Reading two rhizomatic pedagogies diffractively through one another: a Reggio inspired philosophy with children for the postdevelopmental child

Abstract

After situating the figuration of the postdevelopmental child in the context of hegemonic colonising developmental discourses about child rearing and education, I engage with posthumanist perspectives that rupture the binaries, power relations and age discrimination these discourses assume. Developmentalism raises concerns about how child as knower is positioned. Drawing on the ground-breaking work of feminist philosopher and quantum physicist Karen Barad, an affirmative diffractive methodology is used with two approaches to teaching and learning: Reggio Emilia and Philosophy with Children (P4C). Through the experimental diffractive reading of the rhizomatic concept development that is core to both educational philosophies, new ideas are proposed for postdevelopmental curriculum construction. A new pedagogical practice of working with concepts is created, thereby deterritorialising what conceptual knowledge is. By putting philosophy at the heart of deterritorialising knowledge, room is made for children as knowledge producers, rather than knowledge consumers.

Keywords:

• Philosophy for children
• Reggio Emilia
• critical posthumanism
• posthuman child
• postdevelopmental curriculum
• intra-active pedagogies
• diffractive methodology

Notes

1. Throughout my work I have adopted the use of the term ‘child’ without including an article ‘the’, to try and distance myself from the practice of talking about ‘the child’ as a bounded entity in space and time with a set of essential and universal characteristics (often resulting in the marginalisation of children), but still to allow discussion of the concept: ‘child’.

2. It was a break from the then dominant Catholic preschools carried out by nuns.

3. Founded at what is now called Montclair State University (New Jersey US) in 1974.

4. For the distinction between the two see Malaguzzi’s explanation in Cagliari et al. (2016, 335–338).

5. Downloaded from http://www.innovativeteacherproject.org/reggio/poem.php on 29/09/2016.

6. See Brian Massumi in his introduction to Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1987/2014, pp. xiii–iv).

7. For example, Laurie Andersen’s film The Heart of a Dog (2015).

8. Agential realism is Barad’s relational materialist philosophy of immanence. Things or objects are real, but they emerge through particular intra-actions (relationships), boundary-making practices that include or exclude. In agential realism the epistemological, the ontological and the ethical e/merge.