Discovering the Value of the Weak in an Arts Performance Event

• In Event: Art, Artists, and Pedagogy: Philosophy and the Arts in Education

Abstract

As an arts educator there is always a tension between teaching the art as discipline and taking the role of educator where art becomes an encounter. This pull between an instrumental view of education reduces art to set of skills to be acquired as opposed to an art as affect, where children engage in the complexity of making and re-formalising their own work. In the early childhood sector an approach to the arts, can follow what Biesta has termed the teacher’s desire to instruct. This overrides any resistance or consideration of a negotiated approach to the arts where children are able to exercise their own authority or responsibleness in their arts undertaking. These undercurrents become the backdrop to a project that involved community artists, teachers, parents and children working in an early childhood arts project where the emphasis was not on acquiring skills but on an arts encounter. In reporting on the final act of the project, it is maintained that by working with children, artists and the community, teachers achieved ‘grown-up-ness’ by upholding the ‘weak’ of children’s arts endeavour within a community inspired event.

Author

• Christopher Francis Naughton, New Zealand Tertiary College