Finding Child beyond Child: a critical posthumanist orientation to foundation phase

teacher education

Karin Murris and Kathryn Muller

Question Mark Taken from “The Visitors Who came to Stay” Annalena McAfee/Anthony Browne

Guiding aims of education

Qualification: acquisition of

knowledge, skills and

dispositions

Socialisation: learning to do

what/as others do

Subjectification: formation

and transformation of the

person

Relational Material

subjectification

Reading Biesta & Barad

diffractively

(Murris, 2016)

Diffraction as object and method

Throwing two stones in a pond

creating a diffraction pattern or

‘superposition’ (Barad 2007)

Focus on difference not identity:

positive difference. Forever

becoming & beyond binaries.

Reflection: a distance from the world incl. self.

Focus on identity, and an individual ‘stepping

back’. Looking for the same/similar.

Popular metaphor in research and assessment

Anthropomorphic ontology and epistemology

Reflection misses important knowledges

Subjectification

Socialisation: becoming part of an existing

order and the creation of an identity through

identification with that order.

Subjectification: guided by freedom and is

about existence “outside” such orders.

Formation and transformation of students and

teachers into “subjects” coming into presence as

individuals, as independent agents actively

shaping society.

But not in isolation!

Relational ontology, an event

Hannah Arendt’s notion of action:

Each person’s ‘coming into presence’ depends

on how their beginnings are taken up by

others.

“The way in which others take up my

beginnings are radically beyond my control”

(Biesta, 1994: 143).

So, a subject’s coming into world is always

shaped by the actions of others.

What is the ‘superposition’?

Biesta: a subject is an existential event, not an

identity or essence (Biesta, 2014, p.143).

Therefore, education should start “by articulating

an interest in that which announces itself as a

new beginning” (Biesta, 2014, p.143).

Barad: meaning and matter are always

ontologically entangled – against an

anthropocentric epistemology = the idea that

meaning making is a process between humans

only

‘Relational material subjectification’

Biesta: agency is a human affair, so his subjectification

is still humanist

Barad: agency of the environment, things, materials

and places in the on-going interrelations and mutual

processes of transformation emerging in-between

human organisms and matter and in-between different

matter irrespective of human intervention (Palmer

2011)

subjectification is not only discursive, but also material

– the materiality of the human and nonhuman bodies

involved in producing the event

UCT PGCE FP Curriculum

• Education(al Studies) 32 7

• Childhood Studies 10 7

• Life Skills 10 7

• Special Studies 10 7

• Teaching Literacy in Multilingual contexts 10 7

• Mathematics 10 7

• School Experience 32 7

• Xhosa communication (non-credit bearing)

• Communication skills in English (non-credit bearing)

The Childhood Studies course

“This experientially course draws on philosophy of education to

explore key issues in childhood education. The theories we will be

looking at will be used to articulate justifications for certain educational

practices and for most of this year we will be exploring the ‘why’ of

what we do in class as teachers. Broadly speaking, the theoretical

orientation of the course is critical posthumanist, or, sometimes called

relational materialist. In the process of exploring the implications of

posthumanism for childhood education, we will be guided by three

aims of education, and touch on psychological and sociological theories

of childhood, including developmental psychology and Vygotsky. Key

questions are ‘What is knowledge?’, ‘What is learning?’ in the context

of the core question ‘What is child?. From a multidisciplinary

perspective, the course examines shifting conceptions of child and

childhood and the implications for pedagogy…….”

Figurations of

child

Theoretical

Influences

What child lacks by

Nature:

What Culture

needs to provide

Developing child Aristotle,

Darwin, Piaget,

Vygotsky

Maturity Maturation;

Guidance

Ignorant child Plato, Aristotle,

Locke

Rationality;

Experience

Instruction;

Training

Evil child Christianity esp.

Protestantism

Trustworthiness,

natural goodness

Control, discipline

Inculcation;

Drawing in

Innocent child Romantics

(Rousseau)

Responsibility Protection

Facilitation

Communal child African

philosophy,

Ubuntu

Social relationships,

norms and values

Socialisation by

elders

Inculcation

Fragile child Psycho-medical

scientific model

Resilience Protection

Medication

Diagnoses;

Remediation

Figurations of child – in short

1. Developing child – only potential, needs maturing

2. Ignorant child – needs education (‘writing on’)

3. Evil child – needs control & correction

4. Innocent child – needs protection

5. Communal child – needs socialisation, inculcation

6. Fragile child – needs protection

Not-fully human

The Big Baby

Anthony Browne

• passive individual child

to be measured,

controlled and

compared

• incapable, passive,

invisible, vulnerable

and needy

• investment for the

future, a mini adult

• excluded

onto-epistemologically

• a lesser being &

‘listening-as-usual’

Critical ‘post’ humanism

Interdependence

between

human animals, animals

and nonhumans (e.g.

machines, paper,

concepts).

alternative to the

anthropo-centric

nature of binary thinking:

mind/body, inner/outer,

language/matter,

nature/culture, child/adult

…

Posthumanism

Posthumanism: alternative to the anthropocentric

nature of binary thinking: mind/body, child/adult,

language/matter, inner/outer, nature/culture…

A new ontoepistemology: enables a re-evaluation of

child as (e)mergent competent thinker and meaning

maker through material-discursive relationships.

How? By removing language as the main hub of

knowledge production and with it the ‘fully-human’

sophisticated language speaker of age as the sole

knowing subject & different view of time

Subject as iii

Posthumanism:

• rethinking of ‘human’ through

‘child’: multiple, not singular

Body not a bounded object

in space and time

Not a container of e.g.

emotions/thoughts, but a force,

Field matter is not passive, but dynamic and has agency - not

something or someone has, but an enactment

Neologism for ‘bodymindmatter’: iii – relational ontology

- a proposal to help bring about a different way of being, doing

and thinking.

- “might chafe at first, just like a new pair of shoes”

Child as iii – a matter of ontoepistemic

justice

Living without bodily ‘borders’ or ‘boundaries’ ‘the’ ‘iii’ as quantum

entanglement is not a ‘new’ unity, but it is like ‘a’ sea that as a ‘unit’

troubles the very nature of one-ness, two-ness, three-ness…the

use of the pronoun should provoke “a different sense of a-count-

ability, a different arithmetic, a different calculus of response-

ability” (Barad, 2014, p.178).

Relations are always material-discursive and constitute the

individual - not the other way round.

Not just a matter of semantics, but a matter of ethics and politics.

How can we do justice to child by using an ontology that assumes

that there are “no individual independently existing entities or

agents that pre-exist their acting upon one another”?

Entangled material-discursive

engagements of students’ bodyminds

Reflective/reflexive journaling:

Focus on the self & rational choices (collection of competencies

and skills), or

Focus on how power operates (incl emotions) on this reflexive

process and knowledge production

Diffractive journaling:

“a method of diffractively reading insights through one another,

building new insights, and attentively and carefully reading for

differences that matter in their fine details, together with the

recognition that intrinsic to this analysis is an ethics that is not

predicated on externality but rather entanglement. Diffractive

readings bring inventive provocations; they are good to think

with. They are respectful, detailed, ethical engagements”.

Being with and as part of the

world

Aims: further disruption necessary, in particular of

1. Nature/Culture dichotomy &

2. Therefore the particular teacher/child pedagogical

relationship

3. Logic of representation &

4. Language (incl maths) as the only means of

knowledge construction

Interventions: e.g. new reading pack, workshops with

Kristy Stone, Kitamura’s picturebook Once upon an

ordinary schoolday

Philosophy with Children (P4C)

Intra-acting with IWB &

picturebook

New reading pack & workshops

Reading pack:

Erica Burman. Beyond the Baby and the Bathwater

Ramaekers and Suissa. What all parents need to know: exploring the hidden

normativity of the language of developmental psychology.

Palmary and Mahati. Using deconstructing developmental psychology to read

child migrants to South Africa.

Taylor and Blaise. Queer-worlding childhood.

Olsson. Movement and experimentation in young children’s learning.

Taylor and Richardson. Queering Home Corner.

Workshops:

1. P4C workshop

2. Being in touch with materials

3. Hands activity

4. Clay objects intra-acting

Workshops

Students without bodily boundaries?

Diffraction = a relational

ontology – on-going process

in which meaning and matter

are co-constituted

Preparing for the aquarium

outing

‘Oceans’ DvD, OHPs & light

boxes

Assessment of the Childhood

Studies course

Final exhibition that includes a material record

of their own shifting views of child(hood):

1. Diffractive journal with augmented realities

2. Model construction of an ideal classroom

3. Art installation (e.g a construction, series of

photographs, collage, Dvd)

Registering of the differences that matter,

being accountable & response-able for the

new and a mapping of how childism is

produced.

Not ‘object-orientated-ontology’

(OOO)

What does it mean to be an object? To be an animal?

Matter (modernity): ‘simply located’, without relations, inert,

passive mechanically following Newtonian laws.

Disrupted by physics (not only quantum physics)

Whitehead ‘bifurcation of nature: humans distancing

themselves from nature: anthropocentric. Problem with the

very concept of ‘nature’.

OOO: agency to matter, but without the Subject (so humanist)

Posthuman: matter, subject, instrument that measures always

entangled in a material discursive environment

Risk of anthropomorphising?

Humanising

animals

&

things is a

potent

narrative

device for

‘paying

attention’ to

the world we

are part off

The nature of nature

Stengers: Nature is not inert - it is what we are aware

of in perception if we ‘pay full attention’

Not only humans create knowledge with a knowing

subject whose eyes represent the world, while

escaping him or her self from representation

(Haraway)

Teaching is always an entangled relationship

involving all earth dwellers: females, slaves, children,

animals, brittle stars and matter – the not ‘fully-

humans’ of humanism (Murris, 2016)

Kate’s art installation

The examiner of the course