More-than-words: Reconceptualising Two-year-old Children’s Onto-epistemologies Through Improvisation and the Temporal Arts

Arculus, Charlotte Kathleen (2024) More-than-words: Reconceptualising Two-year-old Children’s Onto-epistemologies Through Improvisation and the Temporal Arts. Doctoral thesis (PhD), Manchester Metropolitan University.

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Abstract

This thesis project takes place at a time of increasing focus upon two-year-old children and the words they speak. On the one hand there is a mounting pressure, driven by the school readiness agenda, to make children talk as early as possible. On the other hand, there is an increased interest in understanding children’s communication in order to create effective pedagogies. More-than-words (MTW) examines an improvised art-education practice that combines heterogenous elements: sound, movement and materials (such as silk, string, light) to create encounters for young children, educators and practitioners from diverse backgrounds. During these encounters, adults adopt a practice of stripping back their words in order to tune into the polyphonic ways that children are becoming-with the world. For this research-creation, two MTW sessions for two-year-old children and their carers took place in a specially created installation. These sessions were filmed on a 360˚ camera, nursery school iPad and on a specially made child-friendly Toddler-cam (Tcam) that rolled around in the installation-event with the children. Through using the frameless technology of 360˚ film, I hoped to make tangible the relation and movement of an emergent and improvised happening and the way in which young children operate fluidly through multiple modes. Travelling with posthuman, Deleuzio-Guattarian and feminist vital material philosophy, I wander and wonder speculatively through practice, memory, and film data as a bag lady, a Haraway-ian writer/artist/researcher-creator who resists the story of the wordless child as lacking and tragic; the story that positions the word as heroic. Instead, through returning to the uncertainty of improvisation, I attempt to tune into the savage, untamed and wild music of young children’s animistic onto-epistemologies.