Å få øye på det tause som blir «sagt»: En estetisk tilnærming til barns uartikulerte perspektiver

The article investigates how kindergartens can facilitate minority language children who are new to Norwegian kindergarten settings and the Norwegian language, so that their ‘voices’ are also heard. The author investigates how the kindergarten staff’s attention to their own bodily and aesthetic signs can be a doorway to grasping and being touched by the children's unarticulated perspectives. The article focuses on the staff’s responsibility to see and be touched by the silence that is ‘said’.

The analysis shows how aesthetic and bodily signs are dimensions in the kindergarten teachers’ and students’ language repertoire, of which they were not very aware. The author believes that the analysis points to how bodily and aesthetic signs can create accord between two people who do not share a common spoken language. She believes that an aesthetic approach opens a broader doorway to knowledge about the children’s perspective, in a way that transcends linguistic categories about who the child is and should become.

The source data consists of video observation of 15 arts and crafts situations and audio recordings of 12 reflection conversations, as well as still images and observation notes, over a period of 2-3 months in each kindergarten. The sample consists of two kindergarten teachers and a part-time student studying to become a kindergarten teacher, all of whom had a genuine interest in multilingualism and arts and crafts activities. The criteria for the children in the sample were that they spoke little or no Norwegian, were between three and five years old and had attended kindergarten for less than a year. The children were placed together in groups of two or three children. In order to take a closer look at the focus children’s participation opportunities in a Norwegian-language group, one or two children between the ages of three and five who spoke Norwegian were also invited to participate in the arts and crafts activity.

Ilje-Lien, J. (2019). «Å få øye på det tause som blir «sagt»: En estetisk tilnærming til barns uartikulerte perspektiver».  Nordisk tidsskrift for pedagogikk og kritikk, 5(1):130–146.