Storying practices of witnessing: Refiguring quality in everyday pedagogical encounters

Abstract

This article seeks to contribute towards an unsettling of dominant framings of quality pedagogical practices. The author puts to work the figure of the modest witness as a way of storying everyday pedagogical encounters in childhood settings that might refigure quality in practice as materialized more-than-human becomings. Working within the particular context of British Columbia, Canada, the author's particular orientation is towards emergent interferences to child-centred orientations in everyday practices of art-making and multispecies encounters in relation with a local mountain forest. Through descriptive visual and textual accounts of small stories, the author experiments with foregrounding implicated, responsive and messy practices-in-question that bring hopeful possibilities for reimagining quality in practice without the enclosures of fixed and final resolutions.

Animal Magic, Secret Spells, and Green Power: More-Than-Human Assemblages of Children's Storytelling

“…Drawing invisible lines between interconnected episodes also meant diffractively exploring more subtle, implicated relationalities (Nxumalo, 2016a) between stories and between narrative scenarios. These implicated relationalities were, for instance, stories that emerge under similar narrative circumstances (such as personal anecdotes told during outside play).…”

Children’s development, capability approaches and postdevelopmental child: The birth to four curriculum in South Africa

“…As is the case elsewhere, a major objective of ECE in South Africa is to make young children 'school ready' for the foundation phase (Grade R-Grade 3). 'School readiness' has become a neo-liberal marker globally for 'quality' in education including technologies of evaluation (Dahlberg et al, 2013(Dahlberg et al, [1999; Nxumalo, 2016) as is the case with the National Curriculum Framework's 'exit outcomes' determining children's suitability for 'entry' into the foundation phase. The identification of these exit outcomes was the main objective of the research team I had been invited to observe.…”

“…The implications for the South African National Curriculum Framework -and any curriculum construction for that matter -are that education should concern itself not only with individual humans, whether young or old, but also with the more-than-human. Several (teacher) educators have interrogated the logic and ethics of human-centeredness and human exceptionalism in education and have given concrete examples of decentring the human by resisting 'following the child' only (Blaise et al, 2017;Malone, 2018;Nxumalo, 2016;Taylor, 2013;Taylor and Hughes, 2016). The notions of 'more-than-human development' and reconfiguration of child as inhuman be(com)ing moves theory and practice from a focus on assessing the capabilities of individual children in sociocultural contexts to the tracing of material and discursive entanglements (Barad, 2018) that render children capable.…”

(Re)Encountering Walls, Tattoos, and Chickadees: Disrupting Discursive Tenacity

“…This transformational opportunity disrupts pedagogy as usual (p. 4), creating a space where we can reimagine what it means to be human, including rethinking agency and reenvisioning children's, adults' , and more-than-human relations with/ in the world. Reimaging our complex interspecies relationships is critical at this particular moment, in part due to the irreversible impacts humans have had and are having on the earth (Nxumalo, 2016).…”