Embracing uncertainty in research with young children

Abstract

This article contests the emphasis that is frequently placed upon child-friendly methods in research with young children. Focusing upon a series of research encounters from a doctoral study of play in an early years classroom, I examine my interactions with the children and their social and material worlds and draw upon these encounters to highlight some emergent and unpredictable elements of research with young children. I argue that these elements call for a decreased emphasis upon the implementation of method towards an openness to uncertainty and an ethical responsiveness to the researcher’s relations with children and their everyday lives. An ethical responsiveness to uncertainty has implications throughout the research process, including through the ways in which we choose to read, interpret and present the data. This article offers original contributions to contemporary debates regarding what might become possible when uncertainty is acknowledged and embraced in research with young children.     

Doing curious research to cultivate tentacular becomings

Abstract

Referring to Haraway’s concept of tentacularity, this article embarks on a curious research practice-inspired speculative journey to think with material tentacular becomings in an Australian kindergarten. Some of the questions that guided our curious research practice asked: How does curious practice as a postqualitative methodology enable us, as researchers, to cultivate a presence that creates the conditions for these research encounters and events to be perceived? What becomes possible for generative relational diverse learning with matter-energies if we accept that there is no rational explanation at hand? What worlds come into being if we speculate instead of rationalize? How do children animate, and are animated relationally, in particular worlds and not in others? How do we, as researchers, become entangled within children’s ways of perceiving and naming encounters? We experimented with Haraway’s notion of tentacularity as our navigational tool to map four entangled territories in this article.     

Improving early phoneme skills with a computer program: Differential effects of regulatory skills

Research findingsThe study focused on 90 five-year-olds from fifteen Dutch schools. The children scored among the 30% lowest on literacy tests. Half were randomly assigned to a phonological skills program on the computer, the other half to a book program. Both programs consisted of 15 ten-minute sessions. During the phonological skills program children's mouse behavior was registered every tenth of a second. Intelligence, phoneme skills, and regulatory skills were tested. Children scoring average on regulatory skills benefited from teacher-free encounters with the phonological skills program, children scoring low or high did not. Typically, the lowest-scoring children showed more meaningless mouse activity and more random clicking.Practice or policyComputer programs can be used to stimulate early phoneme skills of poorly performing kindergarten children, but not for all children. Children with poor regulatory skills did not benefit from the intervention program.     

Comprehension difficulties after year 4: Actioning appropriately

Abstract

Many children identified with average intelligence exhibit ongoing reading comprehension difficulties after Year 4. They typically have language delays that are possibly due to their disengagement with reading and they do not process information efficiently in working memory. As a consequence they do not adequately learn from their encounters with print and they develop a reluctance to use appropriate self‐monitoring strategies. Many intervention programs have a limited focus by concentrating on word level processes but these may be largely inappropriate for older children with reading comprehension difficulties. What may be more suitable is the use of scaffolding techniques that promote cognitive and motivational engagement in a rich personalised language environment. The article investigates the problems experienced by such children and suggests some appropriate text processing and reorganisation strategies that can be applied to teaching practice.     

Children encountering each other through storytelling: Promoting intercultural learning in schools

Abstract

Schools need concrete pedagogical tools to promote intercultural learning. The Storycrafting method is used to promote interactions between children that lead to a dynamic, rather than static, experience of culture. Children 9–11 years old exchanged stories told using the Storycrafting method with another class in Finland, Scotland, or an international school in Europe. To understand how children experience the intercultural encounters, the children’s stories and other ethnographic materials are analyzed and frames are developed. These frames are telling to entertain, telling to challenge, telling from real-life experiences, telling from shared experience, responding sensitively and responding defensively. Approaching intercultural learning through Storycrafting creates a shared narrative culture and avoids stereotyping the Other, which is a common limitation in intercultural exchange projects.     

The one-in-ten: quantitative Critical Race Theory and the education of the ‘new (white) oppressed’

ABSTRACT

This paper challenges the notion that quantitative data – as a numeric truth – exist independent of a nation’s political and racial landscape. Utilising large-scale national attainment data, the analysis challenges the belief that ‘White working class’ children in England, especially boys, are ‘the new oppressed’ – as a former equality adviser has publicly claimed. The analysis applies Quantitative Critical Race Theory, or ‘QuantCrit’, an emerging quantitative sub-field of Critical Race Theory in education. The paper argues that far from being ‘oppressed’, White boys continue to enjoy achievement advantages over numerous minoritised groups; especially their peers of Black Caribbean ethnic origin. Additionally, the analysis uniquely exposes racialised trends of ‘equivalency’ in core subject qualifications, whereby minority ethnic children are over-represented in certain lower-status qualifications that are counted as equivalent in education statistics but not in the real world labour market. The analysis concludes that knowing misrepresentations of quantitative data are at the heart of an institutional process through which race and racism are produced, legitimised and perpetuated in education.     

Participatory creativities: developing a research design for children’s pastoral encounters with the natural world

ABSTRACT

In this paper, the author discusses the interrelationship between creativity, children’s experiences of the natural world and pastoral education. Based on a research design developed whilst undertaking a professional doctorate in education (EdD), and grounded in a theoretical framework of children’s rights, the author explores the creative uncertainties of collaboratively researching children’s educational experiences with nature. The paper considers the ways in which the research design supports a pastoral care agenda, whilst encouraging the emergence of ‘creative artefacts’, alongside the extent to which the focus of the research, encounters with the natural world, might be deemed pastorally minded in its own right. The children who have participated in the research then draw the paper to a close, sharing what their involvement in the project has meant to them. Images and excerpts of children’s own creative reflections are offered as illustration of the powerful confluence of the Creative and the Pastoral.     

Peer-led focus groups as ‘dialogic spaces’ for exploring young people’s evolving values

ABSTRACT

Although peer-led focus groups are widely used in research with children and young people, surprisingly little has been written that evaluates their methodological appropriateness. Drawing on data from 10 peer-led focus group sessions across 5 international schools, this article demonstrates how focus group discussions around moral and social values, which become more meaningful though the self-reflection provoked in encounters with different experiences and perspectives, can be advantageous for research. Peer-moderators, as both participants and facilitators, run focus groups that open dialogic spaces for exploratory talk that avoids the self-censure and deference that can emerge in the presence of an adult moderator. This is particularly important when participants are structurally disadvantaged and lack similar spaces for collaborative inquiry into their shared experiences. Video capture allows researchers in-depth access to these focus groups after the event, revealing evidentially and pedagogically rich dialogues.     

Merleau-Ponty’s ‘wild Being’: Tangling with the entanglements of research with the very young

Abstract

This article draws on a study of infant participation in research, and work in philosophical-empirical inquiry, to illuminate some of the inexhaustible entanglements constituting the collective relational landscape of educational research of particular encounters, which have been called moments of wonder. Working with Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical notions of wild Being and flesh, I look closely at one such ‘moment’, as lived as an entanglement of embodied self, worldly things, and other selves that collectively comes into being whilst opening onto time and space. I see this account as demonstrating the value of learning to see the ‘collective’, wherein individualities are engendered, for developing new understandings of early childhood education (ECE) relational landscapes, specifically in relation to ‘participatory’ research with very young children – and educational research more generally.     

‘I think it works better if we have an example to help us’: experiences in collaboratively conceptualizing the scaling of education for sustainable development practices in South Africa

Abstract

This article aims to contribute to the knowledge of how the ‘scaling’ of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) activities is conceptualized in practice through transactional learning encounters. In the context of the UNESCO Global Action Programme (GAP) on ESD, I discuss the re-actualisation of experiences as part of these encounters. The study is a result of data collected as part of a Re-Solve participatory research workshop held in South Africa in 2016, involving researchers and practitioners with experiences of ESD-activities in the Southern African region. To identify and analyse the transactional learning encounters a practical epistemology analysis (PEA) is used. The article draws on a Deweyan theory of learning as transactional encounters, supported with a tentative conceptual framework of scaling-ESD-activities-as-learning (SEAL). Throughout the study, I illustrate the transactional encounters, including the re-actualisation of participants’ past experiences of ESD-activities. These encounters enabled the conceptualization of contextually relevant concepts of scaling, thus constituting an enabling condition for reflective scaling practices.     

Supporting families in the early education of children with special needs: the perspectives of Portage home visitors

ABSTRACT

This qualitative study focuses on Portage home visiting. In‐depth interviews were conducted with 12 Portage home visitors which were transcribed and analysed according to the procedures of Grounded Theory. The following three main themes were identified: the ethos of the Portage model of early intervention; the process of Portage home visiting; and the Portage home visitor as a family supporter. A proposed model of the factors that influence the Portage practice of family support is derived from the data. The discussion addresses the relationship of these findings to the management of Portage home visiting and highlights the use of qualitative methodology in researching the early education of children with special needs.     

Fabricated childhoods: uncanny encounters with the more-than-human

ABSTRACT

This article is based on uncanny encounters with Julia deVille's exhibit, Phantasmagoria. Inspired by Deleuzian-informed research practices, the author experiments with provoking practices to defy dominant developmental notions of childhood. This article reworks a humanist ontology by bringing together the discursive, the material, the human, and the more-than-human through the interweaving of provocations and encounters. Enacting an experimental and performative methodology, the reader's movement through the article mimics the journey through an exhibition and the storm of thought and feeling that art can provoke. These provocations set into motion meanings about childhood that sit outside of developmentalism and are rarely entertained in the field of early childhood education.     

CAMPUS EARLY CHILDHOOD LABORATORY SCHOOLS: PARTNERS IN TEACHER EDUCATION PROGRAMS

Abstract

Making Theory and Development of Early Childhood Education come alive for elementary master's degree students in two learning sites offers opportunities and challenges. In constructing the class, a primary goal was to expose the students to the context under which early childhood educators developed programs and theories. Also, students were challenged to uncover the relationship that the education of young children had with social change and emerging human rights. Utilizing distance learning, contemporary books such as Who Moved My Cheese (Johnson, 1998) and a field trip to the National Civil Rights Museum and the Rock'n Soul Museum, students developed a sense of the place early childhood education had and continues to have in social change and the advancement of civil rights in this country.     

Representation of morality in children: A qualitative approach

ABSTRACT

Previous research on children’s moral reasoning usually used a quantitative approach and a pre-determined set of methods in order to establish early moral landmarks. We proposed a qualitative perspective on the basis of which we have formulated three main objectives: 1) to identify the main categories of behaviors that children spontaneously associate with the notion of morality, in line with Turiel’s Domain Theory; 2) to investigate children’s conceptions of moral and social-conventional rules and 3) to assess the gender differences in the use of care and justice reasoning, in line with Gilligan’s assertion that females are care-oriented and that males consistently use the justice orientation and infrequently use the care orientation. Ninety-two children (57% boys, mean age was 8.19 years) were required to describe morality in behavioral terms without being guided by specific indications from the researchers. Our results reflected a tendency towards morality perceived through behaviors directed towards others, namely through altruism, and also the domination of moral norms as compared to social ones, partially confirming Gilligan’s theory concerning gender specificities regarding moral reasoning in the questions of care and justice.     

Enabling international student families: new empiricisms and posthumanist entanglements in higher education

ABSTRACT

This paper presents research on movements involved in the lives of international university students and their accompanying family members. Located in the framing of new empiricisms and new materialisms, a posthumanist approach is offered as a way to move beyond the limitations of a focus on the educational mobilities of individualised self-contained student subjects. The research this paper draws on engages a diffractive visual methodology involving interview encounters with women who each moved from Iran to Australia together with their partner and children. A materialist feminist approach enables the consideration of how a variety of entangled movements and animated affects shape the lives of international student families. The utility of this approach becomes the inspiration for thinking through the concept of ‘intra-active becoming in movement’. This brings a refreshed set of practices for designing higher education experiences for international students that resists the divisiveness of binary oppositions in Western thought.     

Humor,Philosophy and Education

Abstract

This article begins by examining the bad reputation humor traditionally had in philosophy and education. Two of the main charges against humor—that it is hostile and irresponsible—are linked to the Superiority Theory. That theory is critiqued and two other theories of laughter are presented—the Relief Theory and the Incongruity Theory. In the Relief Theory, laughter is a release of pent-up nervous energy. In the Incongruity Theory, humor is the enjoyment of something that violates ordinary mental patterns and expectations. The development of the Incongruity Theory is traced in thinkers like Aristotle, Kant, Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard, and refinements are suggested to the theory. The Incongruity Theory, it is argued, helps us to appreciate the affinity between philosophy and humor, especially the genre known as stand-up comedy. The article concludes by using Robert Nozick’s analysis of wisdom to show how dramatic comedy embodies practical lessons for living well.     

The poverty of contractarian moral education

ABSTRACT

In A Theory of Moral Education, Michael Hand claims that a directive moral education that seeks to persuade children that a particular conception of contractarian morality is justified can be undertaken without falling foul of the requirement not to indoctrinate. In this article, we set out a series of challenges to Hand’s argument. First, we argue that Hand’s focus on ‘reasonable disagreement’ regarding the status of a moral conception is a red-herring. Second, we argue that the endorsement of moral contractarianism and the prohibition on indoctrination pull in different directions: if contractarianism is sound, then teachers or governments should be less worried about indoctrination than Hand suggests. Third, we argue that moral contractarianism is mistaken; teachers should look elsewhere for guidance on the moral norms and principles towards which they should direct their pupils.     

Encountering education in the rural: migrant women’s perspectives

ABSTRACT

This paper explores migrant women’s encounters with formal and informal education in what can be termed new immigration rural destinations. We ask to what extent educational opportunities are realized in these new destinations. We show that education aspirations may be jeopardized because of the desire to achieve economic goals and thus require remedial action. Specifically, we refer to qualitative data collected in rural (and remote) Boddington in Western Australia, and rural Armagh in Northern Ireland. The paper engages with two interrelated dimensions of this migrant/migration experience. English is not a first language for our participants and we first examine the provision and consumption of informal English Language classes. In doing so, we demonstrate the complex social and cultural dimensions of community-based English language instruction. Second, we attend to migrant mothers’ perceptions of and responses to children’s formal education. We highlight transnational senses of, and tensions around, ‘local/rural’ pedagogies and resultant migrant strategies.     

Review

Art Pearl and Tony Knight, The Democratic Classroom: Theory to Inform Practice. Cresskill, New Jersey, Hampton Press, 1999. 373 pp.     

Pensamiento e ideas fuerza de la educación en derechos humanos en Iberoamérica [Core ideas and thinking about human rights education in Iberoamerica]

ABSTRACT

In A Theory of Moral Education, Michael Hand defends the importance of teaching children moral standards, even while taking seriously the fact that reasonable people disagree about morality. While I agree there are universal moral values based on the kind of beings humans are, I raise two issues with Hand’s account. The first is an omission that may be compatible with Hand’s theory; the role of virtues. A role for the cultivation of virtues and rational emotions such as compassion is vital in accounting for the emotional aspect of morality. The second issue pertains to Hand’s foundational premise of human beings’ rough equality. Following Martha Nussbaum, I argue that contractarian approaches must be critically evaluated to ensure the social contract properly includes and accounts for the human dignity of those who are typically excluded from the benefits of society. Hand’s justificatory arguments rely upon a contractarian premise, and the contract itself needs scrutiny and adjustment if it is to support a viable theory of moral education.