The Ocean Swim: Rethinking Community in an Early Childhood Education Performing Arts Research Initiative

Abstract

This chapter describes a community research project called MAPS (Move, Act, Play, Sing), which involved community artists in music, dance and drama working with three early childhood education centres in Auckland, New Zealand. The MAPS project developed a programme that focused on stimulating and encouraging performing arts teaching and learning through a community-inspired, practice-based research approach. The pedagogy enabled the three early childhood centres with different cultural dispositions to respond to arts provocations from community artists and develop their own cultural focal points, decisions and directions. This chapter describes the project's aims and philosophy of practice and discusses how they can be viewed as alternatives to individualistic approaches to performing arts teaching and learning. A working metaphor of the `ocean swimmer' provides a backdrop for rethinking community in performing arts learning in this context.