Wall(ings): The early childhood story(ings) they tell

Abstract

In putting posthuman theories to work, we shift our gaze beyond the human in two early education classrooms to imagine walls as palimpsests. By thinking-with palimpsests, we imagine walls as multi-layered agentic objects that do more than hold shifting configurations of documentation. Thinking-with walls as palimpsests enables us to make-sense of walls in relation to the past and present through multiple materialities, spaces and times. With this experimental and playful writing, we story wall encounters through stretching our attention to the everydayness of the human-non-human-more-than-human life of walls. In offering up two wall stories, we move our gaze to zoom in and out of walls’ mundanities to materialize encounters. Other kinds of knowledge can be made and remade with different kinds of noticing that take seriously non-human mundanities of time, space and matter with wall storyings. Taking a seriously playful, and speculative, approach we leave our musings of the wall stories unfinished so that new knowledge, and unthought thoughts can be made. We offer provocations for you, dear reader, to take into dialogue with your own walls.

Keywords:

• Walls
• stories
• early childhood education
• posthuman
• more-than-human voice(s)

Hi/hello/welcome/how are you doing?

Welcome to our storyings with walls, those brute objects that surround us every day in both domestic and professional spaces. In our previous inquiries and enquiries, we have both shared a fascination with pedagogical documentation, a well-known practice often attached to walls (Albin-Clark et al. 2023; Albink-Clark, 2021; Ovington, 2023). Documentation practices can include narration and imagery related to playful learning and used for multiple purposes (Carr et al., 2016; Fleet et al., 2017; Rinaldi, 2021).

In this writing, our focus slips beyond documentation practices. Instead, we “turn to notice” (Ovington, 2020, p. 15) slower practices of endless, ever shifting, attachments and reattachments of objects to classroom walls. In doing so, we imagine walls as palimpsests. Palimpsests are manuscripts that have been reused or altered but still bear traces of older marks. Reconceptualising walls as palimpsests enable us to think-with present, and past absent layers (Amoureux & Reddy, 2022). From this position, walls are multi-layered emergence(s) in relation with the past and present through multiple materialities, spaces and times.

In coming together for this research event, we invite you as the reader to think-with the walls you know. By folding in your experiences, we play with fluid methodological approaches (Koro-Ljungberg, 2016) to think-otherwise, and capaciously, in/with/through storying with the spirit of serious play (Haraway, 2016a). For us, serious play means troubling binaries, such as formal/informal writing, human/non-human, solid walls/fluid praxis, writer/reader to disrupt, make ironic, provoke, remake, and reinvent. In that spirit of playfulness, we open up theory and practice to invite provocations and propositions with palimpsestic walls as vital more-than-human materialities. How our research practices relate and evolve all contribute to how knowledge is made (Taylor, 2021)—along with the walls we story with.

Our theoretical propositions

As you read this, pause and ponder the walls around you. Have you ever wondered what they do beyond the structural? The doings of walls have caught our attention. How can it be that walls do things and what theoretical propositions help us to put those ideas to work?

Walls as posthuman

Our doings with the liveliness of walls comes from playing-with posthuman and feminist materialist theories (Albin-Clark et al. 2023; Albin-Clark, 2021; Ovington, 2023). Such theories shift attention from the human to look at the inter-relatedness between humans and non-humans to reveal how the material and discursive entwine (Strom et al., 2020). As we are interested in storymaking and telling, Haraway’s (2016b) speculative fabulation and sympoiesis have been helpful tools for us to think-with and make-with away from dominant anthropocentric narratives. By making-with storyings, we look toward, and back to, palimpsestic walls as multi-layered and over-layering(s) of human and more-than-human lively intra-activities in/with/through space and time.

Where Haraway’s (2016b) thinking has enabled us to think-with storying walls as sympoeisis, we turn to Barad’s (2007) neologism of spacetimemattering as another generative concept for provoking our pedagogical thinking (Kuby & Taylor, 2021). Not just provocative because the concept cements the inseparability between space, time, and matter, but because it troubles linear time. As Barad (2017, p.25) explains ‘“the nowness of time” is not an infinitely thin slice of time called the present moment, but rather a thick-now that is a crystallization of the past diffracted through the present’.

So, when you consider walls as palimpsests, at home or in classrooms, the past traces remain cemented into their present, with the ghostly remnants both absent and present (Amoureux & Reddy, 2022). Walls as a mattering, in relation to spacetime, can make sense of “our relationality with each other, and in the spaces and times we work in (and have worked in), and the matter and mattering of those spacetimes” (Davies, 2023, p. 467). Space is socially produced, dynamic, and relational, not empty and waiting to be filled (Leander & Sheehy, 2004). Moreover, spaces such as classrooms matter, not only because they influence children’s experiences, but they construct “the staging and reproduction of discourses which powerfully shape childhoods” (Kraftl et al., 2012, p.8).

Walls as “bodies without organs”: Moving beyond human voice(s)

In addition, we have found Deleuze & Guattari (1987) writing has guided our thinking to (re)conceptualise walls and the stories they can tell. We know that stories can be nonfiction and/or fiction, and when coupled with imagery, illustrations, and depicted in visual ways, stories might put to work color to aesthetically set a mood or convey an emotion. Philosophically, Deleuze (1981) explored color when analyzing artwork, concluding that color is an essential fabric of human life that can provoke and conjure sensations as a disruptive force. Expanding on this, Craig (2010) argued that the complexity or nuances of color serve to act as entry points. Such entrances enable the experiencing of bodies, including more-than-human bodies, to provide a space to think-with and encounter what a body is and can do.

Putting this to work we bring “color” and walls together, positioning them as entry points that stimulate disruptive forces in classrooms (Author). The force of the disruption in/on our thinking becomes a stimulus to think differently about the meaning(s) we might make when listening to wall stories. Thinking differently is one of the cornerstones of posthumanist thinking, a force that is productive rather than destructive (Strom, 2023) and serves to derail linear thinking and knowledge-making.

To listen to wall stories, we needed different tools and draw on Deleuze & Guattari (1987) body without organs (BwO) as “any one thing, which converges with other bodies” (Author). This is relevant for wall stories as they connect, relate to, and with, multiple other things such as a pin, blue tac, Sellotape, hessian backboard or a picture. All of which collide, becoming a BwO, either working together or against each other at any given time. Emergent from this is a call to “turn to notice” (Author, p.14) what the bodies do and say. Here, voice is understood as “an enactment among researcher-data-participants-theory-analysis” (Mazzei, 2013, p.732). This turn includes noticing any correlation with embodying environment(s), which signals that even small fleeting things matter. This has informed our understanding of embodiment as always active, spanning both the material and virtual worlds that can be influenced by human and more-than-human forces.

Have you ever thought about what walls do?

Previously, walls in our research endeavour(s) (Figure 1) were lively placeholders with documentation and multi-modalities of;

Figure 1. Wall palimpsests: documentation.

photographs,

drawings,

paintings,

adult written signs,

and

narrations of learning processes.

In this way, walls were backdrops for studying the agency of documentation practices that take account of the material-discursive relatedness. Such meanings gesture toward the inseparability of materiality and discourse when considering the creep of standardization agendas (Author; Moss, 2019; Author). From this position, the walls and attached documentation may well foreground children’s learning within certain developmental norms related to literacy and numeracy in ECE. But in this writing, we stretch our attention to consider the everydayness of the human-¹non-human-more-than-human life of walls beyond the discursive to think-with broader wall palimpsests. Like Zarabadi (2022), we seek to notice walls’ mundanities as a form of data that materializes multiplicities.

Zooming out and in

Because we are thinking-with walls as objects that do so much more than hold or house things, it has been helpful to be dynamic with focus. In shifting our focus in and out as a fluid and ongoing process we use the work of Hohti & Tammi (2023) and Hohti (2016a, 2016b). Hohti & Tammi (2023, p.1) explain that stories have an “endless intra-active metabolic continuum” that can shape and remake new worlds. To notice, and attend to these stories, we need to be ‘“zooming in” on the details of the events with increased attentiveness, and pausing with the stories’ (Hohti & Tammi, 2023, p.7). By zooming in and slowing down beyond the anthropocentric gaze (Ulmer, 2021), we wonder what would happen if we paid attention to what is “truly inert, and which cannot speak, move or die” (Bennett, 2016, p.58).

But first, we need to zoom out to appreciate and notice where and how to zoom in as a form of research that can be about “meanings and increased conceptual understanding, but…also… hesitations, wonderings, transformations, worldings” (Hohti & Tammi, 2023, p.7).

Let us start with zooming out to think about what materialities constitute walls.

Over time, walls were, and are still, built from what was/is to hand. More recently, walls are built and come to be occupied with a whole over-layered palimpsest of (Figure 2);

Figure 2. Walls palimpsests: zooming in.

spider webs,

fingerprints,

signs,

chatter,

smells,

displays,

scuffs,

toings and froings,

artworks,

cavities,

insulation,

battens,

beams,

stray whatever is around,

concrete,

stale air,

gypsum,

sweat,

breezeblocks,

plasterboard

and

layers and layers and layers of paint.

Children, families, teachers, teaching assistants, caretakers and visitors come and go. Likewise, all kinds of non-human life live and die unseen in the nooks and crannies. Dust motes gather, and little insects and mice wait for the dark. Multiple generations of species come and go. All of which are part and parcel of the life and liminalities of walls as something that is neither here nor there, with any status or perceptibility.

Walls go on being walls.

Zooming out again, walls become vandalized, fall derelict and crumble (Figure 3). Walls end up repurposed and reconstructed as multi-layered palimpsests with past traces or tipped into landfill pushing down on festering unimagined detritus, partly breaking down, partly remaining steadfast “Every[thing] carries a history” (Tsing, 2015, p.17).

Figure 3. Wall palimpsests: zooming out.

Walls are things that do things beyond their seemingly solid structure. Walls create lively and atmospheric spaces that do things to and with the humans who live/move/work/learn within them. Beyond the structural and architectural, we ponder otherwise doings of thinking-with walls as non-human objects that have agency as material-discursive disruptions. Every dwelling has walls, but what they do is sensed and embodied differently to each and every living and non-living thing as a lively, ever dynamic, intra-activity.

Storying-with and theory-ing with walls

In our wondering-with the doings of walls, and playing-with critical theories entangled with posthumanism, defining what these theories do together can be troublesome as they are always on the move. For example, epistemology, ontology, and methodology are conceptualized fluidly, yet at the same time are knitted and knotted together. Murris (2021, p.2) summarizes this, stating “Postqualitative…materialist and critical posthumanist research engages with a world that doesn’t sit still.” Therefore, thinking-with walls as palimpsests troubles the assumption that walls also sit still, and instead walls are sensed as both a solid object but at the same time are in flux and unfolding. The fluidity and movement provide us with a theoretical framework (Braidotti, 2019) to move beyond preoccupations with/on the human that has long since dominated qualitative research. Instead, we put posthumanism to work to reconfigure non-human and more-than-human phenomena as agentic (Barad, 2007).

Our aim here is to understand how classroom walls might exude agency. In doing so, we trouble what counts as knowledge to make sense of wall-ings and their doings as “Thing–matter–energy–child assemblages with power and force” (Tesar & Arndt, 2016, p. 196). Taylor’s (2021) term knowledge-ing helps us move away from fixing and stabilizing knowledge as a thing, and instead play with knowledge-ing as a never-ending unfolding process. It is with these notions that we wonder what wall knowledge-ing might be generated in the stories and what we can do, or you as the reader with the doings in the stories we will tell.

We have two classroom wall stories to share with you, they purposefully differ in focus to exemplify how wall stories, and their doings, can be seemingly insignificant, mundane, yet can grow and unfold to make connections and intra-connections. Together and apart they enable a reading of classroom walls that account for material-discursive palimpsests of bricks…mortar…plaster…busy children…memories…family life…curriculum.policy…ad infinitum - the “…and. and…and…” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p.25). The repetitious use of the word “and”, according to Deleuze & Guattari (1987), means to work from the middle with the recognition that there is no beginning or end, only fluidity and multivariable speed. Therefore, the stories we will share start in the middle of something, and the stories they tell remain unfinished.

How do walls tell (silent but audible) stories?

Stories have become a way for us to make sense of the various spaces we move between, and the world we inhabit. In our doings we have repeatedly found ourselves returning to the words “it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with…what thoughts think thoughts…It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories” (Haraway, 2016b, p.9). These words inspired our argument that walls have stories to tell and constitute our making-with or sympoiesis (Haraway, 2016b) of walls as human and more-human relationalities in ECE.

Let us start by troubling the word “story”. The word “story” has many definitions, and in essence is an event or a series of events that are connected together that serve as a method of communication (Figure 4) (Smith & Monforte, 2020).

Figure 4. Door architrave from author’s home, taken by the author.

Take for instance a domestic door architrave with pencil and pen markings that tell a story of a child’s growth, and the anticipation for “getting bigger” (Figure 4). It is imbued with hope, laughter, frustration, and speculation of what might be revealed as one of the author’s children stands tall. With Haraway’s (2016a) call to use speculative fabulation as a way to imagine, picture this…

Two feet backed up against a wall.

A child’s eyes tentatively watching a pen move, making its way above their head to mark the wall.

Two bodies vis-à-vis

Anticipation.

Thoughts - ‘Have I grown?

Other thoughts – “They are not so little anymore”

Pen/pencil mark.

Thoughts - New shoes.

Thoughts - New Clothes.

Repeat.

and…and…and…

Such documented marks against the architrave stabilize moments in time. These marks are not just a story of the here and now, but are an over-layered palimpsest of yesterday, and the day before that. Yet at the same time it speaks of tomorrow, the day after, the week after that and so on and so forth. The story draws together memories of outgrown clothes, developmental milestones, and later discussions between parents/guardians of “can you remember when?” Those moments are alive, growing and expanding and colliding with other childhood stories. Such collisions of matter and stories invoke memories of “wish list” objects like bikes, colorful roller boots, music, jewelry, vibrant clothing and much more - all caveated with “when you are big you can”² retorts. Stories are told and exchanged for new ones between parents and children, time and time again—ad infinitum.

Therefore, walls have stories to tell, and the making and growing of spatialities over time fold in an indebtedness to what has gone before (Barad, 2017), thereby making spatialities as acts, both ethical and political (Jones et al., 2016). Notions of spacetimemattering and feminist materialist relational time open up ways to think with spaces as pluralities that are always in motion, making and in process (Fairchild, 2023). Such thinking opens up the potential to make sense of how humans, time, matter and small events (such as the stories we tell) signal how power is at work in educational spaces. Spacetimemattering in thinking-with walls embraces multiplicities of the humans and more-than humans that have come and gone. This means that things and objects in spaces are in relation to multiple temporalities. Moxnes & Aslanian (2022) posit that spacetimematter is always-already in relation to the bodies that inhabit them.

Wall story 1: Can walls grow?

Now we begin to think-with fragments of research from previous research (Author). The walls of Michelle’s³ classroom became quite the inadvertent star of our research dialogue. At first, we talked about documentation practices that attached to walls in their glorious forms (Figure 5), but soon the walls began to call our attention because they seemed to be performative:

Figure 5. Classroom walls.

I start the year with quite a blank canvas sort of room - I don’t believe that stuff on walls has any impact or meaning unless children are part of it. (Michelle)

Here, Michelle emphasizes a complex growing ecology and choreography in-between the humans and non-humans over space and time. Walls were lively with doings in relation to those young children;

I want the space to feel like it belongs to my children so it grows and develops as they do. (Michelle)

Walls grow-ing with documentation intra-act, rather than interact, with spaces in proximity to children and their families as the the senses of belonging are not the property of the humans but rather emerge in a dynamism of forces (Barad, 2007, p.141). In the everyday bread and butter early childhood education practices, such as telling stories and welcoming children each morning, the walls have a role according to Michelle;

these walls are on our carpet space where we welcome children and gather for a story before hometime

It could be said the spacetimemattering of walls were drenched with performativities and gestures of belonging that connected the children and families to that educational place.

But how can walls gesture or perform?

Well, the walls of Michelle’s classroom were stapled full of documentation, but they did so much more than tell stories of learning. The walls grew over and through space and time, all entangled into spacetimematterings. Sense-making with walls as palimpsests of human-non-human material-discursive overlayerings embrace all kinds of lively imagery, furniture and an endless everchanging materiality that all have a role to play in shaping children’s lives.

From Michelle’s reflections, we propose that walls grow. What we mean is that over the course of the school year, walls as palimpsests grow by filling up with documentation that evolves in relation-with the humans who move and inhabit those spaces. Like Zarabadi (2022) we propose that experiences are materialized in all their mundanities, between the staples, plasterboard and curling paper, the walls are part of the documentation-children-teacher-walls that materialize experiences. When the agency of the non-human world and how it changes over time becomes part of the story, then Barad’s notion of spacetimemattering makes sense (2007, 2017).

Wall story 2: Are you listening with your eyes?

Our second story now is about a wall and how it became a silent activist and the carrier of voices.

This classroom wall quietly whispered to Anna every day, and Anna became preoccupied with what to do with the wall, questioning what the space could do in relation to learning. To Anna it was clear there was a performative aspect to the wall, and the space should do something; so, Anna consulted the children. The children called for the wall to reflect them as individuals, and an artistic curator was drafted in to work with the children to craft an exhibition area on two walls. To ensure that the needs of the school and the children were realized, it was decided two exhibition areas would be crafted, one for the children and one for Anna. Both would display the children’s personalities and work - just differently. In the beginning the wall exhibition areas were filled with colorful netting, vibrant textures and randomly placed objects, artifacts and children’s learning. The children had autonomy over the placement and situatedness of their “work” on the teacher’s board. At this time the wall was simply a holder of creativity, a backdrop. However, as time shifted the wall became a BwO with meaningful noiseless voice(s).

Over time Anna’s board metamorphosed back into a traditionally organized space. It was a (re)turning, with children’s work carefully and neatly positioned (Figure 6). The impetus for change was a question from senior staff “what would Ofsted⁴ want to see?”. Thus, new objects joined the children’s work in the form of sticky tape borders and lights to demarcate space, along with signage to ensure any passerby or onlooker could easily establish the purpose of the displayed work.

Figure 6. Anna’s board.

Whereas the children’s board remained, to some extent, free from agenda (Figure 7). Instead, colorful and randomly placed objects spoke of children and their learning. What might be traditionally considered as spelling errors remained uncorrected and untouched by the spearhead “education”. The learning objects spilled over the boarded space, overlapped other objects, and seemingly did their own thing. Hohti & Tammi (2023) describes this as the mingling, nurturing, producing and reproduction of bodies.

Figure 7. Children’s board.

All good - right?

Earlier in this article we discussed zooming in and zooming out as a way to notice relatedness (Hohti & Tammi, 2023). For this wall story we need to zoom in to “turn to notice” (Author) how the wall told a story. Hohti (2016b) describes this as “going very close to a specific event or concept, an approach which is at the same time both somewhat careless yet also detailed, in aiming at attending to entanglement.” (p.51) The first art of noticing involves the disruption to the adult board with the placement of two drawings by children in the class (Figure 8). When asked why they put them there, one replied “it’s our work” and “coz I can”. Another child simply said “pears are cool”.

Figure 8. Children’s own documentation.

Conversations proliferated and children discussed building relationships, not just with other children, but with spatialties. The children talked about their work living in other spaces so that it would call others to be inspired, with things such as pens, pencils and paper taking an active role. There was an underlying hope their drawings would elicit new responses. It could also be said the objects were disrupting the disparate nature of being in the world (Barad, 2007). The artwork formed part of a story that challenged the socially constructed nature of education; wherein children are separated and grouped by ages in difference to the adult. This story exemplifies the intra-active and entangled nature of bodies, human and non-human, that seek out relationality and material-discursive practices embodied as performative agents (Lenz-Taguchi, 2010). Objects that are performative take on a role in children’s learning that put to work agentic forces to disrupt the status quo, in this case homogeneity.

Zooming in even closer provides a further, and for us, more provocative reading of the silent wall story.

Each picture placed upon the board that resembled a human figure depicted an unhappy expression (Figure 9), the wall became a BwO with a voice that was “meaningful as noiseless” (Mazzei & Jackson, 2012, p.747). As the wall, drawings, picture voices, and colors collided they embodied a ‘‘Thing–matter–energy–child assemblages with power and force” (Tesar & Arndt, 2016, p.196) in movement. With this in mind, it was clear that the board was not freely open to the children. The height and placement of the board meant that the placement of objects were made by adults, perhaps guided by the child. More interestingly, despite having control, the children’s work replicated the prescribed norms of education by mirroring and manufacturing what was expected with neatly rowed numbers. This links back to creeping standardization agendas we mentioned in the outset and reifies the argument on how Human Capital theory is driving readiness agendas, “set[ting] up a binary opposition between process and outcome…inscribed with certain values and assumptions…linear progress, objectivity, and universality [and] the child as a knowledge reproducer” (Moss, 2007, p. 230).

Figure 9. Silence tells a different story.

In essence, the story talks about the binary divides of many things, child/adult, teacher/learner, learning/fun, inclusive/exclusive and perhaps even in/out. Drawing on the work of Murris (2016), the boards on the wall served each other in separating out a myriad of things that are in relation. Additionally, the story challenges autonomous agency and calls into question the rights respecting agendas that set the scene for working with the artistic curator in the first place. For us, the message this wall story speaks of is, ‘Doing justice to children means taking account of much greater complexity of “causal” factors when “reading” [or listening to] their actions’ (Murris, 2016, p.105). But this is not just about what we think, hear, and feel but begs another question - what do you hear in the story?

Wall-doings

Our storyings have embraced slippery and capacious approaches with walls both with and beyond the human gaze. Temporalities have stretched and embraced relationality with the more-than-human. But taking our wall stories to play with fluid methodologies means we cannot offer the comfort of a neat conclusion and acknowledge that we may have brought more trouble by shifting attention between storying walls and paying attention to the brute objects of walls themselves.

You never thought we would leave you like that did you? Wall-encounters remain unfinished, as posthuman notions keep unfurling. Fluid methodologies remain unfinished yet offer kinds of “productive failures” to keep on generating fresh ideas with thinking that stays on the move (Koro-Ljungberg, 2016, p.102).

There are always more walls to think and story with.

In failing to conclude, what new doings are produced? We offer provocations for you, dear reader, to take into dialogue with your own walls. You will have noticed that imagery has accompanied our enquiries, and here we toy a little more with artwork to keep our wall stories in motion with you (Figure 10).

Figure 10. Zooming in and out with walls.

With the walls you know, what stories are generated by zooming in?

Zooming in with everyday classroom walls focused our attention to their everyday generative capacities of growth, color, and voice. In truth, these were not the kind of questions we thought we would get to. Zooming into the minutiae of drawing pins that have widened holes on notice boards hint at the everyday unseen disruptions that humans make (Figure 10). Documentation practices require continual attaching and reattaching where teachers might feel pressure to visualize the forward march of learning. Noticing the inter-relatedness between the material and discursive shows the lack of separation between the matterings of walls with the human world. Other kinds of knowledge can be made and remade with different kinds of noticing that take seriously non-human mundanities such as walls (Taylor, 2021; Zarabadi, 2022).

With the walls you know, what stories are generated from zooming out?

Zooming out of walls stretches out time beyond the here and now. Slowing and shifting the anthropocenic gaze (Ulmer, 2021) has encompassed other spacetimematterings. By noticing the fresh and old scuff marks that accumulated through multiple comings and goings of humans (and non-humans and more-than-humans) we have possibly moved beyond human lifespans. Yet, we have not tried to make the bricks or walls talk to us, as Latour’s (2005) Actor Network theory might suggest.

Instead, playing-with wall imagery from multiple viewpoints beyond or outside the normalized human gaze, softens and rescales both framing and proportionality of how humans are but small ingredients of a more-than-human world (Ulmer, 2021). Zooming in also brings attention to the kinds of ethical obligations we have to the non-human world, as not just human bodies matter. We have a duty to things like walls beyond our own human lifespans.

We leave you now to ponder your own walls as our interpretation of Koro-Ljungberg (2016) productive failure. A space has been made so we can imagine your story. Do it! Fancy making a story with a wall you know?

Who would have thought walls could do this?

Table

Our provocation to you is:

With the walls you know, what stories are generated from zooming in and out? We leave a space for your wall story.

Ethics

Ethical approval for the classroom images used in this article were subject to scrutiny and subsequent approval by the University Ethics Committee as part of the Author’s doctoral research. Where images were provided by practitioners these were taken as part of their daily curriculum activities with consent for use supported by ethical guidance which states when activities ‘fall within the range of usual curriculum or other institutional activities’ consent and approval for access/use by researchers can be granted by school staff disposed with legal responsibilities as part of their everyday role’ (Oates et al., 2021, p.17).

Acknowledgments

We want to thank the practitioners that generativity allowed us into the classrooms to take visual artefacts, and/or for sharing their own imagery. Both sparked affirmative and curious discussions about walls and what they do, including how objects and children collide with walls as part of their everyday “doings”. Thank you to the children, and the objects, for providing entry points, for us as researchers, to illuminate your entanglements as part of ongoing spacetimematterings!

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Julie Ann Ovington

Julie Ann Ovington is a Lecturer and Childhood Studies Programme Leader in Childhood Studies at the University of the West of Scotland. This work follows on from a career in family support within communities and in Nursery and Infant schools. Julie completed her doctorate at Northumbria University in 2019. Her thesis explored the “affect” of school readiness in the classroom centred on the lived experiences of two-year-old children. The study drew on a range of philosophical and theoretical frameworks including materialism and posthumanism.

Jo Albin-Clark

Jo Albin-Clark is a Senior Lecturer in Early Education at Edge Hill University. Following a teaching career in nursery and primary schools, Jo has undertaken several roles in teaching, advising, and research in early childhood education. She completed her doctorate at the University of Sheffield in 2019. Her thesis explored documentation practices in early childhood education using posthuman and feminist materialist theories. Her research interests include observation and documentation practices, methodological collaboration, and research creation using a posthuman lenses. A central theme in all her work has been teachers’ embodied experiences of resistance to dominant discourses.

Notes

1 Like Author (2023) and Harding’s recent work (2023) we are fond of seriously playing-with punctuation marks such as hyphens and use them with intention. Inspired by Truman (2021) we put to work hyphens to force ideas together to force hybrids anew.

2 For context, Author wanted to be Madonna and had a penchant for laced up hair, piercings, gloves, and wanted to emulate Madonna’s character in ‘Desperately seeking Susan’. A movie that was released in 1985 when the Author was 7.

3 Michelle was a teacher of three and four-year children in the North of England.

4 Ofsted in a statutory inspection and accountability body in England.