The creative thinktank was hosted by Katherine Zesserson , Professor Graham Welsh & Professor Margaret Barrett. I attended with Dr Jessica Pitt, Dr Christina Macrae, Dr Julian Knight and a cohort of strategists in early childhood music, music psychology and early childhood education.
The Snape Matings page for the creative think tank event is here
This is a transcript of my opening introduction to the group
Snape 15th May 2019
My particular interest is in improvisation across art forms and as a pedagogical approach.
Improvisation involves an awareness of the ever-shifting relationships between our self and world, people and things. There is a relationship between improvisation and wellbeing
I am interested in how pedagogies of improvisation can enable ways of understanding young children’s (and our own) multiplicitious, performative, relationships with the world.
This is a pedagogical strategy that does not rely on words and does not have an end point. It does not involve directing children, telling them what to do or narrating what they are doing.
It involves - to quote musician David Lines - ‘a responsibility within the unfolding ensemble to stay sensitive and also keep exploring. Itrequires openness, alertness and attentiveness to sustain creatively’.
The reason I work with little children is because they are extremely good at improvisation.
They improvise effortlessly across modes of music, movement, object and chorus. They are attuned to what is emerging. They are always in relation to the world and they are not concerned so much with goals but rather processes that can move in any direction at any time, rhythms across modes, refrains across senses. As Dahlberg and Moss say ‘young children are transversal and rhizomic thinkers’. So how about, as a starting point for education, we try not to break this?
Deleuze and Guattari speak rather a lot about music, small children and improvisation. They speak about children, music and improvisation to speak about how the actual cosmos operates. This is a testament to music, improvisation and children.
Wellbeing is a term which, like creativity, is slippery and hard to define. I personally think of both terms as requiring a sense of connection with the world. But following Manning, Barad, D&G among others, I am interested in moving beyond a boundaried, isolated, individual, and joining with forces that are more-than-me.
D&G: But to improvise is to join with the world or meld with it. One ventures from home on the thread of a tune.
I am interested in considering, ideas of subject/object, identity and self, as porous, and fuzzy rather than fixed and absolute because I find this feeling of melding with the world profoundly joyful and I see the same joy in children and adult improvisers. Like a murmuration of birds. Whole and part of, at the same time.
My questions are: How do we make visible these transversal, musical knowledges and improvisational skills in order for children to be able to inform and shape the educational policies that affect them? How do we start to build a workforce of artist-educators who can do this highly skilled nuanced work? Where are the artists who can develop and nurture improvisational practices? We are not producing them, the skills are not valued and we are going to need them.
I think it is a mistake to place young children at the bottom of a developmental hierarchy. I think it is mistaken to explain away young children’s knowledge - for instance Communicative Musicality as proto-music. I think it is a mistake to justify music education by what it can do to help other subjects. I think there is an ethical imperative to resist these discourses and take what children do both very seriously and very playfully.
Finally, we sit here as adults talking about children who do not yet talk. We must own up to this being a colonising act and keep it in mind at all times.