The Vancouver Collaboratory includes several early-years learning programs affiliated with an urban community centre in Vancouver’s east side. The host organization offers a wide variety of programs and services, including ECE and aging adults programs, in collaboration with the Vancouver School Board, the Vancouver Public Library Board, the Vancouver Board of Parks and Recreation, and the City of Vancouver. Tatiana Zakharova-Goodman, atelierista, has an existing multi-year relationship with the organization. She has been carrying out collaborative research with young children and educators here for several years.
How do we think, imagine, and enact artful (art-full) pedagogies in ECE studio? How do we think, imagine, and enact inclusive practices where all children are invited into a studio life in joyful ways?
We begin atelierista studio encounters in the centre by keeping in mind the intentions behind the work: to foster a culture of thinking/doing ideas with children and artistic processes as a way of knowing. A studio is not a space to “teach” children arts, bur rather an artful pedagogical practice. Here, we experiment, inquire, and wonder collectively in search for ways to live well with others (including artistic materials) with difference. It’s a joyful and messy practice.
At times, our studio engagements balance on the precarious edge of anarchy: the paint is in abundance – on paper, walls, and our bodies; the sound reverberates and multiplies; bodies move and ideas are exchanged at speeds we aren’t always quick enough to follow. In these moments, we try to remember that anarchy, too, can be a generative force. While it’s never our intention to create an anything-goes space, we also want to make sure we don’t close an avenue of ideas too soon.
