Dancing-bodies-moving-Spaces: An Ethnography of Disabled and Non-disabled Children's Movement in a Kindergarten Classroom
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Contemporary neuroscientific evidence indicates that unrestricted movement and gesture enhance children’s physical, social and cognitive development by engaging them with the external properties of their environments. Current understanding of children’s engagement with indoor environments is limited. This knowledge gap matters because children’s health, social abilities and cognitive development may be compromised in physical environments that inhibit rather than enhance their movement capacities. This gap is especially problematic for physically disabled children because their motor impairments, exclusionary societal attitudes, safety concerns and environmental barriers curtail their movement. In this study, I describe and interpret the relationship between disabled and non-disabled children’s movement and a kindergarten classroom. Their bodies were conceptualized according to Deleuze’s premise that nothing can be known about bodies until they demonstrate what they can do (1988). The classroom was conceptualized according to Gibson’s theory of affordances, which posits that people and environments are inextricably related (1979). I used a choreographic perspective underpinned by Manning’s philosophy of relational movement (2009) to accentuate the dynamic reciprocity between children’s bodies and the classroom. Eight disabled and 12 non-disabled children participated in this interdisciplinary, ethnographic study. Data were elicited through observations, video recordings and semi-structured interviews. I developed a taxonomy of indoor affordances or ‘compositional elements’ to categorize classroom objects/features that children discovered and actualized through their movement interactions. Subsequently, I observed a dance-in-the-making that led to deeper understandings of the relational and emergent properties of these interactions. Findings suggest that assemblages of bodies, objects and features trigger dynamic movement, and indicate that disabled and non-disabled children alike discover and creatively assemble affordances to facilitate their movement. Overall, my findings recast children’s body-environment interactions and contribute to understandings about environmental features that enhance or inhibit movement capacities. This knowledge could be used to design i) learning environments that are redolent of movement possibilities, ii) interventions to enhance children’s physical, social and cognitive capacities, and iii) education and rehabilitation strategies that encourage them to explore, navigate and shape their environments.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".