Abduktionens successiva, öppna hållning är inte självklart kompatibel med på förhand teoretiskt avgränsade och målstyrda forskningsprojekt, men kan verka inom dessa för teoretiskt och metodologiskt nytänkande. Ambitionen med den här artikeln är att beskriva abduktion och argumentera för dess plats i samhällsvetenskaplig forskning med stöd i Charles Sanders Peirces idé om kunskap som ett socialt och kontinuerligt element. Artikeln utgår från Peirces treställiga tankelära och den kontinuerliga rörelsen mellan känsla och idé för att särskilt betona känslans betydelse för människans lärande. Hennes förmåga att uppmärksamma förnimmelser av betydelse för ny kunskapsbildning knyter Peirces tankelogik till abduktion och forskarens sensitiva uppmärksamhet på omvärldens fenomen. Några för abduktionen specifika kännetecken, såsom uppmärksammandet av det märkliga, frågans successiva uppkomst, och den lekfulla spekulationen, beskrivs för att sedan iscensättas och exemplifieras i ett forskningsexempel. Den lekfulla och öppna hållningen till trots visar exemplet att abduktion öppnar upp för grundade riktningar och hypoteser. Med stora rörelser prövas generella begreppp för sin kapacitet att belysa kvaliteter av betydelse för barns sociala och påtagligt rörliga kunskapsbildning. Tillsammans bildar begreppen grund för förklaringar eller möjliga abduktioner om pedagogiska tillfällen. 

Time för abduction: The carrying capacity of experience in research and education

The article aims to reason with the continuous philosophy of Charles S. Peirce (1839–1914) and argue about a pedagogy for strengthening our ability to diversify and bring forth our experience in knowledge production. The carrying capacity of experience as a basis for reasonable abductions and change is the main argument of the article. Besides this the ambition is to highlight the capacity of abduction as a method to process diverse knowledge practices and make use of pluralistic thus common experiences to produce fair ideas for the future. The temporal attitude of the abductive researcher counteracts the idea of absolute knowledge and reminds us of our tendency to ignore what we actually know, not the least doubt. Thus, the abductive attitude approves of doubt as a wake-up call and starting point for learning, and the acknowledgement of this is by Peirce’s general logic also consistent with a trust in a continuous human and worldly becoming. To further illuminate the educational points of abduction, an ongoing project in higher education is described as a concrete example of abductive, thus experience-based, successive, and common learning. The continuous research/education project unfolds and finds its direction through the triadic abductive process of inference; notifying and acknowledging qualities of past experience, critically comparing qualities to general ideas, and guessing upon new relations or hypothesis about fair future conduct.

In the Nordic countries, there is a culturally rooted understanding of nature as a ‘good’ place for children. The aim of the article is to deconstruct this understanding by exploring how different mobile preschools – buses that bring children to different places on a daily basis – relate to nature spaces and children’s learning and well-being in them. Based on critical theorization of place and the nature/culture divide, we argue that, while there exists an idealization of nature within the mobile preschool tradition, the ways that nature is viewed as ‘good’ for children differ depending on the children’s ethnic background and residential area. The results show that compensatory ideas are especially vivid when it comes to migrant children who live in multi-ethnic neighbourhoods. Education in nature, aiming at freedom and agency, brought forward in the preschool curriculum in the Nordic countries, seems more reserved for children who already have the right kind of cultural background and language. The ‘other’ children, however, are more likely to receive an education aiming to compensate for something perceived as missing – that is, the ‘right’ kind of capital regarding ‘nature’.

The article aims to highlight the means of rhythmicity to social life from within a study of children’s daily travelling with a mobile preschool in Sweden. The point of departure is the neglected mobility practices of young children in research and the difficult relation between children’s everyday movements and persistent representations of childhood time and place. Based on sensuous ethnographic fieldwork travelling with the preschool, the analysis deconstructs to visualize mobility modes at work in the enactment of the daily route, and explores to highlight the preschooler’s collective rhythms of practices while travelling. The rhythmanalysis shows how regular mobilities enable shared experiences and the (re)making of a rhythmicity grounded in an ongoing perceiving and managing of inside and outside rhythms. The result confirms young children’s interdependent mobilities from within an entanglement of different rhythms, and contributes with readings of how they ‘carry on’ in practice.

The presentation takes stance in a study exploring how preschool is performed within the geography of a bus. Focusing the daily routine of debus, we analyse how the practice of 20 preschool children getting of a bus is performed. How are bodies and things organised? Which values are enacted? From previous research, we know that everyday practices of mobile preschools to a high extent concern security issues and geographical order (Gustafsson & van der Burgt 2015). To further understand mobile preschool practices we go deep into one daily activity and ask about how social rhythms are performed. The theoretical framework is childhood geography with a specific interest for social rhythms of early childhood practices. We make use of theories of peer cultures and interpretive reproduction (Corsaro, 2015), as well as a critical theory of social practices (Mol, 2010). The methodological approach is ethnographic and the logic of analysis abductive, trying to encircle the geographical and social performances and values of debus. Data consist mainly of video recordings, field notes and interviews. Consent from parents and pedagogues were collected. To ensure that children participated voluntarily, we explained the study in terms they would understand, and looked for non-verbal indications of withdrawal of consent, or unanticipated ethical problems. Mobile preschools demand bodily smoothness as well as relational adaptability. The values enacted are about mutuality, attentiveness and collective rhythms of socialising. The practices of debus encircle care as a way of doing preschool practices, comprising early childhood relations, interpreted and reproduced Values.

Several studies on life at pre-school have focused on place as an analytical concept. Place is seen as a useful concept regarding children’s conditions for development, as well as it is symbolic in how we position ourselves. Place is further and in everyday life not separable from time. We use time in relation to different places as well as acts are structured by time and place. In using time and place, rhythm is developed. This paper consists of a discussion of how to develop and use a more dynamic concept in pre-school research, namely rhythm. Building on theories of Henri Lefevbre rhythm is both an individual feeling of being/becoming, and a cultural phenomenon. In everyday life cyclical and linear rhythms measure themselves against each other. Seen in today’s pre-school, individual and caring rhythms are balancing against collective rhythms and linear learning goals. Further, various rhythms of learning, growing, playing, get to know…, say hello, eating, sleeping; living, are balancing against each other in pre-school. The question is, which conditions are created when they are to be organized in a place like this? And further, what new ways of being a child are those conditions revealing and/or demanding?

The problem focused in the thesis has its ground in the crossroads between a manifold school-time and shared as well as individual rhythms of pupils. The thesis builds on a theoretical assumption that cultural structures in time are of meaning for an understanding of ourselves and of others, and works as a frame for contemporary values and constraints, especially in school. The aim is to understand and create a thick description of the phenomenon time as a condition for positioning, as young high school pupils see and deal with it. The contexts for their descriptions are three specific schools, challenging traditional ways of studying in time by offer independency, one by distance education, one by mobility between independency and timed lessons, and one by an independent project in an otherwise ordinary timetable. The empirical material is mainly based on interviews, letters and drawings, collected from thirty pupils, ten from each school. The study is conducted and analysed in means of an abductive methodology, and use senzitising concepts to withdraw units of meaning, relating the descriptions of pupils to theoretical assumptions. Time as a condition for positioning is a way of balancing between structure and individual acts. Time in school is created and dealt with in the crossroads between feelings of freedom to, of being in control of and/or close to, and their opposites, feelings of freedom from, or being controlled by and/or on distance. Dreams of spontaneity, closeness and intensity give way to certain temporal dilemmas in a school-time with contradictory values. The rhythms outlined by some of the pupils support the dreams described, as well as they underline the pupils’ need for temporal frames that see and confirm their performances here and now, as well as in the future. Time as an analytical filter reveals a meaning of time as enclosing lines and circles, present moments and stretched lives, school-time and other times.