Global Studies of Childhood

Volume 3 Number 3 2013

www.wwwords.co.uk/GSCH

Taking Children’s Questions Seriously:

the need for creative thought

LISELOTT MARIETT OLSSON

Department of Child and Youth Studies/
Department of Early Childhood Didactics, University of Stockholm, Sweden

ABSTRACT This article recounts and further explores some experimental scientific and didactic work
trying to make use of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in early childhood didactics at
the University of Stockholm, Sweden. Within the setting of problem- and practice-based cooperation,
researchers and teachers have in different projects explored some of the concepts offered by Deleuze
and Guattari and that seem capable of aligning themselves with young children’s strategies for learning
as well as offering new and vital scientific and didactic tools. A thread through the article is the
importance of and conditions needed for being able to really listen to children and take their questions
seriously. The article begins with an argumentation on the need here for ‘creative thought’ and a short
description of how current attempts to tame learning block this thought and neglect children’s
questions. Thereafter the article builds on examples of scientific and didactic work at the University of
Stockholm where three concepts are explored: ‘assemblages of desire’ – as a way of accessing children’s
collective drive for learning; ‘event’ – as a way of accessing children’s production of knowledge; and
‘affect’ – as a way of valuing learning and knowledge in a way that differs from how it is being done
within the formalised school system. The article is concluded with a discussion on children’s affinity
with a creative thought and how this can be used to enrich the formalised school system.

Introduction: children’s questions and creative thought

There is a wonderful little book (REI & Trångsunds preschool community, 2013) produced in a
community south of Stockholm. It recalls a project on ‘air’ that children and teachers in a local
preschool engaged in over two years. The book is full of stunning learning processes,
experimentations, inventions and relations. But more than anything, what stands out in the book is
the importance of taking children’s questions seriously.
As the book shows, children’s questions are always much larger, much more playful and at
the same time much more serious than we imagine. As are their ambitions to learn. ‘I want to learn
how to fly, how do we make a person able to fly?’ says a child at the beginning of the project on air.
When this question comes from a child’s mouth it might be considered delightful, cute, funny and
full of fantasy, and at the same time, unreasonable, unrealistic, even absurd. But in the light of the
history of human inventions we can see that this question – before anyone had flown – was taken
seriously. If this question had not been taken seriously, and this actually needs to be pointed out,
we might have found ourselves today totally incapable of flying. ‘Before anyone had flown’ – it is in
this dimension of knowledge and learning that children seem to find themselves, in that which is
yet not known, in that which it is possible to invent. Far away from already formulated questions
with given and corresponding answers. Far away from already constructed problems with given
and corresponding solutions. Instead, right in the middle of producing sense through formulating and
constructing questions and problems. Another child says in the book when children and teachers are

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studying one of Leonardo Da Vinci’s inventions: ‘Oh! I wish I was the one who invented it and that
I was little, and that it did not exist before.’
This longing for the actual act of invention, for the new, the remarkable, the interesting, and
to be taken seriously in one’s littleness, finds its support in the philosophy presented by French
philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) and his collaborator psychotherapist Félix Guattari
(1930-1992). This is a philosophy that insists on creative thought, on inventing and on that which is
not yet; the littleness that lies there and glimmers in its becoming underneath the large, noisy
events (Deleuze, 1994, p. 163). According to Deleuze (1994, 1988), when it comes down to it, we
actually never think, or at least very rarely and when, on very special occasions, it actually happens:
‘d’avoir une idée c’est une espèce de fête’ [to get an idea is like a party] (Deleuze, 1988a, n.p.), it is a
shocking and vertiginous experience of losing one’s references. Because thinking is most of the
time a question of going in circles. This circular thinking Deleuze calls ‘orthodox’ (Deleuze, 1994),
and the possibilities for a creative thought are blocked by recognizing and reproducing
representations of that which is already known. Within such an image of thought, learning and
knowledge will be about ‘thinking right’ and about reproducing knowledge that already exists.
Questions and problems are givens, corresponding to equally given answers and problems. Sense is
never even discussed – it serves only as the predefined correlative to problems and questions. No
space for invention here. Children, with their longing for invention of the yet not known, for
producing sense and for the formulation and construction of questions and problems, obviously
very often find themselves (together with the distracted and the myopic) in a less advantageous
situation here: ‘Who says “Good morning Theodorus” when Theaetetus passes, “It is three
o’clock”’ when it is three-thirty, and that “7 + 5 = 13”? Answer: the myopic, the distracted and the
young child at school’ (Deleuze, 1994, p. 150). However, as Deleuze continues:
how can we accept that such puerile and artificial textbook examples justify an image of thought?
Every time a proposition is replaced in the context of living thought, it is apparent that it has
exactly the truth it deserves according to its sense, and the falsity appropriate to the non-sense
that it implies. We always have as much truth as we deserve in accordance with the sense of
what we say. Sense is the genesis or the production of true, and truth is only the empirical result
of sense. (Deleuze, 1994, p. 154)
If we follow this and consider truth as an empirical result, a side effect – at the same time as we try
to really listen to children’s questions – we might discover that puerility has nothing to do with
childhood or children and that we no longer need to judge them from the point of view of error,
fantasy or absurdity. We might discover that children are challenging the image of thought as
representation and reproduction through making use of sense as production of truth. We might
sense that children actually display a veritable taste for creative thought and that what they really
do is to go on a hunt for that which glimmers. Listening to children’s questions, taking them
seriously and appreciating their taste for creative thought demands a lot of us today as we seem to
live in a time where creative thought, production of sense, invention and construction of questions
and problems are considered an absolute waste of time. We seem to live within a not-so-
glimmering politics driven by uncreative thought. We seem to live in an individualised control
society embracing a trivialised idea of learning and knowledge expressed through the economic
logic, and the right input-output relation. A society where each individual shall maximise his or her
own resources, although through standardised methods; we shall be measured, weighed, quality
assured, predicted, supervised, controlled, evaluated, and more than anything, we shall be wanting
all this (Rose, 1999; Grieshaber & Hatch, 2003; Dahlberg & Moss, 2005; Dahlberg et al, 2007;
Mozère, 2007; Lenz-Taguchi, 2009; Masny & Cole, 2009; Olsson, 2009; Taubman, 2009; Elfström,
manuscript). We are asked, as Taubman (2009) puts it, to literally teach and learn by numbers.
However, in the midst of this, there are always loopholes, exits and deviations. In the book on ‘air’
referred to above, there are many examples of collaborative and creative work; reading the book is
like taking a hot bath in a society that tends to grow colder as each day passes. As the book shows,
there is with children, more than a taste for creative thought, there is also learning and relating,
both to subject content and to human subjects, that is much more subtle and finely tuned than
what we normally imagine. We can get access to this only through careful listening to their
questions, their constructions of problems and their production of sense. It is here that we need
forceful theories capable of aligning themselves with children’s ways of doing this. For us, the

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philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari is a possible tool. What we have emphasised in our
experimentations with this highly complex philosophy is the possible didactical and inevitably
political activist use of it in early childhood education (ECE). It seems to us that if our idea is to
give the child a somewhat ‘better’ position within the educational context as well as in society, then
we must first of all acknowledge that ‘better’ is something that needs to be collectively done, over and
over again. Moreover, we need theories and concepts that are in some sense ‘more elastic’ and
capable of aligning themselves with and listening to children’s questions. And finally, we need to be
prepared to engage in and activate all new and different sorts of didactical and political trajectories
within and outside the field of early childhood education. In short, we need to look at ECE not as a
site exposed to political implementation, but rather as a continuously changing field open for
creative didactical and political activity (Dahlberg, 2003; Dahlberg & Moss, 2005; Dahlberg et al,
2007; Olsson, 2009; Halvars-Franzén, 2010; Elfström, manuscript; Eriksson, 2013). The second part
of the article describes how we have tried to create a research context that will give us the right
conditions for being able to listen to children’s questions. The last part of the article will then
consist of three examples of our attempts to do such didactical and political activist work.

Research Context
The examples that will be discussed in the last part of the article have all been produced over the
course of three years (2010-12) and within the context of a government-funded research project
called ‘The Magic of Language’ (Dahlberg & Olsson, 2009). The project was given funding by the
Swedish Research Council in order to work with preschool children’s relations to, as well as early
childhood didactic tools for, language, reading and writing, departing from the assumption that
these questions are strongly affected by the fact that we today live in a globalised society marked by
changed knowledge production, an increase in communication through digital devices as well as in
cultural encounters.
The research project took place in a reference group consisting of researchers, PhD students,
an artistic adviser, teachers from four different schools, headmasters, theoretical advisers employed
in these schools, student-teachers and teachers, as well as temporarily invited experts in subject
content – artists, dancers or whatever competency was needed for the specific processes at stake in
the schools involved. The reference group and the schools were purposively sampled (Merriam,
1998) through building on to an already existing network, having worked together in the pilot
project and desiring to pursue a more profound didactic and scientific effort over a longer period of
time.
The reference group met monthly during semesters and worked through different web-based
devices between meetings. Within these monthly meetings both didactical and scientific questions
were evoked. Teachers brought in documented material from class and researchers presented
theoretical perspectives. The empirical material was then collectively analysed with the help of the
theoretical perspectives and all participants in the reference group joined in to extend and deepen
analysis as well as developing didactical tools.
Data collection and analysis was conducted through children, teachers and researchers
collectively experimenting with literacy in practice, departing from a problem-based approach and
work with documentation (observations, film sequences, interviews and children’s artefacts) as
events (Dahlberg & Olsson, 2009; Olsson, 2009, 2012). This approach is close to ethnographic
methods (Geertz, 1988) and to the literacy field’s use of literacy events, but has here a strong focus
on children’s production of sense through the formulation and construction of questions and
problems. Typically, teachers and researchers together with children tried to stage scenes for
experimenting with language, reading and writing, that took the features of ‘irresistible reading and
writing opportunities’ (E. Theorell, personal communication, 5 October 2010), where children’s
own sense, questions, problems, learning strategies and production of knowledge were
acknowledged as the starting point and continuous focus for pedagogical intervention. An artistic
adviser who was employed full time worked together with groups of children and teachers over
longer periods of time, with weekly support from researchers. In this specific context, and with
inspiration from Deleuze (2004b) and French historian of ideas Michel Foucault (1984, 2004),
theory and practice are trying to reach a relation where neither is allowed to be the origin of,

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encompass or explain the other. Here, theoretical concepts are chosen on the basis of them being
capable of aligning themselves with children’s subtle, finely tuned and still stringent learning
processes. Theoretical concepts are used pragmatically and in order to broaden the domains for the
experimental work, and practical experimentations are used so as to intensify theoretical concepts.
Even though the roles and functions of theory and practice are different, this does not imply that
only theory deals with concepts. It also happens that concepts are produced out of practical
experimentation, such as in the above case with the creation of the concept ‘irresistible reading and
writing opportunities’. These concepts are as important as concepts coming from established
theories.
The context described above is still very much a context in progress; we are constantly
struggling to keep a balance between theory and practice. This relation between theory and
practice, or concepts and practical experimentations, seems to us to not be something you can
make into a standardised method. Rather, it seems to concern continuous work that needs to be
nurtured and adjusted in accordance with each unique learning event. We have, for instance,
discovered that when we tried to use a concept that functioned really well in relation to one
specific learning event and process, in relation to another event, the concept as well as the learning
event just became flat and lifeless. Each learning event is singular and demands theory to stretch
out and encounter practice in a very pragmatic and innovative way.
Below, and in the last part of the article, I will share some of this ongoing work with practical
experimentations and theoretical concepts. We are going to have a quick look into parts of three
different projects with the children: ‘The Mirror Project’ and ‘The Name Project’, that both took
place in groups of 25 children aged five; and ‘The Line Project’, that took place in a group of 16
children aged one to two. ‘The Mirror Project’ is, for this article, used to describe how the concept
‘assemblages of desire’ could possibly function so as to help us prepare for getting access to
children’s drive for learning and thereby also their production of sense through the formulation and
construction of questions and problems. ‘The Name Project’ is for this article used as a way of
trying out the concept ‘event’ as a possible way of analysing children’s learning processes through
focusing on sense production and question and problem construction - that is, on their production of
knowledge, incorporating also their reproduction of knowledge. And, finally, ‘The Line Project’ is
for the present article presented together with the concept ‘affect’ in an attempt to value children’s
sense production and question and problem construction from another standpoint than what is
being done in the current not-so-glimmering political climate.

The Mirror Project: assemblages of desire

Figure 1. ‘Knoddar’ – children’s linguistic invention to describe the

‘impossible’ reflection of one’s toes when placing the mirror on one’s feet.

‘Assemblages of desire’ was one of the first concepts that we chose to put to use in our
experimentations with practices. Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of desire as unconscious
production of real always caught up in an assemblage (Deleuze & Guattari, 1984) helped us
reinforce the turn of the gaze that had already begun in our practices by appreciating children’s

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desires no longer as lacking or unreal, but as productions of new realities (Mozère, 1992, 2007;
Olsson, 2009). Most importantly, assembled desire helped us focus on what was going on in the
group, how the children were collectively caught up in something. At the beginning of the research
project ‘The Magic of Language’, when paying attention to how children through their collective
and assembled desires produced sense, questions and problems, we quickly discovered that there
was a discrepancy between existing theoretical and methodological perspectives on language and
children’s own way of dealing with it. According to these perspectives, language is considered a
homogeneous system of universal and abstract representations used in information and
communication (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004). Young children are commonly considered as not
capable of the meta-linguistic capacity needed to enter such a representational logic (Kress, 1997;
Roy, 2005). However, from the point of view of production and invention, we saw that children do
work within a representational logic, although a very different one. Just as young children seem to
prefer to stay in the spheres of invention, formulation and construction of questions and problems,
they likewise seem to prefer working with the production, rather than the acquisition, of linguistic
representations. We therefore started asking questions about the linguistic logic of representation:
is this really a problem for children? Is this not what they do all the time although following a
productive representational logic? And how can we enter this together with the children? Together
with an artist and a dancer, we started constructing a project on mirrors. One might here feel the
need to ask: why mirrors? A project on mirrors seems quite far away from language, reading and
writing, but our observations told us that children treated the linguistic logic of representation in a
similar way to how some artists and thinkers have criticised and offered alternatives to the idea of
the reflection of the mirror as a true and direct representation of reality (Foucault, 1966; Smithson,
1996; Sandström, 2010; Sand, 2012).

Figure 2. From Robert Smithson’s ‘mirror travel’ in the Yucatan, an anti-expedition questioning
mirror reflection and representation in thought, identity, place and language (Smithson, 1996).

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Figure 3. From Monica Sand’s ‘mirror travel’ on the subway in Stockholm, an art installation inspired by Smithson, but in
relation to the problems of representation today concerning thought, identity, place and language (Sand, 2012).

Figure 4. Kajsa Sandström, artistic dancer and researcher, questioning the role
and identity of the dancer as well as the concepts of time and space (Sandström, 2010).

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Figure 5. ‘Las Meninas – The Maids of Honour’ by Velasquez, used by Foucault

in Les Mots et les Choses (1966), questioning the logic of representation and reflection.

When through our preparations we discovered how the representation of a mirror might not at all
be considered a true reflection of any reality but rather a production of new realities and
representations (Foucault, 1966), we decided that this would be a congenial material to use
together with the children. It was an attempt to align ourselves with the children’s ongoing
assembled desire and their questioning and construction of language as a system marked by the
continuous production of representations. Children’s representational logic when it came to
language seemed to be as crazily creative as that of the mirror.
We introduced the mirrors through emptying a whole room and placing the mirrors in an
inviting way and then letting the children enter the room. What took place there the very first day
of the project was for us the sign of an amazing explosion of desiring forces coming together in an
assemblage that turned out to be extremely relevant for the learning of language, reading and
writing.

Figure 6. Prepared room.

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Figure 7. ‘There are holes in the ground!’[2]

Figure 8. ‘Where does it begin and where does it end?’

Figure 9. ‘Look it’s going in two directions at the same time!’

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Figure 10. ‘What if we are really down there and the mirror image is up here?’

Figure 11. ‘That’s not me but who is it then?’

Figure 12. ‘I am flying!’

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Figure 13. ‘Which feet and hands are real?’

Figure 14. ‘A muffinfoot!’

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Figure 15. ‘How many legs?’

Figure 16. ‘How many legs now?’

Figure 17. ‘An X’.

Figure 18. ‘A double double W’.

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During that first day of the project with the children it seemed to us that we had detected an
assemblage of desire with the children that concerned an ontological, even existential question.
Through this material - the mirrors - they seemed to immediately and collectively enter the
ontological/existential questions of all times: what is reality, what is being and what can language
possibly be used for in all of this? The children’s questions are all extremely precise and pointed
questions: all of a sudden there’s a hole in the ground; now, how to move? Where does all this
begin and end? It seems to be going in two directions at the same time? What if the reflection of the
mirror is really up here and we are actually down there? Who am I in this bizarre reflection, mixed
with another, lifting from the ground, flying? Which parts of me are real, the ‘muffinfoot’,
‘knoddar’? How many, how many? And what on earth has language got to do with all of this? Not
surprisingly, teachers and researchers were as amazed as the children over what was going on in
that room. There we went, all of us, tumbling down the rabbit hole!
Even though we can never be sure that the children’s intentions in this process were the same
as ours and that they made an explicit connection between the experimentations with the mirrors
and the ontological status of language, we could still see that this way of working with the mirrors
had an immediate effect on language production as well. The children struggled to describe what
they had lived and experienced, both verbally as well as through images and writings:
I thought, I thought that it was good to take that large mirror, and then when I checked it and
held it against my stomach and then when I looked into it I saw Therese behind me. And then
when I turned it slightly upwards it looked as if she was upside down and there was a hole in the
ground and I saw the ceiling and I stood on one leg (‘flying’) without falling down.
As the project proceeded we tried to create situations together with the children that would
encourage a closer connection between the mirrors and language, reading and writing. For
instance, we would perform a mirror installation on the subway and the children would use
language, reading and writing in their preparations and performance of this installation.

Figure 19. ‘We could place the mirrors here, at the entrance of the subway,
so that people going to work can check that their hair looks nice!’

Or, when we, by the end of the semester, ask the children to invent ways of telling about their
experiences, one of their suggestions was to make a book about what they had lived.
For us, this project is a great example of the need to try to see beyond what we think we
know of children and language in order to appeal to what children really are asking about
language. It seemed to us from our early observations that the children asked about the foundation
of language as a representational system and that they enjoyed experimenting with that ontological
question through producing new representations. Adding the mirrors as material to experiment

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with for a while was possibly a way of reinforcing and offering a context, an irresistible
opportunity, to continue the formulation: what is reality and being, and how to use language in the
midst of all that? It seemed to us that children had created this specific assemblage of desire in
relation to their learning of language, reading and writing, and it seemed important for us to
acknowledge and try to make use of this very drive for learning.

The Name Project – the Event

Figure 20. Albert’s old name.

Albert: A is wrinkled, wears glasses and has not many teeth left. L is an old man with grey hair and moustache. B rides in
a wheelchair and waves. E has got too many lines because he doesn’t remember how many he is supposed to have ...
(Albert takes a pause and laughs a lot). He has got a bad memory and forgets things all the time! R is riding a skateboard.
Old folks can do that as well, they are also supposed to have fun!

‘The Name Project’ (for a full account of the project, see Olsson, 2012) was another project that we
performed together with the children at the beginning of the research project. We wanted this time
to go further with the productive representative logic we had discovered that the children used, but
this time we wanted to try to connect it more closely to the alphabetic letters themselves. The
opportunity arose when we discovered how the children in one group were very busy with the
writing and reading of their names. In an attempt to get the whole group going, we picked up one
boy’s playful writing of his name through the use of both visual and alphabetic representations, a
freezing name (a name that is cold), and asked the children to discuss this strategy:

Figure 21. Casper’s freezing name.

Kelly: What have you done?

Filip: It looks like a frozen name

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Hannah: Is it an ice name?

Albert: Like icicles hanging in an ice cave.
Casper: Well, it’s sort of a shaky name. I did it a while ago. It is bloody freezing so I am shaking.
Kelly: But you haven’t made a C, it looks like a 3 but turned around.
Casper: Well, you know, it’s not so easy to write when you are shaking ...
All of a sudden all the children in the class want to make frozen names, and there is a true explosion
of name making where each child has got his or her unique strategy but where they also pick up,
use and transform each other’s strategies (Eriksson, 2013). Throughout the semester, the children,
together with teachers and researchers, invent new names to read and write: angry names, happy
names, old names ... In Figures 22 and 23, for instance, Presley and Albert are producing
‘mischievous names’ and dealing with the difference between ‘a little mischief and a real quarrel’.

Figure 22. Presley’s mischievous name.

Presley: Sometimes there’s a real quarrel and not only a little mischief, it depends on who is part of it. If somebody hits
too hard there’s a quarrel. P is running after R; they both want to, so that’s just a little mischief. S is cheating, he is
fighting, you must not fight with two people at the same time because you will not see if your friend is all right.

Figure 23. Albert’s mischievous name.

Albert: I am going to make a balloon and write something in it. Because you say ‘mischievous things’ when you’re
mischievous. I make running legs because you run when you’re mischievous. B is laughing. I’ve made a laughing mouth
that asks the L if it wants to play. I’ve done the one you need to do if you ask something [i.e. question mark]. The B says:
‘Oh! I was just joking’ so they start chasing each other. A is not part of the game. Then they happen to run into E so he
gets mad, and T gives an olive to R, but R hates olives he thinks it tastes like junk so he get sad and starts crying. R thinks
that was not a good joke so he gives a chocolate heart to E and then they can play together. Sometimes there’s more

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quarrel than mischief, because not everybody likes the same jokes. So T doesn’t make jokes he’s just nasty giving that
olive. He is upset because he is the last one in my name. Actually, one needs to feel sorry for him …

Another example is when Kelly comes back one Monday and starts making a proper ‘diary of
names’ describing everything she’s done during the weekend: drawing, working in the garden, had
pancakes for lunch, went with mum to workout, vomited at the amusement park after having a
ride in the ‘Wild Mouse’, went and watched brother play hockey …

Figure 24. Kelly’s diary of names.

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When analysing all the names produced within this project, we used a few ideas about the concept
‘event’. According to Deleuze (1994, 2004b), within events there is always an ongoing sense
production and questions and problems await here to be formulated and constructed. Learning is
here considered to consist of the entering into a problematic field (see also Mozère, in press).
Rather than clinging on to and reproducing what we think we already know about what is true or
false, we need to reverse the logic so as to be capable of seeing that each sense production has its
proportional relation to the formulation of questions or problems and likewise to what is true or
false:
Far from being concerned with solutions, truth and falsehood primarily affect problems. A
solution always has the truth it deserves according to the problem to which it is a response, and
the problem always has the solution it deserves in proportion to its own truth or falsity - in other
words, in proportion to its sense. (Deleuze, 1994, p. 159; original emphasis)
Using these ideas when analysing ‘The Name Project’, it seemed to us that the problem that the
children were constructing was the very problem of linguistic representation, but they did so through
departing from a sense of linguistic representation as a visual and alphabetical production and by
hanging up the letters in Life itself. Keeping this and the quote from Deleuze in mind, and looking
back at the very first image of Albert’s old name, it becomes very clear. Albert is here putting too
many lines on his old E, not because he is meta-linguistically immature, but because he’s following
his sense production with intention and a great deal of humour: an old E obviously forgets things
all the time, including how many lines it has got! It seemed to us that the sense the children are
working with when writing and reading names consists in connecting the reading and writing to
physical and psychical states, existential problems and everyday events that concern them, which is
very much in line with how Deleuze talks about the event as ‘making language possible’ (Deleuze,
2004b, p. 208). That is, it is not language that is the cause or origin of our events. Language is part
of events but does not resemble events or contain them. We could conclude that, in sharp contrast
to what established theories and methods say of language and children, the children in this project,
when asking questions about the foundation of the problem of linguistic representation, could be
considered as being the ones who ask the real meta-linguistic question and perform the real meta-
linguistic action: ‘How come we chose this specific connection between words and things? Let’s try
another one!’ We also concluded that the children seemed to learn what they are supposed to learn
from a more formalised educational perspective; as the project proceeded, the children continued
reading and writing also at other occasions and in relation to more things than their names. The
further we went into the semester, new and more alphabetical signs, words, sentences and even
different languages were being produced by the children. From this project and with the concept of
‘the event’ we learned that, in order to analyse children’s learning processes in an ‘aligning’ and
‘listening’ way, one must always look at how the question and the problem under construction
relate to the sense being produced. We might then access a learning that concerns knowledge as
produced, but that also incorporates the reproduction of knowledge.

‘The Line Project’ – Affect

In this last example we worked with the very youngest children aged one to two. These are
children who often do not speak yet but still are already entering written and read language. The
image above shows one common example of the very first attempts to write and read. In this
project we were struggling to find other ways of considering these than as being ‘pre-writing’. We
wanted to find another way to value what these very young children were doing with language,
reading and writing. Here we turned to the concept affect. Affect is originally a concept fetched
from philosopher Baruch de Spinoza (1632-1677), and it has been frequently used by Deleuze and
Guattari, cultural theorist Brian Massumi, and also several researchers in early childhood education
and literacy education (Deleuze, 1988; Massumi, 2002, 2011; Deleuze & Guattari, 2004; Dufresne,
2006; Mozère, 2006; Cole, 2009; Hickey-Moody & Haworth, 2009; Knight, 2009; Masny & Cole,
2009; Olsson, 2009, in press; Masny & Waterhouse, 2011; Dahlberg, manuscript). According to
these references, Spinoza draws up the contours of a universe that consists of bodies (organic as
well as non-organic) that transform and act. Affect is the concept capable of describing a body’s
potential to transform and act. In Deleuze’s writings on Spinoza (1988), this gives us a certain

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devaluation of consciousness through indicating that ‘[w]e do not know what a body can do’, and
through showing how ‘the body surpasses the knowledge we have of it, and that thought likewise
surpasses the consciousness we have of it’ (Deleuze, 1988, p.18; original emphasis). When our body is
being restricted in its capacity to act, we feel passivity, sadness, dissatisfaction, etc. When it is
extending its capacities to act, we feel intensity, joy, satisfaction, etc. With our conscious minds this
is what we experience, but these emotions are only the effect of affect. Emotions are registrations of
the body’s expanded or restricted capacity to affect or be affected, to act (Deleuze, 1988, p. 21). For
us, affect became a very important concept to use in order to value the youngest children’s learning
to read and write differently.

Figure 25. Theo’s writing.

Bearing the above in mind, we arranged very simple but inviting contexts or ‘irresistible reading
and writing opportunities’ for the very youngest children to continue exploring their lines and the
potential of their bodies as well as the bodies of crayons, black felt-tip pens, paper in different sizes,
colours, textures, work in the whole group, smaller groups, two and two, alone ...

Figure 26. Drawing a line, large felt-tip pens and a large sheet of paper.

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Figure 27. Continuing the line over the whole length of the paper.

Figure 28. The other children start walking/reading the line.

Figure 29. Putting up their work on the wall, small square paper with black ink …

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Figure 30. Collage of unique lines, small square paper, black ink.

Figures 31, 32 and 33. Two children, one pen, paying attention to each other’s lines.

Figure 32.

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Figure 33.

Figure 34. The ‘confetti room’ – an irresistible opportunity for reading and writing.

Figure 35. Starting off with the blue paper, filling it up completely before continuing.

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Figure 36. Exploring the transparent paper.

Figure 37. Falling asleep with the still slightly moving pen in hand after two hours of non-stop working.

With the help of the concept of affect, we could value what happens in the exercises shown in
figures 26-37 above as learning to read and write through increasing one’s body’s capacity to act
and through joining one’s own body with the body of the crayon/ink/paper, through becoming
one with the these materials through engaging in writing in an affective way. During the project
we often experienced seeing ‘crayon bodies’ move around in the various situations we created.
Moreover, there is, during all these occasions, a fantastic joy and energy filling up the entire room,
and these are indicators pointing towards increased potential for all bodies involved (organic and
non-organic). Even though the distinction between affect and emotion is important in order to
reach potentiality and this approach should not be confused with any simplified conception of ‘fun
learning’, this does not take away the importance of emotions. For what we experience through
emotions is ‘the perception of one’s own vitality, one’s sense of aliveness, of changeability’
(Massumi, 2002, p. 36). This is exactly what we saw on all these occasions: vitality, aliveness and
changeability. It seemed to us that these ‘irresistible opportunities’ really functioned for the
children. They seemed to appeal to more subtle registers of experience that the very youngest
children use in their learning. Maybe the very youngest children, more or less explicitly, often ask
this specific question: where is there room for the expanding of bodily potential and for joyful
passions?
Another question that we suspected that the very youngest children were working with was
the one of phonetic and graphic representations. Very often when they produced a new sign, a new
sound would immediately follow, or vice versa. We were struck by how extremely deliberate and
unique each child’s signs were. Signs, whether phonetic or graphic, were produced not out of
randomness, but out of intention. We were also struck, actually quite shocked – despite our long
experience of trying to value children’s learning differently – by the extreme span of concentration
and the intensity in their processes (not the least by the child who works alone and intensively in
the ‘confetti room’ for two hours before actually falling asleep, with the still slightly moving pen in
hand…). These are, after all, children who are only one to two years old.

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Through this project we could again see that the children actually did learn what they were
supposed to learn from a more formalised perspective. For instance, the children aged five – and
who went through similar kinds of experimentation with language, reading and writing – left for
primary school in spring 2011 as a group of 14 individuals who all knew how to read and write. It is
the first time in this preschool’s history that all the children in a group entered primary school
already knowing how to read and write. Also, the youngest children now display great interest for
language, reading and writing and choose and engage voluntarily in such activities every day in
preschool. One possible conclusion (that needs to be strengthened over time and in relation to a
larger number of children) is that an affective learning to read and write might also be an effective
learning to read and write (for a fuller of account of the project, see Olsson, in press). For us, this
project showed that even the very youngest children ask meta-linguistic questions about language,
in this project exemplified by their ongoing production of phonetic and graphic representations.
But maybe most importantly, this project taught us that affect might be a factor for valuation of
young children’s learning that is as important as, for instance, numbers.

Discussion
This article has attempted to focus on the importance of, and the conditions needed for, being able
to really listen to children’s questions and take them seriously. This presents a real challenge today
as we are told that cheap, quick and simple solutions and answers are what is needed, whilst the
didactical and political activist work involving listening to children’s questions that is described in
this article is rather expensive, slow and complex. However, there is no need to re-establish yet
another permanent dualism between a more formalised educational system and a more listening and
aligning one. We are, as Deleuze and Guattari express it, forced to go ‘via all the dualisms that are
the enemy, an entirely necessary enemy’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004, p. 23), but the most important
thing is to not get stuck. It is not a question of seeking blindly the ‘new’, or any final alternative to
what already exists. Rather, it concerns the continuous rearranging and revitalisation of what we
already have at our disposal. According to Liane Mozère (2013), Félix Guattari was very fond of
saying, ‘Toujours biner et persévérer’ [Always loosen up and persevere]. And even though we as
adults are quite at home in our orthodox thinking, and despite the fact that we live in a time and
place of a not-so-glimmering politics, we have the possibility to do this. Although here, we actually
need the help of children and their taste for creative thought. Not because they are more ‘natural’
or ‘creative’ in any simplified, romanticised or primitive sense, but simply because they are not yet
completely stuck within orthodox thought. Because of their affinity for creative thought, we need
them to tell us with their production of sense, problems and questions how to constantly loosen up
and persevere. Maybe this was what Deleuze spoke of when he said, ‘If little children managed to
make their protest heard in nursery school, or even simply their questions, it would be enough to
derail the whole educational system’ (Deleuze, 2004b, p. 208).

Acknowledgements
This research has been made possible through the very close cooperation between a number of
people. I would here like to mention and thank children, teachers and head teachers in the
preschools we have been working with, as well as Ebba Theorell, our artistic adviser who is the
one who has been responsible for the extraordinary fieldwork and the beautiful photographs and
film sequences. Thank you Professor Gunilla Dahlberg for believing in and supporting our
sometimes quite wild experimentations. Thank you also all lecturers and doctoral students who
have participated with such joy and skill in our project. And thank you artist/researcher Monica
Sand and dancer/researcher Kajsa Sandström for your participation and for sharing your
knowledge in the mirror project. We all had so much fun!

Notes
[1] This research is supported by the Swedish Research Council.
[2] All the quotations from children are translated from Swedish to English by the author.

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LISELOTT MARIETT OLSSON is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Stockholm, Department

of Child and Youth Studies, and is especially interested in early childhood literacy didactics and
French philosophy. She is a member of the research group ‘The Aesthetics and Ethics of Learning’
and author of Movement and Experimentation in Young Children’s Learning: Deleuze & Guattari in early
childhood education (London: Routledge, 2009). She is also project leader for the research project
‘The Magic of Language’. Correspondence: liselottmariett@me.com

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