ABSTRACT

In this chapter Rose-Anne and Joanne trace dimensions of participation in a philosophical enquiry. In particular, they consider how the chairs work in the classroom when the visiting teacher Sara Stanley is reading aloud the story How to Find Gold (2016) by Viviane Schwarz. They offer a critical posthumanist analysis which engages with material-discursive entanglements in/out of the classroom: children, books, questions, chairs, carpet, thoughts, spoken and written words, student teachers observing, tree, light. These elements, because of their relationality and their mutual agency, are considered as important as the human subjects in this lesson when analysing ‘what is going on’. The authors resist following the children only and focus their attention on more than the teacher-learner verbal interaction when they analyse the philosophical enquiry. They also explore the reactions of student teachers who were observing this lesson, and how their questions about the story suggest that they have experienced and been taught about stories in a particular way – where the teacher mainly guided the discussion and there was a strong focus on the teacher-pupil relationship but not as much focus on the material (nonhuman bodies). Throughout this chapter, Rose-Anne and Joanne particularly draw attention to the coming into literacies play of the chairs, text and body-mind-matter of children and adults.