摘要：This paper explores a common tension for parentsteachers working with young children – the tantrum. Building on practitioner-inquiry methodologies, I engaged in a living inquiry into my practices as a parent, with the initial goal of reducing or preferably eliminating my son’s angry outbursts. Frustrated with approaches informed by theories often applied within early learning contexts to address tantrums, including behavioural, attachmentself-regulation, I turned to new materiality theories, which provide a novel approach in understanding the socio-material constitution of subjectivities, emotions,relationships. Within this assemblage, tantrums were reconfigured as a doing of emotions, occurring in the spaces in/between bodies, rather than an individual act of defiance. Through this inquiry, I shifted from a position of trying to intervene from the outside to eliminate, control or manage my son’s tantrums to a place of ‘intra-acting from within’journeying with. My parental inquiry became a site to continuously workrework everyday lifeparticipate in the creative practice of world making. Although the tantrums, which we came to know as Mad I’m mad, continued, the connection amongbetween my sonI shifted, often in positiveenduring ways. I came to understand parental inquiry as a practice of ‘wayfaring,’ where the focus is on the journey rather than the destination. These stories may ‘trace a path’ for other parentseducators as they participate within their own affectiveembodied entanglements, creating new possibilities for teachinglearning relationships.
