This book explores and critiques topical debates in educational sciences, philosophy, social work and cognitive neuroscience. It examines constructions of children, parents and the welfare state in relation to neurosciences and its vocabulary of brain architecture, critical periods and toxic stress. The authors provide insight into the historical roots of the relationship between early childhood education policy and practice and sciences. The book argues that the neurophilia in the early childhood education field is not a coincidence, but relates to larger societal changes that value economic arguments over ethical, social and eminently pedagogical concerns. It affects the image of the child, the parent and the very meaning of education in general. Constructions of Neuroscience in Early Childhood Education discusses what neuroscience has to offer, what its limitations are, and how to gain a more nuanced view on its benefits and challenges. The debates in this book will support early childhood researchers, students and practitioners in the field to make their own judgements about new evolutions in the scientific discourse.

‘How to give brain and body to the multiple pack that we already are or are becoming: how, in other words, are we to make sensible (auditory, visually and affectively) the time before “I think” and “We think” that we cannot plan, control or know, but simply experiment with, which is the “time of the city” and nothing else?’ (Rajchman, 2010, p. 39) These powerful words constitute the starting point for this article that argues that, within the context of early childhood literacy in a globalized and ‘multicultural’ world, we need to experiment with new ways of understanding identity and language through amalgamating early childhood pedagogy and didactics with aesthetics. Such an endeavour needs to take place beyond ‘the indignity of speaking for the other’ (Deleuze, 2004, p. 208) and beyond the constructed categories that have been attributed to children in the name of one or another minority group. Through vivid examples and theoretical movements taking place within the research project ‘The Magic of Language’ we propose to shift focus – from the identifying and categorizing of individuals, as well as from the epistemological violence performed in the name of recognition and linguistic representation – to aesthetic experimentation and to the place of experiments. A ‘time of the city’ is also a ‘time of the place’ and in this article we are arguing for the importance of aesthetic experimenting with that place.

This article recollects and further explores some experimental scientific and didactic work trying to make use of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in early childhood didactics at the Stockholm University, Sweden. Within the setting of a problem and practice-based cooperation, researchers and teachers have in different projects explored some of the concepts offered by Deleuze and Guattari and that seem capable of aligning themselves with young children’s strategies for learning as well as offering new and vital scientific and didactic tools.

A thread through the article is, the importance of and conditions needed for, being able to really listen to children and to take their questions seriously. The article begins with an argumentation on the need here for a ‘creative thought’ and a short description of how current attempts to tame learning block this thought and neglect children’s questions. Thereafter the article build on examples of our scientific and didactic work where three concepts are explored; ‘assemblages of desire’ – as a way of accessing children’s collective drive for learning, ‘event’ – as a way of accessing children’s production of knowledge and ‘affect’ – as a way of valuing learning and knowledge in a way that differs from how it is being done within the formalized school-system.

The article is concluded with an argumentation in line with the following quote:

’If only little children managed to make their protests heard in nursery school, or even simply their questions, it would be enough to derail the whole educational system’ (Deleuze, 2004b: 208).

The research project “The Magic of Language” has its origin in a small pilot-study between the years 2007-2009 and has been conducted at the department of Child and Youth Studies, Stockholm University, Sweden (Dahlberg & Olsson, 2009). The project is supported by the Swedish Research Council and takes place in a network structure where researchers, preschool teachers, students, and student teachers have been working in close cooperation since the mid-nineties (Barsotti, Dahlberg, Göthson, & Åsén, 1993; Dahlberg, 2003; Dahlberg & Moss, 2005; Dahlberg, Moss, & Pence, 2007; Lenz-Taguchi, 2000; Olsson, 2009). The project “The Magic of Language” received funding in order to work with preschool children’s relations to, and preschools’ didactic tools concerning, language, reading, and writing, departing from the assumption that these questions are strongly affected by the fact that we today live in a globalized society. Thus, our contemporary globalized society could be described through its continuously transforming features. One important current and ongoing transformation concerns what is described as a changed knowledge production, where knowledge is crossing borders, exchanged, changed, and re - evaluated at great speed (Castell, 1997). At the same time, there is, within what has become called “the standards/accountability movement,” an enormous increase in devices intended to produce stable and permanent knowledge through the taming of learning processes as well as entire practices by planning, supervising, controlling, assessing and evaluating them towards preset goals (Dahlberg, Moss & Pence, 2007; Dahlberg & Moss, 2005; Grieshaber & Hatch, 2003; Lenz-Taguchi, 2009; Masny & Cole, 2009; Olsson, 2009; Taubman, 2009). This article proposes a way of orienting ourselves in the current situation through joining examples of preschool children’s learning to read and write and teachers’ and researchers’ work with pedagogical documentation with the concept “event,” which was introduced by French philosophers Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) and Félix Guattari (1930-1992). Deleuze and Guattari use the concept “event” in order to contest that we can have such a thing as permanent and stable knowledge of the world and ourselves and, simultaneously, they present some important ideas on language through this concept (Zourabichvili, 2003). As we shall see, the concept “event” counter-effectuates what is described as “orthodox thought,” which underlies the attempts to tame learning and practices and to standardize and trivialize method within the accountability/standards movement. The concept “event” theoretically reinforces our pedagogical and scientific work with pedagogical documentation, and, most importantly, it seems to relate to children’s way of using language in the most congenial way. 

This study departs from experiences made in a setting where preschool children, teachers, teacher students, teacher educators and researchers in the Stockholm area in Sweden have been collectively experimenting with subjectivity and learning since the beginning of the 1990’s. However, during later years, questions were raised in the context of cooperative work about the changes that have been achieved so far, possibly becoming new and somewhat rigid ‘mappings’ of young children and learning. What has become the latest challenge to practice and research is finding ways of regaining movement and experimentation in subjectivity and learning. The present study sets out to contribute to these recent efforts by having as its purpose to construct the problem of how to work with movement and experimentation in subjectivity and learning in the field of early childhood education practice and research.

Through weaving together later years efforts in practice, with theoretical resources found in the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, three decisive points are identified in order to work theoretically and practically with movement and experimentation.

The first decisive point states that the focus needs to be on process rather than position, as positioning of any kind implies detracting movement from the picture. The concepts ’micro-politics’ and ‘segmentarity’ are used, presenting movement as flows of belief and desire and as that which precedes positions, constituting the starting point of all change in subjectivity and learning. This is connected to how researchers and teachers try to latch on to children’s desires rather than trying to predict, supervise, control and evaluate them according to preset standards. It is argued that in relation to contemporary society, where governing takes place through appealing to these flows of desire, pedagogical and academic institutions need to engage in their own desiring production in order to avoid being inevitably one step behind.

The second decisive point states that one needs to admit science’s inventiveness and productiveness, rather than being confined to its critical agenda, as the latter implies that production processes of subjectivity and learning are treated as taking place separately from the undertaking of research, which can only register them, and thereby also immobilize them as effects and not as ongoing and continuously changing processes. It is demonstrated how switching to methods that recognize and account for their own productiveness and inventiveness can account for movement and experimentation. One such method is tried out through using the concept ‘transcendental empiricism’ to account for the collective, intense and unpredictable experimentation that takes place in between researchers and teachers in the above described setting. Another method is tried out through treating the empirical material in the study - pedagogical documentations of learning processes - as ‘events’. Through insisting upon a continuous production of sense in events it is demonstrated how children’s own sense production can be accessed and how this permits to keep the events in which they take part open ended and in movement.

The third decisive point concerns the dualism individual/society and states that this must no longer be treated as a cause-effect relationship, as this immobilizes subjectivity and learning and hinders experimentation, but rather one must find another logic for how to treat what takes place in between constructed and imagined entities such as individuals and societies. In an analysis of a project in a class of two years olds, the concept ‘assemblages of desire’ is used so as to describe how subjectivity and learning take on the features of ‘a relational field’, where children through their collective desires produce new realities in the classroom.

It is argued that the formalized school and research system could benefit from adding to attempts to predict, supervise, control and evaluate young children’s learning, some of the experiences that become visible in the encounter in between Deleuze’s and Guattari’s philosophy and the practices present in this study. When working theoretically and practically with movement and experimentation it is possible to access very young children’s learning in ways that might force a rethinking of the educational system.