Children’s wellbeing is getting political and pedagogical attention in Denmark and internationally (O’Toole & Simovska, 2022). With this attention follows norms and ideals of positive and negative emotions and where these emotions should be directed (Olsen & Vallgårda, 2022; Wright et al., 2022). In schools this means that emotions are part of the everyday practices and an object of pedagogy that intertwines with the many norms of schooling. I examine some of the many ways emotions become of pedagogical attention and its consequences as a part of school’s wellbeing focus.

Through an ethnographic inspired fieldwork, I show how norms of Danishness and emotional homogeneity has consequences for how it is possible for who to become an emotional subject in the beginning of school. This paper is guided by the following research question: How are pupil’s emotions orientated by wellbeing pedagogy in the school start and what effect does this have on pupils’ possibilities of subjectification?

I draw on poststructuralist (Butler, 1997) and feminist affect theory (Ahmed, 2001, 2010) and an understanding of emotions and feelings as imbedded in social and historical contexts. In these terms it is asked what emotions do and not what they are. Emotions are viewed as something that is assigning meaning and is being assigned meaning in the social, historical, and political contexts they are being shown, evaluated, or encouraged (ibid.). In this examination I am concerned with how ideas of a good (school) life are embedded in the way pupil’s emotions are being orientated and valued by teachers and leaders. Sara Ahmed writes: “In communities of feeling, we share feelings because we share the same object of feeling” (Ahmed, 2010, p. 56). It is the shaping of these communities I am interested in and that I am following methodologically and analytically. More specifically I am interested in how school shape communities of feeling by orienting children through pedagogical practices in what I call the pedagogical focus on emotional wellbeing.  

In the analysis I focus on informal conversations and observations in a Kindergarten class year group. The material is focused on how and when children’s emotions are being evaluated and directed by teachers and a leader at the school. I examine the school class as a community of feelings and the affective aliens (Ahmed, 2010) that is produced, when educating and orientating children’s emotions. I show how the school class is constructed and idealized as an emotional homogenic entity where Danishness become an idealized common emotional object and orientation. This becomes visible in small regulations of the children’s declarations of nationality during lunch and when a child shows solidarity with the Palestinian people by having a keychain with the Palestinian flag and by representing Palestine when playing. Pride in other nationalities than Danish as well as solidarity with Palestine is regulated in pedagogical attempts to orient the children to the class and solidarity with all children. It is these regulations and orientations I examine as producing hierarchies of groups and individuals.

I argue that the rising interest and attention to children’s wellbeing and the pedagogical practices attention to children’s emotions is intertwined with norms of schooling and can’t be separated from the many ways school makes differences. This work contributes to the body of work highlighting how educational institutions reproduces racialized hierarchies through the affective strategies (MacLure et al., 2012; Vertelyte, 2019). Further it explores some of the normative dimensions of the growing work concerning children’s emotional wellbeing (Primdahl & Simovska, 2024).

This paper is based on an ethnographic inspired fieldwork at one school in their three kindergarten classes. The material consists of 35 days observations spread out between the three classes, 7 meetings between kindergarten class teachers and informal conversations with teachers and leaders. I conducted the empirical material from August 2023 and April 2024. The school is a Danish public school and is described as having a lot of social problems by several of the employees. The fieldwork is conducted at in kindergarten class based on an assumption of school start being a time where rules and norms are being explicated to children making them less taken for granted and therefore more visible, than in the higher grade levels (Weiland Willaa, 2023). This means that I see school start as a time where children become pupils with all expectations and logics that imply. Conducting fieldwork at one school made it possible to access a nuanced and variated insight into the everyday life of the school start, where it became possible to gain knowledge on emerging negotiations and forming of communities and subjectivities over time. The design of the study is based on intersectional feminist (Davis, 2014; Lather, 2009) and affective ethnographic methodology (Chadwick, 2021; Knudsen & Stage, 2015; Zembylas, 2016). In the observations I focus on how emotions are being valued and explained to preschoolers in everyday life and how preschool teachers evaluate and interpret emotional expressions and patterns in their meetings and informal conversations with me. My material therefore draw attention to situations where emotions become of pedagogical and social importance (Zembylas, 2016). This includes situations where the children are being told how to manage e.g. conflicts, friendships, or competitions. These situations are seen as pedagogical ways of shaping the children as emotional subjects and communities of feelings (Ahmed, 2010). The analysis is conducted by following emotions of importance in the material through alternating processes of theoretically informed coding in NVivo and highlighting nodes of wonder as what feels of great analytical significance (Childers, 2014; MacLure, 2013). Throughout the analysis I focus on how reiterative practices constitutes intelligible emotional subjects (Butler, 1997) as well as how disturbances and discontinuities emerges throughout my material. In this paper I focus on the processes surrounding the constitutions of nationality and Danishness.

In this presentation I will unfold an analysis of an ongoing negotiation of children’s involvement in conflicts beyond the borders of Denmark and the west. I show how concerns and solidarity with the Palestinian people are redirected and constructed as falling outside a non-political Danish sphere of the school. During my fieldwork, I am told how parents are contacted asking for them to try and keep their child out of the discussions, foreign television is being problematized as going against the school’s project and how teachers are collectively being told to tone the discussions around Isreal and Palestine down. I suggest that these practices take part in shaping affective aliens as well as a Danish community of feeling that contributes to a marginalization and minoritization of children with families where worries for the Palestinian people are inevitable. In line with studies of welfare work in Nordic countries (Vertelyté & Li, 2021), I show how pedagogical attention to children’s emotions is aligning with ideals of Danishness that works to differentiate and hierarchize emotional orientations. I argue that pedagogical practices and theories aiming at children’s emotional wellbeing aren’t neutral and that these knowledges should be viewed as effectful emotional governing when institutionalized. This paper therefore produces new knowledge on the consequences of orientating children’s emotions and how great emphasis on communities and common emotional objects can become differentiating. Further these insights are adding to the growing knowledge on children’s emotions and wellbeing (Primdahl & Simovska, 2024) by showing how emotions become part of school’s processes of differentiation and marginalization – also when perceived as neutral or universally good.

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