Core Intention + Question #2

How might we continually work at co-creating and sustaining more livable – emplaced, fleshed, responsive, affirmative, and ever shapeshifting - bodying relations with children?  

If bodies are not a conduit, stage, or material that discretely hosts the people (the brains, the identities, the knowledgeable) who participate in early childhood education, what is risked or re-invigorated when bodies cannot be discrete – when the code of discretion cannot capture their presence – and actively participate in everyday life? How, for example, does getting to know bodies with children through the frame of addressing children’s ‘basic needs’ create specific practices and relations for understanding bodies (such as relations of maintenance, mechanization, or obligation – and discourses of custodial care)?

If bodies do more than only literally hold subjects (children, educators, researchers) together so that they can then get into the hard work of curriculum, how can we notice and answer to what happens when bodies and curriculum collide (and collide, and collide)? 

If muscles and fat are not an inert precursor to education, and bodies do not enter educational contexts in a cemented form that is preserved throughout, how might we learn to pay attention to how bodies and education relate outside of neutrality and certainty – how might relations of reciprocity, interference, rewriting reconfigure how bodies and education take form?

Core intention + question #1: How do we get to know bodies with children in early childhood education?