Reorienting Pedagogical Attention: Attunement, Participation and the Poetics and Politics of Infant-Toddler Play in ECEC

Abstract

Infant-toddler play and participation in Danish early childhood education and care (ECEC) often unfolds through fleeting movements, sensory orientations, rhythms and material relations that remain difficult to sustain within everyday institutional practices increasingly organized around documentation, coordination, and measurable outcomes. This article explores how pedagogical attention might be reoriented toward the poetics and politics of infant-toddler play and participation within everyday ECEC life. Drawing on a design-based collaboration with pedagogues in four Danish ECEC centers, the study examines three experimental interventions: Sense Expeditions, Living Go-Pros, and the Play Mixer. The interventions temporarily shifted sensory, bodily, and material arrangements, shaping how pedagogical situations become perceptible and inhabitable within everyday practice.

The analysis demonstrates how these altered conditions created new possibilities for pedagogical attunement to ordinary forms of collective life often overlooked within institutional routines, including rhythmic movement, fluctuating proximity, sensory atmospheres and quiet forms of »wildness«. The article conceptualizes attunement as situated sociomaterial accomplishment emerging through changing sensory, material and institutional arrangements. Methodologically, the study demonstrates how sociomaterial interventions can create opportunities for pedagogues and researchers to collectively explore how participation becomes perceptible, inhabitable, and pedagogically consequential within everyday ECEC practice. The article contributes to affect-oriented and sociomaterial approaches to infant-toddler participation by exploring how experimental pedagogical interventions can reorganize attention toward the sensory, relational and material dimensions of everyday collective life in ECEC.