Encounters with Materials in Early Childhood Education (2011-2014) was a three-year project, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, with educators at Capilano University Children’s Centre and University of Victoria Child Care Centre. Through an art-based collaborative inquiry process, we explored what it means to think with materials by considering how each material evokes particular intra-actions, and presents particular possibilities among/with/between young children. We investigated how materials shape us as much as we shape them, how materials are joint participants in early childhood pedagogies, and what happens when we see materials as events instead of objects.
We are interested in how these shifts in perspective might change the nature of our engagement with the world.