Reconceiving a culture of experimentation in early childhood education: In-between listening ~ scribbling, data collaging, storytelling, and materiality

This thesis explores experimentation within relations of early childhood teaching and learning while simultaneously enacting experimentation in how text is produced, through bringing ideas and data alongside one another. It uses the work of philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari to consider ways to inject vitality into the everyday life of early childhood settings and how these ways might help teachers engage with experimentation within their own teaching.

Merging lines of flight in personal thinking~writing~reading around selected philosophical understandings with data – journals, scribbled notes from teaching, photos of learning activities – the thesis maps possibilities for how a culture of experimentation might be (re)conceived in early years learning spaces. These possibilities include reconfiguring the practice of listening through writing – ‘realtime scribbling’ – in moments of teaching, thus becoming a way to engage with the complex intra-activity among human and nonhuman beings. As well, ‘data collages’ become a way of (re)assembling imagery and text towards a diffractive (rhizo)analysis of the data. Further, by engaging with the materiality of the setting how storytelling practices with children intersect with theory/philosophy and early education discourses is explored.

The project links the researcher’s experiences working in a suburban kindergarten and Bush Kinder in Melbourne, an Indigenous recreation centre in outback Australia and an early learning centre in Vietnam. Using journaling of his teaching practices generated within these settings, he works to unfold possibilities that the materiality of the various spaces has for teacher engagement and children’s learning. Realtime scribbling and data collages are used to map ways in which early years teachers might engage in experimentation by contextualising concepts from Deleuze and Guattari. The thesis concludes by employing stories that contextualise ideas from Deleuze and Guattari for use in the workplace to show how these ideas might be brought to life in everyday teaching conversation and practice.