Abstract
Tim Kinard, Jesse Gainer, and Mary Esther Soto Herta tell a story about exploring las fronteras; they tell a story about pushing on boundaries and disrupting ‘either/or’ categories “so that they might lose their acuity in describing us – blur the lines that narrowly define the ‘between’ as a void” (10). Power Play: Explorado y empujando fronteras en una escuela en Tejas through a multilingual play-based early learning curriculum is a story about the power of play and when taken-for-granted assumptions about children are confronted, when activist curricula are contextually created, and when ‘lines of flight’ take to the sky. The teacher activist authors write of hope, resistance, place, privilege, imagination, language, and the potentialities of pedagogical decisions alongside children who are playing and learning in one early learning summer school in Texas. The text is a fitting volume in the Childhood series edited by Gaile Canella. In her foreword, in responding to the authors’ narrative, Canella asks – “how do we ‘become-with’ our own histories and experiences as educators and practicing teachers in the now without silencing the voices who are younger and their families?” (xiv). Her question is posed to the reader, yet it highlights a central contribution that Power Play makes to the childhood studies and early learning fields. The authors acutely explore notions of power, adult/child binaries, and what exists in the in-between.
Power Play complicates ideas of linearity and challenges the very notion of “common sense” curriculum creation. From the initial page of Beginnings (Chapter 1), the impetus to disrupt and resist taken-for-granted ideas about curriculum, children, learning, and play is evident. In Beginnings, the authors use a critical incident from the school’s play yard to illustrate the philosophical understandings and epistemological framing for the multilingual school and text. Kinnard, Gainer, and Soto Heurta rely on a breadth of scholars and theorists to challenge discourses of child innocence and maintain an ethic of resistance against binary thinking (i.e., adult/child, us/them). Drawing on the interpretations of Deluze and Guattari’s “smooth” and “striated” space and lines of flight, the authors discuss how the summer program curriculum was intended to generate lines of flight for the participants of the school. Lines of curricular flight, as described by the authors, are forms of resistance that create “freedom of movement… a smoothing of space” (33) where boundaries are pushed on, explored, and transgressed. Examples of curricular exploration are illustrated through rich descriptions of one room in the school, the Constructive Play Lab, where students constructed objects from open-ended materials, tools, and ready-to-help teachers. The chapter concludes by revisiting and problematizing the initial critical incident through a lens of privilege, ‘risk’, and language.
Chapter 2, Explorando, further explores the text’s philosophical scaffolding, context, and curricular possibilities. Explorando begins with a careful explication of the authors’ positionality and the purposeful choice to write through a unified voice. However, throughout the text, the collaborative narrative is juxtaposed with the interruptions of individual stories, personal memories, and collected biographies. The authors playfully term this literary device an “interruptive narrator” that serves to interrupt “the narration from our telling in the recent past and jumps to other times, other characters, other-ness” (79). The interruptions are purposefully woven into the text to challenge and blur the boundaries of binaries. Throughout the chapter, the authors sketch the visible and invisible boundaries at play in and around the multilingual early learning program, from the impact of the socio-historical implications of place and time to the people for which the program was designed. The authors take care to note that in the act of recognizing identities one then creates categories or in a sense a boundary around that individual. The authors explicate their approach to allowing for fluidity around ‘recognizing’ through a lens of ‘becoming.’ Explorando can be interpreted to be an example of Maxine Greene’s existential philosophy: “I am…not yet” and her urge for ‘wide-awakeness’ through the “plane of consciousness of highest tension” (Green, 1977:124). For this is what I contend the authors are attempting to explore in Chapter 2 – a wide-awake curricula that recognizes the tension, complexity, and possibilities of young children becoming.
The third section of the book, Empujando, includes a deeper discussion of the early learning program’s curricula and the ways in which assumptions of curriculum and assessment were challenged. The authors begin the chapter by outlining their concept of “theorybuilding” which privileges children’s home knowledge, integrates children’s proclivity to wonder and theorize, and emphasizes the association of theories as ‘becoming’ ideas (a key theme woven across chapters 2 and 3). Following the description of how children build knowledge, the authors describe the program’s curricular materials through a Baradian (2007) mind-matter perspective of intra-action. While the descriptions are dense, the authors use imagery and interruptions to clarify their process of curriculum assemblage.
In Chapter 4, El Juego Conmueve, the authors revisit the critical incident depicted in Beginnings and describe how the teachers approached the incident with flexible curricular and pedagogical choices. The pedagogical choice to allow “uncomfortable stories, uncomfortable statements, and uncomfortable desires” (221) into the light of the program’s curriculum is explored in this chapter, particularly around themes like swords, guns, or exclusionary play. The chapter also includes a detailed illustration of how playwork is integral to the educator’s roles within this early learning program curriculum. The authors conclude the text in a fashion similar to how it began: in the middle. In the final section, the authors articulate curriculum playwork as a form of creativity always becoming and continually entangled.
Power Play offers readers a noteworthy story about activist curricula through playwork and the power of recognizing the potential of early learners as boundary-crossers capable of engaging in meaningful, playful curriculum. The text contributes to the field of early learning by showcasing the potentials of activist curricula and the ways in which it could be conceptualized, assembled, and enacted. Given that the text is situated in the burgeoning tradition of new materialisms, those outside of research and higher education settings, or those looking for practical prescriptions may find the curricular assemblage process challenging to navigate. Nonetheless, the potentialities of new materialist notions are promising for moving the field beyond our boundaries and assumptions of curriculum. An additional critique offered relates to the positioning of individuals in the text as ‘becomings’. While the author’s stance is empowering and potentially transformative in relation to boundary crossing, it pushes against alternative notions in which children are framed as being-and-becoming (e.g., Uprichard 2008). I wonder how aligning with a ‘becoming’ lens has the potential to reify developmental discourses of future-oriented growth. I wonder how future-oriented ‘becoming’, even without a pre-determined destination of that becoming, invalidates the being individual in the here-and-now. And, finally, I wonder how Davies (2014) new materialist applications of thinking-being (my emphasis) complicates the singular ‘becomings’ conceptualization presented in this text. With these ponderings in mind, the authors’ use of a ‘becomings’ perspective to resist the limitations of boundaries invariably presents a potential limitation.
In closing, in response to the era of standards-based education, the text beautifully details how one multilingual early learning program was able to meet the play and language needs of their students and community and mutually benefit the district’s needs for curricular accountability. For those in similar circumstances and for those looking for inspiration to be creative resistors and allied activists, Power Play is a beacon of hope for what could be in early learning school-based programming.