CUPS: The affective force of 'things' on learning and subjectivity in early childhood education.

Abstract

This thesis inquires into the affective force of the material world on learning, subjectivity and creative expression in early childhood education. Inspired by Lenz Taguchi’s (2010a) notion of an intra-active pedagogy it (ad)ventures beyond the human-centrism of both cognitive development theory and social constructivist theory prevalent in Te Whāriki (Ministry of Education, 1996), the New Zealand early childhood curriculum, to explore posthuman philosophies and theories associated with the ‘material turn.’ Connections are made between new materialist feminist theory, Barad’s agential realist ontology, Deleuze and Guattari’s ontology of immanence, and Bennett’s theory of ‘vital materiality’ in order to challenge habitual dualistic thinking, and to rethink material matter as immanent to lived practice and discursive meaning-making. In a move away from the positivist paradigms underpinning conventional qualitative research, the inquiry self-generates a new empirical performative process that transgresses the binary divides of science/philosophy and theory/practice. Its evolving performative process is activated and informed by a series of explorative and experimental ‘acts’ that entangle onto-epistemological concepts and ideas with images/imaginings of cups, and cup~child happenings. Thus, the matter of the inquiry produces the process and vice versa. In an iterative process of moving and thinking-inthe- act, performative agentic matter – thoughts~concepts~cups~images~inquirer – merge and emerge in the mutual constitution of new and different ways of thinking and knowing-in-being. The performative inquiry culminates in creative acts of experimentation that unsettle boundaries between subject and object to generate a new ontological optics where the force of things, objects and artefacts matter in processes of transformational learning and becoming. Things are perceived as vibrant and agentic, and as existing in affective, material relationship with other matter, including humans. A relational material perspective generates the idea of an ethics of affection and a pedagogy of affection-ing that argues for the importance of sensing affective forces in-between things, people and places, what/whom/where is being made to matter (or not), and how educators can respond in affirmative, potentiating and inclusive ways.