Nina Odegard is a PhD student at the PhD programme in Educational Sciences for Teacher Education .
Trial Lecture
The trial lecture starts at 10:00 in Zoom.
Title: How can an aesthetic exploration of the entangled relationship between (recycled) matter and children make a new knowledge contribution to practices of posthuman pedagogy?
Public defense
The candidate will defend her thesis at 12:15.
The candidate will defend her thesis, entitled “Aesthetic Explorations with recycled materials. Concepts, ideas and phenomena that matter”.
Ordinary opponents
- First opponent: Professor Cecilia Åsberg, Linköping University
- Second opponent: Professor Bosse Bergstedt, Østfold University College
- Chair of the committee: Associate Professor Øystein Skundberg, OsloMet – Oslo Metropolitan University
Leader of the public defense
- Associate Professor Finn Aarsæther, Vice-Dean at Faculty of Education and International Studies, Oslo Metropolitan University
Supervisors
- Main supervisor: Professor Nina Rossholt, OsloMet – Oslo Metropolitan University
- Co-supervisors: Professor Jayne Osgood, Middlesex University, and Professor Sidsel Germeten, UiT The Arctic University of Norway
Abstract
Title: Aesthetic explorations with recycled materials – concepts, ideas and phenomena that matter
This thesis sets the concept of Aesthetic Exploration in motion in relation to empirical data by exploring young children's encounters with recycled materials in a Blackbox at a Remida. Through four published articles that focus on different parts of the research: methodologically, empirically, and theoretically, I explore how theorising recycling materials and Aesthetic Exploration contribute to the field of early childhood.
I make use of posthumanist and new-materialist theories that underline the significance of nonhuman agency and materiality (2007; Bennett, 2010; Hultman, 2011a; Lenz Taguchi, 2010), to extend understandings of what matters in early childhood education.
With the use of these theories, different perspectives on matter and materiality have emerged through conceptualising and materialising different Aesthetic Explorations in the encounter in-between recycled materials, young children, space (the Blackbox), and tools.
Conceptualising Aesthetic Exploration through this thesis is an on-going process that has no end; instead, it continues to take shape and transform as readers of this thesis encounter it. The thesis conveys some form of threshold, metaphorically, on its way in or out, formed by a need to a temporary standstill.
From the in-between encounters and explorations, I have formulated the following insights;
Explorations with recycled materials, digital and analogue tools in a Blackbox co-created in-between spaces where aesthetic, rhythmic forces were sensed.
These forces contributed to extending and opening out young children's play, learning, narrating, and imaginative explorations.
Vital affective forces arose in-between tools and recycled materials and activated agency and phenomena such as shadows, light, and colours, which became young children's companions and broadened and deepened their play and learning in unanticipated ways.
Aesthetic Exploration, as both concept and phenomenon, is complex, challenging, creative and mobilising. It makes a valuable contribution to thinking and research, as well as to practitioners' and young children's everyday encounters in the field of early childhood education by inviting a curiosity with what else gets produced through children's engagements with space and matter.
To be an aesthetic explorer moves the researcher in time and space where data is understood as much more than the empirical matter collected in the research space.
