Learning in Community: The Song and Dance Women of the Fiery Cottage

This paper looks at how learning is opened up when it occurs in a loving and living space. Working together in a small cottage in a university campus has brought unexpected rewards to the theoretical learning of each of the inhabitants. The history of the women who have passed through this place resonates in the conversations. The place itself provides the conditions for sewing the frayed fabric of creative learning. In the hollow of this lies the shared meaning making that seeps across boundaries. There is a sense of the hidden, subversive unnamed and uncontested which gathers us into the living experience of learning. Here we celebrate the [in]competent, maverick and illegitimate. And here the questions are revealed as seeds for challenging theories of knowledge. We ask, if learning is fundamental to life then what happens when we celebrate the living? We are not attempting to arrive at definitive answers but to open up a conversation with multiple voices

Big data:and the micropolitics of entanglement in the Earth’s becoming

Abstract This paper addresses the entanglements of the earth’s becoming in a multi site cross hemisphere study of the infinite moments of young children’s world making, recorded in multimodal videos, still images, and children’s productions. The postqualitative project was informed by new materialist and posthuman theorising. The researchers conducted their research at seven different early learning centres in NSW, Queensland, Victoria, and Finland. At the end of the project the researchers came together to make sense of the data across all sites and realised that their postqualitative data was BIG and that their ‘little big data’ was generated in the context of the increasing impact of ‘big Big Data.’ We discuss our approaches to posthuman and new materialist big data in order to create a conversation between the two and to highlight the alternative methodological processes we developed to make sense of large bodies of postqualitative data