Why nurturing curiosity is an ethical endeavour: exploring practitioners’ reflections on the importance of curiosity

Several authors have argued that early childhood education and care (ECEC) is essentially an ethical practice based on certain values and conceptions about the purpose of education. Is this also the case for educational practices surrounding the highly valued notion of curiosity? While psychological approaches portray it as neutral, this article aims to explore curiosity's normative connotations. To do so, an ethnographically informed approach and video-stimulated recall focus-group interviews have been used to gather Norwegian ECEC practitioners' reflections on the importance of curiosity. The reflections have been analysed using the concept of ethical rationalities and can be grouped into four approaches to valuing curiosity: the relational approach, the virtue approach, the consequentialist approach and the essentialist approach. The analysis suggests that different practices for nurturing curiosity are constrained and others are enabled, depending on the preferred ethical rationality. To prevent the nurturing of curiosity from being based on an assumed and restricted range of theoretical and ethical perspectives, it is necessary to invite practitioners’ reflections on values associated with curiosity.

SHORT ABSTRACT

While psychological approaches portray it as neutral, this article aims to explore curiosity's normative connotations in the daily practices of ECEC. To do so, an ethnographically informed approach and video-stimulated recall focus-group interviews have been used to gather practitioners' reflections on the importance of nurturing curiosity. These have been analysed using the concept of ethical rationalities and can be grouped into four approaches to valuing curiosity: the relational approach, the virtue approach, the consequentialist approach and the essentialist approach. To prevent the nurturing of curiosity from being based on a restricted range of theoretical and ethical perspectives, it is necessary to invite reflection on its value.