Forskningsarbete pågår - Umeå universitet

practices, pre-supposes a natural child, a child with specific, inherent capacities
to develop walking according to a specific scheme. The pedagogical challenge
lies in giving the right support at the right moment for the child to develop
properly. The child’s response to this developmental help decides then whether
the child is following the normal curve of development or not. 19 I wanted to try
to understand Stella Nona’s apprenticeship of walking from another perspective
than these theories. I saw her lying on her stomach, arms and hands placed in
the height of her armpits, a sudden jump up to a squat position, the slight raising
of the legs, the arms balancing horizontal to the body, and then in the midst of
all the Piagetian concepts of motor development and phases, I all of a sudden
came to think about my surfing class on the west coast two years earlier. Stella
Nona’s movements were exactly the same I had so much trouble getting through
in surfing ; the lying on the board with the hands well placed in the level of the
armpits, the fast jump up with the feet close to the hands, into a squat position,
the slight raising of the legs, the arms balancing horizontal to the body.
This is an added image of the way a child learns how to walk. This is an added
image of who surfs and how. What is important about this connection between
Stella Nona and the surfer, in the example above, is, that we are experiencing what
happens when a child learns to walk in a different way. We could very well say that
the, surfer, too develops. Yes, he develops, but that is because we have chosen to
call these specific movements on a surfboard, a skill that is to be taught in a certain
manner which ends up in a certain result. What I want to show with this example
is how we, with the help of science, have created explanations and definitions of
the naturally developing child, that make it hard for us to see the child and it’s
learning from other perspectives. If we can see the child and the child’s learning
from other perspectives, then other things will happen with the way we experience
the child’s position as a child and the way we experience the learning of a skill. In
short, the way we perceive of the identity of the learning pre-school child. ‘Stella
Nona as a surfer’ is an attempt to do some careful, pragmatic, experimentation.
We have the scientific function of how a child learns to walk, being put to work
with the concept of the surfer. ‘Stella Nona as a surfer’ is an invented, mutated
concept that tries to displace meaning in the image of the identity of the child
that learns to walk. It is a concept that tries to create a relation between the child
and the surfer, between movements being carried out in two different settings,
now all of sudden, in another setting, brought together as one.
conclusion
I have tried to show how Deleuze’s philosophy could possibly propose an addition
to the notion of identity as a natural feature. Through careful, pragmatic
experimentation and with the help of the concepts of ‘a lives’ and ‘virtuality’, we
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