Dinner theater in a toddler classroom: The environment as teacher

Abstract

This article explores the ways that the classroom environment announces a way of being a teacher in relation to pedagogical practices informed by the municipal preschools of Reggio Emilia. Drawing on theories of new materialism, the author considers the idea of environment, understood in/by the context of a Reggio-inspired preschool, to question how the environment teaches. Diffractive methodology informs the work and allows for opportunity to decenter the human subject. With additional support from performance theory and narrative vignette, diffractive methodology produces possibilities for thinking about onto-epistemological questions of being a teacher.

Setting the stage for a research inquiry

It was snack time in the Rabbits classroom, a room filled with 8 two-year-old children and their two teachers. I nearly max out the capacity of the room when I visit, but teachers Sherry and Sue welcome me all the same. I have come to know the toddlers and teachers in this classroom (and they me) through weekly visits and conversations as part of my research responsibilities at an urban public institution located along the southeastern coast of Virginia, in the United States. Snack time is always an important time of the morning and, on this day when I arrived, Michael and Devon immediately tell me about their snacks. Both have apples! And crackers! It is an exciting moment of comparison and connection between the two-year-olds and myself. ¹

Like many aspects of the early childhood curriculum, children’s everyday schooled lives are shaped by collective rituals, including those associated with food. In the Rabbits classroom, for example, snack time was a communal meal that secured a sense of place and belonging among the children and teachers. Before the children sat down, Miss Sherry prepared for mealtime, and always gave attention to the aesthetic presentation, including how the food was served and how the table worked as a provocative invitation for communion. She always unpacked the children’s lunchboxes, located in the cubbies outside the classroom, and brought their food selections to the table. Place settings were prepared before the meal began, often (but not always) with the help of the children. The communal meal was always lively with conversations, both formal and informal. The children in the Rabbits classroom always compared the variety of shapes, colors, tastes, and sounds of the foods they brought for their snack, building exposure to foods and food practices that may be new or unfamiliar to them (Highmore, 2002).

While Miss Sherry and Miss Sue make it a point for the children to share mealtimes as a group activity, they remain flexible in their ideas of children’s bodies. Children are free to choose if, what, and how quickly they eat. Food is served at the table, but bodies are not required to sit at the table. The majority of the children stay put, enjoying the conversation and entertainment of the meal, but there are always a few who prefer to explore the classroom. This does not disrupt, as some might assume, but rather adds to the dynamic flow. Both Miss Sue and Miss Sherry visit with the children while they have their snacks, though they themselves do not sit at the toddler-sized table.

During the month of February, a shadow puppet theater occupied the back corner of the small room. Made simply with white draped fabric hung over the skeletal structure of a tall wooden tunnel, it was at least a foot taller than the two-year-olds who lived in the classroom. The first time I saw it, Miss Sue explained that she initially tried to make the curtain lower, so the children did not need to climb, but the children preferred it to be high, and so the decision was made. I imagined that the bright light shining behind it, and the emerging shadows contrasting its brilliance, must have been all-encompassing for the tiny bodies in front of it. Throughout the month, the shadow theater itself changed in appearance, with several iterations of “puppets” and several options for participating as actors, directors, and audiences. The Rabbits classroom is one of five classrooms I visited regularly at the self-identified Reggio-inspired neighborhood preschool.

Introduction

The municipal preschools of Reggio Emilia are nothing short of an international sensation. Across the globe, educators and researchers are interested in how they do what they do in Reggio Emilia, and how such practices can be adopted outside the cultural contexts of their situatedness (Rinaldi, 2006). To be sure, the city of Reggio Emilia maintains what Moss (2004) identified as the gold standard of early childhood education, and while critique has cultivated important questions about the fidelity of teaching practices adopted across contextual differences, interest in the municipal preschools remains strong.

The preschools of Reggio Emilia are informed by a shared set of values and principles that are expressed in pedagogical actions. While those outside Reggio Emilia may take up their practices, they run the risk of doing so with limited understanding of how they are entangled with philosophical beliefs about children, teaching, and learning. Understanding what it is to “be Reggio” is both a question of knowledge (epistemology) and a question of ontology (being). This onto-epistemological expression of values and principles, forwarded by the municipal preschools, may explain the tensions that arise when particular practices are relocated from one context to another. It may also explain the troubled fidelity of its adoption and why many fall short of reproducing the educational excellence of the municipal preschools in Reggio Emilia.

New materialisms are a set of theoretical and philosophical ideas that attend to onto-epistemological concerns. Posthuman in their orientation, new materialisms work to decenter the human in research in favor of more robust consideration of how the non-human is implicated in producing the social. Here, agency is afforded to things as well as humans, producing a flat (read relational) ontology in which humans and non-humans move in non-hierarchical organization (DeLanda, 2013). Being, as it is expressed in new materialisms, is a doing or, more specifically, the ability for one object (or thing) to affect another.

In this article, I specifically attend to the learning environment as a central feature of Reggio-inspired pedagogical practice. I take up the concept of the “environment as third teacher” to invite questions about what it means to “be” a teacher. Rather than consider the human teacher, I decenter the subject by asking pedagogical questions to the environment. To do so, I first situate Reggio-inspired pedagogy in the neighborhood preschool of my research and then epistemologically explore the environment as third teacher via discourse. Next, I describe my methodologies and introduce the reader to diffraction as a methodological tool for qualitative research. I then consider contributions of performance theory in an affirmative move towards thinking differently about a narrative experience with toddlers, exploring light and shadow in their classroom. I conclude with discussion and summative remarks about the ontological dimensions of teaching and learning.

Contextualizing Reggio-inspired practices

My relationship with the teachers, children, and spaces of the neighborhood school featured in this article began three years ago as an invitation to aid their adoption of Reggio-inspired practices. At the time, the school was in its first full year of this process and questioning what it meant to be Reggio. During our bimonthly staff meetings, this ontological question was raised often. Teachers, for example, would share stories from their classrooms, curricular decisions, and pedagogical methods, and ask: “Is this Reggio?”

Early on, Reggio-inspired practices were primarily adopted both ontologically and epistemologically in relation to (1) beliefs of the child as a resourceful and capable person and learner (Malaguzzi, 1994); (2) attention to notions of beauty and aesthetics (Vecchi, 2010); (3) the use of pedagogical documentation to inform practice and the curriculum (Rinaldi, 2006); and (4) the creation of carefully planned pedagogical environments, or what Reggio Emilia identified as the “environment as the third teacher” (Edwards et al., 1993).

An extensive description of these four touchpoints is beyond the scope of this article, but it is important to understand that, for Miss Sherry and Miss Sue, an onto-epistemological concern meant that choice and agency were key practices which acted with a belief of children as competent and capable, and an understanding that children have much more to say than words alone can tell us. Miss Sherry and Miss Sue considered the senses to be an important connection with the world, and thus critical for the young child’s ability to make meanings. Their classroom was rich in visual, auditory, olfactory, and tactile material, selected with a deep respect for beauty in nature. The arts were a responsive aspect to their Reggio-inspired emergent curriculum, and children’s ideas were taken seriously.

The school environment had been altered the year prior, as the first step towards their goal of “becoming Reggio.” Walls were transformed from primary colors and commercial materials to neutral tones and emphasis on natural materials. Each classroom was designed for self-guided, choice-based learning for the duration of the three-hour school day. The teachers were encouraged to employ materials as provocations for learning, or rather “use the environment” as a teacher, to document how children engaged with learning, and develop curriculum that explored questions and interests generated by/of/with the community. Such is the basis for what the schools of Reggio Emilia refer to as emergent curriculum (Rinaldi, 2006).

The environment as third teacher

Reggio schools believe that there are three primary teachers in the life of the child: the parent, the classroom teacher, and the environment. As the “third” teacher, the environment plays a crucial role in supporting, informing, facilitating, and creating valued learning. Gandini, remembering the words of Malaguzzi, explained:

We value space because of its power to organize, promote pleasant relationships between people of different ages, create a handsome environment, provide changes, promote choices and activity, and its potential for sparking all kinds of social, affective and cognitive learning. (Gandini, 1993: 149)

Classroom environments are inhabited by children, and their teachers, and thus need to be adaptable while maintaining a recognizable identity. Of key consequence here, regarding the role of the environment, are ideas of relationships, aesthetics, affect, and flexibility.

Relationships

Relationships are a central tenet of a Reggio approach and, in terms of the environment, refer to associations between elements (or actors), including teachers, students, and parents, as well as between children and materials, nature, ideas, and activity. As such, relationships are active and characterized by force, or rather by the ways that different elements (or actors) come together, link, and/or provoke (Latour, 2005). Gandini explained that

all the things that surround the people in the school and that they use—the objects, the materials, and the structures—are seen not as passive elements but on the contrary as elements that condition and are conditioned by the actions of children and adults who are active in it. (Gandini, 1998: 177)

Latour (2005) presents this idea as an actor network, and Deleuze and Guattari (1987) refer to it as an assemblage. Deleuze and Parnet explain an assemblage as:

a multiplicity which is made up of many heterogeneous terms and which establishes liaisons, relations between them, across ages, sexes and reigns—different natures. Thus the assemblage’s only unity is that of co-functioning: it is a symbiosis, a “sympathy”. It is never filiations which are important, but alliances, alloys; these are not successions, lines of descent, but contagions, epidemics, the wind. (Deleuze and Parnet, 2006: 52)

While actor network and assemblage are not interchangeable in their use, the combined conceptual vocabulary, presented here, provides important implications for thinking about the qualities of relations and the possibilities for what they can produce. Insofar as they present a way of thinking about processes in the socio-material world, I intentionally blur the lines between them.

Aesthetics

“Aesthetics is an area of art concerned with feelings and responses to color, form, and design” (Isbell and Raines, 2003: 117). How teachers design a space, both physically and visually, relays important communication. Reggio approaches express democratic ideologies, including the idea that children are important and valuable contributors to the social and epistemological landscapes of their communities. As such, careful attention is given to invite children’s curiosity and the varied ways children make meaning. What learning materials are made available is as important as how they are used/understood collectively. Materials also bring beauty to the classroom, maintain important dialogues between interior and exterior, and invite ecological considerations of living with the natural world (Kind, 2014; Trafi-Pratts, 2017).

Affect

Affect refers to embodied or body experience. To be sure, a classroom environment is experienced through feelings and emotions, but to consider affect as an element of the classroom environment is to address the intensities experienced pre-linguistically by the body (Massumi, 2002). Like relations, affect is a verb, a doing. Consequentially for the environment, it is important to consider that although affect is separate from thinking, it decidedly influences it by producing particular kinds of learning experiences and dissuading others. Vecchi explains:

they [children] taste space with their powerful but sensitive sense of physicality. Running, jumping, variations in footsteps, hands touching and stroking surfaces; children explore spaces to make their formal, tactile, sonorous and luminous qualities emerge. They feel chromatic qualities and details. (Vecchi, 2010: 87)

Again, materials feature prominently as offerings of sensorial connections with the physical world and they solicit concentration, persistence, motivation, and wonder.

Flexibility

Flexibility is crucial for an environment that teaches amidst tremendous diversity and movement. Flexible environments respond to their inhabitants and transform in accordance with use, with attention to both short- and long-term concerns (Ceppi and Zini, 1998). In this way, environments are afforded temporal considerations that offer children extended time to think, explore, and investigate. Simultaneously, a flexible environment moves with children’s interests and ideas to extend and deepen experiences. It gives way to, rather than restrains, movement of the body, the mind, and the senses.

Certainly, conceptualizing the environment as the third teacher and its dynamic, complex, and multifaceted qualities are an extensive area of inquiry. What has thus far been presented was not done as an exhaustive search of the literature, but instead directed towards a line of inquiry that helps to support an understanding of how the environment teaches the mind and body. As such, I read the environmental “teacher” as material and discursive pedagogy (Lenz Taguchi, 2009). While certainly classroom environments relay meaning, understood as discourse, I placed particular emphasis on the material, or rather on the relationships between environmental elements and the body. Environments act upon bodies and bodies act upon environments. They become a generative force for creating experiences that are sensed, but not necessarily spoken or linguistic.

I now return our attention back to the Rabbits to consider how this understanding of the environment as teacher materializes in the classroom. Towards this effort, I provide a brief overview of the methodological considerations that were germane to my thinking, before entering the storied world of the Rabbits classroom once again.

Methodological considerations

The vignettes featured in this article provide a narrative thrust for thinking relationally about classroom environments, teaching, and learning. My approach to research is reminiscent of a variety of narrative methodologies within qualitative research. I consider both the interpretive nature of lived experience and the power of stories to offer structure and verisimilitude to our ways of knowing (Bruner, 1990, 1991; Clandinin and Connelly, 2004). I am, however, more experimental in my approach than traditional qualitative methods and not eager to align fully with any of them.

To be sure, the roots of this research emerged from my interests in the relationship between epistemology and ontology, and the rising attention to the material turn among academics in the social sciences. My methodology, or perhaps I should say my “method without methodology” (Koro-Ljungberg, 2016), was informed predominantly by the work of new materialist feminism (see Barad, 2007; Haraway, 1992, 2016) and post-qualitative imaginings (see Koro-Ljungberg, 2016; Lather and St Pierre, 2013). It also maintained fluid connection to teaching practices and a commitment to producing research that supported the 11 women who so generously shared their wisdom, talents, and vulnerabilities as they traversed the ambiguous and the unknown.

Working collaboratively with the teachers, we explored ways of seeing and telling learning stories of their classroom with children and for varied audiences. Thus, as artifacts, the vignettes of this article maintain force within an assemblage of a larger collection of field notes, audio and visual recordings, and journal entries temporally tied together by three years of experimentation and dialogue about children and pedagogy. Certainly, theories of pedagogy and learning abound in the literature, and thus any account of how such research questions informed the data collected is evaded by an overgeneralized description. My choices about what to document, to be more specific, were informed by theoretical orientations that situate knowing as a social and material practice (Lenz Taguchi, 2009), as well as questions and wonderings proposed both formally, during bimonthly staff meetings, and informally, in conversations occurring during weekly visits.

It is likely obvious to the reader that my analytic approach was abductive, which Brinkman (2014: 722) explains as a form of reasoning “that is concerned with the relationships between a situation and an inquiry” (original emphasis). An abductive approach to qualitative analysis maintained a flexible structure that allowed me to consider emergent questions and ideas that inevitably arise when research is understood as co-constituted knowledge. Over the duration of the study, my ideas, thoughts, and understandings shifted; they were forced to become other through readings on new materialist philosophies, interactions with teachers and children, and my own practices of documenting and representing phenomenological experiences. Theory and data became empirical material that aided in aesthetic interpretations which recirculated back into the research inquiry, shaping an iterative analytic practice (Freeman, 2014).

In consideration of research ethics as well as suggestions for member checking in qualitative inquiry (Creswell and Miller, 2000), I gave formal presentations of the research, marked for academic use, to the teachers before introducing it in my own university classrooms, conferences, and/or publications. It is, however, important to recognize that member checking, in the sense of this project, was used as a generative and iterative process. By this I mean that member checking was not about creating (and checking) authentic (re)presented meaning, but instead about presenting meaning. Let me explain. In traditional qualitative research, member checking is thought of as a tool that increases the validity of a study. It allows researchers to represent others’ ideas (read the researcher’s interpreted meaning) of a particular phenomenon, and insures that the meaning represented reflects participants’ actual or intended meaning. The prefix “re” indicates that it is something that has come before. Member checking is a way of asking research participants “Is this what you meant?”

While I shared narratives with the teachers, like the one included in this article, so too did the teachers. The narratives were never a final step in the process, but merely another one. We presented stories and artifacts as possibilities, and talked about how the stories changed the way we thought about things. We did not think about things as if they were finished, but questioned, offered ideas for practice, and investigated again, and again, and again. In this way, the research was an iterative process. Meaning was never fixed or isolated, and thus never a (re)presentation. Instead, it asked us to think differently from how we thought before.

Our histories and our current experiences thus effectuated something new. This practice is explained by new feminist materialisms as diffraction. Originating in the work of Haraway (1992) and her idea of past–present–future reality, diffraction emerged as a metaphor for feminist research in the 1990s that looked towards thinking without presupposing dualistic structure. As Barad (2007: 93) later explained through quantum physics, diffractive readings bring about “respectful engagements with different disciplinary practices” and, instead of isolating philosophies, attempt to speak with, in pursuit of similar goals (Dolphijn and Van der Tuin, 2012). In what follows, I present performance theory and, specifically, Schechner’s ideas of environmental theory, and work affirmatively with them to produce different ways of thinking about how the environment “teaches.” I will then return to the new materialists for discussion and summative remarks.

The performing environment: how the environment teaches

Performance theory builds a framework for understanding how individuals act and react in the world. It seeks to situate people “in” the world and, in doing so, develops a paradigm that places the body as central to meaning-making (Powell, 2007; Springgay and Freedman, 2007). Schechner (1998: 85) explained that “it is hard to define ‘performance’ because the boundaries separating it on the one side from the theater and on the other side from everyday life are arbitrary.” Goffman cogently suggested that

[a] performance may be defined as all the activity of a given participant on a given occasion which serves to influence in any way any of the other participants. Taking a particular participant and his performance as a basic point of reference, we may refer to those who contribute to the other performances as the audience, observers, or co-participants. (Goffman, 1959: 15)

In defining six axioms for environmental theater, Schechner (1968) considered the important ways that elements co-mingle, thus providing a relational view that makes it possible to see theatrical performance as more than the staging of a story, acting, and directing. A theatrical event, he proposed, includes all of the elements involved in the production of a theater performance. This wide-reaching range certainly includes the actors and the stories, but it also gives consideration to the audience, the sensory stimuli, the architectural enclosure and spatial demarcation of the stage, the production equipment, the technicians, and the house personnel (Schechner, 1994). In Schechner’s environmental theater, elements become forces that act upon other elements, creating a sympoietic experimentation with meaning through both material and discursive means.

Environmental theater is a specific type of theatrical production in which performances are designed to create sensory engagement and multiple ways of interacting with the various elements that make up the theatrical event. Environmental theater breaks down the traditional theatrical division between the stage and the house by enacting single and multifocal performances with/in totally transformed or found spaces. Schechner (1994) suggested that, in the theater, the environment can be thought of in (at least) two ways. The first is what it is possible to do with and in a space, or rather how a space is curated; the second is how the space is accepted, or rather the negotiations that occur between the actors (or elements) within a space. To these points, environmental theater assumes a dynamic and relational flow of movement between elements and seeks to create confrontations, slippages, and negotiations amidst repetitions and difference within a loosely defined territory or space.

As a teacher, then, the performing environment is flexible and provocative, familiar and strange, sensuous and spatial, material and discursive, and cohesive and improvisational. The environment attends to both mind and body, cognitively and affectively, in ways that recognize the body as both subject and a material. I now invite you to return to the world of the Rabbits classroom, to describe these ideas in practice.

Dinner and a show: the environment as a science teacher

It was winter in southeastern Virginia, and a particularly rainy one at that. I arrived in Miss Sherry and Miss Sue’s classroom, as I often did, during snack time, but on a day where lights and shadows had become infused in the curriculum. Outside, the gray skies contributed to the dimly lit classroom by way of the large window that, during warmer months, brought bright natural sunlight into the space. Artificial lighting within the classroom was intentionally curated. The overhead incandescence, for example, no longer filled the classroom with a familiar and impenetrable white glow, but instead carefully placed light sources were established in isolated pockets throughout the room, which gave way for shadows to appear on the walls, the tables, and on the children themselves.

Jessie and Miss Sue were acting in the shadow theater when I arrived. Jessie was standing on a two-tier step stool bouncing a black paper spider dangling from the end of a string and tied to a dowel rod. Miss Sue was scaffolding the language necessary for iterations of “Itsy Bitsy Spider.” Twice they sang the song before Jessie’s desire for a snack outweighed her desires for being an actress. She climbed down from the step stool and took a seat among the audience. At the table, Stewart and Mason explored handheld flashlights, a bit of extra (and personal) light to help illuminate paths of wayfinding around the darkened room. Mason used the flashlights to look closely at the materials directly behind the snack table, at Stewart’s snack, and then, amidst protest, directly at Stewart’s face.

It wasn’t long before Adam and Chloe gravitated to the shadow theater—gravitated as in it pulled them in, speaking to their desires for climbing stairs and for making meaning. The storied beginnings of their work were largely confined to negotiations that resulted from the difficult conditions associated with being two and reaching high over a suspended white sheet. Adam was first, and he wanted me to know that he had a sun. He dangled it in front of me and announced it before climbing the step stool and situating it behind the curtain. Chloe was right behind him, pulling a snack bench with one side of her body and carrying the dowel rod, which dangled the black paper spider from its tip, with the other. Predicting the inevitable problem of her size, she announced “I can’t reach” before she began to climb. She waited patiently for the step stool, bouncing the spider in front of the curtain. When Adam began his descent, she noticed immediately. He barely cleared the lower step before Chloe started to climb, pushing past him in her pursuit of the spotlight.

Chloe bounced the spider behind the curtain, squealing with delight. Sue heard her call and answered immediately. She squealed back and added, “That’s a scary spider, the way you wiggle it,” and Chloe laughed. Chloe climbed down from the step stool to show me the spider, grabbed a quick bite from her snack, and then took to the stage a second time. Miss Sue was ready to play. She lowered her own puppet behind the curtain, but it became almost immediately tangled with Chloe’s spider. Miss Sue worked to get the puppets untangled and offered suggestions to avoid the mishap in the future. Chloe waited patiently for the shapes to become free from one another and showed her gratitude to the puppets. Recognizing their agency, she called out “Thank you spider” and then bounced the black shape behind the curtain.

Understanding the important role the puppet theater played in supporting toddlers’ emergent language, Miss Sue chose to focus on the narrative aspects of the drama. She annunciated and encouraged opportunities for the puppets to become subjects when she joined their play and suggested a storyline. She changed her voice to become the simple fish she held behind the curtain. While Miss Sue talked, Chloe smiled and moved the dowel rod so that the black spider bounced across the screen towards the fish. In front of the curtain, she smiled and fixed her gaze on the shadow shapes in front of her. She, too, shifted the sound of her voice in reply. Miss Sue helped to scaffold the verbal part of the storytelling and Chloe animated it with her puppet. Behind me, the sound of laughter caught my attention. It was Hazel, who found the show hilarious entertainment while she dined on her crackers and juice.

“Lucky me!” I thought. I had arrived just in time for dinner and a show!

Discussion

As snack time winded down and more children made their way into the classroom activities, the draped sheet slid from the wooden structure and the drama shows of the shadow theater gave way to other explorations and other performances throughout the classroom. Chloe bounced the spider puppet across the space, pausing to show it to all those who would look. She found a magnifying glass and explored how it could augment her view of the black paper shape. The flashlights exchanged hands and beams of light accentuated various points, materials, and activities in progress. The children used them to explore how light traveled, dispersed, reflected, and was absorbed by the objects and events of the children’s foci—an important reminder of how the environment “teaches.”

To be sure, the puppet theater, in the back corner of the toddler classroom, provided an important space for the young children to perform a specific set of gestures, which can, of course, be read in a myriad of ways. In our discussions following the event, Miss Sue, for example, explored the puppet theater as a modality for learning that linked “real worlds” with possible imagined ones (Ahlcrona, 2012). She provided opportunities for the children to devise and recitate improvisational scripts that forwarded important practice in mastering oral language, aided in building understandings of conventions of stories and storytelling, and provided opportunities to navigate symbolic representation (Furman, 2000). We also explored how the Rabbits classroom, and particularly the theatrical event of the shadow theater, offered possibilities for playing with big ideas pertaining to light and shadows. Certainly, their exploration of, and experiences with, light and shadows, for example, created foundations for building scientific concepts such as translucent, transparent, opaque, reflect, and refraction. While it is useful to consider how the drama of the light and shadows produced possibilities for thinking with/about narrative scientific concepts, a more productive reading of the events as an instance of dinner theater disrupts a traditional cognitivist view that locates teaching (and learning) as an exclusively mental activity.

Schechner’s ideas of performance, and particularly his characterizations of environmental theater, gave pause to consider the pedagogical potential of fully immersing children in aesthetic, bodily, and artful ways of making meaning. In the Rabbits classroom, for example, a sensorial, exploratory, storied, and immersive performance of light and shadows occurred, where the totality of elements participated and performed in the transformative potential of the theatrical event. As a project of study, the environmental teacher included dimmed overhead lights, a demarcated stage, and opportunities for the children to freely choose where, when, and how they participated. Production elements such as the small flashlights and simple, recognizable black paper puppets accentuated concepts by presenting the children with dilemmas, questions, and opportunities to watch, listen, and act. The added element of snack time created a ready-made audience that transformed the classroom into a living, breathing dinner theater. In this configuration, Miss Sue and Miss Sherry worked as set designers, prop masters, and stage managers to ensure the success of the show. Through theater, young children became immersed in the study of science and storytelling as performers, spectators, dramatists, and directors. Aided by the curated environment, the classroom itself exceeded mere drama to become a theatrical event. In doing so, the children’s senses heightened, their bodies activated, and their minds focused as the indelible imprint of light and shadows left its mark on the month of February.

Summative remarks

Pedagogical practices that are inspired by the preschools of Reggio Emilia, Italy, are modeled in countless ways. While it is true that the unique cultural contexts of their municipality cannot be identically replicated, neither should it be a goal of/for early childhood education. Instead, the philosophies and pedagogical practices are best explored and experimented with in ways that invite questions and possibilities for children and learning within their localized contexts.

In this article, I set out to explore how the environment informs what it means to be a teacher in a Reggio-inspired preschool in the USA. Following Vecchi (2010), who noted that attention to the physical environment often serves as a point of genesis for thinking with Reggio ideas, this article considered a key tenet of Reggio Emilia pedagogy—the environment as a third teacher—in the hopes of opening possible dialogue among early childhood educators. Doing so allowed me to decenter the human and thus generated a new materialist perspective to an onto-epistemological question. I then used diffractive methodology to explore how the environment teaches, and presented a narrative of the teacher (read environment) in action. The diffractive methodology allowed invitations for thinking about teaching as the indeterminate act of assembling various kinds of elements. It also presented a teacher who did not rely on methods to secure the acquisition of fixed objects of knowledge, but instead distributed instructional force in non-linear, discursive, and material ways.