Defeating a blueberry

”Each thing organizes the space around it (…) each thing calls, gestures to their beings or battles them for our attention…”, says David Abram. In his text “Astonished by a stone: Art and the eloquence of matter” he writes about body’s ancient relation to nature, claiming that “our animal senses know no (…) passive reality; they perceive things only by interacting with them”.

I am sure that each of us has experienced how “things “catch our eye” and sometimes refuse to let go” (Abram 2007). Even if we do not remember the moments when textures, colours or forms spoke to us and invited us to listen, look and touch, I am sure that such moments were at least the part of our early childhood. If you do not remember the last time a stone or a blueberry spoke to you, here is how such meeting might look like;

Observing my two years old friend tells me about how forms with different surface, size, shape and mass invite his body to action. I can’t hear the voices the way he does, but I can notice the way he tunes his responses. This teaches me how much he (or his body) already knows about the physical world around him. Another thing I realize is how willing he is to extend the limits of his body. It seams like there is an interactive relation between the challenges that the forms provide him with, and his own choices that lead him to construct challenges he need…as if he was aware of Vygotsky’s “zone of proximal development”!

He sees a rock of just right size: he tries to climb, but slides down. He tries again from another angle, explores different techniques and manages to get over the top.

He sees a round stone – quite the same size as a football. He tries to kick it – but it doesn’t move. He tries to lift it with his fingers grabbing around, but the weight of the stone pushes his fingers into the ground. He doesn’t understand why he can not lift the stone smaller that a football…and he learns about weight and different materials.

He picks and eats small blueberries, and discovers some really big ones. These, he doesn’t try to pick or lift. He doesn’t’ try to push them downhill (or my be he does but soon realizes that they are fixed to the ground because they are a part of the sculpture park “Sti for øye” - “Path for the eye”). The large round forms invite him to climb… and the polished surface to slide down again.

Writing about a stone, David Abram says: ”To my sensing and sentient body, the rock is first and foremost another body engaging in the world.” This might be similar to how the little boy experienced the stone, the rock and the blueberry sculpture, but he is not able to verbalize his experience. Fortunately our knowledge about the world is not limited to verbal language – there are many others modes of knowledge and thought (Eisner 2002). The boy’s new knowledge about texture, shape, volume and weight remains embodied in his muscles and veins…

Sculpture park "Sti for øye", Fossnes, Stokke South-East Norway
Eisner, Elliot (2002): The arts and the creation of mind, New Haven: Yale University Press
Abram, David (2007): Astonished by a stone: Art and the eloquence of matter. In Bresler L. Ed. International Handbook of Research in Arts Education

Children’s consent, or not?

The title of this year’s EECERA-conference (held in Strasbourg, August 26th-29th ) was Diversities in Early Childhood Education, and the theme involved many different kinds of diversity: language, social situation, disability, gender, and also methodological diversity in research with young children. My presentation was about diversity in children’s expressive languages (and merging of the languages during children’s play 3D materials), but I wish to write about something else here – some reflections about children’s consent in research.

I attended the parallel session “Qualitative research – revolutions of continuing tensions?” where one of the presentations was: “Children should be involved in research design: even in early years?” by Lorna Savage and Muriel Logan, form Stirling Institute of Education. Some of the addressed questions were how to involve “the competent child” in the research process and design, and “whether early years children have adequate skills and research training to be included in the design process”.

At the same time, one of my colleagues attended another presentation which was about children’s consent and “research contracts” in form of drawings. When we occasionally met that sunny afternoon, we exchanged our experiences form the presentations. This made me think about ethical challenges when I, as a researcher, see a child as both competent and fragile in the same time. I believe that we have to be attentive to the children’s voices (also when they are silent), but isn’t is something completely different to ask them a questions like: “Is it OK for you that I take pictures of you and put them on the internet?”? Can we expect a child to consider all consequences before giving us the answer? Probably not…

What scares me here is that it is possible to be superficial: ask a direct question, and later say that the child has been informed and has given her/his consent (one can even show a contract). But how ethical is it misuses the child’s impossibility to understand complex questions about research and ethics? We can’t be serious to believe that a four year old would understand what “research” means? The complexity of a question is not about how easy it is to give an answer (like in “yes-no questions”), but in the thick levels of consequences that lay behind.