‘Draw yourself and write your name’: Material-discursive agency of names and drawings in early childhood

Abstract

A documented transcript and a series of still images from two spontaneous, incidental and intra-active pedagogical encounters in a preschool are the focus and the source of this article. A turning over of data generated through a piece of doctoral research that explored intra-active learning as a phenomenon makes visible the agency of names and drawings in collaborative and intra-active literacy ‘becomings’. These are the workings of a diffractive data analysis. Already strong affective connections between the children give buoyancy to the playful recitation of written names on a pile of pages. Familiar Grade R (reception year) activities take flight and diffract with age, race and gender to produce new knowledge about ‘what matters’ in early childhood. There are both inward and outward flows between the micro and the macro worlds of ‘becoming reader’ and ‘becoming learner’ as names move in between the sounds of belonging and recognition (the children's and their classmates’ names), and the pull of identifiable shapes and letters, words and meaning. The importance of drawing as meaning-making is affirmed but exceeded as an experimental performativity spills over into further exploration that was shared and extended with a friend. The analysis moves between and among the conceptual, real and virtual through reflective and diffractive insights. The researcher notices patterns of sameness and difference in the playful literacy and drawing events performed by the children with their lively classroom environment. Reconceptualizing the material products of learning as lively co-producers of knowledge with their authors requires a reconceptualizing of the human and a refiguring of the child as learner. Making the ‘child’ visible in posthumanist research means recognizing the inseparability of the learner from the learning and the temporal, material and spatial realities that produce it, and noticing the lively entanglements of names and drawings and what they do.