual physical understanding of the world is productively challenged and new ways of being are provoked. Through disrupting our habitual movements, we invite new sensations, experiences and ideas to arise (Loke Robertson, 2008; Sheets-Johnstone, 1999). De Rijke provides an example of this in her chapter, where she discusses the physical experimentation involved in Cy Tombly’s art-making, which included drawing with his non-dominant hand, drawing while balancing on the shoulders of another person or drawing in the dark in order to create something new and different. The practice of ‘making strange’ is interesting in the context of photography because it suggests a route to unsettling what we think we know through the subconscious processes of habitual movement. Since children’s engagement with photography is likely to be less habitual than adults’, this suggests that children’s photography – more than adults’ photography – has the potential to make the familiar strange and to act as an invitation to remember the endless difference around us. When an adult takes a photograph with the iPad that they own and have used many times, they are likely to have a repertoire of habitual movements that comprises this act. They stop and hold the device in a particular fashion so as to ‘capture’ a particular image and to avoid occluding the image with any part of their hands; they spend a certain amount of time framing the image, and they press the button with a finger that means they do not need to change their position or hold on the device. A three-year-old child who is perhaps using the iPad camera for the first time (as in one of the examples in this chapter) will not have these habitual movements available. While a developmental approach might see this as a deficit in the child’s knowledge, a theoretical framework that foregrounds the value of sense-making will see the lack of habit as an opportunity for artistic

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practice to emerge. The question becomes: ‘What can we learn (or un-learn) through children’s photography?’

A child’s photography in the home To investigate further children’s photography as a means of sense-making, I focus now on photographs made by a three-year-old child with the support of her father in a familiar home environment. The child and father engaged in two episodes of photography using the in-built camera in an iPad2. These episodes occurred as part of a wider research study which looked at how different semiotic resources are drawn into child–parent art-making in the home. In the photography episodes (which constituted two of the total eight episodes that were recorded in the study), the child and father took photographs using the iPad camera and later organized their photographs using the iPad application Our Story which enables users to collate images, sound files and written captions into personalized narratives that can be shared in multiple formats. Here, I consider just the photographs taken, rather than the narratives that were ultimately created. I recorded the episodes of activity using a handheld video camera and analysed the recordings in conjunction with the photographs taken, which were automatically stored in the ‘camera roll’ of the iPad. I am the child’s aunt and the sister of the father. This enabled the observations to remain relaxed and informal (see Adler & Adler, 1996, for a discussion of family members acting as researchers) and meant that the context in which the observations were carried out (the child’s grandparents’ home and my parents’ home) was deeply familiar. I was born in and grew up in the house where the photographs were taken; I lived there until the age of eighteen when I went to university and then returned to the house to live for a few years in my early twenties. It is a place resonant with conscious and subconscious experiences. Since leaving this house, I have returned countless times to visit the family and spend time with the growing extended family. Since the research study was conducted, my parents have moved and so, as a result, has the ‘family home’ where we congregate for Friday night dinners and Sunday afternoon cake and tea. Looking at photographs taken in this other house, the ‘left-behind house’ is tinged with memories of surfaces and layouts that are no longer accessible to me. This all impacts how I now look at and respond to the photographs taken by my niece. The tensions between knowing and not-knowing which are conjured through the photographs are more pertinent than ever.

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Method of analysis Firstly, I selected the photographs I wanted to focus on from the camera roll. I chose the photographs that were taken with relative independence by the child, rather than the photographs that were taken by the child and the father together at the beginning of the task. I gathered seven photographs that showed varied visual impressions in terms of texture, colour and orientation, while also corresponding to a negative or positive immediate affective response in me. Secondly, in order to examine further my immediate affective responses to the images, I used four question clusters to probe further about my response: a. What do I see? What do I notice? b. What do I feel? What is my physical response? c. What feels familiar? What do I recognize? d. What is surprising or unsettling? What strikes me as unusual? I wrote stream-of-consciousness responses to these questions in handwriting while looking at each photograph printed out in colour. I answered the questions in whatever order felt right. In doing this, I found that my focus was increasingly on the (b) cluster of questions relating to my affective response and the nature of my physical response to the images. Increasingly I was aware of my desires to climb, fall, reach and turn away. Thus, my response was connected to Kind’s (2013) observations of how children responded to the photographs of other children, where they typically showed an immediate physical responsiveness. Having said this, the theme of ‘containment’ that I have written about below shows that I kept coming back to the question ‘What am I looking at?’ and trying to make sense of the particular objects and locations that were visible through the image. In my recurring preoccupation with this line of enquiry, I became aware that a lack of understanding about what is in the image can be deeply unsettling, and perhaps this tells us something about our reliance on a ‘common sense’ perception of the world around us. Once I had handwritten my immediate responses to the images, I typed up commentaries for each image, only editing slightly what I had written in a free-flow form. I printed these typed commentaries and then applied a rough thematic analysis, highlighting and annotating what I had written in the commentary, finding points of connection and disconnect between the different commentaries. Having applied this process, I developed five themes that were expanded further by revisiting each photograph in relation to these themes. In the sections below, I explain each of these themes and use the photographs to

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Table 3.1  Themes in the analysis of the photographs Theme

Brief overview

Comfort of containment

I find myself trying to work out what objects and locations I can see; when I can do this, I am comforted.

Desire for orientation

I find myself trying to work out what angle the photograph is taken from. Details that help to orientate the viewer produce a positive affective response in me.

Going beyond the edges of the image

I can often see, hear and feel things that go beyond what is actually visible in the photograph. This reinforces the familiarity of the environment, but it can also involve more fantastical flights of imagination.

Evocation of affective dimensions of experience

I have an affective response to all of the photographs. Some of the photographs bring this dimension of the response to the fore; in particular, some photographs create an authentic sense of discomfort relating to the space of the ‘family home’.

Paying attention to objects

Some photographs highlight the ‘thing-power’ of objects. I am excited, intrigued, intimidated (and so on) by objects that I have previously not consciously paid much attention to.

illustrate these different aspects of my response. Table 3.1 offers a brief overview of the themes so that these can be more easily applied in other research on how we (adults) respond to children’s photography and art-making more generally.

Containment When it is easy to discern, and therefore contain, what I am looking at, I experience positive affect; specifically, I feel comforted. I experience this in relation to Figure  3.1, which shows a pair of man’s shoes. I find these shoes particularly pleasing, even though the shoes are not familiar to me. I work out through a process of deduction that they must belong to my brother, but I do not recognize them on a personal level. I find that I want to crop the image so that it captures more perfectly just the shoes. This relates to a desire for containment and for schematic representation. When this kind of containment and schematic recognition is impossible, it is unsettling. Figure 3.2 shows a blurred image of a bag in the hallway of the house. The bag is open and something white is spilling out but what this is cannot be discerned from the image because of the blur. I

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Figure 3.1 Shoes.

Figure 3.2 Spilling.

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find that I am concerned by the ‘mess’ created by whatever is spilling out of the bag. I am concerned about the fluid boundaries of this object and the inability of the bag to successfully contain its contents. What is the white spilling out of the bag? What is the texture of this material? How fluid is this material? Could it be paper, or perhaps a plastic bag, or even silver foil? How much of a ‘spill’ does it represent? How uncontained is what I am looking at and what needs to

Figure 3.3  Diagonal lines.

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be done in order to contain whatever is currently uncontained? Without clarity about what I am looking at, the fuzziness of the image is unsettling; on the other hand, as we will see with Figure 3.3, blurriness was more tolerable when it was still clear what the image was showing. This is discussed more in the theme below: ‘orientation’.

Orientation Following on from the theme above, with some of the images – particularly those that showed the most motion-blur – I experienced a strong desire to orientate myself and determine the viewpoint of the photographer when making the image. In looking at Figure 3.1, I am unsettled by the orientation of the image. Where is the top and where is the bottom? I find myself tilting my head to try and discern the orientation that corresponds to the person taking the photograph, but of course the position of the camera viewpoint is not necessarily the same as the photographer’s viewpoint. When orientation cannot be deduced, it is troubling. In Figure 3.2, the image is disorientating because I know that this is the hallway but I cannot work out quite what is the wall, what is the door and the angle through which the photograph was taken. On the other hand, Figure 3.3, despite its blur, is easy to locate. When I look at this image, I know that I am looking into the kitchen from the doorway. I have a child’s line of sight so that the bottom half of the kitchen is clear to me. I am looking at the top and bottom parts of the oven, along with the drawers in the kitchen units. The segmentations between the tiles on the floor offer a sense of order. My vision is readily carried through the image, working its way across the diagonal grooves between the kitchen floor tiles and then up the vertical lines that segment the oven and the kitchen units. The motion blur does not jeopardize the order of this image; the lines and points in the photograph demonstrate the stillness of the world, despite the movement of the photographer. With Figure 3.4, I am immediately comforted when I work out how to orientate this image so that it represents a movement through the hallway towards the front door. As soon as I turn the photograph to this orientation, there is familiarity and order. The blurriness and unknowability of the objects that are strewn on the hallway carpet become much less important – they fade into the background of the journey that is known and that this image now represents.

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Figure 3.4  Moving through the hallway.

Beyond the edges of the image I am amazed by how much I imagine that goes beyond what is visible in each photograph. This includes the spaces that are beyond the edges of the photographs. In viewing Figure 3.3, I can easily create a mind’s image of the parts of the kitchen that are not visible in the image: the sink, the kitchen units on the other side of the kitchen, the worktop surfaces and the sliding door that marks the entrance to the kitchen. I even hear the sound of the sliding door when it bangs against the wall. Each image is saturated with textures that are felt through viewing the photograph. This is the ‘haptic visuality’ described by Laura Marks in the context of film studies. Marks (2004) uses this term to refer to cinematic moments in which the viewer is encouraged to understand what they are seeing through felt sensations in the body. In Figure 3.5, for example, I feel the shiny plastic surface of the washing machine and the cold touch of the metallic drum. I hear the sounds that these textures make when they are touched, particularly the metallic ring of the drum. In Figure 3.6, the texture of the radiator feels immediately familiar: the chipped white paint and the bumps in the radiator. I hear the sound made when an object is dragged along the bumps

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of the radiator; this is something I did in this house as a child and something I have seen my nieces and nephews doing many times since. For Figure 3.7, I can feel the ornate shiny texture of the panelled walls in the hallway and the plastic swirls that stand out in relief. The smallest sense of recognition gives rise to a plethora of remembered textures. For example, as soon as I become aware of the sideboard in Figure 3.4, I conjure memories of the carved wood in the doors of the sideboard. The physical sensations I experience in relation to the images go beyond just the felt textures and extend to possible actions that I feel almost ready to enact. Objects that have an obvious function, such as the washing machine in Figure  3.5, invite feelings relating to their use. I want to reach in to close the

Figure 3.5  Washing machine.

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Figure 3.6  Sliding down the radiator.

door of the washing machine; I feel the resistance of the door as it closes into the mechanism and hear the click as the door slots into place. Simultaneously, I conjure sensations associated with the more fantastical experience of climbing into the drum. In response to Figure 3.1, I can feel how it is to slot the cordless phone into its cradle and hear both the mechanical sound of this slotting motion and the digital beep that lets you know the phone is now charging. With Figure 3.7, I feel not just how it is to use the vacuum cleaner but also the frustration I associate with using this object. Beyond the edges of the image sit physical and emotional sensations which quickly emerge through a consideration of what is available through sight. For some images, the physical sensation takes over from the questions ‘What is it?’ and ‘Where am I?’ and the movement seems to take up almost all of the experience of engaging with the image. In response to Figure 3.6, I experience a strong sensation of moving down the radiator at a fast pace. The grooves in the radiator carry me down towards the floor and the shoes; there is a pleasurable sense of contained, controlled falling and I am met at the bottom by the comforting presence of the shoes, which feel known and familiar through Figure 3.1. Photographs which are framed in a more typical

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Figure 3.7  Vacuum cleaner.

way, corresponding to a more ‘common sense’ representation of the world, do not produce the same intensity of affective and physical response. These photographic experiments, so different from the photo-tour-style photographs typically taken by adults, enable me to get back in touch with the physicality of viewing photographs.

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Evoking affective dimensions Familiarity is not something only pertaining to the imagination and what can be consciously brought to the mind’s eye (or ear or skin) but also the sense of a subconscious connection with the place or objects. I feel that I know the dark pink carpet, present in many of the images, in a way that extends beyond a simple recognition of the carpet. I characterize the pervasiveness in Figure 3.7 immediately as ‘the sea of carpet’ in my stream-of-consciousness writing. This metaphor highlights my affective response to the carpet: the sense of being ‘at sea’, of being lost, of being small in comparison to something much bigger, perhaps even of drowning. Throughout viewing the series of photographs, I am struck by how dark and dingy the house feels and yet also how this relates strongly to my memory of the house on the particular afternoon when these photographs were taken. On this dark, wet afternoon in February, my parents were abroad and the house felt empty. Looking at the photographs makes me aware of the journey home that still awaited me after meeting with my brother and niece – the desire to get home and have dinner. To what extent is this affective dimension at work in the images themselves, and to what extent is this contained in my memories of that afternoon? Can we disentangle these two phenomena? Would we want to? I am aware that the photographs correspond to something authentic in my experience; no filters are applied. Because of this what I see is more familiar, more authentic than if it were distanced through more schematic representations of the house. The authenticity actually generates more of an unsettling feeling since the feeling at the time of the experience was partly unsettled.

Paying attention to objects Figure 3.7 seems to highlight the ‘thing-power’ (Bennett, 2004) of the vacuum cleaner. When I look at Figure 3.7, I see the vacuum cleaner in a position of attack. The hose extends beyond the edges of the image, making it feel longer than in real life. I feel almost intimidated by the vacuum cleaner in this position. The small black part on the vertical grey strip seems to be looking out at me and challenging me. The hose appears to penetrate my personal space, which seems to exist at the bottom of the photograph. The monotonous texture of the carpet makes it feel that the vacuum cleaner is almost floating. The vacuum cleaner is just an afterthought, an accessory to daily life in the context of the

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house, but in this photograph, it looms large and has real presence. Through this photograph, I have a new understanding of the fear that the vacuum cleaner evokes in my two-year-old daughter at the time of writing and the fear I have seen previously among my nieces and nephews. The photograph does not just help me to understand their affective response to the vacuum cleaner in an abstract way; it generates a real feeling that I imagine corresponds closely to their experience of this object. As discussed in the background sections of this chapter, many research studies in childhood have used photographs and visual elicitation as a way of understanding more about children’s perspectives. This method still relies on the verbal reflection of the children as a ‘way in’ to what they think and how they feel. With these photographs however, I find that I have a new sense of what the child photographer is feeling, and this occurs directly through my response to the visual; furthermore, the reaction is not ‘one step removed’ but very much my own personal reaction. This indicates the exciting potential of engaging directly with children’s photographs in a research context and not just thinking in terms of the visual elicitation of verbal responses.

Discussion The themes relating to containment and orientation demonstrate the comfort that we tend to place on knowing what we can see (or what we think we can see) in photographs. This corresponds to the comfort of ‘common sense’ ontology more generally. We should not forget that it is deeply uncomfortable, perhaps even painful, to unlearn the generalizations through which we have come to understand the world. We can resist the processes of defamiliarization and ‘making strange’, which necessitates an active push against the desire to blur the endless differences. Children’s photography can help us in the struggle to do this, since it can produce visual stimuli that make the world around us feel unfamiliar. Perhaps the tendency to dismiss some children’s photographs as unsuccessful attempts at photography is partly a response to how uncomfortable we are in having our common sense notions of the world troubled by children’s blurry creations, which resist containment and orientation. Another exciting aspect of the investigation shared in this chapter is the strength of evocation associated with the photographs – the way in which sounds, textures, unseen sights, physical sensations and strong emotions are conjured when responding to the photographs.

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This study suggests that children’s photography has an exciting role to play in supporting insights in qualitative research looking at children’s embodied experiences of the world. Through photographs we can engage with experiences that defy description and explanation through language. However, this can only be achieved when we see the photographs as part of an entangled reality in which our own responses to the photographs – our physical and emotional sensations – are an essential part of the interpretive process. This means that when we aim to consider how children experience a particular place (such as the nursery they attend or a playground they visit), our own physical and affective engagement with the place needs to be part of the examination. Engaging in this way with children’s photographs links to a wider framework of research in childhood studies in which we ask a different set of questions. Rather than ‘what do these photographs tell us?’ or ‘what do they capture?’, we ask ‘what do the photographs do?’, ‘how do they act on the world?’ and ‘what entanglements are they implicated in?’. Future research could build on the work presented in this chapter by challenging further the ways in which we delineate and limit experiences through language. Although my analysis placed an emphasis on physical and affective sensations to the photographs, my responses were still bound in the confines of language. It would be interesting to see, in line with Kind’s (2013) observations, how different physical responses to the photographs unfold. This might involve a multimodal interaction analysis of different individuals’ reactions to the photographs, perhaps in the context of an exhibition of the photographs ideally in the space of the ‘family home’ in which they were taken. In experimenting with how we engage with children’s photographs, we open up new ways of seeing the world and unsettling what we think we know. It should be noted that I am not intending to generalize on the basis of the investigation presented here. I am not generalizing about how children take photographs or how adults respond to these photographs. What I am hoping to do is to invite new ways of engaging with the photographs that children create that move beyond a perspective in which photographs are treated as a ‘phototour’ of experience, which is elucidated through verbal elicitation. Photographs are exciting because of what they do that goes beyond language; engaging our embodied responses to children’s photographs is one way of pushing against the primacy of language in our interpretations of the world and children’s experiences of it. In subverting the confines of language, we can challenge the developmentalist paradigm that dominates childhood studies and asks that we conceptualize child photographers as not-quite-competent artists.

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References Adler, P., & Adler, P. (1996). Parent-as-researcher: The politics of researching in the personal life. Qualitative Sociology, 19(1), 35–58. Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bennett, J. (2004). The force of things: Steps toward an ecology of matter. Political theory, 32(3), 347–372. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. DeMarie, D., & Ethridge, E. A. (2006). Children’s images of preschool: The power of photography. YC Young Children, 61(1), 101. Einarsdottir, J. (2005). Playschool in pictures: Children’s photographs as a research method. Early Child Development and Care, 175(6), 523–541. Ingold, T. (2011). Being alive: Essays on movement, knowledge, and description. New York: Routledge. Kind, S. (2013). Lively entanglements: The doings, movements and enactments of photography. Global Studies of Childhood, 3(4), 427–441. Lambert, G. (2005). Expression. In C. J. Stivale (Ed.), Gilles Deleuze: Key concepts (pp. 31–42). Chesham: Acumen Publishing. Loke, L., & Robertson, T. (2008). Inventing and devising movement in the design of movement-based interactive systems. In Proceedings of the 20th Australian Conference on Human – Computer Interaction (OzCHI’08) (pp. 81–88). New York: ACM. Mace, M. (1997). Toward an understanding of creativity through a qualitative appraisal of contemporary art making. Creativity Research Journal, 10(2&3), 265–278. Mace, M., & Ward, T. (2002). Modeling the creative process: A grounded theory analysis of creativity in the domain of art making. Creativity Research Journal, 14(2), 179–192. Marks, L. U. (2004). Haptic visuality: Touching with the eyes. Framework: The Finnish Art Review, 2, 79–82. Poxon, J. L., & Stivale, C. J. (2005). Sense, series. In C. J. Stivale (Ed.), Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts (pp. 65–77). Chesham: Acumen Publishing. Richards, R. D. (2009). Young visual ethnographers: Children’s use of digital photography to record, share and extend their art experiences. International Art in Early Childhood Research Journal, 1(1), 1–16. Sharples, M., Davison, L., Thomas, G. V., & Rudman, P. D. (2003). Children as photographers: An analysis of children’s photographic behaviour and intentions at three age levels. Visual Communication, 2(3), 303–330.

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Sheets-Johnstone, M. (1999). Emotion and movement. A beginning empiricalphenomenological analysis of their relationship. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 6(11–12), 11–12. Stephenson, A. (2009). Horses in the sandpit: Photography, prolonged involvement and ‘stepping back’ as strategies for listening to children’s voices. Early Child Development and Care, 179(2), 131–141. Surin, K. (2005). Force. In C. J. Stivale (Ed.), Gilles Deleuze: Key concepts (pp. 19–31). Chesham: Acumen Publishing.

4

Holly Banister: A Social Incentive Account of Exceptional Drawing Ability Paul Duncum

Introduction By eight years of age Holly Banister defied critical aspects of the standard stepby-step, linear stage approach to drawing development. Her ability to draw from both life and visual models far exceeded the prescriptions of the developmental sequences once popular in developmental psychology, once unquestionably reiterated in the field of art education (e.g. Lowenfeld & Brittain, 1964), and even recently, despite qualifications, continue to be advanced (e.g. Day & Hurwitz, 2012). Like many other children who draw prolifically in their own time of their own accord (e.g. Fineburg, 1976; Gardner, 1980; Hildreth, 1941; Pearson, 1993; Wilson & Wilson, 1977), judged by the criteria of realism, aspects of Holly’s drawings far exceeded universalistic stage prescriptions for a child of her age. Step-by-step, stage-by-stage approaches can only account for exceptional ability such as Holly’s in terms of special giftedness, of innate talent (e.g. Lowenfeld & Brittian, 1964), or inexplicable or deficient mental operations (e.g. Selfe, 1977), that is, in terms of anomalous, individual psychology where motivation is understood to arise from inner promptings. By contrast, I argue that for Holly an apparent natural inclination for visual observation symbiotically interacted with facilitative environmental incentives. Nature but also nurture combined to produce a prolific, unsolicited drawer who, judged by older developmental models, was truly remarkable. However, considered in terms of environmental incentives, her development was not at all exceptional. Her drawings and many of her environmental circumstances were similar to other prolific child drawers (e.g. Houston, 2006; Pearson,

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1993). Her relative social isolation, and her highly facilitative environment for drawing, had many precedents. Additionally, her social incentives to draw were markedly similar to other prolific child drawers. Holly Banister’s drawings represent what is possible and, consequently, suggest what education could attempt. While Holly’s specific circumstances were uniquely her own, her achievement suggests what might be achieved with appropriate adult assistance.

Theoretical assumptions The current study frames Holly’s drawings as a form of social practice (Ivashkevich, 2009; Pearson, 2001; Schulte, 2015). It provides a snapshot in time of how drawing functioned in her life and for her audience. The study drew upon Social Learning Theory (Bandura, 1977, 1997) with its emphasis on situationally specific behaviour that involves an ongoing symbiosis between individuals and their environment. Behaviour was assumed to be self-motivated, being directed by self-regulatory, self-efficacy expectations. Furthermore, achievement was assumed to be due to rule learning, that rule learning is discipline specific, and that rule learning occurs primarily through modelling. Finally, it was assumed that motivation is infinitely complex and can vary over time. Specifically, the study employed Veroff and Veroff ’s (1980) catalogue of social incentives to help explain Holly’s drawing in terms of her environmental inducements to draw, social incentives being defined as ‘anticipated transaction[s] with the environment, external or internal, that has some attraction to the person’, otherwise described as ‘contemplated results, the desire for which moves a person’ (p. 13). Holly was understood to be an active agent in her own self-motivation. While initially enjoying drawing for its own sake without a reinforcing reward, later, reacting to her own performances became its own reward. Holly did indeed exercise some degree of control over her behaviour by arranging her own environment to provide positive consequences for her behaviour. Holly selected, organized and transformed her environment in order to pursue her passion for drawing. She frequently cajoled her mother to obtain drawing materials, and as her mother commented: She is slowly persuasive. ‘I’d like to do this, or this is why I’d like to do it. I want to go to the zoo because I want to draw the animals, or I want to go the museum. I want to look at the animals to see them where they’re not moving.’

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Conducting the study I met Holly through an approach by her mother who had heard that I was ‘interested in children who draw a lot in their own time’. I explained that I was especially interested in both how such children learn to draw – their learning strategies – and ‘why they like to draw so much – including family influences’. I explained that to conduct a case study I would need to get to know the relevant family dynamics, and to do this I would need to interview Holly over a period of time, each family member at least once and her teachers. After gaining her consent, university research ethical requirements were obtained, which included the provision that the final report from which any later published material would be based would be available to each participant to offer comments. The study was conducted through interviews, document analysis and personal observation. Over a period of eleven months I interviewed Holly six times, always after school and usually alone, beginning when she was 8.1 years. These interviews were largely based on asking open-ended questions about, or making general comments to elicit a response to, previously photocopied pictures; for example, ‘What is happening in this drawing?’ or ‘Tell me about this picture.’ The interviews were taped and lasted about three quarters of an hour. I interviewed her mother twice, at the beginning and at the end of the study. I also interviewed once each, her father, her two older sisters, her specialist art teacher and her class teacher. Most of these interviews were also taped. I examined hundreds of Holly’s drawings, of which 116 were selected on which to base interviews. The drawings were selected because they were either typical or atypical. The drawings were produced six months prior to the commencement of the study, at 7.7 years, until several nights before the final interview at 9 years. On several occasions, I observed Holly drawing horses from memory, and during one interview, she demonstrated how she drew her pet mouse, called ‘Mousie Tong’ from life (see Figure 4.1). Holding her mouse in one hand, she drew with the other, though she had to take short breaks because the mouse became ‘overexcited’. Placed down on the coffee table to ‘relax’, the mouse ran frantically about and defecated. Holly, equally in a frenzy, concealed the dropping behind the settee to avoid her mother’s wrath. She then picked up the mouse and went on drawing. To facilitate the relationship between Holly and myself, I once showed her a few drawing schemata for facial features and lent her a how-to-draw-faces book.

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Figure 4.1  Drawn from observation at 8.2 years in pencil.

Learning to draw Before describing Holly’s environmental context and how it offered a range of incentives to draw prolifically, I describe the learning strategies she employed and introduce the drawings themselves. Prior to the study Holly had learned to draw primarily through copying from pictures, copying while watching her sisters draw, and extensive practice from observing directly from life. She had also used how-to-draw books and received some formal instruction, and she had devised some of her own schema. Holly had copied from picture books on fairies, horses, other animals and historical romance. Figure 4.2 was copied from a picture book. Of copying from one of her sisters, she said, ‘I was watching her all the time, my eyes glued to the paper. She was getting really good and I was always copying her.’ One of her sisters said, ‘I do a drawing and she does lots of drawings like it. And then gradually her drawings get more and more her. They start off like mine, and then she goes off on her own tangent, her own style.’

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Figure 4.2  Drawn from a picture book at 8.7 years in pencil (34 × 41 cms).

For a brief time Holly had attended a private Saturday morning art class. He teacher had showed her, as she said, ‘how to do finger bits, how to do the dark bits, how to shade in’. Apart from copying, Holly’s principle method had been to observe real subjects – animals at the zoo and museum, her pets and people. She said, ‘I kept looking at people from sideways ’cause they always talk to each other like that and you can see it all.’ Holly had an intense interest in drawing from life, unusual

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Figure 4.3  Drawn from life in about one minute at 7.7 years using Conte crayon.

not only among most children her age but also among prolific spontaneous drawers. Figure 4.3 is an example of a series of drawings completed, she claimed, in about one minute while looking not at the drawing but the animals. It is a blind contour drawing. Holly had also devised her own schema for mouths. She had examined a silhouette of herself from a sideshow artist cut from black paper with scissors. The silhouette had used a tiny cut to represent the meeting of the upper and lower lips, and Holly had reasoned that the two extra lines were required to clearly indicate lips.

Holly’s drawings From her earliest years Holly’s subjects had been exclusively animals and human figures, her single most common subjects being horses, horses and riders, and

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her pet mice. Her human figures were typically fashionable young women, fairies, mermaids, portraits and some historical figures with an emphasis on their costumes. The themes of Holly’s drawings included the nurturance by mother of their young, a love of animals, and the power, virility, mastery and nurturance associated with horses, their riding and care. Themes also included personal adornment and a longing for fame. In some drawings Holly casts herself in the role of benefactor and protector. Her father observed, ‘She stays away from traumatic things. She doesn’t draw injured, sick, or dead things. All the things she draws are either sweet, full of action, or bland.’ Holly was very particular about her drawing materials. She often chose not to draw at school because ‘they don’t have the right kind of pencil and paper’. At home, a lack of her preferred materials was a constant source of frustration. Like many other prolific unsolicited drawers, she preferred fine marking tools in order to achieve detail. She preferred to use a dark, soft pencil like a 6B, but also she often used fine felt pens and even biros. She did not like to paint because, as she confided, ‘you can never shade in things. If you were drawing a horse you can’t do the eyes. You get it all mixed up.’ While some of Holly’s drawings were simplified in a way that echoed cartoons, most of her drawings evidenced a reach towards realism. Their success largely depended upon whether she was drawing from a preexisting model, from life, or relying on memory or imagination as well as the time she had spent. Her drawings from memory and imagination were not as realistic as those drawn from either graphic sources or direct observation (see Figures 4.4, 4.5 and 4.6 that were drawn from imagination). During the course of the study, her attention to detail increased markedly and her ability to manage proportions was dramatically emphasized when she began to draw exceptionally large pictures such as Figures 4.2 and 4.7. Her search for realism was illustrated in our interviews by her continual lament over her inaccuracies. For example, I always draw the horse standing still. Because I nearly always do what is kind of too still, because when a horse is standing still horses don’t stand still that much. They’re always hanging their head down, and I usually do their head up.

However, it is not as though Holly’s drawings were simply a stage or two ahead of her peers, as if her drawing development was linear. Stage developmentalists acknowledge that there are deviations from their norms, with some children behind and others ahead (e.g. Lowenfeld & Brittain, 1964). Holly’s drawings were more complicated than a straightforward linear trajectory for they were

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Figure 4.4  Drawn from imagination in pencil at 8.3 years.

Figure 4.5  Drawn from imagination with fountain pen with an elaborate narrative element at 8.3 years.

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Figure 4.6  Drawn from imagination at 8 years.

not uniformly more advanced than her peers. Rather, their degree of realism is quite varied. For example, in Figure 4.1, it is noteworthy that Holly’s representation of her mouse is significantly more realistic than her bananalike fingers. This is what Wilson and Wilson (1981) refer to as a drawing that contains multiple stages or, alternatively, is between stages. The degree of realism also varies between Figure 4.2, which is copied, and Figure 4.8, which is drawn from imagination. The distinction between drawings copied and those drawn from imagination equally holds with the same subject, as with Holly’s drawings of horses; the degree of realism in Figure 4.7 is notably greater than in Figures 4.4 and 4.5. It is equally noteworthy that her ability to place her figures in an approximation of real space is limited; indeed, she appears uninterested in so doing. Thus, while it is possible to address Holly’s reach towards realism in terms of development within the specific medium of drawing (Feldman 1980), it is not possible to consider her drawing as the consequence of a more advanced general

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Figure 4.7  Drawn from a poster with biro at 9 years (25 × 45 cms).

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Figure 4.8  Drawn from imagination with felt pen at 9 years.

cognitive state than her peers. Rather, her unusual ability appears to be due to different methods of working, interest in particular subjects and practice within the specific medium of drawing. Some of Holly’s drawings involved a narrative element though their scope was usually quite limited and rarely was there any visual indication of a

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narrative. Typical of her comments were, ‘That lady is trying to get her horse to go, because it keeps eating grass. She’s not having much fun.’ Of another drawing, she offered, ‘She’s been done off her horse. Or two horses had a collision. She is going to get better. That’s all’ (Figure 4.4). To use Golomb’s (1973) term, this is an example of Holly ‘romancing’; that is, she related a narrative that was possibly made up at the time of telling as well as open to reconstructing. Very occasionally a narrative element was more extensive. In another example of romancing, she said of Figure 4.5: I was just thinking of a horse. It was a very, very windy day. That’s why the horse’s mane is going that way. Its tail is flung up. And I was thinking of the exact horse, thinking of its shadings and patches. It’s a Welsh Mountain pony up in the hills. And it’s really windy and it’s about to rain. And there’s thunder and lightning. And the horses are just getting their babies together so that the foals don’t get stuck by lightning or stray off. She’s trying to get the little baby to go with her because the baby’s scared. She might have run to the back of it, except she didn’t. She’s licking the foal just for the love of licking. I was going to say that this was a grandma pony and it wasn’t a windy day and was just licking, but I changed my mind.

However, unlike Wilson and Wilson’s (1977) assertion that most unsolicited drawings are narrative in nature, most of Holly’s drawings appeared to lack a narrative dimension. With most of her drawings her primary interest appeared to be solely in creating a substitute for the real thing. To open-ended requests, she would comment, for example, ‘I was not thinking much, just how my pencil was moving. Would this be good or not.’ Of another drawing, she said, ‘I was looking at the other picture and not thinking of anything except my drawing. I don’t have a story. I just have a picture.’ Holly’s fascination with visual appearance and general lack of interest in graphic storytelling was reflected in her rare use of written words. Occasionally horse drawings were accompanied with the name or type of horse, but her writing and drawing were always kept spatially apart. While a range of other activities fed Holly’s unsolicited drawing, she saw no relation between her unsolicited drawing and art at school. She said, It’s not like drawing. We usually do string art or puppet making. Only sometimes do we do drawing and I don’t usually do my best drawings there because it’s too noisy. I sway around a lot, but when I am drawing properly I’m stiff. I’m in a more sensible mood. At school I just draw anything.

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Environmental context The Banisters were upper middle class. Both of Holly’s parents were professionals, one a therapist, the other a freelance writer. Both had worked overseas, and when I conducted the study, they lived in a large contemporarystyle, architect-designed house that faced a reserve in a fashionable outer suburb of a city in Australia. The house was furnished in an elegant mix of antiques and contemporary chrome and glass. Original paintings and drawings hung on the walls beside oriental tapestries. Holly’s mother was an amateur photographer, and several of her photographs hung in a hallway. Holly was the youngest by eight and ten years of three sisters. Both Holly and the youngest of her older sisters were attending a private school, and her eldest sister was expected to take up either medicine or law the following year. Family friends included distinguished painters, architects and a millionaire patron of the visual arts. Prior to the study both of Holly’s sisters had spent time with her showing her how to draw. By the time of the study both sisters were going in their own directions and Holly was spending a great deal of her time alone. She saw her father only at weekends, and her mother noted that as a writer she needed time to herself. One of her sisters, who as a child had also been a prolific drawer, commented: When you draw a lot you lead a fairly quiet childhood. You tend not to have bulk friends, tend not to go to lots of little girls’ parties, tend not to be terribly involved at school. You really go off a bit on your own tangent. That’s happening to her now.

Along the same lines, her father said of Holly’s life: It reminds me … of Beatrix Potter a bit. She has had solitude thrust upon her – the company of adults and no real contact with children her own age. … I’d say she’s had to make her own fun from an early age.

From an early age Holly had been introduced to drawing as a valuable activity. Both her older sisters had drawn a great deal. Her mother commented that even ‘as a tiny child in the pram she saw her two sisters drawing. She grew up with the concept that you can control that pencil’. Her father recalled a time when Holly was three years and the family had just arrived back from overseas and were setting up in a new house. We were looking for pictures to hang on the walls …. Pictures were coming in and going out of the house. People were talking about drawing and suggesting this and that … [a family friend] was drawing all the time and offering drawings to be framed. So Holly would have to have been swept up in that a bit.

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One of Holly’s sisters said: I encouraged her and gave her the idea it was a really proud, good, and honorable thing to do, to draw a lot. She’s better than me at her age. She’d say, ‘Oh dear, I’m bored.’ ‘Quick, quick, paper, pencil, draw.’ And I’ve been doing that since she could draw.

Clearly an imaginative child, Holly wrote stories, and at night she would invent stories and poems that were not committed to paper. But drawing had been always her real passion. According to her mother, she would draw while eating if allowed. ‘She arrives home in the afternoon, and from that point on she draws. She goes through the door, up into the sitting room, gets all her materials together and draws.’ Holly had a distinct interest in natural things, as her father put it, ‘in nature, in things that wriggle and crawl, in shells and in collecting rocks and flowers’, and of course her pets, though her mother commented, ‘Every pet exists in two ways. One, as a pet to be loved and, secondly, as a model.’

Social incentives The social incentives that appeared to operate for Holly, as defined by Veroff and Veroff (1980), I found to be curiosity, attachment, assertiveness, aggression and social relatedness. The definitions offered below are derived from theirs.

Curiosity Holly was clearly motivated by curiosity conceived here, not as an inner instigation but as exploring with the anticipation of the pleasure of having had contact with something new and different. Such an inducement was evident from an early age. Her mother said: Before Holly began drawing, even as a tiny child of about 18 months, she would find an object with which she was fascinated – a flower, an ant or a fly – and sit on her haunches and watch it and watch and watch and watch. From the time when she could walk she had this singular and unusual power of observation, which the other girls didn’t. They rushed and hurried.

Holly said, ‘I like drawing my pets, and my mouse is interesting. And I love horses – that’s why I draw them. I play with my mouse, and she does funny things. So I draw her doing those funny things.’

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Attachment Curiosity appeared linked to attachment in Holly’s long-standing, unusual interest in the appearance of a limited number of nature subjects. Attachment is conceived as being attracted to the familiar in order to anchor experience. It helps to avoid threats and the unpleasantness of overstimulation. Attachment is evident in both Holly’s limited choice of topics and her approach to them. Like many other prolific drawers, she focused on just a few topics and addressed them in a limited way. She said, ‘Bad things happen at school. Lots of awful things happen to me at school … getting told off, sometimes for dreaming. I’m always day dreaming about horses. Sometimes I draw so I don’t have to think about bad things.’ Her father observed, ‘She stays away from traumatic things. She doesn’t draw injured, sick, or dead things.’ He concluded our interview by observing, ‘Of course it has to be some kind of security thing. If you took it apart you’d have to say that.’

Assertiveness Holly was aware of her own agency insofar as her own behaviour had impact. She could see that she had improved over time as well as of having had an impact on other people. Of improving over time, her father said, ‘She’s always trying to do better,’ and her mother commented that she worked on the principle that ‘as she goes on and on so she’ll go on improving. So the next drawing will be better. … She is her own critic’. With regard to having an impact on those around her, it was evident that her family was competitive and that she had had to carve out a position for herself. Her mother commented, ‘As the youngest child in a family of girls she has had to compete because if she doesn’t she’ll be overlooked.’ Her father added, ‘She is really quite competitive, and the family is too. I’ve encouraged this. What’s wrong with being the best?’ With Holly’s siblings significantly older than her, she was isolated at home, an isolation that was repeated at school again by virtue of her age. Being a very good student, she had been promoted above her age, making her eight months younger than the average in her class. Her mother noted: She is a bit smaller than the average child in her grade, a bit more of a baby. She always looks like she’s in the wrong class. Sometimes it’s tough for her to cope socially, because the other children are just that little bit more sophisticated.

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Drawing had clearly offered Holly a way to assert herself. She had been able to demonstrate improvement on her appointed task to her own satisfaction as well as impress people about her undoubted ability.

Aggression Assertion could also morph into aggression whenever Holly perceived a threat to her self-efficacy, and her aggression was malignant in the sense that it could be self-destructive. She could be quite sour when her skills were questioned. Her father said, ‘She likes to direct the play. When she’s in a group she likes to be the boss and get her own way. If she can’t have that she tends to feel that everyone hates her.’ Her mother added that Holly was not interested in the local art museum because she was unwilling to acknowledge that others had considerably superior skill. After she had been shown an article I had written that drew comparisons with another prolific drawer, she churlishly asked if the other child had ever drawn horses. Also, she churlishly claimed that one of her sisters had once claimed that her drawings were not as good as I had suggested and that her sister was jealous. Thus, Holly’s self-motivation extended to a felt need to defend her symbolic territory.

Social relatedness Like other prolific unsolicited drawers considered in terms of social practice (e.g. Houston, 2006; Ivashkevich, 2009; Pearson, 1993), Holly was clearly motivated by the inducements of social relatedness. At four years she had won a drawing competition and thereafter had been singled out for her exceptional skill by family friends, relatives, teachers and peers. She had learnt from her sisters that by giving drawings as Christmas presents she could save on money as well as reap the benefit of praise. She had also been asked for several years prior to the study to draw for the annual school magazine. Holly related to other people through her drawings as an achievement, as proof of her competence. She acted in accordance to the norms of performance standards, realism being the standard, working from knowledge of what her peers were able to accomplish. In short, making social comparisons motivated her. ‘Why does she draw?’ her mother asked and immediately answered, ‘The “oohs” and “arrhs” and “how wonderful” from all the relatives and friends. She

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draws to gain attention.’ One of her older sisters commented, ‘At school her ability to draw gives her a lot of status. Nobody can compete with her there.’ Her father agreed, ‘There is nothing Holly likes to hear more than her drawings are those of a child twice her age.’ But Holly was also motivated by the task itself, and often she lost the focus on herself in favour of the task. She found the task inherently captivating. Her drawing skill acted as a tangible goal that had an external validity. Her mother described her attitude while drawing as, very concentrated. … She never makes a sound. She gets irritated if interrupted or she blocks me out altogether. … She doesn’t particularly treasure any drawing. When they’re not successful out they go. She often doesn’t tear up. She just discards things. If a drawing is not going well, she just discards it as meaningless … but that’s not going to stop her from making another one.

It seems that Holly was motivated not just by the completion of a particular drawing but also by a continual search for achieving what she perceived as even better drawings. Holly equally related to others through accommodation. She had learned to accommodate herself to the expectations of both authorities and her peers. She had sought the approval of both. Of special importance was approval from her father. He commented: I’ve praised her up and said that’s not right and so on when we go through her productions. We sometimes have long sessions where we go over the sketchbooks. She selects a lot of pictures for me … and I go through them and select some and put them up on the walls.

Concerning earlier drawings of horses, Holly commented, ‘I did them with only two legs and Dad said, “A horse with two legs?” “Oh no, no!” And I started to do four legs and with their legs lifted and walking, and doing little baby horses.’ Of course, I was also perceived as an authority. As a university researcher publishing on children like Holly, it was inevitable that I was perceived as an expert and she proved keen to follow what little advice I offered. Equally, while her peers at school could offer no guidance on how to draw better, she had navigated her relationships with them so that her classmates did not hinder her. One of her older sisters said that she had encouraged Holly to ‘stuff all your friends, I mean they enjoy what they enjoy – skip rope or something – while you draw’. However, according to Holly, she had maintained positive, affective relationships with a small circle of friends she had known

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since starting school. She said that at school her friends ‘don’t really mind. They’re usually playing while I’m drawing’.

Summary In summary, for Holly, adulation, competitiveness, lack of power and relative social isolation had produced a keen desire for ever-greater success. Figure 4.8 shows Holly receiving trophies for painting and riding. Note the captions: ‘Painter of the Year’, ‘Better than the painter Van Gogh’ and ‘Rider of the Year’. She said of this drawing: It’s a kind of fantasy future. I’d love to do it, be in the papers having all sorts of trophies. I’d love to be famous, a stunt person jumping off buildings or a swimming star, strongest person in the world. I’d love it if they would really come true.

And Holly frequently drew imagining herself as a famous artist.

Implications Very few children experience Holly’s combination of a high level of social isolation, a singular interest in close observation or her highly facilitative home environment, one that offered both encouragement and good models from which to learn. And some children have a passion for something other than drawing. Nevertheless, many children enjoy drawing, and by middle childhood, they typically want to acquire the culturally approved skills of realism. Yet most flounder. Like Holly’s art class, too many art classes focus on craft skills. Or like Holly’s class they focus on painting where students cannot achieve the detail in which they are typically interested. Or when drawing is addressed, students are expected to draw out of their own imaginations. Under the misconception that teachers are engendering creativity and individuality, many view copying as cheating, the very learning strategy prolific drawers gravitate towards as their primary means of acquiring skill. As indicated by Holly’s drawings, her most skilful are those where she copied. In the case of realistic drawing, and unlike all other curriculum subjects, students are commonly denied good models and instruction. This is not to suggest that realism is the only desirable visual style or that imaginative drawing is of lessor importance than realism. But if drawing

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realistically is considered beneficial for students, for example, for self-efficacy or for training visual acuity, copying and instruction are critical for student success. Copying needs to be reconceptualized, not as a mechanical, unthinking operation but as imitating, modelling or borrowing. Imitating means to include something of an original, but it can also involve considerable variation from an original. Similarly, modelling means to follow an original in some respects but not in others. Borrowing means the temporary use of what is taken. Apart from direct observation, these were Holly’s primary learning strategies. Teachers have little or no influence on student’s home environment, but teachers have a role to play in following the learning strategies that prolific drawers find the most beneficial. Otherwise, in attempting to draw realistically, most children are never likely to achieve much felt sense of success.

References Bandura, A. (1977). Social learning theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. New York, NY: Worth. Day, M., & Hurwitz, A. (2012). Children and their art: Art education for elementary and middle schools. Boston, MA: Wadsworth. Feinburg, S. (1976). Combat in child art. In J. Bruner, A. Jolly, & K. Sylva (Eds.), Play: Its role in evolution and development. New York, NY: Basic Books. Feldman, D. H. (1980). Beyond universals in cognitive development. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Gardner, H. (1980). Artful scribbles: The significance of children’s drawing. New York, NY: Basic Books. Golomb, C. (1973). Young children’s sculpture and drawing: A study in representational development. Boston, MA: Harvard University Press. Hildreth, G. (1941). The child mind in evolution. New York, NY: Kings Crown Press. Houston, M. S. (2006). The early drawings of Louis XIII in the journal De Jean Heroard. In J. Fienberg (Ed.), When we were young: New perspectives on the art of the child (pp. 61–76). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Ivashkevich, O. (2009). Children’s drawing as a sociocultural practice: Remaking gender and popular culture. Studies in Art Education, 51(1), 50–63. Lowenfeld, V., & Brittain, W. L. (1964). Creative and mental growth (4th ed.). New York, NY: Prentice Hall. Pearson, P. (1993). Who cares about ninja Turtles? Image making in the life of Rei Iati. Australian Art Education, 17(1), 14–22. Pearson, P. (2001). Towards a theory of children’s drawing as social practice. Studies in Art Education, 42(4), 348–365.

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Schulte, C. (2015). Intergalactic encounters: Desire and the political immediacy of children’s drawing. Studies in Art Education, 56(3), 241–256. Selfe, I. (1977). Nadia: A case of extraordinary drawing ability in an autistic child. London, England: Academic Press. Veroff, J., & Veroff, J. B. (1980). Social incentives: A life-span developmental approach. New York, NY: Academic Press. Wilson, B., & Wilson, M. (1977). An iconoclastic view of the imagery sources of the drawing of young people. Art Education, 30(1), 5–11. Wilson, B., & Wilson, M. (1981). As I see it: The use and uselessness. Art Education, 34(5), 4–6.

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Reconceptualizing Early Childhood Art: The Lessons of Intergenerational Art Curricula and Postdevelopmental Theorizing Rachel Heydon and Lisa-Marie Gagliardi

A group of preschoolers and elders has been making art together for months under the guidance of a practising artist who has been teaching intergenerational art classes like this one for decades. When the class first started working together, members were invited by their teacher to each keep a running, digital portfolio that documented their participation in class. The portfolios were made up of photographs of their artwork, videos of their process and anything else they found important. A careful review of dozens of these portfolios has revealed qualities that contradict modernist developmental notions of young children and their art-making. These portfolios beautifully display the children’s sophisticated technical proficiency, layered expressions, pleasure and pride in their artwork, and commitment to artistic practice. The portfolios also demonstrate the forging of relationships in and through class. These are indeed qualities that as a researcher, I (Rachel) have witnessed in all the intergenerational art classes I have studied since beginning this line of enquiry in 2003. Along with early childhood educator, Lisa-Marie Gagliardi, I set out in this chapter to reconceptualize early childhood art, in part, through an analysis of these portfolios. We move towards this goal by bringing together literatures on theoretical approaches to early childhood curricula and early childhood literacy. We relate these literatures to examples from Rachel’s enquiries into the opportunities for expanded communication and identity options offered to young children and elders. Specifically, we examine the described portfolios from a pilot study that integrated digital tools into intergenerational art programmes (e.g. Heydon et al., 2017). We mine the portfolios, place them in the context of art class

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and demonstrate some of the children’s artistic accomplishments. The chapter closes with talking points crafted from the study’s theorizing and analyses.

Literature: Conceptualizing children, education, development and art Approaches to and views of early childhood art in education have been part of a larger conceptualizing of early childhood education. Early childhood education has traditionally been guided by child development theories. In reviewing the history of early childhood curricula, Cannella (2010) noted that developmental theories promote a view of children dominated by modernist developmental psychology. The view is one that forwards a particular onto-epistemology – a way of defining what is in the world and how one comes to know that world. Cannella argued that modern developmentalism creates an ‘adult-child dichotomy’ whereby people, by virtue of their age, are ascribed to binary categories. The focus is ‘androcentric’ with the assumption that adults can ‘determine universal child needs’ (p. 307). All children are understood to progress through predictable, progressive ‘domains’ of ‘physical, social’ and ‘cognitive’ (p.  307) development towards achieving adulthood, the corollary of this being the establishment of norms of development (Skrtic, 1995). Educational outcomes of modernist developmental theories include the call for curricula that are deemed developmentally appropriate (i.e. in keeping with the norm). This has resulted in the creation of standardized curriculum for normally developing children and specialized curriculum for those deemed to be developing abnormally or at risk of abnormal development (Iannacci & Whitte, 2009). As per Bresler (1993) and Gunn (2000), our reading of the literature that is related to approaches for supporting young children’s artistic practices and premised in developmental theories reveals a paradox: art curricula that are heavily prescribed and product oriented exist alongside art curricula that are open and free-form. Scholars such as Seefeldt (1995) describe the proliferation of developmentally informed art curricula that focus on skill development and product-oriented art experiences for children. Tarr (2001) described art experiences for children in early childhood education that were confined to restrictive art centres, limited by time and space, and offered displays of children’s predictable art products on colourful bulletin boards. Clark (2014) too communicated the prevalence of early learning spaces that contain homogenized, goal-directed and predictable

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product-focused art materials. These art experiences are typically offered in the form of structured activities, geared to children’s skill development, and they rarely incorporate children’s input (Baum, 2017). In contrast, based on developmentalism’s emphasis on the authentic self, recent studies of art curricula have indicated a strong thread of practice that takes up the notion of childhood as an innately creative developmental stage wherein children naturally seek self-expression (Ogata, 2013). Art education from this perspective, in contrast to the traditional lock-step approach just described, is more child centred and offers open-ended art experiences that are framed by a goal of advancing children’s creative expression with minimal intervention on the part of the educator (Baum, 2017; Bresler, 1993; Gunn, 2000). This orientation to practice, referred to as Child-Centered (Gunn, 2000) or Little-Intervention (Bresler, 1993), privileges the process of artistic exploration and imagination, whereby the imagination is conceptualized as inherent to the child. This approach often manifests as a laissez-faire approach to education or an ‘early childhood error’ (Bredekamp & Rosegrant, 1992), whereby educators let children do what they want to express themselves freely with materials without guiding or supporting children’s artistic learning (Gunn, 2000). From this orientation, children’s development is conceptualized as naturally unfolding and the interpreted role of education should support children’s individual needs and interests (Bresler, 1993). Early childhood scholars using a variety of overlapping theories such as feminist theories (e.g. Burman, 2017), post-colonial theories (e.g. Cannella & Viruru, 2004) and reconceptualist theories (e.g. Iannacci & Whitty, 2009) have argued the limits and flaws of modernist developmental theories. Some overarching critiques include how these theories promote a ‘fixed, unilinear and timeless’ (Burman, 2008, p. 82) conceptualization of the authentic child, which belies the dynamism of children and childhood. Rather than focusing on universals, researchers in the postdevelopmental movement have focused instead on ‘diverse knowledges and ways of function (not simply those supported by Western interpretations of logic) and defamiliarizing what has been believed to be known about those who are younger’ (Cannella, 2010, p. 307). Two concepts for supporting theorizing in this movement and accounting for the diversity of people’s knowledge and practices that affect being young and growing up include funds of knowledge (González et al., 2005) and funds of identity (Esteban-Guitart, 2016). The first concept refers to the myriad resources, epistemic and semiotic, which children acquire from all domains they occupy but most specifically their home and home communities. The second denotes ‘the historically accumulated, culturally developed, and socially distributed

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resources that are essential for a person’s self-definition, self-expression, and selfunderstanding’ (Esteban-Guitart & Moll, 2014, p. x). Central to this movement, Cannella (2010) outlined, is a commitment to equity and social justice through curricula that are ‘broader, more diverse’ and ‘less deterministic’ (p. 307) than developmental approaches. Some of these curricula have resulted in innovative, emergent curricula that validate children’s diversity and status as citizens of today (e.g. Government of New Brunswick, 2008). Modernist developmental theories and reconceptualist theories continue to exert influence in early childhood education and care; however, Cannella (2010) and others (e.g. Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2014) have indicated that discourses associated with a neo-liberal market economy are taking on new power. Such discourses position education as important only for how it can feed the economy with children being valued in the discourses as future economic actors (e.g. Heydon, 2007). Educational opportunities for children become reduced to accountability, high-stakes testing, behavioural outcomes and the ‘corporatization of programs that use achievement scores as the bottom line’ (Cannella, 2010, p. 308). As a result, despite recognition that art experiences are critical for children’s learning and well-being, opportunities for art are often considered as supplemental experiences to core curriculum (Baum, 2017; Phillips et al., 2010). Watchers of trends in early childhood education and care are thus seeing that new ways of theorizing children, childhood and education are needed to create the imaginaries necessary to combat the educational outcomes of the market mentality including curricula that ‘ha[ve] become a construct that is either standardized and prescribed or … invisible and considered unimportant’ (Cannella, 2010, p. 308). With insights wrought from previous studies of intergenerational art (e.g. Heydon, 2013; Heydon & O’Neill, 2017; Heydon & Du, in press) triangulated with those from the study we share in this chapter, we explore some of the key elements implicated in the children’s meaning-making and we connect these to the talking points we present in our discussion. Next, we explicate this theorizing.

Theoretical framework: Reconceptualizing early childhood art The theorizing of the study that underlays this chapter can reimagine early childhood art from being an autonomous (i.e. decontextualized, individually owned) set of skills (Street, 1995) that progress along a developmental continuum to a situated, socio-material practice.

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Like many other scholars working in the intersections between art, early childhood and education (e.g. Binder & Kind, 2017), we imagine early childhood art as a form of communication or literacy. Multimodal literacy provides tools for conceptualizing how this can be; it provides an expansive understanding of literacy that goes beyond literacy being just about language (Jewitt, 2009) and opens the view that humans draw from myriad modes to practise their literacies. The term ‘modes’ refers to ‘a regularized organised set of resources for meaningmaking’ and can include ‘image, gaze, gesture, movement, music, speech and sound effects’ (Kress & Jewitt, 2003, p. 1). Most simply, modes are ‘cultural technologies for making meaning visible’ or ‘evident to the sense in some way’ (Domingo et al., 2015). Literacy becomes a practice where semiosis is invoked, meaning, where signifier and signified come together in a sign (Albers, 2007). Multimodal literacy is thus ‘the use of several semiotic modes in the design of a semiotic product or event, together with the particular way in which these modes are combined’ (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001, p. 20). Certain key features of multimodal literacy make it useful for thinking about the literacy practices we share in this chapter. First, multimodal literacy teaches that what might be termed the ‘social’ is a constituent of literacies. Multimodal literacy is based in social semiotics, a ‘form of enquiry’ (van Leeuwen, 2005, p. 3) that is ‘concerned with human semiosis’ (Hodge & Kress, 1988, p. 261). Semiosis is a ‘social phenomenon’ and social semiotics attends to the ‘sources, functions, contexts and effects’ of semiosis, as well as the ‘social meanings constructed through the full range of semiotic forms, through semiotic texts and semiotic practices, in all kinds of human society at all periods of human history’ (p. 261). Literacies have been called social practices, meaning that ‘literacy is primarily something people do; it is an activity, located in the space between thought and text … in the interaction between people’ (Barton & Hamilton, 1998, p. 3). In multimodal literacy, text is ‘any instance of communication in any mode or in any combination of modes’ (Kress, 2003, p. 48). The term ‘text’ is suggestive of something that is fixed; however, the process of transmodal semiosis alerts us to various kinds of textual movements: texts themselves are increasingly multimodal and there is interplay between the various modes that are at work in a text. Second, people will often use modes in ‘sequence’, where they shift, expand and remake meaning across a series of modes (Newfield, 2015, p. 267). Children especially have been documented practising transmodal semiosis as they encounter various modes and media and interact with them, learning what can be done with each (e.g. Wohlwend, 2013).

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Art-making is a sense-filled practice (Heydon & Rowsell, 2015) that engages materialities: ‘the stuff which is physically present as we make meaning’ (Burnett, 2015, p. 520) (e.g. chalk, paint, bodies and voices). The material nature of texts and literacy practices coalesces with their immaterial constituents. Immaterialities ‘are those things that are materially absent or intangible but central to meaningmaking’ (p. 520). These can be ‘associations, memories, feelings and imaginings as well as all the events and processes that have led up to the production of the things that are physically present’ (p. 520). The literature tells us that the texts created in intergenerational art class, like all texts, are constituted in and through interpersonal relationships, emotions and affect (Hicks, 2013) as well as larger social values/norms/ideas (Barton & Hamilton, 2000). The social and material join throughout in, for instance, how modes, including how they are used, are understood as situationally determined, based on communal and social requirements (Bezemer & Kress, 2016), availability and how they are used in people’s everyday (Pahl & Escott, 2015). Given the preponderance of digital media in today’s literacy practices, the boundaries between the material and immaterial can be blurred, prompting researchers like Burnett (2015) to name and hunt for what she calls the (im)material: the relationship between what is and is not physically present. In the intergenerational art study, we might also add the necessity of being on the lookout for pedagogical (im)materialities or those persons, places, things, or the like that create literacy-related learning opportunities.

Methodology This chapter draws on data from a pilot exploratory case study of an attempt to integrate digital media into a preexisting intergenerational art programme. Research participants were fifteen elders and nine preschool children (ages 4–5) who were part of an intergenerational art programme at an integrated elder retirement/assisted living facility, providing day care for children in the urban United States. The community offered continuity of care for adults that ranged from day programmes and assisted living to long-term nursing care, and a child care programme for children ages six weeks to five years. Shared facilities and programming for children and elders such as this can be known as co-located or shared-site intergenerational programming and is the gold standard for providing sustained opportunities for intergenerational contact and interaction (Jarrott & Bruno, 2007). The art class that ran twice weekly from September to

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July was optional for the adults and part of the normal programming for the preschool group. Bridget, the class’s art teacher, was a collaborator in the study. The study team worked with Bridget to back the integration of digital media into the class. Based on her experience with the class and consultation with the team to develop options, Bridget decided to introduce digital portfolios into the class. Using iPads and the Book Creator app (Red Jumper Limited, 2014), Bridget invited class members to document the processes and products of art class. Class generally followed the following pedagogical sequence (Heydon, 2007): (1) activities to (re)acquaint participants with each other and foster community (e.g. sharing of names); (2) a catalyst introducing that class’s big idea and the modes and media involved that could induce conversation (e.g. viewing of artwork and invitation to respond to a key question connected to the content of what would be signified in the artwork); (3) instruction, demonstration and help to actualize the day’s project (e.g. the teacher’s scaffolding of a technique through a practice project); (4) prolonged opportunities to work on the project and draw on fellow participants, volunteers and the teacher for support; (5) occasion to share and close the day’s session. Documentation for the portfolio happened throughout this sequence but generally focused on the fourth and fifth pedagogies. The research team collected ethnographic data in the classes from September to January. Data sources included Bridget’s lesson plans and written and audio-recorded reflections of classes, participants’ portfolios, photographs of observations and programme artefacts, field notes and audio and video recordings of participants during classes, informal conversations with participants during text-making, and semi-structured interviews with elders. Data analysis was inductive and guided by the theoretical framework and the questions (Dyson & Genishi, 2005): what do children express in intergenerational art class, who and what are implicated in the expressions? We were interested in identifying what children did in art class, who and what were involved in the meaning-making, and with what implications for thinking about children’s art. First, we conducted a text- or mode-based analysis (Newfield, 2015) where we viewed and reviewed participant portfolios, applying what we know about semiosis. We conducted a multimodal analysis wherein we listed modes, media, and their interrelationships, and the content of texts; yet we never viewed the constituents of this meaning-making as inert, recognizing the potential of the relationships between literacy constituents (Heydon & Du, in press) as generating effects (including texts). We then checked this first stage of analysis against data related to the making of the texts, ‘tracking the process and movement of transmodal semiosis’ (Newfield, 2015, p. 273, emphasis in original)

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looking for how people, materials, images and the like came together, and what they produced. This stage of the data analysis was ‘more ethnographic, less textbased’ and concerned with following the ‘flow of texts and events through lives, places and times, and the ways in which ensembles of texts, people and objects converge[d] at particular junctures’ (p. 273). Throughout analysis we were vigilant about identifying resonance and dissonance in the data (Pahl, 2007), attempting to retain complexity. To foster trustworthiness, members of the team conducted member checks with participants and findings were compared across researchers.

Findings Next, we provide illustrations of what the children expressed and who and what were involved in this meaning-making. We organized the findings of the analysis into interrelated moments, revealing the portfolios’ and other data’s demonstrations of what the children made with a focus on mode and media, what they were expressing in terms of subject as well as emotion and the social engagements that were entangled within their artistic practice.

Modes and media The children demonstrated engagement with a range of modes, media and genre, crafting a diversity of multimodal texts. As evidenced in the portfolios, for example, the children engaged with a variety of printmaking techniques, using reliefs and engraving. Figure 5.1 shows a relief print that child Reed selected for his portfolio. Figure 5.2 is a page from child Izzy’s portfolio where she has placed the results of an engraving to which she has added, with assistance, a description of the technical process of text-making in writing: ‘We were making pictures and we rolled it and then we printed it and now we are putting the picture in our books!’ Participants created collages of underwater scenes using different types of papers, which they imported into the ChatterPix app (Duck Duck Moose, 2016), animated, and layered with a voice recording. Figure 5.3 is a still of child Jubilee’s multimodal text which, when animated, has the fish saying, ‘I like swimming in the water.’ Painting autumn with acrylics in the style of Georgia O’Keefe is another project that demonstrates the children’s control over their tools and an understanding of O’Keefe’s style. Figure 5.4 is a page from

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Figure 5.1  Relief print.

Figure 5.2  Engraving imported into BookCreator app plus text.

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Figure 5.3  ChatterPix animated collage.

child Zara’s portfolio containing, like O’Keefe, a painting of a natural element (leaf) with the focus of the image squarely on the element with bold colours and brush strokes. The class also worked with charcoal to experiment with value while making drawings of scary scenes using stencils and working with shading. Zara’s rendering of cats is presented in Figure 5.5, where she added in the context of her portfolio the printed caption, ‘A cat that’s going to get a haircut’, and layered a sound file of her voice saying, ‘My picture is a cat parade and the other cat is lost, and it’s hiding behind a wall.’ Zara used her stencil to create both positive and negative space; for example, she cut out a cat stencil in

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Figure 5.4  Painting like Georgia O’Keefe.

Figure 5.5  Stencil print with annotation in portfolio.

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black paper and used a cotton ball with chalk to create the outlines of cats. She then adhered the stencil itself to the upper centre of her page to add a new image and texture. Participants were further invited to create self-portrait paintings using watercolours and pens which they also chose to photograph, import into ChatterPix, animate and add an oral message. Zara’s text which she placed in her portfolio is presented in Figure 5.6, beneath a portrait where she has included the title ‘Self-portrait (Seasick).’ Zara animated the mouth to speak and recorded herself saying: ‘Sea sick! I don’t know why I’m sea sick.’ Other projects included

Figure 5.6  Seasick self-portrait.

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tissue paper and ink renderings of dreams, miniatures using oil pastel and ink on paper, mixed media stylized holiday meals using collage and pastel, collages that emphasized line and shape using maps and bus transfers, and three-dimensional hanging sculptures using paper, pens, pastel, ribbon, string and stuffing. As evidenced in each of the texts just presented, the children knew how to use a variety of modes and media to communicate, and all children sustained their art-making to complete the project and document it in one session (approximately one hour). The portfolios contained artefacts related to process and product, and the portfolios themselves show remarkable flexibility with multimodality through the children’s use of tactile, traditional art materials (e.g. paper and pens), digital apps (ChatterPix, Book Creator) and layering of image, sound, print and other modes. Rolled into the products were the use of high-quality art materials and apt technical vocabulary which they used in class and in the portfolios. Jakob’s portfolio, for instance, included a video of himself using a brayer during the process of printmaking. During the video, volunteer Margaret asked him, ‘You know everything about this don’t you?’ Jakob, with a serious look on his face and never breaking his practice, nodded and signalled yes. Similarly, Reed’s portfolio contained a video of himself during printmaking. The page with the video held the typed caption, which he helped to create: ‘Reed is burnishing his print.’

Layered expressions The technical accomplishments demonstrated by the portfolios were not ends in themselves but rather were (at least) expressions of ideas. The layering of modes in the texts carried complex narratives. In one of Izzy’s portfolio pages, for instance, she included a video of herself discussing a watercolour painting and ink drawing she had made. In the video, she gestured to the camera, modulated her voice and said, ‘This is a picture of a dragon, and the dragon lived in a cave. When people saw him, they liked to laugh. And when they laughed the dragon got mad so they had to run away.’ The extension of image through oral storytelling was common in the portfolios. Consider, for instance, Zara’s story of the cats and the interplay between her words, image and oral storytelling which coalesce to create an intricate, multidimensional text. Sometimes the visual texts were layered with the children’s oral, literal explanations of their images, suggesting a deliberateness and intent to these images. In an audio addition to the portfolio page containing his ‘scary’ picture,

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Jakob responded to volunteer Libby’s question, ‘Jakob, tell me about your piece’ by saying, ‘Those at the top, those are dinosaur scales … and that sticking out, is a trunk that stands him up in the water … so he can bend his head down and drink some water.’ Similarly, in a video of his tissue paper dream painting, Jakob methodically pointed to each aspect of the image and explained, ‘This big yellow is the face of the squid, and this blue diamond is the side with three legs, and these black lines are the tentacles.’

Emotion We read throughout the portfolios what appeared to be demonstrations of emotion, most usually a sense of the children’s pride and delight in their artmaking. Witness, for instance, the video that accompanied Jubilee’s tissue paper dream painting (see Figure 5.7). Smiling and swinging while holding her painting up to the camera, Jubilee announced, ‘This the best picture of my life, and this is my family at the church.’ The painting evidently depicts Jubilee’s happiness and commitments with the rainbow-shaped structure sheltering four figures and smiling faces signalling their joy at being in what is ostensibly her

Figure 5.7  Still from tissue paper dream painting video.

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family church. Her name placed prominently in the top corner of the visual field conveys a pride of authorship. Like Jubilee’s name above, we read other texts that suggested positive affect. In Jakob’s ChatterPix self-portrait, he animated himself saying, ‘These things that are going up and down [the lips on the portrait], these are the things that they know that is mine, and they say, “Jakob’s”.’ Jakob’s use of ‘mine’ and the possessive with his name connote proprietorship and an identity instantiated in the artwork. This sense of the artwork as belonging to the children and the children proudly asserting this ownership is apparent on each portfolio cover where the children included a picture of themselves with an art piece, their name in the font of their choice and a background colour of their choice. Zara’s cover page is especially striking as it shows her holding up a chalk drawing in front of a table full of elders and children. She is smiling with her eyes wide and her face is covered in chalk. The children also conveyed their pride by routinely using verbs that indicated positive preferences related to aspects of the art. Jakob, for example, in a project emphasizing line, wrote on the portfolio page underneath the artwork: ‘My favourite part is the car and the chicken next to it.’ The juxtaposition of the car and chicken for a child who lived in a large urban centre was an inventive addition that conveyed playfulness. Other messages of joy conveyed through the meeting of print text with image was when Zara typed ‘I love what I am doing’ on a portfolio page under a print of a bright yellow sun, green grass, googlyeyed spider and a figure with hair to match her own. Reed also employed such positive language in his portfolio such as in his annotation for a vibrant painting: ‘I like that my giraffe is full of colors!’ Jubilee annotated an etching of butterflies with the message, ‘I learned that I could draw this!’ The word choices signal that the artwork had informed her of abilities, and the punctuation shows how she felt about this. Positive significations relative to the art-making were ubiquitous in the portfolios through the relationship between images and the children’s inclusion of audio recordings of their voices. In an audio inclusion to Jubilee’s portfolio where Bridget asked her about her ‘favourite thing’ about art class, she responded eagerly ‘that we made patterns’. In an audio inclusion tagged to a geometric pattern print, Jakob talked about his artwork and referred to the colours within it saying, ‘My favourite colours that made me so proud is the black and blue and yellow.’ The children also expressed their enthusiasm for their text-making in their ChatterPix texts. Audriella, for instance, in her underwater collage, created a fish which she animated and had say, ‘this is cool’ over and over.

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Relationships The portfolios offered visions of the children’s exploration and demonstration of their technical abilities through which they expressed ideas and affects, including what we read as an apparent commitment to art class and the relationships therein. The children’s art showed a valuing of relationship. The importance of intergenerational relationships in the text-making in art class has been extensively documented in previous related studies (e.g. Heydon & Rowsell, 2015). An example from Reed’s portfolio says it all. Under his ChatterPix selfportrait, Reed included a title reading, ‘Self-portrait Talking to Neal’. When the animation is clicked, Reed’s self-portrait says to his elder partner from art class, ‘I love you, Neal.’ It then goes on to say what he ‘wish[ed]’ for Neal, including that he could sleep in, indicating a friendly knowledge of Neal and a concern for him. The next page in Reed’s portfolio is a photograph of him showing his Georgia O’Keefe painting to Neal. These kinds of photos of children and elders making art together and enjoying being together are in all the portfolios. The findings also indicate how art was made in relationship. Demonstrating the synergies between participants is how the artwork and the process of doing art together were always interconnected and evident in the products. This kind of art-making was foundational to intergenerational art class and was, for the most part, intergenerational itself. For instance, as documented at length in Heydon and O’Neill (2017), Zara and Jubilee organically joined with elder Jean, when making their scary chalk drawings, each creating her own riff on a cat image. Zara and Jubilee noticed Jean’s drawing and were attracted to it; thus, they moved closer to her and they all ended up drawing together using the same image of a black cat as reference. The process of drawing was collaborative, as demonstrated by the participants holding the paper still for each other when they were using the stencils. However, their products, while containing similar elements (e.g. the cat), each told a unique story. Jean superimposed an audio recording of herself meowing loudly overtop of her visual text; Zara’s text is as described in Figure 5.5, and Jubilee’s portfolio included the visual image and an audio clip of herself saying ‘I like this spider and the cat and … on the house … and the, the other house and the cat and … I’m done.’ This type of creation of individual products that are shadows of fellow classmates’ texts was a common occurrence and could also be seen between child and child. Witness Zara’s seasick ChatterPix in Figure 5.6, which is actually a companion piece to

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Jubilee’s self-portrait where she too is portrayed as looking ill and has animated her figure to say, ‘sea sick, sea sick, sea sick!’ Working together allowed all participants to learn from and with each other, a finding that Izzy herself made and expressed in her ChatterPix self-portrait (Figure 5.8). Instead of creating just a one-figure portrait, Izzy chose to include two with the animated mouth between the figures. She then recorded herself speaking at length: What do you know about when you see good stuff? And when you do that, you know about good stuff, and you can know about lots of stuff when you’re at school. And when you’re at school you can learn lots of stuff. Sometimes friends know about butterflies and other animals and they know all about it, and when they do, they can do whatever they want.

When read within the situated nature of class, Izzy seems to be communicating about the importance of art, art class and her peers to her learning. Izzy’s choice of the word ‘see’ in the first sentence is telling because it suggests that one can ‘know’ by viewing ‘good stuff ’, and when one views the good stuff, one might then ‘know’ about good stuff. The ‘school’ Izzy is talking about is presumably her child care programme in which art class is located, given that this is the only ‘school’ that Izzy attends. Izzy suggests that it is at school where one encounters knowledgeable ‘friends’ who can teach you. Note that Izzy explicitly mentions

Figure 5.8  ChatterPix self-portrait.

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butterflies, which Jubilee and others have signified in their artwork. Knowing about such things, Izzy says, provides power or the ability to ‘do whatever [one might] want’. Herein lies the potential of relationship in doing art class. This kind of explicit appreciation for learning in art class is, as mentioned, something that Jubilee conveyed and is seen with other participants, including Reed who annotated a print in his portfolio with the message, ‘I learned printing out my ant picture. My mom & dad will like this picture.’ The children signalled to relationships outside of class that could ostensibly be enhanced through their artwork, cementing their commitment to art-making and relationships. For example, in the example of Reed’s annotation above, we read how his art-making took into consideration his ‘mom & dad’ as an audience for his work and the pride he could feel because they would appreciate or ‘like’ this work. Izzy too in a piece on line and colour annotated her visual text with the message: I like it because it has purpose and pink and all my favorite colors. And I like it because I like my mom and dad. My mom and dad call me artist because I draw pretty stuff. And I like everything I see so I try to draw it.

In the juxtaposition of her favourite colours and the print text, Izzy relayed the significance of her artwork, her parents and the connection between the two. Her positive feelings towards making art were tied up with her parents’ acknowledgement of her as ‘artist,’ and Izzy took on this role through her appreciation of the world when she said, ‘I like everything I see,’ and her attempt to honour this appreciation through representation: ‘so I try to draw it’.

Talking points In this chapter, through data derived from a pilot study of integrating digital tools into a preexisting intergenerational art class, we explored children’s art and artistic processes. We looked at what the children in the class did, what they expressed and the relationships between the (im)material constituents of literacy practices that created opportunities for this communication. We analysed the children’s portfolios within the context of the other situated ethnographic data the team collected. We identified the expansive range of the modes and media that made up the children’s artwork, some of the layered expressions that were carried through these texts, their commitments and encounters. The complexities of the portfolios and the theorizing of the children’s associated

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literacy practices and constituents also decry modernist developmental notions of young children and their art-making and beg for more robust, asset-oriented and complex theories and approach to art curricula than offered through neoliberal discourses. In this section, we offer a series of talking points for helping educators to think through and think anew about young children’s art. All talking points are interrelated and, when aggregated, promote an intricate, plastic and dynamic view of children and their artistic practices. First, we posit that the findings of the study underscore that children are capable communicators and children’s semiotic practices are literacies in their own right, rather than lesser versions of adult practices. The children’s products and processes were sophisticated. The children, who viewed themselves as artists and who were viewed by the adults around them as artists (recall, for instance, Izzy’s message), were accomplished artistic technicians. They knew how to use the tools of art-making, use the language of art-making (e.g. recall the videos of children making prints and working with ‘brayers’ and ‘brandishing’ prints), and use the materials and styles of other members of the art club, like artists such as Georgia O’Keefe. Participating in explicit instruction to learn new techniques, genres and the like to make art; documenting their practices; and working alongside intergenerational artists in class permitted the children to express messages and a variety of visual experiences that were of importance to them. Sometimes these messages were humorous (chicken and cars!); always they were connected to exploring the world, including visual elements like colour (e.g. Reed: ‘I like that my giraffe is full of colors!’). And, of course, the messages demonstrated relationships with each other (e.g. Zara and Jubilee), intergenerationally (Reed and Neal) and with family (e.g. Izzy). The layering of modes, control over media and mutually respectful relationships created opportunities for the children to take pride and delight in their art-making. A new kind of theorizing about children’s art was required to recognize what the children could do and how. Modernist developmental psychology – as previously discussed, with its ‘adult-child dichotomy’, where adults decide for children and children’s abilities can be predicted (Cannella, 2010, p. 307) – does not begin to allow for the surprise, artistic fluency and erudition of the data related to the children’s practices and texts. At the same time, romanticized developmental notions of childhood like those that emphasize children as expressing natural authentic selves (Ogata, 2013) outside of time and place (Burman, 2008) can miss the situated nature of communication; that is the socio-material and even pedagogical foundations of children’s meaning-making. Looking, listening and being close to children’s art processes and products

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allowed us to instead conceptualize children as full human actors within time, place and practice, provoking an appreciation for their funds of knowledge (González et al., 2005), such as what they already know coming in to class and what they potentially teach each other. We could thus recognize and appreciate in a serious way Izzy’s statement about her classmates’ knowledge and ability to teach her to ‘see’ the ‘good stuff ’. Similarly, children’s funds of identity (EstebanGuitart, 2016) become visible, prompting us to see the identities that children could construct in concert with the other people, practices and the materials connected to them. The identity of artist is called to mind, as this title was applied to children by themselves and others, in relation to their artistic capabilities, processes and products. We indexed multimodal literacy as part of the theorizing that propelled this study. Multimodal literacy, as described earlier in this chapter, helped us to perceive how the children’s art, as texts, was socially and materially constituted, that is, how they were made in relation to others through communicational practice (Albers, 2007) and materials (Burnett, 2015). These practices, as seen in the data, were based in interactions with and between multiple modes and media in an explicitly social environment (Heydon & O’Neill, 2017). The portfolios, for example, are layer upon layer of analogue and digital materials, creating particular effects and instantiating relationship through intertextual links such as texts that connect to other texts in the class (e.g. the cat drawings), people in the class (e.g. Reed naming Neal) and even extending to include artists who were physically distant from class (e.g. O’Keefe). Understanding children’s art – its performance and products – through multimodal literacy opens the door for new theorizing of the materiality involved. Multimodal concepts like the (im)material, for example, can provide an entrée to conceptualizing how children’s art is, at least in part, a material accomplishment, where people do not just act on materials but where materials make particular accomplishments more or less possible (e.g. Lenters & Grant, 2016). The affordances of the ChatterPix app, for instance, created new opportunities for meaning-making which the children did not previously have. The chance to animate and have an image speak provoked new artwork. This artwork also allowed for new emotional engagements relative to art class and new ways to communicate emotions. Consider, for instance, the opportunities and effect of Reed being able to speak his love for Neal over and over through his self-portrait. Emotion has surely been dealt with in developmental theories, especially in the ubiquitous quest for children to develop ‘self-regulation’ of emotion (e.g. Shanker, 2012); however, through the data here, we might instead ask how emotion moves and is moved

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in situ through artistic practice and is vital to seeing children as full actors in artistic creation. This perspective coincides with childhood studies scholars who consider children as ‘active agents who enter a world of relationships in progress’ (Marme-Thompson, 2017, p. 10). Marme-Thompson (2017) suggested this shift towards including the socio-material relations in art experiences represents a collective move away from the developmental theories that have dominated the field of early childhood education for the last century. Emerging scholarship in childhood studies like this resists the developmentally focused literature that tends to take conceptualizations of childhood for granted and positions children as always already knowable. The findings and our discussion of them have implications for the practice of childhood art pedagogies. In our literature review, we indicated two trends in art education influenced by developmentalism: prescriptive and product oriented on the one hand and completely open and free-form on the other. Intergenerational art class followed neither of these trends but instead treated all participants, young and old, as already capable communicators who, through encounters with myriad literacy constituents – peers, people of skipped generations, volunteers, teacher, other texts, ideas, other artists, art vocabulary, carefully curated materials, technical instruction, experimentation, documentation and the like – could further develop multimodal facility to make meaning and share that meaning with others. The approach in the data can be further understood through some recent theorizing of early childhood education perspectives of art materials and the early learning environment that has shifted to a focus on children’s art pedagogies. This shift demonstrates a rise in interest in how children encounter and negotiate with materials (Clark, 2014) and calls for art materials that are ‘transformable, experimental, multisensory, and relational’ (p. 318), such as those we saw in the study. We add to this material turn the need to carefully consider all literacy constituents which, in this study, included relationship, affect and the pedagogical sequence. It was not just the participants of art class who delighted in it. We did too. Intergenerational art class, as focused upon through the children’s art and viewed through fresh theorizing, brought into view what mattered to the children in the class and what they contributed to those with whom they shared their artistic practice and work. Thinking with and through the data as we have done in this chapter allows a critical reckoning of art education with young children and revitalizes dialogues about the importance of art in early childhood (Baum, 2017) and, as the data we presented hints, the lifespan.

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References Albers, P. (2007). Finding the artist within: Creating and reading visual texts in the English language arts classroom. Newark, DE: International Reading Association. Barton, D., & Hamilton, M. (1998). Local literacies: A study of reading and writing in one community. London, UK: Routledge. Barton, D., & Hamilton, M. (2000). Literacy practices. In D. Barton, M. Hamilton, & R. Ivanic (Eds.), Situated literacies: Reading and writing in context (pp. 7–15). London, UK: Routledge. Baum, A. C. (2017). Powerful allies: Arts educators and early childhood educators joining forces on behalf of young children. Arts Education Policy Review, 118(3), 183–188. Bezemer, J., & Kress, G. (2016). Multimodality, learning and communication: A social semiotic frame. New York, NY: Routledge. Binder, M., & Kind, S. (Eds.). (2017). Drawing as language: Celebrating the work of Bob Steele. Rotterdam, SH: Sense Publishers. Bredekamp, S., & Rosegrant, T. J. (1992). Reaching potentials. Washington, DC: National Association for the Education of Young Children. Bresler, L. (1993). Three orientations to arts in the primary grades: Implications for curriculum reform. Arts Education Policy Review, 94(6), 29–34. Burman, E. (2008). Developments: Child, image, nation. London: Routledge. Burman, E. (2017). Deconstructing developmental psychology (3rd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. Burnett, C. (2015). (Im)materializing literacies. In J. Rowsell, & K. Pahl (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of literacy studies (pp. 520–531). London: Routledge. Cannella, G. (2010). History of early childhood curriculum. In C. Kridel (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Curriculum Studies (Vol. 1, pp. 306–308). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications Inc. Cannella, G., & Viruru, R. (2004). Childhood and postcolonization: Power, education, and contemporary practice. New York, NY: Routledge. Clark, V. (2014). Entanglements of neoliberal capitalism, whiteness, and technoculture in early childhood art encounters. Power and Education, 6(3), 318–326. Domingo, M., Jewitt, C., & Kress, G. (2015). Multimodal social semiotics: Writing in online contexts. In J. Rowsell, & K. Pahl (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of literacy studies (pp. 251–266). London: Routledge. Duck Duck Moose (2016). Chatterpix (Version 1.3) [Mobile application software]. Retrieved from http://www.duckduckmoose.com/educational-iphone-itouch-appsfor-kids/chatterpix/. Dyson, A. H., & Genishi, C. (2005). On the case. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Estaban-Guitart, M. (2016). Funds of identity: Connecting meaningful learning experiences in and out of school. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

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Estaban-Guitart, M., & Moll, L. C. (2014). Funds of identity: A new concept based on the funds of knowledge approach. Culture & Psychology, 20(1), 31–48. Gonzales, N., Moll, L. C., & Amanti, C. (Eds.). (2005). Funds of knowledge: Theorizing practices in households, communities, and classrooms. Mahwah, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates. Government of New Brunswick (2008). Early learning and child care curriculum. Fredericton, New Brunswick: Department of Social Development. Gunn, A. (2000). Teachers’ beliefs in relation to visual art education in early childhood centres. New Zealand Research in Early Childhood Education, 3, 153–162. Heydon, R. (2007). Making meaning together: Multimodal literacy learning opportunities in an intergenerational art program. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 39(1), 35–62. Heydon, R. (2013). Learning at the ends of life: Children, elders, and literacies in intergenerational curriculum. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Heydon, R., & Du, X. (in press). This is the stuff that identities are made of: Children learning with grandparents and other elders. In J. Rowsell, & N. Kucirkova (Eds.), Contemporary conversations about early childhood theory and method. New York: Routledge. Heydon, R., & O’Neill, S. (2017). Children, elders, and multimodal arts curricula: Semiotic possibilities and the imperative of relationship. In M. Narey (Ed.), Multimodal perspectives of language, literacy, and learning in early childhood: The creative and critical ‘art’ of making meaning (pp. 149–167). Pittsburgh, PA: Springer. Heydon, R., & Rowsell, J. (2015). Phenomenology and literacy studies. In K. Pahl, & J. Rowsell (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Literacy Studies (pp. 454–471). London: Routledge. Heydon, R., McKee, L., & Daly, B. (2017). iPads and paintbrushes: An exploratory case study of integrating digital media as placed resources in an intergenerational art class. Language and Education, 31(4), 351–373. Hicks, D. (2013). The road out: A teacher’s odyssey in poor America. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Hodge, B., & Kress, G. (1988). Social semiotics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Iannacci, L., & Whitty, P. (Eds.). (2009). Early childhood curricula: Reconceptualist perspectives. Calgary, ED: Detselig Enterprises. Jarrott, S. E., & Bruno, K. (2007). Shared site intergenerational programs: A case study. Journal of Applied Gerontology, 26(3), 239–257. Jewitt, C. (2009). The Routledge handbook of multimodal analysis. New York, NY: Routledge. Kress, G. (2003). Literacy in the new media age. London, UK: Routledge. Kress, G., & Jewitt, C. (2003). Introduction. In C. Jewitt, & G. Kress (Eds.), Multimodal Literacy (pp. 1–18). New York, NY: Peter Lang. Kress, G., & van Leeuwen, T. (2001). Multimodal discourse: The modes and media of contemporary communication. New York, NY: Arnold.

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Lenters, K., & Grant, K. (2016). Feedback loops: Assembling students, stories, and devices for multimodal feedback in a writer’s workshop. Language Arts, 93(3), 185–199. Marme-Thompson, C. (2017). Listening for stories: Childhood studies and art education. Studies in Art Education 58(1), 7–16. Newfield, D. (2015). The semiotic mobility of literacy: Four analytic approaches. In J. Rowsell, & K. Pahl (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of literacy studies (pp. 267–281). London: Routledge. Ogata, A. F. (2013). Designing the creative child: Playthings and places in mid-century America. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Pacini-Ketchabaw, V., Nxumalo, F., & Rowan, M. C. (2014). Researching neoliberal and neocolonial assemblages in early childhood education. International Review of Qualitative Research, 7(1), 39–57. Pahl, K. (2007). Creativity in events and practices: A lens for understanding children´s multimodal texts. Literacy, 41(2), 86–91. Pahl, K., & Escott, H. (2015). Materialising literacies. In J. Rowsell, & K. Pahl (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of literacy studies (pp. 489–503). London: Routledge. Phillips, R., Gorton, R., Pinciotti, P., & Sachdev, A. (2010). Promising findings on preschoolers’ emergent literacy and school readiness in arts-integrated early childhood settings. Early Childhood Education Journal, 38(2), 111–122. Red Jumper Limited (2014). Book Creator App. [Mobile application software]. Retrieved from http://itunes.apple.com. Seefeldt, C. (1995). Art: A serious work. Young Children, 50(3), 39–45. Shanker, S. G. (2012). Calm, alert and learning: Classroom strategies for self-regulation. Toronto: Pearson. Skrtic, T. M. (1995). Disability and democracy: Reconstructing (special) education for postmodernity. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Street, B. V. (1995). Social literacies. London: Longman. Tarr, P. (2001). Aesthetic codes in early childhood classrooms: What art educators can learn from Reggio Emilia. Art Education, 54(3), 33–39. van Leeuwen, T. (2005). Introducing social semiotics. New York, NY: Routledge. Wohlwend, K. (2013). Literacy playshop: New literacies, popular media, and play in the early childhood classroom. New York: Teachers College Press.

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‘You Can’t Separate It from Anything’: Glitter’s Doings as Materialized Figurations of Childhood (and) Art Jayne Osgood

What happens when art and early childhood are viewed beyond concerns for human development? This chapter troubles the hegemony of developmentalist logic that shapes early childhood curriculum and pedagogical practices with the intention of highlighting the limiting effects of a narrow concern with representationalism, linear progress and human exceptionalism. I argue that breaking free from developmentalism opens up possibilities within early childhood for adults to be open to the (k)not-known and not-yet-known about childhood entanglements with art. By pursuing diffractive lines of enquiry, the chapter explores some ruptures that allow ideas about children, materials and art to be rethought. The discussion is framed by feminist new materialist philosophies and concepts offered by Jane Bennet (thing power, ecologies), Kathleen Stewart (ordinary affects), Erin Manning (the minor gesture), Nancy Tuana (viscous porosity, interactionism) and Haraway’s SF philosophy, which together provide the conceptual and practical means to rematerialize the social and take seriously the agency of the natural. With glitter as materialized figuration (Haraway, 1994, 1988, 1989), the framework allows for the articulation of alternative stories about what gets produced within, with and from childhood art materials. Specifically, working with glitter allows for tracing, reconfiguring and generating debates about childhood that bring concerns with contemporary art, gender, capitalism, the environment and activism into the fray. I conclude by arguing that there is much to be gained by reaching beyond registering glitter as something superficial, frivolous, habitual, ubiquitous, gaudy and messy; when taken seriously glitter can underscore the importance of an entangled sensibility

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that demands a heightened ethics of responsibility in our research, pedagogical and world-making practices.

The stories currently told about children, materials and artistic practices in early childhood contexts As the collection of chapters in this book attests, within the field of early childhood education, a near obsessive preoccupation for standardized development of the child reigns supreme. Children are expected to move through predictable, identifiable and recognized stages of development, and the primary task for the early childhood educator is to support children to progress from one stage of development to the next. Engaging children in the production of artwork begins from a very young age and persists throughout early childhood as an important means to both support and measure this much coveted development. ‘Messy’, multisensory exploration through artistic activities is viewed a crucial part of the early years curriculum. Within developmentalist logic, it is thought possible to know what children are demonstrating when they are engaged in artistic activities; for developmentalists, discerning precisely what children’s artistic expression represents holds the key to knowledge about children’s cognitive, physical, social and emotional development. As early childhood becomes ever more regulated and tightly shaped by policy imperatives to prove national competitive standards (as evidenced by the recent introduction of ‘Baby PISA’ testing by the OECD), the concern to know, measure and fix children at ever younger ages comes to dominate pedagogical and parenting practices. Adults are persistently concerned with what children should be doing in their art at different ages and stages – and hence the concern becomes to determine the extent to which developmental expectations are being met and the degree to which it falls within the realms of what is appropriate ‘for a child at that age’. The materials that children use in art activities are multiple, but the core repertoire typically includes crayons, paint, clay and paper. Working with these materials is widely understood to promote important cognitive and physical development in terms of strength in arms, hands and fingers. School-readiness discourses also thread through justifications for engaging children in various art-making activities; by developing fine motor skills, especially finger control, and hand-eye coordination, children are poised for the literacy demands of school. Art is also claimed to support social and emotional development as children learn to plan and make decisions about their creations, and work

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with others, which involves managing, exploring and expressing feelings and emotions. The youngest of children in early childhood contexts are encouraged and supported to experiment and explore with textures and sensations, but as children move through stages of development (closer to school age), their creations are intended to, in some sense and increasingly, represent reality. The emphasis shifts from processes to production (of an artefact that can be taken home, interpreted, admired and ultimately archived). This shift in emphasis from bodily encounters and multisensory exploration to producing a representational output is significant and something that this chapter will seek to explore more intensely through material encounters with glitter and a concern to track where glitter might take thoughts about childhood and how matter matters in ways that are not immediately perceptible. Early childhood contexts, framed by child-centred pedagogies and curriculum frameworks (concerned with what adults can observe, do and provide; see DfE, 2012), are inherently human-centric spaces. Art materials are viewed as precisely that, inert matter that is used by humans as a means to experiment, to create and ultimately to support human development. Human educators are concerned to identify appropriate and stimulating materials that can be put to work in ageappropriate projects to ensure that the correct learning is taking place and that children’s artistic processes and products can be judged against measures of mastery and progress. This human intentionality is traceable within curriculum frameworks, inspection criteria, parental expectations; it is the human early childhood educator who is charged with orchestrating and choreographing specific learning encounters, which relies upon the selection of materials that act as tools in the acquisition of skills and aptitudes. ‘Enabling environments’ within the English early years curriculum holds potential to more fully recognize that materials possess vitality (Bennett, 2001) and actively produce affects through their entanglements with space, other objects, humans and technology. Yet, the potential to engage with ideas about ‘thing power’ (Bennett, 2001) and what else gets produced through art-making, in ‘enabling environments’, has not been explored in the English context (interesting work is being undertaken by Pacini-Ketchabaw and colleagues via the Commonworlds Collective, see PaciniKetchabaw et al., 2017). For now though, the ‘enabling environment’ within the Early Years Foundation Stage Curriculum (EYFS) is enabling only to the extent that adult educators make it so through their human endeavours; the framework prompts educators to consider how they can use the environment, organize and place material resources to optimize child development; the emphasis is entirely anthropocentric. This is a concern that this chapter aims to address and which

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I have taken up elsewhere (Osgood, 2018, 2019). It also shapes the work of growing body of scholars (e.g. Anastastiou, 2018; Fairchild, 2017; Hargraves, 2017; Holmes et al., 2018; Jones, 2016; Lyttleton-Smith, 2015). Attending to what entanglements with matter produces within early childhood can present some surprises and expand ideas about children’s worlding practices (Haraway, 2008).

Figuring the agentic child Relatively recent shifts in how children are conceptualized – as agentic, intentional, knowing subjects (Burman, 2008; James & James, 2004; James & Prout, 1990) – have radically altered mainstream early childhood pedagogical practices over the past twenty or so years, which have become increasingly more child-centric. Children are now understood as active learners, and so the role of the educator therefore becomes one of facilitation. Early childhood educators are charged with assisting children’s creativity by encouraging curiosity and questioning, rather than a narrow concern with the demonstration of skills or acquisition of techniques. As articulated by Early Years Matters (2018): Children notice everything and closely observe the most ordinary things that adults often take for granted. Building on children’s interests can lead to them creating amazing inventions or making marks on paper that represent for them an experience or something they have seen. Encouraging children to choose and use materials and resources in an open-ended way helps them to make choices and to have confidence in their own ideas. Retaining childhood confidence in their ideas and skills can easily be lost if others ‘take over’ and try to suggest what the child is making, thinking or doing.

Developmentalist and representational logic remains identifiable within the quote but so too do opportunities to embrace ideas about children and childhood that are less certain and more speculative, and so accommodating of the idea that a need to ‘know and fix’ is not helpful. The recognition of the importance of noticing, close observation and a concern with the ordinary and mundane – all core features of new materialist ontologies – stress that we must put aside a sense of ourselves as expert, all-knowing and instead be open to surprises and what else might be going on. Taking the sentiments of this quote down a feminist new materialist avenue would invite a heightened emphasis on materiality, not only merely as objects chosen by adults or used by children but as ‘vibrant matter’ (Bennett, 2001) that is involved in the co-production of subjectivities.

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Noticing…

Figure 6.1

Art as materialized affective processes Attending to materials and matter as producing affects and creating other possibilities to reach understandings about childhood insists that we re-evaluate our appraisals of what is unfolding in early childhood contexts through creative experimentation and artistic production. As Claire Colebrook (2002, p. 24) stresses: Art is not about knowledge, conveying meanings, or providing information. Art is not an ornament or a style used to make data more palatable or consumable. Art may well have meanings or messages, but what makes it art is not its content but its affect, the sensible force or style through which it produces content.

Colebrook’s conceptualization of art that stresses the centrality of affective forces resonates with ideas offered by Erin Manning (2016) about ‘autistic perception’. For Manning, autistic perception is helpful as a way to research the world because it refuses to resolve into recognition. Rather, an autistic perception involves experiences that linger in richer, comparatively unfiltered sensory

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environments with a corresponding potential for difference. This (minor) mode of being reveals the limitations of normative, fixed and standardized approaches (i.e. major), as she stresses: The minor gesture … is defined by its capacity to vary … For the gesture is only a minor gesture in so far as it creates conditions for a different ecology of time, space and politics. This is its force … it’s call for freedom. (pp. 23–24)

Might it be that very young children, with their capacities to notice, deeply observe and exercise curiosity and fascination for the everyday, are living life in the minor key? Might they be exhibiting, enacting, performing, sensing the ‘autistic perception’ Manning writes of? Furthermore, might it be possible for adults to become attuned to this minor key and encounter the liveliness of matter and to sense enchantment (Bennett, 2001) for the seemingly humdrum and unremarkable, that are readily considered ‘resources’ and artistic ‘materials’ in the major key? What I have written about elsewhere (Osgood, 2014) as the urgent need for adults (educators, researchers, parents) to step aside from recognition and instead be prepared for the familiar to become strange, and so force us into the minor key.

Deep observation…

Figure 6.2

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So far … It is clear that ideas about art in childhood are discursively framed by developmentalist discourses that construct the child as a certain sort of subject. This figure of the child is founded upon ideas of linearity, progress and standardization. It is probably also clear that I want to argue that other conceptualizations of both the child and art are available when matter is taken into account, in seriously yet playful ways. In the remainder of this chapter my intention is to map the feminist new materialist ethic-onto-epistemological framework that will allow for these other conceptualizations to find expression. The goal is to work with the notion that materiality and affect, space and place, are each equally as significant and agentic as the human subject as they relationally participate in any given assemblage; here we are working with the idea of flattened ontologies that decentres but does not invisibilize the human from investigations. This lens presents lines of enquiry that ask questions about what artistic materials (in this case glitter) can potentiate via attempts to reconfigure art, children and early years educators through ‘expressive arts and design’ encounters (Early Education, 2012). It appears that within curriculum frameworks (DfE, 2012) and pedagogical practices (Early Education, 2012), there are fairly firm ideas about what counts as art and creative practices and what educators and children should be working towards to approximate an idealized model that will ensure steady developmental progression. This chapter intends to avoid asking what is art or what counts as art. But it rather attends to what (else) gets produced in childhoods through art practices and materials. Where can tracing artistic materials to other worldly contexts take concerns about childhood and children’s place within the world? How can glitter make other stories about children, childhood, early education and art available? This is about recognizing the importance of understanding material agency, the importance of re-materializing the social as well as understanding material agency – the human as well as the more-than-human (Tuana, 2008).

Anti-method of feminist new materialism Working within a feminist new materialist framework insists that as researchers we bring ourselves more fully into research encounters (Osgood & Robinson, 2019). This involves recognizing that we are entangled, affected and infected by that with which we are concerned to study. Attempting to tell other stories about childhood and ‘expressive art and design’ in early childhood contexts invites us

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to be more speculative about what counts as ‘data’ (Lather & St. Pierre, 2013). The neo-materialist turn in childhood studies takes an experimental, speculative, uncertain and generative approach to research and involves grappling with how childhood is produced through processes of becoming (Taylor et al., 2012). Recognizing the human child as relationally produced through interactions with other humans, materials, contexts, spaces, places and his/her stories makes investigations both more expansive, in the tentacular sense (Haraway, 2016), and more intensely concerned with the minor gesture (Manning, 2016). Research becomes about considering our place in the world and our part in how worlds get made. It is important that we find ways to break free from telling the same stories; there are other accounts about what matters in early childhood art than that which developmentalism and human exceptionalism have to offer. Feminist new materialist accounts of childhood endeavour to pay equal attention to the human, non-human and more-than-human and so generate other ways to sense and be in the world. Taking micro-moments and seemingly insubstantial mundane and habitual practices within early childhood contexts can offer the means to open up our conceptualizations of the child and recognize their relational entanglements (Holmes et al., 2018) and our (human-adult) responsibilities to be more speculative about what we think we see and know. Children notice everything and closely observe the most ordinary things that adults often take for granted …’

What does glitter make possible? This chapter now moves from a concern to map the discursive landscape of developmental approaches to childhood art to embarking upon a materialdiscursive (Haraway, 2008) adventure with glitter. Readers are invited to be open to surprises, to embrace a sense of (k)not-knowing (Osgood, 2018), and a preparedness to be enchanted (Bennett, 2001) by glitter, and to sense the affective forces as it scatters, sparkles and contaminates various glitter ecologies. Embarking upon speculative adventures such as this can produce other ways of thinking, being and becoming in early childhood. It involves an interdisciplinary experiment of thinking deeply about glitter, not just what it is or what it comes to symbolize in a discursive sense but materially how it functions, mutates, contaminates, circulates and scatters. This is a material-discursive investigation into glitter’s doings. Ingold (2011) conceptualizes materials as riddles known through their own stories. He argues that it is necessary to go beyond describing

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properties or attributes of a given material; the goal is to learn how a material moves, what happens as it shifts, mixes, modifies and mutates. For Ingold (2013, p. 29) materials are their verbs and their doings (movements, smells, tastes, textures): ‘material is known not by what it is but by what it does’. Glitter is: Glitter/glita/noun: 1. Bright shimmering reflected light or metallic lustre; 2. Small glittering particles used for ornamentation; 3. Something that is brilliantly attractive, sometimes in a superficial way. Glitter does: Glitter/glita/verb (glittered, glittering) 1a. to shine by reflection in bright flashes or with metallic lustre (the sequins in her dress glittered in the moonlight); 1b. to shine with a glass brilliance (his eyes glittered with anger). 2. To have an enticing brilliance: the world continues to offer glittering prizes to those who have stout hearts and sharp swords (F. E. Smith). (The New Penguin English Dictionary, 2000)

Glittering…

Figure 6.3

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With this in mind, this adventure with glitter asks: what does glitter do? What does it make possible? What else might it do? What can we do with what it does? These questions are difficult and not replete with straight answers. They are intended to stretch, queer and open out enquiries; they will present discomfort, joy, despair, and provoke other paths of curiosity about the inclinations that glitter has, how it acts on and with bodies, how it is receptive, reactive, productive; how it floats, drifts, scatters, clogs and sticks. And the goal is to ask so what? Why and how does the mattering of matter, matter? What can it offer us in our conceptualizations of the child, childhood and art?

Glitter in early childhood Pacini-Ketchabaw et al. (2017) address the liveliness of materials within early childhood encounters in Canadian preschools. The authors are especially concerned to investigate the vitality of apparently ‘natural’ materials, namely clay, paper, charcoal, paint and wooden blocks. Through engagements with artsbased enquiry, the authors experiment with the complexities and possibilities of engaging with materials’ relationality – to space, place, nature, culture and biology. Their work resonates with Tuana’s (2008) concept of viscous porosity that explains the interactionism that occurs between humans and environments, social practices and natural phenomena. For Tuana (2008) viscosity is neither fluid nor solid but somewhere in-between. Meanwhile, attention to the porosity of interactions signals the permeable nature of boundaries (between objects, bodies, discourses, concepts) that once a molecular interaction occurs, there is no divide between nature/culture, natural/artificial. So attending to glitter and glittering practices, my intention is to consider how interactionism opens up possibilities to produce meaning and experiences of childhood and art. Raking through glittering practices allows for an analysis of connection and multiplicity which addresses Tuana’s (2001, p. 238) concern that: The world is neither ‘fabricated’ in the sense of created out of human cultural practices, nor is its existence independent of human interactions of a multitude of forms, including cultural. Interactionism posits a world of complex phenomena in dynamic relationality.

Tuana (2008) argues that we recognize the ‘viscous porosity’ of the categories ‘natural’, ‘human-made’, ‘social’, ‘biological’; she insists that we need to attend to

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the in-between of the complex interrelations from which phenomena emerge. There is no definitive divide between nature and culture; it is impossible to separate what is ‘natural’ from what is ‘human-induced’. Since phenomena are constantly becoming, emergent, transmuting through relational processes, we cannot think of glitter as only manufactured plastic particles; it manifests differently in different times, spaces and contexts. It possesses ‘thing power’ (Bennett, 2010), the curious ability for inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce both dramatic and subtle affects. Bringing the material and the discursive (the natural and cultural) into play with each other refuses the false dichotomy between description and reality. The liveliness of glitter, how it is framed discursively and what it produces materially requires a materialdiscursive account. Glitter is discursively constructed in various early childhood art practice discourses, in myriad ways, but generally it is considered an inert material, one among many ‘arts and crafts’ resources. However, when taken as materialdiscursive, as nature-culture (Haraway, 2008), glitter hails the attention of educators, parents and children; it has the capacity to attract attention, its explicit purpose is to embellish and exaggerate children’s artwork, and it often denotes that a celebration or festival is afoot; and it has the capacity to take us on multiple adventures. Glitter is, glitter does … Glitter is loud. It sparkles, flickers and dazzles. Bright, shiny, scratchy and sharp. It’s glitzy and brash. It blinks, it winks, it exists to be seen. Glitter is gaudy, derided for its flamboyance, messy, excessive, uncontainable, a false, unnatural, extraneous pollutant. Glitter is girly, frivolous and fake!

Embarking on this chapter involved domesticated, personalized glittering practices: trawling through family photos, rummaging through boxes of artwork from my children’s time at nursery, scrolling through fieldwork photos (Osgood, 2016), searching the internet for early childhood art projects: I quickly realize that glitter is everywhere. I see it literally everywhere: on shoes, bags, T-shirts and socks, on hairbands, in face paint, in play dough, on paintings, sprinkled on junk

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modelling, permanently adhered to my kitchen table, decorating the floor of my bin shed, engrained in the sofa cushion. I wonder, does its embedded, habitual, excessive place within early childhood cause some of its lustre and magic to dull? Glitter should be banned over environmental impact, scientists warn. (The Independent, 2017)

Glitter, along with micro-beads, has come under fierce attack as one of the biggest microplastic polluters. As Horton & Dixon (2018, p. 1) stress: Microplastics are pervasive, persistent and potentially harmful pollutants, an understanding of these processes will allow for assessment of exposure to better determine the likely long-term ecological and human health implications of microplastic pollution.

Glitter is among a group of plastics termed micro-plastics since the particles are less than 5 millimetres in length. These tiny plastics are considered to be particularly problematic since they enter directly into land (via agricultural practices), wastewater (via sewage sludge), freshwater (via inadequate waste disposal, i.e. littering or loss from landfill) and ultimately find their way into marine environments. It raises important questions about the ways in which scattering matter matters. Glitter ranges across terrestrial, riverine, marine and coastal environments; it is everywhere – floating in the air that we breathe, as ‘urban dust’ (Dehghani et al., 2017; Dris et al., 2016); dwelling in aquatic systems, finding ways to oceans via rivers and water waste systems (Carr et al., 2016); encountering waxworms, mealworms and microbes that endeavour to ingest and degrade it (Gu, 2003; Yang et al., 2014, 2015). Glitter’s low density allows it to float and drift, on encountering the growth of microalgae, through a process of befouling; its density is increased and it behaves differently, less buoyant, relationally – in concert with currents, winds, tides, floods; glitter travels and gathers, sediments and disperses, excreted within faecal pellets into ‘marine snow’ – no longer floating on the surface or sedimented on the seabed; glitter is found in surprising and troubling oceanic spaces including the deep sea, Southern Ocean and Artic ice cores (Cinceinelli et al., 2017; Obbard et al., 2014; Woodall et al., 2014). Glitter travels through closely interlinked environmental compartments (terrestrial, freshwater, marine and atmospheric), which have permeable boundaries. As Horton and Dixon (2018, p. 11) stress: Microplastics are now so ubiquitous throughout the globe that a paradigm shift is needed, considering them as integrated into earth surface processes.

Microplastics are abundant and widespread across the globe, and the rate of output is increasing. The main concern voiced by environmental scientists

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relates to the potential damage to ecosystems. Large-scale macroplastic (carrier bags, bottles, packaging) has been prominent in the global media for contributing to deaths of marine animals including whales, turtles and seabirds. A growing body of evidence accounts for the harm that microplastics (including glitter) are causing to smaller aquatic organisms including zooplankton and larger invertebrates (mussels, crabs, fish larvae) by clogging guts and gills and causing internal lacerations. Wright and Kelly (2017) and Van Cauwenberghe and Janssen (2014) have raised concerns about the possible consequences for human health as microplastics are ingested or inhaled, which could pose a real risk for workers in textile factories and in plastic recycling plants. As Tuana (2008) stresses in her analysis of the reverberations of Hurricane Katrina, we cannot ignore the asymmetrical costs shaped by class, race and gender. Glitter therefore needs to be encountered as a complex materialized figuration, as nature-culture (Haraway, 2008) it is not a particle that is distinct and separate from humans. Rather, it is entangled, it is generative, and it is lively (Bennett, 2010) and troubling (Haraway, 2016). It must be encountered as something more than inert matter charged with embellishing childhood art; it insists that we exercise our ethical responsibility, and we must respond to the trouble that it presents in each encounter and entanglement. Glitter, loved by youngsters for making Christmas cards and baubles, has been banished at Tops Day Nurseries. (Marine Conservation Society UK, 2018)

Glitter within early childhood contexts receives mixed reviews, but the moral panic generated by the microplastic debate, which powerfully foregrounds what glitter does and the ways in which it is destructively entangled, agitates. A nursery chain announced an outright ban on glitter across its nineteen nurseries in the south of England in 2017, stating that: You can see the children are taking their bits of craft home and there’s glitter on the cardboard, it blows off and into the air and on to the road, and it’s only a tiny little bit, but we’ve got 3,000 children and they’re all doing Christmas craft at the moment, so we’ve got glitter everywhere. To save the oceans, should you give up glitter? (The National Geographic, 2018)

While hailed a proactive approach by environmentalists, this reactionary step reinscribes notions of human exceptionalism. Glitter is materially-discursively fabricated as a dystopian yet inert object that can be contained and controlled

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by human intervention. Furthermore, glitter is rendered homogenous; all that glitters … However, not all glitter is, or needs to be, manufactured from aluminium and polythene terephthalate, shortened to PET (which is found to be harmful to the environment). Thompson (2018) stated that an outright ban on glitter might not be necessary since eco-friendly glitter that biodegrades in an efficient and unharmful way offers a viable alternative. Mica and mineral glitter are sustainable alternatives that are growing in popularity in the cosmetics industry (Parker, 2017). Within this ecological account of glitter is the emergence of a gendered glitter politics, evidently inflected by neo-liberal capitalism and consumerism. ‘Customers’ – that is parents who pay for their children to attend nursery; mothers who purchase household cosmetics, face paint and craft materials – are charged with making the ‘right choices’. Glitter becomes a gendered politics, which materially-discursively places the burden of responsibility upon mothers, childcare workers and girls to engage with glitter in ways that recognize it as both dystopian and frivolous, as inherently gendered and bad. I wonder, does glitter not deserve a deeper, more sustained, multiple and tentacular engagement – while knee-jerk reactions such as an outright ban attracts headline news and, in doing so, raises the profile of a nursery chain and generates cathartic, philanthropic affective charges for those taking decisive human action? But does this intolerance shut down other possibilities to reimagine and encounter glitter in other ways? The managing director of the nursery chain draws upon saviour and childhood innocence discourses when she states: There are 22,000 nurseries in the country, so if we’re all getting through kilos and kilos of glitter, we’re doing terrible damage, and these children, the world is for them … So here we are wrecking the planet for them, and I didn’t even know … I had no idea we’re doing all that damage. You can’t really recycle it because it’s so small, you can’t separate it from anything. (Marine Conservation Society, 2018)

You can’t separate it from anything … Glitter’s inseparability is perhaps the point here. It is everywhere; it gets everywhere; it becomes-with and shape-shifts; it infiltrates and infects; and it resurfaces and sends oscillating affective charges through water, air and earth, through bodies, which raises doubt over whether this anthropocentric solution really addresses the problem. It certainly regenerates a range of familiar discourses including childhood innocence and the need to protect children (Robinson, 2013), romanticized conflation of nature

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with childhood (Taylor et al., 2012), human exceptionalism (Alaimo & Hekman, 2008), capitalism and life in the post-anthropocence (Haraway, 2016). But are there ways in which we might encounter glitter differently, in ways that allow other stories to be told, stories that are more productive and that invite us to grapple with our human place in the world afresh, to break free from our sense of human superiority? Following Pacini-Ketchabaw et al. (2017), this chapter asks, what kinds of work does glitter do? What role do humans play in producing glitter practices? What shifts in assemblages do different glitters and glitter practices encourage? How are childhoods mediated by glitter/glitter practices? Does different glitter in different spaces do different work and engender different bodily practices and relations? Nanoparticles as image enhancing agents for ultrasonography. (Lui, 2006)

Where might this string figuring (Haraway, 1994) with glitter and childhood take us next? To patent number: US9895453B1, ultrasonography and glitter gel. Fenzl and Fenzl (2018) have invented an ultrasound gel, which shimmers and sparkles. For many, ultrasonography is the first time that expectant parents are visually introduced to an unborn child. Ultrasonography assemblages are rarely shimmery and sparkly; rather they comprise sticky vinyl beds, paper sheets, bodies, movements, anticipation, trepidation, anxiety, joy, institutionalized clinical smells and sounds, darkness, wetness and medicinal coldness of synthetic colouring agents mixed with parabens and formaldehyde donor preservatives. US9895453B1 engages in glittering practices that offer another story, pregnant with possibilities: An ultrasound gel that is reflective and combines colour and scent to create a pleasing aesthetic effect, and which uses natural colour additives, preservatives, and perfume, has surprisingly been discovered. In an exemplary embodiment, an improved ultrasound gel is glittery, pink, lavendula coloured and scented … contains elderberry extract … lavender essential oils … this allows people that are fearful of the health risks or allergic reactions associated with paraben preservatives, formaldehyde donor preservatives to have the availability of ultrasound technology … a pleasing scent and colour found in nature, the ultrasound gel creates an enjoyable experience for the patient and health care provider. (Fenzl & Fenzl, 2018, p. 1)

pink and glittery … ‘natural’ … sensory … surfacing … noticing …

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The ultrasound gel contains glitter that reflects the light and allows the ultrasonographer to locate the gel after it has been placed on the patient during the procedure in a room with low ambient light. Larger particles inhibit the conduction of ultrasound waves … The glitter leaves a reflective glimmer on the skin of the patient after the procedure is over and the ultrasound gel is absorbed into the skin. (Fenzl & Fenzl, 2018, p. 2)

You can’t separate it from anything … The glitter in the ultrasound gel is composed of mica and titanium dioxide, combined with lemongrass essential oil, elderberry extract and aloe vera, all of which are claimed to increase the absorption of water into skin and act as an emollient. The patent boasts that the gel has a softening and soothing affect that lasts after the procedure. Elderberry extract and lavender essential oils have an anti-microbial effect, which alleviates concerns that ‘potential consumers’ might have about synthetic materials used in products that are in contact with skin. US9895453B1 offers a means to engage with a different set of glittering practices that stress the permeability of boundaries and surfaces. Working with Tuana’s (2008) concept of viscous porosity, it becomes possible to recognize interactionism at play: unborn child, skin, medical practices, essential oils, ultrasound waves, consumerism and glitter, entangled and productive of a different way to encounter our human exceptionalism. This materialized figuration invites a reassessment of glitter; it allows different stories to be told. Following Haraway (1994), glitter invites curiosity, experimentation and an investment in worldmaking; being open to other stories allows for an engagement with how worlds are made and unmade. Being open to what else might be there takes investigations in multiple, unanticipated directions. Arriving at US9895453B1 takes the story in other directions, which expose the limitations of human-centric accounts of the world. The goal of feminist new materialist enquiries is to resist arriving at easy solutions but instead stay with the trouble (Haraway, 2016). Glittering practices manifest differently, dependent upon context, space, place, and in relation to other matter and bodies; glittering practices behave differently to produce other affects. US9895453B1 offers an alternative account of the entanglements of bodies, childhood, light, water, sound, glitter, noticing and sensing. Essential oils can also have a palliative effect and a therapeutic effect, anti-stretch mark properties, and prevent the formation of stretch marks. (Fenzl & Fenzl, 2018)

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The stretch mark presents this glitter adventure with another sticky knot (Ahmed, 2004). In the UK around 70 per cent of adolescent girls and up to 90 per cent of pregnant women develop stretch marks (Rook et al., 1998). Stretch marks tell multiple stories: gendered stories, maternal stories, obesity stories, stories of race and class, plastic surgery, self-loathing and eating disorders, of acceptance and celebration. Sara Shakeel, a Pakistan-based artist, has gained a following on social media for glittering practices that bring together art, affect, politics and glitter that tell other stories and seek to reconfigure the stretch mark. Referring back to Colebrook (2002), what makes art is its affect. Using art as affective method, Shakeel recognizes the political potential for glitter to produce alternative feminist accounts about female bodies and generate affective charges that directly challenge ideas about bodily perfection. Experimenting with glitter and human bodies, photography and near nudity in ways that challenge hegemonic discourses about idealized femininity, pushes us to think more deeply about what art does and where engagements with glitter can take activist, pedagogical, parental and artistic thoughts and practices. The work that these glittering practices undertake is provocative, restorative and hopeful. Artistic interventions such as this deploy interference strategies in the minor key (Manning, 2017) that disrupt racism

Figure 6.4–6.5 

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and misogyny in powerful ways. Such material-discursive glittering practices extend and challenge entrenched discourses about gender and glitter. The extent to which glitter is understood to be productive of femininity has been widely debated by feminists, with some arguing that glitter serves as a challenge to normative femininity because it is ‘associated with childishness, frivolity, lower-class tastes, drag performances and sex work’ (White, 2015, p. 23). Meanwhile, others are concerned that post-feminists’ celebration of glitter is emblematic of broader weaknesses and failings with post-feminist politics. For Gill (2007) and McRobbie (2009), celebrating and investing in femininity as a corporeal project amounts to a contradictory perspective that takes feminist achievements for granted and produces neo-liberal, consumerist, hyper-feminine subjects. Within such corporeal projects of the self, feminist achievements are taken for granted, and feminism as a critical lens and social movement is repudiated. The extent to which Shakeel’s glittering practices might be considered post-feminist projects of the self is open to debate but not the most salient point here. Rather, the concern remains with what glitter does and what glitter produces. Beckie Coleman (2017) is also concerned with the liveliness of glitter in her research with teenage girls using collaging as an affective methodology. She explores the importance of glitter in debates about gender and sexualities, popular culture and celebrity, and the affective force of glitter to move girls to think and act differently. She also draws attention to how glitter features in LGBTQI+ subcultures through glitter bomb activism of which she states: Glitter bombing draws attention to how glitter as a material, gets everywhere … Glitter bombing works through the particular agency and vibrancy of glitter as a material. It goes everywhere. It sticks to that which it might and might not be intended to. (pp. 6–7)

Glitter, then, does important work; it exhibits liveliness and agency (Bennett, 2010). It irritates and repels old, white male politicians. Glittering practices as a form of activism work to provoke and invite curiosity about (imperfect) female bodies and what constitutes valid forms of femininity. Glitter’s activist doings operate in the minor key and leave traces. As these selected accounts of various forms of arts activism illustrate, while glitter can be provocative, productive, disruptive, and can generate alternative discursive accounts through materialized figurations, there are always other strings that can be pulled, stories to be told. But taking glitter seriously makes it possible to follow, often troubling, lines of enquiry to open out investigations

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into what matters and how matter matters in the generation of ways to live response-ably (Haraway, 2016).

You can’t separate it from anything … I want to return to a familiar and seemingly routine, habitual moment within early childhood when glitter resurfaces and presents other strings to follow, and which persist in underlining the importance of the liveliness of glitter. Face painting is a common feature of early childhood, and an art form of sorts, although usually engaging the artistic talents of adults. The girls patiently queue, giddy with anticipation of the impending transformations to Fairy Princesses, Frozen characters etc. The appeal of having ‘make-up’ applied acts as a powerful force; wriggling, hopping … anticipation mounts, the transformative powers of glitter within reach. The glitter sits in the make-up dish, sparkles in the sunlight, the loaded paint brush makes its landing on a plump cheek. (Observation notes from Osgood, 2016)

Childhood entanglements with glittering make-up practices are complex, multilayered, gendered, classed and raced, which mutate across time and space. Writing in the North American context, Kearney (2015) notes that the sparklification of girlhood has grown exponentially; glittering practices shape contemporary childhoods in myriad ways. Glitter make-up is symptomatic of the sparklification of which she writes and has the capacity to affectively move girls, as the observation above attests. Aside from the significations of glitter in contemporary girlhoods, as matter it generates other affective responses. The Campaign for Safe Cosmetics (2009) was instigated by a group of concerned mothers. In their report ‘Pretty Scary’ high levels of noxious substances present in the leading brands of children’s face paint, including those that contain glitter, are reported. I want to dwell on the ways in which childhoods are mediated by glittering practices in significant ways, in different contexts.

Sparkles in the sunlight … Under pressure from consumer concern about the environmental damage that PET glitter wages upon the planet, the global cosmetic industries demand that ‘natural’ and less environmentally damaging forms of glitter be made available (Bliss, 2017). Further excavation and wayfaring takes this investigation to the illegal mines of India, where childhood encounters with glitter manifest in troubling ways.

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The entire landscape glitters in the sunlight. Imagine a giant brush coating the baked earth with rouge – the shimmer is uncannily similar because top cosmetics brands use mica powder, sourced from this region, to give lipstick and eye shadow their sparkle. (Sunavala, 2014, Times of India)

A sinister story, inflected with British colonialism and global capitalism, surfaces. Children, similar in age to the excited girls in my fieldwork observation, are working in perilous, illegal mica mines – illegal because they have been abandoned and/or are collapsing. Bhalla et al., (2016) reported the horror of this work: glittering practices that witness children’s encounters with death and serious head injuries. More sustained childhood encounters with mica include pneumoconiosis, a debilitating lung infection that can take up to forty years to manifest (Moitra et al., 2018). Pursuing this string further reveals mica as a component in igneous and metamorphic rocks, first mined in India around four thousand years ago when it was celebrated for its medicinal qualities. British colonizers discovered a substantial  mica belt, and for many years the industry boomed across seven districts, with hundreds of legal mines employing tens of thousands of people (Bliss, 2017). However, its decline generated acute rural poverty. Yet the global demand for mica continues and with it the emergence of illegal practices. Currently, 70 per cent of mica production in India is from illegal mines reliant upon child labour and exploited female miners. Glitter’s doings in this specific space, place and time manifest in haunting, harrowing and frightful ways. Revisiting questions about what glitter does: the kinds of work that glitter does, the role that humans play in producing glitter practices; the shifts in assemblages that different glitters and glitter practices encourage; and the ways in which childhoods are mediated by glitter practices is disquieting. Bodily practices of intense physical labour challenge hegemonic constructions of childhood and expose the unrelenting affects of colonialism, the material-discursive intermingling of criminality and capitalism, which in turn is productive of intolerable poverty that acts to sustain mica-glittering practices. In response, the mines themselves exercise vital materialism; depleted, exhausted, the only resistance is collapse. We – the dwellers of this planet at this point in time – are interconnected, but also internally fractured. Class, race, gender and sexual orientations, age and ablebodiedness continue to function as significant markers in framing and policing access to normal ‘humanity’ … critical posthumanities … gives us a frame for the actualization of the many missing people, whose ‘minor’ … knowledge is the breeding ground for possible futures. (Braidotti, 2018, p. 23)

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Glitter is continuum, is story, event; a happening, a doing This chapter has endeavoured to get at the liveliness of glitter. This journey with glittering practices promised hope, joy and despair, and to demand that matter, and how matter matters differently, must be taken seriously. It has attended to the permeability of boundaries, through the telling of entangled, interwoven stories that present endless possibilities to sense the urgency of life in the minor key, while being attentive to the minor gesture (Manning, 2017). Haraway’s (2016) invitation to engage in tentacular thought has involved a deep immersion and a wayfaring sensibility that has allowed our entangled place within the world to be exposed and explored. I have endeavoured to track lines and exercise responseability as ‘high stakes training of the mind and imagination to go visiting, to venture of the beaten path to meet unexpected, non-natal kin, and to strike up conversations, to pose and respond to interesting questions, to propose something unanticipated’ (Haraway, 2016, p. 130). The aim was to make the familiar strange and so challenge habitual ways of thinking and being in early childhood. Inviting a curiosity that allows glitter to be observed, sensed and encountered as agentic has involved reaching out to performative aspects of glitter (what glitter can do, how it functions in relation to time, space, place and other bodies). Glitter is so deeply embedded in early childhood practices and ubiquitously scatters its way through children’s lives in both routine and remarkable ways. Making space to consider glitter as generative can lead investigations into uncharted territories and so heighten our worldly sensibilities (Haraway, 2008).

References Ahmed, S. (2004). The cultural politics of emotion. London: Routledge. Alaimo, S., & Hekman, S. (Eds.). (2008). Material feminisms. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Anastastiou, T. (2018). Textures of food: Diffracting eating relationships in an early years setting. Unpublished PhD Thesis, Manchester Metropolitan University. Bennett, J. (2001). The enchantment of modern life: Attachments, crossings and ethics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. USA: Duke University Press. Bhalla, N., Chandran, R., & Nagaraj, A. (2016). Blood mica: Key findings of investigation into child deaths in India’s illegal mica mines. Accessed 3 February: https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-india-mica-children-findings/blood-mica-

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key-findings-of-investigation-into-child-deaths-in-indias-illegal-mica-minesidUKKCN10D2NG. Bliss, S. (2017). Child labour in India’s mica mines: The global beauty industry. Geography Bulletin, 49(3), 23–31. Braidotti, R. (2018). A theoretical framework for the critical posthumanities. Theory, Culture & Society, 0(0), 1–31. Burman, E. (2008). Developments: Child, image, nation. London: Routledge. Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, The (2009). Pretty scary: Could Halloween face paint cause lifelong health problems?: A report of heavy metals in face paint. Accessed 3 February 2018: http://www.safecosmetics.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Pretty-Scary.pdf. Carr, S. A., Liu, J., and Tesoro, A. G. (2016). Transport and fate of microplastic particles in wastewater treatment plants. Water Research, 91, 174–182. Cincinelli, A., Scopetani, C., Chelazzi, D., Lombardini, E., Martellini, T., Katsoyiannis, A., Fossi, M. C., & Corsolini, S. (2017). Microplastics in the surface of waters of the Ross Sea (Antarctica): Occurrence, distribution and characterisation by FTIR. Chemosphere, 175, 391–400. Colebrook, C. (2002). Gilles Deleuze. London: Routledge. Coleman, R. (2017, 19 May). Glitter: Affectivity, materiality, methodology. Paper Presented at Gender, sexuality and the sensory symposium, University of Kent. Dehghani, S., Moore, F., & Akhbarizadeh, R. (2017). Microplastic pollution in deposited urban dust, Tehran metropolis, Iran. Environmental Science Pollution Research, 24(25), 20360–20371. Department of Education (2012). Early years foundation stage curriculum. London: HMSO. Dris, R., Gasperi, J., Saad, M., Mirande, C., & Tassin, B. (2016). Synthetic fibres in atmospheric fallout: A source of microplastics in the environment? Marine Pollution Bulletin, 104(1–2), 290–293. Early Education (2012). Development matters in the early years foundation stage (EYFS): Non-statutory guidance material. ISBN 978-0-904-187-57-1. Early Years Matters (2018). Expressive arts and design. Accessed 3 February 2018: http:// www.earlyyearsmatters.co.uk/our-services/school-and-nursery-improvementpartner/expressive-arts-and-design-ead/ Fairchild, N. (2017). Earthworm disturbances: The re-imagining of relations in early childhood education and care. Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Southampton. Fenzl, M. E., & Fenzl, T. S. (2018). Shiny ultrasound gel, United States Patent, Patent No: US9,895,453B1. Gill, R. (2007). Post-feminist media culture: Elements of a sensibility. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 10(2), 147–166. Gu, J-D. (2003). Microbiological deterioration and degradation of synthetic polymeric materials: Recent research advances. International Biodeterioration and Biodegradation Journal, 52(2): 69–91.

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Haraway, D. J. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3) Autumn, 575–599. Haraway, D. J. (1989). Primate visions: Gender, race and nature in the world of modern science. London: Routledge. Haraway, D. J. (1994). A game of cat’s cradle: Science studies, feminist theory, cultural studies. Configurations, 2(1), 59–71. Haraway, D. J. (2008). When species meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. London: Duke University Press. Hargraves, V. (2017). Rhythmic affectensities becoming-new: An ethics of expression in early childhood education. Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Auckland. Holmes, R., Jones, L., & Osgood, J. (2018). Mundane habits and methodological creations. In A. Cutter-Mackenzie, K. Malone, & E. Barratt Hacking (Eds.), International handbook on childhood nature. Belgium: Springer. Horton, A. A., & Dixon, S. J. (2018). Microplastics: An introduction to environmental transport processes. WIREs Water, 5, e1268. doi: https://doi.org/10.1002/wat2.1268. Independent, The (2017). Glitter should be banned over environmental impact, scientists warn. Ingold, T. (2011). Being alive: Essays on movement, knowledge and description. New York, NY: Routledge. Ingold, T. (2013). Making: Anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. New York, NY: Routledge. James, A., & James, A. L. (2004). Constructing childhood: Theory, policy & social practice. London: Palgrave. James, A., & Prout, A. (Eds.). (1990). Constructing and reconstructing childhood: Contemporary issues in the sociological study of childhood. London: Falmer Press. Jones, L. (2016). A practice in materialised refiguration: A modest attempt in making a difference. In A. B. Reinertsen (Ed.), Becoming earth. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Kearney, M. C. (2015). Sparkle: Luminosity and post-girl power media. Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 29(2), 263–273. Lather, P., & St. Pierre, E. A. (2013). Post-qualitative inquiry. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26, 629–633. Lui, W-T (2006). Nanoparticles and their biological and environmental applications. Journal of Bioscience and Bioengineering, 102(1), 1–7. Lyttleton-Smith, J. (2015). Becoming gendered bodies: A posthuman analysis of how gender is produced in an early childhood classroom. Unpublished PhD Thesis, Cardiff University. Manning, E. (2016). The minor gesture. London: Duke University Press. Marine Conservation Society, The (2018). Glitter, loved by youngsters for making Christmas cards and baubles, has been banished at Tops Day Nurseries. https:// www.mcsuk.org/news/glitter_ban.

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McRobbie, A. (2009). The aftermath of feminism: Gender, culture & social change. London: Sage. Moitra, S., Bandyopadhyay, A., & Moitra, S. (2018). Mica pneumoconiosis: a neglected occupational lung disease. The Lancet, 6, 39. National Geographic, The (2018). https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/11/glitterplastics-ocean-pollution-environment-spd/. New Penguin English Dictionary, The (2000). London: Penguin Books. Obbard, R. W., Sadri, S., Wong, Y. Q., Khitun, A. A., Baker, I., & Thompson, R. C. (2014). Global warming releases microplastic legacy frozen in Arctic Sea ice. Earth’s Future, 2(6), 315–320. Osgood, J. (2014). Playing with gender: Making space for posthuman childhoods. In J. Moyles, J. Payler, & J. Georgeson (Eds.), Early years foundations: Critical issues (pp. 191–202). Maidenhead: Open University Press. Osgood, J. (2016). The (k)not-knowing ‘diversity’ in early childhood education study. London: Middlesex University. Osgood, J. (2018). Queering understandings of how matter comes to matter in the babyroom. In L. Moran, K. Reilly, & B. Brady (Eds.), Narrating childhoods across contexts: Knowledge, environment and relationships. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Osgood, J. (2019). Materialised reconfigurations of gender in early childhood: Playing seriously with Lego. In J. Osgood, & K. H. Robinson (Eds.), Feminists researching gendered childhoods: Generative entanglements. London: Bloomsbury. Osgood, J., & Robinson, K. H. (2019). Feminists researching gendered childhoods: Generative entanglements. London: Bloomsbury. Pacini-Ketchabaw, V., Kind, S., & Kocher, L. L. (2017). Encounters with materials in early childhood education. London: Routledge. Parker, L. (2017). To save oceans, should you give up glitter? National geographic. http:// news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/11/glitter-plastics-ocen-pollution-environment-spd. Robinson, K. H. (2013). Innocence, knowledge and the construction of childhood: The contradictory nature of sexuality and censorship in children’s contemporary lives. London: Routledge. Rook, A., Wilkinson, D. S., & Ebling, F. J. G. (1998). Textbook of dermatology. Oxford: Blackwell. Sunavala, N. (2014). The lost childhood of India’s mica minors. The Times of India. Accessed 3 February 2018: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/The-lostchildhood-of-Indias-mica-minors/articleshow/51871390.cms. Taylor, A., Pacini-Ketchabaw, V., & Blaise, M. (2012). Children’s relations to the morethan-human-world (Editorial). Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 13(20), 81–85. Thompson, R. (2018). Plastic fantastic. https://www.plymouth.ac.uk/research/marinelitter Tuana, N. (2001). Material locations: An interactionist alternative to realism/social constructivism. In N. Tuana, & S. Morgen (Eds.), Engendering rationalities. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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‘So You Will Remember Me as an Artist’: Art-making as a Way of Being in Early Childhood Christine Marmé Thompson

Introduction For more than a century, developmental psychology prevailed as the undisputed explanation for the nature and evolution of children’s drawings, emphasizing age-related similarities among the drawings produced by children around the world. Late in the twentieth century, in response to more nuanced interpretations of cross-cultural research and the theoretical contributions of Lev Vygotsky (1978) and others, a sociocultural perspective on child art emerged, emphasizing the impact of the intentions children bring to drawing and the influence of the social and visual culture that surrounds them. This perspective generated a resurgence of research in early childhood art, strikingly different in scale and formality from the large-scale collection of drawings used earlier to posit stages of artistic development. In recent years, a new wave of research with children, informed by a childhood studies approach steeped in postmodern thought, reveals a far more variable image of children who make art, expanding our understanding of the materials, intentions and intensities they bring to that process and helping to dissolve previously inviolate boundaries between artmaking as practised by adults and by children.

Children drawing/children’s drawings Describing the performative unfolding of drawing events, I share this assemblage of stories of drawings in the making. I offer these vignettes in order to further

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a postdevelopmental understanding of the process of art-making in early childhood as a microcosm of the process that artists of any age engage, rather than a biologically conditioned and psychologically constrained process of constructing images. To see drawing as a process, an action, a verb, rather than primarily as a product, an image, a noun, is to focus on drawing events as the core of artistic practice in early childhood, the place where unpredictable ‘lines of flight’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004, p. 238) erupt to be pursued by multiple means. What follows is a series of representative anecdotes that describe drawings created by children in what Brent Wilson terms ‘third pedagogical sites’ (2007) within early childhood settings. Third sites are pedagogical situations in which responsibility, choice and decision-making are shared between adults and children, where children’s freedom and choice are maximized within a flexible structure provided by adults. In the context of art classes, such spaces encourage children to explore subjects and modes of drawing that are most compelling to them, without the imposed relevance of assigned topics. When children create such drawings to please and inform themselves, their habitual choices of subject matter make children’s thinking and engagements with the world visible and audible, as the rhizomatic event of drawing spins out. Equally, choice of subject matter tends to shape the drawing processes and repertoires that children draw upon, as they adapt their graphic vocabularies and dialects to various intentions and audiences, revealing a far greater acuity of aesthetic decision-making than young children typically are thought to possess. The drawing events described here track a series of ruptures and shifts in my own thinking, inspired by looking, listening and lingering beside children drawing, being as present as possible during their drawing events. Prompted by the realization that children’s drawings, engaging as they may be, are no more than fragments of the experience that brings them about, I began to document the interactions that occurred in the social settings of early childhood art classrooms. As I grew to understand children’s drawing as a social practice (Pearson, 2001), one that reflected both children’s immediate peer culture and the larger children’s culture they shared, I gravitated towards sociocultural theory and childhood studies, with their emphases on the influences of other people and things on the learning process of the individual child. More recently, I have come to understand the process of drawing as rhizomatic and diffractive (Davies, 2014), infinitely responsive and collaborative, assembling bits and fragments of experience in an improvisational process that is as unpredictable as it is astonishing. This growing appreciation of the complexities

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of the drawing process is certainly not mine alone: it too is an experience, still ongoing, constructed in dialogue with other researchers and teachers, including those whose work appears in this text (see also Schulte & Thompson, 2018; Tarr, 2004). The stories that follow capture moments in this journey. The first two describe events that occurred during ‘sketchbook time’, a regularly scheduled feature of Saturday morning art classes taught by undergraduate students becoming art or early childhood teachers. The third vignette took place in a Head Start classroom in a major city in the United States, where preschool children were considered to be ‘at risk’ of educational disadvantage due to economic circumstances or their identity as English language learners.

Seeing differently: Children’s interests and children’s art Tony’s passion for the Titanic became evident from the first morning he attended Saturday art classes. Over the course of eight weeks, whenever the choice of subject matter was left to Tony, he drew the Titanic. The pages of his sketchbook filled with a roughly sequential recreation of the ship’s misadventure and subsequent attempts to retrieve its secrets. Each instalment in Tony’s visual documentary presented a distinct set of graphic challenges; each episode required a particular perspective to convey its full dramatic import. Tony was equal to the task, moving his liquid baseline up and down the page, providing close-ups and panoramic views, allowing his viewers (and, more importantly, himself) to experience the unfolding tragedy of the ship’s deterioration. When he drew the climactic scene, the immediate aftermath of the Titanic’s collision with the iceberg, Tony’s usual matter-of-fact demeanour shifted noticeably. He looked around nervously, searching for reactions, clearly anticipating shock and adult disapproval. He was prepared to respond, to defend his depiction of severed body parts floating amid the debris. The scene, he assured us, was rooted in historical record. Some of the books he had read mentioned decapitated passengers among the wreckage. Tony’s friends were impressed, it seemed, both by the violent content of the drawing and by Tony’s audacity in drawing such a scene in full view of interested, but potentially censorious, adults. Tony’s teachers received this drawing as they had all other in the series, with appropriate gravity and respect for the intensity of Tony’s interest, the knowledge he had accumulated, and the role that his drawings played in helping him to make sense of the event.

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Tony was willing to talk about the genesis of his fascination with the Titanic, about the model his friend Evan gave him for his birthday, about the books and videos he had since consumed, about any and all aspects of the ship and its fate. He was not willing – quite possibly, not able – to explain the reasons for this fascination. When asked, he shrugged and replied, ‘I just think it’s interesting.’ Other children in Tony’s class also found the Titanic interesting, particularly as presented in Tony’s drawings, which they greatly admired. Both Gabrielle and Thomas, inspired by Tony’s example, drew ships in various perilous situations or orientations. Like most young children, they were ‘impressed by [other children’s] infatuations’ (Paley, 1990, p. 30). But for Gabrielle and Thomas, this interest was momentary and improvised, a tribute to Tony’s discovery of something intrinsically good to draw, a subject they tried on for size, a second-hand garment, considered and quickly discarded. The preschool and kindergarten children who attended these university-  sponsored art classes collected eclectic mixes of imagery in their sketchbooks throughout the semester. A few children found the prospect of drawing in their sketchbooks for twenty minutes or so each morning daunting: it is hard sometimes to come up with that first idea to start or sustain a steady stream of images without external motivation. A few moments of conversation, a bit of casual surveillance of others’ drawings or a review of the previous week’s sketches usually supply inspiration. Most children, however, seem to respond enthusiastically and without hesitation to the invitation sketchbooks issue: to pursue the subject they most want to explore in the company of other children and interested adults. Many children draw assorted things, amassing a collection of curiosities with little apparent relation to one another. Often the most recognizable elements of a particular child’s work are the style of the drawings or the arrangement of forms on the page. Some children, like Madeleine, simply love to draw. Not yet five years old, Madeleine had already informed her family that it is her intention to be an artist when she grows up. All of the drawings in her sketchbook depicted familiar people and objects, pastoral domestic scenes. The most exotic subject she tackled was a rendering of Monet’s garden, inspired by a book on Impressionism owned by her family. Like most of the children around her, Madeleine drew primarily from imagination and memory, although she also drew portraits of her teachers from observation. Madeleine seemed to search constantly for subjects that would exercise and expand her graphic repertoire.

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Like Tony, four-year-old Devin was a specialist who devoted every page of his sketchbook to a single subject. Dinosaurs were Devin’s obsession, and he knew quite a lot about them, far more than the adults to whom he patiently explained how the single figure on the page could be labelled either Brontosaurus or Apatosaurus. Devin sometimes drew a prehistoric creature standing alone mid-page. Often, however, he preferred to create intricate scenes, with sharp-toothed creatures erupting, open-mouthed, onto the scene from the page’s edge, in pursuit of smaller, slithering creatures wriggling away in every direction. Each of these children brings a slightly different motivation, a different constellation of intentions and expectations, to the activity of drawing. As Claire Golomb (1992) observed, ‘drawings can provide multiple sources of satisfaction that are at once of an emotional, cognitive, and aesthetic order’ (p. 162). For some children, drawing is an activity akin to storytelling, a way of recording, re-examining and revising experiences and events, of understanding and exploring things they have seen and done. Many children find the themes that matter most to them writ large in historical events, in legends of distant times and places, in scientific theories and speculations, in arcane events and exotic locations – in a variety of phenomena based in fact but as remote from children’s daily experience as the most esoteric fantasy. Other children take tremendous pleasure in the activity of drawing itself and the effects it produces, not least in its contribution to social exchange and the accumulation of social capital. These children often draw more of the subjects we consider standard children’s fare: people, animals, houses, plants, machines, places and people they know, familiar routines and important occasions. Their work tends to be autobiographical and documentary, rooted in the primary territory of personal experience. They use their sketchbooks as many artists do, as daybooks or journals, repositories of images and reminders of ideas accumulated in the process of living. As we look over young children’s shoulders to survey the drawings they create to please themselves, individuality of interest and of style seems far more striking than the shared characteristics we recognize as developmental. Indeed, as children gravitate towards particular subjects as favourites for drawing, certain aspects of graphic representation seem to gain urgency in the bargain. Children whose imaginative worlds are inhabited by sea serpents and velociraptors, for example, often develop a precocious ability to draw these creatures in continuous contour line, in profile, with teeth bared and claws extended. Favoured subjects of all kinds may be depicted in more fully differentiated and detailed ways than

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auxiliary objects which are, after all, merely background, supporting cast, props and scenery. Just as Marjorie Wilson and Brent Wilson (1977) found that artists in the college years and beyond could be remarkably adept at some approaches to drawing and completely inept at others, young children often span several levels of graphic sophistication within a single drawing. These discrepancies seem to occur most often when children are asked to draw in response to topics suggested or assigned by parents or teachers – when children who tend to draw single objects isolated on the page are asked to include elements of background, for example, or to draw a subject they have never before attempted. But this unevenness also appears in more spontaneous drawings when a child decides to try something new – to draw a new character or form or to place much-practised symbols in a novel context. The type of drawing that Lark-Horovitz et al. (1973) described as ‘free or voluntary’ (p. 35), the type of drawings that result when children are free to depict whatever they wish, is a form of play for young children. The activity itself continually presents new challenges and leads children beyond what they can do easily towards images, ideas and skills slightly beyond their present capacities. Like other forms of play in early childhood, drawing creates its own ‘zone of proximal development’ (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 84), generating a momentum that propels exploration forward. The primary motivation that impels a particular child to draw may be the exploration of form or the creation of meaning, documentation of the everyday or exploration of alternate realities. As we strive to understand what children choose to draw, we learn about the interplay of intention and action, imagination and observation, understanding and interpretation that accomplishes learning in the early years. In doing so, we are continually confronted by the inadequacies of the developmental theories that for so long provided the intellectual foundation of art education and continue to be invoked as foundational knowledge in teacher education. Daniel Walsh commented that universals in children’s development ‘are of trivial importance when compared to the developmental trajectories constrained by culture and situation’ (2002, p. 107). Remnants of an earlier era that prized classification of all things; that sought rounded-off standardized descriptions; that valued predictability and precision; developmental stage theories are not simply a slightly outmoded way of looking at children but one that prevents us from seeing the children in our midst in the fullness of their being and their potential. This effect remains readily apparent in contemporary art education theory and practice.

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Learning to listen: Children’s drawing as performative event Should the drawing or painting be understood as a final image to be inspected and interpreted, as is conventional in studies of visual culture, or should we rather think of it as a node in a matrix of trails to be followed by observant eyes? (Ingold, 2011, p. 197). I watched from the sidelines as student-teacher Paige interrupted four-  year-old Marc drawing with that question that beginning teachers are taught never to ask: ‘What is that?’ Responding to her legitimate curiosity, Marc replied, ‘A polar bear’. The single multi-limbed creature drawn in his sketchbook elicited an approving echo from Paige: ‘A polar bear. Wow.’ Encircling the bear with a line, Marc continued, ‘And that is his cave.’ Paige affirmed this addition, ‘Oh, he lives there. That’s a pretty good home.’ Marc replied, ‘Yeah. This is his friend next door,’ drawing a second bear to the right of the first. And the dialogue and drawing continued: Paige:  Wow. He probably has fun visiting his friend. Marc: Yeah, and this is his friend’s house (drawing a circle around the second bear). Paige:  Alright – great! I really like those polar bears. Marc: (Picking up a black marker) Now this is a big brown bear and he lives upstairs. Paige:  Alright! That’s really cool! Marc: Yeah. (Taking time to replace caps on markers, he then selected another and drew an object coming in to the page from the left). Paige:  Wow. What’s that now? Marc: Tea. Paige:  Tea? I didn’t know bears like tea. That’s neat. Marc:  Oh, no. I mean honey. I just forgot. Yeah, his Mom is giving it to him. Paige:  Alright! I bet he likes that honey – and it’s even in a cup. Cool. Marc: (Drawing a cup for each bear, then drawing lines connecting cups to bears) Yeah. This one is his. And this one is his. And this one is his. Paige:  Sure enough. They are all matched with their cups of honey. Marc:  Yeah. Their Moms are all there. I often share this bit of drawing wrapped in and made possible by dialogue with students in order to alert them to the crucial role that interested adults play in probing the thinking that is accomplished in young children’s drawing, to help

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them understand that, however incomprehensible an image may be, there is likely to be a complex and engaging story behind and around it. At first, focused on the importance of talk in children’s drawing events (Dyson, 1997; Thompson, 2002; Thompson & Bales, 1991; Vygotsky, 1978), I became increasingly fascinated by the performance enacted through word, sound effect and gestures as young children draw. Increasingly, I came to see that the residue left on the page was a pale rendition of what occurred in the making of any drawing, often charming but woefully incomplete as a record of what drawing is for children. Deleuze and Guattari (2004) supply a vocabulary that is more suited to the task of explaining what happens when a young child draws in the company of other children and adults, perhaps even when they are alone. Drawing for young children is an assemblage, a rhizome that spreads into territories of play and imagination and memory and erupts in unpredictable lines of flight as one polar bear is joined by others and their mothers and their tea. Marc’s drawing was a collaboration and a confluence of the things he knows and could bring to bear on that particular occasion. It was thinking made visible, and audible, and, in the pauses and marker-capping and silent smiles that punctuated the drawing, gestural. While this is particularly true of young children’s drawings, and particularly critical to our reception of them, it holds as well for artists of any age: there is inevitably much more to an image than meets the eye. In terms of developmental descriptions of child art, this observation is far from trivial, calling into question the entire methodology of artistic developmental study and the conclusions drawn as a result. No matter how many drawings are collected and compared, from how many children in how many parts of the world, we are looking in all the wrong places if we confine our investigation to the artefacts that result from children’s timed responses to drawing prompts. While drawings can and do yield certain types of information about the commonalities of children’s life experiences, it is in the drawing event – the singular unfolding beginning-to-end occurrence through which a drawing emerges as a souvenir – that truly conveys what the act of drawing means to children, how it functions as a form of play with ideas and images and others that allows the child to stand ‘a head taller’ (Vygotsky, 1967, p. 16) than themselves. Approaching children’s art-making as an enthusiast and a witness, an invited participant in the assemblage through which art comes into being is very different from the more distanced and clinical way that we came to know what was similar in the work of children growing up at the same time in cultures that shared intellectual, pedagogical and aesthetic traditions. To see child art as an element and enactment of children’s culture, as an expression of the position

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of the child in relation to the adult world, is to see each child as possessed of infinite potential and unpredictable trajectories of becoming. It opens the possibility of seeing children, not simply as developing human beings or even as artists learning their craft, but as capable producers of culture, already (always) engaged in contributing meaningfully to a world of images and ideas.

Exploring milieus: Children drawing as event What age can you start being an artist? – Room 13, Caol Primary School

I had only known Richard for a few weeks, but he quickly made an impression – his enthusiasm for our weekly drawing sessions, the way he brightened up (and straightened up) when I entered his classroom, the drawings he inscribed so deftly in his sketchbook and every loose scrap of paper in the room, his devotion to his chosen subject matter, the distinctiveness of his approach to drawing. This was clearly a child exceptionally, intensely invested in drawing. Amazed as I watched him depict yet another in his endless series of active superheroes in his sketchbook, I asked, ‘Richard, do you draw all the time at home too?’ Head bent to his work, he answered instantly, ‘Yes, but I don’t like to tell people that I am an artist.’ How is this thought formed in the mind of a child of four, much less articulated so matter-of-factly? Developmental psychology offers no clues. Richard would be considered an outlier (as he was, to some extent, in his preschool), though he was in so many other respects a slightly more stubborn, less sociable but highly respected member of his class. As someone interested in the assemblage that comprises children’s drawing, the multimodal and diffractive performances that leave a far less vivid residue on the page, I soon recognized how much Richard had to teach me, both in his own exceptional way of being an artist and in his way of being with other children and adults in a place where art-making is what brings people together. Richard was a preschooler in a Head Start programme known for its exemplary service to the children of Mexican heritage who lived in its neighbourhood in Chicago, just south and west of the affluent downtown Loop. I was living temporarily in this neighbourhood and spending my days at the Children and Family Center where Richard spent his mornings, in a classroom with other three- and four-year-old children. Twice each week, I had the immense pleasure of sitting among Richard and his classmates as they drew whatever they wished

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in the pages of the sketchbooks I provided to each of them as open invitations to draw together. While most of the children were receptive to this provocation, Richard was ecstatic. His favourite thing to do was suddenly given time and space in his classroom two days each week! It was as if he had been waiting for just this opportunity to present itself. Although Richard’s family abstained from participation in holiday celebrations, these prohibitions did not extend to their son’s participation in popular culture. Richard was the acknowledged expert among his peers and teachers in all things superheroic. His knowledge of, and love for, the exploits of Batman, Spiderman, the Incredible Hulk and others of their ilk was well known. His drawings made their importance evident. The forty-page sketchbook I presented to him in October was filled, each page on both sides, by December, with superheroes in the most dramatic of poses, isolated on a page or engaged in high dramatic combat. Unlike some children who are intensely invested in drawing at an early age, the ‘patterners’ described by Gardner (1980), Richard was not socially isolated so much as he was particular in his demands for space and uninterrupted time to draw. I suggested a move to an empty table one morning when the energetic scribbles of three-year-old Angelica repeatedly invaded Richard’s drawing page. Angelica followed us, exclaiming in mock horror at the drawing of The Incredible Hulk Richard was working on. ‘He’s a good guy! He’s a good guy,’ Richard assured her, just before he whined, ‘Angelica, I need my space!’ For many of the older children in the class, Richard’s facility with superheroes was a bond they shared, despite the fact that their own drawings of said figures were markedly different in style and sophistication. Richard’s best friends, both named Julian and thus habitually identified by both first and last name, were fascinated by superheroes, drew them avidly and spent considerable time watching Richard draw, talking together about the action emerging in his drawing. While the other children clearly admired Richard’s drawings, they seemed more fascinated by the depth of his knowledge of superheroes and their exploits, completely unperturbed by differences in style and facility in the drawings themselves. Richard’s style was unique: his lines were inscribed rapidly and deftly, his figures enlivened by energy barely contained, narratives in the making rarely shared after the fact. His were not typical four-year-old drawings. On one of the last days I visited his classroom, Richard and his classmates were busy with drawings assigned by their teacher to commemorate the previous day’s field trip to the Shedd Aquarium on the shores of Lake Michigan, not far

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from their own neighbourhood. Richard was uncharacteristically engaged in the task, having found something in the trip that appealed to his sense of adventure, embellishing only a bit around the edges by adding a diver in full gear to the scene of wriggling fish. He looked up as I came in to the room but otherwise continued his drawing without interruption, with an intensity typically reserved for depictions of superheroes and space men. He paused a moment to scrutinize his work before presenting it to me with the solemn dedication, ‘So you will remember me as an artist.’ Everything I know about child art was confirmed, and complicated, by Richard.

Understanding children drawing differently: Events and assemblages In drawing attention to these micro-moments of being, I am working against the grain of taken-for-granted ways of seeing (or not seeing) what it is that children can do. Through listening to children I want to make visible, within the everyday, the extraordinary capacities children have, and the emergent, the creative, the intra-active encounters they engage in as they do the ongoing work of bringing themselves and their community into being. (Davies, 2014, p. 15)

This ‘assemblage of stories’ (Dahlberg & Moss, 2014, p. ix) draws from many years of being with young children in various art-making contexts. The situations described here all began with children making choices, deciding what they will draw, how long they will spend on a drawing, who will share the experience and how. Unlike the large-scale collections of drawings from anonymous children that are the basis of developmental theory, these stories focus primarily on the performative social activity through which drawings come to be, in the emergent relationships between children and materials and companions and memories and inspirations. These are ‘voluntary’ drawings, occurring in what Brent Wilson (2007) describes as ‘third pedagogical sites’, where children’s interests prevail and the typical structures of power are loosened, if not abandoned entirely. These are incidents that occurred as children drew in sketchbooks in the context of art classes where this activity was offered both to enable children to share their ideas in a public space and to allow interested adults to learn from the children. The distinction between these drawings and those completed in response to assignments designed by others is considerable. In fact, it could be argued that,

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whatever forms of graphic activity are captured by traditional developmental research and much of the school art style that relies upon it, it is not artistic development that is made apparent. The bounded games-with-rules that constitute the traditions of practice we know as art education are far too restrictive to qualify as art-making, no matter how closely related they may be to someone’s artistic practice. Are not the arts more adequately characterized by the openness and energy that propels young children towards the unpredictable projects that emerge in their sketchbooks, which play out in dialogue with peers and interested adults, the materials at hand and the images that swirl through the consciousness of a drawing child? As Knight (2013) proposes: Children’s drawings should be thought of as mutable, the imagery in them dependent upon what is thought about and encountered the moment the drawing begins rather than scanning their contents for evidence of schema that asserts the child has passed through some predetermined, scientifically sanctioned symbolic stages …. Children’s drawings should be thought of as mysterious and abstract, and their meanings sometimes closed to the gaze of the audience. (p. 257)

To think differently about young children drawing is to realize that schools (even preschools) need to approach the child with greater humility and far less certainty than developmental stage theories allow us to assume. Drawing for children is not merely a social practice (Pearson, 2001) but a diffractive one as well, an event that affects and is affected by human and material worlds, both immediately present and vaguely or clearly remembered, elaborated and exchanged in talk, gesture and play. It is not predictable but emergent and rhizomatic. It accomplishes thought, and it creates joy: Each joyful encounter with another is what Deleuze calls a haecceity, an immersion in the present moment that ‘moves the soul’ (Deleuze, 1990, p. 140). An encounter is an intensity: a becoming that takes you outside the habitual practices of the already-known; it is intra-active and corresponds to the power to affect and be affected (Deleuze and Parnet, 1987). (Davies, 2014, p. 10)

The exception is the rule: Seductive certainties and self-fulfilling prophecies ‘No adult can approach children devoid of expectations for their behavior, with no predispositions to interpret the things they say and do according to particular ideas about childhood’ (Thompson & Bresler, 2002, p. 89).

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What is the harm in perpetuating the generalizations about children and their art that are embodied in developmental stages? Surely, we agree that the stages are slightly threadbare and in need of an update, but don’t beginning teachers and parents need some guidelines to orient them in their encounters with children? Is this not a permissible white lie, something that we can justify as long as we wrap it in enough layers of qualification, trusting children to present themselves as evidence to the contrary? The question is particularly urgent for those who educate prospective teachers. In colleges and universities throughout the world, mid-century modernist theories of child development continue to be taught, often in tandem with far more progressive theories of curriculum and pedagogy. While most art educators acknowledge that these accounts should be taken with a large grain of salt, they often insist that some notion of what to expect is necessary before students enter classrooms. This assumption was articulated well by Luehrman and Unrath (2006) supporting the argument that information about artistic development is the essential foundation for teaching and curriculum development. While acknowledging the limitations of developmental theory, they recommend a constructivist approach that reinscribes stage theory, adopting a kind of ‘what can you do’ attitude. Citing the complexity of contemporary descriptions of child art (Luehrman & Unrath, 2006, p. 6) as too much for beginning students to absorb, they suggest that we continue to perpetuate developmental fictions. The pseudo-science of developmental theory (Burman, 2008) offers a partial and distorted view of children and art that, in its ambition to be descriptive and predictive, too easily becomes deterministic and prescriptive. As Burman (2008) notes, developmental assertions about ‘the child’ possess a ‘rhetorical power’ that leads easily to discriminatory assumptions and practices. ‘Age, the marking of time on bodies, seeks to lie outside culture, within biology. Like gender, “race,” class and sexuality, differential treatment is typically justified by the appeal to “nature”’ (Burman, 2008, p. 49). Deviation from norms we assume to be typical, and therefore appropriate, for children of a certain age can also lead us to assume that those who do not follow the well-worn path must be either deficient or gifted or both. The tendency to use developmental stage theories as diagnostic aids leads quite easily to reckless labelling of children. Casting immanent events of art-making (and the larger processes of being and becoming that surround and propel them) as linear and logical, progressive and predictable, we lose sight of the fact that children participate in lives that are no more orderly than our own. ‘It is a real challenge for us to move away from the clear, if arduous and oppressive, certainties provided by unitary, universalized models and learn to

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live with the tensions’ (Burman, 2008, p. 179). There is security in the old ways, difficulty in the new. Yet ultimately the children who rely on us to remember them as artists deserve no less than our presence, our attention and our participation in the worlds that emerge in their conversations with materials, companions and experiences imagined, virtual and real.

References Bresler, L., & Thompson, C. M. (Eds.). (2002). The arts in children’s lives: Context, culture, and curriculum. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Press. Burman, E. (2008). Developments: Child, image, nation. London: Routledge. Dahlberg, G., & Moss, P. (2014). Series editors’ foreword. In B. Davies (Ed.), Listening to children: Being and becoming (pp. ix–xiv). London: Routledge. Davies, B. (2014). Listening to children: Being and becoming. London: Routledge. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2004). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (2nd ed.) (B. Massumi, Trans.). London: Continuum. Deleuze, G., & Parnett, C. (1987). Dialogues (H. Tomlinson, & B. Habberjam, Trans.). London: Athlone Press. Dyson, A. H. (1997). Writing superheroes: Contemporary childhood, popular culture, and classroom literacy. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Gardner, H. (1980). Artful scribbles: The significance of children’s drawings. New York, NY: Basic Books. Golomb, C. (1992). The child’s creation of a pictorial world. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Ingold, T. (2011). Being alive: Essays on movement, knowledge and description. London: Routledge. Knight, L. (2013). Not as it seems: Using Deleuzian concepts of the imaginary to rethink children’s drawings. Global Studies of Childhood, 3, 254–265. Lark-Horovitz, B., Lewis, L., & Luca, M. (1973). Understanding children’s art for better teaching (2nd ed.). Columbus, OH: Charles E. Merrill. Luehrman, M., & Unrath, K. (2006). Making theories of children’s artistic development meaningful for preservice teachers. Art Education, 59(3), 6–12. Paley, V. G. (1990). The boy who would be a helicopter: The uses of storytelling in the classroom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pearson, P. W. (2001). Children’s drawings as ‘artistic development’: Art education’s twilight zone. Visual Arts Research, 27(1), 60–74. Schulte, C., & Thompson, C. M. (Eds.). (2018). Communities of practice: Art, play, and aesthetics in early childhood. New York, NY: Springer International Publishing. Tarr, P. (2004). Is development relevant? Visual Arts Research, 30(2), 119–125.

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Thompson, C. M. (2002). Drawing together: Peer influence in preschool-kindergarten art classes. In L. Bresler, & C. M. Thompson (Eds.), The arts in children’s lives: Context, culture, and curriculum (pp. 129–138). Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Press. Thompson, C. M., & Bales, S. (1991). ‘Michael doesn’t like my dinosaurs’: Conversations in a preschool art class. Studies in Art Education, 33(1), 43–55. Vygotsky, L. S. (1967). Play and its role in the mental development of the child. Soviet Psychology, 5, 6–18. Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Walsh, D. (2002). Constructing an artistic self: A cultural perspective. In L. Bresler, & C. M. Thompson (Eds.), The arts in children’s lives: Context, culture, and curriculum (pp. 101–112). Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Press. Wilson, B. (2007). Art, visual culture, and child/adult collaborative images: Recognizing the other-than. Visual Arts Research, 33(65), 6–20. Wilson B., & Wilson, M. (1977). An iconoclastic view of the imagery sources of young people. Art Education, 30(1), 5–11.

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‘It Might Get Messy, or Not Be Right’: Scribble as Postdevelopmental Art Victoria de Rijke

Introduction Children’s scribble is often under-valued and thrown away as junk. It is a ubiquitous part of young children’s mark-making and, from a developmental perspective, is invariably labelled early, random, unintentional, at best experimental mark-making, indicative of a child’s movement towards more mature communication. Educationalists may even be trained to spot fixed stages of development through children’s scribble, as adults gradually persuade the child towards written or drawn recognizable shapes. What is visible is not necessarily legible. Developmental educationalists’ observations on scribble run very little further than reductive categorization. For example, art educationalist Victor Lowenfeld fixed scribble as the first stage of creative and mental growth in human development (aged 2), viewing it as ‘simply records of enjoyable kinaesthetic activity, not attempts at portraying the visual world’. We now know it is glib at best and discriminatory at worst to label the scribbles of primates and children as ‘primitive’ marks towards increasingly sophisticated artistic evolution. How much – or how little – progress is developmental or linear, particularly the playful, creative kinds? If writing is visually representing verbal communication in an encoded, discernible form, scribble’s code is less readable. Scribble escapes through the holes in the sieve, in that it is marked out by nonsensical, non-durable or illegible forms of transfer. Scribble is therefore not strictly proto-writing, or deliberate mnemonic symbols, as with children’s attempts at recognizable letters forms. Scribble is a riddle. Given examining a riddle requires lateral methods, this piece will draw from a selection of ideas by key thinkers mixed with adult

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and children’s artistic practices, not in pursuit of a single – or even cohesive – argument but a postmodern, postdevelopmental, somewhat fragmented series of scribbles on the subject. The artist Paul Klee – among others – searched through his work for something freer and younger than writing or drawing, not just as a child is young but as a process or culture starting out is at the same time complete in and of itself – what he called in his diary ‘a line that eats and digests scribbles’ (Klee, 1964, p. 260). Using young children’s scribbles juxtaposed with avant-garde artworks; this chapter will explore and illustrate how we might define scribble, its practices and institutional expressions related to ‘development’ and artistic creation, and explore how scribble is characteristic of what critic Georges Bataille termed the ‘informe’ or formless, falling beyond the boundaries of reason and control, a postdevelopmental ‘capture of forces’ (Bataille, 1929). Full of bodily sensation, sensory beauty and dynamism, scribble has the potential to be as young or as old, as timeless as air. As such, scribble is a critique of single-path homogenizing development and, via an unconditioning of the known, a reconsideration beyond developmental limits.

Defining scribble Scribble’s origins are mid-fifteenth century, from Medieval Latin scribillare, diminutive of Latin scribere ‘to write’ (from root ‘skribh’ – to cut). The noun, ‘hurried or careless writing,’ emerged in the 1570s from the verb. Naville and Marbacher’s recipe for development From Scribbling to Writing (1991) lists ‘feel’ in the fingers (tactile-kinaesthetic perception), mobility (fine motor coordination) and muscular control (fine dosage of tonic impulses) as all that is required of either. For them, a child in ‘the scribbling stage’ is not drawing symbols for objects. Children like to scribble because it gives them a chance to move their hands and arms around freely. The act of scribbling is kinaesthetic. No educator expects children to pick reading or writing up yet; oddly that remains the approach to scribble and much drawing, as ‘naturally’ acquired. Bryant Cratty (1986) termed scribbling ‘motor babbling’, implying that just as babbling is a natural way to acquire language, scribbling is a natural gateway to motor and muscle control or coordination. There are striking similarities between the developmental paths described by psychologist Lev Vygotsky and education reformer Rudolf Steiner, who both saw development proceeding through gesture and speech to thinking; ‘gesture [being] the initial visual sign that contains the child’s future writing as the

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acorn contains the oak’ (Vygostky, 1978, pp. 107–108). In the beginning, argued Vygotsky, language has an entirely affective-volitional character, where children go through transitional phases such as private speech before inner speech or babbling before thinking. Yet is scribble not a visualized form of babble and thinking? It could be argued that scribble operates like psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas’s notion of the ‘unthought known’ (1987): manifestations of preverbal, unschematized early experiences which may determine behaviour unconsciously yet are barred to conscious thought or direct expression. Scribbles are recognized as symbolic drawing development of some kind, revealing feeling, often at unconscious level. Lowenfeld linked scribbles to the child’s experience of ‘enjoyment in motion’ (Lowenfeld, 1947, p. 156) and more recently John Mathews (1999) sees them as ‘action representations, that is, representations of an object’s motion’. It is thus characteristic of the scribble to be on the move, just as the scribbler is. In her study of conflicting paradigms of vision in drawing development research, Sheila Paine lists many stakeholders: ‘Psychologists, artists, educators, designers, art historians, philosophers, sociologists and anthropologists’, all of whom essentially hold different views and categories of drawing and development associated within their discipline, but sharing a ‘medieval view of the activities of children as trivially playful because essentially not adult’. (Paine, 1992, p. 4)

She feels that is why sculptor Eric Gill’s call to ‘abolish art and teach drawing’ in 1941 (arguing, like teacher Rudolphe Töpffer in 1848, for the superiority of children’s drawing) was so provocative. Paine also points to philosopher Henri Rousseau’s ‘extraordinary fantasy of the development of one child, Emile’ serving his father’s vision with framed drawing ‘specimens’ round the room in degrees of perceived progress, as having ‘persisted far beyond its credibility’ as a model of researching drawing development, especially given Rousseau apparently actually knew very little about either art or parenting. Friedrich Schiller’s view of the ‘wise child’ paired with ‘noble savage’ fostered his revolt against affectation, while Töpffer’s analysis of children’s drawings (compared with graffiti in Pompeii and on soldier’s barrack walls) pointed to the intuitive, instinctive conceptions of drawing often lost with schooling. Idealistic views such as those of Friedrich Froebel and Johann Pestalozzi are thought to stem from their own suffering at school and ironically resulted in rigid systems of the teaching of drawing, linked to Jean Piaget’s evolutionary, followed by Jerome Bruner’s cognitive growth models. All this drove what George Boaz calls the ‘cult

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of childhood’ as a form of cultural primitivism, denying the child their reality and serving to displace adult artist or educator inadequacies (Boaz, 1966, pp. 75–80). Paine reminds us that researchers have enough examples of children exceeding or disrupting staged schema (the subject, Margaret, drawing God Carrying a Soul up to Heaven at four years eight months, for example) to emphasize variation. Given the role that adult deflection and projection play in the notion of normative development, it may also be useful to consider its relation to psychoanalytic theory. Psychotherapist Melanie Klein’s conclusion to her earliest work ‘The Development of a Child’ (1921) marked the start of a bold new approach to analytic treatment and theory, and Klein’s career, and reflects on the relation of education to psychoanalysis. In case study material featuring her own son which she called ‘a case of upbringing with analytic features’, she argued for allowing and encouraging children greater curiosity and freedom. The irony was that her own son revealed he did not necessarily want to know more from her. As Klein respectfully noted, ‘on the other side, there is a great deal that the child holds back that belongs to the development of the child’. Klein called this ‘development as it takes place’ (p. 44). It is her acknowledgement of the child’s independent sense of readiness (rather than development) linked to the immediacy of their feelings and imagination. This was borne out in her commitment to close clinical observation and plain speaking that marked her practice and has influenced child therapy since. Encouraging children to play, draw and scribble both gained the child’s trust and allowed for insights that Klein would interpret unflinchingly, recognizing the ambivalence or anxiety children feel when faced with their own destructive impulses, as the image of scribble (Figure 8.1) by one of her patients suggests. Another of Klein’s young cases, Inge, wrote letters to her therapist which contained ‘nothing but scribbles’ (p. 53). Inge, however, could say a great deal about these phantasy letters and Klein ‘knew that she wished to write beautifully and quickly like grown-ups’. Klein commented in her notes that ‘the compromise between this wish and her intention was scribbling,’ (p. 72) and her later paper on child analysis (1927) spoke of the ‘enormous complexity of development we find in even very little ones [and] their severe conflicts’ (Klein quoted in Britzman, 2015, p. 43). Once it got around that I valued scribble while researching it in a primary school, quite a few children presented me with scribble as gifts, as indicated in Figure 8.2. Some of these children had special educational needs and I was reminded that although what they called writing falls short of the usual educational assessment for their age, the pieces spoke of a very successful compromise between wish and intention, or development as it takes place:

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Figure 8.1   Scribble by one of Klein’s child patients, dated 25 June 1925.

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Figure 8.2  Example of scribble gifted in the playground. Felt-tip pen. Age nine. February 2018.

I would suggest that any timeline of links between scribble, drawing, writing and the formation of a child is thus more suggestive of fixed cultural models serving subjective if not suspect psychological ends. How children and markmaking ‘grow up’ is perhaps more complex, associative and ‘in-the-moment’ than we might like to admit. What might be counted as art is similarly nonlinear if we regard any kind of mark-making as spontaneous thought process and meaning-intention. It does not prove anything; it simply is.

Scribble as developmental marker With the young, scribbling is frequently categorized in fixed developmental phases, ‘milestones’ or stages, as a prescription: Stage 1: (broadly 1–2yrs old) ‘random’ or uncontrolled scribbling, featuring large movements from the shoulder, fist-held tools, a whole body scrubbing motion and an emphasis on sensory experience. Little or no concern for what marks are made. Stage 2: (2–3yrs old) ‘controlled’ scribbling; attributed to better muscle control and pencil grip, children make repeated marks on the page – open circles, diagonal, curved, horizontal, or vertical lines. Stage 3: (3+yrs) moving towards controlled lines and patterns that are viewed as emerging or early signs of ‘developmental’ writing, the naming of scribbling, or ‘fortuitous realism’. (Lowenfeld, 1947)

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The astonishing influence of Viktor Lowenfeld’s study Creative and Mental Growth of 1949 has produced the lasting conviction (Salome & Moore, 1981), particularly in American education, that what follows scribble are the ‘preschematic stage’ (‘floating organisation’ of marks and symbols, three to seven years), the ‘schematic stage’ (repeated symbols for objects, such as stick figures, six to eleven years), the ‘transitional stage’ (some perspective with linear contradictions) and finally, the ‘dawning realism and pseudorealism stages’ (producing artwork in the manner of adult artists, nine years+) before the adult period of ‘decision or crisis’). As with many developmental scales, questions remain as to what exact purpose the categories serve, and though psychologist Rhoda Kellog claimed that ‘drawing ability is more closely related to chronological age than almost any other behaviour’ (Kellog, 1959, p. 129), she also admitted that her study of over 100,000 drawings and paintings made by children age two to four can ‘prove’ nothing but that ‘all human activity has unity with the physical universe’ (Kellog, 1959, p. 124). Interestingly, she observed teachers encouraging anxious, non-drawing children to return to scribbling to allow them to relax ‘for all children are artists when free to fall back on the scribbles’ (Kellog, 1959, p. 126). Kellog was one of the first to point out that our vocabulary to describe children’s ‘pictures’ was impoverished and that assumptions of children ‘trying’ to picture external reality as if at some constant life drawing class is erroneous. Her research observed children expressing ‘inner imagery’ (p. 8), ‘rhythmic body balance’ (p. 13), and, in the attempt to categorize early drawing types into what she calls ‘sequential unfolding’ (p. 1), Kellog listed ‘20 basic scribbles’ and documented them. Claire Golomb (1993) later simplified Kellog’s model as it proved awkward to use in further research, focusing on two types of scribble: loops and circles and parallel lines. This, logically enough, co-joined with research such as Chris Athey’s (1990), resulted in schemas such as ‘dynamic, circular, enclosure, vertical and rotation’ which is still applied in Early Years education today. Yet schemas are both visually and physically predetermined, carrying the assumption that all children, whatever the diversity of their personal, cultural, social, physical or aesthetic circumstances, will ‘fit’ somehow (or adults will find a fit) and thus – conveniently enough – the children will be testable by those measures. Is this really Bataille’s vision of the ‘mathematical frock coat’ that form wears, to avoid facing the possibility of the formless world (Bataille, 1929, p. 382)? Social studies exposées of race and social class deprivation and underachievement as the consequence of educational ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’

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(Rist, 2000) demonstrate school systems (with its sets, streams and schemas) conform to, rather than transform, negative social effects. Similarly, after decades of critiquing the barriers to cultural and linguistic capital, Shirley Brice-Heath now argues for ‘meandered learning’ in ways that acknowledge the importance of ‘hands-on’ haptic experiences: what she calls the ‘thinking hand’ (2013), citing treatises on early child development which underscore the relationship between learning structured symbolic systems and exploring and representing the world with the hands and arms through gesture (Gopnik et al. (1999)), where gestures are both the imagery and components of language. This in turn links to socio-dramatic play lending narrative and meaning to the ‘imagerylanguage-dialectic’ (McNeil, 2005) of gesture and mark-making (Brice-Heath, 2013). The smallest element of McNeil’s dialectic is called the ‘growth point’, a snapshot moment of an utterance at its beginning psychological stage. Developmental psychologist Howard Gardner’s study Artful Scribbles (1980), aware that ‘educators who should know better’ – use scribble as ‘an expression of disparagement’ (p. 18), also insisted on the link from scribble to the child’s other ‘evolving capacities’ (p. 14). Though Gardner’s observations of his own children’s pleasure in mark-making are described as ‘primitive’ or ‘nascent ability to use a tool and create something with it’ (p. 24), one episode of frenzied scribbles (two dozen drawings in less than ten minutes) he declares a ‘microgenesis’ of temporal, spatial and motor development, as if scribbling was to the toddler like an athlete’s programme of muscle development. Gardner recognized how scribble, action and babble (‘running through a corpus of words and sounds’) often play out together with the young child, in halfconscious states, where ‘impersonal developmental forces, the stuff of growth itself, rather than the child’s own emergent skills of planning seem regnant’, though he also admitted ‘we will not be able find a final – or even a first – cause for what is intrinsic to the processes of development’ (Gardner, 1980, pp. 33–37). On one such corpus observation of a reception (age five) child, I watched a boy scribble for over ten minutes on a wall board and the surrounding bricks outside, accompanied throughout by a running humming, singing rap commentary (‘ooh, ooh, red and blue, bhaji, bhaji, in the dot-dot-dot-dot, wah, wah, wah, wah, a-go, a-go, les’ go, rah, rah, rah, I’m in the lava, in the lava, I’ve got a sabre and a star and a star … ’) with frenetic jiggling or dance steps – this all while also holding a large plastic steering wheel, a glove and an orange in one hand, and his chalk in the other (see Figure 8.3).

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Figure 8.3  Wall action scribble in chalk. Age five. February 2018.

With the major rupture that abstract expressionism brought to the arts, critic Harold Rosenberg described the canvas for ‘action paintings’ as ‘an arena in which to act – rather than a space in which to reproduce, redesign, analyse or express an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event’ (Rosenberg, 1952, p. 324). Throwing your energies into a charged moment of creation was central to the feel and expressiveness of the event. Children (at this phase) are attracted to creative energy and freely participate in such happenings, particularly outside, as did I and a few others, joining in the dance movements and watching the scribble event intently. Yet interpreting this as ‘microgenesis’ patronizes the endeavour as abnormally small, whereas the actions are actually writ large and represent an emergence of discernible, continuous growth. When one child asked, ‘Are you making a scribble?’ the artist replied, ‘No, a picture.’ Relative status begins even here, and though ‘picture’ is perhaps better than scribble, it is still a hopelessly impoverished description of the ‘image-gesture-language-dialectic’ that actually took place. Once complete, with that characteristically abrupt ‘Finished!’, he told us that it was ‘everything separated out: me, sabre, lava … ’ etc., naming all the specific areas depicted in different colours.

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The whole action event was also a mapping of itself, like one of Rudolf Steiner’s famous blackboard lectures. In his lifetime Steiner gave over 5,000 lectures, many of which were accompanied by spontaneous drawings on blackboards: ‘writing in cosmic pictures’, ‘dreams’, a kind of seeing as thinking and knowing, with titles like ‘the fragrance of a plant’ or ‘when we think with our fingers and toes’ (Kugler, 2003). Children giving their scribbles names or titles has rather sneeringly been labelled ‘romancing’ or ‘fortuitous realism’ (Gardner, 1980), yet Patricia Tarr’s critical assessment (1990) suggests the close visual attention children give to scribble is suggestive of it being more than just movement, carrying representational meaning in quite as complex a process as any later artistic phases. Children often extract a story from their art (not least because one is demanded of them) or, as Boaz laconically remind us, ‘if one defines the end of art, … as an optical illusion, someone has to be taken in’ (Boaz, 1966, p. 82). Developmental vocabulary offers a series of positional or directional metaphors (higher, middle, lower; working towards, working at, working deeper) and time or age-based metaphors (‘early’, ‘late’, ‘advanced’, ‘delayed’, ‘moving towards’ and so on) marked out by medicalized and educational signposts or milestones coupled to demonstrable skills or abilities which children either fall short of, fit or exceed. This views both skills and knowledge as product separated from process – even as untransferable. Theory must then be adapted to serve this questionable cause from a (surely questionable) perceived process of decline in aesthetic production in young childhood towards adolescence followed by an eventual rebirth referred to by Gardner (1980) as the ‘u-shaped curve’ in aesthetic development or Ofsted’s criteria for an ‘unsuccessful’ Reception year representing a ‘false start’ in their report Bold Beginnings (2017, p. 9). We must not imagine for a moment that children don’t also feel these developmental strictures: while I was scribbling in a Reception class, a boy came up and urgently advised me, ‘You better stop squiggling.’ ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘It might get messy, or not be right,’ he maintained. And this in a free-flow classroom! This linearity has always been contested – even from within educational psychology – as for example Jerome Bruner’s (1960) process-led viewpoint was that ‘any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development’. Does not scribble – in all honesty – exist outside these markers?

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Scribble as art form In Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider, possibly the first journal to publish children’s art for artistic reasons), painter Auguste Macke praised ‘savage’ [sic] artists and children’s artwork, ‘who have their own form, strong as thunder!’ (Macke quoted in Bersson, 2004, p. 522). David Maclagan, in his study of scribble and doodling, points to the possibility of a ‘mythology of unconscious form creation’, what the painter Barnet Newman called ‘contrived spontaneity’. Maclagan argues that ‘Modernism’s quest for imagery as close as possible to the “original” sources of creativity – in the “primitive,” the “childish,” the “mad” or the “outsider,” for example – has arguably led, in each case, to the corruption of that source’s innocence’ (Maclagan, 2013, p. 15). ‘As for the innocence of eye’ as George Boaz demanded in The Cult of Childhood, ‘with what crime has the adult artist been charged?’ (Boaz, 1966, p. 92). This view of the child or naive artist as clear channels to the primal forces of creativity is of course (hopelessly) Romantic and may well be an artistic reaction to (over-developed) forms of modernity, allowing the adult artist a kind of illusory opportunity to ‘invent themselves from scratch’ or enjoy a ‘perennial avant-garde’, resisting the fetters and conventions of their times, avoiding formal instruction for an ‘organic unfolding of intrinsic creative energy’ (Wilson, 1992, p. 19) often manifest in abstract or expressionist forms. Yet, to be fair to child artists, Wilson’s research suggests that ‘the graphic vocabulary of children’s drawings seem nearly as regular as that of their verbal language. Cultural differences extended to syntax as well’ (Wilson, 1992, p. 21), so the power of cultural reference and adult direction is enormous. He argues that child art has lost the status it once had and with the ‘postmodern disassembly of child art, the little child is no longer leading the way to artistic paradise’. For Wilson, ‘the dream of children as creative artists was mere Modernist ideology. More and more, we see how absurd it was to believe that children could be kept in a perennial state of pre-conventional creativity’ (Wilson, 1992, p. 23). Artwork aspiring to certain conditions of the unconscious or child-like, such as has been implied in the work of Expressionist artist Paul Klee. Klee wrote at length about his own sketchy drawings, formally titled many of them scribbles, and reflected on the ‘progress possible on the line’, where ‘the possibility ripened in me of harmonizing my swarming scribbles with firmly restraining linear boundaries. And this will bear for me a further fruit: the line that eats and digests scribbles’ (Klee, 1964, p. 260). Yet Klee, reacting to comparisons made between his work and that of children, pointed to a central contradiction:

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Child’s play! … The critics often say that my pictures resemble the scribbles and messes of children. I hope they do! The pictures that my little boy Felix paints are often better than mine because mine have been filtered through the brain. (Klee quoted in Wiedmann, p. 224) Don’t translate my works to those of children … They are worlds apart … Never forget the child knows nothing of art … the artist on the contrary is concerned with the conscious formal compositions of his pictures, whose representational meaning comes about with intention, through associations of the unconscious. (Klee quoted in Gardner, p. 8)

There is an immediacy about scribble’s kind of creativity, a rapid making in the moment, but we should resist the cliché that, like children’s art, it arises directly from the unconscious without apparent purpose. As Heather Malin has observed, ‘all too often children have been seen as all spontaneous, free expression and completely lacking intention in their art making’ (Malin, 2013, p. 2). Malin reminds us of ‘child-like’ European artists such as Klee, Jean Dubuffet or Wassily Kandinsky who may have contributed to this notion of the child artist. It is important to remember that, though aspiring to the condition or spirit of the child in their material and conceptual approaches, these artists did not simply emulate children’s art techniques and in fact took pains to highlight key distinctions between trained adult artists and children, their work being described as ‘a form of art which heads towards childhood … with the means available to adults’ (Alenchinskey cited in Lowenfeld & Lambert Brittain, 1984, p. 183). Scribble has no ‘form’ in terms of art practice, as drawing or painting does. Like Klee’s ‘child-like’ art, George Bataille’s idea of ‘l’informe’ or formlessless was a reaction to formalist, rationalist classification and linear structure within the arts. Of course resistance to form concedes that art is concerned with form (or visual shape as a metaphor for conceptual form). As Bataille and others predicted, over the course of the twentieth century, the very notion of form became suspect, creating a challenge for the visual arts: to find a form for formlessness. Scribble is just that, perhaps. Rolande Barthes, writing about the abstract artist (and master scribbler) Cy Twombly, argues: The fact that his ‘graphisms’, his compositions, are ‘gauche’ refers [Twombly] to the circle of the excluded, the marginal, where he finds himself, of course, with the children, the disabled, (or the ‘lefty’) as a kind of blind man. (Barthes, 1982, p. 163)

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Figure 8.4   Spectators in front of Cy Twombly’s Untitled and Bacchus (Museum of Metropolitan Art and Tate Gallery).

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Twombly paints by evoking the act of left-handed, awkward handwriting (labelled ‘guache by Barthes’). Twombly both breaks with the rules and plays with the movement possible, experimenting by drawing with his left hand, by balancing on a friend’s shoulders or in the dark in order to arrive at what he called ‘primordial freshness’ (Pinkus-Witton, 1974) as seen in Figure 8.4. Jacques Derrida’s characteristic of drawing is also a relation to blindness with the artist groping for marks, and the drawing itself a blind or ‘intransitive act’, an image drawn in turn from artist Henri Michaux’s writing: Line loathe to ‘arrive,’ line of blind investigation. Leading nowhere, intending neither to be artful or interesting, traversing itself without flinching, without turning away, without twisting, without clinging to anything, without the perception of any object, landscape, figure. Sure of step, sleepwalking line. Curved here and there, yet never entwining. (Michaux, 2001, p. 11)

A view begins to emerge that children’s artwork – setting out, rather than arriving – has its own rules and meanings, linked to Peter Fuller’s notion that ‘all good drawing is transitional’ (Fuller, 1985, p. 7). Here development is continuous, incremental and cumulative. Fuller argues that the person drawing, by mingling

Figure 8.5   Scribble produced at home. Felt-tip pen. Age two.

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subjective and objective experience in a way which transcends fantasy or the factual rendition of obvious perception, ‘creates … an illusion of a third area of experience – unattainable though say dreaming or photography – to which the word “revelation” can legitimately be applied’ (p. 7). Thus, ‘good drawing mingles perception and aperception’ (p. 13). Fuller cites the artist Roger Fry quoting the words of a child, who, when asked how she produced her drawings, said: ‘I think, and then I draw a line around my think’ (in Fuller, 1985, p. 8). Madeline’s scribble, in the ‘third space’ of Figure 8.5, is in advance of her being able to articulate it in language, but it is clear evidence of the complexity of her thinking in the moment of making: bold curves, sweeps, dots and dashes, and seminal use of space.

Scribble as vibration of thinking and resistance Conjugate deterritorialised flows. Follow the plants: you start by delimiting a first line consisting of circles of convergence around successive singularities; then you see whether inside that line new circles of convergence establish themselves with new points located outside the limits and in other directions. Write, form a rhizome. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 12)

Gille Deleuze’s use of iris roots as a metaphor for networking was transformed to the rhizome paradigm with Felix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (1987). François Dosse describes the rhizome as ‘a different way of thinking along horizontal lines, on the plane of immanence, according to a botanical model of rhizomatic plants with proliferating horizontal ramifications’ (Dosse, 2010, p. 361). The rhizome – with its horizontal shoots, growing non-hierarchically (unlike the tree of knowledge or family tree) – was used as a weapon against hierarchical cause and effect, with neither starting point nor end but infinite number of meaningful connections, including breaks called ‘signifying ruptures’ or offshoots, functioning like cuttings. Without orthodox roots, a series of ‘folds’ emerges. Dosse suggests this has caused simplified readings ‘sacrificing content for collage’ (Dosse, 2010, p. 363) where in fact the idea of transversality, as branches form in all directions, allows for rigorous examination of ‘a plane of consistency of mutliplicities’, like those of a plateau. Shoots, genetic material, cells and neurons operate in ‘uncertain, probabilistic systems’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 17).

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The rhizome is neither a matter of tracing something already there nor some genealogical ancestry: it is open to novelty, to capture, towards forever new lines of flight, an opening onto an outside. (Dosse, 2010, p. 364)

Though critics such as Badiou have warned of ‘the tyranny of revisionism’ behind the rhizome, the metaphor has undoubtedly had huge influence for rethinking artistic creation: focusing on neither the quest for mimesis nor truth in representation but a series of ‘becomings’: places where various forms cross, how they meet, creases in the fold and certain lines of flight.

Figure 8.6  Scribble inspired by Big Hero6. Felt-tip pen. Age six.

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Delueze and Guattari’s ‘rhizomatic networks’ inform Marg Sellers’s (2013) lyrical phrase ‘becoming curriculum’, emphasizing how given children can produce their own subjectivities through what matters most to them. Terms such as ‘emergence’ and ‘tracings’ resist hierarchical knowledge structures, yet, as Elizabeth Wood and Helen Hedges (2016) point out, there is a risk that educational systems too loose and mercurial would not necessarily produce life and culture-changing educational results, such as greater world literacy. Their term ‘working theories’ allows for William Pinar’s (2011) dynamic interpretation of curriculum, while acknowledging the working, changing theories of play and learning that teachers and children themselves experience. Deleuze characterized the research undertaken with Guattari as ‘a vegetal model of thought’ (Deleuze, 1995, p. xvii), with becoming as a model of inventing and inhabiting territory, a process of individuation, ‘constituted as a series of striations or phase transitions within a constantly singularising entity that’s understood less as a pre-existing form than as an ongoing series of variations’ (Deleuze, 1995, p. 86). These variations move through self-organizing patterns called ‘refrains’. In the case of the child, gestural, mimetic, ludic, and other semiotic systems regain their freedom and extricate themselves from the ‘tracing’, that is, from the dominant competence of the teacher’s language. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 16)

Scribble, as in Figure 8.6, might be seen as the child’s tracing out of the hegemony of the signifier.

Scribble’s inconclusive conclusion We may be inclined to view this field as a battle field: since the various elements – of cognitive, linguistic and physical development – are so intensely fought over and occur in different patterns in competing theories which, at different times, gain dominance. (Alwyn, 1997, p. 19)

Through a postdevelopmental lens, developmental norms, standards or stages can be questioned as not necessarily having to be linear (Evangelou et al., 2009) but viewed as culturally deterministic and hegemonic (Blaise, 2010). If one sees either childhood or scribble as a developmental given, reduced to a harmless, soon-over homogenous learning stage, this is surely oversimplifying what childhood or scribble might be.

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Howard Gardner’s recent (2017) reflections of his scribble study of thirty years earlier point to changed perspective: Like others at the time, I was tremendously affected by the work of psychologist Jean Piaget and especially the universal stages of development that he laid out. I now feel that, while a convenient expositional term, ‘stages’ may be too stark a term. Much of development turns out to be smooth; other aspects can be jagged, containing both ‘progressive’ and ‘regressive’ facets. … In marked contrast, today I regard developmental trends as being domain-specific: what is happening with symbolization in the graphic area may, but might not, be related to symbolization in language, or pretend play, or dance, or musical expression and the like. (Gardner, 2017, p. 157)

Early childhood development draws on predominantly positivist ontology and epistemology around the biological processes of aging, the mechanisms of learning, cognitive, social, emotional change or adaptation, which have been tested, rated and measured in phases, scales, categories and norms through which a number of Western developmental ‘truths’ have come to be understood. Educationalists and policymakers have, in turn, perhaps too unquestioningly taken up such categories and evidence-based wholesale as given or proven markers – milestones of educational growth and achievement, allowing these to shape (or progressively sequence) learning goals, curricula, pedagogies and assessment on that same basis. Taken too literally, they become a kind of trap. Rather than measuring object phenomena (Rousseau’s ‘sure hand’, Nicolaides’s ‘rules of drawing’, O’Connor’s ‘superior visual perception’ or Henley’s ‘developmental disablement’), transitional understanding allows for analysis of expressive, innocent, less-influenced, less-repressed marks (Paine citing Franz Cizek, 1992, p. 8): Children’s drawings often seem to display in their own terms many of the concepts usually associated with mature adult performance: control of the media, subtlety economy or complexity of expression (in images or ideas underpinning them), and great imagination. (Paine, 1992, p. 11)

Mathews observed nursery age children drawing alone and with peers, noting dynamic reciprocal processes such as skidding marks accompanied by vocalizations, harmonizing and resonating, drawing as mark-making that encompasses representation, time and space. These correspondences between action and speech become part of what he calls ‘action representation’ in ‘continual dialogue between child and drawing production’, those ‘cross-modal associations which are the basis of aesthetic sensibility’ (Mathews, 1999, pp. 31–34). These ‘kinematic actions’ are grouped together in a drawing: meaning-making, dynamic

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action and effect according to creative, not developmental purpose, forming a ‘fourdimensional language’ (Mathews, 1999, p. 38). Mathews resists developmental models in favour of viewing ‘the symbolic systems used by the child [as] legitimate and powerful systems capable of capturing the information the child feels essential’. The media is the message, as drawing itself ‘actually initiates and guides the child’s further detection of structure’ (Mathews, 1999, p. 33) as seen in Figure 8.7. As John Berger said, ‘Drawing is discovery’ (Berger, 2005, p. 3).

Figure 8.7   Scribble/manga-inspired drawing. Pencil and felt-tip pen. Age ten. February 2018.

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Mathews argued that scribbles are invariably where we can best see a child’s meaning as free-flow mark-making is never random, if it is spontaneous, not imposed or directed. Anyone who sees a child singing, humming, muttering, beating our rhythms as they begin to draw and paint he considers is also making ‘an intellectual journey which has musical, linguistic, logical and mathematical as well as aesthetic aspects’ (Mathews, 1999, p. 23). Gadamer’s open-ended model of a conversation, where each remark calls for another, emphasizes the role of difference and disagreement in the formation of understanding, as does his attachment to play as a defining characteristic of language and art. Like play, scribble’s key is that it is unfinished; its ‘metaphorical sense draws our attention to a to and fro movement that is not tied to any goal that would bring it to an end’ (Gadamer, 2004, p. 103). Just as ‘evolutionary schemes may be forced to abandon the old model of the tree and descent’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 10), ‘development’ actually means very little outside of its application, as education is not rule-bound but an unpredictable, open-ended process. Richard Jolley argued that direct observation of picture-making processes ‘may provide us with a new theoretical framework for understanding children’s development in the twenty-first century’ (Jolley, 2010, p. 318), but to break with categorizing schemas we have used for centuries is no easy matter and requires more than just an academic desire for change. But traditions are for transforming. Rhizomes – and scribbles – are non-compliant. I believe that twenty-first-century children themselves are creating the conditions for change as they shift away from trust in fixed, testable categories to modern, digital, social, fluid experiences of cultural exchange. Development needs to be uncoupled from milestones, academic selection, setting, ability grouping and labelling. Education as formation (‘Bildung’) allows us all to be individuals in the making, where the motivation of wanting to understand one another ‘implies a process of transformation’ (Nixon, 2017, p. 56), rather than conformity. Is it the case that ‘for academics to be happy, the universe must have shape’ (Bataille, 1929, p. my trans)? If postdevelopmental thinking allows us to rethink preconditioned givens and imagine development differently, then understanding of children’s scribble fortuitously remains in a somewhat confused state: combining child-centred models of children’s creativity ‘naturally’ unfolding (strongly critiqued by Michael Eisner in the 1970s) with patterns or schema (Athey, 1990; Gardner, 1980; Lowenfeld, 1947) to more recent thinking of ‘less a ladder of stages with orderly progression towards a goal of competence (associated with visual realism), [than] a repertoire of personal styles and genres … ours to nurture or to narrow’ (Anning quoting Wolf, 1997, p. 105).

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Do we really grow up or perhaps grow along, grow inside? Do we really know what the most significant growth points are? Do we need beliefs, or just open observations? Early aesthetic experience – preverbal, pre-schematic, such as actions deep within our early life experiences – can form part of Bollas’s ‘unthought known’. As he put it, ‘the experience of the object precedes the knowing of it’. These pre-thoughts – as with scribble – comprise ‘apprehensive’ rather than ‘comprehensive’ knowledge, a kind of subtext to the main text, known at some unknowable level, yet carrying the power to shape the psyche. Bollas’s ‘aesthetic mode’ in adult life is a key aspect of well-being, epitomized in ‘an experience of reverie or rapport which does not stimulate the self into thought’ (Bollas, 1987, p. 35). In fact, ‘if something has already become thought, it is no good for art’, declared Rudolf Steiner (Steiner, cited in Goodwin, 2016, p. 106). This repertoire of involvement, rapport and reverie is the unthought known in scribble, as we take a line for a walk and enjoy its sense of presence, unmeasured and unthinking. Scribbles, as evidenced by the fact that they are nearly always thrown away, resist ‘being-there’ as they are tracings of ‘becoming’. Barthes’s description of Twombly’s scribbles as ‘tracings’ (markings) insists on the ‘ing’ suffix: the grammatical form known as the gerund, suggesting a continual present, a continuing dynamic activity instead of something represented and complete. The line takes time and IS time as a temporal trace; thus, scribble is a form of ‘becoming’, or growth rather than development, and as such, it remains unfinished, always.

References Alwyn, J. (1997). Lifting a veil on language in the kindergarten: An illumination of the thinking behind gesture and speech; and the use of fairy tale in the pre-school work of a Steiner teacher. In Early childhood: A Steiner monologue. Forest Row: Steiner Education. Athey, C. (1990). Extending thought in Young Children: A Parent-Teacher Partnership, Paul Chapman Educational Publishing. Barthes, R. (1982). Cy Twombly: Works on paper. In Richard Howard (Trans.), The responsibility of forms: Critical essays on music art and representation. Oxford: University of California Press. Bataille, G. (1929). Informe. Documents, 7, 382. Berger, J. (2005). Berger on drawing. Cork, Ireland: Occasional Press. Bersson, R. (2004). Responding to art: Form, content and context. Boston: McGrawHill.

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Blaise, M. (2010). New maps for old terrain: Creating a postdevelopmental logic of gender and sexuality in the early years. In L. Brooker & S. Edwards (Eds.), Engaging play. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Boaz, G. (1966). The cult of childhood. London: Warburg Press. Bollas, C. (1987). The shadow of the object: Psychoanalysis of the unthought known. London, UK: Free Association Books. Britzman, D. P. (2015). Melanie Klein: Early analysis, play and the question of freedom. Key Thinkers in Education, Springer: Springer Internatonal Publishing. Brooker, & Edwards, S. (Eds.) (2010). Engaging play. Maidenhead: Open University Press (pp. 80–95). Brice-Heath, S. (2013). Words at work and play: Three decades in family and community life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bruner, J. (1960). The process of education. CA: Harvard Press. Cratty, B. (1986). Perceptual and motor development in infants and children. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Deleuze, G. (1995). Difference and repetition (Paul Patton, Trans.). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Delueze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987 [2011]). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (Brian Massumi, Trans.). London: Continuum. Dosse, F. (2010). Gilles Delueze & Felix Guattari: Intersecting lives (Deborah Glassman, Trans.). New York: Columbia University Press. Evangelou, M., Sylva, K., Kyriacou, M., Wild, M., & Glenny, G. (2009). Early years learning and development literature review (Report No. DCSF-RR176). Department for Children, Schools and Families. Fuller, P. (1985) Rocks and Flesh: an argument for British drawing. Norwich: Norwich School of Art Gallery. Gadamer, H. G (2004). Truth and method (J. Weinsheimer, & D. G. Marshall, Trans.). London: Continuum. Gardner, H. (1980). Artful scribbles: The significance of children’s drawings. London: Jill Norman. Gardner, H. (2017). Reflections on artful scribbles: The significance of children’s drawings. Studies in Art Education; Reston, 58(2), 155–158. Goodwin, G. (2016) Metamorphosis: Journeys through transformation of Form. Forest Row: Temple Lodge Publishing Golomb, C. (1993). Art and the young child: Another look at the developmental question. Visual Arts Research, 19, no. 1 (Spring ), 1–15. Gopnik, A., Meltzoff, A.N. & Kuhl, P.K. (1999) How Babies Think, London: The Bodley Head Jolley, R. P. (2010). Children and pictures. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Kellog, R. (1959). What children scribble and why. California: NP Publishers. Klee, P. (1964). The diaries of Paul Klee, 1898–1918. Oakland, California: University of California Press.

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Kugler, W. Ed. Introduction to Steiner, R. (2003) Blackboard Drawings 1919-1924. Forest Row: Rudolf Steiner Press Lowenfeld, V. (1947). Creative and mental growth. New York: Macmillan Co. Lowenfeld, V. & Lambert Brittain, W. (1984) 4th edition, Creative and Mental Growth. New York: Macmillan Maclagan, D. (2013) Line Let Loose: Scribbling, Doodling and Automatic Drawing, London: Reaktion Books Malin, H. (2013). Making meaningful: Intention in children’s artmaking. IJade, 32, NSEAD: Blackwell Publishing. Matthews, J. (1999). The art of childhood and adolescence: The construction of meaning. London: Falmer. McNeil, D. (2005). Gesture and thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Michaux, H. (1972 [2001]). Emergences-Résurgences (Seburth, Trans.). Skira. Naville, S., & Marbacher, P. (1991). From scribbling to writing. Kent: Borgman Publishing. Nixon, John. (2017). Hans Georg Gadamer: The hermeneutical imagination. Switzerland: Springer. Ofsted (The Office for Standards in Education). (2017). Bold beginnings: The reception curriculum in a sample of good and outstanding schools. Available at: 28933_ Ofsted_-_Early_Years_Curriculum_Report_-_Accessible.pdf. Paine, S. (1992). Conflicting paradigms of vision in drawing development research. In David Thistlewood (Ed.), Drawing research and development. Essex: Longman. Pinar, W. F. (2011). The character of curriculum studies: Bildung, Currere, and the recurring question of the subject. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Pinkus-Witton, Robert. (1974). Cy Twombly. Artforum, 12(8), https://www.artforum. com/print/reviews/200808/cy-twombly-21145. Rist. (2000). Student social class and teacher expectations: The self-fulfilling prophecy in ghetto education. Harvard Educational Review, 70(3) Fall, 257–301. Rosenberg, H. (1952). The American action painters. Art News, 51, September, 342. Salome, R. A., & Moore, B. E. (n.d.). The five stages of development in children’s art. Retrieved from: http://my.ilstu.edu/~eostewa/ART309/Five_Stages.htm. Salome, R.A., & Moore, B.E. The Five Stages of Development in Children’s Artwork. cited in Wilson, B. & Wilson, M. (1981) The Use and Uselessness of Developmental Stages. Art Education, 34 (5): 4-5. Sellers, M. (2013). Young children becoming curriculum: Deleuze, Te Whāriki and curricular understandings. Abingdon: Routledge. Tarr, P. (1990). More than movement: Scribbling reassessed. Visual Arts Research, 16(1, Issue 31), 83–89. Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The devlopment of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Wilson, Brent. (1992). Primitivism, the avant-garde and the art of little children. In David Thistlewood (Ed.), Drawing research and development. Essex: Longman. Wolf, D. (1997). Reimagining development: Possibilities from the study of children’s art. Human development, 40, 189–194. Wood, E., & Hedges, H. (2016). Curriculum in early childhood education: Critical questions about content, coherence and control. The Curriculum Journal, 27, 3.

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‘We Need It Loud!’: Listening to Preschool Making from Mediated and Materialist Perspectives Karen Wohlwend, Anna Keune and Kylie Peppler

Introduction Playdough, cookie cutters, battery packs, and electronic buzzers are scattered across a child-sized table in the preschool classroom. The children are poking electronic components into pliable clumps of playdough as they create electric circuits to power up the buzzers. The hum of children’s voices rises in sync with the piercing drone of the buzzers. The volume rises and falls as children’s bodies turn toward and away from the buzzers, and as more children begin to understand how to place the buzzers in their emerging designs. As more and more buzzers turn on, the sound sources of each individual component become increasingly blurred. One child, fascinated with the chaotic shrieking of multi-pitched buzzers, exclaims ‘Beautiful music!’ while others clap hands over their ears to mute the noise. In response, the facilitators begin to apply tape over the buzzers to dampen the sound, but the children immediately protest: ‘We need it loud.’

Makerspaces like the activity station in this preschool classroom are springing up across school and out-of-school settings, emerging as sites for rich and active learning (Peppler et al., 2016). Makerspaces can range from shoebox kits with pipe cleaners, hot glue guns and light-emitting diodes (LEDs) to entire suites with virtual reality implementations, rows of 3D printers and laser cutters. Mixing low- and high-tech materials in making activities – such as the play dough, wire circuits and electronic buzzers in this chapter – opens a way for young children to produce and play as creative designers who explore responses to an evolving world that is not fixed or predictable (Resnick, 2017).

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Making invites children to initiate and participate in creating new possibilities for themselves and others. The focus on exploratory tinkering in makerspaces shifts learning from orderly teacher-led achievement to accessible learnerdriven exploration (Resnick & Rosenbaum, 2013; Vossoughi & Bevan, 2014). This transition shifts creative control from teacher to child, sometimes enabling chaotic or disruptive practices to emerge. In these moments, educators may seek to quickly restore order to ensure that all children are safe and have access to a range of design possibilities. However, proactive interventions may forestall learning and tame designs by restricting possibilities for exploring something new. In this chapter, we investigate untidy instances of emergence and cacophony in a preschool makerspace, examining a making activity to identify practices that encourage and sustain new possibilities. More specifically, we analyse sound, an understudied area in literacy learning and making, to better understand what happens when children play with technology-mediated sound-producing crafts. Aligning with recent work in multiliteracies, early childhood makerspaces, sound as multimodal and material composition (e.g. Serafini & Gee, 2017; Skerret, 2018; Thiel & Jones, 2017; Wargo, 2017; Wohlwend, 2017), we highlight the need for expanded ways to consider how sound, materials and meanings come together in art-making as well as ways to trace the emergence of art and the meanings children make with it.

Theoretical background A multimodal lens looks at making as social practice that people use to shape materials in their social and cultural worlds. Here we might ask, ‘How does a young designer read and wield the semiotic affordances of the material resources as they make?’ This framing assumes agentic subjects who use physical aspects of materials to create designs and negotiate cultural worlds. A multimodal focus reveals barriers that prevent some children from accessing particular modes and cultural resources. However, does a human-centric focus that separates social and material, intent on manipulating modes and space, itself contribute to incorrigible disparities (Barad, 2003)? Could thinking differently about relations among humans and materials reveal ways to make learning more accessible and enable new ways of learning? In this chapter, we seek to challenge tacit assumptions in humanist notions of making, learning and development to more expansively consider early childhood learning. Instead of looking at individual learners on developmental trajectories, we consider the larger assemblage

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(Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) – in this case, an entanglement of artefacts, practices and bodies – that produces design, play and experimentation. An early childhood makerspace is an ideal site to shift from attending to differences among individuals to look for connections within assemblages that squish together play dough, batteries, buzzers, fingers, colours and sound. Additionally, our focus on sound as a less-understood mode highlights unexpected possibilities for shared material productions (Skerrett, 2018; Wargo, 2017). We draw upon mediated discourse theory (Scollon, 2001; Wertsch, 1991) to see social actors’ mediation of sound and materials in co-produced interactions reflected in their making practices with tools and their sociocultural purposes through modal and multimodal engagement. Next, to unpack the tangles of meanings, materials and bodies in children’s designed artefacts, we explore a relational materialist orientation (Hultman & Lenz Taguchi, 2010) to literacy that ruptures definitions of development and learning, challenging the notion of texts as intentional representations and durable signs (Kuby & Rucker, 2016; Thiel, 2015). Central to relational materialism is Barad’s (2003) emphasis on connections in intra-action: an interdependent collaboration among material and human actants that co-constitutes play, design and experimentation. Our goal is to track chaotic webs of intra-actions among makerspace assemblages and to recognize knowledge and learning as flows that are continuously emerging, clustering together and coming apart. This multicentred view of bodies, materials and spaces flattens power relations and troubles definitions of ‘design’ as a human manipulation of materials to create message-bearing artefacts, or definitions of ‘play’ as actors’ dramatized and coordinated material reality that can be filmed, saved and shared. Instead, a focus on assemblage and flows moves away from outcomes and categorization to focus on entangled in-the-moment meanings as innovations and co-productions.

The research context and process The vignette above is excerpted from a Design Playshop study (Wohlwend & Peppler, 2015; Wohlwend et al., 2016, 2017) in makerspaces in three classrooms (60 three- to five-year-old children, six teachers) at a preschool in the Midwestern United States. Children voluntarily joined small groups at an ‘art table’ – a stubby 3ʹ × 6ʹ all-purpose table next to a low shelf with art supplies – that constituted a temporary and impromptu makerspace in each classroom. During seven-hour-long sessions over a two-week period, we furnished each classroom

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makerspace with a set of craft and electronic materials for children’s exploratory play and making: tubs of play dough, small toys and Squishy Circuits play dough electronics kits (Johnson & Thomas, 2010). Squishy Circuits is an electronic tool kit consisting of a 6 volt DC battery pack, ten to fifteen LEDs, two buzzers, and a DC motor1 that can be connected using play dough to create a working electrical circuit. We video-recorded the making activity at each art table, positioning the camera at the children’s eye level and focusing on their faces and hands. We recursively selected video data (Erickson, 2004), repeatedly viewing data to reach consensus about which major aspects constituted practices of design, play, collaboration and electronic production. We selected instances with buzzers for close analysis as key site of engagement (Scollon & Scollon, 2004), that is dense moments when assemblages produced amplification or contestation when practices, actors and materials converged, such as the tension between children’s noisy designs and adult interventions to preserve quiet collaboration and successful electronic circuitry. We were especially drawn to material productions, such as the buzzers’ sound production that captivated children yet disrupted adults as this pointed to places where the hierarchy between people and materials was ruptured and generated emergent possibilities and chaos. In this chapter, we first examine art activity from a maker’s perspective using multimodal microanalysis and mediated discourse theory (Scollon, 2001; Wertsch, 1991; Wohlwend, 2011a, b) that allows us to track designers’ interactions with materials, the environment and one another. This multimodal focus analyses how children interact with buzzers and modes to fashion artefacts and how they manipulate modal affordances to craft designs that convey cultural meanings in peer and school cultures. Through this perspective, we can see social actors’ purposes in which tools and objects are wielded to emphasize particular material properties, to develop children’s design skills and to get tool users recognized as experts in the social fabric of peer playgroups. We annotated digital screenshots as analytic maps to sequence changes over time in modal arrays. This multimodal analysis helped us see how the children attached meaning to their projects and to track movement of shared attention, sensory discoveries and content knowledge around the table. We then take a relational materialist perspective (Hultman & Lenz Taguchi, 2010; Lenz Taguchi, 2010) to recognize change as active and ongoing material The salt content of play dough makes it possible to replace typical metal wires with play dough as conductive material and part of an electronic circuit.

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force. We tracked material doings and undoings of assemblages of maker practices, buzzer sounds, circuitry materials, children and adults. We focused on repetition and emergence as always/already-occurring flows in making to see how iterations of actions with materials produced both variations and ruptures that propelled possibilities. We consider ruptures as moments that entangle carefully separated components or undo an entanglement, accessing emergence and engaging possibilities for (re-)assemblage. As a heuristic to track sound through repetitive assemblage and reassemblage, we sought to parse the material interaction and repetitive movement of sound, similar to visual interaction and movement such as shared gaze and repetitions of colour and shape present in the video data. To amplify the material impact of sound and to represent it visually for analysis and publication in print formats, such as this chapter, we created visualizations of the buzzer sounds. Following a new media arts approach of transforming and pairing digital bits to materiality (Ishii & Ullmer, 1997), we used After Effects software animation tool to emphasize sound through a changing visual shape: the physical impact of the buzzers’ volume by varying the size of the shape: larger size for increased volume the frequency of the buzzers’ pitch by varying the speed and geometry of the shape: faster vibrating animation and more acute angles for higher frequencies the proximity of a sound source to people and circuitry tools by placing the shape on the video touching the originating buzzer.

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The visualization of the volumes and frequency intentionally foregrounded sound, made its doing visible and paired it computationally with visuals, so it could not be muted from other parts that were moving in and out of artmaking.

Findings On our third day at the preschool makerspace, we introduced buzzers: small black boxes with red and black wires, which, when turned on, would squeak at different volumes and frequencies and vibrate and rattle on the table surface. Raising an eyebrow, Juan dangled a buzzer by its leads, repeatedly asking, ‘What are these?’ At the other end of the table, Adam replied, ‘Buzzers’, as an adult responded: ‘Well, you’re just going to have to play with them and find

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out.’ Juan shifted materials around, experimenting to find an alignment until suddenly a high-pitched electronic sound flooded the art table. The sound was extinguished just as quickly as it emerged, and all the children turned towards the source of the now-disappeared sound. Juan burst out laughing, and all other children joined in. Adam was next to connect a buzzer, and immediately all eyes turned to him. He smiled, everyone laughed and the action pattern repeated. As more buzzers turned on, the buzzers’ sounds melted into one another and it became increasingly difficult to differentiate their discrete sound sources. Pete and Sarah held their ears against their own buzzers to determine if the buzzer was working. Juan requested, ‘Turn off yours, Adam,’ and Adam plucked the loud buzzer from its play dough wiring. When Lisa’s buzzer finally turned on, she squealed and rapidly wiggled her body, her movements echoing and amplifying the buzzer’s vibration. Some children spread their arms wide open in response to the increasing noise; another shouted, ‘When is it gonna stop? I don’t know when.’ The children responded to the clatter of sound through various strategies to amplify their individual buzzers. Suddenly, one very loud piercing buzzer dominated the soundscape. Juan bent and turned his ear towards it, seeking to decipher whether the new sound emerged from his project. With a broad smile, he loudly pronounced: ‘Beautiful music. Let’s make music.’ But just at this moment, the monitoring researcher/facilitators intervened. After identifying the extra-loud buzzer, one facilitator advised another to ‘find some scotch tape and put it over the buzzer and make it softer,’ while cautioning not to ‘cover it up all the way’ so that some sound could still be heard. With the sound softened, Juan also quieted but objected to adults’ tampering with his project: Juan:    Adult 1:  Juan:    Adult 2: 

Why are you doing that? It makes it less loud. We want it loud. We need it loud. If we make it really loud, you guys can’t hear each other talk.

In this vignette, we were the intervening adults. As researchers and makerspace facilitators, we mediated the blaring of buzzers to fit the expectations for order and harmony in the preschool. In the subsequent analysis of these events, we present how our analysis helped us understand how children were exploring the material possibilities of their designerly intentions and sensory discoveries, and how this brought about a new understanding of materiality that pushed back on assumptions of art-making and schooling.

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Interactions: Mediated action, interactions and multimodality From a mediated discourse perspective, we can see children exploring the meaning potentials of modes and actions with play dough, LEDs and buzzers, as they create artefacts and entertain friends. While commercial play dough sets and LEDs allowed children to vary tactile and visual modes such as the shapes and colours of their doughy snakes and snowmen, the buzzers enabled experimentation with sound as an effect of a working circuit construction but also as a design element. When multiple buzzers went off at various pitches in this chaotic moment, children made sense of the cacophony of buzzing in different ways. Some children bent down and tilted an ear closer to their play dough projects to check if it were the source of the buzzing. Other children covered their ears with cupped hands, at first blocking the noise and then testing how volume could be manipulated by covering and uncovering their ears. Finally, Juan interpreted the buzzing as ‘beautiful music’, a move that immediately defined the multi-pitched sounds as a unified composition, appropriated the buzzer’s sound production capability as a semiotic resource for creating a design, in this case music. The response of the children depended upon their individual purpose in their meaning-making with the sound. Figure 9.1 presents the children’s sensemaking through semiotic engagement with the buzzers and sound. The adults at the table sought to mediate the buzzer action by covering buzzers with bits of tape to reduce vibration and quiet the buzzers but in ways that would still allow children’s experimentation. In this case, our strategies were prompted by an interest in maintaining a more orderly learning environment where everyone could hear their own project, in enabling talk at the table and also in ensuring clear audio for later transcription. We also responded to the overall unruliness of the sound-intense activity in deference to school norms. But quiet buzzers conflicted with children’s interest and excitement in exploration of the range of meaning, action and modal possibilities with buzzers and play dough. From a multimodal perspective, the adults’ interactions backgrounded sound to privilege other modes while children’s engagements foregrounded and directly engaged the design potential of sound – by moving body and object proximity, they explored sound amplification and insulation of sound and representations of pitch, volume and vibration.

Intra-actions: Doing and undoing art-world-making Across all rooms, the camera and external microphone became a distortive component of the entanglements that revealed our preconceived framing from

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Figure 9.1  Illustration of sense-making with buzzers and maintenance of modal possibilities.

a humanist perspective. Through our positioning of camera lenses, we had attended to people (rather than materials), the table (rather than the table-incontext and its relationships) and changeover time (rather than moments of ruptures that revealed how things were held in place). The distortive presence of the recording devices became salient when children moved the external microphone and created feedback noise. This rupture foregrounded our manipulation of data and turned the research gaze back on us as researchers and our analytic choices through research tools. This drew our attention to more closely listen to the possibilities of buzzers.

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Buzzer entanglements consisted of intra-actions that in this case were feeble and transitory doings that could be undone just as quickly as they were established. When wires, play dough, battery packs and children’s hands aligned, buzzers droned on. When any of these assemblage parts slipped out of position, the play dough circuits were cut and the sound was severed. Moments when buzzing emerged stood out as filled with entanglements of unintentional configurations while moments when buzzing ceased were catalysts for intentional retracings as children worked to reinstate particular configurations or recombine elements anew through fresh explorations. Repetition amplified sound as children sought to maintain buzzing and bring it about recurrently. In the flow of continued doing and sounding, new buzzers started up and contributed to the noise concert that transformed the physicality of the art table. Many buzzers sounded at the same time yet at different volumes and frequencies, and the source of any one buzzing noise melted into the rest. This auditory amalgamation created a piercing tonal cacophony that overwhelmed some practices and pulled others forward. The children stopped trying to trace the sound sources and bent towards the cacophony. The emergence of being among the material repercussions of joint human and material production was also the emergence of a sound-governed space not comprehensible from a humanist perspective. However, the camera lens and video analysis made visible how intra-actions of human and non-human playmates together changed the art table composition and its environment through their negotiated intra-actions in the production of ubiquitous buzzing sounds. In the fleeting moments when buzzer noise emerged and was muted by tape and bodies, the art table space took on a new materiality through the doing and undoing of droning buzzers, illustrated in Figure 9.2. The new materiality produced musicians who recognized the high-pitched sounds as ‘beautiful music’ as well as music critics who asked ‘When is it gonna stop?’ Bodies intra-acted differently with the sound-producing mechanisms: the physical change at the art table prompted bending torsos into the flow of sound or covering ears to mute the sound. Art-making – in this case, the shaping of an unexpected and unruly large physical force – was in the children’s actions, the alignment of circuitry parts, the sound production and the multiple relationships among components. The emergence of art-making was fragile and subjected to a privileging of speech, materialized through taping over buzzers to enable talk and transcription. The action of muffling buzzers worked to undo the togetherness of human/ non-human assemblages and to uphold personal boundaries of individuality.

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Figure 9.2  After Effects screenshots flattened for print to show the visualization of audio materiality.

Tension among doing and undoing shaped and was shaped by the sociomaterial relationships among buzzers and children as well as the physical artmaking and world-making possibilities that emerged from these relationships. For example, when a child altered a buzzer’s pitch by wiggling the battery pack and analogized converged buzzers to music, the child-noise entanglement was undone by damping the buzzers to maintain audible boundaries for individual children. In this way, the action of taping ruptured the amplified multi-buzzer sound but also produced pushback from the children-buzzers-noise assemblage (e.g. complaints of ‘what are you doing?’; buzzing that vibrated through the tape). Taping action not only muffled the physical buzzing but also closed off some child-sound and art-world possibilities while opening others. Adults in these shape-shifting encounters also contributed as actants through doings and undoings that underscored the force of world-making of the child-buzzer-art.

Discussion and implications The mediated perspective uncovered designerly exploration of the buzzers, including imitation, insulation, pressure and proximity, by the children and adults driven by social intentions and expressive meaning-making. From a mediated perspective, we found that visualization of sound helped us compare

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the ways that children (and adults) explored manipulation of sound as a mode and as a design element through exploration of sound insulation and sound vibration with their bodies and materials. The materialist perspective, on the other hand, illustrated that a design focus manifested intentions to artificially maintain a one-buzzer/one-child approach to art-making that were ruptured when many buzzers went off simultaneously so that sound sources could not be singled out and buzzers could not be untangled. This convergence required more and more effort to maintain separation among projects in the face of an emerging and overwhelming force at the art table. The materialist perspective prompted analysis of the larger worldmaking phenomenon that was emerging at the table and how the art-making assemblage was undone and redone by attempts to separate the assemblage into modes, projects and components moving towards individual completion goals. The material analysis illuminates how less-privileged components and ways of doing and being and making the world were silenced. Our explorations also point to methodological implications for research that examines processes of translating material states when seeking to identify material forces that act as world-making mechanisms for and with children. The analysis with the video editor After Effects enacted an assemblage of researchers, material instruments and theory that ruptured our humanist foundation for theorizing learning. When we flattened digital audio onto the visual data channel, the audio could not be muted by a stroke of a button of the tangible computer interface; this facilitated the sense that the audio materiality was overlaying, covering and disrupting the visual centrality of humans. Visually and auditorily, the instruments of ‘data collection and analysis’ converged and reconfigured our educational theorizing. The translation of data across senses reveals our perceptual assumptions at the human-computer interaction level and invites us to question sensory privilege in early childhood classrooms. In educational research, there is a need for consistent interrogation of representation and manipulation of data across senses (not only across instruments) to better identify traces of material forces. Digital media arts practices of translating sensory input to other sensory outputs can help further develop these methodological threads, especially when smartphone applications support augmenting camera views with spatio-visual sound interactions. These applications make it easier to collect and translate data across senses. The research has implications for the design of learning experiences for children. The making of something new that continually breaks down previously established assumptions, like the buzzing materiality at the art table, resonates with art that seeks to unsettle and produce new ways of being in the

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world. When we attend to these potentials, instructional limitations morph into listening to relationships that material/child assemblages express together. The chapter highlights the need to provision classrooms with materials that invite exploration and ruptures of predominant practices and that expect the emergence of unexpected material entanglements. It carves out a space for preserving exploratory spaces with opportunities for children to be messy. Rather than mediating towards predetermined goals and outcomes, we encourage listening to the repetitions that are always/already variations and the trajectories that lead learners into new spaces. Zooming out further, this work suggests that keeping classrooms and learning spaces artificially stable is problematic as the worlds that children make and grow up in are neither stable nor predictable.

References Barad, K. (2003). Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28(3), 801–831. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus (Brian Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: The University of Minnesota Press. Erickson, F. (2004). Demystifying data construction and analysis. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 35(4), 486–493. Hultman, K., & Lenz Taguchi, H. (2010). Challenging anthropocentric analysis of visual data: A relational materialist methodological approach to educational research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 23(5), 525–542. Ishii, H., & Ullmer, B. (1997, March). Tangible bits: Towards seamless interfaces between people, bits and atoms. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 234–241). ACM. Johnson, S., & Thomas, A. P. (2010, April). Squishy circuits: A tangible medium for electronics education. In CHI’10 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 4099–4104). ACM. Kress, G. (2003). Literacy in the new media age. New York, NY: Psychology Press. Kuby, C. R., & Rucker, T. G. (2016). Go be a writer!: Expanding the curricular boundaries of literacy learning with children. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Lenz Taguchi, H. (2010). Rethinking pedagogical practices in early childhood education: A multidimensional approach to learning and inclusion. In N. Yelland (Ed.), Contemporary perspectives on early childhood education (pp. 14–32). New York, NY: Open University Press. Peppler, K., Halverson, E., & Kafai, Y. B. (Eds.). (2016). Makeology: Makerspaces as learning environments (Vol. 1). New York, NY: Routledge. Resnick, M. (2017). Lifelong kindergarten: Cultivating creativity through projects, passion, peers, and play. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Resnick, M., & Rosenbaum, E. (2013). Designing for tinkerability. In M. Honey, & D. E. Kanter (Eds.), Design, make, play: Growing the next generation of STEM innovators (pp. 163–181). New York, NY: Routledge. Scollon, R. (2001). Mediated discourse: The nexus of practice. London: Routledge. Scollon, R., & Scollon, S. W. (2004). Nexus analysis: Discourse and the emerging internet. New York, NY: Routledge. Serafini, F., & Gee, E. R. (Eds.). (2017). Remixing multiliteracies: Theory and practice from New London to new times. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Skerrett, A. (2018). Learning music literacies across transnational school settings. Journal of Literacy Research, 50(1), 31–51. doi:10.1177/1086296X17753502. Thiel, J. J. (2015). Vibrant matter: The intra-active role of objects in the construction of young children’s literacies. Literacy Research: Theory, Method, and Practice, 64(1), 112–131. Thiel, J. J., & Jones, S. (2017). The literacies of things: Reconfiguring the materialdiscursive production of race and class in an informal learning centre. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 17(3), 315–335. Vossoughi, S., & Bevan, B. (2014). Making and tinkering: A review of the literature. Academy of Sciences. Retrieved from: http://www.informalscience.org/making-andtinkering-review-literature. Wargo, J. M. (2017). Rhythmic rituals and emergent listening: Intra-activity, sonic sounds and digital composing with young children. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 17(3), 392–408. Wertsch, J. V. (1991). Voices of the mind: A sociocultural approach to mediated action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wohlwend, K., & Peppler, K. (2015). All rigor and no play is no way to improve learning. Phi Delta Kappan, 96(8), 22–26. Wohlwend, K., Keune, A., & Peppler, K. (2016). Design playshop: Preschoolers making, playing, and learning with Squishy Circuits. In K. Peppler, E. Halverson, & Y. Kafai (Eds.), Makeology: Makerspaces as learning environments, (Vol. 1, pp. 83–96). New York, NY: Routledge. Wohlwend, K. E. (2011a). Mapping modes in children’s play and design: An actionoriented approach to critical multimodal analysis. In R. Rogers (Ed.), An introduction to critical discourse analysis in education (2nd ed., pp. 242–266). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Wohlwend, K. E. (2011b). Playing their way into literacies: Reading, writing, and belonging in the early childhood classroom. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Wohlwend, K. E. (2017). The expression of multiliteracies and multimodalities in play. In E. F. Serafini, & E. R. Gee (Eds.), Remixing multiliteracies: Theory and practice from New London to new times (pp. 162–174). New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Wohlwend, K. E., Peppler, K. A., Keune, A., & Thompson, N. (2017). Making sense and nonsense: Comparing mediated discourse and agential realist approaches to materiality in a preschool makerspace. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 17(3), 444–462.

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Thinking Childhood Art with Care in an Ecology of Practices Laura Trafí-Prats

Perhaps it is precisely in the realm of play, outside the dictates of teleology, settled categories, and function, that serious worldliness and recuperation become possible. Haraway (2016). Staying with the trouble, p. 24 Pedagogic work is thus a matter of learning-with and feeling-with in a process of contrapuntual weaving. A learning encounter for a learner is a practical problem involving how something matters. Atkinson (2018). Art, disobedience and ethics: The adventure of pedagogy, p. 215

Introduction Art education theorist Dennis Atkinson (2018) argues that art education has been entrapped by the parameters of historical and contemporary pedagogical movements which have shaped ways of practising, recognizing and valuing art education in schools and other institutions. This entrapment has provoked that curriculum and pedagogy function through what he characterizes as a transcendental force in which methods of procedure establish ways of conceiving and valuing certain practices in art education and not conceiving and valuing others. Such transcendental force has intensified in the contexts of neo-liberal education agendas where state-dictated prescription of what needs to be taught and how it needs to be taught dominates classroom pedagogies. In contraposition to this, Atkinson suggests a pedagogical turn that focuses on ‘the eventfulness of learning through art practices’ (2018, p. 19). This turn involves a recognition of ‘learning as an existential event’ (2018, p. 2), consisting in attuning and being

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responsive to local encounters in which the aim is not to acquire specific sets of content and skills but to ‘build a life, a process of invention and creation involving the emergence of the new within local processes of learning’ (2018, p. 6). In this chapter, I project Atkinson’s (2018) ontology of learning in immanence and with art into an enquiry of parenting as an everyday space-time where care, art and aesthetics are practices that can inform and extend each other. Differently from school contexts where strange, anomalous practices of art in education tend to be overlooked, discredited or marginalized, parenting is an existential mode which is bound to live and create with the unknown and the other. As Baraister (2009) notes, in maternal encounters there is always something irregular, indigestible, small, unintegrated that disrupts experience and needs response. Thinking of childhood in connection to care in everyday encounters and with art practices enacts what Atkinson (2018), in reference to Stengers (2005), calls an experimental togetherness. This experimental togetherness approaches encounters with new existential situations open-endedly, refraining from assumed concepts and procedures, to ask questions around how to care for, know and be together with the demands that a situation poses (also see Savransky, 2016). In this ontology, being in care with children becomes a matter not only of maintenance but of mutual becomings in ecologies of practice. In such ecologies, every practice must be thought anew, with relevant and situated questions that emerge from grappling with the matters that the situation demands (Stengers, 2005). Spaces-times of care seem central to such ontological perspective because parents and children share knowledge connected to wider contexts of experience and in relation to multiple things, places and bodies (Hackett, 2017). Therefore, a focus on spaces-times of care permits us to think about children practices in art in wider contexts too and in relation to an ecology of practice. As I will address with further detail later in the chapter, Haraway (2016) describes these threading between different practices with the concept of sympoesis. Sympoesis fosters an understanding of art as connected and implicated in interdisciplinary knowledge politics with science, technology, cultural studies, indigenous knowledge, and via practices of play and storytelling. This chapter continues and extends earlier work where I imagined that mothering as a feminist aesthetics of existence was a practical and co-constructed enquiry to experiment with alternative forms of being in care with children (Trafí-Prats, 2018). In this chapter I take this argument in new directions and suggest that mothering as a feminist aesthetics of existence engages in what Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) calls speculative openings that permit to think care in non-

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normative ways. I suggest that thinking-doing art with/in everyday encounters is a way for such speculative openings to happen. Although I write about mothering and parenting from my personal experience, my enquiry is not confessional but based on a public dialogue with a number of theoretical sources, research studies and a legacy of feminist artists involved in issues concerning education, care, ethics, art and politics. Feminist art includes multiple examples of speculative openings for thinking and doing care differently. As Haraway (2016) proposes, we must ‘teach about rich pasts to sustain thick presents to keep the story going for those who come after’ (2016, p. 125). In the sections that follow this introduction, I deliver two stories concerning artists Mierle Laderman Ukeles and Lenka Clayton to imagine with their work a field for potential practice in the interstices of care, art, education and the everyday. The two stories are not directly connected to children’s art. However, they offer speculative openings that demand a thinking-doing of care that is entangled with ongoing mundane situations, which I believe can inform a different animation of parenting practice.

Maintenance is art In the late 1960s feminist artists undertook a critique of the prevalence of the studio as the space identified with creativity and art production. These artists exposed how the reduction of artistic inventiveness to such exclusive space, devalued care, maintenance, support and other mundane matterings central to women’s subjective production and collective identity (Sheringham, 2006). Partly, as a result of this critique, a number of post-studio art practices emerged foregrounding art-making as involved in the politics and aesthetics of everyday life (Meyer, 2012). The house and other domestic spaces became sites for artistic activity that engaged in the rhythms, gestures and embodiments of care. After giving birth, artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles documented the disassociation between cleaning diapers, nursing and being in the care of her children, and her work as a sculptor in the studio, and wrote Manifesto for Maintenance Art (2016/1969) (Dimitrikakis, 2013). As early as 1977, she began a residency in the Department of Sanitation in New York City (DSNY) where she scaled up her idea of maintenance art to the entire city, building a sense that maintenance was entangled in larger ecosystems, infrastructures and technologies that keep life going (Lippard, 2016). As part of this residency,

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Ukeles developed works such as Touch Sanitation Performance (1979–1980) where in the course of eleven months she shook hands with the 8,500 sanitation workers in the DSNY and thanked them for their work (Phillips, 2016). She also studied sanmen’s itineraries in different districts and began to develop a series of field notes and space-time drawings capturing the movements and rhythms of three eight-hour work shifts in the vast geography of New York City (Phillips, 2016). The drawings would include annotations of what shift she would join, who would pick up the children from school, what was the schedule of her husband and other mundane arrangements (Phillips, 2016). In her long residency in the DSNY, Ukeles became familiar with the rich and precise knowledge that sanitation workers have of their job and the city. One piece that foregrounds this is Ballet Mécanique (1983), in which six of the best DSNY sweeper drivers performed a choreography in the city streets in front of a large audience. In her work with the DSNY, Ukeles turned from a view of maintenance art as connected to individual tasks in homes, offices and museums to a view entangled in the larger worldly matters of the city including pollution and other ecological issues concerning the materiality of trash, its circulation through the city and the unrecognized practical knowledge of sanitation workers. In this respect, it seems possible to think of her practice with Haraway’s (2016) concept of the sympoetic. As I noted earlier, sympoesis is a way of making with others, which emphasizes the collective nature of processes of life and death. Ukeles’s work is a recognition and an enactment that keeping the city clean and collecting garbage not only is interdependent with other forms of life-death in the city but maintains these forms of life and needs to be thought about and valued with them. For Haraway, nothing is self-organizing and everything is made-with multiples in ‘complex, dynamic, responsive, situated, historical systems’ (p. 68). Sympoesis is the opening towards an ecological relationality inspired by a feminist ethics of care and response-ability, which stirs practices of curiosity, a sense of reciprocity that leads to work in ways that render everyone capable. Haraway sees art as entangled in the ongoing matters of life, as a process of making-with that is sympoetic because, as happens in Ukeles’s practice, art creates platforms to become tangled-with others ‘in diverse, passionate, corporeal, meaningful ways’ (Haraway, 2016, p. 72). Art can ‘cultivate the capacity to respond’ (2016, p. 78) and to form active and plural attachments in an affective ecology that interrupts the separation between care and other ways of life in the city.

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Artist residency in motherhood After realizing that the artist residencies that she had applied and benefitted from before becoming a parent would not accommodate artists with children, Lenka Clayton created the Artist Residency in Motherhood (ARIM) in 2012. She began a residency at her own home in Pittsburgh and created a kit for other parent-artists to develop similar residencies. Clayton’s (2012) kit contains a manifesto in which she affirms the possibility of experimenting with art and parenting in ways that the two practices inform each other through tensions and contaminations. In projects such as 63 Objects taken from my son’s mouth (2011–2012), The distance I can be from my son (2013) and All scissors in the house made safer (2014), Clayton utilizes languages of expression evocative of existing art movements (e.g. minimalism, feminist materialialities, video art) to both create art and recompose the materiality and temporality of care and mothering practices.1 Acts that in the developmental language of childhood studies would be normalized through theories of maternal attachment and discourses of safeguarding are transformed in aesthetic, material and temporal explorations that allow for a creative and worldly invention of care. Clayton’s work seems to illuminate the gender hierarchies between art and capitalism, where care can only be encountered if presented as a valuable object rather than a form of existence and productivity. As Dimitriakakis (2013) purports, feminist artists respond to such gendered hierarchies with ideas of working at home that rather than being local and individual are cosmopolitan; Clayton’s ARIM is an example of this. It is a project that stays at home precisely not to embrace domesticity, intimate or personal narratives but to invent a nonexisting space for parent-artists across the globe to collectively animate embodied, affective, poetic, intersubjective practices traversing art and motherhood. Many of Clayton’s projects perform care as a speculative practice of what is possible (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). Her practice addresses what else can be thought-done in situations of response, reuse and repair. Rather than thinking in a linear time of progress and human intentionality, in which some popular conceptions of artistry reside, Clayton’s work thinks with and through the affects emerging from the constant interruptions, fragmentations, repetitions that constitute being in care with children. Her modus operandi is open to unexpected encounters and collaborations with times, spaces and materials Clayton’s artwork developed in connection to Artist Residency in Motherhood can be viewed here: http://www.lenkaclayton.com/work/

1

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provoked by the bodied and sensorial transformations that human perception undergoes when adults are in care with children (Baraister, 2009). Thinking in terms of worldly matters of care, Clayton’s work could be considered a case of what Haraway (2016) calls staying with the trouble. This is, the trouble of the temporal, financial and emotional precarity that the exclusion of parent-artists from the artworld purports. Clayton stays with the trouble in order to explore other living arrangements that make room for the coexistence of more than one mode within her art practice (Tsing, 2015). Worlds that welcome multiple modes of existence have the potential to coordinate with and contaminate each other in ways that re-think and re-do art, motherhood and care in unexpected, differencing, re-worlding ways. Equipped with parent-artists practice-led stories and carrying along concepts such as the immanence of learning in/with art, experimental togetherness and sympoesis, in what follows, I think with three practices situated in the interstices of art, care, the everyday, play and storytelling in the company of my child, Ingrid, and with my husband Eric in our home and around our neighbourhood. The first practice consists in moments of shared play with the video game Lumino City (State of Play, 2014a). The second practice concerns the family relation with a non-remarkable patch of grass that we cross regularly in our walks in the city. The third practice involves two drawings produced by Ingrid. I address these practices both as posing specific questions to think with (Stengers, 2005) and as sympoetic processes that make with and co-compose worlds (Haraway, 2016). With these series of personal stories, I seek to throw attention to how practices of care reside in everyday details that stick out (Baraister, 2009) and force us to think more deeply about what it means to be with a child in situations of care and art-making.

Caring for things that make worlds liveable In discussing Never Alone (Vesce et al., 2014), a video game conceived and designed by an Inuit group of coders, artists, community activists and storytellers, Haraway (2016) affirms that some video games have the capacity to function as world games that re-engage us with the world by ‘remember(ing) and creat(ing) worlds in dangerous times’ (p. 86). In the game industry, world games are recognized as a new genre ‘taking place inside ongoing indigenous stories’ (p. 87). I suggest that Lumino City (State of Play, 2014a), a game that as a family we began to play in the long and wet evenings of the English North West winter, could be understood as a world game too. This is not because Lumino City

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features any indigenous story but because it puts players up to the challenges of a Capitalocene’s story of depletion, loss of craft and broken sociality, but also repair and creativity. A city controlled by an electric power corporation runs out of oil resources; its main infrastructures stop and need to be put back to work improvising crafty solutions and alternative powers. Lumino City was created by an independent group of London-based artists that go with the name State of Play. The game was designed combining handmade props, camera-filmed animation and digital development. It was produced over the course of three years after a model of a city delightfully handcrafted with paper, cardboard and glue, miniature lights and motors (State of Play, 2014b). Its mode of production is already a testament that digital games can contribute to unmaking the Capitalocene and engage their players in ‘inventing new practices of imagination, resistance, revolt, repair and mourning’ (Haraway, 2016, p. 51). Ingrid had tried Lumino City different times by herself. However, the difficulty of the puzzles had made her to only play it if Eric played it too with her. So the game became a space for Ingrid-Eric to be in an experimental togetherness (Atkinson, 2018; Stengers, 2005), solving a number of surprising puzzles. I call it experimental because video games are not self-revelatory forms. The stories that they present are only revealed based on how much the players move or get stuck. Ingrid-Eric cannot anticipate what the characters, visual cues and environments in a specific video game will make them do; they only can find out by playing and moving and becoming-with the game (Cremin, 2016). As Eric-Ingrid played more and more, they learned to envision how certain actions could enact certain changes, and over time they shaped together a style of playing the game. A situation of support reclaimed by Ingrid became a space to co-construct play and shared knowledge that eventually enlarged the competencies of both Ingrid and Eric (Haraway, 2016). At the beginning of the game, Ingrid-Eric encountered the avatar Lumi, a girl, who faced the mysterious disappearance of her grandfather and a subsequent blackout in the city. To find her grandfather, Lumi (Ingrid-Eric) needed to learn how to make the main infrastructures in the city to work again but this time without oil-based energy. A handyman manual that her grandfather had left behind became key to help Lumi (Ingrid-Eric) in this quest. To reunite Lumi with her grandfather, Ingrid-Eric completed seventeen levels and solved many embedded puzzles that put Ingrid-Eric to operate anachronistic technology such as gears, pulleys, switch boards, lighting systems, telegraph machines, photo chemicals, pinball machines, labelling machines and punch machines. The play with these objects required the use of the handyman manual, which in turn

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produced a constant movement between the book’s old-fashioned graphs and the activation of stuff in the virtual reality of Lumino. The game took Ingrid-Eric to travel through multiple sites that included a photo lab, a crane, a Ferris wheel, a light tower, an American-style diner, a boat, a power station and others. In turn, the operation of equipment in these places required competence in multiple languages such as musical scores, blueprints, periodic tables, Morse code, visual patterns and others. It is not that Ingrid-Eric actually pushed buttons, flipped switches, turned the disc in a label machine or pulled the cords of a guitar. They provided haptic input that simulated the physics of these technologies. Their hands rubbed and tapped to reveal clues and swiped horizontally and vertically to move things. But most of the time, I witnessed them gliding and pointing at elements of the design trying to figure out, sometimes with accumulated frustration, what they needed to do next. Most of the times this was not obvious; nothing in the game followed linear steps and everything required different disconnected actions to take place before the main action, operating and infrastructure, could happen. Many of the technologies, infrastructures and languages were new to Ingrid. For example, Ingrid had never seen an analogic photo lab or known that before digital cameras photos were developed through a chemical process in a dark room involving different baths. As Ingrid-Eric encountered objects, technologies and sites, Ingrid asked many questions; other times Eric told stories about what these technologies were, how they worked, and experiences seeing others using them, or using them himself. The conversations and game made Ingrid-Eric develop an attention to the game that in turn replicated with a new attention to the world (Tsing, 2015), which brought an unexpected engagement with a wealth of lost knowledges and crafts. The game as a sensuous, material and dilated experience of creatively repairing a massive and concatenated breakage along with the stories that resurfaced with it created a space where care was not only practised as support and accompaniment. It became care as a shared practice of attention through storytelling. It was a care for things and the worlds and relations that these things produce and help to maintain (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017).

How is one to know a grass patch? Anna Tsing (2015) suggests that we should tell and combine stories that are not directly connected and that do not belong to the same pattern of production in order to reopen the imagination to the multiple and the polyphonic. Tsing

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invites us to care for disturbed, heterogeneous post-industrial ecologies as a way of ‘listening at separate melody lines and their coming together in unexpected moments of harmony and dissonance’ (p. 158). For this, she proposes to think life in terms of an assemblage. This is, encounters of different modes of being that in combination and coordination can end eating each other, but they also can make life possible in new ways. In an intent to follow threads and patterns, in this section I add another story that like Lumino City involves acts of repair in the city. In this case, the repair is of/with a disturbed grass patch that IngridEric-I encounter when we walk around our neighbourhood (see Figure 10.1). The grass patch is in the curb of a brief segment in Wellington Rd., near the 33-bus stop. It is in a space framed by fenced town houses in one side and a dusty

Figure 10.1  Practice with the grass patch. Photo credit: Laura Trafí-Prats.

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wall on the other. The wall functions as a protective barrier; 10 metres below runs one of the motorways that crosses Manchester. It is quite exceptional in our town, to find grassed curbs. Often when we approach the patch, Ingrid’s body intensifies; rather than walking, she runs or hops towards it. Once in there, she slows down, bends to pick up dandelion clogs, blows them, pulls a branch from one of the trees to extract flowers, scares a starling or a pigeon, or simply activates her body in rhythms that do not consist anymore in walking to a destination. When we moved into our current apartment, I did not feel positive about the patch. Quite often I found myself hurrying Ingrid out of it. The grass in this patch is uneven, sometimes long, other times horribly short. It has been left untreated, weeds abound, and empty bottles of soda, beer cans, cigarette butts and other remnants populate the space. The space affects me at the visceral level. I do not want Ingrid near the wall. The wall accumulates layers of dust expelled from the tons of concrete that build the motorway, which cars lift up and move around as they speed through. Differently, for Ingrid, I sense a lack of care that hurts me, and that propels me to move away. In talking about spaces, objects and pedagogies in Reggio Emilia schools, Vea Vecchi (2010) affirms that care is connected to beauty and the aesthetic dimension of form. Vecchi sees aesthetics and care being interconnected. Aesthetics functions as a filter to interpret the world with an attention to qualities that intensify and make more empathetic our relation with others, things and places. Considering this, most likely Vecchi would see the grass patch as a case where aesthetics and care have been seriously devalued. As time went by, I found myself repeatedly having to stop and linger in this space because Ingrid continued developing activity in it and interrupting our walks. I began to think that these forced stops offered me the possibility to pay attention and eventually alter my lack of positive affection for this space, and I started to wonder: how is one to know with this given patch (Savransky, 2016)? What concepts, aesthetics, practices of movement and dwelling in the city need to be interrogated in accordance with the demands that being-with the patch poses? What qualities and potentials did Ingrid in this space that I could not see? Is it possible that Vecchi’s idea of care, key for modernist art pedagogies, is barely useful to listen at the polyphonies of the patch (Tsing, 2015)? Could Ukeles’s maintenance art be more relevant to consider generative connections between the aesthetics and garbage in the patch? How do past times spent in forests and parks collecting leaves, sticks, worms making marks in the mud, climbing trees, running around resonate in this patch? Has any of the material-sensible activity developed by playing with Lumino City threaded with the activity in the patch?

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There was one event that fully attached Ingrid to this site, and that made us relate to the patch in terms of visiting, as a place to cultivate curiosity and ask new questions (Haraway, 2016). One day in the spring of 2017, when walking by the grass patch, Ingrid noticed that it had been drastically mowed. Many of

Figure 10.2  Material play with dandelions. Photo credit: Laura Trafí-Prats.

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the existing dandelions disappeared. Moved by the loss, Ingrid began collecting dandelions in other places of the neighbourhood, putting them in jars of water on the window sill, and letting them dry, and finally collecting the seeds in another jar. Once several groups of dandelions dried at home, we went back to the patch, and Ingrid blew the seeds. We hoped that they would attach to remaining water drops in the ground. From then to now, Ingrid and I initiated and persisted on a practice of attention and repair with the grass patch. She has kept further seeds at home to respond to eventual injuries caused by cyclical cuts (see Figure 10.2). She began to call the dandelions that were not ‘murdered’ by the land mower ‘survivors’. Was Ingrid inventing practices of repair with affects extracted from Lumino City? Like Lumi, Ingrid-I’s care for/with the patch embedded in material interventions in its disturbed ecology. I abandoned preconceived ideas (e.g. beauty as care, good form, etc.) and engaged speculatively in a practice of visiting, in which we sought material play as a way of troubling the depleting and neglecting practices that are also active in the ecology of the patch.

The sympoetics of Ingrid’s drawings Theoretical work following the new materialisms and the new empiricisms proposes to think pedagogically and philosophically on the immanence of learning and its connection with a learner who is materially embedded in a world of ongoing relations. For instance, working with Deleuze and Guattari’s (1983) concept of desire, early childhood theorist Liselott Mariett Olsson (2009) proposes the idea of assemblage of desire to characterize processes of thinking, talking, acting that always exist ‘in a complex network of relations’ (p. 100). In this case, the focus of pedagogy is not on the lack of knowledge of the learner but on the ongoing relations of the learner with many other things in the world that involve invention and material experimentation. Writing about making as a practice of knowing, anthropologist Tim Ingold (2013) stands critically on a view of making that starts with a project in mind and does not consider the immanence of becoming with the flow of materials and the matters they pose in terms of problems and affordances. Resonating with both Olsson’s and Ingold’s arguments, philosopher Erin Manning (2013) conceptualizes making in connection to a body in improvisatory movement, a body in-formation, that emerges out of frictions, accidents and disagreements with materiality – a body that knows through touch and movement rather than observation. For Manning, making is a way of involving in reciprocal co-forming activity with the world.

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These varieties of perspectives, coming from pedagogy, anthropology and philosophy seem to call for a new thinking around the relation of childhood and art that differs from the grip of constructivist perspectives defining learning in the arts, especially with young children (see Thompson, 2015). Constructivism commonly situates the child at the centre of the education process as intentionally leading processes of enquiry, meaning-making and invention of languages. Informed by new materialist and new empiricist concepts, art pedagogies can decentre the child and imagine art as a more-than-human process of making with agentive materials in a heterogeneous ecology of practices (see also PaciniKetchabaw et al., 2017). Additionally, Springgay and Rotas (2015) and Atkinson (2018) point that the relationality that art develops with the world is not one to stir connection or familiarity but one that emerges from disjunction, ruptures, disobediences with familiar habits, codes, procedures, in which art engages in the production of the new. Under this perspective, art is neither an object nor a knowledge but a force that moves transversally in a logic of affectual contamination, generating what Guattari (1995) calls virtual ecologies. As Atkinson (2018) notes, for understanding what a virtual ecology does, it is key to consider the concept of the virtual, which he describes as ‘a field of potential which is real but that awaits actualisation or a becoming’. In virtual ecologies, learning remains in a virtual realm until it is actualized. These actualizations are a production of the new giving art an ontogenetic effect. The affects, percepts and sensations that art produces are beyond the human, which permits a process of becoming that consists in thinking beyond ourselves (Grosz, 2008). As Atkinson (2018) affirms, the force of art can generate new existential territories and forms of social existence. The idea of art as a force that travels transversally through different temporalities, territories and languages re-composing materiality seems to confirm the fertility of thinking, art and childhood in contexts of parenting and care. Because parents and children move through more everyday spaces and levels of experience together, parents have more opportunities to be attentive, nurture and care for the development of virtual ecologies in which to exist and create. This may involve envisioning opportunities to cultivate curious practices, pose new questions to the world, develop an experimental togetherness in empirical situations that call for response, engage in rich relations with materials that are not exploitative, and involve processes of growing and moving with them (Haraway, 2016; Ingold, 2013; Stengers, 2005). It is possible that through such practices, ‘a multiplicity of local compositions of becoming with the world’ (Atkinson, 2018, p. 174) emerge connected to different contexts of living.

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To end the chapter, I want to consider the ideas of correspondence and sympoesis in connection to two drawings that Ingrid produced contemporaneously to the Lumino City play and the visits to the dandelion patch. As discussed earlier, correspondence refers to how some modes of living unintentionally reciprocate, support and host the production of other modes of living (Tsing, 2015). Correspondence is also a practice of joining with and knowing in participation with others in a movement of growth (Ingold, 2013). Haraway (2016) sees correspondence as working in sympoetic collaboration in which material play and artistic fabulation cultivate exploration and capacity to respond. The first of these two drawings is from April 2017; Ingrid worked on it in her room and came out with the piece finished to show me. We had this conversation, which I annotated at the time: Ingrid: This is a Death-Butterfly. She sucks up the life of flowers. See this flower all dead here in the bottom? Laura:  Yes, I do see. Is her head a skull? Ingrid:  Yes, I told you, she is a Death-Butterfly. See the antennae here? Laura: Yes? Ingrid: It is where all the magic comes from. They get into the flower [Ingrid performs a sucking noise and gesture with lips and hands] and kill them! Laura:  Wow, that is sad. Ingrid:  She is an evil butterfly [with dramatic intonation]. The drawing is made with neon-pink highlighter on regular A4 paper. It contains many intricate details composed by combinations and repetitions of simple and continuous marks: arches, criss-crossed lines, a variety of waves and elliptical movements, zig-zags, points, ovals and circles that reveal the drawing as an animated, embodied movement of lines that mesh and knot (Ingold, 2013) (see Figure 10.3). But the drawing is also the telling of a story. As such, it is the remarkable combination of elements of science and fiction in the rendering of the Death-Butterfly. On the one hand, it evokes the rubbing intimacy that butterflies as pollinators have with flowers. On the other hand, it detours from the fact that this relation should be one of mutual constitution. Its deadly antennae make me think of the tentacular Gorgons that Haraway (2016) describes as stories with which to think the Chthulucene. As the Death-Butterfly story shows, these are stories that give prominence to earthly creatures that touch, buzz, sting and suck. The stories of the Chthulucene project an attention for minor non-human stories ‘of, thought, love, and rage’ (Haraway, 2016, p. 56)

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and of metabolic transformations in which evil butterflies do not reciprocate anymore with flowers. They tell that ‘human beings are not the only important actors of the Chthulucene’ (2016, p. 55).

Figure 10.3  The Death-Butterfly by Ingrid Caudill-Trafí (seven years old), April 2017, reproduced with kind permission of the artist.

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Thinking with unintentional correspondences, and about how stories and materials are made-with other stories and materials, I find interesting that the Death-Butterfly along Lumino City and the grass patch are all stories that materially engage in issues of life and death. However, the Death-Butterfly is also a story that turns away from the anthropocentric focus of Lumino City, to deploy instead a more terrane and monstrous approach to worldly disturbances. At the same time, it seems to evoke some motifs connected with the patch and the dandelion flowers living, dying, ‘being murdered’ and ‘surviving’. Actualizations are always productions of the new. In this context, thinking of correspondence is not trying to match the drawing to an origin but to be situated in the middle of networks of relations (Olsson, 2009) and forming trajectories (Ingold, 2013). Correspondence could be thought as shared but unintentional pattern of concerns traversing through the drawing, the path, the play in lines of harmony and dissonance in-forming a territory of existence. The second drawing propels us to think in the play with the patch and the dandelions as co-composing and opening lines of becoming with other less capacious territories of existence. With this term I am describing school mandates about performing literacy at the grade level, as the ones enacted in Ingrid’s end-of-the-year assessment, which included recommendations to improve spelling, word memorization, and the use of words within simple sentences. With the desire to support Ingrid in her academic progress, Eric involved Ingrid in writing daily mini-stories that Ingrid had to invent. Eric encouraged Ingrid to utilize drawings and to find her own ways of combining sentences with visuals, so she could tell a story without the need of having to write long paragraphs. Stories included a black goldfish that ate popcorn, a magical creature made of many different animal parts, a fashion ad for hamsters, a frog that found a pair of roller skates, and others. One of the days that Eric and Ingrid were to write together, Ingrid declared that she could not imagine any more stories. Eric proposed that she did not have to imagine but write about something that she knew well. Under pressure Ingrid decided to write about dandelions, as if it was something that she could quickly tell from the top of her head. As the drawing dance initiated, I noticed how the telling of the story emerged and went along a rhythm that combined marks, gestures, pauses, conversations, evocations, writing and other semiotic elements (Atkinson, 2018). The drawing features ‘the cycle of the dandelion’, which is a representation of the blooming flower and a series of five steps that cover the process of becoming clog (Figure 10.4). This is a process that Ingrid had repeatedly observed in her ‘dandelion nurseries’. There are also representations of the dandelion seed and

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Figure 10.4  The life cycle of a dandelion, by Ingrid Caudill-Trafí (seven years old), August 2017, reproduced with kind permission of the artist.

the ‘dandelion milk’ pouring from inside the stem. There is a graphic too on how to split the stems, put them in water and transform them in spirals. There is a tiny drawing on an attached piece of black card on how to blow dandelion seeds, with five seeds taped over. All the knowledge about the dandelions that Ingrid presented in this story seems to evoke moments with the flower at home,

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around  the  neighbourhood, but also in the patch that we had lived together. Although the drawing does not contain a coherent linear story, it foregrounds ‘a world of becoming … through a maze of trajectories’ (Ingold, 2013, p. 31), which permits Ingrid to inhabit a territory in which stories are made of multiple substances of expression (MacLure, 2016). In a task of amplifying the territories of existence that parents co-create with children and more-than-human others, writing could be practised experimentally with art and care so what is perceived as problematic (e.g. not spelling at the grade level) is encountered and animated through other lines of living that permit composition, correspondences and becoming-with (Atkinson, 2018).

References Atkinson, D. (2018). Art, disobedience, and ethics: The adventure of pedagogy. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave. Baraister, L. (2009). Maternal encounters: The ethics of interruption. New York, NY: Routledge. Clayton, L. (2012). Art residency in motherhood manifesto. Accessed 17 May 2018: http://www.artistresidencyinmotherhood.com/kit/. Cremin, C. (2016). Exploring videogames with Deleuze and Guattari: Towards an affective theory of form. New York: Routledge. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1983). The anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Dimitrakaki, A. (2013). Gender, artwork and the global imperative: A materialist critique. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Grosz, E. (2008). Chaos, territory, art: Deleuze and the framing of the Earth. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Guattari, F. (1995). Chaosmosis: An ethico-aesthetic paradigm. Sidney, Australia: Power Publications. Hackett, A. (2017). Parents as researchers: Collaborative ethnography with parents. Qualitative Research, 17(5), 481–497. Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the trouble. Making kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ingold, T. (2013). Making: Anthropology, archeology, art and architecture. New York, NY: Routledge. Lippard, L. (2016). Never done: Women’s work by Mierle Lademan Ukeles. In P. C. Phillips, T. Finkelpearl, L. Harris, & L. R. Lippard (Eds.), Mierle Laderman Ukeless: Maintenance art (pp. 14–21). New York, NY: Prestel. MacLure, M. (2016). The refrain of the a-grammatical child: Finding another language in/for qualitative research. Cultural Studies – Critical Methodologies, 16(2), 173–182.

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Manning, E. (2013). Politics of touch: Sense, movement, sovereignty. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Meyer, L. (2012/2009). A studio of their own: The legacy of the Fresno feminist art experiment. In J. Hoffman (Ed.), The studio: Documents of contemporary art (pp. 194–195). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Olsson, L. M. (2009). Movement and experimentation in young children’s learning: Deleuze and Guattari in early childhood education. New York, NY: Routledge. Pacini-Ketchabaw, V., Kind, S., & Kocher, L. (2017). Encounters with materials in early childhood education. New York, NY: Routledge. Phillips, P. C. (2016). Making necessity art: Collisions of maintenance and freedom. In P. C. Phillips, T. Finkelpearl, L. Harris, & L. R. Lippard (Eds.), Mierle Laderman Ukeless: Maintenance art (pp. 22–193). New York, NY: Prestel. Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017). Matters of care: Speculative ethics in more than human worlds. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Savransky, M. (2016). The adventure of relevance: An ethics of social inquiry. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave. Sheringham, M. (2006). Everyday life: Theories and practices surrealism to the present by Michael Sheringham. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Springgay, S. & Rotas, N. (2015). How do you make a classroom operate like a work of art? Deleuzeguattarian methodologies of research-creation. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 28(5): 552–572. State of Play (2014a). Lumino city, video game, iPad. London: State of Play Games Ltd. State of Play (2014b). The making of Lumino City. Videorecording. YouTube. Accessed 15 May 2018: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTPQ0Mf3V18. Stengers, I. (2005). Introductory notes on an ecology of practices. Cultural Studies Review, 11(1), 183–196. Thompson, C. M. (2015). Constructivism in the art classroom: Praxis and policy. Arts Education Policy Review, 116, 118–127. Trafi-Prats, L. (2018). Mothering as an aesthetics of existence. In C. Shultte, & T. Thompson (Eds.), Communities of practice: Art, play, and aesthetics in early childhood (pp. 197–212). Cham, Switzerland: Springer. Tsing, A. (2015). The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Vecchi, V. (2010). Art and creativity in Reggio Emilia: Exploring the role of ateliers in early childhood education. London: Routledge. Vesce, S., Swanson, M., Roberts, G., Koenig, O., Veryouka, D., & Hope, I. A. (2014). Never alone, video game, iPad. Anchorage, AK: Upper One Games, E-Line Media.

Index action representation 170 scribble 161 activism 6, 9, 111, 128 activity theory 14–16, 21 adult art-making 6, 8. See also child/ childhood art child vs. 8 adult-child dichotomy 88, 105 adults’ photography 49, 51 After Effects software animation tool 181 aging, biological processes of 170 alternative education 31 alternative spaces 9–10 American education 159 anthropology 203 anti-developmental 2 apprehensive knowledge 172 arrangement of forms 140 art/arts. See also child/childhood art vs. care 7, 8 Colebrook’s conceptualization of 117 and community education 40, 42, 43 education pedagogies 43 as materialized affective processes 117 materials 24, 107 media 15 movements 195 normalized version of 32 pedagogy, forms of 4 practice 196 provision, postdevelopmental approaches to 39 room 20 teacher 19 art class intergenerational 6 observations of 5 participants of 107 text-making in 102

art education foundation of 142 practices in 191 Artful Scribbles (Gardner) 160 articulation of alternative stories 111 artistic decisions 21 artistic inquiry 17 artistic interventions 127–8 artistic practice 87 artist residency in home 9 in motherhood 195–6 Artist Residency in Motherhood (ARIM) 195 art-making 13–14, 20, 92, 99, 102, 105 activity of 18 in alternative spaces 9–10 assumptions of 182 characteristics of 51 child (see child/childhood art) cognitive development in 18 community 26 concept formation and transformation 16–17 conceptualization of 9 context of 19 emergence of 185 experimentation and invention 22 framework for research on 16–18 imaginations 23 implications 25–6 inquiry 17 intentions in 21 meaning-making 17–18 noticing 24 positive significations 101 possibilities for 23–4 practices and procedures of 30 problem finding and problem-solving 23–4 problem seeking 17 process of 9

Index questions about 13 reasons for 21 in school community 19 art-making assemblage 187 artwork 163 art-world-making 183–4 assemblage of desire 202 assemblage of stories 147 assertiveness 81–2 Athey, C. 159 Atkinson, D. 191, 203 ontology of learning 192 audio materiality, visualization of 186 auditory amalgamation 185 authentic child, conceptualization of 89 authenticity 62 authentic self 89 Banister, H. aggression 82 assertiveness 81–2 attachment 81 behaviour 68 choice of topics 81 curiosity 80 developmental models 67 drawings 72–8, 84 environmental context 70, 79–80 environmental incentives 67 fascination with visual appearance 78 implications 84–5 learning strategies 69 linear stage approach 67 open-ended questions 69 principle method 71 self-motivation of 68, 82 social incentives 80 social isolation 67–8 social relatedness 82–4 stage-by-stage approaches 67 theoretical assumptions 68 Barad, K. 50, 179 Baraister, L. 192 Barthes, R. 164 Bataille, G. 154, 159–60, 164 battery packs 177, 180, 185, 186 Bennet, J. 111 Berger, J. 171 Blaise, M. 32–3 Boaz, G. 156, 163

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Book Creator app 93–5 Bresler, L. 88 British colonizers 130 Bruner, J. 155–6, 162 Burman, E. 2, 4, 85, 105, 114, 149, 150 buzzers/buzzing 177, 181–2 action of muffling 185–6 blaring of 182 entanglements 185 exploration of 186–7 physical 186 possibilities of 184 sense-making with 184 sound 181, 183 vibration 182 CACD. See community arts and cultural development (CACD) Cannella, G. 2, 88–90, 105 Capitalocene’s story of depletion 197 care, art vs. 7, 8 ChatterPix animated collage 96 app 94, 106 self-portrait 103 child-centred pedagogies 113 child/childhood art 1–2, 4, 6, 8, 15, 19 vs. adult art-making 8 contradictory framing of 8 cultural and social factors 5 developmental approaches to 119 developmental descriptions of 144 developmentalist discourses 117–18 developmental paradigm 2 improvisational process of 6 making process 5 observations of 14 open-endedness and complexity of 7 postdevelopmental reading of 30 postmodern disassembly of 163 (re-)conceptualize 1 relation to 10 role of 7 social settings of 138 studio space in 7 study of 1, 10 ways of exploring 3 child/children/childhood 13. See also child/childhood art; childhood art vs. adult art 8–9

212

Index

artistic development 13 artistic practices 154 art-making 18–25 art pedagogies 107 building relationships 23 cognitive activity 23 cognitive development of 13 cognitive engagement in, art-making 23 in community settings 38 cult of 156 design of learning experiences for 187 development 170 developmentalism and human exceptionalism 119 drawings 137–9, 148, 155 education 3, 30, 88 educators 114 engaging in art activity 21 engaging in art-making 19 entanglements 129 experimentation 183 expressive art and design 118–19 imagination of 24 knowledge 192 learning 178–9 Vygotsky conceptualizations of 3 and well-being 90 making judgements 24–5 noisy designs 180 normative visions of 42 pedagogical foundations of 105–6 pedagogical practices 114 perceptions of art-making 19 scholars 89 semiotic practices 105 skill development 89 studies 107 thinking of 138, 192 visions of 32 ways of ‘knowing’ 7 childhood art 87–8, 111–12 anti-method of feminist materialism 118–19 conceptualizations of 120 drawings 137–8 emotion 100–1 figuring agentic child 114–16 findings 94 glitter in 120–31 interests 139–42

layered expressions 99–100 learning to listen 143–5 literature 88–90 as materialized affective processes 117 materials and artistic practices 112–14 methodology 92–4 modes and media 94–9 relationships 102–4 seductive certainties and self-fulfilling prophecies 148–50 talking points 104–7 theoretical framework 90–2 Chthulucene project 7, 10, 204–5 circuitry materials 181 Clark, V. 88–9, 107 classroom 19, 31, 138, 139, 145, 146, 188 early childhood 187 elementary school 14 learning 19 preschool 177 spaces 188 Clayton, L. 9, 193, 195, 196 Colebrook, C. 117, 127 Coleman, B. 128 collective identity 193 colour paintings 20 ‘common sense’ ontology 50 communities of practice (CoP) 14–16, 19 community of art practice 26 contexts 43 festivals 40 ideas and practices of 15 learning 9 pedagogy 5 playgroups 29 projects 38 community arts and cultural development (CACD) 29 community-based arts 43 education 33, 35 projects 33, 40 public pedagogies of 36 community education 29–31 arts in 31, 36, 42, 43 (see also community-based arts) childhood art in 30, 33 description of 29 discussion 42–4 diversity 39–41

Index feminist leadership 36–9 pedagogic invention 41–2 personal history 36–7 as postdevelopmental learning 31–4 postdevelopmental reading of 32, 34 scholarship 43 settings 34 significant aspects of 36 in UK and Australia 34–6 vitality of 42 community educators 30, 36–8 competence 89, 169, 172, 198 comprehensive knowledge 172 contemporary childhood 10 continual dialogue 170 contrived spontaneity 163 cookie cutters 177 CoP. See communities of practice (CoP) copying 21, 70, 71, 84, 85 craft 198 designs 180 loss of 197 materials 124 skills 84 Cratty, B. 154 creativity 23, 27, 114 children’s 172 inherent 2 inner 2 magical 2 ‘original’ sources of 163 scribble’s kind of 164 cross-cultural research, interpretations of 137 cult of childhood 156 cultural activity 14, 18 learning as participation in 15–16 cultural arts festival 40 cultural context 16 cultural knowledge 16 cultural practice, learning as participation in 15–16 cultural primitivism 156 culture contributions to 25 creation of 13 creators of 5 process or 154 social 137 visual 137

213

curriculum 112, 191 dynamic interpretation of 169 formalities of 30 frameworks 113, 118 progressive theories of 149 structures of 33 dandelions 201 groups of 202 life cycle of 207 nurseries 206–7 data analysis 93, 94 Death-Butterfly (drawing) 205–6 Deleuze, G. 5, 47–8, 50, 138, 144, 148, 167, 169, 172, 179, 202 deleuzeguattarian concept 32 DeMarie, D. 48 De Rijke, V. 7–9, 51 Derrida, J. 166 design constituted practices of 179 definition of 179 Design Playshop study 179 desire 202 assemblage of 202 development 3–4 importance of 3 needs 172 norms of 88 patterns of 2, 5 stages of 112, 113 developmentalism 6, 7, 10, 33, 88, 89, 111 developmentalist logic 10, 114 developmental paradigm 1–5 developmental psychology 1–2, 88, 137, 145 developmental stage 148, 149 developmental theory 3, 88 limitations of 149 pseudo-science of 149 developmental thinking 3 developmental vocabulary 162 digital apps 99 digital media 93, 187 Dimitrakaki, A. 193, 195 diversity 5, 30–1, 36, 39–41 domesticate difference 50 Dosse, F. 167–8 drawing 5, 8, 79, 82, 148, 170 development 73 features 206

214

Index

imagination 74–5, 77 large-scale collection of 137 medium of 75–6 performative unfolding of 137–8 stages of 75 subjects and modes of 138 Duncum, P. 2, 5, 8–9 Early Years Foundation Stage Curriculum (EYFS) 113 ecology of practices 191–4, 202 artist residency in motherhood 195–6 caring for things 197–8 maintenance 193–4 mutual becomings in 192 sympoetics of Ingrid’s drawings 202–8 education 41–2, 191 alternative 31 binaried visions of 32 community (see community education) formal 40 form of 31 implications for 25–6 laissez-faire approach to 89 leadership roles in 38 postdevelopmental readings of 31–2 postdevelopmental theories of 32 to psychoanalysis 156 role of 89 school-based 32 theory, conceptual developments in 32 educational opportunities for children 90 educational psychology 162 educators 2, 33, 89, 105, 113, 149, 160, 178 adult 113 childhood 114 community 29, 35–37, 41 Einarsdottir, J. 49 electronic buzzers 177 emotion 100–1 demonstrations of 100 ‘self-regulation’ of 106–7 enabling environments 113 Engeström, Y. 14–15 Environmental Play project 41–2 environment, arts-supportive 26 epistemological frameworks 7 Ethridge, E. A. 48 experimental togetherness approaches 192

experimentation 22, 51, 183, 202 EYFS. See Early Years Foundation Stage Curriculum (EYFS) familiarity 50, 62 fascination 6, 8, 22, 117, 140 femininity 127, 128 valid forms of 128 feminist leaders/leadership 5, 30, 37–9 feminist new materialism 118–19 feminist theories 89 formal education 15, 29–31, 40 formal schooling 34, 43–4 forms of local knowledge 4 Froebel, F. 155 Fry, R. 167 Fuller, P. 166–7 funds of identity 6, 9, 89 funds of knowledge 6, 9, 89 Gadamer, H. G. 172 open-ended model of conversation 172 Gagliardi, L.-M. 6–9, 87 Gardner, H. 67, 146, 160, 162, 164, 170, 172 Gill, R. 128 glitter/glittering in childhood art 120–31 in early childhood 120–31 liveliness of 128, 129 make-up 129 performative aspects of 131 practices 126–9 in ultrasound gel 125–7 global capitalism 130 global cosmetic industries 129 Golomb, C. 13, 78, 141, 159 graphisms 164 grass patch 198–202 practice with 199 Guattari, F. 5, 47–8, 50, 144, 167, 169, 172, 179, 202–3 Gunn, A. 88–9 habitual thoughts 7 Haraway, D. J. 7, 10, 111, 114, 119, 121, 123, 125, 129, 131, 192–4, 196–7, 201, 203–4 Head Start classroom 139

Index Head Start programme 145 Hedges, H. 169 hegemonic discourses 127 Heydon, R. 6, 8–9, 87, 90, 92–3, 102–6 human cognitive process 14 human development 153 human educators 113 human exceptionalism 111, 127 image, edges of 58–61 imagination 14, 23, 24 inventions of 26 immaterialities 92 individual products, creation of 102–3 informal education 9, 29, 34 infrastructures 198 Ingold, T. 4, 47, 119–20, 143, 202–4, 206, 208 inherent creativity 2 intent watchfulness 8 intergenerational art 6, 9 class 92 programme 92 intergenerational relationships, importance of 102 Jolley, R. 172 Kearney, M. C. 129 Kellog, R. 159 Keune, A. 6, 8, 10 kindergartens 29, 34 children 140 Kind, S. 49–51, 53, 64, 91 Klee, P. 154, 163–4 Klein, M. 156–7 Knight, L. 5, 9, 148 knowledge 15, 179, 198 apprehensive 172 comprehensive 172 cultural 16 funds of 6, 9 and learning 15 social 16 Kraftl, P. 29, 31–2, 34, 36, 40–1 language 37 of art-making 105 characteristic of 172 dominance of 48

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expression 195 imagery and components of 160 interpretations 64 in shaping ideas 17 verbal 163 Lark-Horovitz, B. 142 Lather, P. 3–4, 118 layered expressions 99–100 leadership feminist 5, 30, 37–9 roles in education 38 learners/learning 14, 16, 33, 38, 179 childhood 3 communities of practice (CoP) 15 definitions of 179 design 187 explicit appreciation for 104 immanence of 196 knowledge and 15 ontology of 192 as participation in cultural practice and activity 15–16 postdevelopmental theories of 30, 42 sites 33 spaces 30, 43, 88–9, 188 ways of 178 linearity 32, 162 literacy 91, 169 multimodal 91 literacy learning 178 Luehrman, M. 149 Lumino City game 196–7, 200–1, 204, 206 Maclagan, D. 163 magical creativity 2 maker practices, assemblages of 181 makerspace 177 in classrooms 179 exploratory tinkering in 178 preschool 178 making, humanist notions of 178 Malin, H. 5, 8, 20–1, 23, 51, 164 managerial articulation 43 Manning, E. 111, 117, 119, 128, 131, 202 Marbacher, P. 154 Marme-Thompson, C. 107 material analysis 187 materialist ontologies 114 materialist philosophy 6 materiality 92, 181, 182, 185

216 material reality 179 materials 117 Mathews, J. 155, 170–2 McClure, M. 2, 8 McRobbie, A. 128 meandered learning 160 meaning-making 17–18 mediated action 182 mediated discourse theory 179, 180 message-bearing artefacts 179 Michaux, H. 166 microcosm of process 138 microgenesis 160–1 Mills, S. 29, 31–2, 34, 41 mnemonic symbols 153 modal possibilities, maintenance of 184 modernist developmental theories 90 multi-age groups 35 multimodal analysis 93, 180 multimodality 182 multimodal lens 178 multimodal literacy 91, 106 multimodal microanalysis 180 multipurpose spaces 34 Naville, S. 154 neo-liberal market economy 90 Never Alone (video game) 196 Newman, B. 163 noticing 24, 114 O’Keefe’s style 94–6 Olsson, L M. 202, 206 open-ended process 172 Osgood, J. 3, 6, 8–10, 114, 117–19, 122, 129 Pacini-Ketchabaw, V. 120, 203 Paine, S. 155–6, 170 paintings 20, 22, 24, 79, 84, 94, 96 colour 20 face 129 lesson 20 self-portrait 98 tissue paper 100 watercolour 99 parenting 8, 112, 155, 192–3, 195, 203 pedagogic invention 5, 9, 30, 34, 36, 41–2 pedagogic work 191

Index pedagogy 9, 33, 202, 203 function 191 progressive theories of 149 Peppler, K. 6, 8, 10, 177, 179 Pestalozzi, J. 155 photographs/photography 5, 10, 62–3, 87, 127, 167 affective dimensions 62 authentic and informal 49 beyond edges of image 58–61 children’s 48–50 engagement with 51 in home 52 as sense-making 50–2 containment 54–7 method of analysis 53–4 orientation 57–8 paying attention to objects 62–3 themes 48, 54, 63–4 viewpoint 57 physical buzzing 186 Piaget, J. 155–6, 170 Pinar, W. 169 playdough 177 postdevelopmental framing 32 postdevelopmentalism 32 postdevelopmental learning 40, 43 community education as 31–4 theories 42 postdevelopmental theorization 43 postdevelopmental thinking 3, 32, 172 practices, heterogeneous ecology of 203 preschool 177–8 art-world-making, doing and undoing 183–6 children 140 classroom 177 discussion and implications 186–8 findings 181–2 makerspace 178, 181 mediated action, interactions, and multimodality 183 research context and process 179–81 theoretical background 178–9 primordial freshness 166 printmaking techniques 94 problem seeking and problematization 17 proposals 39 psychoanalysis, education to 156 Puig de la Bellacasa, M. 192–3, 195, 198

Index race 160 realism 73, 75 ‘real’ school-based learning 33 reconceptualist theories 89, 90 refrains 169 refusal space 3, 4 relational materialism 179 relief print 94, 95 repetitive assemblage 181 representational logic 114 rhizomatic networks 169 Richards, R. D. 48–9, 51 Robinson, K. 3, 118, 125 Rosenberg, H. 161 Rotas, N. 203 Ryan, S. 31–3, 36–7, 40 Sakr, M. 5, 8, 10 school-based educations 32 school-readiness discourses 112 school/schooling 9, 34, 43 assumptions of 182 literacy demands of 112 scribbles 9, 153–8 as art form 163–7 by child patients 157 creativity 164 developmental educationalists’ observations on 153 as developmental marker 158–62 in early childhood 13 example of 153 fortuitous realism 162 inconclusive conclusion 169–73 inspired by Big Hero6 168 inspired drawing 171 motor babbling 154 origins 154 preschematic stage 159 process of 7 produced at home 166 romancing 162 schematic stage 159 study of 170 transitional stage 159 types of 159 as vibration of thinking and resistance 167–9 wall action 161 Seasick self-portrait 98

217

Seefeldt, C. 88 self-expression 2 self-fulfilling prophecy 160 self-motivation 68 self-portrait paintings 98 Sellers, M. 169 semiosis 91 sense-making 50–2, 184 sequential unfolding 159 Shakeel, S. 127–8 shared facilities 92 shared knowledge 197 shared-site intergenerational programming 92 sharing self 22 Sharples, M. 49 Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine 51 signifying ruptures 167 skills, demonstration of 114 skyscrapers 22, 26 social activity 14, 18 social art-making activity 25 social capital, accumulation of 141 social class 160 social community in UK 35 social context 16 social culture 137 social development theories 14 social incentives 80 social interactions 19 social isolation 67–8, 84 social knowledge 16 social learning process 16 Social Learning Theory 68 social practice 148 social relatedness 82–4 social semiotics 91 social services in UK 35 society contributions to 25 creation of 13 sociocultural development, Vygotsky theories of 14 sociocultural learning theories 13–15, 23 framework 25 framework of 19 as research tool 18 sociocultural theoretical framing 3, 4 sociocultural theory 4 spaces-times of care 192

218 special education 40 speculative openings 192–3 Springgay, S. 203 Steiner, R. 4, 154–5, 162, 173 Stephenson, A. 48 Stewart, K. 111 storytelling 22, 99, 196, 198 St. Pierre, E. A. 2–4, 118 students 18–19, 21, 84, 85, 139, 143, 149 art-making 20 interaction among 25 subjectivities 114 subversive ruptures 51 symbolization 170 sympoesis 192, 194, 204 Tarr, P. 88, 139, 162 text-making in writing 94 text/mode-based analysis 93 thinking 155, 196, 206 of childhood 192 dominant modes of 10 habitual ways of 131 hand 160 Thompson, Christine Marmé 6, 8, 9 A Thousand Plateaus (Guattari) 167 tissue paper dream painting 100 Touch Sanitation Performance (1979– 1980) 194 Trafi-Prats, L. 7–10, 192, 199, 201 translation of data 187 transmodal semiosis 91 Tsing, A. 196, 198–200, 204

Index Tuana, N. 111, 118, 121, 123, 126–7 Twombly, Cy 164–6, 173 Uhrmacher, P. B. 4 Ukeles, M. L. 193–4, 200 ultrasonography assemblages 125–6 ultrasound gel 125, 126 universal developmental sequences 4 universalism 32 Unrath, K. 149 Vea Vecchi, idea of care 200 Veroff, J. B. 68, 80 virtual ecologies 203 virtual ecology 203 viscous porosity, concept of 127 visual arts, challenge for 164 visual centrality of humans 187 visual culture 137 visual realism 2 visual texts 99–100 Vygotsky, L. 14–15, 17, 137, 142, 144, 154–5 conceptualizations of childhood learning 3 theories of sociocultural development 14 Walsh, D. 142 Western educational system 8 Wilson, B. 75, 78, 138, 142, 147, 163 Wilson, M. 75, 142 Wohlwend, K. 6, 8, 10, 91, 178–80 Wood, E. 169 writing-readiness 2