This presentation is part of my ongoing doctoral study on children’s perspectives on life in the classroom. The study is methodologically situated within the framework of narrative ethnography (Gubrium & Holstein 2008), where the interplay of narratives with their material/physical, discursive and social context is taken into account. The children’s perspectives are explored through their own ethnographical writing. The core data were produced during ten months in a Finnish classroom of 10-year-old children.  Two children at a time were asked to write observations, thoughts or stories freely on a laptop computer during the school day. Also autoethnographical  writing of the teacher/researcher, memories, and various school materials are included in the data.

The open-ended writing task resulted in ‘messy’ and rich narrative ethnographical data. The current theoretizations of children and childhoods as multiple, complex and ‘hybrid’ (Prout 2005; Lee 2001, 2008) have inspired me not to reduce the complexity in the children’s writings, but rather to take it as the starting point. I aim to look at relations, processes, flows and intensities instead of fixed entities or separate individuals. To this end, I employ the thought of Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987) via the concepts nomadic and striated and smooth space.

I will here focus on the aspects of time. Time is relevant to ‘hybrid’ children seen as constantly transforming through bio-social processes of maturation. Time also strongly structures the activity taking place in the classroom, as well as the writings of the children which are constructed according to the cultural notions of a diary. I ask: How does time fold within the relations and processes of the children’s nomadic writing in the classroom?

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