STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics) education is currently gaining ground in many parts of the world, particularly in higher stages of the educational system. Foreseeing a development of STEAM policy and research also in the early years, this colloquium seeks to bring questions of gendering processes to the table. The authors aspire to prevent the development of a gender-blind STEAM discourse for early childhood education. Instead, they encourage practitioners and researchers to make use of STEAM education to recognise and transcend gendered norms connected to children’s being and learning in the arts, STEM and STEAM.

This article explores gendered processes in preschool science through Barad's agential realism [2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway. Quantum Physics of the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. London: Duke Universal Press], and as such, the study makes both theoretical and empirical contributions in how it combines perspectives from emergent science [Siraj-Blatchford, J. 2001. Emergent Science and Technology in the Early Years." Paper presented at the XXIII World Congress of OMEP. Santiago, Chile, August 3], new materialism, and gender theory. Empirically, the study makes use of data constructed during a field study in a Swedish preschool with five-year-old children. The focus of the field study was the children's play and explorations together with the preschool environment, during activities not specifically guided by teachers. The analysis highlights how the children's identities and scientific explorations are made possible as well as constrained together with the preschool's material-discursive environment. As such, the study demonstrates how teachers cannot rely on any environment, activity, choice or subject content to be (gender) neutral.

The focus of this study is the co-actings of a 5-year-old girl, a swing, and physical phenomena. The study explores how the swing and physical phenomena worked as co-creators of the girl’s scientific explorations as well as her bodily capacities and identity construction. Empirically, the study makes use of a video sequence generated during a field study in a Swedish preschool with 5-year-old children. The field study focused on the children’s play and explorations together with the preschool environment, during activities not specifically guided by teachers. To conceptualize children’s emergent scientific learning as mutual with their identity construction and as being co-created together with nonhuman agents, the study combines perspectives from new materialism, emergent science, physics, and gender theory. As a theoretical and methodological foundation, a new materialist perspective drawing on Karen Barad’s (Meeting the universe halfway. Quantum physics of the entanglement of matter and meaning, Duke University Press, London, 2007) theory of agential realism and diffractive methodology were used, as well as Elizabeth de Freitas and Anna Palmer’s (Cult Stud Sci Educ 11(4):1201–1222, 2016. 10.1007/s11422-014-9652-6) notion concerning how scientific concepts can work as creative playmates in children’s explorations. The findings show how the girl, together with the swing, could experience and explore various physical phenomena as well as, extend her bodily capacities and become brave and strong. As such, new materialism shows how scientific phenomena can create affordances for an individual’s becomings as scientific as well as how “becoming scientific” can be understood. At the same time, the findings also indicate the importance of teachers not assuming that scientific phenomena are automatically part of children’s play or can be experienced by all children all the time. The explored situation was rare. On most occasions, the girl did not get the same kind of experiences with the swing because of gender norms. I argue that norms and discourses connected to science and gender are not things that “come with” older children or are only introduced by adults. These are instead already in the making and re-making within children’s co-actings with the material-discursive environment in preschool. It is therefore important that teachers engage in children’s embodied play with scientific phenomena, with the aim to empower the children, their bodies, capacities and (science) identities.

Drawing on new materialist thought (Barad 2003, 2007, 2010, 2011, 2014), this study explores preschool children’s gendered becomings as they play and explore together with two large boulders in a natural setting. The study takes its point of departure in emergent science (Siraj-Blatchford 2001) which refers to science as a social practice that is already explored by children’s daily play. Data for the project was constructed during a field study in a Swedish preschool with 25 five-year old children. The focus of the field study was the children’s play and explorations together with the preschool environment, during activities not specifically guided by teachers. The findings show how also natural materials, as the boulders in this study, can take part in and shape, both the children’s scientific explorations and their gendered becomings. This means that the ways that a child managed to explore and become was dependent on if and how the child managed to co-act and play together with the boulders and friction. However, not only the boulders, but also gender norms functioned as co-creators in this process. This goes against the common thought of children’s play in nature as “free and equal”, a notion that is not often questioned. Studies exploring children’s play and learning outdoors often lack gender perspectives, especially when science is also in focus. One of the article’s conclusions is the need for preschool teachers to engage in how children explore emergent science together with the natural/ material-discursive surroundings. That is, how different natural materials co-act with gender norms in different ways, moment by moment, and thus enable or prevent children from engaging with science and scientific phenomena.

In this paper we re-turn (Barad, 2014) parts of the diffractive analyses conducted in a research project on science and gender in preschool (Günther-Hanssen, 2018, 2020; Günther-Hanssen, Danielsson, & Andersson, 2020). In our first re-turning, we explore how a swing and scientific phenomena in the data co-created the knowledge construction in entanglements with the researcher. To do this, we engage with how embodiment and re-actualized experiences of swinging came to matter. We then re-turn how certain events in the data are always part of other events, both in time and space. For this task, we elaborate with writing different situations from the data through one another. As we continue re-turning the analysis, new diffraction patterns emerge with each turn. By the end of the paper, our diffractive writings and readings have been re-turned into explanations of how pendulums can be used to think-with and approach gendering in preschool