Linda M. Knight

Not as it Seems: Using Deleuzian Concepts of the Imaginary to Rethink Children's Drawings

Deleuze states in his 1990 work Negotiations that signs are realised in ideas. Although Deleuze referred to cinema, his thinking about signs and ideas can apply to drawings. Cinema is moving imagery and drawing is static; however, both are informed and constructed from realised ideas that continue to shift beyond the artefact. Theories about childrens drawings have historically pertained to establishing schematic universalities rather than acknowledging the agglomerative connections they make to the multiple things occurring around a drawing as it is created. Universal schemas persist within early childhood art discourses despite the growth of critical theory research into other aspects of childhood. Deleuzes assertions about the signs and classifications of cinema help to contest notions of schematic development – that is, that children should progress through particular iconic drawing stages at particular ages. Deleuzes quotations and thoughts on the imaginary and imagination are referenced to interrogate ‘scientific’ knowledges and the gathering of evidential truths about childrens intellectual growth and development. Four examples from a dataset of drawings from a pilot study undertaken by the author that tested the methodological potential of intergenerational collaborative drawing in early childhood settings facilitate focused discussion on the above contestations.

Communication and Transformation through Collaboration: Rethinking Drawing Activities in Early Childhood.

This article is a study of the arts in early childhood as a way of learning, for both children and their teachers. The author suggests that drawing can be a powerful tool for collaborative approaches to pedagogy. When teachers draw with children, pathways of communication can be opened, and the collaborative exercise can trigger processes of transformation for both adult and child. In order to present challenges to more traditional, hands-off pedagogical practices in arts education, this article is an account of reflexive arts pedagogies, and how they can work to improve communication and understandings between adults and children. Within the educational contexts of Australian preschooling and primary schooling, the author examines the process of collaborative drawing, and how this can enable a process of transformation. Her analysis, and the accompanying examples of reflexive practices, combine complementary lenses, socio-cultural and postmodern, that she sees as working in harmony to produce new possibilities, in arts education in particular, and, more broadly, in early childhood education.

Drawing out critical thinking: testing the methodological value of drawing collaboratively

Early childhood research has long established that drawing is a central, and important activity for young children. Less common are investigations into the drawing activity of adults involved in early childhood. A team of adult early childhood researchers, with differing exposures and familiarities with drawing, experimented with intergenerational collaborative drawing with colleagues, students, family members and others, to explore the effectiveness of drawing as a research process and as an arts-based methodology. This testing prompted critical thinking into how drawing might facilitate research that involves young children, to operate in more communicable ways, and how research-focused drawings might occur in reference to a research project.

Imagining Social Justice

This article examines how creativity and the arts can assist teachers who teach from a social justice perspective, and how knowledge built through meaningful experiences of difference can make a difference. Just as imagining is central to visual arts practice, so too is the capacity to imagine a necessity for social justice. The authors ask what art can do, and how art can work, to bring about greater understandings and practices around social justice and the early years. A version of social justice that is built on a recognition of differences requires the capacity to be sensitive to the multiple voices that need to be heard, and the ability to imagine how lives might be lived differently. The arts can provide powerful means for thinking social justice, and the experiences described in this article can have application in addressing social justice in the professional preparation of prospective teachers. Three teacher educators who teach from a social justice perspective apply a collective biography methodology to their stories of art activity. Data was collected from three sites: transcripts, notes and digital images from a salon evening; ethnographic observations, field notes and artefacts from a school classroom; and a/r/tographic data generated in a university art classroom. The data was analysed using Foucault and the conceptual work of other post-structuralist philosophies in order to explore how aesthetic and creative artistic activity could excite imaginations and open up multiple possibilities for richer forms of educational outcomes — for teacher educators, their students and, ultimately, for young children.

Grotesque gestures or sensuous signs? Rethinking notions of apprenticeship in early childhood education

Deleuze asserts that education is a mass of signs. Children learn to decode these signs, albeit in randomized and individual ways, displaying great skill in decoding some signs but not others, and demonstrating different acuities with different clusters of signs. Deleuzian notions of apprenticeship, a fluid becoming to knowledges as formal education is encountered, operate at some distance to linear, culturally loaded apprenticeship concepts embedded in sociocultural theories. Conceptualizing education as gestures and signs, and apprenticeship as temporal rather than developmental, makes it difficult to try to quantify what is learnt. Deleuzian notions of apprenticeship, whilst troubling, can begin to dislodge teaching and learning conventions, particularly around accessing and responding. This essay explores drawing as education in Deleuzian terms.

Rearticulating Arts, Research, and Education from the Disciplinary to the Affective in Public Arts Practices

The residual meanings attached to the arts emerge through histories that have maintained disciplinary difference between dance, music, art, drama. This modernist persistence affects intellectual and corporeal innovation in school-based arts so how might a rearticulation of arts practices, as well as research and education procedures from the disciplinary to the affective bring about new conceptual and processual possibilities? How might this rearticulation bring about new conceptual understandings about what arts education, arts practice, arts research can be? Two distinctly different examples of urban-based arts projects: David Bowie; and Out of the Box children’s arts festival are rearticulated through affect. While each project, when thought about in a disciplinary sense is wildly different, reconceptualising them through affect helps to consider new arts education futures.

Curious hybrids: creating ‘not-quite’ beings to explore possible childhoods

ABSTRACT Communications between adults and young children can expose different ideas and opinions. Adults and children have different capacities to speak, these discursive spaces can become filled with assumptions, stereotyping and conventional thinking about power and agency. If communication shifts away from the purely discursive, what might be exposed about the explorations, investigations and fantasies adults and children indulge in? Some time ago my young daughter obsessively drew hybrid beings. Created from mixtures of animal, object, human and creature forms, these beings, which are ‘not-quite’, are becoming, able to transform via myriad mutations. We agreed to collaborate and draw additional hybrid beings to experiment with becoming-other through complex entanglements of forms, to complicate, morph and (trans)form from our human selves to hybrid others. The ‘not-quite-ness’ of our monstrous hybrids subvert the conventions of ‘being’ and prompt contemplations about childhood subjectivities, identities, conventionalities and actively interrogate the assumptive knowledges and subjectifications that are held about young children in early childhood professional and academic systems.

Artists and Transpedagogy: Possibilities for Enriching Teaching and Learning Through Radical Engagement with the Arts

Over the last decade, cultural institutions have worked hard to connect audiences with contemporary arts practices that are no longer created by a sole person working alone but by artists who work collaboratively and across disciplines.

Arts-Research-Education: Connections and Directions

Drawing from an international authorship and having global appeal, this book scrutinizes, suggests and aggravates the relationships, boundaries and connections between arts, research and education in various contexts. Building upon existing publications in the field of arts-based educational research, it deliberately connects and disconnects the terms in order to expose and broaden the scope of this field thereby encouraging fresh perspectives. This book portrays both contemporary theoretical prospects as well as contemporary examples of practice. It also presents work of emerging scholars, thereby ‘growing the field’. The book includes academic text-based chapters, as well as poetry, narrative fiction, visual essays, and combinations of text-image-sound/video that demonstrate performance of music, theatre, exhibition and dance. This book provides and provokes critical dialogue about the forms, representations, dissemination and intersections of the arts, research and education. This is a focused collection and resource for scholars and students with an international authorship, perspective and audience.

Digital Aesthetics and Multidimensional Play in Early Childhood

Digital imagery saturates contemporary life. A rapid growth in affordable technologies calls for investigation into the impact of media on young children, particularly as the explosion of smartphone and tablet technologies mean that even very young children easily access digital media and imagery. The enthusiastic way children engage with digital imagery suggests a contemporary childhood lived through digital aesthetics and through intermingling ‘imaginary’, ‘experienced’, and ‘actual’ dimensionalities. Young children also experience digital tablet and computer technologies in their learning environments so these multidimensionalities include the routines, activities and events that occur daily in kindergartens. As a basic question, how do kindergartens become multidimensional? In considering this question digital and non-digital art and play help reconceptualise early childhood learning environments as aesthetically rich, as spatially and temporally fluid and as a space where ideas and concepts can be explored and troubled by adults and young children. Drawing on a research project that took iPads into kindergarten sites in Queensland, Australia, I propose how tablet technologies in daily art and play routines contest aesthetic conventions and destabilise the fixed physicalities and temporalities of early childhood sites and the children that attend them.