Understanding an Arts-Based Project with Children in Kindergarten Through the Lenses of A/r/tography

Abstract

Five-year old children in four kindergartens were given the opportunity to create travel stories, supported and empowered by two artists with music and drama background, respectively. The artists constructed a safe space for improvised story-telling, triggered meaning-making, and bold, artistic expressions with conscious use of song and guitar to highlight the stories’ dramatic turning points. A teddy bear with a passport, Mitwa Potovanja, was the protagonist, and the children were given the lead roles as initiators and storytellers. Over the course of 20 art meetings the children constructed virtual voyages to the former homelands of some of the children, Afghanistan and Syria, or to fantasy worlds, or to the Moon. Among the aims of the project were to unleash the children’s narrative competencies through arts-based activities, and to strengthen language skills and social participation in their new home country. Using a/r/tography to understand the rhizomatic puzzle of narratives evolving from this project, I learned that children’s courage, imagination, and relational skills can be released if they are given a safe space for exploration together with professional facilitators who manage to play along with them and allow them to take the space as initiators and decision-makers.