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thematic issue on posthuman arts education
2/2024
Order and Chaos in the Research-Creation Classroom
Western University
nikki.rotas@uwo.ca
Childhood education; inter-
disciplinarity; minor gesture;
research-creation; thing power.
10. 5 4916/rae.141894
20/06/2024
In this essay I use posthuman
theories and research-creation
methodologies to explore the
tensions between two disciplines
(science and art) alongside children.
Through a short video clip and
still images of children engaging
in abstract painting using magnets,
washers, bolts, and nails, I showcase
the importance of learning with
and through art, and I argue that
posthuman arts education enriches
the pedagogical environment
beyond core academic skills.
Rotas
Research in Arts and Education 2/2024
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Order and Chaos in the Research-Creation Classroom
In the childhood classroom, the words
science and art are often understood
as separate disciplinary domains
that focus on skill building. In recent
years there has been development
of STEM (Science, Technology,
Engineering, Math) and STEAM
(Science, Technology, Engineering,
Art, Math) learning that emphasize
interdisciplinary connections (Durall
et al., 2022; Mejias et al., 2021). The
integration of science and artistic
practice can also be found in early
years contexts such as kindergarten
classrooms and daycare centres. For
instance, STEAM within an early
years Canadian context is grounded
in a play and inquiry-based curricular
stance which encourages experimen-
tation, curiosity, and expression. In
fact, in recent weeks, the Canadian
government (at the Ontario provincial
level) announced a complete overhaul
of the kindergarten curriculum that
will result in a focus on basic literacy,
numeracy, and STEM disciplines.
(Ontario Ministry of Education, 2024).
Although there are continued peda-
gogical eorts to value the integration
of curricular subject matter, I argue
that artistic practice and the arts, more
generally, are diluted into a skill to be
learned and/or an art-object of rep-
resentation (also see Barrett & Bolt,
2013). I propose a move from under-
standing childhood art as a skill-based
discipline toward understanding art
as a quality of experience (Manning,
2016a; also see Tra-Prats, 2020). Art
understood along this line of thought
is not about art as an object and/or
and ends to a means that produces a
static work of art. Art as experience
is a process and practice that outdoes
curricular expectations. The move
from thinking beyond core academic
skills enables conditions that stimulate
an attention to what gets produced in
the middle or in the midst (Manning,
2016a) of making/learning. This
involves a questioning of what poten-
tialities might materialize when the
interposition of the subject and object
become the work of art. This ques-
tioning makes visible the relevance
that posthuman theorizing has for
the arts in childhood education. The
arts, through the lens of a post-frame-
work (Be n nett, 2010; Braidotti,
2013; Manning, 2016a), attend to the
relation between human/non-human,
the material/immaterial, the social/
cultural, which challenges dichoto-
mous thinking and encourages new
forms of engagement with the world.
Posthuman arts education grapples
with in-between states of learning that
simultaneously produce subject and
object, and order and chaos (Springgay
& Rotas, 2014). This line of thinking
is indebted to the feminist work of
post thinkers who continue to vitalize
the eld, including Braidotti’s (2013)
seminal work on the posthuman, Jane
Bennet’s (2010) vital orientation to the
object, and Erin Manning’s (2016a)
commitment to artistic gestures of
experience. My work with children
Figure 1
Rotas
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Order and Chaos in the Research-Creation Classroom
is methodologically grounded in the
practice of research-creation which is
a “post-qualitative” (St. Pierre, 2021)
approach to conducting research in
schools. A post-qualitative approach
as it relates to education refuses
conventional, humanist social science
research. In the eld of education, the
approach is often reliant on the use
of posthuman and/or new materialist
theories to guide innovative pedagogi-
cal practices that are creative in nature
(see Taylor & Hughes, 2016).
In what follows, I assemble a com-
position of images (both photo and
video) that story the tensions of two
disciplines – science and art – as
children (ages 8-9) engage in abstract
painting using magnets, washers,
bolts, and nails. These images are
threaded throughout the written text of
this essay and oer a “partial glimpse”
(Agamben, 2000) of an interdisciplin-
ary practice that creates pedagogical
conditions of participation that outdo
curriculum expectations and initial
propositions to learn about 1) mag-
netism; 2) abstract painters; and 3)
artistic movements. The process and,
thus, the quality of the pedagogical
experience will be emphasized and
indeed valued.
Below, I describe the research context
in order to provide an embodied and
embedded (Braidotti, 2013) approach
to doing research-creation in schools
and with children. I then employ
Manning’s concept of the ‘minor
ge s t u r e,’ which values the process
of learning (not just the knowledge
formed), and Bennett’s concept of
‘thing power’ that similarly values
the entangled nature of subjects and
objects to argue that interdisciplin-
arity provides an opening to a minor
practice that exceeds skill-based
expectations. A minor practice is
speculative. It produces new modes of
existence where control is not in the
hands of the child, but rather in the
relational movement between subject
and object, material and immaterial,
and social and cultural that produce a
work of art. I conclude with a con-
tinued call to engage in the valuation
Figures 2-4
Rotas
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Order and Chaos in the Research-Creation Classroom
of art-making in schools, and further
call for an understanding of posthu-
man arts education as an experience
grounded in the process of learning as
opposed to what is learned. Directly
below, I provide a video-image that
oers a glimpse of the interdisciplin-
ary practice children engaged in. The
image does not represent what hap-
pened but rather shows how subject,
object, science, and art co-compose an
experience. The work of art – as it is
being made – shows a quality of expe-
rience; a process where the language
of science and art fails. Language
fails because it is within the midst of
a process where terms like ‘subject’
and ‘object’ are not yet organized
(Manning, 2016a). It is in the midst
where subject and object, and science
and art co-compose a minor practice
that cannot be reduced to its curricular
intentions.
Research-Creation in the
Childhood Classroom
The 2-year research-creation project
was situated in a public elementary
school in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
The project was embedded in an
Ontario curriculum framework,
drawing on the Ontario Science and
Technology curriculum and the Arts
curriculum for grades 1 to 8. The
Science and Technology curriculum
was recently revised in 2022 in order
to place a greater emphasis on STEM
skills through ‘hands-on’ experiential
learning. The Arts curriculum, on the
other hand, was last revised in 2009.
As of yet, there are no plans for revi-
sions. I believe that the lack of concern
to modernize the Arts curriculum
reects the continued devaluation of
the arts in schools.
The goal of the research-creation proj-
ect was to foster and sustain creative/
artistic and interdisciplinary practices
that meaningfully engage children.
Research-creation is a federally
funded category in academic research
in Canada. According to Canada’s
largest funding body (the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research
Council (SSHRC)), research-creation
is a creative and innovative approach
to research that supports knowledge
production through artistic and schol-
arly practice. Research-creation is an
artistic mode of research that cannot
be reduced to empirical data and/or
limited to researcher interpretation
or analysis. Following Manning’s
(2016b) conceptualization, I under-
stand research-creation as a scholarly,
pedagogical, and mode of expression/
artistic practice. Arts-based education
scholars have similarly emphasized
the inextricable link between artistic
and pedagogical practice, embedding
their work within research-creation
frameworks (Rotas, 2021; Rousell,
2021; Shannon, 2023; Springgay &
Rotas, 2014; Truman, Bozalek &
Kuby, 2023). Using research-creation
as a theoretical and practical tool
was useful for the project because
it provided opportunities to create
research that connects philosophical
concepts with education and artistic
expressions like painting. At the same
time, I used research-creation methods
to gauge the impact of interdisci-
plinary learning, allowing children
themselves to guide the search of the
practice’s potential value. Research-
creation was a suitable methodology to
engage children and the curriculum in
ways that were creative, and in ways
that paid attention to the process of
interdisciplinarity in the childhood
classroom. Below are a series of still
images that oer a glimpse into the
process of a minor practice that does
not separate modes of knowing from
modes of making.
The Minor Gesture as Artistic
Practice
One of the concepts used to guide
the research-creation process was the
‘minor gesture’ (Manning, 2016a),
which engages the tensions between
knowledge and value. Manning writes:
A thought less concerned with
the certainty of what it knows is
more open to the minor in think-
ing, more open to the force of the
as-yet-unformed coursing through
it. This minor tendency values the
force of form, not just the form
knowledge makes. (2016a, p. x)
During the research process I
employed the concept in a way that
grappled with the tensions of the
disciplinar y knowledge of elementary
school science and art. This tension
was not only reected at the macro,
provincial level through prioritizations
of STEM focused curriculum (as noted
above), but also felt in the everyday of
the classroom where the production
and prioritization of disciplinary
knowledge was the expectation. I
approached each lesson dierently
each time, delicately intertwining
the two disciplines, adding dierent
techniques and ways of knowing.
For example, one of my pedagogical
techniques was to simply ask the
children what they were interested
in. I also asked the children to think
about how they might learn about their
interests, and many expressed their
desire to learn through drawing and
painting. Children were responsible
for guiding the learning process and
in turn determining the value of their
own process and product. They were
given many ways to express their
knowing (oral, written, through digital
technology and in the form of draw-
ing, painting, and photography), and
were given many materials to compose
with – paint, br ushes, spoons, paper,
cardboard, washers, nails, bolts, and
iPad etc.
The mode of operation when working
within a research-creation framework
is to ultimately attend to what is
already going on in the classroom in
creative ways. In one particle lesson,
for instance, children were learning
about abstract art through famous
painters such as Wassily Kandinsky.
Rather than learn about abstract
painting through the didactic teaching
of biographical information about
the famous painter, research-cre-
ation emphasizes learning through
Rotas
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Order and Chaos in the Research-Creation Classroom
experimental and ‘hands-on’ tech-
niques. Rather than solely learn about
the life of Kandinsky, children thus
learned through abstract painting
themselves. At the same time, children
were also learning about magnetism
as outlined in the Grade 3 Ontario
Science curriculum. Again, rather
than learn about magnetism through
sheet-work or the handling of repel-
ling/attracting magnets, science and
art were brought together by the very
materials they worked with to in turn
create a work of art that explored
artistic abstraction and magnetism.
Bringing unexpected materials
together creatively is just one way of
doing interdisciplinarity through the
lens of research-creation. There are,
however, many ways of doing the work
of attending to student interest, man-
aging cur riculum expectations, and
in hopes of outdoing routine (paper
and pencil) ways of learning science
and art. The classroom structure is
always malleable, and there is always
a speculative eort and choice in how
learning happens. This is crucial for
posthuman arts pedagogy and for
research-creation.
A minor gesture thrives in classrooms
of inquiry that do not have a given
structure or status. The minor is
connected to a lesson and/or pedagog-
ical event dierently each time. The
fact that the project was not organized
around the didactic lecturing of
specic subject matter made room for
a kind of participation that was not
solely subject or child-driven. When
a practice begins with a child-centred
approach, it shuts down a kind of
participation that emphasizes the qual-
ity of experience (Manning, 2020).
A child-centred approach is, to this
day, the cornerstone of teaching and
learning in the early years. Notably,
Montessori and the Reggio Emilia
approach are enduring examples of
pedagogies that root their practices in
child-centred developmental stages of
learning. Critiques of child-centred
learning have emphasized the need to
re-theorize the role of the child beyond
developmentalism and to focus on the
quality of an experience which is situ-
ated, non-linear, messy, and relational
(Langford, 2010; Taylor & Pacini-
Ketchabaw, 2015; Taylor, 2013). To
emphasize the quality of a pedagogical
experience is to aim for the child-ness
of a process that understands the child
as a situated, relational, and agentive
being that aects and is aected
by the world. Child-ness is a minor
quality; it is an operative that con-
nects and composes with more than
itself (Manning, 2020). The quality of
child-ness can also be described as the
becoming-child (Deleuze & Guattari,
1987) that is always making in excess
of its subjectivity. In other words, the
child co-composes with its objects,
simultaneously producing with and in
its environment.
What I do believe posthuman arts
education oers childhood education
is an understanding that there are also
ineable/imperceptible moments of
learning that operate at the level of
the barely there (Manning, 2009). The
childhood classrooms’ relationship
Figure 5
Rotas
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Order and Chaos in the Research-Creation Classroom
to objects must be re-thought, and
there are childhood scholars who have
similarly made this point (see Pacini-
Ketchabaw et al., 2016). Jane Bennett’s
(2010) theorization of the object is
important to the conversation of post-
human arts education as she acknowl-
edges the power of what cannot be
seen by the human eye and insists that
objects are actants that co-compose
knowledge and understanding.
Thing Power
Objects are co-constituting actants
that produce social, cultural, ethical,
and political lives (Bennett, 2010).
According to Bennett, objects are
alive! She argues that theorizations of
agency often fall back into interven-
tionist methods that ignore nonhuman
actants and uses the concept of ‘thing
power’ to articulate an understanding
of objects as co-composing ‘things’
that operate beyond their utilitarian
use.
In her book Vibrant Matter (2010),
Bennett dissects the power of metal –
what she calls “metallic vitality” (p.
59). Metal bends and moves. It curves
at the molecular level, consisting of
tiny crystal grains that ll space. She
describes the ontology of metal, high-
lighting its elusive materiality and thus
its molecular nature to negotiate space
by interfering with the other crystal
grains that ll space. Importantly, she
notes that the relation of the crystals
determines the shape of the metal
more so than its internal structure.
The elusive ontological movement of
metal is important to note because
it highlights the materialization of
relationships that are beyond the
human eye. Take, for example, the
Figure 6
phenomenon of magnetism and the
magnets that the children learned
within the research project. Magnets
repel and attract, and this process was
made evident as it co-composed with
the children, the paint, and the paper.
Magnetism is a result of charged
particles (i.e., electrons) which are
alive in the atoms of magnetic mate-
rials. At the atomic level, electrons
create tiny magnetic moments that are
mostly randomly oriented but can also
be aligned. Magnetic attraction and
repulsion occur from the alignment or
misalignment of magnetic moments,
which are inuenced by quantum
mechanical interactions. The intricate
interplay of forces can barely be seen.
Advances in technology, including
the invention of the microscope, have
certainly made it possible to see at the
atomic level, and so it is possible to
account for what is barely there.
Rotas
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Order and Chaos in the Research-Creation Classroom
The purpose of delving into the nature
of metals and magnets, here, is to
provoke a conversation and perhaps
a future practice that might not only
acknowledge that metals and magnets
elusively move, but account for the
materiality of a learning process as it
forms into matters of formal knowl-
edge. In accounting for the materiality
of a learning process, artist-educators
might begin to showcase the value of
the process of making and not just the
object that is made (Hellman & Lind,
2017). Bennett (2010) describes metal
as having “itself a life” (p. 57), and if
we (artist-educators) might begin to
think about the classroom as itself a
life, we might then refocus systems of
valuation toward that which cannot be
implemented, but rather that which is
felt in the moments of creating a work
of art.
Might there then be a pedagogical
time and space/place where we might
notice and value the paint-ness of
paint, the br ush-ness of the brush,
the nail-ness of the nail, the bolt-ness
of the bolt, and the wash-ness of the
washer? The -ness of the classroom
is again the quality of a process that
forms knowledge. What might the
interdisciplinary classroom – that
values the forces that form matter
– then do? Quoting Deleuze and
Guattari (1994), St. Pierre points out
that what “cannot be thought and yet
must be thought” is not an option, but
rather becomes an ethical obligation
(2021, p. 7). To then think that which
cannot be thought or has not yet been
thought is also Bennett’s point in
highlighting the life of metals and
the power of things. Thing power is
a speculative concept that narrows in
on the agency of things. Bennet asks:
“Does life only make sense as one side
of a life-matter binary, or is there such
a thing as a mineral or metallic life,
or a life of the it in ‘it rains’” (2010, p.
53)? To thus bring the concept of thing
power in relation with education and
Fig ures 7-9
the posthuman in the context of this
project becomes a matter and obliga-
tion to notice otherwise and to see the
‘it’ of ‘its barely there’ in the life-ness
of the classroom.
A Brief Note on Ethical
Obligations in the Arts
It is a mistake to think that education
needs a method and/or correct mode of
existence (Manning, 2020). I will also
add that it is a mistake to provide a
denition of posthuman arts education
and/or a post-denition of pedagogy.
Echoing Manning and posthuman art
education scholars such as Hickey-
Moody and Page (2015), pedagogy
and art are entangled practices and
modes of thinking that are already in
act. That is why it is challenging to
dene posthuman arts education and
a disservice to concretize the practice
in denitive examples. Education and
learning, in general, is alive in the
Rotas
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Order and Chaos in the Research-Creation Classroom
midst, the minor, the -ness of children
and objects that are always in relation.
It is the task of the eld of posthuman
arts education to make visible the
value of a process and its relationship
to objects/objects of knowledge, and
to push beyond the order of curricular
demands (Rotas, 2019).
In this visual essay, I have refrained
from representing what the children
learned (i.e., poles of attraction,
magnetic elds, prominent artists,
artistic movements etc.). I have
brought forth a speculative practice
and have emphasized the importance
of pedagogy and the disciplines to
not be shackled to one right way of
knowing. It is important to be aware of
the relativity of pedagogy’s power and
Fi g u r e s 10-11
the diculties of translating its ideals
into static art practices (Malaguzzi
in Manning, 2020). As Proust (2002)
infamously exclaims: “Thanks to art,
instead of seeing a single world, our
own, we see it multiplied…” (p. 204).
The value in qualitatively multiplying
pedagogical worlds is ‘arming’
(Braidotti, 2013), and the work of the
posthuman is to dare to think and do
art, science, research and the ‘dis-
ciplines’ otherwise. I am optimistic
about this move toward the qualitative
at the academic level. Interdisciplinary
connections continue to evolve into
transdisciplinary networks where
one can see the eld of education
threaded throughout the humanities,
the arts, and sciences. At the level of
the classroom, artist-educators must
continue to connect and reconnect
horizontally – across the disciplines –
and in ways that generate the unruly
chaos of practice, even if such a desire
is stied at the curricular level. To be
clear, chaos is not chaotic or a chaotic
state of being. The way of chaos is a
becoming process and relational possi-
bility. Chaos can be harnessed through
many materials and ways of knowing,
which in turn can create a messy
pedagogical space to negotiate how
learning happens and what is learned.
Importantly, an attention to what is
already going on in the classroom and
a valuation of what children have the
power to produce is what posthuman
arts education has the capacity to do.
Rotas
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Order and Chaos in the Research-Creation Classroom
102
Figures
Fig ure 1. Figure 2. Figure 3. Figure 4. Figure 5.
Making Art in the Midst Modes of Knowing Modes of Knowing Modes of Knowing The Life of Washers
and Making and Making and Making and Nails
Figure 6.
The Life of Spoons
Fi g u r e 7. Figure 8. Figure 9.
The Life of Metal The Life of Metal The Life of Metal
Fig ure 10.
The Way of Order
and Chaos
Fi g u r e 11.
The Way of Order
and Chaos
Rotas
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Order and Chaos in the Research-Creation Classroom
103
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