ABSTRACT
In much of the early childhood landscape, institutions equate a straight and quiet line as a marker of order and, ultimately, of successful teaching wherein obedient children conform to the desires of in-control teachers. This chapter utilises practitioner inquiry and draws on the work of Ingold (2016) to describe the ways that resistance and conformity, control and obedience, imposition and desire are entangled as young children subvert their teacher’s attempts to manage the process of forming and maintaining the line. Within this space of every/day resistance, there exists the potential to re/examine the politics and power surrounding the mundane practice of lining up, and thus re/consider that, in deregulating lining up processes, we might reveal spaces for teachers to engage alongside children in re/conceptualising the line.
