Playing social justice: How do early childhood teachers enact the right to play through resistance and subversion?

In this paper we narrate how two teachers enact playful pedagogies by resisting the single story of formalised learning discourses in early childhood education and care. Playful learning is well established in international literature and children have the right to play. Yet in contemporary outcomes-driven policy, adult-led formalised teaching has become normalised at the expense of child-initiated play. Play is thus marginalised; positioned as a privilege rather than as a right and dependent on views of children as capable holders of rights. Here, we position play in relation to democracy, equity and social justice by storying how teachers’ circumvent scrutiny to facilitate the right to play and we argue this as a fruitful sub-context for resistance. From this perspective, teachers’ resistances do not just enable play, they embody and enact representative and democratic justice. Firstly, teachers story representative forms of social justice as ‘being the right thing’ in making play happen.  Secondly, teachers enact democratic forms of social justice through resistance actions of ‘doing the right thing’ that entangle an emotional vulnerability to scrutiny. Adopting alternative resistance positions shifts play beyond a privilege and creates transformational spaces for social justice where time, space and materiality have a role to play. We call on teachers and educators to deepen their critical awareness of the narrowness of a single story of learning and the rich relationships between rights and play agendas. We assert that teachers’ resistances can enable playful pedagogies and act as hopeful storytelling of social justice as serious play.   

Wall(ings):the early childhood story(ings) they tell

In putting posthuman theories to work, we shift our gaze beyond the human in two early education classrooms to imagine walls as palimpsests. By thinking-with palimpsests, we imagine walls as multi-layered agentic objects that do more than hold shifting configurations of documentation. Thinking-with walls as palimpsests enables us to make-sense of walls in relation to the past and present through multiple materialities, spaces and times. With this experimental and playful writing, we story wall encounters through stretching our attention to the everydayness of the human-non-human-more-than-human life of walls. In offering up two wall stories, we move our gaze to zoom in and out of walls’ mundanities to materialize encounters. Other kinds of knowledge can be made and remade with different kinds of noticing that take seriously non-human mundanities of time, space and matter with wall storyings. Taking a seriously playful, and speculative, approach we leave our musings of the wall stories unfinished so that new knowledge, and unthought thoughts can be made. We offer provocations for you, dear reader, to take into dialogue with your own walls

What forms of Material-Discursive Intra-Action are generated through Documentation Practices in Early Childhood Education?

The thesis takes an agential reading of documentation practices to trace the intra-activity within contemporary assessment discourses of early childhood education (ECE) and offers a material-discursive exploration of three teachers at work in one school in North West England. The research aims to reflect on the performativity of documentation to illuminate how assessment discourses are game-played and challenged. I put to work the methodological framework of new materialism through embodied, sensory and visual data collection, with on-line blogging along with intraviews. Using a diffractive analysis, I playfully map and cut visual, narrative and theoretical data fragments to create research documentation that traces the intra-activity of the human world of children, families and teachers with the non-human spaces and temporalities of the classroom. The findings uncover resisting and creating intra-actions that generates spaces for teachers to adopt expert gameplay with and against assessment policy discourses. For children and families, the documentation intra-acts with spaces and temporalities to evoke senses of belonging by giving value to children’s playful learning. In summary, this study presents both theoretical and practice implications. Theoretically, a reworked definition through new materialist lenses is proposed as a contribution to knowledge that asserts documentation practice as a potential transformative agent that can shift the teacher gaze. Practically, the thesis proposes that documentation can have powerful affects when its actions within spaces (rather than interpretations) are foregrounded. In addition, I problematise how far new materialist readings can find a practical language that speaks to teachers working within contested spaces shaped by intensifying policyscapes. As a consequence, the thesis proposes that documentation can influence forms of ethical pedagogies that paint hopeful pictures of ECE teachers at work, promoting liveable and flourishing professional spaces in a policy climate that can otherwise confin

What forms of Material-Discursive Intra-Action are generated through Documentation Practices in Early Childhood Education?

The thesis takes an agential reading of documentation practices to trace the intra-activity within contemporary assessment discourses of early childhood education (ECE) and offers a material-discursive exploration of three teachers at work in one school in North West England. The research aims to reflect on the performativity of documentation to illuminate how assessment discourses are game-played and challenged. I put to work the methodological framework of new materialism through embodied, sensory and visual data collection, with on-line blogging along with intraviews. Using a diffractive analysis, I playfully map and cut visual, narrative and theoretical data fragments to create research documentation that traces the intra-activity of the human world of children, families and teachers with the non-human spaces and temporalities of the classroom. The findings uncover resisting and creating intra-actions that generates spaces for teachers to adopt expert gameplay with and against assessment policy discourses. For children and families, the documentation intra-acts with spaces and temporalities to evoke senses of belonging by giving value to children’s playful learning. In summary, this study presents both theoretical and practice implications. Theoretically, a reworked definition through new materialist lenses is proposed as a contribution to knowledge that asserts documentation practice as a potential transformative agent that can shift the teacher gaze. Practically, the thesis proposes that documentation can have powerful affects when its actions within spaces (rather than interpretations) are foregrounded. In addition, I problematise how far new materialist readings can find a practical language that speaks to teachers working within contested spaces shaped by intensifying policyscapes. As a consequence, the thesis proposes that documentation can influence forms of ethical pedagogies that paint hopeful pictures of ECE teachers at work, promoting liveable and flourishing professional spaces in a policy climate that can otherwise confin

Storying hopeful resistances to datafication:Cracks, spacetimematterings and figurations of agency within the more-than-human ecologies of early childhood education and care

In this paper, we ponder the ecologies of spacetimematterings folded into resistance practices and its relationality with figurations of agency outside and beyond datafication agendas. Accountability cultures bound up with datafication have consequences that include a diminished agency for both children and educators. According to Holloway (2010) enactments of resistance can cause cracks to appear that forge creative spaces where different kinds of doings related to agency emerge. The context, potentiality and storyings of cracking encounters is where our interest lies. To ponder crackings, we play with feminist posthuman and materialist theorising with research-creation approaches to notice resistances as material-discursive intra-actions amongst the lively materiality of educational life. From there we notice resistance practices as ecologies. Those ecologies are complex and lively yet often concealed in more-than-human cracks by the grand narrative of datafication. Through storytelling, we re-imagine these cracks as dynamic resistances, often unresolving the relationality between power and the collective more-than-human modes of resistance we witnessed. Different kinds of noticing mattered and amplifying the sharing of resistance stories brings attention to hopeful agencies already and always at work. Sharing stories can strengthen the connectivity of resistances to datafication and build a stronger autonomy and agency for early childhood education and care. Our provocation is to pay attention to the spacetimematterings of ecologies where resistance practices are already at work cracking cracks for different doings. From there, further activisms can mobilise a larger fracturing to the dominance of datafication narratives

Tags, tagging, tagged, # - undisciplining organ-ization of [academic] bodies

We write as a collaborative mode of embodied writing that moves, tags, and re-sites us elsewhere, that mis/dis/aligns self-other, and permeates various stable body(boundaries). We write as a group of (un)bounded (virtual) bodies who aim to collectively create and tag arguments. We write as a collective body where materialities, ideas, discussions and writing become in the doing. Different relational collective practices shared here disturb, disperse, question, undo and undermine sole authorship and consider how tags work and what tags might produce when these objects/things shape our academic lives. While engaged in tagging we also considered how tags tug, how tags shape the ways we think, feel and experience our academic lives. How are we produced by tags? What do tags produce (in/on) us and in our embodied lives?