No abstract

No abstract

In the vast majority of Swedish schools, computer software is used for the registration of the absences and presences of students. How can the material-discursive engagements and practices of registration be researched? The article elaborates, from an agential realist account, on “doing research” in relation to the phenomenon of school absence. Through experimenting with int raviewing, the expressions and actions of materialities are acknowledged and the subject-centrism of conventional humanist qualitative interviewing is questioned. The posthumanist theories engaged with open up a rethinking of the production of data within qualitative research, and a discussion of the inseparability of data, analysis, thinking, and writing. The knowledge created on registration as an embodied, material, affective, and intraactive practice produces school absence as a reality where the computer software is always already a part of the phenomenon and thus needs to be an agential part of researching registration.

Within the field of developmental science, there is a general agreement of the need to work together across academic disciplinary boundaries in order to advance the understandings of how to optimize child development and learning. However, experience also shows that such collaborations may be challenging. This paper reports on the experiences of bidirectional collaboration between researchers in a multidisciplinary research team and between researchers and stakeholders, in the first randomized controlled trial in Swedish preschool. The objective of the trial was to investigate the effects of two pedagogical learning strategies evaluating language, communication, attention, executive functions and early math. The interdisciplinary team includes researchers from early childhood education, linguistics, developmental psychology and cognitive neuro science. Educational researchers and theorists within the field of early childhood education in Sweden have during the last two decades mainly undertaken small-scale qualitative praxis-oriented and participative research. There is a widespread skepticism with regards to some of the core principles in controlled intervention methodologies, including a strong resistance towards individual testing of children. Consequently unanticipated disagreements and conflicts arose within the research team, as RCT methodology requires the measurement of effects pre and post the intervention. The aim of this article is to discuss the conditions for bidirectional collaboration both between researchers and stakeholders and between researchers in the research team. The findings illustrate strategies and negotiations that emerged in order to address ontological and epistemological controversies and disagreements. These include (a) the negotiation of research ethics, (b) making divergences visible and learning from each other, (c) using a multiepistemological and methodological approach as a complement to the RCT design and (d) the negotiation of research problems that are shared between educators and researchers. Background and aim For more than 20 years, educational researchers and theorists in Sweden have pushed for a group-based investigative learning approach, which takes its starting point in children's sense of wonder in their encounter with the world and intrinsic motivation to learn (e.g., Dahlberg,

Genom att introducera en postkvalitativ metodologi tar denna bok ett samlat grepp kring frågor om formulerandet av forskningsproblem, forskningsetiska överväganden samt konstruerandet och analyserandet av empiriskt material. Postkvalitativ metodologi beskrivs utifrån fyra centrala ingångar: posthumanistisk teori; forskning som verklighetsskapande; sammanvävning av diskurs, materialitet och affekt samt en feministisk ansats. Boken belyser hur postkvalitativ metodologi erbjuder experimenterande tillvägagångssätt och är en prövande berättelse om hur kunskap kan produceras och hur världen kan undersökas med ‘en metodologi i blivande’. Den är således inte någon handbok eller manual för hur forskning ska bedrivas utan ett teoretiskt och metodologiskt erbjudande som bland annat utforskar frågor om ontologi, epistemologi och etik. Med sin specifika utgångspunkt i postkvalitativ metodologi ger boken vägledning och inspiration inom många olika områden och vetenskapliga discipliner. Den är därför ett sällskap för studenter och forskare att arbeta tillsammans med i genomförandet av ett forskningsprojekt. Boken vänder sig framförallt till studenter på avancerad nivå, forskarstudenter samt forskare som undrar vad det innebär att arbeta och skapa kunskap med posthumanistisk teori.