Sticky stories from the classroom: from reflection to diffraction in early childhood teacher education

This article aims to challenge the prominence of reflexivity as a strategy for early childhood teachers to adopt by taking Norwegian early childhood teacher education as its focus. Observed micro-moments from a university classroom generate multilayered, multi-sensorial entangled narratives that address what reflection and diffraction are and what they do – where students, the educator, materiality, space and affects intra-act. Furthermore, the article explores the ways in which teacher educators and students in early childhood teacher education become-with the classroom and materiality, and, in doing so, ideas about professionalism in early childhood education are opened out. By identifying the limitations of reflection, the authors go on to explore what working with diffraction might offer to reach alternative understandings. By placing a focus on seemingly unremarkable and routine events in the life of an early childhood teacher education classroom, the authors offer other, potentially more generative ways to think about student teachers and their further professional practice in kindergartens

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

Editorial: Child-animal relations and care as critique

Abstract Childhood scholars have for some time worked toward the idea that instead of being situated in their own micro worlds, waiting rooms, or margins, children should be viewed and accounted for as full participants of society. This special issue aligns with this aspiration, while broadening the notion of what counts as society. It asks how to live and care in a society that does not consist of adult human individuals only, but instead counts children and other-than-human animals in the realm of the social and the societal. By inviting authors to think about child-animal relations and care, we wish to shed light on the ways in which other animals are relevant for human children’s lives, and vice versa, and to argue for the importance of these relations for society in the conflicting times we live in now

From child–animal relations to multispecies assemblages and other-than-human childhoods

Abstract This article discusses how childhood studies could be enriched with a focus on child–animal relations, multispecies assemblages and other-than-human childhoods. First, research on child–animal relations prior to, and at, the animal turn is presented. It is argued that the dominant utilitarian and adult-centered views respond poorly to the significance children themselves see in their relations with other-than-human animals. The article then moves on to the concept of multispecies assemblages. Viewing childhoods as multispecies from the outset allows one to draw attention to the specific and situated relationalities amidst natural, cultural, technological, economic, and political forces. Finally, attention is drawn to other-than-human childhoods. The differences, hierarchies, connections and unequal possibilities that arise from being born and growing up as a member of a distinct species amidst societal processes are discussed. Additionally, childhood is suggested to be an important concept through which to give detail, specificity, and a critical edge to the work of multispecies research

“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