Becoming Child and Sustainability—The Kindergarten Teacher as Agency Mobiliser for Sustainability Through Keeping the Concept of the Child in Play

• Main Authors: Anita Tvedt Crisostomo, Anne B. Reinertsen
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2021-05-01
• Series: Sustainability
• Subjects: early childhood education and care; the wicked problem of sustainability; child agency; the pedagogy of the concept; critical posthumanism; constitution of subjectivity
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/10/5588

In this article, we seek to theorize the role of the kindergarten teacher as an agency mobiliser for sustainability through keeping the concept of the child in play, ultimately envisioning the child as a knowledgeable and connectable collective. This implies a non-dialectical politics of multiplicity ready to support and join a creative pluralism of educational organization and teacher roles for sustainability. Comprising friction zones between actual and virtual multiplicities that replace discursive productions of educational policies with enfoldedness, relations between bodies and becomings. This changes the power, position and function of language in and for agency and change. Not through making the child a constructivist change-agent through language but through opening up the possibilities for teachers to explore relations between language and matter, nature and culture and what might be produced collectively and individually. We go via the concepts of <i>agencement</i> expanding on the concept of agency, and <i>conceptual personae</i> directing the becoming of the kindergarten teacher. Both concepts informed by the transformational pragmatics of Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) and Félix Guattari (1930–1992). The overarching contribution of this article is therefore political and pragmatic and concerns the constitution of subjectivity and transformative citizenships for sustainability in inter- and intra-generational perspectives.