Postdevelopmental Approaches To Childhood Research Observation

This book challenges the developmentalist paradigm that dominates research into children and childhood, focusing on observation as a research method. It offers new postdevelopmental ways of conducting childhood observations which are diverse in context and theoretical orientation, and in the process, deconstructs the dominant traditions of childhood research. Written by leading scholars based in Canada, Norway, the UK, and the USA, the chapters consider observation as it is enacted in the home, nursery or classroom. Drawing on a range of theories including feminist new materialism, social semiotics, and posthumanism, the chapters cover a range of topics including reciprocal methods, photography, childhood art, and memoir.

This book argues that developmental approaches to observation in childhood pedagogy are limiting, that there is an urgent need to unsettle and reimagine observation, proposing new postdevelopmental theories and modes of inquiry for educators. Written by leading scholars based in Australia, Canada, Finland, New Zealand, the UK and the USA, the chapters consider observation as it is enacted in the home, nursery or classroom. Drawing on a range of theories including feminist new materialism, social semiotics, and sociocultural and multimodal approaches to early childhood the chapters cover a range of areas from early childhood art and observational literacy tools to intergenerational research, and using photography and video in observations.

This book argues that developmental approaches to observation in childhood pedagogy are limiting, restrictive, and present social justice dilemmas. This book unsettles, dismantles, and reimagines observation, proposing new postdevelopmental theories and modes of inquiry for educators. Written by leading scholars based in Australia, Canada, Finland, New Zealand, the UK and the USA, the chapters consider observation as it is enacted in the home, nursery or classroom. Drawing on a range of theories including feminist new materialism, social semiotics, and sociocultural and multimodal approaches to early childhood, the chapters cover a range of areas, from early childhood art and observational literacy tools to intergenerational research, and using photography and video in observations.

In childhood research, children's art-making has typically been viewed and understood through a lens of developmental psychology and the notion that children's art-making progresses through a linear series of stages continues to dominate how we design and implement art-making experiences for young children. Postdevelopmental Approaches to Childhood Art brings together the work of theorists from around the world who have presented postdevelopmental approaches to childhood art, thereby playing a vital part in unsettling the dominance of the developmental paradigm and offering worked examples of alternative models. Drawing on sociocultural theory, Deleuzian philosophy, posthumanism and postmodernism each chapter offers a theoretical basis that challenges developmentalism, as well as an application of that theoretical basis. The contributors also consider what this shift in our perspective means for the design and implementation of art-making experiences for young children.

This New Zealand adaptation looks both at historical roots of child observation as well as various approaches to observing young children in early years settings.

Postfoundational Approaches to Qualitative Inquiry is an edited collection that aims to move beyond a critique and deconstruction of method in order to present an engagement with various postfoundational frameworks and approaches that produce new concepts and enactments. What makes this book innovative is the singular focus on postfoundational paradigms, borrowed from the humanities and sciences, that are enveloped in what is referred to as the ontological turn, the new empiricisms, and the new materialisms. Postfoundational inquiry is conceived by the editors as emergent, relational, responsive, involuntary, and inventive. While the editors name the facets of these contingent approaches and explain how they work, they do so not in order to fix a new method, but to spur new connectives. In this collection, authors take up a range of postfoundational theories such as poststructuralism, posthumanism, postcolonialism, feminist new materialism, speculative/ new empiricism, agential realism, immanent ontologies, and affect theory. Provoked by a series of reorienting questions, chapters in the book offer enactments as a way of unfurling what is unthought, not yet, and becoming. The chapters are organized according to four Openings: Atmospheres, Affects, and Hauntings; Archives, Worldings, and Sketchings; Escaping Tradition, Beginning Elsewhere, and the Politics of Doing Otherwise; Pre-personal Agencies and Thought Taking Flight. This book can be used as a standalone text in advanced qualitative inquiry courses, or as a supplementary text in courses that examine the use of theory in research.

This text rearticulates understandings of materials—blocks of clay, sheets of paper, brushes and paints, fabrics, and plastics—to formulate new ideas about what happens when we think with materials and apply them to early childhood development and classrooms. Through a series of ethnographic examples and engagement with existing ideas of relationality in the visual arts, feminist ethics, science studies, philosophy, anthropology, and environmental humanities, Encounters with Materials in Early Childhood Education highlights how materials can be conceptualized as active participants in early childhood education. Updated to include choreographies with fabrics and the process of reparation with plastics, this second edition shows how educators, young children, and researchers have explored what materials are capable of in their encounters with other materials and with children. The book is key reading for undergraduate students, graduate students, and pre-service teachers in early childhood education and art education programs. Access the Instructor and Student Resources at www.encounterswithmaterials.com.

This fully updated third edition of Learning Through Child Observation is a handbook for professionals working in, or students preparing to work in, children's services. This accessible text examines the value of observation, its use in assessment and the practical aspects and methods of observational study. The authors focus on the importance of fully recognising the child's developmental and emotional state when intervening, and the need to see children 'holistically' and as unique individuals within the wider context of the family and community. This new edition reflects updates to policy and practice and further develops the critical perspective on contemporary thinking about childhood and observational methods. This edition has also expanded its focus to include observation of primary-aged children. A popular text, it will appeal to students and professionals in all children's services, whether in pre-school, schools, social care, mental health or health settings.