Session Information
13 SES 04, Posthuman and Agonistic Education
Paper Session
Contribution
The ideas and knowledge about children and children’s learning that takes hold in the official ECEC (Early Childhood Education and Care) discourse varies over time in relation to societal demands, education policy and trends within the research field. Perceptions about the nature of children, their development and learning, are fundamental to the motivation and design of preschool practice, i.e. the everyday reality facing a majority of Swedish 1-5 year olds. On that account, it is of utmost importance to put both traditional established and currently arising conceptions and discourses under scrutiny.
In the new Education Act (SFS 2010:800) and a revised curriculum for Swedish preschool (Lpfö 98/11) teachers’ responsibility to evaluate and develop pedagogical practice based on documentation of individual children’s development and learning, is strongly emphasized. To aid teachers in this work the Swedish National Agency of Education published and distributed a support material (Skolverket, 2012) promoting ‘pedagogical documentation’ as documentation- and evaluation tool understood within a posthumanist theoretical framework. Based on a posthumanist argumentation, the traditional (humanist) educational ideal, with its binary cuts between mind/body, intellect/emotion and theory/practice, is explained as falling short of understanding and describing the trans-disciplinary nature and relational complexity of learning as well as the mutual dependency between the child and the world (Lenz Taghuchi, 2012; Skolverket, 2012). Thus, through the support material, a theoretical statement is made by a governmental authority, which can (in at least a Swedish ECEC context) be considered quite unique. Whether and how this theoretical statement has an impact on preschool practice is partially examined in a previous study (Lindgren, 2015). While following a group of teachers working with the tool pedagogical documentation it became clear that the teachers drew on posthumanist ideas and conceptions when understanding and interpreting children’s beings and interactions with different phenomena in the educational practice. This raises further questions regarding the contextual (cultural, political, scientific and practical) conditions enabling a posthumanist understanding of the preschool child. Although the example is set in a Swedish context it is interesting from an international point of view since it reflects a wider posthumanist movement in educational research (e.g. Spanos, 1993; Snaza, Appelbaum, Bayne, Morris, Rotas, Sandlin, Wallin, Carlson & Weaver, 2008; Sørensen, 2009; Fenwick, Edwards & Sawchuk, 2011; Taylor, Pancinini-Ketchabaw & Blaise, 2012; Snaza & Weaver, 2015).
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. London: Duke University Press. Fairclough, N. (1995/2010). Critical discourse analysis: the critical study of language. (2. ed.) Harlow: Longman. Haraway, D. J. (2008). When species meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Castañeda, C. (2002). Figurations: Child, Bodies, Worlds. London: Duke University Press. Lenz Taguchi, H. (2010;2009;). Going beyond the theory/practice divide in early childhood education: Introducing an intra-active pedagogy. New York: Routledge. Skolverket. (2012). Uppföljning, utvärdering och utveckling i förskolan: pedagogisk dokumentation. Stockholm: Skolverket. Snaza, N. & Weaver, J. (2915). Posthumanism and Educational Research. Routledge. Spanos, W.V. (1993). The end of education: toward posthumanism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
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