Non-speaking children are often wrongly seen as less capable, but a new fellowship tests whether movement-based "Artful Sensing Practices" (ASPs)—using painting, sculpting, and storytelling—can help them express themselves and be understood without pressure to speak. This matters because early education and health settings focus heavily on speech, overlooking the many reasons children may not speak, including environmental, cultural, or neurodivergent factors. The researcher’s PhD showed that ASPs actually increased participation and sometimes even encouraged speech by opening new pathways of curiosity. The fellowship now partners with two arts centres in South and West Yorkshire to work with up to 82 children and parents, many from marginalised or asylum-seeker families, who are twice as likely to experience non-speaking. If successful, the project will produce a first-of-its-kind toolkit for parents and professionals, enabling them to use sensory movement-play in everyday practice. The findings will be published in two high-ranking journals, presented to 1,500 scholars, and shared with 7,800 professionals through networks like Earlyarts. This could shift how educators, health professionals, and policymakers listen to and include non-speaking children, particularly neurodivergent and multilingual children, in mainstream settings.
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Children who do not speak are often viewed as lacking in competence or puzzles to be solved. The emphasis on speech and language in early education overlooks the complexities of not-speaking, such as environmental, cultural, biological or genetic factors (Mazzei, 2017). This fellowship addresses a gap in research by asking how a movement-based methodology for increasing expressive capacities called Artful Sensing Practices (ASPs) can be scaled and applied more widely to engage nonlingual children in multicultural contexts. My PhD pioneered transdisciplinary research in early childhood literacies by establishing how ASPs, movement-based communication methods, allow nonlingual children to express themselves differently and be understood. Tapping into an innate creativity through movement, painting, storytelling and sculpting, ASPs enabled adults and children to listen differently, attuning to body languages and creating spaces for multimodal, multisensory, multilingual expression (Olsson, 2009; Kind, 2020). Using ASPs in my PhD, I demonstrated that not-speaking is not a problem. By attending to the myriad nonlingual ways of communicating, ASPs reduced the pressure to speak and increased children’s participation in everyday worlds. In fact, movement practices often encouraged speech by opening new pathways of curiosity, concentration and productivity (Churchill Dower, 2025). This has significant implications for including marginalised voices in mainstream education and health settings as well as family life. It is a crucial step towards societal and educational inclusion, particularly for neurodivergent children who often sense the world before articulating it, and for Black and South Asian children who are twice as likely to experience non-speaking due to the precarities of living in marginalised multilingual settings (Nair et al, 2024). During this fellowship, I will partner with two arts centres in South and West Yorkshire supporting marginalised and asylum seeker families, to investigate how arts-based expression might help their voices be heard differently by educators, health professionals and policy makers. By co-producing with up to 82 children and parents/carers, I aim firstly to explore the benefits of ASPs for multicultural families who have a higher prevalence of not-speaking, and secondly to discover their implications for the professionals supporting multilingual children. The outcomes will include a first-of-its-kind toolkit for parents and professionals, enabling them to use sensory movement-play to attune to diverse multilingual and multimodal expressions in everyday practice. The outcomes will be published in two high-ranking journals (Discourse: Studies In The Cultural Politics Of Education, and, Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood), presented at three international conferences to 1500 scholars, and disseminated through transdisciplinary networks, including Earlyarts, to 7,800 professionals. Additionally, by connecting pioneering research on multimodal sensing practices led by Helsinki University, together with new literacy approaches at Sheffield Hallam University’s Institute of Education, this project will test, critique and refine this innovative research among academic peers, broaden the project’s impact and offer unique opportunities to collaborate with transdisciplinary specialists. This will lay the foundations for a British Academy postdoctoral fellowship proposal in partnership with the Nordic and UK networks to advance understandings of movement based approaches to language and broaden the application of ASPs in international multicultural communities. Challenging reductive views of differently capable bodies, this fellowship will significantly contribute to children’s literacies. It will reframe non-speaking in early childhood, critical neurodiversity, arts, education and linguistics scholarship, changing narratives around not-speaking in policy and practice, and producing significant publications on new methodologies for multilingual childhoods.
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