Encounters With Materials in Early Childhood Education

Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, Sylvia Kind, Laurie L. M. Kocher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317588573
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

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.

1
Thinking with Materials

In the early childhood classroom, educators and children gather around materials to investigate, negotiate, converse, and share. A block of clay, a brush, pots of paint, a brilliant sheet of paper, a heavy rectangular wooden block, a thin piece of willow charcoal—materials beckon and pull us in. They live, speak, gesture, and call to us. Materials can evoke memories, narrate stories, invite actions, and communicate ideas.

This book sets out to experiment with pedagogies of relationality that emerge when we encounter materials as active participants in early childhood education. Nothing in its pages acts as an appropriate model of practice. There is nothing to rehearse, nothing to appropriate. The book is about encounters. Encounters that are not necessarily good or bad. These are risky, worldly encounters that affect us, provoke us to think and feel, attach us to the world and detach us from it, force us into action, demand from us, prompt us to care, concern us, bring us into question.

Experimenting with these encounters entails nudging ourselves to experience them differently. We do not find, nor are we looking for, the meaning of these encounters. We are not concerned with their facts. We engage with each encounter as an event that demands its own questions, its own concerns, its own ethos. We inhabit each encounter. We are situated in each encounter’s situatedness.

Eventful Material Relations

Encounters With Materials in Early Childhood Education aims to tell stories of what happens when we think with materials, when we choose to see materials as movements, as encounters, as assemblages, as ecologies, as time. Materials live in the world in multiple ways (Bennett, 2004). In the chapters that follow, we think with five materials that are often found in early childhood spaces: paper, charcoal, paint, clay, and blocks. We treat these materials as active and participatory. They set things in motion, incite questions, produce ideas. In other words, they become productive moments.

Throughout the book, materials generate insights by provoking human and nonhuman others. We pay attention to a wide spectrum of forces and movements: how materials move through time and space; how materials move us, physically and emotionally; how time moves; how air moves; how bodies move; and more.

Thinking with materials transforms early childhood education, provoking educators to notice how materials and young children live entangled lives in classrooms, how they change each other through their mutual encounters. We are curious about the ways such a shift in perspective might change our interactions with materials, children, other educators—and perhaps even change the nature of our engagement with society and the world.

The greater goal of this book is to reassemble early childhood spaces as vibrant social-ecological-material-affective-discursive ecologies in which humans and nonhumans are always in relation. Relationality, therefore, is central to Encounters With Materials.

In this chapter, we tell stories of how materials are conceptualized in early childhood education and how we think of materials throughout this book. We outline the project this book is based on: what we did, the questions we asked, how we integrated materials through the arts, how we used video and photography. In other words, this chapter is where our theoretical and methodological frameworks are set into motion. Yet, this introduction is not written to support the book’s structure. Like the book itself, it is written through diffractive movements to produce new possibilities.

Materials in Early Childhood

Engagements with materials are certainly not new in the early childhood literature. Since the 19th century, early childhood scholars have emphasized materials’ importance for the development and education of young children. Frederick Froebel’s gifts, the first educational toys developed in the 1800s, have marked materials’ central role in early education (Prochner, 2011), but John Dewey (1897) reminded us more than a century ago that “the child’s own instincts and powers furnish the material and give the starting point for all education” (art. 1, para. 3).

Today, scholars continue to highlight the importance of materials in young children’s learning. Processes such as painting with a brush and working with clay are seen as activities that contribute to children’s social, physical, emotional, and creative development (Golomb, 1992; Lowenfeld & Brittain, 1987; Matthews, 2003). The majority of texts available emphasize what to do with materials, yet say little about how one might think with them.

While movements have been made toward thinking of children’s artistic explorations of materials as languages (Pelo, 2007), even early childhood centers that integrate the arts in their practices typically use developmental understandings of materials and artistic processes. There may be an interest and desire to engage with the arts as a visual language, yet without a depth of conceptual understanding, too often children’s art is viewed as literal representations of self, experience, or knowledge. Materials are described as “bones” of curriculum (Carter & Curtis, 2007) in a developmental progression from exploration to representation. Often, instructions on how to organize and arrange materials are first provided so that children will learn the materials’ properties and functions. Then, as they become more familiar with the materials, children are encouraged to use them to represent ideas and objects.

Pedagogues in the Reggio Emilia infant and preschool programs in northern Italy have paid close attention to materials, and philosophically complex ideas have been generated from their investigations of materiality (Ceppi & Zini, 2008; Friends of Reggio, 2004; Vecchi, 2010; Vecchi & Giudici, 2004). We see today a myriad of early childhood classrooms inspired by the practices in Reggio Emilia around materials (Callaghan, 2002; Fraser, 2006; Gerst, 1998, 2002, 2003; Kocher, 1999, 2004, 2009, 2010; MacDonald-Carlson, 1997, 2003; Rosen, 2009; Tarr, 2005; Tarr, Bjartveit, Kostiuk, & McCowan, 2009; Wien, 2008; Wong, 2006; Young, 2001).

We, too, have been greatly inspired by the Reggio Emilia pedagogical work. Despite the work’s significance for our field’s development, though, little of the Reggio-inspired early childhood literature focuses on how materials can take part in shaping ideas. This is the focus of our book.

The connections that Encounters With Materials in Early Childhood Education creates might surprise some readers. Instead of suggesting that carefully selected, beautifully organized materials be offered to children to experiment with and to represent their ideas and theories, this book thinks with materials—alongside them, listening to and caring for them, being with and being for things, exploring an ecology and ethics of things (Benso, 2000). We engage in thinking beyond instrumentalism, which reduces things to surface qualities and functions and treats materials as merely what mediates learning and developmental processes (e.g., Rule & Stewart, 2002; Trimis & Savva, 2009).

We investigate how materials “speak back” to children in agentic ways, extending and broadening the important body of knowledge on Reggio Emilia–inspired practices. Simultaneously, we generate original research to inform what Hillevi Lenz Taguchi (2010) refers to as an intra-active pedagogy that shifts attention from intra- and interpersonal relationships toward a material–discursive relationship among all living organisms and the material environment, such as objects and artifacts, spaces and places.

Encounters With Materials in Early Childhood Education challenges understandings of materials that define them from a scientific, rational, or functional viewpoint and through predictable properties of color, shape, density, mass, friction, and gravity. We contest deeply rooted cultural dichotomies—animate versus inanimate, active versus passive, and self versus other, to name a few (Bennett, 2010)—that lead us, often unconsciously, to think of ourselves as animate agents who act on passive, inanimate materials. We ask: What if humans’ role in shaping materials is not as central as we believe? What if materials shape us as much as we shape them? What if we pay attention to the effects of things and to how things move together, not asking what an object or a thing or a material is, but what does a material do?

In this book, materials themselves propose particular possibilities. Materials do not just feel or act differently from each other, or have different properties, or produce different forms and images. They also provoke different ways of thinking as a child engages and works with them.

A block, for instance, is not just a tool for building. A block evokes particular ways of thinking, processing ideas, and making meaning that are profoundly different from the ways one works with paint, charcoal, paper, or clay, for example. In drawing a human figure or in using a camera to create a particular image of a person, the subject may be the same, yet engaging with different media and processes results in different perceptions and ways of thinking through the subject.

This means that how we think about materials shapes what is possible to do with them. For example, if we think of clay as a sculptural material used for making objects, that thought suggests certain engagements. We may set out individual slabs or balls of clay on a table and give directions or support in how to create particular objects. We may talk about form, texture, structure, and balance. We may subtly or directly encourage individual sculptural objects.

What we think clay is for shapes our experience with it, and the language we use to talk about the experience constructs particular meanings. If, on the other hand, we think about movement, place, impermanence, and relationality, then we may consider the possibility of moving toward and away from the clay, attending to the relationship of clay to its surroundings, and inviting interaction with others.

These concepts give structure to and shape the investigations with the material. And so we may set the clay out in other ways, for instance, as a big block in the center of a large mat on the floor, as several blocks stacked so they echo a child’s height, in a space with several overhead projectors to facilitate a complex play of shadow, bodies, and movement. These various ways of setting out the clay do not just invite different interactions. They also shape what and how we see and the meanings we construct of the experience.

The “Material Encounters in Early Childhood Education” Project

This book works with pedagogical events collected through the “Material Encounters in Early Childhood Education” project, a visual ethnographic study conducted in two early childhood centers in Canada and supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. The project’s main goal has been to engage in an art-based collaborative inquiry to experiment with the complexities and possibilities of engaging with materials’ relationality in early childhood spaces.

Inquiring Into Materiality

Over a period of three years, children, educators, and researchers became interested in what might happen to pedagogies when their focus is not solely on how children think about materials, or how materials should be presented to children, or what children’s or educators’ intentions are in relation to materials. Our focus became paying careful attention to materials in interaction. Through that process, we discovered that materials have a life of their own in classrooms and that these lives matter immensely for how we think and act in classrooms. We took materials seriously, not to romanticize them or to think of them as humans, but to attend to what they do when they participate in classrooms. We encountered each material as already filled with histories and stories, and also as an event that would allow us to ask questions and provoke inquiries.

In our weekly inquiries with children and educators, we asked: What does it mean to think with things? How does each material evoke particular invitations and provocations? How does each material live differently among/with/between other things and among/with/between young children? How are materials implicated in a classroom’s movements? These questions framed our collaborations.

Experimentation

Materials, objects, places, and environments are inextricably bound to experimentation; thus, experimentation was key to our inquiries. The work of philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987) helped us to conceptualize our experimentations with materials. Experimentation is a complex social-affective-political phenomenon that actively extends experience (Guattari, 1995). It opens up worlds and creates new venues for thinking and doing (Stengers, 2005). It reveals what human and nonhuman bodies can do and produce when they encounter each other. We embraced experimentation in our collaboration to transform life in the early childhood centers.

We committed ourselves to see encounters among materials, objects, places, and humans as part of the flow of experience. We created pedagogies that assume that we are never separate from the world, that we are made up of relations. Following Deleuze and Guattari, we conceptualized thought as experimentation: Thought creates itself through encounters. We experimented with the ideas that stories are told, forces are harnessed, and roles are performed through thought.

Through experimentation we discovered how something works by relations among the parts of assemblages, structures, flows, and connections. In this way we assumed teaching and learning as processes of creating what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) called lines of flight. By testing new and unpredictable mixes of bodies, forces, and things, we invented. Our process of inquiry into the unknown became embedded in the experimentation of experience, with all its unpredictable connections. Our experiments were not without risk, of course. Outcomes could never be predicted or known in advance. There was always the danger of reproducing the same, of decomposing one or more elements of an assemblage too quickly. Certainly, our project has been imperfect. It has been marked by struggle and, at times, resistance. The work has been slow, often challenging and unsettling. Yet, we committed to staying with the trouble, as Haraway (2008) suggests, that our experimentations brought to us.

Experimentation brought life to our sedimented early childhood discourses, increased our capacity to act in the world, and produced new forms of living (see O’Sullivan, 2006). It allowed us to open up perceptions and understandings of what is possible in the classroom. We engaged with children, materials, narratives, and each other as if they act o...