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Textile Encounters: Practicing With/in a Knotty Curriculum

Sat, April 9, 12:25 to 1:55pm, Marriott Marquis, Floor: Level Four, Liberty Salon N

Abstract

This paper explores the ethico-political and more-than-human relations that are always already situated with/in the ordinary routine encounters of children, teachers and materials in early childhood education curriculum. Drawing on an inquiry with “textiles as provocation”, we consider how complex conceptualizations of child/more-than-human relations might help us to in(e)voke a curriculum of care that responds to the material, colonial and environmental legacies that we live with and bequeath to children.

We draw on the scholarship of feminist scholars who call for new practices of ‘care’ (Barad, 2007; Haraway, 2008, Rose, 2004; van Dooren, 2014). They suggest that care is “an affective state, a material vital doing, and an ethico-political obligation” (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2011, p. 90) that requires an ethic of relationality and interdependence that challenges various forms of exclusion, power and domination. Inspired by Indigenous scholars (e.g., Tuck & Gaztambide-Fernández, 2013; Tuck & Yang, 2014), we extend this notion of care by attending to the always already less-than-seamless, unequal and imperfect, colonial-settler and human and more-than-human relatings that emerge in early childhood curriculum. Although “responding with care” is a central concept and a practice in early childhood education, it is often understood as an un-problematic and universal principle that educators know how to execute (see Thompson, 2015). By drawing on feminist and Indigenous scholars we complicate this taken for granted notions of care through our work with textiles.

We will use visual and textual data generated from our ethnographic child-educator-textile inquiry as a provocation for discussion. Following a diffractive methodology (Barad, 2007; Haraway, 1997), materialsemiotic moments from the inquiry are traced (Barad in Juelskær & Schwennesen, 2012; Haraway, 2012) for/to the multiple complex relationalities that these encounters touch in, near and far from the classroom. The act of tracing is a political and ethical intervention intentionally put to work to make visible the mattering of practices.

We will consider the numerous challenges and tensions that we are grappling with in our work with young children: How do we create spaces for the ethical and political, with the children and educators, with their families? How will we work to make visible that which is (often) unseen (rendered invisible)? How will we, in Haraway's words, “do the work of paying attention and making sure that the suffering is minimal, necessary and consequential” (p. 82, italics in the original). What choices will we make before, during and after our curricula encounters? What and whom will we care for? “To what and whom is a response required?” (Gane & Haraway, 2006, p. 145), for what and whose justice will we work? This paper asks a set of questions that are significant for disrupting (child and futurity centred) developmental interpretations of pedagogical encounters and (re)situating early childhood education curriculum within colonial, material, affective, embodied entanglements.

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