Pedagogy, Culture & Society
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Reading two rhizomatic pedagogies diffractively
through one another: a Reggio inspired philosophy
with children for the postdevelopmental child
Karin Murris
To cite this article: Karin Murris (2017): Reading two rhizomatic pedagogies diffractively through
one another: a Reggio inspired philosophy with children for the postdevelopmental child, Pedagogy,
Culture & Society
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14681366.2017.1286681
Published online: 20 Mar 2017.
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Date: 20 March 2017, At: 04:07
PEDAGOGY, CULTURE & SOCIETY, 2017
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14681366.2017.1286681
Reading two rhizomatic pedagogies difractively through one
another: a Reggio inspired philosophy with children for the
postdevelopmental child
Karin Murris
School of Education, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch, South Africa
ABSTRACT
KEYWORDS
After situating the iguration of the postdevelopmental child in the
context of hegemonic colonising developmental discourses about
child rearing and education, I engage with posthumanist perspectives
that rupture the binaries, power relations and age discrimination
these discourses assume. Developmentalism raises concerns about
how child as knower is positioned. Drawing on the ground-breaking
work of feminist philosopher and quantum physicist Karen Barad,
an airmative difractive methodology is used with two approaches
to teaching and learning: Reggio Emilia and Philosophy with
Children (P4C). Through the experimental difractive reading of the
rhizomatic concept development that is core to both educational
philosophies, new ideas are proposed for postdevelopmental
curriculum construction. A new pedagogical practice of working
with concepts is created, thereby deterritorialising what conceptual
knowledge is. By putting philosophy at the heart of deterritorialising
knowledge, room is made for children as knowledge producers,
rather than knowledge consumers.
Philosophy for children;
Reggio Emilia; critical
posthumanism; posthuman
child; postdevelopmental
curriculum; intra-active
pedagogies; diffractive
methodology
Postdevelopmental child
Child subjectivity is constructed within a web of knowledge claims, drawn mostly from
Western versions of histories, institutions, economies, politics and practices which are riddled
with distinctions, neo-liberal norms and yardsticks by which children’s progress and development is measured and found wanting (Dahlberg and Moss 2005; Dahlberg, Moss, and
Pence 2013; Viruru 2005). In the ields of childhood studies and early childhood education,
entangled connections have been made between colonialism, imperialism, the institutionalisation of childhood, capitalist discourses of progression, and so-called ‘natural’ development (Burman 2008; Cannella and Viruru 2004; Taylor and Pacini-Ketchabaw 2015). Notions
of progress and reason have colonised education through its curriculum construction that
positions children in need of recapitulating the development of the species (Matthews 1994):
children are regarded as simple, concrete, immature thinkers who need age-appropriate
CONTACT Karin Murris
Karin.murris@uct.ac.za
© 2017 Pedagogy, Culture & Society
2
K. MURRIS
interventions in order to mature into autonomous fully-human beings. Since modernity, the
mature, white, able-bodied, heterosexual man of humanism (Braidotti 2013) is the yardstick
by which ‘normal’ and ‘natural’ child development is measured with children at the lowest
level of the patriarchal hierarchy (Cannella and Viruru 2004, 109).
Throughout the history of Western thought, education has been regarded as the formation of childhood (Kohan 2015; Stables 2008). Dominant educational discourses and material practices position child1 as a lesser human being, marginalised and excluded, despite
sustained academic critique from many disciplinary quarters in higher education. For decades, scholars in childhood studies and early childhood education have argued that the
normative knowing subject is assumed to be of a particular age (adult) (Burman 1994;
Cannella and Viruru 2004; Dahlberg, Moss, and Pence 2013; Fendler 1998; Jenks 1996;
Walkerdine 1984).
Although there has been a shift in childhood studies from psychology of childhood, to
sociology of childhood, to philosophy of childhood, psychology is still the dominant discipline in early childhood education policies, practices and curriculum design globally (File,
Basler Wisneski, and Mueller 2012). This orientation informs curricula that move from the
concrete to the abstract, the simple to the complex and from the familiar to the unfamiliar
(Egan 1992, 1993, 1997). It assumes that knowledge is acquired through representation of a
world, not immersion, thereby presupposing a language/reality dualism: sign systems created
by humans represent a world inhabited by independently existing, passive objects without
agency. Pedagogies that focus on the psychological, the social or the discursive only, and
do not acknowledge the material as having agency in knowledge production, assume this
human exceptionalism (relexive self-consciousness), and with it the humanist ‘two-world
view’: childhood vs. adulthood. Through critical engagement with postdevelopmental perspectives we can begin to address existing power relations and age discrimination. The
iguration of postdevelopmental or posthuman child ruptures humanist binaries and is a
lever to rethink subjectivity more generally (Murris 2016).
My overall argument is driven by a desire to show how matters of ontology and epistemology have implications for ethical relationships in educational institutions, and that they
cannot, and should not, be reduced to apolitical governmental concerns about eicacy and
standardisation.
Critical posthumanism
Critical posthumanism as navigational tool ofers a new imaginary for postdevelopmental
pedagogies as it moves beyond predeined boundaries, assumed categories of diference
and language. For posthumanists, the latter has been ‘substantializing’, allowing semiotic
systems to determine our understanding of the world (Barad 2007, 133). Language has
become an epistemic tool to have power over less-fully humans and more-than-humans.
For example, for Deleuze and Guattari (1987), everything in our thinking lows from the habit
of saying ‘I’. Through language, the self is named and cut apart from other selves and things,
also when we talk about diversity and diference. Feminist philosopher and quantum physicist Barad (2007, 134) describes how this ‘I’ includes or excludes the other ‘I’s – a distancing
or cutting apart from the ‘other’ human that is not ‘fully’ formed or developed (as yet) – the
‘I’ who is ‘disabled’, ‘female’, ‘child’, ‘black’, ‘poor’.
PEDAGOGY, CULTURE & SOCIETY
3
A postdevelopmental move away from the exclusive anthropocentric focus on language
and the discursive in education is particularly urgent to enable more just educational
encounters with people who are not only young, but who might also live in poverty and
not have English as their ‘home’ language. Critical posthumanism does so by removing
language as the main hub of knowledge production and with it the ‘fully-human’ sophisticated language speaker of age as the sole producer of knowledge. Deleuze and Guattari
(1987, 89) and Adkins (2015, 67) give the example of bees and how they can communicate
messages about food sources they have seen to other bees. But bees who do not have that
experience cannot communicate that information. They can transmit signs, but their language is limited to irst-hand accounts. In contrast, human animals have a language about
language, which makes it possible to transmit messages about the experiences without
ever having experienced it, but on the basis of ‘hearsay’. This second-order language has
become equated with real knowledge that in turn has to be somehow ‘transmitted’ (or
‘facilitated’ or ‘mediated’) to children, who are themselves less competent language users.
Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 161) propose bold experimentation, not interpretation or signiication: ‘Find your own places, territorialities, deterritorializations, regime, lines of light!
Semiotize yourself instead of rooting around in your prefab childhood and Western
semiology’.
Posthumanism disrupts the anthropocentric nature of binary thinking, and ofers a new
ontology that enables a re-evaluation of child. As Barad herself puts it (2007, 378), posthumanism welcomes ‘females, slaves, children, animals, and other dispossessed Others (exiled
from the land of knowers by Aristotle more than two millennia ago) into the fold of knowers’.
Matter is also among the ‘dispossessed Others’ and ontologically entangled in all knowledge
construction. The removal of the dominance of language (reading and writing) in communicating and creating new knowledge complexiies what knowledge is, thereby also doing
justice to the material world of which humans are a part.
Barad has introduced the helpful neologism intra-action (Barad 2007, 2013, 815). Intraaction does not presuppose individualised existence – not only of subjects, but also of objects
‘in’ the world – and like other critical posthumanists, Barad emphasises mutual relationality:
things ‘are’ because they are in relation to and inluencing each other. Intra-action is diferent
from ‘interaction’ in that ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ are never ‘pure’, are never unafected by each
other, but are always in relation (Barad 2007, 152). Bodies (including human bodies) are
unbounded quantum entanglements constituted by concepts and material forces, where
the social, the political, the biological, and its observing, measuring and controlling machines
are interwoven and entwined. Importantly, these mutual entanglements are not unities, as
each bit of matter, each position in space, at each moment of time, is not ‘a blending of
separate parts or a blurring of boundaries, but in the thick web of its speciicities, what is at
issue is its unique material historialities and how they come to matter’ (Barad 2014, 176). As
Barad (2014, 178) explains: ‘Quantum entanglements are not the intertwining of two (or
more) states/entities/events, but a calling into question of the very nature of twoness, and
ultimately of one-ness as well’. Entangled elements have agentic force, which opens up
possibilities of including a much wider selection of causal factors for understanding what is
going on (as a matter of fact) in knowledge production.
Barad’s scientiic study of small organisms has called into question the individual/group
binary and problematises the nature of identity and individual existence. These tiny creatures
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K. MURRIS
show behaviours and ways of thinking that traditionally would have been located in the
brain but in organisms that have none, for example the brittle star. Barad (2007, 369–384)
argues that the brainless and eyeless brittle star is a ‘living testimony’ of the idea that knowing,
being and doing are inseparable (Barad 2007, 369). Relationships are necessary for uniqueness
to be articulated, for a subject to become singular in an ethical sense, and child subjectivity
includes relationships with other earth dwellers such as brittle stars, other human animals,
nonhuman animals and the material world (e.g., sticks, furniture, glue or paint, but also
questions, thoughts and concepts). The key pedagogical questions this raises is who, where
and how are child’s material-discursive beginnings taken up and materialised in formal and
informal education? What does ‘taking up’ mean and what is the role of the teacher/learners
in this process of ‘taking up’? Could/are teachers also learners, and vice versa, learners also
teachers. And what are the response-abilities of educators in these complex situations?
A difractive reading
I suggest that these questions can be answered through a difractive reading of two rhizomatic pedagogies that do justice to the ontology of postdevelopmental child. Although
difractive readings are gaining traction, the manner by which the method is used cannot
be prescribed for the researcher, because the person doing the research is always already
part of the apparatus that measures. I have used Barad’s article Difraction Difractions: Cutting
Together-Apart (2014) as my main guidance. The method is airmative, creative, intuitive
and non-representational. Posthumanists favour non-representational methodologies that
move beyond the personal and avoid psychological, psycho-analytical or sociological interpretations that involve relection on the past (Coleman and Ringrose 2013; Koro-Ljungberg
2016; Lather 2016; Patel 2016; St Pierre, Jackson, and Mazzei 2016; Taylor and Hughes 2016;
Vannini 2015).
Difraction is a postqualitative methodology developed, irst by Haraway (1988), and built
on by Karen Barad through her interpretation of quantum physics (2003, 2007, 2014), but
importantly should not be understood as a metaphor, which would imply representationalism. The implications of using a difractive methodology for pedagogy and educational
research have been explored only recently by Lenz Taguchi (2010), Palmer (2011), Hultman
and Lenz Taguchi (2010), Jackson and Mazzei (2012), and Murris (2016).
In this article, I read difractively through one another, human and more-than-human
bodies, in particular Barad’s notion of intra-action, the Deleuzian notion of concept,
philosophical concepts as theorised and practised in Philosophy with Children (P4C), and
Reggio Emilia’s concept formation through the use of the ‘hundred languages’ at the heart
of progettazione (explained below). Reading texts, theories about concepts, and the
neologism ‘intra-action’ difractively through one another, ofers a non-representational
way of ‘considering the entanglement of bodies, texts, relationships, data, language, and
theory that we are just beginning to understand and that presents the possibility of much
productive potential’ (Mazzei 2014, 745). Like Barad’s scientiic study of small organisms,
the difractive method calls into question the individual/group binary and problematises
the nature of identity and individual existence. I, myself as researcher, am also part of the
entanglement that is not a unity. In other words, the posthuman philosophy brings forth
its own posthuman method of analysis: difraction queers binaries such as object/subject,
cognition/emotion, world/researcher. This is why I do not use rational argumentation as
PEDAGOGY, CULTURE & SOCIETY
5
my method in this article, for example, by putting forward arguments for a pedagogical
practice that combines certain aspects of Reggio inspired practices and P4C on the basis
of evidence of the similarities and diferences between the two. Representational methods
of research position the researcher (the subject) at a distance from the world, with so-called
‘objective’ access to this world with the mind through cognition. Instead, my difractive
analysis moves rhizomatically in ceaseless variations leading in indeterminate directions,
including unpredictable causal factors, and opening up a space for human and more-thanhuman bodies to also produce afect and intensities, thereby keeping analysis and knowledge
production on the move. Knowledge production is both material and discursive, and
includes the more-than-human. The experiment creates a new interference pattern, a
practice of knowledge construction that queers (an undoing of identity) the powerproducing binaries of humanism: mind/body, nature/culture, child/adult, language/reality,
knowing/being and individual/group. Difraction as a methodology is diferent from
relection. Difraction means ‘to break apart in diferent directions’ (Barad 2014, 168).
Difraction patterns hold for water waves, as well as sound waves, or light waves (Barad
2007, 74). It is where they interfere or overlap that the ‘waves change in themselves in
intra-action’ (Lenz Taguchi 2010, 44) and create a ‘superposition’ (Barad 2007, 76). So how
does the difractive methodology work in this case?
The making of the new interference pattern does not happen by rejecting or critiquing
one text or theory, or by looking for the known or what is similar (as in relection), but through
airmation of each educational philosophy by paying attention to the diferences that
matter – the power-producing binaries that include or exclude. The difractive activity of
reading these philosophies through one another is methodologically a ‘cutting togetherapart’ as one move (Barad 2014). The ideas remain entwined, nothing is ‘left behind’, because
the diference does not exist within ‘itself’, but is exterior. Barad’s approach is to place diferent
transdisciplinary practices in conversation with one another whilst paying attention to ine
details and the exclusions this action produces by investigating how ‘objects’ and ‘subjects’
and other diferences matter, and for whom (Barad 2007, 90–94, 2014). In my difractive
reading, I am not looking for similarities or diferences; I make no comparisons or try and
identify themes, but guided by the above questions and further questions that e/merge,
new pedagogical ideas of working with concepts is created, thereby deterritorialising what
conceptual knowledge is, which also includes child as knowledge co-creator. What e/merges
are new difraction patterns that include and that do not reduce one of these rhizomatic
pedagogies to the other. My reading is not guided by a ‘lack’ either. The superposition created
by the difraction is not ‘critical’, but adds force to ‘both’, without assuming that either is a
unity, nor the interference pattern that has been created. The challenge has been not to
theorise the difraction pattern, but to put it into practice in this article. Unlike a literature
review, I have focused on carefully chosen citations that do the work of making the reader
feel and think diferently about pedagogical practice. I am reading theory with practice
difractively. As part of the difractive analysis, I briely introduce the two educational
philosophies with a deliberate focus on the material-discursive force of the embedded and
embodied life experiences of the originators of these approaches to teaching and learning
and the salient implications for a particular conception of child. The e/mergence of both
Reggio and P4C can itself be understood as a difraction with certain geo-political events,
in this case war. This is followed by a difractive reading focusing on conceptual knowledge
construction.
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K. MURRIS
Reggio Emilia
Reggio Emilia is a city in the Emilia Romagna region of Northern Italy. It is famous for its
development of an early education system, often referred to simply as ‘Reggio’, or ‘Reggioinspired practice’. It is not a method or prescribed curriculum to follow and to copy, but a
socially and culturally embedded educational approach and philosophy (Stremmel 2012,
134). According to its founder, Loris Malaguzzi, its history started six days after the end of
the Second World War, in the Spring of 1945 (Malaguzzi 1998, 49). He had heard that a group
of mothers in nearby Villa Cella wanted to build and run a school for young children, so, a
teacher himself, he literally jumped on his bike and joined them. In an interview, Malaguzzi
(1998, 57) beautifully describes the force of the material in that process of starting a school:
‘…you have to agree that seeing an army tank, six horses, and three trucks generating a
school for young children is extraordinary’. They had been left by the Germans, and the irst
preschool was inanced by selling them and then built by their own hands (Malaguzzi 1998,
49–51).
Run by parents in the poorest parts of this village, they struggled at irst to communicate
well with the children, who were often hungry, in poor health and spoke a local dialect. But
these socioeconomic, cultural and material factors became a positive opportunity. In Loris
Malaguzzi’s own words: ‘A simple, liberating thought came to our aid, namely that things
about children and for children are only learned from children’ (Malaguzzi 1998, 51). It was
the ‘irst spark’ (Malaguzzi 1998, 50) of a now globally well-known and admired (secular2)
approach to early childhood education. The irst municipally funded preschool opened in
1963.
Concerned about Italy’s political role during the Second World and its fascism, a philosophical practice developed (and is still developing) that regards schools as places for democratic conversation, critical and creative thinking and caring relationships (Stremmel 2012,
134). Reggio is a living organism – it shapes itself through the various psychological, sociological and philosophical theories that theorists bring to the practice. The kind of education
it inspires cannot simply be replicated or imitated in other settings. In efect, to avoid domination by hegemonic theories of child and childhood, Reggio practitioners continually
engage with educational theories critically and overtly in collaborative dialogue with significant others: parents and colleagues. In that way, a school becomes an enquiring, inexhaustible and dynamic ‘living organism’ (Malaguzzi 1998, 62, 63).
The literature suggests that Reggio does not exclude developmental psychologists, social
constructionists, social constructivists, pragmatists, phenomenologists, poststructuralists
or postmodernists (Cagliari et al. 2016, 377), although the relational pedagogy certainly
resonates more with some than with others. Theories and practices are constantly evolving,
shifting and changing like a rhizome. Unlike ‘arborescent’ systems of thought and binary
logic that have dominated western epistemological concepts (e.g., ‘root’, ‘foundation’,
‘ground’), rhizomes (e.g., ginger, couchgrass, rats) are multiple and move dynamically and
unpredictably ceaselessly establishing connections (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 5–7). In fact,
the rhizomatic nature of the Reggio school curriculum is echoed in how their schools are
run and managed.
Core to Reggio is the view of child as rich, resilient and resourceful. In an interview,
Malaguzzi describes how he sees child as part of the world: ‘an active co-habitant’. Disrupting
the innate (nature) and acquired (culture) binary, he argues for ‘an ecological child…an
PEDAGOGY, CULTURE & SOCIETY
7
organism disposed to interaction and active self-construction’ (Malaguzzi 1990 in Cagliari
et al. 2016, 375). Malaguzzi (1990, in Cagliari et al. 2016, 374; emphasis in the original)
explains:
…as new-born babies they weave dynamic processes of interactive co-existence and growth
with life, and from birth they continue with their speciic ways of relating. Their interactions
with adults, cultures, environment, things, shadows, colours, spaces, times, sounds, smells and
tastes, immediately situate them in a world of communication and exchange.
The iguration of ecological child disrupts humanism’s power producing-binaries (Malaguzzi
1990 in Cagliari et al. 2016, 375) and the pedagogical possibilities this enables for looking
afresh at knowledge production will e/merge in my difractive reading of Reggio and P4C.
Philosophy with children
Philosophy with children (P4C) was pioneered in the late 1960s by philosopher Lipman (1988,
1991), whose passion to efect real change in the world was also ignited by the Second World
War and its after efects; he had served as a soldier on foreign soil in Europe. Moreover, lack
of critical thinking about the Vietnam War by his fellow Americans (including his own undergraduate philosophy students) gave rise to his inspirational idea to start with teaching philosophy in childhood. Essential for a well-functioning truly democratic society, he speculated
that early intervention through a specially written curriculum (see: Lipman, Sharp, and
Oscanyan 1977) would tap into children’s original curiosity, sense of wonder and enthusiasm
for intellectual enquiry, and strengthen their philosophical thinking.
In his autobiography, Lipman (2008, 53) explains the salient inluence on his philosophy
of education by Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky and the philosophy of, and personal
relationship, he had with John Dewey. Lipman was particularly attracted to study philosophy
as an academic discipline by its concerns with thinking about thinking (Lipman 2008, 58).
Kennedy (2011, 96) describes the revolution Lipman and his colleagues at The Institute
for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children (IAPC)3 brought about as ‘the radical
reconstruction of philosophy as dialogue, and dialogue, moreover, among children’. This
revolution – the emergence of philosophy of childhood – was also supported by philosopher,
Gareth Matthews, who questioned Piagetian developmentalism, and argued for child as
‘natural philosopher’. His highly accessible books (1980, 1984, 1994) are littered with
arguments and dialogues with children that exemplify that children’s thinking is similar to
that of well-known adult philosophers.
Advocates of philosophy with children disagree about their views of child (Haynes and
Murris 2012, 2013; Murris 1997, 2000, 2015). For example, Kohan (1998, 2002, 2011, 2015),
Kennedy (1996, 2000), Haynes (2008, 2009, 2014), Stanley and Lyle (2017) have been a strong
voice in arguing against eforts to include children in the rational world of adults. They see
it as problematic to use adult philosophy as the norm. The encounter between philosophy
and childhood opens up the challenge for adults of a diferent form of reason and knowledge,
resulting in diferent philosophies that children may bring to academic philosophy itself.
Despite these diferences between P4C proponents, childhood became the site for a
radical democratisation of academic philosophy, and, educationally, Lipman combined the
ideas of Paulo Freire (democratic dialogue) and John Dewey (education as enquiry) into the
community of enquiry pedagogy. Resisting the representationalist demand for a deinition,
I put the P4C pedagogy at the centre of practice in my difractive reading and foreground
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K. MURRIS
how concepts are constructed and reconstructed and who and what is included and
excluded.
Rhizomatic concept formation – a difractive reading
Like ‘an earthworm’ making compost, I start by turning ‘the soil over and over – ingesting
and excreting it, tunnelling through it, burrowing, all means of aerating the soil, allowing
oxygen in, opening it up and breathing new life into it’ (Barad 2014, 168). For the remainder
of this article, carefully selected quotes, sometimes followed by comments or questions,
interspersed with practical information informed by theory, are an ‘agential cut’ (Barad 2007).
Agential cuts are speciic intra-actions: they are about matter and meaning at the very same
time. Agential cuts are part of what Barad (2007, 183) calls ‘an apparatus’ – a doing, not a
thing. Apparatuses are boundary-making practices and include and exclude (Barad 2007,
148), because boundaries become determinate through the agential cuts and the intraactions; and it is here that the ethical responsibility of the educator becomes clear as part
of knowledge production and curriculum choices. It is not the case that there are no separations
or diferentiations, but they are always within relationships (Barad 2012, 77). The posthuman
methodology I have used here aims to breathe new life into existing pedagogical practices
and create an interference pattern that disrupts humanist binaries, in particular the child/
adult, learner/teacher binary. The assemblage is a response to the key questions I raised
earlier. How can people respond to children’s initial curiosity, sense of wonder and enthusiasm
for learning in formal and informal educational encounters? How can critical posthumanism
help create postdevelopmental pedagogical practices that position children as knowledge
producers and co-creators, not as knowledge consumers?
In order to answer these questions, I focus on the practice of concept formation in communities of enquiry and have let myself be afected by the writings of Barad, Malaguzzi,
Lipman, Deleuze and Guattari and a few other philosophers. The idea is to look afresh at
pedagogy and although I start at the beginning of what could constitute ‘a lesson’, it is not
linear in terms of chronology – it is always possible to start in the ‘middle’ as Deleuze and
Guattari (1987, 25) explain:
a rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo … The tree imposes the verb ‘to be’, but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, ‘and
… and … and’. Instead of starting from ‘the beginning’, they ‘proceed from the middle, through
the middle, coming and going rather than starting and inishing’.
The idea is to provide an imaginary of what a philosophical education could look like that
moves beyond lessons as units, prescribed lesson plans and curricula and individualised
age-appropriate practice, through the deterritorialising practice of a transdisciplinary
philosophical exploration of concepts that ‘meets the universe halfway’ (Barad 2007). The
energy and dynamism of such playful activities produce strategies, not an implementation
of a programme4. The quotations and the surrounding text difract with each other,
sometimes in terms of highlighting the newly created, other times, in a question-answer
format. The assemblage works as a Baradian apparatus to afect the reader and produce an
ethical and political commitment to particular pedagogical strategies, such as provocation,
dwelling, questioning, rhizomatic concept building and communal thought creating. These
material-discursive practices ‘render each other capable’ (Haraway 2016, 18) and bring into
PEDAGOGY, CULTURE & SOCIETY
9
existence a iguration of child as rich, resilient and resourceful. Deliberately, no attempt has
been made to capture the essence of the quotes that are part of this assemblage through,
for example, paraphrasing, or introducing the citations. Instead, care-fully placed in a
particular sequence and through the use of diferent fonts and font size, the vitality, intensity,
and aesthetic force of the philosopher’s own words have been left to do their carefully staged,
unpredictable work. This choice of methodology is a material-discursive expression and
acknowledgment of the author’s entanglement with the research apparatus. In posthuman
researchpractice the researcherpractitioner cannot stand back at an epistemological distance,
taking up a metacognitive position as in relection. Knowledge creation is part of the world’s
ininite becoming: ontology and epistemology e/merge (Barad 2007). Such an
ontoepistemology is at the heart of protagezzione, the term used in Reggio to describe as
Loris Malaguzzi puts it a lexible approach in which initial hypotheses are made about
classroom work…, but are subject to modiications and changes of direction as the actual
work progresses’, in contrast ‘to programma or programmazione, which implies predeined
curricula, programmes, stages and so on (Malaguzzi 1990 in Cagliari et al. 2016, 357fn8). The
strategies do not belong to any particular stage of a method, but can be used in endless
variation.
Strategy 1: Provocation of a project (‘protagezzione’)
The educator reads a picturebook. It could be with people of any age. The books are
‘post-age’ and carefully selected to open up questions and puzzlement about philosophical
concepts that interest them (Haynes and Murris 2012, 2016). They feature unusual characters
(e.g., mermaids, humans covered in body hair, aliens, cyborgs), extreme concepts (e.g.,
immortality, the size of the universe), or obscure thought experiments. Picturebooks feature
creatures that mediate between binary opposites: e.g., a gorilla who has a cat as a pet
(Browne’s 2008 Little Beauty), a monster with human feet (Sendak’s 1963 Where the Wild
Things Are), a tree that can talk (Silverstein’s 1964 The Giving Tree) or elephants that use their
trunks as guns (McKee’s 1978 Tusk Tusk). They are often ambiguous, mysterious, macabre,
gruesome or fantastical – they play with binaries, therefore perfect provocations for philosophical wonder and questioning (Murris 2016), involving the imagination, emotions, lust
and desire (Lenz Taguchi 2010, 59); the material and the discursive are intra-connected and
inseparable (Lenz Taguchi 2010, 30).
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K. MURRIS
Strategy 2: Giving time to dwell in silence
Children are given opportunities to dwell on the ideas provoked by the picturebook. It
requires an openness to indeterminacy (Barad 2012) and what is thought-provoking.
Time spent in silence during this period can be used to write words down, to draw them,
or to express them through other materials that are made available (e.g., clay). It is a good
idea as educator to reassure children that spelling does not matter and to give instructions
that move away from representationalism (e.g., copying the pictures in the picturebook).
Giving material-discursive opportunities to shape their own responses is prioritised using
PEDAGOGY, CULTURE & SOCIETY
11
children’s ‘a hundred, a thousand creative and communicative potentials’ (Rinaldi 2006, 175)
without prioritising reading and writing for knowledge construction or to emphasise a
product.5
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Typically, extended projects start with ‘verbal outpourings’ that allow easy access to memories and a ‘free reign to thought’ (Edwards 1995, 42), aided also by removal of the obstacle
of having to read or write. Regular philosophical enquiries have other afordances, for example, formulating new theories and hypotheses out of these oral exchanges, real or imagined,
which in turn can be put to the ‘test’ through drawing what they know. Then when drawing,
they might discover ‘gaps’ in their knowledge, and have to readjust the theories (Forman
1994), thereby continuously building on and reining earlier thinking.
The diferent languages difract with one another and create new conceptual understandings in the process. The imagination is part of the cognitive process here by ex-pressing what
is not there, sometimes in 2D, other times in 3D, simultaneously creating a kind of eco-system,
and, in the process, creating deep empathetic understanding for the relational dimension
of one’s being in the world. For example, by drawing a pet by focusing attention on the detail
of the network of relationships the animal is a part of. As Malaguzzi puts it:
we begin to see a world not made of coexisting islands, separate parts, distant unique languages,
but a world held in a web. Migrations, changes of tradition, changes of language are all in this web.
Migrations, changes of tradition, changes of language are all in this web … A world of networks is a
world that communicates even when it does not wish to. (Malaguzzi 1990 in Cagliari et al. 2016, 390)
Strategy 3: Developing questions in small groups
In small groups, children are invited to develop their questions, which are written down
for all to see and subsequently one question is selected democratically to move the project
forward. During this process, the educator listens to the children by walking around, supporting the conceptual work (e.g., ‘pet’ in one of the picturebooks mentioned above), making
notes, taking photos or videos.
PEDAGOGY, CULTURE & SOCIETY
13
This pedagogical documentation demands that teachers be ‘response-able’ (Barad 2007) for
their observations, descriptions, interpretations and explanations, and dare to see the ambiguities (Dahlberg, Moss, and Pence 2013, 155) – always selective, partial, contextual and situated.
A willingness to be open to surprises and the unexpected is key. The documentation brings
into the world a material-discursive expression of children’s learning and their intra-action with
more-than-human things, thought, afect, concepts and environment (Edwards 1995). As a
living record of the pedagogical practice (Dahlberg, Moss, and Pence 2013, 156, 162), the documentation brings ‘forces and energies’ to the project work (Dahlberg 2003). The philosophical
questions are not products of individuals, but they e/merge through the relationality between
the human and more-than-human. The documentation is shared with the children, colleagues,
parents and other members of the community through philosophical dialogue, including the
process and materials used to create it (see e.g., the philosophical play work by Stanley 2012).
The documentation is an ‘apparatus’; it is ‘a doing, not a thing’ without clear identity-producing
boundaries (Barad 2007, 183) between teacher and learner, objectivity and subjectivity. Crucially
the documentation is not about the children’s abilities or capacities as individuals, but the learning
that is made visible through the documentation shows the relationality that has made the
learning possible and how the human and more-than-human render each other able. This
completely changes the landscape of what counts as academic performance and ability, or
what is meant by quality education. As a result, these material-discursive documentations ofer
transformative opportunities to reconigure notions of child and childhood.
Strategy 4: Building a community of philosophical enquiry
The philosophical question children chose to enquire into is itself divergent. For example,
if they had elected ‘What is a pet?’ many other questions could be generated by the community of enquirers, such as ‘Can animals have pets?’, ‘Can a wild animal be a pet?’, or ‘Does
a pet have to have a name in order to be a pet? Why is this philosophical work educationally
important, and how is conceptual knowledge constructed in a community of enquiry?
14
K. MURRIS
The community of enquiry pedagogy is an elusive concept that cannot be deined.
Why use a community of enquiry in education? Will the concept development through
philosophical questioning not develop automatically? Why not just use a dictionary or
Google the answer to these questions?
Concepts are complex, not discrete, or ixed (like Plato’s Forms as heavenly bodies), but
intensive coordinates, in that they are composed of many parts (Deleuze and Guattari 1987,
2014). They are continuously becoming, with tendencies towards chaos and change.
Concepts also have tendencies towards stasis and opinion when concepts are ‘(re)absorbed
in a dominant or traditional way of thinking’ (Adkins 2015, 19), thereby reproducing existing
hierarchical, nesting classiications, as e.g., in text books where ‘pet’, ‘animal’, ‘human’ are not
aforded equal status in the hierarchy of being. For Deleuze6, concepts are a ‘toolbox’, not
bricks to build a wall with, but a ‘pragmatics’ that does not reduce the meaning of a concept
by an apriori determined set of propositions that you can either enter into or not – for
example, by answering a question by tracing the meaning of a concept back to its ‘roots’, or
through ixed deinitions. Kennedy (2012) argues that the community of enquiry in its communal problematisation of the meaning of concepts ofers unique possibilities for rhizomatic
curriculum development that puts philosophy in a transdisciplinary position to ‘meet the
universe halfway’ (Barad 2007) – for example, by examining the concept ‘pet’ through diferent disciplinary lenses using the hundred languages: biological, anthropological (treatment
of pets in various cultures), historical (mapping its domestication), ethico-aesthetic (docking
tails), political (what goes into dog food, puppy farms), legal (animal rights), media studies7
or literary (pets as characters in literature). The community of enquiry deterritorialises concepts from ‘their imprisonment within ideologically locked-down networks of concepts’
(Kennedy 2012, 2) and reterritorialises transdisciplinary. It includes children as players in this
political project.
PEDAGOGY, CULTURE & SOCIETY
15
Concepts make up the system of beliefs that constitute a school curriculum, but every
classiication is already geo-political (culturally and historically constructed). We teach children the distinction between pet animals, wild animals, farm animals and human animals
as if these categorisations are unproblematic. They are not just common and central concepts, but they are also contestable. Philosophical enquiry into their meaning shows up real
diiculties in establishing criteria for the unique diferences between them (reason?, communication? etc.). Curricula are so designed that concepts have been assigned to speciic
disciplines (e.g., number is a mathematics concept), but when allowed to be explored rhizomatically and through connecting with our experiences, de and re-territorialising happens
by making connections with other, related concepts, they suddenly come to life (Kennedy
2012, 2).
Understanding the concept ‘pet’ through binary, arborescent logic would regard the concept as not abstract enough. Massumi argues that abstraction is embodied thought, a ‘lived
abstraction’, thereby ‘actuality swells with possibility’ (Massumi 2014, 7–9). Through my
actions, I ‘comment’ on what I am doing as I am doing it, that is, I treat my dog as a pet not a
wild animal – the diference is in the performance. What a pet means, cannot be ‘captured’
through deinition, because it is the embodied performance of acts that constitutes the
diference between a pet animal and other animals. Importantly, a deinition would not do
justice to the relationality of the concept itself. So in the very same move as the doing, an
abstraction is performed on its action: a lick from my dog, looking in her eyes, walking her,
the cuddles, making a space in our home for her, being part of our family, giving her a name.
In other words, ‘pet’ as a concept is too complex to capture through binary logic. It needs to
be understood through a ‘pragmatics’, that is, directly embodied in action, creatively and
imaginatively.
Interrogating the curriculum itself as a knowledge system
A Reggio inspired philosophy with children concept creation moves away from prioritising
reading and writing, emphasises oral language and iterative intra-actions with materialdiscursive bodies, the material environment (e.g., sitting in a circle), texts, emotions,
16
K. MURRIS
questions, ideas, each other, the teacher, smells, sounds and even silences. The practice
includes questioning contestable, but signiicant concepts, and ‘responsive’ and ‘responseable’ listening, which involves listening out for the new and unfamiliar, enabling a reconstruction of adult/child relations in education, that is, a disruption of practices of power
(Kennedy 2006, 9). This kind of listening is not with a particular part of the body, for example,
the organ ‘ear’, but manifests itself in the relationship through action (e.g., asking a question
in response to what a learner says or does) and making the learning visible through documentation, mind maps, recording questions on paper – continuously intra-acting and
difracting.
Barad uses quantum physics as empirical evidence that discursive practices have
performative agency in that thinking, observing, and theorising are practices of engagement with, and as part of, the world in which we have our being (Barad 2007, 133). A Reggio
inspired philosophy with children enacts Barad’s agential realism8 and satisies Deleuze
and Guattari’s philosophy of immanence by disrupting current educational practices that
use arborescent, hierarchical knowledge systems that position children as knowledge
consumers: all classiications are seen as ahistorical, apolitical and meanings irmly established and transmittable. The superposition or interference pattern created by reading
P4C and Reggio through one another, understands knowledge production and expression
as e/mergent, as part of being, by drawing on all of child’s material-discursive languages.
The new practice powerfully disrupts binaries between adult/child, nature/culture, and
language/reality. In Reggio inspired philosophy with children, concepts are not ‘given’ or
‘transmitted’, because that would mean using the One language that interprets, represents,
and deines what a concept is – assigning it an essence, like pinning a dead butterly to a
display board. To deine, MacLure (2013, 661) points out, is ‘to return to the logic of representation, where words “refer” to entities as if they were separate and distinct from one
another.’ The question ‘what does a concept mean?’ is not crucial but ‘how does it work?’
in lived experience, thereby positioning children as part of the world they share with other
human and more-than-human others and explore intra-actively through materialdiscursive research and experimentation.
Notes
1. Throughout my work I have adopted the use of the term ‘child’ without including an article ‘the’,
to try and distance myself from the practice of talking about ‘the child’ as a bounded entity
in space and time with a set of essential and universal characteristics (often resulting in the
marginalisation of children), but still to allow discussion of the concept: ‘child’.
2. It was a break from the then dominant Catholic preschools carried out by nuns.
3. Founded at what is now called Montclair State University (New Jersey US) in 1974.
4. For the distinction between the two see Malaguzzi’s explanation in Cagliari et al. (2016, 335–
338).
5. Downloaded from http://www.innovativeteacherproject.org/reggio/poem.php on 29/09/2016.
6. See Brian Massumi in his introduction to Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1987/2014,
pp. xiii–iv).
7. For example, Laurie Andersen’s ilm The Heart of a Dog (2015).
8. Agential realism is Barad’s relational materialist philosophy of immanence. Things or objects
are real, but they emerge through particular intra-actions (relationships), boundary-making
practices that include or exclude. In agential realism the epistemological, the ontological and
the ethical e/merge.
PEDAGOGY, CULTURE & SOCIETY
17
Disclosure statement
No potential conlict of interest was reported by the author.
Funding
This work was supported by National Research Foundation [grant number 98992].
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