Encounters With Materials in Early Childhood Education

Encounters with Materials in Early Childhood Education rearticulates understandings of materials?blocks of clay, sheets of paper, brushes and paints?to formulate what happens when we think with materials and apply them to early childhood development and classrooms. The book develops ways of thinking about materials that are more sustainable and insightful than what most children in the Western world experience today through capitalist narratives.

Through a series of ethnographic events and engagement with existing ideas of relationality in the visual arts, feminist ethics, science studies, philosophy, and anthropology, Encounters with Materials in Early Childhood Education highlights how materials can be conceptualized as active participants in early childhood education and generators of human insight. A variety of examples show how educators, young children, and researchers have engaged in thinking with materials in early years classrooms and explore what materials are capable of in their encounters with other materials and with children.

Please visit the companion website at www.encounterswithmaterials.com for additional features, including interviews with the authors and the teachers featured in the book, videos and photographs of the classroom narratives described in these pages, and an ongoing blog of the authors? ethnographic notes.

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1. Thinking With Materials

Eventful Material Relations

Materials in Early Childhood

The "Material Encounters in Early Childhood Education" Project

Inquiring into materiality

Experimentation

The arts as mode of inquiry

The studio

Encounters With Materials and the Reggio Emilia projects

Inviting conversations through images

Diffraction as a Mode of Inquiry

Diffracting with concepts

This Book’s Entanglements with Paper, Charcoal, Paint, Clay, and Blocks

Chapter 2. Paper: Movement

Singularity

The Movements of Making

Continuous Motion

Caught in the Currents

Surprise

Movement Across

Paper in its Final Move

Chapter 3. Charcoal: Encounter

To Meet

To Touch

To Attend

To Open

To Respond

Chapter 4. Paint: Assemblage

Improvising

Emerging

Blending and Bleeding

Assembling

Creating

Chapter 5. Clay: Ecologies

Clay in the atrium studio

Clay in the forest

Clay at the river

Meso and Ethoecology

Attachments

It Matters

Fostering and Nourishing

Folding In

Ecologies of Practice

Chapter 6. Blocks: Time

The Weight of Time

Playing with Time

Time as Lived

Time as Intensity

Transitory Spaces

Afterword: Noticing

References

Index

Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw is Professor of Early Childhood Education in the Faculty of Education at Western University, Canada.

Sylvia Kind is Faculty Instructor, Department of Early Childhood Care and Education at Capilano University, Canada, and Adjunct Assistant Professor, Faculty of Graduate Studies at the University of Victoria, Canada.

Laurie L.M. Kocher is Faculty Instructor, Department of Early Childhood Care and Education at Capilano University, Canada.