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Connecting neuroscience and education is a desire in contemporary society, related to the recurring calls for education to become more evidence-based. Research in educational neuroscience strives towards such interdisciplinary knowledge production and to an enhanced interaction between neuroscience research and educational practice. However, various problems and difficulties in achieving these collaborations are often reported. Discrepancies, hierarchies, misconceptions and communication problems can be described as creating a ‘discourse of difficulty’. The aim of this paper is to trace the specific difficulties that have created this discourse, and to problematize these difficulties in ways that enable new conceptions of what might be entailed by interaction and mutual knowledge development between the fields of neuroscience and education, and between academic theory and educational practice. The most significant difficulty is caused by a binary understanding of the concept of difference in relation to understanding the fields. Instead of understanding the fields in opposition to each other, I will suggest an understanding that implies difference emerging in each of the collaborating fields as the self-differing effects of the encounter. In the concluding discussion, I will argue that an understanding of the concept of difference as a process of mutual transformation can be essential for reciprocity and bi-directionality in collaborations. Instead of producing contradictions and hierarchies between scientific fields and between theory and practice, such an understanding of difference might facilitate an investigation of the polarizations that always position something as of lesser value, and ultimately, creates the gaps that collaborations want to bridge.

Vad är det som efter många år fortfarande lockar förskollärare, pedagoger och forskare inom förskolefältet att inspireras av lyssnandets pedagogik i sina praktiker i Sverige och Norge? Vad är lyssnandets pedagogik för dem i dag, i praktiken och i teorin? Hur ska vi förstå vad som hände då och vad som händer nu i olika kontexter som kan utgöras också av två grannationer? Vad har lyssnande pedagogik betytt för förskolans framväxt och med särskilt fokus på Sverige och Norge där Ann Åbergs texter fått ett stort genomslag? Detta är frågor vi ställde oss och ville få svar på när vi efterlyste bidrag till detta specialnummer av tidskriften Nordisk Barnehageforskning på temat Lyssnandets pedagogik. Ett tjugotal forskare svarade och efter en, på grund av pandemin, utdragen och rigorös review-process publiceras nu elva artiklar i detta temanummer. Tillsammans avspeglar de en angelägen bredd i intresset för vad lyssnandets pedagogik är i dag och kan bli i framtiden.

Children’s language development is a core task in Swedish preschool and central to how educators organize teaching and everyday activities. The curriculum’s definition of language is described as extended, with language as both a prerequisite for learning and a learning effect, i.e. both internal processes and communication. This means that working methods and didactic strategies rely on many different epistemologies and thus different theoretical perspectives. Nevertheless, the research literature, as well as assessments of Swedish preschool services, show that educators’ interpretation of the curriculum is primarily socioculturally oriented. This does not entirely converge with how language is conceptualized in the Swedish preschool curriculum. Against this background, the aim of this paper is to perform a theoretical and empirical investigation of the extended language concept in the curriculum with the intention to understand what the consequences of this extended meaning of language produce in terms of teaching and learning practices. I have traced various epistemologies in language didactic preschool research and related this tracing analysis to empirical examples from preschool practices. The results of my analysis show that the practices are predominantly interpersonally framed, which corresponds to the emphasis in research. In a further analysis, where empirical examples are read from other possible epistemologies, the practices can be perceived as being multi-epistemological in a fashion which corresponds to the curriculum's conceptualization of language. This is discussed as an opportunity for a didactic strengthening of presently neglected perspectives.

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