Embodied Voices and Voicing Embodied Knowing: Accessing and Developing Young Children’s Aesthetic Movement Skills

Abstract

Eleven-month-old Matilda is with her parents in the laundry room where they are hanging out the washing. All the washed and wet clothes are in a pile on the floor. Matilda sits down amidst the clothes while her parents hang shirts and sweaters on hangers. Matilda roots about among the clothes and finds two socks of the same kind, pink with white dots on. She holds one sock in each hand, looks up at her parents, laughs and waves the two socks in the air. Through her actions, Matilda displays some of her many skills. She has noticed symmetry, something that is central to aesthetic knowing as well as to mathematics. However, for her skills to develop into, for example, skills in mathematics (principles such as pairs, number, etc.) or aesthetics (understanding how the beautiful patterns of the fabric and the colours are “constructed”, etc.), we suggest that it will be necessary for her to be introduced into and engaged in speech mediation by another (an adult).

Commentary to Cecilia Wallerstedt, Niklas Pramling and Ingrid Pramling Samuelsson: Embodied Voices and Voicing Embodied Knowing

• Sheila Degotardi 

1. Institute of Early Childhood, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia

   Sheila Degotardi

In their chapter, Cecilia Wallerstedt, Niklas Pramling and Ingrid Pramling Samuelsson describe their approach to researching and facilitating the aesthetic movement development of very young children. They apply the theoretical constructs of developmental pedagogy in order to discuss how teachers and researchers can gain access to the knowledge of young children who demonstrate their conceptual understanding in pre-verbal ways. As identified in the chapter, this is a significant issue that poses challenges for both teachers and researchers. In this commentary, I contribute to the authors’ ideas by discussing why research about infant-toddler conceptual understanding is welcome in the field of early childhood education, before suggesting ways in which researchers and teachers can work collaboratively to advance pedagogical understanding in practice-based and research-based contexts. I conclude by exploring further how researchers who focus on teacher talk can conceptualise how this talk might mediate infant-toddler learning.

Researching the Teaching of Conceptual Understanding

By focusing on the development of aesthetic movement skills and understandings, Cecilia, Niklas and Ingrid draw attention to the importance of research about curriculum concept learning and teaching in infant-toddler programmes. As more infants and toddlers attend early childhood education programmes, there is an increasing body of research that addresses issues of quality in these programmes. This evidence, however, has tended to focus on structural measures of quality or broad measures of caregiver sensitivity or responsiveness (e.g., NICHD Early Child Care Research Network, 1996, 2002) rather than addressing how early childhood teaching and learning can be conceptualised in a more pedagogical sense. Siraj-Blatchford (2009) has recently expressed a concern about childhood teachers’ tendency to adopt a passive facilitative, rather than an active teaching role in respect to cognitive development and conceptual learning. Her criticism is reflected by Fleer (2010) who calls for early childhood teachers to become more conscious of the curriculum-based concepts that they wish to teach and thus adopt a more intentional, teaching stance.

The question of how to research changes in infant-toddler teachers’ views about and teaching practices in relation to children’s conceptual learning is therefore brought to the fore. In their chapter, the authors describe a longitudinal approach in which specialised lectures in dance education were provided to teachers before they engaged in a period of observation of, and reflective conversations about, their teaching practices. This approach recognises and responds to the need for practitioners to have in-depth knowledge of the cognitive concepts that they intend to teach (Fleer, 2010). Of equal importance, though, is the inclusion of on-going professional, reflective dialogues during which teachers’ pedagogical thinking is made explicit to both researcher and teacher. Not only does this dialogic process provide researchers with a valuable point of access to teachers’ thinking, but it also assists teachers to establish the links between theory and practice that have been shown to enhance early childhood teaching (Degotardi, Semann, & Shepherd, in press; Goodfellow, 2005; Waniganayake et al., 2008). When such opportunities are provided by researchers, we see a strength-based, collaborative, practitioner inquiry-based research approach in which researchers and practitioners support one another to co-research ways of conceptualising, documenting and strengthening infant-toddler teaching practice (Goodfellow & Hedges, 2007).

Accessing and Understanding Infant Conceptual Learning

A second question raised by Cecilia, Niklas and Ingrid is how researchers and teachers can effectively access the conceptual understanding of very young children. The notion of embodied voices is offered as a useful means of understanding the perspectives and knowledge of pre-verbal children, as physical movements, responses and gestures that have long been considered infants’ first ways of representing their understanding of the world. The challenge, then, is for researchers and teachers to find ways of accessing and understanding this knowledge. Due to the opaque nature of knowledge representations (Perner, 1991), particularly in pre-verbal children, this process is an interpretive, ascriptive one, which, as the authors acknowledge, can only ever be approached tentatively. Many would argue, however, that it is a vital process to consider if we are to understand the mediating role that adult communication and actions plays in infant learning.

To begin with, Bruner and others argue that adult talk is one of the main ways in which meaning is ascribed to infant actions (Bruner, 1983; Nelson, 1996; Snow, 1984). They argue that caregivers have a general tendency to attribute intentions, feelings and knowledge to the pre-verbal actions of infants, a process that draws infants’ attention to salient aspects of their experience and thus facilitates infants’ gradual understanding of their physical and mental experiences. As Cecilia, Niklas and Ingrid argue, this type of interpretive talk takes into consideration infants’ experiences or their subjective perspectives within the context of meaningful activity. Hence, it is not only the talk that matters but also the ability of the adult to use talk that reflects the infants’ current ways of thinking and understanding their current experiences.

This position is advanced by Nelson (1996), who divides adult–infant interactions into two components. The discourse context refers to the actual talk that is taking place during the infant’s current activity. Such talk exposes infants to words within the context of their current experience, providing them with a linguistic frame from which to extract meaning for their actions. The second component is the cognitive context, which Nelson defines as the infant’s current ways of understanding their world and the experiences in which they participate (see also Sperber & Wilson, 1986). Nelson argues that “in order for the child to extract elements of meaning from the discourse context, the word must be made relevant to the child’s cognitive contexts” (p. 139, italics in original). Within a teaching context, the interpretive, meta-communicative aspect of the talk is highlighted as Nelson’s approach suggests that effective teacher talk only draws infants’ attention to significant situational features and domains of knowing when there is a level of concordance between the talk and infants’ current understanding of the concept in question. From this perspective, concept development is a collaborative process, which relies on the establishment of shared understanding between infant and teacher in relation to the concepts being taught and learned (see also Gauvain, 2001). As Fleer (2010) suggests, when teaching intentions and child understandings are aligned within an experiential framework, the resulting contextual and conceptual intersubjectivity allows teachers to transform young children’s thinking by increasing their consciousness of the concepts under exploration.

Concluding Thoughts

The topic and approach described in this chapter propose a number of opportunities for infant-toddler researchers to increase the knowledge base about the teaching and learning of curriculum-based concepts during children’s first years of life. At a fundamental level, the authors suggest that research is needed about infant-toddler teachers’ understandings of curriculum concepts and the place that they assign to concept teaching and learning within their educational programs. Of equal importance is the need for research into how infant-toddler teachers perceive and interpret infant learning and the ways that this understanding is translated into their everyday practice. These gaps in the research stress the need for multi-method approaches that use both interview and observational measures to access and portray teacher understandings. Finally, if research is to acknowledge the active role of the infant in their learning processes, methods need to be established that can provide fine-grained analyses of the concordance between teacher beliefs, practices and infant understandings. By illustrating how teachers and infants interact and respond to one another’s verbal and non-verbal communication on a moment-to-moment basis, such methods have the potential to deepen current understandings of the complex ways in which perspectives of teachers and young children intersect to support teaching and learning processes.

References

• Bruner, J. (1983). Child’s talk. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.

• Degotardi, S., Semann, A., & Shepherd, W. (in press). Using practitioner inquiry to promote reflexivity and change in infant-toddler early childhood programs. In P. Whiteman & K. De Gioia (Eds.), Children and childhoods: Contemporary perspectives, places and practices. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

• Fleer, M. (2010). Early learning and development. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

• Gauvain, M. (2001). The social context of cognitive development. New York: The Guilford Press.

• Goodfellow, J. (2005). Researching with/for whom? Stepping in and out of practitioner research. Australian Journal of Early Childhood, 30 (4), 48–57.

• Goodfellow, J., & Hedges, H. (2007). Practitioner research “centre stage”: Contexts, contributions and challenges. In L. Keesing-Styles & H. Hedges (Eds.), Theorising early childhood practice: Emerging dialogues (pp. 187–210). Castle Hill, NSW: Pademelon Press.

• Nelson, K. (1996). Language in cognitive development: The emergence of the mediated mind. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

• NICHD Early Child Care Research Network. (1996). Characteristics of infant child care: Factors contributing to positive caregiving. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 11, 269–306.

• NICHD Early Child Care Research Network. (2002). Child-care structure ➔ process ➔ outcome: Direct and indirect effects of child-care quality on young children’s development. Psychological Science, 13 (3), 199–206.

• Perner, J. (1991). Understanding the representational mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

• Siraj-Blatchford, I. (2009). Quality teaching in the early years. In A. Anning, J. Cullen, & M. Fleer (Eds.), Early childhood education: Society and culture (pp. 137–148). London, England: Sage.

• Snow, C. (1984). Parent-child interaction and the development of communicative ability. In R. Schiefelbusch & J. Picker (Eds.), The acquisition of communicative competence (pp. 69–108). Baltimore, MD: University Park Press.

• Sperber, D., & Wilson, D. (1986). Relevance: Communication and cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

• Waniganayake, M., Harrison, L., Cheeseman, S., De Gioia, K., Burgess, C., & Press, F. (2008). Practice potentials: Impact of participation in professional development and support on quality outcomes for children in childcare centres (Report to the National Professional Support Coordinators Alliance). Sydney, NSW: Access Macquarie.