Teaching intra-active comprehension with picturebooks in a grade three South African classroom

Thompson, Robyn Dyan

Teaching intra-active comprehension with picturebooks in a grade three South African classroom

Doctoral Thesis

2019

Abstract

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.

Keywords

Education

Reference:

Collections

PhD / Doctoral

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