ABSTRACT
Working at the axes of sound art, critical childhood studies, and post-human approaches to early literacy, this chapter plays with the politics of ‘noise’ to examine young children’s early art learning. Shaped by the heard and felt dimensions of an 8-week research-creation partnership, it demonstrates how sound was not only a representational resource for design but a vibrant material that children intra-acted with. Challenging mainstream aesthetics and ideologies concerning young children’s artistic learning, this chapter details how young children experimenting with sound art highlighted aesthetic dimensions of more-than-human relationality, reciprocity, and plurality. Embedded in, and inseparable from their environment, we close by highlighting how sound allowed us, as educators, hear more expansive tales of young children’s artistic and embodied entanglements with human and more-than-human worlds.
