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Abstract
The purpose of this study is to discover collective actions of material and human actors in a pre-kindergarten block play area by attention to moments when the blocks make any change in a pre-K classroom. To reinvigorate the role of embodied learning and materials in early childhood education (ECE), this study focuses on the fields most representative play material, blocks, and explores the associations of blocks, children, teachers, materials, and discourses in an ECE classroom. As a theoretical lens, I use the perspective of new materialism, especially Bruno Latours Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and Karen Barads concept of intra-action. Ethnographic research methods are useful for me to investigate the associations of blocks, children, teachers, and other elements in the daily events of a preschool class. I collected data through field notes, video- and audio-recordings, interviews with a teacher from Spring 2016 to Fall 2016 in an urban elementary school. This research explores collective actions of teacher and material actors during rearranging the block area, intra-actions of blocks and children in the rearranged block area, and distinctive descriptions of the block area from the perspective of humanism, object-oriented ontology, and new materialism. Findings show that teachers intentional and intuitive mind, and material actors collectively worked during rearranging the block area. Children and blocks also intra-actively negotiate and perform each other in the rearranged block area. Theoretical experiment with humanism (Piaget), object-oriented ontology (Harman, Morton), and new materialism (Bennett, Barad) presented their own style of description for our insights in ECE. The findings suggest that we need more empirical studies of materiality and collective actions of children, teachers, and things in teaching and learning.