Literacies, Literature and Learning

Reading Classrooms Differently

Karin Murris, Joanna Haynes, Karin Murris, Joanna Haynes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138301924
• eBook ISBN: 9781351400909
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Literacies, Literature and Learning: Reading Classrooms Differently attends to pressing questions in literacy education, such as the poor quality of many children's experiences as readers, routine disregard for their thinking and the degrading impact of narrow skills measurement and comparison. This cutting-edge book moves beyond social, psychological and scientific categories that focus on individualistic and linear notions of the knowing subject; of progress and development; and of child as less than fully human. It adopts a posthumanist framework to explore new perspectives for teaching, learning and research.

Authors from diverse disciplines and continents have collaborated to interrogate the colonising characteristics of humanism and to imagine a different – more just - reading of a literacy classroom. Questions of de/colonisation are tackled through the exploration of both education and research practices that seek to de-centre the human and include the more than human. Inspired by an example of high quality children's literature, playful philosophical teaching and the power of the material, the authors show how the chapters diffract with one another, thereby opening up radical possibilities for a different doing of childhood.

The book hopes to help transform adult-child relationships in schools and universities. As such, it should be of great interest to academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the areas of literacy, philosophy, law, education, the wider social sciences, the arts, health sciences and architecture. It should also be essential reading for teacher educators and practitioners around the world.

Part I

How to find gold in literacies

Chapter 1

Philosophical playthinking in a South African literacy ‘classroom’

Karin Murris with Joanna Haynes

This chapter introduces the book project that emerged out of Decolonising Early Childhood Discourses: Critical Posthumanism in Higher Education (DECD) research. Karin and Joanna outline the project aims and introduce the diverse project members. A posthumanist approach to literacy education moves beyond human social practices; this chapter asks what impact posthumanism could have on the de/colonisation of education and childhood discourses. It explores how the movement towards posthuman identity as in/determinate, porous, without fixed boundaries along with a philosophical commitment to mutual relationality and a politics of belonging, makes us think differently about difference. In the wake of the Anthropocene, this chapter contextualises our efforts to retrieve an openness to thought without foundation and the necessity to take up a more modest epistemic stance. What might a politics of belonging look like in the literacy classroom? How could this inspire those living and working with children to de/colonise their thinking and practices?

Thinking-with: ‘the breeding ground for possible futures’

The classroom-based research project at the heart of this book is inspired by experimenting with posthuman pedagogies in a literacy lesson in one grade 2 South African classroom. We wonder why posthuman feminist philosophers appear to forget about children in their political philosophies. For example, we do not know whether Rosi Braidotti was also thinking of children when she wrote about the ‘multiple missing people’ in the quote below, but we endorse the challenge she poignantly describes. Braidotti (2018:xxiv) writes:

The challenge today is how to transform, or deterritorialise, the human-nonhuman interaction in pedagogical practice, so as to intervene in, but not be over-coded or assimilated by, the fast-moving flows of data-mining by cognitive capitalism. How to bypass the dialectics of otherness, secularizing the concept of human nature and the life that animates it[?] … The field of posthuman scholarship is not aiming at anything like a consensus about a new ‘Humanity’, but it gives us a frame for the actualisation of the many different ways of becoming posthuman. It actualises multiple missing people, whose marginalised knowledge is the breeding ground for possible futures.

In diverse and exciting ways, we give a flavour in Part II of how child’s ‘marginalised knowledge[s] … [can become] the breeding ground for possible futures’ and offer multiple experimental readings of nonprescriptive posthuman ways of doing literacy and research. This book is distinctive in various ways. All authors collaboratively diffract with and through one another and think-with the ‘same’ data. This data includes the picturebook How to Find Gold (2016) by Viviane Schwarz,¹ three video-footages of one literacy lesson and two intra-views and more, as what counts as ‘data’ is not bounded or fixed and keeps changing as we (keep) re-turn(ing) to it. Each chapter reads the classroom differently, as the subtitle of the book suggests – a promise the book would like to keep. The book calls us to think-with and to think differently about literacies,² what it means to learn from and with a picturebook and how posthumanism opens up fresh opportunities for doing research in teaching and learning. Without discarding what has become ‘before’ in literacy education, the main focus of the book is on the ‘new’, thereby paying attention to who and what is included and excluded and hopefully bypassing what Braidotti calls (above) ‘the dialectics of otherness’. We have put the ‘before’ and ‘new’ in the previous sentence in scare quotes for a reason. Posthumanism (and more broadly the ontological turn) calls into question the ‘normal’ use of many words and concepts and invites playthinking and courageous experimentation. Drawing on Quantum Field Theory, physicistphilosopher Karen Barad explains why in posthumanism there is no ‘old’ or ‘new’, why ‘there is no moving beyond, no leaving the ‘old’ behind. There is no absolute boundary between here-now and there-then. There is nothing that is new; there is nothing that is not new’ (Barad 2014:168). Importantly, this is not from the (anthropocentric) perspective of the subject, as, for example, in memory. She continues: ‘Matter itself is diffracted, dispersed, threaded through with materializing and sedimented intra-acting, an open field. Sedimenting does not entail closure’ (Barad 2014:168). This new style of writing might read awkwardly, or annoyingly, and ‘might chafe at first, just like a new pair of shoes’ (Lenz Taguchi 2010:64), but the philosophical and political importance of this kind of experimentation with language and grammar cannot be emphasised enough. Posthumanist writing raises awareness that language has been too substantialising (Barad 2007:133), bringing into existence, for example, figurations of child as substance with essence (Murris 2016), as if the subject-predicate structure of language reflects an ontology: independently existing child with competencies or attributes – the arrogance of the anthropocentric human animal one might say. German philosophers Martin Heidegger and Friedrich Nietzsche also warned against language and the human-centred western metaphysics grammar has brought into existence. French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari write poetically:

When knife cuts flesh, when food or poison spreads through the body, when a drop of wine falls into the water, there is an intermingling of bodies; but the statements, “The knife is cutting the flesh,” “I am eating,” “The water is turning red,” express incorporeal transformations of an entirely different nature (events).

(Deleuze and Guattari 1987/2014:86)

In Chapter 2, we offer a genealogy (a political reading of ‘the’ past) and trace why language has been granted excessive power in determining what is real, but also why language has instilled a deep mistrust of matter in teaching and research, figuring it as mute, passive, immutable (Barad 2007, 2013). Language and discourse have positioned ‘us’ humanimals as thinkers above or outside the (material) world, and with that same move have distanced us, ‘fully-human’ adults, from both matter and child (and other so-called ‘illiterates’).

Experimentation with transmodal³ languages has been adopted in each chapter in this book. The approaches of the chapters differ, with authors drawing on their own transindividual embedded and embodied experiences, geo-political contexts and disciplinary expertise, but all broadly fall within a posthuman orientation, understood as both posthumanist and postanthropocentric, as the two do not always go hand-in-hand (Braidotti 2018:xiii).

Our team of researchers includes the guest teacher, who taught the lesson which takes centre-stage in this book, as well as the children’s usual classroom teacher. Finally, the author and illustrator of the picturebook is also involved in data creation (intra-view).

Reading the book from front cover to back cover, or vice versa, will create a diffraction pattern, created by reading through one another the multiple perspectives and rich transdisciplinary angles ‘thickening’ and ‘sedimenting’ (Barad 2007, 2014) and affecting the reader’s understanding of ‘the’ literacy event.

The book project emerged out of a larger research project Decolonising Early Childhood Discourses: Critical Posthumanism in Higher Education, funded by the National Research Foundation (NRF) of South Africa (see our website www.decolonizingchildhood.org). This three-year project provides rich material-discursive spaces for enquiry – both embodied ‘face to face’ and through technology. One of the aims of our project is to create and become involved in posthuman pedagogies in (higher) education that are generated from, and have resonance for, southern contexts. It has therefore brought together a diverse team of theorists/practitioners, academics, teachers, trainers and post-graduate students, to intra-act across diverse geopolitical contexts to engage in collaborative enquiry about critical posthumanism, the affective turn, and to investigate the impact these philosophical orientations might have on de/colonising⁴childhood discourses. The philosophies that have informed critical posthumanism are not only the object of our study, but also shape our everyday practices, the ways we intra-act and do research together. The neologism intra-action was introduced by one of our project members, feminist philosopher and quantum physicist, Karen Barad (2007, 2013). Intra-action expresses a particular ontological kind of relationality, which we explore in this book in much detail by reading theory with practice – a collaborative experiment in/with a South African classroom.

Posthuman enquiry is all about ‘reality as an active verb’ (how things work). Salient for de/colonising education is the idea that categories that involve binaries, such as ‘subjects, objects, kinds, races, species, genres, and genders’ are all products of relationships ‘between’ significant others (Haraway 2003:6–7). Haraway’s framing places the emphasis on becoming ‘with’ others, and rendering-one-another-capable (Haraway 2016), including humans, and what she terms companion species of the world. An ethics of respect for these ‘significant others’, as Donna Haraway calls them, means ‘to hold in regard, to respond, to look back reciprocally, to notice, to pay attention, to have courteous regard for, to esteem’ (Haraway cited in Lund 2014:103). This relational stance and the qualities of attention it entails are of deep interest for this project, with particular respect to de/colonising practices and discourses of childhood.

In this book, we foreground childism by paying attention to the following categories of exclusion: age, gender, class, ability, race (and their intersectionalities) from a relational materialist perspective. We argue that childhood has been a particularly neglected category of exclusion and opens up a very specific kind of enquiry into concepts of age and ageing – and from there also into the ways we understand, work and move in, through and with time and space. We set out to contribute to playful and creative practices of intra-generationalism in education, both for itself and as an aspect of de/colonising discourses of childhood.

One of the most exciting aspects of critical posthumanism and post-anthropocentrism is that they transgress disciplinary boundaries and do not focus solely on humanities and social sciences. As project member Rosi Braidotti puts it, they traverse ‘science and technology studies, new media and digital culture, environmentalism and earth-sciences, bio-genetics, neuroscience and robotics, evolutionary theory, critical legal theory, primatology, animal rights and science fiction’ (Braidotti 2013:57–58). In this research/book project team we have been pleased to welcome members from the humanities and social sciences (education, higher education, philosophy, built environment, gender studies, etc.), as well as information and communication technologies, earth-sciences and children’s literature. Such a team composition makes it possible to ask each other different questions, to compare approaches and to cross-fertilise each other’s ‘fields’ of enquiry. To acknowledge the limitations and constraints of humanism (as well as posthumanism) and to begin to open up de/colonising practices, such collaborations make particularly good sense.

De/colonising research in South Africa: West or west?

Working to decolonise educational research involves an examination of the various ways in which coloniality manifests itself in the production and communication of knowledge and meaning-making (Patel 2016). In Chapter 2, we explore in more detail the ways in which colonialism has instilled a non-relational ontology and competitive individualised subjectivity in education that continues to regard people, land and knowledge as property. De/colonising projects in higher education in South Africa tend to focus on racism, sexism and classism in its socially just pedagogies and research methods, also further explored in Chapter 2. But ‘child’ is still forgotten: property of the adult, ‘the last savage’: ‘taken for granted as appendages to adult society, or cocooned from the world and thrown out of society, children can only be of nature, which is to say, outside the human’ (Kromidas 2014:429; our italics). Moreover, entangled connections between imperialism and the institutionalisation of childhood have been made (e.g., Burman 2008; Cannella and Viruru 2004). Childhood as an imperialist construct has positioned male children ‘to be healthy and strong so that they could go out and subdue foreign infidels and bring glory “to crown and country” ’ (Cannella and Viruru 2004:4). After all, settler colonialism ‘has been and continues to be a gendered process’ (Arvin, Tuck and Morrill 2013:8). Moreover, mobilising tendencies to save the childhoods of ‘poor’ children in ‘developing’ countries (for example, by aid agencies), has been powerfully critiqued by Erica Burman for decades. She continues to highlight the exploitative link between child developmental discourses and global capitalist agendas (a good example of this in South Africa is the current concern to ‘invest’ in our children to meet the Sustainable Development Goals, see www.ci.uct.ac.za/ci/child-gauge/2017). As Gunilla Dahlberg and Peter Moss (2005:17) point out, dominant discourses typically make: ‘assumptions and values invisible, turn subjective perspectives and understandings into apparently objective truths, and determine that some things are self-evident and realistic while others are dubious and impractical’. Summarising the destructive universalising and normalising role of her own discipline developmental psychology, Burman (2010:11) writes:

The injustices, exclusions, and pathologisations of the discourse of development are writ small in the story of what happens to children and their families while, reciprocally, the story of individual development is writ large in the story of national and international development.

Burman’s (2010:11) (what she calls) ‘antipsychological’ approach is a commitment to counter the damage done by developmental discourses to younger human beings (labelled as children) (Cannella 2010:2).

Though not silent about gender, class or race, as categories of exclusion and discrimination (although arguably far from noisy enough), we want to demonstrate and argue that childism and ageism/ableism in childhood are barely tackled in critical discourse, other than sometimes in ways that underline the exclusion and marginalisation. Intersectionality is also important for our project and something we work with throughout this text. However, we argue that ‘child’ is still largely invisible on the transformational agendas of the sciences and the humanities. The identity prejudices (Fricker 2007) involved in the concepts ‘chil...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Part I How to find gold in literacies
• Part II Finding gold in a South African literacy classroom
• Contributors
• Index