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.