Attuning to the Poetics and Politics of Infant–Toddler Play: Methods for Reorienting Pedagogical Attention

Infant–toddler play often unfolds through fleeting gestures, rhythms and atmospheres that are hard to notice within institutional routines and current regimes of assessment in Danish early childhood education and care. This article asks how we might attend to these poetic and political dimensions of play. We conceptualize attunement as an embodied, relational mode of sensing-with ordinary affects as they circulate through bodies, materials and spaces. The article draws on a design-based collaboration with pedagogues in four ECEC centers, where three experimental methods—Sense Expeditions, Living Go-Pros and the Play Mixer—gently disrupted familiar practices. These interventions did not aim to reveal hidden truths, but to alter arrangements so that other forms of noticing became possible. Vignettes show how sensory disturbance and material reconfiguration opened quiet forms of participation and “wildness” that usually remain unnoticed. We argue that attunement is a relational effect, and that sociomaterial methodologies can enact research as co-participation rather than observation.