Being-and-becoming-with:

Finding Child beyond Child

AT THE ONSET…

At the onset of my installation the agency of different materials that made up my installation were encountered by viewers, both in the dark and the light. I asked them to consider the boundaries and body of the torch, the block-out fabric, sponge, headphones and the relation of these to their own bodies. I asked the reader to consider them not as inert, inactive matter but as matter with material-discoursive agency (from Taguchi 2010:40).”

THERE IS NO CHILD HERE, NOT ONE

The challenge that arises from this initiative is how to bring the idea of Child into play with this ‘acknowledgement’ of material agency; especially when there are no actual children around and ideas are all we have.

LIKE A STREETLAMP THAT PASSES FOR THE MOON.

In the absence of ‘actual’ Child (by no means any easier to pin down) ideas of Child and Childhood must somehow be fashioned from other materials, symbolised and represented; evoked through other medium,

It feels ironic that in order to express posthumanism, we rely so heavily on human language and description, so as to acknowledge and give credence to intra-actions in our surroundings. Is it not perhaps humanistic after all, to want to inscribe agency into everything, and then tell each other about it, in words?

Then again, perhaps the reliance on language is temporary or at any rate introductory. After all, I have found that ideas of posthumanism have sunk deeply into places where verbal language cannot go or be retrieved.

ON BEING-WITH…

I think of the activities we did of ‘being’ with paper, rock, beach debris. Perhaps understanding this theory is also a matter of learning to ‘be’ with it and to let it be with me.

…AND BECOMING-WITH

Here I suddenly saw a way to return to the idea of Child, a way to let Child into the space. The key word (truly in the manner of one that unlocks) is ‘with’, a grammatical preposition denoting a relation between one object/ subject and another. ‘With’ doesn’t stand alone, however, it is accompanied by two other concepts, ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ so that instead of seeing the child, or the teacher, or the table or chair or sand or water or book or idea as simply being, they are seen as ‘being-with’ one another. Standing proudly in the present tense, these beings intra-act with one another and ‘being-with’ becomes an acknowledgement of mutual influence.

ENTANGLEMENT

From here, instead of trying to distinguish the processes of child becoming adult; student becoming teacher; tree becoming paper; paint becoming picture, an entanglement of all these material-discursive existences ensues and they are all ‘becoming-with’ one another.

‘BECOMING TEACHER’

As a prospective teacher, I too am embroiled in a process of being-and-becoming teacher, and I have undergone this process by being-with and becoming-with my PGCE class and lecturers, our classroom, my two Teaching Practice classes and mentor teachers and numerous other influences. The next step in this journey of ‘becoming teacher’ is to become a teacher with a class of children, in a classroom environment and school. Each Child in turn will be and become Child with me, and with one another, and with the materiality of their classroom.

ETHICAL DIMENSIONS

To me, this process, and how I approach it, has crucial ethical dimensions, particularly in relation to how the non-human elements of Child and Childhood are constructed and used in learning environments.

‘DELIBERATELY AND CONSCIOUSLY NON-EXPLOITATIVE’

I see posthumanism as a perception and philosophy that seeks to understand non-human matter and material beyond the reductive and simplistic idea of what that matter or material can do for humans. In other words it is

The idea of exploiting materials (be it other human beings, animals, buildings, plants, books or all manner of other matter) for the purpose of educating ‘the Child’ is hardwired into our very idea of what education is. Child is at the centre, everything else is simply instrumental to their being child and becoming adult.

POSTHUMANISM ASKS,

‘what would happen if the child was not at the centre of our idea of Child and Childhood, and Education?’ What would education look like if the materials of education and childhood were not exploited, but invited or even incidental to the learning that unfolded, between Child and Other?

AT THE AQUARIUM

At the time of filming I was drawn to the penguins because of their uncanny, collective stillness. This surreal stillness, which makes the video-frame seem like a photograph, is interrupted suddenly by a burst of movement as a group of pre-schoolers rustle and bustle their way in and out of the frame, behind the penguin enclosure.

THE VIDEO

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