Learning with Damaged Colonial Places

This book offers a close and detailed account of the emergent and creative pedagogies of children learning together in a small, not-for-profit preschool, and the entangled becomings of their carers as well as the researcher-artist-author. The mutually affecting and inseparable realities of the 'material' and the 'discursive' are made visible through lively and sensual pedagogical invention by a group of five-year olds in the inner-city preschool which is located in Johannesburg, South Africa. These small, local stories are recognized in their emergence with global geopolitical realities. The author makes a valuable contribution to post-qualitative research through the use of visual research methods and non-representational approaches to working with knowledge. The book draws on the constantly evolving practices of Philosophy for Children (P4C) and Reggio Emilia both as pedagogical tools and as research methods. Photographs and stills from videofootage provide a sense of the relatively modest material environment of the school. The book celebrates the considerable richness of the involvement of the children and the enormous possibilities offered by the world both inside and outside of the classroom when an enquiry-led art-based pedagogy is followed. Drawings and other products created by the children in the study offer valuable insight into the depth and complexity of their engagement with their worlds, both individual and collaborative.

Auteur
Dr Theresa Giorza is a lecturer and teacher educator at the University of the Witwatersrand. Her current research focuses on the collaborative creation of knowledges and more ethical ways of being, drawing on the Reggio Emilia approach to early childhood education and Philosophy for Children (P4C). Themes include decolonizing the concepts of child and childhood, epistemological access through the arts, and the interplay between expert knowledge and open enquiry.

Contenu
1 Children's pedagogies: Fool's gold and the rush for readiness. The arts in early learning. Artists working with children.- 2 Running a preschool instead of a shop: The economics of early childhood provision in South Africa. Stories about a Johannesburg not-for-profit preschool.- 3 Teaching is research is learning: Legacies of Reggio Emilia and Philosophy with Children. Enquiry based learning, atelieristas and documentations. A/r/tography. Making photos, creating video, re-working data/creata.- 4 Naming and nont-naming: Thresholds of literacy. Opening the doors of literacy. Teaching as welcoming.- 5 Taking fantasy out of the corner: Sensory worlds and the imagination. The importance of nonsense.- 6 Park-ing: Public spaces renegotiated. Toxic landscapes and influx control.- 7 Possibilities of becoming public. Empyting the prison of childhood.