Upcoming events
Errant Textilities: Research-Creation Acts in the Early Childhood Studio @ MAKE (Methods, Atmospheres, Knowledges, Energies) Conference
Sylvia Kind (Capilano University); Tatiana Zakharova-Goodman (Capilano University); Alex Berry (University of Calgary)
Panel: (Counter)Pedagogies II: Affective Methods
Sun, Oct 25 · 8:15–9:45 AM · HARBOUR 2945 McLean Management Studies Lab
This presentation will explore how research-creation approaches open up alternative, affective, and artful dimensions of research with young children. Within this orientation, art becomes something other than object or form, rather it is a certain kind of attunement and way of moving, acting and activating. Creativity is understood within an ecology of relations, research becomes a co-compositional event, and the early childhood studio a space of and for pedagogical invention, symbiotic relationships, erupting tensions, and collective improvisation. This presentation discusses processes and insights from the first year of a three-year SSHRC Insight Grant, Transforming art studio pedagogies through research-creation in early childhood. Through illustrative instances of working with distinct and errant textilities, we consider the hyphenated and agitative relation of research and creation, the emergent processes of theorizing-creating, and the daily practices of knowledge co-creation with children in the early childhood studio. The work of four studios in British Columbia and Alberta is brought together to highlight that, other than retrospective meaning-making, research-creation strives to animate rather than interpret. Through cultivating the conditions of emergence and the ‘yet to come’, and artful and improvisational processes of moving-with others in their co-compositions and material experimentations, attention is given to how things come into being and the processes of their formation. Our artistic, pedagogical, and research practices become artful ways of responding, answering to, and joining with the flows, forces, and potentialities of emergent relations, politics, ideations, and artistries. Multiple knit, thread, yarn, and textile lines interweave with waste systems, plastics, songs, screams, drawings, enactments, stories, histories, and memories. Itinerant, affective and improvisatory formations arise in the errant wanderings and tangles.
Transforming Art Studio Pedagogies Through Research-Creation in Early Childhood
Dr. Sylvia Kind & Dr. Tatiana Zakharova Goodman
4:00-5:30pm, November 5, 2026
Fulmer Family Centre for Childhood Studies, room 22
Drawing on insights and instances from the first year of our SSHRC funded Insight Research Grant investigating the role of the atelierista and the art studio in early childhood, we explore research-creation as a research methodology and a way of artistically thinking-making-doing and creating a life together with children/others. We consider what it is to research from within the hyphenated, vibratory space between research and creation, where thought is in the act, activating artful, embodied, affective, relational modes of co-composing, experiencing and knowing.