Animated movements, animating methods: An interaction geography approach to space and affect in early childhood education

Abstract

This article uses a comparative case study to examine how a methodological approach called interaction geography provides alternative ways to animate space, movement, and affect within the context of early childhood education. We take animation to incorporate the methods for representing space, movement, and affect; the social-material environment which animates the people and things we study; and the lively, energetic talk-in-interaction that takes place as people and things move. Our first case uses interaction geography to animate what we call gestural energies and choreographies between a teacher, students, and materials in a bilingual kindergarten classroom activity. Our second case uses interaction geography to animate a young child’s excitement for learning and teaching through movement in a cultural heritage museum. Together, our analysis demonstrates how interaction geography provides alternative ways to conceptualize the multimodal nature of literacy practices and contributes to a recent turn to affect in literacy research. We discuss how this work has implications not only for literacy researchers, teachers, and teacher educators, but also for architects, administrators, and researchers concerned with the physical design of literacy spaces.