'Ressursorientert tilnærming til språklig og kulturelt mangfold': Diskursive lesninger av inkludering i barnehagen

This article critically questions how contemporary multicultural pedagogical work for inclusion in Norwegian children’s centers is described in government documents. We find in these documents that what is named as a discursive ‘resource-oriented approach to cultural diversity’ is presented as a strategy to understand how to work and analyse multicultural pedagogical issues. As preschool teachers and researchers our interest is to investigate how and why a resource-oriented approach today seems to have become part of preschool teachers’ normative multicultural work for inclusion. By analysing official early childhood documents discursively we question what effects a resource-oriented approach may have on professional multicultural knowledge production

Researching the assemblage of cultural diversity in Norway: Challenging simplistic research approaches

This article’s point of departure is practicing an(other) methodology than those that are dominant within educational research in Norway. Dominant research can ‘rely on the authority and normativity of methods to produce knowledge devoid of critical reflection and contextual consideration’ (Koro-Ljungberg & Mazzei, 2012, p. 728). Koro-Lungberg (2012) calls this the politics of simplification (p. 809), which is powerful through its control of qualitative research. The authors try to poke holes in this scheme of representation regarding cultural diversity by installing themselves in agentic realist positions with a piece of data – a snapshot of an Internet Web page. To think otherwise about cultural diversity, the authors ‘thinkfeel’ (Lenz Taguchi & Palmer, in press) and are on the ‘lookout’ (Boutang, 2011) for events and transformative moments (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) around the folding of the assemblage of cultural diversity in Norway. Inspired by Lather (2012), we try ‘to live’ the data in new ways

Affirmative critique and strange race-things: Experimenting with art-ing as analysis

This is an open access article originally published in RERM. The article can be found on publisher's webpage by following this link: http://158.36.161.173/index.php/rerm/article/view/2702The focus of this article is affirmative critique, its ontological grounding, and a record of an attempt to perform an affirmative critical analysis with documented strange race-things. It is inspired by the debate on limitations of Enlightened critical practice, and writings on a proposed alternative; affirmative critique (Braidotti, 2011, 2013). Grounded in an ontology of difference, affirmative critique suggests to affirm and create other ways of speaking and living to ‘push power a little’ (Bunz, Kaiser, & Thiele, 2017a, p. 16). Further, it is argued that this might be a more transformative mode than the traditional Enlightened critique informing decades of multitudes of politics, perspectives and practices offered to work against how race is stubbornly becoming in unjust ways. The affirmative critical analysis performed is an experimentation with a print of a photographic image; an art-ing with data.publishedVersio

'Ressursorientert tilnærming til språklig og kulturelt mangfold': Diskursive lesninger av inkludering i barnehagen

The original article can be found at publisher's webpage: www.nordiskbarnehageforskning.noThis article critically questions how contemporary multicultural pedagogical work for inclusion in Norwegian children’s centers is described in government documents. We find in these documents that what is named as a discursive ‘resource-oriented approach to cultural diversity’ is presented as a strategy to understand how to work and analyse multicultural pedagogical issues. As preschool teachers and researchers our interest is to investigate how and why a resource-oriented approach today seems to have become part of preschool teachers’ normative multicultural work for inclusion. By analysing official early childhood documents discursively we question what effects a resource-oriented approach may have on professional multicultural knowledge production

Editorial

The first issue of Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology in 2016 offers three experimental pieces that hold the potential to produce monstrous entanglements when encountered by the reader/listener/viewer/: the in-betweener. We invite you to be open to the possibilities that the contributors to this issue have created through their experimental work. Each piece seeks to stretch what might be understood as data, as research, and as method

The Multicultural Kindergarten in rural areas in Norway - a good place for learning and participation for all children?

In this article we present a selection of results from a survey conducted in kindergartens in Norway in 7 rural counties. Our main purpose is to discuss what conditions for learning and participation for children from linguistic and cultural minorities, based on the reported answers from the respondents, which seems to exist in rural kindergartens. The respondents are 525 pedagogical leaders and 288 head teachers. These were asked about various topics and pedagogical practices related to how they worked with children and families from linguistic and cultural minorities in their institutions. Our findings show that most of the kindergartens in the survey to a low degree meet the cultural and linguistic diversity in a satisfactory way in line with the National framework plan. Further, the results show that very few of the professionals in these kindergartens hold formal qualifications regarding linguistic, cultural and religious diversity. We end the article with some reflections around the responsibilities politicians and institutions providing preschool teacher education might have in these matters

Fugitive Futures and Knowledge Brokering: Adding Value, Habits, and Trust in Early Childhood Education and Educational Research

This article is a collective act of writing preoccupied with the future of education. Our perspectives are different but what we have in common is a wish to explore and contribute to educational innovation. Through knowledge brokering, we try to create openings toward expanded meaning fields nourishing valuable diversities of onto-epistemic cultures ultimately preparing students for fugitive futures. Our project is complex and pluriverse like any brokering process for Other and innovation might be. Both method and means however are simple: Through using the concept of oxymoroning as a rhetorical and epigrammatic device for revealing paradox and through this taking part in polysemantic ambiguity, new concepts, knowledges, and habits are possibilized. Through a montage of thoughts, theories, and stories, hopefully thinking for innovation is given a constant continuation.publishedVersio

A feminist new materialist experiment: exploring what else gets produced through encounters with children’s news media

In this paper we are concerned to grapple with the ways in which real world issues directly impact children’s lives, and ask what else gets produced through encounters with children’s global news media specifically within the contexts of the UK and Norway. Our aim is to experiment with worldling practices as a means to open up generative possibilities to encounter and reconfigure difficult knowledges. We take two contemporary events: the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire tragedy in London, and the 2018 Marjory Stoneman high school shooting massacre in Florida, as a means to attend to ways in which affects are materialised across multiple times and spaces. News reports of these harrowing events, alongside what they produced, in terms of child activism, racism and toxic masculinity, provided a catalyst for a feminist new materialist experiment in generating other knowledges through material-affective-embodied encounters. Newspapers, glue, sticky tape, string, torches, bags and a cartridge for a firearm undertook important work within a speculative workshop, where a small number of early childhood researchers came together to be open to multiple and experimental ways of (k)not-knowing in order to formulate collectively shared problems. Following Manning (2016) we recognise that to avoid getting stuck in familiar ways of thinking and doing we need to undertake research differently. We wondered how might the re-materialisation of these events (through objects, artefacts, sounds and images) shift our thinking about childhood in other directions. We dwell upon the affective work that these high-profile news events perform, and how they might become rearticulated through affective encounters with materiality. Attending to how these events worked on us involves staying with the trouble (Haraway, 2016) as it becomes reignited, mutated and amplified across time and in different contexts. Our goal is to generate other possibilities that seek to reconfigure the ‘image of the child’. By resisting comforts of recognition, reflection and identification we reach beyond what we think we know about how children are in the world, and instead argue for their entanglement with difficult knowledges through, ours and their, world-making practices

The multicultural kindergarten in rural areas

Norsk: I denne rapporten presenteres resultater fra en surveyundersøkelse gjennomført i barnehager i rurale strøk i sju fylker høsten 2009. 525 pedagogiske ledere og 288 styrere svarte på undersøkelsen. Undersøkelsen har hatt som mål å innhente kunnskaper om hva som kjennetegner flerkulturelle barnehager i rurale strøk. Kun 18 av Norges 430 kommuner faller utenfor den definisjonen vi har brukt av rural. Surveyen kan slik sees som relevant for kunnskap om profesjonsutøvelse i barnehager i store deler av Norge. I undersøkelsen er det lagt særlig vekt på å kartlegge profesjonsutøveres arbeid med minoritetsspråklige barn og deres familier, og bakgrunnstall som kan skildre et bilde av en del kontekstuelle forhold for pedagogisk virksomhet. Det er blant annet innhentet kunnskap om hvilke språk som er representert, hvordan barnehagen arbeider med språk og kartlegging av språk, hvilket innhold som presenteres i strukturerte aktiviteter, personalets utdanning og språk, og foreldresamarbeid. Det er gjort frekvensanalyser av svarene på alle spørsmålene i spørreskjemaene. Videre er det gjort variansanalyse på noen av spørsmålene. Rapporten vektlegger i stor grad å presentere resultater fra undersøkelsen. Disse er slik vi forstår det interessante for videre systematisk arbeid for å heve kompetansen blant personalet i barnehager. De er også interessante sett opp mot Kunnskapsdepartementets fokus på kvalitet på innholdet i barnehagen. Resultatene viser at det i alle kommuner i de sju fylkene finnes minoritetsspråklige barn i barnehage. 84 prosent av styrerne svarer at det i dag går flerspråklige barn i deres barnehage. De resterende 16 prosent har arbeidet med minoritetsspråklige barn de siste tre årene. Det er imidlertid få barn med flere språk i hver barnehage, i ca. 31 prosent går det ett eller to barn med flerspråklig kompetanse og i ca 27 prosent av barnehagene går tre eller fire flerspråklige barn. Omtrent 80 prosent av minoritetsspråklige barn i barnehager i rurale områder, har enten polsk, somalisk, arabisk eller somalisk som morsmål. Et sentralt funn er at det kun er 3 prosent av profesjonsutøvere i undersøkelsen som har fordypning og/eller videreutdanning i flerkulturell pedagogikk eller liknende. Dette ser ut til å gjenspeile seg i den praksisen som respondentene rapporterer. Et eksempel er hva slags innhold som velges i strukturerte aktiviteter i barnegrupper. Det ser også ut til at styreres utdanningsbakgrunn i flerkulturell pedagogikk har betydning for den pedagogiske praksisen barn og foreldre møter i barnehagen i rurale områder. Videre er fraværet av minoritetsspråkene i de rapporterte pedagogiske praksiser slående. Det ser ut til at norsk dominerer, både når det gjelder kulturelle uttrykk og innhold, og når det gjelder språk. Norsk i denne sammenheng kan se ut til å bevege seg innenfor en monokulturell betydning.English: This report presents results from a survey that was carried out in kindergartens in rural areas in Norway 2009, and where 525 preschool teachers and 288 head teachers of kindergartens were the respondents. The data from this survey provide knowledge of how kindergartens work with a diverse group of children, and thus functions as a ground from which to critically plan future educational policies for the field of early childhood education in a multicultural society. For clarification, a multicultural kindergarten was defined in the survey as a kindergarten where children from linguistic and cultural minorities attend. The respondents were asked about various topics and pedagogical practices related to how they worked with children and families from linguistic and cultural minorities in their institutions. They were asked questions or asked to respond to statements about their educational backgrounds, how they worked with linguistic minorities to learn Norwegian and to support home languages in formal and informal activities, in what ways they cooperated with parents, who is responsible for the various language learning activities, which topics that were most often used in formal pedagogical situations and what cultural context they were based on (for example, Norwegian, Somali, Polish), thoughts regarding the role of play, etc. They were also asked more informative contextual questions letting us imagine some of the premises of practices in rural areas. The survey aimed at creating knowledge about how staff in kindergartens in rural districts work to cater for the learning and participation of children from linguistic and cultural minorities, and some of the conditions they work under. The reported practices can also say something about how all the children are exposed to the fact that Norway is understood as a multicultural society. The survey is part of a larger project were also qualitative methods are used. In short, the results that is presented in this report show that most preschools in rural areas have a low number of children and parents with minority backgrounds, very few of the professional staff have formal multicultural education, when working with language it is the Norwegian language that seem to be taken up, local/Norwegian culture is dominating when preschool teachers are taking part in meaning making with the children, etc.Kunnskapsdepartementet, Praksisrettet FOU barnehage, grunnopplæring og lærerutdannin

Conferencing Otherwise : A Feminist New Materialist Writing Experiment

This article attempts to reconfigure hegemonic framings of "the academic conference" and thereby offer a means to (re-)encounter the spatial, temporal, and affective forces that conferences generate, differently. We are a geographically dispersed but multiply entangled group of academic researchers united by theoretical fault lines within our work that seek to ask what if and what else. This "what if" and "what else" thinking has manifested in experimental and subversive doings otherwise at a series of academic conferences. The storying practices presented in this article were made possible by the vital materialism of a shared google.doc. It was within this virtual environment that we attempted to weave diffractive accounts of what conferencing otherwise produces. This writing experiment offers a series of speculative provocations and counter-provocations to ask what else does conferencing make possible. This article is an invitation to the reader to plunge in and wallow within the speculative accounts which ensue and to contemplate the possibilities of breaking free from sedimented ways of neoliberal conferencing.Peer reviewe