1,720,991 research outputs found
Becoming affected with artistic memoir: entanglements with arts-based education in India
Get PDFDrawing loosely on feminist and post-human notions of learning as an “untamed” and “more-than-multiple” experience (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 154), I play with the use of Artistic Memoir as a method to explore my affectual experiences (Braidotti, 2002; Springgay, 2008) as a British Columbian, school-based Child and Youth Counsellor working as a visitor in the context of a shanti-school in Goa, India. Well practiced in traditionally Western paradigms of education, my intention is to move beyond my familiar understandings of what it means to be educated in North America to heighten awareness of intuitive forms of learning that arise in an encounter between intra-acting bodies, materials, and the agentic spaces between (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Understanding learning experiences as relational and enigmatic events, composed of rather than in the world, I engage with an inductive, intuitive and becoming-with process, exploring the emerging themes and entanglements of my presence in this Goan classroom as they grow out of a collection of child-driven, emergent art projects (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Mazzei, 2010). As I take on the implications of methodology and “data analysis” in post-qualitative research, I think with Deleuze and Guattari's (1987) constructions of maps, expressing my interpretation of these events with my own poetic and visual assemblages and navigating curiosities through Artistic Memoir. Thinking with philosophies of immanence (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), new materiality (Braidotti, 2002; Stewart, 2007) and the autobiographical nature of a/r/tography (Irwin, Beer, Springgay, Grauer, Xiong, Bickel, 2006), Artistic Memoir has unravelled as a nomadic method, giving my experiences and understandings of the projects a temporal body – a disjointed place for my data, fragments of my affectual reverberations with Goa, to momentarily settle. A fragmented and non-linear collection of poems, images, anecdotes and short stories, this composition begins from the middle and poses no end; its process is designed to stir up questions over answers. Through this method, my intention is to look into the “events of activities and encounters” with affective, arts-based education, “evoking transformation and change” in my experience with “data” and understanding of learning, being and knowing (Hultman & Taguchi, 2010, p. 535)[email protected]
Unsettling encounters with 'natural' places in early childhood education
Get PDFDrawing on everyday encounters from a three year collaborative research project with young children and early childhood educators in British Columbia, Canada, the manuscripts contained in this dissertation craft and put to work practices of witnessing and a methodology of refiguring presences as modes of creating interruptions in settler colonial place relations. This work critically engages with the question of what attention to Indigenous presences, to ongoing colonialisms, and to human/more-than-human entanglements, in everyday pedagogical encounters might do towards enacting anti-colonial early childhood pedagogies. My particular interest is in the anti-colonial possibilities of (re)storying the ‘natural’ places that I inhabit with children and educators.
In the first manuscript, enacting figurations of witnessing, I map the complexities of my role as a pedagogista, early childhood educator, and researcher; situating myself as an embodied and implicated presence within the research and pedagogical practices from which this dissertation is assembled. In the second manuscript, I articulate refiguring presences as an anti-colonial methodological orientation for attending to the intricacies of everyday place encounters in early childhood settings. In the third manuscript, I experiment with refiguring presences through a series of interruptive stories that attend to Indigenous relationalities, human-non-human entanglements and the settler colonial tensions that come together in the making of a mountain forest that I regularly visit with children and educators. In the fourth manuscript, I experiment with refiguring presences to pay attention to everyday encounters with a community garden. I experiment with orientations that bring attention to messy historical relations and that attend to the vitalities of specific plant and animal worlds. I discuss the interruptive effects of this noticing in generating politicized dialogues with this place, where more-than-human socialities (Tsing, 2013) disrupt and subvert colonial impositions of control, belonging and order.Graduat
#AnthropoceneChild: speculative child-figures at the end of the world
No full textIn this dissertation I think-with figures of #AnthropoceneChild in speculative texts that story the end of the world through some form of climate catastrophe. In these post-apocalyptic tales, the child-figures do different things. Firstly, child-figures reflect problematics of the contemporary world without interrupting dominant patterns of thought, materiality, and governance. In these stories, the child is the future and the future is the child. Secondly, some child-figures are tasked with protecting a world in which they have been made disposable. This incites critical questions about distributions of racialized harm and also exposes the limits of survivalist logics. Thirdly, a few child-figures refuse current arrangements of existence and set in motion new worlds, even if the contours, forces, and politics cannot yet be fully described. These are speculative worlds of not this, what if, and not yet. Different aspects of this assemblage are centred at different moments in this dissertation. The looseness of the framework allows me to move between the unsettled complexities of bionormative childhoods, anthropogenic climate change, reproductive futurism, and structures of anti-blackness, settler colonialism, and white supremacy in relation to (1) child-figures at the end of a world, (2) child-figures who save their world, and (3) child-figures who destroy the world.
This dissertation is organized into two main sections: Part I provides the theoretical background for the speculative arguments developed over Part II. In Part I, I unpack my proposal that #AnthropoceneChild bookends the Anthropocene. By this I mean that the language of birth, origin, and innocence finds repetitious form in scholarly discussions of Anthropocene beginnings, and that child-figures are pivotal to playing out the end of the world in pop culture performances of Anthropocene pedagogy. Part II consists of three chapters that engage with speculative child-figures that inherit and inhabit a damaged planet. This includes grappling with racialized technologies of care and abandonment, folding parent-child relations into environmental discourses of stewardship, and gesturing towards imaginaries of what might be possible after the end of the (white) world. The conclusion pulls the ideas and figures of previous chapters together in a queer-kin consideration of geos-futurities for #AnthropoceneChild wherein the end of the world might not be a cause for mourning but a possibility for an otherwise.Graduat
Gathering: an A/R/Tographic practice for teaching in early childhood care and education
No full textThe purpose of this dissertation is to enact and poetically story the nonlinear emergence of an
a/r/tographic practice called gathering—a situated art practice of storying, doing, and making as
researching and thinking—in multiple contexts, including early childhood teacher education and
imperial and settler colonialism in Canada.
Over two years, I sustained a ritual of gathering where I (re)read texts (e.g., Indigenous
theories, Chicana feminisms, antiracist theories, postcolonial theories, and subaltern theories)
and (re)walked the neighbourhood of my apartment on the stolen territories of the Lkwungen people, who are one of the Coast Salish peoples, on southern Vancouver Island, British Columbia. While I walked and as I read, I attended to how other artists, animals, and I gathered objects and ideas, the effects of the environment and weather, and the theoretical orientations and contexts of the ideas and objects. The poetic stories in this dissertation entangle bits of the ideas and objects I gathered during my walks and readings.
I also story how my personal artistic process of gathering unfolded into teaching an
inclusive practice course in the Early Childhood Care and Education Department at Capilano
University. I and my class of preservice early childhood educators gathered on and around the
Capilano campus, located on the traditional territories of Coast Salish peoples, including the
Tsleil-Watuth, Skwxwú7mesh, shíshálh, Lil’Wat, and Musqueam Nations.
With this a/r/tographic research, I offer a pedagogical and aesthetic way with which to
attune to the process, conditions, and situations of engaging multiple theories. I inquire into
different ways of relating with and taking responsibility for others and into what kinds of partial,
incomplete, and imperfect regenerations, possibilities, and futures present themselves through
gathering within a context of imperial and settler colonialism in Canada.Graduat
What Can A Body Do?: Exploring Female Adolescent Sporting Bodies
No full textAs embodiment riddles the body, this thesis interrogates embodiment as a riddle by
foregrounding ethical, epistemological, and ontological questions of what embodiment(s) and bodies might be capable of creating and performing. Articulating local embodiments while also attempting to work through the puzzle of embodiment to playfully illustrate multiple responses to embodiment, this thesis incorporates images and discussion generated with a group of female PeeWee hockey players. Thinking with Deleuze and Guattari, Braidotti, Barad, Kirby, and Grosz, I experiment with articulating tentative, enfleshed, entangled, and emplaced local embodiment(s) through the hockey-bodies of female adolescent athletes.Graduat
Engaging with early childhood educators' encounters with race: an exploration of the discursive, material and affective dimensions of whiteness and processes of racialization.
No full textThere is a lack of critical Canadian scholarship addressing questions of racialization in early childhood education, and yet questions of identity and diversity are at the center of education with young children. Substantive engagement with issues surrounding processes of racialization in early childhood education is often stunted by assertions of childhood innocence, discourses that normalize whiteness, or responses entrenched in multicultural discourse. Using early childhood educators' engagements with racialization and whiteness as starting points, this research employs feminist poststructural, postcolonial and sociomaterial theories to reveal and engage with how whiteness and processes of racialization are negotiated in politically, socially, geographically and temporally located spaces. An exploration of the forces of discourse, affect and materiality in shaping and silencing race opens up new spaces for challenging whiteness and processes of racialization in early childhood education and beyond.Graduat
“Tough parts, connections, interruptions, and courage”: conversations with beginning early childhood educators
No full textThis thesis focuses on beginning early childhood educators and their stories, contributing to an area in the literature that has not been researched extensively. Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) philosophical concepts of assemblage and a rhizome underpin the methodological and theoretical threads in this study, which explores the following research questions: What are the possibilities of conversations when beginning early childhood educators get together? What conditions are needed for beginning educators to stay excited and engaged in their work?
With intention to move beyond an individualistic approach of considering educators as “subjects” telling their individual stories, this study focuses on transcripts, stories, audio recordings, images, materials, the researcher’s memories and stories, related texts, and concepts as vital parts of the assemblage, directing attention to what emerges through connections between the elements. To explore the research questions, four 90-minute group conversation sessions were conducted with four early childhood educators who had been working in the field between one and two years. Collage was used as part of group conversation sessions, to pay attention to what unfolded through engaging with materials and one another.
Bringing together elements of rhizomatic and narrative approaches in the data analysis highlights the importance of listening deeply, attending to one another, and developing trust to engage in genuine conversations from the heart to form caring relations, as well as directing attention to the complexities and tensions of educators’ practice. The results of the study also point in the direction of switching focus from an individualistic, fast-paced professional development approach to meaningful collective opportunities for professional learning, attending to the concept of time as relational. The study suggests creating a network of educators to continue genuine conversations and nurture connections that will help educators to stay excited and engaged in their work.Graduat
Exploring the possibilities of learning stories as a meaningful approach to early childhood education in Nunavik
Get PDFThis study investigates the potential of learning stories to provide a means to incorporate Indigenous perspectives and transform the educational status quo by working with locally based early childcare educators to knead the learning story approach into something community specific. This is an action research project grounded in Indigenous methods and methodologies embedded in processes of transformative education informed by post-colonial discourse and de-colonial theory. The study found that learning stories provide a medium through which children can see themselves as part of a world that includes Inuit knowledge(s) and practices. These stories provide a place through which identities grounded in Inuit knowledge(s) and language can be formed. By creating learning stories, the work of the educator and children together becomes visible to children, parents, and the educator’s colleagues. The process of creating learning stories and planning for them strengthens connections with Elders, who become through the process recognized for their role as valuable transmitters of cultural knowledge.Graduat
Common worlding pedagogies: cultivating the ‘arts of awareness’ with tracking, compost, and death
Get PDFThis thesis foregrounds moments from an early childhood centre’s multispecies inquiry to grapple with the question of what pedagogies and practice might need to look and feel like to create the conditions for new ways of thinking and doing with other species in troubling times. Drawing on post-foundational feminist conceptual frameworks, it takes an interdisciplinary approach to challenging dominant narratives about young children’s more-than-human relations in a rapidly changing world. In the first chapter, I discuss tracking with young children as a generative method for cultivating the arts of awareness and opening up our understandings of place relations. In the second chapter, I reconfigure care as a multispecies achievement to explore the question of what it means to care with and not just for the creatures who thrive inside of an early childhood centre’s worm-compost bin. In it, I juxtapose compost inquiry moments with the material consequences of out-of-sight-out-of-mind approaches to managing our untenable food waste in contemporary Canadian society. In the final chapter, I share moments from an early childhood centre’s unexpected encounter with a dying rat to rethink children’s relations with death in an age of accelerated mass extinctions. What does it mean to care with a creature few want to claim, but with whom we are connected in unsettling ways?Graduat
Disrupting the all-too-human body through art in early childhood education and care
No full textThe purpose of my research is to disrupt the all-too-human body through art in early childhood education and care. This study begins by constructing the problem of the all-too-human body as it is practiced in the classroom and through art. With this study, I attempt to disrupt this way of reading the body through an art encounter. This involves rethinking/rewriting how we come to practice art making. To do this, I turn to the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari (1987) and employ three concepts: the Body without Organs (BwO), assemblage, and becoming. With these concepts, this thesis is inspired by an immanent relational materialist onto-epistemology.Graduat
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