Becoming a Community With Clay

Abstract

This co-composed inquiry project reconceptualizes the idea of a community in early childhood contexts through working with clay. Building a sense of community is a dominant idea commonly brought up in early childhood care and education but is seemingly static and rarely reconsidered. To further delve into this idea of a community, one group of infants and toddlers at Simon Fraser University Childcare Society has worked with clay as a big block over several months. Thinking with place-based pedagogy, we attended to how our particular place – our program, identities, and community – becomes cultivated relationally and materially. This attention allowed us to move beyond viewing clay as modelling material and community as strictly human-centred. Working with clay became a vibrant social practice where our thinking, bodies, and relations with place are interconnected, transforming our understanding of how a community lives in our program, with each other and the world around us. By attending to the many ways in which a community has taken shape alongside our work with clay, the project aims to illuminate the complexities and possibilities of early childhood communities.

Keywords: early childhood care and education, community, place-based pedagogy, clay, social practice