Umeå University's logo

In this article we explore how children's opportunities for subject-related learning in Nordic early childhood education and care (ECEC) depend on intra-actions between the physical environment, gender norms, and the relevant learning content. We apply a socio-material perspective and draw on three Swedish ECEC studies, in which the learning content was related to physics, dance, and environmental sustainability, respectively. The analyses illustrate how socio-material intra-actions encouraged or impeded certain bodily encounters, thereby encouraging or impeding certain kinds of subject-related learning.

There is a growing trend of addressing the benefits of STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics) in literature on Early Childhood Education (ECE). The literature often assumes that adding Arts to STEM in ECE will help young children develop a number of skills such as critical thinking, innovation, creativity, problem-solving, communication and collaboration. We refer to these skills as STEAM buzzwords since they are listed in a recurrent way throughout the literature and are seldom critically assessed or challenged. With this colloquium, we aspire to challenge the use of these buzzwords. The main reason is that three of them, innovation, creativity and problem-solving, carry a gendered and unjust history, associated with white men, progress, economic growth and conquest. We argue that an unreflective use of these buzzwords may steer STEAM education in ECE towards fostering ‘human capital’ rather than enabling children to develop close and empathic relations with organisms and other more than human actors and elements in their surrounding world. Therefore, we invite practitioners and researchers to join us in forming a new set of STEAM buzzwords, a set that is just and apt for all children, and for the world.

In this presentation, we explore how children engage with space and matter while they dance. In particular, we seek to contribute knowledge on if and how children develop motor skills, physics learning, and dance learning simultaneously in dance events.    

In line with posthumanist perspectives (Barad 2007) we assume that learning emerge from within child-matter entanglements, as children make themselves intelligible to the material world, while the material world makes itself intelligible to them. When children step up on a bench, for instance, they ’need to relate to how much force that is needed and how the body should maintain balance in this action’ (Svanbäck-Laaksonen 2020, p.41, translated from Swedish). Children make themselves intelligible to the bench, while the bench makes itself intelligible to them. Moreover, one could say that children who step up and down on a bench show bodily signs of trusting what they and the bench can do together. We use ‘trust’ (Areljung et al., 2023) to capture bodily sign of children’s learning in dance events.  

The presentation builds on a video provided by the Swedish National Agency for Education (n.d). In the video, children dance with the floor, with dance scarves, with air, and with other children. When we analyse the video, we first look for verbs that capture child-matter entanglements related to motor skills, physics and dance. Examples of such verbs are that children and matter ‘spin’, ‘jump’, ‘lean’ and ‘turn’ together (see Areljung 2020 and Svanbäck-Laaksonen 2020). Second, we attempt to unpack the potential learning that emerges within these verbs/entanglements. At these stages, the three of us focus on one learning perspective each: motor skills, physics, and dance.  

We discuss what happens when we merge our three learning perspectives, attentive to the overlaps and differences that come into play when (dis-)trustful child-and-matter events are viewed in relation to motor skills, physics and dance at the same time.  

In the activities of the Nordic preschools, there are motor skills, physics and dance. This presentation can contribute to increased understanding and new learning perspectives on how motor skills, physics and dance can appear simultaneously in dance events. 

References 

Areljung, S. (2020). Capturing the world with verbs: Preschool science education beyond nouns and objects. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 21(1), 70-82.  

Areljung, S., Bäckström, L., & Grenemark, E. (2023). Young children’s learning in physics: a (dis-)trustful play with gravity, friction and counterforces?, European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 31:4, 660-672, https://doi.org/10.1080/1350293X.2023.2177320  

Barad, K. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke University Press 

Skolverket (n.d). Dans i förskolan – estetik, identitet och hälsa. https://youtu.be/Kin2AQ2EaOs 

Svanbäck-Laaksonen, M. 2020. Tvååringars Spontana Utövande av Grundläggande Motoriska Färdigheter i Daghem. Forskning om Undervisning och Lärande 8(2): 25–45. 

In this workshop, we welcome researchers interested in transdisciplinary learning and questions of traversing norms within education - from preschool to higher education. Together we will explore the potentialities of merging STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) and Arts (dance, drama, music, visual arts) into STEAM. 

The concept of STEAM education has become increasingly influential in many parts of the world during the last years. STEAM education is promoted as an arena for developing transdisciplinary knowledge and fostering innovative thinkers who can meet the demands of the future in sustainable ways (Ingold, 2019). One additional argument behind STEAM education is to motivate underrepresented groups, particularly girls, to engage with STEM (European Committee of the Regions, 2019; Ng & Ferguson, 2020). According to research, gender norms connected to STEM and to the arts, imply that some students, thinkings and doings are recognised by teachers and peers, whereas others are not. For example, girls and women have a more narrow space for participating and being recognised as learners in STEM (e.g. Heeg & Avraamidou, 2021; Stephenson, Fleer & Fragkiadaki, 2022), while boys and men have a more narrow space for participating and being recognised as learners in Arts (e.g. Hentschel, 2018; Oliver & Risner, 2017). This implies that children and students face different kinds of normative constraints when they are expected to engage with the world through separate disciplines, that is scientifically, technologically, artistically, engineeringly or mathematically. As we see it, transdisciplinary STEAM education harbours the potential to form new and norm-challenging ways of teaching and learning (Areljung & Günther-Hanssen, 2022). 

The transdisciplinary explorations during the workshop will focus on verbs connected to STEM and Arts. You do not need any specific background in STEM or Arts to participate. Expected outcomes are that the workshop will open up to new ways of being and learning, beyond current gender norms connected to different disciplines in education.

It is well-known that art and cross-sectoral collaborations are needed and have value in the educational sector. The aim of this article is to describe and problematise beliefs, norms, and experiences that are articulated in descriptions of collaboration surrounding dance teaching in educational contexts in Sweden. This article rests on social constructionist perspectives and is informed by discourse analysis to problematise the experiences of collaboration regarding dance education. The empirical material consists of focus group interviews with dance teachers, pre-school teachers, and school-age educare center teachers. Analysis is focused on the discourses that occur in the empirical material, where different educators describe their experiences of collaborations. Three discourses emerge in the result: first, dance as an eraser; second, the dance teacher as inspirer and physically competent; and finally, ‘Jack in the box’—dance as collaboration? The conclusion drawn from the results is that cooperation is common, but collaborations are not. If one intends to develop shared values, alignment, and equal power relations, collaboration is required. The importance of combining dance competence with pedagogical competence adapted to the specific educational setting is essential.

Syftet är att generera kunskap om förskollärares erfarenheter av, och didaktiska reflektioner om undervisning i dans relaterat till innehåll och metoder i förskolan. Förskollärarna deltar i ett aktionsforskningsprojekt och arbetar med dans utifrån ett uttalat genus- och jämställdhetsperspektiv. Artikelns teoretiska ramverk utgår från teorier om kroppen, didaktisk design och en flerdimensionell didaktisk modell. I analysen av förskollärarnas dokumentationer och samtal om dans framträder att undervisningen bedrivs både spontant och planerat. Förskollärarnas deltagande i aktionsforskningsprojektet har bidragit till utforskande och kontinuitet i undervisningen i dans. Relationer till barnen, arbetslaget och föräldrarna har betydelse för barnens delaktighet och undervisningens innehåll. Förskollärarna undervisar på olika sätt vilket kan förstås i termer av en förkroppsligad, levd kunskap. Barns lärande i dans stimuleras även när förskol-lärare medvetet iscensätter och planerar en undervisningssituation utan att själv vara aktivt deltagande. Dans i förskolan kan beskrivas som en rörlig verksamhet. Undervisningen är tematisk och flexibel i relation till rum, tid och barngruppens storlek. Studien indikerar en skiljelinje mellan dansundervisning i en konstnärlig kontext och undervisning i dans i förskolans utbildning.

This article investigates and discusses Swedish preschool teachers’ work with and understanding of teaching dance. Preschool teachers should teach aesthetic expressions such as dance, according to the curriculum. This study depicts how preschool teachers, in semi-structured group interviews in 18 preschools, describe their work with teaching dance.

The results show that early childhood teachers are well prepared for and focused on all children, and let them influence the dance education. They are flexible, oriented towards each child’s needs, regard children as competent co-creators, and they cooperate with colleges to inspire each other. However, the respondents rarely mention their own bodily involvement when dance is taught in their preschool. They have difficulties in picturing dance specific knowledge, separated from other learning areas, and many also state that choreographic material seems frightening to them. The lack of own bodily knowledge and choreographic tools is discussed in relation to children’s possibilities to develop dance knowledge in their preschools.