Refiguring Quality in Early Childhood Educational Practice: Witnessing as a More-Than-Human Methodological Orientation

• In Event: Roundtable Session 15
  In Roundtable Session: Casting a Critical "I/Eye" on Alternative Methodological Perspectives in Education

Abstract

This paper puts to work the figuration of the modest witness (Haraway, 1997) towards a methodology for storying everyday encounters in childhood settings. These stories are partial tellings of ongoing experimentations with possibilities for unsettling dominant framings of quality pedagogical practices. As an interruption to fixities in articulations of quality, I consider how witnessing as a response, might refigure quality in practice as material, more-than-human, and always-becoming. Working within the particular context of British Columbia, Canada, my particular orientation is towards refiguring quality through emergent interferences to child-centeredness in everyday forest encounters. Through a series of performative stories, I experiment with foregrounding implicated, responsive, and messy practices-in-question that might bring hopeful possibilities for re-imagining quality.

Author

• Fikile Nxumalo, The University of Texas - Austin