ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the sociomaterial contingencies, intricacies, and uncertainties that come together to shape articulations of quality in everyday practice within specific contexts. It highlights storied descriptions, rather than definitive interpretations of quality early childhood education practices, as a gesture toward a political ontology that seeks to notice the multiplicities present in, and enacted through, different everyday practices. The chapter explores quality practices through “small stories” of encounters between children and more-than-human others articulated as material–discursive practices of witnessing place specificities, cross-species socialities, damaged landscapes, and watery becomings. Practices of witnessing perform worldings that interrupt what is considered important and “present in everyday life”. Materializing witnessing through performative images brings different kinds of questions and perspectives to the pedagogical practices and complicates meanings of quality. Figurative acts of witnessing are creative material-semiotic ways of mapping relations of knowledge, practice, and place in ways that counter monolithic views of the world, such as a singular view of what counts as quality.
