'Still, No One Was Naked' Amplifications of Textile/Children Entanglements from Gather Round Preschool

Abstract

Daily and nationally children enter classrooms clothed. Foregrounding the taken-for-granted nature of clothing as a classroom material, this project was a layered invitation to these preschoolers to think-with the textiles in their classroom. Textiles, for us, were those that the children wore, carried, played with, sat upon, and were offered for consideration. Rooted in sociomaterial understandings of agency and entanglement, we wondered alongside our textiles for several months, giving particular attention to how children’s stories and expressions about their textiles underscores relationality between textile/child(ren). Beginning with the t-shirts that children wore daily we sought to decouple our textiles from mundanity — to remove our blinders – by giving these same textiles deep pedagogical attention alongside the children.