"This Is Research, Boy!" Emerging and Be[com]ing With Objects in an Early Childhood Literacy Workshop

• In Event: 18.072 - Roundtable Session 6
  In Roundtable Session: 18.072-14 - (Re)thinking and (Re)defining Approaches to Research in Early Childhood

Abstract

This paper examines the ways in which children’s bodies and objects in an early childhood classroom intra-act, creating new modes of existence for the human and nonhuman. The ethnographic study in which this paper is situated evolved over the course of eight months in a second grade public school classroom in the southeastern United States. Drawing on Deleuzoguattarian philosophies, I analyze the ways in which three boys’ intra-actions with the World Wresting Enterprise (WWE) created new opportunities for them to be[come] in school. I consider implications for turning a gaze toward the relationship between the human and nonhuman as a means to move past familiar and often marginalizing representations of young children and to recognize the plurality of early childhood.

Author

• Kortney B. Sherbine, The Pennsylvania State University