Christina MacRae

Animating classroom ethnography: overcoming video‐fear

This article addresses the use of video in classroom research. Influenced by the work of Deleuze on cinema, it challenges the mundane realism that continues to regulate video method, and its role in perpetuating what Deleuze calls the ‘everyday banality’ that produces and conceals the ‘intolerable’. In failing to interfere with the everyday banality of the normal child, research colludes with the production of exclusion, disadvantage and a stunted set of possible futures for children. Written by four ethnographers of early childhood who have themselves (mis)used video cameras in classrooms, the article describes an experimental video film that attempts to intervene in the repetitious production of the banal. The film takes the form of an assemblage that deploys montage, cutting, disconnections of sound, vision and script, and the jolt of the irrational cut. In particular, it tries to mobilise the barely formed, dimly glimpsed sensations that comprise ‘affect’ in its Deleuzian sense.

Becoming a problem: behaviour and reputation in the early years classroom

How does it happen that some children acquire a reputation as a ‘problem’ in school? The article discusses some findings of a qualitative study involving children in the Reception year (ages 4–5). The research focused on problematic behaviour as this emerged within, and was shaped by, the culture of the classroom. A key question for the research was: what makes it difficult for some children to be, and to be recognised as, good students? Using an analytic framework derived from discourse and conversation analysis, we identify some critical factors in the production of reputation, including: the ‘discursive framing’ of behaviour; the public nature of classroom discipline; the linking of behaviour, learning and emotions; the interactional complexities of being (seen to be) good, and the demands on children of passing as the ‘proper child’ required by prevailing discourses of normal development, as coded in UK early years curriculum policy and pedagogy.

Silence as Resistance to Analysis: Or, on Not Opening One’s Mouth Properly

The article engages with the problematic nature of silence and its tendency to trouble qualitative inquiry. Silence is frequently read as resistance—as an impediment to analysis or the emergence of an authentic voice. Rather than seeking methodological remedies for such impediments, the article dwells on, and in, the recalcitrance of silence. The authors read silence, via Derrida and Freud, as the trace of something Other at the heart of utterance—something intractable, unspeakable, unreasonable, unanalyzable. Silence confounds interpretation and manifests, intolerably, the illusory status of speech as full “presence” or living voice. Yet it also incites the search for meaning and is therefore productive. How might Method work with the alterity of silence, rather than seeking to cure or compensate for its necessary insufficiencies? The article is organized around three examples or parables of silence. Humor gets tangled up in the text further on.

Documenting classroom life: how can I write about what I am seeing?

The article is located within a UK based ethnographic research project where the central aim is to understand the processes by which 4— 5 year-old children begin to develop an identity as ‘naughty’ within school. This article considers certain practices that are embedded within the act of documenting data and how these relate to and are connected with identity. Having foregrounded what could be regarded as tactics for ‘authenticating’ data we then move to offer alternative sets of practices where data is considered more in terms of a ‘montage’ where ‘several different images are superimposed onto one another’ (Denzin and Lincoln, 2003: 6).

Children and objects: affection and infection

This paper considers young children’s (aged 3–5 years) relations with objects, and in particular objects that are brought from home to school. We begin by considering the place of objects within early years classrooms and their relationship to children’s education before considering why some objects are often separated from their owners on entry to the classroom. We suggest that the ‘arrest’ of objects is as a consequence of them being understood as ‘infecting’ specific perceptions or constructs of young children. We further suggest that a focus on the dichotomy between affection/infection for and of certain objects may offer new possibilities for seeing and engaging with children, thus expanding the narrow imaginaries of children that are coded in developmental psychology, UK early years education policy and classroom practice.

Using Sense to Make Sense of Art: Young Children in Art Galleries.

This paper reflects on a collaborative project between Manchester City Art Gallery and Manchester Metropolitan University (2003–2004). The projects aim was to attract very young children and their families to the gallery. This paper will not report directly on the research methods used or the outcomes of the project but, rather, will explore questions raised about art galleries and art education in relation to young children. It will ask if it is possible to use art education as a tool for thinking about the world, rather than as a vehicle for expressing a pre‐existing and unitary self, or for representing a pre‐existing and unitary reality. Merleau‐Pontys philosophy of perception will be used to assist in this attempt to open up current notions of art education, and the art gallery space.

Representing Space: Katie's horse and the recalcitrant object

This article is a practitioners attempt to resist habitual ways of interpreting and responding to young childrens drawings. Early art education as a discipline is shot through with complexities, including wider shifting social discourses. This article specifically explores the continuing and powerful effect that Piagets developmental approach has had on ways that teachers expect children to represent the world. The critique of Piaget examines how his stages of cognitive development intersect with an account of perspective that naturalises the claims it makes to represent the world. Critical analysis of responses to a childs drawing draws attention to the ways that this normative and perspectival approach frames readings of the drawing. In order to create new ways of thinking about the drawing, the article offers a material critique of the logic of representation. In this alternative account the object that has been drawn stubbornly refuses to stand in for the real. Difference rather than resemblance is introduced into the reading of childrens drawings.

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.

Young children’s museum geographies: spatial, material and bodily ways of knowing

ABSTRACT In this guest editorial, we outline a new field of children’s museum geographies. We do this by opening up a space for the reader to engage with a collection of papers that trace embodiment, tacit and emplaced knowing, material entanglements and non-representational aspects of experience in accounts of children’s presence in museums. We hope that this special issue will act as an impetus for further working, thinking and collaborating, firstly by disrupting the conflation of children in museums with narrowing notions such as learning and talk, and secondly by highlighting the rich potential of museums as a space of interest for the field of children’s geographies.

Coda: posthumous conversations. A reading group to discuss the work of Dr Elee Kirk

ABSTRACT In May 2017, a group of museum researchers and practitioners met to discuss the writing of Elee Kirk (1977–2016), whose pioneering doctoral study of young children visiting a natural history museum connects with our own work and practice in a number of different ways. Kirk [2015. “Budding Photographers: Young Children’s Digital Photography in a Museum.” In Museums and Visitor Photography: Redefining the Visitor Experience, edited by T. Stylianou-Lambert. MuseumsEtc] advocates for research that views children’s everyday museum visiting ‘beyond their potential for learning’ (p. 238). This paper offers edited transcripts of the discussion sparked by reading Kirk [2015. “Budding Photographers: Young Children’s Digital Photography in a Museum.” In Museums and Visitor Photography: Redefining the Visitor Experience, edited by T. Stylianou-Lambert. MuseumsEtc], documenting the conversation under a number of themes that emerged during the discussion, and reflecting on how each are picked up in more detail by the papers in this Special Issue.