Caring, Dwelling, Becoming: Stories of Multiage Child Care
Date
2015-04-01
Authors
Thompson, Deborah
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Abstract
Using postfoundational and postqualitative frameworks, this dissertation considers what materializes when four child care centres adopt a multiage grouping structure, which includes children born in four consecutive years in each centre. The research question asks how do children live their lives in multiaged child care? To explore that question, the study challenges developmentalism as the dominant principle for organizing child care groupings. Engaging with three theoretical concepts, caring relations, dwelling, and becoming, the dissertation further questions: a) what characterizes relationships in these multi-aged centres? b) how do children negotiate through the curriculum in the centres? c) how can the children’s transformations be conceptualized in postdevelopmental theory/practice?
This action research project employs the process of pedagogical narrations to story three ordinary moments that occurred in the child care centres. The pedagogical narrations process extends those storied moments through the critical reflections of the caregivers who work in the centres. The analytic process, thinking with theory, plugs-in the three concepts, caring relations, dwelling, and becoming, to the stories, producing beyond-developmental understandings of children, childhood, and child care. The study demonstrates pedagogical narrations as an effective postqualitative methodology for caregivers to research their own practices.
This study concludes that child care structures such as age groupings, require situated ethics of care and responsibility, as well as, an early years reconceptualized curriculum that resists universalizing and normalizing practices in favour of situated ones. Considering caring relations, in spaces for young children, provides a context for thinking beyond simply, and only, adults caring for children, to thinking of children in relations of care with place, other non-human beings and non-living things, as well as other people, including other children and adults. Thinking with the dwelling concept encourages an attention to the present in early years settings, allowing more-than-developmental interests to flourish. Thinking becoming means thinking becoming-other, and positions subjectivities, including those of children, caregivers and place as unstable, shifting, and in relation.
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Keywords
caring relations, early childhood education, ethics of care, post qualitative research, pedagogical narrations