Posthumanism, or the material turn, refuses to take the distinction between human and nonhuman for granted. Currently discourses in literacy education focus on the ways of incorporating new tools and technologies (products) but within a design perspective, which does not get at the social and participatory ways (processes) of students creating new relationships and realities with materials. A posthuman stance focuses on the processes of literacy artefacts coming into being and what is being produced in the process(es). The social is (re)imagined and (re)defined in processes that encompass social entanglements of humans/nonhuman materials creating newness, new realities. We put to work posthumanist concepts with data that we call the ‘solar system mural assemblage’ from a 7‐ to 8‐year‐old Writers' Studio in order to (re)imagine and (re)define social. We question what counts as ‘social’ when working from a posthumanist stance. Why does a ‘posthumanist social’ matter for literacy educators? How does this perspective not only change our research practices but also pedagogies? We wonder how literacies are produced – how realities come into being – in assemblages of human and nonhuman materials in Writers' Studio. We discuss how and why it matters that we (re)conceptualise the notion of social in literacy education by drawing on posthumanist views.
Candace Kuby's brave, honest, reflective autoethnography captures the tensions of teacher-researchers living out critical literacy in the early childhood classroom. Kuby explicitly states two purposes that are clearly woven throughout all nine chapters of her text: One, to urge educators to immerse themselves in autoethnographic processes as a way to examine how their ideologies and experiences shape their teaching and learning. .. Two, to urge adults to make room for the voices and experiences of young children, to help them critically read their world. (p. xv
This paper illuminates the possibilities of thinking with poststructural theory when storying an emerging process of engaging in research with young children. The purpose of this paper is to describe processes, tensions, and imaginings while infusing poststructural theories into conversations with data (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987; Lenz Taguchi, 2010; Olsson, 2009). Currently much of early childhood literacy research (Park, 2011; Scull, Nolan and Raban, 2013; Vera, 2011) reports outcome-based findings and implications. While this research is informative, the emphasis is often on children as subjects and/or products/performances resulting from the research. In our narrative inquiry, we (first grade students, teacher, myself) worked together to explore ways students participated in a narrative inquiry about reading during reading workshop. While researching we experienced the ebb and flow-shifts and changes, tensions and challenges, joys and imaginings--of what it meant to participate in research. Thinking rhizomatically with our stories illuminated ways these shifts were initiated by lines of flight-- departures from the norm (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987; Kuby, 2013; Leander and Rowe, 2006). Lines of flight created new trajectories for our research including new ways of participating as we worked toward non-hierarchical relationships with young students. The improvisational nature of participation prompted an imaginative storying of our research through a jazz metaphor. This metaphor revealed relational improvisation with people and with materials as productive for students, teacher, and researcher as we produced our research. Ultimately our research invites practitioners and researchers to embrace teaching as an art, and learning as aesthetic experience.
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