In our presentation we focus on research practice to explore ‘curious practice’ as a post-qualitative methodology to investigate what kind of data emerges, or perhaps rather: how does data shape the research encounters and what new knowledges emerge in educational research with a curious practice methodology? We do this from two perspectives: one focuses on very young children in early childhood education in Australia, the other on children in a primary school in Finland. Data from kindergartens from Melbourne, Australia, will be introduced to critically engage with possibilities and limitations of ‘curious practice’ as a methodology in research with young children in early childhood contexts, while a primary school in Oulu, Finland, will be a site of immersion into curious practice and data from students’ everyday life encounters with nature. In our project with children a ‘curious practice’ methodology is particularly relevant. In the majority of educational research, young children are understood as knowable, due to a historical commitment in early childhood education to developmental psychology (Turmel, 2008). Research with young children often involves observations and interventions, and even when participatory methods are used, understandings of the child as ‘unfolding’ dictate what is deemed possible in data collection (Orholt & Rholt, 2002). Similarly in research with gradeschoolers, the assumption often is that elaborate planning and pre-modeled research techniques guarantee the trustworthiness of a study. The notion of curious practice is borrowed from philosophers Donna Haraway (2015) and Viciane Despret (2015). Curious practice asks of the researcher to create hospitable conditions for encounters without assuming prior knowledge of the other. Despret in her research ‘goes visiting’ instead of data collecting. This is not an easy practice by any means: to go visiting as research practice puts the onus on the researcher to create conditions for the possibility of interesting, lively encounters to take place. Assumptions about data gathering are upended: instead of waiting for the research subject to do something that produces ‘rich data’, the researcher is responsible for finding ways of listening, seeing, being with others that invite engagement in the moment. The shared moment, and whatever happens in this temporary space, is data. Data is the contingent, fleeting capture of specificity – whatever happened could only happen in this encounter, at that moment and in a particular place.

Despret, V. (2015). The Enigma of the Raven. Angelaki, 20(2), 57-72. Haraway, D. (2015). A curious practice. Angelaki, 20(2), 5-14. doi:10.1080/0969725X.2015.1039817 Orholt, K. J., & Rholt, A. T. (2002). Small is powerful: Discourses on `children and participation' in Norway. Childhood, 9(1), 63-82. doi:10.1177/0907568202009001005 Turmel, A. (2008). A historical sociology of childhood: Developmental thinking, categorization and graphic visualization. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.