Grotesque gestures or sensuous signs? Rethinking notions of apprenticeship in early childhood education.

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Abstract

Education might be conceptualized as a swarm of signs. Deleuze, in Proust and Signs (1964/2000) suggests that “Everything that teaches us something emits signs” (p. 4).
Such conceptualizations regard education as fluid, multiple and temporal; a young child can display great skill in decoding some signs but not others. Regarding education as temporal and complex operates at some distance to the sociocultural concepts suggested by Vygotsky (1978) which focus on linear sequences of gaining managed, culturally-loaded knowledge from more experienced others.

Despite differing theorizations around apprenticeship, during early years education a child becomes sensitive to signs that collectively prioritize conventionalized knowledge acquisition and communication practices.

Drawing for learning and communicating exemplifies apprenticeship as a creative process rather than as sequential or culturally driven, and serves to exemplify Deleuzian concepts around the relationships between time and learning, rather than age or development stage and learning.