The paper begins with a rationale for the research, before providing some background to the project as a whole. Having contextualised the centre setting, the philosophical argument is put forward for teachers to allow children to formulate their own powers of interpretation. An outline follows of the work undertaken by the visiting Community Artist as part of the MAPS project, with reference to Deleuzean theory, before some reflections on the project are shared by the teachers at Helensville.

Rationale for MAPS

Move, Act, Play and Sing (MAPS) looked at documenting emergent pedagogical strategies in the performing arts in Reggio Emilia inspired early years centres. This was a response to the call for more research in early childhood education, with reference to building pedagogical knowledge of particular curriculum fields (performing arts), linking theory and practice (Nuttall, 2010). Building on recent arts education research internationally, the research team examined teachers’ and children’s pedagogical understandings and concepts of arts learning and interaction (Edwards, Gandini & Forman, 1998). In terms of availability of research on the performing arts and visual arts, in New Zealand there appeared, from the researchers’ perspective, a limited number of studies. This lack of knowledge about performing arts practice was especially evident in how to build performing arts pedagogical concepts and strategies in early childhood. What evidence there was, seemed to show teachers relying on imitative or performative outcomes, such as singing a song with a CD, stories that were pre-recorded, or other commercial packages that lacked any context for a particular centre (Lines & Naughton, 2009). A gap was then perceived in research about how the performing arts provided meaningful and contextual pathways of learning for young children. In addition, how such pathways were enhanced through teacher interest and provocation were also seen as under- researched areas ripe for examination.

MAPS Project Background: Helensville

The MAPS project involved three Community Artists working in dance, drama and music with three centres in Auckland, New Zealand. The centres involved were St. Andrews, based in the wealthy Auckland suburb of Epsom, Te Puna Kohungahunga, a Māori immersion centre in central Auckland, and a centre in Helensville, a semi-rural district outside Auckland. The MAPS project was funded by the Teaching and Learning Research Initiative (TLRI) of New Zealand and involved a collaboration between three tertiary providers. One of the Principal Researchers and three Research Assistants were from New Zealand Tertiary College, a Private Tertiary Education provider. The other two Principal Researchers were from the University of Auckland. Each centre was allocated a Principal Researcher and a Research Assistant who remained with their selected centre for the duration of the two year study, from March 2012 to June 2014.

Staff at each centre were invited to participate in the research project and all were involved to a greater or lesser degree. The staff at the centres, the research team and Community Artists had access to an online discussion forum or Moodle, where they could post photos, video clips and reflections on the work being undertaken at each centre. Each centre was provided with a video camera, and after each visit by the Community Artist, an audio recording was made with one of the centre staff to reflect on the morning’s work and consider how they might take that work forward before the next visit by the Community Artist.

The project was divided up into five terms. Each term began with a cluster day, where each Community Artist would undertake workshops with everyone involved in the project to explore ways of working in the performing arts that were emergent in nature. By emergent, reference is made to the work of Osberg and Biesta (2008), where teachers were involved in a process of elucidating ideas with the children, and where the children’s work, in effect, became the curriculum.

The pattern of visits undertaken by the Community Artists was on a fortnightly basis, though this fluctuated towards the end of the project, where more support was called for or requested. The working principle underlying the project was that, after each visit by the Community Artist, staff at the centres would develop their version of the activity that had been explored by the artist, or create opportunity for the children to continue and adapt the initial provocation. This was another reason for the audio recording at the end of each session, to allow researchers and teachers to reflect on the learning process. The Community Artists rotated between the centres, changing centre after each term. In term four, one of the artists remained with a centre, working with the teachers as the centre staff took on the role of Community Artists in their own right. The intention was that the centre staff teachers would involve their parents in a sharing of arts practice developed through the project in the build up to a centre community event. The community event was where parents, teachers, children, researchers and Community Artists would come together at the culmination of MAPS, not for a performance but a sharing, a celebration of the arts work within each centre.

Throughout the project, a professional camera team was present at the cluster days and visited each centre twice each term to record the work of the centres. The camera team was also present at each of the community events. This material forms the content of the MAPS DVD.

Helensville

The early childhood centre in Helensville, was set in a semi-rural district on the outskirts of Auckland, New Zealand. The centre has a history of undertaking research projects, though nothing on the scale of MAPS. With two houses, or villas, as they are called in New Zealand, that comprised the accommodation, and a roll of over a hundred children and fifteen staff, this was a much larger enterprise than the other two centres in the project, St. Andrews, Epsom, and Te Puna Khungahunga. Helensville described their teaching approach as:

Each member of staff at Helensville was invited to join MAPS and, in turn, take part in the cluster days. Each participant also had access to the MAPS online forum or Moodle, where photos, movie clips and interactive forums were provided. Having such a large number of staff attending the cluster sessions with the artists engaged the whole centre in the process, which was a specific aim of the project at the outset.

The music work, like all the arts at Helensville, took place in the area between the two houses that was named as the Gazebo. This area had clear plastic sheeting on the sides, a covered roof area and carpet on the wooden floor. This space was dedicated to the MAPS project. As Heather explains:

Theory and MAPS – Deleuze and Arts/Education

This paper now reflects on Deleuze signs and with that, difference, concepts that combine to outline worthwhile teaching with reference to Deleuzean terms. What follows is a theoretical backdrop to the work that was observed at Helensville. The intention is not to align the philosophy with the practice, to ‘join the dots’, but to consider these ideas in relation to teacher activity in the process of theory entering the practice of pedagogy. We begin with a reflection by Tiffany, the Research Assistant who worked at Helensville:

The reaction of the Research Assistant to the extended improvisation by the children with Kirsten Simmons, the Community Artist, is important. Tiffany remarks how this event relied on Kirsten first developing the necessary listening and performance skills with the children to enable them to make music as group. This, however, had come about not by a teacher telling children to play something, but from carefully and deliberately working with the children, developing listening, watching and playing. Playing instruments was undertaken not according to prescription, but making music, something that they had worked on, that they had devised, and learnt how to play from repeated opportunities to experiment through their own practice of their music, their musical utterance.

To look into this in more detail, the researchers took an approach that might be compared to Deleuze’s idea of ‘apprecticeship’. Deleuze sees teaching as an apprenticeship, where learning is seen as interpreting signs (Bogue, 2008). That is, not to see learning as accepting a surface dimension of prescribed definitions of what is, the song or the game, but an engagement with doing and discovery where to learn is to create something new through the act of doing and interpretation. However, in order for thought and action to proceed, such as children engaging in creating and making a reading of their own work, Deleuze sees the need for a ‘jolt’, for ‘having to’ engage in the act of making.

In his essay Proust and Signs (2000), Deleuze considers four signs. Simply put, signs are the reading made of experience. In a wide ranging set of references, the first is the ‘dinner party’, where Deleuze suggests that there is nothing to be read. The signs are superficial and provide nothing for an interpretation to be made. In other words in terms of pedagogy the teacher moves on from the superficial, to another set of signs. Deleuze, in his explanation, shows that reactions to signs can be involuntary. He cites another sign, the sudden recollection of a place or time through external stimuli, such as sight, smell or even taste. This response is instantaneous, while relying on an external stimulus to force such a reaction. We may recollect such instances ourselves as smells that conjure reminiscences, sparking our imagination and creation of a virtual place, feeling or set of associations from our own histories, especially our childhood memories.

The final sign that Deleuze, referring to Proust, explores is art. In the artwork, Deleuze sees that, without any external stimulus of taste, smell, or any other sensate experiences, the observer makes a reading of many different interpretations available in the dance, drama, art or music. To underline this idea of making an individual interpretation, Deleuze (1994) provides a curious analogy that life is like a city, where change occurs all the time, on many levels, and in many different respects. Neighbourhoods change with population flow; buildings appear performing new functions; old buildings are re-used in new ways; districts grow or lessen in density, according to changes in population and policy. What art reveals in Deleuze’s reading is an “… immanent virtual domain, the domain of difference in itself that is ‘real without being actual, ideal without being abstract,’ … in a perpetual infinitive of multiple potential temporal unfoldings” (Deleuze, as cited in Bogue, 2008, p. 5). Art now becomes operational in a virtual domain, without recall to extrinsic stimuli, as in the sign that constantly distinguishes meaning within a period of time. This might seem far removed from the artist and teachers working in an early childhood centre, but these concepts can help us in seeking to understand the artwork and the positionality or difference found within ‘art’ making.

If we consider the ‘art-work’ as a space of making and devising, the making does not happen to be a physical object that is created – although there is a material response to the instrument, the paint, the movement, the costume, for sure (Lenz Taguchi, 2009). If we look at music made by children, this remains virtual while not actual. This understanding relies on the adult seeing art not as an adult fabrication, art as imitation of what adult concepts might be of art. The reading presented here sees art in the work of children, legitimated in how they explore sound objects, voice or affect that may occur in the music/art/space (Naughton & Lines, 2012). If the child engages in art, they have the means to see how the artwork appears to them. As adults, our role is to create the space, actual and virtual, for this to occur while also being present to read their invention and movement in the children’s improvised undertaking.

Taking Deleuze’s idea of multiplicity in making a reading, we acknowledge that there is no one way to read the artwork. At this point, the process of making the art work is to develop “a unique world … disclosed from a specific point of view, but in such a way that the artist-subject is produced by the point of view rather than himself or herself bringing the point of view into existence” (Bogue, 2008, p. 6). The artist, child, becomes through their view of the artwork. The child, in their relation to the artwork, relates to the work as themselves. This is what we all do unconsciously each time we look at a picture, watch a dance, see a play, listen to a piece of music or go to see a movie. We change, in respect to the artwork, through our relation and our perspective within the artwork - that is, if of course, we are open to the experience and capable and practiced in reading what is presented.

Following Deleuze’s argument, this thought making and doing is not undertaken unless we are forced into doing so. Deleuze argues that certain signs force the receiver to respond to the differences within the sign. In the space of the artwork, this is where immanence is seen to be actual, where the self differentiates. To put this another way, as the person listening to music sees the unfolding perpetually of ideas, the state of differentiation within the music enforces a shift on the part of the listener in how they listen. As in the reading of a book, Deleuze, looks at the reader of the book, the effect on the reader of the book and the changing role that is played by the reader in the act of reading and interpreting the narrative.

For children, their take up of their art work, we might call ‘image less’ thought. Rather than the re-creation or (re)presentation of objects, be they the rhyme, song, poem, rhythm and so on, if given the opportunity, children start anew in their making. Yet, what they may see as new is sometimes mistaken as disorder to the adult onlooker, a challenge to the authority of the routine, not what is expected, tolerated or conceived as ‘art’. What may be seen as chaos makes sense to those in the activity itself, while not having a right or predictable answer or outcome and seemingly going in all directions at once. As Deleuze observes, new ideas are thoughts “…which are not forces of recognition, today or tomorrow, but the powers of a completely other model, from an unrecognized and un-recognizable terra incognita” (Deleuze, 1994, p. 39).

MAPS: Introduction Music at Helensville

This reflection by Fale, one of the teachers at Helensville, exemplifies a way of seeing that shifted from perceiving music making as chaotic to one of engagement working with the group. It is the alternation of the chaotic with formal elements that characterised the Community Artists’ work combining both the rigid ‘segments’ (Sellers, 2010; Sellers, 2013) that kept the form to the lesson, but wherever possible looking for openings, ‘lines of flight,’ that the children would make that were celebrated and supported. This reached a climactic point in the final visit, as reported by Kirsten, when the children, well- practiced in playing the instruments in the gazebo and knowing how to start and stop, devised their own combined improvisation:

It was a moment, but that moment could only have come about from the teachers and community musician allowing for the children to extend their music making in accordance with learning to do, and having the teachers allow for the children to play with sound in their gazebo, being supportive listeners and musicians with the children. The pedagogy allowed for invention on the part of the teachers following the musician.

MAPS: The Music Schedule

Kirsten had six three hour fortnightly morning sessions at Helensville over the course of one term. Sessions were split between the under threes and the over three year old groups. The Community Artist, when working with the children, did not have more than twelve in the group, with up to two other teachers present. Heather explains more of the process:

Kirsten’s music sessions involved children and teachers working with musical materials—sound making devices—both conventional and unconventional. She brought along a box of musical materials and opened the box and examined them at the beginning of each session.

The sessions lasted sometimes for up to an hour, with a talk before and afterwards with staff, as part of the project requirements. Kirsten would discuss the mornings’ work with the staff as a debrief and discuss ways to elaborate on the ideas with the children in the two week break before her next visit. Very quickly, it became obvious that the staff and children started to enjoy the sessions with a mixture of short circle warm ups and then discovery work with sound. This might involve walking in the centre grounds, holding a different beater and trying all the surfaces to see what kind of ‘sound’ was made by each, in turn, or a story might be used to start work on sounds – with mouth sounds that illuminated the various characters and events.

Alternatively, the sessions might involve playing on the instruments for some time while Kirsten, and, in time, the teachers, became keen observers and players, feeling where, at times, a steady pulse might be added to the texture, working with the children’s musical ideas. Signals were used to start and stop – those wearing the ‘hat’ could dictate when to start and when the music would stop. These periods of playing the instruments, swapping instruments and working together as ensembles grew each time that Kirsten worked with the children. Gradually, the children themselves learnt on their own rehearsal rules as they practiced in the gazebo at different times during the day, inviting others to join them as they played and experimented on their chosen instruments.

As one of the teachers explains:

As you can tell, in the centre, there was an ethos of respect and active engagement, wanting to follow where the children wanted to go in their music making. A recognition, in other words, of multiplicity in the reading made by children in how they worked with sound, recognising difference and allowing the children to interpret their own musical signs.

In time, the musical materials became sound provocations and the children became sound explorers. The sound sources opened up opportunities for exploration and interaction. A shared narrative emerged as Kirsten pulled out each new sound source from the box and presented them to the children. Each new material invited new forms of response. Kirsten enabled this as she then invited the children to explore the room, which also had different sound sources stationed around it. This opened up a more intense session of play with considerable movement and action. One boy approached a row of colourful bottles filled with materials that sounded when the bottles were shaken. He sounded and rearranged the bottles on a table, quickly moving from one bottle to the next. One of the girls watched him closely but did not move the bottles. She was equally intense in her participation as a watcher. She was intense but still. Teachers were aware of the activity, allowing for the children to establish their own learning pathways in this sound experimentation.

Over time, the pedagogical power moved from Community Artist to the children. It began with Kirsten initiating the session with the sound provocations and moved to the children through invitations of exploratory play. It then returned to the artist, but in a different form, more as a dialogue, as a sharing. The centre teachers entered into the dialogue from sitting down on the floor with children and entering into a “pedagogy of listening” (Rinaldi, 2006) with them. This movement and passing on of pedagogical power into a dialogical sharing became distinctive in the project as teachers and children learnt together their new way to relate to each other and new way to interpret the musical soundscapes that were being created.

Kirsten’s sessions were seen as provocations that would eventually ripple out from the core group to the rest of the centre. This idea was an important philosophy held by centre teachers and articulated as such:

The ripple started to take affect with the watchers. During the music sessions, children from outside the core group were drawn to what was happening in the gazebo and looked inside, actively engaged as watchers. Kirsten noticed the watchers, too:

The teachers were also aware of this and saw the involvement of watchers as a process of giving over of pedagogical power.

The rhizomatic (Deleuze, 1987) movement — the ripple — began with the presentation of musical materials and moved through to the watchers. It involved a process of presenting, inviting, storying, listening, watching and responding. One teacher noticed that it was the musical provocation that initiated the whole process, and it was music that enabled them to share and pass on in the form of ‘showing’. This involvement and individual response was similar to the reading being made of the artwork by the child interpreting the music and designing their own musical language.

MAPS: Reflections on Music at Helensville

Heather, the centre manager, in reflecting on the work of the project, remarked:

What resonates is the lack of surety and even, at times, discomfort in the enterprise, which seems to suggest that a sensibility in the project was never clear, as far as the teachers were concerned. They always had to look for new interpretations as the music changed and another sign emerged, one not recognised previously (Olsson, 2009). Perhaps it is instructive to note that this thinking about children and their achievement is a very different relation, compared to the language that can only position learning on a scale, conveying little to anxious parents and even less, of course, to children.

Heather remarked on this form of interactive pedagogy by saying:

This approach to the pedagogy has obvious resonance with Reggio Emilia practices and the aspiration for removal of the teacher as the sole expert. Seeing the terms ‘power’ and ‘in spite of’ and ‘all being teachers and learners’ changes the politics in the reading of the adult child relationship. The welcoming of difference or singularity, in making a reading, is self-evident, as is the limitation of the adult in what it is that the child may wish to achieve. The acknowledgement and sense of learning being about interpreting the children’s work in the art form was noted by Fale:

The sense of discovery is being acknowledged by Fale as a teacher looks for what is to be ‘read’ within the children’s ideas. There is more a sense of being compelled to read the work of the children anew and to learn through an apprenticeship to what it is that the children are doing. Trying new things asks a lot but is helped by the willingness of the centre to devolve power to children:

Conclusion

Much more could be written about the experience of the Helensville centre and their work in the MAPS project. The production of their own publication is one place to learn more (see Moving, Acting, Singing and Playing, 2014). What has been significant about this research project has been the recognition of multiplicity in the course of the research. When, as staff in a project, the direction of the children, teachers and artist have moved in ways that have been unpredictable or rhizomatic this has led to much discussion as to the validity of the direction that the research project was taking. This was no less apparent in Helensville as the project evolved. In the musical activity, the work, at first, was with some trepidation, but as staff were prepared to adapt themselves and learn to read what occurred, many new sound worlds were revealed. This was the case at Helensville, but many more maps may be drawn and have yet to be drawn, virtually, through the children’s experimentation.

The fit between Deleuzean philosophy and early childhood practice is telling. As one of the Helensville teachers remarked:

If, as teachers, we can learn to work with the children in their art worlds and to see our work as advancing children’s abilities to interpret their art making, we are, as Deleuze has suggested, enabling children to interpret signs. The sign that is most significant is art, and in a world that becomes more passive and utilitarian, music amongst the arts opens the child to their imaginative and creative potential and to a practice that is at once legitimising of their view of their world and their becoming musicians in their own understanding. By making the link to Deleuze and signs, teachers can build on what it is that children produce. Making their own signs children’s work is read by children on their terms not those of an adult audience. As teachers enabling children to read their own signs to interpret their own making children legitimate their own innovative ideas making openings for their learning to further invention and skills leaving the static notion of learning and minimum curriculum requirements behind to engage in problem solving and elaboration in their endeavour. As teachers inspired by encouraging children to become interpreters of their world they naturally engage in their meaning making and their own critical positionality. This active child becoming curriculum was personified in the Helensville music work where children alive to potentialities opened themselves up to music as a living creative force in their lives, where change, movement and re-making characerterised their MAPS experience.

Acknowledgements: Some sections of this paper have been adapted from the MAPS report available on the Teaching Learning Research Initiative (TLRI) website: http://www.tlri.org.nz

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