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Hohti, Riikka

Now – and now – and now: Time, space and the material

entanglements of the classroom

Published:

Hohti, R. (2015). Now—and Now—and Now: Time, Space and the Material Entanglements of the

Classroom. Children & Society. (Early view before print)

This is an accepted auther copy.

Abstract This study examines time and children in the classroom based on free-flowing

observations written in class by ten-year-old pupils. The concept of entanglement is

activated to consider time together with space and matter and explore the dynamics in

which these elements interact. The analysis unsettles the notion of time as a separate,

‘outside’ parameter: rather than examining children in time, this viewpoint enables us

to see children as being or becoming of different times and entangling with material

elements. On the other hand, entanglements also produce different moments of now,

which are seen as multiple and hybrid. The author suggests an understanding of

research with children as ‘lively entanglements’ in which special attention should be

given to things that matter to children.

The ways we understand children, for example as agentic ‘beings’ or as developing

‘becomings’, necessarily include a temporal dimension. Time is also inextricably

involved in the actual lives of children, in what and where they are, what they do, what

they feel and what they plan to do. Nielsen (2015) offers an exploration of the

temporalities of childhood, claiming that some prevailing theoretical dualisms in child

research may be traced back to a split between time and space, which prevents us to

embrace both changes and continuities, and children as complex being-becomings.

Prout (2005, 143-144) and Lee (2001) also struggle against dualistic thinking and

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suggest an approach to children as open-ended ‘becomings’ in relation to their

heterogeneous biological-cultural networks. Nielsen’s (2015, 3) concern is that by

focusing on the endless and emergent processes of ‘becoming’, research becomes

timeless. During her longitudinal study she observed how “it was evident that the

children’s joint projects of being and becoming fed into each other in a continuously

ongoing process” (ibid.). Nielsen promotes an understanding of the dynamic interplay

of the temporal and the spatial through two kinds of temporal modes that intertwine

in children’s lives: the more linear arrow of time and the non-linear space of the

present moment (see also McLeod & Thomson, 2009, 166).

This study joins the above-mentioned discussion by exploring temporalities and

children’s perspective in an ethnographic study on classroom practice. Taking a close

look at the mundane life of a classroom, the study attempts to bring in aspects of how

time is interwoven in children’s lives, with time considered as relational and connected

with space and matter. The empirical part of the study consists of free-flowing

observational data written by ten-year-old children in a Finnish comprehensive school

in which I was their teacher. These ethnographic writings or classroom diaries were

produced during a ten-month period, but the study extends over four years because I

had been teaching the class from the children’s first school year on. This time span,

albeit shorter than the ten years of Nielsen’s study, allows me to take into account

aspects of continuity and change and take advantage of my own experiences as a

teacher. The issues related to time were urgent for a new teacher, and managing

timetables was often the main challenge of the day. With a large group of children in a

relatively small classroom, every day I had to make myriad decisions related to time:

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Should I hand out these papers now or later? Which way saves time and causes less

noise and less commotion? The temporal, spatial and material/physical circumstances

in class sometimes shaped me as a teacher in unpredictable ways. I often noticed that I

was not the child-centred, reform-minded pedagogue that I during my studies

imagined I would become. I understood early on that time was not something neutral,

operating as an outside force, but affected everything we did and what we were in the

classroom.

In the following classroom diary extract by Petri and Erno,1 the two temporalities

proposed by Nielsen (2015), linear ‘clock time’ and non-linear present space, become

visible from a child’s perspective along with the above-mentioned teacher’s struggle:

The mother tongue lesson started now (at 9.16).2

The teacher asks for the attendants

Urho is shouting loudly.

The teacher checks yesterday's exercises

Urho is trying to be funny.

Everybody starts to SHOUT!

Now you have to raise your hand to answer

Harri is playing with his shirt.

1 All the names are pseudonyms.

2The quotations from the classroom diaries have been written on separate lines in order to improve readability. The

excerpts from classroom diaries have been translated into English by Johannes Ihamuotila (11) and Anna Ihamuotila

(14).

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The teacher gets mad at the class.

The teacher asks what 'opposite’ means

(. . .)

Break time starts at 9.45.

Everybody rushes to the break.

The teacher asks what kind of shapes we have drawn.

At 10.02 the break ended.

At 10.11 the teacher came into the classroom

At 10.13 the teacher starts class

At 10.15 the teacher attaches the computer to the projector

At 10.16 the teacher starts pair talk

The teacher starts up the projector

(. . .)

The crucial role of time in childhood institutions has been recognised by many.

Clocking practices in education have often been looked at as disciplining forces (Pacini-

Ketchabaw, 2012), for example Gordon et al. (2000) observe how the strict time-space

paths of school enable the production of a ‘professional pupil’. Children’s perspectives

on time have been taken up mainly in connection with their playful activities and the

timeless ‘flow’ experiences and intensities in these (see Karlsson, 2013; Pacini-

Ketchabaw, 2012). However, in recent studies time has been considered from

increasingly relational and heterogeneous perspectives. McLeod and Thomson (2009,

167) state that it is impossible to isolate time: attending to the temporal aspects in

children’s lives also demands attention to spatiality as well (see also Massey, 1994).

Emerging technologies and the ever-present virtual dimension have urged researchers

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to pay even more attention to the instabilities of time (see e.g. Bodén, 2015;

Ruckenstein, 2013). Pacini-Ketchabaw (2012) offers an alternative to the notion of the

‘tyranny of time’ examining how the clock is both a producer and an enabler, co-

operating with other animate and inanimate things.

My analysis draws on an emerging body of new materialist and post-humanist child

research (Lenz Taguchi and Palmer, 2013; Juelskjaer, 2013; Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2012;

Myers, 2014; Rautio, 2013; Bodén, 2015; see Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987). I draw

especially on agential realism developed by the physicist and feminist social science

scholar Karen Barad (2007) to unsettle the taken-for-granted educational notions

related to time and space: that children travel through (linear) time, are situated in

(stable) spaces and use material/technological tools as the means to acquire skills. I

activate Barad’s concept of entanglement as a way of examining the particularities of

different times, which are thought of not as ‘being there’ outside humans as a

parameter, but as produced in relationships among spatial, material and social factors

and more. According to Barad, humans, time, space and matter exist only in

relationship to each other, a notion implied in her definition of entanglement: “To be

entangled is not simply to be intertwined with another, as in the joining of separate

entities, but to lack an independent, self-contained existence.” (Barad, 2007, ix). Based

on these theoretical premises, I also attempt to rethink research on children as an

entangled practice (see Myers, 2014).

Below, I first present the setting for the study and the data. Next, I explain how the

children’s perspective and the notion of entanglement impelled me to a nomadic

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(Cole, 2013; Deleuze and Guattari, 1987/1980) approach in analysis. Then I present

Barad’s (2007) idea of intra-action in relation to the event of a school morning. Finally,

I delve into the moment of the now in a music class in which temporalities are

considered in connection with certain material objects, namely a musical instrument,

the recorder, and a laptop computer. The analysis is written in a heterogeneous way,

according to the logic of assemblage (MacLure, 2013; see also Barad, 2010), in order to

stay sensitive to entanglements by paying attention to gatherings and combinations in

an open-ended manner.3

The setting for the study

The practice of classroom diaries (in the classroom context) or children writing

ethnography (in the research context) took place in our class between March and

December 2010. It started as a pedagogical practice, but I soon realised that the

children’s writings could be used as research material. I therefore asked the children,

the parents and the institutions for permission to use the material for this purpose.

The core data consist of about 80 documents written in class by ten-year-olds. The

data also include memory data written by the teacher/researcher (me), along with

conversations and other materials, such as the teacher’s notebook. The writers or child

ethnographers, always two at a time, had at their disposal a laptop computer and an

entire school day. Unlike the usual tasks in school, their task did not include any

guidelines as to length, content or form; instead, the children were asked to write their

observations, thoughts or stories freely. The classroom diaries were written regularly,

3 The classroom diary quotes by the children are always presented in italics. The teacher’s memory writing excerpts

are indicated with ◦.

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though not daily. The children were almost always willing to publish their writings, but

they had the right to refuse to show their texts to others at any time. In general, the

children were eager to participate; three pupils refused the use of their writings in the

study. (For a thorough presentation of the approach Children writing ethnography see

my earlier article (Hohti, 2015.)

The instructions for the approach are as follows:

Children writing ethnography/classroom diaries, instructions

1. A suitable place is arranged for two writers of the diary. They are provided with

a (laptop) computer, paper and pens.

2. The teacher/researcher tells everyone that the purpose of the activity is to

produce knowledge about this particular environment (e.g. the classroom).

Specifically, the intention is to produce knowledge about the lives of the children.

3. Two children are selected amongst the volunteers. They form a pair of

ethnographers/diary writers tasked with writing down their accounts of a given period

(one school day, for instance). While completing their task, the writers are given no

other assignments.

4. The teacher/researcher says to the writers:

‘Look at your environment (e.g. the classroom) as carefully as you can.

What do you notice there? What is happening there?

Type your accounts on the computer.

You can also write your thoughts or your stories.

You can also draw pictures or cartoons on paper.’

5. In the end, the documents will be published (with the child writers’

permission).

Children’s perspective and nomadic analysis

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Recent discussions have presented important critiques about how research on children

interprets and reports children’s accounts. For example, in connection with the

concept of children’s voices James (2009) warns us not to produce simplified

representations of children’s views as evidence, and not to forget the complexities that

shape the ways children express themselves. Also Karlsson (2013) observes how a

story is created reciprocally between the listener and the child, not as something

authentic or pre-existing the narrative situation (see also Hohti & Karlsson, 2014). The

open-ended narrative space for children to write freely any observations, thoughts or

stories is crucial to how the children’s perspective is taken up in this study. This space

allowed the children a playful and improvisational engagement with their

surroundings. Writing was employed as a kind of ‘lively entanglement’ (see Kind, 2013,

434, cited in Myers, 2014), which resulted in the creation of rich, often non-coherent

and ‘messy’ data.

The open-ended space for a children’s perspective further obliged me to consider how

the writings of the children should be analysed. Informed by the critical views above, I

did not want to submit the ‘messy’ data to reductive analytical procedures that would

lead to the production of clear and general statements (see MacLure, 2013); I rather

realised a need for alternative, complexity-sensitive analytical approaches and ways of

writing. Similarly for example MacLeod and Thomson (2009, 166) suggest that

academic writing still marginalises the messiness of real life in the name of validity and

generalization, while more experimental styles could be useful in attending to

temporal issues. I eventually came to think of the children’s writings as ‘provocations’

(see St. Pierre, 2011, 620), prompting me to rethink children’s lives, time, space and

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matter with theory. As an educational professional, I had become used to explaining

children’s actions in terms of social interaction and cognitive abilities and to look at

these as meaning or representing something on a ‘higher’ level, for example,

motivation or individual competence. Now, I was provoked to see the connectedness

of many heterogeneous elements and to notice especially the role of material/physical

factors such as the notebook, the shouts, the clothes, or the schoolbag. I started to

question the school’s privileging of mind over body and matter (see Rautio, 2013;

Alaimo and Hekman, 2008).

Because I was involved in the children’s writings in multiple ways, as the teacher and

as a researcher, my position in the study cannot be that of a distant analyst, but rather

entangled right from the beginning. Barad (2007, 49) says: ‘Knowing does not come

from standing at a distance and representing something, but rather from a direct

material engagement with the world.’ In this study the idea of nomadic (Deleuze &

Guattari, 1980/1987; St. Pierre, 2011; author, 2015, in press) makes it possible for me

to take into account the knowing that exists simultaneously in different locations,

times and spaces: the classroom five years ago, the researcher’s room now, the

children’s writings, conversations, my memories and so on. Cole (2013) explains that

nomadic thinking adds a new dimension in social science by navigating the middle

ground between the object and subject. The nomadic approach involves movement

back and forth in the relationality of research and a ‘restless curiosity and thought

outside of institutionally determined norms’ (ibid., 226).

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The analysis proceeded through repeated readings of the children’s writings. While

reading, I avoided quick explanations and instead tried to focus intensively on the

children’s writings, which often involved material objects and actions that at first

seemed to be ‘nothing’. I started to produce my own ‘memory writing’, in which the

things and doings written by the children were combined with my memories and

theory. Here, writing was employed to access entanglements of language and matter

(see MacLure, 2013) and to set different times, spaces and materialities ‘in analytical

motion’ (Juelskjaer, 2013, 765).

The school day begins

An event in classroom can be seen as a gathering of material elements, discourses and

human beings. Barad (2007, 2010) proposes that these elements are co-produced and

(re)shaped in continuous mutual interaction, which she calls intra-action:

‘Existence is not an individual affair. Individuals do not pre-exist their

interactions; rather, individuals emerge through and as part of their entangled

intra-relating. Which is not to say that emergence happens once and for all, as

an event or as a process that takes place according to some external measure

of space and of time, but rather that time and space, like matter and meaning,

come into existence, are iteratively reconfigured through each intra-action,

thereby making it impossible to differentiate in any absolute sense between

creation and renewal, beginning and returning, continuity and discontinuity,

here and there, past and future.’ (Barad, 2007, ix)

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Intra-action is thus not something that can be applied on top of ‘normal’ interaction,

but, according to Barad, is the very condition of existence. It also encompasses the

dimensions of time and space and the processes that we make sense of as changes or

continuities in people’s lives. Barad (2007, 65) draws on Foucault and Butler in

speaking about the historicity of bodies and matter. Both past and future can be found

in the present moment, because matter is always understood as discursive (and thus

historical), and because of the open-ended connections existing in all events.

Below, I examine intra-activity in relation to the mundane event of a school morning

and its timetable. In focusing on material-discursive relations, I explore whether time

could be seen as something other than an abstract parameter by which people

organise their actions and be viewed as a hybrid element, one that participates in

producing human beings. Classroom diary writers Patrik and Teijo observe:

The teacher is writing the day timetable.

It is math lesson.

The teacher is teaching the times of the clock.

The teacher made a mistake in the day timetable.

Then the break started,

the pupils went quickly to the break.

The break ended,

the pupils came into the class.

Then a new math lesson started.

The teacher checked the homework

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And after that the pupils started to do maths.

It was calm in the classroom.

The teacher is walking around the classroom

Right now there is a lot of noise in the classroom

Then lunch started

The pupils went to eat

After lunch the pupils went to break

Every school morning I, the teacher, drew a box on the blackboard with chalk. The box

was then divided into sections and filled with the times of the clock – 8.00, 9.00, 10.00,

11.30, 12.15 – and school subjects and things to remember, like visits to the dentist or

to the special education teacher. This timetable illustrates how in school there are

myriad activities that are supposed to happen only in one place at one time and

nowhere else and at no other time (see Gordon et al., 2000). ‘The day began well’

could be read as ‘things happened when they were supposed to’. All the activities –

gathering in the classroom, standing up, sitting down – are arranged along ‘time-space

paths’ (ibid.) or, in this case, time-space boxes, which enable the organisation of the

current type of school.

It is linear time that is hegemonic in school. Linear time with its evenly measured

portions called hours and minutes regulates the rhythms of the school day. Linear time

also makes it possible to think of learning as a linear process and to evaluate it as less

or more effective (Myers, 2014). The curricula and the classes are arranged according

to notions of age as a linear phenomenon, and the related notions about what is

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normal to be achieved and done at a certain age. These notions also suppose

synchronization in classroom practice, which is illustrated in section 4. To learn the

times of the clock is seen as an ability related to age; not learning the clock during the

first three school years is easily interpreted as signifying a child’s need for special

education. When ‘the teacher is teaching the times of the clock’, the children are

produced as ‘becomings’ on their way from child time to adult time or ‘clock time’

(Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2012, 158; McLeod & Thomson, 2009, 7).

But things in the classroom also repeat themselves in a cyclical manner. School years

are constituted of cycles – of the seasons, routines, birthdays, beginnings and endings,

and repetitions of school days, weeks and months. During my time as a teacher, I

learned to anticipate the more stressful and more peaceful moments of the year and

also to observe how the same curricular contents repeatedly emerged in the textbooks

at certain moments of the school year. And the years started to resemble each other

like pearls in a necklace:

the day began well (. . .)

Today was the beginning of a nice day(. . .)

The school started and the teacher came into the class.(. . .)

The day began noisily. The teacher told us what a quadrangle is. (. . .)

The school day begins (. . .)

It is within these routinely repeating events that subtle, yet ultimately significant

changes take place. The dimensions of both continuity and change (Nielsen, 2015) are

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present also in the school mornings. Ten-year-olds often lose their teeth, which are

replaced with new teeth over time. Or one morning they come to school wearing

braces, sporting a new haircut or carrying a new school bag. Because the children exist

in heterogeneous relations, these changes in turn affect other circumstances, such as

friendships or school success. For me, the bodily changes of the children came at times

as a surprise, as if I had suddenly awakened to them. Children are indeed familiar with

the exclamations of surprise they hear when they meet grown-ups after an interval of

some time. Similarly, we often experience walking a given distance differently;

depending on the time of day or the company, the walk can seem short or long (see

also Bodén, 2015). Our subjective experiences teach us that growth and time are not

linear phenomena, but partly unpredictable and chaotic processes. We take the

changes occurring among children, such as growth spurts, as being caused by

something called time and age. But from an intra-active viewpoint it is possible to state

that also time and age themselves are produced in the shifting and dynamic

entanglements of human-nonhuman relations that produce both predictable and

unpredictable effects. Time is not stable.

Massey’s (1994) work on spatiality helps us to perceive the relations between time and

space. The changes do not happen as incidents situated along a linear timeline, nor do

they take place in spaces as containers. Spaces, according to Massey, can be seen as

particular moments in relations (Massey, 1994, 5), in which time and space are integral

to each other. It is possible to grasp any moment that can be called now only because

‘all observers (participants in social life) move relative to one another, each thinking of

themselves at rest, and each therefore “ slicing the space-time-continuum at different

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angles”’ (Massey, 1994, 4, citing Unwin, 1992). Barad (2012, cited in Juelskjaer 2013,

758) states that humans and other phenomena are ‘material entanglements enfolded

and threaded through the spacetimemattering of the universe’. This way, children are

not in time or space, but of time and space, which cannot be seen as separate

elements outside human beings. From an intra-active viewpoint (Barad, 2007), both

linear and non-linear time in school appear to be multiple, entangled with places and

things and enactments of children and childhoods.

Within the combination of the school morning and the timetable on the blackboard,

different versions of a child and an educator are produced (see Pacini-Ketchabaw,

2012). Before the school day officially starts at 8:00, it is normal for the children to be

in the corridor, which is filled with shouts and running. But as soon as the lesson

begins, it is absolutely not the time to be in the corridor, and being there raises

suspicion, causing a child who is still in the corridor to be viewed as having behaviour

problems or difficulty understanding what he is told. Similarly, a somewhat

professionally incompetent teacher came into being in the eyes of the two diary

writers as a result of the timetable; Patrik and Teijo observed that ‘the teacher makes a

mistake in the daily timetable’ and ‘the teacher comes in late’.

Now we play the recorder

In the previous section I examined the school morning as a moment of both continuity

and change, in which linear and non-linear temporalities intertwined. I will now move

on to a music lesson in which Titta and Siiri are documenting how their classmates

practice playing the recorder. Similarly, I will think of the succession of the nows in

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their writing as intersecting points of multiple times, which are related to matter and

space.

(. . .)

and now we sing

and now we play the recorder

and now we sing

and we play the recorder again

and now we stand up

And play the recorder at the same time

and now we sing

and we play the recorder again

Ville isn't standing properly

And we sing again

and now we play the recorder again

A fun lesson starts now

And now we eat our snacks

and now Senja is telling Sebastian to get off her place

But Sebastian doesn't want to leave

And now Senja came to beg Siiri for snacks

But she didn't get any because Titta and Siiri had eaten the snacks

And now we talk about birds and birds' voices

(. . .)

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Generally, in the relatively unregulated narrative space of the classroom diaries, the

children tend to write a great deal about material beings: books, pencils, rooms, hair,

football cards. If we consider these elements as being relevant to them, then we must

consider matter and body as being more important than is usual in education and the

social sciences (see Alaimo and Hekman, 2008). Two material beings are the special

focus in this event: the recorder, a musical instrument, and the laptop computer. In

our daily life at school there were moments in which it became particularly clear that

the now was not the same for the children as it was for the teacher:

o I remember the energy that filled the atmosphere when we

approached the music class. The instruments on the shelves were not

just things, dead matter, for the children, but they held promises and

suggestions. But for me the walk through the corridor towards the

music class always included an element of anxiety, because I was

unsure if I could really play, or teach the children to play, following the

yearly plan, and if I was able to control the encounters between the

instruments and the children.

The recorder is the most common instrument used in teaching music in third and

fourth-grade Finnish classrooms. Playing the recorder involves complex actions, such

as constructing it from its separate pieces, adjusting it to fit the hands of the player

and blowing air into the mouthpiece. As a consequence of blowing the air too hard or

not covering the air holes properly, very loud and irritating sounds can be created. This

is why specific spatial and temporal arrangements are usually made in teaching the

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recorder. Only half of the group attended this lesson, which took place in a separate

music class. Not all the children were allowed to play at the same time; instead, the

children either were supposed to stand up to play or wait for their turn sitting down. A

refined spatial-temporal order thus emerged with the recorder, in which the

instruments, the moving and singing bodies of the children, the teacher, the music

class and the school subject of music were involved.

In their writing Titta and Siiri observe the above-described procedure and the

participating elements: the recorders, the sitting and standing bodies, the silences and

the playing. There are different nows – the now of the children in the group, who are

supposed to move in synchronization with the sounds and rests; the now of Ville who

is ‘not standing properly’; the now of the teacher who is produced as the authoritative

organiser of the situation. Without the relatively large group of children and the

material being of the recorder, these specific enactments of children and their teacher

would not take place. Furthermore, Titta and Siiri, the classroom diary writers, are

produced differently, in a way that is specific to material and spatial factors, as the

best friends sit together on one side of the music classroom writing on the laptop

computer.

The classroom diary writers, Titta and Siiri, illustrate the productive dimension of

entanglement. They had been seen as problem children and in need of special support

during their school history. Both girls had been subject to numerous inter-professional

meetings because of the difficulties they had in reading and writing, and also in

obeying the school’s temporal and spatial rules.

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o Titta and Siiri were not easy to get close to. Many times Titta would

crawl under a table or go out into the corridor, not responding to my

attempts to communicate with her. She would also come late, without

any explanation. When Siiri was smaller, she locked herself in the toilet

and refused to open the door for one hour. If I had asked these girls to

tell me their thoughts, they would not have answered.

Writing the classroom diary began when the teachers in our school were given new,

gleaming white laptop computers. The children were electrified by the presence of

these material beings: they seemed to immediately recognise the computers’ capacity

to serve as companions for play or as ‘extensions’ (Ruckenstein, 2013; Prout, 2005).

Whereas time and space were parts of creating control around the recorder, here time

and space are at work in a different way. For Titta and Siiri, the time span of the entire

school day and the place outside the rest of the group seem to facilitate playfulness

and an openness to surrounding materialities (see Rautio, 2013). My attachment to the

writings of these two girls is partly because it was these very girls, who were

considered weak writers and readers, yet who connected with each other and the

material-discursive agencies offered by the laptop, who produced such evocative

writings. New agencies emerge, yet which cannot be located in the girls alone. The

present enactments of children as parts of the material entanglements around the

computer reach beyond an individual child or textual ‘data’ (Barad, 2010, 262). Time

that is at hand in this now can be seen as hybrid, because it is specific to the music

class’s spatial arrangements and the computer, allowing fluid, complex and surprising

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enactments of children and childhoods as beings and becomings (see Prout, 2005, 66-

67; Nielsen, 2015).

The now as multiple unsettles ideas of time as a neutral, equal parameter for all.

Material things also can be seen as vibrant (Bennett, 2010; Rautio, 2013) in that they

participate in the shifting networks of relations, emerging differently in different

connections. Sometimes it requires time to realise the instabilities of matter. If I were

to return now, after four years, to the music class, I might find that the recorders, once

seemingly stable, do not exist in the same way as in the event five years ago: owing to

intra-actions with children and time, they would have become worn, changing

molecule by molecule, gradually degrading into the environment. Attending to

entanglements can help unsettle simplified ideas about material beings as dead, numb

and only a means for human agents to achieve ‘higher’ goals, thereby inviting us to a

more refined inspection of relations between children and things (see Rautio, 2013).

Concluding remarks

In this article I explored time in connection with ethnographic writings produced in

class by ten-year-old children. I activated agential realist theory and the concept of

entanglement (Barad, 2007) to analyse different enactments of children (and teachers)

in connection with time, space and different material beings: the timetable drawn on

the blackboard, the school morning in the classroom, the music class, the corridor, the

recorder, the laptop computer. The idea of entanglement allowed an examination of

the children as produced differently according to shifting gatherings and combinations

of elements existing in classroom situations. Moreover, along with multiple

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enactments of the children, multiple, hybrid and porous moments of now were also

produced in the entanglements. Thus, the idea of time as an outside parameter,

neutral and equal for everyone, was unsettled.

Nielsen (2015) and others (see McLeod & Thomson, 2009) urge us to consider the

changes and continuities in children’s lives, which can be understood as including the

joint dimensions of being and becoming. I think Barad’s idea of entanglement enables

us to examine the dynamics in which both continuities and change actualise in

children’s lives. From an agential realist viewpoint, rather than thinking of children as

beings or becomings in time, we could see children and adults as being and becoming

with time or of time, thus opening up both time and children as complex and hybrid.

The possible states of things, from this perspective, can be more stable or more fluid,

depending on the specific relations at hand, but never fixed. A certain fluidity also

applies to past and present in children’s lives. The analysis of the material-discursive

relations existing in the school morning or in the succession of the nows in the music

class showed how both past and present, creation and renewal, are included in

materially entangled events. From an intra-active viewpoint, both linear and non-linear

temporalities appear multiple, entangled with places and things and enactments of

children and childhoods. With an understanding of the instabilities of time and space,

the future horizon can be seen as consisting of both predictabilities and

unpredictabilities.

This study employed a nomadic approach embracing different locations, different

times and different ways of knowing, including an unregulated writing space for the

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children to write their observations, thoughts and stories, along with the subjective

experiences and memories of the teacher-researcher. I suggest that, in addition to

attending to the spatial dimension in connection with time, we could employ even

more heterogeneous, non-reductive approaches to temporality to find more fluid ways

of thinking about children. Researchers themselves may need to engage in

experimental, particular and open-ended ways with children and data. In order to

account for the complexities of children’s lives, we might think of research with

children as ‘lively entanglements’ and give special attention to things and doings that

matter to children.

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