Children as naughty or creative agents?

Using the abductive strategy to see in new ways

Abstract

In this article one focus group interview from previous research on a school-project is discussed. The project concerned students’ experiences of artistic education, in which professional artists were teaching. By using Charles Sanders Peirce’s idea of abduction this interview with four young children is re-interpreted. Instead of considering the interview as being totally out of the scope of the research, what was happening can be set in new perspective out from the abductive analytical approach. The unexpected form of children’s agency is reconsidered, and the children are no longer appearing as naughty girls and boys. Instead, the relations between the children are seen as agentic and as a starting point for challenging the relation to the adult as well as the norms in school, and thereby also the children's conventional subordination. In the empirical example the children are creative in their using of the material for drawing, and they are plying the line for the, in school usually, ‘forbidden’ pictures and words, and they are playing with their voices and make quite a lot of noise. But scrutinizing the transcriptions closely, it also shows that they are partly following the adults’ intention and actually make contributions to the research but in a broader sense. Instead of sharing their experiences of the art-project, they perform playfully, in their peer-culture, meaning-making around their own child position, and in this play the aspect of power is challenged. With a theoretical standpoint in childhood research, the intension with the study’s ethnographic approach was to come close to children’s experiences. The abductive strategy (Paavola, 2014) was used for to go back to this, at first glance misconducted, focus group interview. By using other analytical concepts for interpretation, here aesthetic sublation (Ylönen, 2021), the situation is re-contexualized. Hence dimensions of children's agency as well as their possible resistance towards the adult’s intention becomes salient.  By applying the concept or aesthetic sublation (Ylönen, 2021) the communication and relations within the interview turned out to be possible to interpret as a process of self-creation in which what is seen as ‘disgusting’ places the children out of reach from the adult order. Children's agency can be expressed in different ways and to recognize these variants the researcher’s openness is required. The article approaches the question of ethnography as abductive in itself, as it requires an open-minded and not fixed expectation of the phenomenon of interest. In the ending discussion pragmatism is related to what abduction – and recontextualizing – can bring forward in terms of new possibilities to understand the practical consequences of meaning-making.