The third-grade classroom is leaking: Children, affect, and the mundane
Open Access
- Author:
- Cornwall, Jeffrey M
- Graduate Program:
- Art Education
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- January 21, 2022
- Committee Members:
- Yvonne Gaudelius, Major Field Member
Christopher Mark Schulte, Special Member
Karen Keifer-Boyd, Program Head/Chair
Kimberly Powell, Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Allison Henward, Minor & Outside Field Member
Booker Carpenter, Outside Unit Member - Keywords:
- Mundane
Childhood Art
Post-Development
Deleuze & Guattari
Elementary Art Education - Abstract:
- In the elementary school, children’s learning, thinking, making and doing are usually regarded through universalizing and progression-based accounts particularly from child development. Further, within these developmental frames, learning is often considered as a cognitive process that occurs solely within the conscious mind. In this dissertation, I resist the dominance of child development in elementary school by considering momentary and affective ways in which children learn, think, make and do in the classroom. Specifically, this study attends to the seemingly-mundane things that children think, make and do in the elementary classroom to consider the ways in which they might contribute to children’s learning. The theoretical orientation of this study engages the work of French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari specifically their conceptualizations of “leaking” as a strategy to become attuned to these seemingly-mundane activities of children that are often ignored or go unnoticed in relation to the dominant perspectives of development in the school, classroom and curriculum. I think further about the seemingly-mundane things children think, make and do by enacting Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of affect, the rhizome, rigid lines and supple lines and the body without organs. These concepts challenge the dominance of child development perspectives toward learning in the elementary school by considering learning as momentary and relational encounters between bodies (both human and non-human). During a year-long, ethnographic study in a general third-grade classroom, I attended to the seemingly-mundane things children think, make, and do that hold significance for them yet often go unnoticed or fail to register as being important or meaningful. As a participant-observer in the classroom, I tried to do what the children were doing in order to gain access to children’s spaces and doings that often go unnoticed by adults. This study focuses on three seemingly-mundane events that I observed and participated in during my visits to the third grade-classroom. The three events begin to unfold ways in which children’s supple movements produce cracks in the rigid containments of the elementary school, curriculum, classroom and materials which cause them to start leaking. Because of their supple qualities, these events are not easily defined or categorized disrupting the rigid segmentation that often exists in schools. This dissertation centers on the following questions: In what ways are the dominant discourses of child development leaking in the elementary school classroom? What do children’s seemingly-mundane ways of thinking, making, and doing in the classroom do for children and their learning? How do children’s seemingly-mundane ways of thinking, making, and doing reconceptualize childhood, learning and art in the elementary school? The intent of the dissertation is not to provide answers to these questions but rather present the questions as problems in order to think differently about what the seemingly-mundane activities of children might be doing for them and their learning in the elementary classroom.