“They Couldn’t Name It, But They Felt It . . .”: Examining Young Children’s "Felt" Learning in STEAM

• In Event: Thursday Roundtable Session 12:40 pm
  In Roundtable Session: Expanding Experiences and Intended Outcomes Around STEM Learning (Table 17)

Abstract

Following affective turn in the learning sciences, this paper investigates how attuning to the felt dimensions of young children experimenting with sound in an integrative STEAM unit enabled new forms of thinking, knowing, and being in the early childhood classroom. More specifically, it asks: (1) How did sound – both as a felt material and semiotic resource – function in an early years integrative art-science unit? (2) What were the ‘heard’ resources and ‘felt’ dimensions of young children investigating and constructing explanations about the physical properties of sound production? and (3) How might sound, when understood as a representational analytic and affective object of inquiry, shift modalities of encounter and emergence in the learning sciences?

Author

• Jon M. Wargo, University of Michigan