Desirable Futures and Emotional Investments in Kindergarten Class Pedagogies

Children’s emotional wellbeing has gained political and pedagogical practical attention the last decades (OECD, 2019; O’Toole & Simovska, 2022). With this attention follows ideas and logics of positive and negative emotions and how to work pedagogical with these emotions and their expressions. In this study I examine these logics and how pupils’ emotions are regulated and evaluated by teachers in a kindergarten class year group.

The theoretical framework of this study consists of post structural and feminist affect theories (Abu-Lughod & Lutz, 1990; Ahmed, 2010; Butler, 2021). I therefore understand emotions and the discourses of emotions as socially and historical embedded. Emotions are seen as ascribing and being ascribed meaning in pedagogical practices (Zembylas, 2016). These processes are examined
through an ethnographic inspired fieldwork (Lather, 2009) conducted in a Danish suburb area where I focus on when and how pupils’ emotions are managed by the teachers.

The analysis focuses on how children’s and societal futures are structuring for the ways emotions, their expression and regulation hereof become part of pedagogical practices. I show the implications of the logics followed by the attention to children’s emotions and the ways imagined school and life
trajectories become part of the norms of feeling in the first year of school. Implications I discuss in relation to notions of children as potential and educational futures (Gilliam & Gulløv, 2022; Hultqvist & Dahlberg, 2001).

References

Abu-Lughod, L., & Lutz, C. A. (1990). Introduction: Emotion, discourse, and the politics of everyday life. Language and the Politics of Emotion, 1, 1–23.

Ahmed, S. (2010). The promise of happiness. Duke University Press.

Butler, J. (2021). Excitable speech: A politics of the performative (Routledge Classics edition). Routledge Classics.

Gilliam, L., & Gulløv, E. (2022). Children as potential–a window to cultural ideals, anxieties and conflicts. Children’s Geographies, 20(3), 311–323.

Hultqvist, K., & Dahlberg, G. (2001). Governing the child in the new millennium. In K. Hultqvist & G. Dahlberg (Eds.), Governing the child in the new Millennium (p. s. 1-14). RoutledgeFalmer.

Lather, P. (2009). Getting lost: Feminist efforts toward a double (d) science. Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 30(1), 222–230.

OECD. (2019). PISA 2018 Results (Volume III): What School Life Means for Students’ Lives. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. https://www.oecdilibrary. org/education/pisa-2018-results-volume-iii_acd78851-en

O’Toole, C., & Simovska, V. (2022). Wellbeing and Education: Connecting Mind, Body and World. In R. McLellan, C. Faucher, & V. Simovska (Eds.), Wellbeing and Schooling (Vol. 4, pp. 21– 33). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95205-1_2

Zembylas, M. (2016). Affect theory and Judith Butler: Methodological implications for educational research. Methodological Advances in Research on Emotion and Education, 203–214.