Leaping and dancing with digitality : Exploring human-smartphone-entanglements in classrooms

This chapter explores digitality as part of young people’s everyday lives in the Arctic. It is based on two ethnographic studies situated in the political context of the “digital leap”, the governmental and curricular emphasis on digitality in education in Finland. With the more formal “digital leap”, informal engagements and attachments with digitality intertwine, in which students’ own smartphones play an increasingly significant role. The analyses use the notion of entanglement (Barad) to examine how primary school and upper secondary school students emerge in their situated and specific encounters with smartphones in school. The starting points of things, bodies, affect, time and space open up insights to connectivity between young people’s digital activities and global economic networks as well as to the multidirectionality between humans and technologies: while the students access their digital devices, the digitalities also access their users. We suggest that this wilder form of “digital leap” requires reconsidering materiality, affect, and instability of space and time.Peer reviewe

Children’s Initiatives in the Finnish Early Childhood Education Context

Pedagogical practices in early childhood education, which embrace children’s initiatives and agency, have been found to have an effect on children’s learning and competence skills. These initiatives can be seen crucial for children’s well-being and self-motivation. However, children’s initiatives are sometimes considered only as wants and that children are incapable to express meaningful initiatives in educational settings. In this chapter, we introduce children’s initiatives in their educational settings and examine the gap between children’s experiences and teachers’ observations. Children’s initiatives exist in a myriad of ways through the daily practices and processes that nourish motivation to ultimately create meanings through actions. It is essential to focus on children’s participation as it encourages and promotes agency and motivation within early childhood development.Peer reviewe

Cooking pots, tableware, and the changing sounds of sociability in Italy, 1300–1700

This article considers how the sounds produced by the preparation and consumption of meals in Italy changed between around 1300 and 1700. It argues that by focusing on sound, and by using ecological approaches, we can rediscover obscured connections between different categories of material objects. By examining material and textual evidence for three categories of objects associated with cooking and dining – metalwork, ceramics, and glass – the article traces changes in the material cultures of kitchen and table, and the clear impact these changes had on domestic soundscapes. It considers these sound-producing objects as agents of social interaction, exploring the social relationships they constructed, and the role sound played in those relationships. The article then focuses on the practices of cooking and dining, and the way they shaped the sound of objects. Finally, the article situates objects and social practices within the spatial context of the home, tracing an increasing impetus to manage and control specific types of sound in relation to gender. In the discourse on hospitality, noise came to signify a badly-managed, and therefore morally dubious, household, while silence testified to decorous and authoritative domestic management

“For whom? By whom?”:critical perspectives of participation in ecological citizen science

Abstract This paper is a search for common ground between two natural scientists, two childhood studies and education scholars and two human–animal studies or critical animal studies scholars all working within a shared citizen science project. The search takes the form of a thematic mapping of existing literature on ecological citizen science, with two questions: “Participation on whose terms?”, and “Participation for whose benefit?”. First, we draw from the field of childhood studies to show how the concept of participation can be theorized further. Second, we recontextualize ecological citizen science research from a multispecies perspective, following the non-anthropocentric turn in human and social sciences which has so far drawn limited attention both in educational research and in citizen science projects. We proceed by critically treading the blurry line between predetermined or science-led participation and emergent or participant-led research, forming a fruitful space for examining and reconceptualizing the prevailing human/nature distinction in science and pedagogy. What we end up proposing is not so much a solution to the issues we have located, but rather an invitation to consider participation as a possibility for engaging with the ongoing tensions regarding the apparatuses of power that guide the research practices, researchers’ thinking and ethics. For the democratic ethos of citizen science projects, these observations can result in an ongoing process of asking how would it be possible to make space for various knowledges to be regarded as such: How could different kinds of knowledge co-exist, potentially generating more just worlds