3C
Charcoal
Encounter
Figure 3.1 What marks does charcoal leave in the stories we tell?
Sylvia Kind, Author
Approach, grind, crush, pursue, disguise, climb, blaze, howl, growl, sing, extract, unearth, dig,
discover, excavate, mark, saw, cut, wrap, burn, roast, draw, darken, smudge, conceal, reveal,
sift, hesitate, draw in, shake, pulverize, hammer, thump, transfer, try, pour, examine, uncover,
cover, draw near, disperse, handle, grate, chop, spread, sweep, dust, brush, multiply, stroke,
Pacini-Ketchabaw, Veronica, et al. Encounters with Materials in Early Childhood Education, Taylor & Francis Group, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/vu/detail.action?docID=4649662.
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encompass, draw together, wound, attend, heal, dispense, barter, sell, extrapolate, undo,
recover, remark, return, redo.
We searched the forest for blackened trees burned by long-ago fires and collected their
charred offerings. We gathered branches and prepared them for burning. We sang around a
copper fire bowl as we roasted vegetables, making our own charcoal. We drew together with
charcoal, both purchased and from the fire. We created large studio-events of investigating,
crushing, gathering, sifting, and dispersing charcoal fragments. We were covered. We
uncovered. We recovered from the covering and the uncovering.
Traces of charcoal remain in our memories, ground into our clothes. Traces remain in the
expectation charcoal still generates long after our experimentations. Charcoal-smudged
communion dresses still hang in the studio; sticks are still gathered in anticipation of another
fire. We carry traces of the forest, the wood, the fire, the gathering, crushing, drawing,
burning, marking, blackness, dust. The damp earthy smells of the trees.
Charcoal is a thing: a stick of compressed burned wood. But it is also a continuum, a story,
an event, a happening, a doing. We are interested in charcoalness, the expression and
experience of charcoal in the encounter: always in process, always becoming charcoal. This
“isness” (Springgay, 2011, 2012) of a thing disrupts stillness. Charcoal is not just for drawing
with.
Charcoal still holds hope.
We think about an encounter as a moment of meeting, where things and forces and human
and nonhuman beings come together in spaces of difference. In this meeting we decide how to
respond—whether to follow, join with, intervene, provoke, perhaps work against. Something is
set in motion in the encounter. An encounter emphasizes the collective and the relational, not
individual experience.
And a moment, according to Massumi (2002), is what you are compelled to pay attention to.
There is immediacy in the moment, a sensory, sensational (Springgay, 2011, 2012) attending-to.
We are talking here of a relational encounter, not of an object of recognition. Things connect
tangentially, shooting off in many directions. Nothing is reconfirmed in an encounter. The
world is not already known. Confirmation and knowledge are the domains of recognition.
O’Sullivan (2006) notes that in recognition, “we and the world we inhabit are reconfirmed as
that which we already understood our world and ourselves to be” (p. 1). Unlike a recognition,
an encounter disrupts the “re presentation of something always already in place: our habitual
way of being and acting in the world” (p. 1, emphasis in original).
In a genuine encounter, our usual ways of being in the world are confronted and challenged,
our knowledge systems disrupted: “We are forced to thought” (O’Sullivan, 2006, p. 1). An
encounter, according to Deleuze and Guattari (1987), always disturbs.
This chapter considers moments of encounter where finger meets charcoal, charcoal meets
skin, blackness meets mirror, wood meets fire, and something unexpected and generative
Pacini-Ketchabaw, Veronica, et al. Encounters with Materials in Early Childhood Education, Taylor & Francis Group, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/vu/detail.action?docID=4649662.
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takes place. We consider what happens, what is set in motion, when forces meet-touch-attendopen-respond.
To Meet
We are sitting around a table in the early childhood center, drawing together with
charcoal. Some of the charcoal pieces have been gathered from burnt trees during our
adventures in the forest, and some have been purchased from the local educational
supply store. Sheets of white paper are spread out in front of the children, and a lively,
intermittent conversation touches on wood, trees, bonfires, how to draw tanks and
trucks, bushwhacking, tank stickers, gargoyles, how charcoal might have come to be in
the forest. Nerissa falls silent. With a slow, rhythmic movement of her body, she marks
the paper, studies her hands becoming receptive to the blackness, and smudges careful
charcoal lines on her hands. Noticing how the charcoal migrates to her hands and arms,
she responds to these marks, to the talk around the table, to the paper-becoming-black.
Her paper is soon filled with dense black lines in rhythm with her hands and arms
becoming blacker and blacker until they are covered up to her elbows with soft, rich,
chalky darkness. She smiles and finally looks up at the others around her, holds up her
hands like small claws. With a hint of surprise in her voice, she tells the others she is
becoming a gargoyle.
To meet in spaces of difference means we cannot anticipate or predict what something is,
what something means, what will or should happen. Rather than knowing ahead of time what
certain materials might do or what they might be for, rather than “allowing” children time and
space to discover that which has already been discovered or is predetermined, an encounter is
marked by a certain kind of expectation: a hopeful, watchful attention to what might emerge.
For instance, we might set aside time for children to explore charcoal and the kinds of marks it
makes. While our planning allows for a valuable aspect of getting to know the material, there
is a tendency for our expectations, or our previously held understandings, to frame and
constrain what takes place: that charcoal makes particular marks, that charcoal is for drawing.
Instead of planning or expecting, an encounter looks for the not yet known. It is marked by
a sense of not knowing, of hopeful waiting. A material is not defined by what I know about it.
Things could always become other things. Even in a space set aside for drawing with charcoal,
drawing could be something other than what we understand it to be. Charcoal could become
Pacini-Ketchabaw, Veronica, et al. Encounters with Materials in Early Childhood Education, Taylor & Francis Group, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/vu/detail.action?docID=4649662.
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something other than a drawing instrument. Paper could be more than a surface. We make an
effort to perceive what we haven’t yet imagined, to see what lies beyond our field of vision.
The classroom is quiet and scattered with the residue of charcoal pastel on paper, on
walls, on carpet. Mariam and Joe enter the room and it comes to life. Picking up
charcoal-marked paper from the floor and covering themselves, they exclaim, “We need
tape!” The tape arrives and the children wrap themselves tightly with the charcoal
“costumes.” They are monsters now, running around the classroom. Four other children
join in, and soon everyone is covered with charcoal.
An encounter is interested in the new—new ways of perceiving and acting with and in the
world, unexpected relations, transversal connections. New does not necessarily mean original.
It is not an obsession with the novel. New is what might emerge unexpectedly in an
encounter. New means meeting, always for the first time, even if the “meeters” have met a
hundred times, in spaces of difference.
To meet in spaces of difference requires hospitality and openness to the other. Charcoal is
intensely hospitable to encounters with others. It marks, spreads, covers, envelops, draws in.
As it does this, it announces its presence and compels a response. It is difficult to remain
neutral to charcoal and unaffected by it. Charcoal’s rich blackness, its infinite tiny particles, its
chalky softness compels, repels, affronts.
Such hospitality is imbued with the act of listening. Bronwyn Davies (2014) says that
“encounters with others lie at the heart of listening—and of life itself”(p. 5). She writes:
Listening is about being open to being affected. It is about being open to difference, and, in particular, to difference in all
its multiplicity as it emerges in each moment in between oneself and another. Listening is about not being bound by
what you already know. It is life as movement.
(p. 1, emphasis in original)
Encounters with others, Davies suggests, “where each is open to being affected by the other”
(p. 1), are integral to life itself.
The room is quiet. Only a few child-bodies remain after the others have left the room to
get ready for snack. On the floor, a large sheet of once-white paper is now a deep, rich
black, covered with traces of the pastel charcoal presented to the children that morning.
Martin and Ziri are rolling back and forth on the paper. The paper, the charcoal, and the
Pacini-Ketchabaw, Veronica, et al. Encounters with Materials in Early Childhood Education, Taylor & Francis Group, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/vu/detail.action?docID=4649662.
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bodies become one—boundaries blur as the bodies are covered in charcoal and the
charcoal merges with the bodies. Blake’s “The Snowman, Walking in the Air” plays
softly in the background.
To meet and listen in an encounter is, as Paulina Rautio (2013) proposes, “an occasion to ask:
what is it that takes place in the moment” (p. 399)? It is an education of attention, and of
affirmation. It is hope and expectation—anticipating being moved and affected. Melora
Koepke (2015) writes that “a pedagogy of moments seeks to have the infinite possibilities of
existence narrowed down into the enunciation of the present, with the objects and experiences
that are at hand” (para. 7). It’s not oriented toward results, or what should happen, but toward
“fields of possibility” (para. 13). To meet and to listen is to attend to this moment of meeting:
“ungraspable in its moment of occurrence, but real in its effects” (O’Sullivan, 2006, p. 21).
Being hospitable comes with the hope of being disoriented, of not being able to make sense.
It is rupture: moments of problem posing (Koepke, 2015). It is curating experiences that undo
us, cultivating wonder in the unknown, creating situations that make us uncomfortable so that
genuine encounters might take place and something new might emerge.
These practices are not “wild destratification” (O’Sullivan, 2006, p. 33), however. It is not an
“anything goes” approach. It is thought-full, intentional, and careful attention to what is taking
place and what is emerging in the in-between.
To Touch
To touch charcoal is to gesture toward it. Erin Manning (2007) describes touch as a gesture of
turning toward or reaching toward, a movement, a tenuous, ephemeral exposure of oneself to
the other—not the already-known other, but the other that just might emerge in the exchange.
Potentiality—who one might be or what things might become—is at the heart of this gesture
(p. 7). Touch invents, she says, “by drawing the other into relation” (p. xiv). In her words,
To touch is always to touch something, someone. I touch not by accident, but with a determination to feel you, to reach
you, to be affected by you. Touch implies a transitive verb, it implies that I can, that I will reach toward you and allow
the texture of your body to make an imprint on mine. Touch produces an event.
(p. 12)
To touch charcoal is to be touched, to be affected, to be moved. As Manning (2007) explains, “I
cannot touch you without being responsive” (p. 9). To touch charcoal as Nerissa did, for
instance, or as Martin and Ziri did, is to be touched by it, to be open to a multitude of
possibilities of who one might become, of what the charcoal-drawing-blackness might
Pacini-Ketchabaw, Veronica, et al. Encounters with Materials in Early Childhood Education, Taylor & Francis Group, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/vu/detail.action?docID=4649662.
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become.
Charcoal touched us.
To touch is to attend to the body (Manning & Massumi, 2014), to the ways bodies move.
Manning (2007) locates touch
as one way of thinking this body-in-movement. This is not to give touch preferential treatment … touch is to be
understood synesthetically, operating along relational vectors always in dialogue with other senses (of which there are
likely more than five). To think touch synesthetically is to appreciate all of the ways in which movement alters the body.
(p. xiii)
During our year of experimenting with charcoal, we—educators, researcher, and children
—visited Unfolding, a retrospective of the work of South Korean-born conceptual artist
Kimsooja. Her work engages with everyday objects, the acts of sewing, and the daily life
of textiles. As we entered the exhibit we encountered a room where long fabric panels
hung, as if from a series of clotheslines. As we walked through the room, the vibrantly
colored silk swayed and brushed against our bodies: pinks, yellows, and reds reflected
and multiplied along the mirror-lined walls. It was impossible not to touch and be
touched by the fabric. A multiplicity of senses and connections combined, layered,
infused, overlapped, so that touching was more than the physical act of skin on matter. It
became a receptive turning toward.
For Erin Manning, “the proposition is that touch—every act of reaching toward—enables the
creation of worlds. This production is relational. I reach out to touch you in order to invent a
relation that will, in turn, invent me” (2007, p. xv). In our experimentations, charcoal produced
new visceral bodily relations. Bodies in action: doing, making, becoming. Bodies in process
through sensations. Grosz (2008, cited in Springgay, 2012) writes that “sensation impacts the
body, not through the brain, not through representations, signs, images, or fantasies, but
directly on the body’s own internal forces, on cells, organs, the nervous system” (p. 73).
Veronica’s camera zooms in on Ziri, who is lying motionless on the paper with arms and
legs extended. His open eyes are directed at the ceiling, but we’re almost certain they do
not see. The palms of his hands press on the charcoal-paper-fl oor, fi ngers extended.
Slowly, his legs and arms start moving in rhythmic snow-angel motions. After a few
seconds, he rises to his knees and puts his ear to the charcoal-paper so he can hear what
the charcoal is saying. On his back again, he moves his snow-angel arms and legs on the
Pacini-Ketchabaw, Veronica, et al. Encounters with Materials in Early Childhood Education, Taylor & Francis Group, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/vu/detail.action?docID=4649662.
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paper. Then he crawls across the paper, feeling its texture beneath his knees and hands.
More snow-angel making and he gets up again, this time to show the educator his
charcoal-covered hands. On the paper again, snow-angel movements. This back and
forth continues for more than ten minutes. Every snow-angel motion is coupled with
another action: Ziri jumps like a frog; he circles the paper; he rolls.
To Attend
To attend is to notice the world around us, including its heterogeneity (Tsing, 2011). Practicing
attunement requires awareness of the in-between, attending to the relations between things. It
is akin to van Dooren and Rose’s (forthcoming) “ethical practice of ‘becoming-witness’ which
seeks to explore and respond to others in the fullness of their particular ‘ethos,’ or way of life”
(para. 1). Paying attention “invites us into a sense of wonder” (van Dooren, 2014, p. 8), of
opening ourselves up to the world we are part of.
One morning we take out the large copper fire bowl and prepare for a charcoal-burningveggie-roasting-campfire outside the early childhood center. Our intention is to make
charcoal out of the sticks we had gathered in the forest. Sitting around the fire bowl, we
find ourselves lingering in the midst of camping stories, children singing, dappled light,
rhythms of sharpening roasting sticks, pungent smells of campfire and veggies roasting,
scraping sounds of newly burned charcoal sticks on the sidewalk. This encounter has no
goals. It is a leisurely coming-together of wood and fire and children and light and
vegetables and all the potentialities of our lingering.
To attend to something means to pause. To linger with, dwell in, take time with. As
Kimmerer (2003) writes, “attentiveness alone can rival the most powerful magnifying glass”
(p. 8). Yet this attentiveness is not about looking at the thing per se or observing the children’s
actions, but pausing in the relations between. Being attentive is to take time with the “chaotic
and vibratory spaces of activeness that are co and re-composed” in the world (Springgay,
2012,p. 557). For us, to attend involved creating conditions to linger, let go, stretch out, and
open our minds and eyes to see that anything can connect to anything else.
Pacini-Ketchabaw, Veronica, et al. Encounters with Materials in Early Childhood Education, Taylor & Francis Group, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/vu/detail.action?docID=4649662.
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To Open
We are in the forest collecting charcoal from blackened trees burned in a fire that swept
through the area long ago. The children gather, grind, sift, and experiment with the
charred remains. They saw fallen branches with hand-held graters and gather sawdust
into jars. A few try to grate the root of a living cedar and are surprised when curious
white patches edged with red appear. Zoey slowly runs her finger over the patches,
probing their smooth surface. Caleb poses questions to the others: “Are the trees alive?
How alive are they? Is this their blood and bones? Are they humans? Can they talk?” The
children check for a heartbeat. Hearing nothing, they turn away and continue grating.
But then we see the tree’s wound, the “blood” and “bones.” We hear the hierarchies of
aliveness, and we are undone. What is happening here?
Atkinson (2011) suggests that “allowing oneself to become undone is a crucial condition for
learning” (p. 165). To be undone by a wound to a tree or by the blackness of bodies is a
powerful and risky thing. It means not approaching things as if we need to fix, make “right,”
or limit so that only that which we have previously determined to be acceptable or “good”
will take place. Rather, it is necessary to allow ourselves to be undone and to attend to that
which “undoes” us.
An encounter, O’Sullivan (2006) notes, “operates as a rupture in our habitual modes of being
and thus in our habitual subjectivities” (p. 1). Every encounter produces a “cut,” or a crack, he
says. Yet, it also holds “a moment of affirmation, the affirmation of a new world” (p. 1). It
holds “a way of seeing and thinking this world differently” (p. 1) and requiring “us to think
otherwise” (p. 1).
Thinking is a practice that takes center stage in our early childhood centers. This is not a
cerebral thinking. Thinking for us is about cultivating wonder and opening to encounters in
order to unsettle, disturb, or move them (Davies, 2014). Dahlberg and Moss (2005), draw from
Deleuze suggest that in early childhood education knowledge is “a dull concept, almost deadly,
leading nowhere; it is about recognition of existing facts and the solution of known problems”
(p. 114). They contrast knowledge with the concept of thought, and liken thought to life:
“Thought opens up—to change, innovation, invention of new possibilities. Thought is critical
and creative—of new concepts, problems, and learning” (p. 114).
Pacini-Ketchabaw, Veronica, et al. Encounters with Materials in Early Childhood Education, Taylor & Francis Group, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/vu/detail.action?docID=4649662.
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Several four-year-old girls enter the studio and gather around the long, paper-covered
tables holding collections of charcoal sticks in small porcelain dishes. The charcoal draws
them in, and the girls experiment with making marks on the paper. Meandering,
inquisitive lines go far, while short strokes pressed hard into the paper leave black
crumbs. As the children draw, the charcoal travels, spreading over the paper and
covering fingers and hands. Paper and skin are receptive to charcoal’s soft blackness.
After the first few tentative marks and noticeable pleasure in the spreading charcoal, the
encounter unfolds quickly. Finger meets charcoal, blackness meets skin, charcoal meets
story. Fairy tales, movie scenes, gendered discourses of romance and growing older,
chairs that had been pushed against the wall to make way for the charcoal event all
intertwine. Charcoal becomes makeup. Chairs become a bus. It is as if everything is
thrown into the air (Olssen, 2009) and is combined and recombined in unexpected ways.
We linger for a while to take note of the many things at play here, our hesitation
playing in the erupting encounters as well. By this time the children, nearly fully
blackened by the soft charcoal dust, are sitting on the bus going to a ball to meet the
black prince.
In our daily work, we opened ourselves to experimentation (Kind & Pacini-Ketchabaw,
2016), in particular, to experimentation as a complex social-affective-political phenomenon.
Our intention was always to rupture the romance of experimentation, of the beautiful, of the
exotic. Experimenting has the potential to bring life to sedimented discourses. It aims to
increase our capacity to act in the world, to produce new forms of life (see O’Sullivan, 2006, p.
78), and to open up perceptions and understandings. This is always a risky endeavor.
In opening to experimentation, we engage with children, materials, narratives, and
situations as they act on and act with each other and enter into complex, entangled networks
and assemblages. It is not just human relationality. It is about the capacity for things and
beings to respond to each other in space, in and out of time, in movement, in an environment
that allows for multiple convergences and intersections. In experimentation, we get to know
the power, possibilities, and consequences of a material. We work within the tensions and
ethics of listening to children’s own concerns as we attend to the materials and discourses they
play with. We become witness to how children take the substance of their lives—including the
circulating images, narratives, and ideas—and make something of them, inventing,
reproducing, transforming. We are interested in what children select, what they choose as
desirable, what a material such as charcoal can bring into play. Yet experimentation is not
innocent as if it only involves children’s creative inventions. It is not “free” experimentation
Pacini-Ketchabaw, Veronica, et al. Encounters with Materials in Early Childhood Education, Taylor & Francis Group, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/vu/detail.action?docID=4649662.
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without any obligations or response-abilities (Haraway, 2008). And so we respond.
To Respond
We are in the early childhood center preparing wood we had gathered from the forest for
the charcoal-burning event. At one end of the room, a few children are using a handheld saw to divide a long willow branch into smaller pieces. Others are at tables using
scissors to cut cedar, fi r, alder, and other willow-wood twigs into lengths so they can be
wrapped in foil and placed in the fire. Scissors, saw, and children’s hands cannot cut
wood quickly or easily, so it takes time, and we linger together with the severed pieces,
the scent of the wood, peeling bark, crinkling foil, and a dozen different trajectories of
cutting, breaking, wrapping, covering. Jayden, bringing scissors to twig, notices a tiny
bug crawling over the bark. He gently carries the bug outside to set it free. Still
concerned that we might be about to burn a bug’s home, he writes a thank-you note to
the branch and tapes it onto the wrapped-around foil. Later, when we are gathered
around the fire, there is a momentary pause in the laughter and activity as we silently
watch the flames engulf Jayden’s letter.
To respond in our creative eruptions was a way of learning to move with, not passively
observe, highly charged events, to be open to being moved and to act, to engage with
emerging propositions and step into emerging choreographies. To do something in concert
with the movements. To find ways to play along. This is akin to Haraway’s (2008) responseability: It is more than acknowledging the other or following rules. Response-ability is about
sharing and feeling in the moment, whether it is a moment of joy or a moment of suffering.
Paulina Rautio (2013) writes that “even if we cannot know or control what happens when we
encounter difference in the world, we nevertheless have a responsibility when we enter these
encounters” (pp. 400–401). As in the earlier encounter, “we are accountable for how we do it:
for our attitudes, orientations and capacities in attending to the world and searching for
‘truths’” (pp. 400–401).
We also have responsibilities for the effects of encounters. What do we do with blackness,
for instance? With the residue and the remains? With the bug, with the ashes of Jayden’s
burned letter, with the wound to the tree? Yet, these encounters cannot be engaged at the
level of principles such as conservation, recycling, or not killing. They require, as van Dooren
and Rose (forthcoming) suggest, an “ethics as an openness to others in the material reality of
Pacini-Ketchabaw, Veronica, et al. Encounters with Materials in Early Childhood Education, Taylor & Francis Group, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/vu/detail.action?docID=4649662.
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their own lives” (para. 1). They require a becoming-witness.
Davies (2014), drawing on Deleuze, describes haecceity as the experience of being
immersed in the present moment in such a way that one is acutely affected, completely
absorbed, and moved. She writes: “An encounter is an intensity, a becoming that takes you
outside of the habitual practices of the already-known, it is intra-active, and corresponds to the
power to affect and be affected” (p. 10). Discussing Dahlberg, she says, “Our capacity to enter
into encounters, to re-compose ourselves, to be affected, enhances our specificity, and expands
our capacity for thought and action” (p. 1).
Encountering charcoal offered us hope: the hope to be open to thought. The hope to meet
anew. The hope to touch and be touched. The hope to attend to anything that came along that
wanted attending to. The hope to open ourselves to the unpredictability of the world. The
hope, no matter what, to respond to the assemblages we become part of.
Pacini-Ketchabaw, Veronica, et al. Encounters with Materials in Early Childhood Education, Taylor & Francis Group, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/vu/detail.action?docID=4649662.
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