ERIC Number: EJ1110601
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2016
Pages: 14
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0159-6306
EISSN: N/A
Curious Hybrids: Creating "Not-Quite" Beings to Explore Possible Childhoods
Knight, Linda
Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, v37 n5 p680-693 2016
Communications between adults and young children can expose different ideas and opinions. Adults and children have different capacities to speak, these discursive spaces can become filled with assumptions, stereotyping and conventional thinking about power and agency. If communication shifts away from the purely discursive, what might be exposed about the explorations, investigations and fantasies adults and children indulge in? Some time ago my young daughter obsessively drew hybrid beings. Created from mixtures of animal, object, human and creature forms, these beings, which are "not-quite", are becoming, able to transform via myriad mutations. We agreed to collaborate and draw additional hybrid beings to experiment with becoming-other through complex entanglements of forms, to complicate, morph and (trans)form from our human selves to hybrid others. The "not-quite-ness" of our monstrous hybrids subvert the conventions of "being" and prompt contemplations about childhood subjectivities, identities, conventionalities and actively interrogate the assumptive knowledges and subjectifications that are held about young children in early childhood professional and academic systems.
Descriptors: Parent Child Relationship, Adults, Young Children, Interpersonal Communication, Discourse Analysis, Imagination, Early Childhood Education, Self Concept, Freehand Drawing, Art Activities, Qualitative Research, Inquiry, Fantasy
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: Early Childhood Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A