Blogs
August 26, 2025
Thinking Care-fully with Clay: A Pedagogist’s Notes on Relational Material Engagement
with support from ECPN leadership team – Adrianne Bacelar de Castro & Kathleen Kummen
What happens when we pay attention to materials—not for what they are, but for what they do? This question, offered by atelierista Sylvia Kind in Material Encounters[1] has guided my work as a pedagogist, inviting me to think alongside children and educators about the possibilities that materials offer, possibilities that emerge not from what materials can represent, but from what they provoke.
My intention in working with educators in early childhood centres is to help create conditions for collaborative learning that responds to children’s interests, curiosities and imaginings about what matters in their community context and the wider world. I wonder: If we shift how we see materials, might we also shift how we interact with children, with each other and with the world itself? Might a different kind of engagement become possible—one that unsettles familiar habits and opens new pathways for collective learning?
In this offering, I consider how a shift in perspective on materials might allow us to tell a different story about early childhood education—one that moves beyond developmental and consumerist logics and embraces relational, responsive and co-creative engagements with the world around us. Alongside educators and children, over time, I have witnessed how materials move us as much as we move them, how they invite certain actions, gestures and responses while resisting others.[2] In this blog post, I trace the unfolding dialogue between children, educators and clay, and what becomes possible when we attend closely and care-fully to these relations.
Initial Encounters
In the past few years, I have accompanied children and educators in getting to know clay in early childhood classrooms and outdoor spaces. Through care-fully attending to the qualities of clay, we notice how clay moves when encountering a child’s hands and body that presses and molds it, how clay encounters a hard table or bumpy pavement, what clay does when it encounters canvas, paper, tarp, soft earth or gritty sand, how clay encounters small rocks, pencils, chalk, paint or the body of a plastic dinosaur, or how clay encounters rainwater and snow.
Sometimes, a lump of clay invites curiosity and touch. Other times, it is met with hesitation or avoidance, never touched at all. Clay can feel as cold as ice or as warm as a cozy room. Clay that is found outside in soil is a living composition that might include small rocks, plant fibres, insects, sand and unseen microbial life. It can feel light and dry or heavy and wet, even slimy. Clay can stick onto hands and objects, stay in place, and transform when pressed, molded or dissolved. Clay also offers resistance and challenge, as well as opportunities to experiment and think with new ideas. In the early childhood education spaces I visit, clay has become more than a material resource. It has played an active role in shaping our thinking and engagements.
Meeting Clay on the Land
The excavator has dug into the land beside the early childhood centre to prepare for building and playground expansion. On this cool autumn day, I am outside with a small group of children and educators, returning to this familiar place we often visit to look for mushrooms that may have popped up recently—a curiosity that beckons the children outside to the land. This day, we are here to search for patches of clay newly exposed beneath the grass and soil by the giant machine that has dug into the earth here. Clay from this place has been our companion for over a year, and we are drawn back to gather more from the seemingly abundant supply. The land is still mostly wild, bordered by a creek and dense trees where deer and bears occasionally wander. As we revisit this place, I find myself thinking about how this clay lives in the earth—as part of the soil but also part of the land’s longer histories.
We walk around the area carefully looking for clay that blends seamlessly into the landscape because of its ongoing relations and interactions with sun, wind, rain, new vegetation growth and wandering animals that have helped the land reconstruct itself. The children find some places where clay is visible in the ground, and they seek out the tools and buckets they brought with them to dig some up. The digging is not easy. The clay resists the children’s metal shovels, fingers and found sticks. Twigs break. Small hands struggle to extract the clay. This moment of resistance shifts the rhythm of our gathering. The children begin to experiment with new strategies, adapting to the clay’s dense refusal. We find ourselves rethinking clay—not as an inert material but as an active participant in our inquiry. Clay’s resistance becomes an invitation to consider material agency as a condition of relational learning.
These moments call us back to the blog’s central concern: What does it mean to care with and through materials? What becomes possible when we see clay as a material whose qualities shift in response to changing relationships in the world? What becomes possible when we attend to how we care-fully modify our actions to meet a fluctuating material? Do we become more open to nurturing relationships that allow for the unpredictability of others, human and nonhuman?
To Care with Clay
Clay’s refusal to be easily molded or extracted demands us to respond to it in new ways. We must adopt a different kind of care to answer clay’s resistance to us. In Encounters with Materials in Early Childhood Education, Pacini-Ketchabaw, Kind, and Kocher remind us that care involves grappling with resistance and complexity.[3] Clay is not simply a commodity but a multispecies assemblage—one that “requires thinking from the perspective of maintaining a web of relations … rather than thinking only of its potential benefits to children.”[4] “Clay is living,” they argue, because, as Puig de la Bellacasa argues it holds the potential “to transform relations of care.”[5] To care with clay, then, is to acknowledge its agency, its histories, and its entanglements. Clay is not an inert art supply. It is a living assemblage—one that transforms our gestures and invites us to think about the webs of relation we are already part of.
I pick up a piece of clay dug up from the earth and notice how it is both different from and the same as the “clean” potter’s clay I introduced to the children and educators over a year ago. Similar to potter’s clay, this clay from the earth invites me to explore it with my hands, feel its consistency, imagine what it can be. Dissimilar to potter’s clay is what lives together with this clay—tiny rocks and pieces of plant life, both living and decomposing, are embedded inside of it. This clay contains bits of brown sand and black earth. I think about other elements living with this wild clay that are not easily seen with the naked eye. From a distance, the clay looks like only clay. A closer look reveals a surprising diversity of materials, colours and textures. This wild clay does not come cleaned and packaged. It smells different and emits a blend of unfamiliar earthy odours not easily named. Taking time to notice these details might bring us into the histories and relations held within the clay. What stories of the land does this clay carry? How do our acts of extraction disrupt or connect us to these layered histories? I wonder what it does, disrupts, to take clay out of the earth. I think about how clay is a finite resource connected to everything in the natural world. What might it mean, then, to extract clay with care, to relate to it, and to other materials, as companions rather than commodities?
The children are now working with freshly dug clay, trying to form it into balls. It crumbles at first, too powdery to hold shape, until it’s kneaded, pressed and folded repeatedly. As the children work on the clay, they remove embedded rocks and twigs. One child tries to stick two clay balls together, but the clay has dried and does not stick. A pot of water is fetched from the hose next to the daycare building and brought back to the group outside with the clay. When the clay joins together with the water, it becomes easier to separate the entwined materials, to clean it up and make shapes with it. It is long, hard work but the result is supple clay that the children name “real clay.” This moment reminds us that clay is always in relation. Its possibilities shift depending on what it encounters.
One of the children picks up a stick from the ground and pokes two holes into a clay ball she is holding. She shows us the ball with the two holes and suggests that the holes look like eyes. One educator is holding clay that has formed into what she thinks looks like a hat. She offers to put it atop the clay ball with the holes that look like eyes. The offer is accepted and the two work together with the clay. Once the clay hat is stuck firmly onto the ball, the child pokes a tree branch she finds on the ground into the ball of clay, then picks up another piece of clay. That piece carefully wraps around the branch, hugging it tightly. The child holds the branch in her hand and gleefully presents the clay figure, like a stick puppet, to the group. Meanwhile, the educator has formed another figure with clay and this one is also presented. There is a palpable sense that the clay figures have a life of their own. It is decided these two figures will be married, and they are dressed accordingly with dried leaves found on the ground.
These vignettes are not to be read as mere illustrations of children’s creativity but as moments where materiality opens possibility. Clay doesn’t just reflect ideas—it participates in them. Through tending to the properties of wild clay, shaping and being shaped by it, we find new ways to gather, collaborate and think together. The clay figures did not emerge from a preconceived idea, they were co-created in relationships.
An Invitation to Think Otherwise
My pedagogical commitment is grounded in an ethic of care that strives toward creating a more livable coexistence for all. This commitment notices how human-centered practices often ignore the interdependencies and relations that make up the complex worlds we inhabit. It calls into question the neoliberal conditions and consumerist logics that wreak havoc on both society and the environment. If we are to enact meaningful change, then naming and challenging these problematic conditions matters. And in that process, valuing children’s voices is vital—because children will inherit the complexities of our world and the consequences of the worlds we are making.
As Thom van Dooren reminds us, “the question is how placing care at the centre of our critical work might remake ourselves, our practices and our world.”[6] Clay, in its agency and complexity, offers a way into this remaking. It reminds us that care is not simply a feeling—it is a relational, material practice: an act of attention, response and responsibility. To care with clay is to let it act on us, to let it teach us how to live well with others—human and more-than-human alike.
This is both an ontological and pedagogical claim: that materials such as clay act upon us, make demands of us and shape the conditions of our relational life. What if we understood materials as having agentic force that invites us to think otherwise, feel differently and respond more carefully? To take material agency seriously is to allow materials to coauthor our pedagogical inquiries, to participate in the creation of a culture of gathering and to challenge the terms of our care. Clay, then, is not only a material to think with but a companion in the ongoing work of thinking care-fully.
[1] Sylvia Kind, “Material Encounters,” International Journal of Child, Youth and Family Studies 5, no. 4.2 (2014): 865–877.
[2] Early Childhood Pedagogy Network, “Materials in Early Childhood Education,” 2024, https://ecpn.ca/materials-in-early-childhood-education/
[3] Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, Sylvia Kind, and Laurie L. M. Kocher, Encounters with Materials in Early Childhood Education, 2nd edn (Routledge, 2024).
[4] Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, “Making Time for Soil: Technoscientific Futurity and the Pace of Care,” Social Studies of Science 45, no. 5 (2015): 701, as cited in Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., Encounters with Materials, 60.
[5] Puig de la Bellacasa, “Making Time,” 703, as cited in Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., Encounters with Materials, 60.
[6] Thom van Dooren, Care: Living Lexicon for the Environmental Humanities,” Environmental Humanities 5 (2014): 294, https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3615541.