Children's playful exploration and teachers` practices

2 downloads 0 Views 1MB Size Report
Authors: Elin Eriksen Ødegaard & Ruth Ingrid Skoglund. Paper presented at ISCAR, ... Marilyn Fleer and Mariane Hedegaard. Affiliation: Western Norway ...
Authors: Elin Eriksen Ødegaard & Ruth Ingrid Skoglund

Paper presented at ISCAR, Quebec, Canada, August 28–September 1, 2017 DOUBLE SYMPOSIUM Title: Playworlds,emotions and play explorations Organisers: Marilyn Fleer and Mariane Hedegaard Affiliation: Western Norway University of Applied Science, Norway Contact: [email protected]

Children’s playful exploration and teachers` practices Two cases of children’s explorative activities and unpredictability as a pedagogical condition

Introduction Exploration is central in young children’s formation as persons. This paper starts a process of opening up the concept of exploration within a cultural–historical framework. The aim is to increase the understanding about how early childhood educational institutions condition children’s explorative activities and how these activities emerge and unfold among children and staff members. To achieve this aim, we present two narrative cases for illustrative purposes as the starting point of an even broader empirical study. Both narratives offer a descriptive entry to how children explore and experience the world in which they live. The two cases differ in narrative plot but have some common features; they can both be characterised as playful social activities. Two cases have been chosen in order to elaborate on how different genres of everyday activities disclose varieties of ways that children explore and how cultural institutional practice shape conditions for children’s exploration. The children’s activities are described as foregrounded; however, a Bakhtinian dialogical inspiration allows us to analyse the children’s agency in activities as interwoven in the social, material and discursive institutional space. Therefore, children’s playful explorations are viewed as complex social, personal and cultural dynamic processes.

1

A motivation for the study is the perceived local need for an elaboration on the meaning of explorative activities, how they can be described and what they can mean in pedagogical practices. The concept of exploration can be etymologically traced to the meaning of investigation and examination (Harper, 2001–2012). The verb explore also has historical roots in the Nordic tradition and remains crucial in the new curriculum implemented in August 2017 – Norwegian framework plan for kindergarten content and tasks. The framework plan states, ‘Through interaction, dialogue, playing and exploring, the children shall have the opportunity to develop critical thinking, ethical judgment, ability to resist and action competence so that they can contribute to changes’ (Ministry of Education and Research, 2017, p. 8). The concept of exploration is also mentioned in the framework as a way to perceive children as agents who make sense of the world and learn. In this framework, exploration is regarded as a crucial, complex practice – a wheel for play, learning and participation (agency). What has been missing from all the prominent contributions to children’s play and learning is research on children’s play exploration from the perspective of becoming agentic persons in complex social, personal and cultural dynamic processes from the standpoint of danning (cultural formation). Practice can be considered ‘messy’, heteroglossic, unpredictable and emerging. By highlighting processes of what might be called ‘playful exploration’, we also challenge the view about the child as solely ‘a playing child’, ‘a learning child’, ‘a participating child’ or a child who depends on professional care. How we picture the child conditions practice in discursive and hidden ways as also noted in the recent theorising literature about early childhood education (Fleer, 2014; Löfdahl & Hägglund, 2007). Against this background, we ask what kinds of insights can be gained when a study about children’s playful exploration is analysed from a dialogical perspective. With this first step, we also want to start an identification of what kinds of characteristics, problems or pedagogical conditions and challenges will be of specific interest for further investigations. By raising these questions, we aim to shed light on how explorative activities unfold in practice, how social processes are supported or restricted and thereby how teachers’ practices are dialogically connected to children’s explorations.

2

A cultural–historical framework This paper’s premise is that cultural–historical contexts condition the way that pedagogical institutions act and organise practice and thereby constitute what activities are possible for children to engage in, play with and learn, as well as how events are shaped and thus how persons become (how they develop, what they learn, how they are culturally shaped and how they are agents in the formation of self and others) (Fleer, Hedegaard, Bang, & Hviid, 2008; Ødegaard & Koreponova, 2013; Sawyer, 1997). One consequence of a cultural–historical approach is that the child is perceived as an agent with his or her own intentions and influence but at the same time, in relation and interdependent with others (Fleer, Hedegaard, Bang & Hviid, 2008; Löfdahl & Hägglund, 2007). Heterogeneity in the peer group and the staff, as well as changes in conditions, such as available toys and materials, the places, norms and values, and relations, constantly challenge ideas about pedagogical strategies. Additionally, past, present and future ideas will set the conditions for what is possible for children to imagine and how they will act. From this perspective, conditions for children’s playful explorations will develop in a web of structural, discursive, material, social– psychological and relational conditions.

The inspiration from dialogism is productive for the two narrative cases discussed in this paper. Dialogism refers to the philosophical worldview offered by the Russian philosopher Michael Bakhtin (Bakhtin, 1981; Holquist, 2002). The conventional use of Bakhtin’s dialogism in educational contexts often focuses on sense making, language and communication as social practices. More recent studies also include play in pedagogical practice, involving bodily movements, artefacts and discourse, which comprise a living totality (Linell, 2009; Ødegaard, 2007; Sawyer, 1997; Sullivan, 2012; White & Peters, 2011). Dialogism entails a view of discursively participating in practices and points out the interdependencies with others, for example, by using signs, materials and language. This means that the individual always stands in relation with others and in a particular context. According to Bakhtin (1981), an utterance is the real unit of speech communication. Every utterance displays responsivity to another utterance, while including addressivity and simultaneously being anticipatory with proactive relations to the next possible utterance (Linell, 2009a, p. 21). Different voices are central to the utterance, which involves understanding each voice and simultaneously, the voices from other times and situations. This double dialogical perspective does not perceive sense making as an individual project, but it occurs in encounters with the past, with others’ utterances and with the future, in 3

multivoiced improvisations during playful explorations. For Bakhtin, dialogism is based on the primacy of the social aspect and the assumption that all meaning is achieved, more or less, by conflicting negotiations, tensions and struggles (Holquist, 2002, p. 39). Therefore, it will always occur from multiple perspectives and in sense making in the dialogical dialogue itself (Linell, 2009). Utterances can be verbal, as well as body language and positioning bodies and artefacts in space. Artefacts such as toys and materials can also be utterances when they carry indexical signs. Understandings of the signs come with experiences that provide associations or connections between a toy or a material and a historical meaning. The two cases are presented as narratives in this paper. The empirical background for Case 1 is an observational study conducted in a Norwegian kindergarten by one of the authors. Case 2 comprises a collective narrative analysis involving both the researchers and the kindergartenstaff. Case 1 is grounded in an observation protocol and a recording of the conversation, utterance by utterance. This conversation is transcribed and analysed with Linell and Gustavsson’s (1987) initiative–response model. Against this background, the conversation is deconstructed and rewritten as a narrative. Case 2 is based on staff-written logs and a video observation; against this background, the narrative is collectively written during a workshop. A narrative dialogical analysis considers that utterances are fundamentally relational; they are multivoiced and performed in a certain position that can differ from another point of view. Form and meaning emerge from people engaged in social practices. The researcher is regarded as an agent who strives to create coherence or decline coherence when writing about the case (Ødegaard, 2015).

Uncertainty in communicative activities According to Bakhtin (1981), every utterance, besides being multivoiced, belongs to what he calls a ‘speak genre’ a special way to speak in different contexts. A special speak genre in each distinct setting and situation is often expected in an institutional environment, but it can also become situationally transcending with an explorative mix or discrepancy between how to talk and what to talk about (Linell, 2009, pp. 57–58). The concept of heteroglossia captures the complexity by examining the colliding and competing polyphonic voices or diversity among meanings and within utterances. The concept is often used to suspend certainty (White, 2016, p. 27). The practitioner’s response also seems uncertain, not a clear authoritative voice.

4

Bakhtin (1981) studied the intersection between authoritative discourse and internally persuasive discourse. In a general pedagogical context, authoritative discourse can be associated with the teacher’s voice, consisting of utterances, such as interference from a teacher, institutional rules, governance by a teacher, and so on. But in certain cultures the teachers voice can be hidden, vague or reluctant. Case 1 presents an example of the unpredictability of this intertwined, emerging, still cultural process. The case reveals that inclusion and exclusion are simultaneously ongoing processes through an exploration of contrasting words, which include characteristics of persons and positions. The conversation entails a subtle and competitive exploration of positioning by using words, where neither aggression nor loud quarrel signals what is going on.

Children’s playful explorations as participation in dialogic activities: Case 1 The excerpt from the narrative is based on a conversation among 2–4-year-old children in a Norwegian kindergarten. The observed conversation takes place during the freeplay time in the afternoon. The activity occurs around a table, placed in front of a kitchen bench in a corner of a large room. In the other corners, some children are playing in a doll kitchen, while others are on a car blanket with drawings of different roads for toy cars. Kari (3,7) and Eli (4,7) are often together in the kindergarten, and they have just finished a role play when Eli suggests that they play with beads. The two girls move to the table, where Lina (3,10) is already sitting with Anja, a teacher’s assistant. After some bowls with different coloured beads are set on the table, they start arranging the beads. Lina’s opening remark – ‘Little Kari!’ – immediately causes Kari to protest, ‘No, big Kari, big Kari!’ Eli, the oldest girl, reminds them not to argue. Kari changes the conversation topic by saying, ‘Beige is not a colour!’ Eli disagrees, which Lina supports. Kari explains that she talked to her mother who knows what colour is; therefore, she herself knows now. Lina protests and tells Kari that Kari doesn’t know, but she, Lina, really knows. Eli asks Kari to stop, not to ‘nag like a lion.’ Then Anja, the teacher’s assistant, asks Kari, ‘Are you nagging?’ Kari reasons out that the other two girls said so. Eli and Lina continue to call Kari a little friend, while they are big. Kari turns to Anja and says, ‘They said I am a little friend.’ Anja answers that there is nothing wrong with being a little friend, adding, ‘Yes, you are a little friend.’ Kari doesn’t accept Anja’s answer either and objects, ‘I am a big friend, Anja.’ With several exchanges of utterances, Lina and Eli continue to claim that Kari is a little friend, and Kari reacts with new protests. Carol, another teacher, enters the room and hears some of the conversation. She asks Eli if she thinks that Kari is little. Eli looks up and smiles at Carol, answering, ‘Yes.’ She continues, ‘Kari is so little that she doesn’t understand anything.’ Kari replies that she is not so little. Lina follows up, ‘No, but you are

5

not so big as my mum and dad!’ All three girls stand on the chairs, demonstrating how tall they are.

Play exploration as collective improvisation A dialogic perspective also offers the concept of children’s explorative play as a collectively driven, emerging improvisational activity (Sawyer, 1997). Analysing verbal utterances, bodily actions and the uses of artefacts in situational activities makes it possible to describe the dialogical interconnectedness in playful exploration. Play is often associated with a light and humorous atmosphere. However, a study about young children’s narrative meaning making found a pattern of a playful attitude among the teachers and seriousness in the children’s playfulness (Ødegaard, 2007). This finding can indicate that despite teachers’ knowledge about play, it can be difficult or impossible to perceive the activities in the same way. Bakhtin (1981) would use the concept of being positioned differently. The law of placement indicates that each position has a specific spatial–temporal relation with the other positions in an activity setting. In a pedagogical institution, the position of a teacher will obviously be distinct from that of a child. Children can create collective togetherness in play exploration as shown in Case 2. The next illustration shows how play exploration can be conceptualised as a collective improvisation where both teachers and children are dialogically involved but position themselves differently.

Children’s playful exploration of working: Case 2 The following narrative is based on events taking place in a toddler group in a Norwegian kindergarten. One side of the playground is under renovation. A temporary fence has been set up to secure the children from the workers, the equipment and the construction materials. Some of the children have spent hours looking through the fence for several days. Later, the construction workers arrive, and the children pay careful attention. The preschool teacher notices something happening and starts taking notes. Soon, the staff video documents a certain kind of play going on for weeks. Some parents come with stories about their children coming home with train rail pieces in their socks, which have importance for the children, but why do they do so? In a workshop session, a collaborative story (the participants include three staff members and the researcher Elin) is reconstructed: They walked in a consistent pattern; their hands and pockets were filled with stones and sticks. They communicated so little verbally but moved around in a certain kind of 6

togetherness. We didn’t understand at once, but the next day they moved the same way, and we made the connection to the construction workers near the kindergarten. The workers hammered, screwed and drilled; so did the group of children. They wandered around the playground with train rail pieces in their pockets. They had taken these pieces from the train set in the playroom. One of the boys had no pockets on his pants, so he placed train rail pieces in his socks. His mother pointed out that his socks had been full of train rail pieces several times during the construction period. In the evening when he was going to bed, she had noticed all these pieces falling out of his socks. ‘What was going on?’ The next day, we noticed that the children went to the closet just before they were supposed to play outside. Their pants’ pockets were again filled with train rail pieces, and the boys seemed in agreement about this. One of us kept asking them to take [out the pieces] and put them back in the play box but then changed her mind; she was waiting to see what was about to happen. The first stop was the exit door, where the exchange of information about tools and jobs was conveyed with a nod, one or two words and double checking of pockets and their contents. One staff member had to ask, ‘What are you doing?’ The children gave a coherent answer in a chorus: ‘We are workers; that’s us.’ We then understood a little more; they were actually preparing to go to work as construction workers. We decided that therefore, they needed the train rail pieces to be able to hammer, saw and drill. Setting up train rails and train play were supposed to be indoor activities, but workers needed tools, so they were allowed to bring their tools outside. The train rail pieces stuck out of their pockets and were checked on several occasions. The next stop was outside, near the section of the playground that was being repaired. None of the workers was present at the moment, but the machines and the materials were there under a light snow cover. The boys stood side by side to look, point and talk for a long time. Two of the boys had found some large spades and started to shovel snow. This play continued for weeks. We provided them with boards, which they carried between them. They then found a large stone that was turned into a make-believe construction truck, and they kept loading the truck with planks, unloading it, carrying the planks around and loading the truck again (rewritten from notes for a project, also documented in Kyrkjebø, Haukaas Strøm, Solvang, & Ødegaard, 2013, pp. 178–179).

Summary and brief reflection for further studies We have studied two cases of children’s playful explorations. We have unfolded two narratives that can serve as illustrations of how children are agents in play explorations, as well as how social processes are supported or restricted in heteroglossical ways. Teachers and staff members dialogically intervene in these processes. Case 1 depicts how play exploration can be unpredictable from a pedagogical perspective and that teachers’ practices are dialogically connected to the children’s agency in play explorations. This case has been analysed as a dialogical process of inclusion and exclusion, a process that in pedagogical practice can be blurred, unpredictable and therefore difficult to discover. One possible reason why the teachers in Case 1 do not become actively involved is that the conversation is obtained from a specific institutional setting (Linell, 2009b, pp. 54, 63), at a time of day that is usually spent on free activities. Within certain limits, the children can choose what to do and whom they want to be with, without the teachers’ active involvement. Practitioners, such as teachers and teachers’ assistants usually just intervene when children are 7

quarrelling loudly or using physical force. This practice is also reported in other studies (e.g., Johansson & Emilson, 2016; Newberry & Davis, 2008). In the conversation, the girls seem to explore associative words and connotations of a big girl being more attractive than a little girl, despite the teacher’s comments that being little or big is equally good. In the children’s re-interpretation, being described as little can be an important reason to be excluded, and every day, the girls fight to be included in the child community. At the same time, they explore the power of the utterances and genres that they use for positioning. A paradox occurs between the content of the conversation and the speak genre. Both the practitioners’ restraint in participating in the conversation can be due to their lack of attention to the ongoing positioning among the girls and their interpretation of the conversation as friendly because of the children’s use of a humorous and facetious speak genre. Case 2 shows how play exploration can be collectively driven, improvisational, emerging and motivated by real-life activities. The narrative description shows how the children explore being and acting like construction workers who carry tools in a belt around the waist (in the children’s case, in their socks and pants’ pockets). Furthermore, the case illustrates how the teachers (and the parents) subsequently understand the children’s explorative play. When they do, they also support it by allowing the children to play (work) with tools that were not originally made for the purpose. Letting the children use artefacts in a context other than that in which they are supposed to be used (turning train rail pieces into make-believe hammers, saws, etc., for construction work) is conditioned by both knowledge about imaginary play and how children suspend reality, as well as an atmosphere (culture) of flexibility and supportive pedagogical actions. Case 2 can illustrate how children explore working. Real-life events give inspiration and motivation for children to understand what is going on around them. This situation drives a collective exploration that can be play, but it can also be perceived as work. The children do activities as construction workers; at the same time as it is play, seriousness and deep commitment to the explorative actions are observed. The activity continues for weeks, and obviously, the opportunities for such a deep engagement involve a culture where the staff members support, understand and accept the children’s activities. One teacher says, ‘One of us kept asking them to take out the pieces and put them back in the play box but then changed her mind; she was waiting to see what was about to happen.’ This utterance can illustrate how uncertainty about what is going on leads to curiosity about what is occurring among the children. Perceived dialogically, play exploration embraces the view where children are regarded as participatory actors and creates conditions for how play emerges, unfolds and is experienced differently by the participants, according to how they interact and how places, artefacts and relations condition what is possible for the participants to do and not do. Places, artefacts, relations and conversations carry historical traces. Nonetheless, the ways that children use them are unpredictable because of each child’s motivation, as well as the collective emerging process where the institutional culture and the teacher’s hidden and open pedagogical strategies condition what events emerge and unfold. How the practitioners/teachers act and position themselves with children differs in these two cases. The lack of attention to the content and relations and the reluctance to be involved in the conversation are features in Case 1. In contrast, curiosity, flexibility and 8

an atmosphere of emergent understanding and creative support of the activity characterise Case 2. Both cases can illustrate how pedagogical practice is unpredictable. How staff members and teachers condition children’s explorative motivation should be of special interest in further studies. These will be undertaken in cooperation with kindergartens in the municipality of Bergen. We will conduct video observations in four kindergartens over a year to find more variations in the explorative processes.

References Bakhtin, M. (1981). The dialogic imagination (M. C. H. Emerson, Trans., 2002 ed.). Austin: University of Texas Press. Johansson, E., & Emilson, A. (2016). Conflicts and resistance: potentials for democracy learning in preeschools. International Journal of Early Years Education, 24(1), 19-35. Fleer, M. (2014). Theorizing play in the early years. New York: Cambridge University Press. Fleer, M., Hedegaard, M., Bang, J., & Hviid, P. (2008). Studying children: A cultural–historical approach. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Harper, D. (2001–2012). Online Etymology Dictionary. http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=explore Holquist, M. (2002). Dialogism: Bakhtin and his world (2nd ed.). London: Routledge. Kyrkjebø, T., Haukaas Strøm, K., Solvang, K., & Ødegaard, E. E. (2013). «Vi er jobbemenner vi» – om å oppdage små barns meningsskaping. [‘We are workingmen’ – about the discovery of young children’s meaning making]. Prosjektrapport fra Troms og Hordaland (pp. 178–185). Oslo: Utdanningsdirektoratet. Linell, P. (2009). With respect to Bakhtin: Some trends in contemporary dialogical theories. Paper presented at The Second International Interdisciplinary Conference on Perspectives and Limits of Dialogism in Mikhail Bakhtin, Stockholm University, Department of Scandinavian Languages, Stockholm. Linell, P., & Gustavsson, L. (1987). Initiativ och Respons: Om dialogens dynamic, dominans och koherens. [Initiative and respons: About the dynamics, dominance and coherence of dialogue] Lindköping: Universitetet i Lindköping. Löfdahl, A., & Hägglund, S. (2007). Spaces of participation in pre‐school: Arenas for establishing power orders? Children & Society, 21(5), 328–338. doi:10.1111/j.10990860.2006.00054.x Ministry of Education & Research. (2017). Framework plan for the content and tasks of kindergartens. Retrieved August 8, 2017 from https://www.udir.no/laring-ogtrivsel/rammeplan Newberry, M., & Davis, H. A. (2008). The role of elementary teachers’ conceptions of closeness to students on their differential behavior in classroom. Teaching and Teacher Education,24(8), 1965–1985. doi:10.1016/j.tate.2008.02.015 Ødegaard, E. E. (2007). Meningsskaping i barnehagen: Innhold og bruk av barns og voksnes samtalefortellinger. [Narrative meaning making in preschool.] Göteborg: Göteborgs Universitet. Ødegaard, E. E. (2015). The importance of looking at someone looking through a pirate’s telescope – reflections on the making of knowledge from empirical data. Nordisk barnehageforskning, 11(1), 1–17. Ødegaard, E. E., & Koreponova, I. (2013). Kindergarten as an arena for cultural formation. Cultural–Historical Psychology, 2 Sawyer, K. R. (1997). Pretend play as improvisation – conversation in the preschool classroom (1st ed.). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlaub Associates, Publishers. Sullivan, P. (2012). Qualititative data analysis – using a dialogical approach. London: Sage Publications Ltd. White, E. J. (2016). Introducing dialogic pedagogy – provocations for the early years. New York: Routledge. 9

White, E. J., & Peters, M. (2011). Bakhtinian pedagogy: Opportunities and challenges for research, policy and practice in education across the globe. New York: Peter Laing.

10

11