Movement and experimentation in young children’s learning: Deleuze and Guattari in Early Childhood Education.

The purpose of the study is to find new ways to integrate research and learning with a view to improving early childhood learning at daycare centres. The study explores new perspectives on movement and experimentation in subjectivity and learning in daycare centre practices and research. The study is based on the following theses:
1) Focus should be aimed at processes and movement rather than at standpoints. The concepts 'micro-political' and 'segmentation concept' are used to describe processes and movement as means to monitor children's ideas and wishes rather than to predict, supervise, control and evaluate children on the basis of pre-determined standards.
2) Researchers must cease to be critically outdistanced; they must realise and explain their own productivity and ingenuity, since being critically outdistanced entails seeing subjectivity and learning processes as being separate from research rather than continuously ongoing processes of change. In order to do so, a method called 'transcendental empiricism’ is applied, and it is confirmed that it is necessary to address pedagogical documentation of learning processes as 'events'. It is demonstrated how access to children's own sense of creation can be achieved by insisting on creating meaning-making events, and how this allows ‘events' to be kept open and moving.
3) The relationship between cause and effect in the dualistic society-individual must be challenged to find another logic for what happens between linguistically constructed categories such as individual and society. In an analysis of a group of two-year-olds, the concept ‘collections of wishes' is applied to understand how the children produce new realities in daycare centres through their collective wishes.

The results are presented in the form of selected examples, photographs or text. The study’s results confirm the initial theoretical theses, including:
1) Through micro-politics and segmentation, it is possible to treat movements in subjectivity
and learning as something that is already present.
2) By treating the pedagogical documentation as events, it is possible to develop an alternative scientific and pedagogical-methodological approach that can capture movements in subjectivity and learning.
3) By using the concept of 'collection of wishes' it can be concluded that children are constantly preoccupied
with 'different things'. The constant preoccupation can be interpreted as unconscious production
of new realities.
4) There will always be leaks in the societal structure. Predetermined understandings of modernity and modern/postmodern competences will always be challenged.
This study concludes that the formal educational and research system could benefit from including focus on the movements and wishes that already exist. To search through the 'leaks' in the established societal structures makes it possible to explain how power works through wishes and emotions.

The study is a quasi-experimental action research study.  Qualitative case studies have been carried out. The study involves 15 children of the same age group (one-and-a-half to four years) in a kindergarten. Data collection is based on photographs, observations and field notes that describe the children's work, interaction, engagement and discovery through experiments.

Olsson, L. (2008). Movement and experimentation in young children’s learning: Deleuze and Guattari in Early Childhood Education. Umeå: Umeå Universitet.