This article examines how Relationships Education (RE) can be reimagined through feminist new materialism, arts-based pedagogical practices, relational activism, and Erin Manning’s concept of minor gestures. Building on research demonstrating the positive potential of arts-based methodologies in advancing RE, the study draws on empirical material generated through research activism in the early 2020s in a primary school in Northern Finland. Using participatory observation among 10–12 year old children and their teachers, the data emerged through research notes, sketches, arts-based encounters, and small everyday classroom situations in which affective and material movements — small gestures, hesitant shifts, collaborative making, and embodied or tactile contacts — opened and reshaped possibilities for relationality. The analysis conceptualises these moments as affective-materialist entanglements and forms of relational activism, where creativity, subtle gestures and micro-transitions attune sensitivities toward others and enable collective becoming. Particular attention is given to how the embodied presence and spatial positioning of children and teachers – postures, distances, directions, movements and classroom arrangements – generated shifting relational atmospheres. These micro-configurations alternated between open, warm and inviting spaces and more tense, withdrawn or closed ones, revealing how embodiment and spatiality centrally shape the affective-material dynamics of relational pedagogy. The findings indicate that arts-based activity, spontaneous small gestures, and spatial-embodied arrangements can function as dynamics of relational activism that expand what RE can be. The article proposes approaching RE grounded in the logic of the minor, where arts and creativity, subtle gestures and embodied attunements are recognised as significant relational forces.

Authors:
Eeva-Maria Korhonen, University of Oulu, Finland

About the Presenter(s)
Eeva-Maria Korhonen is a doctoral researcher and specializing in arts-based and relational pedagogies in education. Her work focuses on the intersections of creative methodologies, relationships education and teacher education.

Connect on Linkedin
https://www.linkedin.com/in/eeva-maria-korhonen-24733a330

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