Becoming "Babies" in Real Time: Childhoods and Temporal Emergence in the Classroom Mangle

• In Event: 14.032 - Childhood and Time: Rethinking Notions of Temporality in Early Childhood Education

Abstract

This paper contributes to the emerging “posthuman conversation” (Taylor, Pacini-Ketchabaw, & Blaise, 2012) within early childhood education and childhood studies. Specifically, this work makes moves toward reconceptualizing children’s becoming within educational contexts by interrupting taken-for-granted notions of time and temporality. The purpose of this paper is two-fold: 1) to interrogate the ways in which adult notions of “time” came to bear upon Kindergarten children’s enactments of “babies” within a classroom pretend play performance and, 2) to explore how posthuman conceptions of temporality can resist developmental analyses of children’s (un)timely performances and accommodate a more nuanced version of childhood becoming(s).
This paper focuses on performances of “baby” that occurred during a yearlong ethnographic study in one kindergarten classroom in the United States. Over the course of many weeks, five- and six-year-olds enacted what is commonly conceptualized as a sociodramatic play scheme (Jones & Reynolds, 2011) in which they used props and mutually agreed upon rules/roles to act out a “babies” script. Photographic and narrative data was constructed with children around these play performances wherein they crawled on the floor, cried for their bottles, babbled, feigned scratching and biting, and demanded swaddling and rocking from the researcher. Although mainstream best practice guidelines support sociodramatic play as an avenue for the development of social, cognitive, emotional, and physical skills (Copple & Bredecamp, 2009), “playing babies” troubled teachers that both directly and indirectly observed these enactments. Inherent to adults’ critiques were notions of linear time linked to predetermined developmental outcomes (i.e., childhood-in-time), resulting in the context and content of children’s play being analysed through a lens of temporal normativity.
The second part of this paper forgoes this more fixed conception of time in relation to children’s development and content of play, turning instead to Pickering’s posthuman notion of The Mangle (1995) in order to explore “the temporal emergence of plans and goals and their transformability in encounters with material agency” (Pickering, 1995, p. 18). The Mangle comprises an agential dance wherein both human and nonhuman agents emerge in real-time through reciprocal resistances and accommodations. Since “human intentions, goals, and desires get mangled and emerge in time as a result of these human and nonhuman performances” (Sent, 2008, p.109), the outcomes of practices are impossible to fully predict. Conceptualizing these classroom enactments as/within The Mangle makes room for a more fluid conception of “babies” as temporally emergent (i.e., childhood-as-time). In addition, children’s own perspectives resisted the more humanistic interpretations afforded by developmentalism, articulating “playing babies” as a mangling of various classroom-childhood becomings.

Author

• Casey Yvonne Myers, Kent State University - Kent