Rethinking and mapping influence in Early Childhood Education
This presentation puts theoretical concepts of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari to work with data material focusing children´s everyday actions in a Swedish preschool. The aim is to rethink influence as something entangled in intra-actions between human and more-than-human agents where influence is immanent in every child-world relation. Influence in ECE has often been connected to children´s rights and the integration of children’s voices in decision-making and democratic processes, which focus on children as individual subjects with agency to participate. This perspective of influence is linked to a humanist, individualistic and emancipatory discourse where children are seen as citizen becomings. By challenging this dominant discourses and the dualism between adults-children and subject-world, this study opens for an immanent conceptualizing and practicing of influence in ECE. The study contains data from video recordings and field notes at one Swedish preschool. Ethical considerations have been made both before, during and after the empirical fieldwork by paying attention to the participant´s reactions, both verbal and bodily. In an attempt to unpack and rethink influence, the presentation includes an excerpt of a child-world event where agents as sound, light, height and resistance intra-act with children and matter. A first result reveals these child-world assemblages as de-territorialisations of sense and place, where influence is floating in the relations in-between the children and the world. The study problematizes the implications of an increased individualistic focus concerning children's participation and influence in ECE.
Keywords: immanence, influence, matter, Early Childhood Education, Deleuze & Guattari.