Marg Sellers

Re(con)ceiving young children's curricular performativity

Working (with) Deleuzo‐Guattarian philosophical imaginaries opens (to) a multiplicity of possibilities for thinking differently about curriculum, young children and how they perform their curricular understandings. In this article I work (as) rhizome, bringing the imaginaries becoming and milieu into an early childhood curriculum conversation towards perturbing conventional, entrenched developmental understandings of young children and their learning. It is within/in multiplicitous processing through becoming‐child(ren) that I re(con)ceive children and their relationships with curriculum as a performativity of the milieu(s) they inhabit, milieus that slide alongside/over/through those of adult worlds of curriculum. With/in milieus that children generate for their learning, the complexity of play(ing) is like clouds sculpting skyscapes as they make visible the always already happenings of their curricular performativity.

Playing with play(ing): play-fully writing about play

Disrupting the linear by sit(t)ing their writing alongside, the authors site/cite play on/as a Deleuzoguattarian open plane – of immanence – through a play-full exploration of Play. They explore the notion of the back and forth motion between the known and the unknown, between safety and risk; thinking about play as circular hermeneutical movement, where one re-encounters an ever-changing ocean with new understanding, created and enriched by past experiences. Resonating with these ideas, the authors present their own – play-fully, singularly and together – as a double-column juxtaposition, which in itself emerges from and merges with a Deleuzoguattarian plane of immanence, an open space whereby ideas about play and playing are played with. They work to think differently through encounters with/in an ever-changing ocean of outside forces, through flows of ideas within their thinking as they connect with each other and the literature, the ongoing question being: how might we think differently about play?