In this chapter, we frame data analysis from multimodal (Scollon, 2001; Kress, 2003) and materialist (Lenz Taguchi, 2010) perspectives to expand our understanding of the complex interplay of purposes, properties, and possibilities in a moment of playful making at an impromptu art table in a preschool classroom. This auditory double take-that listens and listens again--problematizes educational assumptions in a prominent anthropocentric
pedagogy that reads child/material productions primarily as evidence of a linear, lockstep developmental sequence. To unpack a moment of early childhood art production from two perspectives, we explore research methods that move away from privileging order and coherence, taming chaotic intra-actions among materials and humans, discounting material catalysts and perhaps child purposes. This chapter advances a notion of development as jumbled, recursive entanglement of action, artifacts, and making worlds. Art becomes coproduction
through which things and humans communicate purposes and possibilities
