Abigail Hackett

Zigging and zooming all over the place: Young children’s meaning making and movement in the museum

This article draws attention to the walking and running of young children as a key element of their multimodal communicative practices. In addition, the article argues that the walking and running of young children can be seen as a place-making activity, acknowledging the power of young children to create meaning in their world. Drawing on ethnographic data from ongoing research with young children and their families in museums, I present some examples of ways in which young children move during museum visits as a powerful, intentional and communicative practice. Focusing on young children’s perspectives of the museum as a place of primary importance enables us to understand the walking and running of young children in the context of their communicative practices in an embodied, emplaced and experienced world.

Posthuman literacies: Young children moving in time, place and more-than-human worlds:

This paper examines the potential of posthumanism to enable a reconceptualisation of young children’s literacies from the starting point of movement and sound in the more-than-human world. We propose movement as a communicative practice that always occurs as a more complex entanglement of relations within more-than-human worlds. Through our analysis, an understanding of sound emerged as a more-than-human practice that encompasses children’s linguistic and non-linguistic utterances, and which occurs through, with, alongside movement. This paper draws on data from two different research studies: in the first study, two-year-old children in the UK banged on drums and marched in a museum. In the second study, two young children in Australia chose sites for their own research and produced a range of emergent literacies from vocalisation and ongoing stories to installations. We present examples of ways in which speaking, gesturing and sounding, as emergent literacy practices, were not so much about transmitting information or intentionally designed signs, but about embodied and sensory experiences in which communication about and in place occurred through the body being and moving in place. This paper contributes to the field of posthuman early childhood literacies by foregrounding movement within in-the-moment becoming. Movement and sound exist beyond the parameters of human perception, within a flat ontology in which humans are decentred and everything exists on the same plane, in constant motion. Starting from movement in order to conceptualise literacy offers, therefore, an expanded field of inquiry into early childhood literacy. In the multimodal literacy practices analysed in this paper, meaning and world emerge simultaneously, offering new forms of literacy and representation and suggesting possibilities for defining or conceptualising literacy in ways that resist anthropocentric or logocentric framings.

In amongst the glitter and the squashed blueberries: crafting a collaborative lens for children’s literacy pedagogy in a community setting

ABSTRACT In this article, we bring together relational arts practice (Kester, 2004) with collaborative ethnography (Campbell and Lassiter, 2015) in order to propose art not as a way of teaching children literacy, but as a lens to enable researchers and practitioners to view children’s literacies differently. Both relational arts practice and collaborative ethnography decentre researcher/artist expertise, providing an understanding that “knowing” is embodied, material and tacit (Ingold, 2013). This has led us to extend understandings of multimodal literacy to stress the embodied and situated nature of meaning making, viewed through a collaborative lens (Hackett, 2014a; Heydon and Rowsell, 2015; Kuby et al, 2015; Pahl and Pool, 2011). We illustrate this approach to researching literacy pedagogy by offering a series of “little” (Olsson, 2013) moments of place/body memory (Somerville, 2013), which emerged from our collaborative dialogic research at a series of den building events for families and their young children. Within our study, an arts practice lens offered a more situated, and entwined way of working that led to joint and blurred outcomes in relation to literacy pedagogy.

Playing with place in early childhood: An analysis of dark emotion and materiality in children’s play:

In this article, the authors bring together the cultural studies of emotion with theories that foreground the agency of place and objects in order to analyse the entanglement of place, children and emotion (particularly fear) in children’s play encounters. When children, objects and places come into play with each other, intensities and emotions emerge. Through an analysis of examples from two ethnographic studies in which play encounters between children and place seem to evoke fear, the authors explore the potentialities of what is evoked. Fear is bounded in place and experienced materially and bodily. As fear becomes entangled in the materiality of place and bodies, emotions work to characterise and categorise bodies (human and non-human) in ways that connect to anthropocentric and colonial metanarratives of animal/human and victim/aggressor. The authors make the case that the cultural studies of emotion can offer a means through which it is possible to connect the micro and the macro, working at these different scales in order to consider the political implications of reconceptualising play encounters through new materialism.

Neanderthals as fiction in archaeological narrative

The authors deconstruct the fictional image of Neanderthals, showing why we see them in the way we do.

Vibrancy, repetition and movement: posthuman theories for reconceptualising young children in museums

ABSTRACT This paper argues for an expanded field of inquiry to conceptualise young children in museums. Drawing on Murris’ [2016. The Post-Human Child: Educational Transformation Through Philosophy with Picturebooks. London: Routledge] analysis of childhood constructions, we discuss how cognitive and socio-constructivist models of the child dominate childhood and museum studies. We argue for the potential of Murris’ figure of the posthuman child to reconceptualise children in museums. This perspective offers a greater focus on the potency of objects themselves, and the animacy of the non-human aspects of the museum. It is also underpinned by a theoretical shift from representation to non-representation [Anderson, B., and P. Harrison. (2010) “The Promise of Non-representational Theories.” In Taking-place: Non-representational Theories and Geography. Farnham: Ashgate], presenting us with new ways to address questions such as ‘what does that mean?’ when we observe children’s learning in museums. Working with data that has proved resistant to interpretation across a range of research projects, what we call ‘sticky data’, we elaborate on three themes emerging from this reconceptualisation: vibrancy, repetition and movement.

Parents as Researchers: Collaborative Ethnography with Parents

This article describes a series of studies of young children’s experience of place in which parents acted as co-researchers, collecting and analysing data. This approach to research resulted in an emphasis on sensory engagement and embodied experience, for both adults and children. As my own young daughter accompanied me during this research, the boundaries between parent and researcher were further blurred. As research progressed, parents became increasingly critical of pathologising discourses about parenting, and stated more strongly the expertise they possessed in their own children. Collaborative research with parents opened up new possibilities for understanding the perspectives of very young children, by drawing on the expertise parents have.

Introduction: Spatial Perspectives and Childhood Studies

This book highlights how recognising the role of space can enhance understandings of children’s ordinary, everyday experiences. Our aim is to connect spatial theory to the interdisciplinary field of childhood studies. We argue that spatial perspectives are central to understanding how children’s practices and trajectories are situated within more-than-social contexts. They move beyond the notion of the individual agent to recognise that agency exists within and between the spaces where children’s lives happen. Examining the entanglements between children and the worlds in which they are situated offers new perspectives on how spaces affect and shape children’s experiences and frame how they choose to navigate their lives. Soja (1996, 2004) recommends ‘putting space first as a critical interpretation perspective’ (2004, p. ix), drawing on Lefebvre’s (1991) promise that such a ‘critical thirding’1 (Soja, 1996, p. 5) has the possibility to disrupt, leading to new ways of understanding society and human experience. This, we argue, is crucial to rethinking the role of space in supporting childhood diversity and difference, where the multiplicity of child- hood experiences and perspectives can be valued. This book is timely because it challenges an established policy context which positions children as ‘becomings’ rather than ‘beings’ (James et ah, 1998), and thus prioritises interventions intended to direct how they develop and what they will become as adults.

Vibrations in Place: Sound and Language in Early Childhood Literacy Practices

This article explores how close attention to sound can help one to rethink literacy in early childhood education. Through an analysis of text, audio, video, and photographic data from a sound walk undertaken with a parent and a child, we make two arguments. First, contrary to skills-based approaches that abstract literacy from context, we show how literacy emerges from vibrational entanglements between bodies and places. We provide examples of how listening and sound-making unfold together in place, as sound moves between different material bodies, including children, animals, objects, buildings, and landscapes. Our analysis suggests that a wide range of sound-making and listening practices, not just those focused on words, should be valued in early childhood literacy. Second, we demonstrate how sound also transcends bodies and places through its multiplicity, ephemerality, and fluidity. We draw on the more-than-human semiotics of Eduardo Kohn to analyze how sounds operate as relational signs between human and nonhuman entities, using his ideas to move beyond human-centered, symbol-centered practices of literacy.

Exploring abstract, physical, social and embodied space: developing an approach for analysing museum spaces for young children

ABSTRACT This paper describes a collaboration between museum staff and university researchers to develop a framework for analysing museum spaces from the perspective of young children. The resultant APSE (abstract, physical, social and embodied) framework draws on spatial theories from childhood studies and architecture to consider children’s museum visiting from a spatial perspective. Starting with space not only foregrounds the role places, objects and bodies play in how experiences are constituted, but also resists linearity and predictability of mainstream educational policy discourses about young children’s learning. As place, children and objects entangle together, they design and make one another. We draw upon Massey’s description of the ‘chance of space’, in which people, objects and places become entangled in unpredictable and unknowable ways, to consider the potential of the APSE framework to offer alternative framings of children in museums.