This article elaborates an intra-active approach to action research, with examples from a recently started action research project carried out in collaboration with three preschools. The aim of the article is to contribute to the discussion about how practice-based research for change can take shape. Therefore, these questions are asked: Which concepts are central and what is produced in intra-active action research? Which potentialities for change are enabled via an intra-active approach to action research? New materialism theories, starting with Barad, are used to rethink action research, focusing on collaboration, movements, and change. An analysis workshop within the project, starting in circular and horizontal movements, inspired by Deleuze and Guattari through the work of Lenz Taguchi, is revisited. The intra-actions in the workshop produce both generative and undermining processes. Therefore, the intra-active action research approach implies that staying in the complexity of practices, rather than seeking to reduce the ‘messiness’, holds potentialities for change that unwind from the middle.

In this article, a collaborative Deleuze-Guattarian-inspired cartography is produced with preschool practitioners to explore the assemblages of teaching in preschool. The aim is to map how teaching comes into being in preschool planning and reflection practices following the movements of territorialisation and re-/de-territorialisation. Unwinding from a policy change that 4 years ago introduced teaching to the Swedish preschool curriculum, the overarching question of what teaching is and could be to follows through the text. The preschool teaching assemblages are visited through three territories in which different continuums of (un)teaching unfold when staying with the emerging messiness. The movements of de-territorialisation open for divergent thinking, questioning traditions and assumptions of how to conduct teaching in preschool practice, in entanglement with both local and global movements.

Artikeln baseras på ett utvecklingsprojekt om undervisning i förskolan som under drygt två år bedrivits i aktionsforskande anda och där tre förskolor i samma förskoleområde deltagit. Syftet med artikeln är att beskriva och diskutera de utvecklande rörelser som kan uppstå i ett utvecklingsprojekt om undervisning i förskolan. Rörelser förstås här som lägesförändringar av människor, tankar och praktiker. Fyra övergripande rörelser har formulerats och diskuteras i relation till aktionsforskning som en ”practice changing practice” samt teorin om praktikarkitekturer. Förändringarna kan ses i den praktiska undervisningen samt i pedagogernas förståelse för undervisning och utvecklingsarbete. Undervisningen görs på ett annat sätt och i större omfattning idag än tidigare. Utvecklandet av ett gemensamt språk för att prata om, och reflektera kring undervisning och utvecklingsarbete har varit viktigt. Även villkoren för praktiken har förändrats. Organiseringen både av och för utbildning och undervisning bygger idag på gemensamma och kollegiala processer.

This paper explores and renegotiates the shapes of teaching in preschool education. Therefore, I engage in storytelling drawing from Haraway and create encounters together and with preschool practices and practitioners in connection to a policy change that introduced teaching into the Swedish preschool curriculum. This multiple inquiry complexifies teaching, starting with the preschool practitioners’ questions and concerns about teaching in preschool. Through stories, teaching takes both place and space in preschool education, challenging and confirming ideas and traditions on how to do preschool. Teaching takes multiple shapes and becomes a practice that extends beyond a specific event, encompassing both preparatory planning and subsequent reflections, as well as the continued process, intertwined with global trends of formalising early childhood education. Resisting a simplified story of the purpose of preschool education, I propose storytelling as a way to acknowledge teaching in preschool practices.