‘The toys you sleep with’: embracing otherwise literacies in early childhood wor(l)ds

‘The toys you sleep with’: embracing otherwise literacies in early childhood wor(l)ds Abstract Early childhood literacy is pervaded by dominant discourses telling children both what to say, how to say it, and what is worthy of adults' attention. These discourses are affected by the need to constantly see language through solely representational accounts, and children as still progressing, developing and becoming literate while excluding the strong presence of more-than-humans and the diverse ways of being child. However, the field of posthuman studies has introduced other perspectives on literacy that are neither solely exclusive to humans nor solely representational or intentional. They trouble the dominancy of literacy that can serve to diminish children, especially those from minority groups. Building on this framework, we propose to address how otherwise literacies are created among children and objects, such as toys. Our data come from a current research project being developed in a school in Seville (Spain). The children in our research are 4 to 5 years old and come from different sociocultural backgrounds. In our research, our data are written as a vignette which describes different affective encounters in a classroom. These encounters are part of an action that required children to bring from home a treasure box with cherished elements inside. We diffract these data through theories of affect to consider what otherwise synergies emerge between children and toys and what we can learn about literacy through them. We claim that the toys you sleep with bring otherwise (political) ways of being and becoming through literacies embedded in more-than-wor(l)ds. They recall how literacy practices involve objects that affect (with) us in unpredictable and not easy to describe ways, but that are essential to consider more justice-oriented practices. Key words: Early Childhood, posthumanism, literacies, postqualitative, affect Introduction Our study adds to the endeavours of other academics working with/in posthumanism who advocate the importance of discussing the ways in which literacy has been theorized because they do not do justice to what happens between children and their material surroundings (see, for example, Dernikos, 2020; Hackett, 2021; Thiel and Jones, 2017; Truman et al., 2020). We embrace those moments in which literacy must be honoured as more than a set of practices represented through linear or descriptive wor(l)ds (Hackett, 2022a) and children not as subjects ‘in development’ but full of potential and more-than- human connections that cannot be known in advance (Murris, 2016). Hence, drawing on the work of Hackett (2021), our interest revolves around those literacies that are written as ‘messy, provisional and holding in tension multiple possibilities, meanings and affects, moving and slipping between the representational and non-representational, between ‘literacy’ and ‘not-literacy’ (86). Finally, we understand that the way literacy is framed (or not) contributes to more justice-oriented practices in early childhood (Thiel and Dernikos, 2020). Accordingly, our work builds on our weekly experiences in a state-funded school located in the city of Seville (Spain). The school borders a low-income neighbourhood. The students we work with (4 to 5 years old) come from different socio-cultural backgrounds (Spanish, Roma and Latin American among others). In this school, we instigated a series of four ‘actions’ that re/created spaces, materials, and times with the children i . These actions are part of larger research project which investigates early childhood literacy (MATILDA / PID2019-104557GB-I00). By the time the first action took place (March 2022), researchers had already spent a considerable amount of time with the teacher and the children supporting, learning, exchanging ideas about the project and getting to know their classroom routines (we started our weekly visit in November 2021). Children have also had time to ask questions about us, the notebooks we used for field notes, the cameras and to know that we would like to understand more about their ways of doing literacy, learning and relating. Parents received all the information about the project and provided consent for their children. In one of our actions (involving a walk in the neighbourhood), some of them were also involved proposing ideas and co-researching. We understand these actions to be neither a one-off nor unilateral event, but a coming together of wor(l)ds and im/possibilities. More specifically, we adopted the term ‘actions’ to disrupt the idea of intervention as solely coming from one side and to avoid thinking about the necessity of a product or a result. In this sense, we agree with Kuby and Gutshall Rucker’s (2020), re-etymologizing what they refer to as ‘E/Interventions’ to recognise in our research that children, more-than- humans, teachers and researchers were always present, acting and re/creating each other. The first section of the first action, which is the one we discuss in this paper, consisted of children bringing a treasure box to the school with cherished toys inside. This was planned as a ‘kick off’ to learn more about ‘more-than-human literacies’ (see Hackett, 2021). We had previously shared the idea of the action with the teacher, who besides asking for support from the parents also gave her opinion on how to work with this group of children and what adaptations in terms of space/time would be necessary. She also worked with the treasure boxes in her classroom encouraging some children to share with the whole group what their boxes contained. At the end of the action, an interview was caried out to hear her opinion and plan the next sections. That said, it is through ‘re-turning’ (Barad, 2014) to the moments of our encounters with Luca’s treasure box that our research unfolds. Our main objective is to address Abigal Hackett’s (2021) call to expand narrow understandings of literacy by focusing on this question: ‘how might we notice, describe, value and encourage what happens between children and things?’ (Hackett, 2021: 109). We start by reviewing some of the criticism of representational or developmental accounts of childhood (and) literacies. We point out how posthumanism allows us to see literacy through a broader perspective that, for instance, does not take for granted the role of humans or the purpose of literacy. Affected by one of the children’s rephrasing of our humancentric questions by inviting us to speak about ‘the toys you sleep with’, we read our encounters with children and toys by diffracting (Barad, 2007) them through different theories of affect (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987; Massumi, 2002, 2015). In this ‘re-turning’ of data and theory, we discuss (i) the limitations of seeing toys as solely tools for literacy (ii) what we learned about toys as affecting and being affected and (iii) the contributions of affect to a reconfiguration of literacy practices. We conclude by pointing out how affects—as ‘forces and intensities’ (Springgay, 2011: 67) — place children, toys, and ourselves in a terrain of literacy where not everything can be represented, separated in different boxes (humans and non-humans) or predicted by adult guidance. Building on Massumi (2002), we argue that in a field full of affects, the intensity matters and not just the accuracy. Moreover, literacy through this perspective is not seen as solely produced by humans, but by assemblages of children-toys-objects (Kuby and Gustshall Rucker, 2016). We highlight how these are (more-than-human) ways of seeing literacy, which trouble the deficit discourses that exclude and marginalize, specifically when considering children from minority social contexts. ‘The toys you sleep with’, therefore, point out to more justice-oriented practices in ECE. Children (and) literacies: some possibilities beyond representation, development and humans The following dialogue draws from a conversation between a teacher and a 5-year-old. It is circle time and, as usual, the teacher invites them to share any ideas, experiences, or stories with the others. It is circle time and we long to share our feelings, thoughts, and news. Alba (student): Today four people woke me up! Carla (teacher): Who lives with you? Alba: Two women and two men…Margot… Carla (interrupts): Who is Margot? Alba: It is my dog! Carla: Then it is not a woman, it is a dog. Alba turns around, turning her back to the assembly. A noisy silence takes place. (Giovanna’s Journal notes, February 2022) Unpacking the injustices of representational and developmental logics The urge to ask and simultaneously make sense of children’s wor(l)ds is deeply connected with our focus on language as a source of representation and order (MacLure, 2016). Barad (2007: 137) points out that ‘representation takes the notion of separation as foundational’. It considers that one can name, interpret, and represent the reality of people or things from a distant and static perspective. In the field of literacy, representational thinking has been associated with the need to find a purpose or an end to children’s literacy practices (Leander and Boldt, 2013), while in research in general, representation contributes to a static understanding of data (MacLure, 2013). With reference to the vignette above, we notice that we (adults) need to represent through language which ones are the dogs and which ones the humans, what makes sense and what does not, what is reality and what is fantasy. Important power dynamics that are at the core of representational ideas about children’s wor(l)ds are emphasised by some authors. For example, Viruru (2001) points out that language can be used as a colonizing mechanism to ‘civilize’ children under certain logics, logics in which silences or inaccurate responses may be taken as a ‘lack’. As a result, in Hackett’s (2022a) accounts, a ‘hierarchy of talk’ is established that expects children to produce meanings that are evaluable and clear (representable) from the adults’ perspective, disregarding, for instance, bodily practices. Following Maclure’s (2016) work, this hierarchy also leads to the cartesian divide that insists on separating children’s bodies from their minds. Meanings that are neither sufficiently accurate nor rational (such as Alba’s) may easily be dismissed, questioned or challenged. According to such reasoning, adults are positioned as the ‘judges’ and ‘saviours’ of children’s language development (Hackett, 2021), perpetuating what Murris (2021a) has claimed to be a colonizing relationship in which children, and their knowledge, are seldom taken seriously. Rather than pointing out an individual practice, or to claim that representation is always inappropriate, the vignette above helps us to explore how representational thinking provides some possibilities for understanding children’s literacy practices, as well as some impossibilities. As Thiel (2020) explains, a child may engage in practices that are anything but producing an outcome or a sense to adults. In this sense, representation may help us to know that Alba has a pet or to categorize the members of her family, but what else could we have learned from her relationship with this pet? What else could we have learned about being a family or about the mornings in which everyone (including her dog) comes to wake her up? What can we learn about the many times Margot joins the classroom without an apparent connection to what is being discussed? Focusing only on the representable aspects may prevent us from considering literacy moments that exceed the limits of causality or explanation. Not every way of doing literacy is linear (Hackett, 2022b). Hence, when language is not sufficient to please adults’ expectations, this does not mean that children are not ‘literate enough’, but perhaps we need to question the background logics that start with an assumption that children are ‘lacking’ certain characteristics (see Murris, 2022). The discourses of ‘lack’ draw on a long tradition in the educational field. Murris (2016) reviews the way in which developmental theories have set homogeneous goals and steps for children's progress. She claims: ‘developmentalism has created a “two-world view”: a world for children and a world for grown-ups’ (226). For Murris (2022), embedded in this binary (Adult/Child) is a Western logic that splits nature (that which children are) and culture (that which is brought to them). The consequence for Murris is a child that is always perceived as, by their very nature, lacking ‘responsibility, maturity, trustworthiness, natural goodness, experience, rationality, norms, and values’ (Murris, 2022: 45). In other words, we may perceive children, fundamentally, as ‘lacking’ and needing to be ‘humanized’ (Snaza, 2013). Therefore, the logics of developmentalism and children as lacking do not take into account the multiple ways in which one can be a child (Rautio and Jokinen, 2016). This is an issue that affects every child, but especially children in minority contexts. After all, as Kromidas (2019) argues, ‘Development instantiates white middle-class children as the selected, casting out every other child as dysselected’ (72). Expanding literacy: posthuman insights for ‘otherwise’ Dominant discourses (adult, white, middle-class, abled-bodied) about children are related to what literacies are acceptable, or even celebrated, at school. For example, Dernikos (2020) discusses how a series of norms dictate the ways in which children’s literacy should sound or not during reading. For her, ‘whiteness’ controls bodies of colour according to humanistic logics. Similarly, Thiel and Jones (2017) consider how the material disposition of a play space can ‘make sense of black, brown, immigrant and poor humans as potentially criminal and in need of being contained or restricted’ (324). In other words, not everyone is considered literate enough and some are trapped in the discourses of ‘lack’ (Kuby and Gutshall Rucker, 2020). Failing to make sense or to represent the world in specific adult, white, middle-class, and able-bodied logics, may mean failing to be ‘more developed’ and ‘more literate’. For this reason, the literature claims that ‘literacy has historically functioned as a humanist and humanizing project that produces a particular kind of literate subject through inclusionary and exclusionary logics’ (Truman et al., 2020: 233). It is, however, by combining the work of different authors that this paper commits to tracing ‘otherwise’ narratives about literacy as more than a set of abilities (to be) dominated by some (Kuby and Gutshall Rucker, 2020). Immersed in the new material turn, research drawing on posthumanism made advances by claiming for otherwise spaces for childhood (and) literacy (Kuby et al., 2019). Braidotti (2019) clarifies that posthumanism does not mean leaving behind humans, but rather (re)working ‘affirmatively’ to (re)consider that this subject is (and has always been) tied to many others. It is about not taking a category of human for granted (Barad and Gandorfer, 2021), because humanistic and representational explanations of literacy are ‘cuts too small’ (Kuby et al., 2019). These cuts deny that which fits neither representational nor developmental structures (Hackett, 2022b) and/or dismiss the powerful presence of more-than-humans in literacy practices (Hackett and Somerville, 2017). Posthuman readings embrace literacies that challenge individualism and dominant ideas about what it is to be human. Posthumanism allows us to think about literacy in a relational plane, troubling the prior humanistic logics of ‘lack’ (MacRae, 2020). In these accounts, literacy can be affective, not only representational (Leander and Boldt, 2013), and shared not only among humans, but also with objects, toys, etc. (Kuby and Gutshall Rucker, 2016). More specifically, posthuman thinking leads to an idea of literacy as ‘the intra-active, in-the- moment becoming of child/materials/time/space/peers/adult’ (Kuby and Gutshall Rucker, 2016: 25). Literacy does not need to build on any framework, but rather can be about embracing moments in which children and more-than-humans relate in a scenario that does not always involve words or definite meanings (Hackett, 2022a). An example of literacy practice for us would be Alba, bringing unusual contributions to the circle time, recreating her more-than-human encounters with Margot, or even expressing through the blink of her eyes how it feels to be awakened every morning by her dog. Such broader understanding of literacy reveals other ways of being and creating (with) the world, which also demand otherwise ways of researching. Postqualitative inquiry: diffracting through emergent data while learning with ethics-to-be Our research During our ‘actions’ and drawing on the work of Hackett (2021), we aligned ourselves with posthumanism while making use of ethnographic techniques. Such an approach meant that we were not interested in seeing children as separate from ourselves, the environment, the language practices, or the more-than-human agents (such as toys). Working with Barad’s (2007) concept of phenomenon indicates that we need to see all of these elements as intra-acting agents that cannot be analysed separately; they are all entangled. With that in mind, during our stays at the school, we engaged with 22 children (4- to 5-year-olds) from different social-cultural backgrounds, but we also worked with materials, objects, spaces, and other more-than-human objects. Field notes, videos and photographs—collected during and after the field work— assisted with the writing of vignettes. Our vignettes, such as the one at the beginning of this paper, are materialized through short text-entries. However, they encompass more than what is written because they help us to think about or rethink happenings, feelings and sensations (that we are part of) in an open-ended, non-representational, and affectional way (see Truman et al., 2020). Doing postqualitative inquiry In this study, we decided to work with postqualitative inquiry. Murris (2021b: 6) states that ‘postqualitative research does not to do away with qualitative research but works differently with data and opens up new perspectives of what counts as data’. Coined by St. Pierre (2019), the term postqualitative inquiry does not focus on retrieving the meaning or purpose of data (certainty), but rather acknowledges the fluidity of reality, the constant ‘becomings’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). Accordingly, postqualitative research troubles the idea of a powerful researcher that takes standardized decisions (such as coding) to choose what data are or what data represent (MacLure, 2013). Rather, as Murris (2022: 61) discusses and drawing on Barad (2007), objectivity here is also about acknowledging how the researcher is ‘part of the material be(com)ing of the universe’. In postqualitative inquiries, data are not considered passive, waiting to be collected or chosen; ‘the distance between researchers and data disappears’ (Koro-Ljungberg, 2013: 275). Seeing data as part of the researcher’s experience allows us to see data as ‘made not found, assembled rather than collected, and ever dynamic’ (Ellingson and Sotirin, 2020: 14). By not denying our own subjectivity in data construction, we can embrace those moments in which data exceed our research questions or purposes; they ‘glow’ (MacLure, 2013), calling our attention to one thing or another. The way these data are ‘made’ produces an ‘agential cut’ (Murris, 2022), which for Karen Barad (2007) does not mean a bounded cut (there are always other intra-actions happening), nor is this cut solely produced by the researcher, as ‘there is no “I” that acts from the outside’ (Barad and Gandorfer, 2021: 30). By cuts we mean a relational decision to trace an intra-action while knowing that this cut is always opened and connected with other intra-actions. Consequently, rather than asking if these cuts/data are sufficient or accurate for discussing literacy, this kind of research demands us to ask, ‘what matters and what is excluded from mattering’ (Barad, 2007: 394). That is, rather than following protocols, postqualitative inquiry invites us to trouble standard protocols and to work differently in each encounter to create new knowledge (St Pierre, 2019). In proposing that knowing and be(com)ing are entangled, Barad (2007) contends that a political background cannot be dismissed, coining the term ‘ethico-onto-epistemology’. This relational perspective troubled the ethics of our research, expanding our orientations beyond predetermined ethical procedures that distance the researcher from the phenomenon (Bozalek, 2021). Consequently, ethics is about ‘responsibility and accountability for the lively relationalities of becoming of which we are part’ (Barad, 2007: 393). In practice, for Murris (2022), this is about continuously questioning the cuts we are part of. For example, with reference to our first vignette, we could ask what changes when this cut produces Margot as a ‘non-human’? Is she allowed to have the same importance in the classroom? How does asking Alba to explain her categorization of dogs and persons produce a particular view of literacy and child? Reading diffractively The vignette that is presented next is discussed through a set of ‘diffractive readings’ that allow us to keep unpacking our assumptions in research (Murris, 2022). All names used are pseudonyms. These diffractions draw on Barad’s (2007, 2014) work, where she discusses diffraction in relation to quantum physics, and defends a reading that superposes and questions through different theories, that ‘aerate’ research (Barad and Gandorfer, 2021). Diffraction encourages a process of constantly evoking ‘what else is going on’ in our cuts (Murris and Peers, 2022: 351), such as evoking the questions we exemplified above. As Murris (2022: 64) says, ‘we must keep asking how these cuts are made’. Reading theories diffractively, therefore, is not about fitting data into specific concepts, but rather allowing data and theory to assemble, troubling previous conceptions (Mazzei, 2014). We present a vignette and read it through different theories of affect (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987; Massumi, 2002; 2015) in order to think literacy ‘otherwise or not-yet-known’ (Kuby and Gutshall Rucker, 2020: 30). Throughout the text, the use of ‘I’ and ‘we’ are purposefully changing to connect Giovanna’s own thoughts about living the event and all three researchers’ conversations about working with this data. Engaging with wor(l)ds-to-come: a more-than-human vignette The following vignette is a cut from the very first time we enacted an ‘action’ with the children. We focused specifically on the moment Luca’s box was being explored. It was the start of many things planned and many others about to happen. Elena (the headteacher) had distributed each child’s treasure box. They had brought them from home, upon our request, with different items inside. I (Giovanna) stayed with a group of 5 children (Luca, Aima, Sara, Alba and Lídia). Two cameras were set up to record the action, one of them hanging round my neck and the other standing beside us on a tripod. Fernando and Eduardo were working with other children in the room. When we started the activity, the other groups had taken the tables available in the classroom. I thought it would be good to stay on the floor, as this was also the space children are used to being in with the teacher during circle time. However, I was also concerned if that space would allow them to really experience each other’s boxes. I was worried both about the sounds in the environment, as there were many people speaking at the same time, and about my own Spanish skills to understand them (my mother tongue is Brazilian Portuguese). Building on this scenario, we share with the readers a vignette of the encounter between the five children and their treasure boxes. We chose to work with this cut because the limits of a small, square box and children's/adult's choices seemed to be constantly expanding from the moment we found ourselves sitting on the floor moving between opening and not opening the boxes. The toys and objects within those boxes, which until then had not been permitted in the school because of COVID-19, started to re/act in unexpected ways, taking the event always a step ahead of what we had imagined, or even feared. Picture 1. The day the treasure box came to school Excitement. We find ourselves sitting in a circle in the middle of the classroom wondering where to start - as if there had to be a command so that things could start happening. There is frenetic movement and loud sounds coming from everywhere. The children start showing their treasure boxes containing toys to each other. In an impulsive, teacher-like-role, I try to organize the order of presentations for each treasure box. I spin a pen in the middle of the circle. Sometimes the pen ends up between two children. It raises some laughs and arguments about who will start first. Excitement. When it gets to Luca’s turn, he opens his fully decorated treasure box. While he shows his belongings, the others gaze into their own boxes. I ask them to listen to Luca’s presentation. He grabs a collage of pictures of his family and points to the picture of the day he went to the cinema; there was popcorn! Excitement. … The other events in the pictures overlap with bodies, sounds, voices, and toys. Any attempt to follow a chronological (re)telling of the scenes in the pictures seems nonsense. Suddenly, Luca lifts up the “very soft” stuffed egg that the three wise men brought him. He passes it round and all hands squeeze it, ensuring they discover the softness of it. He shows the letter written by his mum and I start to read it: “My name is Luca, this is the box of my favourite objects, there is a picture of my family, a puppet…”. However, I am stopped in the middle as the treasure box calls us back to whatever is going on in there. Luca finds the t-shirt from his favourite football team. Children notice that it matches with the stickers he used to decorate the box. Aima enthusiastically exclaims that there are more toys inside. Many fingers are now pointing to the team shield. Excitement. A car from Captain America pops in and, unexpectedly, the car is gone again. Under the shelves, fast, here we go. Tension. No worries, the car is safe! We go back to the unpacking. … Luca picks up another toy which I did not recognize or understand the name of. I ask the name of it again but remain clueless. I remember there are times in which my Spanish (language) skills seem just not enough. He moves the toy through the air and our eyes fly around with it. Excitement. Back to the floor I start to ask, “taking everything that is here…” Aima finishes the sentence, “Which one is your favourite?”. I repeat the question, repeating the word she mispronounced “Which one is your favourite?”. Luca cannot choose just one of the toys and seems to be facing a terrible dilemma by being asked to do so. Aima, moving her arms, interrupts: “Your favourite one, you sleep with it”. Time and space freeze in those wor(l)ds. (Giovanna’s Journal notes, March 2022) Picture 2. Wondering about favourite toys Diffractive reading: thinking with toys, affects, and literacy In the next sections we discuss our vignette. The intensity of our encounter with ‘the toys you sleep with’ required reading this data in three moments. In the first part of our discussion, we connect our own experience in ‘action 1’ with the limitations of taking for granted more-than-humans as passive in relation to human existence, and solely tools for literacy development. Following this rationale, in the second section, we read our data through theories of affect to draw an alternative narrative regarding the role of the more-than-human in education. This conversation embraces the question ‘how does affect work between children and objects such as toys?’. Finally, in the last section we consider how affect theories may allow us to think about literacy differently in our event by posing the question: ‘how do affects connecting us to ‘the toy you sleep with’ reconfigure what we understand by literacy?’ Objects ruled by adults in the literacy classroom Picture 3. Ruled or ruling pen? sleep with’. Rather, as Massumi (2002: 26-27) discussed, ‘intensity’ is missed if and when we prioritize ‘structure’. In practical terms, this means literacy can be about the unplanned affect ‘scratching’ in our classes (Dernikos et al., 2020), for example, in the moments in which words play different roles in different contexts (Boldt and Leander, 2020), or when children and more-than-humans do not reply verbally or accurately to an adult’s impressions (Hackett, 2022a), and even when unexpected more-than-human companions join the class (Lenters, 2019). For us, this implies the need to be open to being surprised by the unstructured wor(l)d that affectively connects, in our case, children and toys, the wor(l)ds that lead children (such as Luca, Aima, Sara, Alba and Lídia) to relate, un/make meaning and affect dismantling the ‘Western bourgeois project’ (Kromidas, 2019: 65). Considering our context, in which students largely come from one of the most disadvantaged neighbourhoods of Seville, we see affective connections with toys as an opportunity to trouble both deficit discourses that may accompany their literacy practices (MacRae, 2020) and ‘hero narratives’ that may overestimate the power of adults (Hackett, 2021: 162). Therefore, we draw on different authors who have claimed that thinking with affect requires thinking about politics (Boldt and Leander, 2020; Truman et al., 2020; Thiel and Dernikos, 2020). For Truman et al. (2020: 233) ‘affects are not neutral and not convivial; affects are bound up in power’. Drawing on these authors, Boldt and Leander (2020) claim that whether literacy is allowed, or not, to exist can differ when the target is a ‘raced and classed and dis/abled reader’ (Boldt and Leander, 2020: 526). Hence, when expanding our understandings of literacy, objects working with children may point to more ethical ways to think about race and class (Thiel and Jones, 2017) and, consequently, address in/equity (Thiel, 2015). An example is questioning how easy it is to dismiss ways of making meaning and affectively relating between the toys and Aima—a child coming from a Roma family—when the adult’s focus is solely centred on the child’s ability to respond, pronounce, describe, etc., or in objects’ ability to scaffold all of those. Hence, from ‘the favourite toys’ to ‘the toys you sleep with’ there is not only an affective shift of wor(l)ds, but also a political shift. From dominant questions, well-pronounced answers, dominant versions of being a child, and adult-led literacy practices, we are challenged by the more-than-human, emergent, and shared worlds of literacy. Even so, we agree with Truman (2019) that it is necessary to keep questioning the whole structure of literacy, not merely claiming new narratives. We see ‘the toys you sleep with’ not only as another ‘cute’ literacy (Hackett, 2021), but also an indication of (in)humanist curricula that silence some bodies and ways of existing more than others (see Kromidas, 2019). Finally, thinking with ‘sleeping-toys’ has demanded reworking how much we do not know as individuals/adults and how much we are willing to be open to know and not control in assemblages of children-toys-objects-boxes-affects-secrets (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). Like the act of sleeping, there is much that we should not predict or ‘own’ in children’s literacy. While sleeping, children, adults, toys, blankets, and other more-than-humans lose their boundaries even before dreams start. While sleeping, we cannot decide how our bodies will move, think or do. Sleeping starts before we think and ends before we notice. Sometimes we remember the dream, sometimes we just feel it happened. Consequently, the alternative, for some researchers, is to allow oneself to feel literacy ‘through the event’ (Ehret, 2018) and not through preconceptions of how literacies ought to be. With this in mind, the phrase ‘the toys you sleep with’, an indicator of affective wor(l)ds, matters because it allows us to consider how literacy may also (so not only): • escape the world of words. • perform through affective, ungraspable, and unplanned wor(l)ds. • flourish, change, and fade away according to affective intensities among children and toys. Conclusion This article has taken Hackett’s (2021) provocation to expand narrows understandings of early childhood literacy, thereby pondering ‘how might we notice, describe, value, and encourage what happens between children and things?’ (Hackett, 2021: 109). Our work was built on our experiences in an ‘action’ instigated in the school our research project is working with. We wanted to delve into the moments where children explored Luca’s treasure box filled with cherished items brought from home. We started by positioning the claim of different authors that humanist ways of framing literacy are exclusionary and unfair (see, for example, Truman et al., 2020; Dernikos, 2020; Thiel and Jones, 2017). We reviewed how the thirst for linear or representational ways of making meaning tells just one narrative about literacy (Leander and Boldt, 2013). This narrative risks an understanding of literacy practices as solely those which make sense or produce settled meanings (Hackett et al., 2021), have an intention (MacRae, 2020), or are seen through anthropocentric accounts (Hackett and Somerville, 2017). Following Murris’s (2016) criticism of developmental logics, we also pointed out how such a rationale perpetuates a perspective of children as lacking and, most importantly, how this narrow narrative maintains dominant images of being human (adult, white, middleclass, able-bodied) (Kromidas, 2019; Snaza, 2013). Captivated by the ways in which children and toys in our research connected through more-than-words and outside of our predictions or fears led us to discuss ‘otherwise literacies’ (Kuby and Gustshall Rucker, 2020). Hence, in our first diffractive reading we underlined the limitations of placing toys or other objects as solely ruled by adults’ proposition for children and their literacy practices. We argued that such an approach is a limiting way to understand literacy. In every encounter, there was always something else happening between the children and Luca’s treasure box that could not fit a narrow rationale. This prompted us to look at the connections between children and toys through the concept of affect (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987; Massumi, 2015). Affects allowed us to map what ‘dis/connects, excites, startles, interrupts, diverts and reorients’ (Dernikos et al., 2020: 4) in child-toy assemblages. Affects required us to be driven by intensities, and not only by im/possible meanings between children and toys (Hackett, 2021), and not to take them as separate bodies (MacRae, 2012). This points out the specificity of each child, each toy and each event as unique and full of potentialities (Boldt and Leander, 2020). Through thinking with affects we noticed how there were flexible rules and secrets-yet-to-be connecting children and toys, opening a world of possibilities for these encounters, which will not always be clear to adults. We do not need to seek responses but to feel the potential of the event itself (Ehret, 2018). These dynamics expanded our ideas upon a toy’s role and use in literacy classrooms, prompted by the words ‘the toys you sleep with’, which deviate from adults’ narrow and representational questions and answers about the items in the treasure boxes. ‘The toys you sleep with’ was a reminder that children are more than what they say and more than what we ask. Following affects is, therefore, a path to literacies that is more just and more attuned to the unexplainable dynamics that occur with/in a classroom, such as the intimacy and absence or need for words in doing/becoming (otherwise) with toys and affects. Acknowledgements We express our gratitude to the CEIP Almotamid in Seville (Spain) and its collaboration as research assistants under the framework of the educational cooperation agreement between the Regional Ministry of Education and Sport and the University of Seville for the development of interventions in the field of innovation and research in non-university public schools of the Regional Ministry of Education. We thank the head teacher, children and toys for always opening the doors/boxes of their classroom to/with us and to Dr Hilary McQueen for her careful review of the text. Finaly, we thank Abigail Hackett and Cathy Burnett for the inspiring conversations about this piece. Declaration of conflicting interests The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. Funding The authors disclosed receipt of financial support for Agencia Estatal de Investigación (AEI) within the framework of the Grant PID2019-104557GB-I00 funded by MCIN/AEI/ 10.13039/501100011033 and Grant PRE2020-094747. Orcid iDs Giovanna Caetano-Silva https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8819-473X Fernando Guzmán-Simón https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7189-1849 Eduardo García-Jiménez https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5885-8267 References Barad K (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press. Barad K (2014) Diffracting diffraction: Cutting together-apart. Parallax 20(3): 168– 187. Barad K and Gandorfer D (2021) Political desirings: Yearnings for mattering (,) differently. Theory & Event 24(1): 14–66. Bennett J (2010) Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press. Boldt G, Lewis C and Leander KM (2015) Moving, feeling, desiring, teaching. Research in the Teaching of English, 49(4): 430–441. 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