Keywords

A video still and a Q R code on the left and right, respectively. The former has 2 soap dispensers in partial view. The taller one has a cartoon of a smiling frog.

  • (Ødegaard & Hoffart, 2021)

  • En dråpe såpe

  • Barra-barra rann-vann

  • Barra-barra kåpe-såpe

  • Barra-barra plum-skum

  • Barra-barra plask-vask

  • Barra-barra børr-tørr

  • English:

  • A Drop of Soap

  • Barra-barra daughter-water

  • Barra-barra coat-soap

  • Barra-barra plum-skum

  • Barra-barra splash-wash

  • Barra-barra try-dry.

1 Introduction—An Innovative Response

Any human act that gives rise to something new is referred to as a creative act, regardless of whether what is created is a physical object or some mental or emotional construct that lives within the person who created it and is known only to him (Vygotsky, 2004, p. 7). With these opening words by Vygotsky, we introduce a chapter that demonstrates how information regarding infection control was creatively recrafted, based on a critique of an existing information video crafted on the initiatives of The Norwegian Directorate for Education and Training and an attraction to art and imagination in a digital agile response in a time of crisis.

A drop of soap, the rhyme in the video, was initiated by the first author, and further elaborated in collaboration with a two-year-old boy and a four-year-old girl and the children’s mother. We are all bonded as a family but live in two different countries; the meeting place was usually a digital platform or smartphone and, during the pandemic, no other options were available. Daily life and keeping safe from the virus were repeated topics in our conversations. Elin (first Author) first introduced existing songs and some beginning lines for a new rhyme connected to water, washing, and soap as a playful approach to a conversation about handwashing. This playful start triggered the four-year-old, so she started to add lines to the rhyme we started to create. The mother, the girl, and the boy started to use the rhyme while handwashing, and a recorded version of the girl saying the rhyme was added to an animated film. The authors of this chapter agreed on the design of this animated short video film, addressing the youngest children. It should inspire handwashing, not by being a moral imperative but rather by being associative and inspiring to explore water while washing one’s hands.

With this description as a starting point, this chapter narrates the process of making a video targeting the youngest children by using cultural-historical and aesthetic analytic models and concepts, where co-creation, creativity, and imagination are crucial. We describe a problem experienced in the early days of the pandemic, namely informing children about the importance of washing one’s hands. The information provided by the Directorate of Education was almost exclusively shaped in a manner best suited to ages four and up. The authors of this chapter (an artist and filmmaker, a child specialist and early-years researcher) identified a lack of awareness regarding successful and age-appropriate communication with children in the tool kit provided by the authorities. Although older children might follow the commands of adults regarding infection control, younger children lack the logical tools required to process such information. Based on this critique, we responded by engaging children, kindergartens, and families in the co-creation of a 90-s video. With the aim of targeting the youngest children, this animated short video used imaginative visual language, rhymes, and rhythms rather than the more common instruction. The result of the co-creation was the crafting of a colourful, abstract animation with stimulating rhythms.

The film was tested by an adult audience (the research group), in a family with one child aged 2 years, and in seven groups of three children (one-to-three-year-olds in an early-year institution). The feedback from the adult researchers was mixed: some liked it, some as it was, and mentioned especially that the sound of the girl saying the rhyme touched their emotions in a positive way. Others were reluctant in their feedback. This reluctance was due to the lack of a narrative thread and the lack of a main character. The family responded positively; they enjoyed the film and praised the surprises that popped up during the 90 s. The responses from the 27 children, watching it in groups of 3 at a time, were observed by staff and by the second author. The children seemed to enjoy the film, as they laughed and asked for repetitions. Small adjustments were made after these rounds of testing. Since the voice of the girl saying the rhyme was mentioned positively by the adults several times, we repeated this sequence.

This chapter presents its cultural-historical perspective by drawing on Vygotsky’s concept of imagination to explain why an associative animation video seemed to appeal to children and to inspire them to explore streaming water and handwashing. In a cultural-historical paradigm, the concept of imagination supports the argument that children would benefit from knowledge of what imagination entails for their understanding and development. Knowledge of children and childhood and of the emergent understanding of the early ages is useful when it comes to how best to communicate with the youngest children.

2 The Problem—Ignoring the Youngest in Society

With the metaphor of ‘loophole’, Bakhtin indicates a side glance, or a shift of focus, where the person involved in an activity (in Bakhtin, it will often be the hero in a novel) can be ambiguous to events (Bakhtin, 1973, pp. 233–234). With the metaphor of loophole, we explain our response to the film launch by The Directorate of Education and Training, at the point in history when children were to go back to schools and kindergartens after being isolated in their homes during the first period of the pandemic. The opening of society was followed by a series of infection control rules and guidelines. The film, launched by The Directorate of Education and Training, was an attempt to give information to children when going back to their institutions. While nearly 100% of children aged 4–5 years attend an early-years institution in Norway, nearly 90% of all children aged 1–3 years attend a full-day institutional stay. This means that providing information to children is a complicated task for authorities. Due to maturity and developmental age, giving information to a very young child is not obvious. This might be the explanation for why the authorities gave information in the manner they did: repeating information, which was directed to the adult audience, on keeping distance and handwashing to avoid the virus.

Giving information to children and listening to them had been on the Norwegian authorities’ agendas since the beginning of the pandemic. The prime minister of Norway, Erna Solberg, gave regular ‘children’s press conferences’ through national broadcasting, with opportunities for children to ask questions (Pramling Samuelsson et al., 2020). This way of reaching out to children has been institutionalised in Norway since the first establishment of the Ombudsman for Children in 1981. In all these years, the outreach to children and children making use of the ombudsman and practices for being involved in society has been, for reasonable reasons, mostly for children of the age of 6 years and up, when they can read and write. How best to give generic information to the youngest children is not evident, as a local contextualised approach will be considered best.

It was with a side glance that we started our explorative journey. Interested in culture and communication provided for children, we studied the information video produced by the health and educational authorities when the early-years institutions reopened for children during the Covid-19 pandemic (The Norwegian Directorate of Education and Training, 2021).

3 Crisis in Development

Vygotsky’s cultural-historical theory about child development set a premise of development as a result of social interactions. In this way, children’s meaning-making and understanding are inherently collaborative (Vygotsky, 1998). Social negotiation is essential for building knowledge and understanding concepts. From its start as a newborn, the child will fuel development through biologically programmed (lower) mental functions such as attention, sensation, perception, and memory. From the start, engaging in relation to others and the environment allows humans to use these abilities to develop ‘higher’ mental functions. The young child is, however, not a blank slate. Vygotsky recognised that the infant comes equipped with innate response tendencies that challenge the caregiver. In the first years of life, when biological programs dominate behaviour, behaviour is an automatic reaction to apparent features of the environment. With experience, the child will develop increased sensitivity to the environment, a better comprehension of it, and flexibility towards it (Vygotsky, 1998, pp. 293–295). According to Vygotsky, a child’s development is indicated by crisis. This is further elaborated and exemplified for institutional settings by Mariane Hedegaard. When a child meets new demands in new institutions, the child appropriates new competencies because what is known does not fit the existing practice (Hedegaard, 2012).

4 Imagination and Reality

According to Vygotsky, the first premise for imagination is the association between imagination and reality: It stems from the fact that everything the imagination creates is always based on elements taken from reality, from a person’s previous experience (Vygotsky, 2004, p. 8). Vygotsky proposes that imagination will always build on using materials supplied by reality and that imagination may create new levels of combination as creative processes. Broadening the experiences of a child will, as a consequence, enrich the foundation for the child’s creativity. The more the child experience, the more productive the imagination will be. During a crisis situation, new and unexpected realities can pop up. During the Covid-19 crisis, there were a lot of restrictions on children, families, and intuitions, and activities and experiences became more limited.

The researchers were also limited. For example, in order to do the observations of the young children’s responses to the video, the observations had to be staged outdoors. The second author needed to observer at a distance when the small groups watched the video on a digital screen, sitting in small groups on a bench outside. Very soon thereafter, the health authorities in Norway advised that children under the age of three should avoid screens both during family time and in institutions. It was easy to understand the background for such a piece of advice, as small children and screen time had, for a long time, been disputed. From the situation emerged a paradox: at a time when children had limited access to experiences, due to all restrictions on movement and socialisation, a piece of experience, namely a video of 90 s with colourful and playful associations to water and handwashing, was restricted from them.

How can we see the link between the film, as reality and experience for children, when it is also a piece of collaborative imaginative art? Vygotsky points out that fantasy and reality are not oppositionally different. He draws on examples to explain the relation between them. He says that when we know something, we do not only reproduce what we know; we create new combinations from a series of knowledges and experiences. The products of the imagination consist of transformed and reworked elements of reality and a large store of experience is required to create these images out of these elements (Vygotsky, 2004, p. 11). We are dependent on experiences in order to create concepts and understandings. Seen in our context, this could mean that the children used their reality experiences of handwashing, of streams of water coming from a tap, of pushing the soap dispenser for drops of soap, to associate and imagine playing with water. This reality inspires them. When, suddenly, a reptile pops up in the video, washing his hands, this micro event might be outside their reality; still, he is washing hands, which is in the frame of reality, so the designer plays with forms inside and outside reality. The response of laughter when the surprises pop up must be seen as a sign of developmentally appropriate events. The children already have emergent concepts of water and handwashing from everyday life experience, so the film elaborates on these concepts in a playful manner. Vygotsky points to how imagination is dependent on previous experience, on the one hand, and, on the other how, at the same time, there is something new in constructs of fantasy in every person. This means that even if the product (the video) is a new digital reality, the experiences of persons responding to it will vary. Vygotsky (p. 66) also points to the connection of children’s imaginary, the meaning-making of parts of the whole, in the making of props, scenery, and costumes when playing and how these activities provide a pretext for visual arts and crafts. When the girl suggests a line in the rhyme, she takes on meaning and purpose; she engages in her own life conditions.

Hedegaard draws upon Vygotsky in her study of street art (Hedegaard, 2014) when she points to emotion and imagination as the core in the aesthetic experience: Imagination and emotion in art become real through relating to the person’s life as a cultural and societal being. Art proceeds from certain live feelings and in art humans realise aspects of psychic tensions that find no expression in everyday life (Hedegaard, 2014, p. 8). For her, like Vygotsky, emotions do not create art per se; the creative act comes into being when overcoming an emotion. In our project making associative imagery, we used our own imagination of what would be appealing and open-ended for a very young child and developed an aesthetic language of moving pictures accordingly.

This collaboration was based on at least four strains of knowledge: (1) a theoretical and practical knowledge of children’s development and the role of play and imagination in children, (2) an art-based knowledge of aesthetic expression, (3) a technological knowledge of animation and sound, and (4) a methodological knowledge of collaborative design.

In addition to the knowledge, this narrative also shows digital agility. As pointed out in the introduction to Part V, digital agility is the ability to move easily and quickly by leveraging digital technology and solutions and reflects a person’s ability to be outward-looking and adaptable to a changing world (Kucirkova & Quinlan, 2017). While the knowledge of children’s development, aesthetic expression, technology and collaborative design was crucial in order to carry through pedagogical innovation, digital agility was the transferable knowledge, an agency to respond to the flaws in communication by the authorities and lack of material provided for the youngest children, the one-three year-olds in kindergarten.

5 Conclusion—Art as Inspiration for Pedagogical Innovation

The design of the film One Drop of Soap was to co-craft a video as a response to crisis where handwashing was important for all citizens, including the youngest children. The chapter has opened up the process of relational imaginative art with and for children. At the same time, it narrates a pedagogical innovation for the early years, as well as it showcases digital agility during the Pandemic.

The film emerged from the problem of flaws in the communication available about infection control for children, and especially how it misappropriated the language of institutional informatics to get children aboard; the need for more open-ended communication became apparent. We sought to convey the activity of handwashing as it is experienced by young children and by staff in a format similar to what they are used to in their daily lives. Rather than neutral third-person instruction, we deemed it more favourable to give children a sense of ownership and identification.

It is not paramount that a 2- or 3-year-old understands precisely the specifics of why clean hands are important with regard to disease. While parents or kindergarten teachers dutifully propagate new routines, a child does not necessarily need a cognitive process of the cause in order to be an ally of it. The child can simply enjoy and experience the activity on its own terms. The motivation to embrace the activity does not rely on reason but rather on attraction and fascination. Thus, if an ‘infomercial’ is to be effectual, it should simply stimulate attraction to the experience itself.

For this chapter, we emphasised that the making of the film was a collaborative, explorative process. One cannot assume that collaboration occurs simply because several people are working together. We claim collaboration because the design promoted dialogue, sharing, and picking up on perspectives for developing a product: the film. Collaboration implies the negotiation of decisions (Carvalho et al., 2021, Ødegaard, 2021). Collaborative exploration, as characterised by the process of the making of the film, holds the promise of contextual responsiveness to children’s lives and formation and is suggested as a signature of the educational approach when working with children, families, and staff (Ødegaard, 2021). With a cultural-historical approach, we contribute to the universal inquiry of how to educate the young child for the future, when all we know is the past and the present. Researchers, families, and teachers are responsive to children’s lives and learn to navigate crisis with responsiveness to the local and situated child and group, informed by knowledge of child development, while at the same time acknowledging a mandate of children’s safety during times of crisis.