The purpose of this study was to explore the emergence of subject-ness among children in the context of a world-centered elementary general music class. I addressed this purpose through the creation and implementation of a curriculum project in which young children engaged in lullaby songwriting. In so doing, I sought to explore curricular and pedagogical alternatives: namely, curricular purposes beyond functional literacy and pedagogical approaches with relational potential. This curriculum project was enacted alongside children (ages 5–6) participating in three classes of kindergarten general music in the elementary school at which I taught at the time.
I framed this study using Biesta’s (2021b) domains of educational purpose and, in particular, the notion that teaching has the potential to encourage children to be(come) subjects in their own lives, rather than objects in the lives of others. Furthermore, I relied upon world-centered education (Biesta, 2021b) in this study as a means of addressing a “grown-up” (p. 51) orientation to subject-ness in which the subject is “in the world and with the world, and not just with themselves” (Biesta, 2020b, p. 37, emphasis in original). To realize this framework, I invoked three supporting concepts: project-based teaching (Dillon, 2023a), dialogic pedagogy (White, 2016a, 2021), and compassionate care (Hendricks, 2023).
For this study, I assembled a critical educational action research design drawing upon Somekh’s (2006) principles of action research. The progressively iterative nature of this three-phase project was initially influenced by the self-reflective action research spiral (Kemmis et al., 2014), which I later adapted into the action research trellis—a visual framing in which inquiry is illustrated as potentially growing in divergent and unpredictable ways. Data collected as part of this action research study included video observations of our enactment of the curriculum project, focus group interviews with children, an individual interview with a kindergarten teacher, my research journal entries, and various artifacts, such as lesson plans.
I conducted a thematic analysis of the data (Glesne, 2016) which yielded three overarching themes: snapshots of emergent subject-ness in childhood focused on care, resistance, and dissent; pointing as an invitation to explore subject-ness, including the myriad ways in which this pointing manifested and facets of the curriculum project which contributed to this pointing; and the reflexive gifts of teaching, including “philosophical play” and teacher-student “connections” (Research Journal Entries). I situated the implications of these findings in terms of both curricular and pedagogical reimaginings.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/49140 |
| Date | 06 August 2024 |
| Creators | Dillon, Jonathan Edan |
| Contributors | Bylica, Kelly |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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