Learning at a Snail's Pace: What Else Is Happening in a Resource-Constrained South African Grade 1 Classroom?

• In Event: AERA Poster Session 8
  In Poster Session: Approaches to Learning (San Diego)

Abstract

This paper draws on a large mixed-method international research project Children,Technology and Play (2019-2020). Provoked by the question ‘What else is happening?’ in one Grade 1 classroom in this study, we give a flavour of how posthuman pedagogies work to trouble culture/nature and adult/child binaries in a South African informal settlement. We theorise the teacher’s creative, non-prescriptive practices through critical posthumanism by taking the relationality between human and non-human bodies as the ontological starting point rather than individual existence. We show children’s learning at a non-linear snail’s pace as multilinear, fluid and spiralling. We offer seven vignettes and take the audience on a sticky visual journey that leaves slimy traces that cannot be erased.

Authors

• Karin Saskia Murris, University of Oulu

• Joanne Kelly Peers, University of Oulu