Doctoral project

Research project: Doctoral project Lena Aronsson

Supervisor: Hillevi Lenz Taguchi
Supervisor: Annika Andersson, PhD, Lunds university/Humanities Lab​

Research area: Early Childhood Education

Publications

Aronsson, L. (2006). Bedömning i förskolan. I: Olofsson, M. (red.) Symposium 2006 - Bedömning, flerspråkighet och lärande. Stockholm: HLS Förlag.

Aronsson, L. (2016). Min sjukdom är fler än en, men färre än många: Att följa Annemarie Mols begrepp multipla verkligheter genom olika praktiker som gör och uppför sjukdom. Tidskrift för Genusvetenskap, 37(3), 114-126.

Aronsson, L., & Lenz Taguchi, H. (2018). Mapping a collaborative cartography of the encounters between the neurosciences and early childhood education practices. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 39(2), 242-257.

Aronsson, L. (2018). Transversality by text-messaging, co-creating skateboards and using a destabilising grammar in writing. Murmurations: Journal of Transformative Systemic Practice, 1(2), 80-95.

A selection from Stockholm University publication database

• Reconsidering the concept of difference

  2019. Lena Aronsson. Policy Futures in Education

  Article

  Connecting neuroscience and education is a desire in contemporary society, related to the recur- ring calls for education to become more evidence-based. Research in educational neuroscience strives towards such interdisciplinary knowledge production and to an enhanced interaction between neuroscience research and educational practice. However, various problems and difficul- ties in achieving these collaborations are often reported. Discrepancies, hierarchies, misconcep- tions and communication problems can be described as creating a ‘discourse of difficulty’. The aim of this paper is to trace the specific difficulties that have created this discourse, and to problematize these difficulties in ways that enable new conceptions of what might be entailed by interaction and mutual knowledge development between the fields of neuroscience and education, and between academic theory and educational practice. The most significant difficulty is caused by a binary understanding of the concept of difference in relation to understanding the fields. Instead of understanding the fields in opposition to each other, I will suggest an understanding that implies difference emerging in each of the collaborating fields as the self-differing effects of the encounter. In the concluding discussion, I will argue that an understanding of the concept of difference as a process of mutual transformation can be essential for reciprocity and bi-directionality in collabo- rations. Instead of producing contradictions and hierarchies between scientific fields and between theory and practice, such an understanding of difference might facilitate an investigation of the polarizations that always position something as of lesser value, and ultimately, creates the gaps that collaborations want to bridge.

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• Mapping a Collaborative Cartography of the Encounters between the Neurosciences and Early Childhood Education Practices

  2018. Lena Aronsson, Hillevi Lenz Taguchi. Discourse. Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 39 (2), 242-257

  Article

  This paper takes its starting point in a shared problem of concern, formulated in terms of what might be produced – or not – as effects of encounters between neuroscientific research and preschool practices. The aim is to show what emerged in collaborative encounters, in what is theorized and practised as Deleuzo–Guattarian-inspired cartography mapping exercises. During regularly scheduled staff ‘reflection meetings’, an invited doctoral student enacted, participated, and documented these encounters with preschool staff at three preschools in the same area outside Stockholm, Sweden. Two major lines of articulation, converging around a core problem, were collaboratively constructed and put on this ‘map’. These were then actively put to play to be disrupted and deterritorialized, making ways for new diverging lines and potential reconfigured forms of literacy practices.

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• Transversality by text-messaging, co-creating skateboards and using a destabilising grammar in writing

  2018. Lena Aronsson.

  Article

  Starting from Deleuze and Guattari‘s remark that concepts are unstable and moving assemblages of components, producing rather than representing, this article asks what the concept of transversal/-ity might be and do. The question originated from a doctoral course on Deleuzian research methodologies and transversal writing, and is basically the way I, as a confused first-year doctoral student, tried to grasp the concept. In this paper, I return to and reuse my notes from the course and a text message conversation with a colleague in which we experimented with the transversality concept in order to compose a meaningful account. By putting to work a grammatical investigation of the concept of transversality, I ask what it is, what it can be, and what it will do. Guided by a destabilising grammar, the possible practices of transversality are unfolded from the co-constitution of my notes and various texts, events, and phenomena. Finally, I reflect upon the usefulness of this exercise, in relation to the aim of composing a meaningful account and the obligation to justify scientific knowledge pro duction. These practices of destabilising by grammar, connecting texts and experiences, and reflecting on meaning-making are both the methodology of the paper and, at the same time, the result. Hence, research processes can sometimes be vague and uncertain, but still worth a try.

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• Min sjukdom är fler än en, men färre än många

  2016. Lena Aronsson. Tidskrift för Genusvetenskap 37 (3), 115-126

  Article

  What is a disease? Can we name it in a coherent way, precisely defined and is it only one? Or is the disease as many as those who are ill, or all of the practices where it appears? A few years ago I was diagnosed with autoimmune hepatitis, which could be a rather serious illness. I experienced bodily changes, had alarming liver values and got side effects from medication, but - ill? To handle the discrepancy, I tried to keep apart "having a serious illness" and "being sick".

  Drawing on Mol's concept Multiple Realities I describe how the disease is performed in various practices and my attempts to become comprehensible when coordinating these practices. At the clinic, in the laboratory, in treatment and in my body the disease is enacted as simultaneous versions. It is not the same disease although it has the same name. One version is available as numerical values in a diagram, in another as questions from a doctor to a patient or as text on a web page. The bodily version is almost invisible to me, but is related to gender, class and other categorizations - that affect relationships and interpretations in all practices. The different versions of the disease consists of human and non-human actors; not just me and the doctor but also tablets, conversations, syringes, computers, edema and compression stockings, Thus, reality does not exist in advance.

  With my disease as an example I discuss what multiple versions of reality can offer beyond what multiple perspectives on the same reality can. Moving away from structures and discursive perspectives to reality as multiple enacted versions, there will be less importance in agreeing on understanding or interpretation. Instead we focus on coordinating, informing and intervening. 

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• The concept of language in the Swedish preschool curriculum: A theoretical and empirical examination of its productions

  2022. Lena Aronsson. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy 22 (1), 5-30

  Article

  Children's language development is a core task in Swedish preschool and central to how educators organize teaching and everyday activities. The curriculum's definition of language is described as extended, with language as both a prerequisite for learning and a learning effect, i.e. both internal processes and communication. This means that working methods and didactic strategies rely on many different epistemologies and thus different theoretical perspectives. Nevertheless, the research literature, as well as assessments of Swedish preschool services, show that educators' interpretation of the curriculum is primarily socioculturally oriented. This does not entirely converge with how language is conceptualized in the Swedish preschool curriculum. Against this background, the aim of this paper is to perform a theoretical and empirical investigation of the extended language concept in the curriculum with the intention to understand what the consequences of this extended meaning of language produce in terms of teaching and learning practices. I have traced various epistemologies in language didactic preschool research and related this tracing analysis to empirical examples from preschool practices. The results of my analysis show that the practices are predominantly interpersonally framed, which corresponds to the emphasis in research. In a further analysis, where empirical examples are read from other possible epistemologies, the practices can be perceived as being multi-epistemological in a fashion which corresponds to the curriculum's conceptualization of language. This is discussed as an opportunity for a didactic strengthening of presently neglected perspectives.

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• Neuropedagogik i förskolan: varför och hur?

  2021. Lena Aronsson.

  Book

  Förskolan måste kunna undervisa både gruppen och individen. För att klara av det behövs en mångfald av teorier om kunskap och lärande. Här fyller neuropedagogiken en viktig funktion för att bredda perspektiven.

  Neuropedagogik handlar om att omsätta den kunskap vi har om hur hjärna och nervsystem fungerar i den pedagogiska praktiken för att exempelvis stärka impulskontrollen eller arbetsminnet hos barnen. Genom att ta in detta perspektiv breddas den vetenskapliga grunden i förskolan och bidrar till större möjlighet att anpassa arbetssätten, med hänsyn till både gruppens och individens lärande och utveckling. Även en större medvetenhet hos barnen själva om hur ”hjärnkontoret” styr allt från kroppsrörelser till tankar och känslor kan bidra till utveckling av exempelvis självreglering och empati.

  Boken ger en teoretisk kunskapsgrund som tillsammans med konkreta inblickar från förskolans vardag i samband med exempelvis samling, språkutvecklingsarbete och konfliktlösning ger guidning till fler tolkningsmöjligheter och ett större pedagogiskt och didaktiskt handlingsutrymme.Vidare diskuteras hur denna mångfald påverkar undervisningsansvaret och därmed även utvecklingen av förskolan.

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• När förskolan möter neurovetenskap: Kunskapsteoretiska möten i teori och i praktik

  2019. Lena Aronsson.

  Thesis (Doc)

  This doctoral thesis in Early Childhood Education reports on encounters between the theories and practices of Swedish preschool and research-based neuroscience knowledge. Thus, this thesis concerns epistemological encounters and didactic consequences. The scientific problem pertains to the relation between scientifically generated knowledge and educational practices in preschool, with specific attention to the requirement that preschool, as the first level in the Swedish education system, should be based on scientific knowledge and verified experience-based knowledge. The didactic problem emerging from this scientific problem concerns how this might affect the daily practices of responsible preschool teachers and educators at large.

  The thesis adopts a relational ontology with a multi-epistemological and methodological approach, based primarily on Stengers’ (e.g., 2018) and Mols’ (e.g., 2002) respective scholarship. The aims of the thesis are to investigate, firstly; what is produced in epistemological encounters within and between the research fields of Early Childhood Education and neuroscience. Secondly; what is produced between these fields and preschool didactic practices. The focus for the latter is on the didactic practices relying on the extended language concept in the Swedish preschool curriculum.

  To explore these aims in more detail, a series of so-called cartography mapping exercises have been conducted. On the one hand, in the analyses of the literature aimed at bringing the two fields together. On the other hand, cartography mapping has been conducted with educators in three preschools collaboratively analyzing their literacy practices. The Deleuze-inspired (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) methodology of cartography mapping aspire to simultaneously critically deconstruct and productively experiment with underlying lines of thinking emerging from scientific or philosophical problems that concern development and learning, and especially language development and skills of literacy during the preschool years (Lenz Taguchi, 2016a, 2016b).

  The knowledge that this thesis produces is summarized below. Cartography mapping can be used both as a research method and as a method in pedagogical practice. In addition, cartography mapping can accommodate issues in different epistemologies and in different practices, such as research practice and preschool didactic practice. That is, practices that are related and share an overarching aim, but which are nevertheless not the same. The method reveals the different epistemologies present and how they can operate simultaneously within preschool didactic practice. The results from the thesis support the Swedish preschool curriculum goals which encompasses a dual assignment of learning (group and individual), that require different epistemological and didactic methods to be fulfilled.

  A preschool practice based on scientific evidence and verified experience-based knowledge thus requires the use of a wide range of theories and epistemologies to guide preschool staff. Hence, the results of this thesis show not just the presence, but also the possibility of developing a multi-epistemological didactic repertoire in preschool development and learning practices.

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Show all publications by Lena Aronsson at Stockholm University