Bad Hands and Big Black Dots: Dissensual Politics in the Kindergarten Classroom

Abstract

In this article, I explore politics in children’s art practices that divert from normalized accounts of children’s art and lives, especially those that seek to compartmentalize the child, children, and children’s artmaking, grounded on the ideas of French philosopher Jacques Rancière—namely, the distribution of the sensible, politics, and dissensus. By sharing a painting event I observed during an ethnographic case study in the arts-integrated kindergarten classroom of a university-affiliated childcare center in Pennsylvania, I examine how children negotiate the rules and roles imposed on them over the desire to work “out of the lines.” In doing so, I raise questions on how the research, pedagogy, and practice of young children’s art could benefit from a reconsideration of typical thinking to potentiate new and different perspectives.

Acknowledgments

All names are pseudonyms. I thank Senior Editor Dónal O’Donoghue and reviewers for their insightful comments. The story of Brian and Oliver painting big dots has been presented elsewhere (see Park, 2019b).

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ According to Rockhill (2013), a wrong is “a specific form of equality the establishes the ‘only universal’ of politics as a polemical point of struggle by relating the manifestations of political subjects to the police order.… A wrong can only be treated by modes of political subjectivization that reconfigure the field of experience” (p. 98).

² Rancière’s intentional naming of this policing is not only to evoke the coercion and repression often associated with the police, but also to refer to Michel Foucault’s analysis of police, in which he analyzes the set of practices that seek both to utilize and to maintain the population of a state (May, 2007).

³ According to May (2010), Rancière views modern society as a time of consensus, which does not mean that everyone approves all public policies, “but rather that there is a general agreement that the partition of the sensible and its distribution of roles is a reasonable one, and that there is no reasonable alternative to it” (para. 8). For a politics to exist, it demands dissensus that reconfigures the forms of visibility and intelligibility that intervenes in the distribution of the sensible.

⁴ As Sakr and Osgood (2019) argued, the term postdevelopmental neither indicates antidevelopmental nor suggests a neat break between developmental and postdevelopmental thinking. It is rather to explore theorizing alternative ways of seeing children’s art while recognizing the importance of developmentalist conceptualizations.

⁵ Although it is difficult to establish an ideal length of an ethnographic study, earlier anthropologists researching in rural cultures spent at least 12 months to experience the annual cycle of the growing season (Jeffrey & Troman, 2004).

⁶ An emic perspective is understanding a culture from an insider point of view, focusing on the particularities and internal schemes, and an etic perspective is taking a general, nonstructural, and objective point of view. In the case of researching with children, as an empirical study by nature, an emic approach might incorporate the voice of children, whereas an etic research would primarily use the voice of a researcher. However, it is important for the researcher to have both perspectives in ethnographic research; in the case of my research, it was essential for me to understand the insider culture and shared understandings in the kindergarten classroom, as well as to attain an etic perspective based on my emic standpoint in the fieldwork of ethnographic research.

⁷ I use the plural here to suggest that the adult power is not limited to Ms. Carla but also includes adults in general, and that power constitutes the less-than image of childhood, which consequently puts children in the situation of having “no part” (Rancière, 1999, p. 11).