Programme in Early Childhood Education 210 credits

 

Doctoral project

A preschool that brings children into public spaces: Onto-epistemological research methods of vocal strolls, metaphors, mappings and preschool displacements

Abstract

The interest of this doctoral thesis in early childhood education concerns the discourse on the need to integrate as well as include the youngest children in society. The overall purpose is to produce methodological experimentations on the possibilities of constructing a preschool which facilitates for preschool and preschool children to be present and take place in, and thereby participate in the construction of public spaces, together with other actors and the places themselves. The aim is to experiment with displacing preschool practices from their institutionalised place into public spaces, inspired by various site-specific artistic place-based methods, in order to develop situated onto-epistemological research methods for early childhood education research. These emerging methods aim to enhance interaction between the preschool institution – including the children – and public spaces, as spaces of societal interaction and transaction between different actors.

The preschool institution was founded in a modernist era which set out to construct a society that could offer safe and appropriate places for all citizens. The institutional preschool was organised as such a separate and reserved place for children in society, but the physical preschool walls and doors simultaneously separate children from the non-institutional places of society – the public places. The public space upholds the potential for interaction, exchange and public action for change.

In the empirical fieldwork enacted for this project, I as a researcher, a group of the youngest preschool children (1-3 years), and a number of educators, enacted together so-called vocal strolls in the public transport system in Stockholm. The research project functions as a method-producing practice, where children’s places – the preschool practices – are brought into adult’s places – public spaces – outside the preschool. The study thus produces emerging and situated – in situ – research methods in collaboration with a preschool (and its children and practices) and the public spaces we encountered and interacted with. The thesis takes an onto-epistemological theoretical stance, to define the research, not as separated from the world, but as one of many practices collaborating in the production of methods on how to take place in public spaces (cf. Stengers, 2018; Barad, 2007).

The thesis consists of three published research papers which delineate vocal strolls, vocal mappings, metaphors and displacements as early childhood education research methods that facilitate a preschool which enables children to take place in public spaces. The onto-epistemological research methods which emerged in this study have been inspired by artistic site-specific practices, which have a long tradition of developing methods on how to move art out from art institutions, e.g. museums, galleries and art-studios. These research methods are embodied methods, which produce a direct knowledge and always transform in relation to the situation and the spatial conditions of a place. Vocal metaphors, strolls, mappings and displacements are constructed in the process of collaboration between multiple different ways of enacting a place and being enacted by the place. This study has shown the possibility of developing place-based research methods for early childhood education research with the aim of understanding how they might transform our notions and practices of preschool.

Supervisor: Hillevi Lenz Taguchi

Second supervisor: Monica Sand, PhD, Art Faculty's  Research Advisor, University of Gothenburg

Research area: Early Childhood Education

A selection from Stockholm University publication database

• Att kuratera en kontext för en förskolepraktik i offentliga rum – En annan direkt demokrati uppstår

  2024. Christine Eriksson. Nordisk Barnehageforskning 21 (3), 79-99

  Article

  Denna artikel intresserar sig för hur förskolan skulle kunna erbjuda barn möjlighet att uttrycka sina angelägenheter om offentliga rum på offentliga platser. Teoretiskt är artikeln baserad på filosofen Isabelle Stengers diskussion kring behovet att skapa en annan vetenskap som aktivt deltar i att skapa ett demokratiskt hållbart samhälle, och på den ANT-inspirerade filosofen Annemarie Mols resonemang om empirisk filosofi i syfte att uppmärksamma hur olika praktiker skapar olika offentliga verkligheter. Artikeln visar hur forskare tillsammans med en liten grupp förskolebarn i åldrarna ett och ett halvt till tre år aktiverar offentliga platser såsom en buss, en tunnelbaneresa och en gång- och cykeltunnel i centrala Stockholm. I dessa empiriska aktiveringar uppstår nya offentliga praktiker som markerar en kollektivt deltagande sångpraktik på bussen, hur en kinestetisk praktik av direkt närvaro uppstår i tunnelbanan och där de förkroppsligade och sensoriska kontaktzonerna etableras genom en annan praktik av att läsa väglinjer. 

  Read more about Att kuratera en kontext för en förskolepraktik i offentliga rum – En annan direkt demokrati uppstår

• Posthumanism/New Materialism: The Child, Childhood and Education

  2021. Hillevi Lenz Taguchi, Christine Eriksson. The SAGE Handbook of Global Childhoods, 165-177

  Chapter

  Read more about Posthumanism/New Materialism

• A preschool that brings children into public spaces

  2020. Christine Eriksson (et al.).

  Thesis (Doc)

  The interest of this doctoral thesis in early childhood education concerns the discourse on the need to integrate as well as include the youngest children in society. The overall purpose is to produce methodological experimentations on the possibilities of constructing a preschool which facilitates for preschool and preschool children to be present and take place in, and thereby participate in the construction of public spaces, together with other actors and the places themselves. The aim is to experiment with displacing preschool practices from their institutionalised place into public spaces, inspired by various site-specific artistic place-based methods, in order to develop situated onto-epistemological research methods for early childhood education research. These emerging methods aim to enhance interaction between the preschool institution – including the children – and public spaces, as spaces of societal interaction and transaction between different actors.

  The preschool institution was founded in a modernist era which set out to construct a society that could offer safe and appropriate places for all citizens. The institutional preschool was organised as such a separate and reserved place for children in society, but the physical preschool walls and doors simultaneously separate children from the non-institutional places of society – the public places. The public space upholds the potential for interaction, exchange and public action for change.

  In the empirical fieldwork enacted for this project, I as a researcher, a group of the youngest preschool children (1-3 years), and a number of educators, enacted together so-called vocal strolls in the public transport system in Stockholm. The research project functions as a method-producing practice, where children’s places – the preschool practices – are brought into adult’s places – public spaces – outside the preschool. The study thus produces emerging and situated – in situ – research methods in collaboration with a preschool (and its children and practices) and the public spaces we encountered and interacted with. The thesis takes an onto-epistemological theoretical stance, to define the research, not as separated from the world, but as one of many practices collaborating in the production of methods on how to take place in public spaces (cf. Stengers, 2018; Barad, 2007).

  The thesis consists of three published research papers which delineate vocal strolls, vocal mappings, metaphors and displacements as early childhood education research methods that facilitate a preschool which enables children to take place in public spaces. The onto-epistemological research methods which emerged in this study have been inspired by artistic site-specific practices, which have a long tradition of developing methods on how to move art out from art institutions, e.g. museums, galleries and art-studios. These research methods are embodied methods, which produce a direct knowledge and always transform in relation to the situation and the spatial conditions of a place. Vocal metaphors, strolls, mappings and displacements are constructed in the process of collaboration between multiple different ways of enacting a place and being enacted by the place. This study has shown the possibility of developing place-based research methods for early childhood education research with the aim of understanding how they might transform our notions and practices of preschool.

  Read more about A preschool that brings children into public spaces

• The art of displacement – curating a preschool context in a public transport system

  2019. Christine Eriksson. Children's Geographies

  Article

  This article discusses ways of enabling the youngest children at preschool (1–3 years) to participate in creating space in the public transport system. One researcher, two preschool educators and six preschool toddlers travelled on foot, by bus and by underground train to the Brunkeberg tunnel, a pedestrian tunnel in the centre of Stockholm, Sweden. Drawing on artistic site-specific methods of displacement, this article details three propositions for how to ‘do’ preschool in the public transport system: locations, dimensions and positions. By placing the routines and rhythms of a preschool practice into the urban spaces of transport, the ‘miniature preschool’ comes to curate context. The article proposes methods for a preschool practice to curate context through activating mobile but particular locations within a specific place; creating a vocal mobile architecture; and enabling multiple and mobile positions within one specific situation.

  Read more about The art of displacement – curating a preschool context in a public transport system

• Belonging in transience

  2018. Christine Eriksson, Monica Sand. Emotion, Space and Society 29, 1-8

  Article

  This article explores and elaborates art theorist Miwon Kwon's (2004) concept of belonging-in-transience through placing a preschool practice in the urban transport system and ask how toddlers can belong in public space. Belonging-in-transience is here seen as a collectively shared emotion system that can be described as ambivalent pre-personal intensities of emotions not yet stated. When a small group of preschool toddlers enters the public transport system - what the anthropologist Marc Auge terms non-places that lack particular shared cultural and social meaning - they both integrate into the routines and rhythms and intervene with the practice of traveling. The article outlines how belonging-in-transience consist of multiple ways to belong that always emerge in and through specific situations and places at hand. The methodological concepts vocal mappings and voice belongings, was developed as a way to delineate how the toddlers orientated themselves in the feeling of belonging through experimentations. Voice belonging and vocal mapping expose belonging as reciprocally dependent on the situation that at the same time influences possible ways of belonging.

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• Placing voice meetings through vocal strolls – Toddlers in resonance with public space

  2017. Christine Eriksson, Monica Sand. SoundEffects 7 (2), 64-78

  Article

  In early childhood education voice metaphors are often used to describe children’s participation, development or efforts to make themselves heard. This article aims to study the ways in which vocal metaphors take place in material and physical events in the Brunkeberg Tunnel (a pedestrian tunnel) in Stockholm, Sweden. Together with preschool toddlers we have developed ‘vocal strolls’ as a research method for early childhood research, where voice as an event takes place in, with and through resonance, rhythms, routines and refrains. To be able to discuss what vocal strolls consist of and what they may offer the toddlers as well as early childhood education we have developed new concepts. These concepts, voice meetings, voice orientations, voice rooms and vocal memory, take into account a relational and spatial way to compose voice, which may be utilised as a didactic method for amplifying voice as a phenomena among preschool toddlers.

  Read more about Placing voice meetings through vocal strolls – Toddlers in resonance with public space

Show all publications by Christine Eriksson at Stockholm University