Entering the assemblage of (un) teaching

Vignette

This study takes off in a policy change that 4 years ago introduced teaching to the Swedish preschool curriculum, a change that can be related to the fact that the Anglo-Saxon school preparatory tradition has gained increased influence over the value-based Nordic social-pedagogical preschool tradition. Unwinding from that change, a multiplicity of questions and concerns have arisen, both in the preschool practices and within us, as researchers. Moving with these concerns, a collaborative cartography with preschool practices and materialities is our way of engaging in what Haraway (2016) called staying with the trouble by actively taking part in creating and writing the story. A multiple and teeming story where a laughter, preventing children from picking fly agaric mushrooms and curriculum-waving researchers all take part in the becoming of teaching. We keep (un)folding and let the philosophical question of what teaching and education are and could become accompany us through this text. The arguments used in support for strengthening the teaching mission are mainly connected to the idea that an increased focus on teaching leads to higher goal completion in preschool education (Ministry of Education, [MoE] 2017). Preschool education, of which teaching is a part, is presented as a solution to a multiplicity of challenges that we currently face in society, such as integration, equality and equivalence, as well as increased ability of individual countries to compete in the global market (e.g. Åsén, 2020; Malone et al., 2020). To focus on teaching, when preschool education contains so much more, creates itching and chafing in and on our preschool-practice-researching-bodies. Doing research differently, questioning, provoking and speculating teaching, as part of childhoods, encouraged by Tesar et al. (2021a, 2021b), is our way to complexifying preschool teaching, not only because teaching in preschool will matter in the future, when preschool children grow up to become adults, but also because it matters right here, right now. For children in preschool, teaching will produce and reproduce, and perhaps even instrumentalise and neutralise, worlds and stories.

Staying with the trouble: Aim and theoretical underpinnings

To stay with the trouble, we enter this study with the geographic philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari (1987) by performing a collaborative cartography with preschool practitioners to create rhizomatic assemblages of teaching. We map how teaching comes into being in preschool planning and reflection practices following the movements of territorialisation and re-/de-territorialisation. More specifically, the following questions are explored: Which multiplicities of desire were active within the teaching assemblage and what was produced? Which territories of teaching emerged in the planning and reflection practices? How did these territories and movements of re-/de-territorialisation function and with what? We lay out a collaboratory constructed ‘map’ of how teaching comes into being. The map should not be seen as a representation of the phenomena; rather, it was used to open for a collaborative knowledge production as an explorative research assemblage that is incorporeal, affective and entangled.

Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) thoughts, theories and concepts are entangled and linked in myriad ways, similar to how they described one of their main concepts, the rhizome. This originates from biology and is used to denote the entanglements of people, ideas, things, practices or thoughts that arise from their connections or becomings. The rhizome ‘has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and which it overspills’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 21). Deleuze and Guattari (1987) began by explaining another concept, the assemblage:

[In] all things, there are lines of articulation or segmentarity, strata and territories; but also lines of flight, movements of deterritorialization and destratification. Comparative rates of flow on these lines produce phenomena of relative slowness and viscosity, or, on the contrary, of acceleration and rupture. All this, lines and measurable speeds, constitutes an assemblage... and as such is unattributable. It is a multiplicity (3–4).

The lines of articulation can express normative perceptions and thoughts that if repeated enough may become segmentary, showing dominating discourses of thinking. There are also lines that express more marginalised thoughts and the disruptive lines of flight that move away from segmentary lines. Lines of flight have multiple and productive forces and opportunities to infringe upon the expected and common; if they are not acknowledged, the lines of flight will rapidly be extinguished (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). Since the lines always connect back to the constantly moving rhizome, they are always on the move and not fixed. Additionally, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) point out that ‘the only assemblages are machinic assemblages of desire and collective assemblages of enunciation’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987:22). It is not a desire for something that a person inhabits or an interest in gaining something consciously in order to fulfil a lack, instead desires are here understood as unconscious forces of production. Desires produce realities (Buchanan, 2021), in this case, teaching. As Buchanan (2021) put it, ‘Desire is primary; it is desire that selects materials and gives them properties that they have in the assemblage’ (56). It is these assemblages of desire with their lines that produce territories and potentials for de-territorialisations (Mazzei and Jackson, 2017). Buchanan (2020) explained the process of territorialisation as follows:

We territorialise because we need to and we need to territorialise because we have to confront chaos, both in its originary form and in the form of black holes. The territory transforms not only the elements constituting it but its inhabitants as well (as both the territory’s creator and primary beneficiary) (289).

According to Deleuze and Guattari, territorialisation is worldmaking: ‘The territory transforms forces of chaos into forces of the earth’ and reminded us that ‘[i]t is not merely the ground beneath our feet but an intense center, a “natal” where we feel at “home”’ (Buchanan, 2021: 105). To de-territorialise can therefore be frightening, since it involves leaving what feels comfortable, giving rise to re-territorialisation that resume some of the control (Buchanan, 2021). Buchanan (2021) reminded us that a ‘[t]erritory is a liveable order produced and sustained by a refrain’ (85). As a way to acknowledge the multiple connections that are constantly created and re-created, we think of teaching as a rhizomatic assemblage. We will come back to the concepts of desire and territories further on as they are productive in this study but let us first enter the messy issue of teaching in preschool.

The messy issue of teaching in preschool

This study untangles from a national curriculum change made in 2019 that underlined teaching as part of preschool education. The policy change can be linked to the global movement of schoolification, a question discussed by both Malone et al. (2020) and Jonsson et al. (2017). Swedish preschool, defined as the first stage in the education system, encompasses almost 86% of all children aged between 1 and 5 years (Swedish National Agency of Education [SNAE], 2022). The concept of teaching was introduced to the Education Act in 2011 (SFS 2010:800) and to the national curriculum for preschool education in 2019 (SNAE, 2019). However, teaching has been part of the debate on Swedish preschool education since its very beginning, in the 1830s. The understanding and vision of what preschool education and teaching is, both in content and form, have changed over the course of history (e.g. Lindgren and Söderlind, 2022). In the Education Act (SFS 2010:800), which applies to the entire school system, teaching is defined as ‘goal-orientated processes that, under the guidance of teachers or preschool teachers, aim for development and learning through the acquisition and development of knowledge and values’ ¹ (section 3; our translation⁾. Additionally, the new curriculum states that ‘[t]eaching means stimulating and challenging the children, taking the goals of the curriculum as a starting point and direction, and is aimed at encouraging development and learning among the children’ (SNAE, 2019: 7). This formulation makes clear that teaching, in contrast to learning, is a relational concept, since it presupposes teachers and their relation to subjects and those who are being taught (Biesta, 2010). Inspection reports from the Swedish Schools Inspectorate (2018) showed that the terms ‘learning’ and ‘education’, but seldom ‘teaching’, were used by practitioners to frame activities in preschool and that ‘learning’ and ‘teaching’ were sometimes used synonymously. This conceptual confusion may be a part of the ambiguity and the resistance towards the validity of teaching, both as a concept and as content in relation to preschool practices, that is expressed by preschool practitioners (Jonsson et al., 2017; Westman and Bergmark, 2014).

Eidevald and Engdahl (2018), among others, pointed out that the uniqueness of preschool justifies a special application of the teaching concept, especially since the national curriculum for Swedish preschool education does not prescribe goals to be achieved by individual children but goal to strive towards. Sheridan and Williams (2018) stressed that preschool education and its types of goals can be seen as a form of bildung in terms of a continuous and lifelong process in which learning and development are integrated with care and play. In addition, teaching is signified as a communicative and creative endeavour in which democratic aspects are highlighted (Eidevald and Engdahl, 2018). Many researchers have also discussed how different theoretical and pedagogical approaches can affect how teaching is performed in preschool (e.g. Malone et al., 2020; Vallberg Roth et al., 2022). Vallberg Roth et al. (2022) have argued that different theories and arrangements fit into different areas and settings of teaching (i.e. multivocal teaching), thereby moving beyond the one-size-fits-all idea of the theoretical underpinnings of teaching.

According to the national curriculum (SNAE, 2019), teaching can be either planned or spontaneous and preschool teachers have responsibility for different aspects of teaching, such as planning, targeting goals and arranging interesting and challenging environments. The new policy formulations, which have strengthened preschool teachers’ responsibilities, can be seen as a breach of the Swedish preschool tradition in at least two ways. First, they challenge the idea of preschool as something different from primary school. Preschool teachers have expressed concerns over the loss of the uniqueness of preschool in the process of schoolification (Jonsson et al., 2017). In an overview of the research on Swedish preschool Åsén (2020) showed that learning in a preschool way, in which a holistic perspective combines education and care (sometimes referred to as EduCare), differs from traditional schooling with formal and instrumental teaching in a classroom. Second, it challenges the tradition of flat work organisation that has prevailed since the 1970s. Following this tradition, the importance of the work team as a unit has been emphasised. Few distinctions between the different professions have been made, despite differences in education. The clarification of the teaching mission in Swedish preschool has resulted in new demands on the leadership of preschool teachers, which can be seen as professionalisation (Tallberg Broman, 2020). At the same time, teachers’ pedagogical and didactic choices and professional judgement have become limited due to the increased quality measurements in certain areas (Edwards-Groves et al., 2018). Such narrowing of the curriculum can be seen as de-professionalisation of the teaching profession (e.g. Olsson et al., 2020). Malone et al. (2020) went further and asked if ‘[p]erhaps we have become enslaved by existing narrowing curricula’ (151). Moreover, Haggerty et al. (2020) argued that intertwined policy–practice movements create both risks, through the reduction and narrowing of curricula, and possibilities, as multiplicities of becomings, for preschool education. Accordingly, teaching in preschool is not an isolated question. It is not only entangled with questions of teachers’ work but also the complex questions of what a child and childhood is (Malone et al., 2020; Tesar et al., 2021a, 2021b). These researchers encourage us to acknowledge multiple stories of childhoods by thinking with new philosophies and concepts and re-think how research can be done.

Methodology for creating explorative research assemblages: Collaborative cartography

To think with Deleuze and Guattari is to engage in philosophical ways of doing inquiry (Tesar et al., 2021a, 2021b), what Masny (2013) expresses as ‘doing Deleuze’ (p. 339). This ‘can lead to a blurring of conceptual and practical boundaries’ (Malone et al., 2020:218) making content and method entangled. In the process of the collaborative cartography in this study, we have plugged in philosophical concepts (Mazzei and Jackson, 2017) in order to think beyond and challenge the dominant and traditional stories of teaching. The choice to use a cartographic methodology was motivated by the desire to start from within and staying where thoughts, ideas and practices are constituted and defined in ongoing movements. Previous research from Aronsson and Lenz Taguchi (2018) showed that a collaborative chartography can be a productive exploration with the potential to differentiate both research and preschool practices. Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) encourage us to ‘[m]ake a map, not a tracing’ (12). However, as underlined by Lenz Taguchi (2016), there is a double movement in the cartographic methodology, both tracing articulations and mapping to produce potentialities for new becomings which we have considered. In accordance with chosen methodology, we have not sought meaning about how teaching is produced, instead as Deleuze and Guattari (1987) put it: ‘We will ask what it functions with, in connection with what other things it does or does not transmit intensities’ (4). Mazzei and Jackson (2017) pointed out that ‘Specifically, mapping the function and effects of the assemblage is to see how a territorial field is both made (through repetition) and unmade (de-territorialisation) through the rhizomatic connectivity of assemblages’ (1094).

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we could not take part in preschool practices involving children to explore how teaching is produced in preschool practice. A collaborative chartography that took place in the planning and reflection practices with practitioners enabled an exploration in another way. This study was made as a part of a broader project where all teaching staff at three preschools, in the same preschool area, participates. The aim of that project was to develop both the joint development and quality work in the preschool area and the teaching at the different preschools based on the practitioners' own questions. Two groups of practitioners took part in this specific study, one consisting of a single work team and the other of a preschool teacher from each preschool assigned to work with quality development. Concerning ethics, informed consent was collected, and the broader project has received ethical approval from the Swedish Ethical Review Authority.

Although mapping should be understood as an ongoing process, only the specific sessions in which human (the practitioners and researcher(s)) and non-human (e.g. documentations, books, pictures and creative materials) agents met are described below. The practitioners were asked to bring different materials that they connected to teaching in preschool and the researchers also brought materials and participated in the mapping, that started on a tablecloth. It should not be understood that the map was a fixed item; rather, it was used to make the sessions the explorative and playful encounters that we wanted them to be. Over a period of 6 months, seven mapping sessions were conducted with the preschool practitioners. The doctoral student, the first author, participated in all the mapping sessions, whereas the senior researcher, supervisor and second author participated in two sessions with each group, at the beginning and end of the period. Each mapping session lasted around 2 hours, and all sessions were audio-recorded and transcribed. The transcripts were brought back to the participants to take part of the ongoing collaborative analysis, which was intertwined with the continuous mapping. Typically, the sessions started with a retrospective part, revisiting both the previous session, and discussing what had happened in preschool practice in the interim. The practitioners brought reflections, frustrations, documentations and materials to become part of the mapping. Sticky notes were used to add concepts, questions and thoughts and lengths of string to mark connections and intertwinings. In addition, we as researchers created friction and caused provocation to further trouble the concept and practice of preschool teaching. Tsing (2005) discussed friction as a productive force – not as resistance per se, but as a reminder ‘that heterogeneous and unequal encounters can lead to new arrangements of culture and power’ (5). In this collaborative work, the creative provocations involved posing critical and annoying questions, documenting the frequency of teaching and proposing theoretical texts for reading or trying new teaching strategies. We as researchers were transparent with when we intended to provoke, and the practitioners were aware of this and had approved. In the following section, we enter the cartography by asking how teaching comes into being and following and exploring the movements of territorialisation and re-/de-territorialisation.

Entering the chartography: Desires, chaos and territories of teaching

Throughout the collaborative process, the map was both created and transformed. Incorporating the assemblages of teaching, the map included books, previous experiences, documentations, reflections, iPads, pictures, articles, creative materials (i.e. paper, pencils, paints and paintbrushes), sticky notes, books for children, pedagogical literature, stories, toys and much more. During one of the mapping sessions, a printed edition of the Curriculum for the preschool (SNAE, 2019) lay just outside the tablecloth marking the map but still affected the dialogue. Utterances such as ‘teaching is dependent on the teacher’ and ‘teaching is goal-orientated’ echoed the curriculum formulations. These segmentary lines of articulation created tensions and frictions when meeting the desires in the teaching assemblage. When desire[s] ‘selects materials’ (Buchanan, 2021, p. 56), in this case to engage in teaching, a pinecone’s properties become more than a carrier of seeds, cone-becoming-world: ‘I love all natural materials, there’s so much, it’s everything, really, it’s the world, this natural material, the smell, the shape, how it feels, it’s beautiful, it’s art too, just look on how it is structured. Bring in a dried flower’. Within the cartography, gathering natural materials and spending time outdoors, preferably in the forest, are driven by the creating-closeness-and-connection-to-the-nature-desire. According to earlier research, the outdoors, as a place, has a special space in preschool education (e.g. Halldén, 2011). It is a space for freedom, where running and wild play are allowed, creating endless opportunities for children to play, but ‘is this teaching?’ Tensions and frictions between policy formulations and the desires create insecurity, ambiguity and/or resistance in relation to being a teacher and teaching in preschool are expressed in the cartography. We discuss these tensions and frictions as chaos below. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) highlight the relation between chaos and territory in the following ‘I growl if anyone enters my territory, I put up placards. Critical distance is a relation based on matters of expression. It is a question of keeping at a distance the forces of chaos knocking at the door’ (319–320). Although the professionalisation that is created through the strengthening of the teaching mission appeals to the teachers as the becoming-professional-desire is active, the chaos also gives rise to movements of territorialisation. The territories feel familiar and comfortable and protect the teachers from the chaos and mark their resistance to the agency of policy as well as the space needed for professional judgement. We followed the lines and movements of territorialisation and de-territorialisation and in addition what these movements produced.

First, we enter three of the territories that emerged when mapping teaching in preschool planning and reflecting practices. The first territory we call The territory of teaching-happens-in-every-situation-and-all-the-time, the second The territory of teaching-takes-children's-interest-as-a-starting-point and the third The territory of preschool-teachers-teach-while-learning-together-with-the-children. After the territories follow the movements of some de-territorialisations, that is, ruptures and reconfigurations of the dominant lines of thinking teaching in preschool. When thinking with Deleuze and Guattari, staying in the arising complexities become important, fighting against reductionism.

There is a constant tendency to seek a ‘reduction’ [...] But this is to content oneself with extracting a pseudoconstant of content, which is no better than extracting a pseudoconstant of expression. Placing-in-variation allows us to avoid these dangers, because it builds a continuum or medium without beginning or end (94).

In the following, the ‘(un)’ construction suggests that a phenomenon is considered a continuum, where all dimensions are continuously acknowledged, not an ‘either/or’. We think of multiple continuums as layers of the territories of teaching, such as (un)place, (un)time, (un)arrangement, (un)knowledge and (un)goal, layers that will be (un)folded in coming sections.

Concluding remarks

The idea of the chartography in this study, in line with Aronsson and Lenz Taguchi (2018), was to make ‘a shift from orthodoxy to multiplicity’ (254) and create encounters to continue to think with, rather than trying to understand and categorise practices (of teaching) and thoughts as good or bad, and instead follow movements of re-/de-territorialisation and constantly ask how and with what teaching functions. This Harawayian staying-with-the-trouble-approach enabled several non-unison stories of teaching to be heard. As noted, tension and friction – and even chaos – are created when changes in policy formulations encounter the desires – the forces of production – that materialise and act in different ways, producing territories of teaching. The three territories laid out in the cartography unfold multiple continuums such as (un)place, (un)time, (un)arrangement, (un)knowledge and (un)goal, showing that layers of the territories exist simultaneously, within the assemblage of teaching, which in itself become a continuum of (un)teaching.

The preschool practitioners in this study are busy navigating policy with a slightly new vocabulary and assumptions about teaching from other school traditions. Place and time for teaching are negotiated to fit the renewed assignment and retain the uniqueness of preschool, trying to cope with fears over schoolification. In addition, arrangements and strategies for teaching beyond traditions are also in movement. According to the national curricula, the mission however is to perform teaching in line with the goals even though it feels uncomfortable since it may reduce children’s agencies and narrow or limit what teaching in preschool education can be. The continuum of (un)arrangements, where teaching is not always necessary for children’s learning, acknowledges children’s ability and curiosity as well as different learning environments. Still, it undervalues teachers’ profession and the possibilities to challenge and tickle children’s desire, engagement and motivation through teaching.

This study shows that the issue of time is tangible; there are many different times for specific activities, among them, teaching. Earlier research has discussed the temporality of education for young children and how to overcome the dominant linear view on time (e.g. da Rosa Riberio, 2023; Westman and Alerby, 2012). The continuum of (un)time unfolded in this study shows how different layers of time coexist – linear and rhizomatic and everything in-between – entangled. Stretching in (un)time is an opportunity to dig deep as well as a risk of standing still and stopping, losing potential within children’s interest.

Olsson et al. (2020) described a development whereby the uniqueness of preschool has gradually decreased and shifted and adapted to other school forms. The territories of teaching that are mapped in this paper give a glimpse of what teaching can be beyond that. Some of the stories are more open-ended than others. The openness, sometimes a crack, like the throwing-out-practice, shows the potentiality for new assemblages of teaching. Colebrook (2017) as well as Malone et al. (2020) and Tesar et al. (2021a; 2021b) argues that we need to think about and conduct education differently, not just by providing answers or using methods that are already known but by instead engaging in creating new worlds through encounters with human and non-human bodies.

Teaching, in both preschool policy and practice, can be seen as constantly becoming or in multiple entanglements with the here and now; the then and before; global trends and local movements; and what is yet to come. Policy changes do not happen in a vacuum but in ongoing entanglement with the world, giving rise to differing policy priorities at different times (Haggerty et al., 2020). Policy affects preschool teachers’ professional identity, preschools’ institutional identity and how teaching should be performed, as well as children’s possibility to be and become both now and in the future. The assemblages of (un)teaching which we entered in this study prompt questions: Who have the legitimacy and power to define what counts as teaching? What kind of place for children, practitioners and the world do we want preschools to be? We also find it important that policymakers acknowledge teachers’ professional judgement concerning how teaching may come in to being in preschool. If learning can take place and shape in a myriad of ways, teaching needs to respond to that.