Hesitation: exploring ambivalence, ambiguity, and avoidance in children’s educational lives

This article investigates children’s practices of hesitation in and across pedagogical organising and explores hesitation as performances of the affective navigations that children scruffle with in their everyday educational lives. The article departs from a multisensory study of children who joined afterschool clubs when they started in middle school, a beginning where choice-based pedagogies accelerated processes of responsibilisation and individualisation for the children. The article empirically unfolds the children’s practices of hesitation during this beginning and conceptualises hesitation as the wavering between attachment and detachment. The article suggests that paying attention to children’s practices of hesitation affords exploring how children navigate complexities, like transitions and choices, in their educational lives. From this, the article unfolds how exploring children’s hesitations can become a way to notice the easily overlooked in educational systems that tend to favour verbalisation and ‘loud’ behaviour.