This presentation explores how our embodied encounters with the world offer new modes of being in the world with others, new forms of becoming. Heeding Elspeth Probyn’s (2004) call to focus on the ‘live body’ in education, I examine how sensuality, understood as both ‘touching’ and ‘being touched by’, offers us a way of thinking about our educational practices as sensual networks of co-emergence and co-becoming. Whilst sensuality is often either neglected or perhaps even feared in teaching, this presentation seeks to understand the ways in which sensuality participates in how we come to understand ourselves in relation to others, to things, and to our environments more generally. Specifically, I outline how actual, physical encounters in the classroom create spaced-times and timed-spaces through two key ideas: 1. spaces of bodying which enable the very contours and substance of our bodies to emerge; and 2. times of unfolding as a relational process of becoming toward a future that is not yet. Drawing on a range of theories from architecture, art, and philosophy, I consider how touching and feeling are central and not peripheral to the very practices we engage in as teachers in the name of education.

In a recent study of learning with iPads our research group looked at what happened as technologies and other materials came into relation with young children and adults in an early years setting. Using a socio-material perspective we focused on how children took up iPads, what iPads did, and what they became. This helped us to describe those moments when an iPad in a classroom became a sledge or tray, and moments when it became some form of text. In this presentation the study is used to explore how relationships between humans, non-humans, meaning making and literacies can be defined in terms of their social-material-textual affects. Under certain conditions and configurations these relationships are recognizable, given value, and are seen as having educational worth by human participants such as educators and researchers. It seems crucially important to interrogate what is recognizable in this way and why, and what such acts of recognition do. This is for two reasons: firstly because the emergence of new practices, such as those associated with iPads, invites new kinds of recognition; and secondly because conceptualisations of literacy and learning are increasingly constrained by an accountability culture that reduces them to outcomes that are easy to observe and measure.

In this talk, Tanu Biswas focuses on the embodied act of breathing as belonging to the 'taken-for-granted' realm of modern human existence. Through the particular example of experiencing breathing with Baby Ole - dr. Biswas presents some generic reflections on the possible scope for adults to deepen their knowledge of breathing in the presence of babies. Finally, following a reflexive approach in the philosophy of education (e.g. Hoveid & Hoveid 2019), dr. Biswas suggests that learning with babies as adults can be understood as letting-teach.

Sharon Todd is Professor of Education at Maynooth University, Ireland. She has published widely in the areas of embodiment, ethics, and politics in education and is currently working on a book for SUNY Press tentatively titled, The Touch of the Present: Education, Encounter and the Politics of the Senses. Previous publications include  Learning from the Other: Levinas, Psychoanalysis and Ethical Possibilities in Education (SUNY, 2003) and Toward an Imperfect Education: Facing Humanity, Rethinking Cosmopolitanism (Paradigm, 2009), the co-edited volumes Re-imagining Educational Relationships: Ethics, Politics, Practices with M. Griffiths, M. Honerød-Hoveid and C. Winter (Wiley, 2014) and Philosophy East/West: Exploring the Intersections between Educational and Contemplative Practices with O. Ergas (Wiley, 2015). She is currently President of the International Network of Philosophers of Education.

Guy Merchant is Professor of Literacy and Education at the Sheffield Institute of Education, Sheffield Hallam University. His research explores the ways in which literacy and technology intersect in the lives of children and young people. Guy is a founding editor of the Journal of Early Childhood Literacy and has written extensively about literacy and new media. He is co-author, with Cathy Burnett, of ‘Undoing the Digital’ (2020), ‘New Media in the Classroom’ (2019), and is a contributing editor for ‘Virtual Literacies’ (2013); ‘New Literacies around the Globe’ (2014); ‘Literacy, Media, Technology’ (2016) and ‘The Case of the iPad’ (2016).

Tanu Biswas is a postdoctoral researcher based at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Bayreuth. Her theoretical and geographical journey with children and childhood in India, Italy, Norway and Germany led to a hybrid nomadic sensibility in her contribution to childism research. Her present focus is on suggesting a childist perspective for the pedagogy of philosophy in response to an overheated era of Anthropocene neoliberalism. Tanu is particularly interested in exploring the philosophical richness that children and childhood have to offer adults.