The makers of new words: A principally ethnographic account of community artists’ language

This principally ethnographic research investigated the pedagogies of eight community artists. Unstructured, artist-led interviews produced salient concepts that were examined in participation observation of twenty workshops across five sites. I chose to represent their pedagogies through three descriptive cases studies that feature four of the eight artists working in outdoor settings. Their workshops served nursery and primary school children, alongside nursery nurses, teachers and members of their families including parents and grandparents. Using a nested case study approach, I included the perspectives of all eight artists to provide their interpretations of what they do and why do it when engaging others in so-called informal, community settings. I found that the community artists attempt to create conditions for open-ended enquiry across five dimensions: space, time, material, body and talk. This article focuses on one of these dimensions – that of language.