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Early childhood educators' dialogical engagement in an artmaking space

University of British Columbia

Early childhood educators nowadays are encouraged to pedagogically engage with children, materials, and their given environments (Jardine et al., 2011; van Manen, 2017; Vintimilla, 2017) and to practice the “pedagogy of listening” (Kind, 2008, 2020; Rinaldi, 2006). However, neither dialogue nor the creation of a space for practicing the pedagogy of listening have received considerable attention (Aoki, 2004; Jardine et al., 2011; Wilson, 2007). Wilson (2007) and Thompson (2015) have suggested that understanding children’s ways of being and of making in an art space requires educators to encounter children in “the pedagogical third space” (Aoki, 2004; Wilson, 2007). The aim of this study is to examine the dialogical engagement of early childhood educators in an artmaking space. Dialogical engagement involves responsible listening, encountering, dwelling, asking questions, thinking with others, engaging in conversations, and learning from and with others (Dahlberg & Moss, 2005; Kind, 2020; Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2017; Rinaldi, 2006). This study was guided by the following primary research question: How do early childhood educators dialogically engage with children during an artmaking process?” A descriptive-qualitative research model was utilized for this phenomenological descriptive case study (van Manen, 2007, 2014; Yazan, 2015; Yin, 2009). I observed the art/drawing events of three early childhood educators in two different early childhood centres and interviewed them to understand how they were attentively attuned to their engagement with children and materials during children’s artmaking sessions and to determine whether they had been purposefully making dialogue to learn something from the children in their art spaces. I discovered that pedagogical listening could facilitate dialogue among educators and children. Moreover, dialogical engagement supported children’s creativity, imagination, and wonderment in the process of making and drawing. The significance of the research is that it demonstrates how early childhood educators implement the pedagogy of listening in their everyday practice. Furthermore, this research reveals the potential impact of educators’ multiple ways of being, dwelling, encountering, and slowing, as well as their responsibility within children’s artmaking spaces.

Text

2021-04-22

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/77918

Art Education

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/