Abstract
Through multimodal retellings of kindergarten children’s performances of “baby,” this article aims to contribute to the emerging “posthuman conversation” within early childhood studies. Specifically, this work makes moves toward reconceptualizing children’s becomings within educational contexts by, first, interrogating the ways in which adult notions of “time” came to bear upon children’s enactments of “babies” within classroom pretend play performances and, second, exploring how posthuman conceptions of temporality—specifically Pickering’s “mangle”—can disrupt developmental analyses of children’s (un)timely performances and accommodate a more nuanced version of childhood becoming(s).
Introduction
The purpose of this article is to contribute to the emerging posthuman landscape within early childhood education and childhood studies. Specifically, I make moves toward reconceptualizing children’s becoming within educational contexts by interrupting taken-for-granted notions of time and temporality through re-presenting sociodramatic play performances of “baby” that occurred during a year-long post-qualitative (Lather, 2013; St Pierre, 2013) inquiry in one kindergarten classroom. This article is organized into three movements. The first briefly outlines the post-qualitative methodological context of the inquiry during which these kindergarten babies emerged. The second re-presents the “baby” events through a series of brief vignettes constructed with the children’s guidance from photographs, children’s dialogue, and my narrative memos. The third presents two contrasting interpretations of these vignettes, each grounded in differing conceptions of the ways in which children become in relation to time. While classroom teachers’ developmental notions reaffirmed a kind of restrictive, temporal normativity with regard to children’s play, a posthuman conception of temporality—specifically Pickering’s (1995) notion of “the mangle”—accommodates a more nuanced version of these “baby” becomings. The conclusion of this article imagines what might become of children’s seemingly inappropriate play performances when they are reimagined as emerging through a posthuman mangle rather than along a developmental timeline.
Methodological context
From September 2013 to May 2014, I spent three days per week researching the material-discursive entanglements (Barad, 2003, 2007) of 16 kindergarten children, aged four to six years, at a university-affiliated laboratory early childcare and education center in the United States. 1 I undertook this inquiry from/with a new materialist perspective, which seeks to highlight the ways in which humans and non-humans engage each other and emerge differently from those engagements (Barad, 2003, 2007; Bennett, 2010; Lenz Taguchi, 2010, 2014). With relational intra-dependency, complexity, and non-linearity as theoretical framings, my main focus throughout the inquiry was to recognize and map the ways in which the children, myself, and the multiple non-human elements/actors of the classroom were bound together in the everyday events of classroom life, and how these events were perceived, articulated, and re-presented by the children.
In keeping with my focus on the complexity of relationships, I employed a post-qualitative approach, attempting to reconfigure what Lather (2013: 642) calls the “settled places in our work.” Not unlike many researchers who work with young children, this inquiry entailed a revision of adult researcher–child roles and data collection methods (e.g. Albon and Rosen, 2014; Clark et al., 2008). However, the ways in which the children and I “did” research focused less on finding out and representing what children already “knew,” and more on mapping what emerged from our being together in the material-discursive flow of the classroom (see also Myers, 2014, forthcoming). For example, although I had secured approval from the ethics review board of both my university and the children’s school, as well as written consent from parents/guardians to “observe,” “document,” and “interview” children about the material-discursive relations within their classroom, I worked with the children themselves to (re)shape the ways in which these more traditional visual ethnographic methods were executed. Within our method assemblage—“a tentative and hesitant unfolding, that is at most only very partially under any deliberate form of control” (Law, 2004: 41)—we subverted “participant observation” in favor of something the children would come to call “being with me/you/us.”
Instead of always observing with the intent to report and document, we agreed that I would function as any other adult in the classroom might until a child would invite me into a collaborative research “mode” by asking me to “be with” him or her. “Being with” meant that I would maintain physical proximity, usually by sitting on the floor, and enter into children’s play if they invited me to do so. While “being with,” I would construct images (photographs or drawings) and/or engage in ways that were outside of the theme of play only if children requested it. In these enactments of “being with,” the making of images was a collaborative event, as the children could also (re)compose, delete, or edit any images that were generated.
When the conception of “participant observer” was actualized as “being with us,” there was no clear division between building rapport and familiarity with children and witnessing “naturally” occurring events. According to the children, an appropriate way of “being with” them was often to engage in (and thereby alter) whatever events were occurring. Once I “be(came) with” them, the flow of events and relationalities was always altered and the boundaries between our subjectivities and the field of relations were constantly in flux. In these assemblages, we produced something different than we could have if we were not becoming together. It was through these entangled “being with” processes that “babies” emerged within this particular kindergarten landscape.
Kindergarten babies emerge
Over the course of several weeks, a group of five- and six-year-old girls were engaged with/by various baby enactments that entailed “a multiplicity of co-occurring agencies or elements, including adult and (child) desires, research methodologies, ideas and technologies, fashions, temporalities, bodies, relationships, and things” (Bradley et al., 2012: 142). These events are re-presented through the following vignettes, utilizing data generated through the previously described “being with” processes. These vignettes are meant to illustrate how enactments of having babies and being babies emerged with various material and human actors/actions, and to provide a provocative context for the theorizing of time and temporality in later sections of the article.
Having babies
Paige taps me on the leg while I am sitting on the carpet with Bella and Petal. 2 She is cradling one of the blue throw rugs that the teachers intended for the children to use as work mats.
See what I’m doing?
I see that you’re holding one.
[interrupting me] Shhh! She’s sleeping. I just got her from that cradle! [gesturing to the basket containing the rest of the rolled-up mats]
[whispering] Oh! Sorry…
My mom said when the baby comes it will sleep all the time [she pulls her baby close, bouncing and rocking her, before mouthing, “Take her picture”].
Okay [taking the photograph]. You’re really holding her gently…
This baby is just the right size for me … and she was just born. Today! Look…
Just then, the lights flicker and two other children call out, “Time to clean up!” She whispers that she will “show me tomorrow” and she places her baby gently in the basket.
The next day, Paige pulls me by the hand to the carpeted block area of the classroom and tells me to sit on the floor next to a stack of arch blocks. She then runs over to the other side of the room and grabs two plastic tubes, one red and one clear.
Do you know what this is?
Um … tubes?
Okay [tying a knot in the red tube], this is part of the belly. The dad cuts it open with a … knife, maybe? And then blood. And then they make a knot and it just grows that way.
Oh! An umbilical cord, right?
Yep. Watch.
Paige picks up a wooden arch block and holds it around her waist with one arm. She tries to tuck the red tube between her stomach and the top of the block, but the knot comes undone. After several tries, she discards it and asks me to tie the end of the clear tube for her.
[tucking the clear tube behind the block] Okay, take a picture of this. This is with all of the blood out. Maybe … I had the baby probably two or three hours or days ago.
A week later, I am “being with” Paige and Petal at the building platform when Bella arrives wearing a paper hat and several sheets of white paper taped to her body. She walks past us several times, stopping to pose as though someone is taking her photograph.
Should I be photographing this?
[smiling] I’m getting married!
Oh, fancy! Did you make your outfit?
Yes! And you know what else? I have something … you can’t see yet. Wait…
Okay … it’s a surprise?
Just wait! Now, watch this! I’m serious…
I’m watching…
She carefully takes the wedding hat off her head and sets it on the floor. She adjusts her wedding dress a few times, carefully arranging several pieces of tape that attach the paper to her shirt. She lifts her paper dress to reveal another piece of paper taped to her shirt, with a figure drawn on it.
See! It’s a … baby!
Wow! You’re having a baby!
Not right now. In a few days it’s about to come out! And have birth … like a birthday.
I want to play! Can I be the baby?
Yes, but you have to crawl … and cry!
Being babies
For the next five days, several children, but most frequently Petal and Bella, moved in and out of being “babies” during the morning free-play period. During the first week, their baby performances mostly comprised crawling on the carpet and on each other. When these babies would come into physical contact, they would often “cry,” “whine,” or “scratch” each other.
[crawling over Bella’s legs; Bella scowls and scratches her] Bella, don’t do that!
Waaah! [clawing at Petal]
Casey! Tell her to stop! [turning to Bella and making a chomping motion with her mouth]
[speaking in a high-pitched tone] Me baby! Waaah!
Waaah! Mama! Mama! [clawing at my leg]
[crawling] Waaah! [scratching my leg] Mama! Mama!
As the girls invite me into their play as their “mama,” I try to honor their baby desires. At the same time, I notice three teachers watching us carefully. I sense that the play is too loud, too rough, and too uncontrolled for their liking.
Babies, when you act like this it makes me think you’re very tired. Are you babies tired?
Hold me, hold me!
No, hold me! [crawling onto my lap, bumping her head on my camera] Ow! Boo-boo! Waaah! Mama!
[pulling on my shirt] My mama!
I can’t hold everyone at once. It’s naptime … could I swaddle you?
What’s swaddle?
To get wrapped up really tight with a blanket so babies feel safe. Wanna try?
All three babies grab fabric from a nearby basket and promptly lie on the ground in front of me. As I wrap each baby tightly in a piece of fabric, I pat their backs and tell them “Good night.” Elizabeth, who is watching nearby, joins us.
I’ll get the bottles! [she brings each baby wooden shapes and places them on their chests]Your medicine is in here, okay? You need to drink all of that then you fall asleep. Okay, now I’m a baby, too! [grabbing fabric and lying down] Wrap me up! Mama! Mama!
This crying–swaddling–medicating–napping sequence repeats several times that morning and continues for the next three days. The babies claw and cry at each other, then at me, and then I bundle them up and put them to bed with their “medicine bottles.” On the fourth day, the babies begin a kind of “self-swaddling” wherein they engage in “tired” behavior and call for me to get them their blankets. Instead of wanting me, their “mama,” to bundle them, they crawl away and wrap themselves up. As they drape themselves in fabrics, they “babble” to each other and giggle.
We’re making our own bed … Goo-goo-gee-gaw-bay-baw!
Right! Goo-goo-goobers [giggling].
Take a picture of our bed, mama! You can’t even see us in here, can you? Goo-goo! [giggling]
Just barely!
Babies need a night light in here! Dark is … goo-goo-doo-doo-mama-papa! [giggling]
Temporal perspectives on (un)becoming babies
What follows is an account of the ways in which these particular “baby” events were interpreted by the children’s classroom teachers and an interrogation of the ways in which young children were beholden to a restrictive kind of linear temporal normativity through these developmental analyses. A contrasting posthuman perspective is also presented, in order to reimagine how kindergarten babies might become differently through a non-linear temporal framing.
Babies as developmental progressions and regressions
Within this particular classroom, the teachers recognized that these children were enacting fantasy or pretense through a sociodramatic play scheme (Jones and Reynolds, 2011), in which they used props and mutually agreed-upon rules/roles to act out a “babies” script. First, Paige and Bella engaged in non-literal uses for common classroom objects (a rug, arch blocks, plastic tubes, paper, tape) in order to pretend to have a baby. Then, several children acted out being babies, wherein they crawled on the floor, cried for their bottles, babbled, and feigned injury. As they played along with my attempts to soothe them as their “mama,” they again transformed wooden shapes and fabrics into medicine-filled bottles and baby blankets. Although mainstream best-practice guidelines support sociodramatic play as an avenue for the development of social, cognitive, emotional, and physical skills (Copple and Bredekamp, 2009), and the Reggio Emilia-informed approach of this specific school theoretically valued social-constructive, creative, and symbolic play as “a celebration of the imagination of the young child” (Johnson, 2014: 185), these baby events troubled many of the teachers who encountered them. I noticed that when I was not actively “being with” the children, these kinds of baby play would be quickly redirected or shut down completely by other adults.
When I discussed these events with their teachers, each brought forth critiques that stemmed from their general understanding that play develops from a solitary endeavor and gains complexity as children share, cooperate, and collaborate within their play, which requires increasing social and linguistic capacities (Siraj-Blatchford, 2007, 2009). Specifically, the teachers expressed concerns related to the children’s use of materials, communication, and age-inappropriate behavior. With regard to materials, the tubes, blocks, and wooden shapes were conceptualized as complex construction materials that were meant to facilitate children’s understanding of physical science concepts, and thus were being underutilized as umbilical cords and bottles. The rolled-up rug that became Paige’s baby was intended to be a “work mat” upon which children should construct and create complex arrangements of materials. With regard to communication, it was thought that their play should involve increasingly complex dialogue through which to negotiate roles/rules and articulate their ever-evolving ideas, rather than babbling, crying, and whining. Relatedly, while the nature of being babies was deemed too simple, too immature overall, the children’s enactments of having babies were deemed too mature or provocative. The teachers commented that “they are too young to be doing that”; it was the visual representation of the baby underneath the paper wedding dress that seemed to be the most offensive to adult onlookers. In both of these circumstances, it seemed that the adults did not want to endorse children’s enactments of behaviors or concepts that were too far beneath or beyond them developmentally.
Even though pretend play was purported to be of value, it was only seen as appropriate if it was adaptive, as it was considered a “preparatory, growth-oriented behavior” (Sutton-Smith, 1997: 27). Lester and Russell (2014: 296) state that “the belief in the value of play for progress gives license for adults to promote the kinds of play that appear to have developmental benefits and to discourage other forms that adults may see as purposeless, disorderly and frivolous.” Likewise, in the case of these kindergarten babies, the ways in which the adults critiqued or distanced themselves from this play indicated that the children were violating the notion that play should be appropriately developmental to be considered educational.
The ways in which the adults took issue with either having or becoming babies disclose a certain perspective on the ways in which children and their play are governed by particular notions of temporality. These idea(l)s surrounding children’s play in the early childhood classroom—what Sutton-Smith (1997) calls a “progress rhetoric”—are central to conceptualizing childhood (and the child within it) as functioning along a pre-existing timeline. On this timeline, “immature/inappropriate” and “mature/appropriate” are polar opposites that stretch from their infancy into the future. Although a dynamic reading of constructivist learning theory argues that the ways in which learning, development, and play emerge in young children within classroom contexts are non-linear and complex (Siraj-Blatchford, 2009), this particular classroom relied on a stage-wise linear categorization of both play and development. From this perspective, children are supposed to be continually inching forward through their play, beholden to these normative notions of (in)appropriate and (im)maturity. But these kindergarten babies, these (un)becomings, were enactments out of time, violating adults’ requirements for reasonable forward movement along the childhood timeline. If we were to forgo this more fixed conception of temporality in relation to the content and purposes of young children’s play, how might these kindergarten babies emerge differently?
Babies as/in the classroom mangle
As my own presence as the classroom researcher was predicated on a kind of material-discursive methodological entanglement, my own ways of making sense of these baby becomings was/is quite different from the developmental progression rhetoric adopted by the children’s well-meaning teachers. I turn instead to Pickering’s (1995: 18) posthuman notion of “the mangle” in order to explore “the temporal emergence of plans and goals and their transformability in encounters with material agency,” and how this reconfiguration of emergence affords a more complex reading of the kindergarten babies.
The mangle comprises a dance wherein both human and non-human agents emerge in real time through reciprocal resistances and accommodations. As such, cause–effect, subject–object, and human–non-human boundaries are blurred within the mangle. In this boundary-blurring manner, the mangle is conceptualized as being both a noun and a verb, a simultaneous being-becoming. As Hekman states: [The mangle] is the entity in which the interaction takes place, but it is also the action that occurs. The elements of the mangle are mangled; they are mixed up with each other into a combination in which the various elements lose their clear boundaries. (Hekman, 2010: 24–25)
When these baby events are conceptualized as emerging within the classroom mangle and as mangling practices themselves, the developmental view of this play as simply “inappropriate” or “untimely” is subverted in two ways.
First, the conception of the classroom as a mangle resists the notion that children are the sole agents in their play events. In a more humanist, developmental view, the children were seen as acting on classroom materials inappropriately, as the blocks, tubes, and wooden shapes were seen as passive learning tools with prescribed uses and a specific set of static properties that children should discover (Lenz Taguchi, 2010, 2014). However, if we “insist on the constitutive intertwining and reciprocal interdefinition of human and material agency” (Pickering, 1995: 26), then the children and the material can only be seen as intra-active and mutually entailed.
The children themselves articulated notions of material-discursive becoming when we engaged with the photographs and retold the stories about having and being babies. When I asked them what they would like for others to know about the “kindergarten babies,” they gave the following accounts of how “baby” knowings and doings were inextricably entangled with the force of material agents, and how their play emerged through this mangle:
I like to feel like I’m really holding a baby and [the rug] is like a heavy, kind of soft baby. And you have to be careful or it will come apart, so if you want it to be rolled up you have to be really careful. Like a mom, and I know that because my mom is going to have a baby, either a boy or a girl, I’m not sure which, in the summer. So I even know how to hold a baby, actually. When I tried to make the tube … well, I wanted the red one because it was supposed to be like blood, but it … wouldn’t stay [tied]. So I did the clear one with you … it was easy to make into a loop so I just thought it was … like the blood was gone and I had a baby a little while ago, like it all came out.
The paper baby would be more like an X-ray. But you can be married and still have a baby. I think maybe you even have a baby first. Or even after! But the important part is that the tape and the paper are important. You can’t have a part that sticks to you without the tape on the sides. And the paper is what makes a part that stays down and part that you can flip up. You took a picture of that part.
See that circle part with the smaller part inside? [pointing to the wooden pieces that made up the “medicine bottle”] Sometimes a bottle has an inside part that pushes out the medicine … so I did it with those. I like getting tight, tight under the blanket, like how you did us. That was a very funny idea. And it is really hot under the blankets and I could come up for more air and then go back under and “goo goo!” [laughing] with a little baby talk. It’s like playing a baby but not all the way because you can’t just stay under a blanket forever.
I would say … write this down: scary, loud, cry, happy, warm, scratching, dark, tight roll-up, making a baby noise and soft … like a baby [hugging herself]. That’s what you do for babies!
Bella, Elizabeth, Petal, and Paige, if we are to take them at their word (and I do), were materially and discursively aware regarding the complexity of their play, commenting on how babies emerged through more-than-human ideas, movements, resistances, feelings, etc. Although this was not explicitly addressed in their teachers’ critiques, all of the children mention that I was also implicated in these baby becomings. My methodological acts of “being with”—from constructing photographic cuts of the events, to holding Paige’s baby and helping her tie the “umbilical” tube, to my camera causing baby Petal’s “boo-boo,” to my introduction of “swaddling”—were entangled with the children’s desires and bodily movements, and material forces of varying kinds. For example, the swaddling practices arose out of the kindergarten babies’ demand for my body, my large camera bumping Petal’s head, my own bodily limitations (i.e. I could not hold more than one five-year-old baby), my acceptance of their invitation to become their “mama,” my desire to continue their play, my knowledges about what babies’ body-minds “need” to reach a homeostatic state, my growing sense that the teachers would have liked for us to be playing in a more quiet and controlled manner, and the availability of fabric pieces. My enactments as a researcher, and all of the affordances and limitations I presented, were bound up with the “babies” in irreducible ways, and this complicates any developmental analysis of the children’s play. Kindergarten babies emerged through “active intervention and invention in the practice of doing research” (Lenz Taguchi, 2014: 88)—not simply with the assistance of a scaffolding proximal adult or simply through the children’s ability or willingness to play in the “appropriate” way or not.
Second, the mangle also subverts the idea of play as simply a progressively adaptive, unidirectional, growth-orientated behavior because it proposes a different conception of temporality. Teachers may have ideals for children’s play related to their linear conceptions of development (itself a time-bound concept), but since “human intentions, goals, and desires get mangled and emerge in time as a result of these human and nonhuman performances” (Sent, 2008: 109; my emphasis), the outcomes of mangling practices are impossible to fully predict. Play, then, is not the result of a child’s (in)appropriate progressive forward movement along a naturally occurring timeline, but is instead a temporally productive event in its own right. The practices of being babies and having babies are temporally emergent within the classroom mangle (i.e. play emerging through an imbroglio of human-material forces in real time) and are themselves mangling practices (i.e. childhood becomings that upend adults’ predictions and linear ideals).
Posthuman play(ful) possibilities
Moving from conceptualizing play as beholden to a developmental timeline to emergent within a complex mangle of temporally emergent conditions would yield a much more open, even playful, relationship to studying and engaging in children’s play performances, enabling those who work, play, and research with young children “to move beyond either/or definitive accounts of playing to develop approaches that can work with the messy, interrelated, and complex nature of minds, bodies, materials, and space” (Lester and Russell, 2014: 297). In the specific case of kindergarten babies, despite adults’ investment in stabilizing the temporality of childhood, the early years classroom—with all of its forces, affects, and agents—persisted to mangle and be mangled. Working within these more fluid temporal conditions that posthuman perspectives afford might allow us to embrace play as a mangling practice, and move beyond restricting children’s play to what is considered developmentally timely. Instead of relying on what we have always perceived to be fixed, certain, and known (e.g. that some ways of playing are inappropriate and immature and others are not), we could attempt to comprehend what it is these babies do in real time and the many agents that are implicated in shaping the contours of these events.
Footnotes
Funding
This project was approved by Kent State University’s Institutional Review Board (Research compliance #13-362, LII, 6/7).