When past and new experiences meet. Negotiating meaning with 3-D materials in early childhood education

Abstract

This article suggests that the process of meaning making is closely related to embodied experience and social interaction. The article is based on a study of specific contexts of visual arts education with 3–5 year old children. The study aims to enlarge understanding of relationships between children’s experience with three-dimensional (3-D) materials and their meaning-making processes. Empirical data were collected through observations of children’s play and video documentation of interactions between a practitioner-researcher and pairs of children. The data were analysed through interpretative, contextual, arts-based inquiry, and the findings were presented in the form of vignettes. Two vignettes with 3-year-old boys are presented in this article, in order to discuss how the boys’ explorative play with 3-D materials formed the basis for their experience, problem solving, imaginative response, multimodal expressions and meaning making. It is further suggested that the children’s new understandings emerge from the ‘meetings’ between their past and new experiences, stimulated by the 3-D material’s affordances and resistance.

Interspecies Pedagogy: What Could a Horse Teach Me About Teaching?

“…It is a case of "interspecies pedagogy" in which we learnt from each other about issues relating to teaching and learning. What I learnt from Zvekki was surprisingly similar to what I learnt during my study of young children's (2-5 years) experiential learning (Fredriksen 2011a(Fredriksen , 2011b(Fredriksen , 2012(Fredriksen , 2016a(Fredriksen , 2017(Fredriksen , 2018. The embodied capacities for learning through experiences, which I discovered in co-research with children, were not only present in Zvekki, but sophisticated, vibrant and impossible to overlook (indeed dangerous to overlook).…”

“…Horses' ability to sense moods, emotions and needs of others, which Blake (2007) calls "communication beyond senses" and "reading of thoughts", resembles Stern's (1998) A horse learns from emotional consequences of her/his behaviour (Wendt 2012), and, similarly to humans, "negotiates meanings" (learns) by connecting past and present experiences (Fredriksen 2011a;2011b). Horses are able to share experiences and learn from each other, for instance by observing and mimicking (De Georgio & De Georgio-Schoorl 2016).…”

“…Teachers that focus on teaching outcomes often ignore past experiences of their morethan-human students, but what is possible to learn depends on the affective values of these experiences (Sterling 2011). We usually don't know our students' experiences -most times we do not even remember our own experiences -yet emotional experiences from the past keep haunting our present negotiations of meaning (Fredriksen 2011b). Zvekki obviously had some negative past experiences from a work paddock, since simply the sight of a fenced space could trigger her negative reactions.…”

Space and materiality in early childhood pedagogy – introductory notes

“…The radical intersubjectivity of the studentteacher relationship (Aspelin, 2010) is seen as entwined with the teaching style as well as the provoking materials. This also fits with the more general socio-cultural view of the importance of acquiring knowledge through dialogic interaction (Bruner, 1990), and through the continuous negotiation of meaning (Fredriksen, 2011) as speaking bodies and body-minds (Dewey, 1925). With reference to Merleau-Ponty (1994) and Shusterman (2008), Fredriksen asserts the role of the knowing body in these processes.…”

Providing materials and spaces for the negotiation of meaning in explorative play: Teachers’ responsibilities

“…My research found that the resistance of materials is especially important to a child's ability to negotiate meaning (Fredriksen, 2011a). If a child uses a material and experiences something that does not work as expected, this new insight can trigger the child's imaginative connection between their past and new experiences (Dewey, 2005(Dewey, [1934), motivate creative problem solving (Fredriksen, 2011b) and allow the child to leave a "personal signature" on the problem solution (Eisner, 2002). Examples involving Eva will show how she negotiated with materials and tools, and how she imagined problem solutions in her own personal ways.…”