Affect and Discursive-Materiality in Early Childhood Studies Placement Assemblages

Abstract

This thesis reconceptualises learning through work-based placement on an Early Childhood Studies (ECS) degree as a nonlinear process of experimentation with more-than-human materiality of placement. It considers placement as contingent and emergent assemblages of human-nonhuman forces; it explores the material aspects of placement contexts; how these material aspects come to matter discursively; and how affective forces mobilise students’ professional learning.

Learning through placement is a key element of many ECS and related degrees in the UK and internationally. The study discussed in this thesis focusses on placements on an ECS programme taught at a university in the North of England. This thesis argues that placement pedagogies may be enhanced considering new understanding that the research generates.

This research makes a methodological contribution through its creative research practices that attune to affective flows, rhythms, and momentary intensities, which often go unnoticed in learning events. By considering the more-than-human materiality of placement, the theoretical contribution to knowledge of this research is the generation of new understandings of placement beyond just focussing on human relationships.

Embodied placement learning travels affectively with students, creating capacities for responsible practice beyond their degree studies, so placement pedagogies that generate new ways of attending to and valuing precarious multispecies entanglements, that think beyond prevailing neoliberal discourses of measuring progress in linear ways, and that reimagine the human in relation with the world, have potentially far-reaching implications for more-than human communities with which graduates practice now and in the future.

Date of Award	7 May 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bath
Supervisor	Carol Taylor (Supervisor) & Rita Chawla-Duggan (Supervisor)