Minor (il)literate artworks: Inventive processes of biliteracy and the role of expertise in early childhood bilingual education

Abstract

This article explores material-semiotic movements of literacy and the collective potentials of an estranged relationship to language in early childhood bilingual education. It engages three different situations from a bilingual, Spanish-Swedish early childhood institution in Sweden with notions of a minor literature, as it appears in Deleuze and Guattari’s writings. This engagement puts forward the material presences of language as well as the creativity of what could be called an (il)literate expertise: balancing and experimenting on the cutting edge between things and propositions. This involves an intensive, deterritorializing treatment of language, a “becoming minor” with language in passionate, sensual, experimenting ways, rather than reproducing a standard, already known version of language. The discussion highlights the inventive processes of biliteracy as well as the need to differentiate the notion of expertise in early childhood bilingual education.

Introduction

In the beginning, when I was a stranger who was to master estrangement, I threw myself over the new language like a starving dog on a juicy piece of meat. I ate up Swedish. I filled my mouth with words, chewed them, and swallowed them. […] I took some words in my mouth like chocolates. […] I fell altogether flat on the monosyllables of Swedish nature. As a writer, I have never been freer than in these first poems, when writing was not bound by banalities like meaning, signification and intention. But it is only once in a lifetime one can write that way. (Kallifatides, 2001: 51–52; my translation)

This article explores some “juicy” and otherwise material parts of language and literacy, working with three situations from a bilingual early childhood institution in Sweden. The quote from the Greek and Swedish writer Theodor Kallifatides serves the purpose of introducing four important and interrelated features of the text: It speaks of words, as if they were as present and as delicious as food. It describes in affirmative terms the possibilities of not knowing a language. It speaks of the encounter with a new language in terms of mastering estrangement. And it describes the runaway character of this encounter. I have chosen Kallifatides’ quote to introduce this article because, as I will discuss later, all these aspects play important parts in the way language and literacy emerge in this study.

The three situations, around which this article is written, come from my yearlong fieldwork at a bilingual, Spanish-Swedish preschool. When engaging with the video-recordings from this time, it struck me that the children, the teachers, and I frequently had different ways of relating to and approaching language. As a single and simple example, the teachers repeatedly asked questions about the meaning of different words and gave importance to correct translations between the two languages. At the same time, the children appeared very seldom to be concerned with this question and they seemed, for instance, to relate more to the sound of different words or to making new combinations of sounds and new words. When learning about the characteristics of a “minor literature” in Deleuze and Guattari (1986, 1987), I tentatively started to connect to some of the situations of my recordings in terms of potential minor (literate) art pieces. The main reason is the intensive—deterritorializing—usage of language that characterizes a minor literature. An intensive usage of language is non-reproductive and creative. It is concentrated in a material, vital, and self-referential usage, opposed to “all symbolic or even significant or simply signifying usages of it” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986: 19). Thus, it is a language that deterritorializes language as re-presentation and re-territorializes in its fleeting present-ation: the material occurrence of language itself. In other words, intensive language has a capacity to break the circle of meaning as representation and embodiment in favor of sense production (Deleuze, 1990), a retaining of the edges of language, its physical vibrations, its vitality and its occurrence. Sense production differs from other dimensions of language studied within the field of linguistics (denotation, manifestation and signification) that work as circular equivalence or isomorphism, fixation of a subject, as well as unanimous logics and standardization. In a quite different way, as a complementary dimension of language, sense opens the door for experimenting (cf. Olsson, 2009, 2012), for exploring and inventing aspects of language yet unknown.

Deleuze and Guattari (1987) note that the authors of a minor literature, for instance, Franz Kafka, often find themselves in a bilingual situation that provides them with specific, even if not unique, opportunities. I believe that what Kallifatides describes in the initial quote encompasses precisely this opportunity provided by a bilingual situation. In relation to this study, it is worth noting that Kallifatides describes the fugitive character of this opportunity when he writes that this freedom and pleasure of writing is a “once in a lifetime” experience, romanticizing the possibilities of the stranger when meeting a new language. Similarly, Deleuze and Guattari refer to children in general as specifically competent in the intensive usage of language, in making words, “the sense of which is only vaguely felt,” vibrate around themselves (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986: 21). As discussed by Hickey-Moody (2013), Deleuze’s and Deleuze and Guattari’s writings on children are in a way integrally conservative of a romanticizing picture of childhood as a stage of life. There are obvious problems with idealizing both the child and the stranger, since this clouds the vision for the vulnerability and difficulties of these positions. At the same time, emphasizing childhood or estrangement/bilingualism as becomings is also helpful in “that it provides tools for thinking about subjectivity as collective and childhood [as well as estrangement/bilingualism] as non-teleological” (Hickey-Moody, 2013: 281). If being a child or a stranger is a fugitive stage of life with specific opportunities, one might ask what specific knowledge or skill it is that a person loses in the process of growing up or learning a language/conquering estrangement. Treating childhood as well as estrangement/bilingualism not as a matter of age or cultural/linguistic competence but rather as omnipresent possibilities and collective potentials of minoritarian becomings opens the door for related, but somewhat different, questions that might be useful in discussing possibilities and challenges of early bilingual education.

In this article, I engage three situations from my fieldwork with Deleuzio-Guattarian writings on a minor literature, weaving them together and producing them as minor (il)literate artworks. By doing so, the aim is to explore material-semiotic movements of literacy and to discuss the collective potentials of “becoming minor/child/stranger” in early bilingual education. The term artworks is employed in the article as a means of valuing variation, creativity, experimentation, and inventiveness in here and now processes of language and literacy in their own right, rather than by means of mere steps toward future linguistic goals in terms of standardized or adult-like versions.

Bilingual children and education

Apart from a deterritorializing, intensive usage of language, Deleuze and Guattari (1986: 18) describe two other main characteristics of a minor literature: the connection of the individual to a political immediacy and the collective assemblage of enunciation. A minor literature is that which a minority constructs within a major language (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986: 16). The notion of minority is not to be understood here as a minority group in terms of numbers or identity and has little to do with minority languages. Rather, it is an unprivileged, non-standard position in terms of power and norms. Thus, a minor literature is an inventive deviation from, within or with a standard language. It always emerges in a creative process of becoming that is made possible through the tension between the standard and the variation. The value of a minor literature approach in early bilingual education is politically related to current conceptions and positioning of both childhood and bilingualism within education. The idea of children as learning subjects in relation to a learning content that they should acquire with the help of an expert teacher is uncontroversial. Children as competent and childhood as valid in its own right have been emphasized, for instance, within childhood sociology (James and Prout, 1997), and this approach has also had a great impact on differentiated attitudes to learning. Nevertheless, the foundational idea of educational systems still encourages a design for the future and a life yet to come. Leaving the obvious, egalitarian, and practical advantages of this notion aside, I will look into some parallel, challenging aspects.

Deleuze and Guattari (1986, 1987) address aspects of power in educational institutions with a specific focus on the role of language. According to the authors, any standardized model of language is not, as one is often led to think, a neutral, unbiased system. Rather, it is a power marker, an expression of domination. In Postulates of linguistics, they underline this political dimension of language and of schooling by stating, “a rule of grammar is a power marker before it is a syntactical marker” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 76). The authors discuss language in relation to a general standard in terms of “the average adult-white-heterosexual-European-male-speaking a standard language.” This general standard is normalized and neutralized as a majoritarian fact, and information is centralized in education around this majoritarian understanding of the world. Nevertheless, there are no individuals or societies that completely conform to the standard, which makes impossible any majoritarian becoming. Becoming is always in a process of continuous variation and therefore always minoritarian. As mentioned above, a minority, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is defined not by numerical power but by subordination, due to deviation from a standard or a norm. Consequently, there is always a tension between the centralization of information by educational faculties and the minoritarian becoming taking place within these faculties. It is by addressing the treatment of this tension that the engagement of the situations in this article with a minor literature arises. “Becoming minor/minoritarian” in Deleuzio-Guattarian writings is a becoming that deviates from the standard, for instance, “becoming woman,” “becoming child,” “becoming bilingual,” “becoming stranger.” Childhood, or “becoming child,” is for Deleuze not a matter of age but rather of fluidity, an omnipresent possibility and collective potential. As expressed by Kohan (2011: 342), becoming child means occupying a revolutionary space of transformation since it is a minoritarian becoming that escapes standardized—majoritarian—models of unification. Below, I will further link these thoughts to notions of literacy and lingualism, or rather (il)literacy and (bi)lingualism, as central concepts for this article.

(Il)literacy

In relation to standardized (adult) models of language and literacy, children constitute a minority, not in terms of numbers but in terms of deviation from the standards. When early childhood education, language, and literacy learning are oriented toward or in line with the (adult) standard, children are expected to develop, acquire, adapt to, or learn the standard. Democratic aspects of this approach are obviously brought up in the argumentation giving all children the same preparation and opportunities for the future (cf. The Swedish National Agency for Education, 2016 [2010]). Nevertheless, there is also reason to believe that a constricted orientation of early education, language, and literacy learning toward standardized models creates a potential blindness and ignorance of the complexities and the variations of the practices in which acquisition of the standard is expected to take place. As argued by Olsson (2012), the accentuated standardization of educational models in recent years, referred to as the standards/accountability movement, tends to narrow down the educational and political focus to what can and will possibly be measured (see also Biesta, 2010; Connell, 2013; Dahlberg and Moss, 2005; Taubman, 2009).

Correspondingly, the discourse on a “literacy crisis” (cf. Colebrook, 2012) and a subsequent need to take action against this crisis have been related by Masny and Cole (2009) to what they phrase as an over-coding of literacy research. In their opinion, a disproportional amount of research has been dedicated to studying how school-based literacy skills (reading, writing and numeracy) are best acquired, in relation to the role that these skills play in the educational process. “Reading comprehension has been over-coded by outside bodies solely interested in the results of reading comprehension, i.e., literacy tests” (Masny and Cole, 2009: 1). These authors argue that the very notion of literacy needs to be reconsidered in order to be able to account for the pluralities and multiple aspects of literacy practices. With similar arguments, Roy (2005) calls for a discussion on the pragmatics of language “that does not quickly collapse into opposing ideas of how language is best acquired” but that sheds new light on language use (p. 100).

The work in this article is encouraged by these and other educational scholars, who engage themselves with extended notions of language and literacy, thus exploring and transforming more traditional understandings (cf. Kress, 1997, 2010; Kuby et al., 2015). Specifically, inspiration is drawn from works that make use of Deleuzian and Deleuzio-Guattarian thinking (Bylund and Björk-Willén, 2015; Dufresne, 2006; Masny, 2006, 2010, 2011; Masny and Cole, 2012; Olsson, 2012, 2013; Riddle, 2014; Roy, 2005). Here, the commitment with a minor literature is especially associated with the concept of illiteracy. As expressed by Colebrook (2012), Deleuze both allows a thought of multiplicity in literacies and is also a theorist of illiteracy, the latter being “a refusal of the letter, an active annihilation of the already inscribed and constituted system” (Colebrook, 2012: x). Engaging with the situations in terms of minor artworks is likewise measured as an engagement with illiteracy. This might perhaps inevitably involve positioning the child as “not yet” in relation to an adult standard for reading and writing skills. But, more importantly, it is a way of approaching variation at the border between literateness and illiterateness. Exploring the tension between the standard and the variation in this article means exploring the possibilities of becoming (il)literate. That would rather include positioning the child as “not yet” and “already” at the same time and childhood not as a stage of life but as a fluidity and inherent in every word (Kohan, 2011 with reference to Lyotard).

(Bi)lingualism

Children as a minority in relation to a majoritarian standard is perhaps even more accentuated when adding the notion of bilingualism. This is related to the fact that bilingualism and multilingualism itself, within many Western nation states, is conceived of as a deviation from a monolingual standard and therefore often treated with a monolingual bias. Bilingualism as bastardization of a monolingual standard fits well with the thought of a minoritarian becoming. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) note that writers of a minor literature, like Kafka, are often in a bilingual situation. Even if bilingualism and multilingualism are conceived of as a perfect example, they are also described by these authors as mere circumstances that create a certain opportunity—an opportunity that can be found elsewhere, like for instance in music, and also within one single language. Nonetheless, the circumstances of a bilingual or multilingual situation provide a specifically opportune opportunity for the treatment of linguistic elements producing continuous variation.

It is important to note how Deleuze and Guattari bring up bilingualism not as an attribute of the individual but as a situation or a circumstance. This advances their writings toward several scholars in interactional sociolinguistics who highlight the bi-/multi-/poly-lingual situation and the acts of languaging forming this situation, rather than studying linguistic systems or individual competences. Besides, the focus on the bilingual situation or circumstances in Deleuze and Guattari is also connected to the collective assemblage of enunciation, which is foundational in the work of these philosophers in general. The collective assemblage of enunciation is an approach to acts and statements as collectively accomplished. The collective assemblage of enunciation is attributed to a machinic assemblage, an intermingling of bodies reacting to one another. Statements as representations of bodies is a dimension of language that falls outside the main interests of these authors. Rather, it is the attributive relationship between statements and bodies that interests them (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 98). Their approach also implies that an exclusive uncovering of any part of an assemblage as either subject or object would be impossible. This complicates the idea of a learning subject who is acquiring content, as mentioned earlier. But furthermore, neither linguistic nor non-linguistic elements can be treated as resources that are used in order to accomplish certain communicative goals. Rather, the collectiveness of the assemblage makes it possible to pull into the same line of variation both linguistic and non-linguistic elements, both bodies and statements. What is more, a minor literature, in its intensive and vital treatment of language, also disturbs an impenetrable boundary between the material and the linguistic. In this article, I work with bilingual situations of early childhood education in exploring this boundary between things and propositions as a means of grasping material-semiotic movements of literacy. This is an affirmative approach in that it sees the deviation from the standard that the bilingual situation potentially produces as a specific opportunity: an opportunity, in this case, for studying intensive treatments of language and a minor biliteracy.

Exploring moments

The explorative writing around the situations is a mutual practical-theoretical engagement that draws on transcendental empiricism (Colebrook, 2002; Coleman and Ringrose, 2013; Deleuze and Guattari, 1994). It is an inventive methodology (Lury and Wakeford, 2012) in that I use Deleuze and Guattari’s works on a minor literature and related concepts to explore the situations in which children and teachers are involved. At the same time, the situations will be used to investigate the concept of a minor literature and make it work in new ways. The main focus is on ways, dimensions, and treatments of language, working with the first characteristic of a minor literature: deterritorialization. I will return to the other two characteristics, as brought up in the previous section, later in the discussion.

The situations that I have produced as “The dancing moment,” “A moment of lemon pips,” and “The sand day moment” were video-recorded as part of my major ethnographic fieldwork at the specific preschool during 2011–2012. The preschool is a bilingual institution in a major municipality in Sweden that works with a Spanish-Swedish 50%–50% profile and policy. Spanish is one of the 10 most spoken languages in Sweden, and apart from being a native language in generations of migrated families, it has since the 1990s increased popularity as a foreign language among students in primary and secondary school. In daily interaction at the preschool, Spanish and Swedish are used alongside each other as half of the staff speak Swedish and half Spanish in everyday talk with children. The children have diverse linguistic backgrounds, and at the preschool, they can choose to speak Swedish or Spanish or both. Generally, Swedish was the common language in children’s peer interaction. At the time of the study, the children were often encouraged by each teacher to adapt to the teacher’s language, which is in line with a “one-person-one-language” approach to raising bilingual children (Barron-Hauwaert, 2004).

The descriptions of the moments were written in interaction with the recordings of the situations—notes made both during the actual recordings and when watching them afterwards—and with theory. In an attempt to allow for a collectiveness of the moments, I tried to attend to what was happening and what affected me when watching the recordings, rather than exclusively following any participant as a stable entity. What affected me was also among many things related to myself speaking and understanding both languages as well as to me being part of a research practice, and in contrast to the professional teachers, with no immediate practical and educational tasks. The methodology employed is inspired by Deleuze and Guattari’s nomadic philosophy (Coleman and Ringrose, 2013; Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) and by rhizoanalysis as a non-hierarchical approach (Masny, 2016). This opens the door for working with multiplicities of participations in the formation of connections (cf. May, 2005: 133). What is more, the inventive character of Deleuze and Guattari’s work encourages creation rather than reproduction or interpretation. Hence, the approach here is to explore what might come about by placing notions of a minor literature to work with these moments, as a means of reading data with theory and putting concepts to work (Mazzei, 2010).

The first situation, the dancing moment, comes from a nursing room, close to the classroom of the youngest children at the preschool. During the main study that I conducted with all the three different classes at the preschool, the group of the youngest children had their classrooms in the middle of a long corridor, and the other two classes had their classrooms at the two extremes of the premises.

The dancing moment

There are two curtains hanging in front of the camera, and behind them, there is the sound of a song, dancing, and laughter. The teacher is singing a Spanish song while changing diapers. One child lies on the changing table, having eye contact with the teacher. The other two children are dancing around on the floor, following the rhythm of the song. The room is a small space that hits me with its densities. The curtains follow the movements of the two dancing children and their clapping, jumping, and running from one direction to another, pushed by the walls and the doorway that limit their space. The lyrics of the song fly around the room and leave it as quickly as they arrived. But in their movement, they leave tracks, the sounds and the contours of the words emerge with similar materiality and presence, as do the facial expressions of the children. The exaggeration of the syllables of the Spanish word MO-JA-DA in the song stays with me, affecting me as much as the exaggerated laughter and the crumpled grimace of the child facing the camera following directly after the word. And I seem not to be the only one captured by this moment. The teacher, in the middle of the song, realizes she is on the second round of changing the diapers of the child on the table.

But the song ends and the dancing stops. The curtains are still. The room tunes in on a different frequency when the teacher starts explaining the lyrics of the song, translating, or transforming the song into a Swedish version. Where there was the song, there is now a stream of speech filling the room and I react to some deviating pronunciations and transformations, both of some of the contents of the song and of the Swedish language. The children make no explicit remarks on this. One child, while she is keeping eye contact with the teacher, her index fingers are busy covering two drill holes in the wall next to her. The children are occupied with the Swedish word “apa” (monkey) as reiterated in the teacher’s searching for the Spanish word “perezoso” (sloth). One child points to a picture of a monkey on the wall. The teacher objects that even if that is also a monkey, it is not the specific kind of monkey that the song tells about. All the diapers are changed and apparently it is time to go back to the others. When the teacher opens the door, children go on fours back to their classroom. The teacher asks them whether they are dogs.

Performance on the edges

Most of the recordings that I made at the preschool were in bigger spaces, like the various classrooms or even outdoor spaces. In relation to those, this recording from the nursing room emerges as particularly condensed. For me, standing with the camera outside the doorway, the dancing moment struck me as being overwhelmingly dense or materially intense. The Dancing moment encompasses the sense dimension of language, the potential, discussed by Deleuze and Guattari (1986), of language to remove itself from symbolism and representation and instead pulsate around the materiality of expression itself. This is most easily described by focusing for a moment on the song or rather the singing of the song.

The fact that the teacher first sings the song, in the first phase of the moment, and then switches to explaining the song, in the second phase, is an opening that helps to address two different dimensions of language. Denotation of the lyrics—which is connected to representation and embodiment of external word meanings—does not emerge as an aspect of language in the first phase. Rather, what is current in singing the song are the physical vibrations of the words, their sounds, and the rhythm with which they are spelled out. The children seem to attach their movements to this very material presence of language as, at the same time, they relate to the physical artifacts that surround them like the curtains sweeping when the air blows around and between the children’s bodies; the walls, pushing the children from one side of the room to the other and together with the doorway making up the limited space of both sounds and movements; the floor that lets the feet take off, stomping, jumping, slithering, and spinning. It looks as though dancing is being created right in the middle of these two presences, between the things or the bodies in the room and the propositions or the expressions of the song. Deleuze (1990) writes, “everything happens at the boundary between things and proposition” (p. 8). This “everything” that happens where bodies and language are at once separated and united is what Deleuze describes as a sense-event, where the event is sense itself. The event occurs in a state of affairs and the sense is inherent in the proposition but these two, sense and event, are the same entity (Deleuze, 1990: 182). Thus, the children’s dancing in this moment could be understood both as the intangible event attributed to the bodies present and as the expressed sense, that which is made possible by the propositions of the song. The sense of the word “MO-JA-DA” in the song is expressed in the paused movement in one of the children’s dancing, his laughter and grimace as he hears it. It is the actualization of the word, its sounds and its effects.

The way the event is gripped in the dancing moment could be expressed as minoritarian becomings. The song sweeps into the room with the teacher singing its lyrics. In this process, the room fades from being a nursery room, and emerges as a stage for performance, where the teacher is a singer and the children are dancers. The song is actualized in the room through textual and extra-textual encounters, creating it differently as a variation of its standard and parallel to its meanings. It is a deterritorializing treatment of the song that makes the whole room vibrate and become with a new intensity.

But what happens with these vibrations, this intensive treatment of language, when the singing stops? When the teacher starts explaining the lyrics, the room takes on another rhythm and velocity. When there is no song, there is no dancing. Instead, the children’s bodies are still listening quietly to the voice of the teacher in her transformation of the Spanish song into a Swedish version. By doing so, the teacher introduces not only another language but, perhaps more importantly, another dimension of language, giving sense to the lyrics through external representation. The children keep linking to material presences in the room: the fingers on the drill holes in the wall, the eye contact with the teacher speaking; however, they also relate to the external dimension, although in a quite special way. While I, watching the situation, stay occupied with the (external) transformation of a sloth into a monkey, the children pull the Swedish word for monkey from the stream of speech of the teacher into the room by relating it to the picture of a monkey on the wall. And while the teacher gets stuck in her explanations about monkeys and different kinds of monkeys, the children go on all fours on the floor, perhaps playing monkeys, or sloths or, as the teacher interprets it, dogs.

Thus, it seems as if the children continue in the middle, balancing on or mastering the boundary line between things and proposition and producing sense as event. Perhaps it is ignorance (?) of the inscribed systems of the lexical meaning of words and equivalents across the two languages—which might be connected to illiteracy (cf. Colebrook, 2012)—that supports this dimension of sense production. The children just move on, connecting and making new attachments, in a continuous, collective, and inventive process. However, it does not seem right to say that the children completely ignore other dimensions of language. They do relate to them as well. But they avoid getting stuck in “banalities like meaning, signification and intention” as Kallifatides (2001) put it, and rather move on by living the existence of language in intense material-semiotic movements: a minoritarian becoming. I would like to express this specific and collective skill in terms of (il)literate expertise. Rather than limiting itself to what is already known (perhaps by others), the (il)literate expert simultaneously elaborates on the unsure. Balancing on the boundary line between things and propositions, this dancing piece of life emerges as a real (il)literate artwork.

The second situation, a moment of lemon pips, is from another class where a group of children are about to have lunch.

A moment of lemon pips

A yellow cloth with white dots on it covers the table that gathers six children around it. They are waiting for their teacher to bring them lunch. The first thing to appear in the middle of the table, which the camera is focused on, is a green plastic cup filled with slices of lemon that directly capture the children’s attention. “Det där är citrooon” (That’s lemon) one child says in Swedish. Other children affirm and repeatedly say they love it.

Later on, the teacher states in Spanish that anyone who wants lemon can take some. All the children want and take a slice each. “A mí me gusta el jugo, así” (I like the juice, like this), one girl says in Spanish, slurping the juice noisily from her slice. When watching the film, I focus on her fingers, which pick out the pips from the slice and put them on an empty part of her plate. When she tells her mates not to eat the pips because you can’t eat pips, she uses an expression that I have never heard before, “pepparna.” The gentle reaction to that word from the teacher focuses on what one can or cannot say. She nicely invites children to conclude with her that in Swedish one says “kärnor” and in Spanish the same thing, the pips, are called “pepas.”

A third child goes with the teacher’s flow and continues to focus on what one can say when she says out loud that she has actually met someone who says “stjärna” instead of “kärna” (two phonetically almost identical Swedish words despite the different initial consonant sound and spelling). The teacher explains the difference in meaning between these words. While “stjärna,” she states, refers to the stars that are up there in the sky, “kärna” is used for the pips that lemons, oranges, and apples have. The girl directly objects to the last one, “la manzana NO” (NOT the apple), she says in Spanish.

During the talking, more hands, fingers, and eyes get busy with picking out the lemon pips from the slices. The conversation revolves continuously around food, mostly on what one can and cannot eat, and what one likes. One child’s spelling out loud of the Swedish word “laktos” (lactose) coincides with another child saying “citron” (lemon), and a third one talking about “sås” (sauce). A fourth child then comes up with a new expression, “citrås” (~lemauce) with a smile on his face.

The teacher asks children what they are eating, encouraging them to verbalize the dish they have on their plate. Some children answer potatoes and fish, using Swedish words and translate into Spanish when asked to do so. One of the girls, with her hands plucking with the lemon slice, answers that she is eating lemon.

She puts her finger through the empty pip holes in the slice. “Jag har tagit av alla såna här” (I have taken off all of these) she says in Swedish. The teacher repeatedly corrects her behavior in Spanish, telling her to eat and not to put her fingers in the food. Another child picks up his slice of lemon with his hands. The conversation turns in to speaking about the smell of lemon. The children come up with suggestions: It smells like foot. It smells like … It smells like juice. It smells like bread. It smells like foot.

Between eating and speaking

The moment of the lemon pips is just one of many mealtime situations that I joined during my time at the preschool. Several typical aspects of fostering young children’s behavior can be related here. What does one eat and how does one eat properly? What are the correct manners? What does one do when eating? What does one talk about? In this moment, all these questions are relevant, but they are also interrelated with kindred issues, for example, what one enjoys eating and what one can or, for instance, due to allergy, cannot eat. Furthermore, the bilingual situation leads to questions like what different aliments are called and what one can and cannot say in different languages. Proper manners are connected with proper language.

This moment applies to the close connection between eating and speaking as elaborated on by Deleuze and Guattari (1986, 1987). Is it more serious, the authors ask, to speak of food or to eat words? “Pepparna,” according to the child saying the word, is something that you cannot eat. But the reaction of the teacher is that it is something you cannot say. Nevertheless, the word was pronounced.

For Deleuze and Guattari (1986: 19), speaking involves a deterritorialization of the mouth, the tongue, and the teeth, since their territory is often to be found in food. This also indicates a very close material/physical connection and perhaps even competition between eating and speaking, as the authors equate speaking with fasting. Possibly, this is where language transforms into something material, present or even sensory, like food. Language, in deterritorializing the mouth, the tongue, and the teeth, re-territorializes in sense. “Ceasing to be the organ of one of the senses, it becomes an instrument of sense” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 99).

The relation between sense and the senses is of specific interest in the moment of the lemon pips. Children taste the lemon slice when slurping its juice. They feel the lemon when they pick out the pips and put their fingers through the empty pip holes. The visual factor is also present in the yellow color of the fruit, perhaps even emphasized by the yellow cloth on the table. The sounds of words are picked up on, for instance, in the different Swedish words “kärna” and “stjärna,” and the moment ends with a conversation about smell. Does lemon smell like foot or bread?

The intermingling of bodies and senses gives way to an inventive and intensive treatment of language in a sensory-material way. A striking example is the simultaneous saying of the words lactose, lemon, and sauce from three different children. On hearing the three voices and the three words together, one of the boys merges them into the new word “citrås” and smiles at his invention. “Citrås” could be labeled a nonsense word due to its lack of an obvious external reference. Deleuze and Guattari describe the relationship between nonsense and sense in that nonsense words are words that tell their own sense. They are self-referential. As a matter of fact, all words tell their own sense in that sense is always continuously produced through nonsense. However, nonsense words allow seeing this much more clearly since nonsense is not bound by signification and predefined meanings. Thus, nonsense helps to listen to a parallel process of sense production, besides meaning making (cf. Roy, 2005). Production of sense here is a sensory involvement with language, playing a part in a constant becoming with the world. There is a sensual relationship between children and language similar, even if not identical, to the very physical relationship between children and the food they are eating. Deleuze and Guattari take the example that when pronouncing the word “carrot,” a carrot passes through the mouth. Similarly, “citrås” passes through the mouth of the boy when he says this word and it seems as if it is a pleasant experience.

What and how does one eat and what and how does one speak? In this moment, the children obviously deviate from the desired behavior, the correct manners of both eating and speaking. The teacher tells the children not to play with their food. However, they keep using their hands plucking with the lemon slices. Similarly, the teacher reacts to the word “pepparna” by attending not to the word itself but to its supposed external reference point, the pips. And drawing on standardized circles of meaning and signification (denotation?), she concludes that the expression is unclear since it is not the word “pepas” in Spanish or the word “kärnorna” in Swedish. Perhaps too occupied with what is right and wrong, the teacher does not attend to the parallel process of sense production and the inventiveness of the word “pepparna” that emerges in the middle.

This “in the middle” invites consideration of the encounter of Spanish and Swedish expression provided by the bilingual situation. At the same time, the expression also appeals to the “in the middle” of food and language, of eating and speaking provided by the same situation. To grasp the sense-event of “pepparna,” I focus on the boundary line where it happens. In so doing, understanding pepparna as referring to the pips needs, at least momentarily, to be left aside. Rather, the relationship between pepparna and the pips is attributive in a process of becoming. In this process, the children both speak of food and eat words. A girl speaks of pips, but in doing so, what passes through her mouth is pepparna. Language is pulled into a becoming with the world that is sense productive in its sensuality. Children are involved with the touch, the sight, the smell of the lemon slices and their pips. Simultaneously, the sensuality, the taste, and the sound of pepparna as it appears are attributed (incorporeally) to the bodies present. This sensory relationship is mutual. It involves the corporeal, almost tangible aspects of language, but it also involves the production of sense as event. The event subsides in language but happens to bodies (Deleuze, 1990). This is why language and food are not all the same but there is this specific dimension of language—the sense/event—that emerges at the boundary between food and language and that enables a transformation of words into something as adhesive and experiential as food.

The sound aspects of language are also productive in the connection of the Swedish word “kärna” as brought into the conversation by the teacher, and the similar “stjärna” as phonetically associated by one of the girls. This is yet another example of how the teacher and the children seem to be working in different, but overlapping segments, with different but overlapping dimensions of language. The teacher seems preoccupied with the standardized, lexical meanings of words between Spanish and Swedish. The children, although they may of course also be paying attention to these word meanings, are explicitly occupied with continuously connecting to the sensory presences of language itself. The similar sounds of pips and stars in Swedish language encourage their connection. However, the external reference point of the stars “that are up there in the sky” is introduced by the teacher who keeps connecting to and explaining the external meaning of words. Slight differently, when the girl associates with the word “stjärna,” she only says that she knows of someone who says “stjärna” when someone else says “kärna.” Thus, she further extends the possibilities of what can actually be said (pepparna—kärna—pepas—stjärna) and orients with the standard toward variation.

The moment of the lemon pips allows grasping children’s orientation toward variation, multiplicities, and intensities of language as they appear in sensual relations at the boundary line between eating and speaking. These are material-semiotic movements, constitutive of a minoritarian becoming in the deviation from both desired table manners and standardized language. In fact, the children could be understood in this moment to be minor lemonade artists, cooking language(s) and lemons together, tasting, smelling, and otherwise experiencing this drink with all the senses without any hesitation over the acidulous stickiness or sugary adhesiveness of this involvement. This is not to say that table manners and standardized language should be abandoned. Rather, this is an incentive to experience the existence and explore the possibilities of parallel dimensions of language, the possibilities of invention through (il)literate expertise.

The third moment is from another mealtime that is about to end.

The sand day moment

It is after lunch and the teacher says in Spanish that soon they will go outdoors, but first “hay un pedacito de melón” (there is a piece of melon) for everyone. The children around the table immediately pick up the fruit expression, creating a rhythmic chant “de me-lón, nam nam nam, de me-lón, nam nam nam, de me-lón,” at the same time moving their bodies in time with the same rhythm.

The children are enthusiastic about getting melon for dessert, but what sort of melon is it? Using Swedish words, the children come up with two different suggestions: “vattenmelon” (watermelon) and “honungsmelon” (honeydew). “No, es solamente melón” (No, it’s only melon) the teacher answers in Spanish. “No hay sandía” (There is no watermelon). When the children insist on knowing whether or not it is honeydew, the teacher shrugs her shoulders and says it might be. She stands up and leaves the room to go and get the melon.

The children discuss the pronunciation of the word melon, exaggerating the Swedish pronunciation by calling it “melOOOn, melOOOn.” So how did the teacher say it? One of the children says she heard “vattenmelón melón,” with the Spanish pronunciation in the ending.

In Spanish, it (watermelon) is called sandía, the teacher says when she comes back. One child exclaims in an appalled voice “SANDía!” and another one continues “SANDía! oh vad äck-” (SANDía! oh how disgust-). “Det är nästan som sand” (It’s almost like sand) she says in Swedish. The teacher insists that they are not getting any watermelon today, that there is only melon. But a third child continues focusing on new possibilities of this word. “Do you know what sandía means?” he asks his mates in Swedish. That it is “sanddag” [sand day]. Other children agree and the first child, the one who was first appalled by the word, stands up and leans out of the window, calmly reaffirming that yes, today is sand day.

From presence to sense

Sand day, in this moment, plays the role of an atypical expression which, in the words of Deleuze and Guattari (1987), “constitutes a cutting edge of deterritorialization of language” (p. 99). Sand day emerges here as a produce of this moment or, in my argumentation, as an artwork. But the artwork also includes its procedure. At the beginning of the moment, the children immediately attach their bodies to the expression “melón” in the teacher’s announcement. They connect to the expression, rhythmically, but they also associate to its content, affirmatively yum-yumming with the same rhythm. Deleuze and Guattari discuss content and expression as two different aspects of pragmatics that join on the same line of variation (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 98). They argue for a treatment of both linguistic and non-linguistic variables in the same fashion, which allows speaking of a form of content as well as of a body of expression. The procedure of sand day enables grasping such a treatment as it appears as a swinging pendulum.

The affirmative yum-yum arrives at an interrogation of the sort of melon: What specific taste are they about to experience? Is it watermelon or is it honeydew? The presentation (presence) of different expressions in Swedish and Spanish here makes the absence of the body of the fruit in the room suddenly very awkward. The prefixed notions created by the Swedish propositions introduce water and honey, as possible attributes of the melon. There is an absence of a similar juxtaposition of melon with any of these attributes in the Spanish propositions applied by the teacher, as is also the case in standard Spanish. While the prefix water is repeatedly related to the Spanish expression “sandía,” honey is instead repeatedly linked to a negation and “only melon.” Possibly, as the teacher concludes might be the case, honeydew and “only melon” function as embodiments of the same fruit. However, denotation here is not a dimension of language that helps to sort things out and arrive at a mutual agreement. The nonappearance of the body of the fruit is too intrusive.

So the teacher goes to get the melon, while the children return to what is present, the expressions. Paying less attention to prefixes, they elaborate on the different pronunciations of the word melon. In their discussion, the children do not refer to either of the possible pronunciations as being Spanish or Swedish. Those are words I use to describe the sounds of it. Rather, they explore how the different sounds of this expression can sound differently. This also allows the possibility of hearing and saying “vatten-melón,” juxtaposing elements from what from my point of view are different languages, but what could also be expressed as a physical encounter.

When the teacher comes back and once again says “sandía,” the children are upset. It seems as if they are continuing to balance on the fine boundary line between things and propositions where words and things are equally, although not identically, material. The word “sandía” transforms, taking on multiple possibilities that are simultaneously content and expression. Ceasing to be a fruit, although still an eatable entity, SANDía passes through the mouth, producing disgust. Who wants to eat sand? While the teacher keeps insisting that sandía is not being served today, the children have already left their disgust of the sand behind and the expression takes on another possible value. Now it has moved on from producing an edible, sandy object to making of this day a “sand day.” Looking out of the window, perhaps, makes it possible to see what such a day looks like.

I include sand day in the words of Deleuze and Guattari when they describe the atypical expression that deterritorializes language. “[I]t causes language to tend toward the limit of its elements, forms or notions, toward a near side or a beyond of language.” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 99). The atypical expression of sand day is a dynamic variation of semantic, phonological, and morphological variables that cut between languages. Yet, these linguistic elements bring into the same line of variation the material presences in the room. The sense-event of a sand day subsides in the word, but it happens to the present bodies, producing disgust, questions, interest, movement, and contemplation. Once again, it is notable how the children and teacher seem to navigate in different but overlapping segments. While the teacher insists that there is no sandía today by fixing its already known relationship to an absent fruit, the children interrupt the logic of the state of affairs, making sense of sandía differently as an (il)literate minor artwork.

Discussion

Using concepts related to a minor literature in writings of Deleuze and Guattari, I have worked with the three moments of dancing, lemon pips, and a sand day highlighting an intensive engagement with language and a treatment of the presence of words in the same sensual fashion as with other presences, like drill holes, pips, or melon. I have described children as balancing on and penetrating the cutting edge between things and propositions and this “in the middle” experience as creative in sense production. Moreover, I have pointed out how teachers and children sometimes seem to be navigating with different but overlapping dimensions of language. The teachers in these moments engage to a greater extent with external reference points and predefined circles of meaning and signification, and they seem to be oriented toward standardized language. The children also relate to this standard, but they do so in what seems to be a looser way, without getting stuck with the standard. Instead, they deterritorialize language, setting the standard in variation. In doing so, they not only experiment with the presences of linguistic elements from two different languages, but they also bring non-linguistic elements into the same line of inventive variation and material-semiotic movements. I have called this deterritorializing, minoritarian engagement and becoming with language an (il)literate expertise in which children appear as high-level dance performers, lemonade makers, and verbal creators.

When discussing the work with early childhood language and literacy in general and bilingualism specifically, I will briefly refer to Reyes (2006), who reviews the term “emergent biliteracy.” In her own definition of the concept, she describes it as “the ongoing, dynamic development of concepts and expertise for thinking, listening, speaking, reading and writing in two languages” (Reyes, 2006: 3). In a sociocultural manner, she describes children’s emergent biliteracy as socially constructed and supported by adults as experts. Inspired by this description, I would make a similar reading, although it differs in some important aspects. Emergent biliteracy, as it could be connected to this article, would include concepts and expertise for thinking, listening, speaking, reading, and writing (as well as dancing, eating, and verbally experimenting) in two (or more) languages. I could also agree to consider it an ongoing and dynamic process, even if I would leave the word “development” aside and avoid defining any end of this process. Nevertheless, in a Deleuzio-Guattarian reading and from working with the moments of this article, two important differences emerge: (1) the process is not only one of reproduction but also of invention, which implies (2) a need for a differentiating view of the expertise in early childhood bilingual education. In the situations studied, material-semiotic movements of biliteracy are continuously produced through illiteracy in a collective assemblage of enunciation. In this continuous process, expertise emerges as attributed to the children rather than to adults. And as such, it involves an intensive, deterritorializing treatment, a way of becoming minor with language in passionate, sensual, experimenting ways, rather than attending exclusively to what is (by others) already known.

So what does paying more attention to this dimension of language imply when working with bilingualism and literacy in early childhood education? What it does not imply is that other dimensions of language should be completely abandoned since these are also part of producing specific opportunities. The children obviously relate to standardized notions as well, it is probably impossible not to do so. The argument here is not to restrict but to extend the possibilities of working with language and literacy in early childhood. In the moments studied, it seems as if the bilingual situation both emphasizes and challenges standardized language models. This article approaches this tension affirmatively, seeing it as an opportunity.

To perceive this opportunity, however, requires chasing the runaway character of the child and the stranger inherent in every word or in every moment. I would like to suggest that the freedom and pleasure of language, that Kallifatides (2001) describes in the quote at the beginning of this article as a “once in a lifetime” possibility, is so only as long as the efforts of reconquering this opportunity are abandoned. Once one has learned a standardized version of language well enough to treat it as the only possible, or at least the only right, one, listening to processes of literacies not only as already known but also as yet to become might be a bigger challenge. It probably demands not settling for what is known as right or correct, but to continuously re-occupy non-standardized, previously unknown positions, to be affected by collective possibilities of becoming minor/child/stranger. There is a specific, creative potential in not knowing a language. Thus, the one who wants to call himself or herself an expert needs to continuously seek to become with both the known and the unknown, and the creative, material-semiotic movements between knowing and not knowing.