From the 1st to the 3rd of this month, the 57th edition of the UKLA international conference took place, in which the members of the Literacies research team Fernando Guzmán Simón, Alejandra Pacheco Costa and Giovanna Caetano da Silva presented the communication entitled The Materialisation of Affective Refusals in School Assembl(y)age: Literacy, Embodiment and Subjectivity in Early Childhood.
The vignette presented is derived from the research project entitled "Enhancing MultimoDAl Literacy in Early Childhood (3-8 years): Developing an Inclusive Model in Areas with Social Transformation Needs" (MATILDA).
The MATILDA project poses new challenges to the research team, as it faces the problems generated by the Spanish school curriculum when it seems to approach children’s learning by focusing only on the acquisition of skills. Teachers become part of the problem when they assume control of the learning process, leaving aside what children learn before and after crossing the threshold of the school. From this perspective, we ask what is lost in children's literacy when learning is limited to the curriculum and the teacher. Learning cannot be reduced to what happens only in the classroom, the everyday values of literacy cannot be measured by the instruments and indicators of the school curriculum. Therefore, our research aims to consider literacy beyond assessment, and promotes a pedagogy committed to the non-representational, to those learnings considered "useless" from the perspective of the curriculum, or “wild” as Hackett (2021) proposes.
Vignette
It is Monday morning, and the children are sitting on the rug around Marta, their teacher. It is the usual routine: to begin the day, Marta encourages them to tell her anything: if they have any news, how they got to school, how they feel, etc. Almost all of them take part in this dialogue, raising their hands before speaking, although today they are particularly restless. I sit to the side, not fully integrated into the circle of children, but also not completely outside of it.
At one point Maher, four, looks directly at Marta and tells her that demons are afraid of him, because Allah protects him. He thinks a bit and adds that Allah protects everyone. Marta asks him if his mother is teaching him Islam again. His mother is Moroccan, and his father is Spanish, and Marta explains to the rest of the class that his mother teaches him, his brothers and his father religion. Apparently, his mother calls them "paradise classes". Gradually, silence falls as the rest of the children witness the conversation between Marta and Maher. Marta explains that his religion is different. The other children continue to watch. Maher stops answering, sitting cross-legged with his back to me. Marta comments that usually children attend after school classes in the afternoons, and asks if any of the others do. Several raise their hands: football, English, sports, homework, etc. A boy says he draws in his afternoon classes, and Maher says he does it too. Marta asks him what he draws, and he says “cars”. She makes a gesture, not seeming satisfied with his answer. As the children continue chiming in, they draw gradually closer, until Maher is separated from the rest. He starts rocking back and forth, legs crossed. He continues swaying while Marta decides to move on to other things.
Regarding this event we see how some elements of the class separate instead of uniting. Our attention is on how we have come to this emptiness, the hollow space, the isolation. In this research we start from a vignette that explores different encounters in an early childhood assembly, finding from it the need to return to the concept of assembly and approach it differently, as Kuby and Rucker's (2020) work on (r)etymologization suggests.
Our proposal addresses the idea of (re)etymologizing the words 'assembly'/ 'assembly', a moment and space in the classroom dedicated to listening and sharing, as a way of addressing the complexity of the materialization of literacy in early childhood education. This process allows us to perceive, feel and reflect on/with the emergence of Maher's affective refusals from a neomaterialist and more than human perspective. Our research delves into the relationships between Maher's identity and subjectivity, and into the emergence of his embodied literacy in school. The materialization of patrimonial literacies in this space is perceived as potentially felt both as a confrontation in/toward and as a rupture in/toward the space of the school. Maher's subjectivity comes to life in/through the embodiment and the non-representational, and show the affective potentialities of the 'no' within the normative literacy of the school. Our conclusions raise the need to (re)think the ways in which the school listens to children beyond their words, and to challenge the limits of the curriculum from a perspective of transcendental empiricism.
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