Negotiating Grasp: Embodied Experience with Three-Dimensional Materials and the Negotiation of Meaning in Early Childhood Education

This review is a report and discussion of an impressive research project by Biljana Fredriksen; it has been previously published in Norwegian and is now translated into English by the author. The research was a detailed study of the processes of meaning-making by young children who were engaged in playing with various three-dimensional (3D) objects. The discussion is of the findings, which were analyzed by coding schemes into emerging themes and related to previous literature from a variety of sources. These sources include children’s development, embodied cognition, creativity, social constructivism, metaphor studies, play, art education, and early childhood education. The discussion should be of interest to readers with any of these interests, and especially for early childhood educators. The author is clearly passionate about improving early childhood education in what might be called a Deweyan direction (this is not her description, but I believe she would agree with it). The research consisted of nine case studies. In each case, two 3-year-old children were brought together to engage with 3D materials. The materials were preselected, but what was to be done with them was left to the children. They were “natural,” in the sense that they were not designed for children to play with—certainly not like LEGO toys or building blocks. In sequence, accompanied occasionally by simple tools, they were bits of wood and twigs “in mystical forms, colors and textures”; assorted textiles; a soft slab of clay and “some natural materials such as sticks, stones and shells”; lumps of clay; pieces of yarn and a small knitting machine; cardboard boxes and scissors; different kinds of sand; pieces of sawn construction wood and nails; and pieces of wool, both felted and not felted. These were selected to promote attention to differences in their qualities, their affordances, and resistances and to stimulate creativity. The researcher observed the children playing with the materials, occasionally asking questions when they seemed “stuck” about what to do. She also wrote field notes and set up a digital camera. She begins her discussion here with a narrative account of the children’s explorations in each case. In later chapters she gives detailed analytic accounts and commentary. The coding and recoding of the data into what she calls “nodes”—emerging themes—are explained in detail. For example, the first emerging theme was the different qualities of the materials—colors, textures, size, smell, softness, hardness—that the children seemed to be noticing and exploring. Each of these was a node. Both bodily movement and sensations were also part of this, and at this point Fredriksen begins to discuss her central interest: How is awareness of qualities, affordances, and resistances, transformed into concepts? How does bodily experience promote thought? How are feelings and sensations transformed into concepts? Or, in her own words, how do young children negotiate their grasp of their experience of such materials? She analyzes her data in great and often perceptive detail and in repeated rounds. For example, when distinguishing between the sensory modes used by the children, she says,