Opening up researcher-teacher dialogue about Performativity, Posthuman theory and Creativity in the Early Years of Primary School.

Making greetings cards for family members with young children is common practice in primary schools, marking events and supporting school-caregiver relationships. Because schools operate in intensifying performative cultures, they can find more open-ended creative activities problematic to justify when learning demonstrably delineated as literacy is afforded a closer scrutiny (Albin-Clark, 2021). From posthuman theoretical lenses, attention shifts to frames of interdependency between humans, matter and materials and the close intra-activity between materials and discourse (Barad, 2007; Lenz Taguchi, 2010). Our paper shares our research encounters with foregrounding creativity and child agency in cardmaking to celebrate Mothering Sunday with three and four-year-old children in a primary school. From a research perspective, we share the tensions in taking the non-human into account for data generation in our focus on the material and the discursive. From a practice perspective, we ponder the close inter-relationships in-between performativity, child-material intra-actions, posthuman theory and the precarious status of creativity in the Early Years of Primary School (Albin-Clark, 2019).