”Negotiating Grasp: Embodied Experience with Three-dimensional Materials and the Negotiations of Meaning in Early Childhood Education”.

This dissertation has two primary purposes. One purpose is to illustrate the necessity of respecting young children’s experimental and bodily learning practices and their ways of constructing meaning. The other purpose is to understand the children’s use of 3D materials in an educational context and to create knowledge about how this contributes to the children’s meaning constructions. The 3D material refers to material which is specific and tangible, such as clay, sand, yarn and cardboard boxes, whereas negotiation and construction of meaning refer to acquisition of knowledge, i.e. learning as a social and not only an individual process.

The study presents specific examples of how children’s construction of meaning takes place when children play with the 3D material. The children enter a room in which they are presented with the materials and are allowed to engage in free play for a while, and observations of this show how the children’s challenges with the material lead to construction of meaning, i.e. learning processes. The study concludes that meaning takes place through processes which combine the children’s experimental use of the material in interaction with other children. Through bodily activity and chosen activities with the 3D materials, the children’s meaning is constructed through their bodies and through the physical and social surroundings.

At a daycare centre, the author planned and organised nine situations in which two children of three and five years old were invited into a room to play with different types of material put out by the author, such as yarn, clay, sand or cardboard. In order to be able to study the children’s constructions of meaning, the author subsequently wrote notes about the situations, which were also recorded on video. The empirical data was analysed in NVivo, a computer software program for qualitative data analysis.

Fredriksen, B.C. (2011). ”Negotiating Grasp: Embodied Experience with Three-dimensional Materials and the Negotiations of Meaning in Early Childhood Education”. Oslo: Oslo School of Architecture and Design.