Doors, Alcoves, Window Ledges, and Crevices

ECEC classrooms are material places where encounters with doors, alcoves, window ledges, and crevices are productive. These elements of classrooms are generally not noticed; they are background phenomena, taken for granted as things that ‘just are’ part of the fabric. Doors, alcoves, window ledges, and crevices are somatechnic classroom matterings that have unforeseen influences on children and teacher bodies. This chapter shows how door place-spaces can regulate and reinforce the child-as-learner. The door minimises distraction and tames the wilful child, keeping matter, bodies, and minds in place. Doors allow for children to receive age-appropriate teaching and resources but do not always allow for children of multiple different ages to mix. Doors care, they provide opportunities for children to develop their own self-care. Furthermore, alcoves, window ledges, and crevices allow for a choreographing of body making practices, producing relational entanglements between children and classrooms. Proprioception becomes a nexus for thinking with and about the impossibility and impermeability of bodily boundaries. When children squeeze into the alcoves, window ledges, and crevices, it can sometimes be impossible to clearly mark where bodies begin and end.