Abstract
This thesis reports on how autistic children’s active participation and learning are produced within, and emerge from, the intra-activity of human and more-than-human co-constituting the early childhood learning environment. An increasing body of early childhood education research interrogates the impact on children’s experiences and learning. However these studies, pervaded by discourses of human exceptionalism, fail to account for the co-constitutive force of people-spaces-objects-practices relations in producing moments of agentic becoming and learning in early childhood education.
The thesis uses a sensory ethnographic case study methodology, informed by new materialist theory, to reveal how two autistic children’s experiences of active participation and learning emerged from the entangled intra-activity of the human and more-than-human dimensions that co-constituted their respective early childhood learning environments. The ethico-onto-epistemological framing of the dissertation in this way meant re-seeing the early childhood learning environment, children’s participation and learning, and the sociocultural theoretical understandings that commonly sustain these, through differently cast eyes.
Methods that were used to coproduce data comprised observations in the form of ‘event production records’ (EPR’s),interviews, photographs, videos, and walking tours led by the children. A new materialist reading and analysis of the data involved my entangled meaning-making. This enabled me to move away from normative interpretations usual in qualitative analysis, and towards a diffractive understanding of the data that moved thought in unpredictable ways. As a result, an assemblage of knowledge production was entered into that would not otherwise have been possible.
The findings of this thesis illustrate how the human and more-than-human dimensions of the early childhood learning environment intra-acted in their co-constitutive production of autistic children’s active participation and learning. Diverse sensoria and modes of sensory meaning-making, which were similarly produced in the intra-activity of the learning environment, were critical to the ways in which each child accessed and practiced opportunities to actively participate and learn. Human and more-than-human components of the learning environments all possessed equitable agentic potentialities in producing the children’s active participation and learning. These agentic potentialities were exercised in a flat ontology of affect that did not privilege the human as being more important than the more-than-human.
I argue that the ethico-onto-epistemological reframings of the early childhood learning environment and autistic children’s active participation and learning within it emerging from this dissertation challenge the human exceptionalism prevalent in early childhood education, and advance a more holistic understanding of the autistic active participant and learner as a result. Accordingly, the thesis possesses the agentic potential to transform the inclusive practice of early childhood teachers, as well as how inclusive early childhood curriculum is understood, enacted and experienced.