Writing posthumanism,qualitative enquiry and early literacy

Abstract

This paper was written in the midst of enquiry – provoked by the question of what happens when we write posthumanism, qualitative enquiry and early literacy together. Rather than offer a stable methodology that is the product of our experimentation, the paper functions as a map, a situated cartography that has multiple access points and is generative and always becoming. Likewise, it does not present findings from which to draw easy (or even difficult) conclusions. Instead, it produces possibilities, as it remains open to further intra-actions that fall into and out of view as different readers, immersed in their various entanglements, take it up and see what it-they-we might do/be/become as they move through the process of territorialization, deterritorialization and reterritorialization, entangled life happening.

Keywords

Early literacy leveled readers methodology posthumanism reading writing

The levelled books are killing me. My son comes home from school making statements like, “I’m a K.” He shows me the little round sticker on the back of his book–the one that marks its level and apparently him as well. “I’m a K.” The other day, he accidentally brought home a J because he looked in the “wrong” crate. He didn’t want to read it. He’s past that; he’s a K. I can’t help worrying and wondering about this little sticker, in this literacy learning assemblage.¹ It’s not just the sticker. It’s the books that bear the sticker and the plastic milk crate that holds the books and the label on the crate and the cluster of children trading their books each morning. It’s the classroom library that is separate from the levelled book crates, emphasizing that they are not accountable to the same criteria of quality, diversity and interest. It’s the parents watching from the doorway, focusing on their children and not on the teacher’s iPad filled with bits of standardized assessment data about reading behaviours. It’s the early-morning tiredness and the backpacks everywhere and the tables the children navigate and every little piece of this assemblage² that makes my son a letter. I don’t know how to think about it, but it does feel like non-human materials are definitely doing something here³.

The above text, and many like it, was written in the midst of enquiry – provoked by the question⁴ of what happens when we write posthumanism, qualitative enquiry and early literacy together. Like this paper, however, the above text isn’t necessarily about writing, posthumanism, qualitative enquiry or early literacy – as if these are separate disciplinary fields,⁵ as if we can access and know them through our readings and research, as if we can tell when we begin or end thinking about them. Rather, the text is thought happening,⁶ following St. Pierre’s urging “[t]o realize, in fact, that we are always already entangled in inquiry, that there is no beginning” (St. Pierre, 2016: 29). Problems, after all, cannot be singular once we acknowledge and take seriously the notion of entanglement (Braidotti, 2016).⁷

Although many early childhood scholars experiment in entanglements of time, space, ethics, matter, human, animal and earth,⁸ Osgood and Giugin (2015) note that there’s little focus on the methodologies used to “harness and mobilize” (p. 347) those approaches to enquiry. Indeed, St. Pierre (2016) asserts that the ontological turn in research is not easy: “[o]ur ambitions seem to exceed our capacities” (p. 26). Despite the challenge, St. Pierre et al. (2016) argue that there is “an ethical imperative to rethink the nature of being” accompanied by a “heightened curiosity” and “experimentation” (p. 100) that demand creative alternatives⁹ for thinking human and nonhuman relations. This paper, then, experiments with simultaneously holding multiple concerns in enquiry as we write “toward emergent possibilities of thought and being where being includes all beings, human, animal, and earth” (Davies, 2014: 36).

What follows¹⁰ is a tale¹¹ of qualitative enquiry,¹² posthumanism and early literacy told through what Massumi (2009) calls enabling constraints. Enabling constraints “create specific conditions for creative interaction” (p. 15), and for us these were anything from giving each other time to “walk away” when we could not follow each other’s thought-happening to limiting our reading to a certain philosopher. Such constraints help us be “creatively ‘impolite’” without “preconceived notion[s] of exactly what the outcome will be or should be” (Massumi, 2009: 15). Consequently, this paper does not offer a stable methodology-as-product of our experimentation. Rather, it functions as a map, a situated cartography with “multiple entryways” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 14) that leaps across conversations with our children, walks in the park, quotes from scholars, and, and, and. Its five subheadings are connectable and “susceptible to constant modification”. ¹³ (p. 12).

What does posthumanism¹⁴ get us?

Apparently, we've been missing something that posthumanism might offer – some way of seeing, thinking, living, doing differently. Maybe it's because, as St. Pierre (2014) says, it’s difficult to escape our training. We were trained in what Braidotti (2013) calls anti-humanism, which analyzes how the subject – a “knowing, epistemological subject who, through the use of reason, can produce foundational truth” (St. Pierre, 2016: 25) – is always already deconstructing. Anti-humanism critiques¹⁵ Da Vinci’s Vetruvian man: white, male, heterosexual, coherent, stable, centred, thinking etc. The human ideal. THE humanist subject. If this is how human is defined, argues Braidotti (2013), then many of us are not “fully human” and, indeed, have never been (p. 1).

Braidotti and St. Pierre have each argued that perhaps persistent critique hasn’t got us anywhere. We’re no closer to dismantling the primacy of the humanist subject after more than 30 years than we were when such critique began in earnest. Even after decades of anti-humanist critique in early literacy (Davies, 2003; Hassett, 2006; Kontovourki and Siegel, 2009), for example, we’re left with an increasingly standardized educational culture reliant on that same humanist subject. Standards documents often assume a literacy subject who can be called a reader/writer and a text that is separate from that subject, inert until animated in the reading process (e.g. Bridges-Rhoads and Van Cleave, 2016). Rather than continuing that critique, Braidotti (2013) argues that posthumanism “works instead towards elaborating alternative ways of conceptualizing the human subject” (p. 37). We need creativity combined with affirmative critique (Braidotti, 2013) that isn’t just discursive but is also material, creating new planes of thought to unthink the nature/culture divide.¹⁶ We need new vocabularies for ordering actants in the world. We need conceptual creativity (Braidotti, 2013) that “leap[s] into the complexities and paradoxes” (p. 54) of human and non-human gatherings, “calling into being not only a different understanding of the past but also animating different futures” (Cameron, 2011: 172).

But how is this different from what we’ve always done in our work? We find ourselves asking that question again and again. We return to previous research projects in literacy education to re-see them (in light of the ontological turn) with posthumanism in mind, asking questions like, Where are the boundaries between posthumanism and anti-humanism? What does it get us to think posthumanism? How might reconceptualizing the subject as on a nature/culture continuum shift everything and anything related to literacy learning and research? We read Barad’s (2007) critique of Foucault and Butler at the same time that we pore over Barad’s (2010) connections with Derrida or Lather’s (2016) note about Barad turning to Derrida. Is it all confusing because we’ve always read Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, and Foucault side-by-side? Is it because, as St. Pierre (2014) says, “Derrida, like Foucault, included the material (the nonconceptual) as well as the discursive (the conceptual)” in their analyses? (p. 4).

When our Kindergarten children come home from school with their leveled books, the Foucauldian critique of how texts produce children as docile bodies is almost automatic, dwelling in the comfortable space of well-worn analyses we’ve enacted for years. We can see how they’re disciplined by the delineation of text features (e.g. sentence structure, story elements, vocabulary) that produce concepts like text complexity and, by extension, the reading levels of both text and reader. But something is missing. We have to disrupt “sedimented habits of thought” (Braidotti, 2013: 54) in order to reorient our thinking, doing and living, even if we don’t know why.

Our reading trajectories take off. Or actually, our listening and viewing propel us in unanticipated directions, as we begin with numerous lectures by Braidotti available on YouTube. YouTube’s algorithm produces a new citational trail, a field of enquiry for us – Barad, Manning and Massumi, Wolfe, Haraway, Colebrook, along with close readings of texts led by Christov-Bakargiev (School of Fine Art The University of Leeds, 2014) and others. As we move in and out of entangled networks of ideas, people, animals, nature, education, philosophy, and, and, and, we find ourselves propelled into discussions of the anthropocene, a geological age marked by the permanent, negative impact of humans on the environment. We must revise our understanding of humans’ relationship to the planet to enable creative solutions to problems with potentially catastrophic effects. Malone (2015) calls this “an ‘unlearning’ of anthropomorphic ways of educating about the world” and Taylor (2011) calls it a “new form of political enquiry that attends to the interconnectedness of humans and the more-than-human world” (p. 432).

We listen to Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. We read Taylor’s Reconfiguring Natures of Childhood. Somehow, in the middle of it all, it happened that our children aren’t in Kindergarten anymore, and now they’re in mixed-age nature schools. We start to experiment with our children as posthuman subjects, with how the nature/culture divide plays out in our lives, in nature schools and in our teaching. We write a grant proposal because we want to know more, perhaps about how “[a]ll life forms (including inanimate forms of liveliness) do theory” (Barad, 2012: 208). We ask what any of this has to do with literacy.

Kindergarten and materials

Let’s collect stuff our children bring home from Kindergarten. I bet we see all sorts of stuff.

Worksheets, books, folders, who knows what else? Stories for sure. They’ll tell us lots of stories.

I just got my son’s supply list the other day.

Oh good. That way we can foreground the materials.

Not sure what that means, but it sounds useful.

MacLure (2013) argues for “engaging the materiality of language itself – its material force and its entanglements in bodies and matter” (p. 658). We can take up her suggestion to draw upon “contemporary materialist theories that reject the hierarchical logic of representation” (p. 658).

We don’t just want to collect that stuff like it’s data though.

As if it’s separable from its entanglements.

I think our data chapter will help us think and do this.

Entanglements.

Expanding our notions of data.

Creating “ways of writing that foreground entanglements of theory and data as they are becoming” (Van Cleave and Bridges-Rhoads, in press).

I can’t stop thinking about the levelled books.

The levelled books are killing me.

Readers and books. Separate entities.

What do we do with that?

Let’s just live and write and be and see what happens.

I can already tell that I’m talking to my children differently.

I’m not sure if I am. I taught a class last night to in-service teachers about using leveled books in guided reading, and we ended up talking about the charts hanging on the walls in their classrooms that sort the children by reading levels.

Have we created any alternatives? Or is this still just critique? It feels different.

Entangled writing

For about two years

Mondays: Skype 9:45 a.m.–2:00 p.m.

Wednesdays: Skype 9:45 a.m.–2:00 p.m.

Sometimes Saturdays: Skype 7:00 a.m.–9:00 a.m.

Sometimes Sundays: Skype 7:00 a.m.–9:00 a.m.

Sometimes after kids go to bed

Sometimes on the phone while driving or walking

Sometimes in iMessage

Sometimes every free moment

One morning, we decided to see what would happen if we spent time writing-thinking about the levelled books our children must read in their respective Kindergarten classrooms. We began in a Google document while simultaneously on Skype, and we each wrote almost the exact same sentence at the same time: “The leveled books are killing me.” We didn’t notice until about two minutes later when one of us broke the silence by laughing.

That sentence became a refrain, a ritornello, over the next days and weeks as we kept writing and talking and thinking and listening and reading and texting and playing and experimenting. As Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987) explain, a ritornello is a little return that creates “beginnings of order in chaos” (p. 311) – a “fragile territory” (MacLure, 2013: 173) with “the capacity to ‘open onto a future’” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980/1987: 323). Ritornello signals to a flat ontology that denies humans’ “natural, privileged place within or above nature” (Kleinherenbrink, 2015: 208). That sentence carved out a territory to which we returned after following of line a flight, but it was never the same. It was always becoming, “in danger of breaking apart at any moment” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980/1987, p. 343), and leaping in new directions, spurring different questions and new trajectories.

Doing enquiry was to write, talk, think, listen, read, text, play, experiment, ritornello for hours, days, weeks, months. It was never about leveled books, per se, although there were times when one of us would demand we do a proper literature review and set this whole thing up like a conventional qualitative study with its “grid of normalizing humanist concepts [e.g. data, representation, theoretical framework]” (St. Pierre, 2014: 10). We never did that.¹⁷ Or maybe one of us tried it and didn’t tell the other.

Mostly, we were doing enquiry differently together, “produc[ing] different knowledge and produc[ing] knowledge differently” (St. Pierre, 1997: 175). It wasn’t just about knowing, but about “being-knowing-responding” (Barad, 2012: 81). We were listening¹⁸ as the enquiry materialized in a shared Google Doc. Line by line, word by word, erasing and expanding – “the very specificity of each individual [was] mobile and intra-active” (Davies, 2014: 1). Listening, as Davies said, is “about not being bound by what you already know. It is life as movement” (p. 1),¹⁹ where the marker of success is as Massumi (n.d.) described:

When it has succeeded in saying something that could not have been said before it was written, and when it enriches its readers’ attention in a way that enables them to perceive things in the world around them that would otherwise have passed unremarked.

What makes it to the page is always incomplete.

Writing-posthumanism-qualitative enquiry-early literacy

The levelled books are killing me. My daughter keeps bringing them home to read every day, and I keep resisting them. It isn't a verbal resistance. I’m not saying, no you can’t read them. But I’m not pressing and waiting for her to do it. I want to tell her a different story of reading. Not just of books that she’s supposed to read. Not just of books containing words carefully chosen from a sight word list that she thinks was invented for her. She doesn’t see that those words are entangled with decades of … what? Not sure if it’s decades of literacy research or what.

The levelled books are killing me. I want to write about them. Then, when I do I feel already too entangled. Maybe this is how Piaget felt when he was studying his children. But he was labelled as “wrong”. Was that because he was doing it on purpose – trying to study his kids? I’m not doing that. My child is more like theory than a participant. He's helping me think posthumanism. Barad (2012) writes, “Theories are living and breathing reconfigurations of the world” (p. 207).

The levelled books are killing me. Same old boring sentence structure, just spewing facts. When we get to the page that says, “snakes are venomous (poisonous),” my daughter says, “No. That’s wrong. The book’s wrong. Snakes cannot be poisonous. Venomous and poisonous aren’t the same thing.” I reply, “Well, it looks like they’re synonymous because it’s in parentheses,” almost taking the book’s side – this stupid book that doesn’t even name an author. She says, “No!” Sure enough, Wikipedia says snakes aren’t poisonous. They choose to use their venom or not. “See? Snakes know,” she asserts.

The levelled books are killing me. My son reads all the time. He told me the other day it’s because it makes him smarter, and it makes him curious, and it gives him things to think about and stuff for his imagination to work on. Those books become part of his speech and shape what he notices in the world, how he describes it, and his play with his brother. He doesn’t think about the levelled books that way. It’s not reading; it’s homework. Homework is something that’s totally disconnected from anything that matters.

The levelled books are killing me. One day, my kid was upset because the day before the book said J and today’s book said level 9. We talked about how they weren’t even the same levelling system. Not on the same linear trajectory. Towards goodness. I didn’t say it like that though. We talked about who gets to decide those and how that matters in life. Then, my kid labeled the other kids in the classroom. One after another.

The levelled books are killing me. One time my daughter was reading a book and the word “here” was in it. She didn’t know the word, and she turned to me and said, “Ahhhhh! I should know that word. It was on my list from the second week of school.” I didn’t know what to talk about or how to think about it. Maybe it would make more sense if I chose a “posthuman” concept to think with. But how can I find a concept in that fleeting moment when I sit with my daughter on the couch as she feels the materiality of the words, the list? Am I supposed to have a whole slew of concepts at the ready for thinking, for intra-acting?

The levelled books are killing me. We just deleted a lot of writing about the levelled books because they are just anti-humanist critiques. Braidotti (2013) says the problem with anti-humanism is that “You just burn the terrain without offering creative alternatives” (para. 18). Our anti-humanism never only did that, I don’t think. Or maybe our anti-humanism was never really anti-humanism. Or maybe we’re missing something.

The levelled books are killing me. I can’t stop thinking about how they’re supposed to make my daughter into a “reader”. But when she reads those books, she just starts talking about words and whether or not she knows them. Whether or not she knows how to put them together in a way that makes sense. It feels like she’s trying to stop everything else around her from happening. It becomes this project of my daughter vs the book. My daughter, the great sorter of words and images, who will make the book make sense and make herself into a reader in the process. I wonder what would happen if I started telling her about something I read that talked about how words “sometimes seem to glow” (MacLure, 2013: 661).

The levelled books are killing me. I was supposed to think about them more today. I was going to sit down and write. Think about posthumanism and early literacy. Think about leveled books. Think about the Kindergarten assemblage. I dropped my son off at school this morning, and the teacher asked if I saw that two sides of the school building were blocked off by crime scene tape. I was hugging my son goodbye when she said that. He slipped out of my fingers and went to go put his backpack away and join the morning routine. He slipped out of my fingers. She said someone had been shot. They found the body in the park attached to the school. The body. She said shooting. The body. Found this morning by a woman walking her dog. An hour and a half before I hugged my son, and he slipped out of my fingers. She said the children were safe. But there was crime scene tape. And police cars. The children weren’t allowed outside. Little bodies, full of energy and curiosity, trapped in the building. No recess. Lunch in the classrooms. I went home and couldn’t write, couldn’t think. So I dug in the dirt. Levelling tiny posts in tiny post holes, moving dirt, measuring, stapling tiny mesh fencing, moving rocks. Dirty and sweating.

The levelled books are killing me. They’re synonymous with early reading, but what if mushrooms were? My daughter came home the other day and wanted to tell me about the mushrooms she saw on her hike. She couldn’t remember the name of one and wanted to know the word. She wanted to see the word. We looked at pictures online and read their labels. We even looked up the spiritual significance of mushrooms for an Indigenous tribe in our area, which led to some much needed debunking of problematic stereotypes of Native Americans as only existing in the past with smoke signals and deerskin pants. Our shared reading even got us to origin stories, and I found myself telling her the story of Skywoman I’d just heard in Braiding Sweetgrass alongside the Adam and Eve story of my childhood. But that isn’t reading in the sense of levelled books. My wandering curiosity entangled with my daughter’s isn’t recognized as a research-based practice that says that children must interact with texts in a certain way.

The levelled books are killing me. Part of reading for my son is becoming the text. Dressing up, acting out parts, finding materials to stand in for parts of the text – ideas, objects, spaces – so he can feel what it’s like to do and be the things in the story. He (re)creates the text he’s reading. Think it, do it, be it. He’s not just recreating the text, though. There’s something about how the text creates him and spaces and materials while he’s creating those things to understand the text and decide what it means to him. My son and the text are what Lenz Taguchi (2014) calls co-constitutive forces. Or maybe it’s a co-creation of reality (realities?) like Barad (2007) says. He doesn’t do that with levelled books.

Territories

… the middle … is where things pick up speed. Between things does not designate a localizable relation going from one thing to the other and back again, but a perpendicular direction, a transversal movement that sweeps one and the other away, a stream without beginning or end that undermines its banks and picks up speed in the middle. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980/1987: 25)

The between. We’re always between. That’s why it feels so hard to find a foothold. We start to carve out a territory, make some sense of a concept like ritornello²⁰ that gives us stable ground on which to stand for a moment so we can think about it. Then the next thing we read – the next word, the next sentence, the next article – crumbles the stability, deterritorializing that space, what we thought we might know, might someday be able to know. Caught again in the stream, the current grows faster. We can think about our children. Our children will help us find stable ground. That’s ridiculous; there’s no stable ground with children. We can think about levelled texts. Levelled texts are something to think about. Reading the literature on levelled texts, carving out a territory. Posthumanism deterritorializes. Now the children are back, reterritorializing, creating stable ground about the levelled texts. But it’s different somehow. They’re saying these things and doing these things in relation to levelled texts that show us how problematic they are. Our children become the literature review of levelled texts. The ground starts to crumble yet again. Levelled text literature – text complexity, reading levels, assessments – stable territory. A return to the stable ground, yet it’s different still. And this territory still has our children. They’re embodiments of those assessments and reading levels. The levelled texts are making them. It’s subjectivity, and anti-humanism comes back. Anti-humanism carves out another little territory, helps us get our footing, temporary respite from the current that threatens to sweep us away again. But the sticker. There’s something about the sticker, and we’re carried out again.

So we stop (not end) where we began – in the middle – with a text that is not about early literacy, qualitative enquiry or posthumanism. It’s not about critiquing levelled readers, writing alternative research reports, or mushrooms. But perhaps it might catalyse something.²¹

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interest

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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Writing posthumanism,qualitative enquiry and early literacy

Abstract

Keywords

What does posthumanism 14 get us?

Kindergarten and materials

Entangled writing

Writing-posthumanism-qualitative enquiry-early literacy

Territories

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interest

Funding

Notes

References

What does posthumanism¹⁴ get us?