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Lindqvist, Anna
Publications (10 of 21) Show all publications
Rönnlund, M., Areljung, S., Günther-Hanssen, A., Heikkilä, M., Hjelmér, C., Lindqvist, A. & Manni, A. (2025). Exploratory space for whom?: children's opportunities for subject-related learning in early childhood education and care. Nordic Studies in Education, 45(1), 1-18
Open this publication in new window or tab >>Exploratory space for whom?: children's opportunities for subject-related learning in early childhood education and care
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2025 (English)In: Nordic Studies in Education, ISSN 1891-5914, E-ISSN 1891-5949, Vol. 45, no 1, p. 1-18Article, review/survey (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

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.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Oslo: Cappelen Damm Akademisk, 2025
Keywords
ECEC, gender, materiality, socio-material perspective, subject-related learning
National Category
Pedagogy
Research subject
educational work
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-236101 (URN)10.23865/nse.v45.6036 (DOI)2-s2.0-86000643005 (Scopus ID)
Available from: 2025-03-04 Created: 2025-03-04 Last updated: 2025-04-15Bibliographically approved
Günther-Hanssen, A., Areljung, S., Magnusson, L. O. & Lindqvist, A. (2025). From problem-solving, innovation and creativity to empathy, connection and care?: Troubling the use of STEAM buzzwords in early childhood education research. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood
Open this publication in new window or tab >>From problem-solving, innovation and creativity to empathy, connection and care?: Troubling the use of STEAM buzzwords in early childhood education research
2025 (English)In: Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, E-ISSN 1463-9491Article in journal (Refereed) Epub ahead of print
Abstract [en]

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.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Sage Publications, 2025
Keywords
twenty-first century skills, feminist perspectives, STEAM, innovation
National Category
Didactics
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-238168 (URN)10.1177/14639491251330301 (DOI)
Funder
Swedish Research Council, 2022-03330
Available from: 2025-04-24 Created: 2025-04-24 Last updated: 2025-06-02
Svanbäck-Laaksonen, M., Lindqvist, A. & Areljung, S. (2024). Children and matter in danceful events: Learning motor skills, physics and dance at the same time?. In: : . Paper presented at NERA 2024, Malmö, Sweden, March 6-8, 2024.
Open this publication in new window or tab >>Children and matter in danceful events: Learning motor skills, physics and dance at the same time?
2024 (English)Conference paper, Oral presentation only (Refereed)
Abstract [en]

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. 

National Category
Educational Sciences
Research subject
educational work
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-224346 (URN)
Conference
NERA 2024, Malmö, Sweden, March 6-8, 2024
Available from: 2024-05-15 Created: 2024-05-15 Last updated: 2024-05-15Bibliographically approved
Lindqvist, A. & Pastorek Gripson, M. (2024). Dans i kulturskolan: utmaningar och möjligheter (1ed.). In: Monica Lindgren; Johan Söderman (Ed.), Pedagogik för kulturskolan: (pp. 103-120). Lund: Studentlitteratur AB
Open this publication in new window or tab >>Dans i kulturskolan: utmaningar och möjligheter
2024 (Swedish)In: Pedagogik för kulturskolan / [ed] Monica Lindgren; Johan Söderman, Lund: Studentlitteratur AB, 2024, 1, p. 103-120Chapter in book (Other academic)
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Lund: Studentlitteratur AB, 2024 Edition: 1
National Category
Humanities and the Arts
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-221080 (URN)978-91-44-16769-5 (ISBN)
Available from: 2024-02-16 Created: 2024-02-16 Last updated: 2024-03-28Bibliographically approved
Günther-Hanssen, A., Areljung, S., Magnusson, L. O. & Lindqvist, A. (2024). Transdisciplinary STEAM education: opportunities for thinking, doing and being beyond the already known?. In: NERA 2024: programme. Paper presented at NERA 2024, Malmö, Sweden, March 6-8, 2024.
Open this publication in new window or tab >>Transdisciplinary STEAM education: opportunities for thinking, doing and being beyond the already known?
2024 (English)In: NERA 2024: programme, 2024Conference paper, Oral presentation with published abstract (Refereed)
Abstract [en]

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.

National Category
Educational Sciences
Research subject
educational work
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-224345 (URN)
Conference
NERA 2024, Malmö, Sweden, March 6-8, 2024
Funder
Swedish Research Council, 2022-03330
Available from: 2024-05-15 Created: 2024-05-15 Last updated: 2024-05-15Bibliographically approved
Pastorek Gripson, M., Mattsson, T. & Lindqvist, A. (2023). “It ended up being a bit too advanced”: discourses on dance collaborations in a Swedish holistic educational landscape. Dance Articulated, 9(1), 31-49
Open this publication in new window or tab >>“It ended up being a bit too advanced”: discourses on dance collaborations in a Swedish holistic educational landscape
2023 (English)In: Dance Articulated, ISSN 2703-8327, Vol. 9, no 1, p. 31-49Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

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.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Trondheim: NTNU Open Access Journals, 2023
Keywords
Dance education, Discourse, Preschool, collaboration, cooperation, school-age educare centers
National Category
Pedagogy
Research subject
educational work
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-218578 (URN)10.5324/da.v9i1.5054 (DOI)
Available from: 2023-12-21 Created: 2023-12-21 Last updated: 2023-12-21Bibliographically approved
Lindqvist, A. & Pastorek Gripson, M. (2022). Undervisning i dans i förskolan – en rörlig verksamhet. Pedagogisk forskning i Sverige, 27(2), 119-143
Open this publication in new window or tab >>Undervisning i dans i förskolan – en rörlig verksamhet
2022 (Swedish)In: Pedagogisk forskning i Sverige, ISSN 1401-6788, E-ISSN 2001-3345, Vol. 27, no 2, p. 119-143Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [sv]

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.

Keywords
dans, didaktik, förskola, kroppen, metoder, undervisning, uttrycksform
National Category
Social Sciences
Research subject
educational work
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-192617 (URN)
Available from: 2022-02-18 Created: 2022-02-18 Last updated: 2022-08-04Bibliographically approved
Pastorek Gripson, M., Lindqvist, A. & Østern, T. P. (2022). 'We put on the music and then the children dance': Swedish preschool teachers' dance educational experiences. Research in Dance Education, 23(3), 337-359
Open this publication in new window or tab >>'We put on the music and then the children dance': Swedish preschool teachers' dance educational experiences
2022 (English)In: Research in Dance Education, ISSN 1464-7893, E-ISSN 1470-1111, Vol. 23, no 3, p. 337-359Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

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.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Routledge, 2022
Keywords
Aesthetic approaches to learning, Dance Education, Embodied pedagogy, Narrative inquiry, preschool education
National Category
Pedagogical Work
Research subject
educational work
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-184159 (URN)10.1080/14647893.2021.1928622 (DOI)000659326400001 ()2-s2.0-85107597131 (Scopus ID)
Available from: 2021-06-09 Created: 2021-06-09 Last updated: 2022-12-20Bibliographically approved
Lindqvist, A. (2021). Kroppen skapar kunskap i förskolan.
Open this publication in new window or tab >>Kroppen skapar kunskap i förskolan
2021 (Swedish)In: Article in journal (Other (popular science, discussion, etc.)) Published
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Stockholm: Skolverket, 2021
National Category
Social Sciences
Research subject
educational work
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-182232 (URN)
Available from: 2021-04-13 Created: 2021-04-13 Last updated: 2021-04-14Bibliographically approved
Lindqvist, A. (2020). ”Många killar som ska va såhära Allanballan”– om möjligheter och utmaningar med dans som uttrycksform. In: Hans Örtegren & Anna Widén (Ed.), Kulturskoleklivet: ett kliv för lärarkåren (pp. 35-51). Umeå: Umeå universitet (18)
Open this publication in new window or tab >>”Många killar som ska va såhära Allanballan”– om möjligheter och utmaningar med dans som uttrycksform
2020 (Swedish)In: Kulturskoleklivet: ett kliv för lärarkåren / [ed] Hans Örtegren & Anna Widén, Umeå: Umeå universitet , 2020, no 18, p. 36p. 35-51Chapter in book (Other academic)
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Umeå: Umeå universitet, 2020. p. 36
Series
Tilde - Rapporter från Institutionen för estetiska ämnen ; 18
National Category
Social Sciences
Research subject
educational work
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-177974 (URN)
Note

I publikationen felaktigt: ISSN 1103-8470

I publikationen felaktigt: ISBN 978-91-7264-535-6

Available from: 2020-12-28 Created: 2020-12-28 Last updated: 2021-02-08Bibliographically approved
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