Wall(ings): The early childhood story(ings) they tell

Abstract

In putting posthuman theories to work, we shift our gaze beyond the human in two early education classrooms to imagine walls as palimpsests. By thinking-with palimpsests, we imagine walls as multi-layered agentic objects that do more than hold shifting configurations of documentation. Thinking-with walls as palimpsests enables us to make-sense of walls in relation to the past and present through multiple materialities, spaces and times. With this experimental and playful writing, we story wall encounters through stretching our attention to the everydayness of the human-non-human-more-than-human life of walls. In offering up two wall stories, we move our gaze to zoom in and out of walls’ mundanities to materialize encounters. Other kinds of knowledge can be made and remade with different kinds of noticing that take seriously non-human mundanities of time, space and matter with wall storyings. Taking a seriously playful, and speculative, approach we leave our musings of the wall stories unfinished so that new knowledge, and unthought thoughts can be made. We offer provocations for you, dear reader, to take into dialogue with your own walls.