Prescribings for artful professionalisms in early childhood education

In this paper, by taking seriously the sensuous and embodied becomings of early childhood education, we make an alternative case for professionalism that foregrounds artful and divergent ways of working, attuning to affective methods of learning through sensing practices that imbricate early educators in more-than-human pedagogies. We demonstrate how developmentalism works to keep children and teachers inside a logic of ‘progression’ and ‘normalisation’, preventing differently-knowing bodies from mattering. Taking inspiration from Manning's notions of the ‘artful’ and finding ‘diversity in diversity’, we advocate for new forms of artful professionalism that become attuned to, and affected by, neurodivergent multi-modal bodyings. We explore how professional modes that co-compose with young children's alternative ways of knowing can animate expansive educational possibilities. Using a research-creation approach with software, we artfully engage with rasterised images of a wool–child–guinea pig encounter, enabling a slowing down and an attunement to sensuous moments with minor resonances. These sensing practices surface the inarticulable affects of more-than-human co-composition – frustrations, joys, curiosities – teaching us much about the potentialities in children's worldings beyond words. We propose a professionalism grounded not in judgement or comprehension but in participation, speculation and embodied experimentation. Becoming an artful, divergent professional is, we find, a generative move. It invites a sensitivity towards emergent possibilities, a resistance to talk, a yielding to what else matters and an openness to the productive differences of bodies. It is a risky but adventurous professionalism that feels at home in the non-conforming, messy and multi-sensory worlds of early childhood.