Tables

Tables are ordinary classroom objects; they are physical structures that people sit at, or under. Orientations matter in the ways tables produce, position, and impose themselves on bodies. This chapter highlights the ways tables offer a myriad of possibilities. They can fill a space and position bodies in particular ways. They are boundary-making and produce relational identities and patterns of table metronome tempos. Table tempos and temporalities are magnified in feminist materialist relational time, where past histories flow into present times, reshaping future happenings. These get subverted by the classroom, garden, material resources, children, and teachers. Tables can disturb, striate, and smooth spaces as part of their wider inter-relationality with other bodies. ECEC table orientations are exemplified by the ways data tables and physical tables are matter in place; they exert place-space-temporal influences on both ECEC teachers and children. Tables manifest teacher-ness, external perspectives of who is a ‘good’ teacher, and what teacherly place-spaces should look like. Tables reorientate their own use value, and their tempo can reinscribe and striate their usage as object-place-spaces of learning.