Abstract
Schulte and Thompson’s edited collection on art, play and aesthetics provides a comprehensive policy-making resource for teachers, early childhood centres, schools, communities, families, education systems, organisations and nations. It achieves this immense task through collecting examples, reflections, narratives, provocations, problematisations, theorisations and deconstructions. The book speaks to the ‘distribution of the sensible’ and the complex interplay between the police and politics of art and play (Rancière, 2010: 37) in a way that offers significant impetus for the collective and critical experience of education policy design, implementation and evaluation (although in a way that at the same time challenges the appearance of any kind of linear policy process).
The explicit aim of the collection is to ‘counter prevailing assumptions about art and play in early childhood, and trouble the often predictive methods presumed essential to research it’ (Schulte and Thompson, 2018: 3). In other words, each chapter more or less explicitly establishes or recognises a prevailing assumption with regards to some problematic and enduring relationships: childhood and adulthood; learning and teaching; aesthetics and (for want of a better term) academics; process and product; active and passive; natural and cultural; digital and organic. These often intersecting binaries are challenged in terms of their tendency to assume, construct and perhaps even fix a particular ethic. With a shared focus on a community of care, each chapter then supports attention to, dwelling in, and reconceptualisation of existing beliefs and practices – for instance the practice of intervening in a child’s art making/working/playing; or the practice of prohibiting digital devices in an early childhood centre; or the practice of giving an apparently educational purpose to a child’s aesthetic journey. For policy making each chapter then reveals a relationship or attitude to reconceptualise, and challenges the ways in which these enduring relationships are constructed across multiple discursive trajectories, recognising the limitations and implications of each trajectory.
The collection of stories contributes to the new material and post-human practices of art education in apparently formal early educational settings – apparently formal because many of the chapters offer insight into the informal cracks in the appearance of formality in early childhood spaces. In other words, the book offers a new way of looking at any assumed traditional spaces, spaces that have always been, and will always be, stubbornly resistant to prescriptive educational programmes (the micro-practices of space). Throwing money at a new studio space to join the new fad of making would then neglect a key policy message here – particularly when that money comes with measurable strings attached. The studio isn’t a flash new wing to improve your educational brand. The studio takes shape as art space, art work, and as active in the social and cultural and aesthetic milieu, and not just studio or maker spaces, every nook and cranny, hallway and pathway.
Questions concerning research design are also addressed throughout the text. Each chapter challenges the idea of neat and orderly researcherly activity. It is then an excellent collection of chapters for policy making to engage in new research programmes that recognise, and perhaps at times even jettison, the methodological and all too often exploitative baggage of an instrumental, technical and prescriptive research design. These constraining elements of empirical work flourish in competitive funding environments – in part because they make the life of decision makers apparently (and also then dangerously) simple. Policy makers have here a very important provocation with regards to how decisions are made about what can be funded. It’s very difficult to compete with orthodox approaches to research in the arts in early childhood. Yet it seems impoverishing to think that risks in research design shouldn't be highly regarded. This volume presents stories of risk taking. It does so in a way that leaves the reader nourished by the very thought of research. This collection is then, for the funders, a collection that can guide research in the arts into a new age of flourishing.
If one problem is that of control then the task for policy is not to suddenly or even slowly come around to the benefits of deconstructing the curriculum and then prescribing those benefits, but rather to recognise that daily practices are constantly thwarted rather than enhanced by regulation and control. No matter how scientifically well-evidenced a regulation regarding space may be, when it operates as a regulation it produces a particular tension that limits the very benefits that regulation is expected to meet. The task then in this work is to recognise what becomes prescribed. However, to suggest that those prescriptions ultimately make no exploration possible is to confer the status of technology of domination (Foucault, 1991) that, with more care and attention, never is what it is.
One nuanced contribution of this book might be understood as an ethical dimension related to what it means to come together as a policy community in arts education. This policy community is a contested space – as all are. With the title Communities of Practice, the collection makes a case for collective policy making. The contributors share an understanding of ‘teaching and learning as an unpredictable series of events grounded in relationships between and among adults and children, their attention mutually directed toward the world of ideas, experiences, and things that bring them together within their own communities of practice’ (Schulte and Thompson, 2018: 4).
Finally, one task for a collection such as this, when considering policy and new languages for policy makers, is to explore the flesh and bones and general webby mish-mashiness of the abiding or driving theoretical concepts. I can imagine a not-too-distant future where the word ‘entanglement’ enters policy making within different systems and structures and apparatuses. In order to avoid a slippery assimilation of entanglements into policy discourse, I think it is vital that a collection like this avoids a tendency to talk (entanglements) without attention to what it means to use this metaphor and theoretical device. This is not to suggest that calling something an entanglement is not accurate, although it’s also at the same time fairly easy to call something an entanglement, but rather the way in which it is used suggests some kind of agreement over meaning, and fails to contribute to the theorisation and application and experience of the concept. This becomes particularly problematic, or will become problematic, when, to stick with this one concept, we start to see institutional policy using the term. Ideas and practices that have radical potential have a tendency to be assimilated into policy-speak whether we like it or not. Look for instance at the way lifelong learning became not just an idea to identify with because learning is something to like, but a bland rhetorical device that started to feel like its very own negation (see for instance Biesta, 2014). Let’s not let ‘entanglement’ become a newspeak mechanism for the teleologists in the future of early childhood policy making.
