Dismantling & creativity

CELS (Broadmeadows) Term 1 2021

The brilliant and imaginative use of materials by this group prompted some further investigation. I highly recommend the following article. Although it is predominantly concerned with pre-school education its comments regarding the role of materials and space are highly relevant.

“In this sense, we can start to think about how materials could have some ‘life’, … This is reminiscent of Jane Bennett’s (2001) ‘enchanted materialism’, which seeks to affirm the liveliness of matter”

“[B]oth Montessori and Froebel understood learning as occurring through the embodied and sensory interactions between individual children and the material environment around them; the task of educating young children, then, is one of devising and arranging materials, such that those materials ‘do’ the teaching.”

https://era.ed.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/1842/1002 /lgallacher001.pdf accessed 2 Aug, 2021