What Is "Child-Friendliness"? A Posthuman Reconceptualization With Art, Bicycles, and Children

• 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 introduces cycling methodologies, a novel approach in qualitative inquiry in which children use bicycles to observe and make art as a means of vibrantly encountering material worlds. Grounded in a posthuman theoretical framework, this approach engages children in participatory, arts-based explorations of urban ‘child-friendliness’ that includes native flora and fauna. This paper discusses the posthuman and pragmatist feminist theoretical underpinnings of cycling methodologies, emphasizing their potential to remedy the marginalization and erasure of children, plants, and animals in public life. The paper deepens insights into the embodied entanglement of humans and non-humans, pertinent to early childhood education research and made vibrant through bicycles.

Author

• Whitney Danielle Blaisdell, University of Regina