Listening is an active verb… It requires openness to change. It demands that we value the unknown, and overcome the feelings of emptiness and precariousness that we experience when our certainties are questioned.(Rinaldi, 2001,p.3)
Salal Place has been putting a Pedagogy of Listening to work in new ways, in an effort to activate pedagogical experimentations with children in their centre.
How can we sustain curriculum-making processes together?
Scarves are a familiar and beloved material within Salal Place. Alongside countless moments that constitute each day, scarves have become a dynamic co-participant for reconsidering ways that bodies and ideas move throughout the centre. Salal Place team is engaging with scarves as a method for learning to listen in new ways and co-create (and tell) new stories this year. Their ‘big body movement room’ has become a space for gauzy fabrication, a place where lines, tensions, slipperiness, the weighty-ness of scarves (and weightlessness, at times!) can be explored.
On Jan. 20th Sadaf and Narda removed books, materials, etc., and arranged scarves throughout the centre in ways (we hoped) might provoke new flows and encounters with children, scarves and educators the next morning. Children filtered into the centre the following day. Movement with scarves morphed and changed along with the increasing morning light and bodies. This provocation was intended to amplify (and document) scarf-child-educator encounters. See below for some of Emily’s notes from that day and a quote from Sylvia Kind and Adrienne Argent (2019), who the team has read and been thinking with about ‘Fabricating Fluidities’ in material encounters with scarves.
Jan. 21, 2024, Provocation Notes from Emily
Key Words: Warm, Gifting, Wrapping, Calm, Focused, Caring, Fluidity, Movement, Stillness
Thoughts/Perspectives: Arriving to Salal I noticed most of the room was bear with no additional materials provided other than the scarves. The scarves were placed gently and purposefully around the room some tied together creating a long chain, others draped over hanging décor in the room. 
While watching the group explore the room as it was offered, I noticed very little hesitation on where to “begin” with the scarves. The children that arrived first moved the scarves around the room to where they desired. Giving more movement and life to the scarves. I heard I____ say to Narda “don’t step on the scarves!”, as he was concerned for the care of them. 
I found it fascinating how quickly the scarves moved into the “Big Body Movement Room”, where they often live on a day-to-day basis. As if they were returning to home base. 
I loved the atmosphere that the sun created as it peered into the room, it created a warm and inviting space. 
The fascination with the shadows on the wall was really interesting to observe, especially J____ as he appeared to be mesmerized.
The use of the air purifier was wonderful to watch because the air added beautiful movement to the scarves. 
I heard some children talk about wrapping me up, and Sadaf said something along the lines of “wrapping a present”. Which I thought was sweet as they were so delicately and thoughtfully wrapping me up with the scarves. I also want to acknowledge how amazing it was that the children stayed all together in the room for over 1 hour, happily playing with each other and the scarves.
The [big body movement room] is not merely a background to children’s experimentations or a container for art explorations but an emergent space itself always in the making…It is not simply about arranging an artistic space or filling it with art materials, rather composing it so that there is an “invitation to realize projects not possible under existing conditions.” Thus, the work becomes an experiment, a desire to produce difference and a search for “unexplored horizons.” …The fabric makes visible the children’s lines of movements and exchanges. And while the fabric draws us all together in the tangles of connections, the nonconforming and slippery nature of the fabric actives a particular quality of being together. The fabric takes shape, but only temporarily because it cannot, on its own, hold a form…Children, educators, [program manager and pedagogist], fabric [light and air] are in moving correspondence together, and we give attention to what is being made and produced in the middle of this. (Kind & Argent, 2019, pp. 35-38)
