Owl Wool: A Narrative Experience of Textile Literacy in an Early Years Classroom

Abstract

With few exceptions, children do not attend school naked. Clothing, as a cultural universal, is often invisible under the gaze of mundanity (e.g. we wear clothing every day). But young children are well suited to paying close attention because, for them, the gaze of mundanity does not yet exist. In order to more clearly see the relationship between preschool aged children and their textiles, this sociomaterial narrative centers on one coastal Canadian preschool’s three-month immersion into textile literacy. This work used listening-as-method in order to explore the multi-stranded stories that arose when preschool students interacted with textile themed provocations in their classroom (Green, 2015, p.1190; Edensor, 2013). Using student stories and placing them under a metaphorical magnifying glass, the work identifies themes and threads between the children’s stories (verbal and nonverbal) and their material, textile, world. These themes and threads ultimately make up an eight-theme web that helps define the research assemblage which highlights children’s relational entanglements, and considers how we might reimagine children's entanglement with the non-human world.