Encounters with Materials in Early Childhood Education
Abstract
Encounters with Materials in Early Childhood Education rearticulates understandings of materials-blocks of clay, sheets of paper, brushes and paints-to formulate what happens when we think with materials and apply them to early childhood development and classrooms. The book develops ways of thinking about materials that are more sustainable and insightful than what most children in the Western world experience today through capitalist narratives. Through a series of ethnographic events and engagement with existing ideas of relationality in the visual arts, feminist ethics, science studies, philosophy, and anthropology, Encounters with Materials in Early Childhood Education highlights how materials can be conceptualized as active participants in early childhood education and generators of human insight. A variety of examples show how educators, young children, and researchers have engaged in thinking with materials in early years classrooms and explore what materials are capable of in their encounters with other materials and with children. Please visit the companion website at www.encounterswithmaterials.com for additional features, including interviews with the authors and the teachers featured in the book, videos and photographs of the classroom narratives described in these pages, and an ongoing blog of the authors’ ethnographic notes.
... The notion that embodied interaction is essential to child development is not a new concept; however, there has been renewed interest in embodiment in ECE. Several studies have drawn attention to the importance of children's embodied exploration, emotions, and active engagement with the material worlds in sense-making and development (Carlsen, 2015;Fredriksen, 2011b;Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2017;Waterhouse et al., 2019). In my opinion, there were positive changes in the 2017 Framework Plan regarding arts and crafts education. ...
... Initially, I described how the focus on material exploration and haptic perception in Norwegian ECE goes all the way back to Fröbel in the 1800s (Carlsen, 2015;Fredriksen, 2011aFredriksen, , 2011b). In addition, I emphasized that children's direct experience with materials is seen as fundamental in arts and crafts education (Fredriksen, 2011a;Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2017;Waterhouse, 2013). I also acknowledged that there has been a material turn in our society (Barad, 2007) and that a renewed interest in the meaning of materiality has emerged (Gregersen & Skiveren, 2016). ...
... Gibson (1979) and Dewey's (1934Dewey's ( /2005 theories offer an understanding of the experiences in human-material interaction, and these theories have been a foundation in ECE arts and crafts theory for a long time. Newer theories in the field of children's arts and crafts education stress the importance of how children develop experiential knowledge through material engagement from an early age (Carlsen, 2015, Fredriksen, 2011bPacini-Ketchabaw, 2017) and how material exploration is a way of negotiating meaning in accordance with the possibilities and limitations of the physical environments (Fredriksen, 2011a;Groth, 2017;Nordtømme, 2016). The meaning of material touch and materiality has been put on the agenda within different disciplines, including neuropsychology (Nicholas, 2010), educational science (Martinussen & Larsen, 2018), anthropology (Ingold, 2017), and the philosophy of science (Barad, 2007). ...
... The dualism of human/more-than-human is a new materialist concept that is essential for understanding the importance of both animate and inanimate dimensions of the learning environment, in terms of their equitable agentic potentials in influencing children's participation and learning (Hackett & Somerville, 2017;Merewether, 2019;. The new materialist literature, as it applies to young children and the early childhood learning environments they are a part of, describes humans as being children and adults of all ages, while more-than-humans are things as disparate as stones, sand, animals, trees and weather (Rautio, 2013;Pacini-Ketchabaw, Kind & Kocher, 2016;Pacini-Ketchabaw, Taylor & Blaise, 2016;Taylor, 2017;Rooney, 2018). Autistic children are particularly sensitive to the agentic potentialities of the more-than-human within the common world of the early childhood learning environment (Kluth, 2012;Silberman, 2015;, making a new materialist approach a natural fit for underpinning this thesis. ...
... The concept of agency in the new materialist tradition describes the equitable capacities for agency held by human and more-than-human dimensions of the common worlding early childhood learning environment, and is crucial for understanding how they all possess the potential to make change to what happens within that space (Barad, 2007;Hickey-Moody, 2020). This differs from a humanistic approach to agency, which privileges human experience within a learning environment (Barad, 2003;Pacini-Ketchabaw, Kind & Kocher, 2016). The new materialist conception of agentic potentials residing in the morethan-human as well as the human is a critical notion to this thesis on a variety of different levels, in terms of supporting early childhood teachers to better understand autistic children's diverse sensoria and sensory meaning-making and different ways of seeing and experiencing the world around them. ...
... This is consistent with precepts of the early childhood learning environment woven throughout Te Whāriki (Ministry of Education, 2017), which are heavily focused on how it is designed to be in the service of the human (Tesar & Arndt, 2019;McAnelly & Gaffney, 2020). A new materialist approach maintains that we should be asking not only who the early childhood learning environment is for, but also what (Lenz Taguchi, 2011;Rautio, 2014;Pacini-Ketchabaw, Kind & Kocher, 2016). That is, the early childhood learning environment is not all about (and for) children, teachers, families and wider communities. ...
This thesis reports on how autistic children’s active participation and learning are produced within, and emerge from, the intra-activity of human and more-than-human co-constituting the early childhood learning environment. An increasing body of early childhood education research interrogates the impact on children’s experiences and learning. However these studies, pervaded by discourses of human exceptionalism, fail to account for the co-constitutive force of people-spaces-objects-practices relations in producing moments of agentic becoming and learning in early childhood education.
The thesis uses a sensory ethnographic case study methodology, informed by new materialist theory, to reveal how two autistic children’s experiences of active participation and learning emerged from the entangled intra-activity of the human and more-than-human dimensions that co-constituted their respective early childhood
learning environments. The ethico-onto-epistemological framing of the dissertation in this way meant re-seeing the early childhood learning environment, children’s participation and learning, and the sociocultural theoretical understandings that commonly sustain these, through differently cast eyes. Methods that were used to coproduce data comprised observations in the form of ‘event production records’ (EPR’s), interviews, photographs, videos, and walking tours led by the children. A new materialist reading and analysis of the data involved my entangled meaning-making. This enabled me to move away from normative interpretations usual in qualitative analysis, and towards a diffractive understanding of the data that moved thought in unpredictable ways. As a result, an assemblage of knowledge production was entered into that would not otherwise have been possible.
The findings of this thesis illustrate how the human and more-than-human dimensions of the early childhood learning environment intra-acted in their co-constitutive production of autistic children’s active participation and learning. Diverse sensoria and modes of sensory meaning-making, which were similarly produced in the intra-activity of the learning environment, were critical to the ways in which each child accessed and practiced opportunities to actively participate and learn. Human and more-than-human components of the learning environments all possessed equitable agentic potentialities in
producing the children’s active participation and learning. These agentic potentialities were exercised in a flat ontology of affect that did not privilege the human as being more important than the more-than-human.
I argue that the ethico-onto-epistemological reframings of the early childhood learning environment and autistic children’s active
participation and learning within it emerging from this dissertation challenge the human exceptionalism prevalent in early childhood education, and advance a more holistic understanding of the autistic active participant and learner as a result. Accordingly, the
thesis possesses the agentic potential to transform the inclusive practice of early childhood teachers, as well as how inclusive early childhood curriculum is understood, enacted and experienced.
... This centre is Reggio inspired, and fundamental to the research project were encounters with materials, art events, and experiences. The educators and children from this centre participated in the study described in Encounters with Materials in Early Childhood Education (Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2017). ...
... Thus, to understand Will's voice, she needs to carefully attend to his actions. Her responsibility, as she responds to his actions and capacities, is to think about what is included and welcomed and what is excluded and troubled (Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2017). Subsequently, Daisy covers the shelf with a big sheet of white paper and creates another drawing space on the toy shelf for Will and the rest of the children. ...
... These materials stay in the room, in the same way as the educators and children live and spend time within the space. Among the educators and the children, as well as among the children's peers, materials such as paper, charcoal, clay, and blocks are an important means of communicating ideas and feelings through art (Kind, 2018;Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2017). ...
This article describes drawing events with a group of toddlers and an educator that I observed during my master’s research study. The article demonstrates how their artmaking space became a pedagogical third site in which the children, educators, and materials flourished together. First, I discuss how posthuman and new materialist perspectives in early childhood education invite consideration of how humans and more-than-humans coconstruct their experiences of mutual teaching and learning. Then, discussing some of the findings from this study, I illustrate how the art space might become a meeting place where children, educators, and materials live together. Finally, I suggest some areas for future research.
... Together the three of us carried ideas around materiality, about the liveliness of materials, and of honouring the complexities and the processual, continuous unfoldings experienced as being meaningful, transformative, inventive, expressive, interpretive, and communicative, not only with the artist, but also with the artist's surroundings. We approached the shaping of ideas as not just coming from the maker or the environment, but also from the materials (Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2017). The materials do something to the maker just as the maker does something to the materials, and it is through this relationship that intra-activity occurs (Barad, 2007). ...
... Materials themselves are not linear or static-each has their own agency, rhythm, movement, and ways of being-a taken-for-granted notion when conceptualized in this way (Kind, 2010). Therefore, we approached this inquiry in spaces of difference with hopes of experiencing multiple encounters which we thought (or conceptualized) as wholly relational, unpredictable, not yet known, undiscovered, and disruptive, coming together moment within moment, with all entities, forces, and spaces, human and more than human (Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2017). We began our encounter with only clay, but as you will see, each encounter provided spaces for diffraction and produced an abundance of multiplicities, such as pottery wheel spinning and twirling with tornado and ballerina. ...
This paper follows three student-educators’ journey with clay. Embedded in the contextual space of the studio, the paper considers the complexities and processes involved in cultivating curriculum and thinking with the idea of art as a language. Inspired by the relational materialist approach, Erin, Roselyn, and Colleen enter into a dialogue with clay—embodying one another, entangling with each other, intra-actively doing unto one another, and reaffirming that knowing things is embedded deeply in relational connectivity with the world around us—onto-epistemology. The authors journey together with clay through spinning, twirling, tornadoes, storms, music, chaos, and destruction.
... The purposeful disruption of the childcare environment generated encounters full of thoughts, connections, and dialogues. When a space for experimentation is opened, Pacini-Ketchabaw, Kind, and Kocher (2016) suggest that: ...
... In thinking with common worlds, we actively embrace indeterminacy without a neoliberal productive end goal. Pacini-Ketchabaw et al. (2016) suggest that in a relational encounter connections happen tangentially and take many directions. With this onto-epistemological understanding of such encounters and the learnings with charcoal and cardboard, we see thoughts and questions, often without answers. ...
What might pedagogies of indeterminacy do? As researchers and educators, we ask that question, inspired by common worlds pedagogies, exploring pedagogies of indeterminacy. Drawing on pedagogical inquiries using charcoal and cardboard in an early childhood centre, we challenge early childhood narratives conformed by neoliberal-informed productivity models and choose to think with a pedagogy of indeterminacy. The larger concept of indeterminacy, for this work with charcoal and cardboard, encompasses working with boredom and contemplation to challenge dominant neoliberal constructs of productivity in early childhood education. We begin by confronting the neoliberal-informed productivity concepts that continue to dominate practices in early childhood education. We then note three ways in which early childhood education conforms to these concepts. Then we trouble these three ways with the possibilities from indeterminacy, boredom, and contemplation. What we propose with pedagogies of indeterminacy is an alternative narrative that challenges dominant productivity logics. Abstract Adrianne de Castro is a Brazilian educator with years of experience working in elementary and secondary schools in Brazil. Her MA Thesis is inspired by common worlds pedagogies and thinking with, rather than mastering concepts, materials and others of shared worlds. She believes in an approach to early childhood education that is collectivist and inclusive of more-than-humans. Her research is a humble response toward more livable worlds in the present human-modified geological epoch of the Anthropocene. Sarah Hennessy is a PhD Candidate in Curriculum Studies at Western University's Faculty of Education. With particular attention to early childhood education, she is curious about art (as artist, researcher and educator) and how creative expression informs understanding. Her research is focused on feminist new materialism and common worlds theoretical perspectives in search of alternative narratives, methods and pedagogies in education. Her approach to research is focused on openings to living well with others, more-than-humans and humans alike. With more than two decades of facilitating learning, she continues to explore the intersections of art, practice, ethical engagement, and place in considering childhoods differently.
... Through experimentation children and teachers did not try to control or manage the waste material; instead, they were encouraged to think with water, paper, nature, space, and waste sounds and smells, focusing on how they are active and participatory. Following Pacini-Ketchabaw et al. (2017), we were curious as to how mutual encounters might change teachers' and children's relations with waste materials and our engagement with the world. In this article we share fragments of paper and water relations, focusing the lens both on the agency and movements of waste materials with us, and on the moments of unease that readily occurred within these encounters, creating an experience of collective professional learning that is aesthetic-ethical-political. ...
... Further, Pacini-Ketchabaw et al. (2016) elaborate on children's process of becoming familiar with the materiality of paint: "becoming competent or familiar with paint involves blurring the gap between the manipulations required to use paint in developmentally focused early childhood classroom and those required in the classroom conditions" (p. 51). ...
... This paper shares data from a collaborative early childhood education pedagogical inquiry research project titled Facetiming Common Worlds. Using a participatory and collaborative educatoraction research methodology (Pacini-Ketchabaw, Kind, & Kocher, 2016;Pacini-Ketchabaw, Nxumalo, Kocher, Elliott, & Sanchez, 2015) children, educators, and researchers on Wurundjeri Country in Melbourne, Australia and Lekwungen territory in Victoria, Canada have been using iPhones and digital applications to exchange our relationships with place. This project is grounded in a common worldsinformed pedagogical intention to unsettle our everyday relationships with place, more-than-human others, and ecological precarities in two countries and education contexts implicated in ongoing settler colonialism. ...
... However, already in that century, several pedagogues attributed some relevance to teaching materials for children's development and learning. There was a call for active, constructive, and meaningful learning, made by educators such as Frederick Froebel or Maria Montessori, who are still relevant today [7]. ...
This paper seeks to identify the pedagogical resources used by kindergarten, primary and secondary teachers in Azores Islands. Additionally, an investigation will be made into how these resources are mobilized in teachers’ pedagogical practice, with the aim of understanding to what extent digital resources, particularly learning objects, are present in schools. For this purpose, a study was developed, which included a questionnaire survey conducted online, and sent to teachers in 2021/22. A total of 426 answers allowed us to conclude that the use of pedagogical resources is still far from the current and emerging need to mobilize digital resources, particularly learning objects, as a tool to enhance meaningful learning.
... If posthumanism, Deleuzo-Guattarian and new materiality theories have been influential in early childhood education and early literacy for some time now (e.g., Hackett & Somerville, 2017;Lenz Taguchi, 2011;Myrstad et al., 2020;Odegard, 2012;Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2017), they have more recently started to take root in language and education research in Canada and elsewhere (e.g., Bangou, 2020;Kuby & Gutshall Rucker, 2016;Pennycook, 2018;Smythe et al., 2017;Toohey et al., 2019;Waterhouse, 2021). This has offered PoM-I a new impetus to move away from its often text-based orientations to consider the entanglement of both human and material. ...
... Si les théories posthumanistes, deleuzo-guattariennes et néo-matérialistes ont eu une influence sur l'éducation et la littératie de la petite enfance depuis un certain temps déjà (ex. : Hackett et Somerville, 2017;Lenz Taguchi, 2011;Myrstad et al., 2020;Odegard, 2012;Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2017), ce n'est que récemment qu'elles ont commencé à s'ancrer dans la recherche sur les langues et l'éducation au Canada et ailleurs (ex. : Bangou, 2020;Kuby & Gutshall Rucker, 2016;Pennycook, 2018;Smythe et al., 2017;Toohey et al. 2019;Waterhouse, 2021). ...
... Rather than relying on habitual forms of knowing and perceiving, a/r/tographers decenter and reframe their engagements. For many, this means, for example, thinking with materials (Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2017); experimentations with movement, the environment, art, and pedagogy (Rousell et al., 2018); and becoming medium (MacDougall et al., 2018). Furthermore, it means being open to the form and formlessness of a/r/tographic work where exhibitions, performances, sonic walks, and all manner of artistic processes and sharing become important-not only to the processes of doing but also to dissemination. ...
This book brings together visual arts educators working on an international research project titled Mapping A/r/tography: Transnational Storytelling Across Historical and Cultural Routes of Significance. Emphasizing a collaboratory model (Muff, 2014) that fuses concepts of collaboration and laboratory, the project underscores how a/r/tography facilitates participatory, collaborative, and cooperative knowledge creation and mobilization. Each chapter is located in a collaboratory in a particular location.
... Rather than relying on habitual forms of knowing and perceiving, a/r/tographers decenter and reframe their engagements. For many, this means, for example, thinking with materials (Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2017); experimentations with movement, the environment, art, and pedagogy; and becoming medium (MacDougall et al., 2018). Furthermore, it means being open to the form and formlessness of a/r/tographic work where exhibitions, performances, sonic walks, and all manner of artistic processes and sharing become important-not only to the processes of doing but also to dissemination. ...
This collaborative research chapter is based on a retreat of an a/r/tographic walking study group at The University of British Columbia. In an unfolding commitment to unsettle our collective walking and writing practice, we trouble everyday ways of working together. This includes centering Indigenous scholarship in our reading practice, and shifting the intention of our walk and creative propositions to a conceptual framing that addresses time, place and making. The reading, walk, a/r/tographic fieldnotes, subsequent making practice and writing took unexpected turns and led to a variation on themes as well as group art sharing and the creation of small art-books. We continue to story the day’s events as we retrace our steps and write with the artefacts made in encounter and unfolding (idio)synchronistic tracings. In our process, we propose propositions from which we may learn to see from the points of view of other people. In an a/r/tographic reflection we share our unique perspectives of the experience in a return to the scholarship that informs our walk and making practices.
... Rather than relying on habitual forms of knowing and perceiving, a/r/tographers decenter and reframe their engagements. For many, this means, for example, thinking with materials (Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2017); experimentations with movement, the environment, art, and pedagogy (Rousell et al., 2018); and becoming medium (MacDougall et al., 2018). Furthermore, it means being open to the form and formlessness of a/r/tographic work where exhibitions, performances, sonic walks, and all manner of artistic processes and sharing become important-not only to the processes of doing but also to dissemination. ...
... From this perspective, intra-activity is understood as the coming together of people and the world in which meaning and matter are inextricably bound (Barad, 2003(Barad, , 2007. Scholarship merging Reggio Emilia philosophy with new materialist theories (Kind, 2014;Murris et al., 2018;Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2017) has contemplated the significance of materials in early childhood education and theorized the encounters and explorations that emerge from Reggio practice (Odegard, 2021). This research has been extended by Molloy-Murphy (2018, whose doctoral study reiterated the need to move away from humancentric discourses by acknowledging plastic's agentic force in early childhood settings. ...
Recent scholarship in childhood studies has raised concerns about humancentric, singular discourses regarding human-plastic relations. As a result, questions of how to develop new forms of learning with materials in environmental education are now an important issue for researchers, educators, and policymakers. This paper activates a feminist new materialist ontology to position plastic as an active participant in the formation of knowledge. Drawing on visual imagery of children’s and artists’ aesthetic experimentations, we explore the intra-related and complex relationship between plastic, children, and the planet. Haraway’s concept of making kin is operationalized to highlight plastic’s multidimensional complexities as both a destructive and creative force, producing a novel framework for understanding and learning with plastic in early childhood education.
... We build on the work of the Common Worlds Research Collective (CWRC) (2020) who argues that a paradigm shift from learning about the world to learning to become with the world is necessary in education if there is any hope for future survival. Like others (Pacini-Ketchabaw, Kind, & Kocher, 2017;Rooney, 2018;Taylor, 2020;Taylor & Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2019), we believe that young children are particularly good at relating and becoming with their worlds as they have not yet been schooled in, and become obedient to, the dichotomous frame of nature versus culture, which education has a long history of implementing. The separating of worlds is done in various ways throughout education. ...
The paper voices Derbarl Yerrigan, a significant river in Western Australia, through three imperfect, non-innocent, and necessary river-child stories. These stories highlight the emergence of a feminist anti-colonial methodology that is attentive to settler response-abilities to Derbarl Yerrigan through situated, relational, active, and generative research methods. Voicing Derbarl Yerrigan influences the methodological practices used as part of an ongoing river-child walking inquiry that is concerned with generating climate change pedagogies in response to the global climate crises and calls for new ways of thinking and producing knowledge. In particular, the authors found that voicing as a methodology includes listening and being responsive to Derbarl Yerrigan's invitations, paying attention to pastspresentsfutures, and forming attachments through naming. By telling lively settler river-child stories, this paper shows how voicing Derbarl Yerrigan is vital to open new possibilities for education and has implications for settler-colonial contexts, where the focus on learning shifts from learning about the world to learning to become with multispecies river worlds.
... The importance of studying the arts and cultural heritage from the early years of education, especially in the context of experiential education, lies in the need to facilitate children's seeing the world with different eyes, exploring materials through their senses, experimenting with new techniques and learning about the world through a multisensory approach. Thus, having encounters with the arts, whether in the school atelier, in museums or in the streets and in public spaces, observing artworks, objects and places is important to help children improve their perceptual skills and nurture the pleasure of enjoying and creating art by bringing art and cultural heritage to children [30][31][32][33][34][35][36]. ...
Schools and museums represent essential spaces for the development of learning and understanding of the world surrounding us through the arts and heritage. One of the things learned in the COVID crisis is that it is key to build bridges between schools and museums to support their educational activities, regardless of the possibility to access these spaces in person. School teachers and museum educators have the opportunity to develop a critical and creative citizenry by collaborating in the design of learning activities that can bring the museums to schools and schools to the museum by adopting the Reggio Emilia approach. The results of the study arise from a triangulation of data, as we contrasted the literature about the Reggio Emilia approach with the practices of museums that use such a philosophy and with the analysis of a series of interviews with experts in early childhood education and Reggio Emilia in order to identify a series of good practices, which we used to delineate recommendations to foster the adoption of this model and establish relationships between schools and museums, enhancing the opportunities to develop critical and creative thinking throughout activities and to understand the heritage and the arts, thus fostering citizenship from an early childhood.
... In taking the material turn of posthumanism (Murris, 2016(Murris, , 2017aMyers, 2015), we are critical of human-centeredness that binarizes learning environments into adult or child-centered (Jobb, 2019), dismissing agentic entangled forces of the material world that children are part of. We weave together Reconceptualist pedagogies (Jobb, 2019;Moss, 2017;Ryan & Grieshaber, 2005;Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2016) and critical children's geographies (Duhn 2012;Hackett et al., 2015;Nairn & Kraftl, 2016) to approach the distinctiveness of space, place, and children's heterotopolgy (Foucault, 1984;MacRae, 2011;Wild, 2011). On this track, our monistic onto-epistemology claims that children's lived citizenship is produced in everyday creative entanglements of heterotopic place-making, where they are equal dwellers of the world and always-already citizens (Hohti, 2016;Murris, 2017a). ...
This paper reconceptualizes children as already-being citizens within kindergarten learning environments. It draws on Foucauldian heterotopology to show what type of
heterotopias entangle two and three-year-old in everyday place-making practices and how they empower themselves to inhabit learning environments as creative citizens. After a
collaborative ethnographic immersion in 16 Chilean public kindergartens during the academic year 2019, findings show three types of heterotopic place-making that enact children’s citizenship: Unpredictable movements and wanderings, new ruling artifacts, and serendipitous spatial transgressions. We discuss how these unsettle ECE learning environment utopias and invite teachers’ improvisatory practices for alternative
spatialities and children’s creative citizenship.
... Hence, teachers need to be aware of how the context, time, and materials are organized and allocated and what kinds of knowledge, experience, learning, and practices might be produced within the intra-activities between children, materials, and the places where children and materials are engaging with each other and with the contexts (Leander & Boldt, 2013;Lenz Taguchi, 2010). That is, teachers need to "think with" materials (Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2017), being sensitive about the inclinations and potentials of different materials in producing in-the-moment practices such as bodily emotions and movements generating from child-material entanglements in certain contexts. ...
Drawing on research about young children’s literacy development, this review article discusses a recent paradigmatic turn for understanding the child and childhood from human-centerism to posthumanism. Building on the new materialist tradition (e.g., Barad, 2007) and the assemblage theory of Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 1997), the posthuman lens enables researchers and educators to see children as parts of entangled networks of relationships who continuously intra-act with their peers, teachers, materials, and the other nonhuman entities and activities produced constantly by the child-material entanglements. As such, the posthumanist perspective expands the current research on early literacy by offering new possibilities for re-conceptualizing the child, the materials or resources for early literacy, and the meaning of childhood and children’s play. These new ways of seeing the child, the materials, and childhood have also generated new pedagogical practices that are material-oriented, intra-active, and flexible. The review concludes by providing directions for conducting research from a posthuman perspective in the field of early literacy education.
... Through experimentation children and teachers did not try to control or manage the waste material; instead, they were encouraged to think with water, paper, nature, space, and waste sounds and smells, focusing on how they are active and participatory. Following Pacini-Ketchabaw et al. (2017), we were curious as to how mutual encounters might change teachers' and children's relations with waste materials and our engagement with the world. In this article we share fragments of paper and water relations, focusing the lens both on the agency and movements of waste materials with us, and on the moments of unease that readily occurred within these encounters, creating an experience of collective professional learning that is aesthetic-ethical-political. ...
Professional learning is considered essential for early childhood teachers, and is frequently associated with childhood outcomes and dominant constructs of quality which perpetuate neoliberal ideals and position early childhood teachers within a framework of rationality, privileging discourses of masculinity and power. By engaging with feminist new materialist perspectives, with the concept of ‘movement’, and with the theory-practice of the educational project of the city of Reggio Emilia, Italy, this paper extends understandings of professional learning to include nonhuman others as worthy interlocutors, and puts forth an invitation to welcome unease and an aesthetic-ethical-political stance in early childhood education. To complicate normative conceptions of professional learning, fragments from a project that used pedagogical documentation and dialogue to transform children’s relations with waste are presented. These fragments elucidate how professional learning in early childhood education might be aesthetically-ethically-politically conceptually grounded and practiced. The conclusions presented are neither simple nor linear; rather invitations are offered to problematise, to avoid being satisfied with overt, dominant and linear constructs, and to welcome uncertainty in worldly relations.
... This research has shown how educators' intra-active pedagogical attunements to children's material-discursive entanglements provide an important alternative to child-centered practices. For example, Pacini-Ketchabaw, Kind, and Kocher (2017), in a visual ethnography focused on children's relations with paper, paint, blocks, and charcoal, illustrated how pedagogical and curricular attention to the liveliness of materials in young children's inquiries brought forth enriched, intense, and sustained pedagogical experimentation with materials by children, researchers, and educators. Attention to the liveliness of the more-than-human in early childhood education has also been enriched by thinking with Indigenous ontologies of relationality and reciprocity (Nxumalo & Berg, 2020). ...
Inquiry-based curriculum is a responsive approach to education in which young children are viewed as capable protagonists of their learning. Inquiry-based curriculum has the potential to challenge the dominance of developmental psychology as the primary way of understanding young children's learning. This approach to curriculum-making also disrupts the instrumentalist "technician" image of the early childhood educator. Practices of inquiry-based curriculum can also extend beyond the early childhood classroom as a potentially transformative teacher education tool, and as a research methodology that counters dominant deficit discourses of childhood. Inquiry-based curriculum in North American early childhood education has been greatly influenced by the Reggio Emilia approach, which is a powerful alternative to predetermined theme-based didactic curriculum. The revolutionary possibilities of inquiry-based curriculum, inspired by Reggio Emilia, are not standardized frameworks to be copied in practice; rather, they create critical entry points into contextual, creative, rigorous, meaningful, and justice-oriented curriculum. One of these entry points is the practice of pedagogical documentation, which not only makes children's learning visible but also enables educators' and researchers' critical reflection. Such reflections can act to foreground the complex, political, and dialogical thinking, doing, and exchanging that happens in inquiry-based early childhood education classrooms. Reggio Emilia-inspired inquiry-based curriculum has brought attention to the important role of the arts in young children's inquiries. Important research in this area includes work that has put new materialist perspectives to work to gain insight into new pedagogical and curricular possibilities that are made possible by attuning to children's relations with materials, where materials are active participants in learning. While more research is needed in this area, recent research has also engaged with how attention to the arts and materials does not preclude attending to and responding to issues of race and racialization. In U.S. early learning contexts, an important area of research in inquiry-based curriculum has demonstrated that this approach, alongside a pedagogy of listening, is central to shifting deficit-based practices with historically marginalized children. This is important work as access to dynamic inquiry-based curriculum remains inaccessible to many young children of color, particularly within increasing policy pressures to prepare children for standardized testing. Finally, there is a growing body of work that is investigating possibilities for inquiry-based curriculum that is responsive to the inequitably distributed environmental precarities that young children are inheriting. This work is an important direction for research in inquiry-based curriculum as it proposes a radical shift from individualist and humanist modes of understanding childhood and childhood learning.
This article engages with discard studies scholarship to interrogate findings from a study that set out to deliberately follow wastepaper in an early childhood setting. The study, which used participatory methods positioning teachers and children as research partners, began with purposeful noticing and attunement to paper’s movements and materiality. This attentiveness defamiliarized paper and the ways in which it is known and experienced. It led to questions about the wider systems in which paper is entangled. In this article, thinking with discard studies provokes us to consider the relational systems that involve paper in early learning settings and leads us to question the reduce-reuse-recycle maxim which allows some systems to flourish by diverting attention away from them. The article concludes by suggesting that if we are to discard well, we must become aware of systems that are maintained by taken-for-granted waste practices such as reducing, reusing, and recycling.
This article explores a 4-year-old recent immigrant and emergent bilingual child’s encounter with voice search technology to understand how assemblages among a young immigrant child, his voice, his family, digital technology, and materials create new possibilities for the understanding of ethnolinguistically marginalized children and families' literacies and digital literacies practices. Data in this article is taken from a larger ethnographic case study and drawn from the child’s home and the preschool classroom. Situated in critical posthumanist scholarship and vital materialism, I show that a child’s unbounded digital and media access and unpredictable encounters through his voice and crossing over languages take part in redistributing the hierarchy of bodies, performances, and productions. Finally, I suggest that understanding children’s use of voice search as one of their key ways of doing literacies and making meaning and noticing the unpredictable, intimate, and playful literacies can help us disrupt the traditional, assimilatory conceptualization of digital literacies.
Building on sociocultural theories of literacy learning, in this article, we think at the intersection of reader response theory and multimodal literacies to examine how 13 preservice teachers in the course Teaching Social Sciences Through the Arts remediated responses to Francisco Jiménez’s The Circuit: Stories From the Life of a Migrant Child through additive manufacturing (i.e. 3D printing) and arts-integrated making. Through qualitative analyses of participants’ in situ processes and product(s), we identified a range of ideological and material supports and constraints during the digital fabrication process. Reading and responding to text—as mediated actions and events—became iterative spaces wherein individual understandings of text transformed into encounters of difference. Suggesting that participants’ artifactual responses at times operated as critical literacy texts, our analyses of 3D fabrication and remediated responses led us to consider how modalities of composition yielded unique affordances and constraints to the ways readers encountered texts and expressed and responded to controversial social issues.
Childhood drawing has long been a subject of interest for researchers, educators, and other interested adults. What children draw, how they come to engage in this work, the milieus in which it occurs, and the rationales that move them, are considerations that remain at the forefront of existing research and theory. Yet, while there is a sense of continuity among the interests reflected by those who study children’s drawing and the questions that are raised may not altogether shift or change, at least not dramatically, the conceptual orientations used to animate this work certainly have. From developmental and sociocultural perspectives to the influence of critical, poststructuralist and posthumanist new materialist approaches, our conceptual orientations give shape to the encounters we have with children and the situatedness of drawing in their lives. Yet, there will always be a need to fashion new images of thought, with the power to orientate us to children’s drawing in ways that are more vitalistic and affective and that differently attune us to the relationalities in which children and their drawing come to matter. This chapter provides a sketch of the various conceptual orientations currently structuring the study of childhood drawing. In addition to outlining what these conceptual orientations are and how they remain a shaping presence in our relations to children’s art, the chapter also explores the need to engage in the creation of new, different, and unsettling images of thought.KeywordsHistory of children’s drawingDevelopmentalismSocio-cultural perspectivesPost-philosophiesPosthumanismNew materialisms
Informed by the work of Fikile Nxumalo, specifically Nxumalo’s conceptualization of place stories, this chapter explores childhood drawing as that which is differentially situated and thus open to new and unsettling relations of place. While only a small gesture in the broader project of decolonizing the study of childhood drawing, a place-stories approach offers one possible strategy to begin the work of interrupting the colonial-ordered relations that routinely constitute children’s bodies, lives, and experiences at the drawing table. This chapter is grounded in fieldwork undertaken in the Fall of 2018 in a mixed-aged (3–5 years) preschool classroom at a university-affiliated childcare center in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States.KeywordsChildrenDrawingPlace storiesDecoloniality
As this text emerges, art educators and early childhood educators find themselves in the midst of a significant paradigm shift in their thinking about children’s drawings, moving toward an understanding of drawing as an event that occurs as children bump up against the swirling influences of a particular moment in the production of their graphic texts. A substantial number of scholars in the past decade have gravitated toward perspectives that allow us to view children’s drawings as contingent, improvisational, emergent, and expansive. Encouraging us to think differently about the ways in which children’s drawing happens, this perspective prompts us to reconsider the significance of voluntary drawing in preschool classrooms. While many researchers concerned with the emergence of drawing in childhood have accepted this challenge, it is incumbent upon parents and teachers to see drawing differently and to reconsider its place in the education of young children. Creating classrooms where immediacy of experience and emergence of thought and affect move to center stage is an imperative for contemporary education.KeywordsDrawing eventsEarly childhoodVoluntary drawingActual art
Background
Beginning with a proposition that physical education (PE) and early childhood education (ECE) build affinities through shared developmental interests, this article works the gaps made possible when PE meets with ECE in unfamiliar ways. Through a shared investment in the normalizing and minoritizing functions of child development, how and why PE collides with ECE often hierarchizes particular knowledges, practices, and relations that typically foster instrumental and technical educational approaches to understanding children’s movement that align with settler colonial, Euro-Western conceptions of bodied individualism, responsibility, and regulation. These status-quo alliances of PE with ECE manifest in children’s movement guidelines and leave little room for local, responsive invention with children. This article asks what becomes within the spaces where PE and ECE collide otherwise – where we do not already know what can be made in the proximities of these two bodies of knowledge and instead attend to moments where, in everyday meetings of PE and ECE, we create unfamiliar pedagogical possibilities for moving with children.
Purpose and Method
I detail one concept found in the literature where PE meets ECE: awkwardness. I re-encounter awkwardness through blog posts co-written by early childhood educator co-researchers and the researcher during Moving Pedagogies, a pedagogical inquiry project where early childhood educators and preschool-aged children investigated how to walk slowly while disrupting walking as primarily a mode of exercise. Then, alongside Manning’s ([2014]. “Wondering the World Directly–or, how Movement Outruns the Subject.” Body & Society 20 (3-4): 162–188.) ‘precarious equilibrium’, awkwardness is engaged through its contradictions and troubles toward nourishing our imperfect work to move otherwise with PE and ECE.
Conclusions
Resisting the urge to articulate an overarching model for PE and ECE to intersect going forward, this article brings to the foreground moments where PE and ECE meet and fail and where what we thought we knew about PE and ECE crumbles. It proposes that with situated, enduring threads of PE and ECE we might co-create with children locally meaningful possibilities for moving together. The article concludes with a vital question for PE and ECE practitioners, educators, and researchers to grapple with: how do we do moving with children with local collisions of PE, ECE, bodies, knowledges, inheritances, and lively more-than-human others, where to move is to take the risk of inventively enmeshing our collective movements within the hopeful, messy, and disorienting ethical and political entanglements that compose complex contemporary worlds?
Early childhood educators have been encouraged to pedagogically engage with children, materials, and their given environments. However, neither dialogue nor the creation of a space for practicing the pedagogy of listening have received considerable attention. This article describes a phenomenological research study that aimed to examine the pedagogical engagement of early childhood educators in an artmaking space. I observed art/drawing events of young children and two early childhood educators in two different early childhood centers and interviewed the educators to gather and explore narratives that could become part of the phenomenological reflection and understanding of the phenomena under review. The study’s findings highlight the potential of drawing and artmaking as pedagogical tools in early education, and they also offer insights into how and why early childhood educators might practice radical dialogues with children within a pedagogy of listening.
The 21st century has implied technological advances and improvements in the quality of life. It is useful that the ecological design is exposed from the educational institutions, so that a deterioration does not take place in the environment. The ecological footprint is a factor that analyzes the environmental impact generated by the demand and the use made of the resources available in the ecosystems. In recent decades, these indicators of pollution and excessive use of non-degradable raw materials have risen considerably, so it is necessary to think about ecological design to maintain the balance for future generations. In Arts Education, practices with an initial approach of analysis can be offered through cartographies, timelines, infographics or drawings that imply a study before the creation of the prototype and the product. After this study, it must be related to some of the fields of ecological design whether product design, packaging design, sustainable architecture, among others. It is also necessary to be aware of the natural materials to be used, as it is essential to maintain life cycles in harmony with nature. Finally, works will be exposed on packaging through ecological design with a vision for the educational field at the university stage.
Drawing on public writing from a pedagogical inquiry research project collaboration between three early childhood educators, a pedagogist-researcher, and preschool-aged children, this article debates how pedagogical inquiry research becomes “hard work.” Against the backdrop of mainstream early childhood education in the lands currently known as Canada, where research is often conducted toward producing universalized best practices or contributing to the machine of child development, this article pays patient attention to rhythms, tensions, and practices of attuning that animated our research, pausing and unpacking moments that felt especially like “hard work.” Refusing to see “hard work” for its colloquial neoliberal connotations, we ask how hard work happens and how hard work makes happen. Thinking with three modes of hard work—remembering, dis/placing and re-placing, and manifesting into a commons—we share questions and encounters that crafted a character of hardness within our laboring together. Importantly, we resist naming all that might be hard work in pedagogical inquiry research, instead inviting readers to consider the situated, slippery, and continually made and re-made contours of hard work in pedagogical inquiry research.
In this article, I move forward the tradition of visuality, or visual studies, in art education in the following ways: I examine, criticize, and expand concepts that are fundamental to the largely ignored subgroup—early childhood art education. I extend the study of images and visuality to unpack current political apparatuses and affects experienced by the public nationwide. Finally, I grapple with competing notions of care and agency to rethink relationality as a pedagogical possibility.
In this article, I share how SQUAD Art Studio functions as an alternative, community-based, multisite Saturday art lab school for negotiating theory and practice with preservice art educators. SQUAD Art Studio educators’ work confronts developmentalist images of children and preconceptions about young children and digital media. We revalue images of children and digital media as we situate them within broader conversations in early childhood studies and art education. We diffract developmentalist images of children as we consider digital media from a feminist new materialist perspective. Our work intervenes in our institutional context. We offer physical and digital sites dedicated to research and practice in early childhood education art that supplant taken-for-granted attitudes toward children, their art, and digital media. In this article, I provide specific outcomes to suggest approaches for art teacher educators who struggle to connect the richness of contemporary theory with the practical constraints within which they work.
This article debates how muscles happen in early childhood education. Drawing on post-developmental pedagogies and feminist science studies, this article integrates moments from a pedagogical inquiry with movement in early childhood education to trace how muscles matter as complex and active ethical, political, and pedagogical concerns. After elaborating how muscles are understood in dominant Canadian pedagogical resources, I think with feminist science studies and post-developmental pedagogies to consider how muscles can be thought as an active undertaking. Then, the diaphragm muscle is mobilised to explore how physiological understandings of muscles might raise questions of muscle consequence, ongoingness, and access and activation, which extend into questions of perceptibility, process, and participation. I conclude by discussing how a focus on ‘muscling’ illuminates how pedagogical intentions can make muscles differently perceptible and emphasise the ethical and political complexities of doing muscling in everyday mo(ve)ments in early childhood.
The standard educational gesture—in defense of its perceived secondary status relative to the “real world”—is to embed everything within its purview, such that even conceiving education as an art becomes a pedagogic imperative. In Anji County, China, we find an early childhood program (Anji Play) that uncouples play from this hierarchy of educational subordinations. Anji Play also appears to mirror Western examples of the integration of play and art, while at the same time suggesting a distinctly Chinese approach to play and to aesthetics. This article introduces some elements and principles of Anji Play, while proposing that they may prompt us to rethink the relations among art, play, and education in light of the current historical, cultural, and theoretical context.
This article explores how the Museum, Art and Wellbeing project brought primary school children and seniors from the same local community together to engage in explorative activities designed to reveal individual and mutual assets for wellbeing. The Museum, Art and Wellbeing project undertook a participatory arts‐based approach to investigate how the assets of a large public institution such as Museums Victoria, Australia could reach out and engage different community groups. The seniors came from a local University of the Third Age (U3A) which offers a wide range of classes but does not usually engage with primary schools. Children at the primary school engage in art learning and separate wellbeing learning but these age‐stage sessions, as designated to incremental year levels, had not previously included direct involvement of seniors in learning activities. For both groups, the connection to Victoria’s state museums is marked by previous occasional one‐off visits. Museum resources have not been considered as ongoing assets for wellbeing that link to the local community in the way that this project does. The university’s role in brokering such connections by deploying often ignored human/institutional assets to support health and strengthen community has been explored in papers by fellow researchers, Justen O’Connor and Laura Alfrey. Our enquiry is extended in this article by focusing on how art education, specifically art‐making, and intergenerational learning can strengthen community and enhance wellbeing across school and community‐based educational contexts and museums.
Indigenous Australian children are more likely to score below the national literacy and numeracy benchmarks and less likely to access quality early childhood education and care than non-Indigenous Australian children. The Early Years Learning Framework positions children as competent and capable agents of their own learning, and recognises their existing funds of knowledge. Despite this, the early literacy preschool experiences for many Indigenous children in remote communities incorporate a range of approaches that are not always culturally relevant, adopting literacy programs originating in the USA in the mid-twentieth century. This chapter presents a critical analysis of the interconnections between these models, broader ECEC pedagogies, and Indigenous pedagogies, to understand effective approaches that encourage Indigenous children’s cultural identity whilst becoming literate in today’s global society.
This article introduces and explores the concept of the deficit aesthetic. Particular attention is given to how the deficit aesthetic was made and the extent to which it continues to be sustained in early art education, especially in the United States. For many children, particularly at this time, the deficit aesthetic factors as yet another lingering obstacle to negotiate, one that re-centers the assumption of childhood drawing as a neutral practice for a natural child. As an interpretive frame, the deficit aesthetic distorts the experience of drawing by disempowering the child, decontextualizing their drawing, and re-prioritizing white Western and middle-class subjectivities.
This paper engages with the question of how ethnographers in the field of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) can respond to the ontological turn in the social studies of childhood. Against the background of ECEC’s deeply sedimented orientation towards the uniqueness of the individual child, the paper wishes to complicate the rationale of de-centring the child and childhood-research’s child-centredness. Building on ethnographic field notes from a nursery class in the Early Years Unit of an Infant School in England, the authors discuss how ethnographers become entangled into the phenomenon of child-centredness, and how this entanglement is central for ethnographers to become answerable and response-able to the field of ECEC. The paper suggests that Karen Barad’s concept of agential seperability offers possibilities to explore how the individual child is enacted in ECEC and to understand, how ECEC is entangled into performing and producing children’s need for education.
This paper explores how new materialist ideas informed a non-linear experimental approach to ‘continuous’ professional development (CPD). Experiences of professional development in the early years are diverse but remain at the heart of continuous improvement practices. In the UK, the roll-out of the ‘disadvantaged two-year-old’ offer increased demand for professional development, at a time when austerity impacted on training budgets. Where opportunities for professional development exist, the focus is typically on ‘best practice’ solutions, which often cling to developmental psychology. This paper focuses on the process of ‘continuous’ professional development inspired by new materialist thinking. It recognises that integral to quality early years’ provision are understandings of how children learn, but that this knowledge is embodied, always in movement and yet deeply situated. Focussing on the first CPD session, the glass jar, this paper assembles happenstance encounters from within and beyond the CPD session to explore how combinations of relational becomings are continuously changing as encounters and experiences spark new thinking and doing in diffusive and irrational ways. This paper emerges only as a resting place; writing becoming part of the movement needed in new materialist practices, vitally informing the transformative potential of CPD that continues to move.
We share moments from ongoing pedagogical inquiry work with toddler-aged children, where we explore together how we might tentatively create conditions for movement to happen outside of the familiar, dominant, status-quo referents of individualism and motor skill development that anchor much physical activity curricula. Sharing pedagogical documentation images and stories, we present three provocations that we moved through with children. We describe how through engaging these provocations together, we came to know movement as communicative, relational, and collective. We conclude by recounting a provocation we hoped would spur conditions for moving differently beyond our habitual taken-for-granted methods of moving together. As we spend time with three provocation stories, we work hard to raise questions and uncertainties and to share our intentions and responses, rather than presenting our activities as universalizable or easily implementable practices. Throughout the article, we engage with movement conditions and pedagogies as ethical and political concerns.
Structured around Bishop’s six fundamental mathematical activities, this book brings together examples of mathematics education from a range of countries to help readers broaden their view on maths and its interrelationship to other aspects of life.
Considering different educational traditions and diverse contexts, and illustrating theory through the use of real-life vignettes throughout, this book encourages readers to review, reflect on, and critique their own practice when conducting activities on explaining, counting, measuring, locating, designing, and playing.
Aimed at early childhood educators and practitioners looking to improve the mathematics learning experience for all their students, this practical and accessible guide provides the knowledge and tools to help every child.
This article considers the turn to experience in contemporary art and examines its potentiality for thinking art education differently. This project should not be mistaken for what Hannah Arendt (1968) identified as “the extraordinary enthusiasm for what is new” (p. 176). Rather, its purpose is to pursue another possibility for art education that has the potential to shape the field in ways that correspond to the life worlds of individuals with whom we, as educators, work. In all that it enables and denies, the turn to experience in contemporary art has something to impart to teachers of art who, in their daily practices, are experience-producers as they define and regulate what is possible to teach and what is appropriate for their students to learn. Whether or not art teachers take up the potentiality of this turn to experience or translate it into art education practice is another matter. In the spirit of the artworks discussed, it is not the actuality of the potentiality that is of interest here. Rather, it is the very potentiality itself. The discussion of experience draws chiefly on the philosophical work of John Dewey and the artworks of Lee Mingwei, Carsten Höller, and Eddie Peake.
The Mosaic approach, developed and used in England since 1999, is a strength-based framework for viewing young children as competent, active, meaning makers and explorers of their environment. Starting from this viewpoint, the Mosaic approach brings together a range of methods for listening to young children’s perspectives about their lives. Observation sits alongside participatory tools. It adopts an interpretivist approach that acknowledges the need to seek to understand how children ‘see’ the world in order to understand their actions. Children’s perspectives become the focus for an exchange of meanings between children, practitioners, parents and researchers. This chapter, written by the originator of the Mosaic approach, examines the approach as a framework for listening to young children and explores the links between this approach and the pedagogy of listening discussed by Rinaldi in the previous chapter.