Sylvia Kind

Capilano University · School of Education and Childhood Studies

This visual essay narrates events of drawing in the early childhood studio with four- and five-year-old children during the coronavirus pandemic. It considers what drawings do, how they draw us to attention, and how we were drawn to the hand. We draw the hand, not as an appendage or shape, but as the hand that holds, loves, leads, is touched as it...

This article introduces the concept of situated improvisations. Drawing from two long-term collaboratories in Australia and Canada, the discussion focusses on improvisation as method to unsettle well-trodden pedagogical choreographies in early childhood education. Through co-labouring, we propose situated improvisations as pedagogical processes of...

What might a decentered approach to doing research with children look like in “practice”? Our interview with Sylvia Kind took place in her studio at Capilano University in Vancouver BC. We had both read Encounters with Materials in Early Childhood Education (Pacini-Ketchabaw, Kind, & Kocher, 2017) and were curious about the role that materials play...

This chapter considers the emergence of an early childhood studio and how the studio arranges situations and creates conditions for inventive and experimental practices and collective improvisations. It highlights moments from a drawing project with 4-year-old children as it explores ways that children, educator, atelierista, drawing boards, narrat...

Drawing as Language: Celebrating the Work of Bob Steele is a Festschrift in honour of Bob Steele, Professor Emeritus, artist, educator and tireless advocate for bringing authentic aesthetic lived experiences to young children. Bob Steele’s prolific contribution to the field of visual arts education recognizes the importance of drawing for everyone,...

As Bob Steele (1998, 2011) insists, drawing is a language and should have a significant place in children’s lives. It engages children in expressive, emotional, imaginative, and intellectual ways. It is an important cognitive and affective process, a rich means of storytelling, and for young children, a valuable way of making sense of the world. Th...

Encounters with Materials in Early Childhood Education rearticulates understandings of materials-blocks of clay, sheets of paper, brushes and paints-to formulate what happens when we think with materials and apply them to early childhood development and classrooms. The book develops ways of thinking about materials that are more sustainable and ins...

Materials, objects, places, and environments are inextricably bound to experimentation. In this regard, Gilles Deleuze helps us see encounters of materials, objects, places, and humans as part of the flow of experience. In his view, we are never separate from the world; we are made up of relations; thought creates itself through encounters. For Del...

This chapter has emerged from conversations that Sylvia and I have had around her experiences with three- and four-year-olds using cameras and my examination of ethical issues in using photos as part of the documentation processes that teachers use to understand children’s thinking (Tarr 2011). We are interested in the intersections of pedagogical...

Working with a camera means engaging with an already troubled material and photography's history of voyeurism, othering, and violence. The language and conventions of photography tend to emphasize images that are ‘captured’ and a gaze that objectifies. However, in discussing a photography project that took place over several months at a Canadian ea...

Artist-in-residence programs frequently act as professional development initiatives for teachers. Little understanding of the relational nature of artist-teacher learning exists. In this article, we discuss "Learning Through The Arts ™," describing conflicting expectations as artists and teachers learn from each other, and explore the relationship...

While art education programs often rely on preservice teachers learning by reading pertinent literature and by following art technique demonstrations alone, they may disregard the tensions many preservice teachers feel between the different contexts of studying in university and teaching in schools. Teachers rarely have the opportunities and time r...

There is a substantial body of literature on arts-based forms of research demonstrating scholars’ endeavors to theorize the production of the arts as a mode of scholarly inquiry and as a method of representation. However, if arts-based research is to be taken seriously as an emerging field of educational research, then perhaps it needs to be unders...

Education is longing for a deeper more connected, more inclusive, and more aware way of knowing. One that connects heart and hand and head and does not split knowledge into dualities of thought and being, mind and body, emotion and intellect, but resonates with a wholeness and fullness that engages every part of one's being. Engagement with the art...