Decolonizing the knowledges of young children through the temporal arts

Abstract

In this article I take a new materialist and posthuman approach to ask: how can improvisation in the temporal arts reconceptualize and broaden our adult understandings of young children’s communication and knowledge? I draw on two filmed events from the recent SALTmusic project. This filmed event data has been returned to many times to illustrate unique and particular events that took place in the past, but – when re-viewed and retold – constitute a new and particular happening or entanglements between the original event, the video technology that brings the past into the present, and the philosophical thinking that the events inspire. In the first part of this article, I critique the fixation on young children being made to talk as early as possible, and call for improvised music and arts practices as decolonizing pedagogies where children’s own knowledges are able to inform and shape their education. By revisiting Trevarthen and Malloch’s Communicative Musicality and Stern’s ideas on vitality affect and the present moment to see how they entangle and transform within new materialist and posthuman philosophy, I question and critique the developmental discourses that conceptualize young children’s musical behaviours as proto-music and, instead, frame the temporal arts, within a posthumanism, as having the potential to cut through the subject/object binary. I explore children’s porous and entangled subjectivities, through the posthuman idea that human identity and human thought connect and are made and remade beyond the individual, bounded human subject, and that children’s relationship with the present moment is a vital capability or knowledge at the heart of what it means to improvise and much more than a developmental stage.