Aesthetic encounters and agency in ECEC: Materiality, intra-action, and sensitive entanglements

The aim of the article is to analyse aesthetic encounters in Danish early childhood and care (ECEC) centres and create knowledge of and a language for aesthetics as sensitive encounters and vibrant matters between humans and the world. The article thus challenges traditional assumptions about and understandings of aesthetics as simply impression, expression, and rather formal hands-on work (also referred to as ‘aesthetic learning processes’). The article links to fieldwork taking place in two Danish ECEC centres – a kindergarten (3–5-year-olds) and an age-integrated centre for kindergarten groups and nursery groups (0–2-year-olds). The fieldwork is framed as focused ethnography, and the methods used are written and visual field notes (video recording, photos) and interviews with artists who visited the ECEC centres and worked with the pedagogues. In the analysis process, the author revisits the empirical data and dwells on micro-moments that, in the article, are sampled into vignettes. With and through theoretical perspectives related to aesthetics as sensitive, vibrant, intra-active, and entangled encounters with materiality, new insights appear and lead to findings that highlight aesthetics as subtle and informal processes engaging materiality as a symmetric co-player alongside the artists and pedagogues and in support of children’s aesthetic agency.