Using postfoundational and postqualitative frameworks, this dissertation considers what materializes when four child care centres adopt a multiage grouping structure, which includes children born in four consecutive years in each centre. The research question asks how do children live their lives in multiaged child care? To explore that question, the study challenges developmentalism as the dominant principle for organizing child care groupings. Engaging with three theoretical concepts, caring relations, dwelling, and becoming, the dissertation further questions: a) what characterizes relationships in these multi-aged centres? b) how do children negotiate through the curriculum in the centres? c) how can the children’s transformations be conceptualized in postdevelopmental theory/practice? This action research project employs the process of pedagogical narrations to story three ordinary moments that occurred in the child care centres. The pedagogical narrations process extends those storied moments through the critical reflections of the caregivers who work in the centres. The analytic process, thinking with theory, plugs-in the three concepts, caring relations, dwelling, and becoming, to the stories, producing beyond-developmental understandings of children, childhood, and child care. The study demonstrates pedagogical narrations as an effective postqualitative methodology for caregivers to research their own practices. This study concludes that child care structures such as age groupings, require situated ethics of care and responsibility, as well as, an early years reconceptualized curriculum that resists universalizing and normalizing practices in favour of situated ones. Considering caring relations, in spaces for young children, provides a context for thinking beyond simply, and only, adults caring for children, to thinking of children in relations of care with place, other non-human beings and non-living things, as well as other people, including other children and adults. Thinking with the dwelling concept encourages an attention to the present in early years settings, allowing more-than-developmental interests to flourish. Thinking becoming means thinking becoming-other, and positions subjectivities, including those of children, caregivers and place as unstable, shifting, and in relation. / Graduate

Feminist theorising has been instrumental in efforts to challenge gender hierarchies and conceptualize care as an ethic of relationality and interdependence, and has influenced visions of pedagogy as a relational, ethical and political endeavour. While these pedagogies importantly challenge simplified, uncontextualized, apolitical notions of both gender and care, they do not necessarily attend to the increasing complexity of children’s heterogeneous commonworlds. Following a theoretical and methodological framework aligned with material feminism and post qualitative research, in particular thinking with feminist scholars Barad and Haraway, this research questions what an engagement with human-and non-human relationality might do to complicate conversations about gender and care. Employing pedagogical narrations through a post-qualitative lens, this inquiry explores how children, educators and things become implicated in gendered caring practices. A diffractive analysis is put to work wherein gender and care are analyzed with/in several child-doll and child-car encounters, and are diffractively read through other doll and car stories near and far from the classroom. This analysis illuminates the political and ethical embeddedness of early childhood pedagogies, and the understanding that gendering and caring emerge with/in a complex web of many relations. Material feminism loosens ties that bind simplified constructions of gender as explanations for care and vice versa, and instead puts forward that gender and care per formatively emerge through intra-action. As such pedagogical and research practices need to pay careful attention to that which is always already on the verge of becoming. / Graduate

This study explores the promise of student success in undergraduate education that exceeds its standard definition and measurement as retention and graduation rates. The research paradox framing this dissertation is: In what ways can universities support conceptions of undergraduate student success that escape measurement? This paradox is explored through two analytic questions: What do the orientations of student success in the American higher education literature produce? and What does the map of student success at Great State University produce? To explore these questions, this study utilizes assemblage theory, a theorization of the composition of the conditions that produce our social fields to develop a molecular sociology, the methodology by which this study opens up the determinate world to the map of the assemblage. A genealogy of the undergraduate education literature explores what the orientations of student success produce. This section first destabilizes the notion that student success is a collection of literature that moves forward linearly with the march of scientific measurement. Second, it provides the orientation of the current student success assemblage in American higher education, data-driven control. A cartography of student success at Great State University next maps the orientations and disorientations of the first year of GSU’s student success initiative to data-driven control. In this mapping, we explore the initiative’s continued production of the in/dividual student: the dividual, or data point subject produced by data-driven control through the justification of student-centered practices. We also explore the moments that escaped the capture of data-driven control, or liberal education. Through a compilation of cartographic locations, we come into relation with student success at GSU as an assemblage of indeterminate molecularities productive of determinate reality. This study concludes with a call for a fractal student success, a student success incommensurate with itself and its locations. This expansive success is fostered by critical methodologies and practices. Narrow policy changes suggested by many organizations active in student success serve to re/produce data-driven control. Change in our students’ lives and possibilities will come from unyielding experimentations in research, practice, and policy to warp and overthrow data-driven control, and all assemblages that follow.

Text component of a doctoral dissertation, which references the full dissertation content in a multi-media web-based format. It includes a background statement, acknowledgements section, printed navigation guide and site map for the website, and a full list of references.

The aim of this study is to investigate the relationship between older women and contemporary dance in a choreographic project. I explore in what sense the participation in the project is of artistic value to these women and also what happens in the meeting between me as a researcher, the project itself and the women. The background of this study is a personal interest in age, body and dance as well as an ambition to change normative ideas about the dancer body through action. With a globally ageing population, I have an interest in highlighting an aging female body as a resource in the context of contemporary dance. The study is conducted on the basis of post-qualitative research and decolonizing methodology. The artistic practice is leading and is based on the experiences of the women who participate in the project. As a researcher, my participation in the practice is necessary. By articulating and visualizing the marginality of older women, dance discourses are deconstructed. With improvisation as a performative choreographic practice, transformative learning emerges among participants. The findings of the study show that older women are resourceful and have the capacity for change through dance. This can be achieved in interaction with others and can then be an artistic experience. The artistic and pedagogical values which are experienced by the women in relation to contemporary dance are self-determination, trust and a sense of community. Both individual and collective struggle emerge among me and the women as a force of action. I argue that age norms and bodily ideals in contemporary dance can be challenged by giving older women access to contemporary dance. By articulating and visualizing the experiences of a marginalized group, the meaning of the concepts of dance, body and age are deconstructed and new insights are created which challenge and broaden normative ideas about dance and the dancer body.