Područje znanosti u susretu s dječjim pitanjima

Ingela Elfström i Bodil Halvars-Franzén istražuju važnost slušanja te odnose u učenju o znanosti

Children and Ethics : Ethical Encounters and Conditions in the Everyday Life of Two Preschool Classes

The aim is to examine how children create and embody ethics by analyzing their encounters and how possibilities are conditioned by the framework surrounding them. The focus has been on the following problem areas: Conditions that enable children’s ethical encounters with regard to frameworks, rules and order Conditions that enable children’s ethical encounters related to the teachers’ approach Children’s encounters in play from an ethical perspective Children’s encounters with nature from an ethical perspective The theoretical standpoint is ”the ethics of an encounter” from Emmanuel Levinas’ idea of ethics of alterity. In ethics which precedes being itself, the ethical becoming and its relational aspects appear in the encounter with the Other. The tools of analysis are mainly drawn from previous pedagogical/didactical research in ethics which highlights the ethical conditions, such as listening, encounters with diversity and differences, and preschool/school as an ethical space. The study is based on one year of ethnographical field studies relying on participant observations, video observations, focus groups, stimulated recalls and guided tours. The empirical findings show that rules and frameworks which regulate the everyday life of the preschool classes are repeatedly negotiated. The negotiations about “what’s what?”, where both the children and the teachers are involved, take place on a verbal and a bodily level. In the pedagogues’ approach, the listening is a central and complex condition for the ethical space in the preschool classes. In the children’s encounters in play and in their encounters with nature the relational aspect becomes clear. The ethical boundaries and the fixing of those boundaries are discussed in connection with the idea of the ethics of an encounter and the vision of preschool/school as a potential ethical space

Children and Ethics : Ethical Encounters and Conditions in the Everyday Life of Two Preschool Classes

The aim is to examine how children create and embody ethics by analyzing their encounters and how possibilities are conditioned by the framework surrounding them. The focus has been on the following problem areas: Conditions that enable children’s ethical encounters with regard to frameworks, rules and order Conditions that enable children’s ethical encounters related to the teachers’ approach Children’s encounters in play from an ethical perspective Children’s encounters with nature from an ethical perspective The theoretical standpoint is ”the ethics of an encounter” from Emmanuel Levinas’ idea of ethics of alterity. In ethics which precedes being itself, the ethical becoming and its relational aspects appear in the encounter with the Other. The tools of analysis are mainly drawn from previous pedagogical/didactical research in ethics which highlights the ethical conditions, such as listening, encounters with diversity and differences, and preschool/school as an ethical space. The study is based on one year of ethnographical field studies relying on participant observations, video observations, focus groups, stimulated recalls and guided tours. The empirical findings show that rules and frameworks which regulate the everyday life of the preschool classes are repeatedly negotiated. The negotiations about “what’s what?”, where both the children and the teachers are involved, take place on a verbal and a bodily level. In the pedagogues’ approach, the listening is a central and complex condition for the ethical space in the preschool classes. In the children’s encounters in play and in their encounters with nature the relational aspect becomes clear. The ethical boundaries and the fixing of those boundaries are discussed in connection with the idea of the ethics of an encounter and the vision of preschool/school as a potential ethical space

Becoming selves with/in landscapes and across borders

In this chapter we explore processes of becoming subjects with/in particular landscapes and the movement from one landscape to another. We find moments becoming in intricate movements from one landscape to another where the child lets go her immersion on one landscape in order to embrace another. The movement across the border is propelled by the intensities of the new landscape seem dangerous. We have argued, as does Butler, that we depend on others (who are part of those landscapes) for our existence and for what “we harbour and preserve in the beings that we are” (Butler, 1997b:2). In our analysis we find that the willing break from dependence on one landscape opens up a new connection, across extensive borders, with a shift in intensity that may be embraced with pleasure or with pain. Our stories work at the paradoxical space of immersion and separation, of movement from one coextensity to another and back again. They show the dependence for existence on particular landscapes, their zones of intensity, and the places and people with/in them. Our stories also show the necessity of letting go in acts of becoming. What our stories suggest is that the disavowal of dependency through which the autonomous subject is created might better be theorized as the movement from one set of intensities to another, and from one set of relations to another