Childhood Geographies and Spatial Justice: Making Sense of Place and Space-Making as Political Acts in Education

American Educational Research Journal Month XXXX, Vol. XX, No. X, pp. 1–33 DOI: 10.3102/0002831216655221 Ó 2016 AERA. http://aerj.aera.net Childhood Geographies and Spatial Justice: Making Sense of Place and Space-Making as Political Acts in Education Stephanie Jones The University of Georgia Jaye Johnson Thiel University of Tennessee Denise Dávila University of Nevada Las Vegas Elizabeth Pittard Georgia State University James F. Woglom Humboldt State University Xiaodi Zhou Taryrn Brown Marianne Snow The University of Georgia This post-qualitative research analyzes the spatialized practices of young people within a working-class community and how those guided the opening and facilitating of a local community center. Seeing place-making as a social and political act, the authors were inspired by Heath’s classic study and argument that children’s education might be better served if educators understood and built on their community-based language practices. Writing through theories of new materialism, spatiality, and children’s geographies, we build an argument for spatial justice by considering the ways educational scholars and educators might understand and build on children’s community-based spatial practices. KEYWORDS: spatial justice, children’s geographies, feminist new materialisms, Reggio Emilia, social class-sensitive pedagogies Introduction Spring in north Georgia is usually delightful, weather-wise. Long, bright days push the daffodils and azaleas open, and the trees spread their green fingers seemingly overnight. It was on a particularly sundrenched late Downloaded from http://aerj.aera.net at UNIV OF TENNESSEE on August 2, 2016 Jones et al. afternoon that Stephanie (author) turned off of a two-lane county road, past a faded vinyl siding mural of Our Lady of Guadalupe, as she drove into a tangle of interconnected streets lined with single-story housing units, the neighborhood we have come to call South Woods (a pseudonym). She visited the community that day in order to introduce herself to children and families and spread the word that as soon as school ends, in the neighborhood’s recently closed after-school space (an unoccupied housing unit), summer lunch service and activity programs would begin for the children of South Woods in a partnership between the regional food bank and the College of Education. Parking in a driveway in front of one of the units, she walked from house to house with a bilingual (Spanish/English) White woman who had worked in the community for a long time, especially helpful since Stephanie is a monolingual (English) White woman with no previous ties to this working-class, predominantly Latino/a and African American neighborhood. The families she met with shook her hand, smiled politely, and welcomed the news about the summer lunches and children’s activities. STEPHANIE JONES is Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Georgia, 225 Cambridge Drive, Athens, GA Georgia 30606; e-mail: sjones1@uga.edu. Her research interests include feminist and class-sensitive pedagogy, justice-oriented teacher education, and educational experiences of children and youth from marginalized families and communities. JAYE JOHNSON THIEL is assistant professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville in the Department of Child and Family Studies. Her research explores how materialdiscursive entanglements produce opportunities for intellectual fullness to emerge during creative play and how these moments serve as counter-narratives to deficit discourses surrounding women, children, families, and teachers. DENISE DÁVILA is assistant professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Her research examines community-based and crossdisciplinary literacy education for ethnically, linguistically, and socioeconomically diverse groups of young children and their families. ELIZABETH PITTARD is clinical assistant professor at Georgia State University. Her research interests are grounded in feminist poststructuralism, investigating the working lives of women elementary school teachers, and the manifestations of neoliberalism in P–12 and teacher education. JAMES F. WOGLOM is assistant professor in the Department of Art at Humboldt State University. James is a multimedia artist and educator whose research interests include arts-based inquiry and ontology in education. TARYRN BROWN is a doctoral student in the Department of Educational Theory and Practice at the University of Georgia. Her research interests include adolescent girls’ and young mothers’ experiences with schooling. XIAODI ZHOU is a doctoral student in the Department of Language and Literacy Education at the University of Georgia. His research interests include multilingual literacies and identities. MARIANNE SNOW is a doctoral student in the Department of Language and Literacy Education at the University of Georgia. 2 Downloaded from http://aerj.aera.net at UNIV OF TENNESSEE on August 2, 2016 Childhood Geographies and Spatial Justice The research presented in this article draws from and extends the groundbreaking work of Shirley Brice Heath in the 1980s (e.g., Heath, 1983), where the researcher studied the language practices of children’s everyday contexts outside of school. Heath’s documentation of the ways that social class and race were implicated in family language and literacy practices informed decades of researchers and practitioners as they intentionally made attempts to validate children’s home language practices and connect those with language and literacy studies in the official curriculum. While Heath, and many others that followed, opened up the possibility to think theoretically and pedagogically about how to build on community strengths through language practices, we shift the focus of analysis to space and the ways in which the spatialities (entwined spatial and social processes) of a local community are created through relational ways of being across the landscape. As researchers and informal education workers in the community, we drew from the production of neighborhood spatialities to inspire the making of a new neighborhood-embedded education space. A significant implication for this research, then, is that taking the time to observe and theorize the spatialities of young people’s everyday lives is one way school- and community-based educators can be more responsive to the children and youth we serve. This article argues that ‘‘making space’’ for and with children (much like privileging or normalizing particular language practices over others) is a political act. In the following sections, we will explain how children’s place-based practices, or their coproduction of local spatialities (e.g., the ways children, the physical landscape, material objects, and other human and nonhuman actors produce a physical and affective space) are linked to theories of childhood spatialities (e.g., Kraftl, 2015) and include the larger context of geopolitics within the neighborhood, city, state, region, and country. We analyze these place-based practices in the neighborhood of South Woods through theories of spatiality (Katz, 2004; Kraftl, 2015; Kraftl, Horton, & Tucker, 2012; Malaguzzi, 1994; Massey, 2005; Soja, 1989, 2010) and post–human inquiry or what is also called new materialisms (Barad, 2007; Bennett, 2010; Braidotti, 2010, 2011; Coole & Frost, 2010) to make sense of children’s engagement with and coproduction of their neighborhood landscape. And much like Heath’s work and her use of ethnographic research to inform school-based curriculum and teacher learning, we used our analyses of spatialities to cultivate an informal learning space in a venue that aims to affirm and extend spatialized practices of the children in their everyday lives. Finally, we build an argument for education scholars to engage theories of spatiality informed by critical human geography and new materialism to foreground the politics of space-making for and with children and to reimagine research and practice with (and in the best interests of) marginalized groups of young people through spatial justice. 3 Downloaded from http://aerj.aera.net at UNIV OF TENNESSEE on August 2, 2016 Jones et al. Conceptual Framework Our ethical commitment coming into the project of designing a community-based educational space in South Woods—largely through the participation of university-based faculty and students—was (and is) informed by our theoretical understandings of space, materiality, power, and agency. These commitments are connected to critical human geography, including the work of Gibson-Graham (2006a, 2006b), Massey (2005), and Soja (1989, 2010) and those working within the subdiscipline of childhood geographies (e.g., Aitken, 2001a, 2001b; Aitken, Ragnhild, & Kjorholt, 2007; Katz, 2004; Kraftl, 2015; Kraftl et al., 2012; Limited Life Working Party, 2003; Thomas, 2011). By challenging the ideological constructs about space, bodies, time, and learning that govern the institutionalized practices of much public education, we hoped we could enter the neighborhood with humility and actively work against the ways neoliberalized institutions have been pushed toward uniformity (Kraftl, 2015). An intensified push toward standardization of time, space, materiality, and bodies can result in the privileging and marginalizing of certain groups of people within such institutions, but as geographers Gibson-Graham (2006b) and Kraftl (2015) point out, diverse ways of living and being continue beyond the institution, often producing spatialities where youth and adults cocreate preferred ways of learning and relating (e.g., Woglom & Jones, 2016). The Power of Childhood Geographies and New Materialisms for Reimagining Education and Research Childhood geographies offer tools to critique the privileging of time over space, encouraging educators to consider lived experiences of young people within and through interaction with materiality in their coproduction of space. Soja (1989) calls this theoretical move toward tending to space the ‘‘spatial turn’’ in social theory, and while some educational researchers have indeed already made that turn, we argue that educational practice remains predominantly grounded in a narrative of time and history (consider developmentalism, organizing education by age and for specific periods of time, emphases on ‘‘time on task’’ and ‘‘progress,’’ predicting students’ potential based on past performances, etc.). The spatial turn, we believe, is linked to what is now being called the ‘‘ontological turn,’’ ‘‘new materialisms,’’ or post-human inquiry (e.g., Barad, 2007; Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Lather & St. Pierre, 2013; Taguchi, 2013; Taylor, 2013; Taylor & Ivinson, 2013) that express the need to better understand the shaped and shaping forces of both the material and the discursive in sociopolitical relations; in other words, the production of space and the spatial conditions under which certain things become possible and impossible. Soja (1989) writes of dialectical relationships between bodies, time, and space, explaining that social practices produce space just as space produces 4 Downloaded from http://aerj.aera.net at UNIV OF TENNESSEE on August 2, 2016 Childhood Geographies and Spatial Justice social practices. We adopted Soja’s concepts to frame our work at the Playhouse as well as this article’s discussion of the dialectical relationships within the space of the Playhouse, within the community of South Woods, and as part of the broader spatialized contexts beyond South Woods that inevitably influence and are influenced by local practices. Applying Soja’s lens, the Playhouse could be considered a ‘‘locale’’ that is a built environment, another created setting for human interaction that is influenced both by humans (the adults and youth who spend time at the Playhouse) and preexisting spatio-temporal conditions (the geography of the neighborhood, minimal infrastructure to support mobility between the neighborhood and other parts of the city, minimal infrastructure for access to jobs, the legacy of race relations in the city and how power operates through racialized relations, the practices of the former community center, etc.). Through the lens of dialectical relationships, we acknowledge that political, social, material, and discursive agents all play a role in the ways spatiality is being produced as well as the ways that spatiality is simultaneously producing political, social, material, and discursive realities within spatio-temporal structuring. Importance of New Social Studies of Childhood and Childhood Geographies Soja’s (1989) theory of spatio-temporal structuration makes us keenly aware of our ethical commitments to respect children and families and actively working against practices that might position the space/bodies of South Woods as deficient. Two fields in human geography that seem important enough to our place-based work to highlight: the new social studies of childhood (NSSC) and children’s geographies. Specifically, we perceive our work to be political in the sense that we assume space is political and the ways that children’s bodies and place produce space is political and constitutive of how children and young people are perceived and perceive themselves and others as spatial beings. This political stance aligns our work with children’s geographies where scholars aim to convince ‘‘researchers, policymakers and practitioners working with children and young people [to] be more aware of how spaces are important in/for their work’’ (Kraftl et al., 2012, p. 8). Within this context of studying childhood and space, we also see the work of the NSSC in our belief that childhood is a social construct and that childhoods are lived in particular ways and therefore experienced very differently by different children living categories of difference such as race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, geography, language, and dis/ability. Finally, but perhaps most importantly, the commitments we bring with us from childhood geographies to our work at the Playhouse include the following (from Kraftl et al., 2012, pp. 8–9): 1. that characteristics of particular spaces—perhaps classrooms, homes, streets, parks, institutions—can be profoundly important in shaping the lives of individual children and young people; 5 Downloaded from http://aerj.aera.net at UNIV OF TENNESSEE on August 2, 2016 Jones et al. 2. that the construction of spaces can be instrumental in the social construction of childhood (and indeed in the staging and reproduction of discourses that powerfully shape childhoods); 3. that relationships, rules, and conflicts relating to spaces can reveal contemporary social norms and structures. In other words, we understand children’s relational ways of being with the physical, material, discursive, and time scales available to them as both shaping their spaces and being shaped by their spaces. We looked for evidence of the ‘‘relationships, rules, and conflicts’’ of the Playhouse space that could ‘‘reveal’’ the ‘‘contemporary social norms and structures’’ of the children’s lives (Kraftl et al., 2012, pp. 8–9). In short, our analysis focused not only on the ways children’s and adults’ bodies occupied the community center and moved across the neighborhood space but also on the politics of occupation and mobility and the interactions among adults and children. Childhood Geographies and Reggio Emilia Approaches to Education Complementary to the theories of Kraftl et al. (2012), we also adopt the lens of Loris Malaguzzi (founder of the ‘‘Reggio Emilia approach’’ to education in the city of Reggio Emilia, Italy) who understood that children’s visibility in and mobility through public spaces produced images of young people as valued citizens and an important part of the larger society. He also understood that the spaces where children spent their time, including school, both reflected the ‘‘image of the child’’ a society held and had a profound impact on children: The environment you construct around you and the children also reflects this image you have about the child. There’s a difference between the environment that you are able to build based on a preconceived image of the child and the environment that you can build that is based on the child you see in front of you. (Malaguzzi, 1994, p. 1) Indeed, the Playhouse we might have created for the preconceived and imagined children of South Woods and the Playhouse we have created based on what we have come to know about the actual children of South Woods are likely different. Additionally, we could not have known the ways in which the actual children of South Woods engaged and shaped their physical landscape without being in that space ourselves and looking for the ways in which their bodies traversed, made, and remade the neighborhood space. Space and created environments continue to be important in contemporary work of Reggio Emilia–inspired educators and researchers (e.g., Rinaldi, 2006; Vecchi, 2010), and these efforts seem to be taking place parallel to the important empirical, theoretical, and political work in childhood 6 Downloaded from http://aerj.aera.net at UNIV OF TENNESSEE on August 2, 2016 Childhood Geographies and Spatial Justice geographies and new materialisms. We see power in the integration of Reggio-grounded work and the overtly political commitments of geographers working toward justice and equity in the spaces of childhood and youth. Specifically, we see: (a) Malaguzzi’s ‘‘image of the child’’ and childhood geographies’ deconstruction of both ‘‘child’’ and ‘‘childhood’’ as powerful lenses through which to critique and reimagine adult perceptions of and interactions with young people and youth, (b) Reggio’s emphasis on student agency and autonomy in educational spaces and childhood geographies’ emphasis on young people’s agency in their own lives and social spaces around them as similar but with important distinctions, (c) Malaguzzi’s emphasis on public visibility of children and youth as an important part of a broader society and childhood geographies’ concern about children and youth having access to and the ability to transform public spaces as ideologically similar, and (d) Reggio’s emphasis on built environments and the aesthetics of school environments and childhood geographies’ theoretical and empirical attention to how children and youth both produce and are produced by the material and discursive spaces where they spend time is a key overlapping concern that could be enhanced through engagement with both approaches. Additionally, it is important to note that Malaguzzi was cultivating these images of the child and creative pedagogies in response to fascism, and we aim to cultivate new images of the child and creative pedagogies in response to neoliberalism. The intentional political act on our part as a group of educators and researchers to create a ‘‘space’’ that engages both Reggio-inspired approaches and activist commitments of childhood geographies to understand traditionally marginalized children’s lived experiences of their neighborhood space is significant. Methodology This post-qualitative study (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012; Lather, 2007; Rhedding-Jones, 1996; St. Pierre, 2011) is focused on how the material (e.g., the physical place, objects, bodies, music) and discursive (e.g., circulating ideologies, ways of using bodies and ways of using the space) merge in South Woods to produce a particular space and sense of place that orients bodies toward particular ways of being. The data we analyzed for this article include (a) published artifacts including historical narratives of the surrounding city and region, census data, school district websites, newspaper articles, and employment and incarceration data; (b) participant-observations of children and families using the outdoor spaces of South Woods documented through fieldnotes; (c) narrative writings about our participation and observations in the neighborhood and Playhouse; (d) photographs, audiorecordings, and notes about informal interviews, small group discussions, and activities taking place in and around the Playhouse and surrounding South 7 Downloaded from http://aerj.aera.net at UNIV OF TENNESSEE on August 2, 2016 Jones et al. Woods; and (e) ongoing group dialogue, including the process of writing and revising this manuscript, which has served as a form of reliability and trustworthiness in our analysis of these data. Questions guiding this inquiry include: Research Question 1: In what ways are space, power, and bodies interacting in this ‘‘place’’ (e.g., in the Playhouse itself, in South Woods, in Middle County, and in the larger region)? Research Question 2: How is the discourse and materiality of the place producing those interactions, and how are those interactions producing the discourse and materiality of the place? Research Question 3: In what ways are the children in this place both producing and being produced by the space (including the discourse and materiality of the space)? Research Question 4: And specifically for the purposes of place-making: In what ways do interactions of bodies, space, materiality, time, discourse, and power shift when intentional changes are made to the place? Early analyses of these questions began when Stephanie and Jaye (authors) were spending time in the community for six months prior to the opening of the Playhouse; they wrote fieldnotes, had long discussions about their observations, and used their analyses to make decisions about how the Playhouse indoor/outdoor space might be structured. When the Playhouse opened its doors in the summer of 2013, they continued to take fieldnotes, write narrative memos about their observations and experiences, and made adjustments in the space that they could control as a way of aligning more with community spatialized practices and diminishing barriers for full participation by the children. In the fall of 2013, Denise, Beth, Jim, Xiaodi, Taryrn, and Marianne (authors) began participating at the Playhouse in a variety of roles. Denise, Xiaodi, and Marianne began a research project with a group of youth that focused on cultivating bilingual literacies in the context of a cooking club where children and grown-ups cooked, videorecorded their cooking, and produced short cooking ‘‘shows’’; Beth was an instructor for an undergraduate teacher education course that required students to participate at the Playhouse as a part of cultivating ethnographic ways of observing children; Jim led a weekly art club at the Playhouse that combined university art education students and young people from the South Woods neighborhood; and Taryrn was a doctoral student whose graduate assistantship assignment was to be the lead teacher and keep narrative fieldnotes about the Playhouse during the academic year, so she was at the Playhouse three afternoons a week as well as coordinating the activities that took place when she wasn’t there. Jaye conducted a yearlong dissertation study during the same academic year, thus generating additional fieldnotes, audiorecordings, photographs, and artifacts produced by the children. While each of us was collecting data and generating fieldnotes, 8 Downloaded from http://aerj.aera.net at UNIV OF TENNESSEE on August 2, 2016 Childhood Geographies and Spatial Justice photographs, audiorecordings, and writing narratives about our work at the Playhouse for our own purposes, our collaborative work on this article called on us to focus on questions that connected to all of our experiences there. Our collaborative writing began in informal conversations as we shared observations with one another and grew into an interest to make sense of the spatialized experiences we were having through a lens of critical childhood geography. This dialogue served a crucial role in our analyses since one of us might make an observation and participants in the conversation would begin thinking with theory as a way of showing multiple interpretations of one observation. So an observation of young children playing outside and even in the road without close adult supervision might be interpreted as a ‘‘lack’’ of safety-mindedness through a lens of child development, but through a lens of poststructural power and childhood geographies, the same observation might be interpreted as children being afforded power and autonomy in a way that could positively influence their sense of self and ability to learn to do things by doing. These conversations also led to our collective insights about the use of new materialisms and post-humanistic inquiry shifting our focus from ‘‘the child’’ to be able to see an assemblage of child/riding toy/yard/empty road and ideologies supporting unstructured play as an important part of being a child. This assemblage produces something—a spatialized practice here—that shapes experiences of children and observations by adults from the outside. Since Stephanie and Jaye were the only two who had observed in the community before the Playhouse opened, they wrote the initial draft of this article beginning in January 2014, then each coauthor engaged with it extensively from April to August of that same year. This engagement included circulating the draft in a Word document with each coauthor giving rounds of comments in the margins where their observations had been different or similar, revising the text to provide more nuance as a way to capture everyone’s ‘‘truth’’ of experience, deleting parts of the text because they didn’t ‘‘ring true’’ for everyone, and adding other parts by coauthors and revising again through the same kind of process. Thus, the writing of this article itself is an important part of our methodology, and we intended it to be so given our large, diverse group and the fact that few of us were ever in the Playhouse context at the same time for the same purposes. The data and analyses come together to shape what we call our spatialized interpretations—or expressions—of practice in South Woods that guided the initial space-making of the Playhouse. These expressions are presented through writing; we view writing as an integral part of our methodologies and analysis (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012; Richardson, 1994; St. Pierre, 2011) as we presume that writing through data and theory can construct new meanings and understandings. The following sections begin a series of narrativized expressions presenting the intertwined theory, data, and 9 Downloaded from http://aerj.aera.net at UNIV OF TENNESSEE on August 2, 2016 Jones et al. analysis that speak to our collective methodologies to make sense of placemaking as a political act in general and more specifically, in places designed for young people from racially, linguistically, and socioeconomically marginalized groups. Preexisting Socio-Historical Conditions Geographical Positioning and Participation The geographical positioning of South Woods is off the beaten path, so to speak. There are many nonprofit organizations and university student and faculty initiatives aimed at low-income children and youth of color across the city. A number of the initiatives focus on one-on-one homework help, tutoring, mentoring, and so on, and in many ways there are some areas of the city that are oversaturated with such activity. But out in South Woods, the neighborhood space still pretty much ‘‘belongs’’ to the residents themselves. As educational researchers, we intended to keep it that way—the neighborhood space belonging to the people who lived there—even while acknowledging that our presence alone would produce effects of which we might never be aware. To be specific, we are a group of university-based professors and doctoral students who could easily be perceived as the city’s elite even though we are racially and ethnically diverse (White and of European descent, Latina, African American, Chinese, White Appalachian), from diverse U.S. regions and social class backgrounds, and with varied experiences in community-based research. We came together because of our overlapping interests in formal and informal education, equity, and justice. Through our dialogues over almost three years within the Playhouse space, we have produced additional shared interests, including the significance of spatiality and childhood geographies and our commitment to play, creativity, and critical literacies. On any given weekday during the summers of 2013, 2014, and 2015, 20 to 50 children ranging from 3 to 15 years of age attended the Playhouse for lunch and activities. During the school years, the numbers fluctuated between 20 and 35 children ranging between 4 and 13 years old each day. About 70% of the students who visit the Playhouse identify as Hispanic/Latino, and about 30% identify as African American. Spatio-Historical Setting of the Study South Woods is part of broader spatial and cultural contexts that produce one’s spatial imagination about the neighborhood. To begin, our understandings of the politics of space and capitalism’s uneven geographical development (e.g., Harvey, 2005; Soja, 1989) across regions and countries help us see and analyze the socio-spatial-historical qualities of South Woods, a small neighborhood on the outskirts of town in Middle County 10 Downloaded from http://aerj.aera.net at UNIV OF TENNESSEE on August 2, 2016 Childhood Geographies and Spatial Justice (pseudonym) where the population is 27% African American, 11% Hispanic/ Latino, and 57% White. A neighborhood connected to a city/county connected to a state connected to a region. In town, a university serves in most ways as the spatio-historical center of power (economics, politics, employment, industry, education) in the region. Indeed, ‘‘historical’’ Greek-Revival plantation style buildings and homes have over time been restored in the city’s center, which calls attention to the narrative of the city’s White, wealthy families who founded and later led the public university to its greatness and the surrounding city to its highly regarded status in the state and region. Some of these architecturally stunning buildings are now home to sororities and fraternities and line both sides of a tree-lined main street near the downtown area. Beyond the restoration of grand homes and places of higher education, there has been little attempt at restoring the homeplaces of Indigenous peoples, enslaved people, or working-class folks who over time have contributed significant labor to the building of the city. However, there is a small restored brick building that was the first Middle County Jail that, although not in its original location, has been placed directly behind the grand house (and now museum) of the family of a Confederate general who owned enslaved people and led the fight against the North during the Civil War. The dominant narrative of progress and accomplishment of the White elite in the city, however, sits uneasily beside the jagged stories about the way exploitative relations between racial and economic groups has produced the place. The land on which South Woods and the grand homes sit is the same physical terrain where Indigenous peoples were violently displaced and the local legacy of slavery and racial segregation continues. Here, the political and economic achievements of African Americans during Reconstruction and desegregation (e.g., Thurman, 2001) are not readily apparent in the area, and the reenslavement of African Americans after Reconstruction and since desegregation (e.g., Alexander, 2012; Blackmon, 2008) seems perpetuated. For example, while there are some local historical buildings marked as having been owned and operated by African American locals, the predominance of Whiteness within the downtown area is palpable. And even with a county population that is nearly 60% White, fewer than one in three (28%) of the incarcerated inmates identifies as White, whereas more than two out of three (68%) identify as Black, a statistic that reflects what Alexander (2012) calls the ‘‘New Jim Crow’’ of mass incarceration of men of color. The number of inmates identifying as Hispanic is relatively low, but the ebb and flow of anti-immigration sentiment (specifically immigration from Mexico) in this Southern state creates a climate where ‘‘raids’’ of neighborhoods and road blocks on county roads (and even near schools during dismissal times and parent-teacher conferences) are used for capturing people perceived to be Mexican immigrants who may be in the country 11 Downloaded from http://aerj.aera.net at UNIV OF TENNESSEE on August 2, 2016 Jones et al. illegally. Regardless of the documented status of the people ‘‘rounded up’’ in such scenarios, they are likely to be quickly handed over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) rather than held in the county jail. In these detention centers they can begin the process of either proving their legal resident status, appealing for asylum, or preparing for deportation. Furthermore, despite the influx of Latino immigrants recruited by ‘‘laborhungry Georgia companies’’ in the 1980s and 1990s (Olsson, 2013), the current exploitation of immigrant workers of mostly Mexican heritage has become normalized. These newcomers are part of the New Latino Diaspora in regions in the United States (of which Georgia is a part) without traditional Latino presence that are experiencing increased immigration from Mexico and other Latin American countries (Wortham, Mortimer, & Allard, 2009). In combination with the Georgia Security and Immigration Compliance Act, which requires individuals to demonstrate legal residency status in order to receive government benefits, the economic challenges of the past decade have increased unfair labor practices against Latinos and heightened the deportation of undocumented people in Georgia (Olsson, 2013). Families in South Woods are well aware of many of these precarious situations, and many have experienced firsthand the arrest and/or deportation of family members, friends, and the terrifying sensation of a strange and unexpected knock on the front door or flashlights shining in the darkness. Today, millions of the billions of federal dollars allotted to the state of Georgia are spent on ICE detention centers largely holding immigrants of Hispanic descent. Consequently, the dominant narrative of the grand ‘‘place’’ and center of power that is in proximity to South Woods is quite different from the spatiality of the residents’ everyday lives where a state law refusing undocumented college-age youth to attend the selective state public universities is being challenged, only 7% of the students at the local university were African American, and 4% were of Hispanic descent in the spring of 2013 (Forbes, 2014). The geography, development, and historical legacies of economic privilege and exploitation have produced a city that has been named one of the most economically unequal cities of its size in the United States. Indeed, one in three people living in the city at large are documented as living below the federally defined poverty level, creating a scenario where many are subsisting under dire financial conditions while others are afforded lives of wealth and privilege. The historical wealth and income gap in Middle County has been blamed for the concentration of racial and ethnic minority children from low-income families in the Middle County School District. On the margins in South Woods. If power, mobility, and accessibility are concentrated around the socio-spatial center of the city and university, then South Woods is literally on the margins of that power, located in the outer boundaries of town. Nevertheless, such a positioning has some positive 12 Downloaded from http://aerj.aera.net at UNIV OF TENNESSEE on August 2, 2016 Childhood Geographies and Spatial Justice affordances beyond the negatives of geographical marginality. For example, each of the 128 homes has outdoor space that, adjoined, offers a vast landscape. Here, children and young people can spend their time, moving fluidly across the collectively shared space with little to no concern for property boundaries. They also have access to a wooded area and open field that border the neighborhood, perfect for nature investigations, soccer matches, and no doubt hiding places where youth can recede from the scrutiny of adult eyes. The Playhouse (housed in one of the homes) itself boasts a modest playground in the backyard that is always accessible to the children and families. Children and families make and remake this space through outdoor recreational pursuits including picnics, ball play, social gatherings, and exploratory play. However, there are no sidewalks on the county road that leads from the neighborhood to the major highway that leads into ‘‘town,’’ making it dangerous on which to walk or wait for the city bus that comes by once each hour. South Woods and the perception that it is more rural than urban like some other affordable housing areas in the city makes it a place that is less visibly patrolled by police compared to similar neighborhoods that are nearer the center. This spatial constitution seems to offer residents more ‘‘space’’ or freedom to congregate, play music, allow children to play in the streets, and gather chairs in a front yard to have a beer or hold celebrations, mostly free of institutional encumbrance. Intentional place-making: How the Playhouse came to be. As educational researchers, we visited South Woods by invitation, though not from the families who lived there. We were invited to the community through an email inquiry several months earlier from the owner of the housing units who was interested in a university partnership after learning that the 12-yearlong presence of a nationally known after-school institution would be closing its doors. The university had, at one point, developed ties to the community through a partnership with the College of Social Work in the mid-1990s. The South Woods community was selected as a site for that partnership because of the rapidly changing demographics from African American to Hispanic, reports of significant tension—including reported gang activity— between African American and Hispanic groups, high reporting rates of child neglect and abuse, and the need for social workers to be able to work with families whose dominant language is not English. Following ‘‘moderate’’ success with adult English classes and much less success around the issue of racial tension in the neighborhood, the university partnership was dissolved and the nationally established after-school program acquired the modest-sized single-family home in the neighborhood that served as the community center. Shutting down one center and initiating something different in the same physical space may seem like a relatively easy process unless one is thinking 13 Downloaded from http://aerj.aera.net at UNIV OF TENNESSEE on August 2, 2016 Jones et al. through theories of spatiality and new materialism. After all, the property and the building were available, the children and the families were accustomed to programs in the neighborhood, and university students had long been volunteer tutors at the center. In reality, however, making such a transition was particularly daunting since the spatialized practices of the previous center were less aligned with spatialities and lived realities in the neighborhood and more in step with the bureaucratic literacies (e.g., Campano, Ghiso, Yee, & Pantoja, 2013) required of contemporary formal schooling informed by neoliberal notions of success (e.g., Harvey, 2005; Kraftl, 2015) through highly structured and heavily surveilled activities such as designated homework times, grade-level reading assignments, and delegated educational computer programs. Rather than import bureaucratic and institutional ways of being into the informal space of children and young people’s neighborhood, we wanted to make sense of the ways they created and used the neighborhood spaces and cocreate an informal education space that aligned more with those ways of being as well as the creative interests and curiosities of the children. Well aware that any institutional presence in a local community could produce ‘‘fundamental acts of geographical violence on human beings (Said, 1993)’’ (Cannella & Viruru, 2004, p. 14), Stephanie gathered a group of colleagues to work with her and members of the community to foster ways of being in the new space that were more responsive to the rhythms, practices, and interests of young people in the neighborhood than had previously been put in place. Rather than join the national preoccupation with children’s ability to excel in standardized tests and assimilate into the dominant Anglo-American culture of public education (as critiqued by Kinloch, 2010; Kraftl, 2015; Rogoff, 2003), our approach is more aligned with Kraftl’s (2015) argument that diverse, ‘‘human-scale’’ ways of being in learning spaces produce a diversity of lived experiences that can decenter and challenge the neoliberal and capitalistic forces (e.g., Gibson-Graham, 2006b) that tend to exploit and marginalize the very families of South Woods. We see, as a part of this call for diversity of learning spaces, the recent advocacy for rich play environments that challenge and support children in expanding intellectual, embodied, and spatialized practices (e.g., Rosin, 2014; Vasudevan & Reilly, 2013; Wohlwend, 2008, 2011), Reggiogrounded emphasis on creativity and expansive images of the child (e.g., Glover & Keene, 2015; Malaguzzi, 1994; Rinaldi, 2006; Vecchi, 2010), and critical literacies that value working-class ways of being and engage in critiques of injustice (e.g., Comber, 1999; Dutro & Bien, 2014; Jones, 2006; Jones & Vagle, 2013; Kinloch, 2010; Thein, Guise, & Sloan, 2012). In the next sections, we use narratives to present expressions of our analyses of data generated across almost three years of research in South Woods. We crafted these narratives in an attempt to help the reader imagine the spatialities of South Woods and how those are produced through the 14 Downloaded from http://aerj.aera.net at UNIV OF TENNESSEE on August 2, 2016 Childhood Geographies and Spatial Justice merging (or what post–humanistic inquiry might call ‘‘assemblages,’’ e.g., Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) of bodies, the physical place, material objects, time, power, and discourse. Therefore, we intentionally include sights, sounds, configurations of activity, and other specific details that might produce different images in one’s mind as well as a sense of the affect (e.g., Kraftl, 2015; Massumi, 2002) produced in such spatialities. Post–human scholar Braidotti (as cited in Kraftl, 2015, p. 52) ‘‘argues for ‘new figurations’ that are ‘not figurative ways of thinking, but rather more materialistic mappings [italics added in Kraftl] of situated, embedded, embodied positions’’ (p. 13), and we consider the following spatialized narratives these kinds of material mappings. Additionally, Braidotti eschews ‘‘the lame quest for angles of resistance’’ or calls to ‘‘overthrow the system’’ in favour of ‘‘counter-actualised’’ praxes, experimentations ‘‘brought about by collective effort’’ to affirm ‘‘the many [new] ‘centres’ punctuating the global economy’’ that may contain the seeds of change. (as cited in Kraftl, 2015, p. 52) We have observed and coproduced spatialities in South Woods and the Playhouse that we believe are counter-actualized praxes and experimentations, and here we aim to affirm such diverse ways of being that call into question the desire and necessity of a neoliberal push toward uniformity (e.g., Sacks, 2000). Narrative of Findings and Discussion Rhythms of South Woods: A School Day When the older children are at school, preschool-aged children stand in red clay front yards busy ‘‘renovating’’ a small, blue, four-legged table that stands as tall as their bellies. One child bangs on the table with a piece of wood, the pounding echoing across the road, while another child puts his face near the top of the table and uses his fingers to tug on the plastic cloth covering. ‘‘Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam.’’ The hammering sound joins in with the chirping of birds, the closing of a door, and a car starting in the distance. A couple of Latina mothers and African American grandfathers sit in chairs outside their homes in their respective yards, looking here and there, taking a drink from a cup, or watering potted flowers. As the child-size table is deconstructed, two more preschool-aged children take turns on a plastic riding toy shaped something like a worm. One sits while the other pushes, then the second sits while the first pushes. The two children ride out of their cement driveway and rumble into the road, bouncing the riding toy and the rider’s body in a fast-paced, the 15 Downloaded from http://aerj.aera.net at UNIV OF TENNESSEE on August 2, 2016 Jones et al. miniature vehicle sounding a ‘‘Ba-Ba-Ba-Ba-Ba’’ cadence. Taking turns pushing and riding, silent as they trade places, these two make their way across the street into one neighbor’s yard, down the street from there into two more neighbors’ yards, and finally back to their driveway. The driveway slopes downward just enough for one push to send the rider squealing and lifting his feet above the worm’s face and hastening the toy’s tires to sound a more rapid ‘‘B-B-B-B-B-B,’’ matching their excitement. Rarely do adults intervene in the outdoor work/play of children during the day. They tend to their own projects, knowing that the children have a variety of materials and spaces to keep them busy: riding toys, small tables and chairs, pieces of wood, rocks, tarp materials, cups, balls, bats, front yards, back yards, driveways, and their tangle of road. Indeed, the very presence of young children and the sounds of their efforts make the neighborhood a different place than it would be without them. Around 3:00 in the afternoon, the roar of school buses can be heard from a half-mile away. Children in kindergarten through fifth grades flow out of the yellow-orange buses in their navy and white school uniforms, and the sounds of laughter, screeches, and shoes beating on pavement fill the air. The space of preschool children’s play/work becomes seemingly overrun by larger bodies, louder voices, and older siblings and cousins lifting the young children to their hips, greeting them with hugs, or questioning them about their projects. At the same time, some of the everyday conflicts that were brewing at school or on the bus between school-aged siblings are played out in the streets, and children can be heard teasing or reprimanding each other or calling out plans for meeting at the Playhouse or in yards. Many of the elementary-aged young people head to their homes first, in groups of two and three siblings or cousins, and emerge from their front doors wearing play clothes likely unaware of how their activity will immediately transform the neighborhood. The bouncing of a basketball starts, and a small group forms by the basketball goal on one side of the street, another small group walks across a long 2 3 4 piece of wood stretching across a shallow ravine, two others jump up to grab the monkey bars on the Playhouse playground and work their way across them, and a single-file line of five children travel to several different houses to pick up their friends. They walk in the order of their heights—the tallest in the lead, the smallest in the back—and look like a string of various sized ducklings chasing after one another. This gathering of friends can also cause tension, as some children are chosen to be part of the group and others are not, and often these tensions spilled over into the Playhouse space where children would express anger and frustration at feeling rejection by what was typically a group of older peers. However, there were times when these divided friendships were steeped in racial tensions and/or discord between families in the community (Thiel, 2016). 16 Downloaded from http://aerj.aera.net at UNIV OF TENNESSEE on August 2, 2016 Childhood Geographies and Spatial Justice Although some parents have asked that children only walk the community with an adult by their side, mostly the children and young people in South Woods have autonomy to walk, run, play, push, climb, and overall explore and remake the physical landscape of their neighborhood using feet, hands, ears, eyes, noses, and any other way they develop a ‘‘sense’’ of their place. This freedom regarding ‘‘where’’ children and young people go positions them as legitimate residents and owners of the place where they live—fully respected as both capable and entitled beings. The temporal fluidity with which the children and young people exercise this freedom is important to note as well. There are, indeed, rhythms of time, sounds, and bodies in space, and though as the sky turns dark blue most children and young people are expected inside their homes, leaving a quiet street and yards to rest, the ways in which children and young people shape their daylight hours is mostly up to them. In other words, the preschool children and adults experience a period of time during the day when the space of the neighborhood belongs largely to them alone, and they coproduce that space by engaging in certain kinds of work/play projects and interactions. The temporal nature of this space is, again, fluid with children and adults going inside and outside, moving from yard to yard, resting for a while in a chair, and getting up again to do something different such as watering the tomato plants or flowers. The temporal marker that shifts their autonomy within the space is the arrival of school buses. As we suggested earlier, it is not the conventional clock of time that produces a change in the public space of South Woods but rather the ‘‘sensation’’ of time: the sound and sight of school buses arriving, children and young people engaged in lively and very mobile activity, pick-up trucks pulling into driveways, and the sun lowering and the air cooling that prompts adults indoors to begin preparing dinner, children feeling tired and slowly heading inside, or the indigo skyline slowly shifting to black. While the school buses’ arrival tends to occur around the same time each day as a result of the institutional time-keeping of schools, the time kept in South Woods after school is governed by need and desire—largely influenced by children’s activity, family obligations including children’s responsibilities for translating for parents or babysitting siblings, time and space to fill until adults come home from work, and the rhythms of daylight and darkness. South Woods on a Weekend The first call of Mexican music out a window on the weekend (or a summer weekday evening) is often met with more music and an occasional young person dancing and singing. Aromas of cooking food drift through the air, a party tent is erected, and sometimes a giant jumpy-house is inflated in front of an anxious audience of at least a dozen children. Birthday parties, 17 Downloaded from http://aerj.aera.net at UNIV OF TENNESSEE on August 2, 2016 Jones et al. baby showers, and other reasons to gather provide South Woods residents with an animated day that has been anticipated by children all week long, evidenced in conversations shared at the Playhouse and sometimes evident by the party remains (i.e., beer and soda cans/bottles, wandering empty bags that once held chips or candy, and the occasional remnants of a piñata). Some families head to a local flea market where they will sell produce, prepared food, and other goods; other families head to the same local flea market to browse the tables and booths, have lunch together at one of the busiest Mexican restaurants around, feed the swans in the pond, or buy household products including clothing and shoes. By late afternoon or early evening, chairs are pulled into two or three front yards. Men might lean against trucks in groups of three or four, perhaps holding a beer or sitting in a chair that is a part of a slightly arced line. Children are back to work/play as they run from house to house, investigating the ‘‘haunted house’’ in the neighborhood, helping take the trash out to the dumpsters, pushing each other in the swings, chasing a group of small dogs galloping through the streets, or singing and dancing on top of picnic tables. While the weekends tend to be shaped somewhat more by adult desire and need (trips to the flea market, preparing things for a party, heading to church on a Sunday morning for the day), the public space of South Woods on these days largely resembles the binary-disrupting fluidity of coming/going and inside/outside as the bodies of residents spill in and out of homes and into other community spaces with seemingly little to no boundaries between doorways, driveways, and yards. It is important to note, as well, that while children and young people may sometimes have required roles to play on the weekends (helping run a produce booth at the flea market or keeping an eye on a younger sibling or cousin), the less restricted conventional ‘‘time’’ of the weekends expands young people’s freedom and autonomy in pursuing the activities in which they are interested. Rhythms of South Woods as a Landscape Within Childhood Geographies Observing and taking part in the rhythms of the public space in South Woods across the first six months afforded us (Jaye and Stephanie) to intentionally plan for the new informal educational space. We witnessed young people’s power over their mobility across the neighborhood landscape, the ways in which they interacted with their physical space to create new social possibilities, and the ease with which they performed creativity and curiosity. In the next section, we put theories of space and spatiality to work as a way to situate the decisions we have made regarding intentional place and space-making at the Playhouse. In other words, the theories informing our collective inquiry were also acting as our methods for implementing practices in this new space. 18 Downloaded from http://aerj.aera.net at UNIV OF TENNESSEE on August 2, 2016 Childhood Geographies and Spatial Justice Rhythms of the Playhouse: Four Practices Grounded in Children’s Coproduction of the South Woods Spatialities Imagining how the Playhouse would ‘‘operate’’—who would attend, hours, days, internal structures, adult-adult interactions, adult-child interactions, child-child interactions—we stepped back to think deeply about our observations and what we perceived to be the empowering childhood rhythms of South Woods and how the Playhouse could support those rhythms in an informal educational space. While there are hundreds of minute-to-minute decisions that are made each day at the Playhouse and all of our structures and practices are fluid (just like the public space of South Woods), we will focus here on four major influences the spatialities of South Woods have had on the structural design of what we call ‘‘practices’’ of the Playhouse: (1) temporal and spatial fluidity between the Playhouse and the rest of the neighborhood; (2) a fluid indoor/outdoor space; (3) open access to materials for making, doing, and being; and (4) little adult intervention. Within each section we describe the practice and include concrete examples that reflect some of the spatialized productions through the practice. Practice 1: Temporal and Spatial Fluidity Between the Playhouse and the Rest of South Woods The Playhouse is always free of charge, and no registration is required. Therefore, we make it clear to children and adults that anyone who shows up is welcome to join in the activities and that no one is required to stay for any certain period of time. The Playhouse is not a ‘‘child care’’ space but rather one additional space (like the ravine, the haunted house, the streets, and one another’s yards) in the neighborhood to which the children have access during the peak activity hours after school and on summer afternoons to enter and create space. As one way to diminish the spatial boundaries between the Playhouse and South Woods, we removed the metal bars that had been installed in the windows by the former center, and we discontinued the former program’s practice of padlocking the gates leading to the playground during the hours we were present. To us, the bars and the locks seemed to echo a dichotomous relationship between the community and the Playhouse as well as reinforced misguided notions about criminal expectations and behaviors by residents in working poor neighborhoods of color. Additionally, during nice weather, we would leave both the front and the back doors open as long as the indoor temperature remained moderate. All three of these physical changes in the space produced a sense of porousness and transparency—indeed vitality and liveliness—different from the space before. The inside of the Playhouse is open to everyone at least three days a week, and we sometimes have special classes for specific age groups 19 Downloaded from http://aerj.aera.net at UNIV OF TENNESSEE on August 2, 2016 Jones et al. (e.g., preschool) or interest groups (e.g., producing a cooking show, music and musicians, young artists, invention studios, lawyers and leaders, and world changers) offered at different times each week. An example of autonomy and agency at work can be illustrated through Yasmin’s story that she told about a conversation she had with her mother. Yasmin, an eight-year-old girl who lives in South Woods and attends the Playhouse almost every day it is open, expressed what it meant to her and her family to have fluid spatio-temporal boundaries between the Playhouse and the rest of the neighborhood. When her cousins (who also lived in South Woods) began attending the local YMCA after school to have access to special programming, Yasmin told her mother that she wanted to go with them. Her mother’s response to Yasmin focused on the choice and power—Yasmin’s agency—as a part of an assemblage with the Playhouse. With no requirement for attendance each day, no precise ‘‘start’’ and ‘‘stop’’ time each afternoon, and no requirement to stay even if she did attend the Playhouse, Yasmin’s mother told her that the Playhouse offered her more freedom. ‘‘If you are tired or you want to do something else and you don’t want to go to the Playhouse, you don’t have to go,’’ Yasmin said her mother told her. But because the YMCA required a bus ride from school and a parent to pick her up after the program, Yasmin’s control over her time/space would be diminished if she chose to participate in the activities offered there. This interaction between Yasmin and her mother demonstrates the respect that many of the children are afforded by their parents and caretakers as intellectual subjects capable of both making good decisions and needing spaces where they can experience power in a positive way—a respect and autonomy we wanted to have reflected in adult-child interactions at the Playhouse. In the end, Yasmin did not register for the YMCA, and it was a rare day when she did not show up at the Playhouse. Parents and other neighborhood adults play an important role in supporting their children’s autonomy and agency through the production of space and spatial possibilities. Just as the South Woods adults tend to their own projects while children play across the yards, streets, and overall landscape of the neighborhood, they also tend to do so when children come to the Playhouse. Parents and grandparents come to the Playhouse for a variety of reasons. A couple of parents walk their children to the Playhouse each day, some will come to pick up their children when they want them to come home, some come and stay at the Playhouse while their children are there, occasionally a parent will come asking for support to read an English language letter from school or solve the problem of a potential eviction, and from time to time a parent or grandparent will come in to help solve a conflict between children or just spend time with their child or grandchild in some kind of activity. Sometimes we advertise special events such as a potluck celebration, and 20 Downloaded from http://aerj.aera.net at UNIV OF TENNESSEE on August 2, 2016 Childhood Geographies and Spatial Justice many adults participated by bringing dishes of food and participating in gallery showings and games. Thus, the spatiality of the Playhouse is coproduced through different intentions projected onto the space and diverse ways of relating to one another within the space. Primarily, however, the Playhouse (much like the streets, the ditches, the playground, and other neighborhood spaces) is filled with the bodies of children and youth who wield much power over the spatial production of this place. Practice 2: Fluid Indoor/Outdoor Space The notion of fluid indoor/outdoor space should go without saying given the previous section where we describe the temporal and spatial fluidity between the Playhouse and the rest of South Woods. However, this part of the Playhouse structure plays out in particular ways that have been shaped and reshaped by our lived experiences of having indoor/outdoor fluidity. In our first attempts at disrupting the binary of the inside and the outside in the summer, we ran into undesirable byproducts that may seem unimportant to someone unfamiliar with the agentic power of red clay: The floors were often completely covered with red clay dirt. Additionally, many materials were left outside for us to pick up after everyone in the neighborhood had settled in for the evening, and occasional disruptions of the indoor space by bodies running and playing tag or sliding down the hallway floor were difficult for the adults to tolerate (although usually fine for the children) and sometimes disruptive to children focusing on indoor activities. But we also saw groups of children gathering around picnic tables to write books with baskets of materials they had brought from inside, children painting the tops of our tree-stump seats, exciting games of soccer, and children experimenting with paper airplanes to see whose would fly the farthest and longest. After having conversations with neighborhood mothers, grandmothers, and grandfathers about how they manage the red clay dirt coming inside their homes, we came to understand this as a constant challenge faced by them as well, with no clear solution. Additionally, our concern about materials being brought back indoors was not necessarily an issue faced by the families since their indoor/outdoor fluidity was lived seven days a week, making it less important that all toys made their way indoors because the play would resume the next morning or afternoon. We remained committed to the indoor/outdoor fluidity, and during these negotiations with red clay and materials, many of us learned to exercise less adult control over bodies and resources, which ultimately led to a more fluid practice of material care. As part of these negotiations, we integrated a couple of practices that have helped with the challenges we were facing such as taking off our shoes when we come inside and asking individual children to be in charge of 21 Downloaded from http://aerj.aera.net at UNIV OF TENNESSEE on August 2, 2016 Jones et al. materials going outside. Over time, the children and adults in South Woods recognize the kinds of materials and toys that might belong to the Playhouse, which has helped with things eventually making their way back, sometimes weeks after they were misplaced or borrowed. José, a five-year-old who lives near the Playhouse, has chased our cars as we headed out of the neighborhood to give us a tennis racket or a ball that was left outside. And Jackson, a grandpa who lives near the Playhouse, collected the pieces of edging that were protecting the small garden in front of the building when he noticed children were playing with them. He held on to them until springtime when the soil was prepared and seeds were planted again and then carefully placed the trellis-shaped edging around the beds. There are also times when things aren’t so fluid, when there is talk of someone taking a handful of pencils or entire box of pens from the supply shelves at the Playhouse and later selling them to friends and schoolmates. And sometimes the open door policy results in children running in to tattle on another child’s actions, even if those actions take place nowhere near the Playhouse grounds. Much like many of the diverse learning spaces studied by Kraftl (2015), there are no clear-cut guidelines or steadfast rules when it comes to these kinds of conflicts or episodes. We depend entirely on the grown-ups in the space being fully present, thoughtful, and capable to analyze situations from multiple and critical perspectives (including spatial and new material perspectives) in order to participate in these moments as they emerge, knowing that each situation is different and often a part of the bigger political and social context of their everyday lives. Practice 3: Open Access to Materials for Making, Doing, and Being While the practices of having fluidity between indoor/outdoor spaces and a more porous temporal and spatial relationship between the Playhouse and the rest of South Woods were noticeably different policies from how the former center operated and produced much uncertainty for children, it was the practice of having open access to materials that produced the most embodied disorientation and reconfiguration for the children (as well as for some of the adults). Across the outdoor terrain of South Woods, if children can see and reach a material object, they will almost never be told not to use it by resident adults (although they might be reprimanded by the neighborhood maintenance man for making what he perceives are messes). Therefore, the ‘‘new’’ practice of the Playhouse was not something new in their lived experiences, but it was new in their lived experiences of semi-institutional spaces, and particularly the former center. Many children would ask for permission to use items that were sitting out and open for exploration or would feel a need to gather as much of one material as possible (all the popsicle sticks or pipe cleaners or guitar picks at once). But over time and with relative quickness, children have grown accustomed to 22 Downloaded from http://aerj.aera.net at UNIV OF TENNESSEE on August 2, 2016 Childhood Geographies and Spatial Justice the freedom to use the materials when they choose to do so and that those materials will be replenished as needed and/or requested. It is important to note that we have come to understand some of the desire to gather as much of a material as possible (including food, which is always set out for children to eat when they choose) is influenced by the fact that most of the children’s lives are lived within a context of material scarcity. Many families have difficulty maintaining food security, and some of the children continue to find it curious that the Playhouse seems to have an unlimited supply of food (thanks to our partnership with the local food bank, which is experimenting with innovative ways to distribute food where it is needed). Other kinds of materials at the Playhouse such as construction paper, glue, scissors, clay, paint, tape, and so on are like food—they must be purchased—and they are often shared across and limited in the neighborhood homes. In these ways, the children and young people understand scarcity intimately, and rather than our orientation be one that would teach children to ‘‘respect’’ and ‘‘appreciate’’ materials offered through the Playhouse, we have come to think deeply about what it means to offer plentiful materials within a context of scarcity. Physical changes to the interior of the approximately 700 square foot building were made to align with our commitment to open access to materials. First we eliminated an adult-only office space that was locked at all times, opting for the kitchen counter serving as something of a Playhouse ‘‘business’’ space where paperwork would be stored. The former office space was changed from a locked and prohibited one into an open-access ‘‘building room’’ with wood building blocks, Legos, pipe cleaners, and all kinds of other recycled building materials inside the small closet that was also fully accessible to the children. The affective response to this change from the children who had participated at the former center was fascinating. One by one and in small groups, for at least the first few weeks, children would jump across the threshold into the room, giggle, yell, throw themselves down on the rug and roll around, and sometimes even dance in the room. Some children experienced the new access to this formerly locked-off space quite differently: Yelling, crying, and angrily throwing blocks inside the room were witnessed intensely for the first two months of the Playhouse and with less and less intensity until the children’s bodies occupied the space with seeming comfort and ease by the time we had been open for six months. Time and time again during the transition into Playhouse practices, we realized the embodiedness (e.g., the affect and bodily performance) of the politics of space. Having open access to ‘‘materials’’ in the Playhouse required that children had access to all of the ‘‘spaces’’ in the Playhouse as well, which dramatically changed the ways in which they could use their bodies/minds and engage in relational ways with the material objects and physical space. For weeks—even months—children would reach for 23 Downloaded from http://aerj.aera.net at UNIV OF TENNESSEE on August 2, 2016 Jones et al. something (a pair of scissors, a marker, a pipe cleaner, glue, a drum, a paintbrush), stop short of touching it, look at a nearby adult and ask, ‘‘Can I use this?’’ ‘‘You can use anything in the Playhouse that you can see,’’ we told them repeatedly. But it took some time for the children to trust there wouldn’t be some kind of reprimand or retaliation for their accessing materials, as this was not only a different experience from the structures in place at the previous after-school program but was also likely different from their daily institutionalized experiences in formal school settings, which tend to be more restrictive in nature. Accessing materials was one commitment we had, and supporting diverse and unconventional uses of materials to make/do/be at the Playhouse was another key commitment. Remember that children in South Woods will use sticks and rocks as tools, toys, and building materials on a regular basis, performing innovative uses of everyday materials in ways that made us admire their ingenuity and improvisation. But watching a child pour liquid glue onto a small mountain of crumpled paper can be difficult for adults who have been conditioned to ration materials in the presence of children (Thiel, 2016). Pausing, observing, and listening closely to what a child is doing/making/being with the material became the work of adults in the Playhouse space, just as Jaye stopped to watch streams of glue slide down the crumpled paper only to learn that the child had created a ‘‘volcano’’ with lava flowing down the sides. Indeed, it was an impressive volcano and one that could only have come to life in the space where the adult sat back to learn. Practice 4: Limited Adult Intervention The four major practices (temporal and spatial fluidity, permeable indoor and outdoor boundaries, open access to materials, and minimal adult intervention) we are highlighting in these narrativized sections are all interrelated, and all of them rely on the restraint of adults. If a child must ask permission to enter or leave the Playhouse space, then there is little porousness between indoors/outdoors or the Playhouse and the rest of South Woods. And if adults are in charge of rationing the materials or selecting which materials are appropriate for specific kinds of activity, then children don’t have open access to materials or making/doing/being with the materials in innovative or sustained ways. Adult intervention into the work/play of children can disrupt their thinking/doing and even create obstacles for expanding their capacity for being in the world. ‘‘Kids only get in trouble when they’re bored,’’ an educator from an elementary school in Auckland, New Zealand says (Television New Zealand Limited, 2014), and kids don’t have time to be bored when they are fully engaged. Engagement and engaged are two words we hear a lot 24 Downloaded from http://aerj.aera.net at UNIV OF TENNESSEE on August 2, 2016 Childhood Geographies and Spatial Justice in U.S. education reform and practice, but their meanings are contested. For example, children might be considered to be engaged when they are tending to a predetermined activity created for them by an adult, but we perceive engagement through a much broader lens to see the spontaneous and improvisational ways young people create with the materials and discourses available to them as engaged. Perhaps some traditional educators might also consider old picnic tables spontaneously becoming stages where songs and dances are performed as engagement and of value, but what about jumping from swings sailing way above our heads? Sitting outside the Playhouse, we watch a four-year-old boy climb to the top of the wood-and-plastic playground apparatus and predict that he will slide down the slide. But he doesn’t. And we can see how one adult expectation of how the playground equipment is ‘‘supposed’’ to be used could restrict play—and therefore development. Come to think of it, how fun is it really to continuously, day in and day out, climb up the steps in the same way and slide down the slide in the same way? Even a four-year-old masters the expected use of the playground equipment, and boredom starts to set in. Instead of sliding down, the small boy struggles to pull himself up on top of the curving, cylindrical, slide, grunting and pushing his little arms to their limit until he finally manages to get one foot in place and finally the other. Standing on top of the slide, arms stretched out to his sides, this young boy has achieved something. He smiles. Then jumps. Witnessing this, and other instances like it, adults at the Playhouse report that their hearts race and mouths fall open. Yes, we are questioning and challenging the ways adult intervention wields too much power over spatialities designed with children in mind, but we are not immune to the assumptions circulating in a society that is saturated with ‘‘safety’’ mindedness and rules (e.g., Rosin, 2014). As Rosin (2014) points out, however, ‘‘a preoccupation with safety has stripped childhood of independence, risk taking, and discovery—without making it safer’’ (p. 74). He lands, hard, and jumps up laughing and smiling and runs to the other side of the playground. This small-statured boy struggled to make his body do something new, do something he didn’t know for sure he was capable of doing, but he was confident enough to give it a try, and he did it. It wasn’t pretty, graceful, or effortless, but it was evidence of motivation, perseverance, risk-taking toward the outer range of ability (determined by him), and success—all produced through his relative freedom to create a new way of being with the physical landscape and the materiality of the playscape. Being engaged in something isn’t just going through the motions of what was already planned ahead of time. For this young boy, continuing to climb 25 Downloaded from http://aerj.aera.net at UNIV OF TENNESSEE on August 2, 2016 Jones et al. up the steps and slide down the same slide in the same fashion day in and day out and well beyond the time within which he has mastered the activity does not produce ‘‘engagement.’’ When he is faced with having mastered the expected use of the material object of the playscape, he makes decisions about whether to abandon the equipment altogether or innovate a use of the equipment that will be more challenging (cognitively and physically— though we don’t see those as separate). Indeed, he figures out a way to challenge himself without the help of well-intended adults who may create a new activity for him that isn’t appropriately engaging. Part of the attraction and motivation of this new task that he has decided to take on may in fact be the unpredictability of it—the fact that the outcome isn’t already determined and every step between the beginning and ending laid out in a predictable fashion. He has to depend on himself and his creative use of the materials available to him, not someone else’s plan. Our witnessing his work/play also planted a seed of certainty that offers a little more comfort in standing back and letting children play in the ways that make them feel good by pushing themselves physically and cognitively. The elementary school in Auckland, New Zealand, referenced earlier, has found that ‘‘no rules’’ on the playground has resulted in a significant decrease in bullying behavior, a significant decrease in kids being in ‘‘trouble,’’ and a significant decrease in the need for adults to be supervising the playground. And, perhaps, little adult intervention at the Playhouse will not only align with the rhythms and practices of children and adults in South Woods, it might also combat national trends showing less creativity among a generation of children who have been ‘‘overprotected’’ (Rosin, 2014). And, as one undergraduate teacher education student working at the Playhouse put it when reflecting on more traditional school spaces where she has both been a student and a tutor, ‘‘I feel so trapped, and I don’t want kids to feel that way.’’ Over-surveillance and too much adult intervention in children’s activities produce particular subjectivities, and this young woman represented one of those as being ‘‘trapped.’’ At the same time, we are keenly aware that we choose to intervene in discourses and embodied practices that we perceive as being racist, sexist, classist, or otherwise hateful, exclusionary, and damaging. For example, some of the 9- to 12-year-old Latino boys often use the ‘‘N’’ word as both an insult to their African American neighbors and as a common word in their language signifying a friend or someone they can trust. Holding up this word as an object of critical inquiry with a small group of both Latino and African American children and youth at the Playhouse led to conversations about racism, discrimination, and how some of the Latino boys were not completely aware of the effect of the word on their friends. This inquiry was extended into a summer mini-camp where young people conceived of themselves as ‘‘world changers’’ and decided to ‘‘give racism the red card,’’ strategizing about specific ways they could enact that commitment in their everyday lives. 26 Downloaded from http://aerj.aera.net at UNIV OF TENNESSEE on August 2, 2016 Childhood Geographies and Spatial Justice We are also aware of how these children’s bodies are often perceived by community outsiders and likely even some educators. Where we see intellect, creativity, and ingenuity, others might see rowdiness, destructiveness, rudeness, and even reason to pursue diagnoses that will label children and youth as socially, psychologically, and/or academically abnormal. One upper elementary-aged girl who attends the Playhouse every day tells us stories of her interventions at school, however, that give us hope that diverse ways of being in different spaces can indeed produce social changes akin to those argued for by Braidotti (2011) and Gibson-Graham (2006b). One such story was about confronting a substitute physical education teacher who created boy-girl teams and made a rule that the girls would receive two points for every goal scored. In Zariah’s story she reportedly said to the substitute teacher, ‘‘There are two ways of being racist, one because of the color of your skin and one because you’re a girl, and I think you are doing the second one right now.’’ The grown-up was reportedly open and mindful enough to hear Zariah and make immediate changes, saying (according to Zariah), ‘‘I never thought of it that way.’’ Zariah told us, ‘‘I think I changed my school today.’’ Our political stance is to recognize children and youth as subjects who enact agency in creative ways as they figure out who they can and cannot be in different contexts as well as how they can shape different contexts as they engage with both adult and youth in those contexts. From this perspective, grown-ups will often need to suspend judgment of a child’s or young person’s ‘‘behavior’’ as well as the compulsion to intervene with a predetermined institutional lesson about (for example) arbitrary definitions of respect or acting ‘‘appropriately.’’ Instead, grown-ups can practice perceiving children and youth from a curious and respectful position and allow oneself to be pleasantly surprised—while also being prepared to engage in the sometimes overwhelmingly difficult discussions about the ongoing exploitation of people in a world where control over minds, bodies, language, and mobility benefits a few, damages the rest, and depends on divisions between groups of people who might otherwise join one another in solidarity. The conditions we put in place in the Playhouse through these four guiding practices, combined with the critically oriented interactions of children and adult bodies that come together to cocreate the spatialities of the Playhouse each day, produce a dynamic and creative place that would not have been possible without our tending to the ways bodies, materiality, power, discourse, physical landscape, and time were produced in the public spaces of South Woods. Conclusions and Implications As educational researchers from the university, we all agree that experiencing South Woods calls on our own bodies to be differently, and that ‘‘call’’ 27 Downloaded from http://aerj.aera.net at UNIV OF TENNESSEE on August 2, 2016 Jones et al. is made through what we would refer to as the material-discursive nature of the space and the assemblage of the Playhouse. Consequently, we found this call to ‘‘be different’’ to also be difficult at times. Several of us learned much about the ways our own bodies had been shaped to produce and perform certain institutionalized practices of perceiving children through a developmental lens and in need of surveillance and adult-formed structures. These circulating ideologies about children, childhood, and education seemed to have become embodied in each of us in such a way that we brought those with us as we joined the assemblage of the Playhouse and became a part of the spatialized practices there. Indeed, our own embodied discomfort that we have all experienced at different times might even indicate that a version of spatial justice is produced through the spatialities of the Playhouse, as the localized spatial ways of being are privileged and institutionalized (White, middle-class, English-dominant) spatial ways of being are decentered. We might have used our collective agency toward different ends, however, and aimed at producing an educational space that emphasizes rigidity, prescribed activities, and overwhelming adult intervention (which may produce more comfortable spatialities for adults who feel comfortable in institutions). Of course the children could also wield their agency within those conditions, but the space would inevitably be very different from what it is now. This brings us to the importance of childhood geographies, and specifically those geographers working in ‘‘activist’’ and ‘‘participatory’’ ways with and on behalf of young people (e.g., Aitken, 2001a, 2001b; Katz, 2004; Kraftl, 2015; Kraftl et al., 2012; Thomas, 2011). The spaces where young people live, work, and play have a profound impact on their lived experiences and subjectivities. Indeed, children and young people are on the front lines of experiencing and confronting the devastating effects of poverty, income inequality, racism, xenophobia, sexism, misogyny, and heterosexism as they navigate through the ragged terrain of neoliberal policies and practices aimed at privileging others. As young people saturated in the sociopolitical ideologies of their time/space, they are always on the edge of both reproducing and subverting dominant discourses and material practices through their active participation in spatialities. Place and how young people are situated within and cocreate their places are central to how they will experience, enact, and confront those discourses and practices. The extent to which young people have power over shaping their geographies and how power operates within those spatialities can have long-lasting effects on how young people perceive themselves and their places in relation to others and other places. Just as social reproduction— including the perpetual marginalization of young working-class children and youth of color—happens within specific spatio-historic dialectics, the disruption of those practices also happens within specific spatio-historic dialectics. In other words, place and space-making for and with children and youth is a political act, and all educators and educational researchers are 28 Downloaded from http://aerj.aera.net at UNIV OF TENNESSEE on August 2, 2016 Childhood Geographies and Spatial Justice engaged in such politics. Spaces can be produced to control, indoctrinate, colonize, and discipline young bodies/minds just as they can be created to actively support creativity, curiosity, expansive subject positions, and social critique. Engaging the lenses of childhood geographies in our study of children’s participation in the shaping of their neighborhood landscape opened up theoretical and pedagogical possibilities for a community-based education center that would not have been possible without these theoretical tools. The result, so far, is a vibrant informal education space that is simultaneously emergent and predictable where adults and children alike lean into the unknown and expect to be surprised by the process and the outcomes (e.g., Thiel, 2014). This is easier, say, when children jump from slides or use big amounts of glue for a volcano than it is when two girls are fighting on the street, pulling one another’s hair and the discussion afterward reveals that envy over brand name clothing has created a distinct division among the girls. It is also hard when a young boy stands outside the screen door and says, ‘‘I can’t come in, I don’t have any money,’’ opening up the deeply entrenched economic model governing lives in neoliberal capitalism. He was, and continues to be, astonished that he can attend for free—but the gut-wrenching resentment we as adults have that some young children already expect their exclusion emerges regularly. For us, the lives children create with their landscapes were and continue to be an integral part of decisions that we make as grown-ups engaged in a pedagogical relation with them. And many times, the children are the ones who are leading and making the decisions—they know much more than we do about the cliques they have formed and why; how and why an African American grandfather is feared by Latino children; who needs to receive a special-made clay pot or card because of the overdose death of a mother or someone moving back to Mexico following the devastating deportation of a family member; how to produce magic tricks and theatrical plays the other kids will like; and why kids might get angry when they see all the materials and food available at the Playhouse. The four pedagogical practices we presented in this article as salient ways in which children engaged their landscape—fluidity of community space, reciprocity of indoor/outdoor experimentation, material accessibility, and minimal adult interference—helped to deconstruct the institutional practices that were once in place in this community center as well as some of our own embodied responses to what it means to be with and work with children—and it establishes a system of predictability that allows other, less predictable conversations and projects to take shape. Place and space-making for and with children and youth is a political act that can align with uniformity, standardization, and the reproduction of power through structures and practices designed with no one in particular in mind. Or it can aim for a more human scale, a flourishing of diversity 29 Downloaded from http://aerj.aera.net at UNIV OF TENNESSEE on August 2, 2016 Jones et al. that affirms and extends distinct local landscapes and the spatialities produced through children’s and youth’s everyday living. As a group of educators and researchers, we held, and continue to hold, a strong commitment to coproducing dignified spaces for children and youth that actively work against neoliberal notions of education that create indistinguishable spatialities through regulation of bodies, materiality, discourse, and time. This kind of spatial justice (e.g., Soja, 2010) can be cultivated through the careful and thoughtful observation of children’s and youth’s everyday spatialized practices, affirming those practices, and reimagining informal and formal educational place-making through a spatialized lens. 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