Excellent article - Children’s Relations to the More-than-Human World

Children’s Relations to the More-than-Human Worldby
AFFRICA TAYLOR
Faculty of Education, University of Canberra, Australia
VERONICA PACININI-KETCHABAW
School of Child and Youth Care, University of Victoria, Canada
MINDY BLAISE
Centre for Childhood Research and Innovation,
Department of Early Childhood Education, Hong Kong Institute of Education

Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood
Volume 13 Number 2 2012http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/ciec.2012.13.2.81"the notion of the autonomous individual child perpetuated by child development theory is not only an illusion, it is also a grossly inadequate conceptual framework for responding to the challenges of growing up in
an increasingly complex, mixed-up, boundary blurring, heterogeneous, interdependent and
ethically confronting world".
- entrenched individualism and human-centrism in early childhood education discourses
- the material turn 

 "refocusing upon the mutually constitutive and generative
relationship between matter (including all manner of nonhuman things) and (human) meaning
(Barad, 2007)"

 - interest lies not in materials’ meaning, but rather in their performative aspects (how things function within a particular context and in relation to the bodies they encounter and their own variabilities).

 - we consider childhood as a series of heterogeneous assemblages including both human and more-than-human entities



Hillevi Lenz TaguchiHillevi Lenz Taguchi (2010), following Barad (2007), has argued for a reconceptualisation of early childhood pedagogy as an intra-active material/discursive practice, in which agency, meaning, and thus potential transformation, are produced in the intra-actions between children and the material ‘things’ with which they are engaged.

- to decentre the autonomous individual by emphasising our ecological interdependence
- approaching childhood as an imbroglio of human-non human relations + reformulating early childhood pedagogies beyond the limits of DAP and the socialisation of the individual child

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