Abstract:
This paper examines how children make meaning through their sociomaterial worlds in an early years classroom in Dubai. The classroom, culturally diverse in nature, operates through a western ideological approach to learning, including curriculum, learning activities and resources. Its cultural makeup mimics many classrooms across the world—places where global flows of people, educational knowledge, practices and materials converge to constitute classrooms in particular ways. This convergence has implications for how children participate in learning, and in this study, how culturally diverse children participate in the classroom sociomateriality.
The research aim is to examine how culturally diverse children, in a school in Dubai, participate in the classroom sociomaterial action. Sociomateriality, a rapidly emerging field of inquiry, proscribes a communicative relationship between human and non-human things and so binds humans and materials in a recursive entanglement of meaning making. Children make meaning through materials, like play dough and math manipulatives, which play a prominent and regular role in teaching and learning in early years classrooms. Unfolding throughout this analysis is that these materials critically shape the children’s social action in the classroom.
The research design utilised a multifaceted approach to interrogate a variety of data—field notes, semi-structured interviews, images, symbols and interactions—gathered over a period of eight weeks in a foundation classroom where an Australian teacher taught children from ten different nations. A multidimensional approach was used to analyse data—discourse analysis located the sociomaterial action in a broader global context of the social institutions in which the classroom was embedded while a multimodal interactional analysis examined children’s actions as they engaged with materials as part of play.
The findings of this study show that in this classroom some children are privileged while others are marginalised in the educative process of play. This privileging and marginalisation, influenced by culturally derived skill sets that children bring to classrooms, manifests in children having different degrees of access to participate in learning. It was found that some children were equipped with skill sets that supported them to translate meaning across a variety of modes and media, thus enabling them to articulate rich meanings across multiple sources. The study’s findings have implications for the work of teachers in increasingly globalised and diversely peopled and resourced classrooms. Paying attention to the way cultural diversity manifests in classroom learning affords a place where all children have greater access to communication and learning.
The research aim is to examine how culturally diverse children, in a school in Dubai, participate in the classroom sociomaterial action. Sociomateriality, a rapidly emerging field of inquiry, proscribes a communicative relationship between human and non-human things and so binds humans and materials in a recursive entanglement of meaning making. Children make meaning through materials, like play dough and math manipulatives, which play a prominent and regular role in teaching and learning in early years classrooms. Unfolding throughout this analysis is that these materials critically shape the children’s social action in the classroom.
The research design utilised a multifaceted approach to interrogate a variety of data—field notes, semi-structured interviews, images, symbols and interactions—gathered over a period of eight weeks in a foundation classroom where an Australian teacher taught children from ten different nations. A multidimensional approach was used to analyse data—discourse analysis located the sociomaterial action in a broader global context of the social institutions in which the classroom was embedded while a multimodal interactional analysis examined children’s actions as they engaged with materials as part of play.
The findings of this study show that in this classroom some children are privileged while others are marginalised in the educative process of play. This privileging and marginalisation, influenced by culturally derived skill sets that children bring to classrooms, manifests in children having different degrees of access to participate in learning. It was found that some children were equipped with skill sets that supported them to translate meaning across a variety of modes and media, thus enabling them to articulate rich meanings across multiple sources. The study’s findings have implications for the work of teachers in increasingly globalised and diversely peopled and resourced classrooms. Paying attention to the way cultural diversity manifests in classroom learning affords a place where all children have greater access to communication and learning.