As if: childhood as a metaphor a psychoanalytic examination of twentieth century texts depicting childhood in the garden and the school.

As If/Childhood as Metaphor takes as its critical method a kind of over-determined `performative' dialectic: the presentation and discussion of diverse yet interrelated ideas without privileging one above the other in the light of a principle, rather than the quest for a single proof, or truth. The principle is that childhood is peculiarly accessible to metaphoric representation, where it features as `unique experiences accessible to adults only as knowledge and memory, ' and the discussion illuminates how metaphor serves this purpose with reference to selected texts. The objective is to test each reading as a new dialectical experience, employing psychoanalytic theory also as a dialectic. The Introduction examines metaphor and literary analysis as critical method in two parts. Part 1. presents a defence of the application of psychoanalytic theory which has developed `grammars' with which to comprehend the human psyche, of which metaphor is one of central significance, and where in analysis, the notion of transference may fruitfully be applied. Part 2., via a survey of diverse texts, examines the discourses of childhood and children's literature with the objective of questioning fixed categories. Chapter one, part 1, sets a context for childhood figured in the garden, and parts 2. and 3., through close readings of The Secret Garden, The Go-Between and Tom's Midnight Garden, suggest that metaphors of time suspension, development in articulacy and psychic growth demonstrate the child aspect of the adult. Chapter two, part 1, with Kindergarten as a bridging text and exemplification of the `change by conflict' of the dialectic, sets a context for childhood figured in school, and parts 2. and 3., through close readings of The Pupil, The Rainbow, A Kestrel for a Knave and Matilda, argue that metaphors of inarticulacy, unreality, combat and damage, demonstrate the adult aspect of the child. Chapter three links the `erotics' of the transference situation (where the analyst and patient can `bind' together intimately), to the sexual curiosity of the child and Cupid figure. The metaphor of the putti figure, in an upward or downward flight, exemplifies the movement made by the author and reader in reading metaphors of childhood in the garden and school. The upward flight of eros or libido is sited in the garden and the downward fall of thanatos in the school. These transferential spaces, when depicting childhood, are bound by metaphoric interpretation, including a psychoanalytic sense of unreal time in a school space to a sense of the real to which the self can retreat in a garden. The Conclusion reflects how a mixed mode of reading and interpreting representations of childhood which incorporates historical, literary and psychoanalytic models, can generate new insights into metaphors of childhood, in performative convergence. An over-determined dialectic, like a dream, presents material in imaginatively linked circles, or associative chains of connotation, where some metaphors such as `green' (disguising highly complex transference material through apparently naive childhood motifs), have turned into culture: partly revealing, partly concealing a retrospective Englishness bound to deferred maturity, an innocence at risk, emblematic of cultural life and death

Love and revolution in the post-truth university

This chapter explores the role of love in institutions of higher education. It has been claimed that love creates ontological panic in educrats, yet, as Thomas Moore argues, surely 'Logos without Eros becomes sadistic'. From literature to research studies, and from classical to revolutionary models, an epistomology of love is presented as at the true heart of education

The And Article: Collage as research method

In the first edition of Qualitative Research Handbook, Denzin and Lincoln suggest an immediate future for qualitative research that is very akin to collage. This article begins by examining a seminal early collage work of art by Kurt Schwitters (1919) and ends with a critical account of an example of the author’s own meta-collage (de Rijke, 2023) as a means of exploring the model of collage as both an artform and a research practice. Claims for collage’s potential for rich data generation and collection plus situated, iterative, critical practice with inclusive, interdisciplinary cultural critique are made, as with that of bringing the ‘unthought known’ (Bollas, 1981) via metaphor to the surface for opening up qualitative, arts-based methods to meet the new demands of future research

"It might get messy, or not be right"; scribble as postdevelopmental art

Drawing on Deleuzian philosophy, posthumanism and postmodernism, this chapter offers a theoretical basis that challenges developmentalism, as well as an application to scribble of that theoretical basis. The chapter considers what shifting our perspective on scribble means for the design and implementation of art-making experiences for young children

Reading children's literature

This article covers the contribution reading and stories (children’s literature) have made to reading, its study, its material world, and the implications for teaching and learning to read -particularly with picturebooks – at the heart of that practice. It first explores the category of children’s literature as a possible ‘lie’, but also its special contributions: animal story or fable as a ‘creativity and criticality genre’ par excellence, attracting artists and writers of extraordinary talent, frequently breaking boundaries, and unashamedly taking partisan positions on matters of identity formation and socio-political justice. Distinctive experiments in crosswriting and originality are cited, and the material poetics, or ‘thingness’ of books, from the constructivist tradition onwards, as one of children’s literature’s leading innovations. The article then engages with the role children’s literature has played in the ‘reading wars’, including teaching strategies and governmental policies for learning to read; the controversies and competitive tensions inherent in the metrics and mechanisms of reading ‘for the test’ or for pleasure. After decades of reader-response theory emphasising the active roles of the reader and the text, the piece concludes with a plea to re-describe reading for new, screen-based, visual literacies offering linear, radial, spatial forms of reading, or reader-as-player

Mud mess and magic: building student teachers’ confidence for art & the outdoors in early years

This article explores making art outdoors as a resistance to a reduction in messy, outdoor play in our early years settings, schools and increasingly risk averse societies. As part of a small-­‐scale Community of Practice research investigation into improving the confidence of student teachers to make a mess and brave the weather, the article argues for a relation with ‘outerness’, where both being outside and exploring natural materials in art can function as play partners in the creative process

'That’s enough!' (but it wasn’t): the generative possibilities of attuning to what else a tantrum can do

Often used in the plural, tantrum denotes an uncontrolled outburst of anger and frustration, typically in a young child. In this paper we attempt to enact a feminist project of reclamation and reconfiguration of ‘the toddler tantrum’. Drawing on a range of theoretical traditions, this paper investigates the complex yet generative possibilities inherent within the tantrum to argue that it can be encountered as more-than-human, as a worldly-becoming, and as a form of resistance to Anthropocentrism and childism. We propose that the tantrum might be reappraised as a generative form of (child) activism. By mobilising the potential of arts-based approaches to the study of childhood we seek to reach other, opened out and speculative accounts of what tantrum-ing is, what it makes possible, and what it might offer to stretch ideas about, and practices with very young children. We undertake a tentacular engagement with children’s literature to arrive at possibilities to resist smoothing out, extinguishing or demonising the uncomfortable affective ecologies that are agitated by child rage. This paper brings together a concern with affect, materialities and bodies as they coalesce in more-than-human relationalities captured within ‘the tantrum’. In doing so, the unthinkable, the unbearable, the uncomfortable and the unknowable are set in motion, in the hope of arriving at a (more) critically affirmative account of childhood in all its messy complexity

Dark play in digital playscapes

Editoria

Playing in the dark with online games for girls

Pregnant Rapunzel Emergency is part of a series of online free games aimed at young girls (forhergames.com or babygirlgames.com), where dozens of characters from fairy tales, children’s toys and media feature in recovery settings, such as ‘Barbie flu’. The range of games available to choose from includes not only dressing, varnishing nails or tidying messy rooms, but also rather more troubling options such as extreme makeovers, losing weight, or a plethora of baby showers, cravings, hospital pregnancy checks, births (including caesarean), postnatal ironing, washing and baby care. Taking the online game Pregnant Rapunzel Emergency as an exemplar of a current digital trend, the authors explore the workings of ‘dark digital play’ from a number of perspectives – one by each named author. The game selected has (what may appear to adults) several disturbing features in that the player is invited to treat wounds of the kind of harm that might usually be associated with domestic violence towards women