Abstract
Toddlers contribute to early childhood education and care (ECEC) environments in unique ways in contrast to older children and adults. In this article, we explore early childhood teachers’ stories about toddlers, thinking, and time. We follow a moment with a toddler’s story told with his fingers, and discuss it through teachers’ stories. Our focus is on what ideas about toddlers, time, and thinking these stories produce, and how these ideas affect toddler’s possibilities to contribute to daily life in ECEC. We use Barad’s concepts spacetimematter and temporal diffraction; and Haraway’s concept Capitalocene and storying, to explore toddlers thinking and time in ECEC. We argue that the dominant concept of time in the Capitalocene can produce thoughtlessness, connected to children and children’s opportunities to participate. Through a process of “storying,” we hope to generate more and maybe different knowledge about toddlers, thinking, and time.
Two toddler fingers, thinking time, and thoughtlessness
Two fingers—belonging to a toddler’s hand begin this article. The two fingers provoked us to ponder young children and
The two fingers that inspired us belong to a toddler in a Norwegian ECEC center, called a “barnehage” which translates as kindergarten. Norwegian kindergartens serve children from 1 to 5 years and are based on a holistic model of learning through play, care, and bildung which takes place both indoors and outdoors. Kindergartens are state subsidized and nearly 85% of all children aged 1–2 year attend for up to 8 hours a day (Statistics Norway, 2020). The Norwegian National Framework Plan for the Content and Tasks of Kindergartens (hereafter the Framework) is process-oriented, emphasizing relationships and creating stimulating play, care, and learning environments (MER, 2017). Children’s right to participate (UN-General-Assembly, 1989) is mandated in the National Law on Kindergartens (MER, 2011) and is highly valued but under researched in ECEC practice. There are no formal requirements for pedagogical content and individual centers are encouraged to shape their programs locally, influenced by local traditions and practices. Thanks to the informal regulations, outside of everyday hygiene, sleep/rest, outdoor play, and nutrition, ECEC teachers in Norway have a great deal of flexibility in terms of how to structure the day and what activities to facilitate. Despite this flexibility and freedom, teachers report feeling pressed for time (Børhaug et al., 2018).
We consider how clock time (connected to ideas of progress, moving forward, modernization, and efficiency) in the Capitalocene (Haraway, 2016) shapes concepts of time in ECEC and in turn affects how children’s thinking appears to teachers—or doesn’t appear. We explore how to make room for
Following Haraway’s (2016: 12–13) call that it matters what stories tell stories, that stories create worlds, and worlds create stories, we use stories to explore toddler thinking time. The stories that matter in this article are inspired by two toddler fingers crawling over a table. Some of the stories are from field-notes, others are shared stories told by teachers working with the youngest in kindergarten. In this article, we hope to poke and prod at our thoughtful and sometimes thoughtless conceptions of toddlers, time, and thinking with the concept of spacetimematter through ongoing story making, as worlding-processes.
The tyranny of time, or “clock” time in ECEC has been a subject in research, with Rose and Whitty (2010: 257) endeavoring to understand and change how “clocked time governing learning, identities, relationships, and curriculum planning” in ECEC-practices limits children’s opportunities for participation, creating a rush to be “on time” (Rose and Whitty, 2010: 264) rather than a curiosity about what teachers and children could do together. Pacini-Ketchabaw (2012: 159) challenges the “clock as tyrant” discourse, exploring the clock as a material-discursive practice. Investigating clocks as embedded in practice, she explores how clocks resonate with teachers and children, and act along with them in daily practices both enabling and limiting what happens. Duhn (2016: 378) questions the understanding of time as linear and what is explained as a “knowable, governable force [. . .] tamed into units that are uniform, measurable and predictable.” Further, she explores time as rhythm, a rhythm that creates differentiations, where the intention is to cut time loose from linearity and causality, and asks if the child can experience time differently, as multiple, and complex (Duhn, 2016: 382). Thinking further with clock-time as seen by Rose and Whitty (2010) and Pacini-Ketchabaw (2012), with Duhn (2016) and time as multiple and complex, and with Barad’s (2007) spacetimemattering, we look to storying as a method to explore thinking and time.
Thinking, thoughtlessness, and time
Arendt (1963) suggests evil flourishes when people stop thinking about what they are doing. Using her observations of the trial of Nazi war criminal Eichmann, Arendt (1963) characterized following rules without thinking and not letting thoughts about what one is doing affect one as
Time in the Capitalocene is also understood through this chain-style, goal oriented thinking. Our memories constitute the “past,” our present experiences the “present” and we project our intentions into an imagined or assumed “future.” Toddlers seem to think and engage with time differently. To engender differences, and explore alternate ways to understand time and thinking, we draw on another concept from physics: diffraction. Diffraction is about difference and new patterns, and is suggested as an alternative to reflection; an alternative that inspires a search for differences instead of the already known (Barad, 2007). Describing temporal diffraction, Barad (2017: 67) explains that “a given entity can be in (a state of) superposition of different times. This means that a given particle can be in a state of indeterminately coexisting at multiple times—for example, yesterday, today, and tomorrow.”
From a quantum physics perspective, there is no final separation of past and present. 1 For Barad (2017), this indeterminacy demands that humans take account of the apparent fact that each history coexists with others and continues to be open to change. In this article, such ideas invite us to speculate as to how toddlers’ opportunities to participate in ECEC may be maximized through teachers engaging with children’s thinking.
In the field of ECEC, knowledge about how children think is primarily based on ideas from developmental psychology, which draws heavily on Piaget’s stage theory that categorizes toddlers as “preoperational” thinkers (Miller, 2011). From a psychological perspective, toddlers are not yet able to manipulate mental ideas to make deductions or solve abstract mental problems through concrete and successive thought processes. In other words, young children are not expert in chain-style thinking, and thus
Barad’s (2007: 181) understanding of time as part of an entanglement of spacetimematter helps us to explore toddler’s thinking and time in Norwegian kindergartens. Spacetimematter describes time as related to space and matter, therefore also related to the body, and flexible, relative, about past, present, here, and now. This time concept does not inspire a speeding-up, linear mode of thinking, but rather an understanding where both the past and future matter as intra-active becoming and where the past is never left behind (Barad, 2007: 181). The thinking concept activated here is as such a combination of these perspectives and Haraway’s (2016) connection to thinking with stories. We follow Haraway together with two toddler fingers further into the article-story.
Storying stories
Haraway (2016: 39) connects thinking-with storytelling, and emphasizes the more than human nature of stories. Considering how broader political structures, nature, past and future hopes are part of our stories is not always easy (Moxnes, 2022), as such stories force more deep thinking about responsibility, our place in the world and our connections to the world. We are inspired by the story about the two toddler fingers, a story from Anna’s field work in a kindergarten years ago, that stuck with her. Through storying, we unfold and investigate, so that storying can continue to work in and inspire the reader to further exploration of ECEC practices. Our aim is to open new ethico-onto-epistemological (Barad, 2007) adventures that can present surprises about what else is going on in ECEC practices. Connecting ethics to ontology and epistemology, is understood as a constant scrutinizing of how knowledge is produced and how we as researchers are responsible for how we spin new entanglements with the world (Barad, 2007: 185).
To get closer to ideas of the Capitalocene that affect perceptions of time, thinking and toddlers, we contacted several kindergartens in our community, asking teachers to share experiences and thoughts about toddlers, thinking and time with us. We informed them about the project and told the story about the two toddler fingers. Due to the ongoing Covid-pandemic, few teachers were available. We are grateful that three teachers agreed to meet-up with Anna to share their thoughts and memories of practice with toddlers. All three teachers are educated kindergarten teachers with a Bachelor degree, and have more than 10 years experience with toddler groups. One of the teachers agreed at short notice to replace another who was sick. This teacher did not have the same volume of time to think about our subject matter and her experiences with it as the two others. Two of the informal conversations took place as walks in the participant’s neighborhood, and one in the kindergarten. The idea was to invite different environments to play a part in our data collection process. Anna wrote field notes after her talks with the teachers and shared and discussed them with Teresa. Together, we were in search of “sticky stories” (Moxnes, 2022; Moxnes and Osgood, 2018). Nestled in teachers’ thoughts and recollections were some stories that stuck to us and became sticky stories or moments we had to continue to think with and bring into the article (Aslanian and Moxnes, 2020; Moxnes and Osgood, 2018). Our memories, histories, and experiences as researchers in the field, talking with children and teachers, the teacher’s stories, our stories, theories, and philosophies all work together as the research materials of this article, hopefully creating possibilities for new stories about toddlers, time, and thinking.
Time to think with two toddler fingers: Or what toddlers’ thinking does in ECEC
As promised, two toddler fingers from Anna’s field work will now begin our storying:
The finger-game (or bodily reply) came about 25 minutes after the question was asked. This happening “stuck” to us and stirred our curiosity. Why did Anna get a reply at all to her silly question? How seriously do children take our questions? Do we take children’s serious engagement with us seriously enough? The “late” reply made us wonder if we may have missed replies from children in the past, and if so, what opportunities to participate have we and children missed in our practice as teachers? We felt ourselves stuck in thoughtlessness, the discourse that young children do not think, since their thinking is often not verbalized (Johannesen and Sandvik, 2008: 76). We are concerned with how we may be immersed in the idea of children belonging to a
To challenge our habitual thinking, we try to understand through thinking with temporal diffraction. The idea of a “late” reply becomes a kind of re-writing of the past. While the adult believed the past was a certain way, that the child was disinterested or did not understand the question, the child’s reply demanded a re-writing of the past. The child
This story sticks to us, and brings to light how toddlers’ unexpected replies inspire reflection and create possibilities for the teacher to think and act differently. The non-chain-like responses require a different kind of non-habitual thinking. Teachers described being surprised by late replies, forced to try to remember, to stop, think and reflect in a new and unexpected way, instigated by the toddler’s thinking process. Teachers are “awakened” out of efficiency thinking and linear “clock time,” and are drawn into an awareness of a more flexible (Duhn, 2016), spacetimemattering where the material situation of the present must be connected to the material situation of the past and the future. The response to toddler’s late response is not possible to achieve through “dependence on shopworn ideologies whose automatic thought patterns serve as a buffer against the revelatory power of experience” (McCarthy, 2012). The habits of the Capitalocene are outmaneuvered by toddler’s thinking, offering teachers an experience that shows them a “way out” of habitual, automatic thought patterns, to think differently. Toddler’s thinking can thus educate adults toward new ways of understanding time.
Time as a “wild” commodity in the Capitalocene
In our analysis of the notes taken from conversations with teachers, we were struck by the prevalence of the concept of time as a commodity, under adult control to give or take, but also something teachers felt the need to portion out and control. Teachers described time as something they had to spend and to give children, something they needed to take and something important to regulate through a daily rhythm. This idea of time as a solid commodity is also described in Rose and Whitty’s (2010) study that looks critically at the concept of time as a commodity they produce even while trying to advocate for a less time focused ECEC practice.
One of the teachers we interviewed shared her view of time with us:
In ECEC, following a rhythm is an important part of everyday life (Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2012), positioned as it is around basic human needs and processes, such as eating, sleeping, using the toilet, getting dressed and undressed, playing, and resting. These things must happen in a day for each child in a group. The common needs present themselves as rhythm. Teachers talked about children’s preference for structured time:
We like rhythms, but how do rhythms cloud our ability to see time differently? How can children participate in the development of rhythms and what is going to happen? Pacini-Ketchabaw (2012) describes “following the clock” as a marker of when to begin and stop activities not as an act of thoughtlessness, but as an act of professional awareness, along with the clock, with the clock as co-actor in the enterprise of ECEC practice. Not a speeding-up, linear mode of thinking, but rather an understanding where both the past and future, clock and activity matter as intra-active becoming and where the past is never left behind (Barad, 2007: 181). Children, and teachers work together, and clocks aid our professional practice. However, how do clocks and clock time also obscure unforeseen contributions from children inhabiting spacetimematter?
Time as out of joint
As we showed earlier, stories we received and experienced ourselves involve an understanding of time as rhythmic. The rhythm was described as a way to control and govern the events of the day, as described by Rose and Whitty (2010). Toddlers in the stories contribute with thoughts and actions that did not follow the clock or a discernible rhythm. The contributions to rhythm produced something else, a rhythm where new possibilities emerge (Duhn, 2016). The toddler’s fingers over the table and the bringing of the hat back after several minutes, opened our senses to a different understanding of time as “out of joint,” as described by Barad (2019: 525): “Time is out of joint. Time is diffracted, broken apart, exploded, scattered in multiple directions. Each moment is an infinite multiplicity where other moments are here-now in particular constellations. “Now” is not an infinitesimal slice, but an infinitely rich condensed node in a changing field diffracted across spacetime”
The time toddlers brought into stories moved in ways beyond the foreseeable and regular ticking of the clock and the predictable, measurable distances between hours we rely on in the Capitalocene. We see the children’s later than expected and “bodily” replies to a question to understand time as diffracted. “Now” is a changing and diffracted field (Barad, 2019), and the understanding of “now” is through Barad’s contribution something splitting, diverse and unpredictable. Thinking requires time, time to think deeply or to think differently about something, also for the toddler. Further, such thinking processes act differently or might need input to diffract and again produce new patterns for further thinking (Moxnes and Osgood, 2018). Time to think is needed to be able to find other ways to respond. Barad (2019: 525) points to how moments are here-now, in spacetimematter, that now is a “rich condensed node in a changing field.” Thoughts and bodies, such as how the two fingers acted upon us, will in this sense become matter as new possibilities for future actions. If we imagine what is going on both in the child’s mind and at the same time in the ECEC center, and in the teachers’ minds as a rich condensed node in a changing field, we suggest that the moment for response might go through a “changing field” (Barad, 2019). The child’s thoughts go through changes as it engages in new material circumstances before being ripe to be made explicit, or it might turn, split up, diffract, and scatter in different directions and places. Our thinking as adults stretches from home to the office, the car and back home again, turning over in new ways. If it does so for us, then why not for young children?
According to Moxnes and Osgood (2018: 304), theory and practice might be passed and twirled around to find re-expressions. To find re-expressions can also be about thinking processes, or as one of the teachers said, that the children’s “heads (as mine) are full of other thoughts, and they must finish thinking those thoughts before they can answer me.”
A teacher tells:
Following the idea that time is out of joint (Barad, 2019: 525) the teacher is here grasping some of Barad’s points. The toddler might realize a reply to a question after many hours, maybe for days. If teachers don’t consider that our understanding of time differs, then the teachers may easily miss the toddler’s reply. Without having perceived replies, the toddler may be perceived instead as a less able and important participator (Johannesen and Sandvik, 2008). We, teachers as well as researchers have to educate ourselves to attune to children’s thinking in order to engage with toddlers as equals. As participators we need to challenge the demands and claims that the Capitalocene relentlessly makes.
The Capitalocene as home
Capitalocene, as the time of “the Human Species Act or undifferentiated Capitalism” (Haraway, 2016: 37), is a wake-up call for thinking. Despite the trouble the Capitalocene produces in our lives, it is our home. Thoughtlessness works with the powerful force of following rules and regulations from powerful people and powerful systems (Arendt, 1963). As a society, following rules is a way to live together, to show respect and agreement about what we value. But when following rules replaces thoughtfulness, the habit can become dangerous. Haraway (2016: 36) calls this tendency “commonplace thoughtlessness,” when duties and functions matter more than worldly matters. To resist, we work to disclose how capitalist forces operate in ECEC institutions, and how constructions of time control and produce knowledge about young children’s thinking and daily life in ECEC. As teachers organize and follow up the demands of ECEC in the Capitalocene, time to think about toddler’s thinking, to perceive unplanned thoughts, to be “tuned in” when an unexpected, “late” non-verbal, or verbal reply arrives is threatened.
Revisiting the two finger sticky-story and the connection to the sound of (maybe) a barking dog can be understood as both a challenge to and a product of toddler life in the time of Capitalocene. The Capitalocene refers to the way capitalism dominates the shaping of the world (Braidotti and Hlavajova, 2018). The ideas and forces at work, such as productivity, efficiency, consumption, shape the way we think, the things we use and produce, our very goals in life. These ideas also shape the ways toddlers grow and become, as well as how we relate to and understand toddlers. The sound of a dog barking, for example, that came with the finger movements was a product of a simplified conception of canines in the Capitalocene. At the same time, the fingers and barking created a disturbance and a “way out” from the Capitalocene. We had to understand the 20 or so minutes that had passed since the question was posed as still connected to the moment at hand, as the child made their fingers crawl. Our concern and focus was pulled away from what was planned, and back to
A teacher tells us:
How can teachers think about children’s time to think if outside pressures makes it difficult for them to think themselves? The saying “in the kindergarten we have all day” is a fascinating idea. As the teacher says, this is a well-known phrase, and perhaps an empty, overused phrase. Changes in the Framework (MER, 2017) shows that more expectations for learning, play, relations, and daily life, are described through aims. The more external aims teachers work to meet, the less time is devoted to listening to children and this
Structural factors seem to have created overwhelming discourses on daily practices, dominating the work of the teachers. How does this influence children’s time to think, to try to find out for themselves? It makes us wonder whether ECEC practices make young children thoughtless through the withdrawal of time. Odegard (2021: 74) emphasizes the importance of “slowing down” in ECEC, “to give time for entanglements and deepening of thoughts, ideas, phenomena, time for formulating, time for listening and time for becoming with . . ..” And further, as a contrast to the temporality of developmental logic.
The massive expansion of ECEC centers with nearly full coverage has led to a more competitive and capitalist approach to ECEC in Norway. The percentage of for-profit institutions as opposed to municipality-run centers is increasing (Dahle, 2020). Along with an increase in privatization and for-profit centers, came an exploding interest from different organizations and individuals to sell their pedagogic ideas and learning programs. Often programs for sale build on evidence-based research, primarily with intentions to increase young children’s learning-outcomes and better prepare them for school (Seland, 2020). ECEC—organizations as a mass-produced business, challenges the idea that “in ECEC we have all day.” They do not have all day—expectations and ideas about what it is important to do overshadows interest in what toddlers want to do with time.
Concluding thoughts about future thinking and time
In this article, we have tried to make time to think as a counter discourse to the dominant concept of time and to make room for re-imagining the toddler as thinker. Claiming that it matters how teachers conceptualize toddlers’s thinking and time in relation to toddlers’ thinking, we have speculated as to how teacher’s perceptions of toddler’s thinking and time might affect young children’s abilities to enact agency as relational participants in their own lives and our common worlds. Through storying stories from our research practice and from teachers working with toddlers, we have explored how habitual thoughtlessness and a linear concept of time affects children’s opportunities to think and participate. We found that toddlers’ thinking acted as a cue to stop, slow down, think back, get in touch with our memories of the past as spacetimematter to try to make sense of the present. In other words, toddlers’ thinking inspired moments of diffraction and deep thinking that break the habit of thoughtlessness. Toddlers become our teachers and portals to understanding and becoming with temporal diffraction, time as past, present and future, entangled here and now. Our hope has been to support toddler’s efforts to contribute with their perspectives, and to explore how toddler’s thinking opens opportunities for different ways of worlding together, at home in the Capitalocene. The traces and signals of toddlers thinking time in our stories produced a crack in our habits, and underlines as such the child’s power to demand us to grasp our experiences here, now and before, and resist being governed by thoughtless habits in the future.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.