Studio pedagogies

Sylvia Kind

Studio pedagogies considers the early childhood studio as an event and experience. As an experimental and improvisational space of collective and collaborative inquiry the studio affords both children and educators time to dwell with materials, linger in artistic processes, and work together on particular ideas and propositions. It becomes a relational space of investigating and creating together; constructing, making, designing, weaving together, sculpting, composing, and proposing understandings. The studio is not conceptualized as a container for creative acts and materials, but an emergent space itself inherently creative and creating and constantly becoming. The studio, alive with materials, drawings, sculptures, memories, histories, speculations, and possibilities, opens to us and we become increasingly attuned to its cues, rhythms, forces, flows, and intensities. It is a space in movement, taking shape as a work of art might, and we move together with the studio’s emergence.

This is thought in movement, or “thought in the act” (Manning & Massumi, 2014), where every work is an experiment, a process of invention and thinking otherwise. As Ingold (2015) illustrates, this movement is not a support or addition to knowing, “moving is knowing” (p. 47). In the doing, creating, and enacting, through lively, sensuous, tactile, “motional-relational” (Manning & Massumi, p. 42) engagement, and tangled webs of maker, making, and material, we are drawn to respond with increasing fluidity and sensitivity. And so we aim to learn the studio’s rhythms, to activate, follow, twist, turn, and continue the movements in a multiplicity of variances, engaging together as Manning & Massumi (2014) would describe, in a co-compositional dance of attention.

References

Ingold, T. (2015) The life of lines. New York: Routledge

Manning, E., & Massumi, B. (2014). Thought in the act: Passages in the ecology of experience. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.