OpenUCT :: Browsing by Author "Murris, Karin"

Browsing by Author "Murris, Karin"

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Open Access
A posthuman reconfiguring of philosophy with children in a government primary school in South Africa
(2021) Reynolds, Rose-Anne; Murris, Karin
This thesis reconfigures Philosophy with Children and its community of philosophical enquiry pedagogy through posthumanist theories and practices. Philosophy with Children is an emerging movement in South Africa and there is currently very limited research on its implementation, especially in a whole primary school setting in the South. Critical posthumanism provides the theoretical framework to analyse philosophical enquiries as more than linguistic and always already material. I theorise with and draw on transdisciplinary scholarship and practices of philosophers/ theorists/ researchers/ practitioners in the fields of Critical Posthumanism, Philosophy for/with Children and Philosophy of Childhood. In this study, the community of philosophical enquiry is both the methodology for my teaching as well as my research methodology. I facilitate thirteen communities of philosophical enquiry with all seven grades of one government primary school in Cape Town (159 children in total). An embroidered tapestry of the school is used to provoke each of the thirteen intra-generational philosophical enquiries. Temporal and spatial diffraction (Barad, 2007, 2010, 2014, 2017) is adopted as a posthuman methodology to re-turn to the data in this experiential, dis/embodied and experimental research project. The communities of philosophical enquiry as pedagogical events generate video-recordings, audio recordings, photographic images, video stills, artwork and transcripts. The co-created data is diffracted through each other and re-turned to again and again. Through tracing the material-discursive entanglements in each of the methodological ‘steps' of a community of philosophical enquiry, my research contributes to the importance of doing justice to the more-than-human as well as children in educational research. The land, school, tapestry as provocation, making of the circle, thinking and drawing as enquiring and other materials show the inclusion of the more-than-human and why this matters. My research does not only give different answers about the inclusion of child and the more-than-human but also asks different kinds of questions that cannot be separated: ethical, philosophical, political, ontological, epistemological and aesthetic.
Open Access
Com-post-humanism: implications for foundation phase environmental education in South Africa
(2018) Meiring, Rouxnette; Murris, Karin
In early childhood education research (which includes Grade R and Grade 1 in the Foundation Phase in South Africa), posthuman frameworks are mostly used without explicitly making the connection to issues of climate change and environmental education/sustainability education. Within the context of the Anthropocene where natural and human forces are visibly entangled, this thesis draws on posthuman frameworks combined with multidisciplinary, place-conscious environmental education theories to inform research and educational practices. These theories are not motivated by a Western ideology or take for granted that Western theorists have the answers that all cultures should live by. These environmental theories and a posthuman praxis are always relational (nature-culture, body-mind, intellect-affect), have a flat ontology where human qualities are not at the centre of relationality and they explore the perceptual, cultural, ecological, and political dimensions of land/place. These theories eschew ideas of romantic (colonial) wilderness experiences and foster wider concerns of ecojustice, ecological thought and life processes that are also relevant to everyday (South African) urban living experiences. The following ‘(in)tension’ (imagining different futures in the midst of the frictions of research) is explored: How do posthuman environmental philosophies disrupt anthropocentric thinking and inform new ways of doing theory and practice for environmental education in South African schools in the Foundation phase? During an eleven month period of practical exploration, ‘walking a world into being’ and encountering Grade R and Grade 3 lessons in a Cape Town urban government school, video recordings and intraviews provoked and disturbed all possibilities of ‘pre-knowing’. Posthuman ‘ethodologies’ were conceptualized to rework the post-human subject at the intersection of post-qualitative research and Anthropocene entanglement. The idea of methods as processes of gathering ‘data’ changed to methods as ‘abecoming-entangled-in-relations’. Methods became receptive of ethicopolitical matters and concerns as they happen. Rather than concluding with ontological certainties and ‘findings’, normative standards (a humanist curriculum and work books) are problematized and the suggestion that all education should be environmental, is offered. The thesis gestures towards a pedagogy of affective learning right across the curriculum with land, multispecies engagements and ‘storied matter’ as an affirmative and creative way to ‘stay with the trouble’.
Open Access
A foundation for foundation phase teacher education: making wise educational judgements
(OASIS Publishing, 2014) Murris, Karin; Verbeek, Clare
We start our paper with a critical exploration of the current 'back to basics' approach in South African foundation phase teacher education with its emphasis on strengthening the teaching of subject knowledge. We claim that such a proposal first demands an answer to the question 'what is foundational in foundation phase teaching?' We propose an answer in three stages. First we argue that teacher education should be concerned not only with schooling or qualification (knowledge, skills and dispositions) and socialisation, but, drawing on Gert Biesta's work, also with subjectification (educating the person towards the ability to make wise educational judgements). Secondly, these three aims of education lead to five core principles, and we finish by showing how these principles inform our storied, thinking and multimodal/semiotic curriculum. Our answer to our leading question is that pedagogical 'know-how' and views of 'child' and 'childhood' constitute the subject knowledge that is foundational in the foundation phase curriculum.
Open Access
Making kin and taking care: intra-active learning with time, space and matter in a Johannesburg preschool
(2018) Giorza, Theresa Magdalen; Murris, Karin; Dixon, Kerryn
This research explores the lives and learning of a group of Grade R children and their human and non-human collaborators, (myself included) paying particular attention to the agency of the material environment. The learning spaces of a preschool and its neighbouring park emerge as key players in the lively thinking-with that is sparked off by our engagements with each other: people, other creatures, plants, spaces, things, energies, pasts, presents and futures. The spaces cannot be separated from their relationships with time and matter (of which we are a part), nor from the stories, habits and patterns of our engagement with them. All of these connected things, material and discursive, work in the research as lively assemblages or apparatuses that change and are changed by ongoing and unanticipated events. Photographs and video clips produce new ideas about and with the data created through the project and rather than reflecting reality, these visual forms diffract with time and space to offer the researcher and the participants new and different sensory, conceptual, affective and temporal experiences. These differences make a difference to the thinking that emerges. Relationships of accountability and belonging are recognized as central concepts in the learning with the park and the preschool. Paying attention to the choices we can make about taking care of our human and nonhuman relations or 'kin’ invites new thoughts about what it means to learn together in an inner-city preschool. Learning together requires a posthuman ethics that pays attention to what matters in the entanglements of learning and the becoming response-able to one another.
Open Access
Philosophical enquiry and autism: story/ing/ied bags of unexpected human and more-than-human encounters in speech-language therapy and classroom spaces
(2025) Babamia, Sumaya; Murris, Karin
This study is located within early childhood education, early childhood intervention and childhood dis/ability studies. The aim of the thesis is to explore the concept of ontoepistemic injustice for autistic children with/in educational and therapeutic settings. Current pedagogies and interventions are embedded in human-centric ontologies that position autistic child as lacking, immature, and often incapacitated epistemologically. Drawing on critical posthumanism, notably Karen Barad's Agential Realism, the study asks: how might the community of philosophical enquiry be put to work with children who present with significant challenges to enquiry-based learning? How can subjectivity for autistic children be re-configured outside of humanist narratives of mastery, skill and performance? The research questions were explored through postqualitative storying practices where communities of autistic learners participated in a teaching and learning approach known as Philosophy for/with Children. The philosophical enquiries took place at two learning centres in Johannesburg, South Africa. These centres were ‘outlier' educational facilities that accommodated the learning differences of children who were deemed to be intellectually in/eligible for mainstream or remedial schooling. Despite learning, language and communication dis/abilities, the enquiries produced philosophical thinking that emerged in unexpected spaces and times. Often, the thinking that emerged worked outside of language and voice yet were weighty and imbued with intensity as well as affect. The postqualitative analysis in the thesis disrupts the nature/culture binary which has historically positioned autistic child as being of dis/ordered mind. Diffractive engagement with the co-created data of videotapes, photographs, drawings, and fieldnotes troubled normative theories of child development in early childhood education and early intervention that still rely heavily on language and cognition. Of significance in this study is the re-configuration of child subjectivity ‘outside' of the adult human-centred privileges of language, power and agency. Postqualitative research methods highlighted the agency of the material-discursive and troubled the ontoepistemic status of autistic child as ‘lacking' and ‘less-than'. The study shows how Philosophy for/with Children, when theorised as a posthumanist transdisciplinary theorypractice of deep, attentive listening to children's questions and ideas, contributes to and innovates within the fields of autism studies, early childhood education and early intervention.
Open Access
Posthuman Literacy Practices in a Reggio-inspired South African school
(2021) Chambers, Lynn; Murris, Karin
Through a posthuman approach to literacy education, I explore the Reggio Emilia pedagogy adopted by an independent South African primary school. Unlike the current emphasis in literacy pedagogy on language, standardised and individualised testing and universal curriculum approaches, Reggio Emilia pedagogy views child, learning and knowing not as separate from each other and from the world, but as entangled and always on the move. Moreover, Reggio Emilia-inspired schools celebrate the ‘hundred languages' of children, not just the spoken or written word, and involve children in an emergent curriculum through pedagogical documentation. In my study, pedagogical documentation (including photos and videos) also serves as research ‘instrument' to co-create data and is analysed diffractively – drawing on feminist philosophers and scientists Donna Haraway and Karen Barad. The new theorypractice produced reconfigures literacy as an assemblage which includes human and nonhuman in an entangled, intra-acting becoming-together. This includes children, no longer understood as individual entities in the world, but as phenomena. My enquiry produces a rich entanglement of unexpected actors, including digital and non-digital technologies, discourses about literacy, questions of ethics and response-abilities, and many more. The ethics of a posthumanist orientation to literacy education urges us to think about what is made to matter in a classroom and what is excluded from mattering. My research shows that children, rather than having agency as singular entities, are part of distributed agency in learning and as such are rendered capable as part of a complex, living system always in motion.
Open Access
Reading Bernstein and Critical Posthumanism Diffractively Through One Another: Intra-activity Pedagogy
(2018) Ha, Bokju; Murris, Karin
Diffractive methodology has been developed by Donna Haraway and Karen Barad as a methodology to read two (or more) different thoughts or works without criticism. The diffractive methodology allows us to see and reinforce connections which seemly opposed to each other (Van der Tuin, 2011:27). This is based on the ontological shift from interaction, where we start with separate entities which then interact, to intra-action, an event through which subject and object emerge (Barad, 2007)). With the help of this posthuman methodology, I read Bernstein’s sociological theory of education that is based on the important concept of boundary and a 'tree-like’ structuring of concepts the structure of trees diffractively through knowledge as conceptualised by critical posthumanists. The latter philosophical orientation (Braidotti, 2013) is based on the structuring of concepts like 'rhizomes’, that is, shooting in all directions without middle or end and with its blurred and indeterminate ontological boundaries. This study aims to answer the following questions through diffraction: What new insight may be realised in terms of knowledge and pedagogy by reading Bernstein and critical posthumanism diffractively? How does critical posthumanism problematise knowledge and pedagogy as theorised by Bernstein? What is a posthuman pedagogy? In what way can each theory contribute to solving the inequalities of education today? Bernstein, who has devoted himself to the analysis of power and control in relation to inequalities in the school, has described inequalities in relation to unequal distribution of power, and social groups and strength of boundaries. In this regard, I will address four concepts related to this egalitarianism through Bernstein and critical posthumanism and suggest the notion of trans-material egalitarianism in relation to equality in education. The four concepts are subject, boundaries, power and causality. Reading these two theories diffractively gives rise to an interference pattern or superposition (Barad, 2007), especially about trans-species egalitarian education. Critical posthumanism offers another perspective that includes transdisciplinary approaches to investigate inequality in schooling. This study will focus on this navigational tool (Braidotti, 2013) in order to combat injustice through the reproduction of inequality. In conclusion, I suggest that the trans-species egalitarianism education has existed in Eastern philosophy for a long time, and that trans-species egalitarianism education in the post - human era will be achieved by reading Eastern and Western education as a diffraction.
Open Access
Reconceptualising quality through pedagogical documentation in early years education in South Africa.
(2018) Peers, Joanne; Murris, Karin
I invite readers to an interest in re-conceptualise-ing quality through pedagogical documentation in early years education in South Africa. Children in South Africa are entangled in legacies of Western philosophical constructions of being (ontology) and knowing (epistemology) and positioned according to the dominant discourses of the society of which they are a part. It is of concern that in the South African education system, curriculum and classroom environments, children's learning is measured, observed and assessed by pre-determined and fixed westernised performance markers particularly through documentation and the narrow view of quality. I investigate how children are unjustly positioned through what counts as quality in the documenting processes in the early years in South African schools. After the fall of Apartheid in South Africa, political decisions created newer ways of positioning teachers, children and the curriculum in schools. In particular, the pressure for difference in the curriculum design resulted in the state considering a quality education model which could compete with universal views of quality education. In the foreword of the National Curriculum Statement (NCS), Angie Motshekga, the Minister of Basic Education, stated that education and the curriculum play an important role in the realisation of the aims of the constitution. In exploring this issue, I enquire how pedagogical documentation in the context of the Curriculum Assessment Policy Statements (CAPS) of the Basic Education Department can shift children from being otherised to more just ways of repositioning children as co-constructors of theories, thoughts and ideas. The Reggio Emilia approach to education founded by Loris Malaguzzi disrupts the patterns of curriculum and documentation by problematising the limited narrative of who a child is in relation to education. Tracing the messy and unequal relationships that are always present in an early childhood classroom and in the relationships between the human and more-than-human other, how can pedagogical documentation offer an alternative? In particular, I investigate how, through a re-conceptualising of the concept of quality, pedagogical documentation can be used as a tool for the one hundred and a hundred more ways that children learn and relate to human and more-than-human others. I find myself in the messy politics of human exceptionalism in education. I immerse myself in a complex working of broadening meanings and denying defining what it means to participate in research spaces. I present differences, perspectives and theoretical standpoints in paying attention to early years education and look more closely at relationships rather than predictions. Re-storying through following theory, bending theory and transforming theory, I situate this work in an intra-activity of theory and practice. Many tracings, disturbances, fissures and historical relatings revealed in the materiality, writing and data created through this project. As a modest witness I am affected by the decomposing and recomposing of many interruptions and impositions for early childhood theory and practice.
Open Access
Teaching intra-active comprehension with picturebooks in a grade three South African classroom
(2019) Thompson, Robyn Dyan; Murris, Karin
My posthumanist research explores how the material-discursive reality of the classroom environment, school time practices, and bodily movements affect the teaching and learning of literac(y)ies. My posthumanist research materialised the notion of Intra-Active Comprehension as a way to describe the rhizomatic, entangled processes of children making meaning through the posthuman pedagogies of philosophy with children and Reggio Emilia. This reconfiguration of comprehension provides a more just and ethical understanding of how the teaching of comprehension e/merges when taking account of how human and nonhuman bodies affect and are affected in a classroom and how knowledge is always produced relationally. Rather than representing and analysing data as inert evidence of what (really) happens in my classroom, my fieldnotes and the iterative re-visiting and re-turning to my videorecordings provide rich opportunities for new and unexpected insights to e/merge – a world-making practice. Through a diffractive reading of the photographs, video clips, memories, writings and drawings, a more just and ethical understanding of the teaching of comprehension in a literacy lesson e/merges through a reconfiguration of the concept of child. Intra-active comprehension takes consideration of, for example, the carpet, little creatures living in it, whispers and silences, the windows and furniture, the atmosphere, standardised testing, the national curriculum, the clock on the wall, the timetable, and the children’s lived stories through movement in a drama lesson. Intra-Active Comprehension offers the opportunity for teachers and children alike to experience and think differently about the small, unexpected ‘minor’ events that e/merge out of the lively assemblages of the connected bodies in children’s daily routines at school and that objects or things all participate in education.
Open Access
‘Undergoing' as posthuman literacy research in an in/formal settlement primary school in South Africa
(2021) Crowther, Judith Lynne; Murris, Karin; Bozalek, Vivienne
My research began with a critical incident of my teaching performance being monitored in a British primary school classroom. A dis/continuous re-turning to the incident catalyses analysis of concepts in education and the educator's role in teaching literacy. Analysis is predominantly enabled through the critical theories and philosophies of Tim Ingold, Rosi Braidotti and Karen Barad. Eight years later, having moved back to South Africa, my research continued in an in/formal settlement government school where I was employed as a literacy support teacher. Inspired by Murris and Haynes' Philosophy with Picturebooks approach, I conducted philosophical enquiries with small groups of primary school children (aged 9-12) as a way of doing literacy support. The children were diagnosed by the school as having barriers to learning and were research participants for a period of six months. Created data includes critical incidents, fieldnotes, children's workbooks, photographs and vignettes of small group enquiries. Central in my research is the notion of subjectivity in an educational community. The formation of subjectivity in community aligns with Ingold's notion of ‘undergoing' which is a guiding concept throughout. I put forward the thesis that ‘undergoing' offers an important alternative to dominant views of education. ‘Undergoing' refers to what we (on a planetary scale) are becoming, that continuously (re)shapes and (re)orients pre-arranged educational ‘doings'. Research as ‘undergoing' is not about producing knowledge to fill in gaps on a given (transcendently known) plane. ‘Undergoing' troubles such humanist literacy support approaches that focus only on language and are guided by notions such as ‘back to basics' or ‘simple to complex'. The concept of ‘undergoing' works to show how literacy education involves processes of subjectification where relational entanglements precede entities formed. In the thesis I argue how critical posthumanism and, in particular, the concept ‘undergoing' enables affirmative posthuman literacy research and pedagogy. ‘Undergoing' matters ethically and politically, because it renders capable so-called ‘failing' children in literacy pursuits, in a context of poverty. It also renders capable so-called ‘failing' teachers in their pedagogical endeavours.

Browsing by Author "Murris, Karin"

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