Journal of Early Childhood Literacy

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.

Drawing on our documentation of transforming an informal learning centre (the Playhouse) in a multilingual, working-class neighbourhood, this paper presents significant and deliberate material-discursive changes at the Playhouse that produced unpredictable shifts in belongings among young children. More specifically, this paper entwines our place-making experiences with theories of feminist new materialism, to explore the object as a material-discursive apparatus in the production of literacies, particularly literacies of race and class. Implications for careful analysis of the racialized and classed literacies produced through the materiality of educational spaces suggest that when we entangle ourselves with material-discursive apparatuses, through play and otherwise, we acquire such literacies and that issues of accessibility always involve the more than human.

Children's intra-actions with the natural world offer an important lens to revisit notions of literacies. They allow for a decentring of humans – here children – as actors. Also, forest schools and nature-based learning programmes are increasingly erupting across North America, although more commonplace in Europe for a longer period. In this presentation of our research, we feature a storying/(re)storying of data from a yearlong research study of children's entanglements with the forest as a more-than-human world. We ask what we might learn if educators, children and researchers think with sticks, not separate from, but in relation to sticks? Eight preschool children, two educators and two researchers ventured into the forest twice a week over the course of a year, documenting their interactions with a mosaic of data generation tools, such as notebooks, iPads, Go-Pro cameras. The forest offered diverse materials that provoked “thing-matter-energy- child-assemblages” that were significant for the children's play and literacy framing. Through post-humanist theorizing, we have paid particular attention to the stick within the children's forest play and illustrate the ways in which the stick was entangled with children’s bodies, relations, identities and discourses. The stick was a catalyst, a friend, a momentary and changing text, an agentic force acting relationally with children's play and stories. The post humanism storying/(re)storying of the children's encounters in the forest with sticks invites infinite possibilities for literacy teaching and learning. How might educators foster such relations, enquiring with and alongside children with an openness toward what the sticks (forests) might teach us?

This manuscript focuses on agency from a posthumanist stance. For so long, educators’ definitions of agency have focused solely on people. As we read more on posthuman ideas of agency, we were also reading Deleuze and Guattari’s work on philosophy and concepts. These two bodies of scholarship intra-acted with each other to create newness of ideas for us. In other words, readings on philosophy and concepts have helped us to better understand what posthumanist enacted agency is (or what it does). In order to think about enacted agency, we invited the concept of persistence(ing) to think-with-us-and-data-and-theories. Situated in a second grade Writers’ Studio, during a study on personal narratives, we found ourselves intrigued by a 20-minute clip of Katie-working-with-materials to create a 3-dimensional cabin as a way to bring her readers/users to the National Parks to which she travelled with her family. We invite the reader to consider: What is posthuman agency? Or more-than-human agency? How do you know when you see it happening? How do you go about researching this agency? Perhaps most importantly, why does it matter for literacy educators to think of agency as enacted between humans and nonhumans? We conclude by discussing several insights from analysis and why posthuman agency is productive for early literacy research and pedagogy.

This paper examines the potential of posthumanism to enable a reconceptualisation of young children’s literacies from the starting point of movement and sound in the more-than-human world. We propose movement as a communicative practice that always occurs as a more complex entanglement of relations within more-than-human worlds. Through our analysis, an understanding of sound emerged as a more-than-human practice that encompasses children’s linguistic and non-linguistic utterances, and which occurs through, with, alongside movement. This paper draws on data from two different research studies: in the first study, two-year-old children in the UK banged on drums and marched in a museum. In the second study, two young children in Australia chose sites for their own research and produced a range of emergent literacies from vocalisation and ongoing stories to installations. We present examples of ways in which speaking, gesturing and sounding, as emergent literacy practices, were not so much about transmitting information or intentionally designed signs, but about embodied and sensory experiences in which communication about and in place occurred through the body being and moving in place. This paper contributes to the field of posthuman early childhood literacies by foregrounding movement within in-the-moment becoming. Movement and sound exist beyond the parameters of human perception, within a flat ontology in which humans are decentred and everything exists on the same plane, in constant motion. Starting from movement in order to conceptualise literacy offers, therefore, an expanded field of inquiry into early childhood literacy. In the multimodal literacy practices analysed in this paper, meaning and world emerge simultaneously, offering new forms of literacy and representation and suggesting possibilities for defining or conceptualising literacy in ways that resist anthropocentric or logocentric framings.

(Re)Entering data from a networked collaborative project exploring how sound operates as a mechanism for attuning towards cultural difference and community literacies, this article examines one primary grade classroom’s participation to investigate the rhythmic rituals of ‘emergent listening’ in early childhood literacy. Thinking with sound studies and more posthuman ways of knowing/being/doing, this article details how the sonic was felt not only as an actor on the scene of young children writing but also as an intra-active agent of what the teacher called ‘making space’ and community. Exploring ‘emergent listening’ through a diffractive entanglement of stories and concepts, this paper focus on two pieces of early writing: a digitally produced audio clip and a ‘body built’ (Ms Lionel’s words) tableau depicting the sensorial process and thinking behind children’s making moments. The findings highlight how particular actions of emergent listening generated new forms of embodied knowledge-in-motion. Encouraging educators to consider the modal affordances of sound and sonic composition, this article expands definitions of young children composing with material realia and explores how, as this article suggests, emergent listening opens up pedagogical spaces where creative energies are generated and mobilized to bring to fruition an ethico-onto-epistemological world view.

In this article, we think through six-year-old Mike’s play with Lego and with his father, using Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the break. For Deleuze and Guattari, the break is thought about in relation to impersonal flows of desire that are always everywhere at work and to the refrain, which we describe as materials and energies organized into repeating patterns. The movement of desiring flows in relation to refrains inevitably produces difference; breaks matter insofar as they are the introduction of difference that might make a difference, that produces movement and momentum, the felt life in things. In this article, we take two passes at thinking about breaks and their associated movements. In the first, we come close to the action of Mike’s play to think about materials, narratives and discourses, and about the ways, both predictable and wild, that they assemble and disassemble, hold together and fall apart. In the second pass, we think about the temporal organization of play and how players mess about in time and with time, drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s (1990) notion of chronos and aiôn. After considering the break in Mike’s play, we conclude with reflections on the differences that would be possible were we to allow movement to be immanent to our ways of being as researchers and as teachers.

This article explores how the processes of writing and writers emerge and transform in two examples of Swedish early childhood educational writing practices. Students’ writing is a multifaceted activity involving a myriad of interconnected elements; however, to make sense of what is going on, more knowledge is needed about the connectivity, the movement and the unpredictability inherent in these activities. Taking a posthuman and nomadic perspective, the article studies how text and writer are co-constituted through the interrelations between human elements and non-human elements. The article concludes that conceptualizing writing as nomadic provides a way to view young children's educational writing as sites of experimentation, thus guiding the pedagogical attention to the productive potential of the writing situation.

Two approaches to materiality (i.e. mediated discourse and agential realism) are compared to explore their usefulness in tracking literacies in action and artefacts produced during a play and design activity in a preschool makerspace. Mediated discourse analysis has relied on linguistic framing and social semiotics to make sense of multimodality. Can a multimodal lens grounded in embodied histories of meaning-making unpack sensory exploration, silly repetition and free-wheeling nonsense in children’s playdough play? Barad’s agential realism seems promising for unpacking the sensory and the emergent produced in the materiality, fluidity and messiness of entangled bodies and things in a makerspace. We compare key constructs of mediated discourse and agential realism, comparing interaction and intra-action in video excerpts from two weeks of play with playdough electronics kits in three early childhood classrooms in a US university childcare centre. Mediated discourse analysis of multimodality identified collaborative interaction among players in a small group and tracked a collective flow of materialized knowledge that moved through children’s sharing and collaboration. Agential realism tracked intra-actions among bodies, materials and spaces as transitory becomings and undoings that rupture definitions of sense-making as strategic design that manipulates materials into artefacts or as play that resemiotizes materials into roles and props in dramatized narratives.