Tag Archives: bordermaking

Response-Ability and Sticking with Paper Borders

Nicole Land thinking with Maria Wysocki, Selena Ha, Andrea Thomas, and Alicja Frankowski

Today we continued to think together with the children about making borders obvious in the yard by attaching a large sheet of white paper to the fence bordering the yard – fences that we rarely notice. I thought that it was quite challenging how we forced ourselves and the children to stick with the paper after an initial flurry of destruction and over the fence that took place when the children first meet the paper at the fence. There’s something to keeping the paper visible, having to work hard to think at what this material can do with the fence after our initial first reactions with it – and, in noticing how we and the children are and are not interested, do and do not notice, the paper when it is no longer novel or easily disposable. The paper, in a way, creates an interesting problem with the fence: both the fence and the paper become less-noticed, more easily ignored, while at the same time they pose a problem through their existence – we have to do something with the paper and the fence. They’re part of how we move and form relations in the place in this moment; they’re both still here, even if we ignore them. 

Continue reading Response-Ability and Sticking with Paper Borders

‘Doing’ Borders Together?

Nicole Land thinking with Maria Wysocki, Selena Ha, Andrea Thomas, and Alicja Frankowski

We’ve been thinking with the idea of bordermaking, and how our bordermaking practices create certain possibilities for being and moving together in the sand (and beyond): how do we do borders? Why do we make borders? What do our borders create or shut down? How do we practice borders? Why? With what materials, ideas, intentions? How do the borders we make shape how we move together?

Continue reading ‘Doing’ Borders Together?

Noticing Borders Otherwise

Nicole Land thinking with Maria Wysocki, Selena Ha, Andrea Thomas, and Alicja Frankowski

While we were sitting on the logs around the sand last week, Andrea asked: what borders do we need to care well together? I think this question is important, because in living well together with the sand, I don’t think that anyone is suggesting relations of anarchy or disorder where we refuse all borders, or a romanticized anti-border world where we suggest that we are post-border or that we have created a space so harmonious there is no need for borders. I think, instead, Andrea’s question reminds me that we need borders; borders are part of world making – borders are a way of navigating, of standing for something, of making choices about care and attention and learning and life. I’ve been thinking about this question alongside a proposition from one of my favourite authors, Alexis Shotwell: “what it means to notice the world as a practice of responsibility” (p. 79). What would it mean to notice borders as a practice of responsibility, where borders are a way of being implicated in worlds and relationships? 

Continue reading Noticing Borders Otherwise

The High Stakes of Thinking with Borders

Nicole Land thinking with Maria Wysocki, Selena Ha, Andrea Thomas, and Alicja Frankowski

I have been thinking about questions of what borders do. Recently in the sandbox we thought with large sheets of white paper, and about how these sheets of paper might help us to notice how we do and make borders (and why) in the sandbox. As we sat “inside” the paper border that the children created with large sheets of paper in the sandbox, a few of the children began to name what the borders created – the sand area was a farm, it was a track; things, I think, that remind me of strict borders and being penned in. Farms have fences that control how animals move, race tracks have a particular path that you are expected to follow to be successful. I want to wonder what relations with borders this logic comes from: are borders something that control? That certainly seems like an inheritance we have in ECE, the idea that we need to use fences and boundaries to regulate moving. The language that we were using for being “in” and “outside” of the paper border is also fascinating.

Continue reading The High Stakes of Thinking with Borders

Bordermaking and Ownership

By Selena Ha and Nicole Land

“How do we move together?” and “How do we get to know a place with movement?”. These have been the big questions in part of the movement research in the preschool room. 

From the start of the research project inquiry work, we noticed children’s conversations and play, such as “No you can’t play here, it’s my house” and “It’s mine”. We wondered: What did children tell us with this play? What ideas and concepts were they thinking with? We noticed children were creating structures and using them as boundaries that stopped the flow of human moving in the playground; structures and boundaries that interrupted the children’s movements. Thus children that used structures, words, and even their own bodies to create boundaries – they were border making, a term we used to describe our acts of creating and participating in boundaries. Noticing how important borders were in shaping moving, we started to question: what do borders really do? 

Continue reading Bordermaking and Ownership