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Children, Among Other Things: Entangled Cartographies of the More-than-Human Kindergarten Classroom

Myers, Casey Y.
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent1437049078

Abstract Details

2015, PHD, Kent State University, College of Education, Health and Human Services / School of Teaching, Learning and Curriculum Studies.
Although new materialisms are emerging as a force within early childhood studies internationally, there are few studies that blend this onto-epistemology with a reconceptualist, participatory model of inquiry with young children in the U.S. context. This is partially due to the dominance of constructivist worldviews and partially due to the paradox of attempting to blend fundamentally humanistic, “child-centered” practices with a posthuman onto-epistemology that decenters the human from the construction of knowledge. The current study attempted to “make room” (Haraway, 1991) for both a rights-based approach to researching with young children and a radical material agency – specifically Barad’s (2003, 2007) notion of entanglement. A post-qualitative method assemblage was activated to attend to the more-than-human entanglements that comprised the classroom relationships of 16 kindergarten children. Through children’s and researcher’s ways of “being with”, “doing photos” and “becoming (with) cameras” within the classroom, they engaged with/in layers of material-discursive data events, constructing visual and narrative cuts of their daily entanglements. A rhizoanalysis was employed to attend to both the delightful and disturbing transformations that emerged between children and “things”. These data events are re-presented through four interconnected and multimodal cartographies that highlight the children’s perspectives on the workings of popular media, weather, bodies, toys, nonhuman species, and more. The potentialities for this research are discussed in terms of “being-becoming, knowing, getting along well together, and living well” (Barad, 2014), specifically questioning notions of consumption, self-regulation, research practices, and quality within early childhood classroom settings.
Janice Kroeger (Committee Chair)
Walter Gershon (Committee Member)
Tricia Niesz (Committee Member)
Kylie Smith (Committee Member)
337 p.
Early Childhood Education
posthumanism; new materialisms; post-qualitative inquiry; participatory research; visual ethnography; early childhood education; kindergarten; Frozen; animality; things; disability

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Myers, C. Y. (2015). Children, Among Other Things: Entangled Cartographies of the More-than-Human Kindergarten Classroom [Doctoral dissertation, Kent State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent1437049078

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Myers, Casey. Children, Among Other Things: Entangled Cartographies of the More-than-Human Kindergarten Classroom. 2015. Kent State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent1437049078.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Myers, Casey. "Children, Among Other Things: Entangled Cartographies of the More-than-Human Kindergarten Classroom." Doctoral dissertation, Kent State University, 2015. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent1437049078

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

kent1437049078
668
© 2015, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by Kent State University and OhioLINK.