Exploring materialities in children’s games: Revisiting the Javanese philosophy of laku in seeking knowledge

Abstract

The provision of early childhood education (ECE) in Indonesia, often focuses on the children’s learning experience and overlooks the complexity of the learning process in children's activities. Children’s games, for instance, are seen as a learning tool to achieve particular learning objectives and developmental tasks. Therefore, without negating children’s roles in the games, this article proposes a new way of understanding learning in the context of children’s games. A new materialist concept of intra-active pedagogy is applied to unpack the complexity of learning processes. The discussion in this article is looking at jamuran, a Javanese game involving embodied movements. This will include an analysis of a case study of a multi-age classroom with children aged six to 7 years old. By reading narratives of the game diffractively, new insights emerge in understanding learning as joining forces and continuous movements of game elements. Interestingly, these insights align with the Javanese philosophy of laku in seeking knowledge. The implication of this finding at the micro-political level is that more attention should be paid to the active role of materialities in a learning event. At the macro level of ECE policy in Indonesia, it encourages revisiting traditional philosophies from a new perspective like new materialism. This would also be expected to create a space for negotiating global-local intertwining views in looking at the learning process in ECE settings.