Exploring Materiality in Childhood

Body, Relations and Space

Maarit Alasuutari, Marleena Mustola, Niina Rutanen, Maarit Alasuutari, Marleena Mustola, Niina Rutanen, Marleena Mustola, Maarit Alasuutari, Niina Rutanen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780367619404
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000218367
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Multicultural Education

Exploring Materiality in Childhood: Body, Relations and Space explores the multiple ways that childhood and materiality are intertwined and assembled. Bringing together a diverse range of authors, this topical book makes a scholarly contribution to our understanding of the entanglements of materiality and childhoods in international contexts.

Chapters explore how various environments and material resources, including technologies and consumer goods, affect children's lives. The book caters to a diverse range of theories, in sociomaterialist, posthumanist, post-anthropocentric and more-than-human research, critically exploring the boundaries of these theoretical approaches with diverse empirical cases. These wide ranges of perspectives develop alternatives to human-centred approaches in understanding children and childhoods. With its diverse theoretical and methodological choices, the book also serves as a versatile example for how to conduct research with children and on childhood.

This book will be of great interest for academics, researchers, and postgraduate students in childhood studies, early childhood education, social sciences, cultural sciences and sociology.

Part I

Body, embodiment and
materiality

1 Becoming unruly?

Bodies and materials in a primary classroom

Paulina Semenec

Introduction (but first, an ‘unruly’ encounter)

I’m sitting at the arts table in the back of the classroom, when K, an 8-year-old boy comes over to me. There’s a plastic tray with some art supplies in it, including a handful of cotton balls. K takes two cotton balls out of the tray, sticks his hips forward in my direction, and dangles the cotton balls over his private parts. ‘Look at my cotton balls!’ he says to me, giggling. Not sure what to say, or unsure of where to look, I laugh (somewhat nervously). Another boy walks by the arts table, and K – who is still dangling the cotton balls over his privates – asks him: ‘Hey! What does this look like?’ The boy replies nonchalantly, ‘balls’, and begins to play with something at the table.

(Adapted from personal fieldnotes, 2017)

This chapter focuses on ‘unruly’ encounters in the classroom. Unruliness can be defined as ‘not submissive or conforming to rule; ungovernable; turbulent … lawless’.¹

Unruly encounters cannot be tamed, or be easily understood, but have an enchanting quality that can break our habits of thinking and doing as usual (see: Davies & Hunt, 1994). In particular, this chapter attends to how bodies and materials can become ‘unruly’, just like the boy and his cotton balls in the above example. This is not to suggest that the boy or the cotton balls on their own are unruly, but that rather, through their coming into contact with one another, a kind of unruliness is produced. Such encounters, I hope to show, are worthy of our pause and attention as educators and researchers who work with young children because they have the potential to radically alter how we think about and respond in our encounters with one another.

My focus on the engagement between bodies and materials in this chapter is informed by posthumanist approaches in education (see: Taylor & Hughes, 2016), and, in particular, by scholars in the field of early childhood education who are taking up the project to de-centre the child in research. Such a project does not imply that children are no longer important in research, but rather takes seriously the ways that other ‘things’ come to matter. For instance, several scholars embrace the material-discursive entanglements that constitute children’s lives including gender (Osgood, 2019; Osgood, Scarlet & Giugni, 2015; Huuki & Renold, 2016), entanglements between children and things (Myers, 2015; Orrmalm, 2019; Prout, 2000; Rautio, 2013), matter (Somerville & Powell, 2019; Pacini-Ketchabaw, Kind & Kocher, 2016), animals (Hohti & Tammi, 2019; Taylor, 2019; Taylor & Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2017; Pacini-Ketchabaw & Nxumalo, 2016) and the spaces/places children occupy (Nxumalo, 2017; Merewether, 2019), just to name a few.

In this way, the project of decentring is not about removing the child from research, but rather the ‘traditional humanist forms of understanding that too often speak for and about the child’ (Schulte, Semenec & Diaz-Diaz, 2020; see also Spyrou, 2017). By attending to bodies and materials in this chapter, I too, attempt to decentre not the children entirely, but rather the focus (on the part of educators and researchers) to understand what children are doing in the classroom and why. I do so by experimenting with writing three vignettes, or what Taylor (2019) calls ‘minor stories’. Such stories may prompt us to attend to what is often insignificant in research – including children’s everyday practices, animals, matter/materials and others. The three minor stories I tell in this chapter focus on what I am calling ‘unruly’ encounters between children and materials and speculate on what else might be produced if we took such encounters seriously rather than solely children’s bodies and behaviours.

Research context (and the persistence of children’s bodies in the classroom)

This chapter is informed by data from my doctoral research, for which I spent ten months (September 2016 – June 2017) with twenty-three children in a primary classroom in Vancouver, British Columbia. My inquiry was focused on better understanding how children enact mindfulness in the context of a classroom – that is, I wanted to explore how children ‘do’ mindfulness through their everyday routines and practices. While mindfulness is a contested term, a popular definition tells us that it is a way of ‘paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally’ (Kabat-Zinn, 2005, p. 4). While mindfulness is not the focus of this chapter, it is important to mention that the discourses of mindfulness framed many of the daily activities that children participated in. Some of these included formal mindful breathing exercises, mindful walking, eating and listening. Within these activities, what children should and should not do with their bodies was highly regulated by the teacher, although it is important to point out that the teacher was not always the one in control (see: Walkerdine, 1990). While the teacher spent a lot of time trying to reinforce ‘good’ behaviour by encouraging children to ‘calm [their] bodies down’, or to ‘make a better choice’ regarding something they had done like touch another student, call out, not get work done, etc., the children were not always successfully ‘docile’ (see: Foucault, 1977). Oftentimes, children’s engagement with materials uniquely positioned them as the ones ‘in charge’ (if only momentarily).

Given my commitment to de-centre what seemed to be solely children’s agency at play in my fieldwork, I am reminded of what Horton & Kraftl (2006) have urged of researchers – to attend to ‘what else’ is going on when we do research with children. These other things include bodies, spaces, affects, material things and more. I began to wonder about how these other forces at work might enable us to think differently about how we come to engage with and respond to children. If children are no longer the central focus, what else do we as researchers focus on? In certain respects, we do not have to look far. Children do well at de-centring themselves. They do so through their engagement with materials, spaces and the more-than-human including animals, insects, plants and more.

Such things were not only used by children in the classroom where I did my fieldwork. In other words, children were not the only ones exercising their agency over them. These objects and materials also did something; they got children out of their desks, caused them to fall, they stuck to hands, stained clothing, got children in trouble, produced wonder. The more time I spent in the school with the children, the more I was drawn to the ways they not only used materials, but also how the materials themselves enabled particular encounters. As Fenwick and Edwards (2010) suggest, materials ‘do not just respond to human intention and force. In fact, things change and shape human intentions, meanings, and relationships, routines, memories, even perceptions itself’ (p. 6). Moreover, I began to pay attention to ‘children’s refusal to see things and objects as inanimate, and their repeated blurring of nonhuman and human elements’ (Merewether, 2019, p. 106). In taking the materials that children attended to seriously, I had to re-orient my thinking about how to position children in my research. While I had intended to pay attention to children and materials throughout my study, this proved difficult early on in my fieldwork, especially since the practice of mindfulness in the classroom was very child focused. Moreover, children were hard to ignore in the classroom. Many demanded my time and attention during my visits, and I became quickly preoccupied with what they were doing (and why) they were doing it. What I hope to show in this chapter, however, is that focusing solely on children does little to disrupt the kind of thinking about children that many childhood scholars have sought to undo: namely, developmental and individual preoccupations with the child as a coherent, stable and agentic subject. Moreover, it does not provide educators or researchers with other possible ways of thinking about children and responding to encounters that may trouble, perplex or enchant us.

Minor story 1

(Unruly) cotton balls

While the child in the scenario outlined at the start of this chapter was drawing my attention to the materials - his ‘cotton balls’, I was initially focused on him, and his somewhat provocative invitation. I wondered what may have come over him, what incited him to firstly, pick up the cotton balls randomly off the table, dangle them over his private parts and then, finally, to invite me – an adult female researcher in that space – to ‘look!’ At the same time, I was not all that surprised that it was this particular child who had invited me to do such a thing. Such an invitation went hand in hand with his outgoing, playful and often mischievous personality. Initially, I thought about whether his engagement with the cotton balls said something about his growing awareness of his body, and what it could do. Or was he simply trying to provoke me – to see how I might respond to his invitation? To be honest, I did not know how to respond to such an invitation. I did not want to engage him, in case the teacher noticed us and most likely reprimanded him. I was keenly aware of the power dynamics at play here, and yet his invitation felt like a ‘shot in the arm’ (Bennett, 2001, p. 5). It shook me (if only for a few moments) out of the mundane routine of classroom life. Something about this encounter mattered.

Often in the classroom, the teacher deemed children’s behaviour to be ‘inappropriate’ for their age. Some children were too ‘touchy’, or ‘too mature’ to be doing certain things. Given this focus, developmental discourses framed many of the discussions around what was happening with children, leaving little opportunity to think otherwise about particular events. Blaise (2013, p. 184) has suggested that developmentalism

represents childhood, teaching and learning in overly simplistic ways. Instead of making room for the complexities of childhood, developmentalism reduces these to an either/or way of thinking … Instead of being curious about childhood and difference, developmentalism encourages teachers to determine, know and ‘fix’ what goes on in the classroom.

In this way, my initial thinking about the encounter with K as having something to do with his growing awareness of his body is incomplete, partial at best.

In returning to the cotton ball encounter, my earlier questions about why K may have invited me to look at his ‘cotton balls’ position adults/educators as the ones responsible for making appropriate and accurate judgements about children’s behaviours, motivations and so on. Why did I think it was up to me to interpret what was happening? I could have asked K why he did what he did, but at the time, I did not. Even so, asking him why would suggest that he had a specific motive, an intention for acting, which may or may not have been the case. It is not uncommon for children (as well as adults) to do things for no apparent reason: doodling, organising items on a desk or assembling objects together. Rautio (2013) writes about such ordinary practices as being autotelic – practices that children take part in for their own sake (see also: Csikszentmihalyi, 1997). It is quite possible then that the cotton ball encounter does not ‘mean’ anything at all, or say anything special about children’s gender, sexuality or development. This is not to say that my initial understanding and questioning of this encounter was ‘wrong’; K may have been exploring the limits of what he could do in relation to his body parts, especially in the presence of an adult researcher. However, focusing solely on these limited interpretations does not do much for thinking about children as complex beings, always in the process of becoming. Furthermore, it obscures the significance of what this encounter did. For me, it opened up the possibility to imagine a more playful engagement with K and the cotton balls. Perhaps I could have asked him whether he enjoyed this type of play, or what else we could make out of this fluffy and pliable material together. Who knows where this unruly encounter may have taken us?

Minor story 2

An (unruly) outfit

The class is a bit hectic – some of the kids are doing work at their seats, others are wandering around the classroom or sitting on the carpet reading. J discovers a plastic garbage bag near the recycling bin and begins to stretch the handle of the bag up towards his torso. Eventually, the plastic bag envelops his body, and it looks like he’s wearing a jumpsuit made of plastic. The teacher sees this and becomes frustrated. She instructs him to take off the plastic bag and get back to his work. He refuses, and wears the bag outside, much to the dismay of some of the boys in the playground. ‘It’s my outfit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Introduction: Toward a material study of childhood
• Part I Body, embodiment and materiality
• Part II Materiality in/as relations
• Part III Space, environment and materiality
• Epilogue
• Index