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Encounters with Materials in Early Childhood Education
Encounters with Materials in Early Childhood Education aims to tell stories of what happens when we think with materials, when we choose to see materials in relation to movements, encounters, assemblages, ecologies, time, choreographies, and recuperation.
Throughout the book, we pay attention to a wide spectrum of forces and movements: how materials move through time and space; how materials move us, physically and emotionally; how materials affect us and how we affect materials; how time moves in relation to materials; how air changes materials; how human and more-than-human bodies interact with materials; and more.
Encounters with Materials in Early Childhood Education sets out to experiment with pedagogies of relationality that emerge when we encounter materials as active participants in early childhood education. The book relates encounters that affect us, provoke us to think and feel, attach us to the world and detach us from it, force us into action, demand from us, prompt us to care, concern us, bring us into question.
Authors
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Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw is a Professor of Early Childhood Education in the Faculty of Education at Western University in Ontario, Canada.
Email: vpacinik@uwo.ca
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Sylvia Kind teaches in the School of Education and Childhood Studies at
Capilano University, where she is also ateleirista at the Children’s Centre.
Email: skind@capilanou.ca
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Laurie L. M. Kocher is a retired faculty member in the School of Education and Childhood Studies at Capilano University.
Email: lkocher@uwo.ca
Reviews
‘What if…?’ This essential question propels this open-ended exploration of the ways that young children and responsive materials interact in early childhood classrooms. The authors invite us to ponder with them, to notice, to question, in ways that move us beyond the conventions and constraints of traditional practices and provisions for young children. Sometimes startling, always provocative, this text rewards careful and considerate reading, as it reminds us how often we tend to structure even the most ‘unstructured’ aspects of early childhood curriculum, prohibiting truly productive encounters between children and the ‘stuff’ that offers unknown possibilities.’
— Christine Marmé Thompson, Professor of Art Education, Pennsylvania
State University, USA
‘Through vivid vignettes and extensive theoretical grounding, readers are challenged to reconsider taken-for-granted assumptions about the role of materials in the early childhood classroom. This groundbreaking, deeply layered book will remain important to me as I revisit and reflect on its ideas, and I highly recommend it as a must-read for educators in the disciplines of both art education and early childhood education.’
— Pat Tarr, PhD, retired art and early childhood
educator, Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary, Canada
‘Materials are often valued for what can be done with/to them. In early childhood classrooms, educators and children are accustomed to working with materials in ways that foreclose experimentation; what a material can do and what can be done with it are already presumed beforehand. Paper is drawn or painted on. Blocks are used for building and so on. In their book Encounters with Materials in Early Childhood Education (2017), Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, Sylvia Kind and Laurie L.M. Kocher work against such static conceptualizations of materials. As they write in the opening pages
of their book, they treat materials ‘as active and participatory’ (p. 2), and in turn, they are interested in exploring the encounters that certain materials make possible in the context of an early childhood daycare centre. Informed by the pedagogical thinking of Reggio Emilia, artists and scholars such as Lenz Taguchi (2010) and Deleuze and Guattari (1987), this book asks what thinking with materials might produce (p. 5). In this way, their book resists interpretive logic and instead, moves towards experimentation.
— Paulina Semenec, The University of British Columbia, Canada
What if materials shape us just as much as we shape them? What if we were to attend with greater care to the effects of things, to the manner in which objects move together? And what if, rather than inquiring about what a material is—literally, interpreting its physical qualities, or confirming what we already know it to be—we instead directed our thinking toward what materials can do— attending to the occasion of materials’ function and performativity in the world? Centered on pedagogical events culled together as part of a 3-year visual ethnography situated in two early childhood care centers in Canada, the authors, Veronica Pacini- Ketchabaw, Sylvia Kind, and Laurie Kocher, explore the uneasy, albeit generous,material realities that accompany these questions. It is a project that attunes the reader to the felt, often-inarticulable ways that materials and young children—in early childhood classrooms—transform each other.
— Christopher M. Schulte, The Pennsylvania State University