Opened epistemological and methodical questions:
How to research life-living events in preschool and ongoing children's participation and creation in life and education?
How can Bergsonian method of intuition help in such endeavour?
"Lifeful pedagogy and research - Children's participation in ECE
Theorethical and empirical ground of the research project
The purpose of my PhD research project is to rethink and reinvent young children's participation in education, both in theory and practice.
Children’s participation is recognized as a child right and an important principle of quality practice in early childhood education. However, despite all existing politics and polices promoting participation, research shows that young children’s influence in their everyday life and education is still very limited (Bea, 2009; Chan, 2010). The reason could be, as different authors claim, that children’s participation is a complex pedagogical, political and ethical issue that is in need of further theorizing and challenging dominant assumptions and practices (Thomas & Percy Smith, 2010).
The notion of children’s participation is often about giving children an opportunity to have a say about their everyday life and education in preschool, reflect upon their previous experiences and/or suggest how they would like their future experiences to be. Efforts are made to arrange situations for children’s participation, usually within the framework proposed by adults, and children are invited to express their views and choose among given opportunities. The main problem with such approach is that it cuts off participation from ongoing relational experiences that children are a part. It considers subject(s) as somehow outside of their experience, looking upon it and projecting it, as it could be predicted and controlled. ‘Agency’ that is closely related to the concept of children’s participation is considered as it belongs to an individual who shapes her experiences. But as living human beings, we are never separate entities. In life-living, there is no position that can enable us to be outside of ongoing experiences in relation with other beings and the world,
In this project, I try to shift the perspective and aproach children’s participation as taking part in life-living events in preschool, in relations between children, teachers and the world, focused on joint learning and co-creating knowledge, culture and values. To make such a theoretical twist, I build on two main theoretical sources - pedagogical ideas of Yugoslavian scholar Aleksandra Marjanović (1926-1986) and philosophy of French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941).
Open education - creative participation in life-living and learning
In the project I start from the notion of open education, developed by Marjanović (1987), as an antithesis to "institutionalized closed system of education", in which education is seen as a social intervention guided by predefined objectives and expected outcomes.
Open education can be seen as a paradigm and vision of education that values life in its complexity, relationality and creativity; in which participation in shared life-living is seen as a source of learning that happens in encounters between children, adults and the world. Open education is open to its surroundings, various forms of life and culture; open to put the world and life into question, and above all, open to children - their ways of being, thinking and acting in the world, and to the questions that they pose to life.
Open education aims to nurture creative force of education. Marjanović starts from the notion of creativity as capacity of life and particularly human life. Children has an advantage when it comes to creativity, as adults are already, to a great extent, socialized in certain ways of being, thinking and acting in life. To creatively participate in education is to create new relations – not impose existing ideas onto reality, but rather to develop new ideas within reality. Play and exploration can be examples of such participation – as they both happen in movement between reality and imagination, freedom and limitations, being present in the world and representing the world (Marjanović, 1987). Art is also a clear example of such practice.