Contemporary early childhood classrooms are spaces of radical heterogeneity, vastly exceeding traditional pedagogical frameworks. These perspectives, anchored in often essentialist psychological, developmental, and cultural assumptions, tend to homogenize under the figure of a "universal childhood"—a construction that, as noted by Malone et al.(2020), frequently embodies a cultural past that is "white, middle class, male, heterosexual," leaving no room for diversities of race, class, and gender. In response, a critical re-examination of the philosophical, discursive, and, crucially, material aspects that weave together complex childhood life is urgently needed. The challenge is not merely to include diversity, but to design methodologies capable of responding to the multiple ways in which children actually learn, grow, and play in their everyday contexts.

This study is situated within a post-qualitative paradigm and was conducted between 2023 and 2025 in a classroom (5-year-olds) at a public school in Barcelona with significant cultural diversity. Its central objective was to investigate: how can the artistic practice of Object Theatre mobilize the life of the early childhood classroom and perform (or materialize) new ways of inhabiting and relating within and to it?

In this study, Object Theatre is understood beyond its traditional or merely instrumental definition. Following playwrights and researchers such as Manuela Infante (2019) and Shaday Larios (2016), I conceive of it as a philosophical and relational practice. Its power lies not in teaching about objects or using them as mere metaphors, but in activating them as catalysts for encounter. As Larios (2016) notes, an object's capacity for agency is also its potency—that is, its ability to provoke socio-cultural action, transforming the classroom, in this case, into an observatory of socio-material culture.

Over the course of eight sessions, children, educators, objects, classroom materials, and the space itself entered into dialogue through creation. This design represented an epistemological shift: it did not start from predefined learning objectives; instead, it sought to let the encounter with the material generate its own questions and directions, assuming the classroom as a socio-material assemblage where agency is distributed among human and non-human actors (Bennett, 2010).

The research shows that Object Theatre acts as a performative force, disrupting the conventional sense of the classroom. By transforming space, time, and materiality into a shared field of experimentation, the lived co-creation of the educational environment becomes possible. This process enables:

Making experiential plurality visible and valued: Unique and dominant narratives blur, giving way to a diversity of expressions, gestures, and uses of objects that make the multiple realities of childhood tangible.

Deepening relational and emergent learning: The focus shifts from predefined individual learning towards the participation of bodies, objects, and space. Affective learning, tacit communication, and collective, situated ways of inhabiting the classroom become evident.

Redistributing agency: It is demonstrated how the everyday materiality of the classroom can become a companion with initiative, reconfiguring hierarchies, attentions, and dynamics within the classroom.

In summary, this study proposes a reconceptualization of the classroom as a space for performative encounter. Its main contribution is to offer a concrete methodological framework for operationalizing in practice complex theoretical currents such as new materialisms in education and critical pedagogy. Thus, Object Theatre reveals itself as both an epistemological and ethical tool, allowing education not only to speak of diversity but to be, literally, performed by it.

This research was operationally materialized in a study consisting of 8 sessions of Object Theatre conducted in a kindergarten classroom (5-year-olds) with significant cultural diversity. A fixed protocol was not applied; instead, a flexible spatiotemporal structure was established -a circle, everyday classroom materials, and personal objects as starting points- that invited encounter. The researcher's role was not to direct toward predefined objectives, but to facilitate, observe, and document agentially through video, photography, field notes, and shared artistic creation. The purpose was to capture how children, objects, and space co-composed new narratives, relationships, and configurations. The analysis consisted of a continuous process of reflective attention to these assemblages, where gestures, silences, interactions between objects, and collective movements were read as live data that interrogated our established understandings of the classroom, learning, and agency. This design is situated and justified within a post-qualitative and performative paradigm, adopting a transmodal approach that rejects predetermined methods and understands them as an inseparable part of the phenomenon under study (Hernández & Ravelles, 2019). It was conceived as a nonlinear, flexible path open to the becoming of the process (Østern et al., 2023), where the researcher becomes agentially entangled with the field. This positioning transforms methods into "non-methods" (Jackson, 2017), blurring the boundaries between the collection, creation, and analysis of material. Data thus resist stabilization, becoming live matter (Koro-Ljungberg et al., 2018), which allows for experimental and less prescriptive analysis (St. Pierre, 2018). Critically, this approach seeks to decenter verbal language as the privileged mode of inquiry and representation. It assumes that data do not speak my language (Østern et al., 2023) and that, especially with children, a great deal of creativity and the creation of possible worlds occurs outside dominant linguistic frameworks (Hackett, 2024). Therefore, the performative potential of artistic methods -in this case, Object Theatre -is unleashed to produce, analyze, and present the research through multiple modes and materialities (gestural, spatial, object-based). This expands the capacity for the production of meaning and affect, allowing the research to "breathe" and inhabit the complexity of the classroom as a socio-material assemblage.

This study concludes that Object Theatre, understood as a philosophical-relational practice (Infante, 2019; Larios, 2016), transcends its status as an artistic resource to constitute itself as a performative pedagogical methodology. Its application in the classroom acts as a force that mobilizes co-creation, responding to the demands of the radical heterogeneity of the contemporary educational context, thereby actively overflowing essentialist perspectives on childhood (Malone et al., 2020). The research demonstrated that this practice makes possible a performative socio-material space, an assemblage where agency is distributed among humans and non-humans (Bennett, 2010). This joint becoming enables: Making visible and valuing children's experiential plurality, rendering tangible those experiences that escape dominant narratives. Deepening relational and emergent learning, shifting the focus from predefined individual outcomes towards what emerges between bodies, objects, and space. Redistributing classroom dynamics, allowing everyday materiality to become a pedagogical companion with initiative. Thus, Object Theatre is confirmed as an "observatory of material culture" (Larios, 2016) and, more crucially, as a concrete methodological vehicle for materializing -that is, for making corporeal and operative- the proposals of critical pedagogies and new materialisms in education. The main implication of this work is a radical invitation to reconsider the classroom as an entity in constant co-creation. This post-qualitative perspective provides vital keys for rethinking central pedagogical notions: curriculum as emergent experience, assessment as relational observation, and coexistence as continuous material negotiation. Ultimately, this study proposes Object Theatre not as a tool to manage or include diversity, but as a catalyst for diversity to constitute itself as the vital force from which the educational common is woven, day by day. This approach offers a practicable path for pedagogical practices to be truly in ontological tune with the multiple, material, and ever-becoming lives that inhabit classrooms.

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