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This article is about children's drawing processes and emergent systems thinking. ‘Emergent systems thinking’ refers to children's awareness of a system's components, their interconnections and the flows that move through them. This study focuses on a video-recorded drawing session involving five five-year-olds who were invited to draw how they think water reaches the tap. My aim is to: (1) examine different ways of engaging with a drawing task and (2) identify signs of emergent systems thinking in the drawing process. Based in a posthumanist perspective, drawing processes are seen as an intra-actions involving pens, paper, children and teachers. This article shows five diverse ways of engaging with the drawing task, such as negotiating with teacher and paper where and what to draw or alternating between pen play and burst of focused drawing. These drawing processes also show several signs of emergent systems thinking. However, some of the visual responses to the teacher's question were eventually ‘disguised’ as the drawing took new turns, shaped by ongoing negotiations among children, materials, teachers and peers. This article suggests that educators should attune to drawing as a shared, evolving inquiry, rather than treating it merely as a final product.

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.

This article explores how teachers can support students’ observational drawing skills in the biology classroom. The article is based on classroom data from a collaborative project involving primary school teachers, arts educators, and researchers. Together, we have planned and implemented classroom interventions, aiming to contribute knowledge about the pedagogical potentials of drawing in science. In this article, we analyse one teacher’s way of teaching observational drawing to 8-year-old students. Our analysis reveals two main teaching emphases: (1) the interplay between observing and drawing and (2) the visual characteristics of natural objects, particularly the shape, colour, and specific details of different species. Our findings provide valuable insights for educators who seek to integrate observational drawing into science education. First, we highlight the significance of the teacher’s content knowledge in biology, as it corresponds to the ability to guide students’ attention to specific details in natural objects. Second, we show the pedagogical potential of providing explicit feedback during the drawing process in terms of encouraging students to make detailed and realistic drawings while also making them visually engaging. Lastly, we show that the teacher makes use of verbal, bodily, and visual resources to create a collaborative space for communication around student drawings.

This article is about the pedagogical potentials and challenges of co-drawing in science education. It builds on video data from three primary school classrooms where students worked in pairs to draw some science content on a shared paper. Grounded in a sociomaterialist approach, we analyse how students, drawing tools, paper templates, visual resources, and science concepts collaborate during drawing activities. Our findings reveal that even though two students share a paper they do not necessarily negotiate their understandings of the science content they are asked to draw. For example, one student may shape a verbal and visual narrative about the science content with little input from the other, or negotiations may focus more on drawing techniques and composition than on understanding the science content. However, the article identifies a promising scenario in terms of science learning opportunities, when both students draw within a confined space on the paper. In such cases, it seems that science learning emerge while drawing and that both students are involved in a joint learning process.

Since the 1800s, researchers have studied children’s drawings to explore their abilities and conceptual understanding. Traditionally, the focus has been on drawings as products. This study, however, shifts the perspective to ‘drawing as process’, aiming to investigate how knowledge emerges while children draw. Grounded in socio-materialist theories, I approach drawing and knowledge production asdynamic processes involving children, drawing materials, composition, and conceptual ideas. The study is part of the Child, City, Future project, in which three preschools engaged with urban infrastructure topics like transport systems and water management. This presentation focuses on asession where five five-year-old children were asked to draw “how water gets to the tap.” The analysis was conducted in two steps. First, I examined the video recordings without sound, focusing on how the children interacted with the drawing materials. Second, I incorporated the sound to add a verbal layer to the analysis.The preliminary findings reveal that children are deeply “entangled” with the drawing materials. For example, they constantly hold pens in their hands, often without drawing. Overall, the findings show that children’s non-verbal actions correspond more closely to “how water gets to the tap” than theirverbal statements. A common pattern is that they start drawing a blue area (the sea or a lake) at the bottom of the paper and connect it to other elements (such as a tap, toilet, or water treatment plant) with blue lines and thin rectangles, the latter representing pipes. The children also move their fingertips above their drawings to illustrate water flow. However, when sound is added to the analysis, it becomes apparent that the children say very little about how water gets to the tap. These findings suggest that children’s collaboration with drawing materials plays a vital role in how they engage with topics in technology education.

References

Knight, L. (2008). Communication and transformation through collaboration: Rethinking drawing activities in early childhood. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 9(4), 306-316. https://doi.org/10.2304/ciec.2008.9.4.306

Penn, L. R. (2019). Drawing, bodies, and difference: Heterocorporeal dialogs and other intra-actions in children’s classroom drawing. Studies in Art Education, 60(2), 103–119. https://doi.org/10.1080/00393541.2019.1600224 

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.

In this study, we investigate how young students can make use of their own disciplinary drawings to support transitions between everyday and scientific discourses of water. The empirical data consists of video-recorded stimulated recall interviews with six student pairs (age 8 years), conducted six months after they had been introduced to a water theme that included disciplinary drawing techniques. During the interviews, we provided students with their drawings as recall material. To stimulate a stalled discussion further or to support a new line of thought, we also asked supporting questions and provided the students with plastic models of water molecules, and a bottle of water. To trace their reasoning over time during the interview, the empirical material was used to construct semantic profiles for all student pairs underpinned by Legitimation Code Theory (LCT). Our findings show that most students used their drawings to bridge everyday experiences and scientific explanations of phenomena involving water. The plastic models and the water bottle however had varying effects, sometimes leading to adding a scientific discourse, and sometimes leading to off-topic reasoning. The students generally needed adult guidance to use their own drawings for navigating between everyday and scientific reasoning. However, our findings also show that some students were able to independently use their drawings to move between everyday and scientific discourse, in a way that suggests a gradual deepening of their understanding of the chemical properties of water. Based on these findings, we advocate for emergent disciplinary drawing, in combination with guided discussions, as an age-appropriate method for supporting primary students to navigate between everyday and scientific discourses in chemistry class. This approach could ensure that the educational value of students' creative efforts when drawing extends beyond the moment of creation, to also foster a richer language that can open for new ways of understanding and making sense of the world.

This study explores how children engage with urban systems for water and transport during arts activities. The research question is: How do children make meaning of urban infrastructure in collaboration with peers and art materials? I aim to contribute to early childhood sustainability education by addressing large underlying drivers behind sustainability challenges, such as, in this case, infrastructure. Such content is often overlooked in ECE, where staff typically focus on recycling and nurturing care for nature (Ärlemalm-Hagsér & Sundberg, 2016; Meland, 2021). Herein, I adopt a socio-material perspective (Barad, 2007; Penn, 2019) to capture how meaning making emerges in intra-action between children and materials during art activities. The study follows an interpretivist paradigm, using video analysis of children sculpting road networks with clay and drawing water systems on large paper. The analysis initially focused on child-material intra-actions, then incorporated verbal data. Ethical measures included informed consent, children’s assent, and discussions with teachers to ensure inclusive participation. The findings show that children initially create networks of roads or pipelines, as expected. Then their engagement deepens and they introduce imaginative narratives, such as using “breathing pills” to move inside the water pipes. These findings show how children’s perspectives on urban infrastructure extend beyond the researcher’s initial objectives. The study contributes to ECE practice and policy by illustrating how factual and imaginative elements intertwine in children’s meaning making of complex global challenges. Moreover, it contributes to ECE research by showing how responsiveness to children’s perspectives can enrichen the knowledge generated in research. 

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.