Block play, the sand pit and the doll corner: the (dis)ordering materialities of educating young children
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Date
2006Author
Gallacher, Lesley-Anne
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Abstract
Recent reconceptualisations of preschool education have tended to treat its role in ordering
and subjectifying children with some suspicion. This paper is an attempt to produce a less
determined and thereby more hopeful, or at least ambivalent, account of the processes of
subjectification by reexamining the peculiar materiality of the nursery. I attempt to redeploy
nursery education’s traditional emphasis on experiential and environmental learning towards
thinking in terms of a performative and affective pedagogy of the event (largely inspired by
Deleuze). In so-doing, I conceive of a different kind of ‘interactive pedagogy’ which enacts
myriad encounters and becomings. This reconfigures the relationship between subject and
object such that both are understood as continually emergent and constitutionally
indeterminate. Thinking in this way is to embrace the disordering that lurks within the very
processes of ordering. In this sense, subjectification may not be ‘innocent’. but it is necessary
nevertheless.