Young Children Becoming Curriculum

Deleuze, Te Whāriki and curricular understandings

Marg Sellers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136280023
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book contests a tradition and convention in educational thinking that dichotomises children and curriculum, by developing the notion of re(con)ceiving children in curriculum. By presenting an innovative research project, in which she worked with children to share their understandings of the internationally renowned Te Wh?riki curriculum, Marg Sellers explores what the curriculum means to children and how it works, as demonstrated in games they played. In generating different ways for thinking, the author draws upon her work with the philosophical imaginaries of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, whose ideas shape both the content and the non-linear structure of this book. Topics covered include:

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• Rhizomes, rhizo-methodology and rhizoanalysis;
• Plateaus;
• De~territorialising lines of flight;
• Dynamic spaces;
• The notion of empowerment.

This assemblage of Deleuzo-Guattarian imaginaries generates ways for thinking differently about children's complex interrelationships with curriculum, and opens possibilities for re(con)ceiving – both reconceiving and receiving – children's understandings within adult conceptions of how curriculum works for young children. This book will be of interest to early childhood students, scholars and practitioners alike, also appealing to those interested in philosophical, theoretical and practical understandings of curriculum in general.

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Preceding echoes ∼ foreshadowing

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starting up rhizome with foreshadowing ideas

The plateaus assembled as this book are a dynamically changing mass – a rhizome – of opening Preceding echoes that segue through the closing Aftrwrdng. The rhizome emerges through the boundless (ad)venture of my doctoral research (Sellers, 2009b), in an altered iteration continuing here. Transgressing conventional chaptering, the plateaus work non-linearly as an assemblage, a milieu of plateaus constituted in different ways by literature and data, variously telling the story of the research and re(con)ceiving children in curriculum. This is not a linear sequence of chapters containing specific segments of the research process. It is a research rhizome; it researches rhizome, recursively applying operations of research and rhizome working together. Thus the plateaus are written so they can be read in any order, according to readers' interests and in response to lines of flight that may emerge in the reading. The following mapping offers four ways through but with the suggestion that this plateau (Preceding echoes) be read first (Map 1.1) as it explicates the Deleuzo-Guattarian imaginaries (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) deployed throughout. However, I invite readers to choose their own pathway, one that resonates with personal interests as they are now and as they emerge in the reading.

Aware that curriculum means different things to different people involving traditional discourses around the what, how and why, my interest is with, ‘How does it work?’ (Deleuze, 1995) but not in a conventional unpacking of curriculum. I am interested in understandings of curriculum as processual, as a lived experience, as currere, as always already becoming, working with the understanding that curriculum processes around us and we process through it. In this way of thinking, curriculum is less a thing and more about happening. Thus my inquiry circulates through how curriculum works, how we put it to work, how we work it as curriculum-ing, as curricular performativity, interwoven with Grumet's (1988) belief that we are curriculum. Curriculum – how it is played out in conditions and expressions of performativity – and the players as curricular performers, commingle. Questions that ease the productivity of this text are: How might Deleuzo-Guattarian imaginaries work with understandings of curriculum and with children's curricular performativity? How do children perform curriculum? How might children's curricular performativity contribute to reconceiving curriculum?

Map 1.1 Negotiating plateaus through leading interests

How are responses to these co-implicated in understandings of Te Whāriki (Ministry of Education, 1996), the Aotearoa New Zealand national early childhood curriculum statement?¹

Considering young children's understandings of the world as significant as those of adults, my approach is to receive children, their childhoods and their understandings into adult conceptions of theorizing curriculum and into readings of Te Whāriki. This venture of re(con)ceiving children in curriculum becomes an adventure, a play-full exploration that works with young children's curricular performativity as expressed through/with/in games they play and their playing of those games, that is, in their play(ing). Similarly, I play with the literature, play-fully bringing it alongside children's play in the data and engaging play as oscillation to move back and forth through the literature. Play in these understandings belies linear progression, in itself generating con/di/verging plateaus rather than conventionally sequenced chapters. Play(ing) with the methodology in this rhizo way opens (to) possibilities² in a transgressive project of disturbing and perturbing the rationale of modernist thought. Already always (re)thinking the doctoral research, different notions of materiality emerge and I work to flatten another binary unnoticed in the doctoral thesis, namely, the material|discursive hierarchy. This disrupts the primacy of logocentrism through actually naming material relations, some of which were already happening in various textual arrangements…and…in the closing moments of thinking and writing the Aftrwrdng another binary (e)merges,³ namely, the hierarchical positioning of formal over informal (in|formal) learning that draws in to itself non|compulsory education and school|early childhood education binaries. These are not addressed, however, in the space-time of this book∼assemblage,⁴ they merely signal more of the milieu of rhizome…

The data generation of the doctoral research was a play-full rhizo adventure of flowing with the children in one kindergarten in Aotearoa New Zealand generating a random selection of games on video. Similarly, the rhizo analysis that both emerges through and merges with the various plateaus – (e)merges – becomes a play-full and serious (ad)venture of processing through the data and the writing of the research journey. For example, working with poietic inscriptions of ideas and style; also acknowledging the significance of the materiality of the text through different formatting arrangements; all challenging conventional linear readings. Curriculum as (a) milieu(s) of becoming emerges from/with/in shadows of my thinking and working with re(con)ceiving children in curriculum becomes a play-full (ad)venture with/of a multiplicity of children always already becoming something different.

Writing these introductory ideas of Preceding echoes is also a less structured venture than the logic of modernist academic realms dictates. Processing through the thought∼thinking of this book∼assemblage resists concretizing all the way. Both beginning and end are then sous rature, as rhizome has no beginnings or endings, only middle spaces in-between. Things slip and slide, continually tipping traditional thought and thinking off balance, creating an a-order and (dis)harmony that is chaotically complex. Within rhizo spaces of this textual assemblage the introduction becomes the conclusion – becomes as in both developing into and enhancing – and from within these (e)merging introductory∼concluding ideas the middle story of the research project unfolds. Foreword becomes introducing ideas become concluding thoughts become after wording thinking becomes Aftrwrdng. Txt-ese, bracketing and slashes become useful for signalling different (in)completely ever changing ideas that this book becomes. The textual performance of research becoming book∼assemblage becomes perceptible as textual performativity of research, a Deleuzo-Guattarian inspired milieu with Preceding echoes foreshadowing the Aftrwrdng…through a dynamic milieu of movements in-between. So, assembling introductory ideas here emerges as an ever changing mass that can only ever be some of this dynamic (ad)venture.

before beginning ∼ a letter for Marcy

This letter was written as I readied the assemblage of plateaus for submission of my doctoral thesis. It acknowledges the inspiration Marcy was and still is for my research activities.

Dear Marcy

It has taken many years to write this letter, to bring together the thoughts and thinking of ideas and inspiration, perceptions and conceptions, visions and suspicions, suggestions and intentions, images and imaginings, words and pictures, reading and writing, consciously and unconsciously in a way that befits my memory of you. The day I met you, you became every child in every early childhood setting everywhere; in my mind's eye, you became the children of many world(s), due unconditional respect from adult worlds. Working with/in my whitened, westernized understandings, you become a severalty of children that I wish to embody within incipiently different approaches to curriculum as commingling learning∼living.

You continue to inspire me to think how I might think differently about children, childhood and curriculum and how I might think differently about thinking (differently). Many years have passed and it's hard to imagine that you were not yet three when our paths crossed, our lines of flight crisscrossing through the milieu(s) of our learning. As I write this, to assure myself you were that young∼old, I (re)turn to my research journal. In August 2003, I wrote about your alerting me to the power-lessness of infants, toddlers and young children in some early childhood settings to eat, sleep or play when and how they want; also about the beginnings of a reconceiving of curriculum towards receiving young children's understandings of themselves and the world(s) around them. It was these thoughts about how you were (mis)understood by your teachers that opened to re(con)ceiving children in curriculum as my doctoral (ad)venture.

14 August 2003: Today Foucault likely turned in his grave. Foucault deconstructed surveillance, among other aspects of power, by analysing the relationship between discipline and punishment in prisons. Prisoners are watched over relentlessly; surveillance is everywhere, limitless, oppressive. While such disciplinary surveillance is an overt form of power, Foucault maintains that the notion of self-discipline, as promoted within the individualism of psychology, is a covert form of surveillance invented by bourgeois society to ensure and maintain cohesion. We have developed an individualized form of power exercised through the surveillance of individuals by themselves in such a way that they develop self-discipline – effectively we are then governed from within.

Valerie Walkerdine (1992) relates such discipline and surveillance to schooling, in that the child becomes the object of psychological theory and pedagogic practice, ‘surveilled’ by teachers, themselves responding to the same threat from above. Even when play is considered to be a child's work, the child is under the watchful and total gaze of the teacher, who is held responsible for the development of each individual. ‘The teacher is there to help, to enable, to facilitate. Only those children with a poor grasp of reality, those poor pathological children, see her power’ (p. 20).

Not knowing the pin number to open the door, I waited to be admitted into the custom built, privately owned early learning centre where you were – there was no one in sight, but at the push of a button the manager appeared. It felt like a corporate office and a prison, spacious with large grand managerial desk, designer reception and staff areas leading into a wide corridor that tracked through the building, giving views through large, well appointed internal windows of all areas where the children were cared for and played. Surveillance abounded, of both staff and children; even the cook was exposed to the view of passers-by. These were open plan spaces with (in)distinct boundaries that allowed (un)restricted flow from one area to another of children and teachers. I sensed something of the ‘reality’ of Foucault's notions of discipline and control, particularly of surveillance, and sensed Walkerdine's assessment of what this means for teaching practice and children's learning.

Walking into a room of under threes seated at two large round tables, I saw the children seemingly ‘listening’ to a story but apparently disengaged from the reading, the reader, and the surroundings. A lone child was doing a puzzle at another table and, as was soon to become apparent, she exemplified Walkerdine's facetious elaboration of a poor pathological child. This child may have been listening to the story being read as she worked on the puzzle, but that was not the issue. In her resistance to join the group, she was labelled ‘a problem’ and ‘disruptive’. But, in her ‘poor’ grasp of reality, was she the (only) one who recognized the power and control she and her peers were subject to? Was she the one who appreciated the surroundings as oppressive to her as a person and to her learning, learning that mattered to her ‘under three-year old’ understanding of what she desired to know?

Although I think of this as your story, Marcy, it is not a story you actually told me, rather it is my storying of your way of connecting with the world in the short time I was part of that. As alluded to above, when I was ushered into your secured (in)secure world, it was like entering Foucault's vision of panopticon. In the under threes' room, I saw a group of children seated around a large round table waiting for a story to be read before morning tea. The teacher overseeing the group was finding it difficult to sustain the children's interest in the book. Admittedly my arrival was a distraction, but none of the children was seated for easy engagement with either teacher or book, and I suspect that the smells wafting from the kitchen were focusing their attention on food and eating, not on books and reading. Your attention, Marcy, was definitely elsewhere. Unnoticed by the teachers, you were engrossed in doing a puzzle, but once spotted you were ordered to join the group. Unsurprisingly, you refused despite further commands. By now, I was sitting on a small chair nearby and, before I could anticipate your next move, you hurtled across the room and planted yourself on my knee. Without thinking, I put my arms around you and you settled into listening to the story. For ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Series editors’ introduction
• ...preambling...
• Mapping milieu(s)
• Plateau starting pages
• Maps, figures and storyboards
• Preceding echoes - foreshadowing
• Reconceiving curriculum-mapping (a) milieu(s) of becoming
• Children performing curriculum complexly
• Children and childhood
• Rhizo-mapping
• Play(ing)
• Children playing rhizo-methodology
• Becoming-child(ren) becoming-power-full
• Matters of materiality - materiality matters
• Aftrwrdng
• References
• Index