Children's collective embodiment—Mobility practices and materialities in mobile preschools

This article looks at young children's mobility practices in public spaces within the context of a mobile preschool practice (i.e., a preschool in a bus), with a specific focus on how materialities matter in children's mobilities. Using ethnographic data from a mobile preschool, we argue that the mobile preschool group's mobility should be understood in terms of collective embodiment and the mobile preschool should be viewed as a moving collective body in public space through which children can negotiate their own mobility practices and exercise agency. We show how this collective body is constituted through an assemblage and collaboration of children's and teachers' bodies and material objects. Collective embodiment not only enables and supports children's mobilities in public space but also helps young children to appropriate and claim their democratic right to public space through the visible copresence of bodies and things.