Getting to know movement differently: Nurturing communicative,relational,and collective movement pedagogies with toddlers

Abstract

We share moments from ongoing pedagogical inquiry work with toddler-aged children, where we explore together how we might tentatively create conditions for movement to happen outside of the familiar, dominant, status-quo referents of individualism and motor skill development that anchor much physical activity curricula. Sharing pedagogical documentation images and stories, we present three provocations that we moved through with children. We describe how through engaging these provocations together, we came to know movement as communicative, relational, and collective. We conclude by recounting a provocation we hoped would spur conditions for moving differently beyond our habitual taken-for-granted methods of moving together. As we spend time with three provocation stories, we work hard to raise questions and uncertainties and to share our intentions and responses, rather than presenting our activities as universalizable or easily implementable practices. Throughout the article, we engage with movement conditions and pedagogies as ethical and political concerns.

Keywords

early childhood education movement pedagogy physical activity toddler

We want to do pedagogical inquiry work with toddler-aged children to attend to how movement happens in everyday spaces. We—Sanja (an early childhood educator) and Nicole (a researcher)—know that taken-for-granted knowledges tell us that movement happens naturally; that children are always in motion, constantly wiggling and running their bodies, and that movement is about motor skill development and learning to regulate your individual body’s energy. As educators and researchers we are taught that movement is mainly physical, a set of various gross motor skills, and is outcome oriented, getting one from here to there. Such a view requires us to think of each child’s movement in isolation from other activities and bodies in the space. In moving with toddler-aged children on the playground, we wondered what else there is to getting to know movement. If children (and adults) spend so much time daily moving in various ways, there must be something more to movement than motion being an easily quantifiable and controllable physical activity.

Movement, in colloquial understandings in early childhood education, is positioned as a behavioral outcome executed by an individual body in the name of promoting physical activity or future health. This is evident, for example, in the section on “Physical Wellbeing” in How Does Learning Happen? Ontario’s Pedagogy for the Early Years (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2014: 29), which brings forward movement by stating that “patterns of eating, physical activity, and sleep that are established in early childhood continue into later life.” Movement here is positioned as an outcome—a pattern of bodied motion that will serve the child well in their future years. It is also positioned as an individual child’s concern; it matters that this child develops a good relationship with, and skills for, physical activity because it is their future that is at risk otherwise.

This conceptualization of movement as/and physical activity, we have come to understand together, is a normative and developmental approach, one that echoes mainstream physical education literature and is deployed in many of the motor learning and physical activity documents that surround early childhood education in our Canadian context (e.g. the B.C. Physical Activity Strategy’s Appetite to Play, Canadian Society for Exercise Physiology’s (n.d.) 24-Hour Movement Guidelines for the Early Years (0–4 years), Healthy Beginnings for Preschoolers 2–5 from the Childhood Obesity Foundation (n.d.a), Physical and Health Education Canada’s (2020) Fundamental Movement Skills, Sport for Life Society’s (n.d.) Physical Literacy). These documents enact a politicized conflation of “movement” with “physical activity” (Land and Danis, 2016). This taken-for-granted approach to understanding movement as physical activity emphasizes, we argue, two qualities: it makes movement meaningful as an (1) outcome, where we value movement for how it achieves a predetermined, easily knowable/quantifiable, familiar, predictable bodied performance. For example, many physical activity resources for children suggest activities to engage in, like learning to climb up a slide’s ladder and slide down the slide. This movement is deemed valuable when a child successfully climbs up the slide and slides down, executing a movement pattern that is familiar and has already been labeled productive by educators and experts. Our familiar ways of getting to know movement with young children position movement as an (2) individual performance or skill—it matters if this particular child can successfully climb up the slide by themselves. This makes movement meaningful as it is executed by individual children whereby it matters if one particular child is learning the movement skills that they will need to be successful (healthy, fit, coordinated) independent of their peers in their future.

In our pedagogical inquiry research with toddler-aged children, we have come to know the profound inadequacy of these two dominant ways of knowing movement (as an outcome and as an individual skill). We have, concurrently, noticed how many of our habitual practices around movement in childcare work very hard to delimit movement, creating conditions for movement to be an individualized outcome. This question of how we create conditions for movement to happen otherwise is one we will turn to in the conclusion of this article.

First, we want to turn to critical physical education literature (Fitzpatrick, 2019; Kirk, 2019) to complexify the high-stakes of how we might get to know movement as more than an outcome performed by an individual child. Azzarito (2019), a critical physical education scholar, argues that “schooling is increasingly driven by an educational market paradigm that positions students through colorblind lenses, merely as ‘objects’ or ‘outputs’ of neoliberal economic goals” (p. 639). Conceptualizing children as objects and outputs of physical education curricula means that, as Quennerstedt (2019) argues, “physical education has been about sport techniques, behaviour modification in relation to physical activity, playing sport in ready-made packages within a movement culture of competitive sports” (p. 615). This means that the curriculum intentions that sustain mainstream movement pedagogies value skill, control, discipline, mastery, competition, and success. These curriculum values largely differ from many curricular approaches in early childhood education. For example, How Does Learning Happen? Ontario’s Pedagogy for the Early Years (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2014) sets forward belonging, wellbeing, engagement, and expression as foundations for learning. These four curricular intentions diverge from the implicit values underpinning unquestioned discourses of movement as individualized, outcome-oriented physical activity. Azzarito (2019) makes clear how these dominant practices of knowing movement only as predictable outcomes performed by individual children are not only incredibly limiting and require we foreclose on other forms of moving that might be meaningful to children, but also serve to perpetuate privileged ideas of how movement should happen. Our movement pedagogies are entangled with the insidious and overt normative subjectivities, idealized bodies, and health and fitness milestones that underpin how we come to understand and promote movement (Azzarito, 2009). That is: how we get to know movement with children is an ethical and political practice (Fitzpatrick and Russell, 2015).

Azzarito et al. (2017) trace how in status-quo physical education practices “for those bodies outside the norm, implicit cultural and economic assumptions about making the ‘right choices’ have an ‘othering’ effect, through which Whiteness operates to normalize and naturalize ‘difference,’ locating ‘other’ people as inferior to White norms, and thus maintaining social inequality in health” (p. 5). Put differently, when ‘normal’ movements are those we know as particular outcomes performed by individuals with particular body capabilities, a particular neoliberal citizen and particular quantifiable, racialized, heteronormative learning achievements through movement are valued (Markula and Kennedy, 2011). Azzarito (2019) makes visible how “a neoliberal agenda in education prioritizes control, competition, accountabilities, and the promotion of self-managing citizens and entrepreneurial practices” (p. 640) which in the context of movement “present an arena of risk and failure, where ethnic minoritized young people’s bodies are being monitored, classified, and constantly marked as the ‘other’ in negative ways” (p. 643). Operating within what Azzarito (2019) calls a deficit paradigm, where individualized, outcome-based modes of understanding movement create approaches to understanding movement where a “failure to place issues of culture and social inequalities at the heart of educational considerations of health and fitness indicates that such efforts assume that ethnic-minoritized young people, their history, experiences, and views of fitness and health are white and middle class” (p. 643). This means that our taken-for-granted practices that know movement as an outcome performed by an individual are non-innocent and instead perpetuate dominant Euro-Western conceptualizations of how children should move and who/what their bodies should become.

Focusing on the prevalence of fitness testing in highschool, Azzarito (2016) argues that “upheld by the body-at-risk discourse, corporate curricula or behavioristic high-stakes fitness testing used by PE teachers implicitly function to reproduce the racialization process and create ‘learning environments’ where ethnic minorities are forced to recognize themselves through universalized White ideals” (p. 143). Extending Azzarito’s (2016, 2019) insights to early childhood education, we contend that the taken-for-granted approach to understanding children’s movement as an outcome performed by an individual is problematic both because only valuing movements that achieve an outcome that curriculum documents deem meaningful is reductive and ignores much movement that is quite meaningful with a shift in attention, and because the benchmark against which “good” outcomes of movement and “successful” performance are measured are universalized, privileged, able-bodied, white ideals. By carefully curating what “counts” as “good” movement outcomes performed by individual children, dominant curricula and rules insidiously perpetuate racialized hierarchies that value some bodies and their capabilities over others. For example, the Childhood Obesity Foundation’s (n.d.b) Healthy Beginnings for Preschoolers 2-5 offers three types of physical activity: light intensity, moderate intensity, vigorous intensity. Describing vigorous intensity physical activity, they offer “fast paced climbing and playing on the playground” (Physical Activity & Screen Time Practices, p. 2). This recommendation exemplifies the clandestine centering of white, middle class children, as it assumes that all children have access to playgrounds where fast-paced climbing and playing are possible (safe community, maintained and modern equipment, present adult supervision/adults have free time, free space in playground for everyone to participate). It also maintains that only children who do vigorous physical activity (and vigorous physical activity is presented as an idealized white, middle class undertaking) are properly active and therefore healthy, skilled, and fit. This is not to argue that racialized children or children from other socioeconomic statuses cannot do vigorous physical activity or be highly active on playgrounds, we just intend to highlight the covert curricular ideals sustaining taken-for-granted ways of knowing movement as an individualized outcome in early childhood education.

Quennerstedt (2019) proposes that we need to “[reclaim] the open-endedness of physical education, which involves acknowledging that movement and movement cultures should be recognised as something that should be discovered, rather than related to behaviour modification” (p. 620). This marks a move away from favoring the successful behavior-modified movements of dominant physical education curriculum, where movement is quantified as knowable, individual skill development and cultivating a “healthy” attitude toward physical fitness is a key outcome. Rather, as Quennerstedt proposes, turning to the “open-endedness” of physical education means taking movement, in all its complex, entangled iterations seriously. Carrying the innovative, political work of critical physical education scholars like Azzarito and Quennerstedt to early childhood education, we must urgently acknowledge that our pedagogical project of working to understand movement as more than an individual outcome—and experimenting with creating conditions to get to know movement differently—is a high stakes, speculative project.

Pedagogical inquiry work

Our ongoing pedagogical inquiry work began in Summer 2019. We utilize a practice of experimental, patient, relational materialist pedagogical inquiry (Hultman and Lenz Taguchi, 2010; Kind, 2018; Nxumalo et al., 2018; Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2016). As researchers, we create provocations that intend to shake up habitual and familiar ways of moving in the yard, such as flipping the plastic push vehicles upside down or using the long strollers to disrupt the square running pathway at the heart of the yard. We create short pedagogical narrations (Hodgins, 2012; Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2015) describing how we participate in moving. We share our informal narrations on a blog (https://movingpedagogies.blog.ryerson.ca/). We gather pedagogical documentation as images, videos, gifs, and short notes. We understand documentation and narration as ways of grappling together with our discomforts, uncertainties, and the possibilities we want to nurture together. For us, pedagogical narrations are “a process by which educational experiences in early childhood settings are narrated and made visible in the public realm” (Berger, 2010: 58). In this article, we share narrations and images from our pedagogical inquiry work with movement. We do this not to present our stories as final, “solved,” or “proof” of any particular approach to moving with children. Rather, we see our narrations and documentation as artefacts in motion, and our writing as the ongoing work of keeping our thinking alive and in conversation with other scholars, educators, sites, spaces, and children. We want to emphasize that our pedagogical inquiry work unfolds in a particular context: a university-based child care center in a large urban city on Dish With One Spoon Territory, a treaty between the Anishinaabe, Mississaugas and Haudenosaunee. Our pedagogical thinking and speculations are entirely entangled with the specific political and ecological conditions of this context, as our pedagogical intentions are always in response to this place (Nxumalo et al., 2018). As such, the thinking we share is non-universalizable; we offer our collaborative propositions as provocations and invitations, not as displaced, immediately transferrable practices. We will turn now to spending time with how we have come to think with movement as (1) communicative and (2) relational and collective. To conclude, we will think through the difficult and imperfect work of creating conditions that care for communicative, relational, and collective movement.

Movement as communicative

Toddlers seem to be often on the go, running, climbing the furniture, dancing, balancing, crawling. In our thinking with children’s movement we noticed that movement is often joyful, it seems to give them a feeling of freedom, and seems to be contagious. For example, when running children often look back, in anticipation, to see if another child is chasing them, and more often than not, another child will join in the running or accept invitations to move collectively in the environment. This made us wonder if movement has a communicative component. Once children enter the collective play, how might they then communicate and negotiate the expectations and evolution of their play and their roles through movement? We propose that what is often seen as simply copying behaviors serves a more complex function, that of communicating and inviting others into play, of negotiating and conveying messages about the rules, roles, and how play unfolds.

In thinking movement as communicative and in response to children’s daily congregation around the double slide, which was amongst the areas where we started noticing and thinking movement as communicative, we offered toddlers a provocation by covering one side of the slide with fabric. Toddlers accepted this provocation and, through movement, began to renegotiate how to unfold their play on and around the slide. As some stand at the top of the slide presumably deciding to go down or not, others slide with the fabric, getting tangled in it, squealing with joy. A few others join in excitedly without any verbal exchange. A shift in thinking movement as not simply individualistic and skill based but rather as a means of communication has practical implications. It means that the educators ought not to focus on guiding, correcting and testing children’s skills related to movement but rather, educators can cultivate/nurture movement to communicatively unfold. Rather than advocating for the fabric-covered slide to remain in its covered state and enforcing that one side of the slide is blocked off or closed at this time as if a rule, we want to think instead about all of the ways of moving that are invited by the slide and the fabric, and how we can respond with the children within these unfamiliar ways of moving. We are trying to open our movement toward and in response to the blocked-off slide, answering to how bodies communicate with the covered slide and how the covered slide engages with bodies to invite particular ways of moving with the slide.

In working to pay attention to how movement is communicative with the slide, and especially amplified with half the slide covered in fabric, we want to emphasize that we are orienting toward the communicative characteristics of movement without reiterating a focus on individual children’s isolated, skilled, solitary movement performances. This means that we want to resist uncovering the “language” of movement the children are using, where for example we might decipher that one child sliding down the slide communicates that their friend should slide down the slide after them. Rather, we want to think movement as communicative within a situated, particular, local array of materials, other bodies, rules, and movements: we want to resist a taken-for-granted impulse to name one child’s movement as inviting or blocking another, and instead pay attention to how movements are gathered together and communicate something through motion as a whole, as a shared movement that incorporates many individual movements. We follow MacRae (2019) who pays attention to young children’s movements, arguing that tuning to motion “makes it possible to read an event in terms of its complexities, and affords the opportunity for practitioners to give attention to children’s intra-actions in much greater depth than is often possible when they make observations that are part of the assessment and planning cycle” (p. 4). This assessment and planning cycle marks our habitual way of reading movement: labeling movements as skills, seeing movement as an individual child’s performance, and assessing how “correct” a movement has been performed and correcting it. Such a way of being involved echoes the normative, skill-based, individualized ways of assessing movement that we inherit in early childhood education—the ways of tending to movement that the critical physical education scholars we visited in our introduction critique.

We want to think with some early childhood education scholars to slow down and carefully offer how we might think of movement as communicative beyond the referent of the individual child and their skill. MacRae (2019) argues that “what I glimpse in the slow-motion dance of bodies is a thinking in action, where entangled bodies sense their own and each other’s changing capacities and tendencies as they play wildly: bodies are kinetically connected, moving in correspondence with each other in an animated dance” (p. 9). With MacRae (2019), capacities are modes of communication, of being in bodied dialogue together. What a body can do becomes a way of participating in conversation with what other bodies can do. What if we understand imitating as a kinetic connection as an exchange between bodied capacities? Here, this communicative motion becomes, as we suggested earlier, about negotiating and conveying messages. Larsson and Quennerstedt (2012), taking up a critical poststructural kinesiology perspective, offer a sociocultural approach for understanding movement that opens space for thinking differently about how movement is communicative. For Larsson and Quennerstedt (2012), “what moving means is, from this perspective, decided as movers engage in movements in particular situations, for example, fitness tests. How people move, where they move, with whom they move, and so forth, constitutes what it means to move” (p. 285). From this perspective, movement is not predetermined as an individual child’s skill execution, but instead movement takes on a meaning—an energy, history, communication—as movement unfolds. We do not already know what it means for communicating through movement to cover half the slide with a blanket: that meaning for movement and those communicative possibilities for movement are created as children negotiate together how to move with the covered slide and fabric. What “counts” as communication, and how movement participates in communication, is made in concert with the slide and fabric and classmates and teachers and sand and weather. It is also unstable. Understanding movement as communicative does not mean that we understand it as communicative once and for all and have a key for deciphering how the children are communicating through moving. Rather, this is ongoing work. It means constantly noticing, responding to, and responding with our own bodied movements.

MacRae (2020) builds on this contention that understanding movement as communicative is constantly ongoing work, suggesting that “by focusing on hands instead of mouths, it is the capacities rather than deficits of young children’s communicative practices that will be highlighted” (p. 92). Our attention needs to shift should we want to pay attention to how movement is communicative. We need to pay attention to what bodies can do in communicative movement, which requires accepting that all movement and communication might not be readily familiar and accessible to us, as adults or interlocutors. To attune to movement as communicative is to acknowledge that our status-quo ways of communicating in education often rely on language, not muscles—and, that we can disrupt these practices and pay attention together to how, what, and why movement communicates in everyday practice.

Movement as relational and collective

We were curious to pay attention to the pathways that we all made in the yard. We wanted to get to know the ways we tracked across the ground and who and what our travels across the floor involved and tracked with us. We took large sheets of white paper and laid them out flat across the length of a common pathway in the yard. Quickly, the paper was dotted with soil, sand, sticks, and leaves that the children carried over. For a few days of inquiry work, we slowed down with this paper on the ground. We paid attention to what was transported onto the paper and how, what it could do once it was on the paper surface, and what our bodies and movements could do to the artefacts sprinkled across the paper’s smooth, clean, surface. We noticed how sand bounced and slid on the paper as different bodies walked across it. We learned how two or more bodies coming to move together with the paper greatly shaped how the paper and sand and leaves moved. Some children noted how when it was just their body or their hands, they could shape how materials moved on the paper, but when a few bodies were involved, materials slid and collided and multiplied. The paper seemed to connect movement from two bodies, as one child stomping the sand on one corner of the paper made the small sticks bounce on another end. Our movements with this large piece of paper and the soil, sand, sticks, and leaves brought to the forefront how our movements are relational and collective—we create together what the paper and materials and our bodies do, and removing any one body or relationship profoundly shifts how the paper and materials and bodies move together. The relationships that nourish our possibilities for moving collectively are consequential; they are high stakes and entangled and resist isolation.

If children communicate through movement, to invite others to join in their play or to accept others’ invitations, and to negotiate roles and rules, then we reason that movement is relational and collective. Children might get to know each other through movement and they build relationships with each other through movement. In addition, the relational aspect of movement applies to children’s interactions with non-human matter; the objects and the environment. The movement of each individual child changes as children have encounters with each other and with their surroundings. The resulting, altered movement changes the movement of both other children and objects as they build on each other’s evolving movement. This is not so simple as a 1:1 stimulus and changed movement—add paper and the children will move like this. Rather, this provocation needs careful patience; thinking movement as communicative means recognizing that communication is often thoughtful, speculative, or propositional. It is about figuring out how to move well in this place, with these humans, these materials, and these plants (this is inspired by a question we learned from pedagogista Dr. Cristina Delgado-Vintimilla). Thus, through movement children create, define, and redefine relations with space, objects, and equipment. It is then, we want to suggest, that through movement children (and others) get to know each other, the environment, and the world around them, and shape relationships with them through the work of moving.

Johnson Thiel (2020) describes moving with children in gatherings that resist and puncture the individualistic, skill-based approach to noticing movement that we have inherited in education, and proposes instead that “noticing the unruliness of such bodily acts can help us disrupt the embodied literacies of hyper-capitalist structures underpinning traditional understandings of everyday childhood practice” (p. 72). These hyper-capitalist and neoliberal frames through which to understand children’s movement are, Azzarito (2019) argues, “constructed in opposition to the ‘other’, [where] Whiteness produces and circulates grand-narratives of achievement, merits, and success in Western society that are not only racialized, but also gendered, classist, and ableistic” (p. 641). Azzarito (2019) continues, making visible how “against the backdrop of ‘deficit thinking’, the normative culture of health and fitness constructed upon white middle-class values, expectations, and performances does not account for issues of race, disability, social class, gender/sex, and culture, but situates minority youths as ‘deficient’ in comparison” (p. 643). This means that the normative, taken-for-granted, status-quo attitude in physical education is non-innocent; it values some (white, able, male) bodies and marks others as “deficient.” Returning to Johnson Thiel’s argument (2020), movement pokes at status-quo rules and assessments for motion in early childhood. Johnson Thiel (2020) argues that “the politics of childhood, the ways childhood is practised and imagined can be found in something as small and seemingly simple as the white spaces of paper and how the marks inhabit it, making it a lively, material happening” (p. 78). We hear Johnson Thiel arguing that materials, rules, habits, traditions, and guidelines come together in everyday moments of movement with children, where movements both align with tradition and resist the status-quo.

Bringing Azzarito’s (2019) argument alongside Johnson Thiel’s (2020), we can recognize how our inherited, neoliberal, individualized guidelines for understanding children’s movement are profoundly politicized and align with dominant hierarchies of race, gender, and ability. We need to find ways of moving together that do not take as status-quo these race, gender, and ability-based measures. As we chose to persist in thinking children’s movement in relation with paper, we thought with the children with the same provocation on a few occasions. Children’s interactions with each other and with paper continued to evolve in unexpected ways, and at one point the paper covered with dirt, sand, and twigs was accidentally ripped. After a short pause, a few children almost simultaneously proceeded with ripping the paper further, in what looked like a smooth dance of children moving through the space and pulling the pieces of ripped paper through the air behind them. They dragged it everywhere with them, throwing it up in the air, and basking in the piles of ripped paper on the ground. There was something intentional and constructive in this collective act of ripping paper and engaging with paper and each other. It did not ascribe to the rules of individualization or skill performance that we have inherited in early childhood education. The sticks and paper were not targeted for an idealized creation, like a fort or hiding place. They became part of the relationships and the collective that nourishes possibilities for moving in these moments. The sticks and full paper and ripped paper and dirt and twigs and human bodies come together to shape how moving happens here. Movement is profoundly relational and collective, not individual and assessable. As the outdoor time came to an end, an educator brought out a canvas bag and children started collecting the ripped paper inside the bag, making sure that every single last piece is picked up. The ripped, dirty paper, as it turns out, is not something to dispose of, but rather something precious, something children formed relationships with, something to keep.

This multilayered view of movement is meaningful to us. It makes us feel content in thinking that movement is not mostly individual or purely physical. Rather it is collective; it weaves together children’s means of communicating with each other, inviting and entering play, forming and building relationships with each other and the world, negotiating roles and rules. When we think of moving as multilayered, relational, and collective, when children develop their own new rules, then we see them as testing limits and pushing the boundaries. They are being active participants of change in their own environment which makes us see movement as means to disrupting the status quo. Movement is far more implicated in a collective and relationships than our taken-for-granted assumption that movement can and should be regulated and controlled in the name of skill development. Instead, we have to know movement that happens in connection, in a group, and within a loop back to continually shape how movement happens every day.

Creating conditions for movement

What happens if we intentionally shake up our familiar modes of moving in the yard? Important in the yard are large pushable plastic vehicles that the children often use to race around the yard and practice gross motor skills like running and balance. One day, we flipped them over, turning the vehicles flat on their heads. It took us some time to figure out what to do with the vehicles: do we flip them back? Invent a new way to use them? What if we take seriously that flipping the vehicles is a practice in creating conditions for movement? That is, it is intentional and offers forward the idea that movement is something we should have to work at. It is not just something we should always automatically know how to do. Rather, what if moving communicatively, relationally, and collectively requires that we respond to the conditions of a place and experiment with how to move well with/in a place?

The push cars have a rich history and life in the yard. Cars and carts have been used by individual children collectively to run around the space. Flipping the cars over was quite a disruptive decision. Some children wanted things “back in order” and as soon as they would see the car turned upside down they would turn it back. We talked with one another and with the children, narrating how we were interested in creating conditions for us to move differently in the yard, and maybe flipping the vehicles and having to figure out what else they can do might be one such strategy. We were curious how we might use the vehicles not just for individual gross motor skill development (running, turning, pushing) but how (or if) the vehicles could participate in shaking up how movement happens carefully and responsively in the yard—if the vehicles could help us to create conditions to move differently, beyond our inherited individual skill development practices. If we are thinking about movement as communicative, relational, and collective, what might taking seriously these upside down vehicles in the playground mean for how we engage with the cars and carts in unfamiliar ways? This is, we have learned, a difficult question: how do we intentionally and carefully work with the features of the yard while holding close to an intention to create conditions for movements that go beyond the status-quo ways we usually support children’s movements (individual, skill, run energy out) and instead respond to how movement happens in ways that are communicative, relational, and/or collective?

We stayed insistent on flipping some of the cars and carts over, and we sat our bodies by them to spin their wheels in the air or put sand on their underside to see how it slid off. After some initial encounters where children tried to show that the cars were in the wrong position and “broken,” some of the children became quite interested in the upside down cars and would bring over leaves or twigs to stick in the wheels. They would spin the wheels at great speed, seeing how fast the wheels could go. Sometimes, the children would completely ignore the flipped over cars and carts—making us reflect that perhaps we could be doing a more relevant job at offering provocations to think together about how movement is communicative, relational, and collective. Our relations with movement come with so many histories in early childhood education: motor skill development, active intensity play, individual entertainment, new and novel materials, strict rules to maintain order and calm. As we worked together to create conditions for movement beyond these inheritances, we continually confronted how entrenched and powerful these discourses are. For example, through thinking movement as communicative, we came to want to disrupt some of the individualist practices we had been promoting around movement, as we wanted to experiment with how we might create opportunities for doing movement that take seriously how movement is communicative. We tried flipping the cars and carts over because we wondered how organizing the cars in such a way that one individual body cannot sit on and fully occupy or drive a car might shift what the cars can do and how the cars can move on the playground. We met, in a profound way, with children’s desire to commandeer and pilot a car by themselves. We continued to unsettle this by flipping cars back over if they got flipped right-side-up, and talking with children about how we can move with the cars when they are flipped. Slowly, and very tentatively, we started to build unfamiliar ways to move with the flipped over cars. This work of intentionally creating conditions for movement is very difficult and uncertain. With the children, we are challenging the status quo of how materials are used and reconfiguring the relational role that a child might take on when using the material. We are reinventing how the material becomes imbricated in the collective movement on the playground and how moving with that material communicates something about the way movement unfolds and is valued in the yard. It is uncertain work and we, as adults and researchers, certainly do not already know the outcomes that might emerge. What we do know is the intentions that we carry to making conditions for movement: communication, collectivity, relationality. With the children, we need to put these in motion in everyday moments and see what we create for how movement can happen together.

Caring for movement

To conclude, we want to think through the difficult work of creating conditions that care for communicative, relational, and collective momentary and emergent movement events. Rather than providing recommendations, we each—Sanja and Nicole—want to highlight our tensions and questions that we hope others will think with in their unique contexts.

Sanja: I want to bring forth my initial internal conflict related to movement. Teachers and educators often ask children not to run inside for safety reasons. Although critical of this rule at the beginning of my career, I too, as a result of injuries, soon adopted it in my classroom. And though I felt I gave rational explanations to children as to why I ask them not to run inside, I still felt uneasy limiting their movement. As mentioned earlier, feeling uneasy about thinking of movement as purely physical helped me see it through different lenses and add more layers and meanings to movement. If I consider movement as communicative, relational, and collective, as well as means of disrupting the status quo, it makes me think that it is time to revisit the widely practiced rules relating to movement, such as no running inside. For if movement is children’s means of communicating and building relationships with one another and the world, or even disrupting status quo (just a few meanings in a row of so many that we will hopefully still begin to notice together) then when we ask children not to run, we concurrently ask them not to communicate with each other, not to build relationships with peers and their community, and not to be the drivers of change in the world around them. When we create firm rules and expectations of movement, we choose to understand movement as something individual (this child is running and they should not be), a physical skill (going up the slide is a skill children have not yet mastered enough to perform it safely), and as an outcome (running, these bodies moving quickly, need to be controlled). Further on, such understanding undermines and limits the potential movement can have in children’s learning beyond physical development. When, on the other hand, we take moving seriously as communicative, relational, and productively disruptive, we open the doors to new, unfamiliar and unpredictable connotations of movement waiting to be further unravelled and freed from the prevalent, simplistic definitions of movement.

My thinking about movement has shifted since I first started thinking about it with my research team. Our thinking with movement disrupts the view of movement as individual, purely physical and outcome based. It proposes new layers that are not finite and predictable. These are all ways of getting to know moving that I want to complexify, and that our thinking with movement with toddlers has unsettled. As we continue thinking with movement from a non- outcome based and measurable perspective how will our practice change? How will it shift the way we set up and organize the environment? How will that, in turn, affect our movement and the movement of children?

Nicole: I want to conclude with some propositions for how we might think about doing movement differently, thoughtfully, with children. My colleague, Dr. Cristina D. Vintimilla (Nxumalo et al., 2018: 438, 439) offers a practice of nurturing what she calls “larval” ideas as important in her work as a pedagogista with early childhood educators and children. Vintimilla “call[s] these ideas larval ideas, not yet fully formed, fragile, and present in multiple ways.” For Vintimilla “larval ideas are a presence that speaks of a yet-to-come, of what is, but is not fully formed. Larval ideas, as potentialities of change, appear in an inchoate excitement. The feeling around them is the feeling of creation and creativity . . . of something in motion, being incubated, about to happen, unfolding.” Something in motion and unfolding, made of ongoing creativity. This, I want to suggest, is an orientation that can tie together doing movement as collective, relational, and communicative. In traditional physical education, we enthusiastically operate with fully-formed criteria and standards: balance on one foot by this age, learn to strike a ball by this age. There is nothing larval about mainstream physical education; there are lots of resources (movement guides, skill-building activities) that work hard to make sure movement pedagogies do not find themselves in the inventive, uncertain world of larval ideas. Thinking about larval ideas and creating conditions for meaningful, collaborative, local, intentional movement, I wonder how we might honestly tune to larval movements within the movement exchanges that happen on the playground. How, when movements that we are unfamiliar with happen in the playground, do we take those movements seriously, and resist immediately comparing them to a standard we carry with us? How might we respond with movements performed by more than one individual, noticing how movement becomes collective and relational? And, how might this shape how we answer to these movements? Vintimilla asks “what forms of thought do we have available as educators to respond to curriculum-as-lived and to its unbound emergence?”. I think this is a proposition for us to carry with us as we think about how movement is more than technical, individual, or skill-performance. How can we, borrowing from Vintimilla, respond to movement-as-lived and to how movement happens in emergent, situated, creative, innovative performances? How does paying attention to movement as communicative, collective, and relational demand of us unfamiliar responses and larval methods of moving our own bodies in answer to the movements we participate in?

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

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) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by a Ryerson University Faculty of Community Services Seed Grant.

ORCID iD

Nicole Land

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