Love in early childhood teaching: reading data diffractively with Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts

Abstract

Love is a significant, complex, and problematic aspect of early childhood teaching that is simultaneously valued, undervalued, feared, and overlooked. This article investigates complexities and tensions within perceptions and experiences of love in early childhood teaching from a posthumanist perspective. Data from a research study exploring emotions in early childhood teaching are analysed using concepts of affect and assemblage; and sense, nonsense, and paradox. Diffractive data analysis teases out flows of affect and forces that enable and constrain ways that love is continuously becoming in early childhood teaching and delves into the process of sensing in between bodies and language. This theoretical framework and methodology provides opportunities for productive ways of perceiving children, teachers, researchers and other-than-human components of early childhood assemblages as continuously produced within complex, unpredictable, and significant loving relationalities.