But instead use space, sound, materials, and bodies to converse with young children?
This is the presentation Dr Christina MacRae and I gave at the LILA (Learning at the Intersection of Language and Arts) Conference in May 2020: Saying the Unsayable
In the field of early childhood, it is all too easy for certain kinds of complicities to become a threat to the order of things. Children who mimic the actions of other children, children’s intimacies with material objects, or adults who respond to children’s moving bodies with mimicry are all instances where complicité can appear to threaten ‘normal’ behaviour.
It is this unspoken understanding that exists between those involved that becomes especially threatening. There is an invisible quality to complicity - it can only be sensed by those inside its playing out or those paying careful attention.
Visitors observing a More-Than-Words session might initially feel troubled by the lack of a single point of focus: the multiple and often brief encounters, the botched attempts at ‘finding a game’ and the sense of being not included in games that others were part of. This leaves practitioners in a risky place where they might appear, as Shotter says, “unprofessional” or “incompetent” and unable to “account” for themselves to those around them. But these are improvised encounters, created in the moment, they are always-evolving, and that demands not knowing what is happening or where things are headed. Attending to the potential in moments of encounter as a significant aspect of this improvisational pedagogy takes us beyond habit and the already known. There are different levels of complicitébetween different players but during these thinking-with encounters, talking runs the risk of killing this confederacy in its tracks.
We would like to also suggest that children are uniquely positioned to teach us about complicity as a force, since it is a quality that is often supressed as reason and language take hold of us. As Iris Duhn notes: very young children, are, “less caught up in the illusion of a self that controls and governs, than older humans who have learned to see, feel and think the self in particular ways.”
Young children also can be distinguished as having a particular “style” that emanates from a corporality that is attuned to the spaces and objects that they encounter. We share Maclure’s caution that we should be wary of romanticising this ‘wild’ element of early childhood but we do think that the affective alliances that infant bodies create with other bodies, both human and more-than-human, should be recognised as capacities rather than as behaviours that threaten the development of reason and language.
As we noted earlier, the term complicity is generally used rhetorically in negative terms, and certainly the contagious complicities of young children running or shouting in unison are ones that adults are fearful of triggering. ….The point we would like to make is that complicity is neither good or bad, but rather, should be thought of as a force that makes us capable of acting in a multitude of ways.
We argue in our forthcoming paper about complicity that paying attention to the way that bodies are set in motion reveals something that is common to us all and produces what Taylor and Blaise call a “collective body or the body-world”. They go on to speculate that to be open to this kind of learning, we need to acknowledge that “we are never operating independently in the world, never acting on intentional agency alone”, and that, instead, “we are moving as a constituent part of a collective worldly body – stirred and affected by our relations with all manner of more-than-human others, living and inert, in our common worlds”.
Acknowledging these as a kind of contingent and situated production of knowledge requires us to take the physical and material qualities of the spaces in which we encounter families very seriously. Working with the concept of complicitébrings a different disciplinary knowledge from the performing arts in order to unsettle the dominance of linguistic and cognitive narratives that have so fully colonised the field of early childhood education. Sumara and Davies point out that while the etymological roots of this word share a history with the word complexity, complicity is also about being implicated in something and being an accomplice.
They say that complicity demands a need to be attentive to one’s participation in an event. Taking up this invitation to become an accomplice to unfolding events as children encounter other bodies could be seen as a way of attempting to reside inside the act of culture-making in order to deliberately resist imposing cultures on families. They also say, that this requires “a willingness and an effort to formulate one’s place in the community ….. and then, reciprocally, to allow that community to become part of the research” (Sumara and Davis, 1997: 309).
Equal to the situational necessity of complicity is its critical relationship to time. Complicity is a force that is necessarily produced in the moment; it always is created fluidly in response to the unfolding dynamics of the present moment.
This can sit awkwardly when we are caught in the shadow cast by the ‘school-ready child’, one produced through the policy discourses of data and assessment. This school-ready child normalises “particular development trajectories” over others through a reduction of complexity in order to create a “hierarchy of unreadiness/readiness”. And this phantasy of the school ready child is a spectre that stops open-ended gaming in it tracks.
Complicité insists on being inside and residing within the time of now …. complicité-as-practice, reminds us to not only take space seriously, but also that sometimes we should give in to time, obeying the imperative to succumb to time in a world that is so worried about wasting it.
We agree with Sumara and Davis that relationships of complicity carry forces that are capable of enlarging “the space of the possible”. (Re)viewing the video vignettes from More-Than-Words workshops we have been struck by how complicité-as-practice was a quality that emerged through the careful, slow multidisciplinary partnership between speech therapists, early years practitioners, parents and multi-arts specialists, where respective practices and techniques were shared and transformed. But further, we feel that complicité-as-practice has a potential itself to engender new multidisciplinary alliances; ones that recognise the capacities and knowledges of children themselves. As a performative tactic that attends to the movement of bodies, it is full of potential. Complicité-as-practice has the capacity to become a force of shared concern and responsiveness that can bring together performance artists, speech therapists, as well as other early years professionals as they work mutually with local communities of families. While parents bring their own implicit and intuitive ways of knowing and responding to children with them, the current climate of assessment, progression and school readiness shape and limit the expression of these more situated and felt funds of knowledge in favour of explicit expectations. The surfacing of complicité as a force that opens up, rather than closes down, has been exciting and offered us hope in a time of increasing parental and professional accountability.
We suggest that movement-oriented arts practices like dance, music and drama might align themselves well alongside and in collaboration with early childhood education. In particular we advocate exploring the potential of complicité-as-practice through forging collaborations between early childhood educators and performance artists. This requires a financial commitment to long-term, situated partnerships that will test potential beyond the short-term, one-off, funded arts projects that has become the norm in UK arts funding. The cross-fertilisation of health, education, artistic and parental practices around early childhood takes time and commitment. We make the case that collaborative partnerships between health, arts and educational research funding sources could be deployed to productively bring these practices together.