Conference Agenda

The LEAP (Little Explorers And Parents & families) project offers a movement- and arts-based intervention for pre-school children in socioeconomically disadvantaged areas in the UK. Developed by a ballet company (Northern Ballet) and building on creative adaptations made during the COVID-19 pandemic, the project fosters physical, cognitive and social development through music, storytelling and multisensory play. A qualitative evaluation was undertaken to explore its implementation and potential for wider application in early years (EY) settings.

Flexible, context-sensitive methods were used to generate data with key actors from five preschools in the north of England. Methods included: interviews and written reflections from EY practitioners; observations and informal conversations with children; and WhatsApp interviews with parents. Visual data, such as photographs, supplemented narrative accounts. Efforts to involve parents/carers revealed key methodological challenges; despite multi-modal recruitment, only two parents took part and both demonstrated limited awareness of the LEAP project.

A relational evaluation framework underpinned the analysis, focusing on interactions between children, practitioners, families and the creative materials. Findings highlight the importance of trust, co-creation and embedded practitioner relationships in enabling meaningful engagement. Small group work and accessible resources supported participation, while space constraints, staff absence and language barriers limited implementation in some contexts.

This study illustrates the methodological value of adaptive, relational approaches in researching arts-based interventions within EY settings. It raises critical questions about whose voices are heard and how engagement is negotiated in under-resourced, culturally diverse communities. In challenging times, such as post-pandemic recovery, the co-construction of knowledge with practitioners and children becomes central to understanding impact and informing scale-up. Future research must continue to embrace flexible, inclusive methods that recognise the complexity of working with young children and families across diverse settings.

As arts-based research (ABR) in the social sciences has evolved over the past 30 years, it has taken on multiple forms, methods, and interpretations (Wang et al., 2017). This paper examines the concept of scholartistry, a term first coined by the Canadian poet and scholar Lorri Neilsen (1998), and expanded through three editions of Arts-Based Research in Education: Foundations for Practice (Cahnmann-Taylor & Siegesmund, 2008, 2018 and forthcoming, with the third edition being released concurrently with the ECQI conference). As developed through the three editions, scholartistry calls for both a deep knowledge of one’s disciplinary base within the social sciences as well as proficiency of a specific and/or multimodal art practice. Additionally, scholartistry is profoundly rooted in the American Pragmatism of John Dewey and William James (Capps & Capps, 2005) with its commitment to discover what we do not yet know in order to make our social life better. Profoundly, this quest for broadening circles of clarity is driven by attention to and the application of tacit knowledge (Polanyi, 1967) in the process of inquiry.

John Dewey, in Art as Experience (1934) referred to the analytic engagement with the tacit realm of experience as thinking in “relations of qualities” (p. 46). Furthermore, Dewey insisted that such qualitative reasoning was distinctly different from thinking in terms of linguistic, mathematical, or even visual symbols.

The distinction between thinking in linguistic and visual symbols (with their attendant structures of metaphor and metonymy) and thinking in the tacit realm of the relationship of qualities is the essential feature of scholartistry and how one would identify a scholartist work of ABR from a symbolic ABR analysis. To support this distinction, visual examples from recent ABR will help clarify the added level of analysis that attention to tacit qualitative reasoning in images might provide.

In this paper, I present artistic research I have carried out with a group of learning-disabled artists, who have existed as a collective for over four decades, collectively known as The Professors. Methodological literatures often present participation and disability inclusion in research in idealised ways, as though if offers an easy resolution to power and oppression. Paradoxically, idealised rhetorics about inclusion may conceal and reinforce old hierarchies (Ahmed, 2012). For instance, it is often assumed that collaborative research involves selecting and sticking to one unified inquiry, which Gallacher and Gallagher (2008) call an ‘adult norm’ of linear research. I argue it is also a neoliberal-ableist one (Goodley, 2018). In this project, I have sought to collaborate with The Professors flexibly and fluidly, allowing multiple fragmented strands of unfolding knowledge production to emerge through their artistic practices, in which such approaches are well-established. The research draws on research-creation - which centres the artistic process (Loveless, 2019) – and ethnographic methods, demonstrating how methodologies embedded in The Professors’ established creative practices generate insights into anti-ableist participatory approaches. Through presenting examples of these creative practices, I show how they resist established norms of academic knowledge production, including idealised concepts of co-production, and offer radical anti-ableist alternatives. However, I will contrast these radical, creative moments with the examples which illustrate the tensions and contradictions that emerge from attempting to do this sort of anti-ableist participatory research from within an neoliberal higher education institution, which are not easily overcome or resolved.

Reference List

Gallacher L-A and Gallagher M (2008) Methodological immaturity in childhood research? Thinking through ’participatory methods’. Childhood 15(4): 499–516.

Goodley D (2018) Dis/ability Studies: Theorising disablism and ableism. Routledge.

Loveless, N. (2019). How to Make Art at the End of the World: A manifesto for research-creation. Duke University Press. https://www.dukeupress.edu/how-to-make-art-at-the-end-of-the-world

This paper introduces a study situated at the intersection of multispecies childhood research and new materialism-oriented art education research. As part of a broader research project examining children's and young people's multispecies relations in the age of ecological crises, I had the opportunity to explore the everyday life of a children's and youth art school in Southern Finland. I examined how children's relationships with other species—and broadly speaking, with other nature—materialized during the meetings of art school groups.

In this paper, I present two dimensions through which I explored the multispecies relationality in the art classroom. On one hand, other species entered the art educational situations through representations and stories: as subjects of artistic work, as visual imagery and objects in the classroom, and as narrated stories. On the other hand, relationships with other species, objects and forces were already present, as continuously co-emerging tapestry of everyday life. This affective dimension, however, felt hard to grasp, as it seemed as a blurry ‘background’ eluding attention.

Finding ways to attune to the affective relationality beyond the explicit pedagogical context and other ‘foreground’ layers of the situation challenged me as a researcher to engage in methodological experimentation. Inspired by Linda Knight's (2021) protocol of inefficient mapping, I developed a method of affective movement mapping through drawing, which allowed me to attune to the affective encounters, rhythms, and intensities in the art classroom.

Through examples, the paper illustrates how this experimental method revealed art education situations as vibrant assemblages of diverse tempos and rhythms of movement, where the touches of hands, materials, and tools are central, and through these encounters, new stories and representations of multispecies relationality emerge.

Arts and science are often seen as dichotomous, opposites. In relatively conservative fields like business and management, endeavors that draw on creativity and emotion are treated as distinct from those relying on rigor, and reason. But what happens when scientific prescriptions, methodological templates and academic conventions do not satisfactorily facilitate our attempts to theorize and represent the worlds of our research participants? I am not an experienced arts-based scholar, nor a particularly talented artist, I am afraid. However, last year I had a serendipitous encounter with ethnodrama, a specific genre of dramatic literary writing, and analytic approaches associated with it, that opened up for me possibilities for knowing, sensing and writing that the traditional methodologies could not accommodate. In this essay, I reflect back on my recent experience with ethnodramatic analysis and writing, and its reception in the review process. I aim to argue about the potential of ethnodramatic analysis and writing to facilitate theorizing ‘that’s moving’, referring on Weick’s (1999) notion of ‘moving’ theories, i.e. ‘theories that affirm the heart’ or in other words, theories that have emotional resonance (p. 140).