Making and being made: wise humanising creativity in interdisciplinary early years arts education

ABSTRACT

This paper focuses on how wise humanising creativity (WHC) is manifested within early years interdisciplinary arts education. It draws on Arts Council-funded participatory research by Devon Carousel Project and University of Exeter’s Graduate School of Education. It is grounded in previous AHRC-funded research, which conceptualised WHC in the face of educational creativity/performativity tensions. WHC articulates the dialogic embodied inter-relationship of creativity and identity – creators are ‘making and being made’; they are ‘becoming’. The research used a qualitative methodology to create open-ended spaces of dialogue or ‘Living Dialogic Spaces’ framed by an ecological model to situate the team’s different positionings. Data collection included traditional qualitative techniques and arts-based techniques. Data analysis involved inductive/deductive conversations between existing theory and emergent themes. Analysis indicated that ‘making and being made’, and other key WHC features were manifested. We conclude by suggesting that WHC can help develop understanding of how creative arts practice supports the breadth of young children’s development, and the role of the creativity-identity dialogue within that, as well as indicating what the practice and research has to offer beyond the Early Years.

KEYWORDS:

• Wise humanising creativity
• interdisciplinary arts
• participatory research
• early years
• embodied dialogue

Acknowledgement

We would like to thank the early years professionals, babies, children and parents of all the research sites who took part in the action research; as well as our partner researchers Catherine Cartwright (Carousel Printmaker, Double Elephant Print Workshop), and Stuart Dawson (Carousel Film-maker), and student volunteer, Ester Clemente.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. www.thecarouselproject.org.uk.

2. This film clip has had the sound removed so as to not identify the children by their real names.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Arts Council England (Grant Number 25073915), Devon County Council and Exeter City Council.