Children’s Underground Life in Danish School Classes for Children with Special Needs

A chair dances with a boy. A glue gun shoots glue. A diversity of materials on a table lure and drag the hands of children and researchers. Smiles open faces. The frame is a ‘special need class’ with 8 boys and two researchers from the research domain of child cultures. In the room there is also boundary markings as screens, time timers, pictograms. There are professionals with a special pedagogy approach and educational tasks entangled in policy, discourses of good school behaviours and economic approaches to inclusion.

With an aim of exploring and transcending boundaries between research domains of special pedagogy and child culture studies the methods of this project include: a review on interfaces between child culture studies and special pedagogics, participant observations in a class with 8 boys (8 – 9 years) and a play experiment (in two iterations).
Questioning Corsaro’s definition of children’s underground life with a strong emphasis on children’s agency and children as producers, we expand with post-qualitative perspectives promoting material encounters and materiality as vibrant matters. Thus, we explore the underground life of children in a ‘special-needs-class’ as intra-active and vibrating becomings through encounters between different materialities and their agencies. This includes frames set and managed both by professionals with a special educational approach in everyday school life and researchers in facilitating a play experiment.

In the presentation we focus on:
Results from the review
Materiality as a powerful co-player in children’s underground life
Play ability of the children within the school setting.