Karen Barad’s Quantum Ontology and Posthuman Ethics: Rethinking the Concept of Relationality

This article focuses on Karen Barad’s quantum ontology and her attempts to reformulate the concept of relationality. The aim is to show how Barad’s work articulates a new kind of empiricism for the social sciences, by reclaiming the creative and speculative force of experimental practice and by recentering the philosophical problem as a source of inquiry. Relationality is redefined through discussions of diffractive apparatus, more-than-human performativity, and the “polymorphous perversity” of the matter-meaning mixture

Notions of agency in early literacy classrooms: assemblages and productive intersections

Agency and its role in the early literacy classroom has long been a topic for debate. While sociocultural accounts often portray the child as a cultural agent who negotiates their own participation in classroom culture and literacy learning, more recent framings draw attention from the individual subject, instead seeing agency as dispersed across people and materials. In this article I draw on my experiences of following children as they followed their interests in an early literacy classroom, drawing on the concepts of assemblage and people yet to come, as defined by Deleuze and Guattari and Spinoza’s common notion. I provide one illustrative account of moment-by-moment activity and suggest that in education settings it is useful to see activity as a direct and ongoing interplay of three dimensions: children’s moving bodies; the classroom; and its materials. I propose that children’s ongoing movements create possibilities for ‘doing’ and ‘being’ that flow across and between children. I argue that thinking with assemblage can draw attention to both the potentiality and the power dynamics inherent in the ongoing present and also counter preconceived notions of individual child agency and linear trajectories of literacy development, and the inequalities this these concepts can perpetuate within early education settings

Posthuman literacies: young children moving in time, place and more-than-human worlds.

This paper examines the potential of posthumanism to enable a reconceptualization of young children’s literacies from the starting point of movement and sound in the more-than-human world. We propose movement as communicative practice that always occurs as a more complex entanglement of relations within more-than-human worlds. Through our analysis, an understanding of sound emerged as a more-than-human practice that encompasses children’s linguistic and non-linguistic utterances, and which occurs through, with, alongside movement. This paper draws on data from two different research studies; in the first two year old children in the UK banged on drums and marched in a museum. In the second study, two young children in Australia chose sites for their own research and produce a range of emergent literacies from vocalisation and ongoing stories to installations. We present examples of ways in which speaking, gesturing and sounding, as emergent literacy practices, were not so much about transmitting information or intentionally designed signs, but about embodied and sensory experiences in which communication about and in place occurred through the body being and moving in place. This paper contributes to the field of posthuman early childhood literacies by foregrounding movement as central to in-the-moment becoming. Movement and sound exist beyond parameters of human perception, within a flat ontology (MacLure, 2013) in which humans are decentred and everything exists on the same plane, in constant motion. Starting from movement in order to conceptualise literacy offers, therefore, an expanded field of inquiry into early childhood literacy. In the multimodal literacy practices analysed in this paper, meaning and world emerge simultaneously, offering new forms of literacy and representation and suggesting possibilities for defining or conceptualising literacy in ways that resist anthropocentric or logocentric framings

Consolidating metabolite identifiers to enable contextual and multi-platform metabolomics data analysis

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Analysis of data from high-throughput experiments depends on the availability of well-structured data that describe the assayed biomolecules. Procedures for obtaining and organizing such meta-data on genes, transcripts and proteins have been streamlined in many data analysis packages, but are still lacking for metabolites. Chemical identifiers are notoriously incoherent, encompassing a wide range of different referencing schemes with varying scope and coverage. Online chemical databases use multiple types of identifiers in parallel but lack a common primary key for reliable database consolidation. Connecting identifiers of analytes found in experimental data with the identifiers of their parent metabolites in public databases can therefore be very laborious.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Here we present a strategy and a software tool for integrating metabolite identifiers from local reference libraries and public databases that do not depend on a single common primary identifier. The program constructs groups of interconnected identifiers of analytes and metabolites to obtain a local metabolite-centric SQLite database. The created database can be used to map in-house identifiers and synonyms to external resources such as the KEGG database. New identifiers can be imported and directly integrated with existing data. Queries can be performed in a flexible way, both from the command line and from the statistical programming environment R, to obtain data set tailored identifier mappings.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Efficient cross-referencing of metabolite identifiers is a key technology for metabolomics data analysis. We provide a practical and flexible solution to this task and an open-source program, the metabolite masking tool (MetMask), available at <url>http://metmask.sourceforge.net</url>, that implements our ideas.</p

Curriculum in early childhood education: critical questions about content, coherence, and control

A continuing struggle over curriculum in early childhood education is evident in contemporary research and debate at national and international levels. This reflects the dominant influence of developmental psychology in international discourses, and in policy frameworks that determine approaches to curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment. Focusing on early childhood education, we argue that this struggle generates critical questions about three significant themes within curriculum theory: content, coherence, and control. We outline two positions from which these themes can be understood: Developmental and Educational Psychology and contemporary policy frameworks. We argue that within and between these positions, curriculum content, coherence, and control are viewed in different and sometimes oppositional ways. Following this analysis, we propose that a focus on ‘working theories’ as a third position offers possibilities for addressing some of these continuing struggles, by exploring different implications for how content, coherence, and control might be understood. We conclude that asking critical questions of curriculum in early childhood education is a necessary endeavour to develop alternative theoretical frameworks for understanding the ways in which curriculum can be considered alongside pedagogy, assessment, play, and learning

Seeking children's perspectives: a respectful layered research approach

This article discusses why researchers and educators might choose to seek children's perspectives. It also highlights some of the key considerations when seeing children as having the right to contribute to decisions that affect them. The article draws on findings from a study that used pedagogically oriented methods for researching three- and four-year-old children's perspectives about outdoor spaces in the early childhood setting they attended. The article discusses the possibilities and practicalities of this research approach for both research and pedagogy. Examples are provided for others who may be considering working/researching in these ways

Sticky stories from the classroom: from reflection to diffraction in early childhood teacher education

This article aims to challenge the prominence of reflexivity as a strategy for early childhood teachers to adopt by taking Norwegian early childhood teacher education as its focus. Observed micro-moments from a university classroom generate multilayered, multi-sensorial entangled narratives that address what reflection and diffraction are and what they do – where students, the educator, materiality, space and affects intra-act. Furthermore, the article explores the ways in which teacher educators and students in early childhood teacher education become-with the classroom and materiality, and, in doing so, ideas about professionalism in early childhood education are opened out. By identifying the limitations of reflection, the authors go on to explore what working with diffraction might offer to reach alternative understandings. By placing a focus on seemingly unremarkable and routine events in the life of an early childhood teacher education classroom, the authors offer other, potentially more generative ways to think about student teachers and their further professional practice in kindergartens

Ready, steady, learn: school readiness and children’s voices in English early childhood settings

Internationally, school readiness is increasingly the rationale for early childhood education and care. This is the case in England, yet the statutory English Early Years Foundation Stage framework for children 0-5 years also requires practitioners to listen to children’s voices: discourse indicates dissonance between school readiness and listening to children’s voices so this paper discusses an intrinsic case study that investigated beliefs and practices of 25 practitioners in the English midlands regarding school readiness and listening to children’s voices. In survey responses and semi-structured interviews, practitioners indicated they listen to – and act on – children’s voices but are confused about school readiness; their beliefs and practices align more strongly with social pedagogy than pre-primary schoolification. Findings carry messages for policymakers regarding the need for coherent policy concerning the purpose of early childhood education and care, with practitioner training and a framework aligned fully with that policy. A larger study is indicated

Vibrancy, repetition, movement: Posthuman theories for reconceptualising young children in museums

This paper argues for an expanded field of inquiry to conceptualise young children in museums. Drawing on Murris’ (2016) analysis of childhood constructions, we discuss how cognitive and socio-constructivist models of the child dominate childhood and museum studies. We argue for the potential of Murris’ figure of the posthuman child to reconceptualise children in museums. This perspective offers a greater focus on the potency of objects themselves, and the animacy of the non-human aspects of the museum. It is also underpinned by a theoretical shift from representation to non-representation (Anderson and Harrison, 2010), presenting us with new ways to address questions such as ‘what does that mean?’ when we observe children’s learning in museums. Working with data that has proved resistant to interpretation across a range of research projects, what we call ‘sticky data’, we elaborate on three themes emerging from this reconceptualisation: vibrancy, repetition, and movement

Early childhood pedagogies: spaces for young children to flourish

This paper introduces the Special Issue of Early Child Development and Care focused on Early Childhood Pedagogy. It opens by considering past and present discourses concerning early childhood pedagogy, and focus is given to established philosophical underpinnings in the field and their translation to contemporary guidance, alongside research and policy. It is argued that early childhood pedagogy is a contested, complex and diverse space, yet these factors are entirely appropriate for supporting young children to flourish as valued individuals in different contexts. Building on this argument, it is posited that it may be more appropriate to discuss early childhood pedagogies rather than early childhood pedagogy. The paper goes on to critique a range of established early childhood pedagogies, before introducing 18 papers from across the world that make exciting new contributions to the discourse. It is intended that this collection will inspire new debates and fresh endeavours concerning early childhood pedagogies