Permission has been given to re-publish some text-passages and photographs from Becoming Pedagogue: Bergson and the Aesthetics, Ethics and Politics in Early Childhood Education and Care by Liselott Mariett Olsson, (© 2023) by Imprint. Reproduced by permission of Taylor & Francis Group.
Permission has been given to re-publish one quote and photographs from Liselott Mariett Olsson, Gunilla Dahlberg and Ebba Theorell (2016) Displacing identity – placing aesthetics: early childhood literacy in a globalized world, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 37 (5): 717-738. DOI: 10.1080/01596306.2015.1075711. Reproduced by permission of Taylor & Francis Group. Co-authors and photographer have also given their permission to re-publish this material.
1Throughout the history of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) aesthetics has played a prominent role and it has been practically and theoretically treated as concerning the relation between matter and mind in a non-dualist and integrated way. However, in the contemporary educational situation the aesthetic dimension is neglected, and the components of the relation are neither distinguished nor “held together.” A certain kind of “abstract formalism” (Løvlie 2007), expressed in ever-growing “standards and accountability movements” (Taubman 2009) and “neuromania” (Vandenbroeck et al. 2017), has taken over the discourse on education and obliterated the aesthetic dimension and relation as well as pedagogical practices and theories connected to these.
- 1 ‘‘réalité ultime’’
- 2 ‘‘la critique de l’espace, étendue à la perception de la matière, conduit à une métaphysique de la (...)
2To address this, some decisive parts of one of Bergson’s major works Matter and Memory (1988) are of value and use. Not least the critique of epiphenomenalism and parallelism in neuroscientific explanations of the human mind as well as the critical and creative account of a non-dualist relation between matter and mind herein displayed. Bergson approaches the problem by showing how the dualism between mind and matter becomes settled when space is allowed to intervene and through perception produce a distance and a division between “our mind” and “our body” (including our material brain) as well as between “our mind” and “things”. This spatialized vision is due to how perception is directed towards action that pragmatically deforms matter. This, however, is not the only or even the true nature of matter and the quest that Bergson begins with this book concerns therefore to restore to matter (including our own body and its brain) its “ultimate reality”1 (Worms 2013a, 112, my translation). The main thesis is double: “the critique of space is extended to the perception of matter, leading to a metaphysics of duration, that in turn is extended to the reality of matter”2 (Worms 2013a, 113, my translation).
3In this article I will further explore this thesis and its potential synergies with the aesthetics of ECEC by proceeding through three movements: 1) critically assessing abstract formalism as a badly stated problem in the aesthetics of ECEC, 2) making a brief inventory of some pedagogical-aesthetical practices and theories in ECEC and 3) giving a concrete example of how to re-activate aesthetics in ECEC.
- 3 For an overview of more knowledge traditions in the scientific study of education, see Furlong and (...)
4Before entering the core of this three-folded argument, it may be of importance to situate such an endeavour a bit. I am here speaking as a pedagogue and within a Continental tradition of pedagogy. In what is conventionally known as the Western world there are two major knowledge traditions in the scientific study of education, the Continental and the Anglo-American tradition (Biesta 2011).3 Within the Anglo-American tradition, pedagogy often means nothing more than pedagogical practice and “method”. Educational research is here conceived as a multidisciplinary field based on four “fundamental” disciplines: philosophy, psychology, sociology and history where neither education nor pedagogy is seen as an academic discipline. Within the Continental tradition the opposite is the case. Pedagogy is here considered an academic discipline that has developed out of its’ intimate relationship with philosophy, but that also has its own knowledge tradition capable of giving both practical and intellectual consistency to education. In this tradition pedagogy is in one sense impossible to disconnect from philosophical thinking – educational questions cannot be posed without philosophical ideas. But in another sense pedagogy here constantly needs to attend to practice – education cannot be thought without referring to concrete action. As Jean Houssaye states:
Pedagogues engage in an educational reality, between ideas and actions, within the articulation of both, without any possible reduction of one to the other (Houssaye 2002, 18, my translation, emphasis added).
5This has implications for situating not only the present endeavour, but also for situating Bergson’s work in relation to education in general. Already in this quote, one can sense the potential synergies between Bergson’s work, pedagogy and education: the non-dualist approach to the relation of idea and action and the quest for real right at their intersection (Ansell Pearson 2018). But situating Bergson’s work in pedagogy and education also implies that there is less defining and positioning problems within philosophical traditions, and more connecting philosophical problems with pedagogical and educational ones where the important thing is how they may contribute to and enrichen each other. Through connecting philosophy with pedagogy and our contemporary educational situation there is the possibility of re-formulating educational problems, but also to prolong and create new meaning and sense of the philosophical perspective in question. In such an ongoing mutual process neither Bergson’s philosophy nor pedagogy or the contemporary educational situation and its problems are given once and for all. In the best of cases, this answers to the call made by both Vladimir Jankélévitch (2015) and Gilles Deleuze (2006) that claim the need for a certain extension and renewal of Bergson’s philosophy in relation to our contemporary situation:
A ‘return’ to Bergson does not only mean a renewed admiration for a great philosopher but a renewal or an extension of his project today, in relation to the transformations of life and society, in parallel with the transformations of science (Deleuze 2006, 115).
6It is, then, within this context that I will address Bergson and the aesthetics of ECEC and in the remains of this text the three-folded argument is displayed.
- 4 This implies a confusion of quantity and quality that in line with Bergson’s argument in his first (...)
7Since at least three decades and within the development of a globally competitive knowledge-society, the idea of education has developed into concerning an economic logic and vocabulary of “efficient transactions of knowledge”, “job-training” and the need to constantly “increase quality” in educational practices (Dahlberg, Moss and Pence 2013; Peters 2017). This has been paired with consequential political reforms leading to a governing of education on all levels (from preschool to university) through accountability and evaluation of “results” as well as through administration of “big data”, bureaucratization and, despite all talk of quality, a focus on quantifiable educational experiences and events (ibid; Furlong and Whitty 2017).4 Consequently, education has become caught up in continuous demands to represent real educational experiences and events through abstract formalisations (Løvlie 2007). In relation to an alleged “crisis” in education, there has been a ferocious development of various tools and standards for assessing and accounting for children’s and teacher’s knowledge-results (Taubman 2009). These tools are all extremely abstract, formalised and general and do not concern the everyday experiences and events that teachers live together with children in ECEC. Even to the point that one of the sides of the aesthetic relation in education – the material conditions for and aspects of education – seem to have fallen into complete oblivion. Educational buildings are deteriorating, preschools and schools are displaced in barracks supposed to be temporary locations that tend to become permanent, or in buildings never meant to harbour any kind of educational activity, and state agencies do not take enough responsibility for the material environment in education (de Laval 2018; Ekström 2021; Krupinska 2018; O’Brien and Roberts 2018; SVT 2013). Today, abstract and formal representations of educational experiences and events seem considered more real than the events and experiences themselves.
8At the same time, such abstract formalism is further enhanced by a seemingly unstoppable “neuromania” in education, touching upon the other side of the aesthetic problem and relation – the intellectual conditions for and aspects of education – and expressed in unqualified translations of findings within the neurosciences into educational contexts and practices (Vandenbroeck et al. 2017). New techniques of imaging in the field of neuroscience claim to visualize not only the structure of the material brain but also the mind’s functioning, allegedly enabling us “to see the neural correlates of the activities of the mind itself in real time” and making it “impossible to doubt that mind is what brain does” (Rose and Abi-Rached 2013, 13, emphasis added). Such ideas are now often imposed in educational practices, and this in a time where the above-mentioned ideas of education have led to a confusion of what “learning” means or, for that matter, what its’ relation to teaching consists in (Biesta 2017; Säfström, Månsson and Osman 2015). Such confusion, paired with a neglect of a rich pedagogical heritage as well as with new challenges of artificial intelligence, digitalization and new media where learning is thought to occur with assistance by computer-generated answers, faster communication and wider distribution (education by anyone, anytime and anywhere), leaves learning vulnerable and exposed to all sorts of abuse. It is easily hi-jacked by abstract and formalised tools and standards, that now also appropriate and translate neuroscientific findings into explanations of educational practices. Such explanations, just as abstract and formalised tools and standards, are often very far from real, lived and acted experiences and events in ECEC. Yet, they are today imposed on educational practice and theory and deemed useful for “improving” children’s and teacher’s knowledge-results.
9In sum, both sides and components of the aesthetic dimension and relation in ECEC seem affected by abstract formalism (Loevli 2007); they are neglected and somewhat confused; they are no longer properly identified nor “held together”; and if crisis there is in education, we should perhaps begin by calling it by its right name, that is, a spatial-intellectual crisis; and, by that definition too, an aesthetic crisis.
10Now, already here, Bergson’s Matter and Memory (1988) may be of use in trying to critically assess abstract formalism as a badly stated problem in the aesthetics of ECEC. This, as Caterina Zanfi (2020) recently has shown, is part of Bergson’s method: one must begin by setting aside badly stated problems. Even though this book (or any other of Bergson’s major works) may not explicitly address aesthetics, considering the current aesthetic crisis in education, it may still – due to its non-dualist ambitions, its critique and its creative quest for the true nature of matter – be useful for having a closer look at how abstract formalism is a badly stated problem in the aesthetics of ECEC.
11In Matter and Memory (1988) Bergson shows how the division between matter and mind may be traced back to how perception has been treated throughout the Western history of philosophy. The philosophical heritage from the earliest philosophical schools of idealism and realism is by Bergson questioned when he claims that both have gone “too far” because: “it is a mistake to reduce matter to the perception which we have of it, a mistake also to make of it a thing able to produce in us perceptions, but in itself of another nature than they” (Bergson 1988, 9). Such notions of perception, especially when continuously confounded, only contribute to undifferentiated notions of mind and matter and to the reduction of reality to “states of the subject”, “illusions” and “veridical hallucinations” (Bergson 1988, 68). Ultimately, the critique that Bergson directs towards both idealism and realism concerns how they reduce perception to epistemology and to a “theory of knowledge in general” that become purely speculative (Bergson 1988, 28). In such speculation what also gets lost is any notion of bodies that act. Neither idealism nor realism manages, due to their speculative interest for pure knowledge, to account for action (Bergson 1988, 231). In line with this, abstract formalism in education is a badly stated problem affecting the aesthetics of ECEC as it is underpinned by such neglect of action and is built upon a reduction of perception to knowledge that in turn reduces real educational experiences and events to illusions. It may be precisely this that is at stake when real, lived and acted educational experiences and events, even educational buildings, are replaced by abstract and formalised tools and standards that account for children’s and teacher’s knowledge-results. But Matter and Memory (1988) – in its own time and now – also presents a pregnant critique of unqualified neuroscientific explanations of the human mind that may be of value for critically assessing how contemporary neuromania in ECEC is part of a badly posed problem that affect the aesthetics of ECEC. Just as the above referred contemporary critique of “neuromania” do, Bergson too criticizes the assumption that “mind is what brain does”, and the epiphenomenalism and parallelism expressed in a simplified causal relation from the latter to the former seems to have no sense for Bergson (1988, 12). Not only because the problem of the relation between the physiological and the psychical is badly stated and that the translation suffers from impreciseness, but more so because it concerns a reduction of the relations the nervous system has to the rest of the material world (Bergson 1988, 24). Bergson presents the human brain as something more than interior grey matter, but also as something less than a cause to, or a container of, representations of the external world. The office of the brain is not to harbour such representations in the shape of cinematographic miniature images located in the grey matter. The brain is completely and wholly directed towards movement: it receives and transmits movements in preparing the body for action (Bergson 1988, 29-30). Bergson postulates that this must also go for perception, which is regulated by the nervous system; perception is a corporeal act through which living organisms orient themselves in a material world and engage with matter, and, moreover, perception is subtractive and pragmatic in that the body perceives only that in the object which interests it, and which is of use for its impending actions (Bergson 1988, 229). The body with its neural and perceptive functions is here destined for action, and as Bergson by the end of the book persistently insists, to action only:
The idea that we have disengaged from the facts and confirmed by reasoning is that our body is an instrument of action, and of action only. In no degree, in no sense, under no aspect, does it serve to prepare, far less to explain, a representation (Bergson 1988, 225).
- 5 Elizabeth de Freitas and Francesca Ferrara (2015), for instance, points toward recent neuroscientif (...)
12This, however, is at odds with both contemporary standards- and accountability movements and neuromania in education, that make of action and of all that is material in education – bodies, brains and buildings alike – sites of abstract and formal representations. The above account of the body and brain’s status and modus points towards the need of recognizing its limits and towards a greater carefulness in the application of neuroscientific findings in education. This does not primarily concern a critique of neuroscience itself which, of course, consists of very rich and rapidly developing fields of scientific study,5 but it does concern the need for a certain carefulness with explanations that tend towards symbolic and simplified translations between brain, mind, and behaviour in educational experiences and events.
- 6 For a fuller account of this and more reasons for why abstract formalism in ECEC should be consider (...)
13So far, abstract formalism has been critically assessed as a badly stated problem in education and it is the first part of Bergson’s double thesis that has been addressed.6 Now, how does Bergson proceed with the second part of the thesis concerning the durational reality of matter, and could that open towards some alternatives and resonances with an aesthetic dimension and relation in ECEC? Memory enters the scene:
In fact, there is no perception which is not full of memories. With the immediate and present data of our senses, we mingle a thousand details out of our past experience (Bergson 1988, 33).
14At first, though, memory enters the scene dressed as an action-figure marked by the same kind of spatialization as perception and in the form of “habit-memory” – corporeal repetitions of acts that become automated. Habit-memory concerns a “learning by heart” that is of utmost importance for our lives: it allows us to perform the many daily acts necessary for our existence in a world of matter. Despite usual negative connotations of habit and its’ flagrant spatializing features, there is a profoundly creative function of this kind of memory. It actualizes past acts and events in a bodily repetition that has no need for conscious reflection (at least once “the lesson is learnt”): it is “lived and acted, rather than represented” (Bergson 1988, 81). There is, however, another form of memory, one that is closer to representation – a more personal memory of singular events in the unique past of an individual. This memory, just as habit-memory, is of utmost importance for our lives: it occurs when our body is not overwhelmed by the necessity to act. Even though this second form of memory is “representing” the past, our body serves to materialize and insert also this memory into an impending action; it joins perception and is “prolonged into a nascent action” (Bergson 1988, 81). And as accessing this memory, like habit-memory, demands a certain act of repetition, it is common that the two memories are mixed up (Bergson 1988, 83). Already here, we may sense an opening towards an alternative of relevance for the aesthetics of ECEC. Despite the limits displayed above, the human body must also be considered in its creativity, and this could be enhanced in education. The lack of attention paid to materiality in education that abstract formalism has produced may well be a consequence of the neglect of the creative powers of our body. An attention paid to the creative aspects of habit-memory and development of bodily habits could imply a renouncement of any too “bookish” and “verbal” a learning and teaching (Mossé-Bastide 1955, 201) in favour of “an education of the hand” (Bergson 2007, 67). At the same time, though, it would be of equal importance to pay attention to the richness of the mind in education. The emptied concept of learning that occurs within abstract formalism in contemporary education may be further explained by the constant confusion of the two different memories. The memory that represents the unique past of an individual seems often to be treated as habit memory and learning here only concerns habitual acts of repetition and recognition of something universal already known. Bergson expresses himself explicitly in the question and points out that such “ready-made” and impersonal knowledge rarely is retained, and that “encyclopaedic programmes” rather suffocate real learning and teaching as well as children’s continuous quest for the new (Bergson 2007, 68). Instead, personal memory-images from the uniquely coloured past of each child as well as collective ones made in groups of children could be enhanced in education, thereby creating a more profound relation to that which is studied.
15This would be all the more important when considering that between these memory-images and perception, there is a “mutual tension” and exchange (Bergson 1988, 116), and even, as stated by Elisabeth Grosz, “a fundamental solidarity”; memory brings back to the object that which perception must discharge, and together they “converge to bathe the object in its potential, to make it available for present and future use in ways unrecognized by habit” (Grosz 2004, 175). Now, this solidarity between perception and memory is perhaps most clearly seen in Bergson’s most famous figure, that of the cone (Bergson 1988, 162). The cone is inverted, and its pointed end illustrates the sensory-motor consciousness expressed and prolonged into bodily action (habit-memory) as it is inserted into the plane of our present perception. The base of the cone is at the top of the figure, illustrating the widest and most relaxed plane of the totality of our memories from the past (representative memory). As we descend from the top and this widest base of our memories, closer and closer towards the pointed end, we come closer and closer to action. Between the pointed end, the present sensory-motor perception and action, and the widest base of the totality of our memories there are differently tensed planes of consciousness. Importantly, these are not given but continuously re-activated and created and they cannot be reduced to a past that is wholly determining the present and the future (Bergson 1988, 148). There is something profoundly transformative at stake and it is precisely in this movement between action and representation that ideas are born (Bergson 1988, 243). Interestingly – especially in relation to the example given in the last part of this article – the figure of the inverted cone illustrates not only the generation of ideas, but also of language:
To hear speech is, in fact, first of all to recognize a sound, then to discover its sense, and finally to interpret it more or less thoroughly: in short, it is to pass through all the stages of attention and to exercise several higher or lower powers of memory […] first, an automatic sensori-motor process; secondly, an active and, so to speak, excentric projection of memory-images (Bergson 1988, 109).
16When listening to a speaker and when learning a language, the listener must first prepare her sensori-motor schemes for the reception of sound, and then, as stated by Elizabeth Grosz (2004, 178), “make a leap” into the past and into a dimension of meaning and sense. In fact, we do not, even though commonly thought, come to understand language piece by piece: “We develop and understanding of language all at once. We can understand language only through a wholesale immersion in its conceptuality or sense” (Grosz 2004, 180). There is more in language than the uttered words (Bergson 1988, 125), and every uttered word and sentence vary with the voice who is pronouncing them (Bergson 1988, 117). For all these reasons, language cannot be considered a “ready-made thing” and language-learning could rather be understood as occurring precisely in the “double current” between action and representation (Bergson 1988, 243) Now, this would certainly present an alternative for the aesthetics of ECEC, that could be enrichened by creating opportunities for learning and teaching that embrace encounters between matter and mind, between perception and memories (see for instance, Lombard 1997; De Freitas and Ferrara 2015). Furthermore, not only language-learning, but also learning in general could benefit from the idea that we must make a “leap” into the past and into a dimension of sense and meaning. Rather than delivering knowledge (of language and other things) “piece by piece”, the movement between perception and memory, between action and representation, could incite and invite education to a more holistic approach to the question of learning and teaching specific knowledge-contents.
- 7 ‘‘le temps fondamental’’
17Even though this account of perception and memory certainly gives a more complex image of both matter and mind and despite the aesthetic alternatives so far presented, there has not yet been any clear signs of the second part of the thesis concerning the durational reality of matter, nor of what that would mean for the aesthetics of ECEC. After having differentiated perception and memory in their “pure states”, the task to join them, as Bergson himself notes in the summary of the book, still remains (Bergson 1988, 243). So, how and where does Bergson go looking for the community of matter and mind? The answer is deceivingly simple: in time itself. In time itself, however, understood precisely not as space. In time understood as the uninterrupted elastic stretch and continuation of the past into the present and the future. In time where past, present and future do not seemingly but seamlessly continue. In short, in time understood as duration and “the fundamental time” 7(Worms 2013b, 31-33, my translation). In duration the present does not constitute a spatialized “mathematical point in space”, and if for the sake of reason this is how we ideally (and practically) represent it, continuous duration still overwhelms it – “as time goes by” the present stretches into both the past and the future (Bergson 1988, 137-138) and consists in “what is being made”, not what “is”(Bergson 1988, 150). The present, then, is fully part of “the invisible progress of the past gnawing into the future” (ibid), and it is rather this “continuity of becoming” that is real:
More generally, in that continuity of becoming which is reality itself, the present moment is constituted by the quasi-instantaneous section effected by our perception in the flowing mass, and this section is precisely that which we call the material world. Our body occupies its center; it is, in this material world, that part of which we directly feel the flux; in its actual state the actuality of our present lies (Bergson 1988, 138-139).
- 8 Several of Bergson’s interpreters point towards the somewhat hesitating (!) conclusions in Matter a (...)
- 9 ‘‘L’éducation devrait en somme être repensée pour augmenter la tension entre la durée de la conscie (...)
18If the continuity of becoming is reality itself and if the “flowing mass” in which we perceive is “the material world”, the problem of duration could be transported to matter and material things themselves. It is no longer only our material body that is at stake. Matter and Memory (1988) points towards the audacious suggestion that matter is an act rather than a thing and that it too, harbours a certain tension of duration, even though minimal as the human consciousness and memory is capable of a more tensed duration than things (Worms 2013a, 139-140). In that sense, and to that end, there is a third kind of memory: immediate memory – a memory that in complement to the first two memories is metaphysical rather than psychological (Worms 2013b, 65-68). It is, then, through appealing not only to the critique of the spatialization of time that our body performs through perception, but also to duration and to immediate memory, capable of actualizing an “immediate knowledge” (Bergson 1988, 187) of matter, that the audacious endeavour to give back to matter its “ultimate reality” may be pursued. In the last chapter of Matter and Memory (1988) Bergson does seem to pursue this endeavour. Matter, just like memory, would then be marked by a double movement of extension and tension (Worms 2013a, 139-140), and with such notion, also space may become something different than an empty container or cause conditioning and grounding all experiences and events; space too may pertain to the indivisible movement of duration. Whether Bergson here succeeds with this endeavour or not is an open question,8 but the idea of matter and space being caught up in motion and duration too, may enhance what pedagogues and teachers in ECEC often already know: learning, teaching and caring with and for very young children within an aesthetic dimension of ECEC must occur not only through mind, but also in multimodal and material ways where neither mind nor matter are givens. In sum, Bergson’s full two-folded thesis may imply that: “Education should, finally, be rethought in order to increase the tension between the duration of consciousness and things, that Bergson finds vital”9 (Zanfi 2020, 33, my translation).
19Despite Bergson’s persistent critique of space and language as the two main enemies that pose obstacles to duration (Bergson 2007), it would, then, be a mistake, especially in a pedagogy and education that wants to encounter and resonate with Bergson’s metaphysics, to count them out. Neither space nor language need to be lost; they harbour more secrets than being only obstacles to duration (even if they certainly are that too). Rather, and especially in an aesthetic dimension of pedagogy and education with very young children, language and space may be explored within their creative, mobile and durational dimension. Before giving a concrete example of what that could look like, below we turn to a brief inventory of some pedagogical-aesthetical resources in ECEC.
20One of the first pedagogues to have spoken of aesthetics in the sense given to it here is Diotima of Mantinea (ca: 440 BC), the pedagogue of Socrates (Irigaray 1989; Jaeger 1943; Neumann 1965). Diotima had an important role in the Symposium and the dialogue on love that occurred at this gathering of notable philosophers, and even though Diotima, for one or another reason, was not herself present at the “conference” and feast, what she has to say is of utmost importance not only for the history of philosophy and pedagogy, but also for the contemporary educational situation. Diotima’s speech evoke love as “the educational force that holds together the whole spiritual cosmos” (Jaeger 1943, 187-192) and that may incite someone “either from his own impulse or from the stimulus of others” to ascend towards “the recognition of the beauty of all science and knowledge” (Jaeger 1943, 192-193) – a spiritual ascent that Plato in the Symposium identifies as pedagogy. However, the aesthetic dimension of pedagogy and education is addressed by Diotima not only through evoking the beautiful and spiritual dimension of education and pedagogy, but also through gently protesting to Socrates’ attempts to generalize and go “looking for his truths beyond the most obvious everyday reality, which he does not see or even perceive” (Irigaray 1986, 38). What Diotima teaches not only Socrates, but potentially all of us today, is to speak in time-infused terms where both body and mind, matter and spirit, find themselves in a becoming, that nevertheless is perfectly real:
She speaks - in a style that is loosely woven but never definitively knotted - of becoming in time, of permanent generation and regeneration here and now in each (wo)man [chacun(e)] of what is more corporeally and spiritually real (Irigaray 1986, 39, original emphasis).
21Such an “aesthetic heritage” exists in ECEC and has been cultivated, mostly by the women therein engaged (Hammarström Lewenhagen 2015), but also by some male pedagogues and philosophers of importance for ECEC. For instance, early aesthetic insights were developed by Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746-1827), who insisted upon “holding together” hand, heart and head in education (Tallberg Broman 1995) and by Friedrich Froebel (1782-1852), who developed a set of 10 gifts and 10 occupations that invite the child to corporeal play, but also to a wide intellectual world (Bruce 2021; Provenzo 2009).
22One should not underestimate these early aesthetic endeavours in the field of ECEC. Not least as it has been shown how many important artists and architects such as Piet Mondrian, Paul Klee and Frank Llyod Wright, were aesthetically educated with and deeply influenced by Froebel’s gifts (Provenzo 2009). Another example of such heritage is John Dewey (1934) that puts forward the argument that all practical activity that carries a processual logic of fulfilment and consummation rather than cessation, and that is coloured by an amalgamated relation between intellectual, affective and emotional qualities, is an aesthetic experience. A more contemporary example come from the early childhood centres in the North-Italian town Reggio Emilia. Artistic advisor in these centres, Vea Vecchi, states that aesthetics concerns a “process of empathy relating the self to things and things to each other” (Vecchi 2010, 5) and that this is clearly seen in the “quality of relations children readily have with things around them and what they are doing” (Vecchi 2010, 31) (fig. 1).
Figure 1. Child’s hand and tree.
Photographer: Ebba Theorell
23Within an education that pays attention to the aesthetic dimension such relations are supported by teachers giving children rich opportunities to explore materials corporeally and sensuously, but also by enhancing their personal memories:
Materials can be of different size, colour, substance, with different qualities of touch and sound, but they should be capable of triggering memories of personal experience. Our minds are capable of connecting very different planes and levels; a sense can call to mind a memory and narrate a reality by recollecting it. Encounters between children and materials are generally extremely rich in suggestive qualities, memories and meanings, without much intervention on the part of the teacher (Vecchi 2010, 32-33).
24The “education of the hand” that Bergson called for, then, really does have a presence in the history of ECEC, that has elaborated an education that truly honours the creative powers of both body and mind, and more profoundly, a certain convergence between these. Inspired not only by Bergson, but also by the above pedagogues and philosophers, below and in the last part of this article, a concrete example of how the aesthetic dimension in education can be re-activated will be given. The example points towards how children’s learning of language may be enhanced by activating a creative, mobile and durational dimension of both language and space where “the tension between the duration of consciousness and things may be increased” (Zanfi 2020, 33, my translation).
- 10 For a fuller account of the exploratory project The Book and the overarching research project and i (...)
25The example described below occurred within a larger government-funded research project on early childhood literacy called The Magic of Language (Swedish Research Council 2009-2011). Within the research project several exploratory projects with children took place, one of them called The Book.10 In the project The Book, educators and researchers spent several months observing and listening to children and their interest in books. We discovered that children would relate to books and do things with books that were quite unexpected. The very youngest children would carry them around, put them to sleep in a doll’s bed, read them upside down or with the text facing outside themselves, and even chew on them. They seemed to have a very close relation to the book as a material object, and yet, even these very young children would show that they made symbolic sense of the book, expressed not least in how their signs changed when they stated that they were writing.
Figure 2. Children’s written lines.
Photographer: Ebba Theorell
Figure 3. Heian Calligraphy
Tokyo National Museum. Wikimedia Commons.
26When observing children’s written lines (fig. 2), we were struck by the rhythm expressed in these. We associated them to an electrocardiogram measuring the rhythm of the heart. At the same time, we studied a calligraphic tradition from the Heian period in Japan (fig. 3) and found striking resonances with the rhythm expressed in the children’s writings of lines. Within this calligraphic tradition the rhythm of the heart has, in fact, a prominent role. It is even stated that part of this art concerns “an alignment of the movements of the heart and the movements in the natural world” and “diminishing the dissonance between world and heart” (Lamarre 2002, 166). Interestingly, this is not only, or even primarily, a question of consciousness and cognition:
At this level, the brush does not function as a tool of conscious expression but as a kind of seismograph, feeling the oscillations and vibrations of the world and of the heart, and signing these on paper, silk, bamboo splints, etc. […] The heart is an aperture made sensitive to natural movements; it dilates and contracts with them, and the hand/brush twitches in response. Thus the writer assembles the body into a series of transformers or exchangers that translate motion to motion, operation to operation, composition to composition. The heart truly is that which moves through the middle (Lamarre 2002, 166).
27These first analyses of how reading and writing seem to begin, spurred us to suggest some offers to the children. One such offer was made through arranging a situation with two simultaneous activities: on the one side of the room a table with clay and on the other side of the room a table with black ink. The suggestion to the children was that they could go between these activities as they pleased, and the idea was to create some synergic effects between these two different materials and to see what kind of rhythms two different materials would provoke in children’s sign-making.
28The ink-signs begin with the conventional forms and letters; it is the circle, the square and letters from the alphabet that first are written (fig. 4). But as the processes at the two tables with the two materials proceed, the rhythm of the writing completely changes and the signs become more and more fluid, more open and undulating. As children start communicating with each other’s signs there is a wandering back and forth between these signs and symbolic signs such as numbers (fig. 5).
Figure 4. Rhythmic signs
Photographer: Ebba Theorell
Figure 5. Other friends join.
Photographer: Ebba Theorell
29These first observations and offers to children were brought with us into observations of how the older children were preoccupied with fabricating their own books. These books were as intriguing as the youngest children’s relations to books. The children would spend a long time fabricating their books and they would be very careful about making them beautiful with all the material resources they could find, such as glitter, colour, different kinds of papers and pens. They would glue objects they liked and had found somewhere into the book. Two girls made, for instance, a “feeling book” with differently textured materials on each side and that, according to the girls, you read through “feeling your way through it” (fig. 6).
Figure 6. Feeling book.
Photographer: Ebba Theorell
30Again, the calligraphic tradition of the Heian period came to our mind and our analyses: the material aspect of this art, for instance, the paper upon which signs are written is of utmost importance and it is created as a sort of “paperscapes” (Lamarre 2002, 150-151). Some of the children’s books reminded us of such “paperscapes” and the study of this tradition of calligraphy made it possible for us to understand and value children’s slightly “odd” books differently.
31But children also told stories in their books. Wonderful and amazing stories that sometimes were quite difficult for adults to understand. At least at first sight. Looking and listening closer, however, very often we would understand the context and the meaning that brought about children’s varying books. The format of the book took different shapes depending upon what in the world interested the children at a particular time. Again, and when trying to understand how children crafted the problem of “the book”, our references to Heian calligraphy became important, as it was described as a “cosmological rhythm” and “rhythms of compilation” that join the sensing writing body with stories in the world:
What is the Heian but a cosmological rhythm? The hand brushes a series of characters in rhythms that are not precisely those of vocal rhythms […]. Verbal rhythms put words in motion, making them pivot and weave; while verbal images hover within and between poems. There are then rhythms of compilation that reprise and extend alternations and resonations of hand/brush, voice, and eyes: cycles of seasons, congratulations, loves, departures, sorrows, names, styles (Lamarre, 2002, 167).
- 11 The reading and analysis with this tradition was paired with other philosophical, aesthetical, ling (...)
32The calligraphic tradition helped us see how children creatively crafted the problem of “the book”11 right at the intersection of sensous-corporeal explorations of the material aspects of a book and the symbolic and representational stories in the world to tell therewithin.
33How, then, to respond to the children’s crafting of the problem? If it was the material variety of books created and the connection between these and symbolic stories in the world that children explored, perhaps we could re-think the format of the book and propose a direction where the making, reading and writing of books goes outwards and into the world? This is how the idea of offering children a paper-room came about (fig. 7).
Figure 7. The Paper-room.
Photographer: Ebba Theorell
34The paper-room was carefully prepared through emptying a room and covering all surfaces therewithin in large sheets of white paper. Black ink and paintbrushes were placed at different places in the room. Three girls aged five were invited to the room. At first, they were hesitating and asking what they should do in the room, and they were then encouraged to go around and explore the room for a little while. Quite quickly the girls discovered the black ink and the paintbrushes, and then they set to work. Figures were starting to take shape on the walls and on the floor.
35The story of two princesses, each with a dog, both pregnant and one terribly sick in chickenpox, started to grow on the walls and on the floor (fig. 8). Sometimes the story was acted out by the girls, giving rise to new events and signs, and sometimes it was the signs that gave rise to a new turn in the story. The girls stayed in the room for almost two hours, working and playing non-stop.
Figure 8. The story unfolded.
Photographer: Ebba Theorell
36The next day, the girls were invited to re-visit the room and their story and to “pick up” the words that they found most interesting in their story to then write these down. The engagement with the material room and the individual and collective memories of the event, the signs and the story created the day before, seemed to spur and motivate the children to pursue their reading and writing (fig. 9).
Figure 9 Written words from the paper-room
Photographer: Ebba Theorell
37Yet a couple of days later, the children were invited to sit down and talk about what they had experienced in the room. They were asked about their sensations in the paper-room. Amazingly, and perhaps testifying to how duration when allowed to enter educational experiences and events provokes creation and mobility of space too, one of the girls responded:
It was…fantastic! I felt, in there, it was like we were given things and that the room offered us a lot of things!
38Her friends nod and hum in agreement.
39In relation to Bergson’s appeal to an “education of the hand” as well as to his distinction and convergence between matter and mind, this exploratory project together with children on language, reading and writing could be an example of how to re-activate the aesthetics of ECEC. The materials, spaces and processes that educators and researchers offer to children may be an example of letting literacy-education go “from the hand to the head” in encounters between sensuous-perceptual engagement with matter and more personal individual and collective memories where the tension between the duration of consciousness and things may have been increased.