From Froebel and the constructivists’s early educational theories to more recent posthumanist thinking, early childhood development (ECD) has been understood to be optimal when it occurs at the level of senses and bodies. 'Integration' discourses prevalent in ECD educational policy and curriculum debates have pointed towards sensing bodies in space. But efforts to bring sensing bodies and space to the centre of ECD practice has remained incomplete. With research-creation’s more open lens, we use the project upon which this article is based to gesture towards how curricula might be spacialised with racialised sensing bodies in mind. We do this by designing, constructing, and studying a prototype ECD learning environment in a South African township context at the level of material objects and spaces with curricular and policy imperatives imbricated into the building structure itself.
'Spatialising the Curriculum' (with Emily Johanna Ashton)
Journal of Curriculum Studies
52
2
2019
177-194
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)
Afield