Conference Program

Pedagogue and philosopher John Dewey defined democracy as more than a societal system where citizens make choices and express their opinion (Dewey 1916). He defined democracy in terms of an ongoing co-construction of a communicative culture, “a way of life”, in education and society (Dewey 1939). In an important reading of Dewey's work, James Carey (1989) draws out the shared root of the words common, community, and communication: persons live in community by virtue of what they hold in common, and communication is the process by which they come to hold things in common. The task of early childhood education and care (ECEC) is thus to create a way of life that accommodates the ongoing, communicative co-construction of common culture, knowledge, and values across generations.

To promote such a way of life in ECEC today is challenging. Across large parts of the world, ECEC is since long subject to a forceful commodification that erodes democracy, equity and inclusion in education (Roberts-Holmes & Moss 2021; Vandenbroeck, Lehrer & Mitchell 2024). In Sweden, these values are now framed as problems to be solved through children's early acquisition of the national language – a logic that reduces communication to transmission, education to instrumental teaching of cognitive linguistic skills, and that, remarkably, lacks scientific grounding and risks undermining the very democratic, equitable and inclusive practices it claims to promote (Lecusay, Olsson & Nilsson, in press; Olsson, Lecusay & Dalsgaard 2023).

To counter this, we draw on an on-going government-funded project designed to study how children’s narratives and commons may be stimulated in what we call Aesthetic Literacy Events (ALEs) – playful explorations of language that activate both body and mind and that carry the potential of enhancing both children’s cognitive language-development and more equitable and inclusive education (Olsson, Lecusay & Dalsgaard 2023). We focus on one of the project’s constituent studies concerning the development and field-testing of a philosophical-pedagogical theory of ALEs. This includes educational commons theory (Pechtelidis & Kioupkiolis 2020; Cappello et al. 2024; Olsson, Lecusay & Nilsson 2024), philosophical perspectives on language and social formation (Bergson 1896/1988; Deleuze & Guattari 2004) as well as cultural-psychological theories of children’s narratives (Bruner 1991, Nelson 1996). These theoretical perspectives, we argue, make it possible to understand even the youngest children – toddlers’ – development of narratives and creation of commons as intertwined and co-emergent processes that may be stimulated in ALEs.

We make this case through examples from fieldwork in Swedish preschools where we engaged with toddlers’ everyday activities as a way of field-testing and refining our developing theoretical framework. Through vignettes of a group clay activity and a moment of playful, humorous interaction, we show how toddlers’ narrative activity and creation of commons constitute moments in which culture, knowledge, and values are communicated and co-constructed. This takes place in preschools that through including elements of ALEs in their daily activities have managed to create a way of life that may constitute a space of togetherness in which democracy is not taught but lived.