2-Curious: The potential of performance-based practice in dialogue with early years practice

This article reports on the preliminary findings of a pilot project commissioned by Curious Minds, which linked two performance-based cultural partners (The Horse and Bamboo and Primed for Life) to two nursery schools in Lancashire. A research team from Manchester Metropolitan University worked in collaboration with Curious Minds to explore how collaborative partnerships between performing artists and Early Years practitioners might inform practices that support children’s acquisition of language and literacy. How this age group learn through their bodies in movement is an under-researched area (Powell and Goouch, 2014). Our research questions were: What might performance-based arts practice contribute to thinking about current pedagogy with two-year-olds? How might performance-based arts practice help us to understand different modes through which young children communicate? Methods A series of six creative workshops for two-year-old children with their parents/carers or