Does space have agency?

I am reading the book The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram.  One of his important premises is that there is a fundamental reciprocity between the human world and the non-human and inanimate world. We affect the non-human world and the non-humane and inanimate world affects us.  I thought I could play around with this idea to see if I could understand this reciprocity as it relates to the sensory table in an early childhood classroom,

Children are always situated in a space.  According to Abram, then, the space plays an important part as the children create their own story.    

For this post, the space in which the children are situated is a Horizontal channel apparatus.  It is a cardboard box set on top of the sensory table.  It has channels and a ramp connect to a tub next to the table.

Abram would not only say that the space is important, but so is the time.  So to include the idea a time, I chose a specific episode. 

The episode is a 14 second video of six children playing around the horizontal channel apparatus.

I will break down each child's actions in the episode to see what role space plays in their exploration of the medium and the materials.   I will start with the child in yellow on the right and work my way around to the child in blue who has lined up his vehicles.

The child in yellow fills his pickup truck that he placed in the second channel.  In a way, that channel holds the truck in on the sides.  And since it is in the channel, it plays a part in focusing where he drops the sand.

 

The next child with the spoon, scoops the sand in the same channel as the first child.  However, for him to scoop the sand, he must run the spoon horizontally down the channel.  In essence the walls of that channel direct his actions.

 

The child with the small red dump truck works in the same space as the child with the spoon and the child with the pickup truck.   She, too, is directed in her actions to scoop sand in the truck by the walls of the channel she is working in.

The child in blue with the yellow dump truck is not working in one of the channels.  Instead, he tosses his truck into the blue tub next to the table.  Why?  Maybe the drop off that is the ramp suggests to him that the truck should fall.  Of course, once the truck falls into the tub, he has to drive it out with great effort out of the tub, over the ramp and back onto the channels' platform

The child in grey below is opposite the child with the yellow dump truck.  He is not playing in the channels, either.  Rather, he is retrieving other construction vehicles that have fallen into the tub.  Why does he retrieve them?  At this point I can only venture a guess.  Maybe he reads the space such that the cars and trucks do their work on the channel apparatus and not in the tub.

The last child has a small bulldozer.  At first he drives the bulldozer in two different channels.  Again the walls direct his actions.  However, when he drives out of the channels, he uses his front plow to push sand off the platform, down the ramp and into the tub.  Since there are no walls to direct his actions and the open platform is less restrictive, he pushes the sand faster and with more force.

Below is the what the 14 second episode looks like all put together

Characters in a story from Thomas Bedard on Vimeo.

What is so interesting is that each child reads the space differently.  That allows each child to create their own story.  It is as if the children are forming a direct and intimate relation to the space.  And maybe that is possible because the space is not passive.  Maybe space has agency and speaks to each child differently?