1st Edition
Researching Child-Dog Relationships and Narratives in the Classroom Rhythms of Posthuman Childhoods
This interdisciplinary book explores posthuman and psychological approaches to childhood education and well-being by examining ‘animal-assisted’ education, using qualitative approaches to understand the nuanced mechanisms which unfold in child-dog interactions.
Mapping the lives of children in a primary school setting and the relationships they share with their school and classroom dog, Ted, the book provides insight into everyday child-dog encounters, the importance of touch in middle childhood and how ‘bodiment’ offers a corporeal and compassionate means to understand the rhythm and musicality in interspecies communication. In doing so, the book uses the unique orientation of ‘rhythmanalysis’, a posthuman critical theory, and new materialist orientation in multispecies empathic childhood flourishing in the future. Reflecting contemporary interest in child-dog companionship, picture books, children’s flourishing, and children’s well-being, the book provides a nuanced multi-disciplinary overview of the field.
Using creative methods as well as spatial, sensory, and movement theory, this book will appeal to scholars, researchers, and academics in the fields of cognitive psychology, child and adolescent psychiatry, and primary and elementary education. Those interested in the early years will also benefit from this volume.
Introduction
PART I: PRELUDE
Chapter 1 Empathic ethnography: A ‘body’ of evidence in fieldwork as methodological praxis
PART II: ENSEMBLE
Chapter 2 Ted ‘makes it feel like home’: Emergent peer-creaturely culture
PART III: RITORNELLO
Chapter 3 The significance of sensory creaturely comfort in child-dog encounters: Touch in the classroom
PART IV: OPUS and FUGUE
Chapter 4 Fascinating rhythms: A soundscape and comic book as rhythmic events and choreographies
PART V: CADENCE and CODA
Chapter 5 Towards a creaturely, loving pedagogy: Ted as ‘pedadog’
Ostinato
Biography
Donna Carlyle is Assistant Professor, Post-Doctorate Researcher, and former Specialist Health Visitor and Psychotherapist, Faculty of Health and Life Sciences, Northumbria University, UK.
"This beautifully crafted book deploys a range of creative methodological practices to illuminate the relationality and materiality of school classrooms. Drawing on posthumanism, new materialism, human geography, psychogeography, and creative practices the books focuses on Ted, the classroom dog. An empathic and walking ethnography reveals dog-human moments, rhythms, and bodiments of interspecies communication in classrooms. The combination of images, etudes, musical scores, photography, and field notes highlights a layering of wander lines which chart the impact of Ted as he connects with bodies, classrooms, and affects. This book is a must for those who wish to explore more-than-human classroom encounters and multispecies empathic flourishing and relationships in a creative and novel way."
Dr Nikki Fairchild, Associate Professor in Creative Methodologies and Education, University of Portsmouth, UK.
"In this book, Donna Carlyle turns our attention to the vital role of more-than-human others in influencing, mediating and enriching classroom experiences. We are carried along on a journey of care for animal companions (in this case, Ted, a classroom dog) through a series of creative and artistic provocations, which open minds to what learning could be if we decentre humans as the only possible teachers. Understanding the world as entangled, affective and responsive has the potential to change the way we educate and move us to a world that fully appreciates complexity. This book is recommended for anyone wanting to re-imagine teaching and learning through exciting methodologies of worlding, kinship, and care."
Dr Kay Sidebottom, Lecturer in Education, University of Stirling, Scotland, UK.
"This is a wonderful book!!! Donna Carlyle brings a fresh, theoretically, methodologically and phenomenologically rich analyses to her interdisciplinary research on ‘animal- assisted’ education in the primary school classroom. She deepens our thinking and understanding of dog-human relations, of ‘making kin’ and brings to life relational concepts such as ‘ethnoarray’ and ‘ethno-mimesis’ through careful observation and psycho-social analysis of movement, rhythmanalysis, storytelling and music in the classroom. Deeply embedded in her ethnographic experience in the classroom with Ted. The book is also a love letter to Ted as pedagogue. Compulsory reading for all in teacher education, education students and for qualitative researchers and teachers within and out with the academy."
Professor Maggie O'Neill, Director of the Institute for Social Sciences in the 21st Century and UCC Futures: Collective Social Futures, University College Cork, Ireland.
