The rhythmicity of daily travel: young children’s mobility practices along the mobile preschool route

Abstract

The article aims to highlight the means of rhythmicity to social life from within a study of children's daily travelling with a mobile preschool in Sweden. The point of departure is the neglected mobility practices of young children in research and the difficult relation between children's everyday movements and persistent representations of childhood time and place. Based on sensuous ethnographic fieldwork travelling with the preschool, the analysis deconstructs to visualize mobility modes at work in the enactment of the daily route, and explores to highlight the preschooler's collective rhythms of practices while travelling. The rhythmanalysis shows how regular mobilities enable shared experiences and the (re)making of a rhythmicity grounded in an ongoing perceiving and managing of inside and outside rhythms. The result confirms young children's interdependent mobilities from within an entanglement of different rhythms, and contributes with readings of how they 'carry on' in practice.

Embodied spatial learning in the mobile preschool: the socio-spatial organization of meals as interactional achievement

“…They are conducted in remodeled buses, equipped with a kitchenette with a fridge and heating cabinet and with seating arranged in fours and twos around small tables, and travel on a daily basis to various locations (see e.g. Balldin and Harju 2020;Gustafson 2018, 2020). As all Swedish ECEC they follow the Curriculum for the Preschool (2018).…”