Embodied Mattering in Research: Listening to Classroom Community Norms

• In Event: Ethnographic Research for Repair, Liberation, and Community Empowerment in Early Childhood Settings

Abstract

Objectives: This presentation grapples with what it means for young children to matter in school and in educational research. Honoring young children’s mattering in research requires emancipatory methodologies that reimagine: “researcher/researched” binaries, how we engage, what is documented and who/what gets to guide the process.
Theoretical framework: Children, especially those racialized and intersectionally marginalized, experience schooling contexts with messages that their identities, languages, (dis)abilities, communities, ways of being, histories, interests, joy, wonder, and movement do not matter (Love, 2019; Muhammad, 2023) or that their mattering is conditional upon their school readiness, educational attainments, or future-oriented neoliberal goals (Carey, 2019; Dahlberg et al., 2007). Young children’s mattering in the classroom has multiple forms: relational, contextual, collective, and embodied (Authors, forthcoming). When young children experience mattering in school, they learn in embodied ways and experience bodily safety. Embodied mattering is visceral: it is the feeling and experience that your movement, perceptions, participation, and relations to other bodies are necessary and protected (Thiel, 2015).
Methods: We draw on two studies that used video-cued ethnographic approaches (Adair & Kurban, 2019; Tobin et al, 1989), in which researchers engage in deep observation, film the classroom, then use the film in video-cued focus groups and interviews.
Data Sources: Both studies took place in classrooms that emphasized and supported young children’s embodied mattering in educational settings. In both research settings, children learned through participation, movement, action, and noise (Adair & Colegrove, 2021). Study 1 focused on the liberatory affordances of a summer school program’s practices, norms, curriculum, and engagements for young Black children. Study 2 focused on how children in two early childhood classrooms learned about race and racism.
Results: Throughout these studies, we experienced shifts in our research methods when we attempted to engage in traditional researcher’s capacities but were gently guided towards a different approach by participants. In study 1, the focal teacher’s feedback shifted author 1 ways of learning with and from the community from data collection focused on written observations to embodied participation and relationship development with children and the community! In study 2, the children shifted researcher stance by moving author 2’s field notes aside and insisting on her full body participation: sitting on the carpet, joining dance circles, cracking cascarones over children’s heads. These shifts enabled different ways of knowing, positively impacted our relationships with participants and created opportunities for children’s increased participation in data collection and analysis. We also explore how the resulting shifts in researcher stance expanded our own understanding of embodied research, helping us identify opportunities for repair such as developing a feel for when filming or documenting would be intrusive or even unethical.
Scholarly significance of the study: We conclude that healing and repair in education and research require we live in the tensions of reenvisionings our ways of knowing, deconstruct old epistemologies and shift research practices while continually engaging in reflexivity – co constructing, consulting and honoring the voices and needs of the communities we are committed to (Pérez, et al., 2022; Urrieta, 2009).

Authors

• Natacha Ndabahagamye Jones, University of North Texas

• Anna Falkner, University of Memphis