ERIC Number: EJ1441455
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2024-Apr
Pages: 28
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0814-0626
EISSN: EISSN-2049-775X
"How Do Bugs Move Us?": Becoming Different(ly) with/in the More-than-Human Movement(s) of the Early Years Classroom
Australian Journal of Environmental Education, v40 n2 p172-199 2024
Despite the growing influence of the "material" turn within childhood studies and education, scholarship related to teaching and learning within the early childhood classroom remains a largely humanistic endeavour. By applying relational and multispecies onto-epistomologies to both children's classroom relations "and" our own teacher subjectivities, this work aims to highlight what other possibilities emerge when the dominant hierarchies of teacher-researcher-child-non-human are destabilised. Taking the idea of destabilisation literally, we diffractively map our own experiences as teacher-researchers within early years educational contexts, utilising diffractive methods to narrow-in on the mutually constituted conditions of "movement." These more-than-human movements emerged during improvised classroom encounters between young children, animals and plants and varied in intensity and duration, as these constructed cuts and data (re)presentations continue to "move" us years later. Building upon research that explores the relationalities of children and non-human others, as well as "how movement does relationships'' in early childhood educational contexts (Riley & Proctor, 2023, p. 663), we argue that a complex meta/physics of more-than-human movement affords literal and conceptual turning, enmeshing, decentering, connecting and rupturing, producing a less certain but more attuned early years teacher.
Descriptors: Animals, Entomology, Early Childhood Education, Elementary School Science, Motion, Science Education, Plants (Botany), Learning Processes
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: Early Childhood Education; Elementary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A