What Children Might Tell Adults If We Asked Better Questions

Charlotte Arculus is an artist-animateur, electro-acoustic musician, sound composter, and maker of visual theatre and immersive, emergent environments. She has been a freelance, socially engaged arts practitioner for 4 decades and is a founder member of Magic Acorns.

Her academic research works imaginatively to think-with young children’s ways of knowing and understanding the world as valid in its own right. She asks: What very young children might tell us about time, music and philosophy if only grown-ups could ask better questions and start listening – with all their senses – to the replies?

Perhaps we all can remember how time, and place felt like when we were children? How places were deeply resonant and materially felt. And how time was experienced rather than measured.

And yet the younger a child is the less their way of knowing the world seems to be valued.

In this talk Charlotte will conceptualise young children as more than adults-in-waiting and tell some of the stories from her research.