Investigating Learning, Participation and Becoming in Early Childhood Practices with a Relational Materialist Approach

Schooling is a significant feature of social experience for children in many countries around the world. However, despite the massive technological, social, economic, environmental and political changes that have occurred during the past few decades, pedagogic approaches in many educational systems appear to have changed relatively little over time. There has been much criticism of traditional schooling practices which have remained constant and unchanging in these times of unprecedented changes. Scholars of education have posed questions about the relevance of long-standing practices to children who live in global economies in the twenty-first century, querying why such practices continue to be replicated without due consideration of the diversity of cultural and social conditions that exist in these new situations, and asking whether alternative pedagogic models and schooling practices might be more relevant to the lives of millennial children living globalized lives. In this article I both welcome and critique two increasingly popular pedagogic approaches – the learning study approach and the Reggio Emilia approach – that have been taken up in schools and classrooms in a range of countries, arguing that these two approaches reproduce dominant binaries associated with modern liberal humanist education. Finally, I consider how a relational materialist approach might offer an alternative approach that attends more seriously to the interdependencies, responsibilities and potentialities that characterize global childhoods.