The Reggio Emilia atelier as a place of disruption: remaking pedagogical alliances through aesthetics and experimentation

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article concerns itself with the potential for ateliers to disrupt conformist approaches to pedagogy in early childhood education and care. An illustration of the role of the atelier in amplifying the aesthetics of the experience of the educational project of Reggio Emilia illuminates how disruption of conformity can be activated through the pedagogical alliances that the atelier solicits, taking a broad view of such alliances to encompass correspondences between humans and materials. Insights are shared from a research project and installation, the Digital Investigations Atelier, a collaboration between academic-researchers and teacher-researchers who work with young children in a variety of education and care settings in Perth, Western Australia. Data that ‘glow’, which for some reason, possibly intangible, stood out, are shared to illuminate conceptual phases of aesthetics, alliances, and experimentation in the creation of the installation and its opening to visitors. The article contends that conventional pedagogies, those that yearn for the predictability of recipes by the minute and elevate neoliberalism’s longing for linearity, are devoid of aesthetics and experimentation, leaving little space for imagining correspondences. Instead, it is speculated that ateliers can be places of disruption, where pedagogical alliances can be re-imagined and remade through aesthetics and experimentation..