This paper will present analysis and reflections from an ongoing PhD-study asking what can be learned about learning and development, when explored from young children’s (0–3-year-olds) perspectives in their everyday lives in and across their families and nurseries.

In Denmark and transnationally there has been a growing focus on the importance of early learning. In Danish ECEC-policies the importance of language, children’s communities and perspectives is foregrounded as significant areas of young children’s learning. Pedagogical practice is prompted to arrange learning environments accordingly. Learning though tends to be conceptualized as teaching, highlighting adult-child interactions and both childrens perspectives and communities as means to achieve and optimising learning outcomes. Rather than understood or theorized from the young children’s perspectives, engagements and activities with each other and their material surroundings.This presentation explores how young children take up the social and material arrangements they live their life in, in unpredictable ways. By analysing the children’s attentions and embodied orientations in the sociomaterial arrangements they participate in, the analysis points to ways young children pursuit subjectively meaningful engagements with each other and with objects, both here-and-now and how these engagements develop as over time, related to the children’s personal standpoints and interest. Insisting on exploring learning and development from young childrens perspectives and their engagements as both meaningful and transformative, challenges dominant political ideas on how to arrange and promote ‘good learning environments’ for young children.

The empirical data stems from 1,5-year ethnographic field study, following 6 children in their everyday lives in nursery and with their families. It consists of participatory observations, Sound recordings, photos and in-situ interviews with adults and older children (siblings).The theoretical point of departure is taken in psychology from the standpoint of the subject, with inspirations from both cultural historical psychology and Ingold’s phenomenological anthropology.