In this article, we explore expansions of our perspectives on pedagogical phenomena in Early Childhood Education through textual- and meta-textual encounters and open-ended dataphilosophy. This implies experimenting with our epistemic understandings of pedagogies and pedagogical research and the ontological models that we have brought to bear. The texts revolve around working doubts, development of pedagogical thoughts and research, and formation of mental images, worldviews, and values. Researchers from Russia and Norway write texts potentializing the shaping of other configurations of—and models for knowledge production—thinking, critiquing, and learning. Our aim is to explore significant conceptual frameworks needed to build up complex research perspectives and dialogic observation cultures through storying across borders.
We are seven experienced academics and researchers from the high north. All within the field of education. We represent different disciplines, countries, and cultures. What we have in common is a wish to cross borders, collaborate, and learn: make space for storied experiences. Our stories are open ended—we start and end in complexities, and embedded in some sort of post- or trans- perspective be it modernisms, -structuralisms, -humanisms, -colonialisms, -feminisms . . . No conclusions or commonalities are necessary. Rather, we want to draw attention to the metatextualities and freedoms of our storying and the inseparability of opposites. We are learning academics beginning where we are. We are learning academics wanting lives of becoming rather than copying or reinforcing what is already there.
Although they commonly are associated with recreation, summer camps for children can be seen as educational arenas that both supplement and challenge school education. Summer camps provide education in a broad sense of bildung. The article aims at describing what is experienced in summer camps and proposes various theoretical frames for these bildung processes. The main focus is on summer camps in Russia, and we interviewed Russian informants who participated in summer camps. The findings were that learning in the camps tends to be non-instrumental, allowing room for play and experimentation for both pupils and teachers. Social learning is marked by collective elements such as camp rituals and spontaneous solidarity, both forming an individual personality. Outdoor activities are important because they connect children to nature and develop a sense of place marked by biophilia. Furthermore, nature’s materiality creates a sense of being in the world, which means developing a sense of multiple relational settings, spanning from the materialities of geography, place, and objects to experiencing new social settings in the form of solidarity, ritual, and friendship.
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