Literacies, Literature and Learning: Reading Classrooms Differently 9781138301924, 9780203732090

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Literacies, Literature and Learning

Literacies, Literature and Learning: Reading Classrooms Differently attends to pressing questions in literacy education, such as the poor quality of many children’s experiences as readers, routine disregard for their thinking and the degrading impact of narrow skills measurement and comparison. This cutting-edge book moves beyond social, psychological and scientific categories that focus on individualistic and linear notions of the knowing subject; of progress and development; and of child as less than fully human. It adopts a posthumanist framework to explore new perspectives for teaching, learning and research. Authors from diverse disciplines and continents have collaborated to interrogate the colonising characteristics of humanism and to imagine a different – more just – reading of a literacy classroom. Questions of de/colonisation are tackled through the exploration of both education and research practices that seek to decentre the human and include the more than human. Inspired by an example of high quality children’s literature, playful philosophical teaching and the power of the material, the authors show how the chapters diffract with one another, thereby opening up radical possibilities for a different doing of childhood. The book hopes to help transform adult-child relationships in schools and universities. As such, it should be of great interest to academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the areas of literacy, philosophy, law, education, the wider social sciences, the arts, health sciences and architecture. It should also be essential reading for teacher educators and practitioners around the world. Karin Murris is Full Professor of Pedagogy and Philosophy in the School of Education at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Joanna Haynes is Associate Professor in Education Studies at Plymouth University Institute of Education, UK.

Literacies, Literature and Learning

Reading Classrooms Differently

Edited by Karin Murris and Joanna Haynes

First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 selection and editorial matter, Karin Murris and Joanna Haynes; individual chapters, the contributors The right of the editor to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Copyright © 2016 Viviane Schwarz. From HOW TO FIND GOLD by Viviane Schwarz. Reproduced by kind permission of Walker Books Ltd, London SE11 5HJ. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-30192-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-73209-0 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

To creative experimentation and mutual collaboration across and through differences of age, gender, race, species, disciplines, professions and status.

Contents

List of figuresix Acknowledgementsxi PART I

How to find gold in literacies1   1 Philosophical playthinking in a South African literacy ‘classroom’

3

KARIN MURRIS WITH JOANNA HAYNES

  2 Posthumanism, de/colonising education and child(hoods) in South Africa

25

KARIN MURRIS

  3 Philosophy for Children: a postdevelopmental relationality

50

KARIN MURRIS AND JOANNA HAYNES

  4 The ‘classroom’ and posthuman research methodologies

64

KARIN MURRIS AND JOANNA HAYNES

PART II

Finding gold in a South African literacy classroom85   5 Beyond words: materiality and the play of things

87

THERESA GIORZA AND JOANNA HAYNES

  6 Bodies with legs: ‘fidgeting’ and how recording practices matter KARIN MURRIS AND SUMAYA BABAMIA

110

viii Contents

  7 Chairs and questions at work in literacies

129

ROSE-ANNE REYNOLDS WITH JOANNE PEERS

  8 Digging and diving for treasure: erasures, silences and secrets

149

KARIN MURRIS AND JUDY CROWTHER, WITH SARA STANLEY

  9 The text in the classroom: decolonial reading practices

173

CHRISTOPHER OUMA

10 Philosopher children moving through spacetime

187

KAI WOOD MAH AND PATRICK LYNN RIVERS

11 Facilitating and difficultating: the cultivation of teacher ignorance and inventiveness

204

JOANNA HAYNES AND WALTER KOHAN

Contributors222 Index227

Figures

2.1 Cogito ergo sum on the back of a toilet door at the University of Cape Town. 2.2 Venn diagram situating critical posthumanism in the ‘posts’. 3.1 How to Find Gold (2016). 4.1 The ‘classroom’. 5.1 Floor, bodies, worldmapping, from How to Find Gold (Schwarz 2016). 5.2 Playing with string. 5.3 Feet that speak. 5.4 Relaxed toes and angry toes. 5.5 The soles/souls of shoes. 5.6 Scissor power. 5.7 Feet waving. 5.8 Scissors become toes. 6.1 Pen-ink-foot-teacher-child entanglement. 6.2 Spell-bound listening to the story. 6.3 ‘The American-Objective View’; camera man and his assistant. 6.4 The GoPro – a wide-angled view with a fixed camera. 6.5 Bodies with legs entangled in the classroom. 6.6 Book-crocodile-children’s-entangled-bodies-map-floorpaper-camera-koki pens. 7.1 Chair with chair bag. 7.2 Bird’s eye view of the circle. 7.3 Anna with Crocodile on her back. 7.4 The giant squid. 7.5 The boy, the chair and the book. 8.1 The ‘classroom’. 8.2 Secret fears. 8.3 The children pass a secret around. 8.4 Crocodile invites Anna to make a secret face. 8.5 Ameera intra-acting with Tshepo.

28 31 54 65 95 98 100 103 103 105 105 106 115 116 120 121 122 123 135 136 138 140 143 151 152 155 156 158

x Figures

8.6 Tshepo comments on Zuma’s Nkandla estate and the sound of laughter (QR code). 165 8.7 A map of the land around the school diffracted through 169 Cape Zebra. 9.1 Anna and Crocodile. 174 9.2 A circle as a collective dynamic of shared imagination. 176 9.3 Children’s own (con)texts of interpretations. 177 9.4 Zombie on the ‘blank’ canvas. 184 10.1 Haggard’s map. 190 10.2 Anna and Crocodile map their adventure in Viviane’s How to Find Gold.193 11.1 Bare feet of teaching. 215 11.2 The affecting presence of the video camera. 216

Acknowledgements

This edited collection came to fruition through a research project which focuses on decolonising early childhood discourses through critical posthumanism. This larger three-year project (2016–2018) is funded by the South African National Research Foundation (NRF) and without it, this book would never have been possible. In collaboration with the main research collaborator, Vivienne Bozalek, it enables us to support project members to meet in person, to fund members to share their research at conferences and employ a research assistant – Sieraaj Francis – who generously shares his time and expertise to run our weekly reading groups, built and maintains our website and manages the data we create. The grant also provides support for people to pursue their PhD and Master’s studies, some of whom have co-written chapters in this book. Relevant for our book project is that the grant made it possible for project members to meet twice (2016 and 2017) in the beautiful surrounds of Mont Fleur, in Stellenbosch, Cape Town, where the idea and plans for the book took shape. Also in June 2017, Karen Barad led an inspiring seminar for us at Monkey Valley, Noordhoek, and her generous sharing of ideas has inspired many authors of this book. This event was also financially supported by the Environmental Humanities (University of Cape Town) – a research centre led by Lesley Green. Many human and nonhuman bodies have intra-acted with the development and writing of this book, which has been a wonderful project and a real privilege. We would like to thank in particular the grade 2 children, parents and staff at the school where the research took place. The philosophical texts, affect, food, computers, iPads, enquiries, swimming pool, sauna, mountains, warm and hospitable staff, air, phones, silence, picturebook, walks, wine, blankets, art materials, laughter, etc., are all entangled in this book. But our biggest thanks goes to Sara Stanley. Without her, the book project would not have been possible. She was willing to make herself vulnerable and allowed her teaching of a onehour literacy lesson to be the focus of our analyses. Afterwards, she continued to respond to our developing ideas, sometimes providing more information and ideas. She has also contributed to Chapter 8.The picturebook artist Viviane Schwarz is also entangled through her picturebook How to Find Gold (2016), her generous engagement with our ideas and willingness to be intra-viewed by Sara. Her contributions have very much enriched the ideas in this book.

xii Acknowledgements

Of course, we would like to thank the authors and co-authors of the chapters for their rich contributions, putting up with tight deadlines and responding timely and scholarly to the peer-reviews. Not everyone from the reading group, our webinars or the residentials contributed to a chapter, but their ideas are entangled and can of course be traced in the book. In particular, we would like to thank Vivienne Bozalek, Karen Barad, Carole Bloch, Erica Burman, Daniela Gachago, Lesley Green, Anna Hickey-Moody, Sieraaj Francis, Bronwen Hiles, Candace Kuby, Brenda Leibowitz,Veronica Mitchell, Siddique Motala, Thandeka Ncube, Fikile Nxumalo, Adrienne van Eeden-Wharton, Veronica Pacini-ketchabaw, Laura Perry, Nike Romano, Tom Sanya, Kristy Stone, Affrica Taylor, Robyn Thompson and many others who joined us in the reading groups, residentials or webinars for the last four years. We would like to thank the following people for their permission to publish images. Stephen and Suzanna Berry from Berry Productions for giving permission to have a photo published with them in it (Figure 6.3). And Laura Perry for her permission to print an image of her playing with string (Figure 5.2).We are grateful to Research Office at the University of Cape Town for subsidising the reproduction of the images from the picturebook How to Find Gold (2016) Copyright © Viviane Schwarz. Reproduced by permission of Walker Books Ltd, London SE11 5 HJ. www.walker.co.uk. A special thanks to Brandan and Rose-Anne Reynolds, who did a marvellous job in turning the images into a format that was publishable at a time when their help was most needed! A special thanks also to Simon Geschwindt for his support and the editing of the first part of the book. Finally we would like to thank our families, dogs and cat in Britain and South Africa for their tireless support for our playful work together and making room for our very special friendship. We have been writing and teaching together for many decades, and it was a real joy again to write and co-edit this book. Karin and Joanna

The following people would like to acknowledge and thank the funders of their research: Karin Murris: The National Research Foundation (NRF) of South Africa (Grant number 98992), Rose-Anne Reynolds: NRF Freestanding, Innovation and Scarce Skills Development Doctoral Scholarship, which enables her to pursue full-time doctoral studies and research projects. Sumaya Babamia: National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIHSS) doctoral programme.

Acknowledgements xiii

Kai Wood Mah and Patrick Lynn Rivers: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). Walter Kohan: National Council of Scientific and Technologic Development of Brazil (CNPq) and the Foundation of Support of Research of the State of Rio de Janeiro (FAPERJ).

Part I

How to find gold in literacies

Chapter 1

Philosophical playthinking in a South African literacy ‘classroom’ Karin Murris with Joanna Haynes

This chapter introduces the book project that emerged out of Decolonising Early Childhood Discourses: Critical Posthumanism in Higher Education (DECD) research. Karin and Joanna outline the project aims and introduce the diverse project members. A posthumanist approach to literacy education moves beyond human social practices; this chapter asks what impact posthumanism could have on the de/colonisation of education and childhood discourses. It explores how the movement towards posthuman identity as in/determinate, porous, without fixed boundaries along with a philosophical commitment to mutual relationality and a politics of belonging, makes us think differently about difference. In the wake of the Anthropocene, this chapter contextualises our efforts to retrieve an openness to thought without foundation and the necessity to take up a more modest epistemic stance. What might a politics of belonging look like in the literacy classroom? How could this inspire those living and working with children to de/colonise their thinking and practices?

Thinking-with: ‘the breeding ground for possible futures’ The classroom-based research project at the heart of this book is inspired by experimenting with posthuman pedagogies in a literacy lesson in one grade 2 South African classroom. We wonder why posthuman feminist philosophers appear to forget about children in their political philosophies. For example, we do not know whether Rosi Braidotti was also thinking of children when she wrote about the ‘multiple missing people’ in the quote below, but we endorse the challenge she poignantly describes. Braidotti (2018:xxiv) writes: The challenge today is how to transform, or deterritorialise, the humannonhuman interaction in pedagogical practice, so as to intervene in, but not be over-coded or assimilated by, the fast-moving flows of data-mining by cognitive capitalism. How to bypass the dialectics of otherness, secularizing the concept of human nature and the life that animates it[?] . . . The field of posthuman scholarship is not aiming at anything like a consensus about a new ‘Humanity’, but it gives us a frame for the actualisation of the

4  Karin Murris with Joanna Haynes

many different ways of becoming posthuman. It actualises multiple missing people, whose marginalised knowledge is the breeding ground for possible futures. In diverse and exciting ways, we give a flavour in Part II of how child’s ‘marginalised knowledge[s] . . . [can become] the breeding ground for possible futures’ and offer multiple experimental readings of nonprescriptive posthuman ways of doing literacy and research. This book is distinctive in various ways. All authors collaboratively diffract with and through one another and think-with the ‘same’ data. This data includes the picturebook How to Find Gold (2016) by Viviane Schwarz,1 three video-footages of one literacy lesson and two intra-views and more, as what counts as ‘data’ is not bounded or fixed and keeps changing as we (keep) re-turn(ing) to it. Each chapter reads the classroom differently, as the subtitle of the book suggests – a promise the book would like to keep. The book calls us to think-with and to think differently about literacies,2 what it means to learn from and with a picturebook and how posthumanism opens up fresh opportunities for doing research in teaching and learning. Without discarding what has become ‘before’ in literacy education, the main focus of the book is on the ‘new’, thereby paying attention to who and what is included and excluded and hopefully bypassing what Braidotti calls (above) ‘the dialectics of otherness’. We have put the ‘before’ and ‘new’ in the previous sentence in scare quotes for a reason. Posthumanism (and more broadly the ontological turn) calls into question the ‘normal’ use of many words and concepts and invites playthinking and courageous experimentation. Drawing on Quantum Field Theory, physicistphilosopher Karen Barad explains why in posthumanism there is no ‘old’ or ‘new’, why ‘there is no moving beyond, no leaving the ‘old’ behind. There is no absolute boundary between here-now and there-then. There is nothing that is new; there is nothing that is not new’ (Barad 2014:168). Importantly, this is not from the (anthropocentric) perspective of the subject, as, for example, in memory. She continues: ‘Matter itself is diffracted, dispersed, threaded through with materializing and sedimented intra-acting, an open field. Sedimenting does not entail closure’ (Barad 2014:168). This new style of writing might read awkwardly, or annoyingly, and ‘might chafe at first, just like a new pair of shoes’ (Lenz Taguchi 2010:64), but the philosophical and political importance of this kind of experimentation with language and grammar cannot be emphasised enough. Posthumanist writing raises awareness that language has been too substantialising (Barad 2007:133), bringing into existence, for example, figurations of child as substance with essence (Murris 2016), as if the subjectpredicate structure of language reflects an ontology: independently existing child with competencies or attributes – the arrogance of the anthropocentric human animal one might say. German philosophers Martin Heidegger and Friedrich Nietzsche also warned against language and the human-centred

Philosophical playthinking in South Africa 5

western metaphysics grammar has brought into existence. French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari write poetically: When knife cuts flesh, when food or poison spreads through the body, when a drop of wine falls into the water, there is an intermingling of bodies; but the statements, “The knife is cutting the flesh,” “I am eating,” “The water is turning red,” express incorporeal transformations of an entirely different nature (events). (Deleuze and Guattari 1987/2014:86) In Chapter 2, we offer a genealogy (a political reading of ‘the’ past) and trace why language has been granted excessive power in determining what is real, but also why language has instilled a deep mistrust of matter in teaching and research, figuring it as mute, passive, immutable (Barad 2007, 2013). Language and discourse have positioned ‘us’ humanimals as thinkers above or outside the (material) world, and with that same move have distanced us, ‘fully-human’ adults, from both matter and child (and other so-called ‘illiterates’). Experimentation with transmodal3 languages has been adopted in each chapter in this book.The approaches of the chapters differ, with authors drawing on their own transindividual embedded and embodied experiences, geo-political contexts and disciplinary expertise, but all broadly fall within a posthuman orientation, understood as both posthumanist and postanthropocentric, as the two do not always go hand-in-hand (Braidotti 2018:xiii). Our team of researchers includes the guest teacher, who taught the lesson which takes centre-stage in this book, as well as the children’s usual classroom teacher. Finally, the author and illustrator of the picturebook is also involved in data creation (intra-view). Reading the book from front cover to back cover, or vice versa, will create a diffraction pattern, created by reading through one another the multiple perspectives and rich transdisciplinary angles ‘thickening’ and ‘sedimenting’ (Barad 2007, 2014) and affecting the reader’s understanding of ‘the’ literacy event. The book project emerged out of a larger research project Decolonising Early Childhood Discourses: Critical Posthumanism in Higher Education, funded by the National Research Foundation (NRF) of South Africa (see our website www. decolonizingchildhood.org). This three-year project provides rich materialdiscursive spaces for enquiry – both embodied ‘face to face’ and through technology. One of the aims of our project is to create and become involved in posthuman pedagogies in (higher) education that are generated from, and have resonance for, southern contexts. It has therefore brought together a diverse team of theorists/practitioners, academics, teachers, trainers and post-graduate students, to intra-act across diverse geopolitical contexts to engage in collaborative enquiry about critical posthumanism, the affective turn, and to investigate the impact these philosophical orientations might have on de/colonising4

6  Karin Murris with Joanna Haynes

childhood discourses.The philosophies that have informed critical posthumanism are not only the object of our study, but also shape our everyday practices, the ways we intra-act and do research together. The neologism intra-action was introduced by one of our project members, feminist philosopher and quantum physicist, Karen Barad (2007, 2013). Intra-action expresses a particular ontological kind of relationality, which we explore in this book in much detail by reading theory with practice – a collaborative experiment in/with a South African classroom. Posthuman enquiry is all about ‘reality as an active verb’ (how things work). Salient for de/colonising education is the idea that categories that involve binaries, such as ‘subjects, objects, kinds, races, species, genres, and genders’ are all products of relationships ‘between’ significant others (Haraway 2003:6–7). Haraway’s framing places the emphasis on becoming ‘with’ others, and rendering-oneanother-capable (Haraway 2016), including humans, and what she terms companion species of the world. An ethics of respect for these ‘significant others’, as Donna Haraway calls them, means ‘to hold in regard, to respond, to look back reciprocally, to notice, to pay attention, to have courteous regard for, to esteem’ (Haraway cited in Lund 2014:103). This relational stance and the qualities of attention it entails are of deep interest for this project, with particular respect to de/colonising practices and discourses of childhood. In this book, we foreground childism by paying attention to the following categories of exclusion: age, gender, class, ability, race (and their intersectionalities) from a relational materialist perspective. We argue that childhood has been a particularly neglected category of exclusion and opens up a very specific kind of enquiry into concepts of age and ageing – and from there also into the ways we understand, work and move in, through and with time and space.We set out to contribute to playful and creative practices of intra-generationalism in education, both for itself and as an aspect of de/colonising discourses of childhood. One of the most exciting aspects of critical posthumanism and post-anthropocentrism is that they transgress disciplinary boundaries and do not focus solely on humanities and social sciences. As project member Rosi Braidotti puts it, they traverse ‘science and technology studies, new media and digital culture, environmentalism and earth-sciences, bio-genetics, neuroscience and robotics, evolutionary theory, critical legal theory, primatology, animal rights and science fiction’ (Braidotti 2013:57–58). In this research/book project team we have been pleased to welcome members from the humanities and social sciences (education, higher education, philosophy, built environment, gender studies, etc.), as well as information and communication technologies, earth-sciences and children’s literature. Such a team composition makes it possible to ask each other different questions, to compare approaches and to cross-fertilise each other’s ‘fields’ of enquiry. To acknowledge the limitations and constraints of humanism (as well as posthumanism) and to begin to open up de/colonising practices, such collaborations make particularly good sense.

Philosophical playthinking in South Africa 7

De/colonising research in South Africa: West or west? Working to decolonise educational research involves an examination of the various ways in which coloniality manifests itself in the production and communication of knowledge and meaning-making (Patel 2016). In Chapter 2, we explore in more detail the ways in which colonialism has instilled a nonrelational ontology and competitive individualised subjectivity in education that continues to regard people, land and knowledge as property. De/colonising projects in higher education in South Africa tend to focus on racism, sexism and classism in its socially just pedagogies and research methods, also further explored in Chapter 2. But ‘child’ is still forgotten: property of the adult,‘the last savage’: ‘taken for granted as appendages to adult society, or cocooned from the world and thrown out of society, children can only be of nature, which is to say, outside the human’ (Kromidas 2014:429; our italics). Moreover, entangled connections between imperialism and the institutionalisation of childhood have been made (e.g., Burman 2008; Cannella and Viruru 2004). Childhood as an imperialist construct has positioned male children ‘to be healthy and strong so that they could go out and subdue foreign infidels and bring glory “to crown and country” ’ (Cannella and Viruru 2004:4). After all, settler colonialism ‘has been and continues to be a gendered process’ (Arvin,Tuck and Morrill 2013:8). Moreover, mobilising tendencies to save the childhoods of ‘poor’ children in ‘developing’ countries (for example, by aid agencies), has been powerfully critiqued by Erica Burman for decades. She continues to highlight the exploitative link between child developmental discourses and global capitalist agendas (a good example of this in South Africa is the current concern to ‘invest’ in our children to meet the Sustainable Development Goals, see www.ci.uct.ac.za/ ci/child-gauge/2017). As Gunilla Dahlberg and Peter Moss (2005:17) point out, dominant discourses typically make: ‘assumptions and values invisible, turn subjective perspectives and understandings into apparently objective truths, and determine that some things are self-evident and realistic while others are dubious and impractical’. Summarising the destructive universalising and normalising role of her own discipline developmental psychology, Burman (2010:11) writes: The injustices, exclusions, and pathologisations of the discourse of development are writ small in the story of what happens to children and their families while, reciprocally, the story of individual development is writ large in the story of national and international development. Burman’s (2010:11) (what she calls) ‘antipsychological’ approach is a commitment to counter the damage done by developmental discourses to younger human beings (labelled as children) (Cannella 2010:2). Though not silent about gender, class or race, as categories of exclusion and discrimination (although arguably far from noisy enough), we want to demonstrate

8  Karin Murris with Joanna Haynes

and argue that childism and ageism/ableism in childhood are barely tackled in critical discourse, other than sometimes in ways that underline the exclusion and marginalisation. Intersectionality is also important for our project and something we work with throughout this text. However, we argue that ‘child’ is still largely invisible on the transformational agendas of the sciences and the humanities.The identity prejudices (Fricker 2007) involved in the concepts ‘child’, ‘children’ and ‘childhood’ (Murris 2013) work in hidden and unexamined ways in all phases of education, including in higher education. These habits of thought regarding age, ability and child inform our pedagogies, and literacy practices, so central to early education, offer a valuable context for such enquiry. In Part I, these claims are further elaborated on to contextualise the specific research project with children in a South African classroom which forms the content of this book. Not forgetting the past, in our desire and hope for a different kind of engagement with what it means to de/colonise childhood discourses, particularly in literacy education, we turn with open hearts to scholars and practitioners who care about and express interest in our research, whether physically located in the geographical West or not. We are aware of the critique that critical posthumanism and new materialism is ‘an overly white academic field that is currently primarily undertaken at universities in Europe and North America rather than at the (academic) margins’ (Hinton, Mehrabi and Barla 2015:2). The use of the term ‘margins’ is in itself provocative. We are aware that there are always risks and blind spots. First, as Helena Pedersen (2010:242) points out, there are dangers in, for example, biotechnicist versions of posthumanism ‘as yet another product and a reiteration of western hegemony, unequally distributed resources, and exclusionary politics; a politics most productive for the already privileged’. Second, Pedersen reminds us that to see education (or research) as a means to remedy the failings of humanism that can be fixed by new and different methods of teaching/research is to express an instrumental view of education and ‘to cultivate the naïve idea that education can locate itself outside of ideology’ (Pedersen 2010:245). In terms of working in education, as we continue to do, we set out to locate and work in the cracks, staying with the difficulties. Creative experimentation comes to the fore in a more fluid kind of relationship with pedagogical theory. Karen Barad’s non-representational agential realism takes a ‘politics of location’ (Braidotti 2006, 2013) further with her proposal of a ‘politics of possibilities’ (Barad 2007:225). This book is a response to that invitation to engage wholeheartedly with the politics of possibilities in classrooms. Cutting across many well-worn oppositions, Barad’s alternative feminist framework shakes loose the foundational character of notions such as location and opens up a space of agency in which the dynamic intra-play of indeterminacy and determinacy reconfigures the possibilities and impossibilities of the world’s becoming such that indeterminacies, contingencies, and ambiguities coexist with causality. (Barad 2007:225)

Philosophical playthinking in South Africa 9

Thinking and enacting (theorising is experimentation for Barad) a different relationality requires a different doing of identity to rupture the western metaphysics that has created the power-producing binaries at the heart of the sciences, common sense and our everyday language globally. It also means a rejection of the deterministic idea that Western philosophy is a homogenous and solid lump, without powerful disruptions from the ‘inside’; critical posthumanism and new materialism e/merging in the West (e.g., Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, Jane Bennett) and other Western thinkers who cannot (e.g., Baruch Spinoza, Martin Heidegger, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari), or prefer not, to be classified as either posthumanist or new materialist (e.g., Donna Haraway 2016:32 – who prefers the term ‘compost’ suggested to her by her partner). However, they offer salient reconfigurations and imaginaries for de/colonising futures, whether their bodyminds are ‘located’ in the West or not. Carving up the world into West, East, South, North prioritises identity, so thereby does not do justice to differences ‘within’ identity (a search for the same and the familiar) and expresses a particular understanding of ‘situatedness’5 (see Chapter 2). As Achille Mbembe points out,6 in times of global capitalism, planetary sustainability is not just a problem Africans can or should solve in a uniquely African way, but instead requires us to all work together on a global scale. ‘We are in it together’ is a refrain in Rosi Braidotti’s Transpositions (2006), and Donna Haraway’s latest book Staying with the Trouble includes the passionate appeal that ‘thinking we must’ (Haraway 2016) and ‘we require each other in unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles. We become-with each other or not at all’ (Haraway 2016:4). These references to the collective ‘we’ sound like a desperate call to move beyond differences (that assume identity) within the one species ‘working and playing for multispecies flourishing’ (Haraway 2016:3). But without naïve ‘forgetfulness’, humans of any age should not forget how they ‘are rendered capable by and with both things and living beings’ (Haraway 2016:16). So, in a way it is a ‘we’, not a capital ‘We’ that needs to be mobilised and a ‘we’ that is perhaps west AND south AND east AND. . . . Troubling human exceptionalism and bounded (capitalist) individualism, our philosophical commitment to mutual relationality implies we see the body itself as a contested location, whether a human body bounded by skin, or a continent bounded by seas or borders. At the same time, ‘we’ also need to continue to ask the awkward questions. When Haraway urges us to think, what kind of thinking does she mean and how does it work? In the wake of the Anthropocene, an entirely different orientation towards the more-than-human might indeed seem a necessity, but questions about the ‘who’, the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of thinking also need to be raised. For example, Claire Colebrook (2016) argues that thought cannot simply continue as before: ‘we’ need to think differently: ‘an overhaul in our entire orientation’ by ‘confronting the “anthropos” of the Anthropocene’, because it tends to be assumed that ‘if man can damage the planet at a geological level he can also transform it for the better’ (Colebrook 2016:n.p.). The very notion of the Anthropocene (a geological period characterised by human irreversible

10  Karin Murris with Joanna Haynes

damage done to the planet) already postulates an understanding of history that foregrounds species (but who is the ‘we’ who caused the damaged planet, Colebrook wonders, and who is excluded?). Inspired by philosophers Heidegger, Irigaray and others, she warns of the danger that, in a state of emergency, ‘thought’ becomes ‘something to be managed, corrected or re-wired’ as, for example, through critical thinking programmes or literacy exercises based on a regime of truth. Colebrook (2016:n.p.) writes: And, yet, those managerial interventions in thinking are symptomatic of precisely what – from Kant to the present – has been lamented as thought’s capacity to reify itself. The very idea that there is something like correct thinking, and that thinking might be realigned by those experts who have an advantage in terms of disciplinary expertise (whether that be psychology, evolutionary science or logic) evidences a failure to confront thought’s essential ungroundedness. One way forward, she proposes, is to think about thought itself, but not as a psychological activity within a bounded thinking subject who can make thinking an object of thought. Instead, the task of thinking, she urges, it to retrieve an openness to thought without foundation. We will keep re-turning in this book to this open relationship to thought itself and its ungroundedness in the context of de/colonising education.

Relationality and a politics of belonging Individuation is often interpreted as a psychological or sociological process, rather than a matter of ontology – policies of individual measurement of development and assessment of progress serve to underline these tendencies in a performative and competitive culture of education. This book itself works with a notion of posthuman identity that is in/determinate, is porous and has no fixed boundaries. In one sense, the authors of this book speak with their own voice. Academic publishing and recognition of achievement link pieces of writing with authors’ names. But in another sense, this practice masks the collaborative and relational nature of all individual endeavours, so when a person writes, the voice s/he uses is in fact a ‘Voice without Organs’ (a voice without a subject). Inspired by Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the ‘Body without Organs’ (thinking without subject), Lisa Mazzei (2013:733) has developed this idea ‘to describe a different kind of human being that enables one to think voice differently’ – a voice not tied to a body bounded by skin, but an unbounded multiple subject (Barad 2007). Deliberately without definition, which would imply the logic of representation, a Body without Organs is not an empty or dead body, but a living body (not necessarily human) ‘populated by multiplicities’ and intensities (Deleuze and Guattari 1987/2014:34). Although limited by the medium of a printed book, what we have tried to do is to maximise intra-action in the chapters as well as between the chapters. Each chapter has e/merged through

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diffractive engagements with each other’s ideas on Google doc and YouTube videos, in residential research retreats, conference presentations, special seminars and weekly reading group meetings, opening up possibilities for the creation of multiple interference patterns without clear identity-producing binaries between (different) writers and readers. In each chapter there are multiple cross-references to ideas and images in other chapters. For Deleuze and Guattari (1987/2014), philosophy is a doing, a creating of concepts. Concepts are complex, not discrete, but intensive coordinates, in that they are composed of many parts. They are continuously becoming, with tendencies towards chaos and change. Such an understanding of philosophy can be evident, we would argue, in practices such as communities of dialogical enquiry particularly with children. Through such practices concepts are not fixed, but fluid; they are porous and have ‘cracks’ (Kennedy and Kennedy 2011) that ‘leak’, usually referred to as ‘lines of flight’. Translator of The Thousand Plateaus (1987/2014) Brian Massumi, explains that Deleuze and Guattari’s use of the French ‘for ‘flight’ covers not only the act of ‘fleeing or eluding’, but also ‘flowing, leaking, and disappearing into the distance’.7 As the French word for ‘flight’, fuite, bears no relation to flying itself, some authors in this book do not use the usual translation of ‘line of flight’, but ‘line of escape’. The reason for this is that concepts, including those introduced by Deleuze and Guattari, have tendencies towards stasis and opinion when concepts are ‘(re)absorbed in a dominant or traditional way of thinking’, thereby reproducing existing ways of thinking (Adkins 2015:19). The use of ‘line of escape’ instead of ‘line of flight’ might keep us philosophically awake (see: Haynes and Murris 2017). For Deleuze,8 concepts are a ‘toolbox’. This masculine language expresses the idea that concepts are not bricks to build a solid wall with, but a ‘pragmatics’. Concepts are like clay or playdough; they are malleable, and their form and substance are affected by the strength of the hands, the warmth of the body and the intensity of the ideas explored and expressed collaboratively – the meaning of any concept involves embodied processes and a relationship to other concepts (Massumi 2014). Such a pragmatics, and contextualised use/invention of concepts, do not reduce the meaning of a concept by an a priori determined set of propositions that you can either enter into or not. So, what is the ‘line of escape’ opened up by the use of a posthuman orientation when exploring the de/colonisation of childhood discourses? The notion of discourse includes language but is not limited to it. Networks of power construct not only what is said, but also what can be said, and the effects of power are the creation of a particular kind of identity. Power is intrinsic to formation of self, as Brian Massumi (2015:18–19) puts this Foucauldian idea: ‘Power doesn’t just force us down certain paths, it puts the paths in us’. The solution lies not in trying to either re-inscribe or escape such categories (gender, race etc.), but ‘flipping them over into degrees of freedom’ (Massumi 2015:17), a power to, not a power over. Here pedagogical possibilities surface. Massumi explains that this flipping over, and power to, cannot be done at an

12  Karin Murris with Joanna Haynes

individual level, but is a relational undertaking and creates what Karen Barad (2007) would call an interference pattern or ‘superposition’: The idea is that there are ways of acting upon the level of belonging itself, on the moving together and coming together of bodies per se . . . It would be a caring for the relating of things as such – a politics of belonging instead of a politics of identity . . . In Isabelle Stengers’ terms this kind of politics is an ecology of practices. It’s a pragmatic politics of the in-between. (Massumi 2015:18; our emphasis) We have discussed elsewhere the notion of in/hospitality in educational settings (Haynes and Murris 2012) that has emerged from experiences of working in many different educational contexts and noticing how we and others are affected by places and patterns of intra-action. Philosophically and pedagogically significant in this context are, for example, Reggio-inspired practices that use transmodal languages to express an object’s relationality with its environment (Murris 2017b).9 So, what might a politics of belonging look like in the literacy classroom and how could this inspire teacher educators and others living and working with children to de/colonise their thinking and practices? It is this question we seek to address in this book through an affirmative posthuman engagement with a one-hour lesson in a South African classroom. We have found our inspiration for this kind of research with one another and in the rapidly growing field of posthuman scholarship in education.

Posthuman scholarship in literac(y)ies education and educational research The recent ‘material’ or ‘ontological turn’ has informed a new scholarship in education to focus not only on the human and the discursive, but also to include the more-than-human, such as the material, space, atmosphere, breath, sound or nonhuman animals.These scholars move beyond the discursive only and exemplify a posthuman reorientation drawing in particular on philosophers Haraway, Barad, Braidotti, Deleuze and Guattari, none of whom, of course, have made explicit how their philosophies should or could be enacted in literacy education. This leaves the ground open for invention and experimentation. For research in literacy education, we have found non-representational methodologies helpful that move beyond the personal and avoid psychological, psycho-analytical or sociological interpretations that involve reflection on what has happened (see e.g., Coleman and Ringrose 2013; Koro-Ljungberg 2016; Lather 2016; Patel 2016; St Pierre, Jackson and Mazzei 2016;Taylor and Hughes 2016; Vannini 2015). They are characterised by ‘overwhelming subject-fatigue’ (Pedersen and Pini 2017:1051), but there is a danger in the methodocentric educational research simply to replace one set of methodologies (e.g., interview, auto-ethnography, case-study, observations) with a new set. Particular research

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methodologies that have emerged so far include diffraction (Lenz Taguchi 2010), rhizoanalysis (Allan 2011; Cumming 2015), cartographies (Masny 2012), mapping (Cole 2012), intra-views (Marn and Wolgemuth 2016) and schizoanalysis. So, what makes research non-representational? First and most importantly, it involves being suspicious of any method ‘that privileges both speaking and hearing human subjects’ and regards ‘voice’ ‘as a prime source of “lived experience” and meaning’ (Pedersen and Pini 2017:1052). Let’s look at schizoanalysis as an example. Deleuze and Guattari (1987/2014:18) propose schizoanalysis instead of psychotherapy, because it resists looking at the ‘unconscious as a centred system’. Instead, they suggest that the unconscious (like thinking) works like a rhizome and is not located in a bounded body. Individual selves do not exist prior to their material-discursive relationships. So, why should this be important for a project that explores de/ colonising childhood discourses? Childhood discourses tend to focus on the psycho-social dimension of children’s behaviour and beliefs; first the individual, then the context (child as ‘ii’, see Murris 2016). So, the concept ‘child’ in such discourses refers to a bounded entity in space and time that exists prior to its intra-actions. Contestations and moves towards a more relational ontology include concerns about the concept child as if it were universal or abstract (as in the human rights discourse), and therefore it has been suggested that we need to talk about ‘childhoods’, rather than ‘childhood’ to express cultural, ethnic and historical diversity. We pick up this important thread again in Chapter 2 in the context of postcolonial theorising and Indigenous ontologies. Relevant for the focus here on the implications of posthuman research on literacy education is the idea that for posthumanists the concept ‘child’ is not abstract enough. Each person (of whatever age) is more than his or her body, always connected, embedded and embodied, dynamic and active. The concept ‘child’ does not express an object in the world, but a complex material-discursive relationality. In this book, we have consulted and built on the following scholars in literacy who use critical posthumanism as a navigational tool, including: Candace Kuby, Tara Gutshall Rucker, Diana Masny, David Cole, Margaret Mackey, Kimberley Lenters, Kevin Leander, Gail Boldt, Cathy Burnett, Guy Merchant, Jon Wargo, Karen Wohlwend, Kylie Peppler, Anna Keune and Naomi Thompson. Building on poststructuralists, and in response to the narrowing down of what counts as literacy by governments globally, they invite their readers to embrace the affective, material and embodied dimensions of meaning-making in literacy education and the complex and ambiguous relationships in between space, body and text. Their work is a reminder that there is no simply cognitive or psycho-linguistic pathway between text and mind, and they problematise notions of context and representation (the posthuman subject is multiple, unbounded and always in relation with the more-than-human). In terms of impact, they warn that knowledge construction is non-linear, that learning is always in process and incomplete, and that learning outcomes are multiple and complex and defy quantification, easy measurement, containment or replication (Burnett and Merchant 2016). Literacy

14  Karin Murris with Joanna Haynes

events are lived experiences, with a focus on process and ‘not projected towards some textual end-point’, or a product (Leander and Boldt 2013:26).The idea that ‘texts’ are more than books or even images is of course not new.We refer here to the distinction between ‘literacy’ and ‘literacies’. James Collins and Richard Blot explain that ‘literacy’ tends to be understood as ‘a uniform set of techniques and uses of language, with identifiable stages of development and clear, predictable consequences for culture and cognition’ (Collins and Blot 2003:3–4). ‘Literacies’, on the other hand, tends to refer to ‘diverse, historically and culturally variable, practices with texts’, hence the latter are ‘relativist, sociocultural or situated’ literacy models (Collins and Blot 2003:4). Although there are indeed important similarities, for example, we also regard readers themselves and their worlds as ‘texts’; we do not subscribe to the relativist epistemology characteristic of the linguistic turn.10 Instead, we use both ‘literacy’ and ‘literacies’ inspired by the ontological turn.11 What makes posthuman literacy practice and scholarship distinct is its affirmative forward movement that includes desire, active experimentation, playful improvisation, conceptual innovation and non-representational readings of text, as well as data. Drawing on Deleuze’s notion of desire (in contrast to Lacan’s notion of desire as lack), Candace Kuby and Tara Gutshall Rucker (2016:5) have introduced the helpful verb (not noun!) of literacy desiring: in literacy events (always) moving and fluid, affective and intra-active connections in relations are made. This desiring-with-others-and-materials is a different doing of literacy that also troubles linear time, what it means to know a text and how to (rationally) plan for literacy lessons. David Cole and Diana Masny (2012:5) describe the literacy classroom as ‘full of hybrid human and non-human subjectivities that can interrelate, overlap and contradict each other in text-based activities’, drawing often on the ‘unconscious’ and ‘associative powers that cannot be predicted beforehand or planned for rationally and need to be ‘valued alongside logic’. Literacy desiring is a kind of learning that moves alongside an ethics and epistemology of ‘uncertainty, fissures, unpredictable movements and experiments’ (Kuby and Gutshall Rucker 2016:6). Although heavily influenced by sociocultural approaches to literacy education and New Literacy Studies, literacy scholars Kuby and Gutshall Rucker (2016:15) acknowledge their profound ontological (and at the very same time epistemological and ethical) shift: the former focus on the meaning of human interaction and knowledge production, literacy desiring, in contrast, pays attention to ‘the agential qualities of humans  materials’ and what is produced through the intra-actions. Learning in literacy and literary studies is therefore always part of a world-making process. The teacher is not at a distance from the world, but her literacy intra-ventions are iterative materialisations sedimented into the world (Barad 2018).

Learning in the ‘classroom’ Philosopher of education Gert Biesta is well-known for his critique of the current focus in education on learning rather than teaching – a dangerous shift in

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educational discourse and practices, he calls ‘learnification’ (Biesta 2010, 2014). This global tendency to talk about ‘learning’ (see e.g. ‘lifelong learning’), rather than ‘education’, he says, has meant a move away from concerns about what content is taught to concerns about process (skills and competences). Biesta agrees with the critique levelled at traditional teaching with its authoritarian conception of teaching as control. He argues that the learner does not exist as a subject in her own right, but merely as an object of the interventions of the teacher. However, (without setting up a binary between teaching and learning) he is equally critical of student-centred teaching that positions the teacher as a facilitator of learning (Biesta 2016).Teaching, he claims, is always about content, that is, about something for particular purposes and is always relational because it involves someone educating somebody else (Biesta 2012:12; our emphasis). His main point is that learnification hides the importance of content, purpose and the ‘who’ or the subjectivity of the teacher in the educational relationship (Biesta 2006, 2010, 2012). As an individualistic concept, learnification shifts the attention away from relationships (Biesta 2014). Student-centred education puts the individual, the student, at the centre of pedagogy in terms of planning by foregrounding their interests, backgrounds, needs and goals. In student-centred education, the development of educational relationships relies on dialogical and sociocultural pedagogies, mentoring, formative assessment, (self-) reflection, reflexivity and relational and interactive strategies such as peer and small group work (Ceder 2016:16). With the emphasis on knowledge and the important role of the teacher, one might mistakenly believe that Biesta is proposing a teacher-centred approach. In the latter, the teacher is in authority of knowledge production, and consequently positions the learner as knowledge consumer, and therefore the relationship between teacher and learner is that of epistemic inequality (Murris 2013). The recent emphasis on evidence-based research, student performance, national and international assessments, yearly exams and tests and homework at increasingly earlier ages positions the teacher as the authority. Biesta is highly critical of the politics and the lingo of the educational measurement culture and he foregrounds relationality. However, in his philosophy, educational relationality is still theorised as someone educating somebody else, therefore in humanistic terms. Whether learner- or teacher-centred education, the dominant ontological paradigm positions the subject before the world, both spatially and temporally, so the natural and social world is an object of learning. The subject is thereby the ‘origin of signification’ – the ‘I’ who asks the questions, the self in whom learning takes place (see Murris 2017a). Educators are trained to regard schools as places of learning for human development and achievement. Children learn to excel through the acquisition of knowledge, skills and dispositions with the main purpose of integration within human society as it is (Snaza, Applebaum, Bayne, Carlson, Rotas, Sandlin, Wallin and Weaver 2014). For example, in learner-centred education, it is assumed that teachers can change children’s thinking and actions by modifying their learning environments.

16  Karin Murris with Joanna Haynes

Both the knowledge-centred approach with the educator as the ‘sage on the stage’ and the student-centred approach ‘find their points of departure not in the processes, but in stable identities existing before and after the process’ (Ceder 2016:18; our emphasis); the knowing subject is formed (teacher-centred) or transformed (student-centred). The pedagogical relationship is between preexisting entities, individual people. This is also the case in Biesta’s educational philosophy. Now, what difference does it make to move the focus away from the human individual (either teacher or learner) and put relationality at the centre of pedagogy? What difference does this make epistemologically, politically and ethically? To answer these questions, we turn to the philosophy of posthumanism and conceptualise an educational intra-relationality theoretically (Part I) and practically (Part II) in a literacy classroom. Drawing on Maggie MacLure's work, Julie Allan (2011:158) suggests adding ‘invisible quotation marks’ to, for example, “ ‘the classroom’, ‘the child’, ‘the researcher’ ”, because these texts are never politically innocent and presuppose binaries that include and exclude. We like the idea of adding quotation marks and make them visible for the ‘classroom’ below and in Chapter 8. Posthuman research is concerned about doing justice to the material and discursive reality of the world humans are part of and are always entangled with (including the cameras humans use for research and are used by). Posthuman research is not motivated by what practices lack or by gaps in the literature.The disruption of self/world, teacher/learner, observer/observed, normal/abnormal, mind/body dualisms in non-representational literacy research opens up particular sensibilities and greater ethical responsibilities for the practitioner/ researcher. As part of the book project and the wider research group, we have also read and discussed the works of a range of early childhood educators who address more explicitly postcoloniality (e.g., Cannella and Viruru 2004; Cannella and Soto 2010).This ‘field’ also includes some of our international project members, such as Erica Burman, Hillevi Lenz Taguchi, Affrica Taylor, Mindy Blaise, Fikile Nxumalo, Anna Hickey-Moody and Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw. We have also engaged with the scholarship of other early childhood education researchers, such as Liselott Olsson, Marg Sellers and Bronwyn Davies. An explicitly posthumanist orientation to de/colonising early childhood discourses is still new (also to South Africa). Much of the posthuman de/colonising education literature is positioned in early childhood education as a site to rethink the human itself through the child. For these researchers, the idea is not, as Kromidas (2014:426–427) puts it beautifully, ‘to extend the boundaries of the human to encompass those children presumably waiting at its gates’, but to reconfigure subjectivity altogether (Murris 2016). In Chapter 4, we look at three concepts and strategies for de/colonising education: ‘diffraction’, ‘dis/identification’ and ‘naturecultures’.

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Core problems that drive our investigations We have identified the following five multifaceted, complex and intricately entangled core problems related to discriminatory childhood discourses and material practices through a critical posthumanist theoretical framework. These problems constitute the foci of our research. Summarised here, each chapter in this book engages with these problems in different ways: 1 The constitution of our understanding of the key concepts ‘child’, ‘childhood’ and ‘development’ through western humanist discourses. Current theories, policies and practices position children as not ‘fully-human’ (developmentalism). In education, developmentalism has profoundly shaped the teaching of literacy and presents obstacles to working affectively with children’s thinking, bodies, relationships and capabilities. 2 Western metaphysics since Ancient Greek philosophy and its logic of representation with its particular assumptions about truth and knowledge shape our humanist binary thinking and the ontological positioning of the human as not being part of the world, but at a distance from it – with all the ethical implications for our (human) intersectional relationships across age, race, gender and class and the relationships with other earth dwellers, including nonhumans and other-than-humans. A logic of representation reduces literacy to a problem of mastery. 3 The view that the mediation and construction of truth and knowledge is exclusively through language (reading and writing), at the expense of other transmodal means of expression and meaning-making, and by excluding other knowledges (affect, imagination, fantasy, the body), causes the epistemic injustice done to children based on identity-prejudice.12 Literacy practices become increasingly narrow and reductive. Neither teachers nor children can operate between the constraining straight lines. 4 The particular view of ‘negative difference’ (difference as lack or as deficit) that currently shapes use of school indoor and outdoor spaces, curriculum, pedagogy and research methodologies. Neoliberal normalising discourses of standardisation and quality in early childhood care and education have led to a one-size-fits-all approach that does not do justice to situated social, political and cultural differences. The obsessive measurement of ability and performance with its segregation of children into able/not able in literacy articulates the collective self-fulfilling prophecy of failure and an ever widening ‘gap’ in individualised attainment. 5 Dominant philosophies of transcendence that have created inequality and inegalitarian relationships between members of the same species based on age prejudice, sometimes cause violence in care and educational settings. Authoritarianism becomes the only answer to failure, when teachers are also under surveillance and measurement through practices such as national and international league tables.

18  Karin Murris with Joanna Haynes

Whilst the challenges of addressing such problems are contextual, they are not unique to South Africa, and we argue that the issues explored here and the examples of different readings of the ‘classroom’ are relevant for educational practitioners elsewhere.The problems are played out differently in other places, but through broadly similar childist discourses. Nevertheless, South Africa has a particular trajectory regarding issues of social justice and social inclusion due to its particular history. Our research responds to such challenges by investigating the use of innovative ‘post-age’ and intra-generational pedagogical practices. To contextualise our study, it is important here to situate the problems within the South African context. The South African government has identified four major cross-cutting knowledge challenges: understanding a changing planet, reducing the human footprint, adapting the way we live and innovation for sustainability.13 Starting sustainable education in childhood is an imperative as habits are formed early in life, but dominant discourses work against this, including how sustainability is conceptualised at the service of global capitalism, also in South Africa (see above). Literacy and literary education has been reluctant to engage critically with the child/nature intersection and its entanglement with environmental concerns as its pedagogies have been shaped by Romantic figurations of child as innocent, vulnerable (Taylor 2013) and ignorant (Murris 2016). Childhood educators and practitioners are positioned as professional substitute mothers who should protect the children in their care from the harsh realities of a damaged planet and other environmental and political issues (Duhn 2012:19–20) or uncomfortable political realities in picturebooks provoking censorship (Haynes and Murris 2012). Our research project addresses the need to reassess normative assumptions about child and childhood and to reimagine different, egalitarian child: adult relationships in health, care and educational contexts through the cross-pollination of ideas across disciplines and geographical North-South contexts. The rationale is to develop and investigate different pedagogical strategies and a ‘new’ kind of human subjectivity with which teachers and higher education students can critically interrogate their figurations of child and childhood, building on the growing literature on posthuman subjectivities and enacting the reconfiguration of the posthuman child (Murris 2016). This book invites practitioners, researchers and students to set aside the familiar stories of learned habits, beliefs, thoughts and so on about child subjectivity, and to adopt a critical posthumanist orientation to analyse how the mind and our practices have been colonised by an anthropocentric onto-epistemology. Pedagogy implicates ideas of the relationship between self and other, and every notion of childhood is inscribed. One of our key questions is how critical posthumanism can assist in conceptualising postcolonial curricula and educational practices that traverse the humanities, the arts, law, health, engineering and the social and natural sciences. Central to this investigation is the way in which a post-anthropocentric posthumanism encourages academics and practitioners to rethink the human itself

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through the child, in the context of working towards an ecologically sustainable future (not only for the human). Disrupting individual pedagogical frameworks that are anthropocentric goes hand in hand with troubling linear time – a conception of time that enables Enlightenment notions of truth and beliefs about progress. Pacini-Ketchabaw and Nxumalo (2014:134) argue that a posthuman orientation disrupts the idea of linear trajectories of change, and that progress ‘embraces mutuality, mess, multiplicity, and contradiction’ in ‘continually emergent past-present-futures’. It disrupts by critiquing a perspective whereby we reflect on the past as distant observers moving as atomistic fleshy units through time and space: past and future are already ‘in’ the present of which we are a part (Barad 2007). By opening up to the more-than-human and material-discursive realities, understandings (e)merge that are relevant for de/colonising education: ‘new connections to things, spaces, and bodies’ (Pacini-Ketchabaw and Nxumalo 2014:135). Introducing the agency of the material as part of an assemblage (e.g., picturebook, furniture, building, bodily movements, trees, windows, emotions, children’s talk, silences, sound, teachers’ instructions, cameras, drawings, koki pens) adds profound complexity to the entangled material-discursive processes in child: adult literacy/ies encounters, and provides an ontoepistemological context that is always shifting, evolving and in/determinate. In recent years, in the effort to be more respectful of children’s different experiences and stories, many practitioners have been doing important work focusing attention on listening to their voices in classrooms, with a view to strengthening children’s agency (e.g., Mary John and others). These efforts are based on an idea of the child as an individual subject with rights. Furthermore, these efforts are so often at odds with curriculum and assessment policies, particularly in literacy, that they confirm children in a less than fully human position (Haynes and Murris 2017). This book, whilst affirming those efforts, sets out to undermine the individualism and human-centrism on which such policies and practices rest. Drawing on Deleuze, Braidotti (2002:78) argues that the transformational project is to develop alternative ‘post-metaphysical’ figurations14 (or ‘reconfigurations’) and different images of subjectivity. In the case of child subjectivity, ‘post-metaphysical’ means a break with the nature/culture binary and a rethinking and redoing of how, for example, voice and agency in literacy education is conceived, encouraged, and evaluated. What is urgently needed for justice is ‘a new starting place’ (Barad 2007:137) of how children grow and think – a relational ontology that includes a performative account of human and nonhuman bodies (Barad 2007:139) as an alternative to dominant ideologies (e.g., developmentalism, children’s rights discourse, social constructionism and poststructuralism). The idea of a ‘multiple listening’ to children that includes particular kinds of observation and assessment (e.g., ‘pedagogical documentation’) is important for our choice of pedagogy for this particular research project we engage with in this book and involves listening for the differences ‘in-between’ people, but also ‘in-between’ the languages – verbal, graphic, plastic, musical, gestural, etc. –

20  Karin Murris with Joanna Haynes

as well as their reciprocal intra-action, that enable the creation of new concepts (Rinaldi 2001:83). A ‘post-age’ kind of listening includes making room for children’s imaginative and embodied ways of thinking and philosophising to be added to the pool of knowledge. These are practices of affinity and being alongside children: already able rather than waiting to be enabled (Haynes and Murris 2012, 2013; Haynes 2014). To investigate the use of a pedagogy called Philosophy for Children for our research project seemed therefore an obvious choice, explored further in Chapter 3. Before turning to the philosophical and practical experiment itself, which we describe in Chapter 4 and enact in Part II, it is necessary to delve a bit deeper into the philosophical framework and postcolonial theories and make some tentative connections between posthumanism, different strands of postcolonial theorising and de/colonising childhood discourses.

Notes 1 For her awards and other information about Viviane Schwarz, see: (www.vivianeschwarz. co.uk/?page_id=66) 2 A posthuman approach to literacy moves beyond human social practices (Kuby and Gutshall Rucker 2016:15). We use the words ‘literacies’ and ‘literacy’ interchangeably throughout this book as we would like to ‘restore’ the meaning of literacy as something more than a technicist skills-based approach. For a discussion of some of the complexity involved in using either literacy, or literacies, see the section below entitled ‘Posthuman scholarship in literac(y)ies education and educational research’. 3 Different from multimodality, we regard transmodality as the creation of new understandings of concepts through the switching of one hundred languages (and a thousand more) to project forwards as part of a process of intra-action in-between human and nonhuman bodies (which is different from self-expression). The famous metaphor of ‘The Hundred Languages’ is from a poem written by Loris Malaguzzi – the founder of the Reggio Emilia approach to education. A powerful critique of the privileging of the dominant two languages in (higher) education, reading and writing, the metaphor refers at one (practical) level to the introduction of material-discursive tools for meaning making in schools, such as visual arts, physical movement, video, digital cameras, augmented realities and computers. At a symbolic level, the hundred languages are, as Carlina Rinaldi puts it: a ‘metaphor for crediting children and adults with a hundred, a thousand creative and communicative potentials’ (2006:175). See also, footnote 12. 4 One of our research finding is the use of de/colonising, instead of decolonising, as in our view de/colonisation also disrupts the epistemic relationship the human has towards Truth. The claim that to decolonise is a linear project towards an end point, a product, a decolonised state of being is problematic. The philosophical complexity of this stance is further explored briefly below through the philosophies of Claire Colebrook and Walter Kohan and picked up again in Chapter 2. For Walter Kohan, each person has to find his or her own way in thinking, which cannot be imitated or reproduced. De/colonising is therefore about inhabiting a particular relationship to knowledge and truth. 5 See, for example, the response by philosophers of education Kai Horsthemke and Penny Enslin to the claim made by Yusuf Waghid and Thaddeus Metz that African philosophy is more communitarian as opposed to the liberal individualism that characterises Western philosophy (Enslin and Horsthemke 2016). However, for posthumanists, separating out communitarianism and individualism is a false dichotomy as it already assumes the individualised western subject. It does not go to the heart of the matter. Braidotti

Philosophical playthinking in South Africa 21 (2006:152) proposes instead, Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘vitalistic yet anti-essentialist brand of immanence that bypasses liberal individualism and dislocates the anthropocentric bias of communitarianism’. 6 During a keynote at the annual conference of the South African Educational Research Association in Cape Town on 25 October 2016 7 See Massumi’s notes on his translation of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1987/2014:xv). 8 As described by Massumi in his forward to Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1987/2014:xiii). 9 See footnote 1: ‘transmodality’. 10 Since the linguistic and cultural turn, scholars assume that there is no unmediated access to reality (as-it-is, untouched by cultural inscription), and claim that all knowledge is a historically, linguistically and socioculturally mediated intersubjective process. Bodies are understood as sites of experience through which we embody and actively respond to our sociocultural and historical context. For key thinkers during this period, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler, all knowledge construction is mediated through semiotic systems that are not politically neutral. 11 Since the ontological turn there has been a radical rethinking of the relationship between the knowing (human) subject that is active and the body that is passive in education. The learner is not an entity bounded by its skin and in a particular position in space and time that precedes relations, but the learner emerges as a result of these relations. Affect and other transcorporeal knowledges, previously excluded from the domain of what counts as knowledge, are being paid attention to. Prior to this turn, language was seen as the prime medium for knowledge construction. Transmodality differs from multiliteracies in the ontology that is presupposed: human and nonhuman bodies do not exist prior to their relationality. See Chapter 2. 12 See in particular Chapters 2 and 3. 13 See: www.gov.za/sites/www.gov.za/files/Global_Change_Research_Plan. Accessed: April 2015. 14 Rosi Braidotti (2002) uses the term figurations as an alternative to metaphors. These figurations are embodied imaginings, cognitive assumptions and beliefs. She explains that ‘figurations are not figurative ways of thinking, but rather more materialistic mappings of situated, or embedded and embodied positions’ (Braidotti 2011:2).They are not metaphors, but social-material positions: ‘living maps, a transformation account of the self ’ (Braidotti 2011:12).

References Adkins, B. (2015) Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: A Critical Introduction and Guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Allan, J. (2011) Complicating, not Explicating: Taking up Philosophy in Learning Disability Research. Learning Disability Quarterly 34, 2:153–161. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23053260; [Accessed 18th December, 2016]. Arvin, M., Tuck, E. & Morrill, A. (2013) Decolonizing Feminism: Challenging Connections Between Settler Colonialism and Heteropatriarchy. Feminist Formations 25, 1:8–34. Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press. Barad, K. (2013) Ma(r)king Time: Material Entanglements and Re-memberings: Cutting Together-Apart. In P. R. Carlile, D. Nicolini, A. Langley and H. Tsoukas (Eds.) How Matter Matters: Objects, Artifacts, and Materiality in Organization Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 16–32.

22  Karin Murris with Joanna Haynes Barad, K. (2014) Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting Together-Apart. Parallax 20, 3:168–187. Barad, K. (2018) Troubling Time/s and Ecologies of Nothingness: On the Im/Possibilities of Living and Dying in the Void. InM. Fritsch, P. Lynes and D.Wood (Eds.) Eco-Deconstruction. Derrida and Environmental Philosophy. New York: Fordham U Press. Biesta, G. J. J. (2006) Beyond Learning. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers. Biesta, G. J. J. (2010) Good Education in an Age of Measurement: Ethics, Politics, Democracy. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers. Biesta, G. J. J. (2012) The Future of Teacher Education: Evidence, Competence or Wisdom? Research on Steiner Education 3, 1:8–21. [Online] Available from: www.rosejourn.com. Accessed: 10 June 2012. Biesta, G. J. J. (2014) The Beautiful Risk of Education. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers. Biesta, G. J. J. (2016) The Rediscovery of Teaching: On Robot Vacuum Cleaners, NonEgological Education and the Limits of the Hermeneutical World View. Educational Philosophy and Theory 48, 4:374–392. Braidotti, R. (2002) Metamorphoses:Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Braidotti, R. (2006) Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics. Cambridge: Polity Press. Braidotti, R. (2011) Nomadic Theory: The Portable Rosi Braidotti. Columbia: Columbia University Press. Braidotti, R. (2013) The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press. Braidotti, R. (2018) Foreword. In V. Bozalek, R. Braidotti, M. Zembylas and T. Shefer (Eds.) Socially Just Pedagogies: Posthumanist, Feminist and Materialist Perspectives in Higher Education. London: Bloomsbury, xiii–xxvii. Burman, E. (2008) Developments: Child, Image, Nation. London: Routledge. Burman, E. (2010) Un/thinking Children in Development: A Contribution From Northern Antidevelopmental Psychology. In G. S. Cannella and L. D. Soto (Eds.) Childhoods: A Handbook. New York: Peter Lang, 9–27. Burnett, C. & Merchant, G. (2016) Boxes of Poison: Baroque Technique as Antidote to Simple Views of Literacy. Journal of Literacy Research 48, 3:258–279. Cannella, G. S. (2010) Introduction. In G. S. Cannella and L. D. Soto (Eds.) Childhoods: A Handbook. New York: Peter Lang, 1–9. Cannella, G. S. & Soto L. D. (Eds.) (2010) Childhoods: A Handbook. New York: Peter Lang, 1–9. Cannella, G. S. & Viruru, R. (2004) Childhood and Postcolonization: Power, Education, and Contemporary Practice. New York: RoutledgeFalmer. Ceder, S. (2016) Cutting Through Water:Towards a Posthuman Theory of Educational Relationality. Doctoral dissertation. Faculty of Social Sciences, Lund University, Sweden. Cole, D. (2012) Mapping Literacies With Affect. In D. Masny and D. Cole (Eds.) Mapping Multiple Literacies: An Introduction to Deleuzian Literacy Studies. London: Continuum, 43–69. Colebrook, C. (2016) Is There Something Wrong With the Task of Thinking? www.academia. edu/30488137/. Accessed: 18 December 2016. Coleman, R. & Ringrose, F. (Eds.) (2013) Deleuze and Research Methodologies. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Collins, J. & Blot, R. K. (2003) Literacy and Literacies: Text, Power and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cumming, T. (2015) Challenges of ‘thinking differently’ With Rhizoanalytic Approaches: A Reflexive Account. International Journal of Research & method in Education 38, 2:137–148. Dahlberg, G. & Moss, P. (2005) Ethics and Politics in Early Childhood Education. London: Routledge.

Philosophical playthinking in South Africa 23 Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987/2014) A Thousand Plateaus. Translated and a foreword by B. Massumi. London: Bloomsbury. Duhn, I. (2012) Making ‘place’ for Ecological Sustainability in Early Childhood Education. Environmental Education Research 18, 1:19–29. Enslin, P. and Horsthemke, K. (2016) Philosophy of education: Becoming less Western, more African? Journal of Philosophy of Education 50, 2:177–190. doi: 10.1111/1467-9752.12199. Fricker, M. (2007) Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Haraway, D. (2003) The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Other Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. Haraway, D. (2016) Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Haynes, J. (2014) Already Equal and Able to Speak: Practising Philosophical Enquiry With Young Children. In S. Robson and S. Quinn (Eds.) Routledge International Handbook on Young Children’s Thinking and Understanding. London: Routledge. Haynes, J. & Murris, K. (2012) Picturebooks, Pedagogy and Philosophy. New York: Routledge. Haynes, J. & Murris, K. (2013) The Realm of Meaning: Imagination, Narrative and Playfulness in Philosophical Exploration With Young Children. In P. Costello (Ed.) Special Issue: Developing Children’s Thinking in Early Childhood Education: Early Child Development and Care, 183, 8:1084–1100. Haynes, J. & Murris, K. (2017) Intra-Generational Education: Imagining a Post-Age Pedagogy. Educational Philosophy and Theory. Available from: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00131 857.2016.1255171. Hinton, P., Mehrabi, T. & Barla, J. (2015) New Materialisms/New Colonialisms. Position paper. www.rairarubiabooks.com/. Accessed: 19 December 2016. Kennedy, N. & Kennedy, D. (2011) Community of Philosophical Inquiry as a Discursive Structure and Its Role in School Curriculum Design. Journal of Philosophy of Education 45, 2:265–283. Koro-Ljungberg, M. (2016) Reconceptualizing Qualitative Research: Methodologies Without Methodology. New York: SAGE Publications. Kromidas, M. (2014) The ‘savage’ Child and the Nature of Race: Posthuman Interventions From New York City. Anthropological Theory 14, 4:422–441. Kuby, C. & Gutshall Rucker, T. G. (2016) Go Be a Writer!: Expanding the Curricular Boundaries of Literacy Learning With Children. New York: Columbia University Press. Lather, P. (2016) Top Ten+ List: (Re)Thinking Ontology in (Post)Qualitative Research. Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies 16, 2:125–131. Leander, K. & Boldt, D. G. (2013) Rereading ‘A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies’ Bodies, Texts, and Emergence. Journal of Literacy Research 45, 1:22–46. Lenz Taguchi, H. (2010) Going Beyond the Theory/Practice Divide in Early Childhood Education. London: Routledge Contesting Early Childhood Series. Lund, G. (2014) Taking Teamwork Seriously: The Sport of Dog Agility as an Ethical Model of Cross-Species Companionship. In J. Gillett and M. Gilbert (Eds.) Sport, Animals and Society. New York: Routledge, 101–126. Marn, T. M. & Wolgemuth, J. R. (2016) Purposeful Entanglements: A New Materialist Analysis of Transformative Interviews. Qualitative Inquiry 23, 5. Published on-line first. doi: 10.1177/1077800416659085. Masny, D. (2012) Cartographies of Multiple Literacies. In D. Masny and D. Cole (Eds.) Mapping Multiple Literacies: An Introduction to Deleuzian Literacy Studies. London: Continuum, 15–43.

24  Karin Murris with Joanna Haynes Massumi, B. (2014) What Animals Teach Us About Ethics. Durham: Durham University Press. Massumi, B. (2015) Politics of Affect. Cambridge: Polity Press. Mazzei, L. A. (2013) A Voice Without Organs: Interviewing in Posthumanist Research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 26, 6:732–740. Murris, K. (2013) The Epistemic Challenge of Hearing Child’s Voice [Special issue]. Studies in Philosophy and Education 32, 3:245–259. Murris, K. (2016) The Posthuman Child: Educational Transformation Through Philosophy With Picturebooks. London: Routledge Contesting Early Childhood Series. Murris, K. (2017a) Learning as ‘Worlding’: Decentring Gert Biesta’s ‘non-egological’ Education. Childhood & Philosophy 13, 26:453–469. Murris, K. (2017b) Reading Two Rhizomatic Pedagogies Diffractively Through One Another: A Reggio Inspired Philosophy With Children for the Postdevelopmental Child. Pedagogy, Culture & Society 25, 4:531–550. Pacini-Ketchabaw,V. & Nxumalo, F. (2014) Posthumanist Imaginaries for Decolonizing Early Childhood Praxis. In M. N. Bloch, B. B. Swadener and G. S. Cannella (Eds.) Reconceptualizing Early Childhood Care & Education. A Reader. New York: Peter Lang, 131–143. Patel, L. (2016) Decolonising Educational Research: From Ownership to Answerability. New York: Routledge. Pedersen, H. (2010) Is ‘the posthuman’ Educable? On the Convergence of Educational Philosophy, Animal Studies, and Posthumanist Theory. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 31, 2:237–250. Pedersen, H. & Pini, B. (2017) Educational Epistemologies and Methods in a More-ThanHuman-World. Educational Philosophy and Theory 49, 11:1051–1054. Rinaldi, C. (2001) Documentation and Assessment: What Is the Relationship? In Project Zero Making Learning Visible: Children as Individual and Group Learners. Reggio Emilia: Reggio Children. Rinaldi, C. (2006) In Dialogue with Reggio Emilia: Listening, Researching and Learning. London: Routledge Contesting Early Childhood Series. Schwarz,V. (2016) How to Find Gold. London: Walkers. Snaza, N., Applebaum, P., Bayne, S., Carlson, D., Rotas, N., Sandlin, J., Wallin, J. & Weaver, J. (2014) Toward a Posthumanist Education. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 30, 2:39–55. St Pierre, E. A., Jackson, A. Y. & Mazzei, L. A. (2016) New Empiricisms and New Materialisms: Conditions for New Enquiry. Cultural Studies  Critical Methodologies 16, 2:99–110. Taylor, A. (2013) Reconfiguring the Natures of Childhood. London: Routledge Contesting Early Childhood Series. Taylor, C. & Hughes, C. (2016) Posthuman Research Practices in Education. London: Palgrave. Vannini, P. (2015) Non-Representational Methodologies: Re-Envisioning Research. London: Routledge.

Chapter 2

Posthumanism, de/colonising education and child(hoods) in South Africa Karin Murris

In this chapter Karin re-turns to the questions about the who and the what of thinking – in particular with a focus on the history of thought’s own preoccupation with self. She explores the patriarchal roots of western metaphysics with a (human) knowing Subject that has agency, voice and identity and destructively detached from nature. Substance ontology has brought into existence humans’ claim to exceptionalism and with it a logic of representation. It has also brought into existence the epistemic arrogance of locating knowledge, intelligence and meaning-making in the subject and in the human subject only of a particular age. Karin shows through a diagram the overlap between critical posthumanism and postcolonial theories that are neither anthropocentric, nor assume that thinking is located in the human mind (or brain). With child and childhood in Africa as our context, she argues that postdevelopmental perspectives in research can begin to address the existing power relations and age discrimination typical of colonial early childhood education. It is this double de/colonising move argued for in Part I and enacted in Part II.

The ontological turn and intra-active relationality Critical posthumanism can be seen as a philosophical response to humanism’s failure to fulfil its own ethical ideals of pluralism, tolerance and equity (Pedersen 2010:242).The reason for this claim is humanism’s misplaced focus on defining and essentialising the human at the expense of the subhuman (e.g. children) and the nonhuman (e.g. animals and things). Claire Colebrook (2016:n.p.) reminds us that we tend to work ‘with violently blunt timelines’, but drawing on Deleuze and Guattari she defends both the possibility as well as the usefulness of a historical perspective on thinking and thought’s complex relationship to life and the world. Here, we pick up the questions again that we posed in the previous chapter about the who and the what of thinking – in this case the history of thought. Colebrook (2016:n.p.; our emphasis) writes: It is not the content of thought that must change; it is not what we think, but what we take thinking to be. As long as thinking takes the form of

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representing, measuring, calculating, picturing or modelling a world that is simply there, what is other than the thinking subject will be so much passive matter, standing reserve or inert substance. Thinking, in turn, will be nothing more than an accurate grasp of what it beholds. With reference to philosophers Martin Heidegger and Luce Irigaray, she proposes that thought’s own preoccupation with self has a history of a destructive detachment from nature with a subject set over and against a representable world. To refuse this subjectivism and rationalism does not, however, involve the rejection of humans as a species, as Colebrook points out, but the rejection of a certain type of relationship to thinking (and the ‘other’), a relationship that is not species-wide. In this chapter, we have a historical focus on humans’ claim to exceptionalism and the epistemic arrogance of locating knowledge, intelligence and meaning-making in the subject and only in the human subject. (Not all strands of posthumanism pay attention to both; see the diagram in Figure 2.2.) We explore how western1 metaphysics makes this possible – its method of thinking (locating thinking in the human mind or brain) and the western (colonising) way of thinking about the relationship between thinking and the world. For our de/colonising research project reported on in this book, we have found inspiration in the critical posthumanism of two project members: feminist philosophers Rosi Braidotti and Karen Barad. We pick up the idea of how they have created fresh ethico-political opportunities for us to understand and do subjectivity differently in our practices – to make an ontological turn. Their passionate writing has inspired an ethico-politically exciting new way of doing research. They have also affirmed the way we work, playthink, read together and create new knowledges in communities of philosophical enquiry, which is the pedagogy of philosophy for children (P4C). (See, for example, Chapter 3.) Karen Barad’s (2003, 2007, 2013) neologism intra-action at the heart of her agential realism emphasises an ontological shift in how humans and more-thanhumans relate and influence each other. Ethics is not just a human affair. Intraaction is different from ‘interaction’ in that ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ are never ‘pure’, are never unaffected by each other but are always in relation. This kind of ‘intra-active relationality’ is ontological and different from ‘intersubjectivity’ (Ceder 2016). Intra-action ruptures the familiar concept of ‘interaction’, which presupposes individualised existence of subjects and objects, and expresses the Subject/Object (S/O) dichotomy on which western metaphysics is built. The individualism and deep dualism this dichotomy has created has become the trademark of western thought, a philosophical substratum that has made colonialism and capitalism possible, and an imperialism that has permeated the globe (Cannella and Viruru 2004; Castaneda 2002). By understanding the Subject (self, ‘I’, me, adult) at an ontological distance from the Object (you, animal, matter, child), particular kinds of power relationships have been made possible: imperial and colonial exploitation of land, resources, animals, certain categories of humans (e.g., young, black, labourer, peasant, nomad, rural dweller, ghetto

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dweller, township inhabitant, infant, child, homosexual, homeless, female, elderly, disabled, disturbed, addict) – complex global networks of political and economic domination. The Object is otherised and placed at a distance. The Culture/Nature dichotomy, mirroring the S/O philosophical template, has inserted itself into western knowledge systems and beliefs and through colonisation and global capitalism, extends its reach to push aside and override different knowledge systems globally. The influence of biologist and feminist philosopher Donna Haraway on Barad has been, and still is, significant; they are kindred philosophers, academics as well as friends. Haraway’s The Companion Species Manifesto (2003) is about ‘the implosion of nature and culture’ – a plea to rethink relationality together, but without the Nature/Culture binary. In Chapter 4, three concepts – ‘naturecultures’, ‘dis/identification’ and ‘diffraction’ – are taken up as a Deleuzian ‘toolbox’ (see Chapter 1) to de/colonise and rupture the western Subject/Object dichotomy. Each concept as method articulates an ontological entanglement in between the natural and the cultural, the material and the semiotic, the bodily and the mind, etc.

Cogito ergo sum on the toilet door For critical posthumanists, words or concepts do not capture or mirror things ‘out there’ in the world but are part of a constantly changing reality. The entanglement of all human and nonhuman phenomena intra-acting with one another means that it is impossible to say where the boundaries are of each entity, including people. This ‘lack’ of bodily boundaries is not just epistemological but also ontological. Put differently, it is the way the world is, not just a matter of how we get to know or describe this world. Ontological intra-active relationality is not a matter of how we experience the world, or a matter of (psychological) awareness. Neither is it a doing away with, or a denial, that there are individual humans who exist, but what is at stake is a rethinking and revaluation of humans’ claims to exceptionalism: the normative idea that what sets human animals apart from other earth dwellers (including matter) is reason and rationality, located in a mind that is contained by a body which exists alongside other bodies moving in and through space and time. For knowledge to be objective, certain and reliable across spatial and temporal contexts, the mind must be of a substance that does not change: the infamous, from a postcolonial perspective, Cartesian cogito ergo sum (‘I think, therefore I am’). In Descartes, we find the most extreme expression of the dichotomous mind/body split that characterises modernity. Universal, timeless knowledge of the ‘outside’ world is obtained from the ‘inside’ of the knowing subject (as conscious, self-aware, self-contained, independent, rational, mature, universal). This strong articulation of the ontological individualism of Ancient Greek metaphysics (substance ontology) with its deep dualisms has infiltrated everyday language (e.g., what counts as ‘common sense’). It has given rise to the sciences with its strong disciplinary divisions, hierarchical categories and

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classifications (Deleuze and Guattari 1987/1994), and in-forms academic discourses in the Global North as well as the Global South. At the University of Cape Town where this research project is based, Cartesian dualism is an integral part of undergraduate courses in academic philosophy as evident in students’ scrawls on a campus toilet door (Figure 2.1). It struck us as particularly amusing. The contradiction involved was so poignant: words written by a ‘thinking substance’ that does not need a body (extension) to have personal identity (Cartesian dualism), but in a place where the body demands us to go to several times a day. It was certainly intriguing to find these words on the toilet door of a Humanities building. It is unlikely that these students have been taught the material and discursive colonial power of cogito ergo sum, and how these concepts have materialised the discriminatory power of humans over subhumans and nonhumans. As far as we know, there are no university courses yet here (other than the ones we are involved with) that engage with students about the humanist ideal notion of the human and how humanity has been restricted to very few humanimals, ironically thereby dehumanising the sexualised ‘other’ (women), racialised ‘other’ and naturalised ‘other’ (e.g., child, matter).

Figure 2.1 Cogito ergo sum on the back of a toilet door at the University of Cape Town.

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Silencing non-western knowledges again? The contestation of the S/O ontology was ‘announced’ centuries ago in the western philosophical tradition. In Chapter 1, we already questioned the idea that western philosophy can be regarded as a homogenous and solid ‘lump’, without powerful disruptions from the ‘inside’ of its ‘own’ tradition. For example, Karen Barad draws heavily on Derrida and Foucault, who in turn were in dialogue with Nietzsche and Heidegger. Rosi Braidotti’s main sources of inspiration are Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, who in turn have developed their ideas in dialogue with the writings of Plato, Leibniz, Kant, Nietzsche and especially Spinoza. Paradigmatic shifts unfold and make an appearance over long periods of time and are not created by one person but whole families of intra-connected human and nonhuman relations. Of course, the ontological turn is more radical for some Western thinkers than for others. For the majority in the West, it involves a radical rethinking of ‘everything we think we know about being – and not just human being’ (St Pierre 2015:1). Critical posthumanism as a ‘navigational tool’ (Braidotti 2013) is ‘radical’ only for the western tradition of thought that was globalised through colonial practices, including education. Juanita Sundberg (2014:36–37) argues that posthumanists are unaware of their own location when making universalising claims about ‘the’ human and are silent about past and present non-western or Indigenous scholarship and ways of living. She points out that ‘other’ knowledge systems based in non-dualist thinking tend to be ‘forgotten’ in the posthuman literature, thereby perpetuating a colonial stance when advancing posthuman scholarship that engages with only ‘Anglo-European scholarship’ (Sundberg 2014:38). Walter Gershon (2016:76) argues that: Many Buddhists and Aboriginal Australians have no need for a flattening of relations among people, ecologies, animals, and things, or for a ‘new’ attention to the porous nature of boundaries. The insistence on such understandings as new can also be understood as a silencing – a remarginalisation of nonWestern, Indigenous, and less mainstream constructions of knowledges. Gershon’s concern about the marginalisation of ‘Indigenous, non-Christian, non-Western, ways of being and knowing’ (2016:76) strikes a real chord with us. He refers to other media to communicate knowledges, such as singing, story-telling and music. After all, ‘much is lost by wrangling words down on a page, virtual or otherwise’ (Gershon 2016:76). For us this list also includes children’s marginalised knowledges. Our approach to literacies in this book is a deliberate move away from the ‘one language’ that really counts epistemologically in schools and universities: reading and writing – both in the narrow sense. A posthuman ontological shift invites us to reconfigure who and what the ‘I’ is as well as its relationship to ‘the’ world. How akin to some Indigenous2 knowledge systems is a posthuman relational ontology? Posthuman

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research requires an un/learning of agency ‘outside the acting, human body’ (Rotas 2015:94) – an unsettling of agency, voice and identity as not something subjects ‘have’. We re-turn to this complex question later in this chapter and engage with Sundberg’s (2014:36) claim that posthumanists are not aware that ‘knowledge comes from somewhere and is, therefore, bound up in power relations’. In Part II of this book, we show by means of an empirical experiment how a (literacy) classroom can be read differently, flattening species hierarchies as well as disrupting the power-producing binaries that are involved when we try to attribute an essence to what it means to be human: mind/body, cognition/emotion, culture/nature, inside/outside. Furthermore, we put into practice the de/colonising idea that taking account of the ‘situatedness’ of knowledge does not mean ‘local’, as this would assume identity and not difference as ontologically a priori (see below).

Which kind of posthumanism? Not only in literacies, philosophy or education, but also in fields as diverse as environmental humanities, the performative arts, cultural studies, organisational studies, critical geography, architecture, anthropology, politics, childhood studies and human-centred figurations of the subject are now being questioned. Such human-centredness is increasingly seen as one of the main reasons for present struggles with respect to race, gender, class and the environmental problems in the controversially termed geological period of the Anthropocene3 in which we now live. A plethora of terms have emerged that describe this ‘new’ philosophical orientation with implications for ethics: ‘posthumanism’, ‘new materialism’, ‘vital materialism’, ‘relational materialism’, ‘socio-materialism’, ‘object orientated ontology’ and so forth. There are subtle differences between these philosophies. Our inspiration for doing education differently is posthuman, understood as both posthuman and post-anthropocentric, as the two do not always go hand-in-hand. The former critiques Man as transcendental signifier, whereas the latter troubles the presumed hierarchy between species (Braidotti 2018:xiii). (See the Venn diagrams in Figure 2.2.) Critical posthumanism as a philosophy is a response to some very complex centuries-old (and still new) philosophical conversations about subjectivity and the knowing subject. The purpose of this chapter is to dive in and to get our heads wet. A re-turning to Western metaphysics is necessary to understand human thought’s own preoccupation with self (Colebrook above), and to build a different relationship with thinking and ‘others’.

Patriarchy and the logic of representation Language and other semiotic systems have created bodies of knowledge mediating understanding of the Object by the (human) Subject, bringing into

Posthumanism, de/colonising and child(hoods) 31

Figure 2.2 Venn diagram situating critical posthumanism in the ‘posts’.

existence a particular binary logic of representation: the Object is represented through complex systems of signs, putting the Subject in the privileged position of deciding what counts as knowledge. Importantly, the Subject that is positioned as constructor of (universal) knowledge is the thinking subject, divorced from a sensing body that is temporal and spatial (a mere Object in the Western metaphysical template and not involved in knowledge creation – passive and without agency). Especially since the Enlightenment, the anthropocentric metaphysical assumption that the structure of human thought (Subject) mirrors the structure of the world (Object) has shaped not only what it means to know, but also has territorialised and set boundaries to what can and cannot be known, and who is doing the knowing. This particular individualised Subject/Object relationship has informed the sciences: psychology, biology, sociology, physics, the arts and so forth. The S/O dichotomy is the condition of the possibility of their existence; they would not have been possible without the binaries the dichotomy has brought into existence, such as body/mind, inner/outer, nature/ culture, self/world and the articulation of the Subject, human mind or intellect, as the bridge that crosses this fundamental divide thereby creating the possibility of claiming objective knowledge and truth through reason and rationality. Affect and other transcorporeal knowledges are excluded from this so-called domain of ‘real’ knowledge.

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Thanks to feminist scholarship, we have also come to understand that this particular conception of knowledge is grounded in patriarchy (e.g., Barad 2007; Braidotti 2006, 2013; Wynter 2003). Reinforced by Cartesian dualisms and underpinning capitalism, onto-epistemologies that assume that knowledge and intelligence are located only in the human, and one human for that matter, have become so naturalised as ‘common sense’ and ingrained in everyday language (Deleuze and Guattari 1987/2014) globally, that it is not easy to identify the ‘I’ as the root cause of structural exploitation, dehumanisation (of women, sexualised, racialised and naturalised ‘others’) and asymmetrical violence (Snaza and Weaver 2015). For poststructuralists and critical posthumanists, the ‘human’ is clearly a political category – white, male, heterosexual, able-bodied (Braidotti 2013), although interestingly and of concern, age is not included (yet) (Murris 2013, 2016c). Sylvia Wynter’s powerful writing makes the receptive reader feel and think differently about the ‘I’ that has made modernity and colonialism possible. She writes that the western bourgeois ‘conception of the human, Man, which over-represents itself as if it were the human itself, and that of securing the well-being, and therefore the full cognitive and behavioral autonomy of the human species itself/ourselves’ (Wynter 2003:260). The western ‘I’ – Man – as universal, essentialising signifier has created identity through difference, that is, the human/subhuman dichotomy. This metaphysics, reinforced by religious humanist mythology, has spawned an ontology and epistemology that move on binary logic, power relations of inequality and ‘otherising’ notions of identity. Not a posthumanist as such, Wynter’s de/colonising project is that of ‘practicing epistemic disobedience’, that is, ‘a delinking of oneself from the knowledge systems we take for granted (and can profit from)’ (Mignolo 2015:107). But Man is not just a product of a particular epistemology, a matter of how and what we know – epistemology and ontology are always entangled as what it means to know, depends on assumptions about what exists (‘onto’). Shifts in ontology have implications for what it means to have agency, a voice or an identity, and, particularly relevant for this book, what it means to do literacies differently. For decades, scholarship in childhood studies and early childhood education has also pointed out that the ‘normal’ Subject is assumed to be of a particular age (adult) (Burman 1994; Cannella and Viruru 2004; Dahlberg, Moss and Pence 1999/2013; Fendler 1998; Jenks 1996; Walkerdine 1984). Critical posthumanism is, in part, a response to this unproblematised western character of knowledges – white, male and particularly relevant in the context of our research, adult – which are assumed to apply to all contexts and which have been used to colonise and subjugate other knowledges in their dominance, also in higher education. So, what would be involved in de/colonising research, particularly in the South African context? And what are the categories of human and more-than-human earth dwellers that we include in such urgent political projects?

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Africa, child(hoods) and de/colonisation Dominant discourses and material practices, especially since modernity, position children as lesser human beings, marginalised and excluded, despite sustained academic critique from many disciplinary quarters in higher education. If these dominant discourses are not contested, the professional preparation of, for example, teachers, architects, lawyers, anthropologists, medical practitioners, art educators and social workers will continue to be ageist. Children experience intersecting forms of discrimination based on race, gender, living in poverty and lack of representation in political decision-making fora. In the African context, coloniality shapes this discrimination in particular ways. As Achille Mbembe (2015:2) comments: Western philosophical traditions regard ‘the body and the flesh’ of the non-Western, and especially the African, as the ‘stranger’. Denying the existence of any ‘self ’ but its own, ‘the idea of a common human nature, a humanity shared with others’ is alien to Western consciousness with its ‘desperate desire to assert its difference from the rest of the world’ (Mbembe 2015:2; emphasis in original). In the context of postcolonial literature responding to Western metaphysics (see, e.g., Mignolo 2007; Maldonado-Torres 2007), Mbembe focuses on an African self, negated because of the western ‘I’ as universal, essentialising signifier, creating identity through difference. As Nelson Maldonado-Torres (2007:243–244) points out ‘[n]ew identities were created in the context of European colonisation’ and ‘coloniality’. The latter remains when colonial administrations have left but continues to dictate long-standing everyday hierarchical patterns of power and ‘superiority is premised on the degree of humanity attributed to the identities in question’. In the case of black child in Africa, an even lesser degree of humanity has been attributed by virtue of not only being black, but also being child – a double dose. As elsewhere, conversations about transformation in South Africa and the literature about de/colonisation tend to focus on the adult human. In that sense, discourses of child, childhood and education have been colonised. Globally, the child is marginal to the adult hegemonic, scientific, Cartesian world-picture that favours language, conventional forms of literacy and a particular kind of rationality and subject/world relationship – one that is mediated through reading and writing where ‘real’ knowledge is located. For example, in cases that directly affect children’s lives (e.g., immigration, housing, family, health care, education) children are not involved in decisions that are made on their behalf and documents (e.g., by courts) are written in a language inaccessible to children. The challenges associated with childism, including marginalisation and abuse, are global. However, there is an urgent need in higher education to address the authoritarian character of adult-child relationships in many schools and other care settings. The use of verbal abuse and violence is common (Murris 2012, 2014, 2016b), especially the use of corporal punishment, despite being illegal,

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and particularly prevalent in schools in low-income environments (Vohito 2011:68). The literature on corporal punishment in South Africa refers to the illegality (since 1996) of the practice, constitutional infringements (Prinsloo 2005), the Schools Act (Maree and Cherian 2004), the South African Council of Education’s Code of Professional Ethics (2002) and human rights’ violations (Clacherty, Donald and Clacherty 2004; Durrant and Smith 2011). Where fear and hatred are so prevalent, we know that the hopes for developing literacies and wider education must be diminished. The urgent need for educational reform has been identified by various researchers, and involves educating parents, children and teachers about the use of alternative means of punishment (see e.g., Porteus, Valley and Ruth 2001; Santrock 2001). When children are raised in a violent society, they learn that adults only mean business when they resort to violence as a means of punishment (Peters 1966:275). Possibilities for change are hampered where children have internalised adult discourses about their position in the hierarchy (Payet and Franchi 2008:163–164). The issue is deeply complex and controversial, especially because research suggests that educators view alternative disciplinary measures as time-consuming and ineffective and feel disempowered in their ability to discipline learners without corporal punishment (Maphosa and Shumba 2010). This book is a response to these concerns by offering a different lens on educational relationality in a classroom – a perspective that positions children as already able and equal (Haynes 2014). What we mean by that is explored in various ways in the chapters of Part II. We also engage with the geopolitical dimensions of the specific empirical research project we report on in this book.The situation is further complexified by the fact that severe limitations have been put on the rights of South African children.

Children in South Africa and their rights In African societies, the extended family is a microcosm of the wider society, characterised by communal interdependence (Letseka 2013). Hierarchies are written into the nature of the universe, with children low in the hierarchy – subservient (obedient and respectful) to adults and ancestors. The child’s place is to serve this extended family, with obedience as a prerequisite and reinforced through physical punishment (Penn 2005:110). Girls have even less status and authority than boys and are expected to be more domesticated and more compliant, also sexually (Penn 2005:110). There is an important difference though from (deficit) western notions of childhood. Children are capable of important responsibilities, and like adults, need to contribute to the subsistence of their extended families and wider communities. Depending on gender, even young children are supposed to, for example, look after infants or herd cattle. Childhood is not seen as a phase in a human life, but is instead associated with certain capabilities, that is, the physical activity to perform adult tasks, economic independence and getting married (Twum-Danso 2005). The hierarchy is less related to

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age and more to children’s obligations to support the family in times of need and old age, so in that sense, children always remain children (of their parents). It is not something they grow out of.The kind of hierarchy implied is therefore different from the western conception of childhood as laid down by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). In the UNCRC (ratified in South Africa in 1995), the basic assumption is that children (‘indoor children’) grow up in a benign environment where the family will look after their development, but child-headed households are not uncommon in Africa (Penn 2005:111). Especially in a continent plagued with HIV/AIDS, there is a distorted picture of what childhood is like for many children, obscuring their capacities and the contributions they make in caring for siblings and other family members (Kesby, Gwanzura-Ottemoller and Chizororo 2006:186). As Penn (2005:111) puts it ‘[c]hildren’s resilience, solidarity, capacity for sharing, their stamina, their sense of time, place and the future, are rarely conceptualized or investigated’. It is significant that although South Africa is a signatory to the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), a critical response to its cultural bias is the African amendment in the form of the 1990 African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child (ACRWC). Article 31 of the Charter has added the responsibilities African children have toward their parents and communities in return of the rights they have been assigned (something the UNCRC does not do). Children’s freedom in Africa is ‘balanced’ by making explicit that children need to respect their ‘parents, superiors and elders at all times and to assist them in case of need’, serve national and international communities, and ‘preserve and strengthen African cultural values . . . in the spirit of tolerance, dialogue and consultation’.4 Although the ACRWC might be valued as a situated response to the imperialist imposition of a western (indoor) child as the global norm, the possible conservative interpretation of the Charter significantly reduces the political gains made on behalf of children worldwide. Putting children’s rights into practice is particularly difficult in patriarchal societies (Jones 2009:7). However, even without the amendment, there is good reason for caution as children rights discourses put adults in the role of experts in determining children’s needs and desires. After all, these are not universal, but depend on situated variables such as age, capacities, language and access to resources (Cregan and Cuthbert 2014; Jones 2009; Sellers 2013). Moreover, as Kate Cregan and Denise Cuthbert (2014:15) point out: attaching rights to individual human beings is ‘both ethnocentric and morally imperialistic’. Not all nations conceptualise citizens in an anthropocentric and humanist manner, Cregan and Cuthbert (2014:15) claim as they are ‘based in notions of rights inherent in an individual “self ”’, but we struggle to find examples. The individualistic nature of the UNCRC is of concern for posthumanists, but not because the child needs to be put back in its place in a hierarchical universe. As we have seen, for posthumanists in a monist (as opposed to dualist) universe, all earth

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dwellers are mutually entangled and always becoming, always intra-acting with everything else (Barad 2007). The notion of posthuman child (Murris 2016c) expresses intra-active relationality. The ontological shift means that there is no prior existence of individuals with properties, competencies, a voice, agency, etc. Individuals materialise and come into being through relationships; and so does meaning. There is ontological, as well as epistemological equality between species and between different members of each species, a philosophy that sits uncomfortably with the idea of human rights. The latter is a critical position that also affirms ways in which rights-driven policies can create political leverage and have sometimes been significant in achieving material and educational improvements, as well as further opportunities for having some say in matters that concern them, in the everyday lives of many children. Although corporal punishment is an extreme expression of ageism (intraconnected with sexism, classism, ableism and racism), the core problem transcends cultures and needs to be investigated philosophically at the level of ingrained habits of thinking and the politics of language. Inherent in its grammatical structures, language assumes a particular human subjectivity and discontinuous relationship with the world (Deleuze 1969/2004; Deleuze and Guattari 1987/2014). It could be pointed out that such an apparent move away from local concerns, perspectives and personal identity is a cynical colonial move. As we have seen above, and argued by Hinton, Mehrabi and Barla (2015:2), the ‘new materialisms still miss a strong link with post- and de-colonial theories, as well as with critical race and migration studies’. They wonder about the ‘very processes through which marked bodies (human and nonhuman alike) come to matter in both senses of the word, as well as of the role bodies themselves take in these processes’ (Hinton, Mehrabi and Barla 2015:5). Methodologically speaking, our investigations do not understand relationality in a psychological or sociological sense, that is, assuming that bodies (whether human or not) exist in space and time prior to their material-discursive intra-actions, including the socio-political knowledge we have about these bodies and how they have become ‘marked’. As Barad (2007:452ftn29) argues: ‘the shift in temporality that agential realism entails undermines the sense of past, future, and change that supports such categorizations’. She is thereby referring to ideas of ‘new’ and ‘old’ in the context of ‘wisdom, indigenous knowledge practices, and a return to better times’ (Barad 2007:452ftn29). Our research leaves the question open as to whether a posthuman project of de/colonising education is indeed a settler move ‘to innocence’ in an attempt to rescue ‘settler futurity’ (Tuck and Wayne Yang 2012:1). This is especially important for South Africa, where settlers have not only stayed, but as a minority still hold the socioeconomic power. How legitimate is it to conduct postcolonial research and include white settlers or researchers who live in the West? This chapter offers some concepts and philosophical distinctions that make this important line of enquiry more complex. Concepts such as ‘situatedness’ and ‘identity’ and how they work in transindividual practices are key concepts.

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#Rhodesmustfall Recent political actions initiated by university students across the country, and with global impact on other universities, has given urgency to what it means to de/colonise coloniality in an educational institution. Higher education institutions are preoccupied with transformational actions, such as renaming buildings and roads on university campuses, redesigning curricula and reconstituting selection committees. The impetus was the #Rhodesmustfall movement, initiated in March 2015 by student protests, which led to the removal of the statue of Cecil Rhodes from its privileged geopolitical place on the University of Cape Town’s upper campus (Murris 2016a).This in turn gave rise to the #Feesmustfall movement in October 2015 demanding free university education for all.5 The demand for black African identity to be respected and included has also mobilised student protests in local high schools; students are challenging discriminatory policies based on race (e.g., hair style) and language (e.g., not being allowed to speak home languages in conversations with fellow students).6 In 2016, new student protests at universities around the country closed down campuses with in/determinate outcomes for either the future of these universities, or the wider de/colonising agenda of the South African government and other stakeholders. However, the many debates and dialogues the students’ actions have provoked tend to focus on human identity, on the visible and audible markers of excluded individual bodies. Discussions about power refer only to human bodies, language and discourse.The more-than-human world does not figure in their onto-epistemological assumptions; the political demands focus on ‘‘‘Third World” peoples, women and queer folks’ (Allen and Jobson 2016:129). In an interesting overview of the ‘decolonising generation’ in the African diaspora, including Africa itself, anthropologists Jafari Sinclaire Allen and Ryan Cecil Jobson (2016:130) agree with the need to regard knowledge construction as temporal, therefore each generation will construct anew an imagination of its future, including the meaning of de/colonisation. Although sympathetic towards the idea of understanding de/colonisation as an open, ongoing project, what is of particular concern for the authors of this book is that children are still invisible and not included in the de/colonising generation, neither as actors, nor as victims of oppressive practices that position them as inferior, lesser human beings. Their plight has not even been recognised, let alone put on the de/colonising agenda.

The double meaning of coloniser and colonised The colonial discourse is characterised by ‘ordering and positioning Others within a superior/inferior axis’ and in educational research this includes conceptual frameworks, tools and constructs, such as ‘intelligence, theories of poverty, gifted and talented and so on’ (Rivas 2010:257). The purpose of postcolonial theory is to address the legacy of colonialism imposed by western

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attempts to dominate the globe over hundreds of years by taking up an activist position seeking material and social transformation (Cannella and Viruru 2004; Viruru 2005). The term ‘coloniser’ and ‘colonised’ takes on a double meaning in the context of childhood as it relates to issues of voice, power and the politics of knowledge production. As Gaile Cannella and Radhika Viruru (2005:87) explain: Whatever the original purpose, the populations of mostly indigenous peoples of color became part of the discourse of progress that privileged White European male adults and placed those that were younger (labelled children) and colonized peoples in much the same positions – called savage, incompetent, out of control, and incomplete. This so-called universal, essentialising knowledge is expressed in notions such as ‘childhood’ – a concept exported to so-called ‘developing’ countries for children deserving a ‘proper’ childhood (Burman 2008), ‘proper’ education and ‘proper’ baby milk instead of breastmilk7 – all entangled phenomena. The knowledge we claim to have about how children learn and develop is created through surveillance and observation (and its bringing into existence of childhood experts and professionals) – research practices we would judge as inappropriate in our research with adults today. Children are at the lowest level of the patriarchal hierarchy (Cannella and Viruru 2004:109). Hegemonic discourses about child rearing and education are dominated by the Enlightenment focus on rationality, combined with the geopolitical issues of global colonisation that have shaped curriculum construction and how humans see their place in the world (Viruru 2005:15–16). Enlightenment notions of progress and reason have colonised education through its curriculum construction that positions children as being in the process of recapitulating the development of the species (Matthews 1994): like Indigenous people, children are portrayed as simple, concrete, immature thinkers who need age-appropriate interventions to mature into autonomous, fully human beings. Child subjectivity is constructed within a web of knowledge claims, drawn mostly from Western versions of histories, institutions, economies, politics and practices and are riddled with distinctions, neo-liberal norms and yardsticks by which children’s progress and development are measured and found wanting (Dahlberg and Moss 2005;Viruru 2005). So, although there is much similarity between the categories of race and age as instruments of exclusion and marginalisation, as Gayatri Spivak in a talk points out in the context of gender,8 age discrimination concerns all children. Throughout the history of western thought, education has been regarded as the formation of childhood (Kohan 2015; Stables 2008). Thus, the need to de/ colonise and disrupt current childhood discourses does not apply only to previously colonised countries. The disruption of developmentalism with its underpinning ideals of individual progress and assumptions about linear time (Cannella and Viruru 2004), and

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its evolutionary (Matthews 1994) and cultural bias (Burman 2008), affect all of us. The kind of Subject/Object ontologies assumed in language and curriculum materials; the hierarchical, individualistic and competitive relationships (whether teacher or child-centred pedagogies); the tree-like hierarchical classifications of the natural sciences (Deleuze and Guattari 1987/2014); all contribute to a global educational system that has turned children and their carers into knowledge consumers, not producers, and where power over other earth dwellers is normalised: they run the risk of becoming colonisers themselves (Cannella and Viruru 2004:110).The use of the label ‘children’ and certain ways of representing children often express a colonising, oppressive and controlling attitude. The plural (children), often used in education settings as a term of address or description that requires no further differentiation, marks depersonalisation and denies individual existences and agency (Cannella and Viruru 2004). It does not do justice to the multiplicity, ambiguity and complexity involved in education or research with children. Through critical engagement with postdevelopmental perspectives, we can begin to address the existing power relations and age discrimination typical of colonial early childhood education in its double meaning. As Veronica PaciniKetchabaw and Affrica Taylor (2015) point out, early childhood education – the relative newcomer to academia – entwined as it is in neo-liberal and capitalist discourses of progression and so-called ‘natural’ development is certainly not politically innocent (see also, Dahlberg and Moss 2005). Our research strives to be open, future-orientated, in/determinate and passionate. It is committed to examine how the S/O metaphysical template and the meaning of concepts and their hierarchical ordering in western thought structures the very grammar of our languages – all languages, not just the dominant English. It means regarding differences not in the absolute sense, but ‘about the entangled nature of differences that matter’ (Barad 2007:36). In a relational ontology, differences are not a priori to intra-actions. The latter ‘reconfigure both what will be and what will be possible’ on the understanding that humans are not the only active beings (Barad 2007:391).

‘Situatedness’ misunderstood It should become clear now that Sundberg’s critique discussed earlier that all posthumanists are not aware that ‘knowledge comes from somewhere and is, therefore, bound up in power relations’ (Sundberg 2014:36) is unfounded. The idea that knowledge is ‘situated’ is often used by critical theorists as part of the argument for an inclusion of Indigenous knowledge systems in curricula. But in critical posthumanism, ontology and epistemology are always entangled with the ethical because knowing subjects are not at a distance from the world.They are always located, but not in a ‘fixed position’, that is, ‘with the specification of one’s social location along a set of axes referencing one’s identity’ (Barad 2007:470Fn45; our italics). Barad points out that Haraway’s notion of ‘situated’

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has been misunderstood. ‘Location’ does not mean the same as ‘local’ or ‘perspective’. For example, my email address is specific in the Internet, but this net itself is always fluid and becoming, and so are identities (Barad 2007:470Fn45), but never politically neutral. It might be helpful to distinguish between context (mobile sets of connections) and location. For Barad, location is about ‘specific connectivity’ (Barad 2007:471Fn45) and has to do with how non-dualist subjects intra-act with the world and are always part of it. Subjectivity is an ontoepistemological issue, not just an epistemological one, and Barad’s knowledge of quantum physics and her diffractive methodology (both temporal and spatial, see chapter 4) inform a radical contestation of Western metaphysics and the kind of identity assumed.

Postcolonial research – two entangled philosophical strands Viruru (2005:2) argues that postcolonial theory cannot and should not be defined as it simplifies this ‘locus of contradictions’ and ‘complex bodies of ideas into neatly labelled categories’. But out of various eclectic approaches to postcolonial theory, at least two philosophically different, but related, approaches to postcolonial theory can be identified. In postcolonial theorising, there tends to be an emphasis on what happens when humans come together in contexts where there are always power differentials. They typically work ‘by casting particular people and practices into binaries of colonizer/colonized, white/[Indigenous], power/resistance, and so on’ (Cameron quoted in Pacini-Ketchabaw and Nxumalo 2014:132). Critical pedagogues in the Freirean tradition, social constructionists or poststructuralists who focus on social power, identity, language and discourse run the risk, ironically, of excluding children as equal knowledge-producers in their pedagogies (Murris 2016c). Focusing on the discursive only, and ignoring the material, divides the world up ‘between black and white, working and privileged classes, citizens and illegal immigrants, men and women, straight and queer, oppressors and oppressed’ (Jansen 2009:256, 260) – truths that need to be transmitted to children as passive receivers of that knowledge, or communicated to readers whose critical consciousness is raised through deconstruction activities. As South African educationalist Jonathan Jansen (2009:257) argues: By otherising the ‘enemy’, that is, ‘a capitalist system, oppressive processes, imposing ideologies, the neoliberal state’ and so forth, we run the risk of ignoring ‘the real human beings’ in, for example, classrooms. For transformation and the creation of new subjectivities, it is salient to move beyond predefined boundaries and assumed categories of difference (see also Ketchabaw and Nxumalo 2014). A posthumanist orientation enables a move away from western metaphysical domination in our thinking and doing. One philosophical strand expresses a more humanist focus on social power, identity and critical agency, and the other is more posthumanist and is about positive

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difference (difference without identity), in contrast to negative difference (difference that creates identity). Positive difference is about ontological relationality, a politics of belonging; difference ‘within’ bodies, not as compared with something ‘outside itself ’ like adult, as is the case with negative difference whereby the focus is on identity. For Deleuze and Guattari (1987/2014) everything in our thinking flows from the habit of saying ‘I’. The self is named and cut apart from other selves and things, also when we talk about diversity and difference. Barad (2007:134) describes this ‘I’ of humanism as a ‘distinct individual, the unit of all measure, finitude made flesh, his separateness is the key’. The not ‘I’ is in opposition, different from the ‘I’ that has not only been cut apart from other animals and things, but an ‘I’ that has also been put above nonhuman others celebrating a higher ontological status. This ‘I’ is normative and includes or excludes the other ‘I’s – a distancing or cutting apart from the ‘other’ human that is not ‘fully’ formed or developed (yet) – the ‘I’ who is ‘disabled’, ‘female’, ‘child’, ‘black’, ‘poor’. The habit of using ‘we’ can operate in precisely the same normative, essentialising and otherising way. The second (posthuman) strand to postcolonial research does not focus on identity created through negative difference but disrupts philosophically the logic of representationalism and the language/reality dichotomy left in place by humanism. This ‘transposition’ (Braidotti 2006) of the Subject might feel counter-intuitive as it contests thousands of years of philosophical bias towards humans’ claimed self-reflexive consciousness and ability to reason through language, which has placed Him above, and has given Him control over animals, plants, and His physical environment. Deleuze and Guattari (1987/2014:33; emphasis in the original) provoke us to move forward philosophically and never again to say, ‘I am this, I am that’. They give the example of bees and how they can communicate messages about food sources they have seen to other bees. But bees who do not have that experience cannot communicate that information. They can transmit signs, but their language is limited to firsthand accounts. In contrast, humanimals have a language about language, which makes it possible to transmit messages about experiences without ever having experienced them, but based on ‘hearsay’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987/2014:89; Adkins 2015:67). This second-order language has often become equated with real knowledge, established, cumulative knowledge with authority, that in turn must be somehow ‘transmitted’ (or ‘facilitated’ or ‘mediated’) to students in all phases of education. A radical contestation of western ontology opens up possibilities of thinking about de/colonising education differently. Deleuzoguatarrian pragmatics proposes bold experimentation, not interpretation or signification: ‘Find your own places, territorialities, deterritorializations, regime, lines of flight! Semiotize yourself instead of rooting around in your prefab childhood and Western semiology’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987/2014:161). But they warn that although it might be relatively easy to stop saying ‘I’, ‘[s]ignifiance and interpretation are

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so thick-skinned, they form such a sticky mixture with subjectification, that it is easy to believe that you are outside them when you are in fact still secreting them’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987/2014:160). For Barad (2007), people’s identities (like atoms) are also multiple – not given, never stable or fixed and always open to future and past reworking, including the possibility of changing the past. Quantum physics disrupts the idea of linear time continuity and has provided empirical evidence that identity is performed, not fixed, and depends on the apparatus that measures it. By reading the oeuvres of Niels Bohr, Judith Butler and Michel Foucault diffractively through one another, Barad (2007:145–146) reworks human subjectivity and notions such as causality, agency, materiality and discursive practices. The diffractive method (see next chapter) builds affirmatively on the work of critical social theorists who have offered accounts of how regulative and discursive practices produce bodies, but anthropocentrically, assume these bodies are exclusively human. For example, Butler’s theory of performativity assumes bodies are passive products of discursive practices, rather than active agents participating in the process of materialisation. Barad’s performative agential realism includes social practices but is not limited to it. An alternative positive philosophical orientation towards a ‘post’colonial future sees difference as always e/merging as an a/effect of connections and relations within and between bodies. In a similar vein, Braidotti’s (2006:154) nomadic subjectivity refers to bodies-in-time, ‘embodied and embedded entities fully immersed in webs of complex interaction, negotiation and transformation with and through other entities’. ‘Immanent and dynamic’, she writes, ‘the mind is part of nature, structurally interactive and thus also ethically accountable’ (Braidotti 2006:154). What exactly she means by ‘embedded and embodied’ in the context of a ‘non-unitary’ subject (Braidotti 2006, 2013) is a subject we will explore further in this book through educational research. Critical posthumanism profoundly democratises relationships within the one species (e.g., young/old, black/white, male/female) and between humans and other earth dwellers. Nothing is regarded as standing ‘outside’, ‘above’, or taking a true privileged transcendental position. The de/colonising difference this makes is twofold. The fact that humans need to be understood relationally and as ontologically entangled with human and nonhuman ‘others’ avoids complexity and reduction in diversity, respects otherness, and thereby does not miss important knowledges (e.g., classroom research tends to be viewed from a social sciences perspective only). The act of representing is an act of mediation between knower and known that displays for Barad ‘a deep mistrust of matter, holding it off at a distance’ (Barad 2007:133). Doing justice to the complexity of reality and the construction of knowledge is one aspect of the de/colonising difference posthumanism makes. Second, posthumanism assumes a radical kind of equality and egalitarianism. It does not focus on (humanist) identity (black, female, rich, working-class), nor

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even multiple identities, but breaks with anthropocentrism, and celebrates differences produced in material-discursive relationships, differences that exclude or include; in other words, differences that matter (Barad 2007, 2013, 2014) (see Figure 2.2). Educational research then becomes postanthropocentric and positions human animals as part of the world. It is about ‘bodies that differentiate in themselves, continuously [like life itself] – one singular event after the other’ (Hultman and Lenz Taguchi 2010:529). As Braidotti (2006:156) puts this non-dualist conception of the knowing subject: a ‘transversal entity’: ‘a foldingin of external influences and a simultaneous unfolding outwards of affects’. Transpositioning the subject requires imagination and courage to think about ontological relationality differently. It also requires a commitment to transspecies and intra-species justice. Thinking about differences differently is not an erasure of differences between Subjects, but reinscribes the singularity of the self along ‘materially embedded coordinates’ (Braidotti 2006:156). Deleuze and Guattari commentator, Brent Adkins (2015:6, 39, 104) explains how the oneness of being in a philosophy of immanence and flattened ontology does not imply the sameness of beings: ‘Multiplicity is a way of thinking the continuous and uncountable . . . intensities rather than extensities’.The unity is ontological, not substantial. Braidotti (2006:157) explains: A radically immanent intensive body is an assemblage of forces, or flows, intensities and passions that solidify in space, and consolidate in time, within the singular configuration commonly known as an ‘individual’ self. For de/colonisation, this posthuman move beyond predefined boundaries and those categories of difference ‘in’ encounters with other earth dwellers that are already assumed is of great significance. By ‘re-turning (to) the past’ (Barad 2014:169), by going ‘back’ to the ‘root’ of the problem that humanism poses for justice – not just social justice – care for the other also includes nonhuman animals. As Barad herself puts it (2007:378), posthumanism welcomes ‘females, slaves, children, animals, and other dispossessed Others (exiled from the land of knowers by Aristotle more than two millennia ago) into the fold of knowers’. Matter is also among the ‘dispossessed Others’. But how could or should this be done? Rosi Braidotti offers a passionate, anti-individualistic, politically new departure. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, she argues for an unhinging of former ‘others’ from their metaphysical frame of reference. How this might work in the case of child and childhood is a thread we pick up in the next chapters in Part I of this book.

‘I walk, therefore I am’ In summary, critical posthumanism offers affirmative possibilities for de/ colonising education with its focus on the interdependence between human

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animals, animals and nonhumans (e.g., machines).9 It redefines the meaning of the humanimal previously assumed in knowledge production and opens up postdevelopmental opportunities to reconfigure child and childhood. For Braidotti, posthumanism is not a concept, but a navigational tool that helps us to rethink the place of human animals in the bio-genetic age known as the Anthropocene (Braidotti 2013:5). In short, the posthuman animal is not the individualised ‘fully’ human at the centre of the epistemological and ontological universe, but a human animal that is both self-organising and materialist (a concept, as we will in the next chapter, that includes both nature and culture). The multiple, embodied and fleshy subject is no longer the Cartesian ‘cogito ergo sum’, but a ‘desidero ergo sum’ – a subject whose thinking is ‘enlarged to encompass a number of faculties of which affectivity, desire and the imagination are prime movers’ (Braidotti 2002:20). Deleuze and Guattari (1987/2014:149) emphasise the experiencing body as always in movement: ‘I walk, therefore I am’. The ontological or material turn disrupts the ‘I’, personal identity, as universal signifier. The differences between the two matter in terms of pedagogy and research methodologies. Social constructionist de/colonisers foreground the personal and focus on identities, whether fractured, multiple or shifting, by providing learners and research participants with opportunities for sharing situated narratives, new perspectives and (auto)biographies, thereby offering counter representations of childhood through ethnographic reflexive methodologies (Cannella and Viruru 2004:116, 119, 131). The key question for them in de/ colonising childhood discourses is: ‘How does one co-construct a new kind of research with children that reflects their perspectives?’. In contrast, the key questions for teaching and research adopting posthumanism as a navigational tool are: 1 How does age work in the intra-action between human and more-thanhuman bodies to include or exclude children as knowers (e.g., the use of authoritative texts, tools and technologies and the assessment apparatus)? 2 How is age communicated materially and discursively in schools and schooling (e.g., the particular use of clothing, furniture arrangement, the positioning of displays, floor covering, teacher’s desk and locked drawers, surveillance systems)? 3 How does posthumanism inspire new pedagogical practices that express a different relationality (e.g., by taking into account the material-discursive agency of breath, sound, rumbling tummies, colour of skin, un/bounded spaces, chairs)? 4 What difference does a posthuman analysis of classroom practice make in terms of de/coloniality, and why does it matter (e.g., reconfigure child as producer of knowledge)? As we have seen in Chapter 1, Walter Kohan’s answer to the question of what de/colonisation means involves a rethinking of the concept ‘learning’. For him,

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teaching should encourage each learner to find his or her own way in thinking, which cannot be imitated or reproduced. Otherwise that person is not thinking. De/colonisation is not so much about a product (e.g., a de/colonised curriculum), but more a particular relationship to knowledge, a relationship that is neither predatory (e.g., ‘discovery’), nor hierarchical, but rhizomatic: an exploration of difference, variation, relationality and fluidity. Arborescent thought establishes the notion of being and identity, while the rhizome is always in the process of ‘becoming’, but not in the sense of linear progression. De/colonising pedagogies disrupt linear time. ‘Thinking’ for Deleuze and Guattari (1994:111) is to experiment with a desire for the new, the remarkable, the unexpected, not a seeking for the truth. Simply put, it is a decentering of meaning-making by de-and reterritorialising what it means to be through a de/colonisation of western ontology, not just humanism, but the S/O template presupposed in Western metaphysics. What are the implications of these two entangled but ontologically different approaches to de/colonising literacy education in the South African context? Powerful creative concepts and strategies for de/colonising pedagogies and research have e/merged, and we will look how each works in turn in the next chapter: the pedagogy of Philosophy for children, and in Chapter 4: ‘diffraction’, ‘dis/identification’ and ‘naturecultures’.

Notes 1 Western is written with a capital 'W' when it refers to the body of Western philosophical knowledge (originating in Ancient Greece) or a particular geographical location. But when 'west' refers to a particular way of thinking, which is now global, it is written with a small 'w'. 2 ‘Indigenous’ tends to be written with a capital ‘I’, because it is a noun referring to particular peoples, their knowledges, ways of being, etc. (Kahira 2015). 3 For example, Donna Haraway (2016:49–57) offers eight reasons why she prefers to distance herself from the word ‘Anthropocene’ and explains why she prefers ‘Chthulucene’ – a tentacular thinking that disrupts the human exceptionalism of the Anthropocene discourse. 4 See: http://pages.au.int/acerwc/documents/african-charter-rights-and-welfare-child-acrwc. Accessed 29 April 2015. 5 See, for example, the website of the #Feesmustfall movement of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg: http://mg.co.za/tag/feesmustfall-1. Accessed: 13 January 2018. 6 See, for example: http://ewn.co.za/Topic/natural-hair. Accessed: 13 January 2018. 7 The baby milk scandal of Nestle’s involvement in causing infant illness and death in poor communities in Africa by promoting bottle feeding and discouraging breast feeding. This problem persists. See e.g., www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/nestle-baby-milkscandal-food-industry-standards. Accessed: 13 October 2017. 8 Gayatri Spivak’s talk was held at the University of Cape Town on 7 July 2016. 9 Posthumanism is different from transhumanism, which is not a critique of the Enlightenment self, but a humanist celebration of the ego (often achieved through technopharmaceutical means). In contrast, the strand of posthumanism embraced in this book rejects anthropocentrism and sees human and nonhuman as always already entangled in the multiplicity of mutual relations.

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References Adkins, B. (2015) Deleuze and Guattari’s a Thousand Plateaus: A Critical Introduction and Guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Allen, J. S. & Jobson, R. C. (2016) The Decolonizing Generation: (Race and) Theory in Anthropology Since the Eighties. Current Anthropology 57, 2:129–148. Barad, K. (2003) Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, 31:801–831. Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press. Barad, K. (2013) Ma(r)king Time: Material Entanglements and Re-memberings: Cutting Together-Apart. In P. R. Carlile, D. Nicolini, A. Langley and H. Tsoukas (Eds.) How Matter Matters: Objects, Artifacts, and Materiality in Organization Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 16–32. Barad, K. (2014) Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting Together-Apart. Parallax 20, 3:168–187. Braidotti, R. (2002) Metamorphoses:Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Braidotti, R. (2006) Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics. Cambridge: Polity Press. Braidotti, R. (2011) Nomadic Theory: The Portable Rosi Braidotti. Columbia: Columbia University Press. Braidotti, R. (2013) The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press. Burman, E. (1994) Deconstructing Developmental Psychology. London and New York: Routledge. Burman, E. (2008) Developments: Child, Image, Nation. London: Routledge. Cannella, G. S. & Viruru, R. (2004) Childhood and Postcolonization: Power, Education, and Contemporary Practice. New York: RoutledgeFalmer. Castaneda, C. (2002) Figurations: Child, Bodies,Worlds. London: Duke University Press. Ceder, S. (2016) Cutting Through Water:Towards a Posthuman Theory of Educational Relationality. Doctoral dissertation. Faculty of Social Sciences, Lund University, Sweden. Clacherty, G., Donald, D. & Clacherty, A. (2004) What South African Children Say About Corporal Punishment. South Africa: Save the Children Sweden. Colebrook, C. (2016) Is There Something Wrong With the Task of Thinking? www.academia. edu/30488137/. Accessed: 18 December 2016. Cregan, K. & Cuthbert, D. (2014) Global Childhoods – Issues and Debates. London: SAGE. Dahlberg, G. & Moss, P. (2005) Ethics and Politics in Early Childhood Education. London: Routledge. Dahlberg, G., Moss, P. & Pence, P. (1999/2013) Beyond Quality in Early Childhood Education and Care: Postmodern Perspectives. London: Falmer Press. Deleuze, G. (1969/2004) The Logic of Sense. London: Bloomsbury. Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987/2014) A Thousand Plateaus. Translated and a foreword by B. Massumi. London: Bloomsbury. Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1994) What Is Philosophy? Translated by Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson. London:Verso. Durrant, J. & Smith, A. B. (2011) Global Pathways to Abolishing Physical Punishment: Realizing Children’s Rights. New York: Routledge. Fendler, L. (1998) What Is It Impossible to Think? A Genealogy of the Educated Subject. In T. Popkewitz and M. Brennan (Eds.) Foucault’s Challenge: Discourse, Knowledge, and Power in Education. New York: Teachers College Press, 39–63.

Posthumanism, de/colonising and child(hoods) 47 Gershon, W. (2016) The Sound of Silence: The Material Consequences of Scholarship. In N. Snaza, D. Sonu, S. E. Truman and Z. Zaliwska (Eds.) Pedagogical Matters: New Materialisms and Curriculum Studies. New York: Peter Lang, 75–91. Manifesto Haraway, D. (2003) The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Other Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. Haraway, D. (2016) Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Haynes, J. (2014) Already Equal and Able to Speak: Practising Philosophical Enquiry With Young Children. In S. Robson and S. Quinn (Eds.) Routledge International Handbook on Young Children’s Thinking and Understanding. London: Routledge. Hinton, P., Mehrabi, T. & Barla, J. (2015) New Materialisms/New Colonialisms. Position paper. www.rairarubiabooks.com/. Accessed: 19 December 2016. Hultman, K. & Lenz Taguchi, H. (2010) Challenging Anthropocentric Analysis of Visual Data: A Relational Materialist Methodological Approach to Educational Research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 23, 5:525–542. Jansen, J. (2009) Knowledge in the Blood: Confronting Race and the Apartheid Past. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Jenks, C. (1996) Childhood. New York: Routledge. Jones, P. (2009) Rethinking Childhood: Attitudes in Contemporary Childhood. New Childhood Series. London: Continuum. Kahira, J. (2015) (Re)creating spaces for uMunthu: postcolonial theory and environmental education in southern Africa. Environmental Education Research, 21(1), 106–128. Kesby, M., Gwanzura-Ottemoller, F. & Chizororo, M. (2006) Theorising Other, ‘other childhoods’: Issues Emerging From Work on HIV in Urban and Rural Zimbabwe. Children’s Geographies, 4, 2:185–202. Kohan, W. (2015) Childhood, Education and Philosophy: New Ideas for an Old Relationship. New York: Routledge. Letseka, M. (2013) Understanding of African Philosophy Through Philosophy for Children (P4C). Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences 4, 14:745–753. Maldonado-Torres, N. (2007) On the Coloniality of Being. Cultural Studies, 21, 2:240–270. Maphosa, C. & Shumba,A. (2010) Educators’ Disciplinary Capabilities After the Banning of Corporal Punishment in South African Schools. South African Journal of Education 30, 3:387–399. Maree, J. G. & Cherian, L. (2004) Hitting the Headlines – The Veil on Corporal Punishment in South Africa Lifted. Acta Criminologica 17, 3:72–85. Matthews, G. (1994) The Philosophy of Childhood. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Matthews, G. (1994) The Philosophy of Childhood. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mbembe, A. (2015) Achille Mbembe on the State of South African Political Life. Africa as a Country. 19 September. http//www.africasacountry.com. Accessed: 15 April 2016. Mignolo, W. D. (2007) Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality. Cultural Studies 21, 2–3:155–167. Mignolo,W. D. (2015) Sylvia Wynter:What Does It Mean to Be Human? In K. McKittrick (Ed.) Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 106–124. Murris, K. (2012) Student Teachers Investigating the Morality of Corporal Punishment in South Africa. Ethics and Education 7, 1:45–59. Murris, K. (2013) The Epistemic Challenge of Hearing Child’s Voice. In J. Haynes and K. Murris (Eds.) Child as Educator. Special Issue. Studies in Philosophy and Education 32, 3:245–259.

48  Karin Murris Murris, K. (2014) Corporal Punishment and the Pain Provoked by the Community of Enquiry Pedagogy in the University Classroom. Africa Education Review 11, 2:219–235. Murris, K. (2016a) #Rhodes Must Fall: A Posthumanist Orientation to Decolonising Higher Education Institutions. Special Issue on Critical Posthumanism, New Materialisms, and the Affective Turn for Socially Just Pedagogies in Higher Education. In V. Bozalek and M. Zembylas (Eds.) South African Journal of Higher Education 30, 3. Murris, K. (2016b) School Ethics With Student Teachers in South Africa: An Innovative Educational Intervention. In H. E. Lees and N. Noddings (Eds.) The Palgrave International Handbook of Alternative Education. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Murris, K. (2016c) The Posthuman Child: Educational Transformation Through Philosophy With Picturebooks. London: Routledge Contesting Early Childhood Series. Pacini-Ketchabaw,V. & Nxumalo, F. (2014) Posthumanist Imaginaries for Decolonizing Early Childhood Praxis. In M. N. Bloch, B. B. Swadener and G. S.Cannella (Eds.) Reconceptualizing Early Childhood Care & Education. A Reader. New York: Peter Lang, 131–143. Pacini-Ketchabaw, V. & Taylor, A. (2015) Unsettling the Colonialist Places and Spaces of Early Childhood Education. New York: Routledge. Payet, J. & Franchi, V. (2008) The Rights of the Child and ‘the Good of the Learners’: A Comparative Ethnological Survey on the Abolition of Corporal Punishment in South African Schools. Childhood 15:57–176. Pedersen, H. (2010) Is ‘the posthuman’ Educable? On the Convergence of Educational Philosophy, Animal Studies, and Posthumanist Theory. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 31, 2:237–250. Penn, H. (2005) Unequal Childhoods: Young Children’s Lives in Poor Countries. London: Routledge. Peters, R. S. (1966) Ethics and Education. London: George Allen & Unwin. Porteus, K., Valley, S. & Ruth, T. (2001) Alternatives to Corporal Punishment. Sandown: Wits Education Policy Unit/SA Human Rights Commission/Heinemann. Prinsloo, I. J. (2005) How Safe Are South African Schools? South African Journal of Education 25, 1:5–10. Rivas, A. (2010) Modern Research Discourses Constructing the Postcolonial Subjectivity of (Mexican) American Children. In G. S. Cannella and L. D. Soto (Eds.) Childhoods: A Handbook. New York: Peter Lang, 245–264. Rotas, N. (2015) Ecologies of Practice: Teaching and Learning Against the Obvious. In N. Snaza and J. Weaver (Eds.) Posthumanism and Educational Research. New York: Routledge, 91–104. Santrock, J. W. (2001) Educational Psychology. Boston: McGraw-Hill. Sellers, M. (2013) Young Children Becoming Curriculum: Deleuze, Te Whariki and Curricular Understandings. London: Routledge Contesting Early Childhood Series. Snaza, N. & Weaver, J. A. (2015). Introduction: Education and the Posthumanist Turn. In N. Snaza and J. A.Weaver (Eds.) Posthumanism and Educational Research. New York and London: Routledge, 1–17. South African Council for Educators. (2002) Handbook for the Code of Conduct of Professional Ethics. Centurion: SACE. St Pierre, E. (2015) Curriculum for New Material, New Empirical Inquiry. In N. Snaza and J. A. Weaver (Eds.) Posthumanism and Educational Research. New York and London: Routledge. Stables, A. (2008) Childhood and the Philosophy of Education: An Anti-Aristotelian Perspective. London: Continuum Studies in Educational Research.

Posthumanism, de/colonising and child(hoods) 49 Sundberg, J. (2014) Decolonizing Posthumanist Geographies. Cultural Geographies 21, 1:33–47. Tuck, E. & Yang, K. W. (2012) Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, 1:1–40. Twum-Danso, A. (2005) The Political Child. In A. McIntyre (Ed.) Invisible Stakeholders -Children and War in Africa. Pretoria: Institute for Security Studies. Viruru, R. (2005) The Impact of Postcolonial Theory on Early Childhood Education. http://joe. ukzn.ac.za/Libraries/No_35_2005/The_impact_of_postcolonial_theory_on_early_ childhood_education.sflb.ashx. Accessed: 1 June 2015. Vohito, S. (2011) Africa: Growing Momentum Towards the Prohibition of Corporal Punishment. In J. Durrant and A. B. Smith (Eds.) Global Pathways to Abolishing Physical Punishment: Realizing Children’s Rights. New York, Routledge, 67–83. Walkerdine, V. (1984) Developmental Psychology and the Child-Centred Pedagogy. In J. Henriques, W. Holloway, C. Unwin, C.Venn and V. Walkerdine (Eds.) Changing the Subject: Psychology, Social Regulation and Subjectivity. London and New York: Routledge. Wynter, S. (2003) Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation – An Argument. The New Centennial Review 3, 3:257–337.

Chapter 3

Philosophy for Children A postdevelopmental relationality Karin Murris and Joanna Haynes

Posthumanist research in literacy education is partly about incorporating children’s perspectives in new ways: exploring difference, variation and change.This chapter explores age as a category of difference that operated as an important concept to be challenged and disrupted in this research project. For the editors of this volume, Karin and Joanna, and for many of the contributors to this book, the movement of Philosophy for Children has been an important space in which different questions about age, knowing and child have come to the fore. In this chapter, Karin and Joanna consider configurations of child and the relations of adult-child they pre-suppose. They discuss the particular and different questions that the movement of Philosophy for Children has brought to their attention.

Disrupting age as category of difference We have seen in Chapter 1 how critical posthumanism exposes certain ways of thinking about the human and relationality, in particular how it has shaped inegalitarian adult-child relationships. Particular figurations of child and childhood rooted in developmentalism assume the Nature/Culture binary and make abusive, authoritarian and violent material as well as discursive practices possible (see Chapter 2).This deep dualism is built into the ontological structure of how knowledge has been conceived ever since Ancient Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle (and still structures curriculum content and divisions between departments and faculties in academia globally). The injustice it has created is not just social, but also ontoepistemic. Children are not listened to because of their very being children and therefore unable to make claims to knowledge, because it is assumed that they are (still) developing, (still) innocent, (still) fragile, (still) immature, (still) irrational and so forth. The child is denied ethically, epistemically and ontologically (Murris 2016). Such discourses inform institutionalised discriminatory child:adult relationships and presuppose specific roles of the educator depending on a particular figuration of child: guide, instructor, trainer, discipliner, facilitator, socialiser, protector, diagnoser, medicator.

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As discussed at the end of Chapter 2, our de/colonising project and this book are concerned with re-thinking concepts of learning, knowledge and relations of knowing and knowers, including children. Dislodging the subject-object relations of humanist epistemology and de-centering the human are important ‘moves’ to shift the focus to the relational in-between. Posthumanist research in literacy education is partly about incorporating children’s perspectives in new ways: exploring difference, variation and change. Age is a category of difference that has not yet been explored as extensively as other powerful categories of human difference and it operates as an important concept to be challenged and disrupted in this research project. Even in participatory research, huge assumptions about children’s capacities as knowers often persist, and these are prejudicial. Certain age-related models of human development have become so deeply entrenched they appear natural.

Configurations of child At least six overlapping configurations of child are dominant (Murris 2016:104– 122): the ‘developing child’ who lacks maturity by nature and needs culture’s guidance; the ‘ignorant child’ who lacks rationality and experience from birth and needs instruction and training; the ‘evil child’ who lacks natural goodness and requires cultural intervention of control and discipline; the ‘innocent child’ who lacks responsibility and who therefore needs culture to provide protection and to facilitate learning; the ‘egocentric child’ who lacks social norms and cultural values and requires socialisation by elders; the ‘fragile child’ who is assumed to lack resilience by nature and needs culture to diagnose, protect and possibly medicate. All these figurations of child assume childhood as an inferior stage in human development with the mature, developed, rational, socialised, autonomous adult self as the normative ideal. De/colonising such discourses and material practices is a philosophical and ethico-political matter and part of the larger creative project of transforming how humans relate to nonhuman ‘others’ and the material environment. As we have seen, although the de/colonisation of speciesist discourses is on the agenda of an increasing number of theorist-practitioners, it is imperative for justice that the de/colonisation of childhood discourses (between members of one species)1 is not forgotten. ‘Child’ is still rarely mentioned as a category of exclusion, even in the feminist and postcolonial literature. Crucially, a reconfiguration of child and childhood is not a matter of including another category of humans previously excluded epistemologically and ontologically, but as argued above, it could be a lever for doing subjectivity and relationality differently. Postage pedagogies (Haynes 2014; Haynes forthcoming; Haynes and Murris 2017) challenge critical pedagogues and postcolonial theorists to (re)consider what de/colonising a curriculum or an organisation might mean, and who and what is included and excluded. The next chapter focuses on the double meaning of de/colonisation and its relevance for our project. Disrupting developmentalism

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and the power-producing binaries it depends on, opens up possibilities to reimagine onto-epistemological relationships that are egalitarian without losing the materiality of embodied place connection (Somerville 2013). Teaching philosophy to young children has become a diverse world-wide movement involving scholarly theorising and curriculum innovations in schools as well as universities (Gregory, Haynes and Murris 2017). Entangled with the increase of popularity of philosophy for children has been the emergence of philosophy of childhood as a respectable new ‘branch’ of philosophy – with Gareth Matthews, Ann Margaret Sharp and Matthew Lipman as key figures, the last two being pivotal in establishing the Philosophy for Children (P4C) movement. Inspired by the philosophies of Plato and John Dewey, Matthew Lipman (1988, 1991) pioneered the teaching of philosophy to children as a response to his concerns that children do not think as well as they are capable of, or as is necessary for a well-functioning, truly democratic society. He speculated that early intervention through a logically, not empirically sequenced specially written curriculum would tap into children’s original curiosity, sense of wonder and enthusiasm for intellectual enquiry, and strengthen their philosophical thinking. In collaboration with colleagues, especially Ann Margaret Sharp, he founded the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children (IAPC) in 1974 at Montclair State University (USA), which soon became the intellectual hub to support the training of teachers and philosophers all over the world in establishing philosophy with children in their own countries (Gregory, Haynes and Murris 2017:xxv–xxvii). He coordinated the Philosophy for Children (P4C) programme and himself wrote many of its philosophical novels and accompanying teacher manuals specially designed for primary and secondary education.The programme has also inspired others to create a variety of alternative resources and approaches to support teachers in their innovative work, either for practical reasons (e.g., shorter, cheaper) or for philosophical and pedagogical reasons. Even before the deaths of Lipman and Sharp (and Matthews), there was been a move away from using the P4C programme around the world, for a variety of practical and complex theoretical reasons (Murris 2015). Rather than using a specially written text, the use of, for example, picturebooks as philosophical texts has made literacy the obvious curriculum slot for P4C.The choice of educational resource material is diverse and contested (Haynes and Murris 2012, 2017), but overall, there is consensus about the community of enquiry as the P4C pedagogy. American pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) was the first to fuse together the terms ‘community’ and ‘enquiry’ in the domain of scientific enquiry, but it was Lipman who introduced the phrase to describe the pedagogy for teaching philosophy in schools (Lipman, Sharp and Oscanyan 1977:Ch 7). It is now used in all subject areas, with all age groups, and includes informal education. Laurance Splitter and Ann Margaret Sharp, who have written extensively on the subject, prefer not to give a definition of a community of enquiry, because it is one of those key concepts, they say, that ‘takes on new aspects and dimensions as teachers and students apply it and modify it to their purposes’. A community of enquiry is at once immanent and transcendent: it provides ‘a framework which

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pervades the everyday life of its participants and it serves as an ideal to strive for’ (Splitter and Sharp 1995:17, 18). The pedagogy is inspired by philosopher Socrates with the prevailing metaphor of thinking as ‘inner speech’. David Kennedy (2011:96) describes the revolution Lipman brought about as ‘the radical reconstruction of philosophy as dialogue, and dialogue, moreover, among children’. This revolution – the emergence of philosophy of childhood – was also supported by philosopher, Gareth Matthews, who questioned Piagetian developmentalism, and argued for child as ‘natural philosopher’. His highly accessible books (1980, 1984, 1994) are littered with arguments and dialogues with children that exemplify that children’s thinking is like that of adult philosophers. The significant contribution he has made to both philosophy of childhood and children’s literature is by showing through his scholarly work how neither children’s literature, nor children deserve condescending attitudes. For children and ‘the child in each of us’, he writes, stories raise perplexities in young and old that ‘demand to be worried over, and worked through, and discussed, and reasoned out, and linked up with each other, and with life’ (Matthews 1976:16). For Matthews, philosophical stories often present thought experiments that raise ageless questions about a concept, a hypothesis or an attitude, whereby there is no place for condescension, but ‘a celebration of the humanity we share with our children’ (Matthews 1988:197). Like Matthews, we work with stories, especially picturebooks that are not written for the teaching of philosophy, like How to Find Gold (2016) by Viviane Schwarz (see Figure 3.1) – the picturebook used for the literacy lesson discussed in this book. But unlike Matthews, we do not use adult philosophy as our criterion for what makes a text a philosophical text (Haynes and Murris 2012, 2017). Adult philosophy (in the Anglo-American analytical tradition) was also Lipman’s inspiration for the content of the P4C programme. He reconstituted philosophy as an activity – ‘a way of life’ and compared academic philosophy to memorising the inscriptions in a graveyard: memorising a collection of names and dates (Lipman 1991). He regarded the Kantian maxim ‘sapere aude’ – have the courage to think for yourself – as central to philosophical practice (Martens 1999). The radically democratic nature of the practice is embraced by many P4C practitioners and theorists, especially from a more humanist philosophical framework, but of course, the ‘post’ in ‘posthumanism’ does not suggest an anti-humanism. Posthumanism does not reject humanism’s secular emancipatory agenda of ‘solidarity, community-bonding, social justice and principles of equality’, nor does it leave behind altogether liberal individualist values such as ‘autonomy, responsibility and self-determination’ (Braidotti 2013:29). But – as Braidotti (2013:30) argues – what posthumanism objects to is the ‘epistemic violence’ done to not fully humans (e.g., child) and the nonhuman ‘social and political “others” of the humanist norm’. The concept of ‘democracy’ is an important one for de/colonisation as it is understood to include moral principles such as freedom and equality of opportunity and implies that schools make space for children to actively participate

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Figure 3.1  H ow to Find Gold (2016). by Viviane Schwarz

as citizens in contexts that are meaningful to them. Regard for children’s rights also involves an acknowledgment and acceptance that children have the right to have knowledge presented to them as fallible, problematic and therefore always open to revision (Lipman 1991). The teacher as ‘facilitator’ (see Chapter 11 for the additional notion of the teacher as ‘difficultator’) is also supposed to ‘model’ such a stance towards knowledge, through the routine problematisation of the meaning of abstract concepts. In the literature, P4C is regarded as a pedagogy that fosters communicative virtues such as tolerance and respect across differences. Differences between people are regarded as rich educational opportunities for the construction of new ideas collaboratively, and learning is seen as

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a process that involves making connections between what people of all ages (think they) know and what is new. In practice, the P4C pedagogy involves building a community of philosophical enquiry (Lipman 1991) – a whole-class dialogue with participants sitting together in a way that enables each of them to hear and see all the others properly, usually in a circle. As described elsewhere (Haynes and Murris 2012), ground rules are developed if and when the community needs them, focusing on responsive listening, inclusiveness of everyone’s needs, and avoidance of bias (e.g., preference for friends over others). The individual right to remain silent is respected, though everyone is gently encouraged to participate.The work is collaborative in that everyone in class is encouraged to listen responsively, to build on each other’s ideas, and to investigate the issue at hand rigorously, developing in the process the social, emotional and cognitive skills and attitudes for working in and as teams. Despite surface similarities with ‘circle time’ or discussion (e.g., circular seating, emphasis on speaking and listening), P4C is unique in its collaborative and creative pursuit of rigour and everyone justifying their beliefs and opinions, including the teacher. Participants are openly encouraged to disagree with each other and to critically reflect on the dialogue through metadialogical activities (dialogues about the dialogue), thereby taking an active role in shaping the content of the lesson and evaluating the investigative strategies used. That children ask their own philosophical questions lies at the core of the practice. Deleuze’s oft-quoted comment about the revolutionary power of children’s questions are a reminder of how taking children’s questioning seriously could affect educational change and de/colonising transformation: ‘If the protests of children were heard in kindergarten, if their questions were attended to, it would be enough to explode the entire educational system’ (Foucault 1972:209). De/colonising childhood discourses is not necessarily achieved through P4C. In terms of de/colonising education, it is obvious that the use of adult philosophers from the analytical Anglo-American2 philosophical canon only can be problematic. As argued elsewhere, the ideal child of the P4C curriculum is the ‘abnormal’ child, the thinking child – the adult philosopher’s child (Murris 2015). For some, this is the autonomous, reasonable, Enlightenment adult with agency and rights as its ideal. However, what is problematic is that such advocates use binary logic and detached argumentation without ‘contamination’ by the emotions as their guidance. They claim that progress in philosophical enquiry can and should be made using logic and other philosophical tools (see e.g., Golding 2017; McCall and Weijers 2017). Other P4C approaches draw more on the Continental tradition in academic philosophy (e.g., Weber and Wolf 2017) with its emphasis on experience and imagination and a knowing subject that is not a detached observer: the view is always from ‘somewhere’. In short, P4C is a movement characterised by very diverse philosophical frameworks (Gregory, Haynes and Murris 2017:xxii–xxxii) and always on the move, absorbing different theories as a living organism (Murris 2016).

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The lack of P4C’s use of other ‘languages’ than the oral and the written when philosophising, has also been critiqued, especially in contexts where children are very young and do not have English as their ‘home’ language (Murris and Thompson 2016; Stanley and Lyle 2017). From a posthuman orientation, pedagogical work needs to include the more-than-human world and move beyond an exclusive focus on the social domain, which can reduce the complexity of data analysis, for example, by interpreting children’s philosophising solely through discourse analyses of transcripts of philosophical enquiries (Murris 2016). Moreover, Argentinian philosopher of education Walter Kohan, a project member and co-author of a chapter in this book, is critical of Lipman’s use of philosophy as an educational vehicle to mould children into good citizens in accordance with the political ideals of a liberal democracy (Kohan 2015:56). In that sense, P4C has a conception of childhood as a chronological stage in a human life (Kohan 2015:56). So, why did we choose P4C as an intra-vention for the research we analyse in this book?

Becoming-child P4C is a living movement that shapes itself according to the psychological, sociological, philosophical and other theories that theorists bring to the practice. As already mentioned, the field embraces a remarkable philosophical and educational diversity. The experiential education P4C inspires cannot be taught through replication or imitation. Kohan wonders what a post-developmental conception of child could be like and what role philosophy could play as a pedagogy. With reference to Ancient Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle, he argues that each conception of childhood presupposes a particular conception of time and childhood as a phase of a human life. This conception assumes chronos, chronological time: a sequential linear time between birth and death with a ‘before’ and ‘after’ (Kohan 2014:56). He turns to Heraclitus who introduced a different relationship between child and time with the help of the concept aion: ‘Time [aion] (is) a child childing (playing); its realm is one of child’ (Heraclitus cited in Kohan 2015:57). Kohan explains the double relationship between time and childhood in the Heraclitus quote: time does what a child does (paizon: plays) and in time, as aion, childhood governs (basilei is a power word, meaning “realm”). Thus, this fragment can be read as showing that time -life-time- is not only a question of numbered movement (chronos). There is another dimension of living time more akin to a childlike form of being (aion), non-numbered. In relation to this kind of time, a child is more powerful than any other being. In aionic life, childhood does not statically exist on one stage of life – the first one – but rather goes through it, powerfully, as an intensity or duration. (Kohan 2015:57)

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So, a non-chronological experience of time is enabled by the concept aion, giving room to disrupt the developmentalism and the Nature/Culture binary. Kohan draws the important (de/colonising) implication: ‘Childhood may here be understood, not only as a period of life but as a specific strength, force or intensity that inhabits a qualitative life at any given chronologic time’ (Kohan 2015:57). Kohan continues by discussing three non-chronological and related conceptions of childhood. For our project, Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘becomingchild’ is a particularly useful concept. Becoming-child has little to do with age, or a particular subject, but more to do with a flux or intensity of the unbounded body that continuously affects and is affected. Kohan clarifies that it is not the case that a given subject becomes a child or transforms herself into a child, nor is even childlike, but becoming-child is a ‘line of escape’ (see Chapter 1). It interrupts, escapes from the system, escapes from history: ‘a revolutionary space of transformation’ (Kohan 2015:57). Instead of the logic of democracy, Kohan offers a logic of experience. Experiences, by their very nature, cannot be predicted or anticipated; they happen. What Kohan is suggesting resonates with Kuby and Gutshall Rucker’s notion of ‘literacy desiring’, referred to in Chapter 1. Experiences are possibilities, opening up the future, unexpected, unsuspected, unbelievable, the different (Kohan 2015:61). There are no predetermined paths or pre-planned outcomes. So how might becoming-child and literacy desiring help shape a different way of doing of literacy through P4C? Massumi (2014) stresses that we cannot think about an event without a different conception of time. The body, he says, is fixed on the binary grid child/ adult and cannot in fact move (Massumi 2002). In his P4C practices in Rio de Janeiro, Kohan and his colleagues open up possibilities of encountering a kind of philosophical thinking that involves everyone in ‘thinking differently than the ways we used to think, and that we are forced or manipulated into thinking by the dominant cultural forces of our time . . . a cultural dislocation’ (Kohan 2015:62). In philosophical encounters, the aim is not to represent, or reproduce, or recognise, but to embrace a kind of thinking that is passionate and spontaneous, with ‘students and teachers entering a zone of interrogation – in putting themselves, their lives, their passions and beliefs into question through the experience of thinking together’ (Kohan 2015:65). So, rather than ‘filling’ students, they are ‘emptied’ of the truths they have had installed in them, and are no longer simply ‘ventriloquists of popular culture’ (Kohan 2015:66). This different relationship with time reminds us of what Colebrook says about the task of thinking: an open relationship to thought without foundation (see Chapter 1). Becoming-child or becoming-minoritarian is a process of unlearning that unleashes a particular active relationship to thinking, that P4C especially can nurture, but that cannot be anticipated or expected (Kohan 2015:71), either by the teacher, or by the children; and it is this playful relationship with knowledge that comes easier for children who have not yet invested as much of their identity in what they know. It is with these ideas in mind that we turned to

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Sara Stanley as our teacher for the philosophy lesson – a practice we regard as a kind of ‘playthinking’.

Researching Sara: a pregnant stingray? Another project member, Sara Stanley, is the teacher of the one literacy lesson we analyse in this book. She is a highly experienced early years’ practitioner and well known in the field for her philosophical play approach.Trained as a P4C facilitator in Britain, she explains that her Philosophy by Children is different from mainstream P4C in that ‘the philosophical is generated by children in play, in their conversation and in their intra-active relationships with people, all living organisms and the material environment’ (Stanley and Lyle 2017:53). These conversations are ‘embodied enactments of philosophical concepts’ (Stanley and Lyle 2017:54) and are documented through note-taking in a diary and are read back to the children. This in turn leads to writing down children’s own questions – the focal point for the subsequent communities of philosophical enquiry. Sara herself explains in an intra-view how her philosophical play approach inspired the actual teaching of the lesson in the grade 2 South African classroom. This intra-view is discussed in Chapter 5, and some topics re/emerge in Chapter 8. A connection is made between the way in which Viviane Schwarz writes and Sara teaches – both in an emergent manner. Some of the authors of this book – Judy Crowther, Rose-Anne Reynolds, Karin Murris and Thandeka Ncube – talk with Sara in Judy’s house near the beach about her choice of picturebook. Why she had been drawn to it. Rose-Anne: . . . Sara can you tell us why you chose the book and why you were drawn to it. Sara: Umm I . . . how to find something that’s valuable. . . That is what you want, that’s what children want to do, what we as adults want to do: to find that thing that’s valuable . . . not necessarily gold . . . I’ve always been fascinated by pirates and the idea of treasure. Always because treasure has so much richness in terms of philosophy, because wealth is such a huge . . . not just . . . in terms of intellect, in terms of food, in terms of family love, in terms of freedom. All the things actually that young children when they first come to school are looking for possibly, so to me that had a promise in it. . . . Because, would I have chosen it without the picture? Yes, I think in a lot of ways it’s the title. There’s something philosophical in the title: ‘How to find gold’ and philosophically that’s: how to find it [Sneeze] find it [Sneeze] What does finding something involve? You know, what? I don’t know. I mean it’s definitely something about hidden treasures. It is definitely something about possibilities.

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Karin:

Did you ever think . . . how to find gold – think about the colonial connotation? I didn’t. Sara: . . . Joburg. Coz you know it’s the city of gold? Karin: No, I didn’t. Sara: . . . When I think about finding gold I think about Peter Pan and Captain Hook. . . . Looking for something . . . finding it . . . let’s find it together, collectively . . . the title is not ‘Anna finds gold’! You know, it’s not ‘Crocodile finds gold’. It’s not, ‘There is gold in this book!’. Rose-Anne: It’s quite egalitarian. Judy: An invitation. It’s an invitation, right . . . How to do it . . . I love to know how to do Sara: things . . . Don’t you? That’s how I work with the children. How do we know this? How do we play it? How does it work? How does it fit with what somebody else is saying? How, how how? More than ‘why?’. Karin: So, it’s not that you are looking for the answers, coz the book opens up the questions that you think are worthwhile engaging with . . . leading to other questions. So actually, what is treasure? If it’s not, if it’s not something you Sara: need to have . . . in your hands . . . and why would you bury it? What if you took something brilliant then why don’t you . . . what use is it, if you don’t have it and what . . . and that was the selling point. But also I know Viv’s work is philosophical, you know I’ve worked with I am Henry Finch3 and I’ve worked with a lot of her books, and it’s because she is a philosophical person, she thinks [train hoots as it passes] . . . don’t think you can be an artist without being philosophical, to me art is philosophy because otherwise it’s just marks on the paper [train hoots again] . . . what was the question again? Rose-Anne: Why you chose the book. . . . Karin: So [the picturebook] doesn’t close down, doesn’t give the answers. Because so often we choose picture books to moralise, and to give the right moral message . . .You can imagine How to find gold could be a book about how we have to be grateful for what we got . . . or some kind of message [laughter], but there is no message here . . . Sara: And also this isn’t your standard gold is it? – look at that . . . that is a treasure trove . . . [sounds of agreement] of weird and wonderful things you would want to find in junk shops like I do [laughter] you know most of my resources come from me diving around looking for treasures that would just make you go ‘ooh!’ what is this, why is this? How did this get here . . . But you know, this whole image . . . what on earth is that? It’s not your standard. . . . Rose-Anne: Exactly!

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Sara:

I mean Viv talks about the birth of this book came from an actual hand book, didn’t it? Like instructions. . . How to find gold, writing instructions. . . . Rose-anne: No, I think she said she started writing it as an instruction manual and then she realised. . . Judy: Without any pictures. . . . . . In some ways the book writes itself, by her [Viviane] responding in Karin: the same way that you respond to the children, she’s responding to how the characters are developing and almost as if she is not in control. I found that fascinating to listen to . . . and also you very much like it when those secrets, when there are . . . Sara: Yes, yes, the secrets are the interesting bit aren’t they. Nosy, am I nosy? I think I am a curious person. . . I’ve got a box full of secrets. . . How do you cultivate curiosity and genuine interest in the world? Karin: Rose-Anne: In relation . . . And I think the problem is we are so taught the world as discovKarin: ered, we know it all, and you know we just need to transmit that knowledge rather than that it’s a fascinating place and that we know so little, but that’s not how we’re taught it.That’s the unfortunate thing . . . Sara: I don’t know if I’ve really done it with you, Karin’s probably seen it . . . I have a little yellow box with question marks on the outside, a little tin, and I’ve got something in it and the lid is quite firmly tight and kids can’t get in it. Now most children when I show that box will want to know what’s in it, they’ll want to want to get in, they’ll want to shake it. Sara’s modest and egalitarian attitude towards knowledge is palpable, in her teaching and when she talks about her teaching. Elsewhere, she is described as a ‘pregnant stingray’ (Murris 2016:181–200). This reconfiguration of the teacher has been created through a diffractive reading4 of three figurations:5 the midwife (who assists in giving birth to new ideas), the stingray (who numbs others and herself through philosophical questioning) and the pregnant body (a body that can be more than one at the same time). The pregnant-stingray-educator treats her own knowledge of concepts as contestable and is willing to inhabit the perplexity of philosophical questions (independently of the age or social status of the questioner). The relationship between learner and educator is not characterised by bodily boundaries that are closed, autonomous or impermeable, but allow the potentiality for otherness to exist within it (Deleuze’s notion of

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the virtual). Teacher and learners do not have pre-existing identities, which, for example, respond or react to new information; they are engaged in a continuous flow and fluidity. Pregnant stingrays are multiple and unbounded inhuman becomings, who can anticipate the not-yet-thought with a fleshy openness to otherness (Battersby 1998:59). As Barad (2011:131) points out, the neuronal receptor cells in stingrays make it possible for these creatures to anticipate a message which has not arrived yet – a kind of clairvoyance, one could argue, that strikingly describes the more-than-human listening of the posthuman educator. Confounding, the logic of causality, stingrays unlock themselves before this is (apparently) necessary (Barad 2011:131). In the second part of this book, we explore collaboratively how Sara unlocks herself as a pregnant stingray by focusing in our analyses on the intra-active relationality in-between the human and the nonhuman.

Notes 1 The category of ‘species’ is also problematic in critical posthumanism as it assumes an arborescent ontology, a hierarchical organisation of human and nonhuman animals (see in particular Deleuze and Guattari, and Haraway). 2 The complex distinction between analytic and Continental philosophy is explained by Gary Gutting in a blog with helpful references, but from an American perspective (e.g., the distinction he claims was institutionalised with reference to the emergence of a new philosophical society in the US) and a clear bias towards what he refers to as the greater clarity offered by analytic philosophers, by which he somewhat misses the deeper point of the fundamental incommensurable difference between the two and already uses analytic evaluation tools in his judgements. See: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/ bridging-the-analytic-continental-divide/?_r=0. Accessed: 13 October 2016. 3 Written by Alexis Deacon and illustrated by Viviane Schwarz I Am Henry Finch got the 2016 Little Rebels Award. The book was described by judge Wendy Cooling as ‘philosophy for beginners . . . introducing the power of ideas and thought to the youngest of children’. From: https://littlerebels.org/2017/01/09/qa-with-2016-award-winnerviviane-schwarz-i-am-henry-finch/. Accessed: 2 February 2018. 4 For the use of diffraction as a research methodology, see Chapter 4. 5 The midwife and the stingray are well-known Platonic metaphors for the teacher. See: Matthews 1999.

References Barad, K. (2011) Nature’s Queer Performativity. Qui parle 19, 2, Spring/summer:121–158. Battersby, C. (1998) The Phenomenal Woman: Feminist Metaphysics and the Patterns of Identity. New York: Routledge. Braidotti, R. (2013) The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press. Foucault, M. (1972) Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Translated by Donald F. Bouchard (Ed.) and Sherry Simon. New York: Cornell University Press. Golding, C. (2017) Getting Better Ideas: A Framework for Understanding Epistemic Philosophical Progress in Philosophy for Children. In M. Rollins Gregory, J. Haynes and K. Murris (Eds.) The Routledge International Handbook of Philosophy for Children. London: Routledge, 65–74.

62  Karin Murris and Joanna Haynes Gregory, M., Haynes, J. & Murris, K. (Eds.) (2017) The Routledge International Handbook of Philosophy for Children. London: Routledge. Haynes, J. (2014) Already Equal and Able to Speak. In S. Robson and S. F. Quinn (Eds.) Routledge International Handbook of Young Children’s Thinking and Understanding. London: Routledge, 463–475. Haynes, J. (forthcoming) The Movement of Philosophy with Children: Beyond Learning as Usual. In S. P. Albert and S. H. Rico (Eds.) Pensamiento Creativo. Una herramienta con future. [Publication of UNESCO Chair of Philosophy for Peace of the Universitat Jaume I of Castellon (Spain)]. Haynes, J. & Murris, K. (2012) Picturebooks, Pedagogy and Philosophy. New York: Routledge. Haynes, J. & Murris, K. (2013) The Realm of Meaning: Imagination, Narrative and Playfulness in Philosophical Exploration With Young Children. In P. Costello (Ed.) Special Issue: Developing Children’s Thinking in Early Childhood Education. Early Child Development and Care 183, 8:1084–1100. Haynes, J. & Murris, K. (2017) Intra-Generational Education: Imagining a Post-Age Pedagogy. Educational Philosophy and Theory 49, 10:971–983. Kennedy, D. (2011) From Outer Space and Across the Street: Matthew Lipman’s Double Vision. Childhood & Philosophy, 7, 13:49–74. Kohan, W. (2014) Philosophy and Childhood: Critical Perspectives and Affirmative Practices. New York: Palgrave. Kohan, W. (2015) Childhood, Education and Philosophy: New Ideas for an Old Relationship. New York: Routledge. Lipman, M. (1988) Philosophy Goes to School. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Lipman, M. (1991) Thinking in Education. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Lipman, M., Sharp, A. M. & Oscanyan, F. S. (1977) Philosophy in the Classroom. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Martens, E. (1999) Spelen Met denken: Over Filosoferen Met Kinderen. Rotterdam: Lemniscaat. Massumi, B. (2002) Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham: Duke University Press. Massumi, B. (2014) What Animals Teach us About Ethics. Durham: Durham University Press. Matthews, G. (1976) Philosophy and Children’s Literature. Metaphilosophy 7, 1:7–16. Matthews, G. (1980) Philosophy and the Young Child. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Matthews, G. (1984) Dialogues With Children. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Matthews, G. (1988) The Philosophical Imagination in Children’s Literature. In K. Egan and D. Nadener (Eds.) Imagination and Education. New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 186–198. Matthews, G. (1994) The Philosophy of Childhood. Harvard: Harvard University Press. Matthews, G. (1999) Socratic Perplexity and the Nature of Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Matthews, G. (2006) Thinking in Stories. Thinking 18, 1:3. McCall, C. & Weijers, E. (2017) Back to Basics: A Philosophical Analysis of Philosophy in Philosophy With Children. In M. Gregory, J. Haynes and K. Murris (Eds.) The Routledge International Handbook of Philosophy for Children. London: Routledge, 83–93. Murris, K. (2015) The Philosophy for Children Curriculum: Resisting ‘Teacher Proof ’ Texts and the Formation of the Ideal Philosopher Child. Studies in Philosophy and Education 35, 1:63–78.

Philosophy for Children 63 Murris, K. (2016) The Posthuman Child: Educational Transformation Through Philosophy With Picturebooks. London: Routledge Contesting Early Childhood Series. Murris, K. & Thompson, R. (2016) Drawings as Imaginative Expressions of Philosophical Ideas in a grade 2 South African Literacy Classroom. Reading  & Writing 7, 2:11 pages. doi: 10.4102/rw.v7i2.127. Somerville, M. (2013) The Nature/Cultures of Children’s Place Learning Maps. In M. Blaise, B. Banerjee, V. Pacini-Ketchabaw, and A. Taylor (Eds.). Special Issue: Researching the naturecultures of postcolonial childhoods. Global Studies of Childhood 3, 4:407–417. Splitter, L. J. & Sharp, A.-M. (1995) Teaching for Better Thinking; The Classroom Community of Enquiry. Melbourne: ACER. Stanley, S. L. & Lyle, S. (2017) Philosophical Play in the Early Years Classroom. In M. Gregory, J. Haynes and K. Murris (Eds.) The Routledge International Handbook of Philosophy for Children. London: Routledge, 53–63. Weber, B., & Wolf, A. (2017). Questioning the Question. A Hermeneutical Perspective on the “Art of Questioning” in a Community of Philosophical Inquiry. In M. Gregory, J. Haynes, & K. Murris (Eds.), The Routledge International Handbook of Philosophy for Children. London and New York: Routledge, 74–83.

Chapter 4

The ‘classroom’ and posthuman research methodologies Karin Murris and Joanna Haynes

This chapter provides further background on the nature of the research project that focused on one lesson in a South African grade 2 classroom. It explains how the project emerged through a particular coincidence of circumstances: a course for foundation phase teachers, a visiting practitioner from the UK (Sara Stanley), a partnership school of the University of Cape Town and a wonderful picturebook How to Find Gold (Schwarz 2016). The chapter reports on ‘methods’ adopted in the project, the ‘apparatus’ of the project and the material and relational nature of the research practices. The complexities of its creative and experimental character are discussed and the ethical questions it provoked are opened up for consideration. The chapter includes an account of the many layers of the project as it unfolded: intra-views with and between Sara and Viviane; residential research workshops. The chapter concludes with a flavour of the writing that follows in Part II with a particular focus on the philosophical methods used.

The literacy lesson and research ethics Being familiar with Sara Stanley’s extraordinary practice and given her many years of experience in teaching philosophy to three- and four-year-olds, observing and recording her teaching as part of our de/colonising childhood research project seemed a highly worthwhile thing to do. Sara was working with student teachers at the University of Cape Town introducing her playful-philosophical approach to them. Sara has also been adopting this approach, as part of literacy learning, in local township and informal settlement early years’ centres in the Western Cape. As part of their studies to become qualified foundation phase teachers, the students were involved in literacy workshops with Sara at the university, and later observed her in action teaching literacy in two of the university’s partnership schools. It was at this point that a golden opportunity presented itself.We applied for and got ethics clearance from the University of Cape Town to turn these observation lessons with the students into a research project. We obtained permission from the children and their parents or guardians. This process of getting permissions for the classroom research was expertly facilitated

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Figure 4.1 The ‘classroom’.

by two of our project members who work at these schools – one of them was the regular classroom teacher of the class we focus on in this book but has since moved on to another school. Four sessions of Sara’s teaching were recorded in the two different schools. For this book, we chose one of these literacy sessions with six- and seven-year olds – filmed from three different angles: a GoPro from the ceiling, a professional filmmaker with a handheld camera and his assistant, sometimes placed on a tripod, and one of us, mainly lying on the floor of the classroom, filming between the chair legs with a tablet (see Figures 6.4 and 6.5). For the literacy lesson we focus on in this book, Sara had chosen How to Find Gold (2016). This picturebook has been written and illustrated by children’s book author Viviane Schwarz, originally from Germany, but living in London. The transcript of some of Sara’s intra-view with this award-winning artist1 in her house and communal garden is also part of the rich data we created and use for our analysis. Project members had also intra-viewed Sara near Muizenberg beach (the beach itself had been preferable, but on the day itself it had been too windy for us to record the conversation). The intra-views with and between Sara and Viviane were made accessible to the authors of this book on Google doc, together with the transcripts of the classroom session. After signing an ethics agreement that we had constituted collaboratively at a residential project

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meeting, we watched the three footages of the lesson simultaneously, engaged in philosophical enquiry ourselves with the picturebook (facilitated by Sara) and started to develop questions and ideas for each of the chapters of this book. The chapter authors are mainly South-African, but also include scholars from Brazil, Canada, England, United States and the Netherlands who have been working collaboratively in analysing the various transcripts and video tapes. The procedures we followed provoked serious ethical dilemmas, which we discussed at length as a team. Agency, for posthumanist Karen Barad, is about response-ability – the possibilities of mutual response and worldly re-configurings, simultaneously attending to power imbalances. In terms of research involving children, the presence in the classroom of the three cameras, a large microphone and the many adult researchers and student teachers raised major ethical questions. Permission had been given by the children and families, but we are all too aware that school can be a tricky space in which to request and gain such permissions. CCTV and mobile phones are now ubiquitous, part of the furniture, part of the world. While we set out to minimise the observer/ observed dualism, notions of intrusion and surveillance frequently entered our discussions, and we stayed with these risks and tensions. In our project, the various cameras and the several observing adults were in plain view and coconstituted the ‘classroom’ on this occasion. Ethical issues were felt, acknowledged and addressed frequently and differently through this project. Because of the ad-hoc nature of the research project, we did not have the financial resources to give each child their own camera. Nor did we share the initial research questions (see Chapter 2) with the children as we did not yet know where the data would take us. As researchers we do not consider ourselves as in control of the research, nor do we regard ourselves as innocent bystanders (Barad 2003:804), representing children’s meaning-making from a distance. Barad acknowledges that some people might get very nervous when one expresses the view that agency is not located in a person, and instead, is attributed to a complex field of forces. However, she assures us2 that the ‘specificity of the intra-actions speaks to the particularities of the power imbalances’ and stresses that taking account of social justice and undoing power imbalances involves necessarily a re-thinking (queering) of the human subject by undoing binaries such as cognition/emotion, inside/outside, mind/body. In posthuman research, the question ‘Who/what is observing who/what?’ is always part of the analysis. The apparatus (including the technology) is part of the phenomena studied and the cameras and adults in the room causally intra-act with and are part of the knowledge produced. The shift in thinking is to give up the idea that educational research can observe (either directly or with recording apparatus) humans in isolation (‘objective’ ‘pure’, ‘given’ in perception) without taking into account the relational material and discursive networks they are always already part of. This is different from saying the world is ‘mediated’ through, for example, reason or language (see also Chapter 1), but ‘the objective referent is phenomena’ (Barad 2003:823). Like

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anything else, research is a material-discursive practice and part of the world in its differential becoming (Barad 2007:89). Research is a doing and involves experimentation, not by applying and testing new technologies, but in our case, trying out a nonrepresentational, posthuman way of thinking with the data. Without hanging onto the familiar, we ventured into the unknown with a desire to imagine and experiment with new, more just ways of understanding and evaluating children’s competencies (Olsson 2009). Our researching with children reminded us of an example given by Donna Haraway (as reported by Barad in an interview with Dolphijn and Van der Tuin 2012). Barad writes: Another example that may be helpful here is an example that Haraway (2008) talks about. It is an example that is raised by Barbara Smuts, who is an American bio-anthropologist who went to Tanzania to investigate baboons in the wild for her doctoral research. She is told as a scientific investigator of nonhuman primates to keep her distance, so that her presence would not influence the behaviour of the research subjects that she was studying. Distance is the condition of objectivity. Smuts talks about the fact that this advice was a complete disaster for her research, that she found herself unable to do any observations since the baboons were constantly attentive to what she was doing. She finally realized that this was because Smuts was behaving so strangely to them, they just could not get over her. She was being a bad social subject in their circles.The only way to carry on and to do research objectively was to be responsible; that is, that objectivity, a theme that feminist science studies has been emphasizing all along, is the fact that objectivity is a matter of responsibility and not a matter of distancing at all. What ultimately did work was that she learned to be completely responsive to the nonhuman primates, and in that way she became a good baboon citizen. They could understand, at least intelligibly to the nonhuman primates, and as a result they left her alone and went about their business, making it possible for her to conduct her research. According to Barad (2014:181), as teacher-researchers we do not exist ‘outside of the diffraction pattern, observing it, telling its story’. On the contrary, we are ‘neither inside, not outside’, but our stories in their ongoing (re)patterning are (re)(con)figuring us; we are ‘of the diffraction pattern’ (Barad 2014:181). In the sense that we as subjects are transindividual, that is ‘always already multiply dispersed and diffracted throughout spacetime (mattering)’ (Barad 2014:182). These ideas create exciting opportunities for researchers and turned out to be rich and challenging provocations for the authors of this book with few other practical examples in the field to act as guides. A year later (April 2017), project members met again at a residential in the beautiful mountains near Stellenbosch. Most authors of this book presented their e/merging chapters, and new ideas materialised using a wealth of materials that had been brought in to play with: wool, wire, paint, paper, scissors, glue,

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a light box, torches, fabric, sand, shells, stones, etc., and through the intra-action with and re-turning to the documentation of this workshop the idea of Chapter 5 materialised. Re-turning to research ethics, Liselott Olsson (2009:126–128) reminds us that research ethics also concerns the quality and integrity of the research. This balancing act between confidentiality and the need in posthuman research not just to describe or analyse data, but to give access to visual details of the human and more-than-human in our footage, caused ethical dilemmas. Disrupting writer/ reader, form/content, insider/outsider and other such binaries, we decided that to be able to maximise the material-discursive force of the data we created, we should include photos of the children in publications. As a team we talked about the children’s concern perhaps later on when they were older, seeing images of themselves in a book when they were much younger. Would they mind, we wondered? Should they be protected from future feelings and identification and was that our responsibility as educational researchers? We asked ourselves whether our very concern about such matters, already implied that we positioned children as vulnerable, innocent and incapable, purely because of their age. In posthuman research, bodies are of utmost importance in learning from and with the data, so in the end we decided to include images of human bodies, but to pixelate the children’s faces and the school’s badges on their uniforms. We were troubled though about only considering the face or head of a body as ethically significant. Related to this concern, and much later in our reading group, we re-turned to the ethical concerns our research project raises when published in a book like this. What struck us was Olsson’s (2009:127) powerful reminder that although posthumanism concerns a subject that is ‘more alive than ever’, this ‘totally unique and singular subject’ is ‘never repeatable, not even to itself ’ and the knowledge produced is always related to the entire relational human and morethan-human field at particular moments ‘in’ time and space (Olsson 2009:128). She then draws the implications for research ethics: subjectivity in this study is treated as caught up in a relational field, where every single person’s thoughts, speech and actions really count for the creation of the field itself, but the focus is really on what takes place in between the children, and in between children as teachers. Although individual contributions count, the focus is on the way they are caught up in a collective process. This implies that what is said in this study has less to do with the individual children or teachers and that they are in this way protected from being exposed as data about individuals with specific characteristics that could be used in ways not intended. (Olsson 2009:127) In other words, ethics procedures are always lagging behind. The children in our study have already ‘moved on’ as we are writing: ‘they are already somewhere else, caught up in different things’ and so have we. Crucially, this book

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does not pretend to be ‘a true story about these children’, but one that is ‘constructed’, requiring the researchers to make the process of its construction visible (Olsson 2009:128). However, in this introduction, we have deliberately refrained from giving information about the school and the children to avoid prejudiced generalisations and to encourage focussing on the fine details of the particular and the singular in its relationality. In Chapter 2, we discussed child and childhood in Africa and the South African educational system, which is widely considered to be in crisis. The educational system in the Western Cape province is a case apart. The distinction between state and independent schools is far from straightforward. Many state schools select on academic merit and operate like independent schools with relatively high school fees. The school of our research is an independent but inclusive school that does not select on merit. Giving too much information about the school could possibly compromise the confidentiality we promised the teachers and the learners (hence our decision to pixelate the faces of the children and the students, and school badge). However, some of the chapters in Part II take up explicitly the geopolitical location of the school, without giving away too much detail. They trace the material-discursive situatedness of the school in various ways, but without moralising and leaving the question open about what it means to de/colonise. So what were the methodologies at our disposal when we started analysing the data we had created as a research team? There are three options that inspired us, but the idea is not to give a complete list or to exhaust the possibilities. They are dis-identification, diffraction and naturecultures, and we explore each in turn.

Dis-identification Posthuman philosophy is a relational ontology (a philosophy of immanence) and takes its inspiration from Spinoza’s monism, especially in ‘post’-deleuzoguattarian philosophies (e.g., Braidotti). To reiterate, for critical posthumanists, difference is difference without identity; that is, a difference that assumes being without substance and subject, ‘the establishment of a relationality that is affirmative – structured by positivity rather than negativity’ (Dolphijn and Van der Tuin 2012:127). A body is not different to something outside itself in a relational ontology. The active, creative process of ‘pushing dualisms to the extreme’ (Dolphijn and Van der Tuin 2012:127) also pushes difference to the limit, and instead of looking for the same in the other (e.g., black, young, able, female) it involves looking for difference in the other, which is not evaluative, but performative (Dolphijn and Van der Tuin 2012:127). The implications for teaching and research are the use of strategies of what Braidotti (2011:83) calls dis-identification and involves: the loss of familiar habits of thought and representation in order to pave the way for the creation of creative alternatives . . . and free the process of subject formation from the normative vision of the self. The frame of

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reference becomes the open-ended, interrelational, multisexed, and transspecies flows of becoming by interaction with multiple others. A subject thus constituted explodes the boundaries of humanism at skin level. This powerful notion for de/colonisation involves fear, a sense of insecurity, nostalgia and pain (Braidotti 2011:219), and requires ‘collective imaginings’ (Braidotti 2011:220) and a thinking that is critical. This ‘critical’ is not in the sense of negatively criticising, but ‘the active, assertive process of inventing new images of thought’, such as the postmetaphysical figuration of ‘becoming-woman’ and ‘becoming-animal’ (Braidotti 2011:84), and in the context of our research, as we have seen in Chapter 3, ‘becoming-child’. Intertextually referencing Plato, French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1991/1994:5) argue that ‘[c]oncepts are not waiting for us ready-made, like heavenly bodies’. Taking up the task put by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, they advise us not just to ‘purify and polish’ concepts, but ‘make and create them, present them and make them convincing’ (Nietzsche quoted in Deleuze and Guattari 1991/1994:5). Philosophy as the activity of creating new concepts is at the heart of the pedagogy of Philosophy for Children (P4C), a theory/practice we research in this book. Importantly, this posthuman pedagogy includes children as concept creators, as further explored in detail in various chapters in Part II. It is mentioned here because postcolonial theory tends to overlook the necessity of including children in its desire for ‘social transformation for liberation’, as for example social constructionists Gaile Cannella and Radhika Viruru (2004:148) stipulate. A posthuman orientation also asks different questions – questions created, posed and answered by children themselves in intra-generational enquiries. By pre-empting the direction of postcolonial futures, we run the risk of continuing the colonisation of children but also rob ourselves of the opportunity to cut through the core of Western metaphysical subjectivity that has otherised child from the adult-Subject as an object of study and knowledge consumer, rather than knowledge creator. Intra-generational communities of enquiry (the pedagogy of Philosophy with Children) enable the inhuman3 ‘blackwhitechildadult’ to co-create new concepts and thereby – by the very nature of the practice – rupture the Subject/ Object western template (see Chapter 2). Posthuman subjects are without fixed identities – always shifting and changing ‘collective assemblages’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987/2014) without bodily boundaries (Barad 2007). Brian Massumi (2015:1) poignantly states that there is not much room for hope ‘when you start trying to think ahead into the future from the present point’. Hope, he says, should be disconnected from expected success and always remain in the present. If not, experimentation is closed down. Massumi (2015:3) explains that this ‘brings a sense of potential to the situation’.The present’s ‘ “boundary condition” . . . is an open threshold – a threshold of potential. You are only ever in the present in passing’. All chapters in Part II play with posthuman subjectivity as intra-active and transindividual. Dis-identification as a posthuman strategy works its way

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through all chapters. This is unusual in literary and literacy research, which tends to work more with identification (e.g., the concern that children need to be able to identify with characters in the story). Dis-identification is closely related to diffraction as a methodology. Both assume a relational ontology, not a substance ontology.

Diffraction In her seminal work Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (2007), Karen Barad offers a posthuman performative account of material-discursive practices, including those that tend to be referred to as ‘social’ or ‘scientific’. The title of our research project, Decolonising Early Childhood Discourses, might suggest that we are concerned mainly with discourses and how representations of children have constructed a particular child subjectivity. Our research diffracts with Foucauldian analyses, which include awareness of the intricate links between knowledge, power and discourse, but also takes us in a new direction, creating a new line of enquiry – a ‘line of escape’ (see Chapter 1). This book contributes to various fields, always moving in between deterritorialising established meanings of concepts such as ‘child’, ‘knowledge’, ‘teaching’, ‘learning’, ‘nature’ and ‘text’, thereby changing the landscape of what is means to de/colonise an educational institution. With its disruption of anthropocentrism and the nature/culture binaries, diffraction as a methodology (Barad 2007, 2014) is an obvious choice for posthuman researchers. Diffraction pays attention to how technoscientific practices are implicated in what it means to do research. It is not only a research methodology, but also a pedagogical tool, in place of the more qualitative and humanist reflective methodologies. Diffraction was first developed by Haraway as a metaphor (1988), and then built on by Barad (2003, 2007, 2014, 2018) through her interpretation of quantum physics. As a strategy for research and pedagogy, diffraction moves beyond the Western metaphysical Subject/Object dichotomy (and therefore it is not a metaphor). In an interview Barad4 explains the difference between diffraction as a classical physics phenomenon and the way she uses it quantum-mechanically: Diffraction, understood using quantum physics, is not just a matter of interference, but of entanglement, an ethico-onto-epistemological matter. This difference is very important. It underlines the fact that knowing is a direct material engagement, a cutting together-apart, where [agential] cuts do violence but also open up and rework the agential conditions of possibility. There is not this knowing from a distance. Instead of there being a separation of subject and object, there is an entanglement of subject and object, which is called the “phenomenon”. Objectivity, instead of being about offering an undistorted mirror image of the world, is about accountability to marks on bodies, and responsibility to the entanglement of which we are a part.

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As Barad (2014:168) explains, ‘the quantum understanding of diffraction troubles the very notion of dicho-tomy – cutting into two – as a singular act of absolute differentiation, fracturing this from that, now from then’. Diffraction means ‘to break apart in different directions’ (Barad 2014:168). Diffraction patterns hold for water waves, as well as sound waves, or light waves (Barad 2007:74). It is where they interfere or overlap that the waves change in themselves in intraaction and create an interference pattern or ‘superposition’ (Barad 2007:76). The new patterns created are the effect of difference and mark where learning has occurred. Importantly, they disrupt identity-producing binaries. Diffraction attends to the relational nature of difference; it does not figure difference as either a matter of essence or as inconsequential (Haraway 1992:300). For Barad, diffraction is not a metaphor as it is for Haraway, as this would imply a logic of representation, but it denotes phenomena of matter itself (Seghal 2014:188). Waves are not bounded objects, but disturbances creating diffraction patterns. According to the ‘highly counterintuitive theory’ of quantum physics, particles can also create diffraction patterns, which means that they can occupy the same place at the same time (as waves do when they overlap) (Barad 2007:81). Depending on the measuring apparatus, matter can exhibit wavelike behaviour. So the methodology tries to break from the familiar habits of reflecting on the world from the outside to a way of understanding the world from within and as part of it (Barad 2007:88). The de/colonising move that diffraction enables researchers, is to think with and through ‘differences across, among, and between genders, species, spaces, knowledges, sexualities, subjectivities, and temporalities’ – differences that are not solidified as “less than” ’ (Barad interviewed in Juelskjaer and Schwennesen 2012:16). In the context of educational research, this means not only studying children through the lenses of the social sciences but to produce something new – fresh patterns of thinking-being by being attentive to what other disciplines offer. In our study, we also deliberately included researchers from speech and language therapy, engineering (built environment), African studies, arts and philosophy. This is salient as sticking to only literacy or literary scholars would have made it difficult to see the diffraction patterns. Barad points out in an interview (Dolphijn and Van der Tuin 2012) that the humanities tend to deal with matters of care and the sciences with matters of fact but intra-action between scholars of very different backgrounds helps to make entanglements between matter and meaning visible. And equally important, we drew on insights from outside academia. Some of the authors are grandmothers, mothers or fathers. Some are also teachers and trainers, and one contributor is a picturebook artist. These entanglements always already exist and through the writing in each chapter some of these intra-active and diffractive insights surface. The diffraction apparatuses, Barad (2007:33) suggests, can be used to study these entanglements, which are specific material-discursive configurations that change with each intra-action. The complexity researchers deal with when using the diffractive method is not so much that entanglements

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change from moment to moment or from place to place, but that ‘space, time, and matter do not exist prior to the intra-actions that constitute’ them (Barad 2007:33). So what are the implications for knowledge production? Barad (2007:91; emphasis in the original) states very clearly that the point is not that knowledge practices have material consequences, but ‘practices of knowing are specific material engagements that participate in (re)configuring the world.Which practices we enact matter – in both senses of the word’. Making knowledge implies giving the world specific form, for which the researcher is also responsible and accountable by paying attention to accurate and fine details (Barad 2007:91–93). How does the methodology work? For example, by reading figurations (see the pregnant stingray in Chapter 3), or texts, or oeuvres through one another. Such readings are affirmative, not critical, and involve ‘respectful, responsive and response-able (enabling response) attention to the details of a text’, thereby trying to ‘do justice to a text’, like Viviane Schwarz’s picturebook How to Find Gold (2016) we used for the literacy lesson. (Barad interviewed in Juelskjaer and Schwennesen 2012:13; emphasis in the original.) In diffractive readings, researchers are not looking for similarities or differences, for example, by making comparisons or try and identify themes. Guided by our research questions (see Chapter 2) and further questions that e/merged as we re-turned to the data, new pedagogical ideas of working with concepts was created, thereby deterritorialising what conceptual knowledge is, which also includes child as knowledge co-creator. The new diffraction patterns include and do not reduce one to the other. Such diffractive readings are not guided by a ‘lack’. The ‘superposition’ created by the diffraction is not ‘critical’, but adds force to ‘both’, without assuming that either is a unity, nor the interference pattern that has been created. Moreover, the challenge in using diffraction as a methodology is not to theorise the diffraction pattern, but to put it into practice, thereby disrupting the theory/practice binary. The idea is to read theory with practice diffractively guided by key questions that move the experiment forward. Re-turning as diffractive method

As teacher-researchers we not only re-turn to the data we created in Part II, but also to Karen Barad’s visit to Cape Town in June 2017 when she worked with us and re-read aloud two papers during a residential seminar: one called Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting Together-Apart (Barad 2014) and one still to be published at the moment of writing this book (Barad 2018). In this chapter, we diffract with our remembering of that event, also by watching the videorecordings again of the presentations. This method is a kind of ‘slow scholarship’, re-turning and re-turning again and again to the ‘same’ text, creating ‘thicker’ understandings about diffraction in the context of one literacy lesson in a grade 2 South African postcolonial classroom. As Barad points out: ‘the mere mark of a hyphen [in re-turning], is an important reminder that reflection (‘returning’, not ‘re-turning’) and diffraction are not opposites’ but overlapping

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optical intra-actions in practice (Barad 2014:185 ftn2). Re-turning, as Barad explains (2014:168), is ‘a mode of intra-acting with diffraction – diffracting diffraction’ and ‘is particularly apt since the temporality of re-turning is integral to the phenomenon of diffraction’ – cutting together-apart as one move. As seen above, this is opposed to cutting into two as in ‘dicho-tomy’, and this includes the dicho-tomy of researcher/researched. As a diffraction pattern – cutting together-apart – as teachers-researchers-researched we do not exist ‘outside of the diffraction pattern, observing it, telling its story’ (Barad 2014:181). On the contrary, we are ‘neither inside, not outside’, and, without fixed bodily boundaries, our ‘story in its ongoing (re)patterning is (re)(con)figuring’ us; we are ‘of the diffraction pattern’ (Barad 2014:181). It is in this sense that as subjects we are transindividual: ‘always already multiply dispersed and diffracted throughout spacetime (mattering) . . . in its ongoing being-becoming’ (Barad 2014:181–182). Put differently, we as researchers writing this book are neither determinate, nor indeterminate, but in/determinate, that is, (like atoms at micro-level) ‘being’ determinate or indeterminate depends on the apparatus that measures: our Man-made categories (and this includes notions of scale). What we can learn from Quantum Field Theory (QFT) is that intra-actions and diffractions are in/determinate in both space and time, for both human and nonhuman. Barad (2014:169) reminds us that in QFT each moment ‘in’ time is ‘an infinite multiplicity . . . broken apart in different directions’. [Deleuze and Guattari (1987/2014:296) also refer to the individual as an infinite multiplicity.] Barad’s agential realism implies that the past is open for future re-workings, and yet, the traces of iterative materialisations are sedimented into the world (Barad 2018). The past is never simply there when we remember the literacy event in the grade 2 ‘classroom’. Re-membering is always intra-active, creating new entanglements without erasing the original diffraction pattern.There is no straightforward billiard-ball causal relationship between past, present and future. The past can be re-worked but not erased. The traces of the past, its sedimenting effects cannot be erased: ‘The memory of its materializing effects is written into the world’ (Barad interviewed in Dolphijn and Van der Tuin 2012). So QFT has not only inspired spatial diffraction as research methodology, but also temporal diffraction and in some chapters, we focus in particular on the latter. ‘Travel hopping’

In one of her presentations during the seminar, Karen Barad used the concept of ‘travel hopping’ as a way of describing quantum leaps or temporal diffraction. A term introduced by Kyoko Hayashi in her novella From Trinity to Trinity (2010), Barad uses ‘travel hopping’ as a powerful concept to unpack the infinite density and complexity of a particular spatial ‘point’ in space and time (‘spacetimemattering’). Travel hopping opens up exciting possibilities for re-turning to the past of the classroom space even without ever having been there as was the case for some members of the research team.This is im/possible,

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because travel hopping is dis/embodied material-discursive labour involving a re-working of the past, not by creating a linear chronology that assumes linear time, but an un/doing of universal time – the idea that moments exist one at a time, the same everywhere, replacing one for the other. It also disrupts what it means to be a human (or a collective of humans) ‘with’ memories moving as a fleshy unit ‘in’ space and ‘through’ time (the modernist notion of the self with, for example, rights). Living without boundaries implies that it is impossible to write ‘a’ history of the school or the classroom space objectively in the traditional sense as this would involve power-producing dualisms between self and world (see Chapter 2). QFT offers empirical evidence that past, present and future are always threaded through one another. It is not the case that ‘the’ past of the school is changed (as, e.g., films about time travel suggest the past might be changed). But as the quantum eraser experiment suggests (Barad 2007:310–317), the classroom’s ontology remains open for future reworking. Hence the importance of travel hopping for de/colonising educational spaces and practices. The past is never ‘here’ or ‘there’ in the sense of objectively fixed, determined and static. However, it does not follow that the past is not real. It reminds us of Massumi’s doubling quality of affect:‘The experience of a change, an affecting-being affected, is redoubled by an experience of the experience’ (Massumi 2015:4). Re-turning to experiences is an entering of a past that was never there for the ‘taking’ and intensifies the affect that experiencing the experience has on human and nonhuman bodies. As we analyse the grade 2 literacy lesson, we trace the marks left on bodies and move beyond the anthropocentric focus on the discursive only and acknowledge the in/determinate agency of the relationality in-between the material and the discursive. Barad’s agential realism makes us think radically differently about concepts that assume binary thinking, such as causality, agency, power and identity – concepts still at the heart of postcolonial theorising that is human-centric (see Chapter 2). What the above exercise in diffracting with diffraction does, is to call the very nature of personal identity into question and not only for human bodies, but also for nonhuman bodies: ‘this’ chapter, ‘the’ picturebook, ‘the’ classroom and so forth.The kind of identity we are interested in is of the philosophical kind, that is, identity as the relation a thing has only to itself (relational ontology), not identity in terms of gender, race, class, age and so forth (substance ontology) – a ‘humanocentric concept of relations’ (Marshall and Alberti 2014:20). Many of the chapters in Part II have adopted diffraction as their methodology and explored the implications of their analyses for de/ colonising teaching and research.

Naturecultures and sympoiesis As Alfred North Whitehead famously characterises the European philosophical tradition, the Nature/Culture dichotomy and its entanglement with modern schooling and figurations of child and childhood, can be traced to ‘a series of

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footnotes to Plato’ (Whitehead 1979:39). In Chapter 2, we have seen how the binary logic put in place by Western metaphysics (and reinforced by capitalism and Judeo-Christian theology) has rendered embodied experiences and the body (Nature) inferior to the mind (Culture) in schooling. ‘Nature’ and ‘Culture’ are abstractions that are mistakenly allowed to stand for the world in representationalism; but as Haraway (2003:6) argues, biological and cultural determinism are ‘both instances of misplaced concreteness’. She writes that ‘flesh and signifier, bodies and words, stories and worlds’ are jointly in ‘naturecultures’ (Haraway 2003:20). Humanimals are neither in charge of nature, nor of culture. As a matter of fact, they are part of naturecultures and cannot take a transcendental, detached point of view (from ‘nowhere’ in particular). It simply is not an option (Haraway1988). Relationships, in other words, bring the ‘relata’ into existence. Haraway (2016:176fn13) writes about the difference between seeing human animals as autopoietic systems and sympoietic systems. In the former, humans have ‘self-produced binaries’, they are ‘organizationally closed’, ‘autonomous units’, centrally controlled (e.g., through a human will or intellect), orientated around growth and development with ‘evolution between systems’, and are ‘predictable’. In contrast, sympoietic systems lack boundaries, are ‘complex amorphous entities’, have ‘distributed control’ with an ‘evolution within systems’ and are ‘unpredictable’. Haraway (2016:58) explains: Sympoiesis is a simple word; it means “making-with”. Nothing makes itself; nothing is really autopoietic or self-organizing. In the words of the Inupiat computer “world game,” earthlings are never alone. That is the radical implication of sympoiesis. Sympoiesis is a word proper to complex, dynamic, responsive, situated, historical systems. It is a word for worlding-with, in company. Embracing natureculture worlds (sympoietic systems) involves thinking about other topologies; instead of universal categories based on binary opposites (e.g., biological reductionism, cultural uniqueness), complex relational maps (‘sketchpads’) emerge (Haraway 2003:8). Otherwise, the result is that ‘the world is precisely what gets lost’ in the process of representing it (Haraway quoted in Taylor 2014:125).This is not just an epistemological issue but is profoundly un/ethical. At all levels of education, knowledge is not about being a part of and being in touch with the world, but about a world represented through words – the one language that has not been taken away in schooling (Malaguzzi 1998). Our desire is to de/colonise childhood through a new postmetaphysical beginning – a beginning that includes what Haraway refers to as ‘significant others’: these include technologies, nonhuman animals and ‘organic beings, such as rice, bees, tulips and intestinal flora, all of whom make life for humans what it is – and vice versa’ (Haraway 2003:15). The key is not to focus on (humanist) identity (black, female, rich, working-class), nor even multiple identities, but to

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break with anthropocentrism, and to focus instead on differences produced in material-discursive relationships, differences that exclude or include; in other words, differences that matter (Barad 2007, 2014). The naturecultures orientation of our research offers new philosophical perspectives on institutionalised ageist practices and investigates to what extent the introduction of pedagogies that include more experimental and embodied multimodal languages, resonate with South African practitioners and children, who are also often disadvantaged in terms of the language of instruction. We diffract with research elsewhere, for example, Affrica Taylor’s common worlds framework that recasts childhood as entangled in real world relations rather than protected in separate spaces (Taylor 2013). The inspiring work of the common world research collective5 focuses on children’s relations with other species, the material world and place. They ground pedagogical transformation in a relational ethic with collective responsibility for the shared interconnected natureculture worlds: ‘mixed-up, non-innocent, multispecies, common worlds that children cohabit with various human and more-than-human others’ (Blaise, Banerjee, Pacini-Ketchabaw and Taylor 2013:350). The ‘naturecultures’ concept or sympoiesis, disrupts the Nature/Culture dichotomy as an instrument for ‘othering’ and assumes a notion of difference that has been made subordinate to identity (Deleuze and Guattari 1987/2014). Sentimental images of children in literature, popular culture, advertising as well as education couple ‘pure nature’ with childhood and have a powerful appeal. Taylor (2014:125) comments that this innocence and ‘naturalness’ disguises the ‘noninnocent politics’ of these cultural representations and disavows ‘the ways in which real childhoods are implicated within the complexities of down-toearth and noninnocent common world relations’. Instead of sanitising classrooms and curricula in a misplaced attempt to protect young children from micropolitics, and in particular colonial interventions and legacies, some early childhood educators are offering de/colonising strategies for early childhood practitioners and scholars (Blaise, Banerjee, Pacini-Ketchabaw and Taylor 2013; Pacini-Ketchabaw and Taylor 2015) – for example, by bringing to the attention the disregard for the environment (Ritchie 2013); industrialisation and depletion of natural resources; displacement and place reconnections (Somerville 2013), and enforced separations of children from their families (Taylor 2013). Unsettling the claimed innocence of early childhood education through pedagogical interventions can include walks through forests encountering old tree stumps and touching tree hollows as active ‘world-making’ (Nxumalo 2015:33). Provoking such encounters and fostering relationships between school, place, human beings and the world they are a part of (Gruenewald 2003:644) sits uncomfortably with western notions of education dominated by accountability, individual measurement, evaluation and taming (Dahlberg and Moss 2005; MacNaughton 2005; Olsson 2009; Rinaldi 2006, Lenz Taguchi 2010). For Gruenewald (2003:624), places are pedagogical. They have ‘something to say’, and, because we have ‘forgotten to hear’, what is required is ‘to learn

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to listen’. The connection between environmental education and naturecultures pedagogies seems an obvious one, but accounts of pedagogies that seek ‘to decolonize and reinhabitate’ as Gruenewald (2003:3) claims, might not necessarily de/colonise child/adult relationships. Children’s responses and conceptual engagement with the more-than-human requires sophisticated pedagogical intra-ventions for learning to become visible through listening to children, even when their language is neither verbal, nor written (Malaguzzi 1998; Rinaldi 2006). For place-based-learning to also be de/colonising, children need to be positioned as producers of knowledge in postdevelopmental egalitarian encounters, not only with the more-than-human, but also with older humanimals. It is this changed relationality between children, animals and the material (in equal partnerships with older humanimals) in the iterative becoming of the world (Barad 2007) that constitutes a de/colonising reading of a learning event. In our research, ‘de/colonisation’ is not used as a metaphor. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (2012) identify the current trend by social justice theorists and critical pedagogues to include it as a metaphor, a danger that risks foreclosing, limiting and domesticating what might be particular about settler colonialism. Emphasising the materiality and ontological relationality of humans’ connectivity with other earth dwellers moves away from the exclusive anthropocentric focus on the psychological, the social or the discursive in education. This is particularly urgent for educational encounters that are more just, with people who are not only young, but might also live in poverty and do not have English as their ‘home’ language. It is an unsettling, complex but profound way of educating for an ecologically sustainable future that includes all our youngest citizens. However, diffraction and dis-identification should lead knowledge production for the new to e/merge without reaffirming colonising identity-producing adult/child binaries. This is not always the case in naturecultures approaches to education.

Re-turning to where we ‘started’ More than two millennia of western metaphysical thought have shaped the language we think with – a language that has been substantialising and essentialising, bringing into existence figurations of child as substance with essence, as if the subject-predicate structure of language reflects an ontology: independently existing child with, for example, competencies, attributes, agency and voice – something someone has, or lacks, as a property. Language and human vision have been granted excessive power in determining what is real, and has instilled a deep mistrust of matter, figuring it as mute, passive, immutable and in need of something else to give it agency (Barad 2007:133; 2013:17). Language and discourse have positioned ‘us’, human animals, as thinkers above or outside the (material) world, and with that same move have distanced us, ‘fully-human’ adults, from both matter and child (and other so-called ‘illiterates’).

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Transforming relationality in educational organisations includes nonhuman spaces and places, thereby moving beyond categorisations (e.g., children, Indigenous peoples) to include the material and the more-than-human world. But our research also has another entirely different entry point; it connects up with dominant views on de/colonisation from a new orientation, a new metaphysics that does not add something ‘new’ in the sense of projecting, prescribing a different de/colonised future (whatever that might be like), but it ‘traverses and thereby rewrites thinking as a whole, leaving nothing untouched, redirecting every possible idea according to its new sense of orientation’ (Dolphijn and Van der Tuin 2012:13). This kind of posthumanism involves memory that is not linear and requires ‘a reconfiguring of past and future that is larger than any individual’ (Barad 2007:ix).Voice does not emanate from a singular subject (Jackson and Mazzei 2012:3; Mazzei 2016), or involve going ‘back to a past that was’ (Barad 2014:168), as if past moments were like ‘beads on a string’ (Barad 2007:394). But like ‘an earthworm’ making compost, ‘the soil [needs to be turned] over and over – ingesting and excreting it, tunnelling through it, burrowing, all means of aerating the soil, allowing oxygen in, opening it up and breathing new life into it’ (Barad 2014:168). The authors of the chapters in Part II do exactly that, and all in their own way they re-turn to the video-recordings of the one literacy lesson, our discussions and presentations at the research residential in 2017 and/or re-member witnessing the literacy event in the ‘classroom’.

Ingesting and secreting, tunnelling through the data In Chapter 5, the authors provide us with a strong sense of the exploratory, playful, creative enquiry that they have freely enjoyed as members of the project. Joanna and Theresa urge the reader to play along with them, to genuinely experiment in research, taking the material into account when reading literacy classrooms differently to produce something new. They avoid sentimentality and bring something fresh and authentically playful to ageist conceptions of who or what can be playful. The focus of this chapter is not on children, neither does it exclude discussion of children; rather it deliberately draws on sources that discuss humans of all ages, as well as the more-than-human. The innovation in this chapter is the risk the authors take in complexifying and co-constituting the material and the material-discursive.They invite the reader to be ‘childlike’ with them – a concept that does not essentialise characteristics of child, but is intended to convey a sense of openness, curiosity and lack of inhibition towards what is new or unfamiliar. In Chapter 6, Sumaya and Karin explore how the three different video-recordings of the literacy lesson were boundary-making practices and how their nonrepresentational research methodologies make the reader think differently about ‘normal’ behaviour in the ‘classroom’, with a specific focus on what it means to ‘fidget’. Its nonrepresentational methodology focuses on the material-discursive performativity of the cameras. Key in their analysis is the posthuman position that

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video-practices are not passive observing instruments and measuring devices but are productive and performative in how a phenomenon materialises and meaning is given to what is observed. In their chapter, they give fascinating visual examples of how the eyes of different organisms or machines ‘see’ differently. They show how ‘objectivity’ in literacy research involves understanding how these different visual systems work. Affected by the human and morethan-human legs in the room, they were compelled to playful experimentation beyond cognition and beyond words. When zig-zagging through the data their interests as researchers, the human and nonhuman bodies (including the recording devices) diffracted in unexpected ways, which only afterwards became apparent when examining and allowing themselves to be affected by the data. In Chapter 7, Rose-Anne and Joanne trace dimensions of participation in a philosophical enquiry by focusing on how the chairs work in the classroom, when the visiting teacher Sara Stanley reads aloud the picturebook How to Find Gold (2016) by Viviane Schwarz. As ‘modest witnesses’ they resist following the children only and focus their attention on more than the teacher-learner verbal interaction when they analyse the conversation that follows. Of particular significance is what the chair bags make possible in terms of participation, and how the involvement of one child is read differently through a Baradian tracing of the human and nonhuman entanglements. Chapter 8 also adopts Baradian methodologies of spatial and temporal diffraction. Karin, Judy and Sara partly follow the human in their analyses and pay attention to traces of erasure in a grade 2 South African ‘classroom’. Disrupting western metaphysics of presence (see Chapter 2), they dig and dive for treasure by paying attention to the infinite amount of nonhuman bodies of different scales in and beyond the classroom. They adopt the kind of ‘slow scholarship’ outlined in Part I, re-turning and re-turning again and again to the ‘same’ text, creating ‘thicker’ understandings about diffraction, secrets, the void and nothingness in the context of the literacy lesson. They partly follow the human in their analysis, but also shift the attention to what is not ‘here’, that is, not visible to the (human) eye, or audible to the (human) ear, and draw some implications for de/colonising education. They speculate about realities that are present and are not present at the same time in the ‘here’ and ‘now’ of the grade 2 South African classroom – a long time ago (and not so long ago and always with an eye to the future[s]). Drawing on Barad’s queer reading of quantum physics, the authors experiment with Barad’s concept of the void, making visible the structure of the void that is not empty, but filled with (colonial) histories of violence, death and dying and multiplicities of attempts to erase the past: secrets that need to be exposed, made visible. Through a Deleuzian rhizomatic logic of experience, they playthink with the concept ‘secret’, deterritorialising and speculating through a diffractive reading of an image (Figure 8.7) how the concept can do de/colonising work by drawing on the sciences. Chris in Chapter 9 also moves beyond a discourse analysis of a semiotic event. Instead, he reads the literacy event as a textual ecosystem with important

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conceptual consequences for his analysis that takes into account the human and the nonhuman, the animate and the inanimate. Chris reminds us to remain conscious of the African context of the literacy lesson. Reading the classroom event from the outset, not just as experts in early childhood education, but also as imaginative beings and as literary critics, he stresses that we are ethically bound to examine our own interpretive prejudices and subjectivities. As a method he goes back to his own childhood to recuperate the animist materialist world as an ontological as well as an epistemological project. The format of the literacy lesson: the circle of bodies and an orally rendered story is one that resonates with the performative contexts of traditional African storytelling modes and disrupts normative arrangements of a literacy environment. Sitting on the ground – a circle of bodies – as opposed to desks lined up facing a blackboard, allows for a different intra-active rhythm of the human and the material. This material-discursive arrangement disrupts ‘normal’ classroom seating – after all a space designed by the project of masculine western modernity with its lined uniformity and ‘disciplined’ bodies. Chris also urges us to ask the awkward questions about, for example, the picturebook title: How to Find Gold. What is the affect of such a title, he wonders, on readers in a country and continent that have suffered so deeply from the colonial enterprise that was largely extractive? Questions such as these, he says, allow us to begin engaging with decolonial interpretive practices in early literacy studies. He concludes that literacy lessons like Sara’s generate the conditions for the possibility of relating childhood studies to critical work on empire and colonialism that contexts such as South Africa inevitably throw into sharp focus. The authors of Chapter 10 start by drawing our attention to the deep inequalities in the South African two-tier educational system. They continue by offering another perspective on decolonisation as they pay attention to the actions of a couple of children in the classroom when Sara is sharing the story with the class. Kai and Patrick speculate that one boy who ‘normally’ might have been considered disruptive or inattentive is actually diffracting with what is happening in the room.They explain that rather than interpreting his behaviour as troublesome, the boy should be understood as a nomadic subject and – as Braidotti would say – is moving towards an ethically sustainable society. For Braidotti, this is a practice of ethics that performs outside of socially constructed identity. The authors then show how this kind of ethics also surfaces at the end of Viviane’s picturebook. They suggest that the ending powerfully dismantles the colonial narrative of exploitation and extraction justified by repeating European narratives about a traced Africa: the gold is not for a person, but for and of the world. Kai and Patrick conclude that the philosopher children in the literacy class articulate and embody nonunitary subjectivities at the core of Braidotti’s nomadic citizenship and urge the adult reader to act for and with children to expand the bounds of citizenship. In chapter 11, Joanna and Walter put into question or even displace some strong and naturalised meanings and senses traditionally ascribed to a teacher:

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knowledge (ignorance); transmission (attention); and hierarchy (equality). This chapter also uses philosophy as method, and by diffracting with Rancière they find an opening towards the possibility of including the more-than-human in ways they have not done before, a way to recuperate the material of human, inhuman and nonhuman in rather than above nature. Playthinking with the concept ‘ignorance’, they find hesitation, waiting and inaction – an open invitation to teachers to de-centre in their teaching life to reposition teaching and open teaching beyond the human. Linking the myth of explication with the myth of progress, Joanna and Walter question the teacher’s position and the assumptions about knowledge upon which so much educational practice in schools seems to be based: a kind of interminable and hierarchical gap-closing exercise, locked into the chronology of progress. They offer a de/colonising imaginary of the role of the teacher: not a transmitter of knowledge, but a transmitter of ignorance. Both an ignorance of what the student will learn and, most important, an ignorance of what presupposes and makes the (pedagogical) institution possible: inequality. This last chapter connects beautifully with where the book started, Claire Colebrook’s reminder of the urgent need in the Anthropocene to think differently about thinking as well as the relationship between thinking and the world. As we have seen in Chapter 1, the task of thinking, Colebrook urges, is to retrieve an openness to thought without foundation.We would like to invite the reader to embrace the open relationship to thought itself in the analyses offered by the authors in Part II of this book and to experiment and playthink with us.

Notes 1 See: www.vivianeschwarz.co.uk/?page_id=66. Accessed: 14 January 2018. 2 See: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/o/ohp/11515701.0001.001/1:4.3/—new-materialisminterviews-cartographies?rgn=div2;view=fulltext. Accessed: 15 January 2018. 3 Like Deleuze’s ‘prehuman’, Barad, who only ‘relatively recently dared to speak about this publicly’, proposes ‘inhuman’ – ‘as an infinite intimacy that touches the very nature of touch, that which holds open the space of the liveliness of indeterminacies that bleed through the cuts and inhabit the between of particular entanglements’ (Barad 2012:34). Colebrook (2002:69) comments that Deleuze also ‘tries to create an inhuman philosophy’ by thinking of the concept of empiricism without a ground outside itself, such as a ‘located point of human observers’. Importantly, quantum entanglements are not unities, nor do they erase differences. On the contrary, Barad states that entanglements entail differentiatings and vice versa. It is what she calls a ‘cutting together-apart’ in one move (Barad 2014:176) 4 See: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/o/ohp/11515701.0001.001/1:4.3/—new-materialisminterviews-cartographies?rgn=div2;view=fulltext. Accessed: 15 January 2018. 5 See: http://commonworlds.net/members-of-the-collective/. Accessed: 16 January 2018.

References Barad, K. (2003) Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, 31:801–831. Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.

‘Classroom’ and posthuman methodologies 83 Barad, K. (2012) What Is the Measure of Nothingness? Infinity,Virtuality, Justice. dOCUMENTA (13) No099. Kassel: Hantje Cantel Verlag. Barad, K. (2013) Ma(r)king Time: Material Entanglements and Re-Memberings: Cutting Together-Apart. In P. R. Carlile, D. Nicolini, A. Langley and H. Tsoukas (Eds.) How Matter Matters: Objects, Artifacts, and Materiality in Organization Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 16–32. Barad, K. (2014) Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting Together-Apart. Parallax 20, 3:168–187. Barad, K. (2018) Troubling Time/s and Ecologies of Nothingness: On the Im/Possibilities of Living and Dying in the Void. In M. Fritsch, P. Lynes and D. Wood (Eds.) Eco-Deconstruction: Derrida and Environmental Philosophy. New York: Fordham University Press. Blaise, M., Banerjee, B., Pacini-Ketchabaw, V. & Taylor, A. (Eds.) (2013) Researching the Naturecultures of Postcolonial Childhoods. Global Studies of Childhood 3, 4:350–354. Braidotti, R. (2011) Nomadic Theory: The Portable Rosi Braidotti. Columbia: Columbia University Press. Cannella, G. S. & Viruru, R. (2004) Childhood and Postcolonization: Power, Education, and Contemporary Practice. New York: RoutledgeFalmer. Colebrook, C. (2002) Understanding Deleuze. New South Wales: Allen & Unwin. Dahlberg, G. & Moss, P. (2005) Ethics and Politics in Early Childhood Education. London: Routledge. Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987/2014) A Thousand Plateaus. Translated and a foreword by B. Massumi. London: Bloomsbury. Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1991/1994) What Is Philosophy? Translated by Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson. London:Verso. Dolphijn, R. & Van der Tuin, I. (2012) New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies. Open Humanities Press. [Online] Available from: http://openhumanitiespress.org/new-materialism.html. Accessed: 12 March 2015. Gruenewald, D. A. (2003) Foundations of Place: A Multi-Disciplinary Framework for PlaceConscious Education. American Educational Research Journal 40, 3:619–654. Haraway, D. (1992) The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others. In L. Grossberg, C. Nelson and P. A. Treichler (Eds.) Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge, 295–337. Haraway, D. (1988) Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism as a Site of Discourse on the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies 14, 3:575–599. Haraway, D. (2003) The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Other Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. Haraway, D. (2016) Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Hayashi, K. (2010) From Trinity to Trinity. Translated by E. Otake. Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press. Jackson, A.Y. & Mazzei, L. A. (Eds.) (2012) Thinking With Theory in Qualitative Research:Viewing Data Across Multiple Perspectives. London: Routledge. Juelskjaer, M. & Schwennesen, N. (2012) Intra-Active Entanglements – an Interview With Karen Barad. Kvinder, Kon-Forskning Nr 1–2. https://tidsskrift.dk/index.php/KKF/article/view/51864/95447. Accessed: 20 November 2015. Lenz Taguchi, H. (2010) Going Beyond the Theory/Practice Divide in Early Childhood Education. London: Routledge Contesting Early Childhood Series. MacNaughton, G. (2005) Doing Foucault in Early Childhood Studies: Applying Poststructural Ideas. London: Routledge.

84  Karin Murris and Joanna Haynes Malaguzzi, L. (1998) History, Ideas, and Basic Philosophy: An Interview With Lella Gandini. In C. Edwards, L. Gandini and G. Forman (Eds.) The Hundred Languages of Children: The Reggio Emilia Approach – Advanced Reflections, 2 Edition. Westport Connecticut: Ablex Publishing. Marshall,Y. & Alberti, B. (2014) A Matter of Difference: Karen Barad, Ontology and Archaeological Bodies. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 24, 1:19–36. Massumi, B. (2015) Politics of Affect. Cambridge: Polity Press. Mazzei, L. A. (2016) Voice Without a Subject. Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies 16, 2:151–161. Nxumalo, F. (2015) Forest Stories – Restorying Encounters With “natural” Places in Early Childhood Education. In V. Pacini-Ketchabaw and A.Taylor (Eds.) Unsettling the Colonialist Places and Spaces of Early Childhood Education. New York: Routledge, 21–42. Olsson, L. M. (2009) Movement and Experimentation in Young Children’s Learning: Deleuze and Guattari in Early Childhood Education. London: Routledge. Pacini-Ketchabaw, V. & Taylor, A. (2015) Unsettling Pedagogies Through Common World Encounters: Grappling With (post) Colonial Legacies in Canadian Forests and Australian Bushlands. In V. Pacini-Ketchabaw and A. Taylor (Eds.) Unsettling the Colonialist Places and Spaces of Early Childhood Education. New York: Routledge, 43–62. Rinaldi, C. (2006) In Dialogue With Reggio Emilia: Listening, Researching and Learning. London: Routledge Contesting Early Childhood Series. Ritchie, J. (2013) Indigenous Onto-Epistemologies and Pedagogies of Care and Affect in Aotearoa. In M. Blaise, B. Banerjee,V. Pacini-Ketchabaw and A. Taylor (Eds.). Special Issue: Researching the Naturecultures of Postcolonial Childhoods. Global Studies of Childhood, 3, 4, 395–406. Schwarz,V. (2016) How to Find Gold. London: Walkers Books. Seghal, M. (2014) Diffractive Propositions: Reading Alfred North Whitehead With Donna Haraway and Karen Barad. Parallax 20, 3:188–201. Somerville, M. (2013) The Nature/Cultures of Children’s Place Learning Maps. In: Blaise, M., Banerjee, B., Pacini-Ketchabaw, V., & Taylor, A. (Eds.). Special Issue: Researching the Naturecultures of Postcolonial Childhoods. In Global Studies of Childhood, 3, 4:407–417. Taylor, A. (2013) Reconfiguring the Natures of Childhood. London: Routledge Contesting Early Childhood Series. Taylor, A. (2014) Situated and Entangled Childhoods: Imagining and Materializing Children’s Common World Relations. In Reconceptualizing Early Childhood Care and Education: Critical Questions, New Imaginaries and Social Activism. London: Peter Lang, 121–130. Tuck, E. & Yang, K. W. (2012) Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, 1:1–40. Whitehead, A. N. (1979) Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. New York:The Free Press (A Division of MacMillan Press).

Part II

Finding gold in a South African literacy classroom

Chapter 5

Beyond words Materiality and the play of things Theresa Giorza and Joanna Haynes

Thing-power, thing-play and the crafty wisdom of the studio inspired a threeday workshop for writers of this book. This chapter gives readers access to the emergent experimental research and pedagogical practice that inspires much of the writing that follows. A new materialist view of reality assigns agency to the more-than-human and places the human in and among these intra-acting parts of the world, as do some other-than-western ontologies. A grade 2 literacy lesson, led by Sara Stanley and based on Viviane Schwarz’s picture storybook, How to Find Gold, performs as the provocation for our in-depth enquiry-with-materials. Theresa and Joanna chart the goings-on and in-between of the collaborative and other-than-wordy experiments carried out. Participants played and thought with string and other materials in response to philosophical questions raised by the viewing and re-viewing of a DVD of the lesson, intraviews between storybook author and literacy teacher, and between teacher and postgraduate students.

Introduction The title phrase ‘beyond words’1 might be a little unexpected in a book about literacy learning. However, this literacy research is all about shifting attention beyond its habitual focus on the narrow immediacy of word-text-reader interfaces. Based on the experience of one residential workshop of DECD2 project members held near Stellenbosch in South Africa in April 2017, this chapter sets out to give readers an impression of some of our experimental research practices, to introduce different possibilities for educational research and for teaching, understanding, observing and evaluating literacy in the classroom.Through giving an account of this practical workshop, in which many of the research project members associated with this book publication took part, we set out to give a flavour of an always emerging methodology. Relaxed but attentive openness and collaboration have been strong features of our workshopping research practices, deliberately shifting away from more familiar research or learning experiences, intentionally trying new things, pushing ourselves and adopting a highly experimental stance. This shift is strongly motivated by the desire to expand our repertoires, as well as concerns about what we may have

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been missing as a result of the popularity of socio-cultural perspectives on literacy research and practice in particular, and on education in general.We aim to provide readers with some ideas to think about and play with in their education settings, wherever those might be, and this includes those in higher education. We are not looking to provide prescriptions for particular age groups or settings, but to open up the possibility of post-age posthuman pedagogies (Haynes and Murris 2017). The chapter seeks to provide a strong sense of the exploratory, playful, creative enquiry that we have freely enjoyed, asking ourselves how to read (in this particular case) literacy classrooms differently, taking the material into account, to produce something new. Rarely does research and professional development feel unbounded and genuinely experimental, as this does. Part I of this book has outlined the broad posthuman theoretical framework of our research project on decolonising early childhood discourses and reexamining associated education practices. Many of us also share the experience of working in various ways through Philosophy with Children (see Chapter 3) and deep concerns about who and what is excluded from education. The varied settings, disciplines and places in which our project members work, have been such a valuable asset in exploring what it means to decolonise child and childhood, to ask one another awkward questions about the assumptions we make and privileges we enjoy. Bringing our reading and discussion to bear on the practical experience of our project’s materiality research workshop held in April 2017, we have put three main themes into the mix for this particular chapter. Materiality is at the heart of what is being explored here: searching beyond abstractions of the human, of mind and language, associated with educational research, with learning to read, with de-coding and comprehension. First, we draw on Jane Bennett’s (2009) work on ‘thing power’. Our writing explores thingness, the vitality of things, the draw of things and relations of materialized human bodies with things. It explores the materiality of enquiry and meaning-making with texts, of thinking and reading with things: an epistemology of learning with, rather than about, the world. Bennett suggests that an advantage of the notion of ‘thing power’ is that it can remind us of a childlike sense of the world filled with animate things of all varieties. A disadvantage of the term is that it is rather fixed and gives too much attention to thingness rather than fluidity, continuity and non-identity. Perhaps ‘childlike’ also inclines towards essentialising characteristics of child – but for now it is intended to convey a sense of openness, curiosity and lack of inhibition towards what is new or unfamiliar. The term thing power might also be understood in an atomistic way – whereas Bennett subscribes to a dynamic and congregational view of agency, a view to which we seek to do justice in this chapter. Bennett points out that our efforts to attend to, and to articulate, the vitality of matter are bound by what she calls the grammar of activity/passivity and by the bias of human perception. She reminds us that this creates some limits to the intelligibility of things and urges us to be mindful of ‘that which refuses to dissolve completely into the milieu of human knowledge’ (Bennett 2010:3). These cautions alert us

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to the value of greater epistemic humility. Second, and alongside thing power, we re-turn to the concept of play and the in-between space of play and thing. In this endeavour, we draw on the work of Pauliina Rautio (2013) on material practices in everyday life and Pauliina Rautio and Joseph Winston (2015) on things and children in play. In using the terms ‘play’ or ‘playful’, we seek to challenge ageist conceptions of who or what can be playful and to avoid sentimentality.We use the terms to try and convey the loose, creative, perhaps repetitive, aeonic nature of playfulness. We affirm Rautio’s and Winston’s (2015:15) notion of play as both a means and an end and their conceptualization of play ‘as intra-active – as players becoming capable of knowing in a variety of social and material relations comprising play(ful) encounters’. We seek to take age out of play. Thirdly, we refer to Viviane Schwarz’s approach to everyday life and the creation of her picturebooks, as well as to the pedagogy of Reggio Emilia (Edwards, Gandini, and Forman 2011); we explore the artist-practitioner studio as an imaginary for creative literacy practices of many kinds. The idea of the studio, a place of making, matching, crafting, installing and demonstrating is one that helps to characterize the space of the residential research workshop that is the subject of this chapter. These three themes, of thing-power, thing-play, and the studio, are all present and intra-woven in the writing that follows.

A residential thing-play workshop The chapter is based on our experiences during a very enjoyable residential workshop with teachers, teacher educators, doctoral students, an artist, a research assistant, literacy project workers and academics from England, South Africa and Australia.This workshop was held at a rural conference centre, and through real and delayed time connections with other project members, in England and in Brazil. Our workshopping activities were spontaneously recorded and noted by various means and by different project members, noticing and thereby producing new things. We gathered in a spirit of cooperative and open enquiry in a small conference centre in a vineyard, near the town of Stellenbosch, South Africa. The buildings nestle at the base of a rocky hillside, whose weighty contours made a striking outline against ever changing skies. It was April (autumn season in SA), and we made the best of the rural setting, the paths up the hillside, the gardens: the indoor, outdoor and in-between spaces. We enjoyed the warm hospitality and tasty cooking offered by the staff working at the retreat. A programme of research activities emerged and included the time spent walking, talking, eating and relaxing together, made possible in the space of the retreat, indoors and outdoors and in-between spaces: the food, water, grass, swimming-pool, sauna, vineyard, hillside, rooftops, our bedrooms; the daylight, the night dark, warm air, laughter, dancing, sounds of insects buzzing, birds singing or planes flying overhead. Our activities and dialogues were video-recorded so we might later access those resources for the purposes of continuing the writing of the chapters of

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this book. At some point, we also watched three different video-recordings of the one literacy lesson at the same time (see Chapter 6 in particular). A small selection of those workshopping activities, recordings of small groups in action and the installations created, have furnished the production of this chapter. During one session of our residential workshop, these group activities were set in motion by our shared viewing of an intraview between the author illustrator Viviane Schwarz, who created the picturebook How to Find Gold (2016), and Sara Stanley (creator of philosophical play and an inspiring early years practitioner). Sara is the practitioner working with children in the video-recorded classroom episode that has provided such rich and generous material for our enquiries into reading literacy classrooms differently. The project of this book has been to create a series of chapters that respond to one classroom episode, and its many ingredients and reworkings.3 We begin with some description of how Viviane Schwarz works as an authorillustrator-inventor. Drawing on just a few of the activities of our residential workshop, we highlight things that members of the research group found significant, or moving, in the intraviews between Viviane and Sara, the questions that unfolded and the ways in which we were inspired, and then re-inspired one another. We set ourselves the challenge of becoming explorers, like the characters in the picturebook How to Find Gold, considering connections with other contexts in which we work: classrooms with different age groups, community story telling contexts, and teacher education, for example. We responded to invitations from artist-practitioner-researcher Theresa Giorza and story-play practitioner Sara Stanley, who proposed ways of getting started, introduced different possibilities and made recordings of the activities. We set out to produce new ways of working, to de-center from an egocentric human only perspective: to include the more than human.

Joining Viviane Schwarz and her studio work – playing with things To visit Viviane’s website (www.vivianeschwarz.co.uk), to watch her in action, and to hear her speak of her work is sheer delight. On her biography webpage she writes: ‘I make things that encourage and facilitate creativity, courage, thoughtfulness and glee.’ How enviable we find that description of work and seek to emulate it in our employ as educator-researchers.Viviane describes herself as an inventor, author-illustrator, performer and teacher. Her work is expressive, playful, humorous, vibrant and alive. Her studio appears deliciously as, among other things, a playground, storeroom, laboratory, museum, cinematic, comic memoir writing space, an ever-changing installation. She is an avid recorder of incidental everyday life, of material and the coincidence of things in and around her studio.The things include her body, her cat, her friends, the sofa, her laptop, the rhythm and changing light of the day and night, chalk, a blackboard, rolls of cardboard, things found and treasured.

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Viviane’s gleeful engagement with collected objects resonates with the collecting in pockets, carrying and arranging of stones and other objects by children (Rautio 2103). Rautio refers to these practices as autotelic, that is, they are activities undertaken for no external reward or recognition – they are internally motivating. Rautio notes that because of the way that childhood is constructed in dominant Western urban cultures, children are ‘allowed’ to engage in relational attachments with objects, and show an ‘attentiveness to and sensuous enchantment by non-human forces’ (Rautio 2013:395). However, rather than being a developmental characteristic or sign of ‘naivete’ that will vanish with growth or education, Rautio points out that this sense of life and matter is a valuable philosophical position. Methodologically, Rautio suggests that a new materialist approach to research might direct attention to the ways in which children constitute their material – human and non-human – surroundings and vice versa. Agency would be allocated space in between children and their environments, arising in complex encounters rather than located only in the human individuals. (Rautio 2013:396) The focus of this chapter is not on children, and neither does it exclude discussion of children; rather it deliberately draws on sources that discuss humans of all ages, as well as the more-than-human. It is the complexifying and co-constituting of the material and the material-discursive, that we are exploring in this chapter. Jane Bennett (2012) speculates about the agency of thing power in her video-recorded lecture ‘Powers of the Hoard: Artistry and Agency in a World of Vibrant Matter’ (https://vimeo.com/29535247). Drawing on documentary cases of human hoarding and seeking to foreground nonhuman matter in her analysis, rather than the psyche or pathology of the human hoarder, she proposes aspects of the agentic vitality of things. She recognizes the difficulty of language to get at this but suggests that words might help signal what she calls the ‘stickiness’ of things. First, she comments on qualities of slowness and endurance, of metal, of rock, of glass – their different temporalities. The second quality of things she notes is porosity, their susceptibility to infusion, collusion or connectedness – their potent materiality.Third, Bennett draws a delicate distinction between aesthetic appreciation and the utility (to humans) of matter, when she describes the sympathy of things freed from the bondage of appeal or usefulness to humans – their inhuman ontologies. Bennett is particularly interested in how humans might become more ethically sensitive to things and ponders the perceptual abilities of humans ‘diagnosed’ as hoarders or described as minimalists. Without implying that the human is more significant, she wonders aloud how humans, at times, have stronger dispositions towards the draw of thingness. Describing a vital materialist perspective, Bennett (2009) regards human power as a kind of thing power. For example, vital materialists do not claim that there are no differences between humans and bones, only that there

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is no necessity to describe these differences in a way that places humans at the top of the hierarchy. In her exploration of thing power, Bennett’s concern is an ethical one. By attending sensitively to compelling experiences of fascination with thing-matter, she suggests that humans might find clues to the vital materiality they share with the nonhuman, come to recognise humans as matter and treat the nonhuman, including animals, plants, earth and commodities more carefully, more strategically and more ecologically (Bennett 2009:17–18). We invite readers to consider how Bennett’s suggestions about thing power, and the relational ethics she espouses, resonate, or not, with the thing-led experiment we describe below. One exciting challenge is to find practical ways of rearranging things so that humans are not automatically placed at the top of the hierarchy: a new order. Bennett (2010) proposes that materiality has life: her ‘vital materialism’ puts humanity on a level and interdependent with the rest of the universe (life and matter are not separable) and while ‘vitalism’ has a long history in Western philosophy, Bennett makes the important distinction of not separating inert, passive material from a separate divine or mysterious force or spirit. We should remember that all matter is actually moving and vibrating with energy (Bennett 2010:55). There are interesting parallels between vital materialism and some ‘non-Western’ philosophies and this will be discussed later in the chapter, in the section on stringplay. So for Bennett, a levelling out of the assumed hierarchies of existence that pervade our inherited notion of existence depends on the recognition of the power of things. Bennett uses the term thing-power but warns that the term might suggest that things exist or act alone (as in an approach called Object Orientated Ontology [OOO]). She insists that things are connected in mutually affecting relationships that include both the human and the nonhuman. Bruno Latour’s term ‘actant’, which refers to a source of action, human or otherwise, is neither subject nor object, but rather intervener (Bennett 2009:9). The congregational agency of things (which includes us) produces new and different arrangements of energetic matter. A congregational understanding of agency involves diluting and shifting the agency of the foregrounded human portrayed as central and ‘against’ a wider ‘backdrop’ of the nonhuman, a kind of ‘scenery’ for human actors – rather, via congregational agency, ‘a wealth of agential entities would surface’ (Rautio 2013:397). These qualifications of ‘thing power’ apply equally to the accounts of ‘thing play’ that are included in this chapter and resonate with Rautio’s account of carrying-stones-in-pockets, and her wider discussion of autotelic practices. Rautio’s questions, in the quote that follows, have been particularly thoughtprovoking for us as this chapter emerged: What if it is the stones, the three shiny white ones and the five black sharply lined ones lying on the ground, rather than personality traits of individuals alone that bring about autotelic behaviour? Could we suggest that autotelic practices emerge in encounters characterized by aesthetic-affective openness

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on our part (Bennett 2010). If so, we would need to be more aware of the practices with which we cultivate and sustain such openness. (Rautio 2013:400) We agree that consideration of practices to cultivate and sustain aesthetic-affective openness is an urgent priority for educator-researchers. Loris Malaguzzi, one of the founders of the Reggio Emilia system of early childhood education (in the City of the same name), introduced ateliers (studios) and atelieristas (artists) into the mix in the early 1970s. In the re-envisaged programme, each municipally run preschool would have a practitioner with an arts background, working in collaboration with the teachers. One of the first atelieristas,Vea Vecchi, has written a book on the work of the atelierista in which she shows: how sensory perception, pleasure and the power to seduce – what Malaguzzi called the ‘aesthetic vibration’ – can become activators of learning; how thay are able to support and nourish kinds of knowledge not based uniquely on information; and how by avoiding simply defineable categories, they can lead to the sensitive empathy and relation with things which creates connections. (Vecchi 2010:6) We have been inspired by the notion of ‘aesthetic vibration’ described here and by witnessing the initiatives and responses of atelieristas and what the studio spaces set in motion, how it materializes, in these pre-school contexts. Theresa is influenced by these ideas and brought this to her work at the residential workshop. The writing of this book has been a case of trying to do justice to the experiences that have been our shared journey with Viviane’s storybook, Sara, the children, the classroom, the map, the floor, the chairs, each other, the recordings and photographs, our enquiry together at the conference centre, the place itself and all our creative material-discursive intra-actions. Our very different histories, geographies, preferences and difficulties formed part of the assemblage that was productive of the writing that emerged for the various chapters of the book. This book is an exploration of the complex and entangled relationality of storying. Thus, we have engaged in numerous ways, and at numerous entry points, with the assemblage that we are a part of, in our work with How to Find Gold, with grade 2s at a local primary school, with Sara the ‘teacher’, with Viviane the author, and with each other as researcher-writers. The things offered by Viviane Schwarz on her website include picturebooks, a comic about anxiety and depression, cat knitting patterns, videos (in which she is reading her books aloud and her hands can be seen turning the pages) and an animated rapping bird. In one of the films, the viewer can see the back of her head and her right hand drawing on the page with pen and ink. As she draws, and we can hear the scratch of the nib on the paper, she exclaims with surprise (and perhaps with dismay), as the drawing seems to draw itself onto the page, to

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become something new. ‘What is it?’ we hear her say, laughing but also unsure of what has appeared.4 To see or read Viviane in action is to appreciate that she has ideas but also that ideas have her – they take her; that there is a dynamism that ebbs and flows in the vital materialism of her practice. Without being sentimental or making claims about all children everywhere, we recognize this capacity for dynamic exploratory play, in which things ‘suggest’ themselves and bodies are ‘taken’ by ideas, in the activities of many children, particularly where younger ones are ‘allowed’ to play, create and explore freely. Noting the sensibilities of childlike and autotelic practices, we respond to Bennett’s observation that by lingering in moments of fascination with objects, taking them as clues to the material vitality we share with them. We accept what we take as an invitation from Viviane and Sara to dive into this world of vibrant matter. Our work together provides opportunities for us to explore and experiment to produce new and post-age practices of higher education, of teacher education, of schools, of literacy, of research (Haynes and Murris 2017).

Philosophical enquiry beyond words Before we continue with our discussion of the residential workshopping activity, it will be helpful for readers to know something of a familiar approach to learning and teaching practiced by several of the research project members, known as Philosophy with Children (see also Chapter 3). Philosophy with Children includes children, but it is not only for children. It is an ageless pedagogy widely adopted in formal, informal and community contexts with people of all ages. The ‘with’ envisages a democratization of philosophy and a world where neither age nor status are barriers to philosophy or to education. The ‘with’ expresses desire for relational practices of knowing-being, where age is not the marker of whether knowing-being is counted/included or not. Many of the participants in this project group are familiar with, and sympathetic to, the democratic community of enquiry pedagogy associated with Philosophy with Children. This approach is collaborative and involves a variety of exploratory activities (such as drawing, writing, paired talk, creative play) as integral elements of the whole group dialogue. Dialogical enquiry is launched by troublesome and perplexing questions emanating from the participants. When it comes to Philosophy with very young Children, Sara Stanley, the practitioner whose work with children in a South African classroom we explore throughout this book, has developed a playful philosophical approach built on the material practices and negotiated meanings of her children’s play. Her practice enables what otherwise might be an oral-only exploration driving towards a consensual resolution to become more processual, multi-lingual (in the sense of 100 languages of Reggio Emilia)5 and polyphonic. Sara’s philosophical storyplay encourages and values philosophical exploration through play, movement and creative endeavour, in which the material space and objects of classrooms

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become part and parcel of the storyworld: experiential, surprising and multiple meaning making events. As we report on the workshopping of the research project members, we show how the community of philosophical enquiry approach, associated mainly with oral dialogue, was extended and amplified on this occasion. We wanted to find out what might be produced if we immersed ourselves in material experimentation, working with Viviane Schwarz’s picturebook How to Find Gold and the conversations between the author and teacher practitioner. In the images throughout the book, we see the interplay between the picturetext and the bodies of children mapping on the classroom floor.The images make visible the three different layers to the work of the research project: first our interest in the work of Viviane, the inventor, writer, creator of the story of How to Find Gold; second, the footage of the work that Sara does with the book together with the class of grade 2 children in a South African classroom; and third, our work as a collaborative research community working in higher education.

Figure 5.1 Floor, bodies, worldmapping, from How to Find Gold (Schwarz 2016).

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There are entanglements between the layers as all are driven by a curiosity and fascination with the world and its endless possibilities and unexpected surprises. When asked about her choice of this particular book as the focus for the enquiry, Sara gave reasons that relate to her own fascination with the idea of hidden treasure, with pirates (motivated in part by her love of the story of Peter Pan) and philosophically with the concept of wealth. This notion of wealth is not just monetary wealth, but ‘in terms of intellect, in terms of food, in terms of family, in terms of love, in terms of freedom’. For Sara, finding gold was about ‘finding something valuable’ and the ‘how’ of the title made it philosophical: ‘what does finding something involve?’ It seemed important to us that Sara’s answer was not about what she thought children of that particular age might be interested in. Both she and Viviane experience frustration with adults who try to categorise children and prescribe their interests. Children can name types of dinosaurs and cars, but we would rather limit their literacy adventures to types of vegetables!

Co-creation and authorship – a workshopping approach In an effort to move away from exclusively linguistic ways of working, and to engage in a way that aligned with Sara’s way of working with stories, we agreed to diffract with a range of materials and see what these could offer our collaborative process. Bringing all her experiences as artist-practitioner-teacher Theresa Giorza, co-author of this chapter, led us in this workshop and, through atelieristing, the space became a philosophical play studio. The invitation offered to the group was to think with the material environment when doing our enquiry, to let the material have us. In contrast to an artmaking process where participants might use materials and objects to ‘represent’ ideas or other things in the ‘real’ world, this process was to be one in which we would think with and among what was at hand: spaces, materials, ideas, conversations. In an anti-Cartesian view of the world, there is not a two-sided reality of first, real world out there and second, human thought and ideas about it inside our heads.We are as much a part of the world as the things we think we can separate ourselves from and present objective truths about. The invitation was to avoid pre-planning and resist making visual representations of already existing ideas or concepts: it was to respond to the materials and see where they might take us as we considered the questions that had arisen in the first part of the enquiry. This can be recognized as a philosophical play practice very similar to Sara’s. Many of us in the group had been reading Donna Haraway’s work on string figures (Haraway 1994, 2011, 2013, 2014).6 A storying practice that uses hands and strings, often needing more than two hands, string figures appear in cultures all over the world at different periods of time. How would string work for us in this process of thinking together? String seemed to promise a more relational kind of storying that entailed give and take as well as a bodily presence of hands and strings (Ingold 2013).These materials and their affordances would be a

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helpful ‘way in’ to finding ways of making connections and narratives and offered an alternative to more visual and individual forms of representation like drawing and writing. It seemed appropriate particularly because the notion of ‘thinking strings’ comes to us from the earliest human inhabitants of Southern Africa, the khoisan, who we are aware of in their absence and silence (see also Chapter 8), and who like many hunter-gatherer societies have/had a worldview that is/was deeply relational (I think because we are . . . not . . . therefore I am as in Descartes’ cogito.) The ‘we’ did not set human life above all else. Theirs was/is a much ‘flatter’, less hierarchical ontology of shared existence with things, plants, animals and people. A posthuman position is not a sentimentalised re-turning to preindustrial pre-modern philosophies, but there are important ways in which these pre-modern ways of thinking connect with the postmodern and posthuman. Gershon (2016:76) suggests that in framing new materialisms as ‘new’ we are committing a second ‘marginalization’ of relational ways of knowing like those of Australian first nations and Buddhists (and we would add the Southern African Khoisan communities).The thought-image of thinking strings (Rusch 2016) offers an alternative to our inherited Western thought-image which is an optical one. Consider the notion of sound as thinking. Sound waves cannot be seen but they set up resonances in and among physical bodies. Sound waves also diffract in interesting ways. Sound is ‘vibrational affect’ (Gershon 2016:75), a connector of human and nonhuman bodies, through which boundaries are made fluid and disordered.The working together with wool, string, twine, wire, beads and whatever else presented itself would be a way to ‘enquire’ with each other in way that was not bound to the speaker/listener binary we usually deal with.The doing and playing would be our dialogue setting up resonances and dissolving boundaries between what could otherwise be isolated bodies producing individual artefacts. We began with some stringplay. We warmed up to the materials and the way of working and the materials warmed up to us.The relation between hands and wool, hands and wire created new possibilities. Ingold (2013) gives a genealogy of string that disrupts the idea of string as something one can name as a separate material object. String is part of a human/nonhuman assemblage that has a long and complex history and the story is on-going. According to Ingold, string is formed by the movement of fibre between two hands. In a deft double move, the string-maker creates a double twist so that the two already wound strands wind against each other and keep the twist tight. ‘Rhythms create form’, say anthropologists Boas and Leroi-Gourhan (cited in Ingold 2013:115). The rhythms of knitting and their patterns of movement create warmth, cultural artefacts and memories of being cared for and clothed by others (usually mothers). Materials are relational. Can we resist the “thingification” of objects (Barad 2003:812) in which we isolate and define each item? What happens if we see the relations between things as primary? The idea of sound as an image of thought shows what happens if we consider connection, resonance, vibration and a merging or blurring of boundaries as central to experience, rather than individual pre-existing objects relating to one another.

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Figure 5.2 Playing with string.

Alongside the collaborative thingplay, Theresa played some recorded music from Madosini, an accomplished bow player from the Eastern Cape. The umrhubhe mouth bow is a single-stringed instrument that uses the musician’s bare upper chest as a resonator. Dargie (2011) claims that these bows were most likely to have been introduced to Xhosa and Swati pastoralists by San hunter gatherers. One of the participants of the workshop, also working as the technical assistant to the project, recognized the music which connected back to a prior workshop process run by Kristy Stone at the same conference centre attended by many of the same people. Theresa said that she brought this music because of its string-ness, not realizing she was re-turning Madosini’s music to

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the group and to the place. Later that evening participants accessed favourite music on YouTube and the music eventually asserted itself and drew us into dancing and singing and moving in the space in freer ways. The literacies of sound, music and movement that are so often excluded from classrooms and learning spaces offer additional ways for resonances to be set up between and among bodies. These resonances create physical experiences that disrupt individuality and autonomy as do the things we play with together. Materials spoke to different people in different ways. Many people were drawn back to early memories provoked by the feel or behaviour of the material. (Throughout the residential workshop, knitting emerged as strong shared practice, several participants brought out and did their knitting alongside one another, comparing work in progress, measuring the growth of pieces: needles clicking rhythmically; hands and forearms moving and dancing and patterning). So Theresa’s invitation to play with string or other material emerged in different ways for participants who might connect wire, wool or raffia to their crafting, engineering or childhood play. This ‘language’ of string, wool, wire soon felt a little more familiar and invited more exploration. The questions that had arisen out of the provocation of the intraview between Sara Stanley and Viviane Schwarz about Viviane’s approach to her picturebook creation, her studio, her drawing, her book How to Find Gold, and all its intra-connections, would now be the starting point for different groups to work together with the material and their ideas, thoughts, hands and bodies. Following the viewing of the video-taped intraview between Viviane and Sara and our small group responses to the viewing we created these questions: 1 What do different methods of exploration bring into being? 2 Does it matter what people think illustrators/authors think that makes them draw, paint, colour, photograph? 3 What do feet bring and also take away from the intraview? 4 Who is the ‘we’ that finds gold? 5 How does the Anna-Crocodile assemblage render each other capable? 6 How does the concept ‘secret’ work in life/art/teaching? Three sub-groups emerged from the discussion of the questions. One explored question one; one took question three; and a third group went with question five.The ease of moving back and forth between the languages of thingplay and of our more familiar language of words worked for us in ways that paralleled the work of the children and their mapping. Each group found space to work: the carpeted floor offering possibilities for spreading out and flexibility. Staying in and among our shared creations and stories, we made and un-made constructions. We negotiated and re-negotiated meanings and questions. As time went on and the workshop programme called us to tea, and then to a scheduled presentation, it became clear that it would be difficult to ‘complete’ the enquiry in the planned time. We agreed to re-turn to the activity later in the evening. We acknowledged that the open-ended, unpredictable collaborations

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between human and nonhuman (carpet, wire, meals, wool, memories, hillside, torch, scissors, firelight, laughter, night, stories) generated shifts and changes in ideas, relationships and the project. It was important to stay long enough in the other-than-wordy world of play to encounter this sense of co-production and newness. In writing about them we are aware of the irony of re-turning once again to the fixity and authority of language, and concede that ‘much is lost by wrangling words down on a page’ (Gershon 2016:76).

Crocodile feet The vital materialism discussed earlier in this chapter flows into the intraviews with Sara about the creation of Viviane’s picturebook How to Find Gold, including bodies becoming ‘things’.This also seemed to make it possible for (arguably neglected) ‘parts’ of bodies to figure differently in our research: calf muscles,

Figure 5.3 Feet that speak.

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backs, top of the head, upper arms, noses, the right knee or left foot. Notable for some of us in one of the conversations were the exchanges about feet.Viviane Schwarz is interested in what feet are communicating and takes this interest into her drawings. In the film footage, human feet can be seen on the grass and Sara and Viviane talk about the feet of Anna and the Crocodile and what they express in the drawings. What do feet bring and also take away from the intraview?

Many of us went for walks during our residential work, and prior to our viewing of this video exchange, one of our sessions was devoted to ‘taking a walk’ with greater awareness of its sensory dimensions, particularly the sense of our feet making contact with the ground, with points of connection. Some went barefoot and through grass. Wearing trainers or boots, others were drawn along stony paths or on the walkways around the buildings. We noted sensations of the body; footprints left on surfaces by a trainer, boot or shoe; mud, small stones, pieces of grass attaching themselves to the bottoms of footwear; points of connection to the earth and patterns of movement of legs or soil; crevices, marks and traces; the word ‘foot’ and all its uses; the feet of other animals; the hardness of old paws and the silky skin of a new-born foot. Later, as you will read, these activities would re-surface in some of the installations we created. With hindsight, it seems likely that this experience of mindful walking also sensitised us to the presence of feet in the conversation between Sara and Viviane, during their recorded intraview. Sara had seen a post by Viviane about some shoes with toes that she had just bought. So Sara knew that Viviane also had strong feelings about feet. Sara herself likes to be barefoot and she usually removes her shoes as a matter of course (see next chapter), when setting up and preparing to greet her children in the morning. Sara talks about shoes not being comfortable. A group of researchers re-visit this conversation between Sara and Viviane and draw Sara into an extended discussion about feet, shoes and the floor and how they work in her classroom. Shoes can be very uncomfortable, particularly when you are expected to sit cross legged wearing school shoes, and ‘the buckles poke into the back of your ankle’. She considers the freeingness of bare feet: ‘when I walk across grass and I’m wearing shoes I don’t want to be wearing shoes because I remember, or my body remembers what it feels like to have grass between your toes’. Walking across grass recalls memories of childhood: ‘everything, the softness, the smell, the memory of doing handstands and cartwheels, all of those things go with being barefoot’. Sara makes connections with classroom dressing up play. She positions the dress-up area close to where the children arrive in the morning. That way, their uniforms and school shoes have been interfered with by the time she meets them for learning and play.

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Shoe power Sara’s observations, and the discomfort she notices and expresses, resonate powerfully with different and contradictory ways that shoes ‘work’ in the context of child, and schooling: disciplinary, oppressive, exclusionary, allowing, competing or keeping secrets. We are struck by the juxtapositions of teachers choosing to go barefoot in the classroom and Sara’s memory of barefoot childhood moments, with children having no choices about footwear (perhaps not having any to wear, when it matters). What do the presence and absence of shoes make possible, or impossible, for learning and teaching?7 The ‘right’ shoes are often a super-significant part of school uniform – the ‘wrong’ shoes producing reprimands from teachers (or being sent home); teasing from peers; pinching of toes; blisters; letting in of water. Shoes and trainers (and the number of pairs ‘owned’ for different activities) betray or boast of their wearers’ social, political and sexual status; they perform as human-body-enhancers – make certain human activities possible. What shoes are made of, where they are made and in what kinds of conditions, reveal different forms of exploitation and cruelty. Hard and highly polished shoes associated with the ‘mode’ of business attire disguise feet and display power – kick arse – rendering poverty and wealth tangible, visible and audible (the tapping of high heels, the squeaking of expensive leather). This style of attire is echoed in school uniforms that speak (or not) of that ‘aspirational’ future in the capitalist world: who is already at the top, who can climb the ladder. Shoes are colonizing too. Sponsored by so many charities and educational funds as a socially equalizing move, the uniform shoes children wear when they go to school in SA are hard and uncomfortable, with their origins in the Western-style business suit. How un-suit-able they are in the climate of South Africa, with summer temperatures often staying well in the range of thirty degrees Celsius and higher. How unforgiving and unfriendly they are for feet that might otherwise feel the air, or the grass, or be more gently covered.

Footpower Viviane expresses her fascination for feet and talks at some length about what the position of Anna’s and Crocodile’s toes in the images express about their state of being, relaxed or more angry and tense (Figure 5.4). ‘Feet don’t lie’, says Viviane in the intraview, and Sara repeats it. Feet and toes reveal things that have been concealed and controlled more successfully by other body parts, like the face and hands. These comments and the filming of Sara and Viviane’s intraview that showed their feet rather than their torsos, shoulders, upper arms or faces, led two members of the research project team, Joanna Haynes and Thandeka Ncube, to follow these notable observations

Figure 5.4 Relaxed toes and angry toes.

Figure 5.5 T he soles/souls of shoes.

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with some further exploration, expressed through the images and writing below. In the daylight floundering, unsure, nervous, tensing; Night falling Supper filling our bellies Flames licking and burning the logs in the fireplace of the lounge The light in this room gentler. Sofas beckoning.We could lie low. Re-turning to our question about feet Thandeka re-membering shoes from the time of childhood; that they mattered, that they told stories of money and status, that they sometimes excluded and exposed. Finding our shoes in our hands, turning them over and over. Soles of feet; soles of shoes (souls of feet; souls of shoes) Points of contact with earth – hidden from view – making marks – leaving traces Earth sticking to the sole, wearing the sole, (wearing the soul) Colonising – de/colonising Making marks; leaving traces; Layers of movement. Maps themselves? Or the means to make a map of feetshoeprintingstepping proportions? Drawn in, energized, the floundering forgotten, Re-turning to Anna and Crocodile, a glass of red wine emptied Moving and moved, travelled feet travelling A lighter room Carpet Floor Laden table: wire, string, paper, boxes, wool, pens, glue Scissors A roll of wire And ALL the scissors Scissor closed blades penetrating spaces between wire circles Wire holes holding scissors Red and blue handles; steel blades Four hands moving, mirroring, following, changing, arranging; Scissor hands Scissor feet . . .

Figure 5.6 Scissor power.

Figure 5.7 Feet waving.

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Figure 5.8 Scissors become toes.

The liveliness of the scissorfeet, Feet move position A bodywire/wirebody Now on its back Its scissorfeet akimbo Tensing or relaxing? A few feet away Legs akimbo Revealing soles Exposed to the air Soles that sway Patterns of black and white Ankles White trousers on a body Mug, ball, string, Shadow

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Already present in the field of playful encounter Re-laxing on the floor Blades now tucked into sandals Sliding under the feet they hold One two three four pairs Splayed and dis-played Scissors become crocodile toes Crocodile feet making crocodile foot prints Crocodile prints making crocodile maps Crocodile reflexology charting Footprints already morphing Metal ring toenails appearing A cotton reel (yellow cotton) The carpet Paper Crayons Gluestick Light Shadow String St . . . . . . ring Stirring

Conclusions This chapter has been an invitation to readers, teachers, researchers to dive into ‘messy methodologies’ (Rautio 2013:403) to explore storyworlds together with us, our colleagues and students in the following pages, and to consider academic/research spaces and literacy classrooms as a swarming movement (Bennett 2009:32) made up of competing and congruent efforts, human and more-thanhuman working in artful, playful and thingfully rich and varied ways. Informed by writings from different cultural traditions, thing power, thing/string play and the ‘studio-ising’ of the research space made different things matter. Concluding here for now, we are deeply struck by the potency that was produced through this materialist approach. In particular, we are moved by the stories of feet and the political and practical performances of shoes. These offer powerful new insights for research and education. Our focus on feet works like a mischievous and subversive kick under the table, making us notice the less obvious but equally important and valuable agency of head-less, shoe-less bodies. So as with all writing, individual and collaborative, there have been some intense periods of individual crafting with the sense that our versions are

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provisional and susceptible to change. We have a sense of being part of a book that is writing itself through the connection we have established between ourselves and the places and experiences that have become the ‘world’ of this book. A teeming, swarming congregation of seductively playful things: people, wool, skin, smells, sounds, surfaces, scissors, ears, feet, stomach and the forces in-between have created, in Viviane’s workshop, in Sara’s grade two classroom, and in our conference studio playspace, energetic milieus with a special feeling (Bennett 2009:35) and products.We don’t know where the boundaries of these things, times and spaces are but there is a mutual and transforming affect that changes everything. These assemblages of agency have produced the book in your hands and we sense it will go on to produce new assemblages of children, adults, books, toys, things and spaces . . . and words. If the stories are true to the resonances and fluidities that emerge, they will pay attention to the human and nonhuman, in a more flattened ontology which does not ignore the ethical, relational, entangled interdependence of all the parts of our vibrating and resonating world.

Acknowledgement With warm and special thanks to Thandeka Ncube for such enjoyable coexperimentation together with scissors, wire and crocodile feet.

Notes 1 We owe this term to the wonderful Beyond Words research project led by Professor Jocey Quinn at Plymouth University, UK www.plymouth.ac.uk/research/the-beyond-wordsproject. Accessed 9 January 2018. 2 DECD stands for Decolonising Early Childhood Discourses: Critical Posthumanism in Higher Education research project. See Chapter 1 and the project’s website: www. decolonizingchildhood.org. 3 Re-visiting video and audio recordings of pedagogical events produce new thoughts, ideas and proposals. Rather than seeing this material as completed sets of ‘data’ that need to be analysed for fixed meaning ‘already there’, we approach the recordings and transcriptions in collaborative and intra-active ways. These thoughts about thoughts and redoings of doings grow as layers and diffractions of experience that are in themselves fresh events and encounters. 4 See: www.vivianeschwarz.co.uk/?page_id=111. Accessed: 9 January 2018. 5 ‘A hundred languages’ is a poem written by Loris Malaguzzi that celebrates the multiple modes of meaning-making, expression and communication other than the verbal and written, that children make use of before the ‘school and the society steal the ninety-nine; https://vimeo.com/124748961 features the poem read by Carlina Rinaldi. 6 Haraway, D. (2014) SF: String figures, multispecies muddles, staying with the trouble. Keynote Lecture, Knowings and Knots, University of Alberta, Canada, March, 24. https://youtu.be/ Z1uTVnhIHS8 7 At the Beyond Words conference held at Plymouth University in 2017 (see endnote 1) guest speaker Professor Carol Taylor talked about the surprising and illuminating a/effects of inviting her undergraduate students to wear their slippers to class.

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References Barad, K. (2003) Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, 3:801–831. Bennett, J. (2009) Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. [Online]. Durham and London: Duke University Press Books. www.mylibrary.com?ID=3036203. Accessed: 1 August 2017. Bennett, J. (2010) Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Bennett, J. (2012) Powers of the Hoard: Artistry and Agency in a World of Vibrant Matter. [Online]. https://vimeo.com/29535247. Accessed: 10 November 2017. Dargie, D. (2011) The Xhosa Umrhubhe Mouthbow: An Extraordinary Musical Instrument. African Music: Journal of the International Library of African Music 9, 1:33–55. Edwards, C., Gandini, L. & Forman, G. (Eds.) (2011) The Hundred Languages of Children: The Reggio Emilia Experience in Transformation: The Reggio Emilia Experience in Transformation. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger. Gershon, W. (2016) The Sound of Silence: The Material Consequences of Scholarship. In N. Snaza, D. Sonu, S. E. Truman and Z. Zaliwska (Eds.) Pedagogical Matters: New Materialisms and Curriculum Studies. New York: Peter Lang, 75–91. Haraway, D. J. (1994) A Game of Cat’s Cradle: Science Studies, Feminist Theory, Cultural Studies. Configurations 2, 1:59–71. Haraway, D. (2011) Sf: Speculative Fabulation and String Figures. Kassel: Hatje Cantz. Haraway, D. (2013) SF: Science Fiction, Speculative Fabulation, String Figures, so Far. Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology 3. [Online journal]. Available at http:// adanewmedia.org/2013/11/issue3-haraway/. Haraway, D. (2014) SF: String Figures, Multispecies Muddles, Staying with the Trouble. Keynote Lecture, Knowings and Knots, University of Alberta, Canada, March 24. https://youtu. be/Z1uTVnhIHS8. Accessed: 23 December 2017. Haynes, J. & Murris, K. (2017) Intra-Generational Education: Imagining a Post-Age Pedagogy. Educational Philosophy and Theory 49, 10:971–983. Ingold, T. (2013) Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. London: Routledge. Rautio, P. (2013) Children Who Carry Stones in Their Pockets: On Autotelic Material Practices in Everyday Life. Children’s Geographies 11, 4:394–408. Rautio, P. & Winston, J. (2015) Things and Children in Play – Improvisation With Language and Matter. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 36, 1:15–26. Rusch, N. (2016) Sounds and Sound Thinking in /xam-ka !au: 'These Are Those to Which I am Listening With All My Ears'. Cogent Arts & Humanities, 3:1233615. http://dx.doi.org /10.1080/23311983.2016.1233615. Accessed: 23 December 2017. Schwarz,V. (2016) How to Find Gold. London: Walker Books. Vecchi,V. (2010)  Art and Creativity in Reggio Emilia: Exploring the Role and Potential of Ateliers in Early Childhood Education. New York: Routledge.

Chapter 6

Bodies with legs ‘Fidgeting’ and how recording practices matter Karin Murris and Sumaya Babamia

Guided by Karen Barad’s diffractive methodology, Karin and Sumaya’s materialdiscursive analysis focuses on how three video-recording practices bring into being, specific child- material-discourse entanglements during their philosophical exploration of the picturebook How to Find Gold (2016) by Viviane Schwarz. They conduct a diffractive reading of three different video angles of the circle, the children’s legs and the chairs on which they are sitting. Their reading opens up the possibility to think differently about what it means ‘to fidget’. Illustrated by images and a link to a technically ‘still’ image that moves, they argue that the technology of photography and video-production matters ontologically, epistemologically and ethically in research. Their experimentation materialises a double de/colonising move. What e/merges are new perspectives on how the inclusion of the material (the use of camera and video as an apparatus) in knowledge production show how space plays an active pedagogical role in the literacy classroom, thereby at the same rendering children capable as knowledge producers.

‘Fidgety’ child After watching the three video footages of Sara Stanley’s literacy lesson – simultaneously projected on three different screens next to each other on a wall – Sumaya writes down the following: Sara engages a philosophical enquiry with a classroom of grade 2s. They sit on the chairs and then on the floor. As we watch the video, I am struck by the extraneous movements of the body; flailing of arms, swinging of legs, shifts in the trunk, erratic head movements as the eyes catch new sites of attraction: posters on the wall, the cameramen and equipment, cameras zooming in and out, little giggles with friends, twitches and itches on the body, ears move in different directions to take in a variety of sounds. Heads are scratched and swivelled, necks crane, mouths yawn, fingers are carefully scrutinized and nails are chewed.Yet when Sara speaks, they react: through voice, body, silence and movement. Simultaneously. Bodies ‘hear’ Sara, and ‘reply’ at their discretion. Not once are the children contained or asked to ‘sit still’.They move

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on different planes of spacetime in relation to the material and political which mark them individually. On the chairs they move their bodies in a variety of ways: rocking, swinging, twisting of torsos, bending, propping head on hands, (dis)engaged glances.Yet on the floor they huddle in a group, noticeably conglomerating in corner with 2/3 of the carpet left bare. Bodies are so close yet barely touch, feet move. There is little synchrony between words and bodies. In fact, the dissonance makes me wonder about the regulation of attention and concentration. The bodily movements are typically not conducive to listening, comprehension, cognitive processing and abstract thought. Sumaya finishes her writing with the following questions: What does it mean to dis-engage in a learning context? What is it to be ‘fidgety child’ in a classroom? Sumaya’s questions trouble the positioning of bodies within the languagelearning-literacy paradigm as theorised and practiced within her field of speech-language therapy. Despite the speech-language therapy literature readily acknowledging the role of the (human) body as a site of non-verbal communication, children’s bodily movements tend to be interpreted, analysed and judged discursively. For example, a smile may signal emotion, a nod with the head approval or a shrug with the shoulders uncertainty. Like education, the speechlanguage therapy literature theorises literacy as closely connected with linguistic, psychological and sociological interpretations in the context of comprehension, communication and abstract thinking (Ferguson and Farwell 1975; Wallach and Goldsmith 1977; Bishop 1992; Rack, Hulme, Snowling and Wightman 1994; Olofsson and Neidersoe 1999; Pennington and Bishop 2009; Nelson 2010). In short, the human body is acknowledged only to the extent that it can enhance linguistic expression (e.g., facial expressions, gestures and body movements) and cognitive capabilities. With the latter firmly seated in the mind; the body is reduced to a mere ‘crutch’ for the acquisition of language and cognitive learning skills.

Embodied cognition and insects in the carpet We wonder whether an alternative to mind/body dualism in theories of learning is the notion of ‘embodied cognition’.1 Embodied cognition is a theoretical attempt to bring the body of the learner back into the brain/mind-dominated, language and learning arena (Adams 2016) and is concerned with how the mind or brain2 thinks and learns in conjunction with the body (Dove 2015; McClelland, Pitt and Stein 2015). As described by Sumaya above, in the classroom, children’s flailing of arms, swinging of legs, shifts in the trunk and their erratic head movements could be understood as inseparable from the cognitive, in the same way that Anna’s movement of her feet in the picturebook, could be seen as part of what she thinks, knows, and feels, for example, what Erin Manning and Brian Massumi (2014) might

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call a ‘thinking in the act’. However, such a reading of the classroom is different from embodied cognition. The latter only allocates a role to the (human) body in the sense of mediating the mental representations (such as schemas, images, concepts) which govern thought processes (Dove 2015), therefore knowing and thinking are seen as disembodied. So, although embodied cognition acknowledges the role of the body in learning, it assumes an interaction3 between mind and body (Iverson and Braddock 2011; Glenberg, Wiit and Metcalf 2013; Wellsby and Pexman 2014). Interaction differs from intra-action, a Baradian neologism that considers the ontological inseparability of phenomena (Barad 2007). Even notions such as the ‘embrained body’ or the ‘bodymind’, only partially call into question the power producing mind/body binary. Such a conceptual move might help integrate mind and body as a single ‘unit’, rather than seeing them as separate substances that can exist independently, as Descartes assumed. However, we are concerned about the particular subjectivity implied and the anthropocentrism involved in this re-conceptualisation of the relationship between mind, brain and body. We explore the importance of the ontological difference between these positions in this through our reading of ‘what-was-going-on-inthe-classroom’ as a text. ‘Texts’ are more than books or images (see Chapter 1). Key in reading the classroom as a text is our ‘re-turning’ (Barad 2007) to this event through the affordances of the three video-recordings of the ‘same’ lesson. Literacy events are lived experiences, with a focus on process and ‘not projected towards some textual end-point’, or a product (Leander and Boldt 2012:26). In these acts of re-turning to the classroom event, we experience the experience time and time again and in principle ad infinitum, but not in the sense that the experience is an object for our detached gaze – these experiences are part of us (Massumi 2015:4, 14). Embodied cognition’s sole emphasis is on human intelligence and agency as the mediator of learning with knowledge reserved to humans only. The expert human adult (teacher or therapist) scaffolds literacy learning for an embodied brain that has a body without intelligence or agency. The material body is a passive mediator (not agent) in learning mental skills. Approaches to education and speech and language therapy that are grounded in developmental psychology, cognitive science, behaviourism, constructionism, social constructivism, or poststructuralism, foreground human exceptionalism (Lenz Taguchi 2010; Taylor 2013). Human supremacy is claimed over nonhumans in the production of knowledge through semiotic systems that exclude embodied activities, such as playing, drawing, running or fidgeting as part of what matters in class academically. The norm of who counts as the knowing subject – the standard by which other earth dwellers (including morethan-humans) are measured – is of a particular gender (male), race (white), able-bodied and with a particular sexual orientation (heterosexual); the humanist ideal of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man as the yardstick by which the worth of the ‘other’ is measured (Braidotti 2013). Anthropocentric practices are deeply entrenched and so habitual that we do not consider the agency of the

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material world (e.g., chairs, cameras, carpet, picturebook, paper and drawing materials) (Bennett 2010) and the relationality between the human and morethan-human (insects in the carpet, the circular seating of chairs) in our literacy practices (Hultman and Taguchi 2010; Kuby and Gutshall Rucker 2016).

How nonhuman bodies matter in reading the classroom As posthumanist Cary Wolfe (interviewed by Lennard & Wolfe 2017:n.p.) points out, the ‘human’ of humanism ‘is only part of the story; it’s nested in a larger, and in many ways nonhuman, set of contexts and force’. Posthumanist research problematises the narrow, patriarchal view of the ‘human’ of humanism. It has ‘given us a language where we can now describe much more intricately and robustly how human beings – not just their minds but their bodies, their microbiomes, their modes of communication and so on – are enmeshed in and interact with the nonhuman world’, and this includes technology (Lennard and Wolfe 2017:n.p.). So, literacy is not only about language or what words denote or images represent, but a ‘multi-layered phenomenon’ (Lennard and Wolfe 2017) that includes body language, the tone and timbre of voice, the breath (Gorska 2016) and so on. Using critical posthumanism as our navigational tool (Braidotti 2013), we wonder how a moving away from a discursive analysis of body (e.g., by focusing on a transcript of the children’s enquiry) brings about fresh perspectives on literacy learning. In critical posthumanism attention is paid to how the material and discursive is always entangled and how privileging the discursive over the material produces inequalities. We can now reconfigure Sumaya’s initial questions above as follows: How does the space matter in how the children are in the classroom? In what way does the choice of video production materialise Sumaya’s interpretations of body movements? Educators and therapists working with children are trained to regard schools as places of learning for human development and achievement only. The aim of education and therapeutic interventions tends to be conceptualised in terms of socialisation – that is, the space is used for children to acquire knowledge, skills and dispositions with the main purpose of integration within human society as it is (Snaza, Applebaum, Bayne, Carlson, Morris, Rotas, Sandlin, Wallin and Weaver 2014). Particularly in the areas of literacy and comprehension, the emphasis on qualification and socialisation (Biesta 2010, 2014) is orientated around cognitive and linguistic capabilities, measured through the observation of behaviour by the teacher or therapist, and through standardised testing administered by the adult expert. Instead, in posthuman literacy research, bodies (including human bodies) are understood as unbounded quantum entanglements constituted by concepts and material forces, where the social, the political, the biological, and its observing, measuring and controlling machines are interwoven and entangled. For Barad (2003:823–824) the difference between

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human and nonhuman bodies is not fixed or a priori; the difference is humanmade, includes and excludes, and is always open to contestation. So, in the first place our research is a response to what Helena Pedersen and Barbara Pini (2017:1) call ‘subject-fatigue’ in research that privileges the human subject as knowledge producer ‘through the forced exposure involved in “making [data] visible” – a form of imperial power’ (Pedersen and Pini 2017:2). So how does posthumanism shift the role of the researcher in educational settings? Pedersen and Pini (20176) urge professionals and academics to listen differently and with respect for the more-than-human world of which they are also a part ontologically and intricately entangled with. Educational and therapeutic spaces are not only about human minds and bodies. On the contrary, paying attention only to the discursive and a refusal to take account of the material, amounts to complexity reduction. Rather, such spaces, and the learning that occurs not only ‘within’, but also with its walls, are multiple intra-connections of materials – bodies, buildings, desks, chairs, classrooms, spaces, writing material, ideas and language (Snaza et al 2014). So our question above ‘How does the space matter in how the children are becoming in the classroom?’ leads us to consider in what way the analysis is complexified by paying attention to human and nonhuman bodies in Sara’s philosophy lesson.What caught our attention as researchers was first, the performative agency of feet and legs as part of the complex entanglement of human and nonhuman bodies without clear bodily boundaries. These human body parts are usually not considered as relevant for children be(com) ing readers. Second, we began to pay attention to the performative agency of the different video practices that we were using (or were using us).

‘Feet don’t lie’ ‘Feet don’t lie’, says author Vivian Schwarz strikingly in her intra-view with Sara Stanley, the teacher of this literacy lesson: Vivian: “Feet don’t lie . . . You can look at people and they can be very assured of themselves, their top halves, and then their bottom halves they are turning their toes in . . . You might control your face and you might control your gestures, but the further away you go . . .When I draw characters, I pay attention to the feet. At least as much as to the hands. They tend to express the whole flavour of the scene and where we are at.” Viviane, both author and illustrator of the picturebook How to Find Gold (2016), continues in the intra-view by pointing on the title page at first Anna and then Crocodile. With both story characters sitting on the floor playing cards,Viviane explains how the reader can tell that Anna is cross simply by looking at her feet (see Figure 5.4 in Chapter 5). Her toes are spread out and pulled up in a way she would only do if she were tense. Crocodile’s feet, on the other hand, are completely relaxed.

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When intra-viewed by four authors of this book, Sara Stanley explains how paying attention to children’s bodies as well as her own is key to her teaching. When entering a classroom, almost the first thing she does, she says, is to take her shoes off and during this particular lesson the pens used by the children during their map-making, leave marks on the soles of her feet (Figure 6.1). When reading the classroom event, we also observe her kneeling and lowering her body often as she is engaging with the children working individually in small groups. Now what is the significance of the pen-ink-foot-teacher-child entanglement when analysing this particular literacy event in the classroom and how are our readings enabled through the material-discursive practices of video-recording? Our readings e/merge ontologically with the quantum ‘entanglements of here and there, now and then . . . dispersed across, and threaded through one

Figure 6.1 Pen-ink-foot-teacher-child entanglement.

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another’ (Barad 2013:16). There are no fixed bodily boundaries that make the concepts ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ possible in the first place, as for example, a cognitive analysis (with ‘the head only’) assumes. First a thought, then a bodily movement. The dis/continuity of quantum entanglements is beautifully expressed in a clip accidentally produced with Karin’s iPad. In the process of transcribing one of the video-recordings – a process that involves a constant pausing and restarting of the video – one technically ‘still’ image shows human bodies that continue to move for a split second in an iterative time loop, repeating itself briefly until Karin’s filming (via her cell phone of the image on her iPad) stops. You can access the video clip called ‘Discontinuity’ here: https://drive.google. com/drive/u/1/folders/0B0i-6mTnhZCXRi1ZakJhNlhVdjg This creation calls to the attention two children moving their feet, a girl moving her hands/arms and two children scratching their heads (further explored below). Interestingly, the question e/merges for us whether the children are fidgeting, or the image? Sara’s excitement and affective engagement with the story is very visible and rubs off on the children who seem spell-bound (Figure 6.2). Pointing her arm to emphasise this particular passage in the book, she shouts (in the video-recording created by the apparatus): THAT is a VERY GOOD

Figure 6.2 Spell-bound listening to the story.

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MAP! Her arm gesture is one of exclamation, infecting the children with her enthusiasm, drawing them into the story. As Sara reads the story out loud, the material bodies, voice, tone, pitch, breath, tensing of her arm, other muscles and so on, affect the other bodyminds-without-bodily boundaries in the room.This in/determinate and dynamic learning process includes unpredictable ‘causal’ factors and opens possibilities to include and thereby does justice to the human and more-than-human bodies in the room as co-producers of knowledge. This process is one of complexification, that is, a doing justice to the complexity of an event. In the dis/continuous and dis/orientating processes of learning and therapeutic processes, matter is not simply an ‘inanimate given’ or ‘mere stuff ’ that is unresponsive and in need of something else ‘to give’ it agency or ‘an inert static canvas’ without ‘memory, history, or an inheritance to call its own’, waiting to be inscribed by human meaning and culture (Barad 2013:17). It is the intra-action, the mutual constitution of entangled agencies, that queer (an un/ doing of identity) the familiar understanding of causality with individually constituted agents or entities (e.g., a human), as well as times and places preceding one another and producing an effect (Barad 2007; Kleinman 2012). Unsettling the metaphysics of individualism, this ontological shift decolonises research by calling into question the ‘fantasy of human control’ in knowledge production (Pedersen and Pini 2017:1). The relational posthuman ontology disrupts our understanding of causal relations and (en)ables us to talk about materials intraactively and how bodies, human and more-than-human, render each other capable (Despret 2004; Haraway 2016).

Video-recording practices and ‘spacing’ We re-turn to our second question above: in what way does the choice of video production materialise Sumaya’s interpretations of body movements? The answer to this question has implications for how we read literacy events and in particular how material-discursive intra-actions have performative agency in be(com)ing readers.Videography, or the use of video, is often seen as a reliable and dominant form of data for documenting what takes place in the classroom (De Freitas 2016). Rather than the standard practice of using video to ‘collect’ data and evidence of learning, we are interested in video research for how ‘it is materially implicated in the production of new knowledge and new kinds of knowers, attending to the unique qualities of digital nature of video data for how it mobilizes new social and cultural relations’ (De Freitas 2016:554). Central in our analysis in this part of the chapter, is an excellent article entitled The video production of space: how different recording practices matter (2016) written by European organisational studies scholars, Jeanne Mengis, Davide Nicolini and Mara Gorli (2016). They argue that space has been ignored in empirical research and propose a reconceptualization of space as ‘spacing’ – a verb that troubles understanding space ‘as an inert and preexisting background or a

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container of . . . activities’ (Mengis, Nicolini and Gorli 2016:2). In contrast, spacing does justice to the performativity and material agency of space and opens fresh possibilities to see classrooms (or therapy rooms) as more than spaces to be filled with bodies (the Newtonian conceptualisation of space as absolute).Video recording is not an objective, neutral methodological tool, epistemologically, ethically or politically, but a ‘seeing with the camera’ (Mengis et al 2016:3).They point out that an important obstacle for the empirical analysis of data is the fact that ‘spaces do not announce themselves through verbal language’ (Mengis et al 2016:2), hence the popularity of video-research as it makes visible ‘the complex set of bodily presences and absences, movements in the space, material details, colors, sounds, and rhythms’ (Mengis et al 2016:4). Furthermore, the possibility to repeatedly playback the recordings offers material-discursive opportunities to explore ‘in detail the effects of specific ways of seeing with a camera’ (Mengis et al 2016:4). Sylvia Kind (2013) argues that such postcolonial research practices are urgently needed to actively disrupt the common assumption that cameras simply objectively record movements and represent the real world as it is. Drawing on their extensive review of the organisational studies literature on this topic and inspired by Barad’s work, Mengis, Nicolini and Gorli (2016) put forward the idea that combining different video apparatuses, that is, different combinations of camera angle and movement, privilege particular spatial understandings, including the materialisation of particular power relations (Mengis et al 2016:2–3). For Barad (2007:183) an ‘apparatus’ is ‘a doing, not a thing’. Apparatuses are boundary-making practices: apparatuses are the material conditions of possibility and impossibility of mattering; they enact what matters and what is excluded from mattering. Apparatuses enact agential cuts that produce determinate boundaries and properties of “entities” within phenomena. (Barad 2007:148) For Barad it is impossible to separate or isolate practices of knowing and being: ‘they are mutually implicated’ (Barad 2007:185). The physical world is not at a distance. All knowledge production practices are ‘material enactments that contribute to, and are a part of, the phenomenon we describe’ (Barad 2007:32). Deeply influenced by both feminist theorist Donna Haraway and quantum physicist Niels Bohr, Karen Barad’s significant contribution to both physics and philosophy is to see the ontological implications of what Haraway and Bohr before her thought were mainly epistemological issues. Bohr’s famous two-slit diffraction experiment (Barad 2007:81–84) made evident that under certain conditions light behaves like a particle (as Newton thought) and under other conditions it behaves like a wave, described by Bohr’s influential complementarity theory. Electrons are neither particles nor waves – ‘a queer experimental finding’ (Barad 2014:173). Wave and particle are not inherent attributes of objects. But, ‘the nature of the observed phenomenon

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changes with corresponding changes in the apparatus’ that measures it (Barad 2007:106). Electrons and the differences ‘between’ them are neither here nor there, this or that, one or the other or any other binary type of difference; and what holds for an electron also holds for a humanimal (Barad 2014:174– 175). In other words, quantum physics gives experimental evidence that the knowing subject and object (the world) are inseparable non-dualistic wholes and knowledge is constructed through “direct material engagement with the world” and not by “standing at a distance and representing” the world (Barad 2007:49). Barad builds on Donna Haraway’s proposal to reclaim vision from how it has been used “to signify a leap out of the marked body and into a conquering gaze from nowhere” (Haraway 1988:581). The implication of this shift from substance ontology to relational ontology is that, particularity not universality makes objectivity possible. We use Haraway and Barad’s philosophical ideas to help explore how the three different video-recordings were boundary-making practices. The non-representational methodology focuses on the material-discursive performativity of the camera. Key in our analysis is the posthuman position that video-practices are not passive observing instruments and measuring devices, but are productive and performative in how a phenomenon materialises and meaning is given to what is observed (Mengis et al 2016:5–6).

Three different video-recording practices We started this chapter with Sumaya’s written observations as she watched the three video footages of Sara Stanley’s literacy lesson after the session had been taught. She notices. . . the cameramen and equipment, cameras zooming in and out. Each time we re-turn to the video-recordings, the more concerned we are about all these cameras and adults in the room. We wonder how child-adult-object relationality and the collaborative enquiry practice of Philosophy with Children in literacy is materialised through our choice of recording practices and who, or what, is included and excluded. In the classroom, a professional camera man stands outside the circle of chairs handling a steady camera on a stand, and a large mic with the help of his female assistant (daughter) (Figure 6.3). This recording practice is called in cinematography the ‘American-Objective view’ (Mengis et al 2016). This video practice popular in Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s, hence the name, makes it possible to follow best how intraactions are accomplished through intra-actions without changing the angle, ‘allowing for a sequential analysis of talk and of the shifting attentions and orientations of participants’ (Mengis et al 2016:6). This medium shot angle constituted different data and created other meanings than the close-up angle, which foregrounds ‘facial expressions and other nonverbal aspects of interpersonal interaction’ (Mengis 2016:6).The American-Objective view does not show the active role of nonhuman objects and architecture and is anthropocentric as it

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Figure 6.3 ‘The American-Objective View’; camera man and his assistant.

focuses on human interactions only. What remains invisible is ‘how spaces are joined, divided and populated, and how the division of space creates access, boundaries and control’ (Mengis et al 2016:19). The GoPro from the ceiling attached to the data projector – a wide-angle view with a fixed camera (Figure 6.4) – made it possible to ‘see’ the classroom event as an unseen observer and not from any subject’s perspective in particular and followed ‘the sequential unfolding of the interaction from the beginning to the end without the need to anticipate events’ (Mengis et al 2016:6). The GoPro’s agency has the advantage of seeing an uninterrupted stream of action and in our case how the circle of chairs worked in the space to create a place for the philosophical work as a boundary-making practice that includes and excludes. The children (and Sara) were included in the philosophical work and

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Figure 6.4 T he GoPro – a wide-angled view with a fixed camera.

the human bodies outside the circle were not, although of course the cameraman, his camera, the mic, the GoPro and other human and nonhuman bodies were all entangled in the data produced. When preparing for the research project, the camera man (enacting the American-Objective view) had been instructed to explicitly not zoom in on the children’s faces when they spoke. We had explained to him that we were interested in how the children’s bodies (and nonhuman bodies) also have agency in literacy learning, and as so poignantly pointed out by Viviane Schwarz in the intra-view, having control over their facial expressions is what children learn quickly, also to stay out of trouble. This particular footage constructed valuable data of the movement of human bodies (as interpreted by the intra-action between camera man and his camera). Of course, video footage offers unique opportunities to slow down what happens in real time through ‘still’ images,4 as we can see in Figure 6.2 and the video clip created by Karin’s iPad (see above). The iPad recording was again a different way of foregrounding space. The iPad offers a more situated point of view in the sense that Karin followed some of the children, sometimes zooming in and out (often on nonhuman bodies), and spending most of the time stretched out on the carpet filming at floor height (see left bottom corner in Figure 6.4). This was not a pre-planned or conscious decision. Somehow, lying on the floor, enabled by the softness of the carpet, seemed a useful action as it would be a clear move away from the children’s faces and less obtrusive, a being-with children-iPad, also at their height. Karin was compelled to this playful experimentation beyond cognition entering ‘an entangled space of a “we” ’ (Kind 2013:431). She felt drawn in particular by the human and more-than-human legs in the room – like a bird drawn

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to fly in a particular direction. This imaginative thinking-with-iPad offers a so-called ‘Roving Point-of-View’, which privileges: an understanding of space as practiced, foregrounding the interaction and relationship of people and artifacts; the rhythm and sequence of activities; the directionalities and orientations of objects, bodies, and activities within space; and the spatial coordination of bodies. It further emphasizes the affective dimension of space pointing to the affective aspects associated with spacing activities. (Mengis et al 2016:15) Karin’s movements as she was filming, enabled us to understand space as practiced.The Roving Point-of-View foregrounds the affective and aesthetic dimension of space associated with spacing activities (Mengis et al 2016:17). Karin, as filmmaker, was part of the moving and feeling bodies as they performed. Through her selection of shots, she added a narrative structure to the data as a material-discursive practice. The following photos are good illustrations of this. Figures 6.5 and 6.6 show how the discursive is always already ontologically part of video-recording practices. In Figure 6.5, Karin has zoomed in on the human and more-than-human bodies as they are engaged in the literacy lesson. The

Figure 6.5 Bodies with legs entangled in the classroom.

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image clearly shows the entanglement of the chair legs and the human legs, but also the latter is entangled with the marks of the pens the children used for the drawing activity. The photo does not mirror the world-as-it-is, but is a performative act of worldmaking (Kind 2013:432), disrupting the human/nonhuman binary. The image draws the attention of the viewer to the chairs’ participation in this event by initiating particular encounters and intra-actions, such as the children’s legs touching the ground, keeping their bodies in place next to each other, closely touching one another, facing the right way, whilst listening to the story. Moreover, the 2D flat surface highlights the ontological fact that human and nonhuman bodies are quantum entanglements and live entangled lives without bodily boundaries.This disrupts a metaphysics that uses the human eye (geometrical optics) in 3D as the paradigm in deciding what is real and not real (Barad 2007). Human vision as an epistemological tool helps to distance the knower from the object of that knowledge. In contrast, in physical optics differences are distributed differently. Knowing is about direct material engagement with and as part of the world. Kind (2013:437) points out that we tend to think about photos as capturing, isolating and freezing moments in time – a kind of ‘violence’ that removes the event from space-time-dis/continuity – ‘a leap out of the marked body . . . into a conquering gaze from nowhere’ (Haraway 1988:581). However, human eyes are ‘active perceptual systems’, not passive or morally and politically innocent, but ‘specific ways of seeing, that is, ways of life’ (Haraway1988:583). The eyes of different organisms or machines ‘see’ differently. Therefore, objectivity involves understanding ‘how these different visual systems work, technically, socially, and psychically’ (Haraway1988:583). With her elbows resting on the floor, her iPad in the palms of her hands, Karin’s eyes are not objective measuring machines that neutrally record an event ‘out there’.The iPad-eyes entanglement is actively involved in world creation (‘worlding’), not just mirroring an independently existing world. For example, the photo in Figure 6.6 pays attention to how

Figure 6.6 Book-crocodile-children’s-entangled-bodies-map-floor-paper-camerakoki pens.

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the posture of the Crocodile (as he is making marks on the map in the picturebook) is mirrored by the posture of the children’s entangled bodies during their map-making.The recording device (entangled with Karin) makes a spatial connection between the material and aesthetic object (the picturebook) and the children’s affective, embodied engagement in the same activity. The iPad brings this imaginative connection into the world, a re-worlding. It is in this way that the recording device combines the interest of the researcher and the working of the recording apparatus in unexpected ways, as it was only afterwards that this connection became apparent when examining and allowing ourselves to be affected by the data. Our interests do not create something out of nothing,5 as if it was not there in the first place, but it is an ‘entering into what is already going on’, a recording of what is happening by disrupting the anthropocentric gaze (Kind 2013:439). This might be an example of what Barad (2015:388) refers to as ‘the materiality of imagining together with the imaginative capacities of materiality’, superpositions created through a nonlinear, diffractive zig-zagging movement through and with the data.

To fidget Not as distanced observers, but as part of the phenomenon we are studying, we used the concept ‘to fidget’ to help guide our analysis.This politically loaded concept was used a few times when adults were talking about the event afterwards, and it struck us as a helpful tool in our playful experimentation – an approach to research that is generally discouraged in the current climate of instrumental, positivist, empirical research.There is no room in that kind of research to pay attention to, and to do justice to, the details of bodily movements and their role in be(com) ing readers of a picturebook such as How to Find Gold. In contrast, our feminist academic style of doing research pays attention to the relational diffraction patterns that are always already there (sedimented into the world), entangled like waves in the sea without fixed boundaries, and our task was to make this evident. According to the Oxford dictionary definition,‘to fidget’ means to ‘make small movements, especially of the hands and feet, through nervousness or impatience’. We offer, by foregrounding the performativity of the video production, a diffractive6 reading of the event that understands the children’s bodily movements not only in socio-psychological terms (‘nervousness’, self-regulation and maintaining bodily equilibrium), or as embodied cognition (a product of interactive systems such as social and environmental contexts), but we have argued that what also needs to be considered is the relationality between the human and nonhuman bodies in the classroom, and the cultural, physical, physiological, biological, geopolitical and historical agential forces that are important for the materialisation of bodies of any age or kind (e.g. the camera) that ‘fidget’. It is worth noting that the use of the concept is rarely used in the context of adults’ behaviour. The posthumanist shift in understanding bodies that fidget complexifies our understanding of the phenomenon. Instead of always focussing on the social, emotional and the linguistic dimensions of educational and therapeutic practices, the diffractive

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methodology demands the inclusion of the more than human dimension of all behaviour and the apparatus that measures.

Wrapping up – decolonising literacy practices In the process of writing this chapter, and re-thinking literacy practices, we re-turned often to the video-recordings of the classroom, the intra-views and the initial questions we posed. We re-turned in the Baradian sense of turning the data over for new findings, diffracting anew, creating again and making new space-matter-temporalities, instead of the linguistic notion of reflecting upon or going back to an instant in the past (Barad 2014). We paused and started the footage over and over again. We let ourselves be affected by it, dis/ continuously looking for the unexpected, a process that lasted and still continues after this chapter has been written, talking and thinking and dreaming and lying awake about it. The technology enabled us to diffract and consider how the relationality between the human and more-than-human renders not only the children, but also the material capable, ‘having’ agency, thereby calling into question the notion of ‘fidgety child’. It helped answering our questions we started with: What does it mean to dis-engage in learning context? What is it to be ‘fidgety child-in-a-classroom’? With De Freitas (2016:566), we resist the notion of video recordings as ‘sensory-motor or “movement-images”, which feeds our desire to interpret motor-activity in terms of mechanical cause and effect’. Our working with video recording as entangled space-time-mattering made it possible to expose the binaries with which we routinely work in literacy and literary education such as inner/outer, animate/inanimate and child/adult. The first decolonising move that e/merges, is that unlike embodied cognition and viewing literacy events as involving human-cognitive ability only, literacy education involves dynamic and fluid activities produced by entangled material bodies, ideas, affect, intensities, thought, language, art, story creating, concepts and so forth. Moving away from human-centred literacy research can help us ‘begin imagining what else might be going on’ (Leander and Boldt 2012:1).What becomes apparent when paying attention to the performative agency of camera and video-methodological practices, thereby disrupting the animate/inanimate binary, is that learning does not take place ‘in’ space and time, but ‘in the making of spacetime itself. The world is an ongoing open process of mattering through which “mattering” itself acquires meaning and form in the realization of different agential possibilities’ (Barad 2003:817). Matter is a doing and plays an agentive role in the world’s ongoing materialisation (Barad 2013:17), including knowledge production and the particular choice of video-taping. The combinations of camera angle, the following of the children’s movements and the making of spatial relationships between human and nonhuman bodies through the cameras had a performative effect. It was not simply a recording of ‘what was going on’. We come to know the materials (video footage, bodies, movement, communication) as operating on multiple levels of sense-feelings, which produce literacy.The

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inclusion of the material in onto-epistemology profoundly disrupts Western metaphysics’ privileging of the human subject over the more-than-human (including nonhuman animals). Acknowledging the role of material in pedagogical and therapeutic practices disrupts binary logic and human exceptionalism. The second decolonising feature of our research is that it shifts the power relations between adult and child implicit in humanist research practices. The inclusion of the material in knowledge production through videography, renders the children capable as part of the material-discursive entanglements.This is obscured by the common (adult) use of the verb ‘fidgeting’ and routine humanist analyses of performance. Our analysis suggests that ‘fidgety’ child is not one of a discursive body with signifying gestures, but instead one of performativity and affect, where signifiers are scrambled, unmade, and unsensed. For Massumi (2002), bodies are about moving and sensing, and even a slight displacement evokes qualitative differences. Embodiment for Massumi is not interaction and independence of skill. Rather, embodiment is about the affect imbued in movement and sense, the beckoning of feelings, where ‘feelings have a way of folding into each other, resonating together, interfering with each other, mutually intensifying in unqualifable ways apt to unfold again in action, often unpredictably’ (Massumi 2002:1). Like Olsson (2012), we signify the need for theory-practice which is elastic, and (performatively) explain the learning processes. We can use a different optics and disrupt habitual practices by and reading classrooms with and through matter. In philosophical encounters, the aim is not to represent, or reproduce, or recognise, but to embrace a kind of thinking in literacy that is playful, passionate and spontaneous, with all bodies with(out) legs in the classroom entering a zone of interrogation in the process of be(com)ing readers.

Notes 1 Despite the influence of Western, dualistic metaphysics, embodied cognition attempts to bridge the mind/body divide by acknowledging the role of the body in learning and human development. However, embodied cognition retains the notion of human exceptionalism – the idea that learning, intelligence and thinking are reserved for human mind and body only. 2 Scientific approaches to learning generally do not make a theoretical distinction between mind and brain. 3 Interaction refers to human engagement only and privileges a metaphysics of individualism. Alternatively, the term intra-action denotes the pattern of diffraction amongst all matter and the mutual constitution of entangled agencies. 4 Following Barad (2013), images are never still. At micro-level electrons are always on the move in in/determinate ways, and therefore the use of the concept ‘still’ already assumes a privileging of a particular anthropocentric spatial scale, that is, macro over micro. Her work queers the micro/macro dualism. 5 Agential realism is not epistemic relativism, not is it the same as classical realism; it makes the very realism/idealism binary redundant (see Chapter 3, Murris 2016). 6 Critical posthumanist Karen Barad (2007:3) explains that ‘matter’ (the material) and ‘meaning’ (the discursive) are always entangled like waves interfering with one another, diffractively creating a new interference pattern without clear identity-producing boundaries. See Chapter 4.

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References Adams, A. M. (2016) How Language Is Embodied in Bilinguals and Children With Specific Language Impairment. Frontiers in Psychology 7:1–13. Barad, K. (2003) Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, 31:801–831. Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press. Barad, K. (2013) Ma(r)king Time: Material Entanglements and Re-Memberings: Cutting Together-Apart. In P. R. Carlile, D. Nicolini, A. Langley and H. Tsoukas (Eds.) How Matter Matters: Objects, Artifacts, and Materiality in Organization Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 16–31. Barad, K. (2014) Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting Together-Apart. Parallax 20, 3:168–187. Barad, K. (2015) TransMaterialities:Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21, 2–3:387–422. Bennett, J. (2010) Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham & London: Duke University Press. Biesta, G. J. J. (2010) Good Education in an Age of Measurement: Ethics, Politics, Democracy. Boulder, USA: Paradigm Publishers. Biesta, G. J. J. (2014) The Beautiful Risk of Education. Boulder, USA: Paradigm Publishers. Bishop, D.V. M. (1992) The Underlying Nature of Specific Language Impairment. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 33, 1:3–66. Braidotti, R. (2013) The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press. De Freitas, E. (2016) The Moving Image in Education Research: Reassembling the Body in Classroom Video Data. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 29, 4:553–572. Despret,V. (2004) The Body We Care For: Figures of Anthropo-Zoo-Genesis. Body and Society 10:111–134. Dove, G. (2015) Three Symbols Ungrounding Problems: Abstract Concepts and the Future of Embodied Cognition. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 23, 4:1109–1121. Ferguson, C. A. & Farwell, C. B. (1975) Words and Sounds in Early Language Acquisition. Language 51:419–439. Glenberg, A. M., Wiit, J. K. & Metcalfe, J. (2013) From the Revolution to the Embodiment: 25 Years of Cognive Psychology. Perspectives on Psychological Science 8, 5:573–585. Gorska, M. (2016) Breathing Matters: Feminist Intersectional Politics of Vulnerability. Linkoping Studies in Arts and Science No. 683. Faculty of Arts and Science. Linkoping University. Haraway, D. (1988) Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism as a Site of Discourse on the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies 14, 3:575–599. Haraway, D. (2016) Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Hultman, K. & Lenz Taguchi, H. (2010) Challenging Anthropocentric Analysis of Visual Data: A Relational Materialist Methodological Approach to Educational Research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 23, 5:525–542. Iverson, J. M. & Braddock, B. A. (2011) Gesture and Motor Skill in Relation to Language in Children With Language Impairment. Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research 54:72–86. Kind, S. (2013) Lively Entanglements: The Doings, Movements and Enactments of Photography. Global Studies of Childhood 3, 4:427–441. Kleinman, A.(2012) ‘Intra-actions’: An Interview With Karen Barad. Mousse #34, June:76–81.

128  Karin Murris and Sumaya Babamia Kuby, C. & Rucker,T. G. (2016) Go Be a Writer: Expanding the Curriculum Boundaries of Literacy Learning With Children. New York and London: Columbia University Teachers College Press. Leander, K. & Boldt, G. (2012) Rereading ‘A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies’: Bodies, Texts and Emergence. Journal of Literacy Research 20, 10:1–25. Lennard, N. & Wolfe, C. (2017) ‘Is Humanism Really Humane?’ New York Times. THE STONE. Accessed: 9 January 2017. Lenz Taguchi, H. (2010) Going Beyond the Theory/Practice Divide in Early Childhood Education. London: Routledge Contesting Early Childhood Series. Manning, E. & Massumi, B. (2014) Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Massumi, B. (2002) Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect and Sensation. Durham: Duke University Press. Massumi, B. (2015) Politics of Affect. Cambridge: Polity Press. McClelland, E., Pitt, A. & Stein, J. (2015) Enhanced Academic Performance Using a Novel Classroom Physical Activity Intervention to Increase Awareness, Attention and Self-Control: Putting Embodied Cognition Into Practice. Improving Schools 18, 1:83–100. Mengis, J., Nicolini, D. & Gorli, M. (2016) The Video Production of Space: How Different Recording Practices Matter. Organizational Research Methods, Published on-line first. Available at https://doi.org/10.1177/1094428116669819. Murris, K. (2016) The Posthuman Child: Educational Transformation through Philosophy with Picturebooks. Routledge Contesting Early Childhood Series. Nelson, N.W. (2010) Language and Literacy Disorders: Infancy Through Adolescence. Boston, USA: Allyn & Bacon. Olofsson, A. & Neidersoe, J. (1999) Early Language Development and Kindergarten Phonological Awareness as Predictors of Reading Problems. Journal of Learning Disabilities 32:464–472. Olsson, L. M. (2012) Eventicizing CurriculumLearning to Read and Write Through Becoming a Citizen of the World. Journal of Curriculum Theorising 28, 1:88–107. Pedersen, H. & Pini, B. (2017) Educational Epistemologies and Methods in a More-ThanHuman World. Educational Philosophy and Theory 49, 11:1051–1054. Pennington, B. F. & Bishop, D.V. M. (2009) Relations Among Speech, Language and Reading Disorders. Annual Review of Psychology 60:283–306. Rack, J., Hulme, C., Snowling, M. J. & Wightman, J. (1994) The Role of Phonology in Young Children Learning to Read Words: The Direct Mapping Hypothesis. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 57:42–71. Schwarz,V. (2016) How to Find Gold. London: Walker Books. Snaza, N., Appelbaum, P., Bayne, S., Carlson, D., Morris, M., Rotas, N., Sandlin, J., Wallin, J., & Weaver, J. (2014) Towards a Posthumanist Education. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing 30, 2:39–55. Taylor, A. (2013) Reconfiguring the Natures of Childhood. Contesting Early Childhood Series. London: Routledge. Wallach, G. P. & Goldsmith, S. C. (1977) Language-Based Learning Disorder: Reading Is a Language, too! Journal of Language Disabilities 10, 3:178–183. Wellsby, M. & Pexman, P. M. (2014) Developing Embodied Cognition: Insights from Children’s Concepts and Language Processing. Frontiers in Psychology 5, 506:1–10.

Chapter 7

Chairs and questions at work in literacies Rose-Anne Reynolds with Joanne Peers

In this chapter Rose-Anne and Joanne trace dimensions of participation in a philosophical enquiry. In particular, they consider how the chairs work in the classroom when the visiting teacher Sara Stanley is reading aloud the story How to Find Gold (2016) by Viviane Schwarz.They offer a critical posthumanist analysis which engages with material-discursive entanglements in/out of the classroom: children, books, questions, chairs, carpet, thoughts, spoken and written words, student teachers observing, tree, light. These elements, because of their relationality and their mutual agency, are considered as important as the human subjects in this lesson when analysing ‘what is going on’. The authors resist following the children only and focus their attention on more than the teacherlearner verbal interaction when they analyse the philosophical enquiry. They also explore the reactions of student teachers who were observing this lesson, and how their questions about the story suggest that they have experienced and been taught about stories in a particular way – where the teacher mainly guided the discussion and there was a strong focus on the teacher-pupil relationship but not as much focus on the material (nonhuman bodies).Throughout this chapter, Rose-Anne and Joanne particularly draw attention to the coming into literacies play of the chairs, text and body-mind-matter of children and adults.

Modest witnessing In this chapter, we explore the material-discursive intra-actions between the human and more than human in the classroom with and through the chairs and the picturebook. Intra-action is a term developed by philosopher and quantum physicist Karen Barad (2007:139). Intra-action is conceptualised in contrast to ‘interaction’ – the former does not presume prior existence of independent entities or relata (Barad 2007:139). We choose to explore this story sharing as an event of material-discursive intra-action between children, other humans and more-than-humans (Barad 2007).This ‘flattened ontology’ calls on us to question the hierarchy that places humans at a distance of the world and as more important than anyone or anything else, and disrupts the power-producing binaries established in Western metaphysics that enable these conventional ways of being

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to be uncontested in classrooms and schools (see Chapter 2). Such questioning leads to the position that not only humans have agency and to explore what else might matter in literacy lessons. The notion of intra-action makes us think differently about what is going on in the classroom, who and what is empowered, and expands our sense of responsibility and accountability. Intra-action makes us reconsider how learning and knowing occurs ontologically, epistemologically and ethically. When material is seen as active ‘agent’, how is the discourse of knowledge construction and reality viewed more justly (Lenz Taguchi 2010)? In our chapter, we aim to analyse how the in-between spaces (rather than the subject or the material) can make us reimagine the literacy practice in a classroom. In the following section, we give some background to our practice of philosophical enquiry with children, a practice that has been critical for our professional development in (literacy) education. We have become aware that – along with most teachers – we are often focussed primarily on actions and behaviours, on what the humans are saying (and not saying) when engaged with children in philosophical enquiry. This is what most teachers are trained and expected to do. This book expresses concern about the limitations of exclusive attention to the human and asks what else is going on and how it might matter. In teaching, there is a tendency to look at the human subject rather than to observe events with their intra-active relationality and entanglements of material and human. In this chapter, we take a different approach to analysing an episode of philosophical enquiry. We choose to ‘witness’ the intra-actions between the human and nonhuman. Feminist biologist, friend and colleague of Barad, Donna Haraway (2008:5), refers to the more-than-human as “meaning-making” figure[s]’. This notion takes into account the material, such as the book, the chairs, the carpet etc. Haraway (2008) looks closely at the practice of ‘staying with the trouble’; she writes: ‘“trouble” is a significant word, coming from a French verb meaning “to stir up”, “to make cloudy’’,“to disturb”’ (Haraway 2016:1).Taylor (2013), who is inspired by the work of Haraway (2008), proposes that we should continue reconfiguring the human-centred ways of being and enter into troubling spaces where we remain curious about the ethical implications of only noticing the human and disqualifying and unjustly excluding the more-than-human entanglements. We argue that this way of noticing and paying attention allows for better articulation of an ethics of reaffirmation of the entanglement of the human and more than human. We try to keep troubling the process of observing what we expect (or hope) to see and notice entangled new ways of being and becoming. Haraway’s (1997) proposal for modest witnessing considers the privileges of witnesses and troubles the power of the witnesses in establishing facts or knowledge through observing or witnessing. Haraway (1997:24) adds that what is central to this form of witnessing’ is the virtue that guarantees that the modest witness is the legitimate and authorized ventriloquist for the object world, adding nothing from his mere opinions, from his biasing embodiment’. Nxumalo (2016) adds to Haraway’s (2008) modest witnessing and suggests ‘refiguring what is seen as mattering-presences’ in her form of documenting the encounters between

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the human and more-than-human. Nxumalo (2016) further describes modest witnessing as a messy practice because it interferes with everyday entanglements of teacher, learner, researcher and the more-than-human others. In other words, how do we observe and account for what is ‘taking place’ in an enquiry by considering the contradictions, leakages, resistances and hopeful potentialities that emerge. When viewed in this way, modest witnessing can bring into focus the power of moving beyond the self (Barad 2011; Dahlberg, Moss and Pence 2006; Haraway 2008; Murris 2016; Nxumalo 2016). Drawing on Nxumalo’s (2016) modest witnessing practices, which can be explained as not only witnessing human performativity, but also (as Barad would put it) tracing the morethan-human that is always already entangled with the human. Nxumalo (2016:3) refers to Haraway (1988) when explaining that modest witnessing is an epistemological and ontological perspective from which to bring a telling, or witnessing, of everyday pedagogical practices, whereby I do not sit in transcendence outside of that which I narrate, where I am not the sole (human and more-than-human) narrator of these stories, and where many unpredictable, unsettling and unresolved questions are thrown up. We write this chapter as modest witnesses by noticing the entanglements between the human and more than human and engage with the ‘unsettling’ questions thrown up, which remain unresolved. Working with the figure of a modest witness, we experiment with encounters within a philosophical enquiry in an early childhood setting. Nxumalo (2016) refers to this as putting to work what might reconfigure more-than-human becomings in early childhood practice. Our role as witnesses is to highlight leakages, hopeful possibilities and questions that emerge in the philosophical enquiry.

Philosophical enquiries with children – knowing/ becoming/changing Philosophy for Children (P4C) is an approach to teaching and learning developed in the 1970s by Matthew Lipman, Ann Sharp and their associates at the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children, at Montclair State University. It was originally conceived by Matthew Lipman in the 1960s as his response to his college students’ inability to think and express themselves creatively, critically and with confidence; he was concerned that the students ‘have been expected to learn philosophy but not do it’ (Lipman 1988:11). He developed a curriculum that would focus on teaching particular thinking skills and dispositions. The pedagogical approach of P4C is known as the Community of Enquiry. The Community of Enquiry process helps develop critical, creative, collaborative and caring thinking through communal dialogue, which is the basis for philosophical enquiries (Hannam and Echeverria 2009:13–19).

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In our experience, a P4C session usually involves a class or group of children and one or more adults, seated in a circle, working from a stimulus. This could be a picture book, story or picture.The group engages in a meaningful philosophical discussion based on questions they have created, arising from the stimulus. This process encourages the asking of open-ended philosophical questions; it develops listening and critical thinking skills; and allows for engaging in meaningful, empathetic dialogue (Stanley and Lyle 2017:55). It also encourages the ability to live with disagreement. It allows a conversation to be on-going and an opportunity to grapple with philosophical, ethical and moral dilemmas within a structured setting. According to Haynes (2014:463), ‘regardless of age or status, a principle of P4C is that all those taking part are valued equally in the collaborative dialogue and quests for truth’. In a country like South Africa, where the power difference between the adult and child in the classroom tends to be fixed, replicated and reproduced, this is transformative. P4C is a pedagogy that appreciates that the differences in the room based on age are affirmative, making this a very exciting way to work with children and adults as it challenges assumptions and stereotyping through the process. According to Murris (2013:250), stereotypes influence to what extent children are regarded as authorities and explains why little credibility is given to young speakers. Collective naturalised conceptions of child as unknowing, irrational and immature influence whether we regard educational relationships as symmetrical or asymmetrical. This can be described as ‘epistemic injustice’, a concept developed by Miranda Fricker, whereby somebody is wronged in their capacity specifically as a knower Fricker (2007). Braidotti (2002:158) reminds us that ‘difference has been based on relations of domination and exclusion, to be different from is to be less than’. A community of enquiry, which is inter and intra-generational (Haynes and Murris 2017), troubles adults’ dominant roles, roles that are often reinforced by the school, the parents and children themselves. Philosophical enquiry is not a simple activity, process or way of working, but an opportunity for problematising the ways in which, for example, we engage in literacy lessons in schools. In the philosophical enquiry session that is the focus of this book, Sara Stanley, as guest teacher, co-constructs the enquiry with the children, desks, chairs, materials. . . Imagine a teacher who acts as a co-enquirer, a participant that asks questions that ‘provoke[s] philosophical enquiry, without knowing the answers to the questions s/he poses; and facilitating only where appropriate, that is benefitting the community’s construction of ideas’ (Murris 2016:182). It is in this way that ‘P4C represents itself as a transformative philosophy of childhood and education, one that entails a fundamental reconfiguration of adult-child relationships and school ethics’ (Haynes 2014:464).

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Entangled moments Rose-Anne experiences communities of philosophical enquiry with children as a democratising pedagogy, because it troubles the established power relationships in the classroom. She works in the South African schooling system, which has its roots in a very specific view of the child. The child is regarded as someone who is to be dominated by the more powerful adult in the class, to be taught through transmission teaching and firmly within a developmental model – where the child is not seen as fully human. She finds it inspiring and challenging to be entangled with children/picturebooks/philosophical questions and philosophical enquiries in their becoming. Philosophy for/with children also makes it possible to be entangled with child as philosopher. It repositions and reimagines child/teacher and the material-discursive. Working as a class teacher in early years education, Joanne recognises that although there is pressure for a ‘best practice’ approach to teaching, her practice has always been in motion, rather than established. Influences of what counts as ‘quality’ lessons and education have at times limited the possibilities of meaningful encounters with children in her teaching. As a teacher, she believes that doing things differently is not merely about resisting what is expected. In her grade 2 classroom, Joanne has experienced how enquiry-based approaches, through picturebooks and other provocations, re-oriented her way of working with the curriculum. This is part of her reason for welcoming Sara into the classroom. Troubling the normalised way of transmitting knowledge, ticking boxes and assessments, she admits is not easy in the South African classroom. Joanne’s working with philosophical questioning and enquiry-based learning has become a necessary part of a more ethical way of working with the human and more-than-human intra-actions. She does not enter the classroom with a single identity as a teacher but with multiple identities, as she is a mother whose boys attend the school too. This forms part of her entanglement, as seen in the photograph stuck to her computer screen (see Figure 6.3 in Chapter 6). The use of How to Find Gold in this philosophical enquiry provokes engagement with various aspects of the book, including author, text, cover, story, language, events, characters and illustrations (Roche 2015:49), and we witness how this creates a space for the children to raise their own questions and to co-construct new knowledges democratically – for example, the engagement with gold as a concept, secrets and treasure.The material discursive and discursive entanglements of the author, the pages, illustrations etc., form part of the philosophical space in which children inquire through philosophical questioning. Putting children’s questions at the heart of a P4C session does not mean that P4C is learner or child-centred. For example, building on his critique of learnification in education, Biesta (2017) argues for more world-centredness, rather than learner-centredness. In her response to Biesta, Murris (2017) suggests that education is not only about world-centredness. She also queers the idea that education only includes humans (and only a small subset for that matter) and not the other-than-human. Haraway

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(2008) proposes the idea of ‘worlding’, which seeks to do justice to the intraactivity between the human and more than human. Common worlding suggests that childhood experiences are not separated from the rest of the world but need to be seen as always already entangled with the everything else and as part of the world. This is not to place childhood experiences at the centre of the world but to recognise that our practice in schools should be explicitly contradicting humanist binaries, such as nature versus culture. Another way of looking at this concept of common worlding is to think about how we can trace the entanglements that are always already there, but are often unjustly overlooked, as mentioned in the form of modest witnessing. Thoughts and thinking can be understood differently using critical posthumanism as a navigational tool (Braidotti 2013:5). Sara Stanley’s theorypractice of storyworlding offers an exciting framework for taking up Haraway’s ideas in classrooms. The focus on concepts is vital in a philosophical enquiry as it shifts the attention from defining concepts to exploring how they are lived and how they work. How then are these leakages of newer ideas witnessed through entanglements? It is the role of the facilitator or, as Haynes and Kohan suggest, the “difficultator” (see Chapter 11), to move concepts from being thought, as just being in the humans and child-humans, to intra-acting with the images in the book. The enquiry moves, for example, through how the children are intra-acting with the floor and how entangled material-discursive realities inform what is being discussed, how it is being discussed and the new that is produced. We are not just interested in the idea of including objects and materiality in educational research, but regard matter as part of the agency we usually only ascribe to humans. Barad (2013:16) challenges our thinking and suggests that, ‘[m]atter doesn’t move in time. Matter doesn’t evolve in time. Matter does time. Matter materializes and enfolds different temporalities.’ Sara Stanley (2012:3) is a philosophical play pioneer who believes that classrooms should be places where ‘children are encouraged to take ownership of thoughts and ideas, where their voices are not only listened to and respected but also challenged’. On the occasion in question, Sara Stanley’s brief for this lesson was to facilitate philosophical enquiry for a class of grade 2 children who were experienced at philosophising. Sara was demonstrating the P4C lesson for a small group of Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) Foundation phase1 student teachers from the University of Cape Town. The purpose of this was for the students to observe a philosophical enquiry. It was also a good opportunity to create research data.The research project’s objective was to investigate how human and nonhuman bodies’ spacetime entanglement works in a literacy lesson (see Chapter 1).

Subjects and objects entangled in a philosophical enquiry In a philosophical enquiry, it is common practice for participants to sit in a circle, either on chairs, the mat, the carpet or the ground. This deliberate strategy

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Figure 7.1 Chair with chair bag.

often changes how the talking, learning, thinking and listening happen in a classroom. For this lesson, Sara placed in a circle the chairs with metal legs and arms, wooden seats and armrests, before the children came into the class for their lesson.When the children walked in, they sat on the chairs.We agree with Olsson (2009:37) who suggests that ‘in a pedagogical environment as possible event children, teachers and even the rooms and furniture find themselves in a continuous process of becoming’. Before Sara’s lesson, the children were accustomed to working with each other and the furniture in a similar way. If the children or the class teacher felt that it would be better to face one another for a lesson, or for a change of visual perspective in the classroom, they would sit in a big rectangle, leaving the centre of the mat open for free play or other games. Often, the furniture in the classroom would have no set arrangement. The children and the teacher would see the chairs or tables as part of the learning and not as a hindrance. If children were working in groups or with partners and chose to position themselves in a different space in the room, they would pick up a chair or move a table, including sitting outside the room. Generally, in this school and others, children would associate the chair bag as a symbol of ownership of the chair. In other words, children might be heard using words like, ‘my chair’, ‘my place’ or ‘my spot’. This is not the case in this enquiry. Children enter the room for the

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lesson with Sara and do not check the chair bags before sitting, which is significant. The teacher believes that this shows how the chairs are part of the learning in the room and not being otherised by human ownership or power.This entanglement of present and past intra-action with the material in the room affects the lesson. Barad’s agential realism challenges some of our habitual thinking in education. She argues that ‘in an agential realist account, matter does not refer to a fixed substance; rather matter is substance in its intra-active becoming – not a thing but a doing, a congealing of agency’ (Barad 2007:151). So the chairs that were placed in a circle for the children to sit on, next to, slide off-and-back-onto are not significant in and of themselves, but become notable through the intraactions with Sara, the story being read, ideas being generated, thoughts being spoken and the bodies leaning in and touching them. These desks are not usually in a circle, though, and so it matters what ‘different temporalities’ the chairs enfold in a circle (Barad 2013:16). During the lesson, the materials and furniture in the classroom are several times repositioned as the playful exploration of the story unfolds. There is only one copy of the picturebook How to Find Gold (2016) by Viviane Schwarz in the classroom. Sara wants the children to see the pictures as the book is read;

Figure 7.2 Bird’s eye view of the circle.

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she engages the children in story sharing. We acknowledge the intra-actions between children, the carpet, the book, Sara, the pages of the book and the images being shared as well as Sara’s voice as she reads the story . . . AND, AND . . . infinite entanglements. The guest teacher, Sara Stanley, brings the picturebook How to Find Gold into the class, to use in this philosophical enquiry. She has worked with Viviane Schwarz’s books before in early years classrooms and often intuitively knows what makes a good picture book for storyworlding. She describes such a text as ‘the ultimate escape and doorway to deeper thinking about the experiences we dream of, wish for and may have the fortune or misfortune, of experiencing’ (Stanley 2012:163). At the beginning of the lesson Sara and the children play ‘introductory’ games, which work with concepts in the book, such as ‘secrets’ (see Chapter 8). Sara sets the tone for how she intends to work with the book and as an example of her Philosophy by Children, which is different from Philosophy for Children. Sara is an expert in what she calls ‘philosophical play’: ‘The focus . . . is the rhetoric of the imaginary, and its capacity to use play as a resource for philosophical enquiry’ (Stanley and Lyle 2017:53). Before Sara shares the story, she invites the children to sit on the chairs that arranged in a circle on the mat. Together they form a circle: Sara, the childhumans2 and more-than-humans, and the chairs.We wonder what is created by/with/through the human and nonhuman participants’ bodies and their intra-actions: floor, chairs, books, lights in the ceiling and the sunlight reflecting off the classroom window, insects crawling in the carpet and the closed classroom door. The student teachers peer and glance, with some scribbling in notebooks perched on their knees or held in their hands.The camera, GoPro and iPad are also part of the entanglement and are all directed towards the bodies of the human participants, trying to ‘capture’ what is (‘really’) going on in the room, as educational research often prescribes or recommends (see Chapter 6). In our research project, our often re-turning to the video-recordings as authors and collaboratively with the other researchers, created new insights, some of which are reported on in this book. What it produced for us, for example, is the realisation that all these intra-actions (also with the cameras) are more than a metaphorical or material enactment of community. In the story, Anna and Crocodile set off on an adventure to find gold. They decide to keep this a secret from everyone else. Anna likes the feeling that it will be dangerous to find gold, and they decide to search for sunken gold, as that will be even more difficult to find. Crocodile draws a map of the whole world, and Anna places an ‘X’ on it – to show where the gold is. Anna gets the boat and they set off on their adventure. They set out to sea and when they see a great storm they decide that is where the gold is and dive right in. . . As we recall the lesson and watch and review the three video footages of the classroom events many times, it gradually dawns on us how the chairs are engaged in the story, reading along with Sara and the children as it were. We focus our analysis on the intra-actions between material, the human and the more than human, including ourselves, as we analyse the ‘data’ in our

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particular critical posthuman way. We choose to move away from the anthropocentric focus – that is, the humanist assumption that learning in this literacy classroom (and classrooms in general) is just happening between the humans. At the risk of sounding absurd – the chairs are engaged in the story, because in a relational ontology – the relationality creates the human and more-thanhuman. The difference between human and nonhuman bodies does not exist prior to their relations and are human made categories (the discursive).To illustrate: two children are sitting on two chairs next to Sara, the rest of the children are on the mat, some feet/shoes side by side, some children bouncing on their bottoms are whispering to each other, loud exclamations as they are looking for humanist explanations or are intrigued by how the story unfolds. Sara not only responds by asking questions about their reactions, but even pauses turning the pages of the book, in this way not only playing with philosophical concepts

Figure 7.3 A nna with Crocodile on her back.

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(such as ‘secret’), but playing with time too, slowing down the reading of/with the book.We witness this when one of the children gets his book from his chair bag to show the monster squid in his book (Figure 7.5). Some months after the lesson, Sara and Viviane, the author and illustrator of the picturebook, both living in the UK, meet to have a conversation about the project and about the book and to find out more about Viviane’s own ideas about how the book came about. In this intra-view, Viviane Schwarz explains to Sara that she is very uncomfortable with terraced houses. She calls them ‘a wall, a buffer zone, the people don’t sit in the front garden and have cups of tea, but they all have back gardens, but you can’t get to them’. Viviane draws the houses in her book on the page where Anna is carrying Crocodile, where they are trying to decide if gold is heavier than a crocodile. On/in/beyond this particular page there are many entangled secrets, further explored in the next chapter. In the literacy lesson itself, we suggest that the chairs, behind and around the children, form a barrier, buffer zone or wall, between the children and Sara; and the other humans and material on the outer side of it (the student teachers, the class teacher, and the crew filming the lesson, including Karin on the floor recording with her iPad). How might we analyse the relationality between chairs and children in this enquiry? Taylor and Giuni (2012) emphasise Donna Haraway’s (2008) use of ‘relationality’ instead of ‘relationship’. They argue that the noun ‘relationship’ often assumes two subjects (as in ‘interaction’) whereas relationality includes the more-than-human (as in ‘intra-action’). They propose that this shift can create mutual transformation. Inspired by Barad, Lenz-Taguchi (2010:43) proposes that discourses are intertwined and intra-acting ‘with the agency of all other bodies, materials and artefacts in the world, with no clear-cut boundaries between them’. Kuby, Gutshall Rucker and Kirchofer (2015:394) note that Barad’s notion of intra-action makes it possible to move away from predicted outcomes and offers opportunities for creating different knowledges. Instead of noticing, for example, children’s ‘participation with the teacher’ in this enquiry, a material-discursive analysis opens up new avenues to explore the concept of ‘participation’ through the inclusion of the nonhuman, like the chairs for example. Barad’s notion of intra-action does justice to the connections between the human and more-than-human in space and time that are always already ‘there’, but are maybe invisible or inaudible to the human senses, for example: the children, the carpet, the chairs, the light, the cameras the tree outside the window, the moon, gravity and the national curriculum ad infinitum. Including not only the discursive, but also the material (across space and time) in our observations, changes how the concept ‘participation’ works in the classroom.

Beyond human social practices – becoming with and through chairs/questions/story In the transcripts below we draw attention to the way in which Sara uses questioning and how they work in this community of philosophical enquiry.

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Figure 7.4 T he giant squid.

The way we work with and through transcripts draws on multiliteracies and New Literacy Studies but differs from them in that we are not reading them as ‘human-centric’ (Kuby and Gutshall Rucker 2016:6). Our analysis focuses on the in-between, what is happening in the intra-actions between the words and the books, chairs, children, humans and the literacies emerging. The way Sara asks the questions and how the children ask questions is important as it is part of a philosophical move and it certainly matters what kinds of questions are asked in a literacy lesson and who asks them. There are no preformed, prewritten or predetermined questions in P4C and Sara’s Philosophy by Children. Rather, the questions generate further questions and then again, open up even more questions. The focus is not on answers, although it would be wrong to say that they do not matter. In the search for answers to questions that matter (for the children), new questions e/merge. What ‘facilitates’ this process is both human and nonhuman. Instead of focusing on the meaning of the picturebook, the focus shifts to the intra-action between humans and material having ‘agentic qualities’ (Kuby and Gutshall Rucker 2016:15). During the story sharing session, when they get to the page with the image of the giant squid (Figure 7.4). there is a discussion about whether squid have teeth or a beak.The way Sara asks the question about the beak – there is a tentativeness about the questioning, she is not presuming the children do not know, she is asking them presuming they could know as equal partners in knowledge production (see also Chapter 8). Her philosophical practice assumes a different view of child, a child who is already capable. Her practice also assumes a different view of knowledge. In the enquiry with the children, for example, Sara suggests ‘we’ look that up – so the focus is moved from the student knowing,

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or the teacher/facilitator knowing the answer, to a more collaborative venture of finding out together, highlighting that knowledge is always situated, shifting, tentative and becoming. And it is not fixed, universal or static, or only located in the human. Sara:

I don’t know if you know anything about squid’s teeth, but they are like a beak. Jordan: It’s a beak. Sara: Yes, that’s right! And they are very strong and can break an arm. I’m not sure if you can call them teeth? We may need to look that up, wouldn’t we? Jordan: [shaking his head] and speaking loudly and with confidence: No we don’t have to, because I’m a marine biologist. Jordan asserts that he actually knows more on this subject than Sara and quite confidently and playfully declares he is a marine biologist. Sara does not say ‘you cannot be it’; rather she responds: Sara: Jordan: Jordan: Tshepo:

Who taught you to be a marine biologist? Well I learned from books and my mom and dad. And I’m a bug guy. And I’m an engineer. [Holding his hand in a thumbs up position using his thumb to point at his chest] Nothando: I’m a doctor. [Holding her finger up to her face.] Sara: How many patients have you operated on? I’m excited. . . . I’m wondering can we learn what we are going to be just by reading books? Rasheed: Mmmm maybe? Jordan: Sometimes. Tshepo: Only if you do what you want to do like making experiments. I want to make lots of experiments and I am going to make robots with powers. That’s what I am going to do and I’ll give them away to people who need them. That sounds amazing and if you did one could you give it to me? Sara: Will you give it to me because I read you the story? I will give it to you for free. Tshepo: Will you make any money from them? Sara: When Jordan declares himself a marine biologist, Sara responds by enquiring further through questioning. The second question is philosophical, the third is perhaps more playful than philosophical, although such distinctions are not simple or straightforward. Sara then turns the page and the page she has turned to reveals the treasure, the gold. The children get very excited, their bodies are moving, they are

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gesticulating with their hands, talking to their friends, pointing with their hands and they start identifying all the golden objects out loud: gold monsters, golden person, golden bird, golden bicycle, golden dog, golden, deep sea monster – and a golden monster. . . When Sara reads golden monster out aloud, it becomes evident that Jordan, who is sitting on the mat, seems to be making tentacular connections with other books and the real world. It becomes clear he is looking for something. He first looks at his chair, then moves away from the group tentatively and starts looking for his book, which is in his chair bag hanging on the back of his chair. Then when Sara who has continued reading says: ‘What have they found?’ he turns back and, while the children and Sara are listing the items of treasure, he looks in his chair bag and pulls his own book out. He then goes back to the mat, to where he was sitting. He now starts paging through the book, saying to whoever will listen that he will find the monster and then the girl next to him starts paging through the book too and the boy behind joins in. By then, there are five hands paging through the book. Jordan: [Looking up at Sara who is still reading to the class says]: I can show you the deep sea monster. Sara: That’s amazing! Can we have a quick look? [Jordan continues paging rapidly through the book.] Sara: [Asks to the class]: What’s your name again? Sir marine biologist. [A child corrects her and says his first name, this seems to spur the other two children on who are sitting next to him, and they help him quickly find the page with the squid on it.] Most of the children are now turned towards him waiting for him to find the page. Sara: [speaking more loudly]: Jordan, Jordan, come sit here then. [Sara points to the floor close to her. He steps carefully over a classmate and brings the book to her, standing, not sitting, with the book spread open across his chest.] Sara: Wow! Show all your friends. [Jordan turns the book around across his chest so his classmates can see the picture.] [Jordan then turns the book and holds it up on the page with the squid on it, above his head for all the children to see.] Sara: [Asks the children] Does that look like ours? Some children replying together: Wow yes! Sara: [says to Jordan]: Can you keep that over there? [pointing at a chair just to the right of her]. Open on that page? [Jordan bends to carefully position the book on the chair, so that it doesn’t fall off.]

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Sara:

[says to Jordan]: We may need that later, thank you for finding that, Jordan. [Jordan puts the book down, turns around, steps carefully over his classmate, to where he was sitting, sits on his knees and Sara continues reading the story.]

We now unpack the way in which the physical space is entangled with the discursive (the transcript above). In literacies research, we tend to focus only on what teacher and children are saying (or not saying), but paying attention to the material shows that a repositioning of agency in human and more-than-human bodies is warranted (and the material includes the questions Sara is asking). Being a democratic teacher is not necessarily about what you say (and can be said), but what you do as well, and how the ‘two’ (the material-discursive) bring a certain practice into existence that includes and excludes. The use of physical space – where Jordan is sitting, when he gets up and goes to his chair bag. When Sara includes his book and knowledges, by suggesting he place it on a chair next to her, these are forms of democratic practice and expressions of the ethos of a community of enquiry.There are infinite other intra-active entanglements we could trace in these few moments of one philosophical enquiry. It seems as if Sara is connecting with what the children desire. Olsson (2009:99; our emphasis) warns that when desire is defined as production, the teacher first and foremost listens to and detects what kind of desires are at stake in the classroom. These desires are then not seen as children’s needs, but rather, they are looked at as very intense forces that are the starting out point for all learning.

Figure 7.5 T he boy, the chair and the book.

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Jordan is encouraged to bring his book to the front, by being allowed to show his version of the squid in his book to the class. With the human and nonhuman bodies standing alongside each other: teacher, child, two books and Sara’s encouragement through her bodily movements and her words, all help to disrupt the adult/child binary. In the present, past and future of these moments, knowledges are intra-acting, including the desire expressed through their own questioning and the knowledge children bring to this encounter and are creating together. The children who are helping him find the page increase the speed of their efforts when Sara starts calling him – as they become more excited about getting to the right page. In ‘this’ moment, ‘the efficacy and the vibrancy of human actions may be the least vital component in an agentic assemblage’ (Jackson and Mazzei 2016:94) as the two books play a significant role in this assemblage. And so do the chairs. After these moments described above, Sara tells Jordan to ‘show all your friends and can you keep that there [pointing at the chair near hers] open on that page’. This material-discursive action becomes an open invitation for Jordan (and for others who might take up the invitation differently, maybe in years to be/come) to voluntarily stand up and pick up the book and show everyone. The book clearly calls him and invites him to respond and think.

What counts as literacies in entangled intra-actions? After the demonstration lesson, the student teachers3 were invited for a feedback session with Sara to explore how the lesson worked. We have seen in the Introduction to this book, how feminist philosophers such as Karen Barad and Donna Haraway have been influenced by poststructuralists such as Michel Foucault and Judith Butler. The latter also take account of the materiality of bodies in their philosophies, however their discussion of materiality is restricted to human bodies (Barad 2007:61–66). Drawing on Foucault, Kerryn Dixon (2014:2) explains that the state creates frameworks for ‘different power relations to operate’. In South Africa, Apartheid was one of these frameworks. Through Apartheid, new forms of knowledge and dominant discourses came about because of the implementation of state power (Dixon 2014). All discourses have power to regulate human bodies as they create boundaries and thereby include and exclude. Historically, discourses of language, quality, knowledge and representation have impacted unjustly on the position of the child (Dahlberg, Moss and Pence 2006:38). These discourses act powerfully, in ways that inform teachers and schools practice and the way in which they work with children. Considering these historical experiences and powerful discourses, we suggest that they are entangled in the way the student teachers responded in the feedback session. Their questions and responses are not based exclusively on this one lesson, but include their lived experience of being learners themselves at South African schools and now also as Higher Education students. In

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critical posthumanism, the past and future are threaded through one another in ‘the present’ (Barad 2007).Threaded through their questions are their imagined own future classrooms and desires, as well as their past embodied experiences of schooling. Sara asks the student teachers what their thoughts about her reading of the story. She asks: In what ways have you always been read stories to or how do you consider . . . or what’s the importance of reading a story or did it matter that I was letting them talk? Or should you read a story and get them to listen quietly? What’s the general opinion in education maybe that you’ve had or in your experience? How do we read stories with children? Any views on how we read stories to children? There is a pause and silence in the room then one student teacher who took notes during the lesson, refers to her notes and then asks Sara (without looking at her notes again). Student Teacher: I thought the comments were very different that you made and the questions you were asking, I wrote down here actually firstly the time you spent so you spent, a lot more time than I thought a teacher would spend on each page and the kinds of questions you were asking were not comprehension type questions, like, what do you think is going to happen next? It wasn’t really that kind of thing, it wasn’t quizzing them on . . . on how much of the plot they were picking up or how much they could predict would happen it was more like – If you had treasure would you bury it? And why would you bury it? And if you bury it and don’t spend it is it still a treasure? Is it still yours? Who does it belong to? So the questions were way more about like philosophical content if you know what I mean rather than what’s happening in the book. Sara replied: But was it comprehension? Student Teacher: It was as well. As well so it was another way of getting children to engage Sara: with – how do I know you’re understanding it? . . . you know if I’m asking those questions and even though I wasn’t directly saying what’s just happened what’s going to happen next – all those things were coming out weren’t they? The student teacher is commenting that the questions Sara is asking are more philosophical than the typical kinds of comprehension questions they are required to ask as student teachers and those they were asked when they were at school.

146  Rose-Anne Reynolds with Joanne Peers

The student then makes a claim that the philosophical content is separate from ‘what’s happening in the book’. This is different to what is happening in this lesson and it seems more to be the case that, as Haynes and Murris (2017:177) suggest, ‘for the educator to philosophize with the children requires direct entry into the world of the text and simultaneously recognising that the text has agency’. The student teachers who witnessed this lesson are now leaving with questions about what they will be required to teach and what that means. How does comprehension differ when it is not only about comprehending what is occurring between the humans, but the more than humans in the classroom? How are the demands of a curriculum met with a curriculum that privileges only human ways of knowing? What does it mean when there are (plural) literacies at work in the classroom? The questions and stirring of working with children in a philosophical way is a necessary troubling. We witness this questioning about comprehension and stories from students as possibilities for further encounters for their future practice as teachers.We witness the student teachers encountering a different way of working picturebooks in comparison to normative ways – for example, the amount of time spent on a page of the picturebook. We see resonances of interrupting an expected way of using a picturebook. In their noticing of how Sara worked, how then are they going to respond as teachers? Knowing the curriculum design and requirements for which these student teachers will have to fulfil, what will be privileged in their lessons?

Thinking through and with data In this chapter, through detailed descriptions of bodily movements and transcripts of a few moments in the philosophical enquiry, we have engaged in experimental educational research, moving away from following only the human (child and adult). By trying to do more justice to the agential role the material plays in story sharing, possibilities are opened up to witness how the questions and chairs perform as part of a material-discursive assemblage. Our analysis of Jordan the marine biologist also throws up some unresolved questions. For example, what are his literacy desirings which Kuby and Gutshall Rucker (2016:5) describe as ‘moments and intra-actions of students-with-materials-space-time’.What about the kind of participation that the philosophical enquiry allowed, as he brought his book to be part of the ever-changing materials that the children were intra-acting with throughout the lesson? We have adopted a non-hierarchical ‘flattened ontology’ (Lenz Taguchi 2010) in our analysis of how the chairs work in one literacy lesson. Critical posthumanist perspectives ‘demand different ways of producing and analyzing data as well as writing up research’ (Kuby and Gutshall Rucker 2016:15). Our different readings of the classroom question Western anthropocentrism and materialise a shift in power and a more just reading of child’s capabilities, without locating competencies in the child, but as a case of rendering-each-other-capable (Haraway 2016). We have focused on Sara Stanley’s philosophical play practice(s) in this literacy lesson and commented on how what she was ‘doing’ raised particular questions

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for the student teachers who were watching. The purpose of this chapter was to bring to the fore the materiality of the chairs, questions, thoughts, discussion, books, carpets, texts, picturebook and images to show that these ‘are’ not just for humans, but form part of the agency of the material-discursive assemblage which constituted this particular literacies lesson.

Notes 1 The Foundation phase in South Africa stretches between ages 5 and 9. 2 Child humans are not considered fully-human but are subhuman in developmental discourses that are hegemonic in educational theory and practices. Rollo (2016:2) uses the term misopedy, which refers ‘to the denigration and subordination of child and childhood’. 3 See the student teachers at the back of the class sitting on tables in Figure 9.2 in Chapter 9.

References Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press. Barad, K. (2011) Nature’s Queer Performativity. Qui Parle 19, 2:121–158. Barad, K. (2013) Ma(r)king Time: Material Entanglements and Re-memberings: Cutting Together-Apart In P. R. Carlile, N. Davide, A. Langley and H. Tsoukas (Eds.) How Matter Matters: Objects,Artifacts and Materiality in Organisation Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Biesta, G. (2017) Touching the Soul? Exploring an Alternative Outlook for Philosophical Work With Children and Young People. Childhood and Philosophy 13, 28:415–452. Braidotti, R. (2002) Metamorphoses:Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Braidotti, R. (2013) The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity. Dahlberg, G., Moss, P. & Pence, A. (2006) Beyond Quality in Early Childhood Education and Care: Postmodern Perspectives, 1st edition. London: Falmer Press. Dixon, K. (2014) Making Space for Literacy Learning: The Impact of Spatial and Temporal Organization in Constructing a Writing Subject in the Early Years. Namibia CPD Journal for Educators 1–18. Fricker, A. (2007) Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hannam, P. & Echeverria, E. (2009) Philosophy With Teenagers: Nurturing a Moral Imagination for the 21st Century. London: Continuum. Haraway, D. (1988) Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism as a Site of Discourse on the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies 14, 3:575–599. Haraway, D. (1997) Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouseª: Feminism and Technoscience. London: Routledge. Haraway, D. (2008) When Species Meet: Posthumanities. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Haraway, D. (2016) Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press. Haynes, J. (2014) Already Able and Equal to Speak. In S. Robson and S. F. Quinn (Eds.) Routledge International Handbook of Young Children’s Thinking and Understanding. London: Routledge, 463–475.

148  Rose-Anne Reynolds with Joanne Peers Haynes, J. & Murris, K. (2017) Readings and Readers of Texts in Philosophy for Children. In M. Rollins, J. Haynes and K. Murris (Eds.) Routledge International Handbook on Philosophy for Children. London: Routledge, 171–179. Jackson, A. Y. & Mazzei, L. A. (2016) Thinking With an Agentic Assemblage in Posthuman Inquiry In C. A. Taylor and C. Hughes (Eds.) Posthuman Research Practices in Education. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Kuby, C. & Gutshall Rucker, T. (2016) Go Be a Writer! Expanding the Curricular Boundaries of Literacy Learning With Children. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Kuby, C., Gutshall Rucker, T. & Kirchofer, J. (2015) ‘Go Be a Writer’: Intra-Activity With Materials, Time and Space in Literacy Learning. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy 15, 3:394–419. Lenz Taguchi, H. (2010) Going Beyond the Theory/Practice Divide in Early Childhood Education: Introducing an Intra-Active Pedagogy. Contesting Early Childhood Series. London: Routledge. Lipman, M. (1988) Philosophy Goes to School. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Murris, K. (2013) The Epistemic Challenge of Hearing Child’s Voice. In J. Haynes and K. Murris (Eds.) Child as Educator Special Issue: Studies in Philosophy and Education 32, 2:245–259. Murris, K. (2016) The Posthuman Child: Educational Transformation Through Philosophy With Picturebooks. Contesting Early Childhood Series. London: Routledge. Murris, K. (2017) Learning as ‘Worlding’: De-Centring Gert Biesta’s ‘Non-egological’ Education. Childhood and Philosophy 13, 28:453–469. Nxumalo, F. (2016) Storying Practices of Witnessing: Refiguring Quality in Everyday Pedagogical Encounters. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood 17, 1:39–53. Olsson, L. M. (2009) Movement and Experimentation in Young Children’s Learning: Deleuze and Guattari in Early Childhood Education. London: Routledge. Roche, M. (2015) Developing Children’s Critical Thinking Through Picturebooks. New York: Routledge. Rollo, T. (2016) Feral Children: Settler Colonialism, Progress, and the Figure of the Child. Settler Colonial Studies 8, 1:1–20. Schwarz,V. (2016) How to Find Gold. London: Walker Books. Stanley, S. (2012) Why Think? Philosophical Play From 3–11. London: Continuum. Stanley, S. & Lyle, S. (2017) Philosophical Play in the Early Years Classroom In M. Rollins, J. Haynes and K. Murris (Eds.) Routledge International Handbook on Philosophy for Children. London: Routledge, 53–63. Taylor, A. (2013) Reconfiguring the Natures of Childhood. Contesting Early Childhood Series. London: Routledge. Taylor, A. & Giuni, M. (2012) Common Worlds: Reconceptualising Inclusion in Early Childhood Communities. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood 13, 2:108–119.

Chapter 8

Digging and diving for treasure Erasures, silences and secrets Karin Murris and Judy Crowther, with Sara Stanley

In this chapter, and guided by many conversations with Sara Stanley, Karin and Judy adopt Baradian methodologies of spatial and temporal diffraction. They partly follow the human in their analyses and they pay attention to ‘nothing’ and traces of erasure in a grade 2 South African ‘classroom’. Disrupting western metaphysics of presence, they dig and dive for treasure with Barad’s concept of the void and playthink with the concept ‘secret’. Through a Deleuzian rhizomatic logic of experience, Karin and Judy deterritorialise ‘secret’ and speculate how the concept can do de/colonising work by drawing on the natural sciences. They wonder about two images and what is not ‘here’, kept secret, not visible to the (human) eye or audible to the (human) ear, and draw some implications for de/colonising teaching and educational research.

A minute particle (with wave-like behaviour) This chapter is a non-chronological sharing of a minute particle (with wavelike behaviour)1 of the multiplicity of intra-ventions that took hold of them/ us in their/our space-time-mattering journey (Barad 2007), in a room ‘full’ of human bodies: grade 2 children, their teacher, a guest teacher (Sara), student teachers, a camera man, his assistant and Karin filming on her iPad. We pay attention to the infinite amount of nonhuman bodies of different scales in and beyond the classroom.The creation of research data ‘started’ in the classroom on 16 March 2016: our bodies, being-with, thinking-with human and nonhuman bodies: colonised land, tables, walls with posters, teacher’s desk, carpet, GoPro hanging from the ceiling, wind, iPad, cell phones, paper, pens, koki pens,2 chairs, books, national curriculum guidance, atmosphere, school policies and values, and so forth. The ‘intra-ventions’, as opposed to ‘interventions’, indicates mutual relationality. We do not regard our decisions as coming from us as autonomous, individual agents, as if we exist independently in spacetime before our intraactions with other body-mind-matters ‘in’ the world (Barad 2007). Sara is the guest teacher of the literacy lesson. Karin is the research project organiser, stretched out on the floor most of the time, filming at the height of the

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legs of both children and nonhuman (chairs) (see Figure 6.4 in Chapter 6). Judy’s body is not physically present but has been entangled with the book project before, during and since the filming (that is the nature of quantum entanglement). Her house near the beach is also the site of our intra-view with Sara. Interviewing, teaching, researching, they are all intra-ventions, what Barad (in interview with Kleinman 2012:77) would call agential cuts – specific intra-actions and always within relationships for which we are responsible and accountable. The neologism ‘intra-action’ at the heart of Barad’s agential realism expresses the kind of relational ontology that is characteristic of critical posthumanism (as opposed to a substance ontology; see Chapter 3). Posthumanism is not about a doing away with the self – the human certainly does exist, but the crux is to re-think how relationality (intra-actions and diffractions) brings subjectivity into existence ontologically. Human and nonhuman bodies do not stand in ‘a relationship of externality to each other’ (Barad 2007:152), spatially or temporally, therefore, agency does not belong to the human alone who acts upon the nonhuman, but to entanglements of human and nonhuman bodies. Matter is not ‘mere stuff ’, an inanimate given that needs a supplement (e.g., spirit) ‘to put it in motion, to enliven it, to give it agency’ (Barad 2013:17). For educators, this means that we are not at an ontological distance or ‘outside’ (even when not physically in the classroom as in Judy’s case) to what is (was) happening in the classroom, for example, judging Sara’s lesson as a ‘good’ literacy lesson’ (or not) by using ‘external’ criteria prescribed by the national curriculum documents about comprehension (Murris 2016). As teacher-researchers, we are part (ontologically) of the phenomena we investigate, and this of course has implications for subjectivity and what knowledge is. In a relational ontology, there are no absolute insides or outsides; we are ourselves part of the ‘apparatus’ that measures (e.g., the conceptual frameworks we use, or that use us). In that sense, we create knowledge (but ‘never’ out of ‘nothing’) and participate in, and are response-able for, (re)configuring the material-discursive world (a world-­ making, worlding practices; see Haraway 2016). In our chapter, we adopt the kind of ‘slow scholarship’ outlined in Part I, re-turning and re-turning again and again to the ‘same’ text, creating ‘thicker’ understandings about diffraction, secrets, the void and nothingness in the context of a literacy lesson in a grade 2 South African postcolonial classroom. We partly follow the human in our analysis, but also shift the attention to what is not ‘here’, that is, not visible to the (human)3 eye, or audible to the (human) ear, and draw some implications for de/colonising education. We speculate about realities that are, and are not, present at the same time in the ‘here’ and ‘now’ of the grade 2 South African classroom – a long time ago (and not so long ago and always with an eye to the future(s)).We experiment with Barad’s concept of the void and playthink4 with the concept ‘secret’. To illustrate how agential realism can de/colonise education (without anthropocentrism), we ‘travel hop’ (see Chapter 4) inspired by one photo of the classroom (see Figure 8.1 – same as Figure 4.1 in Chapter 4) and a map of the

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Figure 8.1 The ‘classroom’.

school (Figure 8.7). We have also scattered (diffracted) throughout this chapter some images from Viviane Schwarz’s picturebook How to Find Gold (2016).

The ‘classroom’ In our remembering what ‘happened’, we are fully implicated as we select ‘examples’ and trace some threads of our entanglements. This also includes ‘our’ and ‘their’ futures including the nonhuman – and that is the reality of what quantum entanglement (Barad 2007) means in the material-discursive theory-practice of the posthuman teacher-researcher. Let us first re-turn to how a picturebook, a material-discursive nonhuman body, affected us/them/it and provoked us/them/it to playthink. We re-turn to the ‘classroom’ (see Figure 8.1) and use ‘classroom’ with quotation marks. We are inspired by Julie Allan’s (2011:158) suggestion of using ‘invisible quotation marks’ to, for example, ‘ “the classroom”, “the child”, “the researcher” ’. She points out that these texts are never politically innocent and presuppose binaries that include and exclude. We do not want to keep this fact a secret and make it visible, hence our use of ‘classroom’- with quotation marks (see also Chapter 1).

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We wonder about the things we are missing, not feeling, hearing, or seeing with our human senses in this grade 2 ‘classroom’. We attend to laughter, affect and atmosphere in the ‘classroom’ and experiment by focusing on more than the human as meaning-makers. How can we sense and make visible what makes us laugh, and the atmosphere in the ‘classroom’ that makes that and other things possible (e.g., a sense of community)? Of course, trying to find out more about the ephemeral is like searching for things in the dark. What secrets do teachers keep? Artists keep secrets too. And so does a picturebook. For example, How to Find Gold (2016) contains many secrets (also) kept by the author and illustrator Viviane Schwarz, invisible to the human eye, but materialised nevertheless into artwork that ‘has’ complexity, ambiguity and depth. Unlike books specially produced for teaching reading, we embrace picturebooks that act as ‘a kind of miniature ecosystem’ (Lewis 2001:48). To illustrate this, we shine torchlight on what is hidden on one page of a picturebook. The photo in Figure 8.2 shows the material-discursive expression of one sub group’s enquiry during the residential workshop described in Chapter 5. In the previous chapter, Rose-Anne and Joanne describe the row of terraced houses and the secrets the back gardens keep (see Figure 7.3). In the intra-view with Sara,Viviane talks about the lorry on the page and how it made her scared (‘it nearly ran me off the street when I tried to cycle’). Highlighted by the torch, the nonhuman bodies on the page express and hide anxiety at the very same time.Viviane describes ‘all the things

Figure 8.2 Secret fears.

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that are slightly threatening’ on the page and that ‘no one knows about’: ‘the dark underpass’, ‘the dog running away’ (she is allergic to dogs) and the bench where she had a ‘massive panic attack under a particular tree’. The way Viviane talks about the lorry (and traffic in general) makes her feel scared sometimes, connects strikingly with what Viviane tells Sara below about traffic lights and how they make her feel safe.

Polysensory events: moving beyond semiotics Good quality picturebooks are more than just books with illustrations. Oftquoted, classic points of reference in children’s literature research argue that picturebooks involve two very different interdependent5 sign systems (the images and the words) (Nikolajeva and Scott 2000, 2006; Sipe 1998, 2012). The reader, so the argument goes, is pulled in different directions of meaning-making by the use of these two different sign systems; the linear direction of the text invites readers to continue reading; the pictures compel them to ponder. Haynes and Murris (2017:176) resist this popular definition that focuses only on the two semiotic sign systems. As Andrew Melrose (2012:17) poignantly observes, what is crucially missing is the ‘third’ level of communication: the intimate and nurturing process of sharing experiences that simply happen and the making of connections as a ‘polysensory event’, connected to the socio-cultural, material and geo-political situatedness of text and reader. In addition, we propose that a polysensory event includes not only anthropocentric constructions of meaning and understandings, but also knowledges previously excluded. Walter Gershon (2016:76) points out that ‘Indigenous, non-Christian, non-Western, ways of being and knowing are often [sic] expressed in sound (if at all)’. We hasten to add that the same holds for young children. In all such cases, Gershon (2016:76) observes, ‘much is lost by wrangling words down on a page, virtual or otherwise’. In a nonhierarchical relational ontology, ‘readers’ of picturebooks in a literacy lesson include everyone (sometimes very young children) and everything (mutual relationality) without the use of the power-producing binary between human and nonhuman, but also between ‘novice-human’ and ‘expert-human’. Immaturity and ignorance are ascribed routinely to children-readers. These judgements stereotype children when made apriori, on the grounds of their young age, or perceived lack of experience, before they have had the opportunity to show what they know and can do.6 Gendered and racialised developmental theories assume that the young individual will recapitulate the development of the species, from irrational and savage to rational and civilized. Recapitulation theories assume that place and land are irrelevant and that there is one single path for human progress and development. Barad (2018) argues movingly for multiplicity, not only of histories, but also of paths towards so-called progress. The feminist notion of ‘situatedness’ (Haraway 1988) applies not only to space, but also to time. Quantum temporality is a radical rethinking of the nature of time. Recapitulation theories,

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capitalism, colonialism and clock time already assume space in their measuring of time (Barad 2018). Like beads on a string, they place each discrete moment one after another, so that time can be measured and humans’ achievements can be controlled, using time as an apparatus through normalising discourses (e.g., ‘school readiness’). This western idea of time assumes that it is universal, homogenous and empty – a vacuum or void. Instead, inspired by Barad (2007, 2018), we work with the quantum idea that time is always situated in an actual place. Far from politically innocent, hegemonic and ‘common sense’ understandings of time (see ‘travel hopping’ in Chapter 4) are profoundly disrupted when we turn to Indigenous ontologies and the knowledges of other so-called subhumans, such as child (see Part I). In this respect, philosophy can play an important de/colonising role. For example, Matthews (1994) argues that philosophy disrupts the idea of human progress in terms of truth and knowledge and is the one discipline that requires everyone to think from scratch and afresh. Growing up and believing that we know a great deal can be an epistemic hindrance, not an advantage. For philosophical playthinking, picturebooks are ideal texts.7 Lewis argues that: the words on their own are always partial, incomplete, unfinished, waiting the flesh of the pictures. Similarly, the pictures are perpetually pregnant with potential narrative meaning, indeterminate, unfinished, awaiting the closure provided by the words. But the words and the pictures come from outside the picturebook. (Lewis 2001:74) What is particularly striking in Lewis’ metaphor is that the intra-action between image and text is in/determinate: neither stable nor predictable. ‘Boundaries have dissolved’, writes Lewis, ‘inviting a promiscuous mixing of forms’ (Lewis 2001:90). In Sara’s philosophical use of picturebooks, she not only provokes linguistic play with philosophical concepts, but also involves children in a promiscuous dis/embodied doing of concepts, for example, when she asks the children to pass on a secret in a circle (see Figure 8.3). What are Sara’s secrets as she reads the story and passes a secret around the ‘classroom’? In Figure 8.4 we can see how Crocodile invites Anna to make a secret face. Crocodile insists that a secret face is necessary; otherwise the treasure could be found by someone else. ‘Look at my face’, he says. ‘No one can tell what I am thinking, because I am making a secret face!’ Later on in the story, Anna tells Crocodile to make a secret face, as no one will ever find the gold. Crocodile confides in her that it is not his secret face, but his happy face – they just look similar. Sara’s practice moves philosophy for children (P4C) from a semiotic approach towards a posthuman ontoepistemology and ethics. A posthuman approach to the use of literature in the ‘classroom’ involves doing more justice

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Figure 8.3 T he children pass a secret around.

to the book’s materiality: the a/effects of graphic design, choice of art style,8 visual grammar,9 use of colour, medium (paper, virtual, etc.) and also what is not ‘there’ here and now, there and then (e.g., what violent past is the whiteness of paper hiding or the word ‘gold’?). We have already given a flavour of some of the secrets the picturebook holds entangled with its pages (the ‘bench’, the ‘row of houses’, see Figures 7.3 and 8.2). Through each page and each picturebook by Schwarz, transindividual histories, memories, time and place are threaded through one another. For example, Viviane Schwarz explains how she had an inflatable crocodile as a child and thought ‘it was the best present ever’. She continues: I thought it was the best thing and I was going around and I was a small child . . . The nose was dragging over the tar and at some point sprung a leak from being dragged around. I had to re-inflate this crocodile and look after it. The whole relationship of just being kind of dependent on each other but in a very safe, like, in a very healthy way. I was just dragging around my crocodile. We continue by speculating about the ‘classroom’ and (its) secrets. Barad explains in an interview (Dolphijn and Van der Tuin 2012) that eros, desire and

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Figure 8.4 Crocodile invites Anna to make a secret face.

life forces run through everything. Matter is not the medium through which desire flows. She says: Materiality itself is always already a desiring dynamism, a reiterative reconfiguring, energized and energizing, enlivened and enlivening. I have been particularly interested in how matter comes to matter. How matter makes itself felt. This is a feminist project whether or not there are any women or people or any other macroscopic beings in sight. Along with other new materialist feminists – Vicki Kirby is notable in this regard – feeling, desiring and experiencing are not singular characteristics or capacities of human consciousness. Matter feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns and remembers.

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We wonder what the gold is we may strike if we pay attention to the material and discursive entanglements? What can we learn from moments of laughter and how these affected the atmosphere in the ‘classroom’? What are the secrets contained within and in its walls, the traces of human and nonhuman sounds? What is kept secret by the image in Figure 8.1?

Secrets and laughter We wonder about what and who is excluded in the ‘classroom’ – the politics of the ontological absence (and presence at the same time) of certain human and nonhuman bodies. What are the treasures we are m/is/sing? The pain that is hiding. The secrets being kept. The voices and other sounds we cannot hear. What is it we are not noticing? Not even noticing we are not noticing? As teachers-researchers, we are always concerned what we might be missing.What makes someone cry or laugh in class or say nothing at all? By being attentive to laughter, affect and atmosphere, we might begin to notice what we are not noticing, but also on the understanding that we will always be missing things and embrace a kind of epistemic humility. Watching the footages of the literacy lesson, we are struck by Tshepo expressing his opinions about the then South African president, Jacob Zuma. Tshepo refers to events that have come to be known in South Africa as the Nkandla Affair. In 2016, the Constitutional Court accepted that the president must repay the state a reasonable percentage10 for improvements to his private home in Nkandla. These improvements were paid out of the public purse and the president finally agreed to back an amount of 7.8 million rand. Tshepo responds to Sara’s question about finding a thousand rand – a question that is provoked by Crocodile’s bewilderment about finding the treasure and not knowing what to do with it. Anna tells Crocodile that if they spend it, people will know where the gold is. So she suggests to not spend the gold, but to hide it instead. Crocodile reminds her to put a cross on the map. Using this as a golden opportunity to create a storyworld that plays with fiction/reality binaries, Sara asks: ‘What would you do if you found one thousand rand just lying on the pavement and there was nobody around?’. Tshepo answers: ‘I don’t want to be rich and great, or else I’ll be greedy, like the president Jacob Zuma. He stole money from lots of people and he just builds the one house, he gets a swimming pool, he doesn’t know how to swim and he just expects someone to teach him to swim and everyone hates him’.Tshepo’s comments affect the bodies around him as he is talking: bodies squirm, eyes widen, there are gasps and giggles. Six screen shots placed next to each other show the dis/embodied reactions of one of the children, Ameera (Figure 8.5). Deleuze (1969/1990:285) remarks ‘[t]hat bodies speak has been known for a long time’. As a neo-Spinozean, Deleuze (1988) talks about the body in terms of its capacity for affecting and being affected (which always go together). When you affect something, you open yourself up to being affected. Affect is more than

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Figure 8.5 A meera intra-acting with Tshepo.

emotions. The latter, like conscious thought, cannot do justice to the depth and breadth of experiences (Massumi 2015:5). Affect can be distinguished from emotion, in that emotion is somehow more ‘settled’ – it is usually identified through naming (thereby reducing its complexity). Affects are more immediate, transindividual, more indistinct, and cannot be articulated through language. Spinoza describes affects as ‘corporeal traces’ – experienced in the body. Anna HickeyMoody (2013) explains how for Deleuze the materiality of sensation is the part of our imagination, grounded in our bodies. To feel or to sense is to imagine. We wonder about Tshepo’s imagining of Zuma’s Nkandla estate. We are struck by the complex connection he makes between Zuma, swimming pools and not being able to swim.We resist psychologising his comment. One could, for example, hypothesise that in his egocentric reasoning Tshepo’s logic is something like this: I can’t swim, I am black, Zuma is black, so he can’t swim, therefore he needs someone to teach him. Alternatively, we could make a different agential cut and hypothesise that he imagines a swimming pool in the presidential estate, which by the way has extensively been in the news. There has been outrage about the cost of it. The Mail and Guardian11 reports that 3.7 million South African Rands were

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spent on installing the pool. When challenged about the cost, a spokesperson explains that it is a ‘fire pool’ – the water can be used to extinguish fires on the estate. This material object (in both the capitalist and posthuman sense) is bound to strike the imagination. It is a symbol of wealth. It is what rich people have, not people living in poverty. At this point, the footage becomes even more interesting. Tshepo is quite right in wondering what the point is of having a swimming pool if you cannot swim. Most likely, Tshepo knows the fact that many black people in South Africa cannot swim, in the sense that they have not been taught how to swim – an Apartheid legacy.12 The school where this research data was created does have a swimming pool, but most black children will not have seen, let alone used, a swimming pool, due to the absence of pools in former black-only schools, especially in townships or informal settlements. Not only is Tshepo most likely aware of this, he also knows that Zuma is regarded as someone who has a clear sense of entitlement. But Zuma does not act in terms of equality,13 not even for black people, so Tshepo says: ‘he just expects someone to teach him to swim and everyone hates him’. According to quantum temporality, it is indeed true that there are multiple paths that can be followed towards making progress in literacies. Fresh opportunities present themselves by attending to human and nonhuman-bodies (e.g., the swimming pool whether real or imagined), how they are affected and how they can affect other bodies. Without that knowledge, we know nothing about a body (Deleuze and Guattari 1987/2014). Therefore, listening to and immersing ourselves in the DVD footages, we are hesitant to interpret what ‘is going on’. At the same, we do not propose a relativist position: it does matter ethically how we choose to analyse an event, because of who (e.g., child) and what (e.g., swimming pool) is excluded, but we simply acknowledge the epistemic im/ possibilities of being certain.The reason for this, is the complexity of reality and we humbly acknowledge our limitations as mere human beings. MacLure (2016) suggests that tears, laughter, hiccups, fidgeting and silence lie on the borders of language and the body. As such, teachers and researchers do not really know what to do with these phenomena. There is not a lot of accounting for laughter; it seems difficult to set it into the ‘order of things’. It bursts in and out, around and through the order – creating ‘lines of escape’14 maybe. It can be ‘appropriate’ and ‘inappropriate’, uproarious, tentative, nervous and shy. MacLure (2016:180) argues that we can pay attention to such disturbances or moments as ‘indicators of the potential for creation and escape that is the other face of order and pattern’. We wonder whether the laughter works here to ‘bury’ the ‘treasure’, in this case, understood as the bold and courageous political views the boy is expressing about the president – laughed away as silly, unimportant or inappropriate by some in the room? Maybe. It is unusual for students to have opportunities to express their own political views in a grade 2 class. What is the treasure here or the secrets kept or told? What are the golden opportunities for the children and the adults in the ‘classroom’? What kind of playthinking is opened up by Sara’s teaching?

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In the picturebook, Anna and Crocodile want to keep the treasure a secret. Crocodile prefers to hide it, while Anna suggests burying it and drawing a map. Crocodile reminds Anna to make a cross on it, but they then decide to hide the map with the treasure. The reasons for this are not given, opening up provocative spaces for speculation (and indeed Chapters 9 and 10 give different readings of this part of the story). We continue to wonder (Sara in her teaching often uses the phrase ‘I wonder. . . ’). When we think of treasure, we often imagine it as buried. We discussed where to locate the treasure metaphorically: above or below ground? In a sense, the teacher owns a metal (treasure) detector. Is teaching about finding or creating treasures? Take note of the colonial implications of the difference between the two and, at the same time, how the two are connected. When digging for a treasure there is a hunch there is something worth digging for (the future is already part of the present). And also that there might be more: the treasure might be a small part of something bigger (a coin that has escaped from the trunk full of them). We have argued that as humans, we tend to be guided by human vision in deciding what is real or not and what is valuable or not. When a treasure is above ground and visible there is often no thought of what might be underneath, and we forget to pay attention to its material-discursive network of relations – kept secret underground. Sara explains that digging and diving for the treasure was an opportunity to look at challenging democracy, power and greed. However, it would be a mistake to overlook how entangled the events of the literacy lesson are/were with the adult observers in the ‘classroom’. In her feedback session with the observing student teachers, Sara says: ‘But also, I think, to say to the students, look how fascinating this is, I bet you have never come across such treasures before and look what we can do with it? Think differently about children . . . they are not cute but profound.’ Anthropomorphising can help guard against the kind of forgetfulness when we keep secrets underground (see e.g., Bennett 2010). We remember Viviane Schwarz’s comments when intra-viewed by Sara. Viviane: Sara: Viviane: Sara: V:

Sara: V:

I always had a thing about, a really particular thing about traffic lights, I was always really quite frightened of traffic and the traffic lights were kind of friendly. Yeah. Because they kept you safe. Controlled But they were also . . . I knew that they were, I kind of imagined they were a kind of network, because I thought, I wonder if they communicate, like coz I thought they all regulate traffic together, are they networked, I don’t know. Yeah. And uh, then, then somebody told me that, I learned somewhere on so on tele or something that they weren’t, and that actually they

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Sara: Viviane: Sara: Viviane:

Viviane: Sara: Viviane:

work on a kind of chaotic principle because if you, if you, they, they tried networking them and it makes the traffic break down because every set pattern that you put on traffic lights. It would be really hard to synchronise them. No, no, it just, you can. . . You can. . . But because the traffic has, just because of the way that it, that a non-chaotic system works, it will like at some point the phases will line up and like certain waves will amplify and then you get suddenly traffic jams, every time or everything breaks down, you have to keep it a bit chaotic to keep constant flow. Well anyway that doesn’t matter but as a child I thought, ‘Oh no, that means that they’re not talking to each other, they’re all lonely, they’re just lonely’, and I was just like then I just started talking to them a little bit because see I was right next to them and I was so used to them and you can kind of put your arm around them, they have like this bit of shoulder, and then I kind of started saying, ‘Hey traffic light, you know the traffic light down the road is doing quite well I think. . . ’ [Sara laughs.] ‘I saw it earlier and uh yeah,’ and I just kind of told, told them about Yeah. I just thought they would like to hear from each other. I just didn’t really question whether they were listening, I just thought – it just seemed the decent thing to do [she laughs]. So, I was quite attached to them, and I thought I am interacting with them, they’re doing something for me.

Atmosphere in the ‘classroom’ The conversation in class moved around ideas about sharing, greed, ownership, theft, loss and responsibility. Akhona talked about ‘making people build’ her house and ‘having things she doesn’t need’. The ethics involved in power and possessions are clearly bubbling away in between these grade 2s. Their interest in and concern with these topics is to be expected considering the topic of the picturebook, ‘finding’ gold in a country such as South Africa, and in a city and country with deep racial and socioeconomic inequalities (with the two intra-connected). Tshepo’s comments about former President Zuma create a shift in the atmosphere in the room. We pay special attention to this, because it helps us with doing literacies differently in the context of our ethico-political concern with de/colonising education. Ben Anderson and James Ash (2015) suggest a method for thinking through atmosphere(s). Importantly, they do not study or

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examine atmosphere as if separate from other things in the room. They are not units in spacetime, nor mere context, but part of what ‘is going on’. Anderson and Ash stress that it is important to resist trying to represent an atmosphere, because such a method would give a false sense of being able to understand, control or manage atmosphere in any simple way. Rather, in their vagueness, in their ambiguity, in their indeterminacy, in their weight, atmospheres might be seen as . . . a matter of concern that heightens the challenges . . . to social scientific habits and practices of description and explanation. (Anderson and Ash 2015:48) The non-representational posthuman methods of research like ours have a different ontological and epistemological orientation and assume an alternative relationship towards knowledge and truth. We do not take up, nor do we desire, being an authoritative, objective, dispassionate observer (a view from ‘nowhere’). The challenge is to resist representationalism (for example, reflecting, naming or labelling) as this is salient when encouraging de/colonising educational habits and practices. One way around this is to try and name an atmosphere, but on the assumption that it does not give it a fixed identity, but simply on the understanding that it acknowledges the presence of the atmosphere. The reason for this is that atmospheres are often ignored. Sometimes, an atmosphere may feel static and sedimented, but they are always ‘on the move’ and intra-acting with everything and ‘nothing’ (see below).We have come up with various contradictory ideas to name the atmospheres we sensed as we watched and diffracted with the footages: discomfort, awkwardness, surprise, embarrassment, horror, shame, amusement, belittlement, tension, conflict.What Tshepo expressed was how the reported behaviour of the president affected him and made him think about his wealth.This triggered a reactive ripple, a gasp. It was as if an arrow appeared from nowhere, spiked in and hovered – commanding attention, creating dis-ease.There was a suspension of the familiar, then the silence of held breath. An exhale followed, a moan, a sigh, a giggle in between the furtive glances, the search for reassurances. Anderson and Ash (2015) suggest that atmospheres can coexist in the same space without necessarily affecting each other. From the view of quantum entanglement, everything is always in relationship with one another, human bodies as well as nonhuman bodies, here and now, then and there. Hence, although our attention as teacher-researchers might be on Tshepo and the more explicit reactions of the bodies around him, all other bodies will have been affected and still are, and in futures to come, and this includes the wall and the chairs (see, e.g., Chapter 4). Atmospheres also have a multiplicity of causes, intra-actively connected and are im/possible to trace. There seems to be a ‘jump’ in the atmosphere of the enquiry from ‘What would you do if you found one thousand rand just lying on the pavement and there was nobody around?’ to ‘I wouldn’t keep it because

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I don’t want to become rich and greedy like Zuma who stole’. However, one explanation might be that children regulated themselves, in a Foucauldian manner, by expressing what they thought the adults in the room wanted to hear. It is im/possible to say with certainty what the complex intra-actions ‘in’ the ‘classroom’ were and caused the shift in openness to a more closed moralising one. There were several intraventions that seem to put pressure on Tshepo to say: ‘I don’t want to become rich and greedy’. Anderson and Ash (2015:45) speak of the ambivalence of atmospheres when trying to understand how and why atmospheres change while at the same time ‘holding on to the touch, or weight, of an atmosphere’. As we watch the footages, we notice two children sitting next to each other and very close to Tshepo. After he had explained why he would resist the thousand rand, they held themselves, starting with their mouths and then bending forwards in their chairs in the brace position. It felt appropriate that they received/absorbed his honesty with eyes closed and hunched over – maybe out of respect. It is im/possible to tell. The dis/embodied reactions to Tshepo’s intra-vention by humans of different ages participating in and observing the lesson are particularly interesting in terms of posthumanism and philosophy for children (P4C) as de/colonising practices. There are ripples ‘in’ the ‘classroom’ of what we might name ‘excitement’, ‘embarrassment’ or ‘confusion’. Ameera in the photos above (Figure 8.5) is looking slightly behind her and to the side, trying to catch the eyes of the student teachers. It is worth noting that they sit on tables much higher than the chairs the children are sitting on (see the student teachers in the image in Figure 9.2). Ameera has possibly sensed their reactions. We could perhaps say that she is on the same ‘wave length’ as the one student teacher who is also observed laughing and displaying uncomfortable body language. We wonder about how striking these words are for what we would like to describe: ‘wave length’ and having ‘brain waves’. Is thinking intra-actively the same as having thought waves expressed through and beyond the individual human bodies? The other children giggle, cover their mouths, wriggle, move their feet and toes, shrink backwards in their chair and move subtly away from Tshepo’s body. Some of these un/conscious body movements might be seen as human responses to discomfort. Toe curling in particular is often interpreted as a reaction to physical or emotional stress (for more on toes, see Chapter 5). As philosophical practitioners, we try to resist normalising and psychologising such events (see e.g., Chapter 6) and embrace people’s complex dis/embodied responses as ‘treasures’, sensing the physical ripples and thought waves and be(com)ing moved by them. It is not surprising, therefore, that children often sense that they can say things in philosophy class they normally are not allowed to say, nor have the opportunity to say. For example, when Tshepo says later in the enquiry: ‘I’m just worried about losing everything I’ve ever wanted. Like if I wanted a family, I would lose it, I don’t want to lose everything I ever had’. Picturebooks as philosophy texts offer golden opportunities for children to speak about matters that matter, and that matter to them. Oral work in pairs, small

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groups or a community of enquiry and listening to children’s own ideas when exploring picturebooks is given no attention in the current English (or other languages) curriculum in South Africa. Listening, is conceived as listening to the teacher (Murris and Thompson 2016).The community of philosophical enquiry can be an uncomfortable space for teachers, and perhaps new teachers especially. Unpredictable, emotional or complicated situations could arise where they might feel vulnerable and unsure. In a keynote address,15 political philosopher Achille Mbembe suggests a politics of viscerality. During the question and answer session after his talk, he refers to the importance of ‘comfort’ for students in the sense of trusting sources of knowledge. In the context of a ‘classroom’, safety and comfort may be found in staying close to the curriculum guidelines. In a community of enquiry, the limits to what can and cannot be spoken about are different, probably making teachers feel insecure about handling the subjects raised by Tshepo, including ‘hate’ and ‘anger’, but these are important topics for young citizens and their participation in de/colonising education. While there are treasures to be found in the naturecultures we know and trust, we may need to surrender to risk (like Crocodile and Anna), trust instinct, recognise feelings, be open to wonder (Vannini 2015) and be open to be affected by human and nonhuman bodies.

Sounds in the walls We wonder whether the sound of the children’s laughter is different from the laughter of the student teachers and the other adults? Often laughter at a child’s words or actions, although without conscious intent of malice, is due to the ‘identityprejudice’ that child is not yet fully formed (Murris 2013, 2016) and that what they do or say does not yet make ‘adult sense’. Sara explains the ethico-political commitment she brings to her teaching: In a democratic space where children and adults work together it is crucial that there is no sense of epistemic injustice. Adults must be able to listen ethically to the child and view all interactions as equally valid. Certain situations that we apply to children should only applied if we are prepared to do the same with adults. For example, would we walk into a bar and tell everybody to sit in a row and face the barperson? Would we expect them to all go to the toilet at the same time, or maybe boys first? Would we give a reward to those sitting up straight? Tell them to finish every last drop? And then ensure they all form a line and walk behind each other to the next bar along the street. Preferably without talking or overtaking. It is certainly amusing to read Sara’s passionate commitment to combatting childism. And there is a difference between laughing at and laughing with – humour can be a very effective vehicle for making serious political points. Laughing with Sara, would Tshepo’s comment have invoked laughter, had he been speaking in a bar, as an adult? This question certainly brings the adult/child binary into sharp focus. It might be the case that the people in the ‘classroom’ are laughing with

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Figure 8.6 T shepo comments on Zuma’s Nkandla estate and the sound of laughter (QR code).

Tshepo. We are puzzled about what exactly is funny about Tshepo’s ponderings? If we analyse the words themselves, there is no play on words, no comedic emphasis on language, facial expression or bodily action. Out of the context of the Nklanda affair, there is no reason why an audience would or should laugh. So, we have to assume that it is not the statement itself that causes laughter, but the idea of a ‘child’ speaking, maybe about things he should not have an opinion about or at least not express in a foundation phase class? How can we tell? It may be helpful to hear the laughter (see the QR code in Figure 8.6)? Maybe. What difference is made by the doubts raised in our analysis?

‘Children are Spinozists’: re-turning and deterritorialising We re-turn to some of the other questions posed earlier. We wonder about what and who is excluded and the politics of the absence of certain sounds, certain human and nonhuman bodies. What are the treasures we are missing and the secrets that are being kept? What are the voices we cannot hear? What is it we are not noticing? Walter Gershon (2016:76) talks about the literal and figurative silencing of sound. Scholarship tends to count only when it is written, but sound, he says, is ‘vibrational’ (Gershon 2016:75).‘The deaf ’, Gershon (2016:75) states, ‘do hear, just not through their ears’. Drawing on Ikonaidou and Altman he argues for something very salient for our research. He urges us ‘to remember that the ability to perceive sound is not only human’ and that what he calls ‘vibrational effect . . . exists within and beyond people and animals’ (Gershon 2016:75).We finish this chapter by using these ideas in the context of the ‘classroom’, the walls, the sounds and the missing voices as we travel hop. What we have learned from temporal and spatial diffraction is that moments in time are diffractions, and so is matter: in/determinacy ‘all the way down’ and at different Man-made scales (Barad 2007, 2014, 2018). How the concept ‘secret’ works in this one-hour literacy lesson continues to be our agential cut. And here we can follow the child in a different way. Not following in the sense of using our adult gaze, measuring, comparing and judging, but by deterritorialising the meaning of a concept. Deleuze and Guattari (1987/2014:298) claim that ‘[c]hildren are Spinozists’. An organ for a child can be ‘a bone, an engine, excrement, the baby, a hand, daddy’s heart’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987/2014:299). For Deleuze and

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Guattari, philosophy is a doing, a creating of concepts. Concepts are complex, not discrete, but intensive coordinates, in that they are composed of many parts and are relational. Concepts often reproduce existing ways of thinking, but we take up the invitation to do some playthinking instead – a Deleuzian pragmatics that involves, in this case, the dis/embodied kneading of the concept ‘secret’. Our use of ‘dis/embodied’ highlights mutual relationality without exclusion, in/ determinate subjects, both human and nonhuman and always produced involving contradiction and multiplicity. Living without bodily boundaries opens up spaces for imaginative, speculative, philosophical enquiries that rupture, unsettle, animate, enliven and re-imagine. A dis/embodied kneading of the concept ‘secret’ disrupts the idea that the meaning of a concept is determined a priori by a set of propositions that you can either enter into or not – for example, by answering a question by tracing the meaning of a concept back to its ‘roots’, or through fixed definitions – in this case, definitions of ‘secret’. David Kennedy (2012) argues that the community of enquiry pedagogy of Philosophy for Children (P4C), in its communal problematisation of the meaning of concepts, offers unique possibilities for rhizomatic curriculum development.We have shown this, for example, by examining the concept ‘secret’ rhizomatically. In the context of the picturebook How to Find Gold (2016) the intra-action between words and images is ‘pregnant’ (Deleuze’s virtual) with potential for connecting ‘secret’ with ‘wealth’, ‘treasure’ and ‘adventure’, shooting off in all directions affecting the atmosphere ‘in’ the room, filling it with hope, because ‘affect as a whole . . . is the virtual co-presence of potentials’ (Massumi 2015:5). A rhizomatic curriculum also puts P4C in a transdisciplinary position, to ‘meet the universe halfway’ (Barad 2007) through different disciplinary lenses: anthropological (how secrecy is viewed differently in different cultures); psychological (secrets and the subconscious); historical (shifting discourses about what should be kept secret, e.g., ‘panic attacks’); ethical (the right and wrongs of keeping or telling secrets); political (the distinction between private and public and politicians’ secrets); legal (one’s rights to keep secrets); journalism (exposing secrets); archaeology (bones buried under ground) or literary research (secrets as theme in literature). Philosophical communities of enquiry are not restricted to disciplinary boundaries and they routinely deterritorialise concepts from ‘their imprisonment within ideologically locked-down networks of concepts’ (Kennedy 2012:2) and reterritorialise them transdisciplinarily through people’s experiences. It includes children as players in this political project. One important question here is to ask how concepts can be explored experientially, not just discursively ‘in the head’, through a playthinking that is transindividual? What would happen if we explore the concept ‘secret’ through the natural sciences? We explore each question in turn.

Turning and re-turning to a dictionary definition An obvious move is to consult a dictionary. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a secret is ‘[s]omething that is kept or meant to be kept unknown or unseen by others’.16 Interestingly, the definition assumes human intention and will. This

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exercise in itself is philosophically significant in terms of identity and difference (Deleuze 1968/1994). How do we decide whether a definition is correct? For example, under the archaeological lens above, we can understand a secret as ‘bones buried under ground’, and in that case, we are not assuming that they were kept buried intentionally. How straightforward is this notion of human intention? In our colonial context (see Chapter 1), how much is kept hidden, perhaps unintentionally? To answer these questions, we need to consult our own experiences. As a philosophical move, this is in itself nothing new. An abstract concept like ‘secret’ tends to be understood in education as an abstraction from the empirical. Social constructivist teachers might encourage children to connect ‘secret’ with how they experience the concept in real life, although some might be concerned about the controversial ‘issues’ this could raise (Haynes 2005). Definitions tend to be regarded as universal, or at least, intersubjectively agreed descriptions of an object or a class of objects. In our case, it is assumed that the concept ‘secret’ stands for something – represents something in the world that takes up a particular spacetime position (Deleuze 1968/1994). Now, for Deleuze, understanding the concept ‘secret’ through binary, arborescent logic would mean regarding the concept as not abstract enough. Inspired by Deleuze and Guattari, Brian Massumi argues that abstraction is embodied thought, a ‘lived abstraction’, thereby ‘actuality swells with possibility’ (Massumi 2014:7–9). When disrupting the subject/world dichotomy, a concept does not describe things, but expresses events (Deleuze 1994), that is, in/determinate encounters with matter (Rotas 2017:183). For Deleuze (1994), there is a crucial distinction between bodies and events: between ‘a’ secret (e.g., a treasure buried in the ground) and the experiencing of a secret as an event. Events are immaterial and unpresentable. They have a different temporality and spatiality as they are always ‘in between’ bodies involving relationality. A focus on events, rather than on bodies (that are in a particular spatial and temporal position and denoted through language and fixed by definitions), makes it possible, in teaching and research, to concentrate on movement. Movement is a form of thinking in the act that is always in between bodies and not located in a human subject that signifies. The ‘in-between’ does not mean a relationship between bodies that exists prior to the intra-action. Thus, a concept like ‘secret’ expresses a relationship, rather than a position in spacetime of this or that body. So, in the case of understanding what a secret ‘is’ in a philosophical enquiry, we need to consult events in lived experience, because through our actions, we ‘comment’ on what we are doing as we are doing it; that is, I treat something as a secret not as something we already know – the difference is in the performance. What a secret means cannot be ‘captured’ through definition, because it is the embodied performance of acts that constitutes the difference between what is and is not a secret. Importantly, a definition would not do justice to the relationality of the concept itself. So, in the very same move as the doing, an abstraction is performed on its action: the laughter of the girl, the atmosphere in the room, the discomfort of the student and so forth. In other words, ‘secret’ as a concept is too complex to capture through binary logic. It needs to be explored in P4C through a ‘pragmatics’, directly embodied in action, creatively and imaginatively.

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Whose gold? Crocodile asks Anna what they will do with all the golden treasure. His question is not only pertinent in respect of what happened in the classroom enquiry we are working with in this book. In the broader context of the ‘classroom’ being a South African one and of South Africa’s history of the discovery, mining and ‘production’ of gold, the question is philosophically and ethically jam-packed! The contestability of what was done and what is done with ‘South Africa’s’ gold continues. What enables particular findings, what they are for and how they may be beneficial are all part of our own digging and diving with Crocodile and Anna. The parallels between the production of gold for economic thriving are not dissimilar to the production of knowledge and skills for economic thriving. The processes of production can, however, tell other stories. While the South African economy began to burgeon after the discovery of gold, stakeholders violently struggled for control of the prosperity (Harrison and Zack 2012). We also speculate how can we pay attention, importantly, not so much to what we (humans) are missing (our focus above). But with an openness to thought itself (Colebrook 2016), we try to attend to what is ‘not’ ‘there’ here and now, but with an openness to the pasts and futures always already threaded through one another.The idea of our diffractive reading, without methodological prescriptions, is to do justice to the potentialities within the image (Figure 8.1) as a text with its inherent ‘porosity’ and openness to difference and differences that matter (also ethically). Barad stipulates that quantum tunnelling, or ‘travel hopping’ (Barad 2018) does not need material that is porous. As a quantum event, it is a ‘means of getting through, without getting over, without borrowing through. Tunneling makes mincemeat of closure, no w/holes are needed’ (Bennett 2010:248). We propose a political and philosophical experiment in listening and seeing, a void ‘filled’ with secrets. For this experiment, we dig and dive further for treasures with the concept ‘secret’. Like Anna we sail into the great storm and dive right in the middle. But let us not go too fast. Let’s keep diving for more treasures. After all, gold is always hidden, Crocodile reminds us. He points out that we need a map with a cross on it to show where the gold is. A map of a whole world, says Anna.

Whose land? We disrupt the western idea that time is universal, homogenous and empty – a vacuum or void. Inspired by Barad (2007, 2018), we ‘finish’ by showing what would happen if we worked with the quantum idea that time is always situated in an actual place – in this case the ‘classroom’. It would be wrong to say that quantum entanglements disappear or change over time; they are simply reconfigured. All material-discursive reconfigurations are sedimented in the world that holds the memories of its iterative becomings (Barad 2018). Barad points out the astonishing fact that even attempts to erase leave their material traces. We can see that Karin took a photo of a video-recording of the ‘classroom’

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Figure 8.7 A  map of the land around the school diffracted through Cape zebra. 17

(Figure 8.1). Our human eye is drawn to her, the iPhone and the children – children who can afford the school fees, thereby excluding the voices of the large majority of South African children in and outside the ‘classroom’ (see Chapter 10). According to QFT, multiplicities in space and time (multiple temporalities) are present in the thickness of the here and now but without any human or nonhuman bodies necessarily being present (Barad 2018). Karen Barad explained in one of her presentations how tracing these enduring entanglements involves making visible the structure of the void that is not empty, but filled with (colonial) histories of violence, death and dying and multiplicities of attempts to erase the past: secrets that need to be exposed, made visible. The land (skin) on which the school has been built is entangled with its Apartheid history that is there and not there at the same time – disrupting binary logic and troubling a metaphysics of presence (through the use of a different optics). At the same time there is the future already threaded through the now: schools are planned with a conception in mind of what they are for and for whom. We imagine who walked there before. We wonder what grew there on that very same spot of the ‘classroom’. Social-ecological research (Anderson and Farrell 2012) suggests that the land on which the school was built was occupied first, for thousands of years by hunter-gatherers (San), then semi-nomadic gatherers (Khoekhoen), followed by transient European travellers (mainly Dutch) who used Cape Town as a refreshment station and subsequently stayed. These travellers were joined by other (mainly British) settlers, whose foremost interest was the extraction of diamonds and gold. All these sedimentations. What is there, but we cannot see, still entangled in the now – space-time-mattering?

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A screenshot of a map of the area around the school (Figure 8.7), diffracted with Cape zebras, is a playful and serious attempt to visualise the void filled with secrets – an idea that hardly makes sense for us now – so used as we are to Newtonian conceptions of space and time. We sense that this might be a good moment to finish, and at the same time start a ‘new’ philosophical enquiry, by listening to the silent sounds of sheep, cattle, elephants, wolves, lions, tigers, wildebeest and zebras roaming the wetlands of the Western Cape. We hear their galloping to the waterholes and the slurping as they drink. We feel the harsh sea winds and large volumes of dust from mobile sands. We smell the smoke of fires used to stimulate grazing and we hear the distressing sounds of slaves shipped from Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Eastern Africa and Mozambique as they are beaten (and worse) by their owners.We also hear laughter that gives us hope in de/colonising educational research.

Notes 1 This is a play on the two-slit experiment in quantum physics, which shows paradoxically that light appears to behave like a wave and a particle, depending on which ‘apparatus’ is being used, which includes the observer (Barad 2007). 2 A koki pen (pronounced /koʊki:/) is a fibre-tip pen (from a defunct local brand name). From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_South_African_English_regionalisms. Accessed: 5 January 2018. 3 The question here is how we decide through vision what is real. Geometric optics (human eye and magnifying glasses) uses the principles of geometrical optics (refraction), while the microscope uses diffraction (physical optics) (Barad 2007:51–52). 4 As we playthink with language we enjoy putting ‘human’ between brackets. 5 Hence the spelling of ‘picturebooks’, instead of ‘picture books’. 6 For more about epistemic injustice in the context of children, see Murris 2013. 7 See also Haynes and Murris 2012:55–56. 8 See, for example, Browne’s fascinating autobiographical reflections on his choice of art styles for his picturebook Little Beauty as described in Murris (2016:Ch9). 9 See, e.g., Serafini (2009). 10 See: www.saflii.org/za/cases/ZACC/2016/11.pdf. Accessed: 15 January 2018. 11 See: https://mg.co.za/article/2016-03-31-six-bizarre-explanations-for-the-nkandla-firepool. Accessed: 10 January 2018. 12 Journalist Siphiwe Sibeko reports that ‘Despite a string of Olympic swimmers and some 2,000 kilometres of stunning coastline, just 15 percent of South Africans can swim – and most of them are white’. 13 See, e.g., the image of Zuma’s estate in comparison with the neighbouring shack://www.sap romo.com/nkandla-zuma-will-not-pay-back-the-money/9455. Accessed: 10 January 2018. 14 ‘Line of escape’ we prefer over the more popular translation of Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘line of flight’. See: Chapter 1. 15 See: www.youtube.com/watch?v=lg_BEodNaEA. Accessed: 16 May 2017. 16 See: https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/secret. Accessed: 6 January 2018. 17 In this figure, one image is a map from 3.3.2 Mowbray Municipal Maps surveyed by Messrs. Braine and Drake between 1902 and 1909. Copies and tracings of most of these sheets are stored in the Survey and Land Information Department Archive at the Cape Town City Council. With thanks to Siddique Motala for sending it to us. This is diffracted through an image bought from www.iStock.com by one of the editors.

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References Allan, J. (2011) Complicating, Not Explicating:Taking Up Philosophy in Learning Disability Research. Learning Disability Quarterly 34, 2:153–161. Anderson, B. & Ash, J. (2015) Atmospheric Methods. In P.Vannini (Ed.) Non-Representational Research Methodologies: Re-Envisioning Research. New York and London: Routledge/Taylor and Francis Group, 34–52. Anderson, P. M. L. & Farrell, P. J. O. (2012) An Ecological View of the History of the City of Cape Town. Ecology and Society 17, 3:28. Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press. Barad, K. (2013) Ma(r)king Time: Material Entanglements and Re-memberings:Cutting Together-Apart. In P. R.Carlile, D. Nicolini, A. Langley and H. Tsoukas (Eds.) How Matter Matters: Objects, Artifacts, and Materiality in Organization Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 16–32. Barad, K. (2014) Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting Together-Apart. Parallax, 20, 3:168–187. Barad, K. (2018) Troubling Time/s and Ecologies of Nothingness: On the Im/Possibilities of Living and Dying in the Void. In M. Fritsch, P. Lynes and D. Wood (Eds.) Eco-Deconstruction: Derrida and Environmental Philosophy. New York: Fordham University Press. Bennett, J. (2010) Vibrant Matter: A Political Economy of Things. Durham: Duke University Press. Colebrook, C. (2016) Is There Something Wrong With the Task of Thinking? www.academia. edu/30488137/. Accessed: 18 December 2016. Deleuze, G. (1968/1994) Difference & Repetition. Translated by P. Patton. London and New York: Continuum. Deleuze, G. (1969/1990) The Logic of Sense.Translated by M. Lester. London:The Athlone Press. Deleuze, G. (1988) Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Translated by R. Hurley. San Francisco: City Lights Books. Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987/2014) A Thousand Plateaus. Translated and a foreword by B. Massumi. London: Bloomsbury. Dolphijn, R. & Van der Tuin, I. (2012) New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies. Open Humanities Press. [Online] Available from: http://openhumanitiespress.org/new-materialism.html. Accessed: 12 March 2015. Gershon, W. (2016) The Sound of Silence: The Material Consequences of Scholarship. In N. Snaza, D. Sonu, S. E. Truman and Z. Zaliwska (Eds.) Pedagogical Matters: New Materialisms and Curriculum Studies. New York: Peter Lang, 75–91. Haraway, D. (1988) Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism as a Site of Discourse on the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies 14, 3:575–599. Haraway, D. (2016) Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Harrison, P. & Zack, T. (2012) The Power of Mining: The Fall of Gold and Rise of Johannesburg. Journal of Contemporary African Studies 30, 4:551–570. Haynes, J. (July-December 2005) Secrets and Boundaries in Classroom Dialogues With Children: From Critical Episode to Social Enquiry. Childhood and Philosophy 1, 2. Available at www.filoeduc.org/childphilo. Haynes, J. & Murris, K. (2012) Picturebooks, Pedagogy and Philosophy. New York: Routledge. Haynes, J. & Murris, K. (2017) Intra-Generational Education: Imagining a Post-Age Pedagogy. Educational Philosophy and Theory. Available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0013185 7.2016.1255171.

172  Karin Murris, Judy Crowther, Sara Stanley Hickey-Moody, A. (2013) Affect as Method: Feelings, Aesthetics and Affective Pedagogy. In R. Coleman and J. Ringrose (Eds.) ​Deleuze and Research Methodologies, ​Edinburgh: ​Edinburgh University Press, 79–95. Kennedy, D. (2012) Rhizomatic Curriculum Development in Community of Philosophical Inquiry. In M. Santi and S. Oliverio (Eds.) Educating for Complex Thinking Through Philosophical Inquiry. Napoli: Liguori Editore, 231–243. Kleinman, A. (2012) ‘Intra-actions’: An Interview With Karen Barad. Mousse #34, June:76–81. Kohan, W. O. (2015) Childhood, Education and Philosophy: New Ideas for an Old Relationship. London: Routledge. Lewis, D. (2001) Reading Contemporary Picturebooks: Picturing Text. London: Routledge. MacLure, M. (2016) The Refrain of the A-Grammatical Child: Finding Another Language in/for Qualitative Research. Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies 16, 2:173–182, SAGE Publications. Massumi, B. (2014) What Animals Teach Us About Ethics. Durham: Durham University Press. Massumi, B. (2015) Politics of Affect. Cambridge: Polity Press. Matthews, G. (1994) The Philosophy of Childhood. Harvard: Harvard Univ Press. Melrose, A. (2012) Monsters Under the Bed: Critically Investigating Early Years Writing. London: Routledge. Melrose, A. (2012) Monsters Under the Bed: Critically Investigating Early Years Writing. London: Routledge. Murris, K. (2013) The Epistemic Challenge of Hearing Child’s Voice. In J. Haynes and K. Murris (Eds.) Child as Educator. Special Issue. Studies in Philosophy and Education 32, 3:245–259. Murris, K. (2016) The Posthuman Child: Educational Transformation Through Philosophy With Picturebooks. Contesting Early Childhood Series. London: Routledge. Murris, K. & Thompson, R. (2016) Drawings as Imaginative Expressions of Philosophical Ideas in a grade 2 South African Literacy Classroom. Reading  & Writing 7, 2:11 pages. doi: 10.4102/rw.v7i2.1. Nikolajeva, M. & Scott, C. (2000) The Dynamics of Picturebook Communication. Children’s Literature in Education 31:225–239. Nikolajeva, M. & Scott, C. (2006) How Picturebooks Work. London: Routledge. Rotas, N. (2017) Moving Toward Practices that Matter. In N. Snaza, D. Sonu, S. E. Truman and Z. Zaliwska (Eds.) Pedagogical Matters: New Materialisms and Curriculum Studies. New York: Peter Lang, 179–197. Schwarz,V. (2016) How to Find Gold. London: Walker Books. Serafini, F. (2009) Understanding Visual Images in Picturebooks. In J. Evans (Ed.) Talking Beyond the Page: Reading and Responding to Picturebooks. London: Routledge, 10–25. Sipe, L. R. (1998) How Picture Books Work: A Semiotically Framed Theory of Text-Picture Relationships. Children’s Literature in Education 29, 2:97–108. Sipe, L. R. (2012) Revisiting the Relationships Between Text and Pictures. Children’s Literature in Education 43:4–12. Vannini, P. (Ed.) (2015) Non-Representational Methodologies: Re-Envisioning Research. New York and London: Routledge.

Chapter 9

The text in the classroom Decolonial reading practices Christopher Ouma

This chapter sets out to reflect on ‘textuality’ in the classroom. It draws on the film footage of a picture book being read with children in a South African classroom to analyse how textuality allows us to think of the early childhood classroom as a space in which the act of storytelling, conducted in visual and oral forms, can generate productive frameworks for thinking about various connections – connections between imagination, orality, the body and the dispersal of cognition across the materiality of the classroom. In other words, the realm of imagination in the context of ‘storyworlding’ invokes, on the part of the learners, a dynamic of dis/identification with illustrated animate and inanimate objects (starting with the picture book) and with their own bodies, while eventually allowing them to de-centre the body in the production of their own imagination – one that emerges as part of the ecosystem of materiality in the classroom. The chapter arrives at this argument by considering the larger debates on the readership and audiences of children’s literature, in relation to authorial voicing and authorial power. This is in the context of the pedagogic space of a classroom, as provided by the footage that is the basis of the analysis in this chapter.

Introduction The title of the text being read in the classroom – How to Find Gold (2016) (authored by Viviane Schwarz) – plugs into the ‘quest’ narrative of numerous oral fables and/or folk tales in many parts of the African continent and the world – where the protagonist goes out on a mission to discover, or find something valuable or in a journey that allegorises an ontological mission of finding the self. Anna, the human protagonist, joins ‘the crocodile’ on a mission to find gold, which becomes an adventure that takes them under water, to encounters with various aquatic creatures and finally to the ‘sunken gold’ treasure. Upon its retrieval, they both agree to bury the gold and keep it as a secret treasure that they both know about.Viviane’s narrative, shifting from land to sea, is populated by human and nonhuman actors, animate and inanimate objects. The illustrations in the book foreground that crucial space of equivalence between Anna and the crocodile, in colour, while backgrounding built

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and natural environment, cats, dogs and birds, amongst other things in black and white (see Figures 9.1 in Chapter 9 and 7.3 in Chapter 7). In Figure 9.1, visible in the background is mostly built environment – buildings, lamp posts, a plane flying past, a dustbin as well as visible clouds in the sky and a tree. Figure 7.3 on the other hand surfaces terraced buildings in the farthest reach of the background, moving vehicles, a tunnel with another child riding a bicycle, a hill next to a park pew strewn with trees. More prominently is not just the dominant figure of Anna carrying the crocodile, but also other smaller animals in the foreground – a bird, a cat, a small dog. A quick consideration of Viviane’s oeuvre of illustrated children’s books gives a clear sense of the privileging of nonhuman and inanimate protagonists, something she confirms in her interview with Sara Stanley. Her picture books, graphic and illustrated novels contain a range of animal protagonists located within an ecosystem that draws equivalence between

Figure 9.1 A nna and Crocodile.

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the human and nonhuman; animal and material; realist and animist. Perhaps a sentence that captures this logic on Viviane’s website (www.vivianeschwarz.co.uk), where she frames her graphic novel The Sleepwalkers (2013) (while addressing a potential audience in second person narrative format) says: You will meet beasts and monsters great and small, prehistoric and mechanical, deafening, invisible, friendly and hungry.You will see places above the sky, under the sea, and the very heart of darkness.You may turn into a tree, or learn to fly a plane Viviane’s corpus of work performs slippages between space and time, the terrestrial and ethereal, productively inviting their readers into imagining themselves outside of the category of the human through the performative spaces of the visual and textual.The human, as constructed in the statement above, is dispersed and infiltrated by the nonhuman and the aesthetic project of Schwarz’s craft invokes ontological frameworks that reposition the human as non-central to this ecosystem. In addition, some of Viviane’s illustrated books (e.g., Is there a Dog in this Book? (2013)) experiment through their layout design and the illustrations, ways of reading, seeing and talking through an intra-active design. These books construct worlds in between their pages in ways that disperse the sensibilities of apprehending textual universes across sight, touch and sound. How to Find Gold is already invoking in its performance of textuality – visual and otherwise, the productive slippages between animate and inanimate as we see terraced houses, lamp posts, birds and cats, amongst other visual pallets of the story. And so the ontological equivalence of Anna and the Crocodile does not arise as simply symbolic, or merely animist, but in fact embodied and embedded in the material cultures of the story and therefore anticipated to inspire, as it were, distinct imaginative investments in the children.

Community of listener-readers: space, body, text We see in the footage of the literacy lesson that Sara’s cue for the learners to orally pass around an imagined secret (Figure 8.3 in Chapter 8) is an important gesture for them to enter into the story as an interactive audience with redistributed sensibilities that are governed by the imaginative capital that they each bring into the activity (see e.g., Figure 9.2). Sitting in a circle initially, their bodies are attuned to a space of collective reciprocity at the centre, one which after the story is read, becomes a space of real authorial possibility (more on this later). The navigation of space in relation to imagination and textuality is crucial in how we see the learners interact with the text. It allows us to take seriously Toby Rollo’s notion of childhood agency as ‘non-representational’ (Rollo 2016b:237) – in other words, as surplus to the abstracted forms of representation that govern problematic assumptions around freedom, political agency

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and cognition that define the development of humanity. More specifically, a consideration of how the learners in this classroom navigate space, as part of the imaginative investments that define interaction with the story, will allow us to recuperate complex forms of agency, interpretive practices and interactions with the worlds of imagination and material culture at stake in this literary classroom. The recognition of how this space of storyworlding generates the interaction of thought/imagination, material cultures, human as nonhuman and vice-versa is therefore quite resonant to our project of thinking about a decolonized space of pedagogical performance. When the children are invited to sit on the ground at the beginning of the actual session, their bodies transform into platforms of interactive and intra-active investment within the activity of imagining themselves in and out of the story (see Figures 9.2 and 9.3). The children constitute an audience already primed to enter the session as imaginative beings, who while previously sitting in a circle have already created a collective dynamic of shared imagination – by passing around a secret as instructed by Sara. This is the first step towards generating a dynamic not just of collective identity as part of the socializing logic intended for story-telling in traditional platforms, but also open up space for dis/identification and agency in relation to a shared community of listeners. When their bodies populate that shared circular space at the beginning of the actual story, they re-constitute

Figure 9.2 A  circle as a collective dynamic of shared imagination.

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themselves primarily as a community of listeners, secondarily as readers and watchers, and ultimately as authors of their own narratives. The text, How to Find Gold, assumes a central organizing principle as a living, talking book, opening up a space of performative-interactive imagination on the part of the children. As an audience (if we follow Rollo), who constitute themselves through the logic of non-representation, reading their bodies provides an important window into complex interpretive practices. They transform at different moments of listening to the story and seeing the illustrations on the text, for instance, body contortions at the sight of illustrations of various aquatic creatures (Figure 9.3). Interactions with the text through imagination also allows them to bring into this literary classroom, their own (con)texts of interpretations. For instance, the ‘dangerous and difficult’ adventure of ‘finding gold’ is read as ‘smart but crazy’ while the idea of the ‘universe’ on a single map generates an awareness of the impossibility of representing an entire ecosystem. These limits of representability register on their bodily reactions from horror, to excitement and anticipation, partly because of their non-investment in the process of imagination as a purely cerebral activity. These interpretive reactions force us to think through problematic hierarchies of body/mind in relation to development and maturity as demonstrated by ‘thinking’ as an ‘elevated’ cerebral activity. In addition, they also signal to the possibilities of the

Figure 9.3 Children’s own (con)texts of interpretations.

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violence of representation and the need for an ethical encounter that does not continue to reproduce imperial/colonial logics of conquest and occupation. The illustrations/pictures and texts that accompany them, combined with the oral rendering of the narrative by Sara, creates a complex imagery unpacked through the redistributed sensibility of their bodies – sight, smell, touch and taste. In other words, Sara’s voice elicits a specific set of reactions, the pictures/ illustrations as well as the words. Responses to the nonhuman are particularly interesting, in terms of how the affective response by the children can be read as them imagining themselves in and out of the human, as part of a larger ecosystem, but also bringing into the narrative their own interpretive abilities. The varied responses regarding the ‘crab’, ‘squid’, ‘sea monster’, ‘monsterpus’ and/ or ‘octopus’ are part of their consciousness towards eco-systemic interpretive regimes. It is remarkable that at one point this awareness poignantly reveals itself when one of the children pulls out another text – with a blown-out image of a squid to be in conversation with those in the pages of How to Find Gold (see also the analysis in Chapter 7).This demonstrable intertextuality by the child referred to as the ‘marine biologist’ is indeed one of the ways in which a secondary form of authorial agency can be seen in this literary classroom.2 The ability to appropriate a word, an image, a concept or an idea used in another context and populate it with other meanings in one’s context comes out of this awareness of (con)texts as already in conversation with others. The space of imagination engendered by the rendering of the story in this classroom allows the movement of objects – animate and inanimate in and out of it.

Framing ‘Textuality’ A reflection on ‘textuality’ in the context of the footage draws our attention to a number of things, in relation to material culture in the classroom which I will turn to in a moment.3 From the outset, however, I will begin by considering the assumption that textuality is apprehended largely through ‘ocularcentric’ modes of cognition. I borrow Ashcroft’s Foucauldian formulation here to register his conceptualisation of the ‘ocular’ as a sensibility inflected with imperial/colonial regimes of spatial control – ‘the linking of Knowledge, reason and sight’ (Ashcroft 2001:126). This means the creation of a spatial order, in which the ocular becomes the basis for processing epistemic orders. Modern literacy and textuality in fundamental senses are products of ocularcentric imperialism(s). However, this can be challenged by what Jacques Rancière (2004) calls elsewhere a ‘redistribution of the sensible’ – a politics of (re)cognition, where cognitive sensibilities are dispersed therefore yielding alternative interpretive and aesthetic regimes (see also Chapter 11). In other words, how does one apprehend textuality outside of the ocular? Subsequently, in my reading of this footage, I am aware of various ‘architexts’, to use Evelyne Ender’s (2005) formulation, that generate multiple frames within which we enter into the classroom activities. First, the footage is a ‘filmic text’ that calls into question particular ways of framing what is presented for analysis.

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By framing, in its inimitability as a specific genre, the filmic performs its textuality and creates a framework for my engagement as a viewer of the footage. I read the footage as mediated, with the machine that frames my reading. Reflecting on this framing allows me to be conscious of my own engagement with this classroom, the actors and agents – animate or inanimate within it – and therefore from the outset, be able to read the relationship(s) between the texts in this classroom and the audiences in and out of the frame of the footage of analysis.The notion of framing used here invites a consideration of ways of seeing this footage, as a ‘framed’ participant/observer of the activities in the classroom. It subsequently generates conscious ways of reading the same. Framing therefore maps the ur-text – that reference point that sets the discursive framework from within which we arrive at conceptual pronunciations about pedagogical practices in this classroom. Do I consider myself an audience, from without the filmic frame? What about the ‘live’ audience that is doing the actual filming, as well as the various filming activities seen within the footage provided for us? Indeed what is the effect of the filmic gaze in the classroom, and on my analyticalreading practices? We could also ask what effect this filmic gaze, embodied in the camera has on the children’s activities in the classroom. Does it make them aware of various audiences within its palimpsest of frames? This is not simply an exercise in the discourse analysis of a semiotic event, but the beginnings of an appraisal of a textual ecosystem that has important conceptual consequences on an analysis of the literary objects, the children’s interaction with them and my analysis. These objects are marked as textual, but also allow for them to be placed in the context of the human and nonhuman, animate and inanimate and generate a productive dispersal of sensorial apprehension on the part of the children. A number of things emerge about textuality in this classroom. The first, largely basic but central aspect that we can begin unpacking is the actual classroom activity, which involves the picture book in front of the children and how the book allows us to think about them as a primary audience, and their interaction with the activities of listening, speaking and reading inspired by the text.4 In other words, we are considering this as an early childhood literary classroom. As an audience which participates in this specific context, debates around the generic sub-discipline of children’s literature become important, in bringing into view basic ideas about the ethical encounter between the adult author and the child reader as engaged by some scholars (Hunt 1999; May 1995). These early debates sought to deconstruct the power dynamics between child readers and adult authors. These scholars reflect on the (un)conscious overdetermination of adultist framing of these projects of imagination and the lack of a space of equal and reciprocal interpretation – indeed the lack of a space of epistemological reciprocity. Jacqueline Rose (1984) also teases out the power relations assumed in this dynamic and clichéd ideas around a ‘civilising’ and ‘socialising’ process for child readers. In this way, the broader field of critical studies in children’s literature raises questions about the continuities of an imperial logic in adult-authorial child-reader relations.5 But perhaps in considering the actual space of a literary classroom such as this

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one, in which the text comes to interpretive life with an active audience, these criticisms gain greater resonance. This is especially because of the unchallenged assumptions of the child as a passive receptacle of prescribed adult wisdom, and not as part of an active readership which generates its own meanings while interacting with the space of imagination, in complex and deconstructive ways. Indeed, there are conceptual repercussions for studies on audiences, readerships or ‘publics’, and consequently the deficient interpretative regimes that arise and govern our semantic relationship to phenomena. In an interview with teacher/practitioner Sara Stanley, author and illustrator of the book How to Find Gold Viviane Schwarz shares her concerns about the dynamics of power that influence prescriptive ideas on the content of illustrated children’s books. Viviane highlights assumptions made about the kinds of imagistic texts that are assumed ‘identifiable’ to children. The unique and complex sociologies of reading, listening and creating children’s literature play a part in the choice of images that go into Viviane’s illustrated children’s books, as well as the influence of her own lived experience. These concerns relate to the ways in which the project of imagination in the children’s classroom can be engaged with. Assumptions around how the children in the classroom enter the activity of imagination can be seen in relation to them as ‘readerly’ as well as authorial subjects. In linking this project of imagination to their identity, one has to read the classroom events beyond the binaries of adult/child; nature/culture; body/mind to arrive at the interaction between the human, nonhuman and material elements within the classroom. At the centre of this interaction is the story How to Find Gold, whose two protagonists are Anna, a black girl, and the crocodile. As human and nonhuman protagonists, the choice of the crocodile is important, in terms of how the audience imagines themselves in relation to the story and to animals. These choices on the part of the author can have the effect of productively blurring the binaries mentioned above while allowing for dis/identification. A productive space is opened up in which to reflect on the text as acquiring what Murris and Haynes in Chapter 1 in this volume refer to as ‘the agency of the material’ – the analytical dynamic that brings together ‘space, body and text’ in this classroom. In what ways for instance do the children listening/reading and looking at the story imagine themselves in and out of the human? How do choices like this trouble the assumed anthropomorphism of the activity of reading in the classroom? We observe some of the children contorting their bodies as they look at the illustrations as the story is read to them (Figure 9.4).What does this produce? Sitting on the floor, their positioning – already a ‘worm’s eye view’ – allows for their interaction with the textual material in ways that disrupt normative arrangement of a literacy environment (see Figure 9.3). Sitting on the ground – a circle of bodies – as opposed to desks lined up facing a blackboard, allows an interactive rhythm of the human and material differently. The classroom, a space designed by the project of Western modernity in specific ways – lined uniformity – a signalling to the interchangeability of learning subjects, is disrupted through this format of engagement. Uniformity and the interchangeability dynamic of a normative

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classroom produces ‘disciplined’ (read masculinized) bodies, similar to the production line of eighteenth-century industrial plants. As the story is read with the children, and as they see the images and listen to the narrative, while imagining themselves in it, we can invoke debates on orality and literacy in relation to children’s literature, and to broader scholarly work around writing and textuality in African literary contexts (Julien 1992; Finnegan 1970; Ong 1982).These debates, mostly known in arguments on tradition and modernity, are not merely about the pedagogical goals of the acquisition of language in the context of modernity in Africa – as the arrival/ascendance into writing after listening, speaking and reading. Indeed, the notion of childhood development, framed as the acquisition of language through the pedagogical protocols described above, becomes the spectral logic behind colonial modernity’s rationalization of the imperial project in toto: the absence of the history of the colonised because of the absence of documentary evidence, hence the Hegelian ‘land of childhood’ metaphor. In other words, textuality becomes the platform that articulates the ‘superiority’ of the meta-language of Western colonial modernity, its cartographic and therefore ‘ocularcentric’ imperialism and its erasure of cultural geographies that precede its incursion into spaces of conquest. Elsewhere Michael J Shapiro’s formulation (1997) ‘Violent cartographies’ captures this imperial project – the creation of the ‘other’ as an ontological project of the imperial self in ways that resonate with Edward Said’s (1978) important arguments on the creation of the ‘Orient’. So therefore, debates on orality and literacy had the effect of not only asking questions about the hierarchies of the performance of language inherent in those binaries (tradition vs. modernity; East vs. West; orality vs. literacy), but also of invoking epistemological contexts, such as those of Africa that demanded a redistribution of pedagogical sensibilities. To frame it more clearly, these debates put into question the larger and broader archive of evidence that was the basis of imperial architecture.This included imperial definitions of historical evidence, which defined its relationship to the colonies as tabula rasa – empty spaces with no history, no culture and therefore without any complex identity politics, and which were ready for the project of occupation. It is these ontological assumptions which for Said create the Orient as the other of the Occident while ironically invoking their radical incommensurability.

Literary-critical contexts The choice of a black female protagonist in How to Find Gold should remind us of early debates which read the shift from orality to writing in African societies as a privileging of male and patriarchal cultures of storytelling.6 Neil Ten Kortenaar (2011) has also done an interesting study on the history of literacy in African societies, particularly the evolving sociologies of storytelling as many societies moved towards assimilation into colonial modernity. So the oral framework in which Anna’s story is rendered in the classroom allows us to reflect on the disrupted hierarchies of the oral and written, seen as equivalent

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modes of complex narrative formation within the classroom. Moreover, the format – circle of bodies and an orally rendered story – is one that resonates with the performative contexts of traditional African storytelling modes. These orally performed contexts involved an interesting gendered division of labour, part of what we see for instance in Chinua Achebe’s (1958) Things Fall Apart – where ‘male’ and ‘female’ stories defined the socialising of gendered childhoods. While these anthropomorphically overdetermined ideas around the socialisation of children, as human-centred beings rather than as part of an ecosystem of sentient beings can come under critique, the traditional genres – oral tales/folk tales – had content that was mostly inanimate and had the effect of creating relative equivalence and an awareness of the nonhuman and material universe at large. I raise this point in recognition of the choice of the crocodile as a key protagonist alongside Anna in Schwarz’s How to Find Gold. Fables, folk tales, oral tales in many African societies draw equivalence between human and nonhuman, animate and inanimate.While these have been read allegorically by literary critics, in relation to the human world around them, there were blurred boundaries between all of the presumed binaries. Storytelling for children invoked the full gamut of ecological symbolism, from the animal kingdom, fantastical beings to the cosmological framework that created the conditions for what Garuba (2003) elsewhere calls ‘animist materialism’ – where the material took on sentient subjectivity. Garuba’s critical intervention demonstrates the inherent ethereal and inanimate in the material and in the human as opposed to previous schemas designated ‘magical realist’ (Warnes 2009; Gaylard 2005) – and which remained negatively oxymoronic. Elsewhere, Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s (1982:61) Devil on the Cross has a passage where one of the protagonists, reflecting on folk tales from his village, says that an organizing dictum was ‘All stories are old. All stories are new. All stories belong to tomorrow’.This reference to the timelessness of storytelling foregrounds the oral as a vast landscape of spatio-temporal incorporation. For Chinua Achebe in his book The Education of a British Protected Child, deconstructing colonial modernity’s epistemological project meant going back to his own childhood to recuperate the animist materialist world as an ontological as well as an epistemological project. This world, seen through the logic of a ‘celebration’ (Achebe 2009:108) for Achebe meant the awareness of material and immaterial worlds – a cosmological logic – which centres the human, precisely because of colonial modernity’s creation of the human ‘other’. Part of the argument that Achebe and a host of other early modern African writers were trying to put across was not simply one defined by a process of cultural retrieval, but that pre-colonial societies, were already framed through the recognition of cosmologies as constituting the lived environment – an awareness of the human as existing alongside equally powerful beings – material, immaterial or inanimate. The recuperation of this world requires a non-normative process of re-representation, one that deconstructs what Hammond and Jablow (1978) call The Africa that Never Was – the product of epistemological violence from the imperial library. So in fact, writers like D O Fagunwa and Amos Tutuola were already demonstrating in their craft, the ‘material-discursive’ effect of cosmological African worlds in

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which the ethereal, the celestial is already embedded in the terrestrial and that the human is a being amongst other beings.7 I raise the literary-critical contexts above to not only locate what the content of the text in this classroom invokes but also remaining conscious of the African context of this pedagogical platform. Reading the classroom events from the outset, not just as experts in early childhood education, but also as imaginative beings, and as literary critics amongst others, we are ethically bound to examine our own interpretive prejudices and subjectivities, and the contexts of our own intellectual formation, in relation to the primary field of analysis in front of us. In this sense we ask questions such as, what interpretative effect a title like How to Find Gold means in a country (South Africa) and a continent (Africa) whose structural history (at all levels in modern times) – economic, political and social – is informed by a colonial enterprise that was largely extractive? Questions such as these allow us to begin engaging with decolonial interpretive practices, in relation to early childhood studies. To reflect on the adult-centric nature of modern subjectivity – whose legacy we are enraptured is one level of analysis, while to reflect on the geographies of the kinds of childhood we study is a second and important level. So we have to think through the connection between on the one hand the classroom space as already embedded in particular ideas of literacy in relation to the macro-concepts of cognitive development – in connection with temporal schemas of modernity, and on the other, seeing these schemas as generating the conditions for the possibility of relating childhood studies to critical work on empire and colonialism that contexts such as South Africa inevitably throw into sharp focus. This argument is related to Toby Rollo’s work (2016a), which reads the power dynamics of adult-child relations as conceptually translatable to projects of empire and settler colonialism. Rollo’s work speaks to the ways in which imperial discourse infantilises indigenous people in places of conquest through the logic of cognitive development, reason and rationality as produced through ‘civilizational progress’.8 The effect of this is the infantilization extended to engagement with children. For Rollo, there is a net conceptual effect on childhood studies around the world as overdetermined by this temporal logic. So therefore, to think about decolonizing early childhood studies, with regards to literacy would mean fleshing out these contexts and being aware of what kinds of interpretative frameworks the texts can allow us to create and also which dominant frameworks can then be challenged and reformulated. The context of a South African early childhood literary classroom is therefore important in its distinct variations of interpellations and entanglements with modernity, colonialism, apartheid and early childhood literacy.

Imaginative cartographies, authorial agency and collective creativity When the children are asked to create their own maps on a blank canvas, after the session, various objects and animals find their way onto the blank canvas. Their authorial agency is something to reflect on, particularly in relation to

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Figure 9.4 Zombie on the ‘blank’ canvas.

the process of arriving at populating the blank canvas. Here, space becomes an important analytic in terms of the various frames the body navigates in and out of.The classroom, the floor, the blank canvas are various frames which the body inhabits. Asked to create the boundaries of their universe on the blank canvas, they position themselves around it at first and when asked to populate it with their imagination, their bodies navigate in and out of the canvas in various positions and in various movements. Their bodies become part of the material universe of textuality in and out of the canvas, amidst the papers, pens and ink markers. Their bodies perform the kind of textuality that is unhindered, uncolonized by the lined and desked uniformity of a traditional classroom, as well as even by the boundaries created on the blank canvas. Their fictional universe is rendered as an ecosystem where the centrality of the human is secondary, even tertiary to this process of creativity – squids, ‘monsters’, whirlpools, birds other nonhuman animals form a majority product of this process of collective creativity. The closest to the human is a ‘zombie’ (Figure 9.4). In interesting ways, we can connect the space of equivalence drawn between Anna and the Crocodile to the representational effect in this moment of authorial performance for the children.

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The two protagonists happen on the page of How to Find Gold without the audience questioning their provenance – was Cocodile male or female? Adult or child? It is clear that Crocodile is not Anna’s pet for instance but an equal – ‘smart but crazy’ as one of the children regard them in responding to their ‘dangerous’ adventure. The relationship between Anna and Crocodile escapes the categorical regimes of the human, placing both as protagonists in an equivalent and symbiotic dynamic in the adventure.At the same time, the relationship is not reduced to allegorical animism and/or as merely an exercise in didactic analysis. In this way therefore, the narrative is able to problematize the hierarchical dynamic in the binary relationship between human/nonhuman; animate/inanimate; adult/child that are inherent in normative ways of creating and reading children’s literature.

Conclusion An early literary classroom such as this one gives us the opportunity to observe the text as it generates a space that incorporates the children’s bodies as part of the material cultures of the classroom. It allows us to reflect on the dynamics of power between the adult author of children’s literature and the child reader. In this way we are able to reflect on this power dynamic as already engendered in the imperial modern project in connection with the binary logic of ontological and epistemological frameworks of thinking about the human. We are then able to invoke the context of Africa, whose storytelling cultures continue to reflect on the legacies of a ‘storied’ ecosystem through the debates on orality and literacy – the problematic hierarchical relationship that resonates with the modern imperial project at stake in our present classroom. In other words, we will have to re-turn to early childhood studies, its spaces of pedagogical practice, to be able to grapple with the roots of the problem of modern human subjectivity, and therefore to craft a new decolonial ontological and epistemological framework of literacy studies.

Notes 1 Sara Stanley, uses the word ‘storyworlding’ in relation to the activities she does with the children in this classroom. I will use her formulation, particularly in the context of its usage in this classroom. 2 I use the term ‘intertextuality’ (commonly used in literary studies) to refer to how texts are brought into conversation with other texts, as we see in this instance, and the potential for this process of intertextuality to generate its own authorial platform. 3 I use textuality here broadly but also in signalling to different genres, including the picture book, amongst other texts in the classroom, but also the footage I use in my own analysis as a ‘filmic text’. 4 My use of the word audience should be read, in the first instance, as nominal, but which acquires the dynamism of participation, observation and even creative production on the part of the children. 5 See also Kimberley Reynold Radical Children’s Literature: Future Visions and Aesthetic Transformations in Juvenile Fiction (2007). 6 See Nnaemeka, O. (1994) From Orality to Writing: African Women Writers and the (Re) Inscription of Womanhood. Research in African Literatures 25(4):137–57.

186  Christopher Ouma 7 See, for instance, D O Fagunwa’s Forest of A thousand Demons and Amos Tutuola’s The Palm Wine Drinkard. 8 See: Rollo 2016a:1.

References Achebe, C. (1958) Things Fall Apart. London: Heinemann. Achebe, C. (2009) The Education of a British-Protected Child. New York: Knopf. Ashcroft, B. (2001) Post-Colonial Transformation. London: Routledge. Ender, E (2005) The Architexts of Memory: Literature, Science and Autobiography. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Fagunwa, D. O (1968) Forest of A thousand Demons: A Hunters Saga. Translated by Wole Soyinka. London: Nelson. Finnegan, R. (1970) Oral Literature in Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Garuba, H. (2003) Explorations in Animist Materialism: Notes on Reading/Writing African Literature, Culture and Society. Public Culture 15, 2:261–285. Gaylard, G. (2005) After Colonialism: African Postmodernism and Magical Realism. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. Hammond, D. & Jablow, A. (1978) The Africa that Never Was: Four Centuries of British Writing About Africa. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press. Hunt P. (Ed.) (1999) Understanding Children’s Literature. London: Routledge. Julien, E. (1992) African Novels and the Question of Orality. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. May, J. (1995) Children’s Literature and Critical Theory: Reading and Writing for Understanding. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nnaemeka, O. (1994) From Orality to Writing: African Women Writers and the (Re)Inscription of Womanhood. Research in African Literatures, 25, 4:137–157. Ong, W. (1982) Orality and Literacy. New York: Routledge. Rancière, J. (2004) The Politics of Aesthetics:The Distribution of the Sensible.Translatedby Gabriel Rockhill. New York: Continuum. Reynolds, K. (2007) Radical Children’s Literature: Future Visions and Aesthetic Transformations in Juvenile Fiction. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Rollo, T. (2016a) Feral Children: Settler Colonialism, Progress, and the Figure of the Child. Settler Colonial Studies 1–20. Rollo, T. (2016b) Democracy, Agency and Radical Children’s Geographies. In R. J. White, S. Springer and M. de Souza (Eds.) The Practice of Freedom: Anarchism, Geography, and the Spirit of Revolt. London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 235–255. Rose, J. (1984) The Case of Peter Pan or the Impossibility of Children’s Literature. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Shapiro, M. J. (1997) Violent Cartographies: Mapping Cultures of War. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ten Kortenaar, N. (2011) Postcolonial Literature and the Impact of Literacy: Reading and Writing in African and Caribbean Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tutuola, A. (1952) The Palm Wine Drinkard: And His Dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Dead’s Town. London: Faber and Faber. Wa Thiong’o, N. (1982) Devil on the Cross. London: Heinemann. Warnes, C. (2009) Magical Realism and the Postcolonial Novel: Between Faith and Irreverence. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Chapter 10

Philosopher children moving through spacetime Kai Wood Mah and Patrick Lynn Rivers

Philosopher children prove critical to decolonisation. In South Africa, second graders in this chapter reimagine H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885) largely set in South Africa. Haggard’s novel chronicles the search for treasure in Africa’s hinterland dependent on the tracing of the land, with plants, animals and Africans described in binary. Contrastingly, children highlighted in this chapter map to locate treasure by engaging Viviane Schwarz’s How to Find Gold (2016). To this end, Kai and Patrick’s chapter unfolds through progressive diffractive posthumanist readings. First, they read Haggard’s novel revolving around ‘tracings’ of coloniality as opposed to ‘mappings’. Second, Schwarz, as projected into the classroom by teacher Sara Stanley, presents a different anti-Cartesian geography by diffracting civilized-savage binaries where protagonists traverse difference without surrendering subjectivities. Finally, philosopher children diffract Schwarz’s diffraction.They ultimately demonstrate the potential of affirmative critical politics hinging on an entanglement with and freedom from colonial and apartheid histories.

Introduction Philosopher children are critical to South Africa’s decolonisation. Not unlike Plato’s ‘philosopher king’, philosopher children’s curiosity, nimble thinking, sensibility, and calming enthusiasm for the newness offered by the parallax makes them South Africa’s best hope now that the post-apartheid dream has been dulled. The philosopher children in the second grade class live in a nation marked but not necessarily defined by violence, corruption, economic stagnancy and a general malaise dominating South Africa’s present political discourse. They look askance at the ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ binaries akin to the ‘citizen’ and ‘foreigner’ binary reified by a xenophobic South Africa. Not that these young citizens defy gravity and float in a world of fantasy, because they do not. What goes on in the classroom is only a part of the story; classroom events exist as inextricable part of a larger context that cannot take a back seat. Not to romanticise or essentialise a class of children, but much of what ails South Africa with its historical present marked by remnants of colonialism and apartheid lives in the second graders central to this chapter, even as these

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second graders map a different trajectory. We thus acknowledge, for starters, that the philosopher children in this chapter occupy a very privileged position in South Africa, particularly compared to many of their peers nationwide. Specifically, the second graders in this chapter and book attend a pricey private school (i.e., an ‘independent school’ in SA parlance) which was, under the apartheid regime, whites only. (Monthly tuition fees at their school for 2017, without the ‘extras,’ is twice the 2016–2017 minimum monthly wage of a domestic worker employed fulltime.) In 2015, 566,194 (4.4%) of South African learners grade R through grade 12 attended private school, out of 12,814,473 total grade R through grade 12 students. (See Department of Basic Education 2014, Table 4.) Significantly, the vast number of South African learners grade R through grade 12 attend public schools, which are unequally resourced and not racially and socioeconomically diverse like the school attended by our second graders. ‘Public,’ though, is a misleading demarcation in the state’s basic education funding formula because ‘private’ schools receive a partial state subsidy based on the individual learner’s financial need. ‘Public’ schools accept funding based on their quintile, with the poorest quintiles (overwhelmingly if not all black) receiving the highest amount of state funding. Quintiles, as neat and tidy categories, fail to capture the inequitable resource distribution between ‘public’ and ‘private’ schools, nor do they reflect the lack of equity between the wealthiest public quintile and the next ‘wealthiest’.1 Highlighting the numbers is important in a post-apartheid context where black children still have less in material terms as a continuation of the colonial condition set as ‘the [racial] Other’ in particular came to be. Numbers, in perspective, underline the more-than-relative advantage of our multicultural class of philosopher children, at school, if not at home.This is an advantage within an educational landscape where stories abound about poorly trained teachers performing dismally on content knowledge exams, students using (and even drowning in) pit latrine toilets at school and students spending large parts of the academic year without school text books because of the state’s organisational shortcomings. (See Bansilal, Mkhwanazi and Brijlall 2014; SAPA and Staff Reporter 2014; Skelton 2014; Tshabalala, Mthemba and SAPA 2012.) This all leads us to a quandary that brings us trepidation that is an integral part of the classroom story unfolding in one second grade classroom centred in this book. Namely, are the in-class circumstances of teacher Sara Stanley’s use of Viviane Schwarz’s picturebook How to Find Gold (2016) as the basis of a lesson exceptional? Would the results be comparable with a different teacher and class in a poor and all black public school? We need to state with emphasis that we are in no way suggesting that black children in poor schools cannot be philosopher children, just in case anyone is left with that impression. At a certain level, we are the second grade learners in this chapter, but transported to North America because of immigration in one case and forced migration in another. One of us is an immigrant to Canada from Hong Kong who grew up in a working-class Montreal household during the 1970s and 1980s at the height of Quebec nationalism where the immigrant’s citizenship was in question. The other descends from slaves brought to the United States and grew

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up in an equally diverse and tense racial 1970s and 1980s Miami characterised by US racial segregation and antipathy towards immigrants from other parts of the Americas, not to mention poor blacks denied full citizenship rights. We both, though, attended well-resourced schools situated within social contexts characterised by racism, as well multiculturalism, and even cosmopolitanism. That is, our days in well-resourced schools that were also very multiracial and socioeconomically diverse meant that we did not just intersect with those who differed in racial and class terms, for example, but our consciousness of how our lives intra-sected with others was most apparent at school.2 And this privileged subject position, even within disadvantageous racist North American social contexts, gave us a particular outlook during the 1970s and 1980s through to the present that we intimately recognise in the second grade class about whom we now write. Ultimately wrangling with difference that is more than discursive, this chapter largely takes shape through a series of progressive diffractive posthumanist readings of nomadism, or degrees of nomadity, linking South Africa’s white settlers during the nineteenth century and our multicultural second graders. First, we use the next section to appraise in short order H. Rider Haggard’s novel King Solomon’s Mines (1885/1994). Haggard’s colonial-era novel, set in what would become a South Africa where colonisers dreamed of treasure, is a means by which we start to compare the projective cartography of a diverse class of philosopher children with the Cartesian and colonial prism through which Haggard’s settler protagonists understood Africa. Second, and more substantially, we use the section after the Haggard section to explore how one South African class of philosopher children moving through spacetime diffracts Viviane’s picturebook How to Find Gold and how their reading of a map and their subsequent mapmaking differs from Haggard’s South African cartography. The perspective of the second graders, in a racially and socioeconomically diverse school with, as a school, clear material advantages over most South African schools, is quite instructive. Not having to worry about hunger at school, philosopher children centred in this chapter and book notably reroute the imperial tracing in Haggard’s novel underlying white supremacy and patriarchy. Not having to worry about sanitation at school, philosopher children in at least one South African second grade classroom offer a compelling reading of mapped, as opposed to traced, treasure through their engagement with Viviane’s picturebook. Not having to worry about clean clothes at a school sensitive to material differences in the lives of its learners, our philosopher children map a different direction as their map reflects the potential of young subjects both entangled with and less bound to lingering colonial and apartheid histories. Finally, we offer a brief postscript.

Tracing the noncitizen H. Rider Haggard wrote King Solomon’s Mines in 1885 after having re-turned to England from Africa in 1882. He had been based, for several years, in South

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Africa as a young man, mostly serving in various colonial administrative positions. Work gave Haggard reason to travel into the continent’s interior that reminded us of Viviane’s invitation to How to Find Gold readers like our philosopher children. Haggard marvelled at the continent’s natural resource wealth and was, perhaps, as much as a coloniser could be, intrigued by ‘native’ culture. King Solomon’s Mines became a way for Haggard to chronicle the travails of a

Figure 10.1 Haggard’s map.

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kind of alter ego through the character of Allan Quatermain, who was a white Durban-based adventurer. In terms of the book’s basic plot, Quatermain agreed to search for the missing brother of a British aristocrat, Sir Henry Curtis, who would also figure in other Haggard novels. The brother had disappeared after setting out for a ‘Lost World’ to ‘discover’ King Solomon’s Mines where, according to myth, riches were to be found. (In fact, the Haggard book was an early example of the ‘Lost World’ genre in colonial literature with ‘lost’ worlds or civilizations really satisfying the colonizer’s humanist-centred desire to find, control and enrich.) Quatermain became the ideal leader of the search because he possessed a ‘map’ which was ‘traced’ by Haggard’s fictional Portuguese explorer Jose da Silvestre in 1590. With the ‘map,’ Quatermain had the power to prevail. The search party, led by Quatermain, encountered many of the typical types of ‘adventure’ that we would now consider typical of such stories involving white settlers venturing into ‘deepest darkest Africa’ – complete with ‘savage’ natives possessing mysterious powers, wildlife at every turn, swashbuckling white heroes taming that which was deemed to be in need of taming, and imperial treasure to be usurped in the South Africa shaping and shaped by the second graders centred in this chapter. When first confronted with the classroom data serving as evidentiary basis of this chapter and book, and the centrality of maps in both Viviane’s picturebook and the map that the philosopher children drew, we both eventually recalled how Anne McClintock’s reading of the ‘map’ in Haggard’s possession left an impression on us as PhD students in the 1990s. To McClintock, writing in Imperial Leather about that which served as premise to deny black dignity and not just citizenship, the map spoke to the three ‘governing themes of Western imperialism: the transmission of white male power through the control of colonised women; the emergence of a new global order of cultural knowledge; and the imperial command of commodity capital’ (McClintock 1995:2–3). And really, the logic embedded within the ‘map’ underscored the logic of citizenship in colonial Africa as the very real underpinnings of insiders and outsiders to power. McClintock quickly differentiated the fictional da Silvestre’s treasure ‘map’ (as McClintock called it) from others drawn by settlers; it was ‘explicitly sexualized’ (McClintock 1995:3) with da Silvestre’s ‘map’ drawn while he was starving to death on the ‘nipple’ of ‘Sheba’s Breasts’ mountain (McClintock 1995:2). According to McClintock, the land on da Silvestre’s ‘map’ is ‘female,’ and ‘literally’ drawn with ‘male body fluids, and da Silvestre’s phallic cleft bone becomes the organ through which he bequests the patrimony of surplus capital’ (McClintock 1995:3). The ‘map’ excludes women, not to mention black and black female bodies from the conservation of white male heterosexual citizens who sought to determine Africa’s fate. Wrote McClintock, ‘Da Silvestre’s demise on the bad (frozen) nipple is avenged and white patrilineal inheritance assured, only with the death of Gagool’, the black female character in Haggard’s

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book because the black female character was the ultimate obstacle separating white men from treasure and power (McClintock 1995:3). McClintock continued:The ‘map’ drawn by Haggard’s fictional da Silvestre ‘hints at a hidden order underlying industrial modernity: the conquest of the sexual and labour power of colonized women’ (McClintock 1995:3). But according to McClintock, the ‘map’ also provided a paradox in addition to an ordered secret. At one level, it marked the path to treasure as ‘maps’ are supposed to do. However, at another level, there was a flipside: ‘Inverted, it reveals at once the diagram of a female body.The body is spread-eagled and truncated – the only parts drawn are those that denote female sexuality’ (McClintock 1995:3).3 Haggard’s Quatermain, as McClintock noted, placed a compass next to the ‘mapped’ Three Witches (a mound). It was the epitome of knowledge-power with the compass being, as McClintock described it in writing, ‘the icon of Western “reason,” technical aggression and the male militarized possession of the earth’ (McClintock 1995:4). This is a ‘reason’ that our second grade class of philosopher children challenge. We reference and quote Imperial Leather at length because McClintock’s postcolonial reading of King Solomon’s Mines is in stark contrast to the antiCartesian geography elaborated by our philosopher children in concert with picturebook author Viviane and teacher Sara. In fact, with implications for who can be a citizen, philosopher children in this chapter actually map while da Silvestre’s ‘map’ wielded by Haggard actually ‘traced’ colonial Africa. Hence, we place ‘map’ in quotation marks when referring to Haggard and da Silvelstre.The distinction that we make here comes directly from Deleuze and Guattari, who differentiate ‘tracing’ and ‘mapping’ in their book A Thousand Plateaus (1987). For Deleuze and Guattari, ‘a map has multiple entryways, as opposed to tracing, which always comes “back to the same.” The map has to do with performance, whereas the tracing always involves an alleged “competence” ’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:5).4 Likewise, colonizers empowered by humanism’s Enlightenment science (including its compass) trace. This is a tracing consistent with McClintock’s Haggard, Quatermain and da Silvestre who, respectively, imagine, use and trace Africa. And as read by McClintock and expanded by us, the tracing inevitably parses humans (by, e.g., race, gender, sex and sexuality), other animals, landscapes, not to mention inanimate creatures frequently in binary terms underlying a web of social supremacies justifying the exclusions.To us, Deleuze and Guattari’s mapping, as opposed to tracing, has the potential to open up citizenship in a way that exceeds the relatively inflexible citizenship rights of humanists in political practice.

Mapping nomadic citizenship Especially compared with McClintock’s reading of Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, Anna, the protagonist of Viviane’s How to Find Gold, imagines and maps a visual and narrative landscape defying socially constructed binaries. The book contains multiple diffractions of the mind-body dualism. Its differentiation of

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race and gender departs from any kind of unitary and fixed subjectivity that might be used to construct ‘the Other’ in one-dimensional ways. Character development of Anna and Crocodile in How to Find Gold helps to project ‘lines of flight’ that set into motion a series of ‘subjects-in-process’ (Braidotti 2006:17) opening the door to a more flexible citizenship – where belonging can be extended beyond the human to encompass the living even when the living is ‘inanimate.’ Anna and Crocodile’s subjectivities become the objects of transposition. To quickly note these transpositional moments, but by no means to reduce them, the lines of flight are as follow: becoming strong-becoming cartographers-becoming sailors and adventurers-becoming courageous. And finally, the fifth line of flight, and the most poignant of all, is becoming-nonexploitative explorers in a mode quite contrary to the prevalent colonial narrative used to construct ‘the explorer’ in novels like King Solomon’s Mines. How to Find Gold ends with a statement of ethical value by burying the treasure and the map so that they are never to be discovered. Anna and Crocodile’s greatest reward

Figure 10.2 Anna and Crocodile map their adventure in Viviane’s How to Find Gold.

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comes with their own giddy happiness; they found gold and the adventure was ‘dangerous and difficult.’ Viviane’s Anna and Crocodile rock the norm. Historically, adventure narratives such as Haggard’s favour representations of the strong, virile and courageous white male. Adventure stories are habitually given to boys as instructional reading to help nurture an inner and inwardly stable and staid masculinity and manhood according to dominant notions of ‘stable’ and ‘staid.’ Similarly, in colonial African adventure narratives like Kipling’s Jungle Book (1894) and Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes (1914), white male characters overcome adversity by mastering nature both physically and metaphorically via tracing as opposed to mapping in the Deleuze and Guattarian sense. Tracing helps to secure their exclusive right to a white masculinist citizenship. Adventure narratives in the Haggard, Kipling and Burroughs mode lack (an expressed and substantive) exploration except perhaps of the self in relation to a binarised ‘Other.’ (Hence we ask why even liken ‘adventure’ to ‘exploration.’) Nature, by the way, is feminine, untamed, wild, native, uncivilized, noble, etc. It, as suggested by McClintock, needs to be penetrated, explored and exploited by extractive means like mining. In the colonial imaginary, black women, at the intra-section of race and gender, become the primitive and savage ‘Other’ who is sexualized and fetishised (e.g., Europe’s fascination with South Africa’s own Saartjie Baartman). In a mode that is not about tracing from the coloniser’s perspective, readers may but not necessarily assume that Anna is black (or at least of colour), and female, with a sporty natural hairstyle (probably but not necessarily an afro), and Crocodile is, well, a crocodile but not the kind of crocodile we have been taught to know. Anna is brave, strong and intelligent. Furthermore, Anna’s youthfulness fails to deter her from an adventure ‘that would be dangerous and difficult’; in fact, these would-be deterrents are the very reasons that make the adventure worthwhile for Anna. Crocodile also resists easy categorization with humanist lenses. While the sex and gender (or sex-gender) of Crocodile are indeterminate, existing outside of any gendered binary, Crocodile’s species is clear even after Viviane anthropomorphizses the character. The anthropomorphised Crocodile proves to be consistent with the book’s overall diffraction of the adventure narrative as genre. Animals, especially in ‘deepest and darkest Africa’, are supposedly wild and dangerous. Wild and dangerous animals of the nonhuman variety thus end up in an animal hierarchy. ‘Primates’ (with a Latin root suggesting that they are amongst the first in rank) are on top, with (white and masculine) ‘man’ taking the unearned pole position with all the rights to humanist citizenship thereunto appertaining. Animals identified higher in the evolutionary chain have bodily resemblances to humans and have a propensity for material culture proximate to humans. ‘Other’ animals without a traceable resemblance to humans assume their place in the hierarchy based on their ability to be domesticated and trained (i.e., dogs, cats, horses, elephants), as kind of honorary citizens but never equal citizens, even if it is taboo for humans to eat them. In Viviane’s picturebook, Crocodile, in most cases ranked at the low end

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of the humanist evolutionary chain as reptile with prehistoric origins, is Anna’s friend, and Crocodile has human language and abilities. Not only is Crocodile associated with inhabitants of a river like the Limpopo, where humanist crocodile narratives highlight crocodiles who eat undocumented migrants entering South Africa, Crocodile also has association through kinship with the dinosaur, now beloved in popular culture. These conflicting humanist views negate each other. Effectively, Crocodile is the embodiment of a deconstructed binary order in 2017. This deconstructed binary order, as exemplified in Crocodile’s posthumanist and mapped presentation, helps to trouble the human and nonhuman binary, gender binary, and racial binary in particular. Additionally, Anna and Crocodile’s friendship marks that point in which the human-nonhuman binary becomes more about the kind of kinship that Donna Haraway (2016) encourages. The three centrefolds in How to Find Gold sequentially illustrate the figurative sense of transposing nomadically where the mapped subject can become a citizen that is not necessarily the bounded clone of a ‘normal’ subject whose race, gender and species in particular can be definitively known. Anna and Crocodile plunge into the sea in a great storm, the water is splashing and swirling as Crocodile does a cannonball and Anna goes in bravely arms stretched and head first. This first illustration (large and zoomed-in) invites us straight into the depths of the sea. As the page is turned, a second centrefold of the deep turquoise water looks back at the reader and shows Viviane’s protagonists to commune with the world coming into contact with co-citizens.This illustration is the most telling in the entire book, and most deterritorialised, contrary to most Cartesian maps (see Figure 7.4 in Chapter 7). Both Anna and Crocodile appear six times, swirling and swimming along with a school of fish.They appear not from one point to another, but instead in the multiplicity of representations as they move through the gathering currents and as they turn in the sea.They appear in the intransitive sense of movement – that is, they are swimming in the sea with the (swimming) to where and to what still unfolding. The intransitive verb is all action without object or destination. This multiplicity restores, as much as a two-dimensional illustration can, the uncontained body of posthumanist citizens moving in spacetime. According to Deleuze and Guattari’s epistemology, Anna and Crocodile, as intra-species kin not defined by blood are moving through spacetime in the multitude of folds, or boundless place, within a deterritorialised and ethical spacetime of co-existence as co-citizens.5 As we turn the page to the third centrefold, we meet gold. In the series of these three centrefolds, our senses and the body engage, without the complement of words, in transitory positions. Rosi Braidotti, in her book Transpositions (2006), earnestly articulates a ‘nonunitary subjectivity’ that prods us towards an ethically sustainable society that weaves instead of parses.To Braidotti, the aim is to explore ‘a nomadic, dispersed, fragmented vision, which is nonetheless functional, coherent and accountable, mostly because it is embedded and embodied’ (Braidotti 2006:4). Ethics and ethical values prove important to the claim put forth in Transpositions. And

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Braidotti’s ethics and ethical values, ‘far from requiring a steady and unified vision of the subject, rests on a non-unitary, nomadic or rhizomatic view’ (Braidotti 2006:4) quite present in the second graders engagement with How to Find Gold. Braidotti wraps the above points of reference within a ‘notion of “sustainability” ’ that draws on notions of sustainability emerging in development studies discourse about the Global South, but which eventually jumped to analyses of the overdeveloped world (Braidotti 2006:4, 206). Whereas current and prevalent notions of sustainability are built upon the importance of ‘continuity’ and ‘faith in the future’, Braidotti complicates the current and prevalent by emphasizing an ‘ethics of sustainability’ that ‘emerges as a way of doing justice to the complexities within, while providing a cartographic account of the external power-relations’ (Braidotti 2006:259). This ethics, for Braidotti, necessitates a ‘creative process, a praxis, an activity’ not unlike that undertaken by Viviane, Sara and the second graders. Arriving at a realised ethics of sustainability occurs through ‘transpositions’, and, really, through successful efforts to ‘transpose nomadically from philosophical theory to ethical practice.’ To transpose is important in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary discourses because it makes transformative stuff happen. Thus, transposition ‘indicates an intertextual, cross-boundary or transversal transfer, in the sense of a leap from one code, field or axis into another, not merely in the quantitative mode of plural multiplications, but rather in the qualitative sense of complex multiplicities’ (Braidotti 2006:5–7). Humanists might be understood to parse past from present from future. However, Braidotti’s sustainable nomadic ethics gestures towards a post-posthumanism, with an edge that transcends, as Braidotti quotes Manuel Castells,‘ “timeless time” ’ (Braidotti 2006:159). Use of Castell’s ‘ “timeless time” ’ becomes a way to, for example, disconnect a second-grade classroom in 2017 South Africa from the South Africa constructed and distilled in a nineteenth-century novel like King Solomon’s Mines. Nomadic citizenship as developed in Transpositions captures Braidotti’s play with a series of progressive intra-locutors (e.g., Crenshaw 1989; Hall 1996; Hardt and Negri 2000) deeply invested in historical, social and political analyses and intra-ventions built more on connections than disconnect. Braidotti’s adoption of the nomad and nomadic subjectivity as a basis for citizenship enable her to explore sustainable ethical possibilities of becoming when subjects wander in the world and the world wanders in them without being either apolitical, asocial or ahistorical. In this legible new real, different intraaction, possibilities arise within and between humanist species construction not to mention within and between binarised animate and inanimate domains. Before ‘story-play’ with Viviane’s How to Find Gold picturebook, teacher Sara, who ‘difficultates’ (see Chapter 11) the lesson for our second grade class of philosopher children, starts by asking the class to stand up one at a time. The class sits in a circle of chairs – not in rows that would suggest the fixed order denounced in the Pink Floyd song ‘The Wall.’ ‘It takes the bravest to be the first to stand up,’ Sara says. Then, several philosophers stand up, sit down, and

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several others stand up at the same time, and this goes on for several tries. ‘It isn’t easy,’ according to Sara, ‘how can we make it easier?’ ‘You have to watch each other . . . and you need to stand up briskly,’ she adds, suggesting the need to think about connectedness and, really, we might add, a co-citizenship with emphasis on the ‘co-’. After several tries, the class members stand; then Sara comments, ‘Working together, team work!’ Sara goes away and re-turns to her seat with something cupped in her hands. She then gently passes something – which may very well be microscopic and animate, or even invisible, thus not easily traceable – to the co-citizen sitting next to her. Mimicking Sara’s gestures, the learner, holding the something in cupped hands, takes a peek, before carefully passing it to the next co-citizen, who then takes the something into their cupped hands without letting it escape (see Figure 8.3 in Chapter 8). This is repeated around the circle, and back to Sara. They continue: ‘What is it?’ Sara asks. One says, ‘It is nothing.’ Another responds, ‘No it is not nothing.’ One says, ‘Cockroach.’ Then, one learner (whom we will call the Inventor) shouts, ‘A secret!’6 Sara asks, ‘Did anyone drop my secret . . . did you see my face when I  looked at it?’ Sara adds, ‘My face is keeping a secret.’ The lesson continues with a reference to How to Find Gold which she reads aloud and, specifically, Anna’s attempt to make a secret face after Crocodile tells Anna that ‘no one else can know what we are doing, or they will find it [gold] first’. In the exchange between Anna and Crocodile, Anna tries three times to make a secret face, and each time Crocodile guesses that Anna is thinking about gold.The scene ends with Anna saying: ‘Oh, but you know me very well . . . It’ll do. Let’s go!’ (see Figure 8.4 in Chapter 8). And they look for gold, without a map at first, which prompts them to make their own map – charting their own course without tracing as a kind of copying. The secret face in the book and in Sara’s lesson queers the interiority-exteriority binary of body (face as exterior) and identity (emotion and essence as interior) by diffracting simple correlations. By diffracting, the secret face, as Karen Barad (2014:168) might suggest, ‘troubles the very notion of dicho-tomy – cutting into two – as a singular act’, in this case, the singularity of expression that is what it might appear to be in the humanist order and ordering of things. Referencing the scene, Sara asks, ‘What would your secret face look like? . . . Let’s see your secret face.’ After secret faces are made by the learners, class members query Sara about Anna’s facial expression in the illustration, where Anna jumps into a sea serving as co-citizen. ‘Anna should not be smiling because there’s a whirlpool; I would be screaming,’ one learner says. Then the next says, ‘I would be smiling because it is exciting!’

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Several diffractions are at play. We do not actually know whether Anna is thinking about gold, or not, as Crocodile infers. Furthermore, is Anna making a secret face at all? The learners’ enquiry points to the difficulty of reducing emotions and affect to facial expressions, as we discussed earlier. The face is unable to represent the affective that is experienced, embodied and contained in a singular body, and sensed. The muscles in the face that activate miniscule gestures are the finer movements of the body moving through spacetime. The philosopher children in grade two use bodily movement as a mode of enquiry. For instance, one learner (whom we call the Inspector) sits in a chair for the entire story but stands up several times to take a closer look at the illustrations. Certainly, Inspector’s attention reaches a peak at those moments. What prompted Inspector to get up and point to the illustrations – beyond Sara’s invitation which came by placing the open book on the adjacent chair? We only surmise Inspector’s intention, but Inspector’s action, which might be considered insignificant elsewhere or may even be described as disruptive or inattentive in some classrooms, can be understood as diffraction. The Inspector intra-jects as Sara reads in order to verify Viviane’s illustration. Inspector’s movement in spacetime makes the material, Viviane and Sara accountable. The movement generates a force that shifts the flow of the lesson and materials in ways that can only be mapped and not traced, gathering intransitive momentum as the other citizen learners approach Sara for a closer look at the book. Inspector stands up again to point to the place in Viviane’s book where Anna and Crocodile find gold.At that very assemblage of movements and force, another learner (whom we call Marine Biologist) appears with a book on marine life. Marine Biologist shows Sara and others another illustration of a squid from a different book to verify that Viviane’s squid was indeed a squid. This moment complicated Sara’s lesson and Viviane’s book. Sara as teacher was accountable for her story. Viviane as author was accountable for her drawing. Marine Biologist as expert was accountable for knowledge. Sara pauses at the intra-polation and engages the second graders along the new line of thinking that was rhizomatic and untraceable but not necessarily without Sara as teacher-citizen having a desired end in mind. (This is what Karin Murris would liken to being stung by the teacher as a ‘pregnant stingray’ [see Murris 2016:Ch 8; and Part I]). At that moment, Marine Biologist transposes the lesson in proximate ways into an array of ethical practices with each member being co-responsible for their contributions. Marine Biologist’s action in a humanist context would be ‘troublesome’ in many a classroom as suggested above – learners should, after all, sit quietly and listen to the teacher. This moment provided an example of what Braidotti describes as ‘non-unitary subjectivity moving towards an ethically sustainable society’ (Braidotti 2006:4). Marine Biologist is, here, a nonunitary subject whose actions as co-citizen had the effect of reconfiguring the subject positions of teacher, author and student, leading to a practice

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of enquiry. To Braidotti, this is a practice of ethics, performing outside of socially constructed identity. This ethics also surfaces at the end of Viviane’s picturebook. Anna and Crocodile bury gold and hide the map they made, so no one can find the gold. The book ends by stating that the gold is ‘ours forever’ and ‘it was’. These two formidable statements – the latter without any indication of the subject – powerfully dismantled the colonial narrative of exploitation and extraction justified by repeating European narratives about a traced Africa. Without being fixated on authorial intent, to us, ‘ours’ really implied the world as ours, and that the gold is for and of the world, no one person or nation ought to possess it. And relatedly, without gold, when transposed to the South African context, there would be no need to trace Africa, with traces surviving in South African classrooms to the present; there would be no need for a socially constructed ‘Other’ denied citizenship. This understanding of ethical practice only transpired because of Anna and Crocodile’s nomadic subjectivities and nomadic citizenship that, to us, might be also understood to reflect and inflect our second graders as philosopher children and philosopher citizens. The question regarding whether one should keep the gold or not sparked the most profound philosophical enquiry of the lesson. It touched upon greed, exploitation and the right to property. Inventor initiates the enquiry with a very clever diffraction of the binary between children as unknowing and adults as knowing persons. Inventor explains that when people find the map – we assume Inventor means adults – they will make nothing of it as it was made by children who made it for fun. In the process, Inventor exerts children’s agency by undermining the child-adult binary and as we suggest below, demonstrating philosopher children’s ability to map without reproducing Cartesian geographies including the citizen-noncitizen binary. In fact, Inventor questions the need to hide the map at all, as adults would not even think it was real, diffracting upon diffraction.This leads to enquiry about the meaning of greed and fairness referenced in Chapter 8 of this volume. ‘Zuma steals money from people and builds a big house . . . People hate him and he has to pay back the money,’ says Inventor. Inventor adds, ‘He [Zuma] said he will give back the money if you will give me more money . . . He is lying all the time.’ Inventor was referring to the recent and somewhat ongoing controversy regarding misappropriation of government funds on President Jacob Zuma’s US$23 million home improvements. (For more on this scandal, see Chan 2016.) Inventor’s enquiry referencing citizen ‘Number One’ (with ‘Number One’ being code for Zuma in South African political discourse) guides Sara to ask: ‘If you have the gold, will you build a big house . . . If you have money and others don’t have, is it fair?’

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Inventor quickly and assuredly responds, ‘I will throw it away.’ Then Inventor adds,‘Give some of the gold to other people . . . I will become greedy – make people build my house bigger.’ Another learner says, ‘Give the money to help schools, share it,’ which would go a long way towards expanding dignity, not just full citizenship. The enquiry is responding to the political landscape of South Africa. In a rich country with high poverty rates, greed, corruption and injustice have led to an imbalance of wealth, resources and equality noteworthy amongst the majority of black South Africans. Housing and education are the two social institutions in South Africa most in need of improvement and transformation. For the second grade class of philosopher children as citizens, and really co-citizens, addressing material conditions matters, not just deconstructing binaries discursively. In the final part of the lesson, with chairs already pushed against the walls, Sara asks the students to draw a map of the world. With the learners, Sara spreads a large sheet of paper on the floor. She instructs the class to pass a marker around to draw a continuous outline of the world. On their hands and knees, the class draws the outline. Sara wants the line to represent the boundary of the world. Asking the youngsters to draw the outline together and to draw what they saw on their journey, Sara wants the mapmaking exercise, and the map, to be inclusive – without the insider-outsider binary characterising humanist discourses including adventure novels like Haggard’s helping to deny ‘the Other’ dignity and full citizenship. However, notwithstanding the unifying outline that alone bounded the representation of the world, the diverse class of citizen learners walk on the map. They kneel on the inside of the outline to draw and to inhabit the map. Marine Biologist, still holding the book, sets out to draw the squid and the sea. Others plant their drawings here and there, treating the map more like a free spacetime without hierarchy and prescription of what they had to draw. (No taking turns to draw.) On their knees drawing, the markers become tools to smear the paper, rubbing off blues, greens, yellows, purples onto knees, elbows and hands (see e.g., Figure 6.6 in Chapter 6) and on the soles of Sara’s feet (see Figure 6.1 in Chapter 6). What mattered in this map was that the wholeness was not inscribed by a false unity of lines and a colonial proclamation of Crown Land to be doled out to settler citizens or consistency in drawing conventions and techniques, but rather the togetherness coalesced by sharing the surface of paper spread on the floor, coexisting like Anna and Crocodile with the creatures of the sea as co-citizens. On this map, there existed no here or there, or from here to there. The children’s drawings were everywhere, imprinted on the map, on their bodies – blended and dis/embodied. There is a secret in the classroom footage. During the mapmaking, Inventor stops drawing and gets up so as to move towards Sara. Inventor disappears from the camera lens and reappears next to Sara. Shortly after, Sara gets up, walks to Inventor and sits next to the learners. Inventor continues drawing. Sara’s back is towards the camera. What were they discussing? Why did Inventor ask

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Sara to come over? Was it something about Inventor’s drawing that required Sara’s attention? Even if the angle of the camera captured Sara’s face, we would not know the nature of the exchange. This ‘secret’ between Sara and Inventor speaks to the aesthetic and ethics in their performative agency. Because the exchange is mute to us, rendering their bodies is futile because they exist outside the bounds of the privilege of language.The movement of their bodies, thus, diffracts the excessive and essentialising power of language in inscribing identity and forming knowledge via the trace. This moment is one in which privileging the body in spacetime – this is a body not intended to be easily read – has its limits. As we reviewed the classroom data, we have to accept the limitations of what we are able to hear, see and feel. What we can sense is framed by the cameras relationally positioned and pointed as transmitted through the virtuality of our laptop screens. What we can see is recorded by the microphone. The dialogue is muffled by the kids chatting, the sounds of their bodies, clothes, ruffling and shifting, among other clatter in the room. Additionally, we accept the limit of writing as mapmaking used to represent the richness of the classroom data and using language to describe the atmosphere and liveliness of everybody and everything.We recognize, too, that the moving camera as opposed to the stationary camera (or stationary perspective) is better at capturing the lesson as intra-textual conservation. The camera sometimes moves with the children, moves into details and moves out to get a larger view, but never able to represent totally the philosopher children moving through untraceable spacetime.

Postscript The ‘post-’ in posthumanism has potential for post-apartheid South Africa. Humanist rationales have been systematically deployed to justify institutionalised nationalism, racism, and tribalism. Posthumanism potentially undoes these ‘-isms’ but only when posthumanism moves beyond deconstruction.This entails moving beyond language and academic critique and moving towards a sustainable practice of ethics grounded in material conditions in more forthright ways. Braidotti (2012) used a public lecture to expound upon notions of nomadic subjectivity introduced in Transpositions. Beyond overcoming the axes of racial and gendered difference, Braidotti encourages us to understand knowledge production from the body. Philosopher children in this chapter help to move us in this direction with their know-how and ability to articulate and embody nonunitary subjectivities at the core of Braidotti’s nomadic citizenship.And they bring this into being within the normative spacetime of a classroom because they are unencumbered in the use of their bodies as knowledge-producing matter. However, philosopher children’s agency is contingent upon – or at least made easier – when their environment is affable to children’s philosophising and becoming posthumanist citizens. Most children learn in institutional settings where the environment is not conducive to philosophising (i.e., being

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hungry at school, lacking sanitation at school, inadequate clothing to wear while at school). Once again, this is not to say that poor children in township schools are not and cannot be philosopher children moving through spacetime. It is to say that the material is discursive and the discursive material. If philosopher children are leading South Africa to a more ethical and inclusive society of co-citizens without citizenship not limited to citizens of the Eurocentric nation-state, how must adults transpose knowledge into a productive register? And how must adults leverage this knowledge in ways that promote the work of philosopher children as co-citizens? At the policy level, we need to deliver healthy and safe housing, and schooling, across difference without equivocation. This means recognising the very real and impactful differences in material conditions between learners in South Africa, and indeed, many other places in the Global South and North. One fundamental thing, though, underlies everything: We must have the capacity to act for and with children to expand the bounds of citizenship.

Notes 1 Disparities between public (or ‘state’) schools mostly occur between the four most disadvantaged (and nearly all-black quintiles if not all-black quintiles) and the most advantaged quintile in which whites are disproportionately represented with many schools in the latter quintile being former ‘Model C’ schools which would have been ‘all-white’ during apartheid. 2 Here and elsewhere in this chapter we use ‘intra-’ variations to convey the indivisibility and connectedness of that which might be, in a humanist vein, parsed into parts. So, we see our lives, and fate, being linked to the second graders in imbricated ways regardless of our geographies and generations. As youth coming of age during a particular racist and multicultural moment in North America, we look back and see how that context affirmatively connected us to individuals and communities then and now – allowing us to move through familiar ‘foreign’ spacetime.Why? Because we saw ourselves as a part of, not apart from. For more on this ‘intra-’ see Barad 2014:168. 3 McClintock continued: ‘The travelers [in King Solomon’s Mines] cross the body from the south, beginning near the head, which is represented by the shrunken “pan bad water” – the mutilated syntax depicting the place of female intelligence and creativity as a site of degeneration. At the center of the map lie two mountain peaks called Sheba’s Breasts – from which mountain ranges stretch to either side as handless arms. The body’s length is inscribed by the right royal way of Solomon’s Road, leading from the threshold of the frozen breasts over the navel koppie straight as a die to the pubic mound. In the narrative, this mound is named the “Three Witches” and is figured by a triangle of three hills covered in “dark heather.” This dark triangle both points to and conceals the entrances to two forbidden passages: the “mouth of treasure cave” – the vaginal entrance into which the men are led by the black mother, Gagool – and, behind it, the anal pit from which the men will eventually crawl with the diamonds, in a male birthing ritual that leaves the black mother, Gagool, lying dead within’ (McClintock 1995:3). 4 Deleuze and Guattari went on to write: ‘It is inaccurate to say that a tracing reproduces the map. It is instead like a photograph or x-ray that begins by selecting or isolating, by artificial means such as colorations or other restrictive procedures, what it intends to reproduce. . . . The tracing has already translated the map into an image . . . It has organised, stabilised, neutralised the multiplicities according to the axes of significance and

Philosopher children through spacetime 203 subjectification belonging to it. It has generated, structuralised the rhizome, and when it thinks it is reproducing something else it is in fact only reproducing itself ’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:13). 5 See Deleuze and Guattari 1987. For a theoretical explanation of movements and becoming through the senses, see Brian Massumi’s Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (2002). 6 We avoid using gendered pronouns for the learners, because we prefer not to presume the pronoun(s), if any, Anna, Crocodile or the learners adopt.

References Bansilal, B., Mkhwanazi, T. & Brijlall, D. (2014) An Exploration of the Common Content Knowledge of High School Mathematics Teachers. Perspectives in Education 32:34–50. Barad, K. (2014) Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting Together Apart. Parallax 20:168–187. Braidotti, R. (2006) Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Braidotti, R. (2012) Nomadic Feminist Theory in a Global Era. 5 November 2012. www.ucd.ie/ humanities/events/podcasts/2012/rosi-braidotti-feminist-theory/. Burroughs, E. R. (1914) Tarzan of the Apes. New York: A. L. Burt. Chan, S. (2016) Jacob Zuma, South African Leader, to Repay Part of the Money Spent on His Home. New York Times. 3 February. www.nytimes.com/2016/02/04/world/africa/ jacob-zuma-south-africa-president-home.html?_r=0. Crenshaw, K. (1989) Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Anti-Discrimination Doctrine and Antiracist Politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum 139–167. Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Continuum. Department of Basic Education. (2015) School Realities. Pretoria: Department of Basic Education. Haggard, H. R. (1885/1994) King Solomon’s Mines. Cutchogue, NY: Buccaneer Books. Hall, S. (1996) When Was the ‘Post Colonial?’ In I. Chambers and L. Curti (Eds.) The Postcolonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons. New York: Routledge, 242–260. Haraway, D. (2016) Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hardt, M. & Negri, A. (2000) Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kipling, R. (1894) The Jungle Book. London: Macmillan. Massumi, B. (2002) Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. McClintock, A. (1995) Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context. New York: Routledge. Murris, K. (2016) The Posthuman Child: Educational Transformation Through Philosophy With Picturebooks. New York: Routledge, 2016. SAPA and Staff Reporter. (2014) Human Rights Commission to Probe Limpopo School Toilets. Mail & Guardian. 23 January. http://bit.ly/2naN0Zl. Schwarz,V. (2016) How to Find Gold. Somerville, MA: Candlewick Press. Skelton, S. (2014) Leveraging Funds for School Infrastructure: The South African ‘Mud Schools’ Case Study. International Journal of Educational Development 39:59–63. Tshabalala, T., Mthemba, S. & SAPA. (2012) Textbook Shortage Not a Scandal – Angie. IOL. 6 October. http://bit.ly/2naVv6p.

Chapter 11

Facilitating and difficultating The cultivation of teacher ignorance and inventiveness Joanna Haynes and Walter Kohan

As well as achieving the goal of examining the task of the teacher, this text aims to inspire educators to put into question their own position as educators, in the broadest sense of the word. Joanna and Walter take as their point of departure Rancière’s conceptualisation of the difference between an emancipating and a stultifying teacher. They pay particular attention to certain dispositions and actions by the teacher (Sara Stanley), which are not discussed elsewhere in this book. In the film footage of Sara, the children, the text and the classroom, they become attentive to the expression and atmosphere of ignorance and uncertainty, the character of her attention to the complexity of processes unfolding in each event. They ask: What happens when we work backwards and ignorantly explore one short, yet rich and complex, teaching event? Throughout the chapter, they remain conscious of tensions between the humanism of Rancière’s work and the posthumanism of the research project of which they are a part.

Introduction This chapter is born of a number of coincidences. The authors are longstanding participants of the Philosophy for/with Children movement, a movement (discussed in the introduction to this book) that explores the relationships between childhood, education and philosophy. We are both members of the Decolonising Early Childhood Discourses: Critical Posthumanism in Higher Education (DECD), hosted at the University of Cape Town, directed by Karin Murris.The posthumanist perspective adopted by the DECD research project is presented in the introduction to this book. It involves decentering from a human only position and taking the nonhuman into account. The challenge we set ourselves in this chapter is to realise this whilst paying particular attention to certain dispositions and actions by the teacher (Sara Stanley) and not discussed elsewhere in the book. What differences appear in a commentary of teaching when the nonhuman is included? In this de/colonising project, we are invited to clear our minds and reconsider our most deeply held beliefs about thinking, teaching and learning and the relations between them, especially in the presence of childhood. We are invited to become ignorant, again

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and again, and learn alongside each other: to become ignorant of our ignorance and rebuild a new form of ignorance. In writing this chapter, we have been inspired by J. Rancière’s book The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1991) and by wider discussion of his writing in philosophy of education. The film footage of Sara teaching a group of grade two children in a Cape Town classroom with the picturebook text by Viviane Schwarz has been a provocation for us to rethink the agency of the educator, working with the political philosophy of Rancière. Most importantly, for this discussion, neither of us feels comfortable with the term ‘facilitator’ to describe the task of a teacher.We want to stir up discomfort with its use to help re-examine the terms ‘teacher’ and ‘teaching’. We want to engage with renaming what, according to Freud, is one of the three impossible human occupations (the other two, besides Teacher, being Psychoanalyst and Politician). How can we think of teaching being impossible when millions of teachers entering classrooms every day seem to suggest otherwise?

Working with Rancière’s writing on pedagogy in the context of a book exploring posthumanist ideas for education The chapter aims to inspire educators to put into question their own position as educators in the broadest sense of the word and including their practices of research as education. We look at Sara’s teaching to explore ways in which teaching is perhaps more a case of difficultating than facilitating the way we are in the world. We work with Rancière’s description of explanation as the art of distance and his conceptualization of the difference between an emancipating and a stultifying teacher. Rancière does not use the term decolonisation in his writing, but from his political philosophy, we draw out the importance of decolonising the way we look at the relationship between teacher and knowledge by splitting it and identifying the role of a teacher as more of a political position than an epistemological one. From a posthumanist perspective, it also involves splitting also the relationship between teaching and the teacher, opening spaces for nonhuman teaching. Our discussion of The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1991) works with the social and political ideas and terminology adopted by Rancière, a political philosopher writing within a discourse of social equality and human emancipation. Like others in the field of philosophy of education (see for example Bingham and Biesta 2010), we found Rancière’s work to be immensely valuable in deepening our appreciation of the complex politics of equality. This is something that has long been at the heart of our concerns and that we bring to our work for this book, and now with the entanglement of posthumanist perspectives. Rancière’s work has been discussed elsewhere by posthumanists. For example, writing about Rancière’s politicised aesthetics and connection to both artistic research, art education and wider practices of equality, jagodzinski (2015) highlights

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Rancière’s anthropomorphic emphasis on human agency and political action. Rancière conceives politics not as about exercising power but as about ‘an intervention at the level of what is visible and audible’, which according to jagodzinski should also include the ‘feelable’ (2015:126). He proposes an extension of the subject to the inhuman and nonhuman to de-anthropomorphize Rancière. In other words, he enlarges the distribution of the sensible not only to the ‘excluded’ human but also to the excluded nonhuman and inhuman (see Chapter 2). To confront the abyss of human extinction we are so close to, he argues, the only solution is a ‘dark ecology’ in which art speaks to a view of subjectivity ‘without authority’, that could be made public pedagogically (2015:127). jagodzinski claims a neovitalist notion of subjectivity, in order to face both the effects of repressive power as well as power as potential for affirmative change. jagodzinski’s critique of Rancière’s humanism also touches our writing. In this sense, we can question what a de-centred pedagogy of ignorance can do not only in terms of the human subjects in the classroom (teacher and children) as we focus in this chapter but also related to the inhuman and the nonhuman, attending to the feelable, as well as to the visible and audible. Ignorance is not a negative oppositional position. With regard to decentering, in ignorance we find hesitation and waiting, inaction, an opening towards the possibility of including the more than human in ways that we have not done before, a way to recuperate the material of human, inhuman and nonhuman in rather than above nature. We might find ways of moving from progressive practices of individuality towards more fluid practices of becoming and individuation, rendered possible through radical ignorance. In this chapter, Rancière’s meditation on pedagogy is put to work affirmatively in the interests of a larger enquiry about what it means to teach, from a de-centered perspective, and to include the more than human in education, with all its welcome difficulties. Throughout this writing, we have been conscious of tensions between the humanism of Rancière’s work and the posthumanism of the research project of which we are a part. We hope that this chapter might be just a starting point. From it, we want teachers to ask: is there something here to carry out differently and more response-ably in our teaching life in order to reposition our teaching and open teaching beyond the human?

Masterliness, explication and distance Rancière’s meditation on equality and emancipation is a social and political critique. It does not tell us directly what to do or how to act in education, and that would not be desirable in our view. In The Ignorant Schoolmaster1 (1991), Rancière portrays a pedagogical myth that divides the world into knower and ignorant, mature and unformed, capable and incapable. He suggests that this fiction works by presenting inequality in terms of velocity: slowness, backwardness and delay, and the perpetual need to catch up. This supposed gap, with its temporal and spatial dimensions, also serves to help us interrogate the teacher’s position and the assumptions about knowledge upon which so

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much educational practice in schools seems to be based: a kind of interminable and hierarchical gap-closing exercise, locked into the chronology of progress. In South Africa, as in Brazil, Europe and so many other parts of the world, the international league tables of educational attainment serve teachers with a constant reminder of this gap, of their failure, and the impossibility of its closure, based as it is on a mythology of unequal intelligence. For Rancière, education is a working allegory of the way that inequality is reproduced, by making visible equality: [The school is] the model of an inequality which identifies itself with the visible difference between those who know and those who do not know and which devotes itself, visibly, to the task of teaching those who are ignorant that which they do not know, and thus reducing such inequality [. . .] Scholarly progression is the art of limiting the transmission of knowledge, of organising delay, of deferring equality. (Rancière, in Bingham and Biesta 2010:8) Those of us who work in schools and teacher education are all too familiar with the practices of diagnosis and assessment that underpin this art of categorisation and managing progression. Education, as usually practised, is the art of distance, and the ‘master’s secret’ is to recognise this distance in its various forms and to abolish it (Rancière 1991:5). Around this statement, The Ignorant Schoolmaster draws its strategy: if the teacher considers herself an explicator, she will presuppose a division between the superior and the inferior, the more and the less able. She will set up and administrate this supposed distance between learning and understanding; between what she knows and what her students know; between her capacity to know and her students’ capacity to know. This is how a stultifier schoolmaster proceeds: her main task is to shorten the distance that she, consciously or unconsciously, explicitly or implicitly, has presupposed as a natural principle. Of interest here, particularly where a ‘deficit’ in students’ expression and use of language is assumed, is Rancière’s discussion of the explicative order: ‘the explicator sets up and abolishes this distance – deploys it and reabsorbs it in the fullness of his speech’ (1991:5). In this passage, we recognise and feel the futility of masterful reasoning and explanation, the intense effort to mediate the distance. Explication, Rancière argues, is a fundamental myth of pedagogy, a pedagogy that today encompasses the whole of society, not just schools (we need to be schooled by professionals in everything, from giving birth to parenting; from being a citizen, to grieving and managing trauma). Such a pedagogy is all about working at better explication and based on the premise that students’ understanding always needs assistance, it is something that cannot be done without the master.The myth of explication is linked to the myth of progress: to teach is to signal the commencement of learning, to lift the veil of student misunderstanding, at the desirable speed, taking into account the ability of the student. The pedagogical myth further divides intelligence into inferior

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and superior. According to this myth, inferior intelligence ‘registers perceptions by chance, retains them, interprets and repeats them empirically, within the closed circle of habit and need.This is the intelligence of the young child and the common man’ (Rancière 1991:7). On the other hand, the argument continues, the superior intelligence ‘knows things by reason, proceeds by method, from the simple to the complex, from the part to the whole’ (Rancière 1991:7). Such superior intelligence makes it possible for the master to transmit his knowledge by adapting it to the intellectual capacities of the student and to verify that it has been understood. Thus, for children and the common man, there are stories; for rational minds, there are reasons. Developmental thinking and all forms of pedagogy, whether progressive or critical, seem to be implicated in this attack on the division of intelligence. Rancière equates the principle of explication with enforced stultification. It is stultification because, in this order, understanding is never more than translating: offering an equivalent of a text, but never its very reason.The teaching of literacy, where accurate translation of the words on a page is the primary goal, serves as a beautiful example of the teacher as stultifying arbiter of progress. Rancière offers us a wonderfully provocative question. In the case of children learning to read, why would letters necessarily be easier than words? A whole army of specialist educators and psychologists have addressed this educational problem of accurate translation, inventing ever more sophisticated resources and techniques designed to remove obstacles to equality, conceived as transmission or distribution (in the UK. SA and elsewhere it is common to talk about lesson delivery) of the ‘same knowledge’ to every student. In the opposite direction, the emancipatory schoolmaster ignores this distance and affirms the principle of equality: ‘every human being is equally intelligent’. Rancière acknowledges the difficulty with asserting the equality of intelligence: we can never isolate intelligence and measure it; we always come to know it by particular effects. He suggests rather that the interesting problem is to see what might be done under such a supposition. He equates this supposition with the principle of equality, something neither given, nor claimed, but rather verified. This principle is an assumption and a faith that enables the intelligence of the student to work freely by itself. It configures the task of the teacher as a pure relationship from her will to another will. Equality is a practice rather than a goal or a reward. Emancipation is possible, and verifiable, in the case of the act of an intelligence obeying only itself, even while the will obeys another will. One educational issue is how to reveal an intelligence to itself, without stultification. In this way, Rancière/Jacotot redefines the role and meaning of working as a teacher: the teacher is someone who no longer transmits her knowledge (she knows that an emancipator teacher does not transmit what she knows). Rather, she transmits her ignorance, both an ignorance of what the student will learn and most importantly, an ignorance of what presupposes and makes the (pedagogical) institution possible: inequality. So, if explication is not the practice to follow, what might ignorant practices look like?

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Facilitation as explication in disguise? Thinking again about the impossibility of teaching, and the constraints of many education policies today, perhaps the notion of facilitation emerges from deep distaste with didactic and transmissive approaches: a desire to disassociate from that model of the explicator teacher. Facilitation suggests moving away from the idea of teaching as instruction and confrontation; perhaps to suggest that the teacher can smooth the pathway, make things easier or more comfortable for children, or to propose that students might make greater progress if things were made less complicated. There is a tendency to think that the facilitator’s job is to provide the structure and organisation believed necessary for learning: to create orders of knowledge (or procedures) and render them comprehensible. Tired of the denigration of many students and the systems that seem to fail them and sustain or widen inequality, the teaching of thinking skills (through facilitation) has appealed to many educators, perhaps even seduced them. In Philosophy with Children, for example, we know that many children and teachers breathe a great sigh of relief when introduced to teaching as facilitation: they honestly feel liberated (Haynes 2007). All the more so when advocates suggest that it is an approach that has gap-closing properties, arming them with evidence of improved intelligence, carefully measured through reliable standardised tests before and after the intervention, to persuade their school leaders. Nevertheless, we consider that the distance affirmed in the stultifier paradigm is expressed in different forms, one of which could be in the idea of the teacher as ‘facilitator’. This might presuppose a hierarchy between the teacher and the student. The former being a ‘higher-order’ thinker, one capable of understanding the complexities and difficulties of a given problem, situation or concept, and who has the task of reducing complexity so that the ‘lower-order’ thinker, the student, will be rendered able to engage in a discussion or in the cognitive processing of a given concept. In other words, teaching as facilitation merely might change the kind of distance between the teacher and the student: where the traditional teacher conceives this distance in terms of knowledge, the facilitator conceives it in terms of quality of thinking. In some practices of philosophical facilitation this distance is sophisticated in the teacher formation model: there is the philosopher, the highest-order thinker, and somehow a disembodied, personally and politically absent one, who forms the teacher so she can then facilitate the introduction of the student in the philosophical world.The philosopher is often portrayed as the gatekeeping guardian of complexity and depth, a kind of wizard of the philosophical method, a champion of the contestable concept and paragon of procedural questions – these are the magical questions that will help in the translation of lower to higher order thinking. The so-called selfeffacement of the teacher is feigned, part of the artistry and performance of

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philosophical facilitation. Rancière has critiqued such liberalist maieutic aims in the Socratic tradition, saying: This is the secret of good masters: through their questions, they discreetly guide the student’s intelligence – discreetly enough to make it work, but not to the point of leaving it to itself. There is a Socrates sleeping in every explicator [. . .] The Socratic method is thus a perfected form of stultification. (Rancière 1991:29) The task of an emancipating/decolonising teacher is not an easy one. The pedagogical order is based on the inequality of knowledge and intelligence. If she accepts this order of inequality, she will always reproduce it. She needs to ignore it, not because she does not know it, but because she does not accept it: her ignorance is an act of political will. To ignore this order is to disobey it: the emancipator (or decolonising teacher) knows this inequality, but she does not obey it. Therefore, her acts of teaching are political and what she transmits is this kind of ignorance as disobedience, wilfulness or insubordination to the stultifying order that prevents a human intelligence (and with a posthuman perspective the intelligences of the morethan-human too) from developing its own capacities. Certainly, in order to emancipate others, the teacher should be emancipated herself (Rancière 1991:15), in Rancière’s humanistic terms ‘conscious of the true power of the human mind’, her political will invokes the conditions so that her students can put into practice their own capacities from the egalitarian principle. We suggest that this political will is a force that is part of the relational human and more than human context. The political nature of this act lies in the teacher’s enactment of belief, along with obliging the student to realize her capacity in a circle of power homologous to the circle of powerlessness that ties the student to the explicator of the old method [. . .] the circle of powerlessness is always already there: it is the very workings of the social world [. . .] the circle of power, on the other hand, can only take effect by being made public. (Rancière 1991:15) In this sense, the teacher is a difficultator of what the school as institution asks her to teach and the student to learn. The teacher does not want the student to learn from her, but with her and alongside her, starting from the egalitarian principle that school as political institution denies. She doesn’t want the student to learn what the schools tell her to learn (that she is incapable of learning without following the path of who is capable, i.e., the teacher), but its opposite: to learn, first of all, that she is as capable as anyone else of learning what she desires to learn.

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An ignorant-emancipator-decolonising schoolmaster might look absurd and anti-‘natural’ in front of the evident and habitual character of a regular teacher. If a teacher is considered a teacher because she knows what the student needs to learn and her function is precisely to transmit this knowledge (or skills or capacities or whatever), how can a teacher be a teacher without knowing what the student needs to know and she herself does not know? How can a student learn from or be taught (Biesta 2010b) what the teacher does not know? It is precisely this anti-natural character, which expresses the political force of the act of teaching, according to The Ignorant Schoolmaster. This is one of the key movements of Rancière’s book: to split the ‘natural’ connection between teaching and knowing and the ‘natural’ role of the teacher as someone who transmits what she knows to her students. As its consequence, this movement renders the teacher someone who: a) teaches not knowledge but a relationship to knowledge and intelligence; b) is a teacher not because of what she knows but because of what she assumes (the equality of intelligence) or ignores (the systemic inequality that operates within the educational institution). This new role of the teacher makes her a specific political actress: by resisting, disobeying and contesting the inequality that passes through the educational institutions, she transmits a form of exercising power. In Rancièrian terms, we could state that the ignorant schoolmaster affirms a democratic politics: she interrupts the stultifying order and invokes conditions so that the apparent incompetents, the students, the ignorants, govern themselves in their path of knowing. So that in an emancipating/de/colonising schoolmaster’s classroom, those who govern are those who are normally considered as incompetent, ignorant and powerless. It is important to clarify that this Rancièrian schoolmaster does not necessarily imply a constructivist theory of knowledge, nor the view that all knowledge has the same value, nor that there is no need to have a teacher in a classroom (see Biesta 2010a). To say that the student learns with the teacher and not from her does not necessarily mean that the teacher is a ‘constructivist’ one. Whilst for this book politics, epistemology, ontology and pedagogy are entangled, Rancière is not worried about the method of teaching but about its political principle. A teacher seemingly not teaching anything, not transmitting any explicit knowledge, could be a stultifying one if she implicitly transmits the inequality of intelligence. Many constructivist students learn ‘to know by themselves’ following the path of the principle of inequality – that is, after learning that if they want to really know they need to follow the one who really knows how to know and can affirm which knowledge is legitimate and which is not. By contrast, according to Rancière, an emancipatory teacher has a very precise task and two main activities to carry out: a) she interrogates or demands that the other intelligences speak by themselves; b) she verifies that the other

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intelligences are working with attention, that is, under the constraint of their will. Through these actions, the teacher, according to Rancière, accomplishes the essential task of a teacher: keeping ‘the researcher on his own route, the one that he alone is following and keeps following’ (Rancière 1991:33). The teacher is then a master of confidence and care for the way her students are paying attention in their search, caring about their doing their work attentively (Rancière 1991:31). According to Rancière, attention is ‘the act that makes an intelligence proceed under the absolute constraint of a will’ (Rancière 1991:25). Attention, in this sense, is relational.When students are attentive, they are committed to their learning, to being themselves with their entire will, forcing their intelligence to unfold all its capacity. To put it another way, the teacher is not interested in the content or outcome of her students’ engagement, but in the quality of the engagement itself, in their experience of learning. She is concerned with whether they learn attentively or not. The master is also a searching person. Her belief in the equality of intelligences is an assumption to verify, not a truth to demonstrate. She is not sure about anything, including the beliefs that support her practice. She is in a permanent state of searching. Being a teacher is being on the move, being a searcher. She feels the equality of intelligences, and out of this feeling, she continues searching, in order to continue having further encounters on the road (Rancière 1991:45). Her belief in the equality of intelligence is a kind of compass that helps her understand why things like different results in the learning process of her students occur: she doesn´t understand those cases as caused by a difference in intelligence but by a difference in attention (Rancière 1991:51). This is why her work is focused entirely on the attention of her students, so that they can stay firmly and attentively in their searching path.This is not a disciplinary focus, with the character of a reprimand when students’ attention wanes; rather it is the compelling form of engagement that is called for, by virtue of being ignorant. Ignorance is part of the atmosphere. The teacher is not a judge, legislator or police officer, but a co-searcher.

Is a pedagogy of attentive ignorance possible? We do not ignore the constraints and limits of school as disciplinary institution, stated first by Foucault (Foucault 1975) and a large Foucauldian tradition of studies in Education. However, starting from another of Rancière´s essays we can consider school as schole, a form of equal experience of time (Rancière 1988). What Rancière argues in that text is that school is born, as schole, not as a place for learning but as a place of division between two experiences of time. Those who are outside school have their time conditioned to produce what they are required to produce in the labour market, and those who have free time have their time liberated from the productive to dedicate it to themselves in studying and exercising. The latter are in school as a place to experience

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an unproductive time. Ignorance and a lack of productivity become part of a dynamic flow. From Masschelein and Simons we consider school a space of suspension and profanation of the values, ideas and hierarchies socially accepted (Masschelein and Simons 2013). This means that in school as schole the social order is suspended, in order to study it, put into question, and eventually go beyond it. It is not that every school suspends and profanates the social order, but it is true that every school inhabits schole as its virtuality. It is not that the real schools are stultifying and the ideal ones would be emancipating. It is not about making real the possible or turning the possible into reality. In an immanent reality, we can distinguish two forms, the actual and the virtual.While both are real, one of the tasks of a teacher is to help actualise what is virtually there, i.e. to invent schole in school, giving space to a free time that, even virtually, is as real as the productive time that overwhelms teaching activities in our contemporary schools.2 The task of the teacher might be considered as creating the conditions so that a free, unproductive, liberated time can be experienced in school. In other words, if we consider the classical distinction between the Greek times chronos and aion, the task of the teacher can be seen as establishing the conditions so that an aionic time (schole) could be experienced in a chronological institution (school) (Kohan 2014, 2015a). We have moved a little far from Rancière and his Ignorant Schoolmaster. Nevertheless, in spite of the pessimistic and conformist tone of the last couple of chapters of the book, Jacotot is an exciting figure with which to think the meaning and sense of being a teacher. In particular, his principle of the equality of intelligence, the position of ignorance he gives to the teacher and the stress on attention, both on the teacher and on what she should care about in relation to on the student, are all very inspiring. Through this characterization, we put into question or even displace some strong and naturalized meanings and senses traditionally ascribed to a teacher: knowledge (ignorance); transmission (attention); and hierarchy (equality).

Experimentation and invention rather than explication – events in teaching and research In the context of our searching together the practices recorded in the film footages of Sara, the children, the text, the classroom, the things, human bodies and the atmosphere in the classroom, we become attentive to these qualities, the expression of ignorance and uncertainty, the expression of belief in equality, the character of her attention and the calls made upon it by the complexity of processes in each unfolding event. We search again, putting aside expectations and prescriptions, to notice the newness in the material, spatial and social happenings of a literacy lesson. We take time to experiment in our forms of ignorance, to make schooling more difficult for one another, and we think it is timely for us to insist on doing so.

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In writing about education, as in teaching itself, in the drive to come to universal conclusions about gap closing and emancipation, perhaps we have all relied too much on explication and the propagation of generalizable models of childhood, learning, teaching and teacher formation. We have relied too much on looking at and listening to the human participants in classrooms. What happens when instead we work backwards and ignorantly explore one minor, yet rich and complex, teaching event? It has been the dominant practice to analyse teaching and learning by focusing on patterns of linguistic interactions. Little attention has been paid to the unrepeatable presence of teachers, children, and their particular material and social contexts, let alone experiential, corporeal and sensory feelable matters. So this time, instead of only paying attention to what is said and what it means for teaching and learning – we also look at them, not to judge or evaluate, but rather as testimonies (or not) of equality. We take account of the physical and material world, of the bodies of children and adults, of the technological apparatus, and we can see ourselves searching there, from near and far. Is this a fantasy or fiction? Does it break the rules of ‘academic’ research? How might it be justifiable? What does it mean for Walter and Joanna to practise ignorance here, and to look for it in a classroom at the same time? As we write, we do so from our different countries and continents, Walter in urban Rio de Janeiro and Joanna in rural Devon, UK.We exchange our writing in the virtual space of the Internet – each of us sees it on our iPads or computer screens, we think, email and write about the recorded events in the Cape Town grade 2 classroom.What we can do is share with each other and with the research group what we notice as we engage with the film footage. Perhaps in this process, this task we are undertaking surfaces in our minds at odd times, walking, cooking, eating, swimming or playing football; in our dreams and day time reveries, and on waking, thoughts take shape. We notice the interplay of physical activity and everyday rhythms, the effects of fresh air and food, the emotions associated with collaborative writing and our being in the world, what this all brings into being, what new is produced. The generosity of the children and of Sara ignoring allowance of the crowding students and filmmakers

While some of the other researchers in the group were present during Sara’s teaching, neither of us was there. The first thing that we noticed in watching the footage was the setup of the classroom, the lesson taking place with Sara and the children, the arrangement of chairs in a circle forming a kind of inner space in the room. Around the outer edges of the classroom, and rather squeezed in, there are a number of adults. There is a group of trainee teachers. Some of them are seated on the low wall units. They appear at times a little uncertain or uncomfortable here. Is their brief to watch and to listen? Do their thoughts drift? A camera operator adjusts the camera and the tripod position from time to time: he has a definite job to do.The children do not have cameras

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or audio-recording equipment. Karin is seated at first, and then she takes her iPad and lies down on the floor behind the chairs, filming what she sees from this position, evidently animated by what she sees, and purposeful. The person teaching the lesson, Sara, remains seated on a chair among the children. There is something interesting to note about Sara: she is barefoot, the only one in the classroom with no shoes on her feet. This means that she is feeling the ground with her body and that she does not cover this part of her body. Her feet are exposed, and we see there a bodily expression of exposition and openness, a direct contact open to the others (see Figure 11.1).

Figure 11.1 Bare feet of teaching.

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Sara calls the children to come near her, and the circulation is disrupted. There is no fixed form, methodology. They sit on the floor close to Sara to listen to the story. Sara reads the story from the picturebook, looking around and pausing for interjections. The children alternate between making a circle and undoing the circle. Later, when the children are on the floor working together on large sheets of paper, she bends her head forward to converse with and listen to individuals. What was immediately striking in this living tableau? a) there is no fixed arrangement, no fixed position of bodies in the classroom: the teacher and the children move to find different spaces and positions: b) the way in which those in the inner circle, for the most part, appeared neither preoccupied nor unaware of the people watching and recording their activity. They accept the arrangement of the room and work within it. There is a sense of acceptance, generosity, in their getting on with their activity; appearing to accept that the ‘extra’ adults had their own reasons for being present. The cameras too are playing a part, but to us looking at the footage from far away it is not obvious what this is (see Figure 11.2).

Figure 11.2 T he affecting presence of the video camera.

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The delicately entangled legs and feet stepping lightly

The chairs matter in this scenario. They too are active in filling and shaping the space. When seated, the children are not at all still or in repose. They appear animated by the story and by Sara’s questions. Her questions have the character of playful invitations. Children respond in different ways, moving to the floor to draw and write on large sheets of paper that have been joined to form a mat that fills the whole space inside the circle of chairs. They look at each other’s marks on the paper. They move around, and it is noticeable that this is such a careful stepping, not treading on any marks or drawing equipment. At one point, a child comes out of the circle to move to another part of the classroom, and he steps lightly over Karin’s body lying there on the floor. From where she is lying to begin with, she can see pairs of legs hanging down from the chairs, with different socks and shoes, and they are swinging in a kind of collective dance – none of them colliding with each other. Later she can see the legs in different postures on the floor, kneeling or cross-legged, and it is not always easy to make out whose legs belong to which bodies. Sara seems to be close to the principle of an emancipatory/decolonising teacher: she gives equal attention to every child; she seems to be pre-supposing that they are all equally intelligent. She enacts the two main activities of an ignorant schoolmaster: a) she interrogates or demands the children’s intelligences to speak by themselves; b) she verifies that their intelligences are working with attention (not through demand or reprimand, but through reciprocal engagement, pleasure, and curiosity). It seems to be Sara’s effortless desire to keep the children searching along their own routes. The political nature of this act lies in Sara’s enactment of belief along with obliging the students to realise their capacity . . . she herself is obliged, bound together with the learners in a place where they can only escape by themselves: ‘how can we make it easier?’. She does not give the answers or solutions but energises the learners to look by themselves. She treats them as already equal and able to speak (Haynes 2014). This is the circle of power that the teacher is committed to, the empowering of all and every intelligence through making public its equal capacity. Sara wants all her students to be attentive so they can commit to their learning, to really wanting to learn, to their thinking, to carefully and strongly unfolding their capacity. She is in the shared space of commitment alongside the students. She unfolds a number of strategies: in the ‘secret’ activity, for example, the tone of voice and her gestures seem designed to capture the attention of the students with what is in her hands: a mystery, a secret. ‘Don’t let it escape’, she repeats . . . what is she speaking about? (See Figure 8.3 in Chapter 8). Probably about children’s capacity to think by themselves . . . her work is focused mainly on the attention of her learners. She does not seem too worried about what they learn but interested in the way they learn and their desiring to learn. To put it in other words, the teacher is not interested in the outcome of her students’

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engagement, but in the form of the engagement itself, in their carrying attentively their experience of learning. How does this happen? There a number of pedagogical ‘strategies’ . . . one of which is to offer aesthetically attractive activities, like the drawing of a map on such an immense piece of paper. What seems to be the most impressive ‘strategy’ is that of showing herself to be attentive – to the story, to the children’s comments or questions, to the map, to the way they echo the secret-keeping story. She does not seem to be sure about anything, of the story, of what she says, of what the children say. She expresses and lives an inquiring position, or perhaps we can say that the atmosphere is one of uncertainty. There are a number of ways in which she demonstrates this political position. At the beginning, Sara proposes the children to stand up one person at a time without telling anyone else and not going in a Mexican wave. They try several times, and it does not work. Sara and the children try, and they fail. So Sara says that they need to make it easier, but instead of telling them how to make it easier, she asks them ‘Let’s make it easier: how do we make it easier?’ By this movement, Sara tells them that they need to pay attention and to find an alternative way by themselves.They need to find a way to get out of the difficulty. More important than that, the ethos is one of trust and confidence so that they can find a way for themselves, to think that whenever they want to get out from a difficulty they do not need to wait for the teacher’s solution, but they can try to get out of it by themselves.

Conclusions There are a number of reasons why we think that the word ‘facilitator’ is not an interesting one to describe what a teacher does: a) it presupposes a kind of superiority of the teacher who can help the student learning by decreasing the difficulty of it. In other words, if something (what needs to be learned or even the conditions of learning) needs to be facilitated by the teacher, it is because, without this facilitation, the students would not be able to do their work; b) it suggests that the task of the teacher can be developed in a technical way, that there is a kind of technique, method or instrument that could be applied by teachers to do what they need to do; c) it presupposes a sort of anti-critical position: if critique has to be with ‘turning more complex gestures too easy’ (Foucault 2000:160), then considering the teacher as a facilitator puts her into an anti-critical position. None of these corresponds to what we have seen in Sara’s practice. She does not put herself in any hierarchical position in relation to her students; she does not really facilitate anything. She prefers to make it more difficult, for herself as well, and invites them to think by themselves in their own way.

Facilitating and difficultating 219

There is no application of techniques. Sara’s way of being in the classroom is an embodied and artistic task. She is affected, and this creates in the moment a specific way of responding. Sara’s position seems to be as critical as possible; she does not suppress the complexity of what is produced. There is other example where Sara’s position is more clearly a difficultator one. When dialogue starts and questions begin to emerge, Sara is particularly attentive to log, underline and unfold complex questions that emerge from the children’s interventions. This is the case when the children discuss the topic of people having and not having money. A number of questions arise in different ways from Sara and the children, and all seem to show the complexity of the issue: Should people with lots of money just give the money to poor people? Is it fair that the president has money when other people haven’t? What is it about having or not having money? (See Chapter 8 for a further elaboration.) Sara introduces a further dimension into the dialogue: ‘The other thing that has made me think is what you were saying about. . . ’. What she says matters less than the place she gives the children in her thinking: ‘what you were saying made me think’; the message is clear: I think with you; my thinking begins from your thinking. This is what the children learn from her. Sara seems to be trying to involve every child in the conversation, in the search, in the process of thinking . . . this is the meaning of an inventive teacher according to Simón Rodríguez (Rodríguez 2001; Kohan 2015b), someone who is attentive, hospitable, sensitive to the other person’s thinking, to the thinking of others, to the others of thinking. The etymology of inventive might help us here: in-ventus is that which has come in or arrived. Invention is something that comes from the outside. An inventive teacher is sensitive to newcomers, to those who arrive, to opening the door to the outsiders. As we have argued, the role of a teacher is a difficultator of what the school as institution asks her to teach and the student to learn. The teacher does not want the student to learn that she is incapable of learning without following the path of who is capable, that is, the teacher, but its opposite. She wants the student to learn that she is as capable as anyone else of learning what she desires to learn. ‘This is what emancipation means: the practice of dissensus, constructing another time in the time of domination, the time of equality within the time of inequality’ (Rancière 2012:28).This seems to be what Sara is sensitive to opening in her classroom: a time of equality where the newcomers learn that they are equally as capable as anyone else to think of the kind of world in which they want to live. The posthumanist perspective adopted by the DECD research project presented in the introduction to this book invites us to enlarge these considerations. If this perspective involves decentering from a human only position and taking the nonhuman into account, then what we have seen as Sara’s teaching in the film footage could be enlarged as a virtuality of anyone’s or anything’s teaching in the classroom. In that respect, Sara fosters the attention of the children in her classroom not only by showing attentiveness, but also by fostering attention to the nonhuman in her classroom, in the story, in the map.

220  Joanna Haynes and Walter Kohan

In effect, if we take seriously the above considerations, teaching is not a property of anyone but a virtuality of everyone and everything inhabiting the classroom: the human, the nonhuman, the inhuman present in it; the teaching of ignorance itself wherever it is present in the world. At the same time, from a posthumanist perspective, the teaching position needs to be considered beyond some Rancierian categories, such as the centrality of the will, equality thought exclusively in terms of human intelligence and so on. This tremendous task could only be pointed out and modestly begun here. As we have argued in this chapter, the task of a de/ colonizing teacher is not an easy one; it involves and produces struggles, not only with the outside world but also with the teacher she has so well learned to be.

Notes 1 We adopt Rancière’s use of the terms schoolmaster and masterliness throughout, to remain close to his analysis, whilst thinking of all teachers in a non-gendered sense. 2 This might be considered a neo-Spinozean philosophy of immanence, inspired by G. Deleuze and F. Guattari (1980). See Zourabichvili, (1998). Concerning invention and the task of the teacher in an immanent school, see Rodríguez (2001) and Kohan (2015b).

References Biesta, G. J. J. (2010a) A New ‘logic’ of Emancipation:The Methodology of Jacques Rancière. Educational Theory 60, 1:39–59. Biesta, G. J. J. (2010b) Learner, Student, Speaker: Why It Matters How We Call Those We Teach. Educational Philosophy and Theory 42, 4:540–552. Bingham, C. & Biesta, G. (2010) Jacques Rancière: Education, Truth, Emancipation, with a new essay by Jacques Rancière. London: Continuum. Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1980) Mille Plateaux. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit. Foucault, M. (1975) Discipline and Punish:The Birth of the Prison. New York: Random House. Foucault, M. (2000) So is it important to think? In J. Faubion (Ed.) Power. New York: New Press, 160–161. Haynes, J. (2007) Freedom and the Urge to Think in Philosophy with Children. Gifted Education International, 22, 2/3: 229–238. Special Issue on Philosophy for Children. Haynes, J. (2014) Already Equal and Able to Speak: Practising Philosophical Enquiry With Young Children. In S. Robson and S. Quinn (Eds.) The Routledge International Handbook on Young Children’s Thinking and Understanding. London: Routledge. jagodzinski, J. (2015) Affirmations and Limitations of Rancière’s Aesthetics: Questions for art and Its Education in the Anthropocene. In N. Snaza and J.Weaver (Eds.) Posthumanism and Educational Research. New York, NY: Routledge, 121–133. Kohan,W. O. (2014) Philosophy and Childhood. Critical Perspectives and Affirmative Practices. New York: Palgrave. Kohan, W. O. (2015a) Childhood, Education and Philosophy. New ideas for an old relationship. New York: Routledge. Kohan, W. O. (2015b) The Inventive Schoolmaster. Boston: Sense. Masschelein, J. & Simons, M. (2013) In Defense of the School. Leuven: E-Education, Culture and Society (Apologie van de schole Leuven: Acco/Den Haag, 2012).

Facilitating and difficultating 221 Rancière, J. (1988) Ecole, Production, égalité. In RENOU, Xavier. L’école de la démocratie. Paris: Edilig, Fondation Diderot, 1988. Access: www.horlieu-editions.com/textes-enlignes/politique/Rancière-ecole-production-egalite.pdf. Rancière, J. (1991) The Ignorant Schoolmaster. Translated by K. Ross. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Rancière, J. (2012) In what time do we live? In M. Kuzma, P. Lafuente and P. Osborne (Eds.) The State of Things. London: Office for Contemporary Art Norway and Koenig.Books. Rodríguez, S. (2001) Obra Completa.Tomos I-II. Caracas: Presidencia de la República. Zoura. Zourabichvili, F. (1998). Deleuze et le possible. De l’involontarisme en politique. In E. Alliez (Ed.) Deleuze. Une vie philosophique. Paris: Les Empêcheurs de Penser en Rond. Engl. Transl.: Deleuze and the Possible. On involuntarism in Politics. Theory & Event (20:1), 2017:152–171.

Contributors

Karin Murris (editor & author) Karin Murris holds a PhD in Philosophy with Children (P4C) and is Professor of Pedagogy and Philosophy at the School of Education, University of Cape Town (South Africa), where she convened the Sixteenth International Council of Philosophical Inquiry with Children (ICPIC) Conference in 2013 and set up the Southern African P4C network. She was president of ICPIC between 2015 and 2017. Karin is Principal Investigator of the Decolonising Early Childhood Discourses: Critical Posthumanism in Higher Education project, funded by the South African National Research Foundation (NRF). Website: www. decolonizingchildhood.org. Her research interests include childhood studies, early literacy, children’s literature, posthumanism and postqualitative research. Karin is the author of Teaching Philosophy with Picture Books (1992), The Posthuman Child: Educational Transformation through Philosophy with Picturebooks (2016), and (with Joanna Haynes) Storywise: Thinking through Stories (2002) and Picturebooks, Pedagogy and Philosophy (2012). She is also co-editor of the Routledge International Handbook of Philosophy for Children (2017). Joanna Haynes (co-editor and author) Joanna Haynes holds a PhD in Philosophy for Children and is Associate Professor in Education Studies at Plymouth University Institute of Education (UK). Her research interests include childhood, community and democratic education. Joanna is a highly experienced educator and has taught in nursery, primary, secondary, adult and community settings, as well as in teacher education, continuing professional development and higher education. She is author of Children as Philosophers, (2002; 2008), which has been published in Spanish, Greek and Korean and co-edited (with S. Gibson) Engaging Education: Perspectives on Participation and Inclusion (2009). She co-authored (with K. Murris) Picturebooks, Pedagogy and Philosophy (2012) and (with K. Gale and M. Parker) Philosophy and Education: An Introduction to Key Questions and Themes (2014). She is also co-editor of the Routledge International Handbook of Philosophy for Children (2017).

Contributors 223

Sumaya Babamia Sumaya Babamia is a doctoral candidate in the School of Education at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Her academic and clinical background is in speech-language pathology and audiology, having graduated with a BA (Speech and Hearing Therapy) and MA (Speech-Language Pathology) from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. She has worked extensively with children from birth to school age who present with speech-language and communication difficulties. Sumaya has worked across academic and clinical settings in Johannesburg. Her research has been presented at national and international levels. Sumaya’s doctoral work looks at the material-discursive intra-action of philosophical enquiry with autistic children. Judy Crowther Judy’s doctoral study is based in a remedial English classroom in one of the oldest informal settlements in Cape Town. She is interested in researching learning experiences of children whose English is often assessed as two to three years behind national averages. Using critical posthumanism as a framework, language, literacy and subjectivity are entangled and explored within a community of enquiry pedagogy. Judy started out teaching in a London primary school for three years and was later involved in homeschooling and the management and supervision of preschools in Durham and Lancaster. While teaching in Stoke-on-Trent from 2004 onwards she completed an MA in Educational Leadership, Learning and Management. She is currently employed as a remedial English teacher in a Cape Flats’ school, where she’s loved working and researching for the last six to seven years! Theresa Giorza Theresa is a doctoral student in the School of Education, University of Cape Town. Her current research explores the connections between the agency of material environments in early learning and the possibilities for more ethical and inclusive approaches to the co-production of spaces. Theresa has a range of experience in the arts, and in art education from early years to higher education. She teaches and supervises students at the Wits School of Education (University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg) in undergraduate and postgraduate study and participates in professional networks of early childhood practice around Reggio-inspired pedagogies and Philosophy with Children. She is the author of “Playing with Learning: Childhood Pedagogies for Higher Education” (Universities, the Citizen Scholar and the Future of Higher Education [2016]), and “Thinking together through pictures: the community of philosophical enquiry and visual analysis as a transformative pedagogy” (Perspectives in Education, 34.1.2016:167–181). Walter Kohan Walter Omar Kohan is a full professor at the Childhood Studies Department of the State University of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil); senior researcher of the National

224 Contributors

Council of Scientific and Technologic Development (CNPQ, Brazil) and of the Foundation of Support of Research of the State of Rio de Janeiro (FAPERJ); and former president (1999–2001) and member of the Advisory Board of the International Council for Philosophical Inquiry with Children (ICPIC). Walter is currently a CNPq Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of British Columbia, Canada, 2017–2018, where he is an International Research Visiting Fellow (IRVF) at ECPS/UBC. Co-editor of Childhood & Philosophy, Journal of ICPIC, he has published books in Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, English and French. In English: Philosophy and Childhood: Critical Perspectives and Affirmative Practices. (Palgrave, 2014); Childhood, education and philosophy: new ideas for an old relationship (Routledge, 2015); The inventive Schoolmaster (Sense, 2015). Kai Wood Mah Kai Wood Mah, PhD, OAQ, is an architect, design historian and co-founder of Afield, a design research platform with projects in Canada, United States and South Africa. Afield projects bring together design and social science research as a means to advance social architecture. Currently, he is the co-investigator of Democratic Crèche, a research-creation project funded by the Canadian government. The project will lead to the design and construction of two early childhood development centres. Beyond this, the centres will become boundary objects that advance our knowledge of design and politics. Democratic Crèche as a project reflects his interest in children, education and the built environment. He has lectured on this subject as an invited speaker and as a presenter at national and international conferences. His writing has appeared in Visual Studies, Public, African Identities, Children, Youth and Environments and Space and Culture among other journals, as well as collected volumes. Previously, Mah taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the Department of Art History, Theory and Criticism, from 2007 to 2013. From 1997 to 2003, he led community-based building projects, most notably in indigenous communities of Northern Quebec. He is currently associate professor of architecture at the McEwen School of Architecture, Laurentian University (Canada) where he is a founding faculty member. Christopher Ouma Christopher E. W. Ouma holds a PhD from the Department of African Literature at University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg South Africa. He is a senior lecturer in the University of Cape Town’s English Language and Literature Department. His research interests and publications revolve around popular culture, the representation of childhood and its connections to Postcolonial studies and Contemporary or new Diasporic African identities. He lectures and gives seminars on East, West and South African literatures. He is currently coeditor of Social Dynamics: A Journal of African Studies. Joanne Peers Joanne Peers is Head of Inclusive Support at Pinelands North Primary School in Cape Town. She has been involved in the early childhood sector and teaching

Contributors 225

in the Foundation Phase for the past seventeen years. She is interested in transformative education which looks to reposition children within the schooling environment. She is currently completing her Master’s at the University of Cape Town with a focus on reconfiguring the concept of quality through pedagogical documentation. She is a guest lecturer at the University of Cape Town with the Foundation Phase PGCE students in the subject of life skills. She and her husband have three boys, two dogs and a bunny so far! Rose-Anne Reynolds Rose-Anne Reynolds holds an MEd in applied language and literacy studies from the University of Cape Town (UCT). As a teacher she taught in Cape Town, Johannesburg and Atlanta, Georgia – focusing on Inclusive Education and Inclusive Schooling practices. She is currently a full-time PhD student at UCT and lectures in the Foundation Phase Post-Graduate Certificate in Education Programme at UCT. Her research interests include: philosophy with children and philosophy of child and childhood. Rose-Anne is a project member of two international research projects – one funded by the Swiss National Foundation in Switzerland and the other by the PASCO Network in Denmark. She is also an active project member of the Decolonising Early Childhood Discourses: Critical Posthumanism in Higher Education project, funded by the South African National Research Foundation (NRF). Rose-Anne is currently a secretary of The International Council of Philosophical Inquiry with Children (ICPIC). Rose-Anne is also a Philosophy with Children trainer working with teachers in South Africa and an active member of the Southern African P4C network. Patrick Lynn Rivers Patrick Lynn Rivers (PhD, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) is co-director of Afield, a comparative interdisciplinary design research practice based in Cape Town, Chicago and Montreal. Afield’s work is critically informed by the integration of design and social science methodologies that advance research-creation. Rivers is currently at work on a major research-creation project generously funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada. The collaborative project will result in two prototype ECD centres in the Western Cape province of South Africa – one in an urban township and the other in a rural township. Among Rivers’ publications are the book Governing Hate and Race, peer-reviewed articles appearing in journals as diverse as Critical Studies in Media Communication, the South African Law Journal and Space and Culture, as well as contemporary political analysis in outlets like the Toronto Star and The Star (Johannesburg). Viviane Schwarz Viviane Schwarz was born in Germany. As a child she spent a lot of her time inventing and making things with her family – sculptures, machines, puppets, theatres, books, super-8 animations, etc. She would often go to museums and find new ideas for things to make and go straight to the hardware store to pick

226 Contributors

up more materials and tools. She developed a strong interest in science and technology as well as traditional methods and crafts. She read American literature and linguistics at university while writing fantasy stories. She then moved to Cornwall, England, to study. She now holds a master’s degree in authorial illustration from Falmouth College of Arts. She is an award-winning illustrator and has written many picturebooks, comics, craft books and interactive books, including How to Find Gold (2016), I Am Henry Finch (2015), Is There A Dog In This Book (2014), There Are Cats in This Book (2008) and The Adventures of a Nose (2002).You can find her website on: www.vivianeschwarz.co.uk. Sara Stanley Sara Stanley (BEdHons Cambs) has spent 26 years in the Foundation Stage classroom as both a teacher, Foundation stage leader and teacher educator. Her expertise is in the use of children’s literature in education. She trained in Philosophy for Children (P4C) in 1997 and has worked as an accredited trainer in the UK and in South Africa. Since 2013 Sara has been involved in Early Years projects for the development of literacy and philosophical story play with the Project for the Study of Alternative Education in South Africa (PRAESA). She is guest lecturer at the University of Cape Town (PGCE Foundation Phase) and is a research associate and collaborator in the NRF project Decolonising Early Childhood Discourses which uses examples of her practice as research data.When not in the southern hemisphere Sara is a philosophical story world consultant and volunteer in the refugee camps of Northern France, where she has created play spaces for young children. She is the author of But Why? (2008) and Why think?: Philosophical Play 3–11 (2012). Website: www.sarastanley.co.uk

Index

Note: Page numbers in italic indicate figures. ableism 8, 36 Achebe, Chinua 182 Adkins, Brent 43 adult-child relationships 33 – 34 aesthetic vibration, notion of 93 Africa: childhoods and de/colonisation 33 – 34; storytelling in literacy lesson 80 – 81; see also South Africa African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child (ACRWC) 35 ageism 7, 36 agential realism 8, 26, 36, 42, 74 – 75, 126n5, 136, 150 Allan, Julie 16, 151 Allen, Jafari Sinclaire 37 Ameera, intra-acting with Tshepo 158, 163 American-Objective view, video-recording 119 – 120, 120 Anderson, Ben 161 animist materialism 81, 182 Anna and Crocodile 174; in adventure to find gold 137 – 139, 138; collective creativity 184 – 185; from How to Find Gold (Schwarz) 173 – 175, 192 – 199; making secret face 156; mapping their adventure 193; secret fears 152; treasure as secret 160; whose gold 168 Anthropocene 30, 45n3, 82 anthropocentrism 43, 45n9, 71, 77, 112, 146, 150 Aristotle 43, 50, 56 Ash, James 161 atmosphere of ‘classroom’ 161 – 164 attentive ignorance 212 – 213 authoritarianism 17 autopoietic systems 76

baby milk scandal 38, 45n7 Barad, Karen 4, 5, 8, 12, 26, 29, 66, 70, 73, 118, 169, 197 Bennett, Jane 9, 88, 91 – 92 beyond words: footpower 102, 104, 106 – 107; materiality 88; philosophical enquiry 94 – 96; phrase 87, 108n1; residential workshop 89 – 90; Schwarz and playing with things 90 – 94; scissors 104, 105, 106, 106 – 107; shoe power 102; soles/souls of shoes 103; stringplay 97 – 99; workshopping approach 96 – 100; see also materiality Beyond Words conference 108n7 Biesta, Gert 14 Blaise, Mindy 16 Blot, Richard 14 bodies: embodied cognition 111 – 112; ‘to fidget’ concept 124; fidgety child in lesson 110 – 111 Bohr, Niels 42, 118 Boldt, Gail 13 Braidotti, Rosi 3, 6, 8, 9, 12, 19, 26, 29, 43, 195, 196 Burman, Erica 7, 16 Burnett, Cathy 13 Butler, Judith 20n10, 42, 144 Cannella, Gaile 38, 70 Cape zebras 169, 170 Castells, Manuel 196 childhood: concept of 38; relationship between time and 56 – 57 childism 6, 8 children: Africa and de/colonisation 33 – 34; age as category of difference 50 – 51;

228 Index configurations of 51 – 56; embodied cognition in 111 – 112; fidgety 110 – 111, 125; Philosophy for Children (P4C) programme 20, 52 – 56; relationship between time and 56 – 57; rights of in South Africa 34 – 36; as Spinozists 165 – 166; teaching philosophy to 51 – 52 cinematography, American-Objective view 119 – 120, 120 ‘classroom’ 65, 151; atmosphere in 161 – 164; authorial agency 183; community of listener-readers 175 – 178; gold in 168; imaginative cartographies 183 – 185; land in 168 – 170; learning in 14 – 16; literacy lesson 64 – 69; literarycritical contexts 181 – 183; materialdiscursive theory in 151 – 153; nonhuman bodies reading the 113 – 114; secrets and laughter 157 – 161; sounds in the walls 164; thinking with research project 3 – 6; video-recording practices in 119 – 124 cogito ergo sum 44, 97; on toilet door 28, 28 Cole, David 13 Colebrook, Claire 9, 20n4, 26, 82 Collins, James 14 coloniser and colonized, double meaning of 37 – 39 community of enquiry 52; Philosophy for Children (P4C) 131 – 132 community of listener-readers, text in classroom 175 – 178 concepts, creating 10 – 11, 165 – 166 corporal punishment, use of 33 – 34 Cregan, Kate 35 critical posthumanism 30, 31, 32; as navigational tool 29 – 30 crocodile feet 100 – 101, 107; see also feet Crowther, Judy 58 – 60 Culture/Nature dichotomy see Nature/ Culture dichotomy Cuthbert, Denise 35 Dahlberg, Gunilla 7 da Silvestre, Jose 191 – 192 Davies, Bronwyn 16 da Vinci, Leonardo 112 DECD (Decolonising Early Childhood Discourses) project 5, 88, 108n2, 204, 219 de/colonisation: Africa, childhoods and 33 – 34; childhood discourses 51, 55; dis-identification 69 – 70; meaning of

37; research in South Africa 7 – 10, 20n4; Western Ontology of 41 – 42 Deleuze, Gilles 5, 9, 10, 12 – 13, 29, 70 democracy 53, 56 – 57, 160 Derrida, Jacques 20n10, 29 Descartes, René 27, 97 developmentalism 17, 19, 53; adult-child relationships 50; disruption of 38 – 39, 51, 57 Devil on the Cross (Thiong’o) 182 Dewey, John 52 dichotomy, notion of 197; see also Nature/ Culture dichotomy; Subject/Object (S/O) dichotomy difficultates 196 difficultating 205 difficultator, teacher as 54, 134, 210, 219 diffraction 71 – 75, 78; as metaphor 71; quantum understanding of 71 – 73; re-turning as diffractive method 73 – 74; spatial and temporal 80; travel hopping 74 – 75 ‘Discontinuity’ video clip 116 disidentification 69 – 70, 78 Dixon, Kerryn 144 education: attentive ignorance 212 – 213; corporal punishment 33 – 34; equality and emancipation 206 – 208; experimentation and invention 213 – 218; facilitation by teacher 209 – 212; learning in the classroom 14 – 16; posthumanist ideas for 205 – 206; reform 34; research of de/ colonising in South Africa 7 – 10 Education of a British Protected Child,The (Achebe) 182 electrons, quantum physics 118 – 119 embodied cognition, notion of 111 – 112 Ender, Evelyne 178 Enlightenment 19, 31, 38, 45n9, 55, 192 Enslin, Penny 20n5 entangled moments, philosophical enquiry 133 – 134 epistemic inequality 15 epistemology 14, 32, 195, 211; of learning with world 88; literacy desiring 14; ontology and epistemology 18, 32, 125, 154; subject-object relations of humanist 51; facilitating 205; teacher as facilitator 218; teaching by 209 – 212 Fagunwa, D. O. 182 #Feesmustfall movement 37

Index 229 feet: bare feet of teaching 215; crocodile feet 100 – 101, 107; footpower 102 – 107; pen-ink-foot-teacher-child entanglement 115; shoe power 102; waving 105; see also shoe power fidget: child in lesson 110 – 111; concept 124 figurations, term 19, 21n14 Floyd, Pink 196 Foucault, Michel 20n10, 29, 42, 144 Fricker, Miranda 132 From Trinity to Trinity (Hayashi) 74 Gershon, Walter 29, 153, 165 Giorza, Theresa 90, 96 GoPro 65: video-recording practices 119 – 120, 121; viewing entanglement 137 Gorli, Mara 117 Guattari, Felix 5, 9, 10 – 11, 12 – 13, 29, 69 Gutshall Rucker, Tara 13 – 14 Gutting, Gary 61n2 Haggard, H. Rider 189; map 190 Haraway, Donna 6, 9, 12, 27, 45n3, 67, 96, 118, 119, 139, 195 Hayashi, Kyoko 74 Haynes, Joanna 102 Heidegger, Martin 4, 9, 10, 26, 29 Heraclitus 56 Hickey-Moody, Anna 16, 158 Horsthemke, Kai 20n5 How to Find Gold (Schwarz) 3, 53, 65, 73, 80, 81, 89 – 90, 95, 99, 114, 136, 166, 188, 189; Anna and Crocodile in 173 – 175, 174, 192 – 199; collective creativity 184 – 185; community of listener-readers 175 – 178; crocodile feet 100, 100 – 101; engaging children in story sharing 136 – 137, 136; literary-critical contexts 181 – 183; relaxed toes and angry toes 103; scissors 105, 106; secret fears 152; secrets in 151 – 152; use in philosophical enquiry 133; see also Anna and Crocodile humanimals 5, 28, 41, 44, 75 – 76, 77 – 78 human nature 3, 33 human supremacy 112 I: conception of human 32; of humanism 41; personal identity 44 I am Henry Finch (Schwarz) 59, 61n3 identity 11; concept of 36; human 37; prejudices 8; situatedness 39 – 40

Ignorant Schoolmaster,The (Rancière) 205, 206 – 207, 211, 213 Imperial Leather (McClintock) 191 – 192 Indigenous, non-Christian, non-Western, marginalisation of 29 Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children (IAPC) 52, 131 intersectionality 8 intertextuality 178, 185n2 intra-action 117, 149, 154; interaction vs 112; literacies in entangled 144 – 146; neologism 6, 26; term 126n3, 129; words and images 166 intra-relationality 16 intra-vention 149, 163 investigations, problems driving 17 – 20 iPad: Roving Point-of-View videorecording 121 – 122, 122, 123; viewing entanglement 137 Irigaray, Luce 10, 26 Jansen, Jonathan 40 Jobson, Ryan Cecil 37 Jungle Book (Kipling) 194 Kennedy, David 53, 166 Keune, Anna 13 khoisan 97 Kind, Sylvia 118 King Solomon’s Mines (Haggard) 189, 192, 196, 202n3 Kirby,Vicki 156 Kohan, Walter 20n4, 44, 56 Kuby, Candace 13, 14 Latour, Bruno 92 laughter: secrets and 157 – 161; sounds in the walls 164 Leander, Kevin 13 learnification 15, 133 learning in classroom 14 – 16; see also ‘classroom’ Lenters, Kimberley 13 Lenz Taguchi, Hillevi 16 Lipman, Matthew 52, 131 literacy lesson: African context of 80 – 81; decolonising practices 125 – 126; entangled intra-actions 144 – 146; ‘feet don’t lie’ 114 – 117; fidgety child in 110 – 111, 125; practices for videorecording 119 – 124; research ethics and 64 – 69; spell-bound children listening

230 Index 116; video-recording and spacing 117 – 119; wrapping up and decolonising practices 125 – 126 literacy/literacies: distinction between 13 – 14; education and research 12 – 14; words 20n2 McClintock, Anne 191 – 192 Mackey, Margaret 13 MacLure, Maggie 16 Mail and Guardian (newspaper) 158 Malaguzzi, Loris 93, 108n5 Maldonado-Torres, Nelson 33 Man, conception of human 32 maps: Anna and Crocodile adventure 193; Haggard 190; Mobray Municipal Maps 169, 170n17 Masny, Diana 13, 14 Massumi, Brian 11, 11, 70, 167 material-discursive: entanglements 18 – 19; 125 – 126, 126n6, 132; intra-actions 36, 93, 117, 129; performativity of cameras 79, 117 – 119; practice 70, 122, 150; realities 18, 134; relationality 12, 13, 36, 43, 76, 160; research as process 66; tools for meaning-making 20n3; videorecording 115 materiality: beyond words 87 – 89; residential workshop 89 – 90; vital materialism 92 Matthews, Gareth 52, 53 Mazzei, Lisa 10 Mbembe, Achille 33, 164 meaning-making 7, 108n5; children’s 66; decentering of 45; different directions of 153; intelligence and 26; in literary education 13, 17; materiality of enquiry and 88; notion of 130 Meeting the Universe Halfway (Barad) 71 Melrose, Andrew 153 Mengis, Jeanne 117 Merchant, Guy 13 Metz, Thaddeus 20n5 minute particle, with wave-like behaviour 149 – 150 misopedy, term 146n2 monism 69 Montclair State University (USA) 52, 131 Moss, Peter 7 multiplicity 19, 39, 153, 162, 166; infinite 74; of intra-ventions 149; of mutual relations 45n9; of representations 195; way of thinking 43 Murris, Karin 58 – 60, 198, 204

National Research Foundation (NRF) of South Africa 5 Nature/Culture dichotomy 27, 50; sympoiesis and 75 – 78; time and childhood 56 – 57 naturecultures 16, 45, 69; concept 27, 77; orientation of research 76 – 78; treasures in 164 Ncube, Thandeka 58, 102 negative difference 17, 41 new materialism 8, 30, 36, 97 Nicolini, Davide 117 Nietzsche, Friedrich 4, 29, 70 Nkandla Affair 157, 164, 165 Nxumalo, Fikile 16, 19 Object Orientated Ontology (OOO) 92 Olsson, Liselott 16, 68 Others 30, 32: human and more-thanhuman 77, 130; nonhuman 41, 42, 51, 53; ordering and positioning 37 – 39; posthumanism welcoming 43; significant others 6, 76 P4C see Philosophy for Children (P4C) programme Pacini-Ketchabaw,Veronica 16, 19, 39 patriarchy, logic of representation 30, 32 Pedersen, Helena 8, 114 Peirce, Charles Sanders 52 Peppler, Kylie 13 philosopher children: mapping nomadic citizenship 192 – 201; South Africa’s decolonisation 187 – 189, 201 – 202; tracing the noncitizen 189 – 192 philosophical enquiry: entangled moments 133 – 134; modest witnessing 129 – 131; questioning and community of 139 – 144; story sharing 136 – 137, 140 – 144; subjects and objects entangled in 134 – 139 Philosophy by Children 58, 137, 140 Philosophy for Children (P4C) 140, 154, 166, 167; programme 20, 52 – 56, 204; teaching and learning approach 131 – 132 Philosophy with Children 88, 94, 119, 204, 209 picturebooks: as philosophy texts 163; playthinking and 154; polysensory events 153 – 157; see also How to Find Gold (Schwarz) Pini, Barbara 114 Plato 29, 52, 56, 70, 187

Index 231 playthinking 82; philosophy lesson 58 – 61; picturebooks and 154 politics of belonging, relationality and 10 – 12 positive difference 40 – 41 postanthropocentric 30, 31 postcolonialism 30, 31; research 40 – 43 Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) 134 posthuman child, notion of 36 posthumanism 4, 18, 30, 30, 53; critical 30, 31; critical, as navigational tool 29 – 30, 113; dis-identification in 69 – 70; equality and egalitarianism 42 – 43; ideas for education 205 – 206; ‘I walk, therefore I am’ 43 – 45; post in 201; reconfiguring past and future 78 – 79; relational ontology of 149 – 150; relationships within species 42; transhumanism vs 45n9; video-recordings of lessons 79 posthuman scholarship, literacy education and research 12 – 14 pregnant stingray 58 – 61 progress: civilizational 183; Enlightenment notions of 18, 38; in literacies 159; myth of 82, 207; paths towards 153; philosophy of 55, 153 – 154 quantum entanglements 82n3, 115, 150; dis/continuity of 116; human and nonhuman bodies 122 – 123 Quantum Field Theory (QFT) 4, 74, 169 quantum physics 42; diffraction in 71 – 73; electrons 118 – 119; minute particle with wave–like behaviour 149 – 150 questioning 129 – 131 Quinn, Jocey 108n1 Rancière, Jacques 178, 205 Rautio, Pauliina 89 recapitulation theories 153 – 154 Reggio Emilia system 89, 93, 94 relationality 6, 13; inter-active 25 – 26; politics of belonging and 10 – 12; transforming 78 – 79; use of 139 relational materialism 30 research: experimentation and invention in teaching 213 – 218; literacy lesson and ethics 64 – 69; problems driving investigation 17 – 20 Reynolds, Rose-Anne 58 – 60 #Rhodesmustfall movement 37 Rodríguez, Simón 219

Rollo, Toby 175, 183 Rose, Jacqueline 179 Roving Point-of-View, video-recording 121 – 122, 122, 123 Said, Edward 181 schole, considering school as 212 – 213 Schools Act 34 Schwarz,Viviane 3, 53, 58, 61n3, 64 – 65, 73, 80, 93, 188; crocodile feet 100 – 101; How to Find Gold 3, 53, 65, 73, 80, 81, 89 – 90, 95, 99, 114, 136, 152, 166, 179 – 180, 188, 189; inflatable crocodile of 155; intraview with Sara 99, 101, 102, 114, 121, 139, 160 – 161; studio work playing with things 89, 90 – 94 scissors 104, 105, 106, 106 – 107 secret: concept of 137, 150, 165 – 166; Crocodile and Anna making face 156; dictionary definition 166 – 167; fears 152; laughter and 157 – 161; passing a 155; in picturebooks 151 – 152 Sellers, Marg 16 Shapiro, Michael J. 181 Sharp, Ann Margaret 52, 131 shoe power 102; soles/souls of shoes 103, 104 Sibeko, Siphiwe 170n12 signification, origin of 15 situatedness: concept of 36; feminist notion of 153; misunderstanding 39 – 40 Sleepwalkers,The (Schwarz) 174 socialization, human development 113 socio-materialism 30 South Africa: children and their rights 34 – 36; de/colonising research in 7 – 10; National Research Foundation (NRF) of 5; philosopher children in 187 – 189, 201 – 202; problems driving investigations 17 – 20; public and private education 187 – 188, 202n1 South African Council of Education, Code of Professional Ethics 34 Spinoza, Baruch 9, 29, 69; children as Spinozists 165 – 166 Spivak, Gayatri 38, 45n8 Splitter, Laurance 52 Stanley, Sara 57, 58 – 61, 64, 80, 90, 94 – 96, 99, 134, 160 – 161, 174, 180, 188, 204; entangled legs and feet 217 – 218; ignoring allowance of crowding students and filmmakers 214 – 216; intraview with Schwarz 99, 101, 102,

232 Index 114, 121, 139, 160 – 161; literacy lesson 119; philosophical play practice 146; story sharing 0, 136 – 137, 140 – 144; storyworlding 185n1; using How to Find Gold (Schwarz) 136; video footages of literacy lesson 110 Staying with the Trouble (Haraway) 9 Stone, Kristy 98 storytelling, literary-critical contexts 181 – 183 storyworlding 134, 137, 176, 185n1 string, playing with 97 – 99, 98 Subject/Object (S/O) dichotomy 26; contestation of 29 – 30; diffraction and 71; knowledge mediating 30, 32; ontologies in language 39 substantialising 4, 78 Sundberg, Juanita 29 – 30 sustainability, notion of 195 – 196 Sustainable Development Goals 7 sympoiesis 76; Nature/Culture dichotomy and 75 – 78; naturecultures concept 77 tabula rasa 181 Tarzan of the Apes (Burroughs) 194 Taylor, Affrica 16, 39, 76 textuality 185n3; framing 178 – 181 thingification of objects 97 – 100 thing power 92; agency of 91 – 92; residential play-thing workshop 89 – 90; term 88 Things Fall Apart (Achebe) 182 thinking through and with data 146 – 147 thinking with, classroom-based project 3 – 6 Thiong’o, Ngugi wa 182 Thompson, Naomi 13 Thousand Plateaus, A (Deleuze and Guattari) 11, 192 time, Western idea of 153 toilet door, cogito ergo sum on 28, 28 transcendence, philosophies of 17 transhumanism, posthumanism vs 45n9 transmodality 20n3, 21n11 Transpositions (Braidotti) 9, 195, 196, 201 travel hopping, concept of 74 – 75

Tshepo 141; Ameera intra-acting with 158, 163; expression opinion on Zuma 157 – 159, 161, 163; subjects by 163164; QR code 165 Tuck, Eve 78 Tutuola, Amos 182 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) 35 University of Cape Town 28, 28, 64, 204; student protests at 37 Vecchi,Vea 93 video recording: affecting presence of video camera 216; American-Objective view 119 – 120, 120; ‘Discontinuity’ video clip 116; entangled legs and feet 217 – 218; GoPro 119 – 120, 121; ignoring allowance of crowding students and filmmakers 214 – 216; interpreting motor activity 125; practices 119 – 124; Roving Point-of-View 121 – 122, 122, 123; spacing of 117 – 119 Viruru, Radhika 38, 70 vital materialism 30, 92 void and playthink 150 Waghid,Yusuf 20n5 “Wall, The” (Pink Floyd) 196 Wargo, Jon 13 Western metaphysics 17, 45, 76, 78, 126n1 Western ontology, de/colonising question 41 – 42 Winston, Joseph 89 witnessing, modest 129 – 131 Wohlwend, Karen 13 Wolfe, Cary 113 workshopping: co-creation and authorship of 96 – 100; residential thing-play 89 – 90 Wynter, Sylvia 32 Yang, K. Wayne 78 Zuma, Jacob 157 – 159, 161, 163, 165, 199