Contemporary neuroscientific evidence indicates that unrestricted movement and gesture enhance children’s physical, social and cognitive development by engaging them with the external properties of their environments. Current understanding of children’s engagement with indoor environments is limited. This knowledge gap matters because children’s health, social abilities and cognitive development may be compromised in physical environments that inhibit rather than enhance their movement capacities. This gap is especially problematic for physically disabled children because their motor impairments, exclusionary societal attitudes, safety concerns and environmental barriers curtail their movement.
In this study, I describe and interpret the relationship between disabled and non-disabled children’s movement and a kindergarten classroom. Their bodies were conceptualized according to Deleuze’s premise that nothing can be known about bodies until they demonstrate what they can do (1988). The classroom was conceptualized according to Gibson’s theory of affordances, which posits that people and environments are inextricably related (1979). I used a choreographic perspective underpinned by Manning’s philosophy of relational movement (2009) to accentuate the dynamic reciprocity between children’s bodies and the classroom.
Eight disabled and 12 non-disabled children participated in this interdisciplinary, ethnographic study. Data were elicited through observations, video recordings and semi-structured interviews. I developed a taxonomy of indoor affordances or ‘compositional elements’ to categorize classroom objects/features that children discovered and actualized through their movement interactions. Subsequently, I observed a dance-in-the-making that led to deeper understandings of the relational and emergent properties of these interactions. Findings suggest that assemblages of bodies, objects and features trigger dynamic movement, and indicate that disabled and non-disabled children alike discover and creatively assemble affordances to facilitate their movement.
Overall, my findings recast children’s body-environment interactions and contribute to understandings about environmental features that enhance or inhibit movement capacities. This knowledge could be used to design i) learning environments that are redolent of movement possibilities, ii) interventions to enhance children’s physical, social and cognitive capacities, and iii) education and rehabilitation strategies that encourage them to explore, navigate and shape their environments.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TORONTO/oai:tspace.library.utoronto.ca:1807/65705 |
| Date | 13 August 2014 |
| Creators | McLaren, Coralee |
| Contributors | McKeever, Patricia |
| Source Sets | University of Toronto |
| Language | en_ca |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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