Unsettling Early Childhood Education and Care classrooms: Ecological relations, professionals and more-than-human subjectivities.

This project engaged with posthuman methodologies to unsettle humanist visions of subjectivity and professional identity for Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) professionals. It explored how ECEC Professionals (working with children from birth to five) negotiated classrooms and outdoor spaces to reveal ecological relational connections with human and non-human bodies activating expanded forms of subjectivity and enactments within a more-than-human world. Adopting a 'walking-with' methodology (Springgay and Truman, 2018) ensured humans are not the only ‘object’ of study but that a host of other materialities, affects, elements, things and objects deserve attention as vital ontological players. In this conception matter has agentic potential and breaking nature: culture binaries open up more generative visions for relational more-than-human connections (Barad, 2007) which can help theorise ‘other-than-socially-constructed components of subjectivity’ (Lara et al., 2017: 31).

An exploration of space and place in Early Childhood and how this impact on Children and Professionals