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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 multi-epistemological and methodological approach as a complement to the RCT design and (d) the negotiation of research problems that are shared between educators and researchers.

The performance of standardized tests is an ongoing matter of concern for childhood researchers. Standardized tests are often described as neglecting the ethical complexities of doing research with young children. However, this critique is primarily presented in general terms, and does not attend to the locality and specificity of particular test situations. With this as a starting point, the aim of this article is to challenge a narrow understanding of standardized tests as activities done 'on' children and examine the complexities of emerging relations in test situations performed in Swedish preschools. Through analysing video recordings made as part of an intervention project, the article focuses on the practices that surface in test situations with four- to six-year-olds. Inspired by Haraway and Strathern, the article puts to work a relational approach to analysing the test situations. This approach contributes with an understanding in which the contextual details are taken into account, which in turn highlights how the atypical and the moving are often the standard in standardized testing. The insights from a relational analysis point to important aspects to consider in the performance of standardized tests: it matters to attune to and problematize a narrow understanding of standardized tests; it matters to consider the local specificities; and it matters to scrutinize in new ways the relations between children and researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on digital text messages containing information about students' absences and sent to parents by schools, the paper investigates the way school absenteeism is produced within affective assemblages. The paper unfolds a theoretical and methodological approach of "going with" the text messages, in entanglements of affective flows. The empirical engagements, produced together with multiple agents in two Swedish schools, show that within the assemblages of human and nonhuman bodies, the text messages can become "stirrers" that evoke nervousness and anxiety, but also excitement and feelings of control that affect the production and conception of absenteeism. The affective flows of text messages thus travel in all directions, with and against notions of linearity. The conclusion emphasizes how the text messages, as affective materialities, are an inextricable part of the production of school absenteeism in multiple and sometimes unexpected ways.

Working with a posthumanist approach, this article explores how the computer software Dexter, used for the registration of students' absences and presences, is part of the production of different practices of time, place, space, and matter in Swedish schools. The empirical material engaged with comes from two schools, and the students involved are in grades 7-9. The article creates knowledge on how the digital registration of students' presences, absences, or late arrivals is dependent upon material-discursive practices. The "bodily presences" of students are continually destabilized in relation to Dexter, showing that school absences and presences are (re)shaped depending on relations of spacetimematter.

An increasing number of Swedish municipalities use digital software to manage the registration of students' school absences. The software is regarded as a problem-solving tool to make registration more efficient, but its effects on the educational setting have been largely neglected. Focusing on an event with two students from a class of 11-year-olds, the aim of the paper is to explore schools' common uses of computer software for registering absence in order to understand how materialities--like the software--are entangled with the production of school absence. In the paper, the Deleuzio-Guattarian concept of the "assemblage" is put to work within a feminist relational materialist framework. This enables an understanding of the complexity of school absence, where materialities of the educational setting are theorized as entangled with social and gendered discursive components.

This text is an exploration of collaborative thinking and writing through theories, methods, and experiences on the topic of the child, children, and childhood. It is a collaborative written text (with 32 authors) that sprang out of the experimental workshop Child Studies Multiple. The workshop and this text are about daring to stay with mess, "un-closure", and uncertainty in order to investigate the (e)motions and complexities of being either a child or a researcher. The theoretical and methodological processes presented here offer an opportunity to shake the ground on which individual researchers stand by raising questions about scientific inspiration, theoretical and methodological productivity, and thinking through focusing on process, play, and collaboration. The effect of this is a questioning of the singular academic 'I' by exploring and showing what a plural 'I' can look like. It is about what the multiplicity of voice can offer research in a highly individualistic time. The article allows the reader to follow and watch the unconventional trial-and-error path of the ongoing-ness of exploring theories and methods together as a research community via methods of drama, palimpsest, and fictionary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we elaborate on postqualitative methodology by engaging with two questions: What does postqualitative mean? Why is the postqualitative movement important? The engagement with these questions evokes a conversation, which becomes our methodology. The conversation is an assemblage, always multiple and collective. This allows us to acknowledge the messy and hybrid processes of knowledge production, and it forces us to be responsive to moments and movements, while remaining vague and ambivalent. As such, the postqualitative provides us with nothing. Simultaneously, it offers tools to navigate and can turn into anything. Nonetheless, it implies hope and is therefore everything. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 multi-epistemological and methodological approach as a complement to the RCT design and (d) the negotiation of research problems that are shared between educators and researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on digital text messages containing information about students' absences and sent to parents by schools, the paper investigates the way school absenteeism is produced within affective assemblages. The paper unfolds a theoretical and methodological approach of 'going with' the text messages, in entanglements of affective flows. The empirical engagements, produced together with multiple agents in two Swedish schools, show that within the assemblages of human and nonhuman bodies, the text messages can become 'stirrers' that evoke nervousness and anxiety, but also excitement and feelings of control that affect the production and conception of absenteeism. The affective flows of text messages thus travel in all directions, with and against notions of linearity. The conclusion emphasizes how the text messages, as affective materialities, are an inextricable part of the production of school absenteeism in multiple and sometimes unexpected ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Working with a posthumanist approach, this article explores how the computer software Dexter, used for the registration of students' absences and presences, is part of the production of different practices of time, place, space, and matter in Swedish schools. The empirical material engaged with comes from two schools, and the students involved are in grades 7–9. The article creates knowledge on how the digital registration of students' presences, absences, or late arrivals is dependent upon material-discursive practices. The “bodily presences” of students are continually destabilized in relation to Dexter, showing that school absences and presences are (re)shaped depending on relations of spacetimematter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 intraviewing, 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]