Childhood Art in Community Education: Postdevelopmental Learning through Feminist Leadership, Diversity and Pedagogic Invention

Abstract

In this chapter I use community education as an umbrella term to describe learning outside the formal spaces of school and before school settings such as kindergarten and long day care. In using community education I make reference to cultural groups, community playgroups, specialist after school activities, holiday camps, and festivals where children work often in multi-age groups and with flexible attendance with adults who identify as community educators: artists, sportspeople, musicians, librarians, cultural elders and more. I acknowledge that my description takes a first world view of community, replete with particular societal and institutional infrastructures to support the availability of extra-curricular, and/or prior-to-school opportunities, however the chapter will also reference global examples of community education in its different contexts and organisations. Community education is not a recent development, although it is the focus of a growing curiosity about what, how and where children learn, and how that might be thought about through ‘post’ theories including posthumanism, postfoundational, new materialism, and postdevelomentalism. Non-formal pedagogic sites have come into view because they offer ways to think about where education addresses "the needs of the state, as they are used to mobilise wider political and policy-based discourses around participation, citizenship and engagement.” (Mills & Kraftl 2014, p. 1). As education research expands and diversifies, humanist readings of community education notice, perhaps nervously, that they remain as sites of powerful learning exchange in contrast to formal education which has had its politics strangulated and siphoned through over-standardisation, regulation and surveillancing. Community education, in ‘flying under the radar’ are difficult to control because they remain as sites with contextual particularity and thus with relative political fluidity, and supporting pedagogic and learning invention. For Mills & Kraftl (2014) community education has great potency due to the "everyday and spontaneous learning experiences that vary across different local, national and global contexts.” (Mills & Kraftl 2014, p. 1). In recognition of the rich diversity globally, of community education provision they ask "how are young people positioned within philosophies of informal education?” (Mills & Kraftl 2014, p. 2). It is this question of positioning and conceptualising that I take on in this chapter. In my history as a community artist educator, then as an early childhood education scholar I have observed how, despite the steady creep of regulatory standardisation in early childhood education and care, younger children continue to spend significant amounts of time encountering education in community contexts. Many children across social and demographic contexts attend festivals, weekend events, holiday clubs, cultural gatherings in addition to their regular attendance at more formal learning spaces. My extension question then, is to ask ’How does community education take a postdevelopmental approach to early childhood art? I use my experiences of working as a community artist educator/early childhood education scholar at a large arts festival dedicated to children 0 - 8 years, to suggest how the learning philosophies of community education enable postdevelopmental learning, and support pedagogic invention. Mills, S. & Kraftl, P. (Eds.) (2014) Informal education, childhood and youth: geographies, histories, practices. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.