Learning an aesthetic subject is a sensory endeavour. In the school subject food education, senses are continuously engaged: the students are touching the earthy potato as they peel it under running cold water, looking at onions soften in the pot, inhaling the aroma of bread baking in the oven, and tasting the warm prepared dishes alongside their classmates. Existing educational research in the school subject food education (also called home economics) has primarily focused on teacher practices and syllabus requirements (see, for example (Benn, 2009; Makumbe & Nyevera, 2021; Veka & Djupegot, 2025). But the kitchen classroom is inhabited by a swarm of young people with moving bodies, kitchen tables, stoves, sinks, cutlery, and food - vegetables, legumes, grains, dairy products, meats, and spices.

Creative and aesthetic school subjects, such as food education, have historically received limited attention within compulsory schooling. In many countries, food education is often a voluntary after-school activity, particularly in the upper grades (Benn, 2009). In the Danish school system, however, this positioning has begun to shift, as what may be described as a practical turn. For the first time in several decades, the Danish government in 2018 decided to increase the number of lessons allocated to aesthetic subjects in compulsory schooling (Ministry of Education, 2018). As a response to what may be described as a unilateral emphasis on academic skills in literacy and numeracy, greater curricular space has been given to subjects such as sloyd, visual arts, music, and food education. This turn has been articulated in Danish school policy discourse through the concept of practiacy (praksisfaglighed in Danish), which has, since the 2018 initiative, begun to develop as a new pedagogical phenomenon. Practiacy encompasses ambitions for more practical and varied teaching across school subjects, as well as a renewed focus on craft, craftwork, and vocational pathways beyond compulsory schooling (Ravn, 2024). With this new situatedness of the aesthetic school subjects, this paper is based on my PhD project exploring learning with things.

The aim of this paper is to explore research creation practices to trace learning processes with things, drawing on posthuman understandings of classroom assemblages as emergent becomings of human and non-human forces and relations (Lenz-Taguchi, 2009; Bennett, 2010; de Freitas, 2012; Deleuze et al., 1987). This paper takes shape through a posthuman and postqualitative inspiration to research, understood as an open-ended process of research creations (Taylor & Hughes, 2016). Rather than approaching knowledge as representation or outcome, inquiry is practiced as something that unfolds through experimental, relational, and more-than-human encounters. Grounded on postfoundational approaches (Gunnarsson & Bodén, 2021; Mazzei & Jackson, 2024), and Deleuzian notions of becoming (Deleuze et al., 1987), research is approached as practices that come into being alongside the worlds it engages. Knowledge is thus understood as situated and emergent, and is becoming through shifting relations among bodies, things, discourses, and affects. Postapproaches challenge human exceptionalism and foreground the significance of more-than-human participants in educational practices (Haraway, 2016). Through this perspective, teaching and learning processes are not pre-given phenomena but are continually made and remade within classroom assemblages as fluid configurations of students, teachers, things, buildings, curricular intentions, and discursive forces (Lenz-Taguchi, 2009; de Freitas, 2012; Murris, 2020). This approach invites attention to how matter comes to matter in school learning. The research question addressed is: How might learning processes with things be explored as classroom assemblages, emerging through shifting relations and affects among human and non-human participants?

Methodology Grounded in understanding of research as a haptic sensorium (Bergstedt, 2021) and in postqualitative methodology as a practice of material and bodily proximity (Gunnarsson & Bodén, 2021), the study employs sensory ethnographic fieldwork (Pink, 2015). Multisensory research practices have been a vital part of fieldwork practices (Howes, 2017). Food education is a multisensory school subject; using the senses is not supplementary but constitutive of learning processes, both for the students and for me as a researcher. Like culinary craft, the subject is inherently multisensory, engaging the senses of taste, smell, touch, sound, movement, and vision. These sensory engagements are central to both the quality of culinary food practices and to how learning processes unfold in the classroom. Consequently, sensing is not approached solely as a methodological concern, but as a part of the curricular and pedagogical content through which knowledge is produced. While multisensory ethnography has developed in response to the historical privileging of the visual in the humanities (Pink, 2015; Howes, 2019), the use of taste as a research method remains relatively underexplored. In this study, tasting is approached as both object and mode of inquiry. Drawing on taste as social (Counihan & Højlund, 2018) and Sutton’s anthropology of cooking (2015), tasting is understood as material and relational practices. Investigating tasting and investigating through tasting thus become entangled, allowing learning processes to be explored as sensory, collective, and emergent events. Grounded in an interest in school practices, this paper is based on experiences of empirical production that took shape through fieldwork in over 18 months in three lower secondary public schools in Denmark, as I followed school practices in food education classes in Grades 7–8. The students were young people aged 13-15, and the teachers were trained educators specialising in food education. The fieldwork comprises 93 lessons, and I followed 24 students through their practical and oral examinations. Throughout the fieldwork, attention was directed toward learning and teaching with things - how students’ and teachers’ practical doings took shape through their shifting relations with the kitchen classroom and its multiple materialities, including food items, kitchen utensils, and cookers. The fieldwork is documented through approximately 2,500 photographic fieldnotes, complemented by written fieldnotes.

Expected outcomes This paper explores how learning processes with things may be explored as classroom assemblages, emerging through shifting relations and affects among human and non-human participants. The paper’s expected outcomes elaborate on two interconnected knots: a) Becoming with kitchen practices Investigating a practical school subject - as practical - calls for a researcher who is likewise practically engaged, as knowledge in the haptic sensorium comes into being with and through the researcher’s body (Bergstedt, 2021). Rather than fully participating in cooking, which often produced asymmetrical collaborations due to my professional cooking skills, I attuned myself to the practical rhythms of food education by moving curiously through the kitchen classroom with my camera while students cooked, engaging in brief conversations along the way. When it was time to eat, I invited myself to join a group at the table. Eating together enabled me to taste the same food as the students and to take part in their conversations about dishes and flavours. Each shared meal became a small research-creation event when students photographed me eating their food, folding my body into the empirical assemblage. b) Capturing thing-power in the classroom The empirical material, photographic and written fieldnotes, was approached not as representational data but as active participants in the research process. The analyses attend to classroom assemblages in which bodies, things, and spaces come into relation and take shape through practice. Photographic fieldnotes played a central role in foregrounding material forces and spatial intensities, the thing-power, of these assemblages. Drawing on the method of following things (Woodward, 2022), I photographed not only human activity but also the doings of objects and rooms. In this way, material arrangements and transformations guided analytical attention, positioning things and spaces as active contributors to the becoming of teaching situations rather than as background context.

Benn, J. (2009). Practical Wisdom, Understanding of Coherence and Competencies for Everyday Life. International Journal of Home Economics, 2(1), 2–14. Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter : a political ecology of things. Duke University Press. Bergstedt, B. (2021). The Ontology of Becoming: To Research and Become with the World. Education sciences, 11(9), 491. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci11090491 Counihan, C., & Højlund, S. (2018). Making Taste Public: Ethnographies of Food and the Senses (1 ed.). Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350052710 de Freitas, E. (2012). The Classroom as Rhizome: New Strategies for Diagramming Knotted Interactions. Qualitative inquiry, 18(7), 557–570. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800412450155 Deleuze, G., Guattari, F., & Massumi, B. (1987). A thousand plateaus : capitalism and schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press. Gunnarsson, K., & Bodén, L. (2021). Introduktion till postkvalitativ metodologi (Vol. 2). Stockholm University Press. https://doi.org/10.16993/bbh Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (1 ed.). Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822373780 Howes, D. (2019). Multisensory Anthropology. Annual review of anthropology, 48(1), 17–28. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-102218-011324 Lenz-Taguchi, H. (2009). Going beyond the theory/practice divide in early childhood education : introducing an intra-active pedagogy (1st ed.). Routledge. Makumbe, S., & Nyevera, T. (2021). The Teaching of Home Economics in Primary Schools in Zimbabwe. In Advances in 21st Century Human Settlements (pp. 161–173). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-0305-1_11 Mazzei, L. A., & Jackson, A. Y. (2024). Postfoundational Approaches to Qualitative Inquiry (First edition. ed.). Routledge. Ministry of Education [Børne- og Undervisningsministeriet] (2018). Aftale om styrket praksisfaglighed i folkeskolen [Agreement on strengthened practice-based teaching and learning in the elementary school] https://www.regeringen.dk/media/5650/180612-aftale-omstyrket-praksisfaglighed-i-folkeskolen-ny.pdf (in Danish) Murris, K. (2020). Navigating the Postqualitative, New Materialist and Critical Posthumanist Terrain Across Disciplines: An Introductory Guide (1st edition ed.). Taylor and Francis. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003041177 Ravn, M. (2024). Becomings of Practiacy Between Policy Intentions and Pedagogical Research (2018–2024). Aarhus University (conference video-paper in Danish) https://youtu.be/SJvHIU6ZKik Sutton, D. (2015). The Anthropology of Cooking. In J. L. Watson & J. A. Klein (Eds.), The Handbook of Food and Anthopology. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. Taylor, C. A., & Hughes, C. (2016). Posthuman research practices in education. Palgrave Macmillan. Veka, I., & Djupegot, I. L. (2025). En oversiktsstudie av empirisk forskning på det norske skolefaget mat og helse i perioden 2006-2023. Smak, 1/2025. [A Review of Empirical Research on the Norwegian School Subject Food and Health (2006–2023)] (in Norwegian] Woodward, S. (2022). Material methods : researching and thinking with things. SAGE Publications.