When matter in the classroom matters [electronic resource] : encounters with race in pedagogical conversations / Kathleen Kummen

This article considers how mattering and meaning are mutually constituted in the production of knowledge (Barad, 2007). Drawing on a research project with first year early childhood education (ECE) students in a university setting, I argue that material-feminism, as understood through the work of Barad (2007, 2008), offers a lens through which pedagogical practices can be re-conceptualized as more than anthropocentric endeavours. The research project explores the processes that occurred when a group of ECE students and I engaged with and in pedagogical narrations over one academic term as we attempted to make visible and disrupt the hegemonic images we held of both children and childhood. In the doing of pedagogical narrations, artefacts were produced that were not merely representations of our collaborative thinking. Rather, the artefacts that emerged-in between the material, the discursive and the participants, were themselves agentic; they invited us to shift our gaze and our conversation, and thereby new meanings and realities were produced. I provide one example that discusses how the presence of the artefacts invited “race” into a conversation of childhood in a way that reverberated in our thinking, feeling, and being. The article concludes by considering the pedagogical implications for learning, for both children and those learning to work with children, when matter comes to matter in the classroom.