Anna Palmer

'I'm not a “maths-person”!' : Reconstituting mathematical subjectivities in a esthetic teaching practices

In this study I have investigated how alternative ways of teaching mathematics influence and affect Early Childhood Education (ECE) students’ attitudes towards maths and how they understand their own subjectivities as more or less mathematical during a 10‐week alternative maths course. The investigated course adopts a feminist post‐structural approach based on critical pedagogy and deconstructive theory and includes an interdisciplinary approach to investigative mathematics. The data used include the memory/narrative writings and process‐writings of 75 female teacher‐education students, collected from three different cohorts, in which the students describe their learning processes throughout the maths course. The study shows that, in the main, the students became much more positively inclined to the subject of mathematics after the maths course and agreed that this course had changed their understanding of their own mathematical subjectivity, albeit in different and varying ways.

Reading a Deleuzio-Guattarian Cartography of Young Girls' School-Related Ill-/Well-Being

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.

Individuating ‘sparks’ and ‘flickers’ of ‘a life’ in dance practices with preschoolers: the ‘monstrous child’ of Colebrook's Queer Vitalism

ABSTRACT What are the dominant images of the Child in contemporary Western societies? In order to challenge some dominant images of the Child, this essay explores the possibilities of analyzing an experimental dance practice with preschoolers aged 1–2 years with Claire Colebrooks theorizing on ‘the war on norms’. Colebrook suggests a Queer Vitalism to push the limits of how to understand humanness generally, and more specifically, how to understand processes of subjectification. She moves from a post-structuralist understanding toward the Deleuzian notion of practices of individuation and processes of becoming-imperceptible. In this essay, we draw on Queer Vitalism to show how it is possible to understand childrens constructions of subjectivity in events of experimental dance practices for preschoolers. The analysis is performed in close interactions with video-films from these workshops transformed to still photography. We aspire to show how these practices can be understood as counter-power strategies in the enactment of an image of a Monstrous Child. Such an image might transform the taken-for-granted image of the Child and preschool practices in subversive ways.

‘Is this the tallest building in the world?’ A posthuman approach to ethical dilemmas in young children’s learning projects:

In this article, I explore alternative ways of understanding ethics in preschool. In this, I draw on a posthumanist understanding of ethical concerns as entangled intra-actions of the world, rather than as a human affair. The examined data are part of an ongoing preschool project called ‘Children’s relations to the city’, in which children begin to investigate tall buildings in the immediate vicinity of the preschool and then turn their attention to other larger and more famous buildings in the world, such as Burj Khalifa, the World Trade Centre and Tapei 101. At first, the children seem to be interested in mathematics and science and collaboratively measure and compare the towers shown on pictures. The project then changes gear, and the children ask questions about the living conditions in faraway countries. This transfers the project from the local preschool to a global world in which complex ethical dilemmas emerge. The article discusses the ethics that can emerge when understanding children’s play and learning in preschool as always and already ethical and entangled with a more-than-human global world.

Bidirectional collaborations in an intervention randomized controlled trial performed in the Swedish early childhood education context

ABSTRACT Within the field of developmental science, there is a general agreement of the need to work together across academic disciplinary boundaries in order to advance the understandings of how to optimize child development and learning. However, experience also shows that such collaborations may be challenging. This paper reports on the experiences of bidirectional collaboration between researchers in a multidisciplinary research team and between researchers and stakeholders, in the first randomized controlled trial in Swedish preschool. The objective of the trial was to investigate the effects of two pedagogical learning strategies evaluating language, communication, attention, executive functions and early math. The interdisciplinary team includes researchers from early childhood education, linguistics, developmental psychology and cognitive neuro science. Educational researchers and theorists within the field of early childhood education in Sweden have during the last two decades mainly undertaken small-scale qualitative praxis-oriented and participative research. There is a widespread skepticism with regards to some of the core principles in controlled intervention methodologies, including a strong resistance towards individual testing of children. Consequently unanticipated disagreements and conflicts arose within the research team, as RCT methodology requires the measurement of effects pre and post the intervention. The aim of this article is to discuss the conditions for bidirectional collaboration both between researchers and stakeholders and between researchers in the research team. The findings illustrate strategies and negotiations that emerged in order to address ontological and epistemological controversies and disagreements. These include (a) the negotiation of research ethics, (b) making divergences visible and learning from each other, (c) using a multi-epistemological and methodological approach as a complement to the RCT design and (d) the negotiation of research problems that are shared between educators and researchers.