Children's Agency Within Emergent Curriculum

Children’s Agency within Emergent Curriculum:

A Case of Networked Interests

Kuan-Hui Leu

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Education in Teachers College, Columbia University

2021

Abstract

Children’s Agency within Emergent Curriculum:

A Case of Networked Interests

Kuan-Hui Leu

Children’s interests are often used as a rationale in child-centered approaches to build emergent curriculum that is tailored to young children’s motivations for learning. Against a neoliberal backdrop of standardized learning objectives, emergent curriculum appeals to children’s interests to foster children’s agency through building curriculum alongside teachers.

However, research on children’s interests calls for further development of theory regarding children’s interests as the concept may be conceptualized narrowly in research and practice.

This study explored the concept of children’s interests within a child-centered preschool classroom at a private university-based school that implements emergent curriculum. I used critical childhoods studies and Actor Network Theory as analytic and theoretical frames for conceptualizing children’s interests as socially and materially constructed among networks of both human and nonhuman actors. The findings are presented as a case study of a Store project that was developed based on children’s interests in money, stores, and ice cream. Fieldnotes and memos from participant observation, artifacts, and teacher documentation were used to map actor networks acting upon one another in the development of the Store project.

Through the tracing of the material and semiotic transformations of money, stores, and ice cream, I argue that children exhibited agency through expressions of resistance that were

made viable in network with material and other nonhuman actors. Children sought free interests that circulated outside the frames of the Store project’s currency by networking with red shoes, emptied bookshelves, and lollipops. Even as teachers supported and sustained the interest-based

Store project toward real learning goals through eliciting children’s feedback and sense of duty, children offered silence as well as critique of the shopkeeper/customer dichotomy as resistance.

As such, I propose that children exhibit agency through resistance in the process of redefining their interests within the contexts of their particular childhoods.

Implications of the findings explore ways that children’s interests are situated within and propulsive toward particular childhoods and markets of labor futures. Though non-publicly funded child-centered settings that adopt emergent curriculum are partially sheltered from neoliberal demands on proffering real learning outcomes, they are networked within a neoliberal context through their positions within markets of schooling.

Table of Contents

List of Tables ...... v List of Figures ...... vi Acknowledgments...... vii Dedication ...... x Preface...... 1 Chapter 1 – Introduction ...... 4 Background of the Problem ...... 4 Emergent Curriculum ...... 5 “Interest” ...... 6 Problem Statement ...... 8 Predetermined Learning in a Neoliberal Context ...... 8 Theorizing Interest ...... 10 Rationale and Theoretical Framework ...... 11 Critical Childhood Studies ...... 12 Children’s Agency ...... 13 Resonance and Resistance ...... 13 Networked Interests ...... 15 Research Questions ...... 16 Significance...... 16 Chapter 2 – Literature Review and Conceptual Framework ...... 18 Background of Research on Interest ...... 18 Philosophical Perspective ...... 19 Edu-Psychological Perspective ...... 20 Sociocultural Perspective ...... 23 Network Perspective ...... 25 Children’s Agency in Negotiating Interests within Play and Peer Cultures ...... 27 Whose Knowledges Count as An Interest? ...... 28 Control ...... 29

Funds of Identity in Children’s Spaces ...... 30 Controlling Pop Culture ...... 31 Who Chooses Interests? ...... 32 Children’s Agency ...... 33 Towards a Methodological Framework of Children’s Agency ...... 35 Chapter 3 – Methodology ...... 39 Research Design...... 40 Pilot Study ...... 41 Research Site and Participants ...... 44 Demographics Relative to the Neighborhood ...... 46 Curricular Approach ...... 47 Researcher’s Positionality ...... 50 Data Collection ...... 51 From the Observation Booth ...... 52 Participant Observation in the Classroom...... 53 Teachers’ Curriculum Planning Meetings ...... 54 Teachers’ Documentation ...... 54 Data Analysis ...... 55 Connections Across Data Sources ...... 57 Presentation of Data ...... 60 Validity and Ethics ...... 62 Limitations ...... 63 Interlude – Networks in Discovery of One Another ...... 64 Chapter 4 – Translating Actors in Networked Interests ...... 67 “The Store for Everything” ...... 67 An Origin Story...... 68 Coining the Name ...... 71 A Grand Opening ...... 74 “The Real Store” ...... 75 Networks in Establishing Children’s Interests within the Store Project ...... 77 Teachers, Projects, and Child-led Pedagogy ...... 78

The Precedence of Bake Sale Projects ...... 79 Integration with Other Curricula ...... 81 Children’s Desires, Peer Cultures, and Real Questions ...... 84 Sisters with Social Capital ...... 86 Social Capital and Other Interests...... 91 Free Interests: The Materiality of Resistance ...... 94 What Are Free Interests?...... 96 Free vs. Premium Shoes ...... 97 Freed Shelves...... 98 Toys from Home ...... 99 Conclusion ...... 102 Chapter 5 – Feedback and Duty: Enclosures in Sustaining Interests ...... 104 Feedback: Listening to Sustain Interest ...... 105 Devices of Interessement ...... 105 Taking Ownership of “Change”...... 107 Breaks ...... 108 “Breaks are ok when you are really tired” ...... 109 Closing Time ...... 111 Enclosure and Power...... 113 Duty...... 114 Obligatory Passage Points...... 115 Job Chart ...... 116 “It is our jobs” ...... 118 Jobs, Labor, and Effort...... 120 Resistance ...... 122 Resistance to Duty: “And sometimes the customers get tired” ...... 123 Silence: Feedback Without Feeding Back ...... 127 Silence and Teaching ...... 130 Silence and Risk ...... 131 Conclusion ...... 132 Chapter 6 – Real Interests ...... 134

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The Materiality of Translating Interests ...... 136 Two Coins: Movement Toward “Real Money” ...... 138 What Is Real? ...... 140 Two Stores: Movement Toward a “Different” and “Next” Store ...... 142 Two Currencies for Compliance ...... 145 Two Scoops: Movement Toward Real Ice Cream ...... 148 Real Interests and Particular Childhoods ...... 152 The Invisible Teacher and Independent Child ...... 152 Two Markets: Movement Toward a “Different” and “Next” Labor Market ...... 157 Conclusion ...... 159 Interlude – Two Backpacks ...... 161 Chapter 7 – Conclusion ...... 164 Interest as Resistance ...... 165 Resistance and Power Within the Store Project ...... 166 Resistance from the Margins ...... 167 Tiredness and the Extraction of Labor ...... 169 Neoliberal Labor ...... 169 The Trajectory of Interests and Childhoods...... 171 Limitations ...... 172 Assembled Networks ...... 173 Ambiguous Networks ...... 175 Implications for Practice: Un-Networked Interests and Systemic Inequality ...... 177 Access ...... 178 Boundaries of Innocent Spaces ...... 179 Emerge from What, And How? ...... 180 References ...... 182 Appendix A – Classroom Map ...... 195 Appendix B – Views of the Classroom Space ...... 196 Appendix C – Timeline of the Store Project ...... 200

List of Tables

Table 3.1 – Demogaphics of Child Participants ...... 45 Table 3.2 – Demographics of Teachers ...... 46 Table 3.3 – Schedule of the Day ...... 48 Table 3.4 – Data Sources & Rationale ...... 52

List of Figures

Figure 3.1 – The Elf House wall ...... 42 Figure 3.2 – Knotted interactions...... 43 Figure 3.3 – Sisters, clock, key, dinosaur ...... 60 Figure 4.1 – A customer waits to enter The Store for Everything ...... 68 Figure 4.2 – The coin in Celine’s pocket ...... 69 Figure 4.3 – A classroom parent buys baked goods at the Real Store ...... 76 Figure 4.4 – The art teacher works with the preschoolers to assemble the Store ...... 81 Figure 4.5 – The preschoolers design their own currency based off of U.S. notes ...... 82 Figure 4.6 – Ian gives change as a shopkeeper ...... 83 Figure 4.7 – Sophie and Celine come up with matching outfits ...... 87 Figure 4.8 – Sophie and Celine riding on a public bus with the class ...... 88 Figure 4.9 – Adam’s dinosaur toys from home ...... 92 Figure 4.10 – Empty shelves become bunk beds for Sophie and Celine ...... 98 Figure 4.11 – Items from home...... 100 Figure 5.1 – Towline as a “device of interessement” ...... 106 Figure 5.2 – The “geometry” of “interessement” ...... 107 Figure 5.3 – “Obligatory passage point”...... 116 Figure 6.1 – Andrei and Mika arrive with their lollipops ...... 147 Figure 6.2 – Paolo gives change for a five-dollar bill ...... 153 Figure 6.3 – A big Bake Sale sign made by preschoolers ...... 154 Figure 6.4 – Sheila checks the conversion chart on the wall ...... 155

Acknowledgments

This work was made possible by many communities that have formed and shaped the ideas that became part of this dissertation. The immediate satisfaction of its completion comes solely from the occasions of acknowledging and remembering the people I have come to know and learn from through the process.

I send much love to my RGC family that has given me every opportunity to grow as a teacher of young children. Susan, you and the late Dr. Leslie Williams have created a beautiful home for so many. Come home and sit in the classroom with us any time. Patrice, thank you for your leadership that embraces all that teachers bring to the classroom. You support our other lives as students, parents, researchers, artists, travelers and view them as assets.

Thank you, Margaret, for being my colleague and teacher. You see children with the high esteem, love, fascination, respect, and thoroughness that you do all people. Erica, your heart continues to grow with no bounds for children and families. Thank you for inspiring from whatever platform you have, whether in the classroom or beyond. Jeanne, Hema, and Dana – I had the best fortune of starting my career under the mentorship of the Dream Team of early childhood teachers. Your legacies of warmth and curiosity with children will continue as long as there is pizza on Fridays. Marta, I learned from our trip to China what a world class teacher looks like. Your inquiry with children is magical and I will never see everyday materials the same way.

Lexi, you are always there for your friends whether their age is still counted by months or whether they need to take a break from writing over margaritas.

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Thank you to all my fellow doc students for your camaraderie. Emmy and Amanda, thank you for showing each step of the way in navigating being a teacher, student, and researcher. I get to see firsthand how you bring your interpretive lenses to the exquisite subtleties of the small moments in classroom life to the larger questions of reimagining what teaching sounds like, looks like, and feels like. To my study group, Katie, Nicole, and Daniel, that won’t quit until we all hit sumbit[sic]. To Claire, Nicole Fox, Aura, Gail, Sarah, Cindy, Rachel, Bernadette, and

Brennan for writing with me and/or encouraging me to keep going. To Maureen for staying up late to let me practice my presentation and letting me know you are there for me.

Thank you to all my TC professors for seeing me through. Nancy and Sam, for taking me under their wings and encouraging me to apply to the EdD program. Haeny, I am continually amazed at how you go above and beyond to be there for your students. Whether it’s writing a paper about your students’ research strands or producing a podcast or video just for a class session or navigating and thinking alongside us in the dissertation, you put us at the intersections of your skills, passions, and attention. María Paula, thank you for moving my thinking forward on issues of equity and critical teaching practice. Your questions of “but what if…,” and, “why couldn’t it be…,” reorient and expand how I see my work. Emilie, it’s an honor to meet you after finding your work in my review of literature. I’m looking forward to finding new ways that our research interests resonate. Thank you, Matthew for bringing thoughtful and fresh eyes to my study.

To the Leu family, you have been safe harbor for me and my mom. There is always fresh rice in the Zojirushi rice cookers whenever I come home to you. The world would be so small without you.

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To my second family, the Fynns. It has been a blessing to know you all and to witness your family grow over the years. Your support and care for me has meant everything.

To my church family at Union, thank you for many, many years of encouraging notes and care packages. It might be hard to remember a time when I was not in grad school, but this is it, I promise. We’ll find other occasions for notes and care packages to spur one another onward and upward. Jesus, I thank you for these families that have grounded me and for your everlasting kindness that has seen me through many seasons of faith.

K. H. L.

Dedication

To my mom, for her perseverance through difficulty and dedication to my education.

Preface

First impressions count for something but like all memories, they are subject to reinterpretation. At the spring potluck dinner at the school where I teach, we usually meet some new families that will join the classroom next year. On one particular year, we were anticipating twin boys who, upon first look, just might make it all too easy to rhyme the word “double.”

“Good luck,” quipped the twin boys’ mom as the boys wrestled and climbed up and under the table. These were obviously active boys who looked like they could play football one day, or maybe even in just a few moments. On their first day of school, they free climbed our loft. At the park, they gathered sticks and used them as swords to fight each other. Would the rest of their school days be filled with hearing no and don’t because their inclinations do not fit into early schooling? Perhaps they would need to be broken in like wild stallions to be “ready” for school.

Yes, they were very active and physical; we played a lot of football during our outdoor time those two years. However, they shared much more of themselves with the class. It was their interest in The Beatles that grew into a concert and band project. They often listened to “Come and Get It” at home with their parents and brought that into their play at school. They set up a stage and recreated Beatles music videos. One played my guitar and the other sang into a pretend microphone on a stage that they built with large wooden blocks. This led to learning more

Beatles songs, reading books about The Beatles, performing our favorite songs in a real auditorium with real microphones and amps, and visiting Strawberry Fields and John Lennon’s apartment at The Dakota.

The interest culminated in a battle-of-the-bands type concert that the class planned together. We split up into bands, came up with and voted on our own band names (my favorite band name, “Zebra Nail Polish,” sadly did not make the cut), picked out set lists, wrote and sent out invitations, chose instruments, held rehearsals and dress rehearsals, coordinated outfits, made tickets, and transformed the classroom into an auditorium for a live audience. “The Beats,” “The

Preschoolers That Never Give Up,” and, “Recken Sprite” put on a memorable rock show.

My research into children’s interests is linked to my curiosity of who each child is and my desire to teach children in a way that reflects the vibrancy of their lives. Curriculum, like relationships, is alive and can emerge in response to children and the relationships that form in the classroom. The preschool teaching team has developed curriculum from interests that come from home life as well as serendipitous moments in play just like in The Beatles project. One year, a small group’s excitement about the Japanese anime film, My Neighbor Totoro, became an adapted play that was performed for parents (Leu, Templeton, & Yoon, 2016). Another year, a would-be rock star’s original song about pancakes became the hit single for a class-made CD

(Leu, 2015).

Such sources of curriculum can easily be overlooked as trivial or not worth school time, but the emotional electricity at moments within these projects still stand out in my mind. There was something special about those projects that curricula that appeal to children in a general sense cannot quite capture. I believe a part of that specialness may be found in what the children bring into the classroom and the ways they transform the life of the classroom. What I designate as children’s “interests” is one placeholder for this ingredient in curriculum that comes alive and emerges.

What an exciting and important responsibility it is to be in the lives of children! The relationships that form in the classroom are complex and emergent: they change, grow, break down, reconstitute, heal, and transform. The liveliness of the classroom relationships fuels my teaching because the outcomes are not necessarily determined. Just like relationships can change in a number of ways, what I teach and how I teach should change according to whom I teach.

Had my initial impressions of the twins remained static without any consideration of their home life and their emerging selves within the classroom, the curriculum would have likely been very different. Through relationships we can ask, “How do I teach this child?” and “What is worth knowing?” in a more particular manner.

This way of teaching is full of uncertainties and contingencies. Each year is a new adventure as the teachers learn who the children are and how they work best. There are moments when I believe I understand a child’s interest only to find shortly after that she has moved on to something seemingly unrelated. Or there may be interests that I find myself resisting even as they continue to endure in individual or groups of children. In my 13 years of engaging with the indeterminate nature of children’s interests, I am fascinated by how “interests” are elevated into classroom curricula and how children themselves shape this notion of their interests. Given the demands of the moment, the day, and the school year, what interests emerge as co-constructed events, sustained by both teachers and students? In this dissertation, my focus is on how the notion of children’s interests is negotiated by the various actors that play a role in constructing classroom curricula. Additionally, I focus on children’s agency in shaping and contesting interests that are used in schooling.

Chapter 1 – Introduction

In this study, I explore the notion of children’s interests as negotiated by their agency and peer cultures (Corsaro, 2003). While children’s interests are widely used to implement curriculum within progressive early childhood settings (birth to age 8) in the United States (Buell

& Sutton, 2008; Jones, 2012; Jones & Nimmo, 1994; Sheerer et al., 1996; Wien, 2006), they may be too simply defined as activity choices or subjects that elicit a reliable favorable response and used to loosely justify adults’ curricular choices (Birbili & Tsitouridou, 2008; Hedges & Cooper,

2016). In order to highlight children’s role in their own socialization and schooling experience

(James & Prout, 1990), I adopt a critical childhoods framework to focus on children’s agentic moves to pursue and push against notions of their interests that arise within a preschool classroom community. I also analyze data with Actor Network Theory (Callon, 1986; Fenwick &

Edwards, 2010; Latour, 2005) as these interests yield power and mass in the classroom through entangled (Barad, 2007; Davies, 2017; de Freitas, 2012) and networked interactions between multiple human and nonhuman actors (Chesworth, 2019; Moberg, 2018a).

Background of the Problem

From an adult perspective, children’s interests are not necessarily linked nor considered when approaching learning. That is, adults are thought to know what is best for children by virtue of age, experience, and societal role. In contrast, the notion of children’s interests is situated within progressive ideals of education that charge adults with discovering and building off children’s wonderings to arrive at productive and tangible outcomes. Emergent curriculum, a widely adopted progressive approach to curriculum in early childhood education, involves

identifying students’ interests and building curriculum upon those interests (Stacey, 2011; Wien,

2006). This educational tradition recognizes the potential of engaging children’s interests rather than delimiting these from more “important” learning. Young children are abundantly curious since many experiences are naturally new to them such as animals, myths, sports, music, or technology. Though everything may potentially be interesting, fascination carries on into an enduring interest that may be a site of deep exploration. Therefore, such interests may be a rich source of curricular ideas to develop through inquiry that may even become expertise (Wade,

1999, 2001).

Emergent Curriculum

In emergent curriculum, knowledge and learning is not unidirectional, flowing from the teacher to student, but is grounded in children’s experiences and responsive to what emerges from their lives (Jones & Nimmo, 1994; Moll et al., 1992). This approach assumes that children are not receivers of knowledge but are considered a source of curriculum. In this way, curriculum emerges from the child. The curriculum is not set before the school year begins but is contingent upon an ever-changing understanding of children because it matters who they are and what they bring into the classroom. Children have identities that make them distinct from any other child. Therefore, they cannot be simply categorized or labeled. Furthermore, just as there is no “typical” individual child, teachers need to know who their students are in order to adapt their teaching to a unique group of children and their particular ways of interacting in the classroom.

Assessments, examinations, and other diagnostic tools are one method of understanding children and their competencies. While they are widely used in schooling, they offer only a limited view of who young people are. Children are no simpler to know than a person of any other age. To account for this complexity, a more holistic view of the child is necessary and may

include understandings of the child’s identity in relation to family, culture, personality, learning styles, intelligences, and interests. These factors intersect in a child’s identity and may be a powerful source of learning as children seek to make sense of their experience in the world

(Miller Marsh & Zhulamanova, 2017). Emergent curriculum keys in on interest as a factor that overlaps with other aspects of children’s identity.

“Interest”

Dewey (1913) defined interest as a “propulsive” action toward an object of interest that is related to one’s identity formation. According to Dewey, the force of this propulsion is, “the recognized identity of the fact to be learned or the action proposed with the growing self” (p. 7).

The motivation to learn through interests is set in line with identity exploration. A child’s interests can provide insight into who the child is and her/his ways of relating to the world.

Dewey contrasted interest with “effort,” which is the energy children expend to accomplish a task outside of their interest. Even when employing effort, children find ways to align it to their interests subtly and subversively. Interest is always at play when children’s agency is accounted for.

However, interests are complex constructions and may not be so straightforward.

Freudian psychology reveals that much lays beneath the surface of behavior and conscious thought (Freud, 1915). Therefore, children’s presentation of interests may not be taken at face value. While some children’s interests may appear to be readily apparent such as in a child who is known to be an “animal lover,” that child’s interest may or may not actually only be about animals and may not be the same kind of interest as another child’s interest in animals. For example, an interest in dinosaurs may not actually be just an interest in dinosaurs, but possibly also an exploration of power or fear and other “real questions” that children have about the world

around them (Hedges & Cooper, 2016; Wells, 1999). Hedges et al. (2011) espouse a sociocultural (Vygotsky, 1978) view of children’s interest, defining it as “children’s spontaneous, self-motivated play, discussions, inquiry and/or investigations that derive from their social and cultural experiences” (p. 187). Thus, interests are different for each individual and are simultaneously yet-to-be-determined as it is shaped by their interactions with others.

Davies (2017) explains that “we are each, singly and collectively, produced through these encounters; we are multiplicities, always in process of becoming other than we were before” (p.

67). A child’s interest in “dinosaurs” could also be described as an interest in engaging with a parent who values trips to a local natural history museum.

Interests, then, are not necessarily located within any individual though they may often be attributed to individuals, such as in notions of an “individual interest” (Krapp, 1999). According to DiGiacomo et al. (2018), it may be useful to define interest

not as a fixed or inherent trait, but rather as a multiply constituted and fluid phenomenon shaped by and through one’s experiences in and across the various sociocultural, socioeconomic, and sociopolitical contexts of everyday life. (p. 52)

This multiple constitution of interest may involve nature, nurture, as well as the material environment (e.g., a museum, fossils, toys, books, a dinosaur lunch box). Moberg (2018a) studied interests with Actor-Network Theory (ANT) to demonstrate how commonly overlooked nonhuman factors such as a classroom schedule, popular toys, and gathering rugs are brought to bear on how an interest develops within a classroom. Through interaction within networks of meaning that become relevant within the classroom (Fenwick & Edwards, 2010), interests are co-constructed between children, teachers, families, communities, and materials across histories, cultures, and discourses.

Problem Statement

The study addresses two issues within early childhood education. The first is that curriculum is determined for children within a neoliberal context to prepare them for a future stage in life and constrains children’s agency in co-constructing their experience in classrooms.

The second is that even within settings that seek to center children’s interests within the curriculum, the notion of children’s interests is under-theorized and therefore can still ultimately be co-opted to serve adults’ agendas (Birbili & Tsitouridou, 2008) and be used as a form of pedagogical control (Wood, 2014). Both of these issues are problematic because they do not acknowledge children’s agency as social actors in their own lives (James & Prout, 1990).

Predetermined Learning in a Neoliberal Context

Recognizing and supporting children’s interests in curriculum and the classroom community is important especially within a neoliberal educational climate that necessitates the standardization and uniformity of teaching and learning. The institution of schooling positions children as raw economic resources to sustain economic growth (Au, 2008). In order to prepare children to be competitive on the school market and future job market in the global economy, policy makers and educators determine for children the knowledges that are worthy of time and resources. As learning goals are predetermined, “the tension between standardization and individually responsive practices is felt keenly in early childhood education” (Paris & Lung,

2008, p. 254). Early childhood settings face pressure to move away from play-based curriculum and secure children’s “readiness” for a structured and testing-focused primary school experience.

Standardized tests are linked to definitions of quality schools and effective teachers through reforms such as the No Child Left Behind act (2002-2015) and the Race to the Top grant

(2009). These reforms incentivize schools and teachers to place their efforts toward preparing

children to do well on tests perhaps over other aspects of learning (Brown, 2015; Hursh, 2007).

In 2018, the Trump administration proposed to merge the Education and Labor departments to become the Department of Education and Workforce for “greater efficiency” in government operations (Strauss, 2018 June 21). This formally solidifies the purpose of public education as a preparation for the workforce over other purposes and serves as a sorting mechanism that further perpetuates social and economic disparities (Anyon, 1980; Bowles & Gintis, 1976).

Falchi and Friedman (2015) argue that “living and learning in the now and for the now becomes paramount, rather than getting ready for some unforeseeable future life that simply may not come to be” (p. 119). Children’s present concerns, interests, and lived experiences matter and not only when they converge with standardized learning goals. The “planned enculturation” of neoliberal education is problematic because it preconfigures learning to set outcomes and raises

“the question of who decides what or whose culture should be promoted through education”

(Osberg & Biesta, 2008, p. 315). In a diverse society, children present a wealth of knowledge when invited to be part of the curriculum-making process (Moll et al., 1992).

This study builds on approaches that honor children’s active participation in determining their own educational experiences. Looking more closely at how children are agents in determining their interests alongside teachers would contribute to understanding of early childhood curriculum by finding the lines between “unguided learning” and “planned enculturation” (Osberg & Biesta, 2008). In such a curriculum, teachers do not disappear to let the children fully lead their own learning, but also do not determine the learning for children.

Children may be agentic in determining their own learning experience when teachers and children co-construct curriculum to reflect children’s interests and identities (Falchi & Friedman,

2015). What then might be the possibilities of schooling that involves children in curriculum

making through the discovery of their interests and identity in relation to their world? Markstrom and Hallden (2009) affirm that “children must be analysed as active agents in the society and not merely as recipients of adults’ actions” (p. 113). As technology changes the way information travels and is accessed, children are called forth into a world where agency is crucial and imbibing facts and rote procedures becomes ancillary.

Theorizing Interest

Birbili & Tsitouridou (2008) argue that teachers often do not know the theoretical bases for building curriculum upon children’s interests and justify their curricular decisions with tenuous connections to observable interests. Understandably, children are known to seek out their favorites with great zeal—so much so that visits to the dentist are chased with a reward of a sticker or toothbrush emblazoned with the iconic images of the cartoon character du jour.

However, if students continuously ask to dance to “Let It Go” from Disney’s Frozen or to play out light saber battles from Star Wars (as they have often done in my own classroom), are teachers at the mercy of cleverly crafted melodies, special effects, and advertising campaigns?

Without further consideration for the implications of using children’s interests, educators risk misunderstanding and oversimplifying what children’s genuine interests are or riding a wave of great interest to superficial effect.

Interest is conceptualized in various ways within the literature, which have implications for its understanding and implementation. Interest has been defined in terms of activity choices among a large body of research that view it as a psychological construct that can greatly affect motivation (Hidi, 1990). Given this definition of interest, a subject of interest should be pursued if it is brought up significantly more than other subjects. Such a definition presents problems for implementation as I have experienced in my own practice and have observed in my pilot study.

Some frequently mentioned subjects do not lend themselves to be easily studied or built upon in a meaningful manner. The prevailing interest in my pilot study was what the children called “The

Elf House.” Teachers made connections to elves and Santa, but they discovered that it was enclosed spaces that the children were exploring as they built enclosed spaces for Elsa’s and bees as well. Merely noticing the repeated mentions of “The Elf House” was not a firm enough foundation to build on and neither is a definition of children’s interest based on activity choices.

Another problem with available conceptions of interest is tied to one of its greatest strengths, that is to motivate children. If an interest is found to consistently motivate children to engage, it can be manipulated to serve adult-determined goals such as compliance or sustained attention. Much like how play can be used as a reward for or an accompaniment to undesirable work, appealing to a child’s interest can make obedience more palatable. DiGiacomo et al.

(2018) state that in a “market-driven educational era,” it is important to “[ask] questions that speak to ‘how’ and ‘why’ youth interests take shape, as well as ‘for whom’ particular interest- related pursuits are designed and made visible” (p. 53). Interest sells and is therefore a potential conflict of interest that requires careful unpacking with attention to identifying children’s agentic stake in the interest.

Rationale and Theoretical Framework

This study addresses the problem of standardized paradigms of education by employing a critical childhoods framing of children’s interests that features their agentic moves within their peer cultures and the actor networks (Callon, 1986; Latour, 2005) connected to the classroom community. This theoretical framework posits that discourses of childhood are socially constructed while also granting that adult institutions of schooling and governmental policies take a part in that construction (James & James, 2001). Childhoods are plural and non-

homogenous (Matthews, 2007) so curriculum should reflect the diversity within children’s co- construction of their interests. Furthermore, this study seeks to contribute to understandings of children’s interest within the literature by conceptualizing interest as more than a psychological construct that is located within any individual human actor but involves a network of human as well as nonhuman material actors (Birbili, 2019; Chesworth, 2019; Hedges & Cooper, 2016;

Moberg, 2018a).

Critical Childhoods Studies

Also known as “the new sociology of childhood” (James & Prout, 1990; Matthews,

2007), critical childhoods studies respond to deterministic models of childhood, “in which the child plays a basically passive role” (Corsaro, 2018, p. 7) in being shaped by society.

Deterministic models suggest that children need to be “socialized” to become full participants in society. For example, behaviorism posits that human behavior can be shaped to conform to desired patterns. Similarly, deterministic models regard curriculum and pedagogy as prescription and treatment that lead to measurable outcomes.

Instead, a critical childhoods frame recognizes the importance of children as both

“beings” in the present as well as what they are “becoming” (Lee, 2001; Prout, 2011). James et al. (2005) assert that “‘children’s culture’ can be fruitfully addressed as the temporal site of cultural reproduction,” (p. 82) and that “it is a form of social action … resonant with particular times and places” (p. 90). In other words, children are not blank slates but indeed act to shape their own peer cultures (Corsaro, 2003) and reinterpret adult culture to influence society-at-large

(Corsaro, 2012).

Therefore, this framework suggests that children are already agentic in co-constructing their interests with peers and adults whether they are in classrooms that seek to support their

interests or in ones that do not. Even in the face of standardized schooling, children are both constrained by and make “secondary adjustments” (Goffman, 1961, as cited in Corsaro, 2018, p.

45) to those constraints in order to exhibit agentic control over their experiences. Another implication is that children take up adult-initiated ideas as well as pop culture interests (such as

Disney and Star Wars characters mentioned previously) and reinterpret them for their own purposes in what Corsaro (2012) calls “interpretive reproduction.”

Children’s Agency

Therefore, children are not passive recipients of socialization but take part in interpreting and participating in their very own socialization as agents. James cites Mayall’s (2002) definition of agency that

the agent is someone who does something with other people, and, in so doing, makes things happen, thereby contributing to the wider processes of social and cultural reproduction. (as cited in James, 2009, p. 41)

Within schools, children make their presence felt whether overtly or in disengagement. Children may have so great an effect that teachers and schools have no choice but to change practices and routines in response, such that new rules need to be set or exceptions are made. The critical childhoods framework regards children’s actions as agents “worthy of study in their own right, independent of the perspective and concerns of adults” (James & Prout, 1990, p. 8). Children’s agentic moves to pursue interests need to be studied to better understand their relationship to the ways that teachers interpret what children’s interests are in making curricular decisions.

Resonance and Resistance. In this study, I operationalize children’s agentic moves as

“affective intensities” (Ringrose & Renold, 2014) of resonance and resistance. While there is a continuum between interest and “(dis)interest” (Moberg, 2018a), affective intensities of resonance and resistance may signify sites of tension where actors are making agentic moves to

negotiate a co-constructed and networked interest. The intensity of the interactions signal that something is at stake and is meaningful to the actors involved. Children make moves to push against established regimes of interest by both acknowledging its reality (insofar as it has power to continue affecting the social realm) and resisting it to change it for their own purposes.

Moberg (2018a) describes these moves as “frictions and connections generated by children’s doings in collaborations and breaks” with other actors (p. 116). This raises the value of considering the ways that “disinterest” (p. 123) may be a valuable site to view children’s agentic moves as they refuse a bid from another actor.

In my pilot study, a key episode featured a showdown between two similar but competing play interests: the “Elf House,” which was the established interest, and the “Elsa Castle,” which some Elsa devotees had built out of large blocks before Jeffrey (pseudonym) arrived at school to start building his Elf House. Jeffrey confronted the inhabitants of the Elsa Castle and tried to break down the block wall but the head teacher pronounced that the Elsa Castle was fairly established. Jeffrey cried and was comforted by several adults before making moves to eventually integrate with the Elsa Castle play.

In that episode, the builders of the Elsa Castle resonated with the Elf House interest by replicating the Elf House’s most distinctive feature: a wall made of large blocks to mark off a play space. This new interpretation of the interest was met with resistance, and in both agentic acts of resonance and resistance, the emerging negotiated interest presents itself as a site of investigation that accounts for both teachers’ interpretations of, as well as, children’s agentic moves to co-produce the interest.

Networked Interests

The Elf House interest was not a singular interest but continued to grow as a networked interest that included an Elf on the Shelf toy from Jeffrey’s home, routines of house play, large blocks and open classroom space, a flexible arrival time policy that allowed some children to start playing before others, plans written on chart paper for a classroom version of the Elf House, an Elsa Castle, and a torn down wall that was re-established. According to Fenwick and Edwards

(2010),

ANT approaches can help educators and students together to deconstruct monolithic knowledge systems by examining their multivocality and precarious connections among things and people. ANT unpicks the apparent black boxes of much curricular knowledge and educational practice, and offers resources to trace the many webs and players and non-coherences embedded in them. (p. 55)

In this way, this study uses ANT to discover the many actors that constitute an interest

(Chesworth, 2019). As opposed to research that views interests as a psychological construct located within the mind, a networked view of interest takes a closer look at “the things that are not yet imagined but may be at work” (Fenwick & Edwards, 2010, p. 35). While the interest started with Jeffrey’s intensity of talk and play around the topic of elves, it became useful for more actors in the classroom as a network of meaning was built around it. Fenwick and Edwards

(2010) explain that such a “network was created because it could sustain and propagate accomplishments that were desired by all the participants” (p. 31). The Elf House interest became an “immutable mobile” that others could take up for their own purposes such as by teachers to teach writing and collaborative planning or by those who wished to pretend to be

Elsas.

Research Questions

Within this framing of children’s interests, this study is guided by the following questions:

1. What human and nonhuman actors constitute a network of children’s interests?

2. How do children resonate with and resist against those interests within a

preschool classroom?

3. How do teachers take up and respond to children’s interests in the curriculum?

Significance

Framing children’s interest as a networked and co-constructed process rather than a teacher-driven or child-initiated process could address some concerns that have been raised by critics of emergent curriculum. Building a curriculum around the children’s interest does not have to create a feedback loop within the bubble of the child’s experiences. Rodriguez (2013) questions whether child-centered pedagogy reifies neoliberal agendas rather than supports democratic ideals they supposedly serve. Langford (2010) and Surtees (2008) point to the importance of gender, ethnicity, class, and sexuality as factors in constructing what only appears to “naturally” come from the child. Similarly, Norquay (1999) problematizes the conception of curriculum that is “appropriate” to “unique individual” children. Acknowledging the teacher and families’ roles in negotiating what the child brings to curriculum may offer another perspective that is neither teacher-centered nor child-centered (Chesworth, 2019; Rogoff et al., 1996).

Additionally, there needs to be new pathways for employing children’s interests in curriculum that do not necessarily fall under a “brand” of emergent curriculum. Curriculum that is constructed from children’s unique interests does not suggest any particular aesthetic for the classroom environment the way some interpretations of the Reggio Emilia approach (Gandini,

1993) might call for documentation panels or a light table. Much of the literature on emergent curriculum is associated with the Reggio Emilia approach, but broadening the theories on emergent curriculum may encourage teachers to try different ways of co-constructing curriculum with children that acknowledges their agentic moves. Un-branding the use of children’s interests can also present options for teachers in settings that do not implement emergent curriculum.

Chapter 2 – Literature Review and Conceptual Framework

There is a substantial body of literature that seeks to understand interest and what its relationship is to education and learning. Research on using interest in education reflects a philosophical perspective, an educational-psychological perspective (Krapp, 2007), a sociocultural perspective, and a network perspective. However, there is a need for more research that explores the ways that children take up each others’ interests within peer cultures (Corsaro,

2003) for their own purposes that may be distinct from the purposes of early schooling. This chapter surveys these various perspectives in order to question the application, purpose, and role of children’s interests in children experiences in early childhood education and care.

I develop an operationalized definition of children’s interests to argue for a need to understand children’s interests in terms of their social, emotional, and relational needs alongside educational purposes. Within early childhood curriculum, how can we understand children’s interests as intellectual and personal pursuits that forefront their agency and identity? That is, I argue that research on children’s interests needs to further unpack issues of knowledge and choice to address hidden assumptions that children’s interests necessarily solely reflect their own knowledges and choices.

Background of Research on Interest

The seemingly common-sense notion that people learn better when they are interested is supported by a considerable history of research. However, many prominent scholars who study interest have concluded that research on interest is disjointed and incoherent as a whole (Allport,

1946, as cited in Renninger & Hidi, 2011; Birbili, 2019; Birbili & Tsitouridou, 2008; Renninger

& Hidi, 2011; Hedges & Cooper, 2016). According to Krapp (1999),

researchers use different conceptualizations, each of which reflects different metatheoretical and methodological beliefs, general theoretical orientations, and paradigms of empirical research. (p. 24)

These disparate definitions result in different applications within educational and research contexts.

Philosophical Perspective

Scholars have asked several questions about the nature of interest and have offered a variety of ways to define it since at least the beginning of the 19th century. Hidi (1990) and

Schiefele (1991) trace the modern theory of interest to the German philosopher Herbart

(1806/1965, 1841/1965; as cited in Hidi, 1990), who believed that teaching to interest leads to deeper and more meaningful learning experiences that result in improved retention and sustained motivation (Schiefele, 1991, p. 300). With the development of the field of psychology, pioneering psychologists at the turn of the 20th century took note of the impact of interest on human behavior (James, 1890; as cited in Hidi, 1990; Baldwin, 1897; as cited in Hidi, 1990;

Claparede, 1911; as cited in Hidi, 1990; Schiefele, 1991).

Dewey’s (1913) work on interest, Interest and Effort defined the concept along philosophical terms. According to Dewey (1913), the defining characteristics of interest are that it is active, object-based, and personally meaningful. Dewey notes that “the etymology of the term inter-esse, ‘to be between,’” places interest in the path of one’s personal development such that pursuing “interest marks the annihilation of the distance between the person and the materials and results of his action” (p. 17). In contrast to employing “effort” to engage in an activity that is not of personal significance, “an interest is primarily a form of self-expressive

activity—that is, of growth that comes through acting upon nascent tendencies” (p. 21). Dewey takes this distinction further and maintains that there is nothing done from pure effort. Interest is always involved, and direct interest is replaced with an appeal to another kind of interest, whether it is the promise of monetary reward for drudgery or the approval of an authority figure.

Thus, a defining characteristic of Dewey’s conceptualization of interest is the process of identification of a person with the object of interest. The interest “lies in the direction of the agent’s own growth, and is, therefore, imperiously demanded if the agent is to be himself” (p. 7).

Dewey’s conceptualization of interest would provide a foundation for a modern conceptualization of interest as an aspect of personal growth and self-motivated learning

(Schiefele, 1991; McPhail et al., 2000). However, research into interest lay dormant during the mid-1900s (Renninger & Hidi, 2011) as psychological research shifted towards defining motivation along the lines of “curiosity, attention achievement motivation, intrinsic motivation,

[and] flow” (Krapp, 1999, p. 23). Research on interest gained momentum again starting in the

1980s (Renninger & Wozniak, 1985) and has followed an arc that can be called the “educational- psychological conceptualization of interest” (Krapp, 2007), abbreviated here as the “edu- psychological” perspective.

Edu-Psychological Perspective

As the field of psychology grew, the study of interest focused on understanding behavior and the effects of interest-based learning on cognition. This edu-psychological conceptualization of interest falls within the broader study of human motivation and learning (Krapp, 2007).

Interest is a factor that can motivate humans to respond positively to particular learning stimuli in a single event as well as across longer periods within a lifespan. Studies study interest and

“interestingness” in relation to academic achievement, acquired subject knowledge, learning outcomes, attention, learning strategies, and quality of learning experience (Krapp, 1999).

Though conceptualizations of interest vary within this perspective, there are commonalities within the literature that are generally accepted as the person-object theory of interest (POI) (Schiefele et al., 1983, as cited in Krapp, 1999) that states that interest is oriented toward an object of interest such as “concrete things, a topic, a subject-matter, an abstract idea, or any other content” (p. 26). Interest comes about through continuous cognitive as well as affective interaction between a person and the environment. Furthermore, the person may or may not be aware of their own experience of being interested but the object of interest physiologically triggers the reward circuitry in the person’s brain (Renninger & Hidi, 2011).

The edu-psychological perspective studies interest by breaking it down into categories, levels, and stages. Krapp, Hidi, and Renninger (1992) delineate three levels from which to analyze interest: individual, actualized, and situational interest. An individual interest develops within an individual such that the person is predisposed to engage with the object of interest.

Studies in individual interest, or personal interest (Renninger, 1990), consider the intraindividual development of an interest and the stages that mark its progression. When a person connects with an object of interest, the interest is considered an actualized interest. In situational interest, interest is invoked in people by the “interestingness” of an object or learning environment.

Factors that characterize interesting learning environments appeal to a broad audience. Educators might then know how to design learning to spark interest (e.g., factors that make text interesting to read).

Krapp (2002a) maps out a three-stage model for the ontogeny of individual interest. First, situational interest is triggered or awakened by external stimuli. The interest is then stabilized as

more is learned about the object of interest. Lastly, the interest becomes an enduring interest in a particular subject. Krapp (2002b) describes these stages as the “catch-facet,” “hold-facet,” and

“internalization” of interest where the interest captures interest, is sustained, and then integrated with the self. Hidi and Renninger (2006) propose a similar model and describe the ontogeny of interest in four phases: triggered situational interest, maintained situational interest, emerging individual interest, and well-developed individual interest. According to Krapp (2005), individuals move through these levels and stages of interest through a dual regulation system where the object of interest stimulates cognitive curiosity as well as an emotional connection; this is what bonds the person to the subject of study.

Research studies that take on the edu-psychological perspective typically aim to find the links between interest and variables in academic learning using quantitative methods (though there are qualitative studies as well; cf. Renninger & Hidi, 2002). For example, Schiefele (1990) studied the effect of interest in a topic on comprehending text. Even after controlling for intelligence, short-term memory, and prior knowledge of the topic, interest was correlated with better comprehension especially for more difficult text. Naceur and Schiefele (2005) looked at the effect of interest-based learning on long term retention. They provided high schoolers with two texts to read and tested them for retention after a week. Interest was a significant intraindividual factor showing that individuals remember text better when it is of interest.

However, other factors such as prior knowledge explained differences more across individuals.

McPhail et al. (2000) found that 6th grade students who chose interest-based inquiry learning courses show higher affective activation. Such results would seem to suggest giving students choice over inquiry projects can lead to more engagement. This line of research enlists students’

interests for academic purposes. Interest is then not just a personality trait or an aspect of self but also a tool for pedagogy.

Sociocultural Perspective

Critics of the edu-psychological perspective move away from locating children’s interests as a psychological phenomenon within an individual child and point to the broader sociocultural and historical context from which interests may arise (Hedges et al., 2011). Cremin and Slatter

(2004, as cited in Hedges & Cooper, 2016) argue that the edu-psychological perspective limits its definition of interest to activity choices. Hedges and Cooper (2016) add that

such research commonly relied on surveys, interviews with adults or a researcher-applied rating scale of individual children rather than engaging with children’s own actions and understandings. (p. 305)

This is problematic because it mostly sidesteps questions of whose knowledges and choices children’s interests uphold. The edu-psychological perspective assumes the child’s interest are found within the child’s mind. Instead, Hedges and Cooper (2016) argue that children’s interests are constructed within sociocultural interactions through intent participation with family members and in communities (Paradise & Rogoff, 2009), which builds funds of knowledge that can be used in developing curriculum (Gonzalez et al., 2005).

From a sociocultural perspective, children’s interests may be developed by “observing and pitching in” during everyday activities within the home in what Paradise and Rogoff (2009) call “intent participation.” Exposure to potential interests such as cooking, reading, being active, and caring for animals or babies could start within the home since there is a drive to find belonging as an active member within a community. It is a common sight to see children play out what they observe their parents do such as making phone calls, going off to work, or preparing a meal. Hedges et al. (2011) found that children’s interests may often be linked to taking part in

household tasks, exploration of parents’ and family members’ work and leisure activities, identification with family beliefs and values, exploration of teachers’ and peers’ interests, involvement in cultural events and holidays, as well as exposure to pop culture. Through their participation in both adult cultures and peer cultures, children build up rich funds of knowledge

(Gonzalez et al., 2005) that Hedges and Cooper (2016) argue can be a more situated framework to understand children’s interests.

Chesworth (2016) built on Hedges’s work on the sociocultural conceptualization of children’s interests by video recording children’s play to elicit insider responses from the children as well as their parents. Chesworth’s (2016) findings “raise questions regarding the influence that differing funds of knowledge may have upon the manifestation of power, agency and choice with young children’s peer cultures” (p. 304). Within peer cultures, the diversity of funds of knowledge may be part of the basis for inclusion and exclusion in play. However,

“mutually constituted funds of knowledge” (p. 305) was a potential site for building

“togetherness” when all participants exhibited agency. Chesworth’s (2016) study demonstrates that interests are not immune to the effects of power in deciding whose knowledges and choices constitute children’s interests.

Hedges and Cooper (2016) also point out that interests cannot always be taken at face value as is the case within research that views interests as activity choices. An interest may actually point to children’s “real questions” (Wells, 1999, as cited in Hedges & Cooper, 2016) about “birth, death, good, evil, power, danger, survival, generosity, adventure” (Bereiter, 2002, p. 301, as cited in Hedges & Cooper, 2016). A sociocultural perspective on interest proposes that when children explore their interests they are essentially asking, “How can I make sense of my world to lead an interesting, fulfilling and meaningful life as a participant in my family,

community and culture?” (Hedges & Cooper, 2016, p. 307; Hedges, 2010). Without consideration of children’s underlying motives and questions, understandings of children’s interests remain superficial such as when a child is said to be interested in cars, superheroes, or

Disney princesses. Studying a child’s interest must account for the context from which it arises and flexible in considering multiple interpretations.

Network Perspective

Post-humanist (and new materialist) studies of children’s interests have conceptualized it as a network of related meanings between both human and nonhuman actors. Using Actor-

Network Theory (ANT), Moberg (2018a) shows how children’s interests are influenced by sociocultural elements as well as “carpets, Minecraft figures, boxes, …and schedules” (p. 113).

Moberg demonstrated how a teachers’ understanding that children were interested in playing indoors instead of moving outside was determined by the children’s unrest as well as through the combination of the availability of calming magnet toys, a carpet that invites children to gather in play, and the sound of an intensely crying child. The children’s pleas to stay inside along with their stealth movement of their nametags away from the outdoor slot were met with additional favorable factors. Moberg explains that

the curriculum concept of children’s interests is circulated and comes to act through all of these association and breaks between children, teachers, nametags, carpets and laminated pictures. (p. 121)

Moberg’s study draws attention to the material constitution of interest and that interests come to be what they are by nonhuman influence as well.

ANT also offers a way of understanding the “black box” of children’s interests to investigate how it develops and changes. ANT can reveal “multiple ontologies” to show versions of a child’s interest that exist simultaneously (Fenwick & Edwards, 2010). This view of interest

takes it beyond the social realm and acknowledges how a child’s interest is multiple and is always translated by and acts upon other actors. The way a child’s interest plays out in different ways depending on how it acts upon, intersects with, and is changed by actors within a network.

An interest can very well be translated as an “obsession” or “hobby” depending on the actors working upon the interest. Or an interest in trains or animals could possibly be approached from a scientific angle or taken along a new path with the emergence of a related popular television show or an easily accessible museum. Yoon (2013) says that this process of

curricular translation is a reappropriated process of creating meaning anew. Hence, translations are not static, but are repopulated with new meaning whenever teachers and students take them up in classroom spaces. (p. 149)

As children engage with adults, other children, and available artifacts, their interests continually shift and branch out depending on how it acts upon or is translated by other actors.

Heydon, Crocker, and Zhang (2014) studied how literacy curriculum in a Kindergarten class was a network effect that included human actors, policies, as well as materials. Heydon et al. traced the exchange of ideas, the curation of materials, and contextual shifts that led the class to move from a study of Roald Dahl’s Willy Wonka and the Great Glass Elevator to an interest in lifecycles, which led to the introduction of tadpoles and E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web, which continued on into a study of birds and eggs with the arrival of spring. The connections between each curricular element might not have been an obvious one, but through a network of actors, they were brought together. Through an ANT lens, Heydon et al. (2014) view

curriculum as multiple, dynamic and the effect of a network of actors who change and influence each other, means that classroom curricula are differently formed depending upon who or what are involved, and all actors have the potential to translate the effects of others. (p. 28)

Likewise, defining an interest in any singular, stable, and discreet manner is impossible. A child’s interest from one context might appear to look and sound the same in another but is

always being translated in different ways. From a network perspective, children’s interests within the

enacted curriculum [is] seen as more complex than a negotiation between students and teachers. Rather, it [is] both expanded and constrained by the changing materiality of the classroom, and the networks of distant actors whose work was also connected to the moment. (Ferguson, 2018, p. 204)

The network perspective offers a tracing of how events unfold with and through nonhuman actors as well as how interest itself can be viewed as intra-activity (Barad, 2007) where materials act upon humans to create an interest as much as humans take an interest in certain materials. Chesworth (2019) interpreted an episode of a child playing with water from a network perspective to demonstrate how a young child’s engagement with water could be seen as the child learning about the properties of water as well as “learning with water” (p. 6). In

Chesworth’s (2019) study, a teacher set up an activity where children could learn how water flows down a slope. However, the children made the water flow beyond the teacher-defined confines of the activity to create a puddle that then became the subject of interest. A network

“reading suggests that a dynamic configuration of humans, materials, spaces, practices and discourses were acting together to create the children’s interest in the puddle formation” (p. 6).

According to Chesworth (2019), “interests can therefore be understood as the means by which children learn with, rather than learn about, the components of the worlds in which they live” (p.

7). Such a perspective of interest makes it not just a psychological or human construct, but an interconnected and material phenomenon.

Children’s Agency in Negotiating Interests within Play and Peer Cultures

The literature presented thus far offers insight into what interests are, how they may be defined, what shapes their ontology, and how they are constituted within home and classroom spaces. I build my conceptualization of children’s interests within this study based on this body

of research and use its perspectives to understand interest as a sociocultural construction that is multiply produced through networked translations. However, embedded in the practice of using interest in education are questions of whose knowledges are valued and whose choices matter. I argue that it is only an illusion that children’s interests, as implemented within educational settings, necessarily reflect children’s knowledges and choices by virtue of being attributed to children.

While philosophical and edu-psychological perspectives tend to view children’s personal interests as a construct located within the child, sociocultural and network perspectives raise the interconnected nature of children’s interests as a construct that is translated within ever-shifting contexts. Interests are made to hold weight not only by a person’s choice to engage in a particular activity or by the attractive properties of a subject matter to generate interest but by generational power (Mayall, 2008) that guides what is valued knowledge and what choices are made available. It is therefore in children’s play and peer cultures that children demonstrate agency in negotiating their interests.

Whose Knowledges Count as An Interest?

Interest is linked to the learning process as a factor in how people find a personal stake in what they learn, as in individual interest, or are compelled to engage a topic when situational interest is triggered (Krapp et al., 1992). The content of that learning is always mediated as when children learn through intent participation in cultural activities (Paradise & Rogoff, 2009).

Within educational settings that use children’s interests in the curriculum (i.e., emergent curriculum), interests are informed by families, communities, schools, and pop culture (Hedges et al., 2011) such that these interests may be viewed as funds of knowledge (Moll et al., 1992) that children bring into the classroom space.

However, these knowledges are not neutral and are their value is contested in various arenas even when children’s interests are foundational to the curriculum (Chesworth, 2019). In a study with Greek early childhood teachers, Birbili (2019) found that teachers’ views on what counts as knowledge influences how they respond to children’s interests. For example, teachers leaned on “classic” topics that were based on the calendar, which included seasons and holidays.

One teacher reasoned that “a teacher’s goals ‘cannot always be worked through children's interests’” (p. 7). Another believed that anything can become an interest and that it ultimately depends on how teachers can make a topic interesting to children. Birbili (2019) reports that

“only interests with a clearly perceived connection to curriculum goals are utilized by the teachers of the study” (p. 11). These qualitative findings are not conveyed as representative of all teachers who implement emergent curriculum, but point to the complexity of genuinely taking up children’s interests in curriculum (p. 10).

Control

This complexity is illustrative of the base tensions in early childhood curriculum that

Wood and Hedges (2016) identify as issues of content, coherence, and control. These tensions play out in teachers’ practice as they create curriculum. Even for teachers and settings that value play and children’s interests, “interpretations of play and learning are inevitably pedagogical, in that perceived outcomes must be framed in ways that align with curriculum goals” (p. 391).

When children’s interests fall out of the realm of adult-valued content, perceived coherence, and teacher control, they risk being framed as leisure and perhaps less fruitful for use in curriculum.

The knowledges enacted within children’s play and interests are then filtered in what Rogers

(2010) calls the “pedagogization of play” where play “has increasingly become an instrument for learning adult competencies” and “is valued mainly for the ways in which it reproduces and

rehearses the expectations of society” (p. 154). Interest, similarly, may be colonized by adult interests.

When control becomes a primary concern for the classroom, children’s agency to inform curriculum is constrained. Heydon, Moffat, and Iannacci (2015) studied the classroom-enacted literacy curriculum at a Canadian kindergarten to investigate what networked actors produced the curriculum and what implications it had for children’s literacy and identity options. They found that actors such as a large class size had a regulatory effect on children’s available expressions of literacy and exploration because teachers needed to focus on the control of voices and bodies.

Heydon et al. (2014) look not just at teachers’ actions or the impact of class size but note the absence of mediating actors to make available a wider range of possibilities for children’s enactment of knowledge and identity exploration.

Funds of Identity in Children’s Spaces

The issue of control over interests and curriculum is a matter of control over knowledge and consequently of identity as well. Children’s interest can be a “funds of identity” “through which human beings constitute themselves. People are perpetually engaged in processes whereby they define and produce their own self-understanding” (Esteban-Guitart & Moll, 2014, p. 39).

Esteban-Guitart and Moll (2014) used self-portraits and relational mapping to elicit the identities that youth hold. One 19-year-old identified “literature, Japanese culture, the Internet, role- playing, psychology, music, fantasy” (p. 40) as elements of her identity. Children may define themselves in relation to their interests and accumulate funds of identity in those activities.

According to Esteban-Guitart and Moll (2014), “children, too, create their own funds of knowledge, which may be independent from the adult’s social life” (p. 43) even as “social institutions and practices (work, school, church, sport) work as a hub of activities, resources, and

patterns of identity that are available to children” (p. 37), children can exhibit agency in responding to how they take up those identities.

Miller Marsh and Zhulamanova (2017) take up the notion of funds of identity to look at how various identities may or may not be available to preschool children within the curriculum.

They find that adults’

perspectives of the children’s interest and knowledge were limited by [an] inability to see their curriculum making potential beyond the classroom walls and by [a] hesitation to offer the curriculum the children desire (Miller Marsh & Zhulamanova, 2017, p. 1013) because the children’s interest in Disney princesses presented potentially problematic identities.

However, the children “entered into pretend play by accessing familiar storylines, and based on their own identities and the children’s literature they were reading, created new storylines along the way” (Miller Marsh & Zhulamanova, 2017, p. 1013).

Controlling Pop Culture. As shown in Miller Marsh and Zhulamanova’s (2017) study, pop culture is a site of contested knowledge and often not considered an interest to follow.

Hedges et al. (2011) found that teachers would “deflect” or “divert” interests in pop culture to more acceptable versions of the interest. Since pop culture interests can often be strong desires, teachers may feel a need to censor or limit it. However, Hedges (2011) argues that pop culture is a fund of knowledge from which children explore “friendship, risk taking, danger, good, evil, and helping others” (p. 28).

Rather than passively reproduce pop culture, children reinterpret it for their own purposes

(Wohlwend, 2009). Wohlwend (2013) explains that children are “produsers (Bruns, 2008) who

[use] microtactics to repurpose and twist the meanings of the media they [consume]” (p. 10).

Furthermore, children use pop culture as a “textual resource” and “is constitutive of children’s own childhoods and, at least potentially, of their pathways into school literacy” (Dyson, 2003, p.

355). Yoon’s (2014) study of Kindergarten children’s writing practices demonstrates how pop culture knowledge and traditional academic learning can be combined when children are given the space to play. The children in the study took up the “resources they learned in school (e.g. friendly letters, phonemic awareness, letters)…to reinvent themselves…, to navigate conflicts…, and to build new relationships” (p. 119) for their purposes within play. So when it comes to questions of control over curriculum, children can and do control their interests even in pop culture that adults can sometimes view as dangerous knowledge.

Who Chooses Interests?

The assumption that interests are solely represented by children’s choices is hidden in the envelope of its name. Interest may be defined as simply what children choose, yet there are many factors implicated in those choices. Children do not choose within a vacuum but from an environment that has been constructed by previous generations. Moreover, within educational spaces, the learning environment is embedded with curated choices that are influenced by multiple actors including teachers, policies, and societal shifts. This is not to say that children and their interests are fully at the mercy of these actors and forces. They indeed choose from, with, without, against, and for choices that they inherit.

As a thought experiment, I wonder how an interest attributed to a given child would be different if the child were born in a different place and time. What aspects of that interest would remain similar in essence and which aspects are characteristic of marketing, movements, and mandates? This is of course an impossible question to answer as the child and the interest on a surface level would never be the same because the interests would be named and interpreted in various ways. Hedges (2010) proposes looking at interests on a deeper level. Hedges presents interests as a continuum from activity-based interests that are heavily influenced by “responses

to the environment” (p. 30), to continuing interests that may extend over a period of time and across contexts, to fundamental inquiry interests that reflect a deeper existential inquiry (e.g.

“How can I make and communicate meaning?” and “What is special about my identity in the place I live in?”) (p. 34). While children may not actually express these fundamental inquiry interests as verbal questions, their actions in exploring interests reveal an ongoing investigation to make sense of and participate in their worlds. To inquire into this possibly deeper level of interest, literature on children’s agency and peer cultures may offer insight into the ways children make choices in response to the choices made around their interests within emergent curriculum and other interest-based curricula.

Children’s Agency

Even as the notion of children’s interests is a pedagogical tool explored and used by adults, children actively take up this notion to build their own peer cultures and communities.

According to Corsaro (2012), children “create and participate in their peer cultures by appropriating information from the adult world to address their unique peer concerns” (p. 288).

Research that solely positions children’s interests to further institutional and neoliberal purposes, typically from an edu-psychological perspective, has a blind spot that does not recognize the agency that children already exhibit (Markstrom & Hallden, 2009). Aliwood (2010) credits children for holding “a significant body of knowledge about the functioning of their social world; a knowledge to which most adults do not have access” (p. 217). Aliwood cites Theobold’s (2009, as cited in Aliwood, 2010) example of children “playing the system” by both breaking the rules and also leveraging the rules to “tell on” others in order to achieve desired outcomes within their peer cultures. While teachers may implicitly consider children’s knowledges and choices in building curriculum around their interests, children may also pursue interests based on the

knowledges and choices within their peer cultures that are not readily available to adults and directly useful to institutional definitions of learning.

To acknowledge children’s role in shaping their interests with other actors is to acknowledge that they do not take as they are given, or conversely, what is taken up as an interest by adults is not necessarily what they are offering up. Aliwood (2010) postulates that

“children do not just ‘choose’ what we as teachers in early childhood would want them to choose, they engage in their own political decision making and negotiations” (p. 218). Interest can therefore be found as much in resonance as in resistance (Markstrom, 2010) or (dis)interest

(Moberg, 2018a). Severinsson & Markstrom (2015) maintain that students’ resistance to identities offered within institutions can be framed as a positive force for accountability rather than willful disobedience. Resistance disrupts the disequilibrium of power and can be a resource to recognize children’s agency.

Heydon (2013) found that when funds of knowledge were not present in the curriculum, children made “alternate assemblages” (Fenwick & Edwards, 2010) in response to prescriptive curriculum. While there are “sanctioned literacies” within the curriculum, a “literate underlife” also appears to negotiate what is viewed as valuable knowledge (Finders, 1997, as cited in

Heydon, 2013). Heydon (2013) gives the example of a kindergarten boy who was asked to guess the temperature outside but finds a way to slip in what he really wanted to express: “My brother hit me on the face. I had stitches. I got my head stuck, and …I think it’s 13 degrees Celsius” (p.

505). This move deftly slipped just beneath the threshold of a deviation from the official curriculum. Such a comment by a child may be dismissed as silliness or attention-seeking behavior or a cue to adjust the curriculum to create space for other knowledges to be shared.

Given teachers’ oversight of children’s agency, teachers need to embrace uncertainty

(Chesworth, 2018) and assume of a posture of immaturity (Gallacher & Gallagher, 2008) in methods for implementing curriculum that seeks to forefront children’s knowledges, and choices.

Towards a Methodological Framework of Children’s Agency

Just as the pedagogical use of children’s interests is bound to questions of children’s knowledges and agency, child-centered research shares similar concerns. Consequently, the ethics of research needs to be a prime consideration especially with young children who may be misinterpretation and are vulnerable to coercion and exploitation. Woodhead and Faulkner

(2008) maintain that

power relationships in the research process are traditionally weighted towards the researcher as the expert on children, and on how to study children, on what to study about children and about how to interpret what children say and do. (p. 14)

They assert that children are not to be objects of study but rather subjects and, moreso, participants and co-researchers. Early psychological studies with children experimented on them as objects to see how they would respond to contrived unnaturalistic situations such as the

“strange situation” (Ainsworth et al., 1978) in which children are separated and reunited with mothers to evaluate their attachment styles. Such research reveals how “adults may be unaware of what participating in a study means to children” (Dell Clark, 2011, p. 27).

While research that objectifies children makes certain contributions to the literature, children are more than objects and “are social actors in their own right and thus participants in the shaping of social, political, cultural and economic structures” (Christensen & James, 2008, p.

5). In fact, children already use their knowledges in many contexts and, as Orellana (2001) demonstrates, do work to support their families and schools whether they are formally recognized or compensated for it or not. Children are capable of making an impact in their lives as well as in research. Furthermore, it is important as a case of upholding children’s rights that

they have agency in contributing to the decisions that affect their lives. Dell Clark (2011) cites an example in which children were invited to provide input over designing city spaces based on what they understood to be important for urban spaces. Without their input, certain factors might not have been considered otherwise.

Other research methodologies that take up “child-centered inquiry” (Dell Clark, 2011) involve children in research in various ways. Clark and Moss (2001) developed the “mosaic approach” in which data is collected in various ways, one of which involves children taking the lead in showing what is important to them in a given space. Children are invited to create their own narratives through methods such as

simulation games, role playing, brainstorming, youth clubs, letter writing, public presentations, drawings, collages, map making, youth conducted interviews or surveys, photography and video, music, dance, puppetry, drama, festivals, parades, and competitions. (Dell Clark, 2011, p. 35)

However, the point is not to necessarily create “fun methods” or “child-friendly” methods, but for methods to be “participant-friendly” (Fraser, 2004). In considering the ways in which children communicate within their cultural context, they can be welcomed to express themselves in a way that makes sense to them.

While child participatory methods aim to engage the child in the research process, it is no guarantee that children are necessarily empowered (Gallacher & Gallagher, 2008). Gallacher and

Gallagher (2008) argue that while participatory methods intend to involve children in research they can actually reify adultist notions of participation such as determining research goals through a democratic discussion. Additionally, Gallacher and Gallagher claim that while participatory methods may assume that children are experts on their own lives (Harcourt, 2011), they are not the only experts (Lancaster & Broadbent, 2003). Interestingly, children’s agency can be present even in research designs that do not forefront children’s participatory role. Gallacher

and Gallagher (2008) point out that in their own research, “some of the most fascinating insights have emerged from children acting in unexpected ways: appropriating, resisting or manipulating our research techniques for their own purposes” (p. 508). They describe how children get curious about the researcher’s clipboard or recording device, make scribbles in fieldnotes, and negotiate who gets to sit on the new adult’s lap. Their agency may not be demonstrated in the ways that researchers ask them to or defined in the same terms. In the end, a research study remains a project originated as an adult construction. While children may assent to participating and even co-constructing research, they also have their own questions. What questions do children already ask of their “field sites” and where do they tell the stories of their “findings”? In my own work with children, I find that they constantly test out what it means to be a child and who adults and teachers are whether by words or actions or analysis in sociodramatic or object play. They retell tales from pop culture and reimagine it in their own skin.

Gallacher and Gallagher’s (2008) critiques point out that it is an ongoing endeavor to continue to find ways to not take children’s role in research for granted and to honor their ways of making meaning of the world. Davies et al. (2013) describes this ongoing endeavor as “a moment-by-moment ethical questioning that asks how things come to matter in the ways they do” (p. 680, as cited in Chesworth, 2018). Thus, Chesworth (2018) proposes “acknowledging and embracing the uncertainty in research with young children” (p. 852) by being “[responsive] to the dynamic relationships and interactions associated with the research encounter” (p. 859).

This reflexivity “shifts the emphasis from research as method towards research as ethical praxis” (Palaiologou, 2014, as cited in Chesworth, 2018, p. 859).

Shier (2001) charts five principles in ethically engaging children in research: that they are listened to, supported in expressing their views, have their views taken into account, involved in

decision-making processes, and given shared power and responsibility in decision making (as cited in Dell Clark, 2011, p. 32). With these principles as a guideline, what are ongoing methodological possibilities for research with children? This may depend on the ever-shifting power dynamics between adults and children as well as the generational issues that arise. Mayall

(2008) states that “the adult researcher who wishes to research with children must confront generational issues” (p. 109). The ways that childhoods are defined bring up new ways that the power dynamic needs to be ethically unpacked.

Chapter 3 – Methodology

As I have described so far, this qualitative study will examine the development of children’s interests embedded within the social context of a classroom community. I conceptualized children’s interests as a dynamic sociocultural construction (Vygotsky, 1978) rather than a static individual personality trait to be excavated. I do not seek to locate a discrete interest enfolded within individual children but rather teachers’ and children’s negotiated understandings of what children’s interests are. Children’s interests are not set before they are lived out within social communities. Its reality is in the way networks of meanings that surround the interest affect social negotiations.

I also examine the relationships between people as well as artifacts and structures that carry meaning in the classroom guided by the post-humanist “premise that humans never act in isolation, but rather in concert with changing networks of people, objects, histories, and institutions” (Nichols & Campano, 2017, p. 246). Using Actor-Network Theory (Callon, 1986;

Fenwick & Edwards, 2010; Latour, 1987, 2005; Law, 1992; Mol, 2002, 2010), I develop my methodology to consider the role that materialities and discourses play in mediating the social construction of children’s interests.

Therefore, the study is not of any individual child’s interests even though certain children may play prominent roles in its manifestation or be closely associated to the interest. Rather, the interest takes hold in a community through series of interactions and activities that construct

“multiple ontologies” (Mol, 2002) of interest. It is within these experiences that tentative

interpretations form, change, solidify, reconfigure, and disperse all while curricular decisions are made each day.

The study foregrounds children’s role in their own socialization based on a critical childhoods framework. According to Corsaro (2012), “children do not simply internalize society and culture, but they actively contribute to cultural production and change” (p. 489). Moreover,

Corsaro (2012) maintains that children’s peer cultures have a powerful influence on the development of children’s interests. So, the study will key in on the ways that children assert their interest whether by action or inaction. Sites of resonance with or resistance to peers’, teachers’, and families’ interpretations of children’s interests may be potentially rich sources of data for investigation. I seek to answer the following research questions through qualitative methods:

1. What human and nonhuman actors constitute a network of children’s interests?

2. How do children resonate with and resist against those interests within a

preschool classroom?

3. How do teachers take up and respond to children’s interests in the curriculum?

Research Design

To address these questions, I used ethnographic tools to gain an on-the-ground perspective of these complexities of classroom life: joining in via participant-observation with the aid of audio and video recordings, writing fieldnotes and memos, and reviewing teacher’s anecdotal and photo documentation. These multiple sources of data from the classroom helped me to identify actors and artifacts that were important in constituting children’s interests and also to map out how social actors interpret and negotiate what is understood as an interest. I then present a case study (Dyson & Genishi, 2005; Stake, 1995) of a school setting that sought to

build curriculum around children’s interests. Dyson and Genishi (2005) explain that, “In their case studies, qualitative researchers are interested in the meaning people make of their lives in very particular contexts” (p. 9). I chose to present a case study because of the way I defined children’s interests in this study as networked, multiple, situated, and not contained within parameters that cleanly transport across contexts. Therefore, the case in this study is neither of one singular interest or type of interest, nor of one child’s various interests, or one interest within a classroom. The case is of the “naturalistic social unit” (Dyson & Genishi, 2005) of one classroom and how the social phenomenon of interests attributed to children are networked between multiple actors.

Pilot Study

This research design is informed by a 6-week pilot study that I conducted in the preschool classroom where this study took place. I observed mainly from an observation booth behind a two-way mirror two times a week from February-March 2018. I wrote fieldnotes and memos to connect what I observed to the teachers’ anecdotal documentation and transcripts of large group meetings. I taught in that classroom the year before so I knew some of the children that returned for a second year but I was pleased to find that much of the conversations and play that was happening in the classroom did not immediately make sense to me. The rhythm of the morning remained the same as children arrived at different times and settled in by proudly displaying a treasured object from home or shyly hiding behind a parent’s legs. It was a refreshing perspective of the room to not be physically present. With the classroom set like a stage before me from observation booth, I could attend to how events unfolded and connect to each other than if I were in the room and focused on being involved.

I found the interest of the “Elf House” was taking shape in many forms in the classroom.

The Elf House (see Figure 3.1) was a wall of blocks that was recreated each day to split off one part of the room from the rest where many tactical and sometimes violent negotiations took place at the border. The class had already started making plans to make an elf house out of cardboard even before I started observing the classroom indicating that teachers had started to take it up into official curriculum.

Figure 3.1 – The Elf House wall

By looking into the photos and anecdotes that teachers collected, I found that a second- year preschooler, Jeffrey, who had an influential role in the classroom, started talking about elves in November of that school year because his parents got an Elf on a Shelf that is used to convince children that an elf was watching who would be put on the “naughty” or “nice” list.

Teachers translated this frequently mentioned subject into an opportunity to encourage writing since the child wanted to write his classmates names on lists. They also picked up on Jeffrey’s reinterpretation of surveillance of naughty behavior and allowed him to check up on who had

gone to the potty yet or not. The interest in elves (and surveillance) became an interest in Elf

Houses as the child became close friends with another child who liked playing house and hiding away.

Figure 3.2 – Knotted interactions

To analyze the data, I used ANT to look at how networks of meaning arose among human as well as nonhuman actors such as blocks, teal dresses, drop off routines, cardboard, large wooden blocks, views of literacy, spy glasses, and wands. I diagrammed (Figure 3.2) these actors to represent their relationships to each other in knotted interactions (de Freitas, 2012).

These various actors pushed up against, entangled with, and tied off loops and knots of meaning with each other. The knots in the diagram represent an entanglement of two or more actors that depend on each other to produce an effect in the classroom. For example, the interest in elves became knotted with literacy in schooling to support the writing of naughty or nice lists. The flexible drop off routine knotted in conjunction with the need for reserved space and the large

number of available large blocks allowed those who arrived earlier to wall off a portion of the room to ensure their play and social configuration is protected.

The Elf House interest also took hold within the classroom community via replicas. Some children used cushions to close off the loft as a reserved space or house. Others who were interested in dressing up as Princess Elsa took up the Elf House wall building routine to establish princess and costume play. According to de Freitas (2012), networks are

a subject with distributive agency, whose capacity to act evolves through a process of repetition, variation, proliferation, and differentiation in an acentric network of dispersed affect. (p. 592)

The emergence of replicas perhaps indicated the networked interest held power and could be copied to further other agendas.

The knotted interaction diagramming proved to be useful in organizing various themes that emerged in the data and, while not meant as an “accurate” representation, revealed how the interest proliferates via interactions between both human and nonhuman actors.

Research Site and Participants

The study took place at Bright Pearls Children’s Center (BPCC), a privately funded laboratory school in New York City. The school was located within an elite graduate school and had three classrooms for infants, toddlers, and preschoolers. The study was conducted within the preschool classroom that had two head teachers, eight assistant teachers, and 13 children whose ages ranged from 3 to 5 years (Table 3.1). Families were admitted to BPCC based on their affiliation with the university as either a student, employee, or faculty member. The families were middle to upper class and the racial diversity fluctuates from year to year but is predominantly White. Many families had at least one parent that grew up in another country and spoke another language.

Table 3.1 – Demographics of Child Participants

Pseudonym Assigned Age Racial Background Languages Spoken Gender (May 2019) at Home Andrei Male 3-6 White & Latino English, Russian, Brazilian Portuguese Adam Male 4-11 Asian & White English, Mandarin Carina Female 3-8 White & White (Middle English, Arabic, Eastern) Spanish Celine Female 5-4 South Asian & White English Cindy Female 3-9 White English, Spanish Ian Male 3-8 White (Middle Eastern) English, Moroccan, French Maysie Female 3-5 White English Mika Male 3-6 Latino & White English, Russian, Brazilian Portuguese Paolo Male 4-9 White English, Italian Reese Male 4-1 White English, French Sheila Female 3-11 Asian & White English, Mandarin Sophie Female 5-3 White English Tanya Female 5-1 Asian English, Korean

The participants of this study included the 13 preschool children, two head teachers, and the school director (Table 3.2). Given the school’s approach to building curriculum around children’s interests, these participants’ roles in the classroom were such that they shared and exchanged ideas about their observations of the children while in the classroom as well as during large group meetings, teaching team meetings, and conferences with parents. Since the study focused on children’s interests, this could have potentially encompassed nearly every child’s engagement in an interest that became relevant within the classroom community whether by active participation, disinterest, or silence. However, in analyzing a networked interest, I focused on the actors that were particularly influential and how multiple actors were positioned in relation to one another. Some teachers and children figured more prominently in the data because of their positioning with the project that was developed to explore children’s interests. 45

Table 3.2 – Demographics of Teachers

Pseudonym & Role Gender Racial Background Years in Education Anne-Marie, Head Teacher Female Asian 19+ Danielle, Head Teacher Female White 8 Rachel, Director Female White 25+

Participants that were representative of the teachers’ perspective on the networked interest involve the two co-head teachers who are primarily responsible for making curricular decisions and the on-site director who facilitates weekly team meetings to discuss and plan for curriculum. They were the gatekeepers whom I approached to begin the study. The head teachers were also responsible for purchasing materials for the classroom and arranging the classroom space that played a large part in the ways that nonhuman actors networked with children’s interests.

Demographics Relative to the Neighborhood

The university community stood in notable contrast to the neighborhood it was situated within, both in racial makeup and socioeconomic status. At the university, domestic students were 52.5% White, 14.5% Asian, 14.2% Hispanic, 12.2% Black or African American, 3.4% not indicated, and 3.2% that identified with two or more racial categories (no source cited for anonymity). International students, which made up about 20% of the student body, were mostly from Asia (76%). Faculty of the university were 26% minority. The surrounding neighborhood that shared the same zip code was 39.5% Black or African American, 23.7% Hispanic, 23.6%

White, and 9.2% Asian as of 2014 (zipdatamaps.com). The contrast is even more stark when looking at the demographics of public school families where in 2014 the students were 50.5%

Black of African American, 39.8% Hispanic, 6% White, and 1.6% Asian (zipdatamaps.com).

The median household income was $31,782 in 2014 (zipdatamaps.com), while tuition for 9 months at BPCC was up to almost $24,000.

Curricular Approach

The school used an emergent curriculum (Wien, 2006) that the teachers described as

“child-led” as opposed to “child-centered.” The two terms are used interchangeably in this study though literature often uses the term “child-centered.” Keogh Lindsay (2013) offers insight to how child-centered curriculum may involve

infusing children’s interests into the curriculum [that] may create relevancy and engagement for children, but it does not mean that children have direct influence in shaping curricular structures. (p. 24)

Hence, in a child-led curriculum, teachers are open and responsive to children’s interests rather than predetermining an “embalmed curriculum” (Jones & Nimmo, 1994) that is reused each year.

The curriculum is also described as play-based and teachers develop short- and long-term projects (Helm & Katz, 2010) with the children. Play was viewed as a central activity in the children’s classroom experience rather than as leisure or as a reward for doing other work. It was a generative site of ideas that could potentially be taken up in more official classroom-wide projects. This curriculum was supported by a high teacher-to-student ratio as the room was staffed with three to four teachers at any given time to allow for children to engage in small groups around play or project work.

A typical day began with roughly 2 hours for play and activities that children mostly chose for themselves. After cleaning up the classroom together, the class gathered for a Meeting time to discuss issues that come up, do show-and-tell, or make plans for ongoing projects. After

Meetings, the class went outdoors as weather permitted or went on special outings such as a field

trip or soccer and ballet lessons. After lunch and nap, there was an hour or so of play before the children are picked up. The afternoon was also another time to work on ongoing projects, albeit within a shorter time frame.

Table 3.3 – Schedule of the Day

Time Activity 08:45 a.m. - 10:30 a.m. Free play and project work 10:30 a.m. - 11:15 a.m. Clean up and large group meeting 11:15 a.m. - 12:15 p.m. Outing and gross motor play 12:15 p.m. - 01:15 p.m. Lunch and pick up for half-day children 01:15 p.m. - 03:15 p.m. Nap 03:15 p.m. - 05:00 p.m. Free play and project work

The classroom schedule, space (See Appendix A & B for classroom map), and materials were arranged to stay relevant to the children’s activities and the time of the school year. There was typically always a mix of dramatic play, play with constructive materials, games, sensory table explorations, book reading, baking, painting and sculpture making, singing, gross motor play, or building cardboard play structures. These curated learning materials were sources of data and considered as nonhuman actors within the study.

As teachers discussed their observations and subsequently changed the materials and environment to match their observations and hunches, perceived interests developed into whole class projects. In past years, interests have become projects that explore New York City bridges and parks, baseball and football, The Beatles and a battle of the bands, Hurricane Sandy

(Templeton, 2013), songwriting and making a CD (Leu, 2015), writing and acting out fairy tales and My Neighbor Totoro (Leu et al., 2016), pulleys and cranes, and architecture. These projects typically developed in the latter half of the school year as the class were more familiar with one another and settled with routines. Projects could last several months and usually end with a

culminating even such as a publishing party, performance, field trip, celebration, or other demonstration of what was accomplished.

The site was suited for a study on children’s interests because the curriculum and philosophy are directed towards building on what teachers perceive to be the children’s interests.

Teachers’ meetings were geared towards planning based on children’s interests and needs. The school’s curricular approach afforded time, space, resources, and freedom for children to establish peer groups and explore their interests. Teachers were trained to focus on observing or facilitating rather than leading play, spending 1-2 hours each day documenting what they observed for each child and then posting it on a website called CubbyHub for parents to read.

CubbyHub entries often also included relevant photos.

In my pilot study, I found that this daily anecdotal data was useful to look back and follow how various interests and peer groups form over the course of the year before data collection began. While the anecdotes were generally supposed to be written without too much explicit subjectivity, they also represented what episodes teachers chose to communicate to parents as potentially significant or to record for later reference when teacher wrote the children’s end-of-the-year narrative summaries that are referred to as “Preschool Stories.”

Additionally, the school was designed to support research as each classroom is observable via a two-way mirror. One of the school’s four missions, according to their website, included supporting research contributing to early childhood theory and practice, so teachers and other researchers often conduct empirical studies each year. Parents affiliated with the university were also involved in research of their own as professors, researchers, and doctoral students.

Therefore, families and teachers at the school are accustomed to being involved in research.

Researcher’s Positionality

Since I was quite familiar with working with the on-site director and the head teachers, there were major considerations for how I navigated my role as both a researcher and a colleague. I am a former head teacher in the classroom and taught in the classroom for 10 years prior to moving to another classroom within the same school. I worked with one of the current head teachers for 8 years prior to the study so I am quite familiar with the life of the classroom and its curricular approach. As an established member of this community, there were several benefits to conducting the study in this classroom as well as issues that needed to be strategically navigated. I have established relationships with key gatekeepers and most of the families, so access and acclimation to the setting took less time than in a new setting.

Although known in the role of teacher and colleague, my role as a researcher raised practical and ethical issues. To not place any pressure on the parents to give consent for their child to participate in the study by being their child’s teacher, I moved to teach in the toddler classroom. By not teaching in the classroom where I conducted the study, I attempted to remove myself as much as possible from influencing how the school year developed before the study began. Most importantly, the children did not know me as their classroom teacher (though six children were previously my students in the toddler classroom), and I thought I could enter the classroom without the obligation to uphold any classroom rules. Once I started participant observations, though, I found this to not be the case as I became aware of the many ways I was known. The ones that were not my former students knew me as the teacher down the hall or as their younger sibling’s teacher. I could not be just a “fly on the wall” and operate as an anonymous observer. I would have to navigate my positions as an incoming teacher, a colleague, and employee while integrating them into a new role of researcher. I simultaneously arrive at my

study because of my positions and, having arrived, realize the study requires me to rethink my positions. I discuss these tensions in further detail in Chapter 7 when discussing the limitations of the study.

Another issue is that I am unavoidably philosophically, personally, and financially invested as a progressive teacher, as a colleague, and as a paid teacher in the school. Since I had been teaching at the school for more than 12 years at the time of the study, I was fully immersed in the school’s culture and ways of thinking. I shared many of the same assumptions about education and children as other teachers. We espoused ideals of “progressive” education regarding the agency of children, the supportive rather than directive role of the teacher, the necessity of a holistic view of the child, and the importance of a strong home-school connection.

To make the familiar strange (Van Maanen, 1995), I took a critically reflexive stance in viewing my practice in relation to the practices that I observed. To be open to other ways of viewing the classroom, I do not assume that the school’s philosophy is necessarily the singularly best approach or even that expressions of teaching fully align with any adopted philosophy.

Nonetheless, Cerwonka and Malkki (2007) point out that researchers “always understand through a set of priorities and questions that we bring to the phenomenon/object we are researching” (p. 28). Accordingly, understanding the cultural practices within the school as an insider can be more useful than not, but it would be wise to excavate the meanings that need not be spoken about.

Data Collection

I joined the preschool classroom to listen, watch, feel, and engage to gather data over the course of 8 weeks from the beginning of April 2019 to the end of May 2019. By this time of the school year, the children and teachers had already been working on several projects based on

children’s interests. After the on-site and faculty directors approved of the study, I asked to meet with the teachers to describe the timeline and methods of my study. The teachers and director assisted me in sending my description of the study to parents and distributing hard copies of permission forms. Over a week and a half, I made myself available for questions when parents dropped off and picked up their children.

Table 3.4 – Data Sources & Rationale

Data Type Duration & Research Rationale Total Collected Q’s Observation booth 1.5 weeks; 3 times RQ’s 1 - To prepare for participant observations Participant 6.5 weeks from RQ’s 1, 2, - To observe play and observation April 17 – May 31; 3 conversations 33 times; - To document nonhuman 45-60 minutes each actors - Supplemented with audio and video recording Teacher team 3 meetings, RQ 3 - To understand how meetings 3 hours total teachers interpret and plan for children’s interests Researcher memos 20 entries RQ’s 1, 2, - To draw connections 3 between networked actors Teachers’ CubbyHub Entire school year RQ’s 1, 2, - To sample what teachers anecdotes (9 months) 3 are attuning to in their & photo observations documentation 760 pages; - Served as archival data to 18,250 photos provide context for researcher’s observations Large group Meeting Entire school year RQ’s 1, 2, - Focused on teacher’s transcripts (9 months) 3 framing of and children’s agentic moves in dialogue 77 pages - Supplemented with audio and video recording From the Observation Booth

Over 1.5 weeks in early April, I observed in the observation booth on 3 occasions for 1 hour each time to get a sense of how the classroom community had come together. The observation booth was located in an adjacent room where parents, school staff, researchers, and

other visitors could observe the classroom from one of the classroom’s four walls (see Appendix

A & B for classroom map). Microphones were placed throughout the classroom ceiling to aid in hearing what was happening also. Even though the children were used to visitors entering the classroom for observation, the observation booth offered a place to observe without disrupting what was happening in the classroom.

Participant Observation in the Classroom

Data collection inside the classroom began on April 16, 2019 as the teachers introduced me to the class at Meeting time to ask for the children’s assent to observe and record. I became a participant observer in the room for 6.5 weeks until May 31, 2019, resulting in 33 total observations that were 45-60 minutes long. The first week, I was mostly an observer and, if approached by children, I explained that I wanted to see what they liked to play with. While making use of the observation booth was productive, I could not hear very clearly and could not move closer to observe far corners of the room. I had to rely on quickly transcribing dialogue which took my attention away from observing and recording body language and facial expressions.

Participation observation with the help of audiovisual recording addressed some of those issues. I set up a camera on a small tri-pod in a central location that would not be intrusive of the classroom space. As I moved around the room to observe interactions, I carried an audio recording device to capture conversations (Iorio, 2008). I took photos of artifacts such as charts and schedules that teachers wrote down to record curricular plans and to assign tasks for the project among the children. There were times that I was invited to engage in play with the children or to participate in classroom activities so I wrote my notes down at the end of my work day. In addition to fieldnotes, I wrote memos (Bogdan & Biklen, 2007) to further explore

connections that were forming. These memos were also part of the data analysis during data collection to think through my emerging interpretations of observations and my review of the photo and anecdotal documentation.

Teachers’ Curriculum Planning Meetings

I tried to understand how teachers interpret their observations of children’s interest and to trace their curricular decisions. I used this data to better understand how they interpret their experience with the child participants. Instead of formal interviews, I sat in on teaching team meetings to naturalistically observed the ways they typically make curricular decisions. The director, Rachel, led the meeting with the two head teachers, Danielle and Anne-Marie. These meetings were not be recorded to mitigate the pressure to produce formal conversation. Though the planning meetings were scheduled in the middle of each week, it was the end of the school year and several meetings were cancelled for parent conferences or other meetings. In total, I observed three meetings that were about 1 hour each. The teachers updated me on how they were approaching each child’s learning to provide context for their discussions.

Teachers’ Documentation

My observations were supplemented by data that the teachers already collect throughout the day: CubbyHub anecdotal observations, digital photo documentation, and transcripts of large group meetings (Table 3.4). These were a substantial amount of data as the CubbyHub anecdotal entries filled 760 pages when collected onto a Word document. Teachers take upwards of 100 photos a day and so photo documentation that was relevant to the children’s time in the classroom amounted to 18,250 photos. Meeting transcripts were sent daily, and the most relevant transcripts totaled 77 pages when collected onto a Word document.

CubbyHub anecdotes served multiple purposes. For teachers, the practice of writing down observations served to spur analyses of significant events. The anecdotes served to communicate both explicitly and implicitly what learning was occurring in the classroom whether through planned activities or children’s spontaneous play. The anecdotes finally served as an archived record to refer to when reporting on children’s learning progression to their future schools. In effect, they are textual artifacts of how teachers chose to communicate children’s responses to the curriculum, which is a vital source of data (See Table 3.4 in Data Sources &

Rationale) to address Research Question #3.

Meetings were an important event in the schedule and served as a key source of data to trace the curriculum from both the teachers and children’s words. Meetings were transcribed by teachers either live or from an audio recording and emailed to parents daily. The Meeting’s importance to the curriculum was marked by the contents of the Meeting, its role in moving ongoing projects forward, and the expected participation relative to other features of the schedule.

Data Analysis

Data analysis occurred both during and after the data collection period. I processed my experience as a participant-observer even as I wrote up fieldnotes after an observation. Writing memos based on the fieldnotes was a part of the analysis as I tested out connections between my observations in the classroom and what I found in the teacher-documented anecdotes and photos.

After data collection, I revisited the fieldnotes and referenced audio and video recordings. I focused on “affective intensities” (Ringrose & Renold, 2014) manifested in enthusiasm or tension and also considered disinterest and resistance. These moments in the data “glowed”

(MacClure, 2013) with interactions between the participants around the interests as they made

me wonder why certain items or issues mattered to the participants. Additionally, I questioned the social dynamics that were affecting and moving the participants as Mühlhoff (2015) describes “affective resonance… [as] processes of social interaction whose progression is dynamically shaped in an entanglement of moving and being-moved, affecting and being- affected” (p. 1001).

For example, in the pilot study, this occurred during moments when Jeffrey cried, when the blocks of the Elsa Castle began to tumble, or when the teacher reaffirmed the legitimacy of the Elsa Castle. In this study, seeing the children often play in pairs made me wonder if duos were the unit of friendship in the classroom and how that figures in acts of inclusion and exclusion (see Chapters 4 & 6). This prompted further observation and searches for answers in other data sources such as teacher documentation and photos. A moment that “glowed” intensely was when teachers announced that the class would go to Shake Shack for lunch:

Anne-Marie: Preschoolers, so we are not having lunch here okay? We're going to Shake Shack-- Preschoolers: YAY! Anne-Marie: So you are bringing your lunch with you and then at Shake Shack we are going to buy french fries and milk shakes. Preschoolers: YAY! #resonance #intensity #agency #treat (Meeting transcript, 14 May 2019)

My coding methods were low-tech as I used color-coded highlighting and embedded hashtags

(#) in the data so that I could search the data by visual color density and hashtagged codes. In this Meeting transcript excerpt that I also observed, the children’s reaction was intense with feet stomping. Shake Shack is always an occasion for jubilant celebration by adults and children alike, but the children’s reaction in this moment was the most intense response that I observed of the group. The major significance of this moment came into fuller view as I mapped out the actor

networks. The tagging of #treat would connect with observations of the relationship of treats, such as lollipops (Chapter 6), to other treats related to the networked interest in this study.

Connections Across Data Sources

I used grounded theory methods for coding (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) to analyze the data and develop tentative themes. It was an iterative process as I made adaptations in what I observed throughout the study (Bogdan & Biklen, 2007; LeCompte & Schensul, 2010). I then used visual devices, such as a table of contents (Dyson & Genishi, 2005) to organize the codes and themes to connect them to the sources of data (Miles & Huberman, 1994). This was done by coding across data sources.

From the start of my observations and the teacher planning meetings, it was clear that the class had been working on a Store project that took a large part of the classroom’s space, time, and energy. While I did not assume the Store project to be the only interest in play, it certainly was a large actor network. I collected and read through all of the teachers’ anecdotal observations on CubbyHub for the entire year, tagging it for patterns and possibly relevant connections to the development of the Store project. I browsed through all of the teachers’ photo documentation and gathered possibly relevant photos. Finally, I collected all of the Meeting transcripts and coded them. From these data sources, I pieced together a timeline of the Store project (Appendix C). The timeline was useful in noting important dates and moments as well as understanding how the teachers noted what parts of the project were important. These were given longer and detailed CubbyHub entries and led to longer discussions during Meetings.

Since I am using ANT, I developed my codes across multiple data sources and developed themes from seemingly different events. They may be represented as nonhuman materials in photos, frequently mentioned in conversations, or closely associated with certain human actors.

For example, “treats” were a significant actor network at play that manifested in the soft serve ice cream that children wanted to buy, all the candy that children mentioned on a walk they imagined they would eat once they became adults, the lollipops that children were awarded for heading out of the house in a timely fashion, and the Shake Shack ice cream shakes that the children bought with money that they earned.

As I went over the data through multiple passes, the many networked themes developed as sites of negotiation. They often appeared overlayed on top of one another and so I used color coding to see how they acted upon and with one another. The following Meeting transcript is a prime example of how several themes come together and how codes connect across data sources as one of the head teachers, Anne-Marie, sought feedback on how the Store project was going.

The teal highlights mark nonhuman actors that are acting on human social dynamics such as a

“chart” that tracks the children’s “jobs,” a favored toy “dinosaur,” the role of “customer” vs.

“shopkeeper,” and the “clock” that tracks the concept of “closing time.” The red highlights mark affect and connections between how the actors relate to one another became more clear.

The preschoolers gather in a circle sitting on top of pillows. Anne-Marie: So Cindy, the dance party was a great idea. It looks like everybody danced at some point. Okay something that we need to hear about is the store. We added closing times and we assigned store keepers. Do we like that or the other way of doing it?#feedback Cindy: The other way of doing it. Anne-Marie: What was the other way? Cindy: We didn’t have a chart #duty Anne-Marie: So we just ask someone in the morning? And what about the closing time? Do we like that? Tanya: Yeah. Anne-Marie: Why? Tanya: So that we know when the store is closing. Ian: Yea. Anne-Marie: Why do you like the closing time? Ian: I bought dinosaurs. Anne-Marie: Yes but we are talking about why it is better for a closing time. We now have a time on the clock for when the store closes and before we did not

have that. So Tanya said she likes that because now she knows when the store closes. So Ian why do you like that? Ian: Because on the clock in one minute it is closing. (Meeting transcript, 11 Apr 2019)

The “chart” mentioned was an artifact that I took a photo of as it scheduled children to work as shopkeepers at the Store (among other classroom jobs such as announcing transitions). I labeled it #duty as the chart was a sign up sheet that served as documentation of the children’s intent to participate. It became a contract of sorts that the children would be held to as teachers encouraged children to follow through on their commitments. The “clock” connected to posted reference charts for children to recognize what position the hands on the clock should be for the

Store to close, marking the end of their duty to their job as shopkeeper.

In the second half of this transcript, affective intensities come more into play as children express how they feel about clocks and closing time:

Anne-Marie: So do you like watching the clock and knowing when it closes? Ian: Yeah. Sophie: I’m glad there is a closing time because working at the store is exhausting and now I know when my job is done. #feedback Celine: I love when the store closes because I like playing with Sophie #sisters #resistance Anne-Marie: So when the store is closed you have time to play. Tanya: When there’s no time you don’t know when the store closes. #work Anne-Marie: Yes and I think what we noticed for teachers too that when we announce that there are 5 more minutes for the store to close people will go and buy toys. And before when the shopkeepers were taking a break and people wanted toys, they would have to go back and forth and this way the store is closed when we say it is closed so you need to buy your toys before. Carina: And sometimes the customers get tired #resistance Anne-Marie: Can you share what you did when there were no customers this morning Celine and Adam? Celine: Play with Legos. Anne-Marie: And what happened when the store closed? What did you do with the Legos? Celine: Put them away. Anne-Marie: So should we keep having a closing time? Preschoolers: Yes! (Meeting transcript, 11 Apr 2019)

From my observations, I noted how Celine and Sophie referred to each other as “sisters” and planned their own wedding. I tagged Celine’s statement with #sisters and also labeled it

#resistance because of its relation to the concept of the store closing as a break from duty to the

Store project. All these themes would be developed into my findings as I returned to the data sources to make arguments for the connections between the network of actors.

Figure 3.3 – Sisters, clock, key, dinosaurs

Presentation of Data

The findings are presented as a case study of a networked interest. Within that networked interest, I mapped out both human and nonhuman actors and drew connections between them based on the themes that I developed. From the perspectives of both human and nonhuman actors, I retell the story of the case of networked interest while emphasizing various aspects of its place in curriculum and children’s classroom experiences. This case study uses thick description

(Denzin, 1989) to represent multiple episodes within the classroom that illustrate what constitutes that interest. I highlighted children’s agentic moves and focusing on what they resonated with and resisted by selecting illuminating anecdotes that represent the roles they played in negotiating the interest.

The findings are presented through connections to the ANT concepts of translation

(Callon, 1986) in Chapter 4, interessement (Callon, 1986) and obligatory passage points (Callon,

1986) in Chapter 5, and transformations (Latour, 1990) in Chapter 6. These concepts will be defined in greater detail in their respective chapters. For now, a brief definition of each will establish their relevance to the study of children’s interests.

Translation is “the term used by Latour (1987) to describe when entities, human and nonhuman, come together and connect, changing one another to form links” (Fenwick and Edwards,

2010, p. 9). For example, the networked actors of teachers implementing emergent curriculum and child-led pedagogy come to translate children’s desires for ice cream as a project on how money can be used to buy ice cream.

Interessement is one of four steps in the process of translation whereby actors become networked with one another. Callon (1986) traces the etymology of the word to be “interested” in, “in between,” or “interposed” (p. 62). According to Callon (1986), “to interest other actors is to build devices which can be placed between them and all other entities who want to define their identities otherwise. Teachers “enroll” (Callon, 1986) children into solving the “problem”

(Callon, 1986) of creating curriculum from children’s interests by the interessement of their desire for ice cream with the project of learning about money that can buy ice cream. This blocks their desire for ice cream from being translated otherwise as just “a child with a sweet tooth.”

This particular translation of children’s interest can only remain in network if all of the actors go through what Callon (1986) calls an obligatory passage point (OPP). If all of the actors get what they seek within this network configuration, they are bound to the OPP. If children want to get their ice cream, if teachers want to build curriculum, if the school wants to deliver a service to parents while answering to other stakeholders, the children must perform the acts of

learning themselves in an acceptably independent manner. If the children fail to do so, the whole network collapses and reconfigures to enroll other actors.

Finally, Latour (1990) explains how actors materially change through transformations.

Such as the concept of replicas of Elf Houses in my pilot study, a networked interest can reemerge in different forms as it networks with other actors such as Elsa enthusiasts looking to claim space for their play. Thus objects of interest can appear to be transformed from one iteration to another by adopting labels or form or a similar mechanism such as a wall that effectually contains and keeps out.

Validity and Ethics

According to Lather (1986), validity is not just meant to support why an interpretation is valid but also to consider the ways in which it might be wrong or thought of differently. In order to consider other possible ways of understanding the data, reflexivity (Pillow, 2003) within memo writing was needed to continually consider how my positionality shaped how I framed the data and what I might be leaving out-of-frame.

Conducting research leaves a footprint and it is impossible to leave a site “undisturbed.”

When entering someone else’s space, it may be a principle to leave it better than it was found, what is “better” needs to be negotiated within a respectful and loving relationship. Obtaining consent and continually looking for assent, especially with young children, is a foundation in initiating and maintaining that relationship. With colleagues that I have worked with before, I would need to ask for permission for actions that I may be usually be privileged to do such as walking into the classroom. I scheduled when I would be in the classroom on a calendar rather than assumed that I am welcomed as I might usually be as another teacher in the school.

Additionally, as I collected data and produced texts around the experiences in the classroom, I needed to carefully handle that information by respecting participant’s confidentiality through the use of pseudonyms and securing files within password protected digital folders and locked filing cabinets on site for physical data.

Limitations

While the site is useful for studying children’s interests within emergent curriculum, children’s interests can and are engaged within different kinds of schools and spaces. The interests at the site are constructed within a particular pedagogical tradition, with a population from an elite university setting, and with children from middle to upper class families. While there has been a new wave of studies on children’s interests within the last decade (Azevedo,

2019; Chesworth, 2016, 2019; DiGiacomo et al., 2018; Hedges & Cooper, 2016; Hedges et al.,

2011; Hedges, 2019; Hollet & Hein, 2019; Moberg, 2018a; Ramey & Stevens, 2019), there have not been many studies done on how children’s interests are taken up within classrooms that do not explicitly consider children’s interests as central to curriculum. Furthermore, within this site, the data that is collected can only address a miniscule portion of the complex engagements that happen each day and moment. There is no way to capture everything, but this study only takes up so much of what is involved in multiple ontologies of children’s interests. They study’s limitations are discussed further in Chapter 7.

Interlude – Networks in Discovery of One Another

I stepped back into the preschool classroom that I used to be part of and into the stream of activity that started several months ago at the beginning of the school year. I was transitioning into the role of a researcher and, eventually, back into the role of a co-head teacher in the classroom. While I was a familiar face to the preschool children, they were trying to make sense of what this change would mean. I was being noticed and read. Reese, who is not shy to talk to newcomers, approached me one morning on the 2nd week of my visits with his hands on his hips and said, “Kuan! You’re here…again??” As I settled in each morning, I looked for places to be least conspicuous. Being much taller than the children, I sat down as much as possible and next to shelves as if to somehow become as seemingly inert as the furniture. I tried to place my camera on the periphery and on top of bookshelves to be a fly on the wall, but the children were flies drawn to sugar.

Much of my footage from those first few days were close-ups of children looking into the lens. I felt a need to further explain its and my presence by showing them how to use the camera so that I could simultaneously get footage of the classroom activities and transition out of being a novel object that triggered their curiosity and interest (Renninger et al., 2018). Asdal et al. (2007) explain that

to be involved, then, is a requirement for being in the game. …[W]e are involved in enacting realities rather than representing them. And our enactments interfere with other enactments and theories at work in the same context. (p. 34)

I could not escape that I, along with the camera, were actor networks coming in contact and entangling with the existing actor networks I had been trying to observe.

I introduced myself as a researcher to the class at their whole group Meeting Time (April

16, 2019), while Danielle, the teacher I would be switching with, announced that she would become a teacher in the infant classroom and that I would be their teacher soon (an infant teacher was returning from maternity leave that required teachers to switch classrooms). Celine, who remembered me from her first summer in the preschool classroom, asked me, “When will you be a preschool teacher?” as if I would suddenly transform at the time when my officially title changed. What would it actually mean that I would become their teacher as opposed to a regular visitor? Materially, this meant that I was going to be physically present in the classroom more often based on a calendar of planned visits to the classroom. I would be handed a set of keys to the classroom, a tray to store my belongings, and the passwords to the classroom accounts. As I thought about when interests become an interest, I saw parallels to my becoming a researcher and their new teacher as transitions and movements rather than discrete milestones. There are no clean slates even at beginnings as meaning is made in the shifts and the implications thereafter.

Two of the students were transitioning into the preschool classroom, one of them reporting back to the other “toddlers” that “one day,” they too would undergo this transition. For these two children, their transition to becoming preschoolers seemed to be akin to becoming a

“big kid” the way one does when one goes from being 2 years old to 3, or again from 3 to 3 years and 366 non-leap-year-days old, and so on. Transitions and movements, by way of age bands, classrooms, and materials may seem arbitrary yet significant. In thinking about all these transitions taking place simultaneously, I wonder how the network of children’s interests shifts into becoming a formalized part of the classroom. Where are the officially marked transitions and the precursors that call for such shifts? More formally marked transitions offer a glimpse into the nature of pre-existing configurations of networks. The transitions for the two incoming

preschoolers and me into the preschool classroom offered a chance to wonder, “What’s happening? Why now? How come, in this way?”

The following three chapters explore the actor networks involved in producing curriculum that is based on children’s interests. Chapter 4 follows the development of a project based on teachers’ observations of two children on a quest for soft serve ice cream. As the project takes hold in the classroom and dramatically “transforms” (Latour, 1990) the arrangement of space and materials, the actor networks shift and produce new possibilities for teachers, children, as well as nonhuman entities such as empty shelves. Children take up these

“free” spaces and materials to redefine their interests both within and outside of the official curriculum.

Chapter 5 explores the mechanisms that teachers use to expand upon and bind children’s interests to the developing project. By “letting the child lead” and ensuring that children are invested in the project, teachers use devices of interessement (Callon, 1986) to accomplish curricular goals while staying networked with children’s interests. Children’s moves around and against these devices of interessement signify acts of agency and resistance.

Chapter 6 maps the broader context of schooling that socializes children through emergent and interest-based curriculum. Through analyzing the “transformations” (Latour, 1990) of material representations of children’s interests such as coins, ice cream, and stores through teachers’ curricular responses, children’s interests are socialized into particular childhoods that continually transform their material worlds.

Chapter 4 – Translating Actors in Networked Interests

While there is not just “one day” that an interest suddenly becomes an interest, there are critical moments of interfacing between actors that recognize in each other a binding and networking element. Together, these moments of translation make interchange of meaning and purpose possible. Callon (1986) defines translation as a process “during which the identity of actors, the possibility of interaction, and the margins of manoeuvre are negotiated and delimited”

(p. 59). This chapter maps the actor networks involved in the pursuit of a project based on children’s interests to explore what human and nonhuman actors constitute a networked interest

(Research Question #1). As actor networks translate and act upon each other, new possibilities arise as classroom spaces and materials are “freed” up for understanding children’s agency in redefining their interests (Research Question #3) in response to teachers’ translations of children’s interests (Research Question #2).

“The Store for Everything”

The major interest-based project happening in the classroom was called The Store for

Everything, the teachers’ curricular response to their observations of the children’s interest in finding money to buy the things they want. The Store for Everything (also referred to as “The

Store”) was a pretend store in the preschool classroom where almost all of the toys in the classroom were sold and dispensed each morning and afternoon in exchange for currency that the preschoolers made themselves. Jars of playdough and slime, books, games, figurines, pretend kitchen items, costumes, and magnatiles lined this single-aisle store as two preschooler

“shopkeepers” switched off on working the cash register and assisting customers.

Figure 4.1 – A customer waits to enter The Store for Everything

To open the Store, the assigned shopkeepers would get their aprons and name tags from teachers, grab the classroom-made keys to the Store from the teacher’s key hook, then turn off the classroom lights to make the announcement: “The Store is open!” The rest of the class would pick up their “wallets” (envelopes with their names) from their personal bins and form a queue at the door. One customer would enter the Store at a time and choose what to buy based on the price tags and how much money was left in the wallet. Items were then returned or put away at clean up time by the person who bought it.

An Origin Story

Actor networks involved in the production of the Store project do not have a beginning point as they are constantly shifting, though they recognize in each other some binding elements or points of connection. According to Callon (1998), characteristics of the actors along with their motivations are not predetermined. The actors’ processes of enrollment and translation of each other to become known as the Store project are then multiple. Therefore, there is no singular origin story of how the Store project came to be whether from children’s interests as a “source”

or from teachers as arbiters of curriculum. Rather they are bound together in relation to one another through what Callon (1986) describes as “devices of interessement” (p. 61). Callon explains the etymological connection between “interessement” and “interest” as more than coincidental: “to be interested is to be in between (inter-esse), to be interposed” (p. 62). While

Callon is not specifically describing children’s interests when using the term “interessement,” the parallel is clear that actors’ goals converge.

Figure 4.2 – The coin in Celine’s pocket

One telling of the origins of the Store project involve an ice cream truck, the transition from summer to fall, two coins, two preschoolers, and two teachers. The first explicit reference to the idea to run a Store in the classroom was documented by Anne-Marie in CubbyHub early in the school year:

When we got to ABC Park, Celine and Sophie asked if we could get Mr. Softee ice cream if [the ice cream truck] comes by. Anne-Marie told them that we didn’t have money for it. They were disappointed. Later on, they went back to Anne-Marie to tell her that we could get money from the bank using a card. Anne-Marie told them we don’t have a card and Celine suggested to buy a card. Anne-Marie reminded her that we need

money to buy a card and suggested to look for money instead in the park. They thought it was a good idea! They got excited and minutes later, Celine showed Anne-Marie a dime that she found. Celine and Sophie were motivated to look for more since the dime was not enough for Mr. Softee. Danielle told them it was enough only for a lick! Celine put the dime in her dress pocket and Anne-Marie took a picture of it. And she lost the dime while playing! Anne-Marie told her to follow back her footsteps, which she did. She found the dime on the ramp. They found a penny also but before they left the park, they lost both coins. Celine said she will bring money “tomorrow.” (CubbyHub anecdote, 9 Oct 2018)

Two days later, Anne-Marie and Celine had an informal planning session at the snack table to think through what would be needed to earn money to buy ice cream (CubbyHub anecdote, 11 Oct 2018). They decided to make the currency yellow, to make a key to open the store, to make price tags, and to decide at Meeting time with the other preschoolers on a store name and what would be sold. The project was taking shape and Anne-Marie, in documenting the plans in CubbyHub for parents to read, was taking a step in committing to pursuing the project.

Perhaps energized by the plans made at the snack table, Celine, Sophie, and Tanya started making signs for an Ice Cream Shop the very next day. Anne-Marie’s in-the-moment response

(Chesworth, 2019) to Celine and Sophie’s request for ice cream sparked a follow-up to draft the blueprint for what would become the Store project. The children confirmed their motivation to pursue the idea through the immediacy of play, unprompted by teachers to create an Ice Cream

Shop, while the teacher was motivated to follow up on the idea rather than letting it pass by signing her name to the project on teacher documentation that is accessible to parents and other stakeholders in the classroom. The interests were converging in a way that fulfilled teachers’ professional role and also was a subject of interest in children’s plans and play.

A month later, Anne-Marie and Celine presented the idea of the Store to the whole class at Meeting time (Meeting transcript, 13 Nov 2018). Birbili (2019) calculates that

as soon as [teachers] identify ‘an interest’, teachers’ ‘next move’ is to check whether ‘other children are interested too’. This is done ‘transferring’ a child’s interest, ‘as a discussion at circle time [in order] to see who else has something to say about that, how much other children care about the topic, the intension of their interest.’ (p. 9)

This was the case at BPPC as Anne-Marie opened the discussion to get the preschooler’s prior knowledge about what a store is and what they could possibly sell at their own store. The idea for the Store took several months to develop as the preschoolers were involved in many other activities such as ballet and soccer classes, Halloween and Valentine’s Day festivities, exploration of dinosaur and firefighter interests, in addition to the winter break.

Callon (1986) calls part of this binding in collective action the step of “problematization” where actors become “indispensable” to each other in that all the actors “cannot attain what they want by themselves” (Callon, 1986, p. 61). As the days got cooler in the fall, an ice cream truck tried to close out the ice cream selling season, using its recognizable tune to attract children and their parents’ wallets toward itself. The children, who returned to school looked for ice cream, perhaps reminiscing of hot summer days while teachers saw an opportunity to enroll this desire for ice cream into an extended teachable moment. Spontaneous events like these that draw children’s attention can be interpreted by teachers as an interest. In Birbili’s (2019) study, when a girl commented about having ants in her home, it reminded other children of the ants in their homes and led the teacher to recognize a teachable moment by asking, “Do you know that apartments are not ants’ natural home?” (pp. 8-9). The work of problematization was needed to more fully join the perceived interest with curriculum in the classroom.

Coining the Name

After winter break, Anne-Marie picked up the idea again and presented the idea of running “a toy store and food store” at Meeting:

Anne-Marie: I spoke to Celine this morning about the store that we talked about, so since we don’t really know how a store works, Celine has an idea that we can have a pretend toy store. Can you tell them what we need? Celine: A pretend toy store and a real food store. (Meeting transcript, 29 Jan 2019)

The notion of curriculum coming from children’s interest is activated by enrolling Celine as a

“spokesperson” (Callon, 1986) rather than teachers directly telling the children what they planned to talk about.

A couple of days later, the idea of the Store continued to become more fleshed out as this joint venture took on a form that required a name. While discussing at Meeting (Meeting transcript, 31 Jan 2019) what the name for the classroom store would be, the preschoolers tossed around ideas such as Whole Foods, Preschoolers’ Food, Target, Trader Preschoolers, and the

Bright Pearls Children’s Center Store. Then, Celine relayed an experience of visiting “a store that sells everything” with her mom. The class inched closer to the eventual name:

Anne-Marie: So, if we want to sell everything, we need to make a name that tells we sell everything. Maysie, do you have an idea? Maysie: Yeah! Boxers. Anne-Marie: What does boxers mean to you, Maysie? Maysie: Boxers. Anne-Marie: Okay, when you hear the word, “boxers,” what do you have in mind? What would that store sell? Sheila: Clothes. Cindy: Or maybe boxers. Something with mommy and daddy, we make sure everyone has boxers and we went to a store like that where boxers were and we got that. (Meeting transcript, 29 Jan 2019)

Anne-Marie sensed a winning name in the concept of “everything” and continued to lead in that direction. Though it is a goal of teachers to entertain and encourage all of the children’s contributions, there are points of departure that teachers try to steer towards by calling for a consensus and steer away from by asking for further clarification. Sophie would coin a name that had a catchy ring to it, a catch-all that was not as generic or derivative as Bright Pearls

Children’s Center Store or Trader Preschoolers, yet also not as amusingly specific as Cindy’s vision of a store that only sold boxers:

Anne-Marie: So, I think Celine had a good suggestion. If we wanted to sell everything in our store, we would need a name that shows that. Celine: We do food and things and everything! Sophie: The name that I have in mind is that we can call it “a store for everything”! (Meeting transcript, 29 Jan 2019)

Not everyone was immediately sold on the idea, however, and again, the would-be name was at least a vote shy of unanimous. Cindy was going to take her right to make suggestions seriously:

Anne-Marie: So do we like Sophie’s name for the store? Cindy: No. Anne-Marie: What suggestion would you make? Cindy: A bookstore. Anne-Marie: But that would mean we are just selling books. Is that what you have in mind? Cindy: Yes. Anne-Marie: And if we use the name that Sophie has in mind, we can sell anything we want in that store. … Anne-Marie: So do we like Sophie’s name for the store? And if you make a picture or a necklace or a book, you can sell it in the store. Cindy: But I want bookstore! Celine: You can sell books in our store, too. (Meeting transcript, 29 Jan 2019)

This process of negotiating the name of the Store reveals the actions of amplifying, resisting, and translating the burgeoning Store project. While maintaining the principles of child- led pedagogy, the teacher encourages more children to suggest names for the Store while also curating their responses to not get too far from teachers’ intentions to develop a project.

Cindy, a younger and first-year preschooler, was a relatively vocal participant in the

Meetings and firmly held her positions. She seemed to have an understanding that her ideas would have to be considered in some way in this exchange between teachers and other children.

She did not let her ideas go but pressed on by trying to claim her child-led pedagogy voucher.

Thrice, Cindy confirmed she wanted her idea of the bookstore instead and, under certain democratic and child-led rules, the idea of “Everything” could have been passed over.

Nevertheless, with some finesse by momentarily diverting the preschoolers’ attention to the more problematic idea of selling preschoolers on Anne-Marie’s part in conjunction with Celine’s logical argument that “Everything” includes everyone else’s ideas, “A Store for Everything” was voted in even if Cindy was never fully convinced. It was as if current-day Jeff Bezos (played by

Celine) went back in time to visit the 1995 version of Jeff Bezos (played by Cindy) to incept the notion that a bookstore could be oh-so-much more.

A Grand Opening

The Store for Everything officially opened on Tuesday, February 19, 2019 (see Appendix

C, “Timeline of the Store Project”). Anne-Marie documented the opening in CubbyHub:

Throughout the course of the morning, the preschoolers checked out the store from the inside and out. They saw most of our toys are part of our store. We also have new and old books in our bookshelves about store/market, money, and firetrucks/firefighters. Other books are “for sale” in the store. We only had blocks, books in the shelves, and sensory table that they could play with while the store is still closed. (CubbyHub anecdote, 19 Feb 2019)

Anne-Marie notes the layout of the room with books about stores and money to supplement children’s knowledge. In contrast to these curricular-specific texts, “other books” that were popular in the classroom were placed in the Store to be sold. The significance of this distinction between materials inside of the Store and outside of the Store re-emerges throughout the project and even affects the distinction between shopkeepers and customers who are inside and outside of the Store, respectively. Anne-Marie continues on in the CubbyHub anecdote to describe the orientation process and design of the Store:

Anne-Marie showed them the money that each preschooler would get each morning to purchase what they want in the store. The price tags (which [two assistant teachers] put on the items yesterday) are color coded and match with the colors of money that they

had. The denominations of the money are: pink (one), five (blue), ten (white), and twenty (green). These were made by some preschoolers a couple of weeks ago and Danielle photocopied them on colored paper. Anne-Marie also pointed out that they didn't need to spend all the money they have, encouraging them to put more thought about what they will buy and thinking about the item before actually buying it. (CubbyHub anecdote, 19 Feb 2019)

Their earlier plans were all coming together and a micro-market was up and running. Teachers had designed aspects of the Store to be conducive to learning certain economic principles through the color-coded design of the money and verbal cues to consider saving money and budgeting in response to prices. After having a test run, the teachers noted the children’s feedback both during and after running the Store for the first time:

Celine suggested we could go to a bank if we used up all our money but Anne-Marie told her that the money from the bank is not the same money they could use in the store. Cindy pointed out that grown-ups use wallets to put their money in. Anne-Marie showed them envelopes with their name on it with their money in it. The envelope could be their wallet for now. At the end of the day, all the toys will go back to the store to be sold again the next day. The preschoolers will take turns being the store keepers, two per day like our pizza helpers. (CubbyHub anecdote, 19 Feb 2019)

Engagement with the Store spurred new ideas of recreating parallels to the real world by having a bank and “grown-up” wallets. The teachers and children continued to pursue this realism in the

Store both in materials, concepts, and the children’s original desire to buy their own ice cream.

The “Real Store”

At the beginning of data collection (Fieldnote, 17 Apr 2019), the Store was nearing its end as plans for moving on to the “Real Store” were already in the works (see Appendix C

“Timeline of the Store Project”). The Real Store was an extension of the Store for Everything where the preschoolers sold baked goods that they made in the classroom and their families made at home. The Real Store ran for 4 days in the lobby of the building where the school is housed, just one floor below the classroom.

Figure 4.3 – A classroom parent buys baked goods at the Real Store

Like the Store for Everything, the Real Store was staffed by two shopkeepers who invited potential customers to visit the table, introduced them to the baked goods and prices, provided them with their chosen items while wearing disposable gloves, and handled the exchange of money including giving change. This handling of interacting with real customers and real money seemed to be a key part in assessing how much the preschoolers had learned from their experience in The Store for Everything, as reported by Anne-Marie (CubbyHub anecdote, 30

Apr 2019).

Both the Store for Everything and the Real Store offered many opportunities for the children to learn how to collaboratively plan as a class and work directly with peers, to learn about money, to learn mathematical principles, to be able to tell when it is closing time, to write and design signs and currency, to construct and decorate the store structure with the art teacher, and to take responsibility for a collective effort among other skills. The Real Store will be

discussed more in depth in Chapter 6 to explore the notion of what a real version of the Store may signify for children’s interests.

Networks in Establishing Children’s Interests within the Store Project

The notion of a singular, pure interest that comes from the child is illusory (Birbili &

Tsitouridou, 2008; Hedges & Cooper, 2016; Moberg, 2018a). Moberg (2018a) maintains that

“there is no single concept of children’s interests circulating in the preschool practice” (p. 115).

Rather, children’s interest must be constructed and can be seen in construction in the timeline of the Store (Appendix C) as well as in the planning of the Store’s name depicted above. In continuing to explore my first research question, I look at what network of human and nonhuman actors allowed for this Store interest to take hold in the curriculum in these ways rather than other possible interests. The children and teachers explored firefighters, dinosaurs, sisterhood, cars, and PJ Masks (a popular superhero cartoon) in various ways throughout the school year.

The class visited a local fire station, several children wore dinosaurs on their clothing and brought in dinosaur toys, the teachers turned the sensory table into a fossil excavation site,

Sophie and Celine called themselves “sisters” while others found a close friend or a “favorite girl,” and cars and PJ Masks were reoccurring elements of play scenarios. Still, these reoccurring interests did not develop into the project that the Store did.

I argue that children’s interests are bound in network with various actors’ interests and plans for the arrangement of time, space, and materials (Moberg, 2018a). According to

Chesworth (2018),

The nonhuman elements of the play encounter are consequently no longer positioned as ‘passive backdrop or stage of the active human subject’ (Lenz Taguchi, 2011, p. 37), nor even as affordances (Gibson, 1977) in which the children’s use of resources are ‘fuelled by the jointly constructed cultural context’ (Vuorisalo, Rutanen, & Raittila, 2015, p. 76). Instead, the focus of attention become the dynamic interconnectedness of human and non-human elements, and the effects that these connections produce. (p. 6)

Even in spaces such as curriculum planning and Meetings where teachers take on more prominent roles, all actors are involved in transforming the meaning of language, texts, time, space, and materials. For example, even though a teacher may be designated as the one to lead a

Meeting, several factors and actors may, in fact, become more influential in that space. For example, a fit of laughter from the children in reaction to something that is particularly funny to them may prompt a break from teachers’ plans and call forth a response to laugh along, or

“redirect” back to a linear developmental agenda, or regain a sense or appearance of “control” as a teacher who is accountable to other actors that frame particular framing of teachers’ roles.

Moberg (2018a) describes how multiple actors act together for a classroom to stay inside even though the teachers’ original agenda called for going outdoors. The children respond with quiet energy while engaging with a calming magnet brick activity. Thus, the magnets as well as children take part in the collective decision to break from the agenda even though teachers are supposedly the ones to “officially” make the decision.

Teachers, Projects, and Child-led Pedagogy

Teachers are certainly powerful actors in the classroom. The teachers choose to follow up on certain ideas and encourage those ideas and interests to endure. Teachers themselves are networked to project-based learning and child-led pedagogy that fit within a progressive tradition for curriculum (Chung & Walsh, 2000). Teachers in the preschool classroom at Bright Pearls

Children’s Center meet as a classroom teaching team weekly to plan the curriculum through discussion with periodic use of diagrams and webs that are typical for planning project-based learning (Helm & Katz, 2010). Teachers enact these plans through the arrangement of materials and furniture, arranging the way time is used, leading discussions at Meeting, and co-creating artifacts with children. The Store for Everything, for instance, got an official place in the

classroom compared to a store that is made during an everyday dramatic play scenario that would dissipate by clean up time. The teachers allowed the Store to take up a certain length of time to continue to snowball in importance until a culminating event or convenient end point as is often seen in project-based learning.

As the project progressed, it required the participation of each child since teachers raised it to Meeting-level discourse, meaning it would be more consequential to ignore. The creation of the Store would shape the experience of being in the classroom and the collaborative process for creating the Store necessitated children’s opinions, ideas, and effort. Children at Meeting would be expected to respond to teachers’ prompts, contribute their thoughts, or at the least stay seated and not disruptive. Children that do not speak as often would be asked for their ideas on what the

Store name might be whether it was ultimately used or not. Additionally, choosing to play with toys in the room would require going through the Store. Thus, the teachers use their instruments for bringing certain ideas into more formally recognized curriculum to build on and, with the children, to shape what the interest is. The teachers and children continue to make choices that the interest is “this” and also “not that” (as discussed further in Chapter 5).

The Precedence of Bake Sale Projects

Had Celine and Sophie’s request for Mr. Softee been framed as an interest in ice cream, that characterization might have been translated in vastly different ways. For example, the teacher could have suggested making ice cream in the classroom as a way to obtain ice cream instead of buying it directly. The connection to teaching chemistry might be enough to justify the consumption of the adult-regulated substance. Alternatively, the children’s request for ice cream could have been gently denied and not spoken of until the next request for a dessert. Another interest might have taken hold in the classroom, then, and certain aspects of the interest could

have been left out of the network. The Store for Everything could also have been an Ice Cream

Store project with a visit to the nearby Ben and Jerry’s, or a Coin Drive to raise money for charity. Such projects might also fit in with American images of progressive early childhood curricula (Chung & Walsh, 2000; Kliebard, 2004).

One possible reason that The Store project took hold as it did was perhaps because of the precedence in the classroom for running bake sales. The class has held bake sales around the winter holiday season to raise money for various causes such as buying school supplies to donate to a local kindergarten classroom or to buy toys for a school affected by Hurricane Sandy

(Templeton, 2013). Like a bake sale, the Store project was an opportunity to teach counting, adding and subtracting, writing signs, making price tags, building a sense of responsibility in doing a job, and learning social skills in working together and interacting with customers. The

Store project could more readily be networked to the established bake sale routine because of its similarities and since the bake sale has produced favorable results in the past. Teachers in

Birbili’s (2019) study noted how

a teacher’s goals “cannot always be worked through children’s interests” (Leda). This is the reason why the teachers of the study choose topics that have been “tested” and more importantly “give children the kind of knowledge young children need” (Leda). (p. 7)

Without a dependable frame of reference such as previous bake sales, the interest in money might not have been taken up as smoothly.

The essential elements of the Real Store were the same as the bake sale routine from its location in the lobby of the building, involvement of parents, sign making, engagement with customers, handling of real money, to counting the total revenue at the end. However, the overall

Store project (both the Store for Everything and the Real Store) was much larger in scope. There were many connections to the life of the classroom. Creating the idea of the Store was a

collaborative process that connected to the Meeting time routine that served the purpose of making decisions, giving updates, sending reminders, and getting feedback. It allowed children like Celine and Sophie to propose an idea and for other children such as Cindy and Maysie to also voice different opinions.

Integration with Other Curricula

Constructing the Store for Everything in the classroom was an opportunity to integrate the art curriculum into the classroom. The exploration of materials in creating art was applied in designing the space as well as making the door, key, signs, and decorative fringes. The children could work with materials to solve problems and develop their fine motor skills.

Figure 4.4 – The art teacher works with the preschoolers to assemble the Store

The Store project provided a connection to social studies topics such as learning about different denominations of money and how different countries have currencies that look unique.

Danielle led the children in observing U.S. dollars to design their own money. Reese wrote the number 5 on the corners of his design and wrote out the word “FIVE.” Danielle also helped him

notice the pictures of important people and buildings on the U.S. bill so that he could include it on his design. They talked about what the exchange of money means and brought in the children’s experiential knowledge of how they see the adults in their lives handle money.

Figure 4.5 – The preschoolers design their own currency based off of U.S. notes

The children could also learn about economic principles as they practiced the exchange of goods and services. Danielle noted in a CubbyHub entry entitled “Preschool Economics” that

Sophie and Celine were having some money problems when they were trying to buy the magnatiles from the store. Even when they combined their money, they were short. Celine tried to convince Paolo and Reese, who were the storekeepers, that when customers don’t have enough money, the storekeepers are supposed to give it to them. Liping (assistant teacher) explained that that’s not actually the case, and then Celine called out to Danielle to tell her that Liping wasn’t letting them have more money.

Danielle told Celine that she agreed with Liping and asked Celine if she could think of another way to get more money. Sophie and Celine both said they had to go to a bank or a machine to get more money. Danielle suggested that maybe they could get some ideas from the books on the shelf that talk about money. Celine and Sophie got some books and read them with Liping.

Afterward, the idea of earning money from doing something didn’t come up immediately. A bit later at pickup time, Sophie said, “Oh - you have to do something, like make someone something, like cookies...” Danielle told Sophie that it was true, a baker is a person who bakes to earn money. Sophie and Celine then came up with many other jobs that they had read about in the books from the shelf. Danielle told them to think about

what they could do in the preschool room to earn extra money and they could talk about it later. (CubbyHub anecdote, 12 Mar 2019)

The Store project lent itself to discovering new avenues to explore economic principles such as how to create value by producing goods and services. The teachers set the high price of the magnatiles to set up a problem where the preschoolers would eventually have to think of what to do if they did not have enough money. This would eventually lead to the creation of a lemonade stand and also the Real Store.

Figure 4.6 – Ian gives change as a shopkeeper

Lastly, there was a connection to the social curriculum where the children could practice their social skills. The teachers were working with Ian on how to socially engage with other children and the role of shopkeeper requires certain social skills that would hopefully transfer to everyday interactions:

Anne-Marie coached Ian what to say to his customers, “Good morning! How may I help you?” And then when done with their business, Ian said (with coaching), “Thanks for coming.” For the next few customers, Ian said parts of these lines on his own. (CubbyHub anecdote, 25 Feb 2019)

Working on these social skills would make sense not only in the context of everyday conversations but could also have the added motivation to maintain character in being a good shopkeeper.

The Store project connected with certain aspects of teacher’s ideals about education and, as will be explored further in Chapter 6, the notion of real learning. Teachers could integrate curriculum by incorporating math, art, writing, and social studies into the project in a meaningful way. It also helped that Clean Up time was often very short since items were already returned to the Store after use. The Store as an interest also advantageously networked with other powerful actors in the classroom such as children’s desires to exhibit agency and the sisterhood bond between Celine and Sophie.

These various networks and factors shape the way children’s interests are taken up in the curriculum in the way that it did for the Store project. The tradition of using project-based and child-led approaches, a history of successful bake sales, and the necessity for the integration of various aspects of a holistic curricula all contribute to the particular arrangement of time, space, and materials in the production of children’s interests in the classroom.

Children’s Desires, Peer Cultures, and Real Questions

Eating ice cream could be considered a child’s interest, but perhaps it was not just the act of having ice cream that was attractive. Having access to money to purchase one’s ice cream could also be a vital component of this networked interest. This interest would be larger than the material consumption of ice cream and could potentially connect to children’s desires to access power that they do not typically have. For example, while Celine and Adam walked to the park together, a teacher noted that the two preschoolers “talked about what life would be like when they [become] adults. They would buy lots of treats and lollipops” and also decide when they

would get to have sleepovers (CubbyHub anecdote, 8 Nov 2018). They would get to decide when and how much “treats” to consume and determine their own living and sleeping arrangements. The teachers’ connection of Celine and Sophie’s desire to buy and have ice cream allowed for the act of legitimately purchasing treats as an adult would.

When teachers asked what the preschoolers liked about the Store during a feedback session at Meeting time (Meeting transcript, 25 Feb 2019), they reported that they liked operating the cash register and unlocking the door. For the Real Store (Meeting transcript, 26

Apr 2019), they liked handling actual money, seeing their parents visit as customers, and getting to buy a treat with their own money. The Store project seemed to connect with the children’s experience of their childhoods. The coins on the playground that Celine and Sophie found represent one of the limited sources of money to which children have free access aside from asking adults. The Store project brought them closer to gaining access to treats that adults in their life regulate. Thus, a recognized interest in coins in this case is also representative of Celine and

Sophie’s desire for a degree of autonomy that they do not yet have as children. Similarly, the door key and buttons of the cash register (or other devices) can represent power and responsibility that the adults in their lives typically have.

This is consistent with Hedges and Cooper’s (2016) findings that children’s interests reflect their “real questions” about what it means to be a member of their communities and also what it might be to be adult-like in that setting (Rogoff & Paradise, 2009). In addition to viewing children’s interests from a participatory learning perspective that highlights the relationships between children and socialization with adults (Rogoff, 1998; Rogoff, 2003; Vygotsky, 1978), children perhaps also explore what it would be like to be powerful or agentic. Children try on roles that are afforded power such as beauty, strength, size, status and power, and responsibility

from adults in their lives as well as characters from books and pop culture that may or may not be adults or real people.

Children’s desires and moves for agency are taken up in the Store project, in a sense, as an extended performance in coordination with teachers to play out having children work for money in a setting where it is not typical for children to directly labor for capital. As is discussed further in Chapter 6, this interest in selling and buying is framed within the larger context of other childhoods where children do work to sell in stores.

Sisters with Social Capital

The Store project gained traction from having spokespersons so that the idea does not appear to outrightly come from the teachers. Teachers could pull along an interest if needed but it helps to have preschoolers be the face of the project in a child-led curriculum. Celine and

Sophie, who referred to themselves as “sisters,” are afforded social capital in the classroom by teachers and the discourses of development as older preschoolers who are verbal, charismatic, able to write letters, and vocal participants at Meeting. The two were literally attached at the hip as they would bind themselves together by having scarves tying them together. They often played off each other’s ideas such as when the Sophie came up with the name “A Store for

Everything” off of Celine’s idea that the store would sell everything.

Their sisterhood was a major part of the social dynamic of the classroom. Children’s social worlds can dynamically shape the culture and social planes of the classroom (Comber,

2016; Dyson, 1993; Wohlwend & Kargin, 2013). They were both part of the classroom the year prior but did not develop their close bond until their second year. Early on in the fall of 2018, they started spending the majority of their time together. The chose to sit together whenever

possible and to join activities together. They often hugged and maintained physical proximity.

By late in the school year, the two planned to get married and made invitations for their wedding.

Figure 4.7 – Sophie and Celine come up with matching outfits

While their affinity for each other was generally mutually beneficial, teachers started to take note of the need for some space between the two. Danielle had a conversation with Sophie and Celine about what it meant to them that they were friends (CubbyHub anecdote, 23 Oct

2018):

Sophie said, “It means that we love being together all the time!” Celine agreed, repeating what Sophie said. Danielle questioned whether they loved being together all of the time and asked them if they ever got mad at the other. With this question, the two looked at each other briefly and said, “No!”, almost in unison.

They would eventually admit that they do get mad at each other sometimes and Danielle affirmed that it is okay if friends do not always agree. Even as they had the conversation with

Danielle, the two would whisper to each other. Sophie explained that they were whispering because “she wanted to know what Celine’s answer would be so that they could answer the same” (CubbyHub anecdote, 23 Oct 2018). Sophie and Celine’s strong interest in each other had enough gravity that it shifted the ways that they joined in on conversations. The side whispers were their way of getting on the same page so that their responses would be the same, thus reinforcing the strength of their sisterhood in their eyes as well as others’. When one made a statement, they would seek confirmation from the other by adding, “Right, Celine?” or “Right,

Sophie?”

Figure 4.8 – Sophie and Celine riding on a public bus with the class

The teachers continued to challenge the two to think for themselves and carve out some individuality in their close friendship. When there were instances when the two disagreed, teachers commended them for having their individual opinions. When one of them insisted on having the other do what they ask, the teachers would push back:

While Celine and Sophie were digging in the sensory table with Adam, Celine was really wanting Sophie to help her dig out some dinosaur claws. Sophie was resisting at first but then seemed to give in to Celine’s request. Danielle told Sophie that she didn’t

have to help Celine if she didn’t want to and told Celine that if Sophie didn’t want to help her, she could ask Adam. Sophie responded, “I’m just trying to be a good friend.” A bit later, Sophie was whispering to Celine. Celine then told Danielle that Sophie was telling her that she had to wear a costume like her (Sophie) while she dug. When Danielle started to talk to Sophie about it, Sophie’s face started to blush a bit, and she agreed with Danielle that if Celine didn’t want to wear a costume, she shouldn’t keep insisting that she should. (CubbyHub anecdote, 29 Oct 2018)

So strong was their interest in each other that they and the teachers had to actively resist falling into their established pattern of engaging with each other.

In this anecdote, the two children shifted around in their positions of maintaining agreement in relation to the teacher. At first, Sophie changed her mind to acquiesce to Celine’s request. As Danielle intervened to present other options such as saying “no” or letting another child help instead, the duo’s dynamic took up Danielle’s translation of their interaction. Sophie attempted to find a plane of communication that was less detectable by teachers through whispering. Perhaps if Danielle had not heard Sophie’s request for Celine to wear a costume to match, their performance of “sisterhood” might not have been perceived as coercion by teachers and subsequently checked. Interestingly, Celine broke alignment and decided to bring Danielle back into the interaction. Perhaps a balance was restored as Sophie was checked on her request to dress alike just as Celine was previously checked on her request to dig together. It is uncertain why Celine made that choice, yet it is clear that Celine was aware of how Danielle’s and teachers’ translation of their interest in being sisters was a mobilizable factor. Their interest in being sisters continually shifted as it was recognized and networked with other actors.

The strength of their friendship also made pairings and duos noticeable and a pattern of grouping in play. Two of the preschoolers, Andrei and Mika, were twin brothers and were obviously paired together in people’s eyes. Andrei sought out Sophie late in the school year and called her his “favorite girl.” Adam and Paolo were also close friends with similar interests and

temperaments. Cindy and Sheila’s families live in the same building and often spent time together outside of school. Carina and Reese, both newcomers to the school, also developed a friendship later in the school year. The appearance of other duos may also reflect the effect of their influence on other children that looked to have a similar relationship of their own or, for

Andrei, to have Sophie as his “favorite girl.” An assistant teacher noted in a CubbyHub anecdote that “on our walk this morning, Andrei turned to Sophie and exclaimed, “Sophie, you’re my favorite girl ever!” and gave her a big hug. Sophie replied, “Wow, Andrei, you really can’t get enough of me!” (CubbyHub anecdote, 16 May 2019).

Chesworth (2016) calls for investigating “how interests are manifested within the social hierarchies that operate in classrooms between adults and children, and between children in peer cultures” (p. 297). In contrast to Sophie and Celine, Ian was a child who was most frequently excluded from play and was tabbed by teachers and one child’s parents as someone who needed extra mediation in negotiating social situations (Fieldnotes, 10 May 2019). Chesworth (2016) finds that there is an “uneven playing field upon which children are able to demonstrate agency and make meaning of their interests” (p. 297). This is because “the social structures of peer cultures create high- and low status positions that impact upon the negotiation of play roles and act as devices to control children’s inclusion or exclusion in play” (Chesworth, 2016, p. 297). Ian might be considered to have a “low status position” relative to his peers. While he seeks to connect with others’ play interests, he faces rejection in many ways. He greeted a visiting child from the toddler classroom with excitement but the child backed away as he got very close to her faces to talk to her. On another occasion, while Ian moved closer to join Carina and Reese

(seemingly a duo) on their “cowboy” play, they kept moving away from him until Ian went to the bottom of the loft alone and muttered under his breath, “But I want to be a cowboy…” After a

few moments, he joined another group that was in the loft riding an airplane. However, as he traversed across the large open space in the middle of the room, he was called out by his peers on the rule against running: “You’re running!” thus reaffirming his status (Fieldnotes, 16 Apr 2019).

While Ian played a smaller role in the Store project, Sophie and Celine were powerful figures as older, talkative, well-connected members of the classroom community and it is reflected in the teachers’ anecdotes, photos, teacher meeting conversations, and meeting transcripts. The Store project networked with the gravitational pull of Sophie and Celine’s social capital in their interest in being “sisters” as they were enrolled as spokespersons for the Store project. There were other prominent interests in the classroom that were taken up into the curriculum, but not in the same magnitude.

Social Capital and Other Interests

Dinosaurs were a major interest that was widely discussed and displayed. Adam, Paolo, and Reese showed their interest in dinosaurs often in revealing their knowledge about the topic in conversations, their choice of clothing and toys, their choice of TV shows, and their frequent play with dinosaur figurines. Adam, in particular, was known as an expert on dinosaurs. He knew the names of more obscure dinosaurs and could explain the science and history behind dinosaurs and their extinction. At one Meeting, dinosaurs were brought into a conversation about animals:

Reese: We saw a dinosaur swimming in the water. Paolo: I saw a dino-suitcase. Anne-Marie: What is a Dino-suitcase? Adam: It’s a TV show. Adam explains that it is a name of a TV show and mentions another character. Adam: I see a spinosaurus. Anne-Marie: It’s a kind of dinosaur? Adam: It looks like fish. It’s the only dinosaur that can swim in the water. Do you know what the flying dinosaur is called? It’s called a prehistoric animal. (Meeting transcript, 25 Feb 2019)

When there was an opportunity to, Reese brought the conversation to dinosaurs. Paolo and Adam piggybacked on it and added their shared and individual knowledge about dinosaurs. Teachers picked up on this area of expertise and encouraged him to share what he knows with the group.

At Meeting, Danielle went around the circle to ask each child to report on what they did in the morning:

Danielle: Adam, what did you do? Adam: (talking very softly) Um, I did the puzzle with Paolo, the dinosaur puzzle. Anne-Marie: Can you talk a little louder, please? Adam: (talking louder) I built a dinosaur puzzle with Paolo. Danielle: Do you remember what dinosaurs were in the puzzle? Adam: T-Rex, and Iguanadon, Quetzelcoatlus, Orynthomimus. An assistant teacher helps him remember with the beginning syllable, Adam says each full name. Danielle: Those are really hard names to say, Adam. (Meeting transcript, 9 Oct 2018)

Figure 4.9 – Adam’s dinosaur toys from home

The teachers recognized Adam’s impressive memory of the dinosaurs complex names and invited him to display it by asking him to name the dinosaurs and also to support his recall by

prompting him with the beginning syllables of the names. Outstanding interests can sometimes be used as a tool to give more quiet or shy children a chance to display a strength or to talk about something that they love.

Since several children signaled an interest in dinosaurs, Danielle followed up on this interest by turning the sensory table into an excavation site. They put dinosaurs and other toys into the table and covered them with a faux concrete slurry. Danielle documents this in a

CubbyHub entry:

The sensory table has become our new archeological site where the preschoolers use small tools (they are sharp, as the preschoolers noted on several occasions) to dig up the fossils hidden under the dirt. Adam spent most of the morning at the table, excitedly and very purposefully digging out the rocks and shells that he could find. He was careful while digging, explaining that you had to be so that the bones wouldn’t break. He also explained to Celine and Sophie, who were at the table with him at the time, that they were being paleontologists and how his mother had told him that paleontologists dig up dinosaur and animal bones. (CubbyHub anecdote, 29 Oct 2018)

Later that morning at Meeting, Adam was the spokesperson to tell the class about the excavation site:

Danielle tells everyone about the excavation dig in the sensory table. Since not everyone was there to check it out this morning, she calls on Adam to tell everyone something about it. Adam: (talking very softly) Me, Sophie, and Reese and we dig some bones and we didn’t have much time but we see some bones. And I let Reese share some of my dinosaur and I brought his dinosaur back to school. (Meeting transcript, 29 Oct 2018)

The interest lasted through the entire year even while the Store project was running. Several children played with dinosaurs that they “bought” from the Store and would play with dinosaurs on their down time when not working at the Real Store. The interest never faded out yet did not take center stage in quite the way that the Store project did. One possible reason could be that both Adam and Paolo can be more private in the ways they explore and express their ideas.

While Adam and Paolo were well-connected socially as sought-after friends and play partners, they were similarly not typically ones to direct ideas at Meeting time and often spoke very quietly as was noted in Meeting transcripts. Reese is more vocal in larger groups and has an extroverted personality, but being younger and new to the classroom and school, he would be less likely to push his ideas through in the mixed-age classroom on a similar level as Celine and

Sophie.

Children also demonstrated interests in firefighters, race cars, fashion, and popular children’s tv shows such as PJ Masks and Paw Patrol in their conversations, play, toys, and accessories. These were explored during in-the-moment interactions as well as a field trip to the local fire station. These interests were brought under the umbrella of the Store project as the related toys and books could be purchased at the Store for Everything. Chesworth (2016) explains how different interests are taken up differently as “children’s play choices are not always freely made, but occur within the context of relational power differentials that place some children at an advantage over others” (Blaise & Ryan 2012; Wood 2014a, both as cited in

Chesworth, 2016, p. 297). However, children find ways to exhibit resistance to whatever power structures they find themselves in (Markstrom & Hallden, 2009) and that resistance itself can offer insight into how children are making sense of their interests in relation to those power structures. This plays out socially in peer cultures as well as materially and spatially. If interests did not neatly fit into the frame of the Store project, they became what I call free interests where children pursue the interest outside of the frame of the Store project.

Free Interests: The Materiality of Resistance

While teachers and children are prominent actors in classrooms, the principle of general symmetry in Actor Network Theory (Latour, 2005) gives equal importance to nonhuman actors

in the processes of translating children’s interests. Chesworth (2018), in taking multiple readings of data, did not only focus on teachers or children or only the interplay between teachers and children when considering the actor networks at play. By also analyzing the role of nonhuman material actors through Barad’s (2007) theory of intra-activity, new understandings of children’s interests become possible. The material world, imbued with its own networks of meaning, also translate children’s interests, desires, and behaviors into particular networked interests.

Likewise, human actors also interpret and re-translate the shifting material and spatial networks for their own purposes. Through translation and purposing between teachers, children, and nonhuman actors, children’s interests are taken up into curriculum. A recognized interest such as the one in dinosaurs or superheroes did not take hold in curriculum in the same way as the interest in money. This is not to say that the interest in dinosaurs could not have been taken up to that level or that it did not meet a certain threshold of networking to gain traction. The

Store project was not necessarily inevitable given the networks in action. In this setting, the teachers could very well have continued to explore dinosaurs or firefighters since they are given more autonomy in managing the time, space, and materials in the classroom as long as teachers make a case that it is child-led to parents and administrators.

The purpose of this analysis is not to determine how “successfully” or accurately teachers interpreted and translated children’s interests to curriculum. Rather, analysis through a critical childhoods lens traces agentic moves children make in response to an interest that is taken up into more formal curriculum. In fact, I argue that any interest that gets taken up into curriculum is not inevitably so. Mapping networks in action provides a context for understanding the agentic moves children make in response to interest-based curriculum as well as the agency that shifts in material and spatial actor networks afford children. Thus, this distributed notion of agency

(Chesworth, 2018; Lenz Taguchi, 2011) among several human and nonhuman actors does not make inevitable any one translation or interpretation of children’s interests. Chesworth (2018) argues that by taking an intra-active reading of children’s interests “would suggest that agency is enacted in multiple modes by all material bodies” (p. 6).

What Are Free Interests?

One way that I understand the intra-active (Barad, 2007) agentic moves that children made is in their exploration of free items within the Store project. Since almost all the toys and materials in the classroom were housed in the Store and given a price, there were only some items in the classroom that were free and accessible without participation in the Store. These items included the large blocks that are more practically stored outside of the Store, the sensory table, the loft, a bin of dress up shoes, books related to money and firefighters, and the art materials on the shelves. Since the Store had to be staffed with shopkeepers and officially announced to be open for business, the free items were all that was available in the early morning.

The availability of the free items stood in contrast to their relationship with items that needed to be purchased and therefore lent themselves to be used by children to explore their interests in other ways. Just as Sophie sought to communicate her plans to continue being sisters with Celine by dressing in costumes together via whispering (CubbyHub anecdote, 29 Oct 2018), so likewise do children find ways to explore their interests outside of the framing of their interests within curriculum. This “intra-action” (Barad, 2007) resists any inevitability of how children’s interests are translated and taken up into the curriculum or not as new possibilities for agency are made available through the shifting of both human and nonhuman networks.

Free vs. Premium Shoes

This concept of free, in keeping with the analogy to adult monetary economies, was described in a CubbyHub entry:

Sheila and Tanya spent a lot of time playing together this morning. First, they put on the “free” shoes in the classroom and went up to the loft, where they played for a while. Once the store was open, they both quickly got their wallets and went to the store to buy their favorite shoes - the sparkly red shoes for Sheila and the red boots for Tanya. (CubbyHub anecdote, 7 Mar 2019)

The teacher, presumably Danielle, documenting Sheila and Tanya’s choices that morning caught onto one way that children were responding to the implications that the Store had for life in the classroom. In order to carry out their play in the loft, they chose the available dress up shoes outside of the Store as a stand-in until they could get to their preferred “premium” shoes that may have been strategically included in the Store. Their favorite red sparkly shoes and red boots did not cost any “real” money but the shoes do have an actual cost, in a sense, of buying into the established Store project. Sheila and Tanya could have rejected the rules as anarchists and looted the Store for their desired items, but chose a temporary work-around in the free items.

While a recognized interest that is supported by teachers can be more recognizable and unavoidable to some extent, this concept of a free item opens up a way of looking at the negative space of the recognized interest, of which may also include dis-interest. Though the concept of nothing or zero can be taken for granted as simply everything else that is not something, zero is constructed and not a given fact. Items that cost zero dollars in the classroom are chosen in relation to the items that can only be bought in the Store. This means that other materials and spaces in the classroom take on new meaning in their relationship to the curricular interpretation of children’s interests. These materials and spaces are freed up to be used to explore other formulations of children’s interests. Chesworth (2019) calls for children’s interests to be

“conceptualised in terms of the interconnectedness of all matter” (p. 7). Instead of viewing interests from adults’ and children’s perspectives alone, interests should be “relocated within a complex web of relations which can potentially involve children, adults, space, time, animals, materials and objects” (Chesworth, 2019, p. 7). The free items that lay outside of the Store structure connected with children’s interests that lay outside of the Store’s frame.

Freed Shelves

When I started my observations inside the classroom, Sophie gave me a tour of the classroom (Fieldnotes, April 16, 2019). I had heard that the classroom was very empty because everything was taken off the shelves and placed in the Store and now got to see for myself.

Sophie introduced me to an empty large rectangular shelf with two levels. She was not showing me empty space or “nothing,” but in fact, a bunk bed that was now more possible after the toys were housed in the Store.

Figure 4.10 – Empty shelves become bunk beds for Sophie and Celine

The consequences of deciding that the Store would sell “everything” in addition to the migration of all of the toys from the shelves to the Store left a negative space in the classroom that itself became a proactive actor in the classroom. The emptiness of the shelves did not just

serve to contrast with the fullness of the Store for Everything. Instead, the Shelves of Nothing were fertile ground for translation and repurposing (Yoon, 2013). It can be said that the shelves, now made freely available, “invited” Sophie and Celine to explore their interest in being sisters and ironically resisted the inertness of emptiness. Dewey (1913) explains the free nature of objects in that “there is nothing in a wheel and a piece of string to arouse a child’s activity save as they appeal to some instinct or impulse already active, and supply it with means of execution”

(p. 20).

The location of all the toys in the Store for Everything concentrated demand in the spatial boundaries of the Store and created an “obligatory passage point” to engage in the Store project

(Callon, 1986). The children had to participate in the Store for Everything and be customers if they wanted to use the “premium” toys that they really wanted to play with. The children started to realize this and, as will be explored further in Chapter 5, Carina expressed this sentiment at

Meeting by declaring “sometimes the customers get tired” just as it is “tiring” for shopkeepers to stay at their post (Meeting transcript, 11 Apr 2019).

Toys from Home

Another item that becomes free in relation to the Store project are toys that are brought in from home. The children have always brought in toys or special items from home even before the Store project began. However, since these toys belong to individual children, they cannot be placed in the Store to be sold. Therefore, if the child is happy to play with and share these toys, they would not necessarily also need something from the Store. Adam continued to bring in dinosaurs from home in addition to purchasing dinosaurs and other items from the Store.

Clothing and accessories that are considered to be special from every day clothes can serve a similar purpose to dress up clothes, as the children come into school already “in character.”

These objects brought in from outside of the classroom represent ways to explore other interests without passing through the Store. They can represent interests that do not fit as well within the

Store framework.

Figure 4.11 – Items from home

Mika and Andrei’s interest in race cars is an example of an interest that did not connect with the Store project directly and were explored as a free interest via bringing toys from home.

Andrei and Mika brought in small race cars almost daily and could start their morning by playing with their race cars. They brought up race cars in conversation and made attempts to work it into

Store project framework at Meeting throughout the year. In a discussion where Anne-Marie was asking for suggestions about what to name the Store, Andrei and Mika tried to make a connection between their favorite toy and the discussion topic:

Andrei: (mumbling) My race car from a store... Anne-Marie: What store is your race car from? Do you know the name of it? Andrei: My name is right they know for race car for my truck.. Anne-Marie: Does anybody else know a name of a store? Mika: More race car...

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Anne-Marie: I know you bought a race car from a store but what is the name of the store where you got the race car? Mika: I don’t know. (Meeting transcript, 31 Jan 2019)

Anne-Marie tried to direct their contribution toward the aim of coming up with a name for the

Store. There was an impasse where the topic of race cars cannot fit neatly into the discussion and results in not knowing, mumbling, and moving on. These assertions of interest can be seen as being off topic or better fit for conversation in another context:

Mika: I see mommy put get for me new water bottle with water race cars and then I go home and I go on with mommy and the party got candies. Anne-Marie: Are you talking about the store Whole Foods? Mika: No, Halloween Anne-Marie: Maybe at lunch you can tell us more about Halloween. Yes, Adam you said you have been to Whole Foods. What did you see there? (Meeting transcript, 24 Jan 2019)

In a Meeting where Anne-Marie asked the class what should be sold at the Real Store, Mika once again tried to fit his interest into the conversation.

Mika: Race car, police car from the real store. Anne-Marie: Where are you going to get that? Will you make it? Mika: It is a big toy where big kids play. It can put in the water Anne-Marie: Okay, but what I am asking is if it is something you have at home that you can make or something you want to buy in the store. Mika: Buy in the store. Anne-Marie: Okay, but we are talking about things that we can sell in our own store. Mika: I just want the race car, police car. Anne-Marie: So, will you make that to sell? Mika: Yeah. It just connect together. (gesturing with his hands) Anne-Marie: Okay, it sounds like you have an idea of how to make it. So maybe you can ask [the art teacher] for help with it. Anybody else have an idea? (Meeting transcript, 4 Apr 2019)

Though the contributions may address the question being asked in some way, it might not work as well as selling food at the Real Store given the precedence for selling baked goods rather than race cars. Instead, Anne-Marie redirects the idea of selling race cars toward the art curriculum

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given the precedence of making sculptures and work with assembling objects with art teachers at this school.

There is a parallel then in the sorting and translating of ideas in the Meeting space as well as the classroom space for interests that are taken up and interests that can be explored in free play. BPCC allowed children to bring objects from home into the classroom to a degree that it blended in with materials purchased for the classroom. In school settings where objects and clothing from home was more regulated or where there is less opportunity for free play, these free interests may move outside of teacher-directed spaces.

Conclusion

The Store project could be said to have come from Celine and Sophie’s interest in coins and buying things from a store. This interest in coins connects to children’s desire for access to authority that is not available to them in their childhoods such as deciding when and how much treats to have or directly arranging their sleepovers. With the teachers’ decision and support to develop this interest into a larger project, Celine and Sophie became the child spokespersons at

Meeting to bring the Store idea to the class.

The Store necessitated the creation of routines and products. Materially, the Store was authorized to stay up and running over a period of time. The Store differed from any other pretend store that was spontaneously put together in dramatic play because of its relative permanency. Impromptu stores were cleaned up each day and reset as just one of many possible options for the next day. The Store was made to stay due to the physical and visual field space it occupied, the sign up schedule for all preschoolers to take turns as shopkeepers, the announcement that the Store was open that called for a response from the children to initiate the

Store routine, and the discussions brought to the whole group at Meeting time by teachers.

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Within the context of whatever interest is taken up into curriculum, children make use of teachers’ response to observed interests to continually shape their experiences in school. Even when children’s interests become part of formal curriculum, children continue to carve out free space to continue to play with what their evolving interests are. Chesworth (2019) asserts that

“interests are created through children’s intra-actions with the social, material and discursive elements of the worlds in which they live” (p. 6). Therefore, the Store project does not linearly begin from Celine and Sophie’s interest. It is children’s carving of free space within the material worlds of their childhoods by finding available coins on the ground. It is teachers’ and school’s search for a suitable interest to expand into a multi-faceted project. It is the subsequent materials and space of the classroom that provide crevices and contours from which more possible existences form. There are always freed interests that manifest in the shifting of networks and materials and space; they intersect with and house the possibilities of new translations of interests. Metaphorically then, what might children’s construction of free spaces and materials in the classroom mean for teachers in curriculum-making?

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Chapter 5 – Feedback and Duty: Enclosures in Sustaining Interests

Chapter 4 mapped out the progression of an interest in coins and money to the Store project within the context of classroom social dynamics and circulated interests. Children claim free spaces and materials to extend or demarcate their ever-evolving interests in relation to an interest that teachers build into the curriculum. Children’s resistance is marked by moves to engage items and spaces that are outside of the market and frame of the classroom’s Store project. Resistance in this sense is not necessarily a response to an imposition, rather it is children’s agentic act to continue constructing for themselves and with others what their interests and identities are becoming.

This chapter explores processes and tensions in sustaining the Store project as a child-led and interest-based endeavor. The data present opportunities to acknowledge and analyze the pedagogical maneuvers teachers employ to keep their curricular decisions in step with children’s interests and desires (Research Question #2). Concurrently, within the broader context of a neoliberal schooling ecosystem, teachers’ efforts to “listen” to children’s ideas are necessarily networked to the material production of learning and a “commodification” of children’s interests

(Yoon & Templeton, 2019). Teachers’ efforts to maintain a child-led approach through continually eliciting feedback from children and to instill in them a sense of duty, commitment, and perseverance create an obligatory passage point (Callon, 1986) that hinges upon children doing the work of running the Store themselves. Thus, teachers interpret and translate children’s feedback and resistance (Research Question #3) as opportunities to extend and sustain children’s interests to meet curricular goals.

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Feedback: Listening to Sustain Interest

The teachers at Bright Pearls Children’s Center enacted a curriculum that was based on children’s interests, play themes, and social connections. They intently observed and recorded what children did and said to adapt the curriculum to account for how the children were learning with each other. The Store project was birthed through this effort and was met with enthusiasm.

However, even the sugar of novelty and the steadiness of ritual will not last on its own. The motivation to engage in situational interest can run out if it is not sustained to become a maintained situational interest or an enduring lifelong individual interest (Hidi & Renninger,

2006). In order for the project and the pursuit of children’s interest to hold together, connections to other networks need to be established or the project needs to be reconfigured as it moves forward. Teachers therefore perform significant roles in constructing and supporting these interests as they act from their own sense of duty and accountability to their role in finding ways to mediate children’s interests into curriculum and their pedagogy.

Devices of Interessement

Callon (1986) studied how several actors became networked with one another and how that actor network was sustained by looking at how Pecten maximus scallops, fishers, and scallop researchers become interessed with one another. Each have their own motives and goals in becoming interested in one another and their networked relationship hinged upon the question of how scallop larvae anchor themselves to proliferate. While the network appears to be established in that scallops anchor to reproduce, fishers seek to profit from a healthy scallop population, and researchers need empirical data, Callon argues that the network has to overcome several

“obstacle-problems” to continue to hold.

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Figure 5.1 – Towline as a “device of interessement” (Callon, 1986, p. 64)

“Devices of interessement” are employed to overcome and prevent these issues. In this case, as seen in Figure 5.1, the material device of a towline with attached netting prevents starfish from consuming scallop larvae, other fishers from poaching the larvae, and water currents from dispersing the larvae and making it difficult for researchers to observe.

Similarly, to prevent obstacle-problems from disrupting the Store project from producing learning outcomes in children, devices of interessement are needed as enclosures to overcome and prevent dilution of the children’s participation in the Store project. Obstacle-problems such as other competing interests, holidays and school breaks, and possible complaints need to be addressed yet under the banner of child-led pedagogy. Figure 5.2 shows a further abstracted version of Figure 5.1 to demonstrate how devices of interessement are positioned “between [the subject of interest] and all other entities who want to define their identities otherwise” (Callon,

1986, p. 63). While devices of interessement move toward enclosure as suggested by the arc, actor networks continually shift and are never absolutely and indefinitely enclosed as is seen in the progression of the Store project.

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Figure 5.2 – The “geometry” of “interessement” (Callon, 1986, p. 63)

Taking Ownership of “Change”

A device of interessement that the head teachers took to extend the children’s interest in the project was to regularly elicit feedback from the children during Meeting time. Immediately after the soft opening of The Store for Everything on February 19th, Anne-Marie held a debriefing meeting to check in on children’s experiences with the Store:

Anne-Marie: So far you all have worked so much in the store, so this afternoon we can start practicing how the store would run. You can decide what needs to be added and what needs to be changed. So far, have you seen what’s inside? (Meeting transcript, 19 Feb 2019)

The head teachers invited the children to be owners of their Store by suggesting that items in the

Store could be changed and the way that it is run can be adjusted based on feedback from the start. The teachers did not observe and solve for the issues on their own without consulting the children, even though that could easily have been their prerogative. The emphasis on the effort of the children is forefronted when Anne-Marie says that “so far you all have worked” and “you can decide” (emphases added). This frames the project as a child-led endeavor even though teachers plan and work, as well, to make that happen.

Even later in the project, the teachers continued to ask for feedback at each major juncture, such as when the Real Store opened:

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Anne-Marie: Okay, so Paolo and Mika, you will be working downstairs later. And Maysie, you will also be working downstairs, and Sheila you, too. So far, is there anything you want to change that we are doing in the (Real) store? Aside from Tanya, who wants a shorter time working? Mika: Keep doing. Adam: It’s good. (Meeting transcript, 25 Apr 2019)

Eliciting feedback from the children was a regular part of the conversation at Meeting and problem-solving issues that arose became part of the work of maintaining the Store. Though the structure of the Store was built, the work of making the Store work for the classroom community was not done and always a work-in-progress. The teachers established the children’s exercise of voicing their opinion as a main part of their learning in network with the teachers’ approach to democratic as well as child-led pedagogy. Democratic pedagogy is used in this case as a practice where changes and policies regarding the project are to be discussed and voted upon before their enactment.

Breaks

As the general managers of the Store project, teachers used feedback to check in on whether the children were still on board with what they implemented. Some of these adjustments happened in-the-moment during the first few days as the mechanics of operating the Store was worked out such as when Celine thought of having a bank to replenish funds when they ran out.

Cindy thought of having wallets to keep the money in. Sophie thought of returning boots that did not fit in exchange for a purse (CubbyHub anecdote, 20 Feb 2019). These informal adjustments to problems such as needing to print money through monetary policy, tracking ownership and the store money, figuring out the Store’s return and exchange policies were made into formal policies in the Store’s operation through feedback focus groups. These were part of the hands-on

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learning about “Preschool economics” that the teachers were excited to document in their anecdotes.

One issue that arose on that same day continued to be discussed throughout the project.

Sheila and Ian, who were the shopkeepers, petitioned to play, so “Anne-Marie made an announcement that the store will close for a break” (CubbyHub anecdote, 20 Feb 2019). Anne-

Marie’s move to make an announcement acknowledged the children’s desire to do other things yet couched it in realistic terms such as when workers take a “break” from work. This fit in with the theme of the Store and centered the Store as the main activity that children “broke” away from to do other things. While many American preschool classrooms structure the room in centers where children have to sign up to enter or exit, children at BPCC are allowed to move from one activity to another or in between a few (with some caveats).

“Breaks are ok when you are really tired.” The idea for shopkeepers to take breaks continued to gain traction as a point of reference for when the Store would close and when shopkeepers could choose to do other things (CubbyHub anecdote, 25 Feb 2019). However, as each shopkeeper had a different threshold for when a break was needed, parameters had to be set around taking breaks. The class discussed different solutions for when breaks could be taken:

Danielle: Sheila, this morning you were the store keeper. Can you think of something you liked or did not like? Sheila: When it’s busy. Danielle: It was busy at the store. What did you do? Sheila: Taking breaks. Danielle: Yes. Both of you were really tired, and you told me you want breaks. But you are actually not really tired. You wanted to have a break and play. Preschoolers, what will happen if the shop keepers take a lot of breaks? Sophie: Customers cannot buy the things they want to. Danielle: Yes, the customers cannot get what they want if the shop keepers take too many breaks. What should we do? What should teachers say? Sophie: The store is closed.

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Danielle: The store is closed? Ok. So for tomorrow morning, the store will just open for a few minutes and it will close. Is this good for everyone? Does everyone agree? (Meeting transcript, 6 Mar 2019)

Danielle invited feedback from Sheila, one of the shopkeepers that morning, on how the Store was running. Perhaps with a sense of what issue might be raised, Danielle analyzed the notion of being “tired” as not one of physical exhaustion, but a desire to have the choice to do other things when business was slow. Danielle did not attribute Sheila’s request to take breaks to a lack of interest but saw it as an opportunity to engage in dialogue on what would work for everyone. On one end of a spectrum of changes that could be made would be Sophie’s suggestion that teachers announce the closing of the Store for the day.

Danielle continued to lead the class in thinking through the implications of proposed changes by testing the criteria of consequence and consensus in asking, “What will happen if…?” and, “Is this good for everyone?”

Celine: I don’t think so. Danielle: You don’t agree? Why do you disagree? Celine: Because people don’t get what they want. Sheila: Then the store closed, you cannot buy anything. Danielle: Yes. Who else doesn’t like it? Some preschoolers raise their hands. Danielle: So we need to make a rule about store keepers. What can be the rules for our store? Sheila: You need to get in line to get into the store. Danielle: What else? Sheila: You need to put money into cashier. Sophie: Taking breaks are ok when you are really tired. Sheila: This morning, me and Tanya take breaks and the store closed. Danielle: And Jie (student teacher) was helping Andrei. She is not a store keeper, and this is not her job. Alright preschoolers. Here are the rules. The next time we ask you if you want to be a shop keeper or not, if you say yes, that means you will the shop keeper for that time. If you need to use the potty or have some snack, you can take a break. If you are tired and want to play, you can also have a break. But play near the store. So when customers come, you can help them. (Meeting transcript, 6 Mar 2019)

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If teachers could not just close the Store based on a fixed time and if shopkeepers could not take a break whenever they wanted to, Danielle pointed out that a “rule” must be made to address leaving the job or not signing up to do the job. Additionally, Danielle made the point that taking breaks should not result in the responsibility being passed down to teachers by default.

“This is not her job” and if teachers were left to run the Store, the project would not be child-led and the children would not be practicing giving change and engaging with customers.

Sophie took up Danielle’s use of the phrase “really tired” from earlier on in the meeting to state that “taking breaks are ok when you are really tired” as a suggested rule. However, the possibility that all of the children could elect to take a break remained. So Danielle added to the rule and emphasized sticking to a commitment or at the very least maintaining proximity to the

Store to be ready to take on the role of shopkeeper at a moment’s notice. These amendments to the rules address the children’s desire to move away from the space of the Store or to do something else just as in Figure 5.2, the device of interessement encloses the growing threat of

“being tired.”

Danielle openly invited the children to voice differing opinions and make proposals, by asking, “Does everyone agree?,” “Why do you disagree?,” and, “What can be the rules for our store?” Through this process, Danielle solidified the children’s ownership of the Store project.

Therefore, as children show signs of disengaging with an interest that is taken up in the curriculum, teachers extend it by translating it into another opportunity to teach.

Closing Time

Teachers continued to take children’s feedback into consideration as the Store project progressed. Shopkeepers were free to take breaks as long as they maintained proximity to the

Store to be ready to help potential customers. Teachers established a “closing time” for the Store

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that both marked the end of the shopkeepers’ job for the day and also condensed the demand for the Store to a shorter span of time. Auspiciously, this provided an opportunity for the children to learn how to tell time by looking at the classroom’s analog clock. Closing time not only addressed children’s requests for breaks but also authorized teachers to teach an academic skill and encourage children to be more independent in telling time as opposed to waiting for teachers to tell them when time is up. At Meeting, Anne-Marie taught the children how to tell time by recognizing the numbers on the clock as well as by visually matching it to a diagram of a clock at the 9:45 a.m. closing time:

Anne-Marie: Preschoolers, we are going to talk about our store. Today Carina and Tanya were the shop keepers. Carina and Tanya! How did you feel about having a closing time? Did you like it better? Carina: Yes. (nodding her head) Tanya: I like it. Anne-Marie: Okay. That’s what we are going to do. Do you see the picture of the clock? It says the closing time of the store. When the long hand reaches number 9, the store is closed. If you see the clock matches the picture, it will be time for us to close the store. Sophie: If you know it’s time to close, please switch the side of the sign (so that it displays “Closed”). Anne-Marie: Yes. If you are coming in late and the store is closed, we are not going to reopen the store for you. Sophie: It is not because you are coming late! It’s because we need to track the time. (Meeting transcript, 8 Apr 2019)

Tanya had been particularly concerned about the time spent as shopkeepers and was glad to have a closing time. To claim this closing time, however, she and the other children would have to learn how to recognize for themselves that it was closing time. It was a cleverly designed teaching tool that capitalized on the children’s desire to punch out for the day in addition to giving the children more independence in managing the operation of the Store. This was more meaningful and contextualized learning of the skill compared to worksheets that require children to write the time that the hands of the clock indicate. The Store project was paying off in

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producing many opportunities to integrate math, literacy, social studies, and socioemotional interaction. Even issues that come up in running the Store are good lessons because they are analogous to real issues that store managers have to work through. The teachers were responsive to the suggestions that the children made and continued to extend the project into new avenues for learning.

Enclosure and Power. Closing time served as a device of interessement to enclose time as a parameter and to concentrate interest and participation before releasing the pressure of being

“tired” and wanting to do other things. According to Callon (1986), “[The] interessement helps corner the entities to be enrolled. In addition, it attempts to interrupt all potential competing associations and to construct a system of alliances” (p. 65). The educational benefit of learning to tell time allied with curricular goals that make its implementation connect within this actor network.

Furthermore, Anne-Marie’s warning that “we are not going to reopen the store for you” emphasizes the firmness of the enclosure. The firmness of the statement had an impact as

Sophie, who often added on to teachers’ statements, softened it a little with her own clarification that not reopening for anyone was “not because you are coming late!” but just that they “need to track the time.” However, the firmness of Anne-Marie’s statement is perhaps part of the design as a deterrent for lateness and an encouragement for concentrated participation in the Store.

Callon (1986) explains that “the devices of interessement create a favorable balance of power” (p. 65). While child-led approaches seek to shift the balance of power toward children in having a large stake in making decisions that affect the classroom community, the power dynamic between adult and children, as well as teacher and student, is unavoidable to an extent.

To sustain the project and propel it forward in the ways that it did, that balance of power may

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surface at times in the process of enclosure. Still, as was discussed in the previous chapter, free spaces and materials are taken up in resisting full enclosure. Later in this chapter, resistance to enclosure from these devices of interessement will be discussed.

Duty

Just as eliciting feedback from the children binds the Store project and the children’s interests together, instilling a sense of duty in the children was another way that teachers held the two together. As teachers make curricular decisions to build on children’s interest in money and plans materialized in the rearrangement of classroom space and materials, the observed interest is held more static than it had been manifested in conversations and play. The larger scale and scope of the project required a constant effort to translate and re-translate children’s interests to make it cohere for the group even as networks continually shift (Fenwick & Edwards, 2010).

Teachers looked for children’s feedback to make sure the children were still on board. Instilling in children a sense of duty holds children to the project long enough for the collective effort to gain traction. Realistically, getting a group of 13 people together to accomplish a common goal is a challenge and requires some sense of duty and commitment even if everyone is enthusiastically interested.

This sense of duty means following through with commitments despite inevitable disruptions, waning motivation, and other enticing alternatives. Dewey (1913) describes this ethos of duty as “effort,” such that “the demand for effort is a demand for continuity in the face of difficulties” (p. 47) even if the difficulties lie in between oneself and one’s interest. This ethos is reiterated in Danielle’s reminder of the expectations of being a shopkeeper: “The next time we ask you if you want to be a shop keeper or not, if you say yes, that means you will the shop keeper for that time” (Meeting transcript, 6 Mar 2019). Even at the beginning of the project,

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Anne-Marie, who has worked on many projects anticipated periods of time where commitment might waver, presaged, “Okay, so that means you really need to work on this, if you won’t work on this we won’t be able to have the store” (Meeting transcript, 29 Jan 2019). In other words, true interest in pursuing the project needs to be reflected in sticking to it.

Obligatory Passage Points

The test of the extent of children’s interest and commitment to the project came in moments within a shopkeeper’s work shift that resulted in allowing for breaks. As the project extended across months from February to early April, a solution for a challenge to the project’s daily upkeep came in the form of establishing a closing time that allowed for the class to explore other areas of the curriculum without needing a shopkeeper to run the Store for the whole morning. No matter what obstacle-problem came up, the same issue was that the children were to be the ones running the Store and not the teachers. As Danielle led the class to discuss the ramifications of taking too many breaks, Sheila reported that she and Tanya took a break that resulted in the closure of the Store:

Sheila: This morning, me and Tanya take breaks and the store closed. Danielle: And Jie (student teacher) was helping Andrei. She is not a store keeper and this is not her job. (Meeting transcript, 6 Mar 2019)

Jie’s attempt to help Andrei get the Store back up and running again was a temporary fix but not a desired precedent at this stage in the project where teachers are no longer modeling how to be a shopkeeper for the children. These obstacle-problems must pass through what Callon (1986) calls an “obligatory passage point”:

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Figure 5.3 – “Obligatory passage point” (Callon, 1986, p. 62)

In order for the Store project to still address children’s interest in money and buying ice cream under the guise of a curricular project, the bottom line is that the children must do the selling.

The optics of having a teacher doing all the work of selling baked goods at a bake sale would not be good and customers might not pay a premium for the baked goods. The customers would then be shortchanged without the child’s performance of demonstrating what they have learned or are practicing. Callon (1986) diagrams the role of an obligatory passage point as a binding force that brings together the interests of several actors into one networked endeavor in Figure 5.3.

Teachers doing the job of teaching in a child-led approach, children having access to money to buy ice cream, and this researcher having data to explore children’s interests are pulled together through this obligatory passage point.

Job Chart

A material manifestation of the ethos of duty was a job chart that kept track of the various tasks that the children wanted to do such as turning off the lights to make announcements that signal a transition to snacks or clean up and doing roll call before heading outdoors. These tasks

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were assigned informally based on whoever asked first or whoever had not had a turn recently.

The job chart also served the purpose of making sure some children who choose not to participate in important activities also get a chance to have that experience. Some who had not had as many turns being a shopkeeper would be scheduled to take a turn:

Anne-Marie: So preschoolers, we have something new on our wall that maybe none of you have noticed that Danielle made yesterday while you all were napping. Remember, you all want to call the names or count the heads...so everyday we are going to write down the names of who does what. … Anne-Marie: Sheila did the snack announcement, Maysie called 5 more minutes, Ian called time for clean up. We are going to write the names, so from now on, hopefully we will not hear, “I never get to” because you will have the chart to see who has done it. Sometimes kids will ask to do things more than other kids, so we want to make sure that everyone has a chance to do something each week before our break. Anne-Marie uses the shopkeeper job as an example. Before break, Maysie had only been the shopkeeper once but Cindy had been the shopkeeper many times before that. (Meeting transcript, 26 Mar 2019)

This serves to set a base level for any individual’s involvement in the classroom as well as for the Store. The children’s participation in the Store is organized through the job chart that represents the ethos of duty. The writing of the names on paper resembles a contract and informally binds the actors to a time and place where they assented. The written document serves as a logistical tool and can be called upon as a record to hold children accountable to their commitment.

Anne-Marie emphasized from the early stages of planning the Store, that big dreams require big work. The seriousness of the children’s interest is tested against effort and commitment from the assumption that if one is really interested in it, one would do it. The children signed up to work on various parts of the Store at Meeting and their names were recorded on chart paper:

Preschoolers raise their hands and Anne-Marie assigns tasks:

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Money – Mika, Celine, Tanya, and Reese Sign – Sophie, Paolo, Ian, Sheila, and Adam Price tags – Carina, Maysie, Andrei, and Cindy

Anne-Marie: Okay, so that means you really need to work on this, if you won’t work on this we won’t be able to have the store. (Meeting transcript, 29 Jan 2019)

“It is our jobs”

In addition to agreements written on paper, the ethos of duty was networked with the idea of having a “job” and taking ownership that fits within the enclosures of the Store project. The children were reminded of this ethos of duty throughout the project, especially in early March when the rules around taking breaks was being discussed:

Anne-Marie: Preschoolers we are going to talk about the store. The other day Danielle was talking about storekeepers and how if you choose that job you need to stick to the job. You can take breaks for snack or bathroom, but you need to stay with the job the entire time. … Celine: Yeah, you can only take a break if you feel like no one is coming. Anne-Marie: Yes, if it seems like nobody is coming and they have all the toys they wanted then it is okay to take a break. … Sophie: You can take a break if everyone is occupied. (Meeting transcript, 7 Mar 2019)

It needed to be established that taking breaks was reasonable only under legitimate circumstances and not due to a lack of effort or enthusiasm. Or, if one shows a deficient diligence and a degrading sense of duty, it should not affect the collective effort to maintain the vibrancy of the Store project.

As the class transitioned from operating the Store for Everything to running the Real

Store, the same ethos was applied so that children stay with the task and to try it at least once:

Danielle: Preschoolers, we have to let you know is that everyone will have a turn, and just like the pretend store in the classroom, when you decide you want to be a shopkeeper, we ask you to stay for a certain amount of time. …The same thing with our real store.

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… You can’t just come back here if you decide you are done. It won’t be for too long that we are asking you to stay. And then if it is something you don’t want to do again, let us know, and so the next time when the store is open, we can ask somebody else to do it. But we ask you that if it is something that we talked about today that you try, you try it for some time. Does anybody have any questions? Tanya: When we have a real store, what time will it close? Danielle: What time we are closing? That is a very good question, Tanya. Our real store in the afternoon is going to close at 4:30pm. After nap time, we are going to have some time to clean up the mats. And we are gonna have some time to set up the store downstairs. Celine: Can the preschoolers come to help? Danielle: Of course, it’s your store. Reese: And it is our jobs. (Meeting transcript, 24 Apr 2019)

The stakes were raised in running the Real Store since the children would be handling real food, real cash, and real customers. After all, part of the real economic cost of a brownie at a school bake sale accounts for having a child either bake or serve it. It is not the teacher’s job to do certain things for children at a progressive school because part of the cost of attending and running such a school is to have the children work on the projects. Indeed, it is literally the children’s job and position within the broader “real” economy to participate in the project that is developed based on their interests and they are held accountable to doing that job in part by taking their feedback into consideration and developing a sense of duty. Outside of this context, children participate in the “real” economy in various ways that can often be unrecognized and unpaid such as immigrant children’s work as translators and interpreters between their families and schools (Orellana, 2009).

For just as issues that arose from the Store was an opportunity for teachers to elicit feedback and lead a problem-solving focus group, signs of a lack of ownership of the Store were a chance to reiterate the ethos of duty:

Anne-Marie: Also, today Sheila was the only shopkeeper we had today. So if we want to keep the store going, we need to have more preschoolers volunteering

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to work in the store because it is not fair to always have the same person working in the store. So now later in the afternoon when we open the store, Sheila will not be the shopkeeper. Another preschooler will have to be the shop keeper. So Sheila, how was it to be the only one? Did you like to work by yourself? Sheila: No. Anne-Marie: So we asked everybody if they want to and Sheila was the only one who said yes and had to work alone and she did not like it. So we will just have to ask you to do it if nobody else says that they can. And that can happen with the cooking we will do next week too. If you do not volunteer, we will just have to tell people to do it. (Meeting transcript, 18 Apr 2019)

Within the frame of the Store, shopkeepers were performing a job even if they volunteered for it.

Likewise, embarking on the Store project was a job even though it was voted on and chosen.

Anne-Marie was teaching the children that setting out to accomplish a goal should not be dependent on fluctuating feelings of interest otherwise very little can be achieved. In a child-led approach, Anne-Marie positions the issue of Sheila being the lone shopkeeper as one of

“fairness”. The children’s response to the call to duty would answer a plea for empathy.

However, being that Sheila was in the situation because she was one of the most consistent volunteers, it would seem that the problem was more that the obligatory passage point of having the children doing the selling was in jeopardy. The ethos of duty steps out from behind Sheila being the spokesperson for equitable participation: “So we will just have to ask you to do it if nobody else says that they can.”

Jobs, Labor, and Effort

The ethos of duty has parallels in more teacher-directed approaches that more overtly foreground the teacher’s voice. If a student does not feel up to the task, the student would be reminded more directly through conversations, grades, stickers, traffic lights, and various behavioral technologies. Whether by the belief that there is a greater good to be achieved or a

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line of accountability to administrators, government policies, and global competition, teachers are positioned to move students towards learning production.

Even child-led approaches are not exempt from this dynamic. At the end of that excerpt,

Anne-Marie steps forward to state more unequivocally, “If you do not volunteer, we will just have to tell people to do it” (Meeting transcript, 19 Apr 2019). The same rule applies when the children cook as a class; they are reminded that if nobody cooks, nobody eats because it is not the teacher’s job to cook nor is it the only reason that there is cooking in the classroom. The teacher could very well cook or be a substitute shopkeeper, but the networks that make this child-led curricular approach possible would collapse on itself if the children are not held to the obligatory passage point of taking ownership of the Store. So, in a sense, even with the choice of learning based on children’s interests, children and teachers are bound to their positioning within the networks of child-led schooling through technologies such as feedback and duty.

Dewey (1913) wrote about the role of interest in motivating children to persist. Dewey claims that, “Effort, like interest, is significant only in connection with a course of action, an action that takes time for its completion since it develops through a succession of stages” (p. 47).

Anne-Marie assumes her role as a teacher to help push the children through challenges with calls for effort to dutifully stick with the project to its completion. Dewey calculates that as the “bond of connection” to interest becomes looser, “prevalent practices and the training and disposition of the teacher will decide whether the methods of ‘hard’ or of ‘soft’ pedagogy shall be resorted to”

(p. 33). Since the BPCC teachers take up child-led pedagogy, most practices would be considered “soft” pedagogy and signifies the relationship between interest and effort for children and the school within the broader market of schools and available childhoods (Chapter 6). Under more teacher-directed pedagogies, Dewey says that hierarchy of interest and effort is more

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inverted such that “after subject matter has been selected, then the teacher should make it interesting” (p. 23).

Resistance

The Store project was developed by experienced teachers who honor children’s voices.

They listened carefully to children’s ideas and used their insight and creativity to build on children’s interests in a way that involved every child. They themselves were engaged and worked conscientiously to make it a vibrant project that featured many modes to learn skills in meaningful contexts. Even in the most successful projects, as this one was by many measures, children will exhibit their agency in ways that resist and push against even the most favorable frames for their interests. By no means were the children held against their will. When the Store project came to a close, the children expressed sadness that it was concluding with “aww’s” and remembered it with fondness afterward. Moreover, the class was doing many other activities throughout this time both inside and outside of the classroom. Resistance is not a judgment of how much a child likes or does not like an activity or project, rather, resistance is a condition of agency as children mark who they are becoming by pushing against and pushing for how they define their own existence. Even within curricula that aims to be child-led, children continually redefine their interests through resistance.

While children’s interests shift and continually become translated and networked in various ways, children’s resistance present opportunities to mark how their interests are shifting in relationship to other actors. The interests are defined by how children continue to seek out the activities of interest as well as how they resist and redefine what the interest is. Teachers regularly invited the children to speak about their experience with running the Store and encouraged them to think about how it could be better. In order to allow the project to grow and

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expand into the multifaceted platform for learning that it became, developing a sense of duty kept the project on course. Feedback and duty served as glue to continue to hold children’s resistance and teachers’ interests together. Feedback and duty were devices of interessement

(Callon, 1986) to take in children’s resistance under the umbrella of the project. Two recurring acts of resistance were declarations of being “tired” as well as silence. These acts are considered resistance in that they appear to provoke a response that belies the power structures involved in the networked interest in the Store project.

Resistance to Duty: “And sometimes the customers get tired”

As the Store project progressed, there was some resistance that pushed against the enclosures of the project. During the Meeting where Anne-Marie asked the class for their feedback on how they liked the implementation of closing times, Carina expressed her concerns by challenging the notion that those who sell were the only ones that get tired:

Cindy: And customers want to play, too! The person, the one who is outside, they will not be able to find the person that is with them. … Anne-Marie: So think about what toys you want and buy them before the store is closed. Carina: Sometimes you can get tired of buying. Anne-Marie: Yes, and sometimes you can get tired of selling. Selling is more tiring than buying. And a lot of you think selling is a lot of work. Carina: I don’t want people get tired of buying. Tanya: You have to tell everybody, “Store is closed.” Anne-Marie: Yes. Just make the decision if you want to buy anything. Don’t make that decision when the store is closed. It will not be open again. Sophie: If you want to, you should make your decision earlier. Cindy: The people in the store, they might be sleeping in there. (Meeting transcript, 8 Apr 2019)

Here, Cindy made an astute observation on the role of the spatial and social boundary between

“customers” and shopkeepers. Since the discussions around taking breaks had been focused on shopkeepers leaving their posts, Carina built on Cindy’s dissection to point out that buyers can

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get tired also. However, the focus of Anne-Marie’s response to children’s feedback had been on how those who sell can get tired because they had to do their job by staying near the Store. It could be assumed that those that buy have no real labor except to pick up the toy they were would have picked off the shelf regardless. After all, the assumption might be that customers buy what they are interested in. Carina stood firm and reiterated her stance with not much change in her argument. Tanya offered the “closing time” device as a solution that would apply to shopkeepers and customers alike. This was not a fleeting thought as Carina followed up on this thought a few days later:

Anne-Marie: So do you like watching the clock and knowing when it closes? Ian: Yeah. Sophie: I’m glad there is a closing time because working at the store is exhausting and now I know when my job is done. Celine: I love when the store closes because I like playing with Sophie. Anne-Marie: So when the store is closed you have time to play. Tanya: When there’s no time you don’t know when the store closes. Anne-Marie: Yes and I think what we noticed for teachers too that when we announce that there are 5 more minutes for the store to close people will go and buy toys. And before when the shopkeepers were taking a break and people wanted toys, they would have to go back and forth and this way the store is closed when we say it is closed so you need to buy your toys before. Carina: And sometimes the customers get tired. (Meeting transcript, 11 Apr 2019)

In repeating that “sometimes the customers get tired” too, Carina is perhaps expressing that one cannot escape the frame of the Store; it is inevitable to participate in the market of the

Store project. Even materially, almost all of the toys were housed inside of the Store and mirrored how the project framed the classroom. The emptiness of the shelves were the negative space that outlined the extended boundaries of the Store and the toys were capital resources that had been mined from the shelves to supply the Store and tilt the demand toward participation in the Store’s ecosystem. Sophie also recognized the enclosure of having a job and that she is “glad

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there is a closing time because working at the Store is exhausting and now I know when my job is done.” When the Store closes, she could partially step out of the frame of the Store project.

The teachers’ eliciting of feedback around closing times for the Store unearthed other desires that were present while the Store was open. Had the talk of being “tired” and

“exhaustion” only been attributed to shopkeepers, it would have still fit within the frame of the

Store as a capitalist lesson that the real work of operating a Store is tiring and requires work, and perhaps is even something to be proud of. Being “tired” in this sense is not exhaustion in the sense of a lack of calories to burn or a build up of lactic acid inside muscles even though there may be a physiological response. Being tired seems to be juxtaposed with what else is possible outside of the frame of the Store. For example, even Celine, who was one of the original spokespersons for creating the Store, admitted, “I love when the store closes because I like playing with Sophie,” who was, at times, separated by the cardboard key-locked door and the shopkeeper/customer dichotomy. This perhaps alludes to what Cindy had brought up how, “The person, the one who is outside, they will not be able to find the person that is with them.” The

Store inadvertently, or perhaps by design, separated shopkeepers on the inside from those on the outside. The physical walls of the Store created a spatial separation of those on the inside and outside of production and consumption just as the physical walls of a “real” store need to enclose the goods and services being sold.

Being “tired” is perhaps also a push to redefine socially constructed roles and also a feeling akin to the exhaustion of being both a producer and consumer in a capitalist system. The fact that the Store project is an actual market makes more apparent the connection to the neoliberal market of children’s interests where “listening” to children itself is a

“commodification” of their ideas (Yoon & Templeton, 2019) to be used for curriculum that leads

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children toward socially stratified childhoods and futures within the broader economy. This interplay between the “pretend” Store in this classroom and its network with the larger “real” markets of curricula and schools will be explored further in Chapter 6.

As the Store project came to a close, Anne-Marie noted the lack of buyer activity as well as the material deterioration of the walls:

Anne-Marie: Another thing. We have closed our Real Store. I think it’s also time to close our Store for Everything for—forever. Celine, Ian: Nooo... Many: Nooo... Anne-Marie: You say no but nobody wants to be store keeper anymore. At the end of the day, I see the store is all messed up. No one’s taking care of it anymore. Nobody even wants to buy anything anymore. So I think it’s really time to close it up alright? A new preschooler offers to help clean. Anne-Marie: Thank you. Tomorrow we’re going to put all of those things back on shelves. And some of them will maybe be put in the booth. Several: Aww... aw.. Anne-Marie: You know what? Us teachers are actually looking at what you guys are doing. It seems like nobody wants to make the store to run anymore. What we’ve seen is that a lot of you have been engaged in planting and look more plants are growing over there so we can do more planting and take care of plants out in the courtyard okay? Carina: And sometimes um my cat can’t make [...]. Anne-Marie: Alright so will you help us clean up and put away all those things from the store? Several: Yeah. Carina: And also we need space for a kitty box. (Meeting transcript, 14 May 2019)

The discursive and material enclosures of the Store were crumbling and also allowed to be moved. Materials moved out of place were perhaps not as vigilantly returned to its designated spot as the appearance of the Store became “all messed up.” The assemblage (Deleuze &

Guattari, 1987) was becoming deterritorialized and reflected in its material and spatial composition. With the children having earned their Shake Shack ice cream through running the

Real Store and with the semester coming to a close based on the school calendar, the decision to

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bring the Store project to a close had already been made by teachers before Anne-Marie announced it at Meeting. The signs that Anne-Marie offered as a need to change were already there at least as early as when Carina said that customers were tired also. Perhaps what this official announcement signified was that lines of flight (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) that had constantly presented themselves were being released from enclosure within a centralized interest-based project. Spyrou (2018) explains that

“lines of flight” (made possible through specific assembled relations) help de- territorialize their otherwise highly territorialized and stabilized assemblages enabling in them capacities to act on the world in new ways (Deleuze and Guattari 1987; see also Aitken et al. 2014). (p. 143)

These “stabilized assemblages” are like the actor network of the Store project that attempts to enclose lines of flight such as when Carina’s assertion that customers were tired was redirected towards ways to continue to work better within the system of buying and selling. Now that the Store project was coming to a close, Anne-Marie suggested to transition attention to planting. Still, Carina saw an opening to talk about a kitten that she had been fostering. Though the curriculum moved toward planting in the spring, the teachers did also follow up on the news of the kitten and Carina brought her new foster kitten to show the class. As such, resistance through lines of flight of being “tired” was finally actualized as the project found closure in earning money for ice cream and the end of the semester.

Silence: Feedback Without Feeding Back

From a critical childhoods lens for understanding children’s agency, Yoon and

Templeton (2019) argue that while adults “may attempt to set up the conditions for learning via curriculum, interactions, and instruction, children find ways to assert their voice” (p. 72).

Especially with young children, their voice, feedback, and resistance are filtered through adult lenses. The resistance that children express may not be easily comprehensible by or acceptable to

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adults since children also speak with their bodies in a “corporeal voice” (Fincham, 2016). Their

“voice” then can be corporeal as well as silent (Spyrou, 2016). As being “tired” was resistance to the enclosure of dutifully buying and selling, silence was a notable form of resistance to the enclosure of feedback. Children’s agency is defined as resistance here by its relationship to the response it elicits:

Anne-Marie: Actually, all the other preschoolers have been shopkeeper except Cindy and Andrei. So this afternoon, you will be the shopkeepers. Let’s share what you like as a shopkeepers. Things you like, things you find hard, or anything you remember doing as shopkeepers. Carina, what do you like about being a shopkeeper? Carina is silent and looks sideways. Anne-Marie: Alright, we will come back to you later. Celine, what do you like about being a shopkeeper? Celine: We get to unlock the store. … Anne-Marie: And what did you like or did not like when you were a shopkeeper? Sheila: I like the magnatiles. Anne-Marie: Okay. I’m asking what it is that you like or did not like when you were a shop keeper. ... What did you like [about being] the shop keeper this morning, Tanya? Tanya is silent. Anne-Marie: You and Ian were working together... Tanya is silent. Anne-Marie: How about you, Carina? Carina is silent. Anne-Marie: Alright, I need Carina, Tanya, and Sheila to listen closely... I need you to pay attention to the things we are asking you to do. You need to think about what are you doing so that you understand why are you doing those things. So next time you can do it better or you can make it easier and not just do it because we were asking you to do it. We don’t want to hear ‘I don’t remember’, ‘I don’t know’...We are not asking you about something you do not know or do not do. It’s about what you already did. Okay? (Meeting transcript, 25 Feb 2019)

Feedback was a mechanism for the children to take ownership of the project and verbal participation in the Meeting was a way to evaluate the children’s learning. Yoon & Templeton

(2019) poses the act of listening to young children’s voices as one that

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necessitates generous interpretation and thoughtful response. It implies that teaching, learning, and research are dialogic processes, and for work with young children, understanding their narratives take on other forms and sounds as well. (p. 61)

While the elicitation of feedback seeks to tap into children’s voice, that voice is expected to fit within normalized forms of expression in American schooling such as verbal expressions in

English that follow a certain timing and teacher-perceived relevance to the question asked.

However, formal dialogue in schooling, such as the conversations in Meeting, follow the IRE pattern of teacher Initiation, student Response, and teacher Evaluation (Mehan, 1979). Such a structure establishes the teacher’s position of authority to determine the structure and progression of the dialogue. Additionally, dialogue between students becomes secondary to dialogue between teacher and student or is encouraged only as far as it gets to the teacher’s agenda.

However, the children’s silence resisted the productivity of text. In order to fit within the structure of the Meeting conversation and a neoliberal demand for production and evaluation, silence can then be interpreted through dominant discourses embedded in these interactions

(Spyrou, 2016). Spyrou (2016) points out that it can be easy to

explain away silence (often using a culturally specific and stereotypical explanation of what silence is and means) in ways which are narrow and reductive (e.g. as lack of interest or passivity or as “having nothing to say”) (Mazzei, 2003, p. 363). (p. 17)

Through the discourse of development, Sheila and Carina’s silence can indicate that a child is

“not ready” because of their age or is at a lower level of development and may need verbal prompts to scaffold their progress toward independently producing a fitting response. Sheila’s answers can be perceived as non-sequiturs or a misunderstanding of the question that warrant a rephrasing of the question. Carina’s body language of tilting her head to the side could indicate that she might have felt shy or unsure of what to say. Anne-Marie said she would follow up later

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to give Carina time to think or to hear other answers modeled by other children. Additionally, following up can be a signal to others that silence will not be a way out of answering.

Silence and Teaching

Silence can be quite difficult to navigate as teachers have to interpret the silence through multiple layers of context. Anne-Marie points out an accommodation that she already built into the question that would perhaps preclude some reasons for silence: “We are not asking you about something you do not know or do not do. It’s about what you already did.” Teachers use a variety of strategies, but as those various strategies are still met with silence, other interpretations might come in to play such as a lack of effort or “attention” or “understanding.” This response suggests that the silence has a strong effect on the networks at stake. The non-participatory thrust of silence resists the enclosure of the feedback device for learning. As a teacher myself, I also feel the compounding threat that silence poses to the discourses of being a “good teacher.”

Yoon and Templeton (2019) argue that “to simply assert spaces as child-centered does not guarantee that adults will not make moves to center larger agenda” (p. 81). Within a neoliberal vision of schooling, teachers and students are in classrooms to “do” something and there must be proof that something of value was done or made to stakeholders outside of the classroom. Even the act of listening to children’s feedback is a provocation to demonstrate verbal acuity and comprehension. Although BPCC is a play-based setting, children do not simply play.

The families that choose a play-based setting such as BPCC must eventually join kindergarten classrooms and elementary schools that allot increasingly less time and space for children’s play and expect a higher floor of academic abilities upon arrival. In considering that transition

(Recchia & Bentley, 2013), the curriculum in preschool cannot completely ignore the need to be ready to learn letters and numbers, or to speak in a large group setting.

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Silence and Risk

Tanya, who is older than Sheila and Carina, joined the school that year as an English

Language Learner (ELL) and was most fluent in Korean. Tanya’s silence is at risk of being attributed to her status as an ELL as well as the “double whammy” of perceived deficit due to gender and race (Julé, 2004, p. 4). In another Meeting where Tanya’s silence is noted, the triple

“whammy” dynamic can be contrasted with the model responses of Celine and Sophie:

Anne-Marie: Okay, I want you to close your eyes and think to yourself about a sandwich you have had before. Then raise your hand to let us know the sandwich that you are thinking about. Preschoolers close their eyes and shortly after, some raise their hand. Sophie: Bacon, egg, and cheese! Anne-Marie calls on Tanya. Tanya doesn’t say anything at first. Anne-Marie explains what a sandwich is, two pieces of bread with something in the middle. Tanya: Cheese. Celine: Pepperoni. Adam: Pancake. Mika: Broccoli. Sheila: Grape. Paolo: Hamburger. Sophie: And speaking of burgers, I like Shake Shack! Celine: Me, too! Anne-Marie: Maybe we can think about having a Shake Shack Friday! Celine: Yeah! With the money from the store! … Celine shares a story about having cheese and egg and bacon sandwich at Kitchenette. Anne-Marie: (continuing on with the second bread choice) We also have bagel. Celine: Bagel?! Anne-Marie: We also have oranges and apple with your lunch. Celine: Are we going to have dessert? Anne-Marie: Did anyone bring dessert? Reese raises his hand. Anne-Marie calls on him. Reese: Pasta sandwich. Anne-Marie: (to Celine) You can have apples for dessert. Sophie: Are the sandwiches one per customer? Anne-Marie: It depends on your belly. Tanya has her hand raised. Anne-Marie calls on her. Tanya: Bagel? Anne-Marie: Yes, I’ve seen you have had bagel before and we have that choice for lunch today. (Meeting transcript, 9 Nov 2018)

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Celine and Sophie often exemplify an ideal response within the Meeting structure as is characterized by their comfort in guiding the direction of the conversation and being affirmed.

Celine and Sophie had been going to BPCC for several years and at this point, Tanya had been at

BPCC for a couple of months. However, the risk in both speaking in and out of turn is calculated differently for children like Celine and Sophie who are in their second year in the classroom, highly verbal, and extroverted when together. Tanya’s silence can be understood in its position in relation to other speech. This is not to say that Celine and Sophie should not speak as much or as freely, but that silence is positioned in relation to a network of forms of agency. Spyrou (2018) defines children’s agency as

fundamentally relational—as networked, assembled, and infrastructured. …[Oswell takes this] assemblage to be a generative arrangement “which is a composition of dynamic, generative and agentic parts, such that those parts have temporality, movement and capacity only by virtue of their being composed or arranged” (Oswell, 2013, p. 73, as cited in Spyrou, 2018). (p. 130)

Listening to silence as feedback involves understanding its position in the assemblage or network of speech as it involves normalized speech and the neoliberal demand for evaluation.

Conclusion

Why might the mechanisms of feedback and duty be called upon in maintaining the children’s interest and what are the implications for an understanding of children’s interests through a critical childhoods and ANT framework? Children’s interests do not exist on their own and within any individual child. Interests are necessarily networked within the context of the children’s experiences of childhood in relation to many other available childhoods. While eliciting feedback from children can be a soft way to tailor curricula to individual children, it cannot be fully detethered from the neoliberal context of education and capitalist productivity

(Yoon & Templeton, 2019).

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The Store project networked with the idea of having a job and the duty that comes with producing labor. That convenient metaphor unveiled the labor capital that children produce while being in schools to allow parents to work all while they themselves are beginning to be positioned as investments. When Carina stated that customers can get tired too, it revealed a connection to curriculum that is marketed to children’s interests can also make the child

“customers” weary at times too. Similarly, as social media has become a map of social networks and their interrelated desires and “likes,” participation in that market of information and products can be burdensome (Zuboff, 2019) even if it is constructed according to interests.

Furthermore, as children’s interests are embedded in networks and markets that ultimately extract productivity, they lie in relation to other approaches to learning that may not elicit feedback and demand duty without any other pretense. As Anyon (1980) pointed out how the “hidden curriculum” that is taught according to different socioeconomic classes reifies class structures, children’s interests are framed according to access to certain schools and curricula.

Certainly, race, gender, and ability also intersectionally (Crenshaw, 1991) define the nature of the way children’s interests are networked and responded to via feedback and duty.

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Chapter 6 – Real Interests

Chapter 4 explored the networks that fostered the generation of the Store project as a curricular response to children’s interests in money and the subsequent free interests that opened up. Chapter 5 identified feedback and duty as “devices of interessement” (Callon, 1986) to sustain interest in the Store project. Children exhibit agency within and against these enclosures of their interests through breaking from the “obligatory passage point” (Callon, 1986) that required children to be the shopkeepers. This chapter analyzes the “transformation” (Latour,

1990) of the Store project from the Store for Everything to the Real Store to examine the implications of broader movements of translating children’s interests (Chesworth, 2019) into a real or, socialized and scaffolded, framing of the interest (Research Question #1).

As the network of actors that established interest-based projects within BPCC discovered children’s interest in using real money to buy what they want, these interests became networked and manifested materially in the production of the Store project. This progression toward handling real money satisfied teachers’ goals of fostering independence and other learning experiences they valued while also satisfying children’s desires to enjoy a serving of Shake

Shack ice cream. Birbili (2019) states that

how teachers respond to children’s interests also relates to their views on what constitutes “necessary knowledge” for children in kindergarten, their image of children and the beliefs that give meaning to the term. (p. 11)

Children’s interests are then never discovered in its raw state from within the child without being aligned to other actor networks. Indeed, “teachers, whether they realize or not, get into a process of enriching children’s interests” (Birbili, 2019, p. 9). This “enrichment” is the translation and

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movement of children’s interests toward teachers’ and schools’ views of “necessary knowledge” or real learning.

Real is italicized in this chapter to signify its use in naming and distinguishing the Real

Store from the pretend Store for Everything. It also represents the telos or imagined futures of the translations made on and by actor networks. Colloquially, real is like a term used by adults to encourage children toward a valued version of a behavior in saying, “You’re really doing it!”

The child was previously doing something but is now praised for their movement toward real-ly doing it as opposed pretending to do it or having it done for them. In learning how to ride a bicycle, the child is taught a particular skill that is valued through various mechanisms that speak to the values and pedagogies the adults practice. How a child learns to ride a bicycle may manifest materially depending on how they are socialized. Training wheels that replace the constant failsafe of an adult’s steadying hand may be employed. A pedal-less bike might let the child glide on their own to practice their balance and get used to the motion before graduating to a real bike. A tricycle might be used to remove balance from the equation so the child can develop the muscles to pedal and push their own weight. Or, an adult might just let the child learn by falling and earning their skill through as many scrapes and bruises as is necessary.

Likewise, material translations occur in the movement of a child’s interest toward a real version of that interest. Analyzing these material translations is part of a “complex reading of play in which individual, social, material, spatial and discursive elements act together to create, and to potentially transform, children’s interests” (Chesworth, 2019, p. 5). Moreover, the methods of mobilizing a child’s interest toward a real interest is situated within broader markets of schooling nested in pedagogies of emergence and scaffolding that socialize children into particular childhoods where children’s proximity to power is naturalized while teachers’ delivery

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of power is made invisible (Langford, 2010). This movement will be examined in this chapter through tracking the series of translations involved in alchemical “transformations” (Latour,

1990) of coins, stores, and ice cream.

The Materiality of Translating Interests

First, this movement must be understood through the materiality of translations as according to Callon (1986), “translation is the mechanism by which the social and natural worlds progressively take form” (p. 215). As networks engage with one another, they transform the various human and nonhuman actors in relationship to one another. The principle of general symmetry in Actor Network Theory states that both nonhuman actors play as critical a role as human actors in how networks of meaning develop (Callon, 1986; Latour, 2005; Law, 1992;

Fenwick & Edwards, 2010). While Chapter 4 was a time-based origin story of the Store project from the perspectives of teachers as they documented children’s play and conversations, another way to trace the progression of the Store project might start with coins on the playground floor that fell from the hands and pockets of those that did not notice or perhaps care enough about their loss.

By starting from the coins, I trace what Latour (1990) calls transformations that can happen along two dimensions. One is an “association (akin to the linguist’s syntagm) and,” the other is a “substitution (or paradigm for the linguists)” (p. 106). A syntagm are linguistic units that are linked in order to make a statement (e.g., “I love ice cream” can become “I love having

Shake Shack ice cream on a hot summer day”), whereas a paradigm is the structure for a statement where the parts may be interchanged but have a similar structure (e.g., “I love ice cream” can become “Preschoolers crave lollipops”).

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Latour (1990) argues that actors can become networked together through transformations to have different effects as a statement. Latour gives the example of European hotel managers trying to get hotel guests to return their room key after they check out. The hotel manager can make a verbal reminder to guests to “Please bring back your keys” with some effect on the guests’ behavior of remembering to return their keys. This statement can be made more effective by creating more associations to help guests remember. In addition to the verbal reminder, a written sign can be placed near exits, for example. This sign in addition to a verbal reminder may result in more keys being returned. However, attaching a large metal fob to the key in addition to written and verbal reminders yields an even better result as guests that have a heavy weight in their pockets would be more than willing to pass the key off to the hotel manager.

In Latour’s (1990) example, the materiality of the heavy key fob effectively makes the statement, “Please bring back your keys” more “real” rather than wishful thinking that guests would spontaneously drop the keys off at the front desk. In addition to the statement becoming longer by “association,” the various actors are transformed by “substitution.” Not only does the key transform into a key with a weighted key fob, the “forgetful” hotel guests are transformed into “dutiful” ones.

Now, we turn to look a few principal nonhuman actors that transform within the paradigm of [treat – store – shopkeeper – currency – customer] such as when a found coin

(currency) is “substituted” by pretend money and then “real money” or when the Store for

Everything (store) is “substituted” by the Real Store and then by Shake Shack. Over the course of the Store project, children and teachers are transformed as well by ever-extending

“associations” as both move towards notions of real learning. This transformation by extending associations is what I discuss later in the chapter as a movement or socialization toward

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particular childhoods. Moreover, these transformations made more visible the market of schooling and the multiple positions of children and teachers as customers and shopkeepers.

Two Coins: Movement Toward “Real Money”

To whom would these flat, circular, and metallic objects with markings signifying relatively low value have particular significance? It was a tough market for a lost penny and dime to find an owner yet the coins on the playground found their target demographic.

Fortunately, they caught Sophie and Celine’s eyes as the girls looked for real money to buy soft serve ice cream. According to Latour (1994), “Objects that exist simply as objects, finished, not part of a collective life, are unknown, buried under soil. Real objects are always part of institutions…” (p. 64). That is, materials disconnected from actor networks are as good as buried like these coins were. They become real and take on networked meaning as they become part of a collective, or society or institution.

While the children knew that their parents got money from a card at a bank (LifeCubby anecdote, 9 Oct 2018), the only real money they had immediate access to were the coins that

Anne-Marie suggested that they find. Children’s desires for agency in getting what they want, namely soft-serve ice cream, networked with the availability of loose change at the playground.

Chesworth (2019) argues that

nonhuman matter is not passive; rather, it has a vibrancy (Bennett, 2010) which unsettles the anthropocentric view that human culture is separate from, and in authority over, nonhuman domains. (p. 5)

Though the coins had fallen out of circulation in the broader economy, they called out to the children and instead were brought into circulation within a different market. The coins became a proxy that represented the funds available to the children until they could find a way to get real money.

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To whom would these two children’s dreams of using the coins to buy ice cream have particular significance? These children’s desire to be able to have what they want, when they want it, was picked up by Anne-Marie who teaches at a school that focuses on observing children to build curriculum that integrates children’s interests with learning objectives. Anne-

Marie saw potential in this interest and started planning with the children. Anne-Marie started her documentation of the incident later that day by naming Celine and Sophie as the principal actors in asking their teachers for help with buying ice cream from the Mr. Softee truck

(CubbyHub anecdote, 9 Oct 2018). Anne-Marie continued to think about the incident and wrote about her initial plans to make a store with Celine in a CubbyHub entry:

Celine and [I] talked about putting up a store at the table where some were having snacks. [I] wanted to find out more of the details of Celine’s idea. So far, this is the list of what we need to make a store: - yellow paper for money (yellow was the choice among different colored paper in [the school] office) - green paper to make keys (like the one [an assistant teacher] made last year) - Celine’s suggested name for the store: Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods – I explained that those are names of stores already and that we have to come up with something different, Celine agrees to talk about this at one of our meetings - Adam suggested a sign that says, “This food is good for you.” - what to sell: costumes, pillows, puzzles, pretend yogurt using old yogurt containers - make price tags (CubbyHub anecdote, 11 Oct 2018)

The children’s interest in buying ice cream at this point was on its way to being translated into material products such as a list of ideas, pretend money and keys, a sign, goods, and price tags.

Anne-Marie continued on in that same entry and made note of Celine’s distinction of “real money” as opposed to the pretend money they planned to make:

Celine really wants to get real money and [I] told her that there has to be something for people to have that they give us money for. Celine suggested we can make food. Adam suggested “money for buying toys.” Reese suggested “dinosaurs.” Carina suggested “food.” [I] also said that if we make real money from other people, the money will be not

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for us to use but to use it for something that other people may need. She gave examples of other preschoolers before buying toys for kids who didn’t have toys and books for a classroom that needed more books. Celine suggested art supplies. This brainstorming of ideas is not done yet. We will continue to think of other details. (CubbyHub anecdote, 11 Oct 2018)

After coming up with a list of pretend items to make, Celine appeared to have clarified that was not all that she wanted and called for “real money.” This dynamic between real as opposed to pretend would come up throughout the project and heralded the creation of the Real

Store. Rather than going along with wish fulfillment through pretend play, Celine had the persistence to reject counterfeits and reiterate that she wanted cold hard cash that she could use at a real brick and mortar store. Adam and Reese seemed to pick up on this idea as well, perhaps wishing they had real money to buy toys like dinosaurs for themselves. Anne-Marie warned that if they wanted to deal with real money as opposed to pretend money, “the money would not be for us” as it would fall outside of the purposes of school activities. A privately-run lemonade stand could be used to buy dinosaurs and ice cream, but a school-run store would need to have educational value cutting into the profit.

What Is Real?

What makes the money “real”? This distinction and the need to distinguish it as “real” speaks to the context in which it is being discussed. In a corporate business meeting, calling money “real” money would be redundant. The money is “real” to Celine perhaps because of her position as a child who does not directly handle money on her own authority. She might have been given a bill to hand to a cashier before, but even that exchange is still facilitated by a parent or caregiver. To directly satisfy this desire to have real money, the teachers could have given them real coins and bills or held on a penny drive. However, in order for the interest in real money to be explored in this school setting, the notion of real money was translated to become

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an emergent child-led project. Either way, the children would have to work for it by learning in school and by selling something for real.

While Celine and Anne-Marie use the word “real” to distinguish between homemade money that is used in pretend play and money that is circulated in the broader economy, this distinction develops into the way that it is used in the Real Store. I use “real” in quotes when it is used the way Celine and Anne-Marie use it to distinguish actual U.S. currency from pretend money. Real, as it is used in this chapter, is the direction that interests are being translated toward as it is taken up into curriculum the way the pretend Store for Everything is translated toward the

Real Store. Latour (1994) defines translation as “the means by which we inscribe in a different matter features of our social order” (p. 64). In this version of children’s interest in having agency to get what they want, real money involves earning money through the exchange of goods and services that are opportunities to learn math, writing, social interaction, responsibility, ownership, and capitalist values for the distribution of resources. Celine and Sophie’s desire for ice cream and interest in accessing money would of course be different if explored within other networks such as an agrarian or a socialist society, for example.

The meaning of real is therefore particular to the actor networks involved. As the project took shape, the children were guided to simulate a particular reality where “shopkeepers” wear aprons and have ID badges and take breaks during their shift. Just as children wear dress up costumes in their dramatic play, participating in the project was another kind of dress up that is connected to knowledges valued by teachers in a capitalist society and neoliberal educational context such as having a sense of duty as a laborer, learning to write letters, reading the hands of a clock, and learning how to add and subtract to give change. The children learn about economic principles such as the purpose of earning money by playing out and simulating running a small

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business in their self-contained economy as Danielle noted in her CubbyHub entry entitled

“Preschool economics” (CubbyHub anecdote, 12 Mar 2019).

In telling an origin story from the coin’s perspective, the original coins found on the playground became lost from yet another pocket and, though the actual coins that the children picked up are likely still on the playground somewhere, the networked significance of those coins underwent a transfiguration and became re-materialized (Latour, 1990) as child-made currency in the Store for Everything. The symbol of the original coins as a way for children to buy what they want started to move towards becoming real as well. Though the child-made and pretend monies were not materially transactional (as opposed to coins that can be used in the outside world), they allowed children to exchange goods in the classrooms. Children used the pretend money to buy items and the pretend money, while unusable in the larger economy, served as a “local” form of viable currency in classroom exchanges. Pretend money meant that children could practice handling it without the risk of loss or ripping. Before the pretend money within this networked interest would become actual U.S. dollars again, it had to be pretend money first as children practiced handling it and were scaffolded through the process of learning how some adults use money in a capitalist society. So, nonhuman actors both transformed and transform through the translation (Latour, 1990) of children’s interests toward a real interest.

Two Stores: Movement Toward a “Different” and “Next” Store

Just as the coins from the playground went through translations and were reborn in different material form, so too did the notion of the store. The notion of the store did not begin with the Store for Everything but was actually represented by the ice cream truck that played its tune and offered soft serve to children at the playground (CubbyHub anecdote, 9 Oct 2018). The

Mr. Softee ice cream truck is a particular kind of store targeted to children and their parents on

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hot summer days. Their standardized shape and characteristic tunes are instantly recognizable to children across the country and their soft serve and barely recognizable cartoon character- inspired popsicles are irresistible to the customers in this niche market. Celine and Sophie were not able to buy from that “store” because they did not have any real money. The teachers might have been able to buy the ice cream for the children, but perhaps did not think it was a meaningful standalone experience to pursue. The teachers have bought from street vendors before and even carry cash in the school backpack specifically to buy tamales from a local street vendor to encourage the children to try new foods. The teachers have even bought popsicle sticks for the children from the supermarket in past years, so they are not against purchasing sweets.

They did, however, spot an opportunity to use it in curriculum in a way that transformed the notion of the store to become more real as two days later, Anne-Marie noted, “[I] wanted to find out more of the details of Celine’s idea” and started planning with her and other children

(CubbyHub anecdote, 11 Oct 2018). The ice cream truck store and the coins moved toward becoming more real through the teachers’ and children’s process of planning the Store project together. The original ice cream truck store became the Store for Everything to play out the wish fulfillment of being able to buy and sell. While the teachers could have helped the children buy ice cream outright or held a bake sale to raise money to buy ice cream, that would not have been easily justified without producing real learning outcomes; the Store project needed to be stretched out more to serve as the premise for a project.

Around the time when Danielle discussed what to do when shopkeepers take too many breaks and become too “tired” (CubbyHub anecdote, 6 Mar 2019), talk about a “different” and

“next” store started to pick up. Danielle piloted a lemonade stand with some children as was discussed at the Meeting led by Anne-Marie:

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Anne-Marie: …Yes and the dinosaurs are very popular, too. And yesterday we tried a lemonade stand. We tried a different store that sells something different. So maybe we could try that a different time since Carina and Adam were not here for that. So we could look at different things and see the demand. I think we are expanding our choices here. Cindy: And we could have 10 of them. (referring to having ten cups of lemonade) Anne-Marie: Maybe we can make more of it but I think ten of them will hurt your belly. And maybe our next store will have to be a medicine store! Sophie: Uh! Cindy: But if you are sick for real then you can’t be at school. Anne-Marie: Yes, that is true. Okay, so we are going to go to the dance space. The preschoolers cheer. (Meeting transcript, 7 Mar 2019)

Perhaps the teachers sensed the need to keep the project moving by “expanding [their] choices” or introducing some novelty to keep it fresh; they would try selling something different to “see the demand,” or gauge the level of interest.

The move toward having the Real Store served the purpose of having the project fill the school year as well as allowing the children to use real money as they had talked about. The

Store project continued to expand as teachers elicited the children’s feedback on what could be changed and made better. The pursuit of the interest in real money and running a store connected with children’s experience with money and also served to fulfill a curriculum that runs according to a school calendar. As interests emerge, they also must map onto a school year in some way with holiday intermissions. Each year, the class has one large project that is suitable for integrating many areas of learning. This typically occurs in the spring semester when the class has had time to cohere socially and builds up to a large culminating event or demonstration of what is learned. In previous years, an interest in The Beatles became a battle of the bands concert, an interest in animals became a fundraising project for an animal shelter, and an interest in New York City became a project to recreate favorite features of the city inside the classroom.

While the Store project was the featured project that year, the class pursued other interests as

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well, such as a dinosaur fossil excavation in the sensory table and a visit to the local fire station, but this project had more to explore—namely, the real money that had originally been sought after.

Two Currencies for Compliance

By mid-March, the school closed for Spring Break and the class reconvened a week later.

Anne-Marie led the Meeting and tried to move the project forward toward making the Real Store and to use real money:

Anne-Marie: School is back, the store is back, maybe at the end of this week we can think about what to do with the store. Maybe figure out if we want to make a real store with real money, like the money that your mommy and daddy have at home. Some kids get really excited when they see real money. … Anne-Marie: What does it mean to sell something? … Sheila: We could sell the blocks. Anne-Marie: Yes you could but what does that mean? Mika: I want to buy with my whole family.... I can buy some ice cream and you need money to buy ice cream. Anne-Marie: To buy something it means something is being sold. Just like games, and costumes, and play dough, and slime... Sheila: And books, also. (Meeting transcript, 26 Mar 2019)

Children got excited to see real money as Anne-Marie held up a bill since this was what they wanted. Mika understood what it would mean to have “the money your mom and dad have at home” because if you want ice cream, “you need money to buy ice cream.”

Yet, real money was more than just money to the children and perhaps their interest was more than just about finding money. It was connected to their agency and getting what they wanted, as well. At one point in the meeting, Mika elaborated on his idea that he wanted to buy ice cream with his whole family and it hits on something similar to Celine and Sophie’s

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experience with money and stores that might have significance for what “real” means to the preschoolers:

Mika: No no no, if you say, ‘I want ice cream with sprinkles,’ they say, ‘no,’ because no money (sic) and the person is sad. Andrei: Ice cream is one dollar. (Meeting transcript, 26 Mar 2019)

“The person” that was sad was quite possibly Mika himself. His twin brother, Andrei, added that the ice cream has a specific price. One could imagine that once upon a time, perhaps even in front of a Mr. Softee ice cream truck, Mika and Andrei’s parents or another caregiver told them that they did not have (or want to pay) that amount at the time to dissuade them from having a treat—a similar experience to the exchange that Celine and Sophie had with their teachers on the playground.

Treats are a currency with children and was exchanged this way with Mika and Andrei and the adults in their lives. Mika and Andrei often arrived at school just a little late with lollipops in hand because their grandfather had a difficult time getting them out of the house to school. When Mika had to nap at school one day, he was given a treat as a reward and incentive to stay on his mat. Another time, when Celine brought something to share with the class, Andrei immediately asked, “Is it foods or is it lollipops?” “Foods” would be allowed while “lollipops” are more regulated by adults. Even Adam and Celine, who imagined what life would be like as adults while walking back from the park, dreamt that they “would buy lots of treats and lollipops and be with [Adam’s sister] and their mommies” (CubbyHub anecdote, 8 Nov 2019).

While sugar can be a strong motivator, it represents more than carnal satisfaction. In

“seeing the demand” for treats, it also brings up how the supply is controlled by adults and dispensed at price points in a market that these children are particularly well-versed in. Mika and

Andrei were savvy options traders and, knowing that the price for compliance was bound to rise

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as it got closer to the time to leave for school, cashed in regularly. Though Mika and Andrei did not have real money of their own to buy ice cream and lollipops, they still found the means to exchange good behavior and compliance to get those same goods. Real money, while it represented hands-on learning in the Store project that was valued by teachers, also had connections to children’s sense of agency in getting the treats they want or, more broadly, making decisions the way adults do in their lives such as having too many treats.

Figure 6.1 – Andrei and Mika arrive with their lollipops

Real interests similarly are interests that find a market in curriculum. As children’s interests are networked with curricular goals, there are exchanges that take place. In exchange for pursuing an interest that hits on excitement, enthusiasm, curiosity, or intensity, the real-ized interest demands labor from children. The children do work and become “tired,” but teachers try to find compensation for continuing with the real interest by increasing their sense of ownership in the project (as was discussed in Chapter 5) or by finding other aspects of the project that could also be of interest.

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Two Scoops: Movement Toward Real Ice Cream

The big payoff for the preschoolers as well as the teachers came after figuring out what to do with their hard-earned money. After several days of baking and selling, they had one more lesson in counting different denominations of bills and coins. Anne-Marie demonstrated what a quarter was by cutting the snacks up into four parts each for the children to see:

Anne-Marie puts a cutting board, an apple, a bagel, Harris’s doughnut, and knives on the meeting rug. Andrei: An apple! Reese: My doughnut! Anne-Marie: Okay, how many bagels do you see? (lifting a bagel for everyone to see) The preschoolers exclaim, “One!” Anne-Marie: So, now I will cut this bagel. Sophie: Four pieces of bagel now because you cut it into 1 2 3 4. Anne-Marie: So now I have four pieces of bagel but look I can put them back together and make one full bagel. So now we have four pieces and that can be called a quarter of a bagel. When you see the whole bagel it is one, but now we split it into four and we have 1 quarter, 2 quarters, 3 quarters, and 4 quarters. Sophie: And then you get a full bagel! Celine: Just like you get a full dollar! (Meeting transcript, 2 May 2019)

Sophie and Celine understood the analogy between the parts to whole relationship of the bagel slices to the quarters to dollars. However, for the younger preschoolers like Cindy, Andrei, and

Mika, this demonstration proved to be a cross between a Piagetian task and the Stanford

Marshmallow test:

Anne-Marie: So, if someone asks you for a dollar and you give them one quarter, is that right? Cindy: Yeah. Anne-Marie: Why? Cindy: Because that is just one quarter. Celine: No, you wouldn’t have enough. Anne-Marie: What if someone asks you for a quarter and you give them one dollar because that is all you have? You could give them one dollar and how much would they give you back? Celine: Three quarters.

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Anne-Marie: Yes, because your dollar is the same as four quarters and the person only needed one so they could give you three back. Andrei: I really want that bagel. Mika: I want the doughnut. (Meeting transcript, 2 May 2019)

The class then split into groups and counted each type of bill and coin with the total coming out to $324. The class had previously discussed how to use the money and several ideas were raised back in April:

Anne-Marie: Not yet, Cindy! One more thing! With the real store, we get real money. And we are not going to keep the money and we are not using it for ourselves. Sophie: What we can do with is that we have some people who don’t have a lot of money, we can give it to them. Reese: If people buy in store, then I think I’m gonna buy an animal and give the money. (Reese laughs.) Anne-Marie: No Reese, this is serious. And it’s real money. Sophie mentioned giving money to people who don’t have a lot of money. How can we help them? The idea of giving money is not a really good one. Sophie: With the money, we already got. Cindy: A person can actually go with a buffalo and you can give a piece of your money and a piece of orange and put them in their month. Anne-Marie: For buffalo, you mean the place or the animal? Cindy: The animal. Anne-Marie: We are not giving money to the animals. Sophie: We are giving money to real people! Anne-Marie: Yeah. Remember Kim? (student teacher from the previous semester) Some preschoolers nod their head. Anne-Marie: She is teaching in a different school this semester. If her classroom needs something, we can help them get it with our money. (Meeting transcript, 8 Apr 2019)

Between suggesting that the store should sell just books or boxers at the beginning of the project to feeding the bills to buffalos with an orange chaser as a final hurrah, Cindy had struck out a couple of times with her ideas, as unique and creative as they were. While Reese’s laughter at his own suggestion to buy an animal with the money indicated that it was a joke, Cindy’s suggestions were in earnest as she always trusted her own ideas whenever Anne-Marie thoughtfully followed up to clarify the seemingly outlandish suggestions. By suggesting to sell

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books or boxers, Cindy was making some connection to her own experiences and perhaps her suggestion about the buffalo was a connection to Reese’s comment about animals and giving money. Still, Cindy’s suggestions were not the type of answers that fit well into the learning goals that teachers had for the Store project.

Anne-Marie was guiding the class to decide to donate the proceeds and had maintained since the beginning of the project that the money would have to be donated and not spent on themselves. To run a bake sale, the children would likely be asked what they were raising money for. The option with the better optics would have been to donate the money to a charity since

BPCC is a privately funded school and it was assumed that a “different school” that they had connections to would appreciate the proceeds more. This was the tradition for bake sales and

Anne-Marie continued to hold firm to this stance:

Anne-Marie: And some people when they come they might ask you what are we gonna use the money for. One idea is that we are gonna buy school things, school supplies like papers, markers, for a different school. Sophie: But I got another idea. Anne-Marie: Sophie has got another idea. She said she is going to give it to a person who doesn’t have a lot of money. Sophie: And also the other idea is that we can go to buy things when we go to another store. Anne-Marie: Yeah, but we are not keeping them for us. We are going to buy things that a school may not have a lot. We don’t know yet. Maybe other kids and other families might have some ideas. We will talk about it later. (Meeting transcript, 23 Apr 2019)

However, Sophie was able to change Anne-Marie’s mind over time strategically with a “yes, and” approach by agreeing to donate to charity and to also buy a little something for themselves at “another” store. Sophie and Celine had thought of this idea back in November, even before the

Store for Everything was built, that laid the blueprint for the Real Store:

Anne-Marie: Okay, I want you to close your eyes and think to yourself about a sandwich you have had before. Then raise your hand to let us know the sandwich that you are thinking about.

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Preschoolers close their eyes and shortly after, some raise their hand. … Paolo: Hamburger. Sophie: And speaking of burgers, I like Shake Shack! Celine: Me, too! Anne-Marie: Maybe we can think about having a Shake Shack Friday! (in lieu of the tradition to make pizza on Fridays) Celine: Yeah! With the money from the store! (Meeting transcript, 9 Nov 2018)

Celine made the connection between the possibility of having Shake Shack for lunch one day with the emerging Store project. It matched what she had in mind to do with the money, which was to get ice cream. Given their social capital (as discussed in Chapter 4) and abilities to give the kinds of answers that teachers look for, this idea would indeed come to fruition as some of the proceeds from the Real Store were set aside to pay the preschoolers their wage:

Anne-Marie: Preschoolers, so we are not having lunch here okay? We’re going to Shake Shack– Preschoolers: –YAY! Anne-Marie: So you are bringing your lunch with you and then at Shake Shack we are going to buy french fries and milk shakes. Preschoolers: YAY! Anne-Marie: Look we have money from the Real Store that we’re going to use to pay. They need real money okay not money from our class. Someone: Yay yay yay yay! (stomping) (Meeting transcript, 14 May 2019)

The class’s reaction was intense, punctuated by stomping. As great of a treat Shake Shack would have been back in November when it was first suggested, the preschoolers’ excitement was probably much more profound having gone through the long project with a sense of truly earning that money. They had to learn how to exchange money on their own and to understand what it really means to exchange something real for real money. The length of the project, which was noted by some adults in the classroom community, was a big build up to a major culminating event that coincided with the final weeks of the semester. The stretching of the project led to

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transforming two coins into $324 in cash, an ice cream truck into Shake Shack, and soft serve into arguably the best milk shake in town.

Perhaps part of that elation was in how the children secured Shake Shack ice cream that may not necessarily have happened given how bake sales are typically used to fundraise for charity and how Anne-Marie had stated throughout that real money would be given away. The project could very well have ended with a donation to Kim’s classroom only and fulfilled the goals of the teachers. Like the lollipops that Andrei and Mika managed to buy with compliance, the ice cream earned in the end represented an exchange of the use of the preschoolers’ interest in real money for a scoop of ice cream.

Real Interests and Particular Childhoods

In addressing Research Question #1, Chapter 4 mapped out various human and nonhuman actors within the classroom community that constitute the notion of children’s interests as they are taken up into curriculum. This chapter uncovers broader actor networks that the classroom community is nested within—that is a socializing force that translates and moves teaching and learning practices toward producing real learning outcomes under the banner of child-led pedagogy. This movement in translating interests, desires, and materials comes with strings attached as it is a force of socialization toward participating in adults’ worlds and particular childhoods. As nonhuman actors such as coins, stores, and ice cream are translated, so too are teachers and children as human actors. The following analysis focuses in on how teachers and children are materially transformed as well into real teachers and real students.

The Invisible Teacher and Independent Child

In this classroom, teaching math, language and communication, reading, writing, and interpersonal skills was done through a series of scaffolded steps as in accordance with child-led

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pedagogy. By working in a child’s zone of proximal development in the Store for Everything, the teachers moved towards the Real Store by rendering themselves as invisible as possible

(Langford, 2010). Just as materials changed through this scaffolded movement, teachers also

“transformed” (Latour, 1990) to be more inconspicuous in their guidance and direction. Langford

(2010) attributes this to how child-led pedagogies prop up a “masculinized” notion of children as

“active, free, autonomous, omnipotent” (p. 115) whereas the teacher role is “feminized” as one who “watches, observes, monitors and facilitates” (p. 116). While it is considered good practice to let the child lead, the teacher’s authority is still present and most effective when it is subtle or thinly veiled.

Figure 6.2 – Paolo gives change for a five-dollar bill

As teachers scaffolded the interest by setting up the pretend Store for Everything, they made several moves to remove themselves from the frame so that the children would be buying, selling, and earning all on their own. Even in photos that teachers take of the children handling money from the customer, the teacher hides behind the camera and literally stay out of the frame to show that the children are doing it on their own (Figure 6.2). The aesthetic of the adult-

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dictated but child-written signs (Figure 6.3) add to this narrative of independence through invisibility where the visible parts of the Real Store have children’s fingerprints on them.

This narrative of children’s independence is not told without much work on the teachers’ part. Paolo (Figure 6.2) does not give change without working at the Store for Everything first and the Bake Sale sign in Figure 6.3 is made by children who have practiced signing their names on thank you cards in the prior months. In taking up children’s interests into curriculum, teachers network the children’s interests with their teaching objectives and bind them through mechanisms such as feedback and duty (Chapter 5).

Figure 6.3 – A big Bake Sale sign made by preschoolers

They had to pull the strings by eliciting feedback and calling upon a sense of duty to get various members to move in coordination. Additionally, Anne-Marie and Danielle used voting to confirm that it was children’s choice each step of the way yet also structured the progression of questions to be voted on. They made the job charts to help everyone remember whose turn it was

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to be a shopkeeper. They posted conversion charts as a visual reference for children when giving change from various denominations that were color-coded to be easier to identify:

For change, when necessary, Anne-Marie pointed out the conversion chart on the wall and also using her fingers to figure out how much change was needed. Tanya, who arrived later, was the other storekeeper. They both took turns with the cash register, putting in the money from their sale. Both of them sorted the bills according to the color that was already in the register. (CubbyHub anecdote, 25 Feb 2019)

These documents stood in for the teacher just as Maria Montessori’s ideal of the “disinterested teacher” let the materials do the teaching even as the materials themselves were crafted by

Montessori herself. The design of the documents serve as an immutable mobile that stands in as the teacher to extend the teacher’s reach across space and time (Latour, 2005; Fenwick &

Edwards, 2010). The teacher’s color coding of the bills and initial reminders of the conversion chart are enough to ingrain into habit what were the teacher’s intentions.

Figure 6.4 – Sheila checks the conversion chart on the wall

Anne-Marie noted how the various steps involved in running the Store for Everything led to the children running the Real Store:

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The preschoolers were very busy today! Our real store/bake sale had so many customers. Many families brought baked goods from home and stayed in the lobby for periods of time as customers. Thank you, everyone, for your enthusiasm and your support on our ongoing store project!!! Some preschoolers are sad and disappointed that our real store won’t open again after this morning. One significant observation at the real store is that the preschoolers were really good at handling the trade of goods and money and the money itself. They were great at counting change and determining how much a customer should pay based on how much they bought. They were also good at handing the items to the customer. After running the Store for Everything in the classroom for over two months, they have acquired skills that were useful in the real store. … (CubbyHub anecdote, 30 Apr 2019)

Anne-Marie attributed the success of the children in performing the essential functions of the

Real Store to their practice in running the Store for Everything in the classroom. She notes that the children “acquired skills that were useful in the real store” to draw the connection between the two stores. Through the process of preparing the children to be independent, the teachers translated the children’s interest into practices that produced real learning outcomes.

Had the teachers started with the Real Store to get real money more immediately, the teachers would have needed to assist the children hand-over-hand in giving change to customers, thus shattering the image of the independent child. It would not yet be real unless the teacher’s hand transformed into an invisible hand via various mechanisms such as repetition, reminders, or rewards. If the Store for Everything was a rehearsal, the Real Store was real because it was the performance of independent action. Moving the Store project outside of the classroom and into the public sphere of the lobby meant there were real customers, some of whom might be strangers. Their selling to strangers is what real shopkeepers do and it is then truly their job.

Yet, even the Real Store is at once real and pretend. The children did not make the store themselves but are playing out what they have practiced in the Store for Everything. The adults have become just a little more invisible now that they are exchanging edible food and using real

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currency. In this sense, children get to play with the real money by running a real store. Langford

(2010) critiques this notion of independence in child-led pedagogies and cites how

Cannella (1997, p. 121) maintained that “choice for children is actually an illusion” and “adults actually control the choices that surround children and the capacity for follow- through when choices are made.” (p. 117)

Rodriguez (2013) connects the notion of the individual child to neoliberal ideology even as it is used in child-led pedagogy. Rodriguez argues that child-led pedagogy and “constructivism was very successful in redefining the learner as an enterprising self, as an individual always capable of regulating and conducting his/her own learning” (p. 70). So just as the teachers scaffolded children to be independent shopkeepers by becoming more and more invisible, child-led pedagogy and its connection to neoliberal regimes produce particular childhoods where children practice being self-directed producers and consumers.

Two Markets: Movement Toward a “Different” and “Next” Labor Market

In other words, the telos or end goal of practicing being shopkeepers is not to produce future small business owners but is a socialization toward particular childhoods and relationships to modes of production. There is no true end point to the movement of this socialization.

Childhood dreams and an interest in becoming a firefighter do not follow any linear path even if putting out fires for capital is in one’s destiny. A real firefighter becomes one based on their willingness or inclination to do the work within the labor market. My father was a chef at

Chinese restaurants, but he did not see himself as a chef at heart. He became a chef as an immigrant from Taiwan in the late 1970s because of the networks that established Chinese

Restaurants as a real option for the newer Asian immigrants that arrived in the U.S. without graduate degrees.

There are never naked and unaltered interests that lie fully within the child and apart from the networks embedded in the child and in society (Chesworth, 2019; DiGiacomo et al., 2018; 157

Hedges, 2018; Moberg, 2018a). Interests are translated and become more real as a particular version of children’s observed interests. Thus, as the interest becomes more real, they are part of the socialization of children into particular childhoods. Latour (1994) makes a distinction between objects (nonhuman as well as human) and the properties and identities that are given to those objects by institutions:

A forsaken pipette is a mere piece of matter, but what would an abandoned pipetter be? A human, yes…but not a molecular biologist. Purposeful action and intentionality may not be the properties of objects… They are the properties of institutions… Boeing-747s do not fly, airlines fly. (p. 46)

That is, the object of an aircraft flies by Bernoulli’s law but a Boeing-747 is a particular jet in a particular market of jets that support travel and shipping industries in distinction from land- or sea-based vehicles. When sliced in this way, the humans known as teachers and children and the flat metallic embossed discs known as coins become particularized in their relationship to each other and the larger “collective” of child-led pedagogy within a broader market of schooling.

Real interests, then, is a movement toward delivering skills that have value within a neoliberal educational market where certain skills are valued over others (Dahlberg et al., 1999).

Real is a childhood that is made available to an expression of desires within the market of the classroom and of schooling. The preschoolers at BPCC are not training to be entrepreneurs but are socialized into particular childhoods. Their enrollment at a school that uses child-led pedagogy in relation to their desires is positioned in relation to “different schools,” some where the teachers are most visible and children become invisible as documents and numbers.

Children’s interests are taken up into curriculum in particular ways and shape how those interests develop and change. Depending on how the child’s inclinations, talents, and interests are positioned, the childhoods they are socialized in(to) are affected by societal values, stereotypes, biases, and hegemony that make some interests real-izable or unavailable.

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DiGiacomo et al. (2018) laments that “the notion of interest(s)…is…shaped by the persistent opportunity gaps that continue to structure how learning is organized for our young people, in and outside of the classroom” (p. 59). Child-led pedagogy and emergent curricula is positioned on a continuum of curricular options where some curricula value abstracted and decontextualized learning, rote learning of skills, responding to the teacher as an overt authority figure, and spatial/bodily discipline (Anyon, 1980). Within the educational market and even within the same classroom, some children have more choice to be the kind of students they would like to be than others. The ice cream that the BPCC preschoolers earned compensates them for their labor in selling the baked goods as part of an educational project as well as for their labor in holding their job as students. Tragically, the movement toward Real for the childhoods of many BIPOC children follows the school to prison pipeline where the role of the teacher maps onto that of a security guard (Noguera, 2003; Rashid, 2009). The labor of children in being dutiful to curriculum maps onto compliance to authority.

DiGiacomo et al. (2018) advises that “asking questions that speak to ‘how’ and ‘why’ youth interests take shape, as well as ‘for whom’ particular interest-related pursuits are designed and made visible” is critical given the “layers of asymmetrical power relations and positioning that shape contemporary educational settings” (p. 53). A study of children’s interests at BPCC cannot only consider the actor networks contained with the walls of the school. What constitutes children’s interests as it is taken up into curriculum has to be understood within context to other schools, pedagogies, and futures.

Conclusion

Children’s interests take hold in networks where children engage with their material and social worlds through play and participation (Hedges & Cooper, 2016; Moberg, 2018a; Paradise

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& Rogoff, 2009). In engaging with the Store project in collaboration with teachers, the preschoolers at BPCC reference their experiences with buying food at Whole Foods, asking parents to buy ice cream from Mr. Softee, and going to a store to get boxers. However, children’s interests are not static. These interests continually change as networks constantly shift yet follow an arc of socialization that offers a framing of the interest that reflects the types of learning and knowledges that are valued by actors that enact power over bodies and voices.

Even as adults may look back on their childhoods as a time when an interest developed into an expertise or even a profession, the interest does not remain the same materially. The materiality of interests change along with muscles and neurons. This socialization of children’s interests does not wholly represent children’s experiences yet powerfully mobilizes children’s interests through material realities in space and time. Some interests track efficiently to marketable skills while others are resisted or made unavailable because of hegemonic constructions of race, gender, class, sexuality, and ability (DiGiacomo et al., 2018).

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Interlude –Two Backpacks

“Your backpack. Can you tell me what happened to it?”

. . .

My mother called me into the room with a stern voice. I was in trouble for sure, but I was not sure why. I looked in the closet and brought out the plastic neon backpack that my cousins from California gifted me several years ago. It was the 90s and everything from the west coast was bedazzled with neon. My mother pointed to two large tears down the face of the backpack and asked, “Did you do this?”

“No, it ripped. I’ve had it for a long time and it’s old now.”

I wore that backpack for several years but it was not the Jansport backpack with the signature cowhide tassels tied to the YKK zipper of the front pouch that the cool kids carried. My plastic

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neon backpack was dorky and unfortunately too darn durable. The only way I would get a new backpack would be if it somehow broke. Somehow.

The clean edges of the gashes suggested a scissor was involved and my mom wasn’t convinced the gashes were caused by normal wear and tear. “Do you think you’ll get a new backpack just because you broke it?! Do you think we have money to get a new one just because you want a new one?” We really did not have any money for new toys or trendy clothes and accessories. My parents traveled from restaurant to restaurant as chef and waitress to save up money for my education. So in her anger, she dealt with the situation as best as she knew how at the time and demanded that I hold my hands out, palms up. With a ruler, she taught me how to measure the value of my belongings better next time. To further prove her point, she repaired the tears and I would continue carrying that backpack years later.

. . .

Whenever my mom tells the story of when she came to the United States, she jokes about how she walked the whole way from Taiwan to New York City. I was 3 years old and cried the whole plane ride over so she walked me up and down the aisle to keep me occupied on the 7,900 mile flight. The backpack that she carried with her on that trip was handed down to her as well. It was a blue canvas external frame hiking backpack that carried all the clothes that we would bring with us.

For 5 years after we arrived, my mom and my dad carried that backpack to work at various restaurants all around the country from Texas to Virginia to Buffalo, NY while I stayed in New York City with my grandparents and cousins. They took turns to come back and visit me and to deliver money that they had saved up. While working at the restaurants, they rented out rooms that only had a mattress so my parents used the 12” x 18” flat surface on the top of that

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backpack as a dining table. Over the years, all the zippers had broken at least once and the canvas was fraying at every possible seam. The backpack had been repaired so many times, that were it not for the metal frame, it might effectually be considered a new backpack.

After 35 years in the United States, my mom was now preparing for retirement and planning to move back to Taiwan to take care of my grandmother. As I helped my mom pack up her belongings to move out of her apartment this past year, we dug up documents and artifacts that we had saved and we traveled across decades together. Some artifacts were worth keeping and others we parted with, appreciating it for the memories it evoked just one last time. We cleared the apartment until our job seemed to be done, until the two of us stood in the near empty apartment in front of the backpack. “Should I keep this?” she asked. She did not need my permission to keep it. It had served its purpose and she could have thrown it away just as well. I remembered my neon backpack and the stories of the two suddenly made sense mapped onto one another. Though different, they were the same. “Yeah,” I answered, “you should bring it back to

Taiwan. It’s our story.”

. . .

“Your backpack. Can you tell me what happened to it?”

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Chapter 7 – Conclusion

As the Store project came to a close, the class worked together to return the classroom to how it was arranged before. Shelves were moved “back.” Toys, books, and other materials were placed “back” on shelves. Celine remarked how closing the Store for Everything meant, “It’s gonna look like what it looked like last year!” (Meeting transcript, 15 May 2019), perhaps like how a story’s ending might reveal that “it was all a dream.” However, moving things “back” is not exactly an undoing or rewinding of what was but a reaffirming of what has been all along yet will never be again. Though everything had returned “back” to an approximation of “normal,” the actor networks in the classroom had been irreversibly changed.

This study looked at the transformations (Latour, 1990) that took place in the preschool classroom at BPCC and how human and nonhuman actor networks shaped and took on the shapes of children’s experience of their childhoods. My research questions asked what human and nonhuman actors constitute a network of children’s interests. In that process, what changes take place in children and teachers as they negotiate those networked meanings? Children’s interests emerge from desires that are networked with their material and sociocultural contexts.

Those interests do not belong solely to the child as they are networked with other constructs that reconfigure and are reconfigured by those desires. This chapter concludes the study as a conjecture to what these findings might mean, as I look at my findings as I have arranged them and put them “back” in the ethnographic past (H. Yoon, personal communication, 28 Feb 2021).

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Interest as Resistance

Though the study explores the network of actors, the meaning of the findings of this study are focused on the childhoods that are in contention in the construction of children’s interests. In mapping the actors that constitute an interest and tracing the teachers’ curricular responses to children’s interests, I aimed to orient the findings to focus on children from a critical childhoods perspective, with particular emphasis on their resistance and the ways that their interests play a role in their experiences of childhood. Just like children’s interests, their resistance is not fully located within themselves or even in their peer cultures. Neither is resistance just a matter of the dyadic dynamic between children and adults. Rather, Chesworth

(2019) argues that

an interpretation that positions interests within the underlife of children’s peer cultures does not illuminate how multiple elements of the classroom have the potential to interweave in order to enable such interests to become more complex, nor indeed to develop in new and unpredictable directions. (p. 5)

In order to follow the “emergence” of interests within emergent curriculum, then, the lines of resistance offer a path to trace.

Templeton and Cheruvu (2020) emphasize how “childhood identity is co-produced through larger social forces and curriculum, as well as marked by children’s resistance to curricular content and their participation in social processes outside of curriculum” (p. 134).

Therefore, the frontiers of children’s interests, as they and other actors translate them, are contested through resistance and the affordances of resistance that nonhuman actors make available (Chesworth, 2019, Lenz Taguchi, 2011). Children’s resistance is indicative of the particular networks of power relations involved in constructing particular iterations of a child’s interest as it demonstrates that there is something worth contesting.

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Checchi (2014) argues for the “primacy of resistance” in unveiling and awakening power to respond to one’s claims to agency. If children’s actions fall within the frames of power, there is no explicit need for power to be wielded to police bodies and behavior. However, as children continually define their interests and navigate their desires in ways that challenge the frames of power, they experience the conspiring of embedded power relations to more actively determine and define their interests.

Resistance and Power Within the Store Project

As children’s interests were taken up into curriculum as a large project that transformed the classroom space, negotiations around stepping outside the frame of the Store project were sites of resistance. In this study, children’s resistance was identified in the data as the “free” items that could be used without using the Store’s currency in Chapter 4. This notion could be applied to other ways children explored their interests that did not intersect with the functioning of the Store project such as when Sophie and Celine used the shelves that were emptied for the

Store as bunk beds to play out their interest in being “sisters.” Sheila’s favorite red shoes were housed within the Store so she found other red shoes in the bin outside of the Store to use as a stand-in for her actual favorite shoes until the Store was open for business.

Such acts of resistance were not met with power to redirect the children’s choices since pretend play and open access to toys and materials is allowed during free play time as described in Chapter 3. However, resistance to the child-led ideal of the preschool classroom at BPCC was more explicitly sanctioned. A critical function of the Store project was to make sure the Store was run by preschoolers (Chapter 5). Children were expected to participate and contribute their ideas openly and even differences of opinions were encouraged because it demonstrated a sense of ownership by the children. Carina’s feedback that customers can also be tired was met with

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silence and redirection. Shopkeepers could take breaks or learn how to tell time for when the

Store would close, but consumerism does not work if customers take a break.

Additionally, children’s silence was allowed as teachers gave them time to think or watch while other children modeled answering the posed question. However, indefinite silence to the teachers’ posed questions was problematic within this setting such as when Tanya and Carina did not verbally respond (Meeting transcript, 25 Feb 2019). When children’s resistance pushes up against a fundamental function of schooling, power is called upon to encourage or ensure children work within the frame of the educational project. Constraints on the exploration of free interests may be curbed depending on the expectations placed on students and teachers in other settings. For instance, perhaps in other settings, students’ silence might be expected and even desired.

Children’s resistance should be considered in relation to when adults sense a need to exercise authority and power that is couched in the adult-child or teacher-student dyadic relationship. This is not necessarily a call for teachers to find ways to bring free interests or resistance into curriculum, but rather to acknowledge the ways that children continue to play a role in redefining their interests within various contexts.

Resistance from the Margins

The Store project was developed based on the interests of Celine and Sophie who held social capital within the classroom as older and charismatic children. Their interest in money aligned with teachers’ curricular goals and mapped well onto the template of bake sale projects that the class had ran in past years. Moreover, the Store project brought other minor interests in as favorite toys, books, and games were housed within the Store. Being a customer of their own

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interest meant other children were engaging their interests within the Store as they could buy their favorite things for their play.

As much as the Store project ran through Celine and Sophie’s abilities and social positions, Asdal et al. (2007) recount how Susan Leigh Star argued for “the study of networks from the bottom up, beginning with those on the margins, and pursuing the question of who profits from this and who does not” (p. 35). The question of whose interests are taken up in the larger framing of curricula is critical to examining how children’s interests are constituted in relation to fields of interests both within the classroom community as well as beyond it. How do teachers and researchers start with children who are not centered, whose interests are not as considerably bound to curricula? Here, ANT and the notion of free interests explored in this study may possibly offer a way to ask: What free interests are children on the margins claiming?

How do they express “tiredness”? What images of their real interests are made available to them?

These questions might possibly be useful for teachers in meeting the interests and needs of all children and for researchers to explore children’s interests as they are situated in power relationships. To be clear, I am not arguing that the children that I identified as “resisting” such as Carina, Tanya, and Ian were marginalized in the classroom. In fact, Anne-Marie and Danielle worked thoughtfully to meet the needs of all children and families by providing a vibrant curriculum in addition to the Store project. Ian’s family led a green screen demonstration for the class. Carina brought the foster kitten that she was so excited about to show the class. Tanya and her classmates made food (kimbap) that was culturally relevant to Tanya’s family in the classroom for everyone to try. Even so, children’s interests are necessarily situated by power and their resistance to the ways their interests are or are not taken up into the curriculum can be used

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as feedback (Markstrom & Hallden, 2009). What would the story of the Store Project be when centered on Ian’s perspective? What research design and child-led approach might reflect marginal perspectives (Yoon, 2020)? Listening (Yoon & Templeton, 2019) to children’s resistance to translations of their interests may offer a glimpse of their particular childhoods.

Tiredness and the Extraction of Labor

There were many instances where BPCC preschoolers took up the platform they were given to help build the Store project with teachers. That they accomplished what they set out to do in buying ice cream with their own money was just a cherry on top. Yet since I was looking for resistance within the data, I focused on expressions of resistance. I analyzed variations of the expression of “tiredness” in Chapter 5 such as when Carina worried that customers would be tired also, when Danielle noted at meeting that preschoolers were taking too many breaks, and how a closing time for the Store was implemented. The fact that the children were pretending to be workers in this Store project operated as an assistive lens for me to make a connection between the labor that children do as students and the various labor markets’ relationships to exhaustion.

Neoliberal Labor

At BPCC, the children were given a platform to express their feelings of tiredness during feedback sessions at Meeting. This was a child-centered version of being tired from neoliberal demands on productivity and the commodification of interests (Yoon & Templeton, 2019).

Children’s opinions were actively sought and curriculum was purposely planned around their interests. When moving forward with a multi-faceted project was challenging, they were coached and encouraged to keep going just as a marathoner with an interest in reaching the finish line requires discipline and commitment toward achieving that goal.

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In this setting, there was a balance between continually adjusting the curriculum based on teachers’ understandings of children’s interest and holding an identified interest static enough to extend it to meet learning goals. There was a practical need to fulfill the role of schooling and stretch the project across the constructed time within the school calendar. Within these parameters of time and learning goals, teachers had to make calculations on when to keep moving forward and what course changes would work even if the children may feel “tired.”

Children’s productivity and contributions to current and future labor markets in schooling is often tied to the notion of “work” while play is delineated as pleasurable and “free.” However, as preschool can often be children’s first entry into schooling, they may experience tiredness when “the show must go on” as they need to separate from parents whether they want to or not.

Even leaving the house may not be what they desire at the moment, but they must even if it requires an adult to exercise power by offering a previously top-shelved lollipop as in Mika and

Andrei’s case. The children must work through the “tiredness” because, as it is sometimes explained to them by adults, their parents “need to go to work.” The children also must learn what it means to be a student by arriving at the starting line of the track for their future labor, sometimes wearing a “Princeton” onesie. Children, like adults, must face their labor even if emotional and other needs cannot be met at the moment.

Children’s interests as it is positioned as antithesis to the effort (Dewey, 1913) to overcome this tiredness is markedly revealing of the curriculum’s place in the market of schools.

Just as it is a privilege to abide by the adage, “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day,” when choosing a career path, being tired can look very different depending on the school setting.

For example, the expression of tiredness in the Store project at BPCC resulted in adaptations to the curriculum within the teachers’ plans and at the children’s request. Even child-centered

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settings do not elude neoliberal demands (Rodriguez, 2013). This finding raises several questions for me. What does being “tired” look like in other settings in both teachers and children? What is the curricular positioning of interest-based curricula in relation to other approaches?

The Trajectory of Interests and Childhoods

Children are, at once, labor and commodity (Schulz, 2018; Yoon & Templeton, 2019) within the neoliberal educational market. Their ideas and thinking are shaped as a commodity through schooling in ways that often reifies existing social stratification (Anyon, 1980). This is the trajectory of their socialization, a large actor network outside of the classroom walls that I found in the use of the term real to distinguish pretend and real money as well as the Store for

Everything from the Real Store (Chapter 6). Just as the Real Store was run outside of the classroom, it brought in real money that the children used outside of school at Shake Shack. This is more than a coincidence as the money and the store materially changed and moved toward a real economy as opposed to just a Preschool economy (CubbyHub anecdote, 12 Mar 2019). This transformation (Latour, 1990) of the material manifestations of children’s interests moved outward into the real world where the skills children learn in school can be used outside of it in the future.

While declaring that “children are our future” is an optimistic statement about the trajectory of children, it comes with many stipulations (Schulz, 2018) as children are politically positioned (Templeton & Moffett, 2019) in relation to labor and capital. These stipulations can be marked by the movement of labor and capital along the line from students onward. The children spokespersons for the Store project are afforded agency and also commodifiable due to their age and ability as they are useful in establishing project. Children’s labor and expressions of tiredness is accountable to the teachers’ labor. When children refused to give feedback for the

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Store project through silence, they stepped off the currere (Pinar, 1994), or path of learning set before them so teachers had to labor to move them back on through “soft” or “hard” pedagogy

(Dewey, 1913, p. 33). Teachers’ labor and tiredness is related to the school’s accountability to stakeholders such as parents, taxpayers, policymakers, government officials that tender public and private funds. As a privately funded school, BPCC must answer to parents who pay tuition and be marketable to parents who can pay tuition.

Even research on children’s interests reflects this trajectory. Edu-psychological studies on interests (Krapp, 2007) have sought to find ways to encourage interests to become sustained interests. The phase-based models of interests (Hidi & Renninger, 2006) suggest a trajectory toward mastery and an enduring application perhaps within a vocation. Enduring interests that become long-term individual interests (Hidi & Renninger, 2006) are framed through opportunities for expression of those interests or the commercial viability of translating those interests into a vocation. Children’s interests when considered within educational contexts are networked with the trajectory toward a real version of that interest whereas viewing interest as resistance may suggest a more iterative process across various contexts. DiGiacomo et al. (2018) call to

see extended and more ethnographic cross-contextual and cross-cultural studies into the how and why of youths’ participation and engagement in interest-related activities/programs, with particular attention to the social, economic, and political dimensions of that participation. (p. 60)

Limitations

These findings were not inevitable. If the study had been done in a different school year that featured a different project or a different school with a similar project, the findings about children’s interests would have to be different. If another study was done on this particular case study of the Store project at BPCC, the findings would likely be different regardless of the 172

researcher(s). The generalizability of the claims about children’s interests as well as the reliability and validity of representing what happened at BPCC must be examined because of my methodological implementation of ANT and my positions as a researcher in this setting.

Assembled Networks

In applying general symmetry (Latour, 2005) to human and nonhuman actors, I privileged myself as the researcher to arrange the actors in network with each other. The study was not focused on teachers’ perspectives on children’s interests, or it might lean more heavily on interviews of teachers. Given the power relationships between actors that I observed, I looked for agency and resistance more in children as teachers are naturally afforded a larger platform as was also reflected in transcripts and anecdotes. Nonhuman actors can be easily less regarded than human actors because they do not speak, so I tried telling an origin story of the project from their perspective while cataloguing their “transformations” and possible calls to other actor networks

(Latour, 1990). Although, nonhuman actors can also be significantly more powerful than humans as immutable mobiles such as curricular materials that continually force their way into classrooms (Ferguson, 2018). Or anecdotally, nonhuman actors such as ill-fitting winter gloves, prickly sweaters, snow pants, and adultist notions of care have exulted at the despair of many adults and children alike during cold climate excursions.

The choice of using ANT to map and assemble these networked interests is a practice in exploring relationships between various actors and I cannot necessarily claim to fully capture the child’s voice (James, 2007; Mayall, 2002) or teachers’ rationale for their decisions. It is also not possible to fully cover every network that is involved or to name them properly whether by the useful tools of in-depth interviews or extended and regular observation. It is not a representation of what happened as much as it is the researcher’s search to find a narrative from points of

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datum. All this arranging and moderating puts a heavy burden of proof on me as the researcher that I attempt to mitigate by tempering the reach of these findings and reflexively challenging the ways I designed the study. I am not proclaiming truths about the nature of emergent and interest- based curricula and progressive schooling. It is how I made sense of what I observed and read in relation to my own experiences and what these new experiences inspire me to think and ask.

Therefore, I was the most privileged human actor in the network as I present the findings to the

Academy. However, since ANT can be considered a method more than a theory of reality (Mol,

2010), I assemble the network by using ANT as a method “as if” humans and nonhumans were on equal footing, not that they are (E. Moberg, personal communication, 9 Apr 2021).

When talking about implications for schooling and early childhood curriculum, I do not seek to generalize to the field but speak from my position as a teacher who uses emergent curriculum and interest-based approaches. The discussion of the findings reflects my experience of questioning my position as a teacher within the market of schools available to 3- to 5-year- olds in New York City. Furthermore, I do not wish to recommend retroactively anything to this particular case study of the Store project by suggesting anything should have been done any differently by the teachers or children. As a colleague and fellow teacher, I celebrate the work of the teachers and admire the thoughtfulness and creativity behind the project that spurred the children to feel invested in their own learning and classroom community. Neither do I make prescriptive suggestions for what teachers might do if children express interest in money in a similar setting as translations of interests are complex, interactive, and conditional.

I do claim degrees of reliability that the continual effects of what took place in the Store project spread through the various networks connected to the human and nonhuman actors. In making claims of effects, I tried to connect at least two different actors and across multiple

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instances: children and coins, teachers and “tiredness” and clocks, shelves and sisters and arguments, lollipops and morning routines and grandfather, for example. In future studies, methods such as photo elicitation might make the connection between actors, both human-human and nonhuman-human, stronger and (dis)confirm themes that appear.

An important group of actors that needed to be more carefully considered in this study were parents (M. Zajic, personal communication, 9 Apr 2021). Since parents were not participants in my study, I did not collect data from them and from the children’s home settings.

This would provide insight and clarity into how parents make decisions and view their children’s interests in relation to the curriculum. In my findings, I only mentioned parents as a singular group of actors that made social and economic calculations to enroll their children at BPCC when their role was much more complex. The complexity of those decisions were unexplored in the scope of this study.

In fact, Danielle and Anne-Marie continually elicited feedback and input from parents in the Store project. Parents had thought of making the store a project of sustainability where unused clothing and toys could be sold to reduce waste as well as raise funds for a charitable cause. Parents were having conversations at home with their children about the Store project and also thought of demonstrating that money can be used to help others.

Ambiguous Networks

Additionally, I realized that my research design reflected my attempts at entering the research site as a “fly on the wall.” I had planned on using Corsaro’s (1981, 2003) “reactive method” to gain access to children’s peer cultures by waiting for children to react to and define my role in their invitations to play. While this resonated with aspects of my own style in teaching young children, it became clear I could not just be a curious observer or available play partner in

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the way Corsaro became known as “Big Bill” for his tall stature and honorary status as a “big kid” (Corsaro, 2003). As discussed in the Interlude before Chapter 4, the anticipation of my becoming a teacher in the classroom as well as my video camera drew a lot of attention from the first day of data collection. Many of the early videos captured were of children observing the camera and of me “teaching” them how to use the camera. I somehow felt the need to justify the camera’s entry into the space as an observer by allying it with an educational aim to try to make it “blend in.” My attempts at hiding my height difference and status as a visitor by sitting on the perimeters of the classroom and camouflaging myself with large furniture exposed my standpoint and tensions with reconciling my multiple roles as researcher and incoming teacher in the classroom.

My relationships with Danielle and Anne-Marie as colleagues became more ambiguous and “ambi-valent” (Moberg, 2018b) as my role as a researcher unsettled preexisting negotiations of shared power and collegiality. My decision to “naturalistically” sit in on teacher team meetings instead of interviewing them directly fit in with the pattern of trying to “blend in” as one of the teachers. Reflecting back on my study, I can see it as a flaw and lost opportunity and also as an unanticipated discovery of what it meant for me to conduct a study from my standpoints that I present as the conditions of these findings. Moberg (2018b), in her study of evaluation practices in a Swedish preschool, offers the concept of “ambivalence” as a resource to look at what actors are activated in reconciling the “irresolvable or impossible” (p. 376). These vulnerabilities and affordances in the methods of my study that my findings are embedded in reflect to a degree the ambi-valences in combining the roles of researcher, teacher, and colleague.

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Implications for Practice: Un-Networked Interests and Systemic Inequality

Finally, the limitations of my study are the networks and experiences around the concept of children’s interests that the data from my study and research site cannot directly speak to though certainly signals towards. Chesworth’s (2019) calls for research on children’s interests to

investigate critical questions regarding how different classroom assemblages of material, social, spatial and discursive agents act together to privilege some interests over others, and to perpetuate or disrupt educational inequalities associated with gender, race, class and ethnicity. (p. 8)

These “assemblages” or networks can be viewed on a scale of a case study as in this study, or on a classroom level, school level, or larger systematic level. Ferguson (2018) proposes that the

“uncasing” of networks “is as essential as casing in order to highlight how no site—a school, a classroom, or an instructional block—is a fixed case but rather constructed through networks of relations streaming from other places” (p. 71). The findings of my study while drawn from my study of the Store project at BPCC signal towards interests that are un-networked. This includes other sites that take up children’s interest in curriculum, but more specifically must address educational spaces that are denied network through systemic inequalities in access and constructs of children’s innocence.

Access

In Chapter 3, the demographics of this research site in relation to the surrounding neighborhood and public schools show a stark contrast. Even as more families at BPCC and the university that it is based in are White, the surrounding neighborhood is predominantly Black.

Moreover, the percentage of Black students in the surrounding public schools is even higher than the percentage of Black families in the neighborhood. As public schools are funded directly in relation to neoliberal measures of learning, access to schools that do not report directly to national learning standards is split by race as well as socioeconomic status.

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The neoliberal construction of childhood as preparation for the workforce compounds material differences along lines of race, class, and gender. Wright (2011) states that, “social norms and funding structures, including the lack of universal, publicly funded high-quality preschool offerings, have served to perpetuate gender, class, economic, and racial inequity” (p.

241). While private early childhood schools are more likely to afford children time to play and explore their interests in the curriculum, these schools are often not accessible to children of color and working-class families. The hidden curriculum (Anyon, 1980) is set in place in early education and amplified by neoliberal policies as play and exploring one’s interests becomes a luxury.

Children’s participation in determining and responding to curriculum that takes their interests into account can be considered a child’s right and not just a privilege for some

(Berthelsen & Brownlee, 2005). According to Dumas and Nelson (2016), neoliberal reforms privilege

Black educational attainment (as narrowly assessed by high-stakes test scores) and zero- tolerance surveillance (Nolan, 2011) over and above Black children’s happiness and creative exploration of themselves and their social worlds. (p. 34)

Without availability of this “creative exploration,” Black, indigenous, and brown (BIPOC) children as well as children from poor families inequitably have their tiredness and labor frontloaded to their schooling experiences. Furthermore, BIPOC families that do have access to schools that take up children’s interests and agency in curriculum face translations of their children’s interests and play through deficit lens (Nxumalo & Ross, 2019) and those translations must be understood as intersectionally bound (Bryan, 2020).

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Boundaries of Innocent Spaces

DiGiacomo et al. (2018) declare that “we, as a community of educational researchers, designers, and practitioners, continue to fall short in ensuring that all youth, not just those from wealthy and white communities, can learn, grow, and participate fully in this 21st century” (p.

60). The response to that acknowledgement is not to make the Reggio Emilia approach or emergent curriculum available to everyone however, as they carry Eurocentric translations

(Johnson, 1999) of children’s interests. Providing more equitable access to educational spaces that affirm children’s agency, interests, and cultural knowledges is only one step. Nxumalo and

Ross (2019) point out that the root causes of the inequity lay in notions of racial innocence that need to be unearthed.

Children’s interests may be denied networking with “difficult knowledges” (Britzman,

1998, as cited in Garlen, 2019, p. 64). Protection from “difficult knowledges” is a privilege of the same educational spaces of innocence that can afford to abate the “tiredness” associated with the neoliberal demands of school “readiness” (M. P. Ghiso, personal communication, 12 Mar

2021). Garlen (2019) maintains that

In early childhood classrooms, the ideal of innocence manifests at the macro level of official curricula and the micro level of individual instructional decisions as the avoidance of potentially “controversial” topics. (p. 64)

According to Garlen (2019), this precludes children’s engagement with issues of social injustice on the basis of maintaining an illusory sense of their “innocence.” Templeton and Cheruvu

(2020) turn the question of risk to children’s innocence around to ask, “[W]hat is the real harm imposed by the partial narratives and distorted cultural memory we bestow onto children?” (p.

144). There is harm in not knowing and even more harm to those outside of the boundaries of innocence. How then might be the locations of children’s interests in research, emergent

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curriculum, and schooling when acknowledging these larger contexts outside of the boundaries of innocent spaces?

Therefore, changing access to particular schools and particular curricula alone is not a sufficient solution if curricula is segregated by boundaries of innocence. The translations of children’s interest must be critically examined and new ways of conceptualizing emergent curriculum must be imagined and implemented in diverse as well as non-diverse settings. “Can emergent curriculum be critical?” (M. P. Ghiso, personal communication, 9 Apr 2021). If a coin is not just a coin and ice cream is not just ice cream, the conceptualization of children’s interests as networked affords practitioners the opportunity and responsibility to network curriculum and learning and children’s desires and interests with critical perspectives (Freire, 2000; Souto-

Manning, 2013). This is not a license to take children’s interests whichever direction a teacher intends it in a way that unhinges from other actors as emergence is not of singular domination and control by any one actor. As this case study indicates and as Anne-Marie and Danielle did well within their context, emergent curriculum that is networked with critical pedagogy (Freire,

2000) must take into account all of the human and non-human actors in context. Furthermore, children’s resistance is valuable indication for the continual emergence of any critical project.

Emerge from What, And How?

Through this case study of a networked interest within emergent curriculum, I argue that children’s interests are networked with their various social positions as they are translated for the purposes of schooling. When viewed through critical childhoods and ANT lenses, the curricular concept of children’s interests transformed human and nonhuman actors in relation to one another (Latour, 1990). From soft serve to an ice cream shake, from two coins to real money, from the Store for Everything to the Real Store, the various actor networks reconfigured and

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provided new contexts for children’s expression of their experienced childhoods through their agency and resistance. Children reclaimed “free” spaces and materials in red footwear, toys from home, and empty shelves. Children found expressions of “tiredness” that refused to be enclosed for curricular purposes. Children continually found agency through resistance to how their agency and interests were translated for the purposes of child-centered curriculum. As they cannot be disconnected from the larger educational context, children’s interests are always emerging even as they are taken up in curriculum.

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Appendix A – Classroom Map

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Appendix B – Views of the Classroom Space

Classroom view while entering front door

Right side – facing blocks, art area, bathroom, and kitchen

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Appendix B (continued)

View from the loft facing bathroom, computer, and front door

Left side – Facing sofa, observation booth, and loft

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Appendix B (continued)

Classroom facing loft and dress up area

Facing computer, front door, sofa, and bookshelves

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Appendix B (continued)

Left side – Facing the book area, Store for Everything, loft, and dress up area

Inside the Store for Everything

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Appendix C – Timeline of the Store Project

Data Date Day Source Summary 9-Oct T CubbyHub Celine and Sophie ask to buy Mr. Softee ice cream at the park

Anne-Marie and Danielle tell them they need money Celine finds and loses 11 cents, but vows to bring money the next day Celine and Anne-Marie make initial plans for Store at snack 11-Oct R CubbyHub table 12-Oct F CubbyHub Tanya, Sophie, Celine craft their own ice cream shop Celine Adam want to buy candy and have long-term 8-Nov R CubbyHub sleepover as adults 9-Nov F Meeting Sophie mentions Shake Shack; Celine mentions buying 13-Nov T Meeting Anne-Marie presents Celine's idea for a classroom store

What is a store? What kind of store will it be? 24-Jan R Meeting The class decides to have a store Celine presents the idea for a pretend toy store & real food 29-Jan T Meeting store 31-Jan R Meeting Danielle and preschoolers make their own currency

The preschoolers choose the name: A Store for Everything 12-Feb T Meeting The money is made in color-coded denominations

The Store will need shopkeepers 19-Feb T Meeting Store has a soft opening and preschoolers give feedback The art teacher works with preschoolers to build and decorate 19-Feb T CubbyHub the Store 19-Feb T CubbyHub The Store for Everything officially opens! 20-Feb W CubbyHub Shopkeepers wear aprons and ID The small space requires customers to line up and enter one at a time The class discovers a need for shopkeepers to take “breaks” 25-Feb M CubbyHub Teachers post a conversion chart to assist in money exchange 25-Feb M Meeting Feedback on being a Shopkeeper 6-Mar W Meeting Rules for shopkeepers

Shopkeepers are taking too many breaks

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7-Mar R Meeting Breaks & “sticking to the job”

Feedback on the prices of items A “different store” opens: a lemonade stand 12-Mar T CubbyHub Celine Sophie need more money even after pooling funds

Danielle intros idea of earning more money by working 26-Mar T Meeting Teachers create a schedule for Shopkeepers

Class discusses what it means to really sell at a “real” store 2-Apr T Meeting Class votes for having a “Real Store” 4-Apr R Meeting Class decides what to sell at the Real Store 8-Apr M Meeting Feedback on having a set Closing Time Class brainstorms about what they could make that people 9-Apr T Meeting would buy 11-Apr R Meeting Feedback on the shopkeeper schedule & closing time

17-Apr Participant observation begins 18-Apr R Meeting Sheila works as lone shopkeeper “if you do not volunteer we will just have to tell people to do it” 22-Apr M Meeting Real Store plans for making a big sign, labels, price tags 23-Apr T Meeting Real Store opens tomorrow

Sophie suggests to give money to someone who needs it Sophie’s other idea is to “buy things when we go to another store” 24-Apr W Meeting Class decides on the prices of goods at the Real Store

Teachers reminder that you can’t just quit mid-shift Training on what to say to customers 25-Apr R Meeting Feedback on how the Real Store is going

“Keep doing.” “It’s good.” 26-Apr F Meeting Feedback: on Real Store

Difference between Store for Everything and Real Store Vote: Close Real Store? Preschoolers get treat for hard work Announcement that Danielle will go to Infant Room; Kuan to Preschool Room 29-Apr M Meeting Last day for Real Store Summary of Store for Everything transferring skills to Real 30-Apr T CubbyHub Store 2-May R Meeting Feedback on the best part of the Real Store

Counting all the money from Real Store Anne-Marie uses bagels to teach quarters

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14-May T Meeting Plan to eat at Shake Shack

The Store for Everything is closed 15-May W Meeting Preschoolers move toys back into shelves

“It’s gonna look like what it looked like last year!”

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