The focus of this study is the co-actings of a 5-year-old girl, a swing, and physical phenomena. The study explores how the swing and physical phenomena worked as co-creators of the girl’s scientific explorations as well as her bodily capacities and identity construction. Empirically, the study makes use of a video sequence generated during a field study in a Swedish preschool with 5-year-old children. The field study focused on the children’s play and explorations together with the preschool environment, during activities not specifically guided by teachers. To conceptualize children’s emergent scientific learning as mutual with their identity construction and as being co-created together with nonhuman agents, the study combines perspectives from new materialism, emergent science, physics, and gender theory. As a theoretical and methodological foundation, a new materialist perspective drawing on Karen Barad’s (Meeting the universe halfway. Quantum physics of the entanglement of matter and meaning, Duke University Press, London, 2007) theory of agential realism and diffractive methodology were used, as well as Elizabeth de Freitas and Anna Palmer’s (Cult Stud Sci Educ 11(4):1201–1222, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11422-014-9652-6) notion concerning how scientific concepts can work as creative playmates in children’s explorations. The findings show how the girl, together with the swing, could experience and explore various physical phenomena as well as, extend her bodily capacities and become brave and strong. As such, new materialism shows how scientific phenomena can create affordances for an individual’s becomings as scientific as well as how “becoming scientific” can be understood. At the same time, the findings also indicate the importance of teachers not assuming that scientific phenomena are automatically part of children’s play or can be experienced by all children all the time. The explored situation was rare. On most occasions, the girl did not get the same kind of experiences with the swing because of gender norms. I argue that norms and discourses connected to science and gender are not things that “come with” older children or are only introduced by adults. These are instead already in the making and re-making within children’s co-actings with the material-discursive environment in preschool. It is therefore important that teachers engage in children’s embodied play with scientific phenomena, with the aim to empower the children, their bodies, capacities and (science) identities.

这项研究的重点是一个5岁女孩的角色，秋千和身体现象。这项研究探索了秋千和身体现象如何作为女孩科学探索以及她的身体能力和身份建构的共同创造者。根据经验，该研究利用在瑞典5岁儿童学龄前的实地研究中产生的视频序列。在教师没有特别指导的活动中，现场研究的重点是儿童的游戏和探索以及学前环境。为了将儿童的新兴科学学习概念化为他们的身份认同的共同体，并与非人类行为者共同创造，这项研究结合了新唯物主义，新兴科学，物理学和性别理论的观点。作为理论和方法论的基础，使用了新的唯物主义视角，借鉴了卡伦·巴拉德（Karen Barad）（半途遇见宇宙。物质与意义纠缠的量子物理学，杜克大学出版社，伦敦，2007年）的代理现实主义理论和衍射方法。以及伊丽莎白·德·弗雷塔斯（Elizabeth de Freitas）和安娜·帕尔默（Anna Palmer）的著作（Cult Stud Sci Educ 11（4）：1201–1222，2016. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11422-014-9652-6）关于科学概念如何运作的概念在儿童探索中发挥创造力的玩伴。研究结果表明，女孩与秋千一起如何体验和探索各种身体现象，以及如何扩展她的身体能力并变得勇敢而坚强。因此，新的唯物主义展示了科学现象如何能够为个人的科学发展创造负担，以及如何理解“成为科学”。同时，研究结果还表明教师的重要性，而不是假设科学现象自动成为儿童游戏的一部分或所有儿童一直都能经历。探索的情况很少见。在大多数情况下，由于性别规范，女孩没有得到与秋千相同的经历。我认为，与科学和性别相关的规范和话语不是“伴随”年龄较大的孩子或仅由成年人引入的事物。相反，这些已经在儿童与幼儿的物质分散环境的互动中进行制作和重新制作。