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Drawing and Storytelling as Political Action: Difference, Plurality and Coming into Presence in the Early Childhood Classroom
Author(s) -
Sunday Kristine E.
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
international journal of art and design education
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.312
H-Index - 25
eISSN - 1476-8070
pISSN - 1476-8062
DOI - 10.1111/jade.12097
Subject(s) - narrative , storytelling , action (physics) , embodied cognition , politics , subjectivity , sociology , event (particle physics) , representation (politics) , aesthetics , epistemology , early childhood , psychology , pedagogy , literature , political science , art , developmental psychology , philosophy , law , physics , quantum mechanics
This article is an embodied representation of how narrative illustrates Hannah Arendt's ideas of action, natality and plurality. It is, in essence, a story of a story that situates the actions of two young children as an instance where difference came together through the political and public act of drawing. Throughout the unfolding of the event, and in the subsequent retelling of that event, subjectivity came into presence, for both the children and myself. Our knowing was mediated by our immediate experience and understood only in the reflection of the experience. The encounter highlights how early childhood art practices can serve as an opening for contemplating a relational theory of learning. It further illustrates how narrative frameworks provide important opportunities to respond to difference through the reorganisation and reintegration of ideas generated in action.