Gloria Quiñones

“Visual Vivencias”: A Cultural-Historical Tool for Understanding the Lived Experiences of Young Children’s Everyday Lives

The aim of this chapter is to present a theorisation of “Visual Vivencias” as a method for studying children aged 3 years and younger and, through this, contribute to a new cultural-historical understanding of early childhood research. We specifically introduce a case example that took place in a Mexican family in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, Mexico, as part of a wider project reported elsewhere (Quinones, 2011).

An Assessment Perezhivanie: Building an Assessment Pedagogy for, with and of Early Childhood Science Learning

Assessment for, with and of learning within the field of early childhood science education brings to the fore the child within their social and emotional context. In this chapter we seek to explore the wholeness of the assessment context where the learner and the social context are inextricably fused, in order to discuss the complexity of assessment in early childhood science education. We introduce an assessment perezhivanie and the concept of ‘potentive assessment’ as a complement to formative and summative assessment for early year’s science and technology education. We draw specifically on cultural-historical theory to present our arguments and to highlight a framework which seeks to make visible an assessment approach which captures the dynamic relations between development and learning within the early childhood period, and, through this, provide an assessment approach which is centred upon illuminating children’s science content knowledge and capability as located and understood within meaningful contexts.

A Visual and Tactile Path: Affective Positioning of Researcher Using a Cultural-Historical Visual Methodology

This chapter theorises the role of the researcher in relation to how the participants affectively position the researcher. A cultural-historical approach is used in investigating how emotions and affect are part of the everyday life of the researcher and her participants. The different zones of sense are explained on how the researcher senses the role that the participants place on her. The methodological tool of ‘Visual Vivencias’ is used on how through visual mobile images intense emotions can be captured visually. The research took place in a rural community in Mexico. Three examples are presented to understand the researcher as a teacher, a friend and a participant of an intense moment – a perezhivanie in the everyday life of Mayra. The researcher is affectively positioned, and this is discussed through dialogues and visual images. The researcher took a visual and affective and tactile pact through sensing what the participants’ intentions were. The affective positioning of the researcher allowed to have trustful relationships with participants and touched the life of the researcher. Taking upon these roles allowed her to establish a new relationship in the field and a more authentic experience in which it was recognised that not only her participants have intense emotions but she also has them.

Play Performance and Affect in a Mexican Telenovela

This chapter focuses on the unity of thought and affect in play as suggested by Vygotsky and the cultural-historical approach. A theoretical analysis of this Vygotskian idea is carried out in relation to play performances in the everyday life of Mayra, a 5-year-old girl, who lives in a rural community in the north of Mexico. The empirical material consists of ethnographic video recordings of her play performance enacting, singing and dancing like the heroine of her favourite TV show “Telenovela”. The concept of affective intentions theorized in this chapter shows how children express emotions through repertoires of non-verbal language, gestures and movements. Affect captured visually in a play performance example allows for demonstrating momentitos in time where Mayra’s affective intentions and interests are present. Further, Mayra’s affective intentions are discussed in relation to how she collectively and individually imagines her everyday world and how her identity changes when moving between institutions such as family and kindergarten. Play in this cultural community involves the telenovela, which in turn contains intense affects and emotions for the players such as Mayra. This play performance is valued in the community and becomes important to Mayra’s identity formation and belonging to the rural community.

Early Childhood Education and Development in Latin America

This section presents the state of the art of early childhood education and development through history and to date in several countries in Latin America. Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Guatemala, Mexico, and Peru give us an idea of the specifics as well as their shared problems and developments regarding how they provide attention, care, and education to their young children. The authors of the different countries and chapters that follow, offer historical accounts on how early childhood has been framed, how social and educational policies have developed, and the challenges they still address and face. They also discuss main research in this area and the research that is still needed.

Eye-to-Eye with Otherness: A Childhoodnature Figuration

Taking a narrative approach that follows Haraway’s (Staying with the trouble. Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, Durham/London, 2016) call for making kin with growing awareness of a looming 6th mass extinction of species, the chapter focuses on multispecies encounters to consider what childhoodnature as a concept can do for research. The intention is neither to focus on what can be learned from multispecies child-animal encounters, nor is it an attempt to document such encounters in “real life.” Rather, the chapter experiments with the porosity and liveliness of materialized thought (the text) as it gives form to an event (the multispecies encounter) across time and in place. The story is a hen and child story. They are the main actors and we thank them for their ability to call us to attention. Chickens and child are members of Gloria’s kin and we hope that we have captured their encounters in ways that agree with them. And Ena, thank you for sharing worlds for a time. I. Duhn (*) · G. Quinones Faculty of Education, Monash University, Frankston, VIC, Australia e-mail: iris.duhn@monash.edu; gloria.quinones@monash.edu # Springer International Publishing AG 2018 A. Cutter-Mackenzie et al. (eds.), Research Handbook on Childhoodnature, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51949-4_9-1 1 The intention is to speculatively imagine a childhoodnature figuration of a hen and a child as a lively encounter that ripples through time/place and that generates unexpected lines of inquiry. The chapter experiments with a speculative approach to explore new ways of thinking and doing multispecies relationships as “earthly encounters” that matter to politics and ethics of sharing worlds. This, we argue, is an essential task in the midst of loss of diversity as it opens spaces for new imaginings about sharing worlds through kin-making in childhoodnature research.

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.