Storying teaching together and with preschool practitioners: Renegotiating shapes of teaching in preschool education

Abstract

This paper explores and renegotiates the shapes of teaching in preschool education. Therefore, I engage in storytelling drawing from Haraway and create encounters together and with preschool practices and practitioners in connection to a policy change that introduced teaching into the Swedish preschool curriculum. This multiple inquiry complexifies teaching, starting with the preschool practitioners’ questions and concerns about teaching in preschool. Through stories, teaching takes both place and space in preschool education, challenging and confirming ideas and traditions on how to do preschool. Teaching takes multiple shapes and becomes a practice that extends beyond a specific event, encompassing both preparatory planning and subsequent reflections, as well as the continued process, intertwined with global trends of formalising early childhood education. Resisting a simplified story of the purpose of preschool education, I propose storytelling as a way to acknowledge teaching in preschool practices.

In this paper, I explore and renegotiate the shapes of teaching in preschool education. I use storytelling following Haraway and engage with encounters within preschool practices. Drawing from Haraway (2016), stories are situated, multiple and relational; they not only describe the world but also actively participate in its creation, with an awareness of their limitations. This renegotiation takes off in the middle of a planned teaching event:

One child stands behind a small table and proclaims that the store is now open. Three other children enter the imaginary store and begin to search for interesting things to buy. On the shelves, they find fruits, vegetables, ketchup and small cars. Several of the children are particularly interested in a pineapple and negotiate who is entitled to buy it. The practitioner sits on a rolling stool close to the checkout counter, confirming and commenting on what happens in the store, playing-acting-reminding-teaching the children of the different roles in a store, such as cashier and customer. This practice of teaching addresses the possibility of participation for each and every child, both now and in coming plays and activities. When it is time to pay, the children and the practitioner count together to ensure the correct sum, in kapla planks and golden curtain finials. The children then switch roles. After each child has had the opportunity to experience all roles, the practitioner says: ‘Now, we’re closing the store, and you’re free to play.’ The playful borders of teaching materialise.

Openings and closings, motions of bodies, things and numbers collaborate and co-create the teaching events, making children, practitioners and the preschool environment come into being – the teaching takes shape in a place and sometimes creates a space, a space where every child can take part in play and in the world. I will re-turn, with reference to Barad (2014), the opening story later in the paper. Barad (2014: 168) suggests that:

We might imagine re-turning as a multiplicity of processes, such as the kinds earthworms revel in while helping to make compost or otherwise being busy at work and at play: turning the soil over and over /…/ aerating the soil, allowing oxygen in, opening it up and breathing new life into it.

The outline of the paper is as follows: hereafter, I continue to provide openings to/for/with/about teaching in preschool and my methodology. After these openings follow stories of/with/within teaching in preschool practice, and the paper ends with a concluding discussion.

Openings

By presenting three, out of multiple, openings to renegotiating the shapes of teaching in preschool, I employ a way of starting in the middle – where intersections intersect.

Resisting a simplified story

Within the Swedish educational system, preschool serves as the first part and is a non-compulsory education with nearly 86% of children between 1 and 5 years enrolled (Swedish National Agency for Education [SNAE], 2024). In a preschool, there are a myriad and ongoingness of practices, and since the policy change in 2019, in alignment with the Swedish Curriculum for the Preschool (SNAE, 2019), teaching is intended to be one of these practices. Historically, teaching has been been a part of early childhood education in Sweden, with variations in form and content (Lindgren and Söderlind, 2022; Westberg, 2008). Even before the curriculum renewal, the Educational Act (SFS, 2010: 800) had already designated teaching as a part of preschool education for almost a decade.

Teaching is defined for the entire school system in the Educational Act (SFS 2010: 800) 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’ (Section 3; my translation). ¹ According to the preschool curriculum, ‘[t]eaching means stimulating and challenging the children, taking the goals of the curriculum as a starting point and direction’ (SNAE, 2019: 7). Responsible for the teaching, which can be either planned or spontaneous, are the preschool teachers, but other members of the work team also participate. These definitions and formulations from policy documents were the point of entry for the practitioners in this study when we first met during the collaborative inquiry of which this paper is a part. Talking and thinking with Barad (2007), policy documents became performative actors. In the beginning of our collaborative inquiry, prior to what is reported in this paper, we engaged in reflection and planning practices to address the policy changes and the effects on preschool practices and professional roles, starting from the practitioners’ questions ( Frid and Westman, 2024). As we delved deeper, new questions emerged, leading us to continue our inquiry to include practices with children.

The introduction of teaching in the Swedish curriculum can be seen as a part of a global development, which has experienced an increased formalisation of early childhood education (ECE) in the last decades (Fleer and van Oers, 2018; Malone et al., 2020; Moss, 2014; Vandenbroeck et al., 2023). Moss (2014) expresses concerns about the current state and the dominant story, namely, ‘the Story of Quality and High Returns’ where ECE's aim, purpose and practice are ruled by the logics of new public management, resulting in a focus on investments and outcomes. As Moss (2014: 3) highlights, it is argued that ECE can solve a lot of problems and lead to ‘improved education, employment and earnings and reduced social problems’. This future-focused problem-solving potential is used to underscore the importance of ECE, both for the individual child and for society.

Previous studies indicate that attending preschool has several positive effects for children, such as better skills in math and language, fewer infections and mental health problems, higher educational attainment, and higher incomes in adulthood (Public Health Agency of Sweden and Center for Epidemiology and Community Medicine, 2017). What Moss (2014) and Vandenbroeck et al. (2023), among others, see as questionable is not that there are positive effects of ECE, but the idea that education is commodified – treated as a product – and therefore valued and evaluated in economic terms. Commodification of education has affected nations’ priorities within education, since high scores in international tests have become advantages for competing in the global market. Decreasing results on the tests are used to underpin and argue for the need for different actions and changes at the policy level and in teaching at different levels (Landahl, 2020; Vandenbroeck et al., 2023). Accordingly, other aspects of education, such as social and democratic, are not given the same importance.

This restricting frame shapes the expectations for what education and teaching should contribute both nationally and globally. With increasing intensity following the latest policy revisions, practitioners and researchers have grappled with the complexities of teaching in preschool education (Catucci, 2021; Eidevald and Engdahl, 2018a; Hildén, 2021; Nilsson et al., 2018; Olsson et al., 2020; Vallberg Roth et al., 2022). The struggles – and thus the suggestions and approaches – vary depending on each actor's starting point and chosen perspective. Sheridan and Williams (2018) underline the necessity of collaborating with preschool practitioners in research on preschool teaching to ensure the relevance; this study's collaboration was built with that in mind.

Researchers (e.g., Eidevald and Engdahl, 2018a) emphasise that teaching in preschool holds both opportunities and challenges. They express concern that teachers may struggle to capture and follow the children's interests when conducting teaching. However, other researchers, such as Björklund et al. (2018), underscore the necessity of goal-driven teaching, with mathematics as their example, to ensure that children do not miss learning opportunities. These researchers all address concerns about children's well-being, emphasising the importance of being listened to and respected as learning beings. Different theoretical and pedagogical perspectives have been used to formulate didactical approaches, of which play responsive teaching (cf. Pramling et al., 2019), multivocal teaching (cf. Vallberg Roth et al., 2022), and the pedagogy of listening (cf. Andersen et al., 2023) are three prominent ones in recent years.

Practitioners in previous research (Jonsson et al., 2017; Olsson et al., 2020; Vallberg Roth et al., 2022) as well as in the present study are searching for answers to how to conduct teaching in preschool. Moving within the entanglements of this study, an overarching question emerges: ‘Why should there be teaching in preschool at all?’ Due to intonation, this question spreads out differently, as do the responses. Throughout the process of this study, teaching was our shared focus, and it became our shared matter of concern, using the words of Stengers (2010). Accordingly, we shared more than a direction or a focus as we searched beyond finite answers and definitions of what teaching is. We grappled with the ambiguities and acknowledged complexities in what matters to preschool education and to the world.

Entering ethico-onto-epistemological engagements

When I opened the door to the preschool department involved in this study, I met 19 children aged between two and four years, two preschool teachers and one child minder, who were doing preschool. Over a period of seven months, I conducted 21 visits, each lasting between two and seven hours. Additionally, I participated in planning and reflection meetings with the practitioners on five occasions.

Barad (2007: 185) suggests ‘an ethico-onto-epistemology – an appreciation of the intertwining of ethics, knowing, and being’, making ethics extend far beyond formal documents and consents. This implies that ethical responsibility demands a high level of sensitivity throughout the entire research process, something that I have worked with variously. My idea has been to appear as a preschool researcher, both in relation to practitioners and children, although in the beginning, this posed challenges for all involved. I repeatedly engaged in conversations about my presence and the purpose of being at the preschool, both with children and staff, to clarify my roles.

Strategies during this research involved material aspects, such as a nameplate, indoor shoes, practical clothing and more elusive aspects, such as my positioning and my following of ongoing practices. The nameplate, bearing my name and the university logo, served as a visible marker for myself, practitioners, guardians and other visitors, distinguishing my role as not a part of the ordinary staff. However, I wanted to be able to follow what happened both indoors and outdoors; therefore, suitable clothing was needed, making me look like the other adults in the practice.

I engaged with the ongoing process in various ways, depending on what was going on. If there were invitations for me to dance, I danced. On other occasions, I sat in close connection to the situation without actively taking part in the event. When invited by children to play, by lamps to explore, by small critters to stop, or by adults to take a coffee break, I embraced the invitation.

Regarding formal ethics, informed consent was requested from the practitioners and the children's guardians; 16 children out of 19 had guardians who consented. When dividing the children into groups and in my movements and positions, these conditions were considered. Additionally, consent was repeatedly sought from the children, and both verbal and non-verbal rejections, such as moving away or showing a stop hand, were acknowledged as non-consent. This study is part of a broader project that has received ethical approval from the Swedish Ethical Review Authority.

Storytelling following Haraway: In and with networks of practices

Inspired by Haraway (2016: 1), who encourages us not only to stay still with the trouble but also to ‘make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places’, teaching is, in this paper, complexified with and through stories. This is done without ignoring the resistance, uncertainty and ambiguity towards labelling their work as teaching expressed by preschool practitioners, both in this study and previous research (Jonsson et al., 2017; Olsson et al., 2020; Vallberg Roth et al., 2022; Westman and Bergmark, 2014), nor accepting that anything goes.

In approaching the specific preschool practice within this study, small details, such as intonation, blue plastic shoe covers, and sitting down on the floor, became important with respect to my entry into – for me – new and someone else's practices. Keeping in mind that there is no practice ‘like any other’, I align with Stengers (2005: 184), who highlights that:

Approaching a practice then means approaching it as it diverges, that is, feeling its borders, experimenting with the questions which practitioners may accept as relevant, even if they are not their own questions, rather than posing insulting questions that would lead them to mobilise and transform the border into a defence against their outside.

The research created within these encounters is, in itself, a practice. Since I am interested in what happens in these meetings, I have made use of Stengers (2005) tool for thought, an ecology of practices, and directed my focus to ‘the practices’ relations or the network of ‘practices’ relations that emerge’, as expressed by Elkin Postila (2023: 27). I think with Barad (2007) and Stengers (2010), who recognise practices as always in a process of becoming and never fixed, open for humans as well as other materialities to participate in.

In the present study and in line with Stengers (2018) and Elkin Postila (2023), preschool practitioners are regarded as connoisseurs – experts on their specific situated knowledge derived from inhabiting and living their preschool – a regard that aligns with a practice-based approach to educational research that emphasises the importance of working together and with practitioners in collaborations rather than from a distance and on them (cf. Bergmark, 2020; Heron and Reason, 2001).

A multiple inquiry, such as the one presented in this paper, has diverse potentials to transform research practice and practicing, as well as the knowledge and realities produced, and how these are connected to the world (Lenz Taguchi and Elkin Postila, 2023; Lenz Taguchi and Eriksson, 2021; Molloy Murphy et al., 2024). Haraway (2016: 12), with reference to Strathern (1990), states that ‘it matters what ideas we use to think other ideas [with] … It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; … It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.’ This quote underlines the importance of how, who and what are invited and involved in storytelling, including in research, which itself is a storytelling practice. Taylor et al. (2012) argue that we need educational frameworks and theories to think with that go beyond human-centred individualism. Therefore, they suggest engaging in Haraway's bag-lady storytelling – that is, a storytelling practice of ‘putting unexpected partners and irreducible details into a frayed, porous carrier bag’ (Haraway, 2003: 127); as items will fall out, collecting and losing are both part of the storying. In this paper, I use storytelling practices ‘in processes of worlding as a way of getting in the thick of things’, as suggested by Osgood and Andersen (2019: 366).

Collaboration can be built in a variety of modes; this inquiry has been done within the everyday practices of a specific preschool and as an academic text production of writing this paper, all these practices are inevitably collaborative. However, when it comes to writing this paper with the stories, I am solely responsible. The stories are rewritings of my memory notes from my visits, together with transcripts from audio recordings of reflection meetings. Variations of some of the stories were created and plugged in during some of my visits to the preschool, whereas others were created afterwards.

Stories of/with/within teaching

Stories produce knowledge and, therefore, according to Haraway (2016), require messmates – productive forces that take part in stirring up and troubling the ongoing wording practices. As emphasised by Lenz Taguchi and Elkin Postila (2023: 230), ‘a messmate also refers to cultural discourse, ideas, notions, works of art, scientific facts, bodies and agents of matter, and living species of various kinds’. A question arose during a reflection meeting: ‘Which are the specific conditions that needs to be fulfilled in order to classify an event as teaching?’ This question propelled us beyond textual formulations in policy and into the realm of transforming preschool practice. This movement – the becoming of teaching in preschool practice – is where we enter the preschool practice again, on an occasion where children meet in play groups with a practitioner. The play groups met three days a week, one group each day, and were created to be an opportunity for every child to be seen and listened to. They started from the practitioners’ jointly planned invitations to teaching events but did not necessarily end up taking the pre-planned route.

Clay-play teaching

It is an ordinary Tuesday forenoon at the preschool. Most of the children are getting dressed for outdoor play, while one play group of six children stays inside to continue this year's common project, Building Bridges. The theme is designed to be interpreted in two ways: bridges are both the subject, exploring their parts, construction, and building, and a metaphor, as the practitioners aim to build bridges between the children through playful teaching and cooperation. Six children and a preschool practitioner gather around a child-sized table. They are each equipped with a tray and lumps and strings of clay lying in front of them on the table, free to use. The children pull, bang, stack, and connect bits and formations of clay into various shapes and constructions. Hands working with the clay make it more malleable, which is also noticed by the children. The children had earlier been invited to explore the clay with all their senses. These experiences are re-activated in the continued clay play, and a thoughtful practice of noticing–posing questions–teaching emerges.

One child works intensively with the clay to form a tree trunk, but despite the efforts, the trunk fails to stand upright; it slowly bends as the construction is too heavy and lacks support or armour. Meanwhile, the tree-building child continues to explore how the clay can be handled and formed. A conversation spreads about how clay and strength in different constructions are related. The trunk is continuously built and rebuilt, with hands, proposals, curiosity and joy, making the trunk move and grow in different directions, and it is suggested that maybe magic is involved. While watching the video of this event during a reflection meeting, the trunk struggles emerged as a thick moment, brimming with excitement and possibilities, as the clay posed various questions to the children, and to us. The clay became a messmate, not only did it leave the table in a mess, it also messed with the practitioners perceptions of how long the children could stay focused. Revisiting the documentation also prompted practitioners to reflect upon their actions and non-actions, questions and non-questions. They considered questions and proposals not only regarding the specific event under discussion but also in relation to past and upcoming teaching events. The becoming of teaching continued.

In line with Barad's (2014) thinking on re-turns, watching video recordings from teaching events is not about verifying the past; rather, it is about aerating and allowing for alternative perspectives, and stories. Although retrospective practices often encourage self-reflection and questioning of one's doings, they also serve to confirm what works well or feels comfortable, potentially leading individuals to prefer to remain in familiar territories, as previously discussed by Lenz Taguchi (2012, 2023).

Various clay techniques, such as gluing with clay, armouring and adding water, were plugged into the following clay-play-teaching events, creating possibilities for both re-turnings and new explorations, such as delving deeper and reaching higher. Although clay differs from other more fixed materials, it does not have inherent specific qualities ready to be revealed and released; the clay intra-actively takes part in the teaching, together with various actors. In the intra-actions, ‘marks are left on bodies’ (Barad, 2007: 176) and therefore constitute specific patterns in the world; ‘[a]gential intra-actions are casual enactments’ (Barad, 2007: 176). As the clay-play teaching invited shaping and reshaping, being shaped and reshaped, the ongoing process remained in focus, prioritising it over the end product. Lenz Taguchi and Elkin Postila (2023: 237) elaborate on ‘a collaborative and relational art of noticing’, with reference to Tsing (2015), as a way to acknowledge and practice worlding together and with various messmates. Such a practice involves paying attention to how everyday doings, matter, facts and questions, among other entities, are intra-actively connected and affected. Clay-play teaching and other collaborative practices can be places for practising this noticing.

Arranging for teaching, as in providing time and place, plugging-in facts and techniques emerged as malleable teaching strategies that, in line with the curriculum, made the goals serve as ‘a starting point and direction’ (SNAE, 2019: 7) for preschool education, aiming at the development and learning of the children involved. As also discussed by Catucci (2021), this approach leaves leeway to the children's exploration rather than challenging the children in relation to the curriculum goals. Posing open and thought-provoking questions is a strategy for challenging children's knowledge; this appears easier when the goal targets a specific (school) subject than when a goal focuses on more elusive values.

Spacetimemattering

06:30 a.m. Opening, joint for all departments at the preschool

07:30 a.m. Splitting up by department

08:00 a.m. Breakfast: porridge or soured milk and sandwich

08:45 a.m. Getting dressed for outdoor play or staying inside for play group

10:30 a.m. Tidy up, return inside to get undressed

10:50 a.m. Lunch

12:00 p.m. Reading in small groups or napping

01:20 p.m. Tidy up

01:30 p.m. Circle time

02:00 p.m. Sandwich and milk, followed by fruit

02:30 p.m. Outdoor or indoor play

04:30 p.m. The whole preschool stays outdoors or at one department

05:30 p.m. Closing

While exploring and storying the becoming of teaching in preschool practices together with practitioners, children and their surroundings, the slots for each activity were narrow. There was a time for everything; the every-day-the-same timetable aims to create predictability, overview and space for the spontaneous, both in relation to teaching and other parts of education. Planned teaching often takes time during forenoons within the play groups, although the reading after lunch and circle time also have planned content.

Preschool is, in many ways, a place where teaching and other practices are done following routines, traditions and a timetable based on non-movable activities, at least that is how they are treated, such as eating, sleeping and breaks for the practitioners. Davies (2009: 5), drawing on Deleuze, makes a distinction between place and space: ‘whereas place signifies a somewhere that already has an identity, space signals a place that is not fixed, and that is open to multiplicity’. Following this, preschool is also a space where everything is possible; the carpet becomes a lava river, a silver cape makes you a superhero and a play can go on for months. Massey (2005: 9) proposes that ‘[p]erhaps we could imagine space as a simultaneity of stories-so-far’ and underlines that spaces are always in the process of becoming since they are ‘never finished; never closed’. Preschools are, by necessity, both places and spaces, or, as discussed by Lenz Taguchi (2012), drawing from Deleuze and Guattari, spaces and places can be both striated and smooth. Striated spaces have a clear structure that materialises in, for example, furnishing, expectations, desires, proposals and questions. Smooth spaces have a weak infrastructure and are, therefore, free from customary behaviour. As underlined by Lenz Taguchi (2012), it is not a question of either or, for spaces and places are a mixture of both striated and smooth. The point is neither to rank one over the other but to be aware that different spaces produce different possibilities and constraints, to in this case, teaching.

In the curriculum it is stated that, ‘[p]reschool teachers should lead the goal-oriented processes and assume responsibility in teaching for activities and interests that occur spontaneously, everyday activities and procedures in the preschool becoming part of teaching’ (SNAE, 2019: 20). Eating is such a recurring activity at the preschool; eating is also together with other routine situations by the practitioners considered to be full of learning opportunities for the children, in line with the Nordic preschool tradition (Åsén, 2020). A holistic view emphasising that ‘care, development and learning’ (SNAE, 2019: 7) should form a whole is a foundation for preschool education in Sweden. Teaching strategies or didactical choices in relation to routines are seldom discussed by the practitioners in this inquiry, although they continue to address them as possible teaching events, both planned and spontaneous. Big cartons of milk and big pitchers of water tell small hands that self-serving is difficult, almost impossible. Values, such as peace and quiet, and needs for specific children turn the eating situations into units to handle more than opportunities for teaching.

Teaching within preschool places and spaces can be seen as multiple stories, allowing for a variety of practices to unfold across time, place and space. Barad (2007: 181) introduces spacetimemattering to denote how space, time, and matter are intra-connected and co-producing of each other in an entangled way.

Sitting-reading-resting-circle-time teaching

Teaching is often a sitting practice; children are assigned to sit on child-fitted chairs, the edge of rugs, or in typical preschool sofas, and practitioners sit on rolling stools. These stools aim to enhance ergonomics as well as co-work with the flexible-and-ready-to-act expectations there are on preschool practitioners. After lunch, some of the children take a nap, while the rest are divided into two groups for a read-aloud session. The children are given the opportunity to choose books, and the teacher read them aloud. We are invited to sit on a sofa with a discreet bluish pattern. The children sit so close together that even a small motion by the neighbour can be felt. I choose to sit on the floor next to the sofa. Then, through a children's book, our journey began – a beautiful, poetic, and philosophical quest in search of the sister of the moon. None of us, neither children nor adults, has seen the book before; the pictures fascinate and invite numerous questions. We stop to talk about these questions, or difficult words. After a short while, the sofa seems to prickle, and the beautiful pictures and exiting wor(l)ds bounce around rather than connect us listeners and the book. A change of book ensues; a well-known character from a children's cartoon appears in book form. The story was simple and straightforward, the pictures clear, and the children are engaged, guessing what would happen on the next page, really committed. I find myself struggling to keep my eyelids from growing heavy, fighting to stay alert. Before the afternoon sandwich, and just after tidying up, we are invited to sit down again, circle-time-teaching. Counting days until Christmas with the playful help of a building-block-snowman qualifies as maths, singing songs as music, building and constructing as technique. The lack of a round rug made the children move around to see better, and as a result, they obscure some of the other children's views. Noticing this movement expands to a discussion of why circle time is treated as teaching per se; the borders of teaching materialise and take the shape of a circle.

Questions on how far a planning reach or how short an event can be to still be considered teaching were posed when re-turning the teaching events in the reflection meetings. We kept on turning and turning on these border-drawing questions, leaving the idea that there was a single answer. Methodologically, it is a challenge to stay in the complexity that comprises preschool, with a myriad of processes and practices continuously unfolding, while simultaneously attempting to delineate and demarcate teaching practices for further inquiry. While researching teaching situations, this research became a productive knowledge apparatus in itself, drawing from Barad (2007). However, it is impossible to predetermine the outcome, as the apparatus was not built up on the promises of linearity. Apparatuses are ‘boundary-drawing practices’ (Barad, 2007: 140), which in this study keeps producing teaching-non-teaching teaching. Does the read-aloud session, as well as the circle time – which was planned, as it was assigned a specific timeslot, scheduled, had content, more or less well thought-out in advance, and directed by a preschool practitioner – qualify as teaching? As Haraway (1988: 565) underlines, ‘boundaries are very tricky’, simultaneously unstable and productive, rising conflict levels and also possible to challenge.

The practitioners expressed that teaching often did not turn out as planned. The book that, from our adults’ point of view, had a lot to offer did not work to open new wor(l)ds; instead, what seemed to be a poor story made the children literally dive into the book. Different priorities and practices were fighting on a restricted territory, and producing planning equated to scheduling; it was crowded. If the content of the book, rather than the chosen content of the curriculum goals, makes the children engaged, then the reading repose can be used to discuss and highlight situations and/or dilemmas that can occur in children's lives. This might afterwards be connected to the curriculum goals as a confirmation that teaching occurred. Such a post linking to goals has also been observed in previous research (Catucci, 2021), as an outcome of this teaching itself emerges as a goal, regardless of the content.

The bear is sleeping teaching

On a winter's day outside, the children engage with the snow in different ways, digging, shovelling, pulling a sled, sliding down the slope on their bums. Some children are playing a chase game that is getting out of hand, and a practitioner initiates the ‘bear is sleeping’ game, which several children join.

The practitioner actively participates, ensuring that the game remains organised; for example, taking turns in being a bear becomes a part of the game. It is a practice of playing-acting-reminding teaching the children about the different roles in the game. This practice of teaching addresses the possibility of participation for each and every child, both now and in coming plays and activities. Despite the layers of winter clothing, they all express feelings of fright and excitement, acting bearlike and preylike when, with their whole bodies, running, grimacing, roaring. Instead of completely prohibiting hunting activities, the game evolves, allowing more children to participate, and spaces for becoming bears and preys, being hunted, and hunting emerge. The game is repeated over and over again, until it is time to go inside.

Re-turning the opening and closing practices from the store story at the beginning of this paper, and by thinking inside doings with outside doings, teaching becomes very/not/special, as the chosen content takes different forms. When these stories are read together, teaching becomes a practice that extends beyond a specific event, encompassing both the preparatory planning and the subsequent reflections, as well as the continued process. The content for the teaching is participation in aiming for democracy and to give every child an opportunity to succeed in and take part in play. A spontaneously arising teaching event creates a bridge to the indoor and pre-planned store game.

The unplanned characteristics of spontaneous teaching present challenges in both research and preschool practice. Unlike planned teaching, documenting spontaneous teaching was more difficult, resulting in these events receiving less attention during planning and reflection meetings. This made it harder for both the practitioners and me to notice and acknowledge these events as teaching and to identify potential content within them.

Quiet please: Teaching in progress

Directly across from the staff entrance door, nestled in a narrow corner, sits a work desk with a staff computer, and next to that is a printer. A constricted place assigned for practitioners’ planning and reflection in a corridor where children pass on their way to the canteen. This narrowness is repeated.

In the planning and reflection meetings, we sit around a table that barely fits three adults, although we are four, and the table is too small to also fit tablets, calendars and papers needed for the task at hand. Almost finished with the meeting for the day. In the delicate state of wrapping up, someone knocks on the door and asks when we would be done; we lose our momentum. This interruption is caught on the audio recording and transcribed and, therefore, also revisited during our continued process. We are interrupted in our endeavours of grappling with how teaching might be done in preschool education; repeated interruptions become disruptions. After watching a number of video-recorded teaching events, the practitioners’ attention is drawn to the frequent interruptions from the outside – doors swinging open, practical questions posed in the middle of a construction process, or an exciting conversation about how lava from the bottom of the sea becomes the clay now lying in front of us. One of the practitioners suggests a sign paraphrasing those on film sets: ‘Quiet please – Teaching in progress’, as a reminder to everyone that teaching matters.

Teaching matters to both children and practitioners, since it holds possibilities and potentialities for meaningful and collaborative explorations right here, right now, and in the future. The practice of folding and unfolding teaching continues – through repeated demarcations of what teaching is – producing sketches of the foundations for how preschool teaching can be done. Nevertheless, it was until the conversation left the unconfident practice of deciding whether or not a specific activity was a teaching event that it became interesting.

Occasionally, the practitioners mentioned spontaneous teaching events as anecdotes during meetings. To embrace this, I formulated stories of possible teaching events that I noticed. These events were plugged into our discussions towards the end of the project, as it was at this point that we first figured out that and how this storying practice was productive.

Carpe teaching

Teaching is a disruptive force, challenging traditions of preschool education and interrupting children's ongoing play. Teaching is also a vulnerable entity, threatened by time constraints, staff shortages and the relentless tide of interruptions. Teaching is negotiated within preschool practices; however, this does not imply that anything goes, and not everything is or should be teaching.

The practitioners’ search for answers regarding teaching in preschool led to the emergence of further inquiries, rather than definite answers, aligning with Olsson et al.'s (2020: 46) argument that ‘[t]eaching appears rather as a movement that is formed in interaction with children, colleagues and curriculum goals than as something that allows itself to be fixed’ (my translation). The network of local, national and global practices entangles, making preschool education a solution to a variety of challenges in society (Malone et al., 2020; Vandenbroeck et al., 2023). Within preschool education, teaching becomes in different shapes, as multiple and complex stories that go beyond stereotypes borrowed from other school forms, as well as echoing them.

As emphasised by Eidevald and Engdahl (2018b), it is important that policy formulations are negotiated and tailored to suit the uniqueness of preschool education, which entails more than simply adapting to a vocabulary designed for other school forms. To collaborate with preschool practitioners and to acknowledge them as connoisseurs (Elkin Postila, 2023; Stengers, 2018) – as actors that participate in telling and sharing stories of preschool teaching – is to recognise their role in shaping preschool teaching and education. Such collaboration is not only about staying with the trouble but also about making trouble, as encouraged by Haraway (2016). Therefore, I propose storytelling, as a way to acknowledge teaching, specifically spontaneous teaching within preschool practices. As Haraway (2016) expresses, it matters what concepts, ideas and stories that are used to create new stories and thereby new worlds. Let there be multiple stories about and with teaching in preschool, so that preschools can continue to be full of both places and spaces with stories to listened to and told.