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This article introduces the concept of situated improvisations. Drawing from two long-term collaboratories in Australia and Canada, the discussion focusses on improvisation as method to unsettle we...

Based on collaborative work done over more than a decade, this chapter elucidates what becomes possible for teacher education when artistic and pedagogical situations are designed and proposed at the intersection between pedagogista and atelierista work. To do so, the chapter outlines the orientations that guide such work when creating artistic situations that invite early childhood education students to think differently, less instrumentally, and more inventively about pedagogical and curricular processes with young children. The chapter highlights these orientations by tracing what emerged when creating situations and happenings between students, educators, young children, and charcoal.

This chapter considers the emergence of an early childhood studio and how the studio arranges situations and creates conditions for inventive and experimental practices and collective improvisations. It highlights moments from a drawing project with 4-year-old children as it explores ways that children, educator, atelierista, drawing boards, narrative props, conversations, stories, ideas, and drawn representations play and move together in a moving choreography and “dance of attention” (Manning E, Massumi B, Thought in the act: passages in the ecology of experience. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, p 5, 2014). It explores the lively material entanglements, experimentations, negotiations and pedagogical orientations that allow the early childhood studio to emerge as an event-full place.

As Bob Steele (1998, 2011) insists, drawing is a language and should have a significant place in children’s lives. It engages children in expressive, emotional, imaginative, and intellectual ways. It is an important cognitive and affective process, a rich means of storytelling, and for young children, a valuable way of making sense of the world. Through drawing, one can express what cannot be adequately put into words.

Working with a camera means engaging with an already troubled material and photography's history of voyeurism, othering, and violence. The language and conventions of photography tend to emphasize images that are ‘captured’ and a gaze that objectifies. However, in discussing a photography project that took place over several months at a Canadian early childhood center, this article explores what it might mean not to erase the camera's voyeuristic gaze and photography's colonial histories, but to play with them. In improvising with the camera we engage in a world, not of subjects and objects, binaries of perceiver and perceived, but rather various materialities, material relations, compositions, intra-actions and lively entanglements.

Materials, objects, places, and environments are inextricably bound to experimentation. In this regard, Gilles Deleuze helps us see encounters of materials, objects, places, and humans as part of the flow of experience. In his view, we are never separate from the world; we are made up of relations; thought creates itself through encounters. For Deleuze and Guattari (1987), thought is experimentation. Stories are told through it, forces are harnessed, and roles are performed.

This chapter has emerged from conversations that Sylvia and I have had around her experiences with three- and four-year-olds using cameras and my examination of ethical issues in using photos as part of the documentation processes that teachers use to understand children’s thinking (Tarr 2011). We are interested in the intersections of pedagogical documentation (Dahlberg 2012; Dahlberg, Moss & Pence 2007; Rinaldi 2006) research with children, children using cameras to document their own interests (Bitou & Waller 2011; Clark 2005), and a shared space in which educators, children, and cameras blur and blend insider and outsider perspectives into a between-space (Kind 2013; Wilson 2007). In this chapter we will explore the questions and issues that have emerged for us around the use of photography with young children that have implications for both educators and researchers incorporating visual methods with children, especially young children.

There is a substantial body of literature on arts-based forms of research demonstrating scholars’ endeavors to theorize the production of the arts as a mode of scholarly inquiry and as a method of representation. However, if arts-based research is to be taken seriously as an emerging field of educational research, then perhaps it needs to be understood as a methodology in its own right. This entails moving beyond the use of existing criteria that exists for qualitative research and toward an understanding of interdisciplinarity not as a patchwork of different disciplines and methodologies but as a loss, a shift, or a rupture where in absence, new courses of action un/fold. This article proposes an understanding of arts-based research as enacted, living inquiry through six renderings of a/r/tography: contiguity, living inquiry, openings, metaphor/metonymy, reverberations, and excess.

Here is a call that yearns for what has been separated and one that also rings with a joy at the resounding rhythm of life. Possibilities are all around us— the empty, the full, and all that lies between— the choices among them are ours, a choice to wake up, a choice to hear the call of our own heartbeat. Surely we recognize the rhythm, the spirit that animates our deepest places and pulsates through every now moment, that rhythm which vitalizes our being from its prison of numbness. But do we feel that rhythm? Do we hear that call?

Materials live in the world in multiple ways. They can evoke memories, narrate stories, invite actions, and communicate meanings. Materials and objects create meeting places. In early childhood education we gather around things to investigate, negotiate, converse, and share. Materials – a block of clay, pots of paint, a brush, a colourful wire, a translucent sheet of paper, a rectangular block – beckon and draw us in. Materials are not immutable, passive, or lifeless until the moment we do something to them; they participate in our early childhood projects. They live, speak, gesture, and call to us. (Kind, 2014, p. 865 of this issue) This special issue of the International Journal of Child, Youth and Family Studies (IJCYFS) focuses on non-traditional approaches to materiality in relation to learning in early childhood education. The articles emerged, in large part, from a three-year study funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), entitled Encounters with Materials in Early Education , through which the editors conducted a visual ethnography study in two early childhood centres in Western Canada. That research provoked interest in exploring more broadly how notions of materiality are taken up in different contexts.

While the movement for more public standards has gained considerable strength in the United States, there has been little talk of teaching standards in Canada until quite recently. Beginning in the late 1990s there have been publicized reforms in teaching standards by conservative governments in Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia. In this chapter we examine how the Community and Inquiry in Teacher Education (CITE) cohort in the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia—tried to interpret the teaching standards in light of program values and practices. Using a selfstudy approach cohort instructors asked: In what ways might the standards enable or hinder our effort to live the values of community and inquiry in teacher education? Ontario’s College of Teachers produced Standards of Practice for the Teaching Profession in 1999 as a basis for assessing pre-service teachereducation programs. Beck et al., (2002) note the potential for this document, and standards in general, to increase the status and autonomy for teachers. They endorse teaching standards over curriculum standards

Artist‐in‐residence programs frequently act as professional development initiatives for teachers. Little understanding of the relational nature of artist‐teacher learning exists. In this article, we discuss Learning Through The Arts ™, describing conflicting expectations as artists and teachers learn from each other, and explore the relationship of artists’ growth and learning to teacher development. Using participants’ narratives, we illustrate existing tensions and challenges for visual art education. We present the need to open spaces for artists to construct new understandings of themselves as teachers in relation to themselves as artists, and for teachers to develop artist selves alongside their teacher selves.