Vibrations in place: sound and language in early childhood literacy practices

This article explores how close attention to sound can help one to rethink literacy in early childhood education. Through an analysis of text, audio, video, and photographic data from a sound walk undertaken with a parent and a child, we make two arguments. First, contrary to skills-based approaches that abstract literacy from context, we show how literacy emerges from vibrational entanglements between bodies and places. We provide examples of how listening and sound-making unfold together in place, as sound moves between different material bodies, including children, animals, objects, buildings, and landscapes. Our analysis suggests that a wide range of sound-making and listening practices, not just those focused on words, should be valued in early childhood literacy. Second, we demonstrate how sound also transcends bodies and places through its multiplicity, ephemerality, and fluidity. We draw on the more-than-human semiotics of Eduardo Kohn to analyze how sounds operate as relational signs between human and nonhuman entities, using his ideas to move beyond human-centered, symbol-centered practices of literacy

Unlikely Qualities of Writing Qualitatively: Porous Stories of Thresholds, In-Betweeness and the Everyday.

In this paper, we seek to intervene in the proposition that there are recognisable or abstract-able modes of doing qualitative writing, and instead affirm that writing from a feminist scholarly perspective is often an embodied, domestic, haptic and serendipitous gesture. Occurring in in-between spaces and moments, in which personal and professional life frequently meld, with porous boundaries, our writing practices appear to talk back rhetorically to the notion of writing qualitatively. What are the qualities of qualitative writing? Within education (our field) quality can seem to masquerade as a measurable, generalizable thing, implying a ‘gold standard’ or that different writing practices or products can or should be compared or ranked. For us, writing is frequently encountered as serendipitous, messy and intricately entwined with daily life at numerous scales. This is not to suggest that writing magically takes shape, but rather it is un-abstract-able from daily routines, situations and energies at local and global scales. In the middle of these situations, writing happens when it takes precedence, at whatever cost that might be to bodies, relationships and domestic schedules. Working with a range of feminist philosophers, we draw the temporal, situated, mattering of writing into focus. This paper engages in non-linear story-telling about the processes of our collaborative writing of this paper. We are particularly inspired by Stewart’s (2007:75) approach to writing to convey moments of ordinary life, which she describes as ‘a circuit that is always tuned into some little something, somewhere. A mode of attending to the possible and the threatening’. We dwell upon the somethings and the somewheres as a means to draw out the temporal passing by of life in all its messiness, as a piece of writing comes together, tracing moments of shimmering intensity and mundane frustration and distraction throughout the work

"I kept telling myself I have to learn; it is good for me and my children”: Motherhood, motivation and learning English amongst a group of Pakistani British women.

This article uses an Islamic lens to explore the question, What are the identities, aspirations, and motivations for Pakistani and Muslim women learning English? As Muslim women, the research participants had a strong allegiance to motherhood, with children being a motivating factor in learning English. This study explores how motherhood identities and the Islamic faith intersect in powerful ways for Pakistani British women learning English in the United Kingdom. The way that motherhood identity is conceptualised through the Islamic faith for these learners can be invisible to educational institutions and policymakers. The article offers an alternative narrative by directly engaging with women's lived experiences as language learners, as Muslim women and as mothers, thus contributing knowledge from the perspective of the learners, whose voices are often not heard in TESOL debates

Answering the world: young children’s running and rolling as more-than-human multimodal meaning making

This paper makes a case for a view of young children’s meaning making in which human actants are not separate from, but deeply entwined in, a more-than-human world. In order to interrogate the more-than-human processes through which multimodal meaning making emerges, we focus on meaning making through running and rolling that we have observed in early childhood settings in Finland and the UK. In doing so, we rethink the process of bringing-into-relation (Weheliye, 2014) that underpin multimodal literacy practices. Ingold’s (2013) notion of correspondence is offered as a generative way to conceptualize the interplay between human and nonhuman elements as they “make themselves intelligible to each other” (p.97). We show how posthuman theory offers the possibility for reconceptualising emergence and intentionality, within young children’s meaning making

Opaque reciprocity: or theorising Glissant’s ‘right to opacity’ as a communication and language praxis in early childhood education

In this article, the authors argue for what Édouard Glissant terms the ‘right to opacity’ in teaching and assessing communication and language skills in early childhood education (ECE). We draw from Glissant’s writing on Relation, and his interrelated concepts of ‘opacity’ and ‘transparency’, to consider two vignettes from sensory ethnographic research conducted in ECE settings: a special education classroom and a nursery. We contest the international emphasis on efficiency, clarity, and rationality in ECE communication and language provision as one informed by colonial and ableist logics of ‘transparency’. Instead, we argue for an attention to moments of what we call ‘opaque reciprocity’: of (1) non-dyadic, non-developmentalist, more-than-human exchange, within which (2) authorship becomes distributed inter-subjectively, thereby (3) de-emphasising efficient, clear, and rational notions of meaning-making

Thinking about the more than human in making and research process.

The aim of this workshop is to explore the role of making and embodied thinking in processes of engaging with research data, findings and ideas. As researchers, we are inseperable from the world (Harraway, 2016), in which humans and things “slip-slide into each other” (Bennet, 2010, p.4). Thus, the more-than-human material world, and the materiality of our human bodies, is always part of the research processes. Ingold (2013) describes processes of ‘making to think’ or ‘designerly making’ (69), in which human cognition is never fully or entirely in control. Instead, the maker’s imagination must hurry to keep up with the materials, in a process forever poised between “catching dreams and coaxing materials” (73). This workshop will explore processes of making and thinking, by employing intra action with simple materials, including paper, scissors, lego and playdoh, in order to explore research data. The workshop will begin with the presentation of two research projects. In the first a closed Facebook Group and a new build residential apartment block are the sites of the research. I present explorations of home learning activities which were enacted across the sites with a focus on more-than-human flows between the digital and physical spaces and places. I will share images from the Facebook Group and some models I have made with the digital data. In the second, young children played and explored during a series of ‘forest schools’ session as a nursery. In particular, I focus on the children’s rolling down a small hill in the nursery grounds, thinking about how these actions came to feel so significant and place-shaping within the research. I will share in particular video data from a series of different episodes of hill rolling, and offer as a provocation ideas about the role of bodily experience, place, materiality of the hill and intra action in making sense of these episodes. In the second part of the workshop, participants will be invited to explore the emergent ideas we have presented, by making to think. Choosing from paper, lego or playdoh, participants will work the materials with their bodies, at the same time as discussing the ideas presented, whilst still images and video data are played on loop throughout the making session. To conclude the session we ask the participants to give us feedback on the experience of exploring data but not having been there for the original fieldwork. Drawing on Haraway’s (2016) concept of speculative fabulation (Haraway, 2016) we end the session by reflecting with our material creations through storytelling. To explore how these different theoretical and disciplinary perspectives might come into dialogue and enable us to think in new ways about research, making and design processes as never a soley human endeavour

Reconceptualising early language development: matter, sensation and the more-than-human

This article critically interrogates the model of language that underpins early years policy and pedagogy. Our arguments emerge from an ethnographic study involving 2-year-olds attending a day care centre that had begun to hold a substantial proportion of its sessions outdoors. The resultant shift in pedagogy coincided with changes in the children’s speaking and listening practices. We take these changes as a starting point for a reconceptualisation of early language and the conditions under which it develops. Drawing on posthuman and Deleuzian theory, we propose a relational- material model of early language, which situates language within a wider, multi-sensory and more-than-human milieu, in which children are immersed from their earliest days. We end by asking whether early language development might be better supported by paying less attention to words, grammar and meaning, in favour of fostering participation in dynamic, multisensory, collective events