Doing curious research to cultivate tentacular becomings

Abstract

Referring to Haraway’s concept of tentacularity, this article embarks on a curious research practice-inspired speculative journey to think with material tentacular becomings in an Australian kindergarten. Some of the questions that guided our curious research practice asked: How does curious practice as a postqualitative methodology enable us, as researchers, to cultivate a presence that creates the conditions for these research encounters and events to be perceived? What becomes possible for generative relational diverse learning with matter-energies if we accept that there is no rational explanation at hand? What worlds come into being if we speculate instead of rationalize? How do children animate, and are animated relationally, in particular worlds and not in others? How do we, as researchers, become entangled within children’s ways of perceiving and naming encounters? We experimented with Haraway’s notion of tentacularity as our navigational tool to map four entangled territories in this article.

Keywords:

• Postqualitative
• environmental education
• early childhood education
• curious practice
• matter and materialities

Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge the children, teachers and families in the three kindergartens that made this research possible. Thank you for thinking with us. We acknowledge Country and its Elders, past, present and emerging. And we acknowledge our fellow researchers in this project, Margaret Somerville, Annette Woods, Pauliina Rautio and Sarah Powell.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This project was funded by the Australian Research Council as a Discovery Project (DP 160101008).

Notes on contributors

Iris Duhn

Iris Duhn is Associate Professor at Monash’s Faculty of Education. She has a long standing interest in environmental education with young children. Her particular interests are methodologies that invite re-thinking and un-doing.

Sarita Galvez

Sarita Galvez recently completed her PhD in which she entangled ancient Andean methodologies with speculative futures.