ENCOUNTERING CHILDREN’S PERSPECTIVES IN PLAY: HOW A PLAY EXPERIMENT WITH ANIMAL CLOAKS BECAME A RESEARCH APPROACH IN ECEC

• Authors: Jørgensen Hanne Hede
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

In Danish early childhood education and care (ECEC), pedagogues traditionally work in a child-centred manner, valuing the children’s experiences. During the last 150 years pedagogues have developed expertise in framing everyday life for children while paying double attention to the children’s perspectives, on one hand, and to their own pedagogical interests, on the other. Therefore, play and experiments are essential components of Danish ECEC. This article starts from this pedagogical tradition. It explores if and how researchers can benefit from employing such double attentiveness and uses it to bridge the gap between encountering children’s perspectives and making those perspectives an object of investigation. The empirical materials were derived from a pilot study. Pivotal to this study was the exploration of play experiments as an encounter between children, pedagogues and researchers in which the children’s different perspectives could emerge. The findings suggest that play experiments can be effective as a child-sensitive research approach that enhances children’s embodied knowledge and promotes children’s participation in research. However, methodological questions are raised concerning how to maintain the children’s perspectives and transforming their embodied knowledge into empirical data. Also, the need for further exploration of play experiments as a space for collaborative encounters is appointed.

Keywords

EN

DANISH PEDAGOGY; EARLY CHILDHOOD; EDUCATION; PLAY; ECEC

• Publisher: Faculty of Education, Trnava University
• Journal: Pedagogický časopis (Journal of Pedagogy)
• Year: 2023
• Volume: 14
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 17 – 36

Contributors

author

Jørgensen Hanne Hede

• Research Centre for Pedagogy and Education, VIA University College, 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark

Identifiers

DOI

10.2478/jped-2023-0002