Prosthetic Imaginings and Pedagogies of Early Childhood Art

Failure, struggle, uncertainty, and not knowing the outcomes in advance may be difficult concepts for education to embrace yet they are essential elements of artistic practice.

For many years, my research has focused on young children, preschoolers, and kindergarteners mostly, gathered together in classrooms with art at their center. For many years, scholars who were interested in children’s art focused primarily on children’s drawings, the artifacts that remain when the drawing is done. They read these documents as if they were psychic electrocardiograms (EKGs), evidence of children’s intellectual or emotional well-being, or admired them for the vitality of their form and color, their lack of calculation. Researchers, psychologists, artists, and educators were interested in the residue of the process of making, in drawing as a noun, a thing made. I became interested in the process of drawing as a gerund, a performance, and fascinated by the life of the classroom, the intensities of social interaction that belied accounts of drawing in childhood as a solitary and silent activity. The shabby truism that it is “process not product” that matters when it comes to early childhood art is deeply embedded in the conventional wisdom of early childhood education. However, like most deeply sedimented knowledge, some careful excavation is required to unearth what is truly at stake in the process of art making when makers of images and objects are in the middle of their work, as for the artists that Charles Garoian (2013b) describes in The Prosthetic Pedagogy of Art: Embodied Research and Practice. The shop talk that artists (have always) share(d) belies the tenacious modernist notion that works of art stand as mute evidence, complete in themselves, requiring no further explanation. The length of labels and the profusion of explanatory text in contemporary art museums testify to a similar recognition of the importance of the artist’s thought, her personal and cultural history, her intentions and circumstances, entangled within and beyond the work. Languages intertwine in contemporary art, as they do in the classroom; word and image, thought and gesture, commitment and indeterminacy. We recognize the origins of art making in the cultural conversations that were in progress long before our birth. Much to his credit, and unlike many others, Garoian recognizes that child and adult artists are enmeshed in what is essentially the same activity, confronting similar issues, as they engage in the infinitely variable processes of making art.

My gaze is focused on what Anne Dyson (1993) termed “drawing events,” on child or children in the middle of making, caught in the assemblage of material and human influences that result in drawings that, quite often, reveal little of the complexity involved in their making. This image (Figure 1), for example, is one of the more expressive drawings made during the year I spent drawing with 3- and 4-year-old children in a Head Start program in Chicago. It may communicate some element of menace or disturbance to you, without further explanation. To witness its coming into being, however, is to understand the complexity of the forces entangled in its making, the particular cultural and personal references it evokes, and the questions about childhood and art making and pedagogy that it raises. This is the drawing in process, as assemblage and event:

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Alex & Teddy’s drawing, The Blood, 2008. Courtesy Christine Marmé Thompson.

Alexis and Teddy were drawing together, alone, at a table just to the side of the larger one where other children were working that day. Their isolation was chosen in the interest of excluding others, of being, conspicuously, alone. However, their distance from the group also provided opportunity for some subversive play, inspired by the juiciness of a special red marker, elaborated in a drawing of murder and mayhem.

Elsewhere in the classroom, a child belted out the series of notes that precede the call of “Charge!” at Chicago Bulls games. Alexis and Teddy turned to look his way, but quickly resumed their drawing. Teddy’s marks were short and scattered, a violent splatter in the making; Alexis applied black Flair pen to a bloody pool. “And, you know, we . . . ,” she paused as she drew, then completed her thought, advising Teddy, “Be careful ‘cuz there’s blood all over the place. And this body that we’re killing . . . ” Teddy squirmed a bit, and pressed his own capped marker into the crook of his arm, attempting to divert the conversation to the aftermath of a recent inoculation. Alexis drew with energetic strokes, repeating “and the blood . . . and the blood . . . and the blood . . . ” Teddy stopped to watch. Minutes later, Alexis sprang from her chair, a blur, pouncing playfully pounced on Teddy, pretending to strangle him. He protested, “Hey, stop that!” glancing my way, as much (I think) to see whether I disapproved as to seek adult intervention. To Alexis he said, “Stop trying to be a monster!”

Next to me, Melanie was feeling neglected, first by Alexis, her former “Best Friend Forever” and now by me, as I continued to watch and film the nearby “massacre-in-the-making.” She, too, had been listening in to Alexis and Teddy’s conversation. She waved her drawing in from of the camera lens: “Teacher, look at my blood!” “What happened to your hand?” “I cut myself!” “Look it! Look it!”

Alexis visited the larger table in search of fresh markers. Melanie paused to watch her former best friend’s every move. Behind us, Teddy expanded and intensified his bloody scribble until Alexis returned. Setting a new set of markers on the table, she cackled gleefully in a manner meant to be sinister. Teddy stretched his arm toward her, to silence her, or ward off her advances. “I’m gonna kill somebody,” Alexis mused quietly, picking up and examining the markers in which “blood” floated inside the barrel. Teddy, trying to get into the spirit of things, dramatically stroked his own turquoise marker over the vivid patch he had drawn previously, holding it up toward Alexis, and proclaiming with ghoulish delight, “Oh, it’s black.” As Alexis sorted through the remaining markers in their plastic box, Melanie called out, “Teacher. Teacher. Can I tell you something? Alexis doesn’t want to be my friend. I just want to be her friend and she just wants Teddy.” “She wants Teddy to be her friend?” “No, her friend.” Alexis and Teddy appeared to be oblivious to Melanie’s plaint. I made platitudinous teacher noises, “What do you think about that?” “It’s good to have lots of friends.” Melanie continued, “When somebody else talks to her, says ‘I wanna be your friend,’ she just says NO.” In the background, Alexis cackled once again, as Melanie, smiling her sweetest smile, held up her picture of the severed limb, ready to be photographed. “Tell me what happened to your hand there,” I asked. “She doesn’t have it anymore,” Melanie answered, matter-of-factly. ¹

As Sylvia Kind (2010) notes,

Art is not easy, it is not always calm and nice and pretty. It can be messy, disruptive and unsettling. It works with the excesses. In the openings and ruptures (Springgay, 2008). It pushes boundaries and it has the potential to disorder, transform, and bring in the unthought and unimagined. (p. 119)

Murder and jealousy are the stuff of which much compelling art has been made. However, we may find ourselves startled, if not appalled, to find these themes so starkly present in preschool. How do we reconcile our belief in the innocence of preschool children with the ghoulish delight and deliberation with which Alexis and Teddy planned and executed the demise of “this body”? How do we interpret these exchanges when we learn that these are Latino children enrolled in Head Start program in a major American city, where the majority of children come from families whose income is below the conservatively calculated poverty line? Does the fact that these children may have witnessed murders that were not contained by a video screen change the terms of their participation in the world-making narratives (M. Wilson & Wilson, 1982/2010) that drawing encourages, making the production of such graphic stories more, or less, acceptable as a form of play with the boundaries of what is possible? How does our image of the child adapt to (apparently) “knowing” (Higgonet, 1998) children in our classrooms?

It is easy enough for us to dismiss stories such as this as simply amusing, evidence that “kids (still) say the darnedest things,” as Art Linkletter demonstrated to television audiences long ago. As a researcher who takes children and their creative play seriously, I meet this reaction more often than I care to admit. It is a reaction that belies a certain adult disdain for the minds of children:

When teachers smile knowingly to one another or laugh as children express novel ways of understanding the world, this endearment allows them to avoid any re-examination of their own beliefs and assumptions. Sentimentality and endearment seems to presuppose vulnerability and inequality . . . This laughter is an example of adult distancing from the child. (Haynes & Murris, 2013, p. 252)

What we witness in this incident is the assemblage of children’s art making that Garoian (2013b) describes so well in The Prosthetic Pedagogy of Art: Embodied Research and Practice: These are children who have chosen to draw in a “prosthetic space,” in sketchbooks which are designated as territory open to their exploration, available for recording the everyday or the unfamiliar, for pursuing personal projects, inscribing their memories of home and school, capturing fragments of cultural experience. In Garoian’s words,

The liminality and contingency of prosthetic space is characterized as providing children with opportunities to expose, examine, and critique rarified academic, logical, rational, bureaucratized, institutionalized, and commodified places of schooling through art making activities, which enable them to attain creative and political agency as critical citizens in contemporary culture. Within the prosthetic space of art research and practice, children’s exploratory, experimental, and improvisational performances of subjectivity constitute critical interventions in overly determined school curricula, thus enabling their creative and intellectual growth. (Garoian, 2013b, p. 19)

The “official” curriculum in this Head Start program was relatively scant, determined primarily by the regimented schedule of preparation for meals, tooth brushings and hand washings, indoor and outdoor play. However, there were prohibitions and assumptions that were violated in the making of this drawing. The school was situated squarely on the border between territories claimed by rival gangs in a neighborhood frequently beset by violence. In an effort to assure children of the safety of their school, teachers followed the common practice of prohibiting all violent play, ² whether enacted physically on the playground, or in the dress up corner, or in the pages of sketchbooks. Although some of the teachers were willing to relax these prohibitions in deference to my interest in what children draw to please and inform themselves, others regarded any deviation from this school policy as indefensible. Alexis and Teddy’s teacher was firmly allied with the more prohibitive camp.

What is the role and responsibility of the teacher in all this? “How should I respond to this apparently violent play?” (Edmiston, 2008, p. 1), even in my role as a quasi-teacher, as a researcher working very directly with children? Should I have intervened in Alexis and Teddy’s drawing, to disapprove, or reassure, or simply to question (a strategy that surely would have tilted toward disapproval or reassurance)? Was I right to simply listen and learn from this interchange, to carry it away with me that day to continue to sweep back into my thoughts about early drawing events? Would I have intervened in the making of a similarly gory graphic dialogue had it occurred among the children I usually work with, in university-sponsored Saturday art classes? Would the cultural experiences and curiosities and concerns of these city-dwelling bicultural children be deemed abnormal and unhealthy, differing in meaning from the similarly brutal scenes created from time to time by third culture kids and faculty offspring, were I to do so? Do we deprive children of the playful experimentation that is art when we censor or respond with horror to their ventures?

Considering the perennial debate about the persistence of violent imagery in children’s drawings and imaginative play, Brian Edmiston (2008) reconceptualizes such images as forms of “mythic play, based . . . on narratives of power” (p. 8). Edmiston suggests that what we see in such events may well be something quite different and far less alarming than we suppose:

Over time, pretending to be other people [mythic heroes as well as destructive monsters] can assist children to take up other perspectives that refract with previous discourses. Not to advance them through a particular moral stage of development, but rather to become answerable for their own actions as part of developing a disposition to answer people who address them. (p. 281)

Edmiston (2008) recognizes that “children can enact and evaluate events that in everyday life could be considered socially inappropriate or bizarre as well as those that would be socially acceptable or expected” (p. 22). Writing of his son’s preoccupation with stories of dragons and monsters (and people mistaken for monsters), Edmiston (2008) stresses the utility of mythic form and content in helping children to consider their concerns at arm’s length, in the terms of fantasy: “Knowing that they are physically and emotionally safe as they play, children are able to feel deeply about imagined events that would be so violent, horrific, or traumatic that they would have difficulty contemplating their significance” (p. 55). M. Wilson and Wilson (1982/2010) share Edmiston’s conviction that, by engaging in narrative play, children invent ways to safely explore the multiple realities of the world and their relationship to it, at a time when “Firsthand exploration is the furthest from their grasp” (p. 23). They suggest that young children, in their desire to know, are particularly receptive to visual symbolic media, including television, the Internet, films, drawings, and paintings:

These visual symbols require “reading” as much as word symbols do, but the media-saturated child of our society acquires the skill early. The process of reading visual symbols begins almost at birth with the continuous bombardment of visual stimuli that display actors, actions, objects, and places. These visual symbols—pictures—provide children with their primary symbolic means for understanding reality. (p. 23)

Jones (2002) also considers the subject in ways that resonate with my own experience and convictions: “Exploring, in a safe and controlled context, what is impossible or too dangerous or forbidden to them is a crucial tool in accepting the limits of reality. Playing with rage is a valuable way to reduce its power” (p. 11). Continuing his defense of the sometimes violent turns that children’s play can take, Jones cautions,

We don’t help children to learn the difference between fantasy and reality when we allow their fantasies to provoke reactions from us that are more appropriate to reality . . . . we blur the boundaries we are trying to establish . . . The result for the child is more anxiety and self-doubt, more concern about the power of violent thoughts, less sense of power over their own feelings, and less practice expressing their fantasies. (p. 56)

What if, in this extremely violent and unpredictable world, the drawings that distress us so greatly are not the products of fantasy but direct reflections of children’s lived experiences? Certainly, the children running from unrelenting bombings in Gaza in the summer of 2014, or meeting militarism and hostility and deprivation at the border they have risked their lives to reach, or witnessing gun violence in their homes and neighborhoods, have a very different relationship with their subject matter than those whose acquaintance, fear, and curiosity exist at a greater remove. For contemporary children, encounters with violence are inescapable. Even those who witness it primarily on the nightly news are left with questions of the kind that none of us can easily answer. Most often, we do not know, in the case of an individual child, what blend of fantasy and reality, of immediate and mediated experience, is evoked in their drawings or their play. We can only engage in a form of rhizoanalysis as we attempt to decipher the ways that the world’s ways are “challenged, disrupted, and reimagined by children” (Leafgren, 2009, p. 90) through their creative play.

As MacNaughton (2005) explains, “The intent of rhizoanalysis is to use text, discourse, and theory to ‘cast a shadow’ over mapped text to create tracings that disrupt and challenge what has been mapped” (p. 136). Just as this special issue of the journal allows its authors to lay our own work next to or on top of Garoian’s, to cast shadows on work that has modulated and overlaid our own, rhizoanalysis moves us beyond the ready explanations, the stock phrases, and shocked responses that might otherwise attend the story of three children, a gory drawing, and the fragility of relationships. Rhizoanalysis continues to question, to compare, to follow the lines of flight that erupt without warning in the children’s play and my persistent turning it over in my mind. Similar in process to the “thought experiments” recommended by phenomenologists (most notably Husserl, 1973), these explorations differ radically in function. Their purpose is not to find the essential or structural invariants of the experience of being a child drawing violence, but rather to document the multiple possibilities of being a child drawing among other children in a classroom where everything within and surrounding the child is in flux.

We see the improvisational nature of the drawing event, the ways in which fragments of experience cohere in the assemblage of actions and choices, disruptions and discussions, gestures and silences, and sound effects that make up the drawing as a performative event that occurs and extends far beyond the boundaries of the children’s sketchbooks. In a recent article, Garoian (2013a) considers the meaning of art as an event:

As in Deleuze’s double question—What is going to happen? What has just happened?—the title of this article, “In the Event that Art Occurs,” is also double articulated to suggest that art is an immanent occurrence that remains unseen and unknown until it is being experienced . . . . experiencing visually and comprehending conceptually that which is visually imperceptible and conceptually incomprehensible constitutes the event of art as an immanent force of becoming-intense, becoming-other, becoming-political; a moment of unbinding. (p. 29)

Within this event of becoming intense, even the most mundane detail contributes to the constantly emerging whole. The special “blood-letting” red marker that Alexis used that morning was at work in this assemblage. The tendency of the ink contained in the transparent barrel of those markers to splatter when contacting paper with sufficient force was well known and deeply enjoyed by the children. Associations and plot lines tumbled forth from the first collision of marker on page. Similarly, the placement of tables, the commotion in other parts of the room, the possibility of adult displeasure or intervention, the undercurrent of Melanie’s complaint, all were a part of the assemblage that constituted this drawing event. The material world, that particular morning in that specific classroom, the unstable triangle of Alexis–Teddy–Melanie, were as much a part of the drawing as the marks on paper. We witness here a “contingent tableau that they formed with each other, with the [other] students, with the weather that morning, with me” (Bennett, 2013, p. 5).

So too was the world that entered the classroom with them, and awaited their return. Alexis, the youngest child and only girl in a family of five, frequently introduced the plot lines of television dramas, disguised as startling autobiographical revelations, in her conversations with adults. It was months later that I realized that the story she had shared with me about her “first mother” and her death in Mexico, a murder that Alexis claimed to have witnessed, bore an uncanny resemblance to a defining incident in the life of HBO’s endearing serial killer, Dexter. Her teacher, when asked whether Alexis’ mother was her stepmother, asserted that Alexis remained with her birth parents, still intact. We could surely debate the appropriateness of Dexter as children’s media fare. We might speculate on the nature and extent of the influence of her older brothers on Alexis’ imagination. We might wonder whether Alexis’ vivid storytelling, of murder and mayhem and “zombie dogs” loose in the neighborhood, provided a way to make sense of sensational content, real or imagined, that exceeded her understanding and incited her fears. For the moment, it may suffice to say that the circumstances of her life, her memory, and cultural experiences converged in a concern with violence that was captured and transformed through playful explorations of art making. We see Alexis using art as a language of prosthetic inquiry, taking her ever-reluctant sidekick Teddy along for the ride. Their drawings constitute “a prosthetic augmentation of [the] body’s perceptual capabilities” (Garoian, 2013, p. 28), escorting them through a shared—if asymmetrical—exploration of the commission of acts of violence, an experience that lay beyond the children’s everyday or firsthand experience.

Ultimately, what we make of this incident depends largely on our image of the child, our understanding of what art does, and our definitions of pedagogy and the relationships that sustain it. Garoian’s concept of “prosthetic pedagogy” begins in a refusal to define learners through what they lack, in what is often termed a “deficit model” (Shakespeare & Watson, 2001), a way of thinking that constitutes the taken-for-granted attitudes of far too many adults. In the case of Alexis and Teddy and Melanie, a deficit gaze (Dudley-Marling & Gurn, 2010) might lead us to ignore the “developmentally inappropriate” circumstances of their life experiences, in favor of pretending that their fears are unfounded. That is, we might too easily deny the reality of the children’s experience, dismiss the validity of their fear, and censure their play to maintain the illusion that young children can and should be shielded from the harsher realities of life. Too often, we deny the experiences children have, telling them that they are not hurt, for example, even when the evidence of a deeply scoured knee clearly says otherwise. Even when the distress is invisible, or the issue shifts toward a refusal to recognize that children know what they know—an obscenity and its grammatical function, for example—adults are often highly censorious, blaming the child for feelings or knowledge that we find uncomfortably mature and threatening to our vision of their innocence. We treat children differently from we would another adult in a similar situation. Prosthetic pedagogy, recognizing the perils inherent as seeing the student as “other,” is accepting of difference. It is, as Garoian (2013) puts it, “An embodied form of art research and teaching that challenges and resists both the disabling stereotypes and stigmas of the amputated as dysfunctional, and the fear and loathing of technological supplements that enable the body’s agency” (p. 29). Prosthetic pedagogies value the supports we find and make from the stuff that surrounds us. Prosthetic pedagogies erase boundaries, creating permeable spaces where children’s experiences outside school are welcomed as “linkages” that augment, if they do not simply allow, learning.

The art making that can occur in such prosthetic spaces is assembled from bits and fragments and flows of experience, propelled by “conceptual leaps from one space to another” (Garoian, 2013, p. 4). Garoian describes the amalgamation of forces that converged on the first blank canvas he faced as an art student, a space that became the ground for “the contingent and the ephemeral, yet profound interconnections” between the classroom and his life, the “complex and contradictory spaces, the canvas, the art classroom, the vineyard, the irrigation ditch, the dump, the dairy, Armenia, and the others” (p. 5). Although he had acquired many or most of these experiences first hand, as a child and then an adolescent growing up on a raisin farm outside Fresno, the memories of Armenia that continue to infuse so much of his work were, at that time, largely the memories others shared, as they continually turned them over in their own minds, wondering what they could mean, for survivors, victims, refugees, culture transplanted and altered and bequeathed to others.

Writing of the nature of what she terms “prosthetic memory,” Landsberg (2004) suggests that films and experiential museums may become “the interface between a person and a historical narrative about the past. . . . In this moment of contact, an experience occurs through which the person sutures himself or herself into a larger [memory and] history” (p. 2). Garoian asserts that schools can and often do function in the same manner. In this case, Alexis’ experience of media sources, and her appropriation of their stories as her own, may provide a prosthetic space where the encounters and alliances of troubling fantasies and real fears can be explored. Landsberg (2004) emphasizes the status of prosthetic memories as external and commodified, but nevertheless useful and enabling:

Landsberg (2004) explains that “the cinema transports people into lives they have not lived in the traditional sense but that they are nevertheless invited to experience and even inhabit, albeit briefly” (p. 12). The communal experience of viewing the same media productions, reading the same texts, inhabiting the same spaces constructs “a shared archive of experience” for diverse audience members, potentially allowing us to dwell within and begin to understand the experiences of others:

Commodification enables memories and images of the past to circulate on a grand scale . . . Prosthetic memory, therefore, unlike its medieval and nineteenth century precursors, is not simply a means for consolidating a particular group’s identity and passing on its memories; it also enables the transmission of memories to people who have no “natural” or “biological” claim to them. (p. 18)

In this way, history and memory are entangled, the personal and the cultural intertwined, in a process of continual negotiation.

The theory of prosthetic memory that Landsberg (2004) presents may explain some of the moral panics that tend to surround young children’s consumption of media and the vividness of its displays of violence and sexuality. Landsberg points out that experience has always been mediated through representations and narratives in multiple symbolic languages, but admits that, “Although all aesthetic experience has a sensuous component, the sensuous in the cinema—the experiential nature of the spectator’s engagement with the image—is different from other aesthetic experiences such as reading” (pp. 28-29). In fact, she argues, mediated experiences have become so much a part of the way in which we acquire knowledge, that they can no longer be considered entities entirely separate from the acquisition of lived experience and the memories that preserve it. Prosthetic and “real” memories are indistinguishable in an age where we recognize the extent to which “new technologies have the capacity to alter radically a culture’s way of seeing, its modes of perception, and its structures of feeling” (pp. 33-34). The question of where our memories originate is far less compelling, Landsberg suggests, than how they enable us to live in the present and envision the future, how they mediate intersubjectivity and become the “grounds for political alliances and the production of new, potentially counterhegemonic public spheres” (p. 34). Discussing the power of film to invite “prosthetic imagining,” Landsberg focuses briefly on the “visceral pedagogy” of film, noting that “the experience of feeling vulnerable or disempowered or of being put in the position of seeing through someone else’s eyes might change how one sees the world and one’s place in it” (p. 101).

Braidotti (2000) describes children’s art works as “fabulations,” a form of “fiction that offers us a world clearly and radically discontinuous from the one we know, yet returns to confront that known world in some cognitive way” (p. 47). Deleuze (1997) recognized the multiple languages intertwined in children’s drawings, the role of talk and gesture and sound effects in performing drawing: “In its own way, art says what children say. Children never stop talking about what they are doing or trying to do: exploring milieus, by means of dynamic trajectories, and drawing up maps of them” (p. 61). Furthermore, he recognized that the process of drawing is a complex and constantly shifting assemblage, whether it is practiced by young children or highly experienced adults:

Art is defined, then, as an impersonal process in which the work is composed somewhat like a cairn, with stones carried in by different voyages and beings in becoming (rather than ghosts) [devenants plutôt que revenants] that may or may not depend on a single author. (Deleuze, 1997, p. 66)

As Linda Knight (2013) asserts,

Deleuzian concepts of the imaginary provide some different entryways into thinking about young children’s drawings . . . Children’s drawings should be thought of as mutable, the imagery in them dependent upon what is thought about and encountered the moment the drawing begins rather than scanning their contents for evidence of schema that asserts the child has passed through some predetermined, scientifically sanctioned symbolic stages . . . Children’s drawings should be thought of as mysterious and abstract, and their meanings as sometimes closed to the gaze of the audience. (p. 257)

Garoian emphasizes the rhizomatic nature of prosthetic pedagogy, both in the “shared subjectivities” (Zurmuehlen, 1990, p. 67) of the art classroom and the alliances that learners make with physical and virtual communities beyond the classroom:

What children learn through empirical processes making art has the potential for multiple sutures: their private memories and cultural histories; with those of their classmates; with the public memory of schooling, museums, films, and other cultural representations; and the public memory of the mass media and the Internet. (Garoian, 2013, p. 47)

In the preschool where I met Alexis and Teddy, the introduction of sketchbooks, markers, and time to draw in the company of other children and interested adults created what Brent Wilson (2007) identifies as a “third pedagogical site” (p. 918): a space where “the teacher and learner interact dialogically, one learning from the other, and in doing so both are engaged in eccentric learning, to-and-fro between ignorant schoolmaster and emancipated spectator” (Garoian, 2013, p. 50). A distinct space, marked off from the routines of schooling, a third pedagogical site erupts when the usual roles of teacher and student are reversed or momentarily suspended. The role of the adult here is that of the “ignorant schoolmaster,” as Ranciere (1991) describes it, one who teaches what she herself does not know, practicing a “pedagogy of listening and radical dialogue” (Dahlberg & Moss, 2005, p. 98), in a context designed to “foster children’s play, their improvisations, explorations, and expressions through art” (Garoian, 2013, p. 44). As Garoian explains, Ranciere’s tale of the ignorant schoolmaster

suggests that teachers can consciously position themselves in the classroom as ignorant schoolmasters not to abdicate their pedagogical responsibilities, but to postpone their predetermined academic teaching and allow for their students’ playful observations, explorations and improvisations . . . . for Ranciere, the example of the ignorant schoolmaster represents the possibility that the knowledge and understandings that students and teachers bring to the classroom are not in a hierarchical relationship but are interdependent and necessary for their mutual creative and intellectual development. (pp. 45-46)

Garoian envisions art in the schools as a smooth space, where lines of flight emerge and disarticulate the routines of schooling that, too often, constrain dialogue and limit investigation. Lines of flight are the ruptures in the everyday where newness arises.

As Mary Ann Reilly (2011) explains,

Lines of flight are creative and liberatory escapes from the standardization, oppression, and stratification of society. Lines of flight, big or small, are available to us at any time and can lead in any direction. They are instances of thinking “outside of the box,” with a greater understanding of what the box is, how it works, and how we can break it open and perhaps transform it for the better.

Lines of flight occur within the process of drawing, as they do within larger institutional structures: They cannot be predetermined or planned. As Olsson (2009) explains,

When something new and different is coming about, when the lines of flight are created and activated in practices, it is never taking place as a relationally planned and implemented change by specific individuals. Rather, there are from time to time magic moments where something entirely new and different seems to be coming about. (p. 63)

Within the perspective of a prosthetic pedagogy of art for young children, we recognize that both adults and children come to schools “with pieces of the world attached” (Malaguzzi, 1994). Setting off together from that understanding, children and adults alike may begin to see “the world and others differently, in new and compassionate ways through art research and practice” (Garoian, 2013, p. 5).