About Children as Aesthetic BeingsSenior Lecturer, Ph.D. student Henriette Klitnæs

Children in Cultural Children of Europe/CCE:

From Project description

PURPOSE

CCE will increase the children’s musical-creative skills as well as their social and learning-related skills by involving them actively, inquiringly, experimentally and co-creatingly in cultural activities both in daycare institutions and in schools and in the transition between these institutions.

Knowledge About and From Children

Child perspectives direct adult´s attention towards an understanding of children´s perceptions, experiences, and actions in the world. ”Outside in” – methods from adults

Children´s perspectives represent children´s experiences, perceptions, and understanding in their life-world. ”Inside out” –expressions from the children themselves (words, thoughts, images)

Approaches to Children in Research and Pedagogics

Beings children as subjects in their own right. Childhood as a special and important period om its own. Children as active participants. Children as players

Becommings to prepare children to school and adult life. Upbringing, learning, educating and to be civilized

Belonging to be a part of a place (institution) and to have influence on every day life in activities/frames/settings/possibilities

Children as Felix Aestheticus

” … felix aestheticus is by no meansthe artist or the poet: Instead he is the whole man, accomodatingwithin himself a great number of different aims, some of themincommensurable with each other. Man cannot, and … ought not be, reduced to either a purely rational or a purely sensual being. … Felixaestheticus can be interpreted as the sensible creator and developer of his own world, that is, human culture” (About Baumgarten in Gross, 2002, 404-405)

Children as Reflective-Aesthetic-Beings

”Children´s ways of reflecting are often embodied in concrete activities as narration and play; and they are

not neccesarily expressed in words or terms” (Mouritsen in Mouritsens Method, 2016, 529)

• How do you notice and collect children´s reflections and expressions?

• How do you use this collected knowledge?

A sensitive pocket or a beauty-bubble in kindergartenSuni carreses/swipes his face with a metal-branch-flower-like-artefact. Nanna, a girl, at the same age, looks at him. Suni continues his gestures and is deeply involved in his activity. He continues the swiping over his cheeks, then his chin, and back up to his forehead. His eyes are half closedand he doesn´t seem to notice what is going on around him. For a little whilehe stands there and enjoys his handle of the artefact, which seems as an extension of his hand. Later, he tellsme, that his pedagogue made the artefact.(From fieldnotes, October 2016)

Aesthetic Experience: When something is of importance

• Play pockets

• Aesthetic pockets

• Participation pockets

• Beauty bubbles

Children´s Aesthetic Experiencein Institutional Settings

How to facilitate children´s aesthetic experiences in institutionalsettings in a field between governmentality/steering and freedom?