Researcher: Dr. Alex Berry
Artist-in-Residence: Kate Harvey Ritchie
Studio Co-researchers: Lisa Menzies, Sayward Wilkinson Blanc, Stephanie Rutledge,Madeline Dimagiba, Meghan Drennan, the Children at Common Digs
This research attends to the everyday practice of an artist-in-residence with educators and young children in an early childhood art studio. The goals of this study are to generate knowledge that will: (1) shed further light on the intricate work of an artist-in-residence in an early childhood art studio as an ongoing and co-compositional pedagogical presence; and (2) provoke and sustain engaging arts-infused curricula and pedagogies across the field of early childhood education. The project engages research-creation—acts of creation as research, and research as creation. Educators and children at the ReImagine Centre and Common Digs Early Learning Centre have been collaborating with a local weaver to explore how weaving becomes a living practice and an act of research in early childhood curriculum.
A child pushes a heavy spool of blue plastic twine. Unrolling, its slippery movement is announced by the spring of a thin, circular thread. Another child intersects, nudging the spool a bit further. As its pace quickens, blue yarn spills like water from the tap.
A group of young children and early childhood educators is invited into collective weaving through the art practice of Kate Ritchie, a local weaver in the Treaty 7 region of southern Alberta, Canada, where our pedagogical work is situated. Queering domestic acts of care through textile remakings, Kate asks, through her practice, “What would happen if I tried to unweave something and reweave it into a new context? Would it still be recognizable?” (Ritchie, 2023, p. 13). Together we read these questions as pedagogical propositions for early childhood pedagogies. How might Kate’s art practice fold in on early childhood education, and how might the children’s processes fold back into Kate’s art practice? What happens in the to and fro?
As part of a broader collaboration across Western Canada called Transforming Art Studio Pedagogies Through Research-Creation in Early Childhood1, this project attends to the intricate, everyday practice of an artist-in-residence with educators and young children as an ongoing and co-compositional presence in early childhood education. The project experiments with research-creation—acts of creation as research, and research as creation (Manning & Massumi, 2014; Springgay, 2022) in early childhood. Educators and children at a local childcare centre in Mohkinstsis, also known as Calgary, have been joining with Kate in her art practice to consider both how weaving with plastic waste materials might become a collective living practice and its pedagogical impetus. Following Kathryn Yusoff (2013), who writes from the context of biodiversity loss and climate change, our pedagogical work with plastic waste is interested in nurturing collective responsiveness—or sensibility—“to that which disappears without a trace” (p. 209).
