Eventicizing Curriculum: Learning to Read and Write through Becoming a Citizen of the World

Within our contemporary globalized society exists a discourse on a changed knowledge production, where knowledge is crossing borders, exchanged, changed and re-evaluated at great speed. At the same time, there is within the field of education an enormous increase in devices intended to produce stable and permanent knowledge through the taming of learning processes as well as entire practices by planning, supervising, controlling, assessing and evaluating them towards preset goals. This article proposes a way of orienting ourselves in the current situation through describing some of the didactical and scientific work effectuated within the research project "The Magic of Language". Through weaving together examples from preschool children's learning to read and write, teachers and researchers work with pedagogical documentation and French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's concept "event", it is demonstrated how we can counter-effectuate current attempts to tame learning and practices and instead engage in a more creative, profound, collective and nevertheless stringent approach

Listening to young children outdoors with pedagogical documentation

If children are to be heard in research and pedagogy, we need to find ways to listen to them. But how do we listen to young children when words are not their primary means of communication? Drawing on research investigating children’s perspectives of outdoor spaces in pedagogical settings, this article discusses the use of pedagogical documentation as a way of listening to young children. This listening involves children and adults working together in a relationship of co-experimentation which requires suspension of judgment, openness and preparedness to be affected by the ‘other’ [Davies, Bronwyn. (2014). Listening to Children: Being and Becoming. London: Routledge; Rinaldi, Carla. (2006). In Dialogue with Reggio Emilia: Listening, Researching and Learning. London: Routledge]. The article explores ways in which pedagogical documentation can not only lead to insights into children’s thinking, but also to questioning of taken-for-granted assumptions about children, learning and the wider world. Furthermore, the article highlights the way in which the materiality of pedagogical documentation strategies also actively contributes to the research. The study’s findings suggest that in thinking with pedagogical documentation, children, adults and nonhuman elements all work together in an interconnected and ever-changing assemblage which does not result in definitive conclusions but instead leads to more questions