Abstract
This book is an account of a piece of educational research carried out with a group of five-year-olds and their teacher in 2015 in an inner-city preschool in Johannesburg. In the five years since then, many things have changed, and notably, the unavoidable reality of climate change and the planetary crisis have become increasingly pressing but also eerily reminiscent of older stories of extinction, calamity, devastation and loss. The author’s awareness of these calamities, both cosmic and human-made, grew through her engagement with this research and its connection with her focus on childhood percolated through as the data came into being.
One ventures from home on the thread of a tune
Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 363
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Notes
- 1.
In an apparent undermining of the cross cutting potential of the subject, time allocations are prescribed: Life skills is allocated 6 h per week for Grade R to 2 and covers the areas framed as: beginning knowledge; creative arts ; physical education and personal and social wellbeing. Language learning is given 10 h per week and mathematics 7 h.
- 2.
In South Africa the term ‘black’ has a history as a category of classification under Apartheid, in which black Africans were separated from ‘whites’, mixed-race ‘coloureds’, and ‘Indians’. Its current usage, with a capital ‘B’ is often a politically charged term and owes much of its power to the Black Consciousness Movement. It works as a boundary-making concept alongside a theorisation of ‘whiteness’ (Mangcu, 2016).
- 3.
On the whole, land use and demographics show unchanged apartheid spatial patterns (South African Government, 2011, p. 260).
- 4.
The Hundred Languages of Children was the title of a poem written by Loris Malaguzzi. It is also the title of the first ‘Reggio’ international exhibition that went on tour in 1981 and thirty years later is still travelling. It is also the title of a book of essays first published in 1993 by the municipal company, Reggio Children, in collaboration with the North American Reggio Emilia Alliance, now in its third edition (Gandini 2012). An English translation of the poem is accessible at: www.innovativeteacherproject.org/reggio/poem.php
- 5.
Well into its third decade of operation, the CDP continues to work in the area of art in ECD with economic empowerment projects for women as a parallel strand.
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Giorza, T.M. (2021). Setting off. In: Learning with Damaged Colonial Places. Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-1421-7_1
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