‘Exploring’
In my dance pedagogical sessions, the exploring phase is the main focus, a time for creative work, playful exploration, and the use of imagination in and through dancing.
In this section, I narrate my dance pedagogical exploration at the Helsinki City ECEC centre Forest. This period spanned 46 working days over five months, involving cooperation with three groups—Brook, Spring, and Pond—of 3- to 6-year-olds, totalling 46 children and 13 adults. To reiterate, my aim was to gather insights related to my research question: How can improvisation-based, intra-active dance pedagogy can transform prevailing approaches to dance education and facilitate its fuller integration into the embodied, play-based, and holistic learning environments of ECEC? This aim was approached through practical research propositions: What emerges when a dancer–pedagogue–researcher spends several months in an early childhood education context, using her artistic expertise creatively and intuitively in child and adult encounters? Allowing time for discovery. To see and to become seen. To listen. To move and to be moved. To dance. To play. To be with. To not know. The idea of these propositions was to support an open-ended focus on embodied and emergent qualities of my research activities.
Aligned with posthuman perspectives that build on poststructuralist thinking, I have chosen not to present the fieldwork chronologically, a strategy that several other scholars have also experimented with (e.g., Myers 2019). Instead, I analyse the fieldwork by working diffractively through my research propositions, enabling readers to engage with the material in any order they prefer. However, I will start this section with a brief summary of my practical preparations before the fieldwork phase. A more detailed presentation of my research approaches and methods is compiled in the section ‘Warming Up’ with Methodology.