1st Edition

Encounters With Materials in Early Childhood Education

    104 Pages 12 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    104 Pages 12 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    Encounters with Materials in Early Childhood Education rearticulates understandings of materials—blocks of clay, sheets of paper, brushes and paints—to formulate what happens when we think with materials and apply them to early childhood development and classrooms. The book develops ways of thinking about materials that are more sustainable and insightful than what most children in the Western world experience today through capitalist narratives.

    Through a series of ethnographic events and engagement with existing ideas of relationality in the visual arts, feminist ethics, science studies, philosophy, and anthropology, Encounters with Materials in Early Childhood Education highlights how materials can be conceptualized as active participants in early childhood education and generators of human insight. A variety of examples show how educators, young children, and researchers have engaged in thinking with materials in early years classrooms and explore what materials are capable of in their encounters with other materials and with children.

    Please visit the companion website at www.encounterswithmaterials.com for additional features, including interviews with the authors and the teachers featured in the book, videos and photographs of the classroom narratives described in these pages, and an ongoing blog of the authors’ ethnographic notes.

    List of Figures

    Acknowledgments

    Chapter 1. Thinking With Materials

    Eventful Material Relations

    Materials in Early Childhood

    The "Material Encounters in Early Childhood Education" Project

    Inquiring into materiality

    Experimentation

    The arts as mode of inquiry

    The studio

    Encounters With Materials and the Reggio Emilia projects

    Inviting conversations through images

    Diffraction as a Mode of Inquiry

    Diffracting with concepts

    This Book’s Entanglements with Paper, Charcoal, Paint, Clay, and Blocks

    Chapter 2. Paper: Movement

    Singularity

    The Movements of Making

    Continuous Motion

    Caught in the Currents

    Surprise

    Movement Across

    Paper in its Final Move

    Chapter 3. Charcoal: Encounter

    To Meet

    To Touch

    To Attend

    To Open

    To Respond

    Chapter 4. Paint: Assemblage

    Improvising

    Emerging

    Blending and Bleeding

    Assembling

    Creating

    Chapter 5. Clay: Ecologies

    Clay in the atrium studio

    Clay in the forest

    Clay at the river

    Meso and Ethoecology

    Attachments

    It Matters

    Fostering and Nourishing

    Folding In

    Ecologies of Practice

    Chapter 6. Blocks: Time

    The Weight of Time

    Playing with Time

    Time as Lived

    Time as Intensity

    Transitory Spaces

    Afterword: Noticing

    References

    Index

    Biography

    Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw is Professor of Early Childhood Education in the Faculty of Education at Western University, Canada.

    Sylvia Kind is Faculty Instructor, Department of Early Childhood Care and Education at Capilano University, Canada, and Adjunct Assistant Professor, Faculty of Graduate Studies at the University of Victoria, Canada.

    Laurie L.M. Kocher is Faculty Instructor, Department of Early Childhood Care and Education at Capilano University, Canada.

    "Through vivid vignettes and extensive theoretical grounding, readers are challenged to reconsider taken-for-granted assumptions about the role of materials in the early childhood classroom. This groundbreaking, deeply layered book will remain important to me as I revisit and reflect on its ideas, and I highly recommend it as a must-read for educators in the disciplines of both art education and early childhood education."

    --Pat Tarr, PhD, retired art and early childhood educator, Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary, Canada

    "'What if…?' This essential question propels this open-ended exploration of the ways that young children and responsive materials interact in early childhood classrooms. The authors invite us to ponder with them, to notice, to question, in ways that move us beyond the conventions and constraints of traditional practices and provisions for young children. Sometimes startling, always provocative, this text rewards careful and considerate reading, as it reminds us how often we tend to structure even the most 'unstructured' aspects of early childhood curriculum, prohibiting truly productive encounters between children and the 'stuff' that offers unknown possibilities."

    --Christine Marmé Thompson, Professor of Art Education, Pennsylvania State University, USA