Professional Documents
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ABSTRACT This article presents a negotiating practice that demonstrates the importance of the
interplay of visual, verbal and linguistic signs. As such it discusses the relationship between identity and
a signifying practice in a Swedish preschool, as children and teachers negotiate meaning. With
emphasis on the relationship between building identity and having access to discourses, the notion of
identity is troubled among these children, the teachers and within the research practice. A negotiating
practice unfolds thanks to a documentation practice that also forms the research material: photographs
and conversations made and used within the childrens work in a seven month-long creative process.
Introduction
A group of four to five year-old boys is playing and wrestling together a bit roughly and noisily.
The preschool teacher is just about to ask them to calm down, and stop fooling around! But she
restrains her frustration and impulse to check the boys activity, and instead she directs a question
to them all: What are you doing? Momentarily and with some hesitation a boy answers: We are
making ... Creations!
From that moment on, the content and signification of the preschool activities changed day by day,
thanks to the signifying practice that took off from the concept of Creations. The process that
followed is exemplified in this article with combinations of conversations, observational drawings,
clay models and photo documentation of the bodily Creations that emerged in a playroom with a
mattress on the floor and a mirror on the wall.
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Elements or signs that connect in an unpredictable manner characterise a rhizomatic process. This
process is not ruled by a plan for definite goals and is exemplified and developed in this article, as a
practice with children. When the teacher allowed the children to name their activity themselves,
she could simultaneously reconceptualise what she observed the children were doing. In the events
depicted in this article, these children were not just fooling around. They had created something
important with their bodies, and their conglomerated bodies functioned as an utterance. A new
concept was born on that day, said these teachers. They called it a creation, which is the concept I
shall here be presenting, in connection with my theories. The teachers followed up the notion of
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the creation with challenging questionings of the children: What is a Creation and what is not a
Creation? How can you make Creations?
In what follows I translate the spoken language from the Swedish, although no two languages
ever exactly correlate, and I try to give a literal and cultural sense of the Swedish rather than
produce English idioms.
Elsa: Creations are cool.
Ella: Creations are something high, and you need quite many [children] to work when you make
creations.
Elsa: Yes, you probably need to have at least five children. You can make a star creation, with all
the children, one in the middle of a circle with children holding hands.
Elsa: The castle in clay [that] we did, is a creation. And if you have many, many small cats you
can make a creation of them.
Jonathan: That creation looks like a star.
Christoffer: A missile I think, or something you can use for cracking nuts.
Folke: We can say that we made creations out of different child-parts.
Gustav: Well, a creation is something with many parts that are connected. The computer is also a
creation with an engine and some more stuff, everything is put together in a way.
Folke: When all children stand on each other, then it is a creation.
Gustav: That food wagon is a creation because it has wheels that are connected with those
crossbars and a hot plate to put the food on.
Alva E: You can actually make a creation out of yourself, for example become a table.
Johanna: Yes, or you can say into a bridge. And hairstyles are creations.
Gustav: It can be scrap gadgets put together.
Alva E: Pyramids are some sort of creations and also smashing houses.
Gustav: Oh yes, you can build creations out of everything.
Folke: Not porcelain, because then everything can crash down.
When the children presented their creations as investigations for each other they discussed and
negotiated the temporary conclusions about what creations could be and how they could be seen
or made. One such conclusion was that creations are something that you build from something
that is not there already.
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This is hard to draw when he lies underneath, then I don't see the whole body. (Johanna)
Johanna: Malte was hardest to draw, because he stood with his leg in a very strange way. That is
Wilmer lying down under there. At the start it was very strange, because I did not have enough
space for Malte. I had to make Wilmer taller, to get enough space for Malte to fit in. I am the one
standing in the front, stretching up my arms.
Wilmer: Were you there when we made those pyramid creations?
Linus: Yes, I was on top. It was a little shaky ... I like to have photos of the creations.
Mns: It was quite heavy with Theodor, but Alice was not that heavy, but I think it must have
been very heavy for Alice.
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Due to the childrens identification with the motifs, they were able to trouble the task they were
given, with words, graphics and plastic art material. While they drew the sketches and worked with
clay they referred to and discussed with each other the experiences of making creations. I could say
that they were in positions to use both the gaze, which is an objectified look (Bal, 1996, p. 266) and
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the glance, which is an involved look (Bryson, 1988, pp. 87-108). The gaze is a powerful examining
look from a distance and the glance is an engaged look that recognises the positions as viewer, and
that the image represents what it shows and is not something objective. This means that the
children had access to different positions within shifting discourses. They worked with observations
and transformations of the photos to make new visual and verbal presentations. When they
explored the photos of themselves building the creations, they explored at the same time
experiences from different positions from which they look at, learn and know about the
construction of the creation. They could move around within these viewer positions.
In the Eyes of the Beholder
There are further positions to examine in this project, in relation to the digital camera. The
function of the camera becomes interactive in a special mode, because of its immediate responses
to the events (see Nordin-Hultman, 2004, p. 87, about preschool material that is responsive to
childrens operations and with power to have them recognise differences and relational qualities).
The children look at the images they have printed, which turns the camera and the photo session
into a co-constructor of the project. The camera allows the children to expand their experience and
learn to use the camera-event, by deciding the right moment for the photos to be taken. This
makes visible other forthcoming purposes of the installations of creation, to be portrayed and
manifested (for perpetuation). In collaboration with the teachers, the children installed themselves
as creations, and announced when the teachers could photograph the image. As both actors and
directors at the same time the children employed and practised the arts of stage, performance and
visuality. Access to the camera facilitates and reinforces the acts of creation. It also benefits the
teachers knowing of what becomes important and desirable for the children during the process.
How do they make the most of the possibilities in these situations? How can they stretch the
bounds of will, desire and risk taking? How can they communicate this process of floating
significations? Here this composed interplay made visual expectations and learning important and
powerful, while other discourses that normally guided judgements and directions in artistic and
creative activities, were displaced.
Production of a Domestic Discourse
The digital camera was crucial in this project and almost always available to document the shortlived bodily formations. Because the creations were made on the floor, through the temporary
constructing and assembling of bodies together, they are in art terms to be considered
performances rather than sculptures. They could thus not be preserved without a camera. The
photographed creations linked content and production (or the doing of creations connected via
observational drawing practices) and the signifying practices of reflection and conversation. This
procedure of constructing learning and making meaning was an important condition for the
construction of a growing cooperative body of creation memory. This memory is a social memory,
captured in a process that gave new contexts and meanings to normalise behaviour and thinking,
and gave speed to a reconstruction of an epistemology of everyday life as local situated knowledge.
The most important outcome is perhaps the power that the children gain over the process. The
unabated, fearless play of differences allows them to trouble all the solidity in the discourse of how
children learn, play, create and construct. Here the camera is not an external, objective recorder, a
depicting eye; but instead a highly responsive element in a learning environment as a third
pedagogue, such as is discussed in Reggio Emilia discourse (Ceppi & Zini, 1998; Dahlberg et al,
1999). This gives the children, as well as the teachers, access to alternative subject positions that
bring about, form, construct, explore and make learning visible. Presence and experience were part
of a floating signifying process of making meaning that was not just delivered by a single person
but came from all connections to discourse elements through people, representations and objects.
What emerged in the creation project was a redistribution of power and responsibility in the
footwork of circumlocution, paraphrasing and rotating reconsiderations in the repositioning of
others and selves.
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An important issue here is how the children bring in, as puzzling material for the creative process,
traces from the visual culture world into which they are inscribed. But the strongest source of
energy is the childrens desire to do something together. All of this activity started in a room with a
mirror and a mattress, set up for the children to do things with their bodies. These children could
transgress what they normally felt invited to do as gender-specific play in this room: such as girls
dancing in front of the mirror (acting out femininity) and boys wrestling on the floor (acting out
masculinity). Through the creation project they carried out a distinctive and different gender play,
compared to the way they otherwise acted with wrestling or dancing. When the creators
assembled their bodies in new shapes, the shifting of gender positions also took place. This they
transgressed in two ways: according to expectations in that particular room, and according to
gender binary expectations of what a boy or girl can or cannot do. Using sculpture or performance
as a method for constructing and negotiating a new social order, as I mentioned earlier, can also
result in a method for negotiating a deconstructed gender order. In the shifting play of body parts,
body positions and body relations, a range of gender stereotypes were thus displaced.
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The work of childhood according to Davies (1989) is the work that every child does to
establish gendered practices and identities. To get its gender right, to be seen as normal and
acceptable within the terms and narratives of culture and society, the child can be seen to be
competently constructing a gendered world (1989, p. 20). From a feminist post-structural
perspective, gender stereotypes then have to be challenged in school practice, in order to make
both sexes aware of the power and making of gender positions and how to trouble them. Danby
(1998) discusses how such a perspective does not fit in within the conventional early childhood
paradigm that views play as fun: as having no external goals, positing play either as an ungendered
phenomenon or as a natural manifestation of biological determination. In play situations, Danby
says, the very serious work of constructing social order is finely attuned to recognition so that there
is more than one social order to manage: gender is one type of social order; age is another (p. 178).
When I read the process of these childrens creations as a gender discourse, I see how playful
seriousness about age and/or gender limits as well as allows for opportunities.
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between the subject and the world is inserted the entire sum of discourses that make up visuality,
and that culturally construct the visually different from vision (the notion of unmediated visual
experience): Between the retina and the world a screen of signs is inserted, consisting of all the
multiple discourses of vision built into the social arena (pp. 91-92).
With help from Rose (1996) I suggest that we might produce more in terms of intelligibility if
we consider the question of subjectification less in terms of what kind of subject is produced as a
self, an individual, an agent with his/her identity. Instead, we should think in terms of what
humans are enabled to do through the forms into which they are machinated or composed. The
concept of machination of subject bodies also lives in the productive metaphors of Butler (1990),
particularly her notions of performativity and inscription used for analyses of the construction of
gender identity. When the children in the creation project inscribed and re-inscribed possibilities of
how to act with their bodies, and how to construct meanings of creations, they also assumed
another performative gaze.
Subjectivity and Childrens Spaces
When the creation project emerged during the spring term, the children and the teachers formed a
different everyday environment. They did not separate artwork from other activities. The teachers
supported the children to integrate and connect ideas, art, construction and habits. I would say that
this explorative process constructed an epistemology of everyday life. This is an expression
adopted from Code (1995) to indicate a move from common philosophical preoccupation with
what ideal knowers ought to do, and to derive normative principles from knowledge in production
and what various situated knowers actually do (p. xi).
My reading of the preschool childrens creative work gives the insight that if schools as
learning environments shall ever welcome a decentred subject, they must furnish relational spaces
where children can follow trajectories, make distinctions, connections and choices, and revisit paths
and positions. A relational space is a description taken from the Reggio Emilia discourse and its
trust put on aesthetic qualities in building learning environments that transcend traditional rules
and regulations. Here aesthetic quality is not just a question of style, methods or techniques but
also depends on the quality of connections children can make, says atelierista Vea Vecci in Reggio
Emilia (Ceppi & Zini, 1998). This quality is named the aesthetic of links: When we talk about
relational space, we mean an integrated space in which the qualities are not strictly aesthetic but
are more closely related to performance features. This means that space is not composed of the
functional zones but of fluidization of functional zones (Ceppi & Zini, 1998, p. 12). Reggio Emilia
pedagogue Carlina Rinaldi says: We are not searching for an ideal space, but one that is capable
of generating its own change (Ceppi & Zini, 1998, p. 115).
Childrens spaces as relational spaces describe what Code (1995) says are spatial metaphors:
important marks that relate to a late twentieth-century concern with location: with territories,
mappings and positions. Subjectivities are thus variously enacted and identities are constructed and
continually reconstructed in the processes of enacting. Here hierarchies of power and privilege
contribute to shaping these processes, sometimes creating receptive, friendly environments, at
other times becoming oppositional or indifferent (Code, 1995, p. ix).
Deleuze (1998) uses strong spatial metaphors in arguments about what children say. He says:
Children never stop talking about what they are doing or trying to do: exploring milieus, by means
of dynamic trajectories, and drawing up maps for them. The maps of these trajectories are essential
to psychic activity (Deleuze, 1998, p. 61). Further, says Deleuze, the map is an expression of the
identity of the journey or what one journeys through, and it merges with its object, when the object
itself is movement (p. 61). This also describes subject positions that constantly move around,
drawing maps of the body that journeys.
Is there then such a thing as the Body? I think there is need in the early childhood education
research field for a theoretical approach that targets the Body beyond phenomenology. When I
follow these childrens creation process back to their bodily formations, when they are separate
bodies connected and assembled as conjunctions of events, I have to ask what kind of body regime
they produce, if any. Perhaps the Body is then not an organic totality which is capable of the
wholesale expression of subjectivity, but is itself an assemblage of organs, processes, pleasures,
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With teachers practices of returning and revisiting all kinds of documentation about children, they
make visible the particular ways in which particular processes provide children and teachers with
technologies of the self. Thus children take up as their own the obligation to regulate and control
themselves: as actors, directors, audience and producers (Davies, 1996, p. 31).
Correspondence
Ulla Lind, Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design, Box 3601,
SE-126 27 Stockholm, Sweden (ulla.lind@konstfack.se).
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