Weaving with Excess in Early Childhood Education

This paper attempts to take seriously a methodological obligation to excess through the processes of weaving with plastics. I propose weaving as a way of thinking about and creating pedagogies that engage with excess. Storying minor acts (Manning, 2016) of weaving with Andean straw and plastic yarn, this paper seeks to cultivate sensitivities to material distinctions and entanglements toward a remaking of relations with the explosive growth of plastic materials in the forest beside a school for young children in the Ecuadorian Andes.

Excess has a divergent quality (de la Cadena, 2019). It constitutes itself, in distinction, through its practice in a mutuality. To situate this notion of divergence within my pedagogical work at this school, I think with de la Cadena’s (2019) expression of a “complex we”: a conceptual proposition she suggests for thinking through mutual excesses, or “forms of being that each of us in the ‘we’ [are] not” (p. 478). de la Cadena uses this concept to convey a common condition that constitutes mutual excess as it emerges through “intra-acted assertions of divergence” (p. 478). Because mutual excess occurs at the meetings of categorical peripheries, it has a divergent characteristic that escapes/disassociates/protrudes from its other, while remaining in common.

de la Cadena (2019) suggests attention to mutual excess as a generative space for rethinking the human and its relations with the earth, an invitation to flesh out the categories/classifications that sustain this human and its practices, and to become open to what exceeds and cannot be contained by them. In this paper, I consider the generative refrains of weaving with excess as a proposition for early childhood pedagogies.