More than Words: Reconceptualising young children’s communication and language through improvisation and the temporal arts (PhD)

• Principal supervisor: Dr Christina MacRae
• Supervisors: Professor Rachel Holmes and Dr Abigail Hackett
• Start date: September 2018
• End date: August 2021

Background and aims

More than Words reconceptualises understandings of young children’s communication through improvisational art practices. The project takes place at a time of increasing focus on two-year-old children. On the one hand, there is mounting pressure driven by the school readiness agenda to make children talk as early as possible and, on the other hand, an increased interest in understanding children’s communication in order to create effective pedagogies.

More than Words uses music and dance in synthesis with materials such as silk, string, and light to create encounters for young children, their families and early years educators. During these encounters, a practice is adopted of stripping back talk in order to tune into the many ways that children make meaning and language through a synthesis with movement, sound and material.

The project uses innovative 360˚ video techniques to create audio visual data. This more-than-human technology observes in ways radically different from ‘framed’ video. It makes tangible young children’s entangled knowledge through relation and movement in ways that are not always perceptible to adult gaze or traditional video technology.

publications

Arculus, C.  (2020 forthcoming). Decolonizing the knowledges of young children through the temporal arts. International Journal of Music in Early Childhood. 15:1 pp. 61-73.

Arculus, C. & Macrae, C. (2020 forthcoming). Complicité: resisting the tyranny of talk. Global Education Review. 

CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS

• LILA (learning at the intersection of language and the arts). 29 May 2020 : What happens when adults “don’t talk” but instead use space, sound, materials, and bodies to converse with young children? Dr Christina MacRae and Charlotte Arculus
• MERYC (music educators and researchers for young children) March 2019. What is the potential of music as emergent knowledge? 
• RECE (reconceptualising early childhood education) October 2018. Actual children, unique situations: improvisation and immersive pedagogy: A collection of vignettes from a collective of artist-educators.

Contact charlotte

Email: charlotte.arculus@stu.mmu.ac.uk

Other links:

• Project page