Children’s Entanglements with scientific Concepts : Embodied Scientific Subjectivity in Preschool emergent Science

This aim of this study is to explore how scientific concepts can takepart in increasing children’s possibilities to act, explore and become. Thestudy takes its point of departure in combining perspectives from emergentscience (Siraj-Blatchford, 2001), new materialism (Barad, 2007; de Freitas& Palmer, 2016), and gender theory (Barad, 2003). The empirical dataconsists of video-recordings and field notes from a field study in a Swedishpreschool in a group of five-year old children. The focus of the field studywas the children as they played and explored without specific guidance from theteachers. This paper considers how scientific concepts can work as creativeplaymates in children’s play (de Freitas and Palmer, 2016) and a video sequencewhere a girl explores together with a swing, gravity and kinetic energy is analysed. During theanalysis, Barad’s (2007) theory of agential realism as well as diffractivemethodology are being used. Early findings show how the swing, scientific concepts andphenomena worked as co-creators – not only of thegirl’s scientific explorations, but also of her capacities and identity construction. For example, byentangling with the matter and forces, she could jump higher and longer thanfrom the ground and become as someone brave and strong. In the paper it will bediscussed how children’sexplorations of/with scientific phenomena,and the mutual processes of (gendered) becoming (Barad, 2007), can materialize (Barad, 2003) in their bodies and minds and in this way co-createchildren’s embodied scientific subjectivities. A contemporary challenge in science education thus becomes to see that“the beauty and pleasure of understanding”, is an ontological question as muchas an epistemological, in which learning and becoming, matter and meaning areof equal importance