Materiality and childhoods that co-move through outdoor play

Abstract

Over the past two decades, alternative narratives have emerged to conceptualize early childhood education beyond dominant discourses. These perspectives challenge anthropocentric ideologies (Moss, 2019), which traditionally theorize educational practices through binary separations that prioritize the human over the non-human. Such approaches also frame children as independent subjects detached from their environment (Hultman & Lenz Taguchi, 2010).

Posthumanist perspectives in educational research advocate for an onto-epistemological and methodological shift (Barad, 2003, 2007; Mazzei, 2014; St. Pierre, 2014). This shift enables a transformation in how children's learning is understood from early childhood, moving away from representations inherent to traditional education systems. Embracing this form of inquiry allows scholars to raise awareness to specific affects that provide new relational possibilities (Roisek et al., 2024). Situated within this framework, our study presents an early childhood education initiative conducted in an urban public park in Chile. The initiative involved outdoor play spaces with unstructured materials, aiming to observe and understand learning events that emerge when children intra-act with these materials. These intra-actions create unlimited possibilities for human and more-than-human bodies to meet, intertwine, assemble, and co-move.

While a growing body of research worldwide adopts a posthumanist approach to early childhood education (Murris, 2020; Ottersland, 2021; Price & Chao, 2023; Torres-Begines, 2024), this perspective remains underexplored in Chile (Adlerstein & Echeverría, 2021). This gap highlights the significance of our work, as we aim to challenge absolute truths established by conventional frameworks that dictate specific pathways for child development and learning. Our study contributes to discussions on the situated, relational, and intra-active nature of learning occurring in outdoor play spaces in Chile, motivating us to share our observations.

Adopting a posthumanist perspective has significant implications for how pedagogy is conceptualized. Lenz Taguchi (2010) argues that in an intra-active pedagogy, learning cannot be precisely predicted or planned, as it emerges from intra-actions among human and more-than-human entities within a given space-time. Consequently, the teacher's role shifts from that of a mediator and transmitter of knowledge to an equal participant in these entanglements, capable to respond and engage with them (Jokinen & Murris, 2020). Reimagining this role also positions educators as designers of environments that facilitate spaces, times, and materialities leading to co-constructed learning and play. In this framework, children propose and construct meaning with autonomy (Adlerstein & Echeverría, 2021). The reflective teacher thus develops an elevated awareness of the everyday and values encounters (Malone et al., 2020).

This article is based on data from a previous study involving three play sessions with 12 children aged 3 to 6. The research documented conversations, photographs, and diffractive readings to analyze, from a posthumanist and postqualitative perspective, how materialities co-create worlds and play with children. The study examined the role of more-than-human elements in shaping human existence and learning, challenging traditional hierarchies. The findings highlight the necessity of reimagining learning as a dynamic, relational, and decolonized process beyond formal educational spaces.