Grotesque gestures or sensuous signs? Rethinking notions of apprenticeship in early childhood education

Abstract

Deleuze asserts that education is a mass of signs. Children learn to decode these signs, albeit in randomized and individual ways, displaying great skill in decoding some signs but not others, and demonstrating different acuities with different clusters of signs. Deleuzian notions of apprenticeship, a fluid becoming to knowledges as formal education is encountered, operate at some distance to linear, culturally loaded apprenticeship concepts embedded in sociocultural theories. Conceptualizing education as gestures and signs, and apprenticeship as temporal rather than developmental, makes it difficult to try to quantify what is learnt. Deleuzian notions of apprenticeship, whilst troubling, can begin to dislodge teaching and learning conventions, particularly around accessing and responding. This essay explores drawing as education in Deleuzian terms.

Keywords:

• Children's drawings
• temporal apprenticeship
• early childhood
• critical pedagogy
• Deleuze
• communication theory