When matter comes to matter – working pedagogically with junk materials

Abstract

This article focuses on junk materials and how they invite and encourage children to play and construct without the need to name, define or label the constructions. The article also deals with how practitioners’ expectations can disturb this creative and transitory process. The article is based on one aspect of my study entitled “When matter comes to matter: Recycled materials as a pedagogic idea” (Odegard, 2011). A focus of the study concerns how pre-school children’s meetings with recycled materials can encourage equality and creativity. The junk materials seem to be equal in that they can invite children and practitioners to play and learn on equal terms. The children appear to be given equal opportunities from the material itself, regardless of gender, culture, age, disability, language, ethnic background and history. Having been saved from the garbage bin, recycled materials seem to have lost their function, which in turn seems to appeal to children’s creativity and make them collaborate and construct in numerous ways. My discussion relates to MacRae’s studies (2008; 2011) and to Foucault’s concept of heterotopias (1986) combined with Deleuze, Guattari and Massumi’s lines of flight (1988). These concepts enlighten the issue of practitioners’ expectations to children’s work with junk materials, as this issue emerged from analyses of the focus group conversations of my study.

Key Words:

• junk-materials
• materiality
• expectations
• lines of flight
• heterotopia