“Worm Alert!” Disrupting Neoliberal Straightening in Early Learning Through Child-Led Documentation and Relational Ebullience

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Saturday 8:00 am Four Seasons Ballroom 1
  In Roundtable Session: Critical Arts-Based Approaches in Early Childhood (Table 4)

Abstract

This paper draws from a yearlong multispecies ethnography of preschoolers’ common world encounters in an urban garden through child-led documentation. Focusing on an emergent worm curriculum, I diffractively attend to child-material-more-than-human encounters using an intra-active pedagogy and describe a phenomenon I call relational ebullience: children’s spontaneous, dynamic, and joyful intra-active encounters in child-led documentation. Applying a critical phenomenological lens, this paper conceptualizes pedagogical documentation as an orientation device and offers a praxis-oriented push to disrupt neoliberal straightening of documentation practices in early childhood education by centering children’s perspectives and multispecies relationships in place-based learning.

Author

• Luke Max Muscat, St. Luke's School