Pedagogical assemblages: rearranging children's traffic education

Kullman, Kim (2015). Pedagogical assemblages: rearranging children's traffic education. Social & Cultural Geography, 16(3) pp. 255–275.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2014.976765

Abstract

This article engages with the everyday geographies of mobile pedagogy by exploring Children's Traffic City, a model traffic area for 5- to 10-year-olds that is operated by the Youth Department of Helsinki, Finland. Drawing from the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, the article elaborates the notion of pedagogical assemblage to unsettle a series of problematic assumptions about children's mobility in present Euro-American settings, among them the idea that children are inherently unable to understand traffic environments and that these are exclusively dangerous spaces. Rather than conforming to prior pedagogical ideals, the instructors and pupils of Children's Traffic City are playing with alternative styles of learning and teaching mobilities by collaboratively reassembling essential components of traffic, including the multiple rhythms of moving bodies and the shifting materialities of infrastructures. Apart from offering insight into new ways of fostering children's participation in traffic environments, the article argues that such doings point to the role that mobile pedagogy can have in the making and unmaking of mundane habits and practices of movement and transport.

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