Children and the Ethics of Creativity / Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories (PDF)

Victoria Hargraves is a researcher, mother, and teacher living in Tasmania with her husband and two children. She has a long career in teaching, both in the UK and in New Zealand, at primary and early childhood levels, within the state sector and in commercial and not-for-profit organisations. She has held several leadership roles, where she found important principles for working with children, such as empowerment, self-determination, self-belief and encouragement, to be just as relevant for teachers. Inspired by a study tour to Reggio Emilia, she became fascinated by the potentially limitless creativity of children's thinking about the world, and convinced of a strong impulse for conforming, narrowing and dismissing of children's ideas which occurs as a result of an attempted socialization into the logical adult world of classification, categorization and knowledge. Stumbling through the first years of a PhD, it was not until she read Deleuze and Guattari's notion of the rhizome that she began to make sense of a process for accessing wide potentialities inherent in matter but disguised by logic and classification. She puzzled (and continues to puzzle) over these ideas as, post-PhD, she researches aspects of early childhood education for dissemination online, while home-schooling her children and wondering how to enact a Deleuzian sensibility for the education of her children, and the life she shares with her children and a multitude of non-human others, including animals, birds, trees, river, wind and sun. She lives and learns as she opens herself up to a life living in concert with child, nature and the material world, and tries to succumb to their influence in a mutual determination of how events unfold in this place we find ourselves.