Answering the world: young children’s running and rolling as more-than-human multimodal meaning making

Hackett, Abigail and Rautio, Pauliina (2019) Answering the world: young children’s running and rolling as more-than-human multimodal meaning making. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 32 (8). pp. 1019-1031. ISSN 0951-8398

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Abstract

This paper makes a case for a view of young children’s meaning making in which human actants are not separate from, but deeply entwined in, a more-than-human world. In order to interrogate the more-than-human processes through which multimodal meaning making emerges, we focus on meaning making through running and rolling that we have observed in early childhood settings in Finland and the UK. In doing so, we rethink the process of bringing-into-relation (Weheliye, 2014) that underpin multimodal literacy practices. Ingold’s (2013) notion of correspondence is offered as a generative way to conceptualize the interplay between human and nonhuman elements as they “make themselves intelligible to each other” (p.97). We show how posthuman theory offers the possibility for reconceptualising emergence and intentionality, within young children’s meaning making.