Getting Lost in Affective Landscapes of Listening: Being There with Children Through Art, Adventure Play and Playwork
Open Access
- Author:
- Coombs, Alison Katherine
- Graduate Program:
- Art Education
- Degree:
- Master of Science
- Document Type:
- Master Thesis
- Date of Defense:
- March 31, 2015
- Committee Members:
- Christine Thompson, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor
Booker Stephen Carpenter Ii, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor - Keywords:
- Art
Art Education
Adventure Playgrounds
Playwork - Abstract:
- My thesis research explores a different way of being with children, focusing on ways to support the emergent and ongoing encounters of children. My thesis specifically investigates playwork, a practice whereby adults called playworkers create and foster environments that are playful. Playworkers support children’s play, assess children’s encounters of risk versus hazard, and assist children when needed, without usurping their play experiences. Playwork has historically emerged out of adventure playground contexts. For this reason, in my thesis I give rise to a short history of adventure playgrounds: sites comprised of loose parts that children can move and manipulate to create their own structures for play. Furthermore, adventure playgrounds are sites where playworkers are present, but to the least necessary degree. The idea is that these playgrounds foster a free and permissive environment for children to play, explore, discover, and make stuff, with the ability to take risks, without the absolute absence of an adult. When I think about my motivations in writing this thesis, I am brought back to my belief that listening to and being with children, as adults/educators/researchers, is an ethical necessity which facilitates an ability to come to know children through letting go of adult presuppositions. I am moved by the way playworkers function in a perpetual state of coming to know children through letting go in their attempts to make themselves as invisible as possible in their work with children. They put the development of the child before their adult discomforts. Coming to know about playwork has significantly impacted the trajectory of my pedagogy as an art educator. It has caused me to wonder about further ways of knowing the artistic and conceptual work of young children, and how it informs my work as an adult/teacher/researcher. Thus, in this thesis, I take up the question: How does adult curiosity and curation of materials along with children’s expertise and inquiry converge in the constructions of art making through play? Even more, how might theoretical concepts of the playful co-production of space in the form of adventure playgrounds/play installations inform pedagogical practices of art educators?