Elemental Childhoods Beyond Space and Time

• In Event: Childhood and Schooling Beyond the Western Horizon Encounters with Memories, Matter, and More-than-Human Worlds

Proposal

This paper explores children’s embodied experiences with matter and the more-than-human world across place and time. Revisiting data from two projects of co-researching with children in the United States and Brazil through the lens of pancha bhutas, an elemental framework, we acknowledge that the universe is supported by the five gross elements. These elements are space (akash), air (vayu), fire (agni), water (Jal) and earth which, according to Hinduism, are represented in everything and form the basis of life everywhere (D. Saraswati, 2012; T. Saraswati, 2004). In this paper, we address the question: How does an elemental framework allow us to see embodied childhoods of/across/beyond place and time?

The five basic elements are found across space and time in all objects and forms in the universe in multiple varying configurations. When children interact with the world around them, their embodied experiences are with different configurations of the same elements. Associated with these basic elements are their intrinsic qualities, which are not limited to, but include movement, the ability to change form, blending with other elements to create new objects, and energy to cross boundaries while at the same time fit into the shape of the context. We examine children’s meaning-making through this lens to understand their experiences connected to and through the qualities of the five basic elements or pancha bhutas. Exploring children’s relationships with the worlds around them through this lens allows us to see beyond the mainstream developmental perspectives used in the early childhood field to understand the connection of children’s experiences with the basic elements of life that connect us to a specific locale. Drawing on data generated with children in the United States and Brazil including daily journal entries, children’s world books, photographs, art and artifacts as well as fieldnotes, we explore how the qualities of one of the elements, water, are represented in our data, and, by extension, children’s worlds. Visual data from our fieldwork such as photos and children’s drawings, allows us to compare how children in both contexts interact with different configurations of the elements including blocks, dirt, flowers, firewood, and animals. This process of applying an elemental framework analysis to ethnographic data generated with children highlights the intrinsic characteristics of the elements - in this case, how water flows and is boundless - as they are reflected within and beyond the children. In other words, we observe that as children reconfigure the elements, they reconfigure themselves. New configurations emerge across space and time.

Tuning into embodied childhoods across geographic location and linear time has implications for how we view education and learning in the context of intersecting vulnerabilities such as the hierarchical divisions between teacher and student as well as between human and nature. When we view learning through this lens as both relational and grounded in the intrinsic properties of the elements that comprise the universe, we broaden what it means to foster environmentally just and equitable education.

Authors

• Anu Sachdev, EAST STROUDSBURG UNIVERSITY

• Janna Goebel, Arizona State University