Drumming in excess and chaos: Music, literacy and sustainability in early years learning

Abstract

For children born in the 21st century, the enmeshing of natural and human forces in the survival of the planet requires conceptual and practical innovation. This paper comes from a project funded by the Australian Research Council investigating the integration of literacy and sustainability in early years learning. The methodology employed was ‘deep hanging out’, the purpose of which is to observe without bias or assumption. This paper focuses on a video from a preschool depicting children playing drums and percussion instruments outside, in the playground. We consider the nature of literacy differently, conceptualizing literacy+sustainability within the context of the more-than-human, intra-active world. In our example, the drumming ebbs and flows in intensity, children come and go, rhythms merge then diverge; a chaos of sound and vibration, a refrain of rhythm, movement and bodies, driven by the excess of the earth’s energy and musical force. We see children communicate a sense of the world – with drums, each other, earth – sustained by the vitality of place, the materiality of drums and sound, the energy of earth and the movement of bodies. In this example, we extend the conversation around what literacy and sustainability might look like, offering possibilities for producing new knowledge about literacy and new understandings of sustainability.

Answering the world: young children’s running and rolling as more-than-human multimodal meaning making

“…Rather than an increasing mastery of the world through language, as a practice of fixing and holding in place, an increasingly skilled craft in more-than-human literacies would require an ever deeper wrapping together of human and nonhuman processes of growth and dissolution, and ever expanding notion of what it might mean to make oneself present in the world. Rather than merely supporting or enhancing children's ability to describe or order their worlds, multimodal meaning making understood in this way gestures towards a different conceptualization of literacies, which is about being alongside rather than mastery over more-thanhuman world (Powell & Somerville, 2018). Thus, these ideas might offer a route towards more sustainable, de-anthropocised and entangled conceptualization of early childhood literacies.…”

“…Conducted simultaneously, our contextually separate fieldwork examples share a conceptual frame: both belong to a wider international project focusing on young children's literacy and sustainability development (see note 1). Both studies involved deep hanging out (Powell and Somerville, 2018) for 12 months in an early childhood centre, generated an extensive data set of fieldnotes and video footage. As the purpose of this paper is theoretical rather than empirical, we offer just one small story from each of our fieldsites, for the purpose of interrogating further what it might mean for children to correspond (Ingold, 2013) with the world as more-than-human multimodal meaning makers.…”

Practicing Belonging in Kindergarten: Children’s Use of Places and Artifacts

“…In practice, this was accomplished by that the researcher only followed children that verbally or by body language or gestures invited her in, and by that photos and recordings of children were taken exclusively with their consent. Such strategy is associated with the approach called "Deep hanging out" (Powell & Somerville, 2018), which includes that the researcher in addition to being open and curious, is patiently awaiting something interesting to emerge.…”

The Capaciousness of No: Affective Refusals as Literacy Practices

“…Abi (second author), an early‐career researcher carrying out her first postdoctoral research project, collected Beth’s story (vignette 2) as part of a two‐year ethnographic study, The Emergence of Literacy in Very Young Children. Abi visited the nursery, located in a former coal mining community, regularly for deep hanging out (Powell & Sommerville, 2018) with the children and staff, collecting field notes and small video clips. In Beth’s community, since the closure of the pit, many families have experienced long‐term unemployment.…”