Capturing the world with verbs: Preschool science education beyond nouns and objects

Areljung, Sofie

doi:10.1177/1463949118805438

Cited by 5 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…In line with Haus (2018), Areljung (2018), and de Freitas and Palmer (2016), the present findings show how Emily's emergent scientific inquiries included, as well as co-constructed, her whole body. Thus, if teachers are to support young children's construction of an emergent science identity, they need to consider the whole child.…”

Section: Conclusion and Implications For Practicesupporting

confidence: 88%

“…Other studies using new materialist perspectives also engage with the agencies of the scientific content. In these studies, scientific phenomena and concepts are treated as agentive rather than pre-existing abstractions (Areljung 2018) and as creative playmates in children's activities and learning (de Freitas and Palmer 2016). Various examples are given concerning how different scientific phenomena can co-create not only children's explorations, but also their becomings.…”

Section: Materiality and Scientific Phenomena As Co-creating Science mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…She explains that concepts can be understood as material (rather than abstract) through children's embodied play and entanglements with them. Areljung (2018) provides examples of how children can feel various scientific phenomena in their bodies as they play, for instance force and acceleration when rolling down a hill. She suggests that one way to highlight children's embodied entanglements with scientific phenomena is to be action oriented and focus on children's encounters with everyday scientific verbs, such as rolling, rather than only focusing on their encounters with tangible objects.…”

Section: Materiality and Scientific Phenomena As Co-creating Science mentioning

confidence: 99%

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A swing and a child: how scientific phenomena can come to matter for preschool children’s emergent science identities

Günther-Hanssen

2020

Cult Stud of Sci Educ

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The focus of this study is the co-actings of a 5-year-old girl, a swing, and physical phenomena. The study explores how the swing and physical phenomena worked as co-creators of the girl’s scientific explorations as well as her bodily capacities and identity construction. Empirically, the study makes use of a video sequence generated during a field study in a Swedish preschool with 5-year-old children. The field study focused on the children’s play and explorations together with the preschool environment, during activities not specifically guided by teachers. To conceptualize children’s emergent scientific learning as mutual with their identity construction and as being co-created together with nonhuman agents, the study combines perspectives from new materialism, emergent science, physics, and gender theory. As a theoretical and methodological foundation, a new materialist perspective drawing on Karen Barad’s (Meeting the universe halfway. Quantum physics of the entanglement of matter and meaning, Duke University Press, London, 2007) theory of agential realism and diffractive methodology were used, as well as Elizabeth de Freitas and Anna Palmer’s (Cult Stud Sci Educ 11(4):1201–1222, 2016. 10.1007/s11422-014-9652-6) notion concerning how scientific concepts can work as creative playmates in children’s explorations. The findings show how the girl, together with the swing, could experience and explore various physical phenomena as well as, extend her bodily capacities and become brave and strong. As such, new materialism shows how scientific phenomena can create affordances for an individual’s becomings as scientific as well as how “becoming scientific” can be understood. At the same time, the findings also indicate the importance of teachers not assuming that scientific phenomena are automatically part of children’s play or can be experienced by all children all the time. The explored situation was rare. On most occasions, the girl did not get the same kind of experiences with the swing because of gender norms. I argue that norms and discourses connected to science and gender are not things that “come with” older children or are only introduced by adults. These are instead already in the making and re-making within children’s co-actings with the material-discursive environment in preschool. It is therefore important that teachers engage in children’s embodied play with scientific phenomena, with the aim to empower the children, their bodies, capacities and (science) identities.

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Section: Conclusion and Implications For Practicesupporting

confidence: 88%

Section: Materiality and Scientific Phenomena As Co-creating Science mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Materiality and Scientific Phenomena As Co-creating Science mentioning

confidence: 99%

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A swing and a child: how scientific phenomena can come to matter for preschool children’s emergent science identities

Günther-Hanssen

2020

Cult Stud of Sci Educ

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“…Monitoring the verbs used by preschoolers appears to be a suitable goal for further research. Monitoring the verbs used enables monitoring of the understanding of phenomena and processes, thus making preschool science pedagogies available that go beyond subjective/objective and concrete/abstract binaries [21,22].…”

Section: Utilitarianmentioning

confidence: 99%

Czech Preschool Children’s Conceptions about Nature

Jančaříková

2021

Sustainability

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This study focused on young children’s understanding of nature, an issue observed to be a research gap in the scientific community. The question “What nature?” is central to this research. Answers to this question were obtained from 342 children from 21 Czech kindergartens, and results showed 302 preschool and children (aged from 3 to 6.5 years) from the sample displayed a conceptual understanding of nature and expressed their ideas verbally. Qualitative content analysis and comparative analysis (nouns and verbs separately) were performed on the results. Most children interpreted nature through lists of objects or as a space or a concrete place, and most of the objects mentioned related to living nature. Children used verbs describing natural events more often than verbs describing their own or human activities in nature. The comparison between children’s, adults’, and pupils’ concepts of nature shows that children expressed their concepts in a similar, albeit not identical, manner to adults. They expressed the utilitarian and aesthetic value of nature, showed a scientific interest and an emotional connection to nature, and showed their joy in interacting with nature. Children understood nature more positively (no fear, aversion, or efforts to control nature) than adults. Czech children noticed more plants and mushrooms than Norwegian children. A similar percentage of Czech and Australian children included people on their lists of nature. Although certain similarities in children’s answers were noted, each child understands nature individually. Teachers should respect this fact and consider this in environmental and global education.

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“…In line with others (Childers, 2013;Haus, 2018;Magnusson, 2020;Rautio, 2014;Sörensen, 2009;Taylor, 2013), the potentialities of paying close attention to the nonhuman agencies in this data were that aspects emerged during the analysis that the first author did not initially think about, such as the entanglements of scientific phenomena and affect. This alone could have constituted a contribution with knowledge concerning how young children can be seen as playing with scientific phenomena, creating scientific knowledge with and through their whole bodies (also see Areljung, 2020, Haus, 2018de Freitas & Palmer, 2016). As such, the study including Emily and the swing (Günther-Hanssen, 2020) could have been written solely with focus on the co-actings of Emily, the swing, and physical phenomena.…”

Section: Can You Feel the Acceleration Affect Your Stomach?mentioning

confidence: 99%

From swings, through physics, with pendulums, to gendering: Re-turning diffractive analyses on science and gender in preschool

Günther-Hanssen¹,

Jobér²,

Andersson³

2021

RERM

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In this paper we re-turn (Barad, 2014) parts of the diffractive analyses conducted in a research project on science and gender in preschool (Günther-Hanssen, 2018, 2020; Günther-Hanssen, Danielsson, & Andersson, 2020). In our first re-turning, we explore how a swing and scientific phenomena in the data co-created the knowledge construction in entanglements with the researcher. To do this, we engage with how embodiment and re-actualized experiences of swinging came to matter. We then re-turn how certain events in the data are always part of other events, both in time and space. For this task, we elaborate with writing different situations from the data through one another. As we continue re-turning the analysis, new diffraction patterns emerge with each turn. By the end of the paper, our diffractive writings and readings have been re-turned into explanations of how pendulums can be used to think-with and approach gendering in preschool

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Capturing the world with verbs: Preschool science education beyond nouns and objects

Cited by 5 publications

References 38 publications

A swing and a child: how scientific phenomena can come to matter for preschool children’s emergent science identities

A swing and a child: how scientific phenomena can come to matter for preschool children’s emergent science identities

Czech Preschool Children’s Conceptions about Nature

From swings, through physics, with pendulums, to gendering: Re-turning diffractive analyses on science and gender in preschool

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