Beauty Bubbles, Subtle Meetings, and Frames for Play: Aesthetic Processes in Danish Kindergartens.

Abstract

This article contributes to the knowledge about artist-teacher collaboration by focusing on aesthetic processes in a partnership between pedagogues and artists in two Danish kindergartens over a period of 18 months. The research is within the framework of action research and links to the development project, European Children of Culture, which involved several European/Baltic/Nordic countries in 2015-2017. The article rests on empirical material (interviews, photos, video recordings and field notes from actions and reflections) and investigates how the involved adults understand, facilitate and frame aesthetic processes and how this leads the researcher to expand perspectives on aesthetics in early childhood services. The aim of the article is to rethink aesthetic processes – to explore the many layers of aesthetics, not to reduce them. Hence, aesthetic processes in kindergartens become profound aesthetic-sensitive experiences involving hands-on processes with intensified meaning, subtle meetings and intermediate worlds, and ultimately termed “beauty bubbles”. IJEA Vol. 20 No. 1 http://www.ijea.org/v20n1/ 2 Introduction and Focus Teacher-artist collaboration is considered to be valuable in educational settings and is in International Journal of Education & the Arts mainly connected to school settings. The articles here highlight the teacher-artist collaboration and its impact on school employees (Ansio, Seppälä, & Houni, 2017), pupils’ learning outcomes and the benefits of the arts in young peoples’ lives (Upitis, 2005) and the organisation of collaboration and reflection on results (Nevanen, Juvonen, & Ruismäki, 2012). In Denmark, the focus on collaboration and partnership between teachers and artists has developed significantly since the school reform of 2014 and the vision of “the open school” making schools responsible for organizing partnerships with the local community. The open school vision and its partnerships with the arts draws on the research by Anne Bamford about quality in arts education and how teaching in the arts improves learning skills in, for example, mathematics and reading (Bamford, 2006; Bamford & Qvortrup, 2006). This article, however, does not address the school area, pupils or teachers, but turns to artist collaboration in early childhood services. The collaboration between artists and pedagogues is, as it is in schools, a growing field, and expressed in a new law as a part of “The open day care service”. This article focuses on kindergartens, pedagogues (pædagoger, in Danish) and artists, and examines a less explored topic in the collaboration – the attention to and concrete unpacking of aesthetic processes. The aim of the article is to broaden understandings of aesthetics in early childhood services as more than art and symbolic mediated forms, but as intermediate worlds, subtle meetings, apprehension and delight in the material world that leads to something more. Kindergartens in Denmark (as in other Scandinavian countries) are not part of the schools, and the very large majority of them are government-sponsored. The article examines how pedagogues and artists understand and facilitate aesthetic processes and how, through collaboration, they expand their understandings of aesthetics and each other. The theoretical approach in the article is philosophical perspectives on aesthetics and aesthetics as the sensitive cognition and -experience. The article investigates the following questions: How do artists and pedagogues understand and facilitate aesthetic processes in a collaborative partnership – and how can this lead to new perspectives on aesthetic processes and experiences in early childhood services? Names of kindergartens, pedagogues, artists, and children have been fictionalized. 1 The law became effective in July 2018. See Aftale I folketinget om Stærke Dagtilbud – alle børn skal med i fællesskabet (Agreement in the Danish Parliament about Strong Daycare Services – Every Child is a Member of a Group and of the Community). Publication from Childand Social Ministry (2017, p. 9). Blomgren: Beauty Bubbles 3 About Pedagogues and Artists In Denmark, pedagogues – not pre-school teachers – attend to the pedagogical work in early childhood services. Pedagogue is a distinct and widespread profession requiring a three-and-ahalf-year BA degree, leading to work in a range of settings (Jensen, 2011, p. 142). Students choose between three specialisations: early childhood services (infants), school and ‘freetime’ services (schoolchildren), and social work and special services (adults and people with special needs). Early childhood services in kindergartens accommodate children from three to six years old. The pedagogue’s approach to children is holistic and relational in a personal and professional way – a way that does not include a traditional teaching approach (Moss, 2002, p. 143). Instead, pedagogues incorporate the curriculum through a play-learning perspective by facilitating different kinds of activities and through daily routines (Ahrenkiel et al., 2013). The pedagogue is oriented towards everyday life, wellbeing and social relations (Thingstrup, Schmidt, & Andersen, 2017, p. 1) and supporting the child in becoming a democratic and independent being (Sommer, Samuelsson, & Hundeide, 2010, p. 15). However, the current restructuring of public services, including early childhood services, as a part of the educational framework, challenges the role of the pedagogue in implementing learning environments (Krejsler, 2012). In this action research examined, the pedagogues collaborated with artists and supporting the curriculum theme Cultural Expressions and Values (Sommer, Samuelsson, & Hundeide, 2010, p. 15). This theme is recently, within a new law concerning day care services, transformed into Culture, Aesthetics and Relations and thus promotes a stronger focus on aesthetics alongside the vison of “The open day care service” including partnerships with artists or art institutions. This article describes a partnership based on collaborative work between artists and pedagogues. The collaborative type of settings where children meet artists in early childhood institutions refers to partnerships based on mutual respect and a rather close collaboration which ideally takes place over an extended period of time (Borgen, 2011, p. 374). What makes this research significant, in the least in a Danish context, is the long-term collaboration, with the children meeting a new artist every six months over an 18-month period. The artists were educated at accredited Danish and foreign institutions of artistic higher education as musicians, visual artists, dramaturges, textile designers and architects. Each artist engaged with the children and pedagogues in action on three to seven occasions. After each action there followed reflections with the pedagogues, pedagogical leaders and the researcher. Theoretical Framework Drawing on insights from both philosophical (Baumgarten 1750/1992; Gross, 2002; Jørgensen, 2015; 2018) and child cultural perspectives on aesthetics (Juncker, 2017; Mouritsen, 2002; von Bonsdorff, 2009), this article is written in opposition to psychological IJEA Vol. 20 No. 1 http://www.ijea.org/v20n1/ 4 and learning approaches concerning aesthetics that express and mediate impressions, innerfeelings, and ‘the unsaid’ into symbolic forms (Austring & Sørensen, 2012, p. 93). The German Enlightenment philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714-1762) distinguished between a lower and a higher part of the cognitive faculty (Jørgensen, 2015, p. 12). Yet, he broke with the established notion of the lower cognitive faculty as a provider of concept to the higher cognitive faculty and established lower faculty cognition as an independent and sovereign source of a certain kind of cognition (Gross, 2002, p. 408). He referred to this certain kind of cognition as aesthetic cognition which he defined as sensitive, and not sensual, and as emphasizing imagination, thinking, and intuitive approaches (awareness, attunement, presentiments and sensations) (Jørgensen, 2015, p. 26; 2018, p. 25). According to Baumgarten and the Danish professor of Philosophy and History of Ideas, Dorthe Jørgensen (2015), the goal of sensitive cognition, that is aesthetics, is perfection of the sensitive: ... it is the perfection of the sensitive cognition that is the goal of aesthetics, and perfection is identical to beauty. ... Sensitive cognitions ... are specific and characterized by both unity and diversity. ... in sensitive cognitions the many individual marks of the specific are not lost in abstraction, and not only complexity is experienced, but meaning as well. In sensitive cognitions we do not only sense a multitude of marks. We also perceive a whole that is characterized both by liveliness thanks to this wealth, and by meaningfulness thanks to inner consistency. (p. 13-14) Aesthetic experience is an experience of beauty. Beauty does not relate to whether something is nice or pretty, but stresses the holistic creation of meaning and new worlds through the sensitive pathways to knowledge. One does this by creating connections to the world around one’s self (objects, persons and atmospheres) and creating, perceiving and playing with complexity, diversity and many possible options. This is described by Jørgensen (2015; 2018) as beautiful (expanded) thinking and intermediate worlds (p. 25, pp. 35-37). The intermediate world occurs in a creative act where subject and object erase and is “the sphere of our experiences of transcendence; experience of a ‘surplus’ of meaning is the content of this sphere” (Jørgensen, 2018 p. 38). Philosophical aesthetics, with its sensitive cognition, marks aesthetic processes as creative processes alternating between the subject and the world and such processes changing the people and surroundings involved (Jørgensen, 2015). Those processes are made possible through hands-on processes with a phy