The matter of the stick: Storying/(re)storying children’s literacies in the forest

Abstract

Children's intra-actions with the natural world offer an important lens to revisit notions of literacies. They allow for a decentring of humans – here children – as actors. Also, forest schools and nature-based learning programmes are increasingly erupting across North America, although more commonplace in Europe for a longer period. In this presentation of our research, we feature a storying/(re)storying of data from a yearlong research study of children's entanglements with the forest as a more-than-human world. We ask what we might learn if educators, children and researchers think with sticks, not separate from, but in relation to sticks? Eight preschool children, two educators and two researchers ventured into the forest twice a week over the course of a year, documenting their interactions with a mosaic of data generation tools, such as notebooks, iPads, Go-Pro cameras. The forest offered diverse materials that provoked “thing-matter-energy- child-assemblages” that were significant for the children's play and literacy framing. Through post-humanist theorizing, we have paid particular attention to the stick within the children's forest play and illustrate the ways in which the stick was entangled with children’s bodies, relations, identities and discourses. The stick was a catalyst, a friend, a momentary and changing text, an agentic force acting relationally with children's play and stories. The post humanism storying/(re)storying of the children's encounters in the forest with sticks invites infinite possibilities for literacy teaching and learning. How might educators foster such relations, enquiring with and alongside children with an openness toward what the sticks (forests) might teach us?

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

“…A clapping stick discarded does not lie for long before being claimed by a child again, a drum left unattended is quickly repossessed, and the sound endures uninterrupted, generating the vibration and resonance felt by all. Harwood and Collier (2017) argue that moving away from a human-centric reading of the world means ‘viewing relations within a material turn’ (339) in ‘a process that is mutually interdependent and intertwined’ (338), rather than privileging the human in these encounters. Everything, even an instrument lying on the ground, is a ‘performative agent’ (338) with the capacity to impact on other entities.…”

“…Whilst acknowledging established literacy learning practices, a posthumanist perspective challenges the expected and focuses instead on ‘departures from the expected’ and on ‘notions of becoming’ (Kuby and Vaughn, 2015: 438), a concept drawn from the work of Deleuze and Guattari (1987). Thinking in this way and embracing such ‘entanglements help[s] highlight the playful improvisational literacy assemblages and intra-actions that unfold’ (Harwood and Collier, 2017: 347). We want to extend the conversation about being in the more-than-human world by suggesting that sound (which includes resonance and vibration) is the ‘lesser known modal resource’ (Wargo, 2017) and a material force, that intra-acts with child(ren) and matter(s) to give rise to something new, where each constituent implicates others and is simultaneously implicated by those others in a simultaneous process of be(com)ing.…”

The Blue Car in the Forest: Exploring Children’s Experiences of Sustainability in a Canadian Forest

“…In this paper, I focus on the data collected from the third year of the study, recognizing fully that children's experiences and educators' pedagogies have transformed over time. Moreover, the methodological approaches educed by this long-term foray into the woods are fluid as the goal of post-era research is to unsettle the usual foci and allow for something new to emerge (Harwood & Collier, 2017;Harwood & Collier, 2019).…”

Closing the gap? Overcoming limitations in sociomaterial accounts of early literacy

“…As we explored earlier, the recent insertion of posthumanism in to literacy studies (see e.g. Harwood and Collier, 2017;Wargo, 2017 andHackett andSomerville, 2017) has made two important contributions: first, it has explained how deficit discourses are themselves sustained through sociomaterial relations; and second, it has exposed the inadequacy of deficit perspectives by presenting alternative accounts. Our contribution here is to suggest that holding together these two perspectivesand moreis important if we are to engage in questions of social justice in ways that acknowledge the complexity and multiplicity of what goes on in educational settings, if we are to continue to probe questions of ethics, and if we are to intervene in ways that work to disrupt the practices we set out to critique.…”