‘What If? As If’, an approach to action research practice: becoming-different in school-age childcare

Abstract

When doing research, or for that matter working in school-age childcare, the researcher/teacher is required to develop a plan for her/his work in spite of knowing that unexpected things will happen. This article aims to explore the relationship between the process of planning and unexpected events in childcare practice and action research. The article uses transcripts of discussions from a collaborative action research project focusing on playing in school-age childcare to explore this relationship. The article attempts to go beyond dualisms to understand playing as a way to disturb existing practices. In conjunction with specified transcripts from ongoing research, this is done by folding together concepts inspired by Deleuze and Guattari such as becoming-different with concepts from play theory and action research. The article argues that there may be such a thing as a ‘What If? As If’ approach to practice, according to which collaborators are playing to change social situations and develop new knowledge. Being alert to invitations to playing allows the process of planning to continuously become-different.

Keywords:

• action research
• Deleuze and Guattari
• playing
• school-age childcare

Acknowledgements

A special thank you to staff at the participating school, to Kathleen Clayton, Charles Sturt University, Australia, to Kajsa Ohrlander and Anna Palmer, Stockholm University, Sweden and to the reviewers. All comments were thought provoking and helpful.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. A playframe, according to Else (2008, 80), is ‘the environment in which the play takes place’. Guilbaud (2003, 10) adds to this understanding the idea that a playframe constitutes an alternative reality created by the players. In this article, I understand a playframe to be both the physical environment as well as the narrative of the playing.