Going Beyond the Theory/Practice Divide in Early Childhood Education focuses on the use of pedagogical documentation as a tool for learning and transformation. Based on innovative research, the ...author presents new approaches to learning in early childhood education, shifting attention to the force and impact which material objects and artefacts can have in learning. Drawing upon the theories of feminist Karen Barad and philosophers Gille Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Hillevi Lenz Taguchi discusses examples of how pens, paper, clay and construction materials can be understood as active and performative agents, challenging binary divides such as theory/practice, discourse/matter and mind/body in teaching and learning. Numerous examples from practice are explored to introduce an intra-active pedagogy. 'Methodological' strategies for learning with children in preschools, and in teacher education, are brought to the fore. For example:
the neighbourhood around the preschool and children's homes is explored, using drawing and construction-work on the floor;
mathematics is investigated in teacher education, using the body, dance and music to investigate mathematical relationships and problems;
taken-for-granted forms of academic writing are challenged by different forms of praxis- and experience-based writings that transgress the theory/practice divide;
children, students and teacher educators use pedagogical documentation to understand their own learning, and to critique dominant habits of thinking and doing.
Challenging the dominant understanding of ‘inclusion’ in educational contexts, and making ‘difference’ actively visible and positive, this book is rooted in the experiences, practices and words of teachers, teacher educators and student teachers. It will appeal to all those involved in early childhood education and also to those interested in challenging educational thinking and practices.
Hillevi Lenz Taguchi is an Associate Professor at the Department of Education, Stockholm University, Sweden.
Introduction 1. Going beyond the theory/practice and discourse/matter divides 2. Learning and becoming in an onto-epistemology 3. The tool of pedagogical documentation 4. An intra-active pedagogy and its dual movements 5. Transgressing binary practices in Early Childhood Teacher Education 6. The hybrid-writing-process – going beyond the theory/practice divide in academic writing 7. An ethics of immanence and potentialities for early childhood education References
The purpose of this paper is to challenge the habitual anthropocentric gaze we use when analysing educational data, which takes human beings as the starting point and centre, and gives humans a ...self-evident higher position above other matter in reality. By enacting analysis of photographic images from a preschool playground, using a relational materialist methodological approach, we put to work concepts that open up possibilities to understand the child as emergent in a relational field, where non-human forces are equally at play in constituting children's becomings. In the second part of the paper, we discuss how the decentring of the child may also be applied to researchers as producers of knowledge. Such a decentring, where the data itself is considered to have a constitutive force and be working upon the researcher as much as the researcher works upon the data, has both methodological and ethical consequences for research.
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This article explores the possibilities of considering how ‘matter and meaning are mutually constituted’ in the production of knowledge (Barad, 2007: 152) through presenting a diffractive analysis of ...a piece of interview data with a six-year-old boy in a preschool class. Inspired by Donna Haraway’s (1997) and Karen Barad’s (2007) theorising, I understand diffractive analysis as an embodied engagement with the materiality of research data: a becoming-with the data as researcher. Understanding the body as a space of transit, a series of open-ended systems in interaction with the material-discursive ‘environment’, diffractive analyses constitute transcorporeal engagements with data. Stacy Alaimo’s (2010) theorisation of the transcorporeal is put to work diffractively with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s (1987) thinking on the process of becoming minor or minoritarian. This implies a reconceptualisation of the very act of thinking as a transcorporeal process of engagement, going beyond the idea of reflexivity and interpretation as inner mental activities taking place in the mind of the researcher understood as separated from the data. Through my example, I argue that diffractive analysis can make visible new kinds of material-discursive realities that can have transformative and political consequences.
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Qualitative feminist studies are much challenged by the contemporary critique of social constructionist postmodernism, as well as the renewed search for the body and materiality. The result is (at ...least) two diverging research accounts: a renewed feminist materialism, relying on some foundational ontologies and what has been called a new materialist feminist account that constitutes radical ontological rewritings. The aim of this paper is to investigate what kind of researcher subjectivities these different accounts produce for qualitative inquiry. This investigation will be unfolded using an example from a collaborative research process involving 10 PhD students. The example is woven into Deleuze and Guattari's discussions on the Image of Thought and the three images of thinking outlined in A Thousand Plateaus. The investigation shows that although the aim of our collaborative process was to resist the assumed Cogito/"I" of philosophy and qualitative inquiry, we still got caught up in taken-for-granted images of thinking and doing analysis. A deterritorializing of habits of thinking and practicing in order for new and other researcher subjectivities to emerge required collaborative efforts that put to work a rhizomatic image of thinking and operated from within an ontology of difference.
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School girls in Sweden are reported to develop psychological (ill)health in relation to their school behaviour and over-achievements. The methods offered as prevention and treatments are aimed at the ...individual girl's self-management of stress, health and psychological state, putting the responsibility on the girls themselves. This feminist agential realist study aims to explore how the material-discursive school environment, that is, the entanglement of architecture, materialities, bodies, discourses and discursive practices - including the discourses on girls' health in research and media texts - are collectively responsible for, co-constitutive of and enacting female students' ill- and well-being. Doing a diffractive analysis, we register how we as researchers are involved and co-productive of this complex apparatus of knowing of school-related ill-/well-being. A diffractive analysis aims to not only analyse how this apparatus is made and what it produces, but also how it can be productive of new possible realities that might produce more livable school environments.
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Inspired by Claire Colebrook and Deleuze and Guattari, I aim to make the concept of posthumanism itself my “method.” The objective of such an inquiry is a growing self-critique of how posthumanism ...has, in part, been adopted in educational research. Concept as method puts the concept to play on, in this case, a feminist plane of thinking, to trace-and-map the problems and components from which the concept emerges; that is, it takes on its meanings and practices on this particular plane. Hereby, a reconfigured “face” of the concept of posthumanism takes the shape of the ultrasoundfetusimage.
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This article introduces this special issue of Qualitative Inquiry focused on using concepts as methods in educational and social science inquiry to account for an ontological arrangement in which ...humans are not seen as the only beginning of inquiry and in which transcendental and/or radical empiricism is in play. With the articles of this issue, we would like to offer a partly new or reconceptualized way of doing educational inquiry: a way where concepts—acts of thought—are practices that reorient thinking, undo the theory/practice binary, and open inquiry to new possibilities.
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8.
The Concept as Method Lenz Taguchi, Hillevi
Cultural studies, critical methodologies,
04/2016, Volume:
16, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
For this article, I ask how it might be possible to study the encounter between the practices that involve the concept of the Neuro(n) and educational practices of teaching and learning. The article ...aims to experiment by thinking “the concept as method.” This entails the doubled and entangled movement of tracing-and-mapping the concept of—in this case—the Neuro(n). I suggest that the contemporary obsession with the Neuro(n) in the field of education emerges from the desire to know more about the learning subject, knowledge, and the problem of how something new comes into the world.
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This paper takes its starting point in a shared problem of concern, formulated in terms of what might be produced - or not - as effects of encounters between neuroscientific research and preschool ...practices. The aim is to show what emerged in collaborative encounters, in what is theorized and practised as Deleuzo-Guattarian-inspired cartography mapping exercises. During regularly scheduled staff 'reflection meetings', an invited doctoral student enacted, participated, and documented these encounters with preschool staff at three preschools in the same area outside Stockholm, Sweden. Two major lines of articulation, converging around a core problem, were collaboratively constructed and put on this 'map'. These were then actively put to play to be disrupted and deterritorialized, making ways for new diverging lines and potential reconfigured forms of literacy practices.
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This article puts to work a Deleuzio-Guattarian methodology of cartography using data from a pilot study of young schoolgirls’ “school-related” ill-health and well-being. Doing a cartography means ...setting up a “map” of various kinds of data produced by a multiplicity of desiring agents in various power-producing fields such as medicine, psychology, popular science, media, as well as narrative data from young girls and the two researchers themselves. Together, these data make up a wider machinic assemblage of Public Health in Sweden. As researchers, we understand ourselves as co-productive of this machinic assemblage that, in turn, is productive of a multiplicity of different Bodies without Organs (BwOs) that young schoolgirls fabricate for themselves. The analysis will show the specific types of BwOs that are fabricated, how they are fabricated, the modes of desire that come to pass on them, and thus what kinds of subjectivities of schoolgirls might be produced.
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