Decolonising the knowledges of young children through music and the temporal arts

Abstract

In this paper I take a new-materialist and posthuman approach to ask: How can improvisation in the temporal arts reconceptualise and broaden our adult understandings of young children’s communication and knowledge?

I draw on two filmed events from the recent SALTmusic project (Pitt & Arculus 2018). This filmed event data has been re-turned to many times used to illustrate unique and particular events which took place in the past, but when re-viewedand re-told constitute a new and particular happening or entanglements (Barad, 2007) between the original event, the video technology which brings the past into the present and the philosophical thinking that the events inspire.

While there is growing body of literature and research situated in new materialist and posthuman perspectives in early childhood, there is very little research focusing on temporal arts and two-year-olds.  The temporal arts are intrinsic, indescribable, knowledges based in relation and movement (Manning 2009). Improvised temporal arts practices are not concerned with representation or reproduction and they offer an alternative to the ways in which spoken language in early childhood is increasingly used to narrate, describe, direct and name (Maclure, 2013, 2016). In the first part of this paper, I critique the fixation on young children being made to talk as early as possible and call for improvised arts practices as decolonising pedagogies where children’s own knowledges are able to inform and shape their education.

By revisiting Trevarthen and Malloch’s Communicative Musicality and Stern’s ideas on vitality affect and the present moment to see how they entangle and transform within new materialist and posthuman philosophy, I question and critique the developmental discourses that conceptualise young children’s musical behaviours as proto-music  and instead frame the temporal arts, within a posthumanism, as having the potential to cut through the subject/object binary. I put forward the idea of children’s subjectivities and their relationship with the present moment as a vital knowledge that is much more than a stage.

Taking ideas of a ‘pedagogy of improvisation’ (Lines, 2017) as having unique and particular affordances for collaborative thinking with movement, sound and gesture. I will discuss improvisation, and its relation to young children’s transversal, rhizomic thinking (Dahlberg 2016) as an ethical responsibility to the give-and-take, in-the-moment, on-going creative processes that are unfolding. I resist dominant forces in education policy that colonize childhood and attempt to make pedagogy a fixed and measureable object.