Avis Ridgway

Drawing out critical thinking: testing the methodological value of drawing collaboratively

Early childhood research has long established that drawing is a central, and important activity for young children. Less common are investigations into the drawing activity of adults involved in early childhood. A team of adult early childhood researchers, with differing exposures and familiarities with drawing, experimented with intergenerational collaborative drawing with colleagues, students, family members and others, to explore the effectiveness of drawing as a research process and as an arts-based methodology. This testing prompted critical thinking into how drawing might facilitate research that involves young children, to operate in more communicable ways, and how research-focused drawings might occur in reference to a research project.

Digital Oral Feedback on Written Assignments as Professional Learning for Teacher Educators: A collaborative self-study

This article reports on a self-study of teacher educators involved in a preservice teacher unit on literacy. In this study the teacher educators provided the preservice teachers with digital oral feedback about their final unit of work. Rather than marking written work as individual lecturers, we collaboratively read each assignment and recorded a sound file of our conversation. We constructed our collaborative marking of each assignment as a “cultural gift” to our own professional learning. We found that we were providing more in-depth feedback on the assessment criteria for each assignment than we would have with written feedback prepared individually. We also uncovered tensions in relation to our preferred modalities associated with the digital marking.

The Past-Present Dialectic: A New Methodological Tool for Seeing the Historical Dynamic in Cultural-Historical Research

We can use visual narrative methodology to understand child development in its historical sense by looking to the past to understand the present. In child development it is important to account for external culture and historical influences (Vygotsky, The collected works of L.S. Vygotsky. (Prologue by Carl Ratner): vol. 5. Child psychology. 1998 Publishers, Kluwer Academic/Plenum, Boston/Dordrecht/London/Moscow, 1987). The historical dynamic implies a need to see changing practices in motion, iteration and transformation over time. The study reported in this chapter took place in an Australian community pre-school, where I had taught (1976–1979). Returning as a researcher in 2005–2008, the past appeared present in phenomena such as the boat in the yard. Visual narrative data around the boat from interview transcripts, photographs, archival records and field notes were juxtaposed to form a methodological dialectic. To conceptualise the dynamic-forms and transformations of the boat in relation to external cultural-historical influences, a new tool to interpret a methodological dialectic, the past-present dialectic, was created. Applied to analysis of visual narrative data, this tool revealed hidden cultural-historical influences in child development through showing institutional practices around changing forms and uses of the boat over time.

Transitory moments as "affective moments of action" in toddler play

This chapter examines how toddlers develop affective relations while they play. A cultural–historical approach is used to understand affect and play. Visual methodologies are used to illustrate moments of affect in peer play. The case study involves two Australian-borne babies aged one and a half and two with Mexican and Chinese heritages, respectively. The case example analyses how transitory moments emerge when there are “affective moments of action”, as toddlers play together affectively and reciprocally. It is found that toddler’s affective actions are important in how they develop their play. Familiar games such as peek-a-boo, crawling like dogs and hop up and down like bunnies were played and shared in affective moments of action. These affective moments of action as transitory moments involved toddlers’ self-awareness of each other, change of actions and the sharing of multiple affective gazes and movements used to play collectively. Important implications for future research involve being aware of how peer play offers the exploration of toddlers’ will and agency and development of affective interest in each other’s play and games.

Examining the Dynamics of Infant Reciprocity and Affective Fatherhood

This chapter brings together new research into infants’ home upbringing that reflects cultural beliefs and practices. Visual narratives from home lives of three Australian-born babies and their fathers capture events in case examples. These events involve fathers with infants in playful participation around fence building, using cooking toys and experimenting with sound in a recording studio. Each case example illustrates and analyses cultural elements and dynamic forms present in transitory, short-lived infant experiences. A method of interobserver reliability is used. Each author/researcher examines the others’ visual data to discuss, debate and form new impressions through the use of dialogue commentary. The unique situation of studying the simultaneous upbringing in Australia of three babies with different cultural heritages offers opportunity to examine the dynamics of infant reciprocity from a cultural-historical view. Collaborative discussion and analysis of data of a family life event reveal reciprocal interactions and embodied emotional engagement framed by different perspectives. We present the notion of conceptual reciprocity (a reciprocal intention relating to nurturing and supporting learning through a shared experience) illustrating how it forms in the lives of three babies and their families.

A Wholeness Approach to Babies’ and Toddlers’ Learning and Development

In this chapter the three co-authors and editors, from varied cultural backgrounds, choose a ‘wholeness approach’ to bring coherence to the work of contributing scholars who offer local and international research in their studies of babies and toddlers. Through these collaborations, a new model for thinking about studying babies and toddlers was generated. The potentialities of an adapted wholeness approach for uniting the diverse ideas into a meaningful whole are an exciting challenge for researchers studying babies and toddlers in the field of early childhood.

The Babies’ Perspective: Emotional Experience of Their Creative Acts

How do adults take babies’ perspective to support their learning during transitory cultural events such as family routines in daily life? Explorations in the research site of three babies’ daily lives are used to investigate this question. In this study, Vygotsky’s (The problem of the environment. In: van der Veer R, Valsiner J (eds) The Vygotsky reader. Blackwell, Oxford, 338–354, 1994) cultural-historical concept of perezhivanie (emotional experience) informs the research. This chapter focuses in particular on exploring babies’ perezhivanie (emotional experience) of spontaneous creative acts in family life events which inform how parents/adults can take babies’ perspective and reciprocally engage in such transitory moments. Visual methodology is applied in the research to frame the analysis of babies’ everyday experiences with families. The chapter analyses expressive daily life events of three babies (with cultural heritages from Australia, China and Mexico) and unpacks the various dimensions of parent-baby shared daily practices. Babies’ emotional experience of their creative acts with parents are discussed, in order to uncover the pedagogical strategies parents/adults use to engage with babies.

Introducing dialogic pedagogy: provocations for the early years. By E. Jane White

A work’s author is present only in the whole of the work, not in one separate aspect of this whole, and least of all in content that is severed from the whole. (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 160)The author, E....

Play Affordances Across Institutional Contexts

‘Affordance’ was a term first used by Gibson (1979) to mean: …something that refers to both the environment (and what it offers) and the animal…the term implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment (1979, p. 127). In this chapter we use the term affordance to examine the elements of time, continuity and culture of pedagogical practices in play offered across institutional settings in contemporary Australian and international contexts. In terms of affordance our illustration suggests that a tree is an opportunity for the child to learn to swing; an outdoor space a playful chance to try handstands; a school playground a place to learn skipping games; and a home may give freedom for the child to greet the day with a stretch. We ask what affordances can pedagogical play offer the child in terms of learning across institutional contexts?

Imagination in Play: Space and Artefacts

This chapter presents the importance of play space that is created by educators and children to enact and imagine the possibilities of play. In particular how and why educators need to account for the child’s perspective in creating play environments and space in order to support children’s formation of agentic imagination and their imaginative thinking. The relations between imagination and play will be more explicitly explored, alongside the questions of how this is linked to pedagogical strategies for supporting children’s learning and development and how the children’s agentic imagination is generated in play space.