Children's intra-actions with the natural world offer an important lens to revisit notions of literacies. They allow for a decentring of humans – here children – as actors. Also, forest schools and nature-based learning programmes are increasingly erupting across North America, although more commonplace in Europe for a longer period. In this presentation of our research, we feature a storying/(re)storying of data from a yearlong research study of children's entanglements with the forest as a more-than-human world. We ask what we might learn if educators, children and researchers think with sticks, not separate from, but in relation to sticks? Eight preschool children, two educators and two researchers ventured into the forest twice a week over the course of a year, documenting their interactions with a mosaic of data generation tools, such as notebooks, iPads, Go-Pro cameras. The forest offered diverse materials that provoked “thing-matter-energy- child-assemblages” that were significant for the children'...
AbstractEarly literacy is often over-simplified as a set of skills for beginning reading, an approach which overlooks the ways that children play their way into cultures, using play as a literacy that accesses popular media as rich literary repertoires of characters and storylines. This article examines how children’s play reveals their participatory literacies in preschool classrooms where teachers provide play-based media literacy curricula. Participatory literacies are ways of interpreting, m...
#1Michael H. Little(UNC: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)H-Index: 4
#2Lora Cohen-Vogel(UNC: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)H-Index: 19
In recent years, a debate over kindergarten has ensued. We refer to the actors in this debate as developmentalists , on the one hand , and academic advocates , on the other. Developmentalists argue that kindergarten should be centered on child-initiated play and intentional teaching through play, art activities, and hands on activities. Academic advocates argue that young children are capable of learning academic content in kindergarten and that academic instruction is necessary to help some stu...
In this article, school division and Ministry of Education–based early childhood consultants and university researchers respond to the question of whether play is at risk in kindergartens in five Canadian provinces by analyzing current and previous kindergarten curricula using Sutton-Smith’s framework of rhetorics of play. We find that play is integral to kindergarten curricula in Saskatchewan and Ontario, but only implicitly mentioned in the Alberta, British Columbia, and Manitoba curricula whe...
Last. Marianne Snow(UGA: University of Georgia)H-Index: 3
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This post-qualitative research analyzes the spatialized practices of young people within a working-class community and how those guided the opening and facilitating of a local community center. Seeing place-making as a social and political act, the authors were inspired by Heath’s classic study and argument that children’s education might be better served if educators understood and built on their community-based language practices. Writing through theories of new materialism, spatiality, and ch...
AbstractThe editors of a recent special edition of Qualitative Studies in Education map a new field of post-qualitative research and raise fundamental questions about core concepts such as ‘method’ and ‘data.’ They ask whether qualitative inquiry as we know it is any longer possible if we understand language, the human and the material as completely imbricated. In taking up the relation between language and representation as core to what is proposed as the ‘new new,’ the paper examines these que...
This case study examines the multimodal literacy practices of 11-year-old Nigel as he plays with assemblages of people, objects, and practices in his storywriting. The study asks “How does followin...
Although there has been a great deal of debate about the effectiveness of charter schools in the research literature, there has been surprisingly little attention paid to English language learners (ELLs) in charter schools. Moreover, the charter school research has predominantly focused on whether or not charter schools are effective rather than how or why high-performing charter schools work, particularly for ELLs. We contend that researchers must expand their focus beyond access and achievemen...
In this article, we explore the “vibrancy of matter” and “things” in early childhood education. We use Bennett’s and others’ ideas on the political ecology of place in a philosophical examination of vibrant entanglements of “things,” “thing-hoods,” and childhoods. We work with Bennett’s challenge to shift from thinking solely about “think-power” to also consider “thing-power” and “thing-hood” to take the call for-of things seriously within young children’s place. Matter has agency that behaves i...
In the present paper, a posthumanist approach is used to analyse children's play activities in natural environments. The aim is to analyse intra-actions between children, the material environment and discourses, with a focus on the material and embodied aspects of these intra-actions. Forty-two children between six and eight years and from two Swedish schools participated in the study. Video observations of play activities have been the most important data source. For the analysis of how matter ...
#1Z. Dabaja(U of W: University of Windsor)H-Index: 1
Dabaja ([2021]. “The Forest School Impact on Children: Reviewing Two Decades of Research.” Education 3-13. doi:10.1080/03004279.2021.1889013) drew on the literature published between 2000 and 2019 ...
This article generates two dialogical theorisations of young children’s encounters in more-than-human worlds involving metaphor. The first theorisation devises metaphor as an entry point into the d...
This review integrates literature on cross-disciplinary quantitative and qualitative studies related to children’s reading on screen published between January 2016 and September 2017, with a focus ...
#2Guofang Li(UBC: University of British Columbia)H-Index: 18
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, ...
For children born in the 21st century, the enmeshing of natural and human forces in the survival of the planet requires conceptual and practical innovation. This paper comes from a project funded b...
#2Z. Dabaja(U of W: University of Windsor)H-Index: 1
Over the last decade, interest in nature-based educational programs has been growing in Canada, yet there has been little research on the nature of these programs and how they are being implemented. This small-scale study provides baseline information on the characteristics of Canadian Forest Schools, the challenges that educators face in starting up these outdoor programs, and the potential benefits for enrolled children. An online survey study was conducted in the fall of 2017, to which 25 For...
Drawing on a relational ontology and scholarship of new literacies, we investigate the materiality and performativity of children’s augmented storying in nature. Our study is situated in a Finnish primary school in which a novel, augmented reality application (MyAR Julle) was utilized as a digital storytelling tool for children (n = 62, aged 7–9), allowing them to explore, interact, and imagine in nature and to create/share their stories. The data corpus consists of their narrations of their aug...
#1Jackie Marsh(University of Sheffield)H-Index: 31
In this chapter, data from a study of young children’s play in the home are considered. Focusing on a child’s interaction with a robotic toy, Furby, the chapter considers the ways in which humans and machines playfully interact. Drawing on the concepts of the uncanny valley and anthropomorphism, the affective relationship between child and Furby is analysed. In the final part of the chapter, post-human philosophy is drawn upon to move beyond a human-centric perspective of play in an attempt to u...
