Scielo RSS http://www.scielo.org.za/rss.php?pid=2221-407020190001&lang=en vol. 8 num. 1 lang. en http://www.scielo.org.za/img/en/fbpelogp.gif http://www.scielo.org.za http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S2221-40702019000100001&lng=en&nrm=iso&tlng=en http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S2221-40702019000100002&lng=en&nrm=iso&tlng=en If we begin with the premise that learning opportunities are not confined to classrooms, then we open up a new way of thinking about education. Most research in qualitative inquiry explores humans and their complexity, based on interviews and observations. However, if we shift our focus to the context itself and, more specifically, to the objects that we see and experience in the world around us, these sights and experiences can be incorporated more fully into the ever developing and deepening reflective memories that connect our present to our past. In this article, I used daily walks with Rudy, our family beagle, as a field of data that could transform the commonplace sensory experience of objects into new perspectives for education and education research. While the human explorer in this study focused on the past, current, and future meanings of objects encountered during the fall and winter of 2017, his canine collaborator focused on everything sensory. As it turned out, Rudy enlarged the experiences and appreciations of the human because dogs, like children, are more concerned with the present than with memories of the past or concerns about the future. http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S2221-40702019000100003&lng=en&nrm=iso&tlng=en Research supports the use of geographic information systems (GIS) to inform and direct action in geography and urban planning. As critical researchers, we also see the power of GIS in participatory projects with students to analyse power, privilege, and oppression in order to move toward action. Understanding that meaning shifts through an interplay of social, linguistic, and material interactions, GIS has the unique ability to show fluidity yet connectedness across geographic borders, providing intriguing opportunities as a research tool. Drawing on recent studies of GIS in research, we recognise the potential to build understanding of spatial context as both socially and politically constructed, but also the tendency to see a map as bounded data in finality. We argue here the importance to return the data back to the material itself in order to avoid reifying a flat, discursive representation of the material without claiming agency. Through the planning of a participatory project with GIS as a research tool, we consider the implications, cautions, and potential of using GIS as a fluid and incomplete representation of a moment in time and space that is also a path moving toward something else. http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S2221-40702019000100004&lng=en&nrm=iso&tlng=en In this article, I share how I developed an affirmative and intensive concept, the ensemble of life, in a postqualitative study about family history genealogy. Intensive concepts are new concepts that are developed using alternative methods, and seek to affirm what is being lived as well as open up possibilities for different ways of living. Data assembled during a postqualitative study about family history genealogists and the objects (e.g., photographs, documents, and other artefacts) they use to construct their ancestors provided fertile ground for intensive concept development. The excess of the objects bloated preexisting concepts and warranted a new concept, the ensemble of life, to describe the work of objects in family history genealogy that affirms that work and opens it up to becomings. The ensemble of life is a loose grouping of a person's trajectories-or lines-that are formed by the objects in a deceased person's life, the sensations associated with those objects, and the virtual potential of those objects. http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S2221-40702019000100005&lng=en&nrm=iso&tlng=en The power of literacy is such that it has the ability to drive social change. This narrative inquiry study, which is informed by sociocultural theory, was inspired by the 2016 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study report. The report, which indicated that 80% of South African Grade 4 children cannot read for meaning, encouraged two teacher educators to investigate our literacy journeys. We selected objects that represent our literate life histories and wrote about our individual visual representations before discussing our objects. The objects selected were photographs of a father and his daughter and of a pile of books. Through our objects, this article identifies what shaped our reading proficiencies, and explores ways in which we can influence pre-service language teachers to recognise reading as a driver of social change. Our interactions with our chosen objects brought us to the realisation that, in spite of our multifarious backgrounds, our common literacy experiences enabled us to become proficient readers through which we gained access to higher education and academic success. http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S2221-40702019000100006&lng=en&nrm=iso&tlng=en This article is a reflection on the use of object memory in creating a collaborative arts-based narrative that explores educator experiences with transformation in higher education. The collaborative arts-based narrative that I present here emerged from my doctoral thesis in which I collaborated with participants to explore how our memories and experiences could help us understand and approach issues of social justice in education. In this article, I reflect on the way in which memory objects guided the creation of a collaborative arts-based narrative of educators' autobiographical experiences, educational encounters, and anti-oppressive education. Memory objects are used to explore educator identity, subjectivity, and experience in relation to issues of social change and social justice in higher education. Through this exploration, I hope to highlight the entanglement of context, experience, and the theoretical understandings of social justice and anti-oppressive education. The aim of this article is to reflect on how objects were used to make new connections and exciting discoveries through a collaborative narrative of memories and experiences of educators working towards social change in higher education. http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S2221-40702019000100007&lng=en&nrm=iso&tlng=en This paper reports on what I learned in a self-study research project, using artefacts for teaching foundation phase (FP) pre-service (student) teachers in the module, Numeracy in the Early Years. The study focused on the merits of an integrated learning approach (ILA). As a teacher educator, the self-study concept has inspired me to continually attempt to improve my educational practices with the aim of supporting pre-service teachers' learning and, consequently, their teaching. ILA requires critical awareness of how mathematical relationships are used in social, environmental, and cultural relations. I adopted a sociocultural theoretical perspective that highlights the fundamental requirement of working together in educational contexts in order to make sense of collective and personal experiences. In the artefact activity I employed, students discussed and presented self-selected cultural artefacts such as beadwork, jewellery, and clothing. This interactive activity demonstrated that pre-service teachers require ample opportunities to utilise objects from their sociocultural environments whilst gaining practical experience of the content of early childhood mathematics in order to learn about and appreciate mathematics in a meaningful way. By engaging in innovative self-study methods to support pre-service teachers, teacher educators can improve the quality of their own practice, and improve student learning. http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S2221-40702019000100008&lng=en&nrm=iso&tlng=en Research on teachers' professional practices to facilitate equity and social justice has often focused on pedagogical approaches or dispositions aligned with this aim. Less attention has been given to how interactions with material contexts, tools, or resources can also contribute towards such a purpose. This article reports on a study that sought to investigate the ways material resources served as a vehicle to promote social change and educational equity in a culturally and linguistically diverse early childhood classroom. The study reports on objects from the classroom of Valentina, a mid-career Latina preschool teacher in an urban context. Data sources were multiple observations of Valentina's teaching, audio-recorded and transcribed interviews, lesson plans, and reflections on her practice. Employing a new materialist theoretical lens, analysis suggests that the micro-politics of classroom activity reflect inter/intra-actions with myriad tools (i.e., objects) with the agentic capacities to advance educational equity. Classroom objects were chiefly employed to promote student learning. Nonetheless, they were also repurposed, both by Valentina and by her students, in ways that highlighted the objects' agentic capacities. Recommendations for future research on objects are provided. http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S2221-40702019000100009&lng=en&nrm=iso&tlng=en This study intervenes in commonsensical ways of exploring and understanding educational assessment within an audit culture of measurement. Drawing on sociomateriality and methodological approaches associated with material culture and narrative inquiry, we curated an exhibition based on interviews with 13 informants and the things they brought to convey their assessment experiences. Based on analysis of their narratives, we clustered our findings and organised them into a gallery of two thing-centred installations: "Assessment and Tools," and "Assessment and Arts/Crafts." Curating the gallery led us to a creative way of articulating concerns about excessive assessment into a thing-interview protocol to be used in future inquiry, involving interviews with people and things. We showcase these installations, along with interview prompts, as an online exhibition. The aim is to continue the conversation on the future of assessment in connection to purposeful, equity-oriented education. http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S2221-40702019000100010&lng=en&nrm=iso&tlng=en A feeding hawk, a sculpture of a fallen robot, and chalk markings pointing to a slave cemetery-each of these objects was unexpectedly encountered during walking interviews on a college campus. This article explores these object encounters in turn as provocations toward the potential for walking as a method to generate interventions in the reproduction of hegemonic spaces. Specifically, this paper takes up the Deleuzoguattarian concepts of the rhizome and the assemblage to explore how the practice of walking makes possible creative and imaginative explorations in the relationship between objects and place. Methodologically, walking produces the possibility for affirmative difference in the interview, a positive embrace of reading objects as complex and connected through an embodied enactment of rhizomes and assemblages. Inquiry that thinks with rhizomes and assemblages connects disparate encounters, moments, and objects through affirmative difference, embracing connections and relations. This article suggests implications for how the walking interview might engender reflective entanglements of theory and methodology, resist extractive methods, as well as produce imaginative reconceptualisations of place, and interventions and disruptions of hegemonic narratives. http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S2221-40702019000100011&lng=en&nrm=iso&tlng=en A feeding hawk, a sculpture of a fallen robot, and chalk markings pointing to a slave cemetery-each of these objects was unexpectedly encountered during walking interviews on a college campus. This article explores these object encounters in turn as provocations toward the potential for walking as a method to generate interventions in the reproduction of hegemonic spaces. Specifically, this paper takes up the Deleuzoguattarian concepts of the rhizome and the assemblage to explore how the practice of walking makes possible creative and imaginative explorations in the relationship between objects and place. Methodologically, walking produces the possibility for affirmative difference in the interview, a positive embrace of reading objects as complex and connected through an embodied enactment of rhizomes and assemblages. Inquiry that thinks with rhizomes and assemblages connects disparate encounters, moments, and objects through affirmative difference, embracing connections and relations. This article suggests implications for how the walking interview might engender reflective entanglements of theory and methodology, resist extractive methods, as well as produce imaginative reconceptualisations of place, and interventions and disruptions of hegemonic narratives. http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S2221-40702019000100012&lng=en&nrm=iso&tlng=en A feeding hawk, a sculpture of a fallen robot, and chalk markings pointing to a slave cemetery-each of these objects was unexpectedly encountered during walking interviews on a college campus. This article explores these object encounters in turn as provocations toward the potential for walking as a method to generate interventions in the reproduction of hegemonic spaces. Specifically, this paper takes up the Deleuzoguattarian concepts of the rhizome and the assemblage to explore how the practice of walking makes possible creative and imaginative explorations in the relationship between objects and place. Methodologically, walking produces the possibility for affirmative difference in the interview, a positive embrace of reading objects as complex and connected through an embodied enactment of rhizomes and assemblages. Inquiry that thinks with rhizomes and assemblages connects disparate encounters, moments, and objects through affirmative difference, embracing connections and relations. This article suggests implications for how the walking interview might engender reflective entanglements of theory and methodology, resist extractive methods, as well as produce imaginative reconceptualisations of place, and interventions and disruptions of hegemonic narratives.