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pedagogical commitments place-responsive pedagogy more-than human materials

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Clay and Its Inherited Histories: Working With and Beyond Protocols

with support from ECPN leadership team – Meagan Montpetit & Kathleen Kummen

In many early childhood spaces, materials are taken up as tools to support children’s development or as resources to be consumed in service of predetermined learning outcomes. Such views risk narrowing our encounters with materials and overlooking their potential to act, provoke and participate in shaping pedagogical relations.[1] This blog post invites a different approach, one that attends to the inheritances that shape how materials are taken up and reimagines curriculum making as pedagogical events grounded in relation rather than as a series of activities for children and educators to consume. As a pedagogist committed to thinking with the ethical and pedagogical implications of our inheritances and current conditions, I engage in ongoing inquiries with educators that make space for other narratives rooted in relationality, situated histories and the complexities of living well together.

The curricular choices we make are never neutral; they are shaped by inherited histories and present conditions, and they shape what becomes possible in early childhood spaces. In my work with educators, we engage in sustained, collective inquiry to notice how our practices are situated, and to imagine otherwise. Together, we attend to how pedagogy can emerge from relations with place, histories and more-than-human others. In doing so, we compose stories that resist easy resolution and remain open to the complexities of living well together.

Inheritances with clay

By September 2024, I had been working as a pedagogist with North Shore Neighbourhood House for nearly three years. With support and encouragement from management, educators and I collectively decided to begin weekly encounters with clay in one of the 3–5-year-old classrooms. This choice was made with care and deliberation, given clay’s history within the organization. Long before I arrived, clay had been removed from classroom spaces, its presence entangled with risk and concerns about damage. In the past, its use had led to blocked and damaged pipes, resulting in costly repairs. Beginning again with clay was not about giving children access to more materials or enhancing learning through exposure to variety. Rather, it was a pedagogical decision to revisit a material with a difficult past and to do so in ways that invited educators and children into new kinds of relations grounded in care, attention and the shared work of rethinking what clay might come to mean in this place and time.

The steps we took to bring clay back were shaped by a commitment to think with its history. These steps functioned as protocols. Not simply about preventing damage or enacting procedures as a fixed routine, they became invitations to reflect on how we engage with materials and what it means to engage with them in ways that are intentional, situated and relational. The protocols asked educators, children and me to consider our responsibilities to clay, including how it is used, cared for and cleaned up. In this way, the protocols were pedagogical tools—ones that supported ways of being with materials that are grounded in care, attentiveness and shared responsibility.

Encounters

Drawing on Encounters with Materials in Early Childhood Education by Pacini-Ketchabaw, Kind and Kocher[2], I want to consider why thinking differently about materials matters in early childhood spaces. In this blog, I hope to create conditions for thinking with clay, not as an activity to pass time, but as something we, as educators and children, can encounter with care and attentiveness.

To encounter a material is not to direct it toward a specific outcome. Rather, it is to be moved by it, to be affected, and to remain open to the questions it raises. This matters because it shifts our attention from using materials to meet predetermined learning goals toward noticing how materials participate in pedagogical processes. Encounters make space for uncertainty, curiosity, and transformation. Working with clay is not simply busy work. It invites us to slow down and respond to how the material shifts in relation to its surroundings, and to shift alongside it. For instance, cold weather makes clay stiff and less responsive to touch. We cannot mold it as we might in warmer conditions, and this resistance invites us to think carefully about how clay interacts with its environment and those who encounter it.

Clay asks something of us. Without attention and care, it becomes difficult to work with, even disruptive. Its presence in the classroom does not begin at the moment it is placed on a table. Clay comes with a history. It is gathered from the earth and often contains stones, plant matter, sand. It must be sifted, kneaded and mixed with water before it can be worked. Though it no longer resembles its place of origin, clay remains situated and carries traces of its past. It asks us to attend to its histories and to the processes that make its presence in early childhood spaces possible.[3] Important questions arise: When does clay welcome engagement? When does it resist, pushing back against our intentions? What does it mean to care for clay, and how might that care shift our relationship with it?

My pedagogical intention is to think with materials as a way of constructing ideas in relation with children, while resisting the idea that experimentation must be unbounded or directionless. Thinking with clay, within the context of the protocols outlined below, invites us to collaborate with children as co-constructors of meaning. It asks us to slow down, to notice, and to stay with what emerges rather than rushing toward a finished product. This orientation resists prescriptive, outcome-driven practices that prioritize efficiency over engagement. The protocols, in this sense, are not constraints but conditions that support responsive encounters. They help us remain attuned to shared pedagogical questions: What happens when we think with clay? Why does it matter to return to clay? What intentions guide this work? These questions also shape how I think about my own role. What does it mean to work with clay as a pedagogist? And what are my responsibilities in holding space for this kind of inquiry?

Encounters with protocols

Before our encounters with clay began, a set of protocols was established in collaboration with the management team. These protocols were put in place as a condition for reintroducing clay into the classroom. While created in response to practical concerns, they later became a site of pedagogical inquiry. Rather than accepting them as fixed rules, we asked how protocols might be taken up as part of our thinking with materials.

Protocols for working with clay:

• Clay must remain outside.
• Clay cannot be disposed of in the sink.
• Clay may only be used when the pedagogist is present.

At first, these protocols appeared as clear boundaries—guidelines to prevent past issues from recurring. But as we engaged with clay, I found myself returning to them, not only as logistical constraints, but as provocations. What does a protocol need in order to matter? What allows it to hold open the possibility of something more than compliance? Can a protocol invite care, responsiveness, attentiveness?

Like clay, protocols require maintenance and reflection, or they risk becoming empty procedures. With intention, they can support pedagogical engagements that are grounded in responsibility and relations. Clay itself teaches us this. It changes in response to temperature, to touch, to time. It resists imposition and asks for a kind of engagement that is both situated and responsive. Together with educators, we revisited the original protocols, not to dismiss them but to rework them in ways that reflected our pedagogical intentions.

Conditions for working with clay (revised with educators):

• Engage in conversations with children about why clay cannot go down the drain and how it affects the classroom environment.
• Work in small groups to foster intentional engagement with clay.
• Slow down and observe what emerges as children encounter clay.
• Be mindful of the language used when talking about clay (e.g., say “Your hands are covered in clay” instead of “Your hands are dirty”).

These revised conditions helped us return to the protocols, not only as requirements but as provocations that could support a more intentional way of working with clay. They reminded us that how we think about materials is always present in the decisions we make, including the protocols we create. Protocols, in this sense, are not only practical responses. They also reflect and influence our pedagogical orientations.

How we think about materials affects how we engage with them.[4] For example, when clay is understood as a structural material, protocols for engaging with it may focus on containment and control: Tools are laid out, objects are produced, mess is managed. But when clay is taken up as an encounter, everything shifts. The protocols reflect a different set of intentions. The language we use, how we organize the space, and the expectations we carry all begin to support a more open and relational way of engaging.

This matters because materials are not neutral. They carry histories, possibilities and limitations. They alter relationships and influence how meaning is made. When approached pedagogically, protocols can help us stay attuned to these dynamics. Rather than closing down possibilities, they can create the conditions for careful, responsive engagement. In this way, the classroom begins to feel less like a place where materials are used and more like a space of encounter, where educators, children and materials think and create together.

Encounters with clay

Clay is often described as a versatile and easily molded material. Yet in practice, it asks something more of us. It invites us to slow down, pay attention and respond to how it shifts in relation to its surroundings. How we engage with clay matters. It matters how we work with it, how we think alongside it and how we care for it. Working with clay is not only about forming objects or expressing ideas. It is about building a relationship—learning to notice its qualities, respond to its resistances and remain open to what it might make possible in a particular time and place.

When we first received the clay from North Shore Neighbourhood House, it arrived dry, block-shaped and marked by both prior use and long neglect. Its condition raised immediate questions. Rather than seeing this as a problem, I saw it as an opportunity to wonder with educators and children: Can we touch this clay? Is something wrong with it? Can we bring it back to life?

Even before opening the container, the educators and I talked together and with the children about what it means to work with clay. We talked about why we were taking it outside, and why it could not be washed down the sink. These conversations were not only about safety. They were also part of how we introduced clay as a material that requires care and attention.

Sviatozar: “Is it poison?”

Maria: “It’s not poison…”

Sviatozar: “No, when you eat it, is it?”

Riley: “No, but we can’t eat it.”

Theia: “It’s really hard, and it will get stuck. And it’ll make the sink stop.”

These early moments revealed the pedagogical possibilities of beginning with questions. Rather than positioning clay as a material to use, we encountered it as something uncertain—something that invites conversation, prompts curiosity and helps us think together about what it means to work with materials in responsive ways.

As our conversations about clay continue, the children engage with questions beyond safety. They begin to explore the relationships among materials, bodies and the classroom environment. Their thinking extends to the unseen pathways clay might travel—down the sink, through the pipes and into places we cannot follow.

In working with clay, the question is not only “What is clay?” but also “What becomes possible as we engage with clay?” A process unfolds where the material invites both intentionality and improvisation. The questions we ask—such as “What can we do to get to know clay?” and “What is emerging as we work with it?”— deepen our relationship with the material. These questions open up a practice that is situated and responsive, moving us away from viewing clay as a consumable resource tied to developmental outcomes.

As we work with the hardened clay, children speculate about what might happen when clay and water come together. Their curiosity is not only about transformation, but about relation—what becomes possible when we attend to clay with care, patience and wonder.

Chase: “It makes it soft, and it also makes your hand clay colour.”

Oliver: “It gets slippery and stick to my hands.”

Kelly: “Sticky like slime. You put water to clay, and you will have sticky clay.”

Chase: “It wasn’t sticky last time.”

James W: “It changed from grey to yellow!”

Chase: “This big piece is going to take a while.”

James W: “It’s easier to do things now.”

Chase: “They’re easy to break, too. I can break it!”

As we experiment with adding water, we notice how clay transforms. Its shape shifts, its texture softens and its properties change. Rather than treating clay as a passive material used to produce something, we recognize its agentic force. Clay resists, responds and invites us to think and relate differently.

These moments remind us that protocols are not separate from our work with materials. When approached pedagogically, protocols can support a shift away from developmental and instrumental logics. They help us stay with the complexities of working with materials like clay by creating conditions that foreground care, responsibility and relation. Instead of viewing clay as an activity to be used up, the protocols invite us to consider how we engage with it, how we clean and return it, and how we speak about it with children.

In this way, working with clay becomes more than a classroom task. It becomes a practice of shared inquiry—one that resists efficiency and consumption and instead supports intentional, ethical and situated engagement. Through this work, our orientations shift, and space opens for new possibilities to take form.

Ending Provocation

Questions invite us to rethink our approach, drawing us toward deeper, ongoing relationships with materials, with one another and with the conditions that influence our work. Protocols, when held pedagogically, can support this rethinking. They are not only guidelines to follow but invitations to engage with care, intention and reciprocity.

Clay is not a one-time activity or a task to complete. It is a material that asks something of us, that responds to how we show up and participates in our pedagogical relations.

How might we collaborate in the process of engaging with clay in ways that support mutual care and attentiveness? What role might protocols play in creating conditions for this shared work? And how might our encounters with clay reshape our pedagogical commitments?

[1] Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, Sylvia Kind, and Laurie L. Kocher, Encounters with Materials in Early Childhood Education (London: Routledge, 2024).

[2] Ibid.

[3] Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw and Kelly Boucher, “Claying: Attending to Earth’s Caring Relations,” in Feminist Research for 21^st-Century Childhoods: Common Worlds Methods, edited by B. Denise Hodgins (London: Bloomsbury), 25–34.

[4] Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., Encounters with Materials.