Everyday Artfulness

This book uses an artistic lens to see and understand differently, young children’s everyday play with materials in their early childhood education and care setting. The work focuses on ‘small moments’ which may be easily overlooked, to develop a picture of ‘everyday artfulness’ using the radical inclusivity of posthuman theory.

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This work suggests that art has more to offer education than diverting activities grounded by ideas of human exceptionalism. Posthuman perspectives of everyday playful activity in Early Childhood Education and Care, can offer alternative ways of seeing and understanding nature/culture entanglements. Tuning in to young children’s play with materials through a posthuman theoretical lens, can orientate adults’ attention toward the innate artfulness of young children’s everyday moments of learning and growth. This perspective reveals how such moments of intensity and learning always occur in complex relation with diverse others, human and non-human, natural and technological, living and non-living. This emphasises the undeniably rich, yet easily overlooked, relationship with the material and social complexities of the world, upon which all human learning and growth relies.