International Perspectives on Early Childhood Research: A Day in the Life

International Perspectives on Early Childhood Research A Day in the Life

Also by Julia Gillen THE LANGUAGE OF CHILDREN CHANGING ENGLISH (co-edited) RESEARCHING LEARNING IN VIRTUAL WORLDS (co-edited)

Also by Catherine Ann Cameron UNDERSTANDING ABUSE: Partnering for Change (co-edited)

International Perspectives on Early Childhood Research A Day in the Life Edited by

Julia Gillen Lancaster University, UK and

Catherine Ann Cameron University of British Columbia, Canada

Selection and editorial matter © Julia Gillen and Catherine Ann Cameron 2010 Individual chapters © their respective authors 2010 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries ISBN 978–0–230–23249–5

hardback

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

For the girls and their families, Julia: also for Lesley Abbott Ann: and for Maxwell Cameron, Ian Cameron, Leslie Cameron, and Steven Cameron

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Contents Preface

viii

Notes on Contributors

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1

Introduction Julia Gillen and Catherine Ann Cameron

1

2

Using Video Technology Roger Hancock, Julia Gillen and Giuliana Pinto

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3

Musicality Susan Young and Julia Gillen

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4

Emotional Security Catherine Ann Cameron, Ayshe Talay-Ongan, Roger Hancock and Sombat Tapanya

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5

Eating Julia Gillen and Roger Hancock

100

6

Notational Systems Giuliana Pinto, Beatrice Accorti Gamannossi and Catherine Ann Cameron

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7

Humour E. Leslie Cameron, Beatrice Accorti Gamannossi, Julia Gillen and Catherine Ann Cameron

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8

Conclusions Catherine Ann Cameron and Julia Gillen

155

Appendix: Locating the Children

165

References

180

Index

194

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Preface The goal of this volume is to share the openings that our new day in the life methodology afforded us when thinking about early childhood well-being and implications for human culture more generally. After viewing and reviewing the children’s filmed days, we have come to a new perception of the breadth of possibilities when contemplating the desiderata for supporting young children thriving. The seven children and their families described in these pages have given us much to consider in regard to the presence of a strong child amid everyday interactions with her environment including that family, and the reciprocal roles played. The ambitious research endeavour reported in this book originated during a workshop sponsored by the Research Development Initiative (RDI) programme of the Social Sciences Research Council of Canada. Dr Tara Callaghan was the primary investigator and Dr Catherine Ann Cameron was a co-investigator. Dr Julia Gillen, Dr Giuliana Pinto and Dr Sombat Tapanya were collaborators. The RDI, ‘Interdisciplinary examination of the role of culture on human development: An international project for the development of new methodologies’ was based at the Center for Research on Culture and Human Development at St Francis Xavier University, Canada. Support for collecting data in Thailand, Peru and Canada was additionally provided by Human Resource Development Canada. The British Council funded a research trip to the UK so that the primary investigators (and editors of this volume) could work together on advancing the application of the day in the life methodology to the initially gathered video data. From those early seeds additional colleagues joined us and collected data in the UK, the US and Turkey. As more locations came on board, we received institutional support from The Open University, UK, the Universities of New Brunswick and British Columbia, Canada, the University of Florence, Italy, Chiang Mai University, Thailand, Exeter University, UK, Lancaster University, UK and Carthage College, USA. The Open University was particularly helpful in supporting the duplication, conversion and sharing of data. Exeter University hosted a residential workshop for some of us in January 2004. Our major debt of gratitude is to the children whose days we have come so to respect, enjoy and be intrigued by; and who were most viii

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enthusiastically engaged in their days in spite of us, showing us glimpses of their active worlds. Their families who very generously and graciously welcomed us into their homes taught us so very much about the wide range of healthy variations in the contexts for toddler well being. It would be difficult to overstate the rewards and challenges faced by our multidisciplinary, multinational team: in viewing data records from many perspectives; in communicating through different modes and media; in working together towards conference presentations and papers for scholarly journals, and ultimately in coming together to write this book in discourses that seek to bridge disciplines and continents. We are all enriched immeasurably by the experience and have learnt to see the many sides of what at first seemed like one coin. We benefited from the assiduous participation of our research assistants: Tina Carreau, Laura Campbell, Amanda Kidwell, Fusun Singi and, most notably, Nora Didkowsky, who subsequently became a doctoral student and Manager of the Negotiating Resilience Project at Dalhousie University, Canada involved in extending our methodology to resilient adolescents. We should note that project team membership developed in an almost organic fashion. The original team, as indicated above, formed at the Canadian RDI workshop and included Giuliana Pinto and Sombat Tapanya under the leadership of Ann Cameron and Julia Gillen. Julia recruited, through conference presentations, Roger Hancock and Susan Young in the UK. Giuliana Pinto recruited Beatrice Accorti Gamannossi in Italy. Ann Cameron recruited Ayshe Talay-Ongan at a conference, who in turn volunteered to recruit her niece as a participant and was trained in Florence to conduct the data collection by Giuliana Pinto and Beatrice Accorti Gamannossi. Ann Cameron recruited the US child Katy, and after the data were collected under her supervision, Katy’s mother, Leslie Cameron volunteered to join the team as a co-investigator. All recruits had in common a fascination for the richness of the information gathered with the day in the life methodology. As implied above, our international, interdisciplinary team presented symposia at several scholarly conferences that we found invaluable in consolidating our work. Most notable of these were: The biennial meeting of the International Society for the Study of Behavioural Development, Ghent, Belgium, 11–15 July 2004 where Sombat Tapanya and Ann Cameron convened a poster symposium, A day in the life: Ecological investigation of an interactional construction of childhood in diverse communities. Posters presented were as follows:

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Tapanya, S., Didkowsky, N. & Cameron, C. A. Methodologies for studying healthy early childhood interactions in local context. Hancock, R. & Gillen, J. Eating, artefacts and the communication of values. Pinto, G. & Accorti Gamannossi, B. Emergent knowledge of notational systems in cultural perspective. Young, S., Didkowsky, N. & Gillen, J. Musicality in early childhood: Flourishing of proclivities; forms of cultural organization. Sylvie Normandeau served as discussant. At the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Montreal, Canada, 11–15 April 2005, Julia Gillen convened an interactive research symposium, A day in the life: Ecological investigation of learning in diverse communities with two-year-old girls. Papers presented were as follows: Gillen, J., Cameron, C. A., Tapanya, S., Pinto, G., Hancock, R., Young, S. & Accorti Gamannossi, B. A. A day in the life: Methodology. Tapanya, S. & Cameron, C. A. Swings and hammocks as secure bases during A day in the life in diverse cultures. Gillen, J. & Hancock, R. Exploring ‘eating events’ in interactions between children and family members. Young, S., Gillen, J. & Cameron, C. A. Musical experiences during A day in the life. Pinto, G., Accorti Gamannossi, B. & Cameron, C. A. The development of symbolic systems: A cultural perspective. Sylvie Normandeau again served as discussant At the annual meeting of the Jean Piaget Society, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, 31 May–2 June, 2007, Julia Gillen and Ann Cameron convened a symposium, A day in the life: Studying strong children in diverse global communities: An ecological approach. Papers presented were as follows: Hancock, R. & Gillen, J. Children at play in safe domestic spaces. Cameron, L., Accorti Gamannossi, B., Gillen, J. & Cameron, C. A. Two-year-olds’ use of playful language and humour in three family contexts. Tapanya, S., Talay-Ongan, A. & Cameron, C. A. Intergenerational transmission of harmony: Gentle strokes, and pats for the strong child. Pinto, G. & Accorti Gamannossi, B. Children’s drawing activities in different cultures. Young, S. Small musical events in A day in the life.

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At the ‘Ecologies of Diversities: The developmental and historical interarticulation of human meditational forms’ meeting of International Society for Cultural and Activity Research, San Diego, USA, 8–11 September 2008, Julia Gillen and Ann Cameron convened a symposium discussing the following: Cameron, C. A. & Pinto, G. A day in the life: Aspects of an ecological study of thriving two-year-old girls in diverse communities around the globe. Gillen, J. Accorti Gamannossi, B. & Hancock, R. A day in the life: Relating understandings of ‘eating events’ to the concept of ‘literacy events’ as cultural activities in the lives of two-year-old girls in diverse global communities. Giuliana Pinto edited a special issue of Rassegna di Psicologia: Rassegna di Psicologia. (Ed. G. Pinto). (2006) XXIII (3), NUMERO SPECIALE A day in the life: Un’indagine ecologica sul costruirsi degli apprendimenti in comunità diverse [A day in the life: Ecological investigation of learning in diverse communities] (pp. 5–113). It had the following contents: Editoriale: Pinto, G. A day in the life un ’indangi ecologica sul construirsi deglie apprendimenti in comunita diverse. [A day in the life: Ecological investigation of learning in diverse communities] 5–10. Gillen, J., Cameron, C. A., Tapanya, S., Pinto, G., Hancock, R., Young, S., Accorti Gamannossi, B. & Didkowsky, N. Una metodologia per lo studio culturale dello sviluppo e dell’apprendimento nella prima infanzia. [A day in the life: advancing a methodology for the cultural study of development and learning in early childhood], 11–24. Cameron, C. A. & Tapanya, S. Altalene ed amache come basi sicure per la capacità di recupero durante un‘Giorno nella vita’ in diverse culture [Swings and hammocks as secure bases for resilience during A day in the life in diverse cultures], 25–40. Gillen, J. & Hancock, R. I pasti, gli artefatti e la trasmissione dei valori [Eating, artefacts and the communication of values], 41–59. Young, S. & Gillen, J. La musicalità comunicativa come pratica educative [Communicative musicality as parenting practice], 61–77. Pinto, G., Accorti Gamannossi, B. & Cameron, C. A. Alfabetizzazione emergente in ‘Un giorno nella vita’ [Emergent literacy in A day in the life], 79–92. Accorti Gamannossi, B. Lo studio dello sviluppo in contesti culturali diversi: la predisposizione dei materiali di ricerca [The study of development in different cultural contexts: the arrangement of research materials], 93–107.

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Normandeau, S. Dalle attività quotidiane in diverse culture a un giorno nella vita di cinque bambine nelle rispettive culture [From daily activities in diverse cultures to A day in the life of five girls in their respective cultures], 109–113. Other journal publications relating to the project are cited in the text and listed on the project website at http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/projects/ dayinthelife/ (accessed 1 January 2010). We thank the following publishers for permission to use materials published in this book: To Springer for permission to quote from: Cameron, C. A., Tapanya, S. & Gillen, J. (2006). Swings, hammocks, and rocking chairs as secure bases during A day in the Life in diverse cultures. Child and Youth Care Forum, 35 (3), 231–247. To Early Childhood Australia for permission to adapt: Gillen, J. & Hancock, R. (2006) ‘A day in the life’: Exploring eating events involving two-year-old girls and their families in diverse communities. Australian Journal of Early Childhood, 31 (4), 23–29. And to Taylor & Francis for quoting from: Hancock, R. & Gillen, J. (2007). Safe places in domestic spaces: Two-yearolds at play in their homes. Children’s Geographies, 5 (4), 337–351. Pinto, G., Accorti Gamannossi, B. & Cameron, C. A. (2009). From scribbles to meanings: Social interaction in different cultures and the emergence of young children’s early drawing. Early Child Development and Care, 179 (8), 1–19.

Notes on Contributors Editors and authors Dr Julia Gillen is Senior Lecturer in the Literacy Research Centre, Lancaster University, UK. Dr Catherine Ann Cameron is Honorary Professor of Psychology, University of British Columbia; Emerita & Honorary Research Professor, University of New Brunswick; Adjunct Professor, University of Victoria, Canada.

Contributing authors Dr Giuliana Pinto is Full Professor of Developmental and Educational Psychology at University of Florence, Italy. Dr Sombat Tapanya is Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry, Chiang Mai University, Thailand. Dr Beatrice Accorti Gamannossi is Lecturer in Developmental and Educational Psychology at University of Florence, Italy. Dr Roger Hancock is Senior Lecturer in Education at the Open University, UK. Dr Susan Young is Senior Lecturer in the School of Education and Lifelong Learning, Exeter University, UK and Senior Research Fellow with the Centre for International Research in Music Education at the University of Surrey Roehampton, UK. Dr Leslie Cameron is Associate Professor of Psychology at Carthage College, Wisconsin, USA. Dr Ayshe Talay-Ongan is Retired Senior Lecturer, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia.

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1 Introduction Julia Gillen and Catherine Ann Cameron

Days’ openings In Peru, a young child is eating breakfast on her bed accompanied by a large balloon on a stick, a small yellow toy dog, her father and her cousin. Juanita is dividing her attention between her breakfast of fried potatoes, bread, and lonche (peanut water), her father Cesar, the toy dog and cartoons on TV.

Juanita eating her breakfast, with the balloon on the stick on one side of her, and her toy dog on the other. Various objects on the small shelves behind are accessible to her.

After chewing a few mouthfuls, she hands a book that has slipped down the side of the bed to her father. She is about to spend over an hour on the bed, engaged in various amusements including dancing, sometimes while waving the balloon. Her movements trace the sophisticated rhythms of indigenous Peruvian dancing and her father videos her, delighted by her prowess. In the UK, Rachel, accompanied by her one-year-old daughter Alison, approaches the room where two-year-old Jessica and her twin brother are standing side-by-side in their adjacent twin cots. 1

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Jessica wakes in the close proximity to her brother she will experience for most of the day. Each cot is furnished with a few familiar soft toys.

They have been awake for some time, chatting and playing with their soft toys. The family quickly moves into the playroom, where the children’s height charts on the door become a focus of attention. Margaret, the grandmother, firstly points out Alison’s mark then Paul, their father, crouches down in his dressing gown while the twins ‘read’ off the numbers. It is a hot day in Italy and Beatrice has already been to the park with her father Claudio and returned home. In the living room of the compact city apartment Claudio is blowing bubbles which Beatrice tries to catch, jumping about excitedly.

Children’s toys, large and small, vie with the adults’ possessions for space; however, the occupations and interests of all family members, together and separately, are catered for and Beatrice still has room to jump about in relative comfort.

She suddenly sees a large ball in the corner of the living room and takes it, alternately bouncing, throwing and kicking it. Each time it only goes a short way and then has to be retrieved from under a piece of furniture. One such is a computer on a desk, clearly an adult ‘office’ taking

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up a small area of the hall adjacent to the living room; another is a toy ‘kitchen’, which takes up a substantial portion of the living room rug. In the family room of a house in rural Canada, Nora has modelling clay in her hands as she and her mother Catherine are hunched on the floor close to a large piece of plywood out of which Catherine is planning to build a birdhouse.

Nora and Catherine begin their day with practical design activities in a room that features many adaptations to facilitate a range of daily family oriented activities.

There is a discussion as to whether it is to be a house or a feeder. Catherine gets marking instruments and a straight edge and her daughter is trying to decide how to contribute to the project. Nora’s baby sister Chelsea awakens from a nap, so the project is momentarily delayed, but Catherine perseveres while Nora wants to draw stars on the plywood board, to measure with her mother’s large ruler and to be integrally involved on the project. Both make asides regarding the younger sibling’s not being mature enough for this sort of activity. In the USA, the mother gently approaches Katy in her crib: ‘How are you? Did you have a good sleep?’

As Elisabeth comes into the room, her daughter lifts herself up quickly in the cot, smiling and holding her comfort blanket. The sunshine is streaming through the window onto some of Katy’s toys.

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Mother and child hug and snuggle briefly; Elisabeth kisses Katy on the cheek, whispering ‘Hey sweets’ and then the child wriggles out of her mother’s arms (the mother saying, ‘Get down?’ and agrees that the comfort blanket be carried during the transition out of the crib). Katy turns quickly to inspect several board books in her bookcase, but then moves on to the major ongoing occupation of her day, selecting from an extensive array of purses, shopping bags, pails and other different containers. Her mother observes, ‘Oh boy, here we go with the bags! You gonna fill up your bags again?’ In Turkey, as the father prepares to leave the house for work, Selin, like her twin sister, is moving rapidly around the room, going forwards and backwards to and from their father.

Selin’s father has sung her name and she turns, intent on him. A few seconds earlier her sister was in an almost identical position.

Selin then goes to sit beside her mother Nurbike, book in hand, watching the television, making casual comments, clapping hands to televised music, making observations on both book and TV contents. Selin starts to make a paper airplane, while noting and periodically intersecting with the ongoing household activity including the actions of her sister and an adult cousin. Her father departs as the girls wave to him from the balcony beside their sitting room. In Thailand, Gai stands on a swaying bench, moaning slightly and waving her hands to attract the attention of the adults nearby. Her grandmother says, ‘Don’t cry now, don’t cry’, and her mother Siriwan suggests she chases away the dogs and goes to play with her sister. The garden includes two visitors. Gai’s grandmother is politely welcoming one of the visitors, for he is a man of some professional status, a university professor who is the local investigator for this research. The family are being asked not to take too much notice of the other visitor, a Canadian intern who is wielding a camera at the beginning of an ambitious attempt to record almost all of Gai’s day. She will spend much of her time in the family outdoors area on the outside covered balcony

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Gai is perched on a swinging bench, one of the many seats in the enclosed area that serves as garden, orchard, work and rest place for members of the extended family. Her tricycle, which she uses a lot to get around, is nearby.

and in the house of her aunt and uncle as well as in her own immediate family’s smaller house to the side of the ‘compound’. She will interact with a range of people and objects in her environment, which is protected and safe but gives her many opportunities for exploration. This last short vignette is the first one in which we have explicitly introduced the presence of the researchers and videos into our descriptions of the beginnings of the core element of our project A day in the life. Yet this addition is vital because this book is not an attempt to give a one-voiced invisible narrator’s description of glimpses into these girls’ lives, with the gloss that a fictionalized account might give them, but rather a consolidated report of an ambitious multinational research project taking an ecological approach to understanding young thriving children. Making visible the presence of the researchers and their equipment is essential to introducing this study. In many other ways, other elements of the scenes that might be called ‘context’ are also important contributions in sharing our understandings; very little, if anything, happens in human society without the participants’ bringing some cultural and/or historical knowledge to bear in interpreting current events. So, let us return to each of the vignettes above and provide a little more framing to the events adumbrated.

Peru The small room is on the upper storey of the building in the family compound that is the centre for all domestic, retail and animal husbanding activities. The main family business is a shop, where Luisa, Juanita’s mother, spends most of her time serving customers and baking bread.

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She has another daughter, Roxana, who is 17 years old. After spending the early morning with her father, Cesar, Juanita spends time with her cousin Ana and other members of her family who also live on the property – especially her aunt Lina and her grandparents. The family lives in a small town of about 300 inhabitants in rural Peru, 8 km away from a larger town. Juanita spends her days at home with the adults, but today is part of a summer holiday so the older children of the family are also home. Besides the family members in the small bedroom there are also two researchers, both Canadians, who have spent a considerable time in rural Peru, one working and one studying. They take turns throughout the day to alternate between videoing and making field notes. They have spent the previous day talking about the project with the family and undertaking some preliminary filming. One of the researchers has previously spent over a week living with the family; an initial associate of the project (an academic developmental psychologist) had introduced her to the family and originally identified Juanita as a ‘thriving child’ for this study. From spending time in this location, she understands the value the family puts on nourishing Juanita; the spectre of infant mortality haunted rural Peru relatively recently. Cesar’s encouragements to his daughter to eat and drink are familiar, yet at the same time the researcher notes it is relatively unusual for him to spend so much time at her bedside at this time of day and that the presence of the researchers may be providing additional interest. Juanita’s day will be spent in the compound, with its considerable diversity of activities and opportunities for interactions with people and things.

UK The family of two parents and their three young children live in a modern house in a rapidly growing ‘new town’ of south-eastern England. The father will shortly be leaving to commute to London for his own business in new technology; however, the two grandparents live in the house Monday to Friday. This set of grandparents lives in every other week, alternating with the other pair of grandparents, so that at all times on weekdays there are three adult carers essentially focussed on the three very young children. In this family, there is a considerable tradition of strong grandparent involvement in everyday child rearing. When Rachel was young, her own mother Margaret had virtually no maternity leave before returning to work full-time in her medical profession. Rachel spent a great deal of time with her grandmother and the whole family still enjoys a strong relationship with the now elderly and frail

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great-grandmother. After waking, the children are about to move into the kitchen for breakfast time, lively with eating, drawing and talking. The two researchers present are educationalists at the university with which the mother is associated, with backgrounds in teaching and research, including with young children and families. They are alternating between three different video cameras and taking field notes. During the day, Jessica will take them around the rooms in the house that are demarcated for family activities, they will accompany her out to the town’s shopping mall and a ‘farm attraction’ a car-drive away.

Italy Beatrice’s excited movements are constantly in close proximity to the two researchers, Italian developmental psychologists who have spent years working and living in or near this city. Beatrice cannot help but engage them in her excitement; they try hard to respond warmly but quietly as they are seeking not to play with her but to record her actions through videos and field notes during this day. It will be spent in this apartment that – although it might be deemed constrained to some observers – has a wealth of opportunities for activities that interest Beatrice. Her mother will soon return home from working in her active profession and the remainder of the day will be played out among the family of three. The careful preparation and enjoyment of midday meals will constitute some highlights. The child’s imaginative play is effective in entraining her attentive parents into mutual engagement in little fantasies. She uses wiles to delay nappy changes, recruit parents as playmates in her games, while they use her rich fantasy landscape to remind her of their priorities as well, such as in eating well or taking a nap. There seems no hesitation on the part of the parents to participate actively in the child’s world, largely on her terms, in the presence of observing strangers. Mutual care-giving is a major theme and the child reciprocates her parents’ playful ministrations both with them and with her toy animals and dolls. Mutuality of attention, be it to dancing to music, singing, or joint book reading all seamlessly emerged over the course of this child’s day while the observers seemed quite invisible.

Canada Nora’s family was recruited into the project because one of the local investigators had already worked with her in a study of artistic development. The family see Nora as a graphically talented little girl and provide

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her with many opportunities for artistic expression: a drawing easel, art materials, and chances to draw, paint, and sculpt over the course of the day. We two distal researchers, later watching the video of the day in its entirety, originally interpreted the birdhouse construction activity as possibly reflecting pedagogical motives of the mother Catherine. We thought that Catherine had initiated it as a good way to induct her daughter in an area of her strength, that is, in graphic representational activities. Later the two local researchers interviewed the family, showing Catherine a clip of this part of the day. She denied having any such pedagogical intentions, stating that she just been wanting to build a birdhouse and decided that that would be a good day to do it and was incorporating the children into her own endeavour. The day revealed many other activities and ways of pursuing the child’s interests, both inside and outdoors, both locations featuring many adaptations of furniture and equipment to cater for two young children. Nora, perhaps as a result of having engaged previously with one of the local researchers, invited her to join in on the activities on several occasions, but it was explained that she was doing her work in videoing her during that day so could not stop to play.

USA The interaction between Elisabeth, the mother, and Katy, included Elisabeth’s explanatory aside to Katy about the college student researchers who were already present at the moment of waking: (‘That’s just Amanda and Zack. … They’re working.’) Katy will fill different containers with crayons, pencils, pens, and felt markers over the course of this day in her life. Her family provide a wide range of opportunities for other activities, including swimming in a community indoor pool with her older brother, mother, and family friends; being read to by both father and mother; and a peer play date; but when left to her own devices, she often spontaneously resumes her occupation with filling containers with writing implements and integrating them into various imaginative play activities. While Katy seemed unconcerned by the presence of observers/filmers during the day, the hospitality that she extended during her play date was also extended to the research crew as she sought to ensure that they were comfortably accommodated as the day wore on. She enquired as to whether they would be going swimming with the family, and once, when planning to ‘play house’, invited the tall camera operator to join in, offering him the role of ‘big sister’ in the play that she was orchestrating. Occasionally her pretence

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play seems at least partly modelled on her parents, both academics working at the same college in the mid-west of the USA. The family live in a house in which they have lived for less than four years; no other family members live nearby. During a pre-filming interview, Elisabeth and her husband Fred summarized their views of the driving forces behind healthy development as being education along with love and confidence imparted from parents. They also value fostering children’s independence to discover personal interests.

Turkey As with the USA, the first description written at the beginning of the chapter omitted from its enumeration of participants the presence of a family friend who was note taking and the child’s aunt, a developmental psychologist, who was filming the day. This family reports during interviews and demonstrates during the day their prioritising of reading, writing, and musical activities. The television set showing childdirected programming was on early in the day and then later as well; there was a variety of mechanical toys, as well as musical instruments, available for their daughters to play with. Four adults were present in the home in addition to the children and their parents: a nanny serving meals, an older cousin often engaged in reading and playing with one or other of the little girls, the aunt, and the family friend. Yet the child seemed to be setting her own agenda. When she wanted support she had an inviting way of grasping the index finger of her play partner. When joint book reading was in progress, she grasped her partner’s finger to propel the story along. When she wanted a location change for activities, she grasped the finger of her chosen travel partner. She gently but lightly led the way like a Fred Astaire. Although she would normally have commandeered her favourite aunt into dialogue, she seemed to accept the alternative interlocutors and play partners while her auntie was engaged in filming her for the entire day.

Thailand Gai’s day began on the grounds of the family compound ‘furnished’ with a range of tropical trees, plants, flowers, birds and artefacts, including several swings and hammocks. In retrospect, it seems unlikely that the dogs were troubling her at the time the Canadian started filming close to her, since she went on to spend much of the day in their vicinity completely untroubled – but it might have seemed rude for a family

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member to refer to the young woman filming rather than the animals as causing distress so the dogs were invoked. Gai’s immediate family lives in a simple three-roomed house adjacent to the compound in which are located her grandparent’s larger home and her aunt and uncle’s even larger house, where she spends a high proportion of the day. Today is a Buddhist holiday so mother Siriwan, who has a job as a messenger in an academic institution, is at home. Chai, her father, who works in a labour-intensive position for a private company that does not acknowledge the holiday, returns home about an hour before we finish filming. Several months later, during discussions immediately before watching the selected excerpts from the day, the local investigator asked, ‘What is a strong child?’ implying both physical and emotional strength. Siriwan responded by proposing confidence, while remaining within the family. Grandmother Kampa chimed in, suggesting self-reliance and the development of practical skills, including being able to wash one’s clothes, take care of oneself and cook. When discussing what ‘desirable’ qualities a child might display, the local investigator, a health psychologist, decided deliberately to use a colloquial Thai phrase ‘look tee krai krai tongkarn’ (a child who everybody wants to have). This evoked a good degree of discussion: the mother stressed being obedient when taught; the father not being stubborn; and the grandmother being good, strong and healthy.

Studying a day in the lives of two-year-old girls It is already apparent that the girls at the centre of our study are growing up in very different environments. Yet the territory in which we are working is shaped by the assumption, shared with Nsamenang (1992), that the human endeavour to raise thriving children is recognizable across a breadth of communities, while starting notions of developmental strength in ‘growing up well’ (Ungar, Clark, Kwong, Makhnach, & Cameron, 2005) are variable. Accordingly our initial starting point in building research relationships with the families is to share explicitly a perspective on the child as generally thriving, and to explain the aims of our project as exploring this in a variety of contexts. Immediately, this brings us into a participatory, interpretive, emic way of working with families rather than one which proclaims objectivity and applies measures of assessment invented outside the project and then applied to it (see Abbott & Gillen, 1999; Graue & Walsh, 1995; Shweder, 1996; Tobin, Wu & Davidson, 1989).

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Before endeavouring to explain the aims of our project, we need to say something more about ‘the territory in which we are working’ and those very assumptions and starting notions that underpin our work. The aims of our project may indeed be instantiated in that kernel of an idea: the possibility (and value) of investigating ‘developmental strength in “growing up well”’ that emerges in the previous paragraph and that might already be hinted at in the texture of our initial vignette writing. In 1999 the psychologist and educationalist Woodhead, who has worked with and studied children across the globe, especially with UNESCO, issued a challenge to break away from ‘a standardized image of childhood’ by including more recognition of diverse environments and to reflect on culture in an inclusive way. Soon afterwards a seminal issue of the journal Human Development devoted itself to recommending the conscious broadening of the scope of early childhood development studies to include multifarious cultural dimensions. The multidimensionality of the suggestion is perhaps most ambitiously expressed in the title of Bornstein’s (2002) contribution entitled, ‘Toward a multiculture, multi-age, multimethod science’. The various contributions in that issue can be seen as one set of inspirations for the day in the life research reported on here. We try to capture what Goodnow (2002, p. 244) identified as ‘the significance of everyday routines: ways of acting that embod[ies] what parents [think is] important or that perhaps [have] a life of their own’, striving to combine ‘conceptual frameworks with researchable questions [with] implications for understanding both the nature of influences and the nature of what develops’ (Goodnow, 2005, p. 83). The day in the life project had its beginnings in a planned programme of research concerned with developing new methods for the study of early childhood that involves several locations across the globe (see preface p. viii). However, it is not easy to summarize the antecedents of this project, which has taken up so much of our time over several years. As researchers from different countries and different disciplinary backgrounds, we necessarily respond in very different ways to the literature that each of us brings to this investigation, just as we respond differently to the data. This introduction, then, is an attempt to scope the territory in which we work and to delineate some of its boundaries – which also means recognizing some key limitations. We will draw on some reactions to this study – both more and less encouraging – that we have already received during presentations at international conferences and other research gatherings, as well as responses to the journal articles that have so far been published from this research project.

12

Introduction

We have already mentioned ‘developmental strength’ and, as various chapters in this book will make plain, in some key ways the discipline of developmental psychology with a broad socio-cultural perspective is at the heart of this project. With Vygotsky (1987) and Leontiev (1978) we acknowledge the specific material conditions in which human practices develop. It is in activity, in sensory interactions with the material world, that cognition takes shape. In common with many researchers who refer to cultural historical activity theory (CHAT), we agree with Leontiev’s (1978, p. 13) assertion: Cognition does not exist outside the life process that in its very nature is a material, practical process. The reflection of reality arises and develops in the process of the development of real ties of cognitive people with the human world surrounding them; it is defined by these ties and, in its turn, has an effect on their development. CHAT is appropriate to our study as it prioritizes a focus on interactions over individuals by emphasizing the dialectical nature of activity systems. According to this vision, human development is rooted in, derivative of, instrumental in, and constituted by the material collaborative social practices of people (i.e., human goal-directed, purposeful, collaborative activities) aimed at transforming their world. (Stetsenko, 2009, p. 126) Using the concept of a day at the core of our methodology demonstrates that in this project our interest lies more in studying moments of being in situ than investigating developmental change over time. We seek, through this study of these particular children, to contribute to research understandings of strength and thriving in early childhood. It is immediately necessary to enrich this aim by explaining that we seek not to do this by imposing a single understanding, or indeed ‘measure’, of such notions of childhood flourishing, but rather include in our study – characterise it even – by considering multiple voices from our research participants (meaning both researchers and family members studied) on what those notions of well-being might be. Our broad, shared grounding in a socio-cultural tradition has much to offer to interdisciplinary trajectories of exploration, as we shall seek to demonstrate. Of course our descriptive, observational methodologies necessarily have limitations. We do not seek to make direct cross-cultural

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comparisons for we do not think our enterprise is in any possible sense comparing ‘like with like’. As Tudge (2008, p. 17) observes, there is considerable danger that the very salience of findings in ‘crosscultural’ studies is only valued in comparisons of the ‘maximally dissimilar’. Individual human tapestries are far more complex. We do not seek to formulate generalizations as to universal developmental paths or to make causal assertions from our somewhat naturalistic observations. So a very pertinent issue here arises as to the nature of our data: what they can be taken to exemplify and what they cannot. Our vignettes referred to ‘Peru’, ‘USA’ and so on, and these appellations may often appear in subheadings in this book. However, these should be viewed as labels that stand for ‘A Day in the Life of child x in family y in z small town in a mountainous region of Peru on nth day of x month of the year 200x’. We are not suggesting any causality between a geographic location and any specific aspect of a girl’s experience. We do not seek to encapsulate the experience of young childhood in any one location, let alone make claims to universality. Nobody would expect a book about a ‘Day in the Life’ of seven adults in seven countries to cover the full spectrum of experiences by adults, nor for these adults in some way to represent those countries. As Tudge (2008, p. 6; p. 44) also warns, heterogeneity exists within every society and we must not allow the depiction of one ‘group’ (however that may be defined) to stand for the whole. We make no claims as to the representativeness of what is shown here. We recognize that growing up in the UK, for example, could be a very different experience depending on who your parents are, where your home is, what siblings you have, and so on – including what your own temperament is and how you have reacted to and been shaped by your experiences, and how you have affected those people and settings that are around you. The contexts we are interested in, which include the children, their families and the local communities of caregivers and investigators, might best be seen, following Rogoff, Mistri, Goncu and Mosier (1993, pp. 2–3) as ‘“cultural communities”, rather than “cultures or nations”, so as to avoid the danger of generalizing to national groups from observations of a few people in a single community’. We are interested in how the families’ declared and implicit values are evident in their social and material interactions with their child; how that child shapes these interactions and in turn appears to be affecting the families’ notions of ‘a thriving child’. Seeking to explore these different perspectives, and through a reflective endeavour involving a multinational, multidisciplinary team, leads

14

Introduction

us to a recognition of what ecological strivings and ethnographic perspectives (see discussion below) can bring to our endeavours. A psychological investigation that takes place across a number of different countries is often termed ‘cross-cultural’. In a sense, our project is more cross-contextual than cross-cultural because our methodology was not designed to encompass the general assumption underlying some crosscultural studies that comparisons can meaningfully be made between specific, isolable variables across locations. In such studies, the wish to achieve discretely measurable outcomes can overwhelm any proclaimed allegiance to a reflexive, interpretive approach. To examine one relevant instance, see Weisner’s (2002) investigation of ‘ecocultural’ contexts for young children in a variety of communities. He applied an ‘Ecocultural Family Interview’ founded upon US conceptions of the motivations behind ‘everyday activities’ and then in turn derived ‘scores’ for family routines. ‘Evaluating children’s development across cultures’ then was conceived as an achievable research aim, deliverable by outsiders in ‘cross-cultural’ studies that seek to instantiate a universal developmental outcome (characterised there as ‘well being’) assumed to vary along a dimension known as ‘community’ or ‘culture’. We agree with Nsamenang’s (1992) alternative view of what it means to apply an ecocultural framework. He draws on Pence’s (1988 [p. xxii]) assertion that this is ‘far more conceptual than methodological, more a call to thoughtful, systematic awareness than an operationalised, methodological guide’. We endeavour to reflect upon our observations of these toddlers’ interacting with the environments of their home settings, during the course of a day, making use of the affordances (opportunities and constraints) offered by the use of video as a tool. We hope that concerns about globalization becoming synonymous with North Americanization could be attenuated by projecting light on the positive contributions of culturally sensitive studies of children in diverse settings such as those reported many years ago by Whiting (1963) that provide an appreciation of the multiplicity of opportunities for the development of well being in its many and varying manifestations. Bronfenbrenner, in his enduring call for a dynamic, participatory, ecological approach to child development, also enjoined researchers to grasp the opportunity to include the child in context even when it is not possible to engage a thoroughgoing ecological methodology: ‘it is neither necessary nor possible to meet all the criteria for ecological research within a single investigation’ (Bronfenbrenner, 1979, p. 13). We do, however, meet several of Bronfenbrenner’s criteria for productive ecological study of early human psychological growth: we carefully observe,

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document, and analyse ‘modal activities’ or continuing processes, ‘ongoing behavior possessing a momentum of its own and perceived as having meaning or intent by participants in the setting’ (p. 45). Furthermore, the contexts that we have studied involve interpersonal structures crucial to human development. The relationships enacted during the day in the life engage persons in the diverse settings to pay ‘attention to or participate … in the activities of another’ (p. 56). With joint attention or participation, joint activity dyads emerge and these dyads become transformed into primary dyads; that is, dyads with mutuality of positive feelings leading to maximized mutual impacts and, ultimately, learning and development that becomes increasingly complex with time; and the learning is seen as reciprocal (pp. 59–60). As we established our work on this project, we came to prefer the term ‘cultural’ to ‘cross-cultural’, despite all the breadth, some might even say vagueness, of the first term. Shore (2002) points out that after much deconstruction of ‘culture’ within anthropology, many have become wary of the very idea. However, we share the commitment of Shore to cultural psychology and agree with others who draw on the work of cultural psychologists (such as Cole, Goodnow, and Rogoff) that it has much to contribute in early childhood research. Immediately before exploring concepts of culture, as central as they are to this study, it could be useful to think again about the potentiality and limitations of this study. We have already referred to an ethnographic perspective. Although the time span and methodology of the project clearly preclude it being properly termed fully ethnographic, our careful combination of multiple methods is aligned towards valuing the study of multiple points of view. As we shall explain in more detail in the following section, we did not simply collect data through single-camera videos and field notes of the day. We also spent time with the families in interactions that generally included research interviews (we will have more to say about the variability of procedures below) before the days as well as engaging in some pilot videoing. Subsequent to the day in an initial stage of interpretation, two investigators from other national settings made a compilation video of a selection of excerpts from the day that they thought might exemplify ways in which the child was thriving in situ. These compilation videos were then taken back to the families a few months after the initial day. The family watched the video and discussed both events as portrayed there and other issues pertaining to their child-rearing opinions and values; this subsequent iterative stage was itself videoed and formed new data for analysis.

16

Introduction

This method – owing much to Tobin and colleagues’ ‘multivocal ethnography’ (1989, pp. 3–5) – is distant from more common observational methods that sample short segments of activity and rate them as to presence or absence of such behaviours as cooperation or aggression. It is also distant from the kind of ethnography that seeks to achieve richer understandings of a society (including a family) through spending considerable time of physically present participation in it (such as Briggs, 1998). Every study design has its benefits and limitations; in this study the representation of multiple perspectives is striven for through the following features: • Utilizing the technology of video, which, despite many possible limitations, such as the video camera’s potentially invasive presence in the day, does preserve such a rich record that it is amenable to analyses stemming from many points of interrogation. • Examining the central data provided in the day against the other sources, including parental interviews etc., increases the potential for a deeper understanding of the data. • Combining the researchers’ own different disciplinary, national, professional, and even personal standpoints in various ways, accommodates diverging perspectives, interpretations, or approaches to the data. • Accessing parental feedback on our selection of passages for a compilation tape elicited their retrospective reflections on their child and on childrearing in general. Although many of the tools we have employed to explore the days in the lives of these seven little girls are common to studies in human development, cultural psychology and early childhood education, the broad disciplines of sociology, anthropology and geography; with their feet firmly planted in the conceptual sea of human culture, have much to offer our study and so will also be called upon in further chapters. We agree with James, Jenks, and Prout (1998, pp. 25–29) that to describe childhood as socially constructed is to suspend deeply taken-for-granted assumptions about childhood as a stage of life. Their work usefully characterises many assumptions about childhood as universal, idealized, or even as ‘tribal’, a kind of immanent status of being. Childhood is often conceived as essentially apart from adulthood; the child a kind of empty vessel waiting for processes of socialization and acculturation – themselves considered essentially one-way processes. An alternative view on the sociology of childhood proposed by James, Jenks, and Prout

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involves trying to study ‘children as being’ rather than ‘children as becoming’ and to share ‘the view that children are not formed by natural and social forces but rather that they inhabit a world of meaning created by themselves and through their interaction with adults’ (p. 28). Constructing worlds of meaning is clearly a cultural activity; we will now briefly enumerate three ways in which the concept of culture is extremely useful to us. First, in common with other cultural psychologists of childhood and education, we would seek to emphasize a view of culture that is manifest not in overarching symbolic categories but rather that is visible in the social practices of everyday life. Cole has observed: There is no doubt that culture is patterned, but there is also no doubt that it is far from uniform and that its patterning is experienced in local, face-to-face interactions that are locally constrained. (Cole, 1997, p. 250) In this approach to development, sometimes termed cultural-historical or socio-cultural, human cognition is considered the emergent outcome of transformations within and among several developmental domains: phylogenetic (at the level of the species); ontogenetic (at the level of the individual) and microgenetic (changes moment by moment as learning progresses); each domain interacting with the others as development occurs. It would be valid to add to this Richard’s (1998) idea that theories of development might become ‘epigenetic’ – i.e., in addition to the above, take account of interplay with biological changes even at the level of chemical constituents of the cell – however, this is certainly beyond the bounds of the current study. An important point here is the embrace of complexity in understanding how changes occur, necessitating both a close focus on interactions and an awareness of the interwoven influences that affect meaning making processes. Heath and Street (2008) build on this insight to suggest that in ethnographic study culture should be treated as a verb rather than a noun, for it is always a dynamic process. Our methods are centred on the examination in the fine grained detail of everyday interactions involving a child in her family, and sometimes wider environment, including care givers, family members, and family friends. Our approaches to analysis are also inspired by Rogoff (1997): From a participation perspective, similar or contrasting processes are sought across activities, with the generalizations being in the nature

18

Introduction

of the patterns in the dynamic processes of activities rather than residing in the individuals or in the materials or tasks. (p. 275) Accordingly, culture is seen to emerge in the patterns of everyday life, the activities and interactions with other people in an environment that itself is not static and simply external but is itself shaped in the flow of ongoing events and perceptions (Bang, 2009). Second, ‘culture’ is an extremely broad, portmanteau term, which may be used to locate virtually any aspect of human life, and is probably indeed a limitless concept. We did not start off by thinking with an overall plan, ‘what elements of culture are important?’ or even ‘what aspects of family cultural activity in the lives of these girls impinge on their development?’ Rather, as we began to work with our data (in combinations of researchers) we worked outwards from what we were particularly disposed to ‘see’ in the data according to our own habitus as academic researchers interested in human development, to make use of Bourdieu’s (1991) concept. That is, we recognize that as researchers we come with a professional and personal history, disposed to pay attention to certain aspects of culture, and to make connections between what we are looking at, our memories and the theories or ideas about reality we already possess. This was made immediately apparent to one of us when first viewing some of the video data from Thailand with a technician. (He was the first of many, all too briefly recruited on a shoestring budget to try to help us with our multiple challenges over equipment and software incompatibility.) The researcher was concentrating on the young child, not an unexpected focus in this project. However, in conversation it turned out that the technician, who was experienced in producing natural history broadcasts for television, had not noticed that there was a young child always in shot, but was attending far more closely to the birdsong, dogs, plants, and so forth. This was an immediately salutary lesson as to the power of each viewer’s habitus and the diversity of what might most readily emerge for us as appropriate for study. Perhaps we had better admit that despite this very interesting nudge towards features of the flora and fauna in the children’s environments, in this book we write very little about the natural history of the settings; although even as we write this it is with some reluctance as indeed the places of animals, for example, in the lives of these children could be a new topic for us as we continue to broaden our ecocultural sensitivity. We have, we think, selected a significant number of central aspects

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of familial culture for attention. These themes arose – in a grounded way – from repeated viewings of the data we collected. Third, an important angle on culture for us comes from Hammel’s (1990) useful interdisciplinary work. Published in a journal for demographers, his account makes use of work in social anthropology, sociology and economics, and in its breadth of vision for the social sciences is potentially relevant to any of us involved in studying human development. One of the key ‘components’ of his exploration of culture and its impact on research methodology is constituted by the following idea: Culture is an evaluative conversation constructed by actors out of the raw materials afforded by tradition and ongoing experience. It is continually modified by them in processes of social interaction, and their behavior is guided by anticipation of such cultural evaluation. (Hammel, 1990, p. 457) This notion of culture can be seen as underlying our project methodology in (at least) two ways: our core investigative focus and our construction of procedures. These two are also entwined as Gaskins understood when advocating the combination of observations and interviews in studies of developmental processes: First, one must study children engaged in their daily activities to observe the unit of child-in-activity-in-context that represents the locus of the developmental process. Second, one must also study the cultural belief systems and institutions that are responsible for consistency in the everyday contexts of behavior experienced by children. (Gaskins, 1999, p. 27) We pursue a range of methods that are designed to explore data from a number of perspectives: to feature close observations, and for analysis to be ‘precise, in the sense of being close to the thing discussed and thus being ready to take account of matters not anticipated’ (Becker, 1996; p. 67). We agree with Rogoff’s (1997) interrogation of an unreflexive adherence to an ideal ‘standardization of procedures’. As she explains, ‘identical procedures do not necessarily have the same meanings from the perspectives of the people who are involved’ (p. 267). Throughout, as human investigators selecting and interpreting data, we are endeavouring to be self-conscious in these processes. Following Geertz (1973, p. 9), ‘What we call our data are really our own constructions of other

20

Introduction

peoples’ constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to.’ We therefore find our warrants not in the comparisons of large-scale studies, where variables may be considered through manipulation techniques, but in the constant setting up of acts of interpretation, of selfcritical consideration of the attributions we are making to the data in view (Tomanovic, 2003). It may be useful at this point to make direct comparisons with two studies that can be seen as quite closely related to our own. Each of these became clearly relevant to our work only after all our fieldwork was complete; however, reflecting on them in considering the advantages and limitations of our methodology has been useful.

One Boy’s Day: A Specimen Record of Behavior We have returned to a 60-years-old yet still most impressive antecedent: One Boy’s Day: A Specimen Record of Behavior, written by Roger G. Barker and Herbert F. Wright (1951) in collaboration with eight colleagues. This book records all the activities and speech of one boy on one particular day in 1949 in a small town in the Mid West of the USA. Some of the ways in which our approach resembles that earlier study are as follows: • The overall aim was to study all the everyday interactions of the young boy (RB) in his context. Concise information is given as to the context of RB’s communications, whether through speech, drawing or non-verbal activities. The reader understands that the motivation of the research is to try to approach an understanding of the events from the participants’ perspectives rather than to impose the researchers’ prior agendas. Nevertheless it is acknowledged that such endeavours can never be assumed to be definitively successful. • Floor plans, photographs, and other illustrations give a flavour of the environment in which he acts, while preserving the anonymity of RB, his family, and others. The researchers/observers made considerable endeavours to familiarize themselves with the settings and the family in advance. • The observation method was treated as a flexible guide: in the words of Barker and Wright (p. 6): ‘The observers had been trained to keep in the background by varying their behaviour as the situation varied. On some occasions, inactivity and unresponsiveness make an observer stand out as a stationary figure against a moving ground. On other occasions activity and responsiveness have the reverse effect. A good

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field observer is one who has mastered the technique of being present but inconspicuous.’ • It is agreed that the act of observing has an effect upon behaviour but also that ‘Every such interaction can be accepted as telling something about [RB] as a particular boy.’ We have been less inclusive in our documentation of our children’s ecologies than Barker and Wright in a few respects, more inclusive in some others. We have not studied the surrounding environs and economies of the homes in which we worked and did not record some factors that the earlier study attended to, such as temperature levels. Of course, whatever aspects of an environment are attended to selection is always inevitable. We have had the inestimable benefit of later technology, however; as we discuss further in Chapter 2, the depth of analysis and potential for revisiting, reviewing, and revising our interpretations in our study is unimaginable without the opportunities for repeated viewings. Yet we are full of admiration for the way in which Barker and Wright planned and utilized their system of observers to excellent effect, while not hiding small practical and even ethical challenges that arose during the day. Finally, in their introduction Barker and Wright claim that their book is both a scientific, objective record and an interpretive study, as they considered making use of interpretations vital in the act of inferring meaning to the observations. They are bold in making claims for interdisciplinary value that we have enjoyed at least thinking about: One Boy’s Day is a specimen of the behavior and of the cultural and psychological habitat of a child. It is a field study in psychological ecology. As with other field specimens, parts of the original have been altered and other parts of have been lost in the process of getting and preserving it. A pressed flower in an herbarium is not the same as a flower in bloom. It is useful to botanists nonetheless. Similarly this specimen of behavior may prove useful to social scientists. Artists and laymen who are interested in the contemporary scene also may find it of value. (p. 1) Our study can be seen both to follow on from, but also extend, this as an interpretive study; a large part of that term is concerned with the sense in which our study is ‘partial’ as just described.

22

Introduction

The Everyday Lives of Young Children: Culture, class, and child rearing in diverse societies This book, published by Tudge in 2008, presents many interesting points of comparison with our approaches. The children he studied were aged 28–45 months. We have a great deal in common with the overall understandings that permeate Tudge’s project, named ‘The Cultural Ecology of Young Children’. Tudge writes: It is by engaging in practices – activities and interactions in which we engage alone and with others – that we both recreate the culture of which we are a part and help to change that culture. To see this process, it is thus important to examine how people, particularly young children, engage in their typically occurring activities and interactions with others. (p. 5) This emphasis on the dynamic processes of interacting with others is wholly commensurate with the overall goal of his research design. ‘The goal is simply to follow the children who are the focus of attention, putting no restrictions on where they go or on the people who interact with them.’ (p. 90) Tudge’s emphasis then is on the study of the everyday; his use of the term ‘ecological’ points to the commitment to study children in the contexts in which they spend their days. As we mentioned above in respect of Barker and Wright’s study, a proper consideration of the child’s context can take a considerable number of factors into its purview. Tudge (p. 100) recognizes that the child’s environment is not merely the physical spaces and people with whom s/he interacts directly, it also ‘includes the broader socio-historical context at some period of historical time’. Accordingly, he devotes considerable energies to describing the material, economic, historical, and cultural backgrounds of the cities, towns, and regions in which the families studied are situated. We could, with some measure of justification, bleat that our limited resources made this rather difficult. However, we recognize that we could have done more in this respect than we did; at the time of fieldwork we concentrated merely on the family setting with elements of the family’s own history and in hindsight wish we had done more to appreciate broader elements of the socio-historical context. Tudge recognized the importance of familiarity with the community in fieldwork and at least some layer of interpretive work, and

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thus trained as assistants people indigenous to or highly familiar with the region studied. We do distinguish our approach from Tudge’s with less regret in some methodological decisions; we will mention some key points. Tudge reports having collected ‘the equivalent of a complete day in their lives’ through the device of observing the child for 20 hours over a period of a week, in two or four hour slots. But during these 20 hours data is gathered only through a 30-second ‘window’ every six minutes. As Tudge explains, although this time sampling method can record what a child was doing at a particular moment, it is not so suitable for showing how the child was drawn into an activity or how she draws others into it. The children are fitted with wireless microphones on the shoulder and transmitter in small packs on the child’s waist. Videoing is only done for the final two hours of the 20. Tudge’s (p. 92) observations of the limitations of videoing will be returned to in Chapter 2; here we will merely observe that he suggests that the presence of the observer and the audio equipment was easier for the child to become accustomed to than a camera would have been. Observers recorded their notes through filling in a predetermined coding sheet, one for each window (illustrated in Tudge, 2008, p. 101; see also the ‘descriptions of focal activity’ on p. 93). This means, as Tudge explains, that the child’s activities are recorded and categorized according to decisions made prior to the observation; these he terms his ‘lens’. ‘Major’ or ‘focal’ activities were categorized under four broad headings of lessons, work, play, and conversation. These are further defined in ways we cannot do justice to here, for example ‘we only coded as conversation talk that was not related to the ongoing activity and which had a sustained or focused topic’ (p. 96). Activities already determined as ‘non-focal’ are recorded relatively briefly. Tudge does worry that this approach may ‘disenfranchise’ children in privileging pre-set categories over their own meaning-making but feels that overall his approach, which included field notes and permitted the inductive creation of new categories was useful in obliterating the inconsistencies of methods between settings that he seeks to overcome (p. 6; p. 54). In conclusion, we appreciate that Tudge is treading a difficult balancing act in setting the elimination of inconsistency in approach as a primary goal. But the fruits of his labours lie not in transcriptions of interactions or vignettes poured over by researchers consciously in dialogue about their different interpretations, but rather in itemized

24

Introduction

findings that appear to instantiate the variables of location, class, etc. against instances of the totalized ‘focal activities’ in the specific acts of measurement. It is difficult in these circumstances to retain confidence in Tudge’s claimed resistance to over-interpreting his instances of data as ‘representative’. Indeed, in the final conclusion he does perhaps lean in the direction of the logic of his methods. For when he pursues the question of whether his work is ‘representative’ and concludes that it is not, this is not because such a notion is a chimera, incommensurate with the goals of cultural psychology, but because the data are inadequate in quantity. [The inadequacy of representativeness] should serve as the impetus for others to collect data in similar ways from different groups. (p. 282) Our approach has been more geared to capturing data as it occurred in the flow of the day, bringing a larger proportion of the balance of interpretive work to subsequent viewings as opposed to loading a priori categorization.

The ‘strong’ child One core investigative aim for us has been the exploration of the notion of a ‘strong’ child as developed in the interplay of the child, family, and their socio-cultural context as far as that may be rendered visible to us. We seek to explore both explicit and implicit views of such thriving children, as enacted during and subsequent to our capturing a day in each of their lives. We consider that a participatory understanding of development can be applied to children, caregivers, and those who seek to understand them, and that this is likely to be the most fruitful approach within an interpretive approach to research (Abbott & Gillen, 1999; Rogoff et al., 1993). Recognizing that the starting notion of a ‘strong’ child is itself variable across communities, we included in our interviews attempts to find the most appropriate phrase in each family’s language. This starting point is extended in observations of the ‘strong child’ as she interacts within her familial environment, in the course of the captured day in her life. Of course, as we discuss in Chapter 2, a naturalistic observation will always be unattainable; nevertheless, the day as performed has to be indicative of the family’s values (Goffman, 1959). These data are further explored through interviews and an iterative stage of data collection as described below.

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Suffice to say briefly at this point that we heard in the interviews that in Canada, a priority for this mother was for her ‘sturdy child’ to be kind, independent, and sociable. In Italy, when asked the makings of a ‘bambino in gamba’, with its connotations of thriving health, the ability to act on her own initiative, self confidence and security were identified. In Thailand, familial priorities for a strong child include confidence, staying with family, and self-reliance. In Peru, aunt, grandparents, and parents each played a significant role in the child’s nurturance and the grandfather emphasized the importance of traditional religious values. In Turkey, the parents said they provided scope for exploration, seeing rich early experiences as formative of healthy later development. In the UK having twins has convinced their mother that children were ‘their own little people’, and she also stressed the impacts of the environment on their differences. In the US, striving for independence was highlighted along with warm, sensitive guidance. Our orientation owes much to ‘the Nordic notion of the good childhood’ (Wagner & Einarsdottir, 2008): Among the most distinctive features of childhood in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden is a pervasive kind of child-centredness at the centre of the good childhood ideal. While this concept defies full explanation in English, its central tenets include: • • • •

naturalness of childhood; equality and egalitarianism; democracy defined as lived daily experience for children; freedom, conceptualized as automony to play and to develop one’s own self; • emancipation, or liberation from over-supervision and overcontrol by adults; • warm and cooperative social relationships with adults and peers; and • solidarity with Nordicness, or connecting with Nordic heritage through consistent enactment of distinct cultural traditions … The concept presumes that children should enjoy childhood, have their rights respected and their voices heard … in spite of societal changes, Nordic people remain committed to the good childhood before children become socialized into an adult ‘culture’. (p. 265)

26

Introduction

Delineation of methods Phase 1: Locating research participants An umbrella research development conference at St Francis Xavier University, Nova Scotia, Canada, gave us opportunities to meet distal co-researchers – that is academics from different global locations willing and able to participate in the project – and Canadian interns resourced and trained to work with those co-researchers in those locations (See preface p. viii). Collaborating with these colleagues, we were able to draw up initial protocols, although always emphasizing the desirability of striving towards sensitivity for local interpretations. After the conference, it was these partners who located an appropriate family, with an apparently thriving two-and-a-half-year-old girl, willing to engage in the project. We sought to correct a paucity of research that focuses on strength-based analysis of female growth and development. We were working with families whose attitudes towards the project were those of positive interest and those who would be able to accommodate the potential intrusion, for a whole day or almost that, of researchers with a note pad on a clipboard and a camera. Throughout our aim has been to employ professional judgement in context to identify instances of thriving in order to instantiate a multitude of different perceptions. Phase 2: Pre-filming: Family preparation Two researchers (either the local researcher and a Canadian intern or two local researchers) visited the family to establish initial rapport and collect basic demographic, health, and lifestyle information through a semi-structured interview. The project’s aims, extents of commitment, confidentiality, and rights, were fully discussed with the families. There was also a one-hour session of filming to accustom the child and her interactants at least slightly to the experience of being followed around by a video camera and field note taker for an entire waking day. In collaboration with the family, a suitable day was agreed upon for filming a day in the life of their child. Phase 3: Day in the Life first iterative filming The two researchers arrived at the family home soon after the child woke and stayed for as much of the day as possible. Videoing, usually using a small digital camcorder, was halted while the child was asleep or engaged in toilet activities. At least six hours of video was obtained in each location.

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The researcher present, who was not filming, quietly observed, making notes on a spreadsheet on a clipboard, identifying the times the child changed her activity or location and people present at the scene. S/he also wrote explanatory notes about other activities or features of the environment to assist the distal project researchers with their understandings. S/he minimized exchanges with the videoed child to communicate that there was work to be done and she was not available to play. Plans of the environment were also drawn. The composition of the team could be altered in line with circumstances. For example, in one location a caregiver politely sought to engage the local researcher in lengthy conversation. The local investigator judged it wise therefore to leave the scene, with the (very capable) Canadian intern continuing to video, and to return later, filling in the notes through watching the video and consulting with the intern. In another location, the note taker left after a long period of recording and an appropriate extendedfamily member assumed the notating role for the rest of the day under the supervision of the primary investigator/film-maker. This flexibility in carrying through the protocol worked in the best interest both of the families and of the integrity of the research. Phase 4: Selection of focal interchanges Day in the life videos were collected and perused individually and then together by two distal researchers. The focus was on real time viewing and reviewing by the investigators who are from two different countries and disciplines. In most cases the distal researchers were the authors of this chapter, the project co-directors; in every case one of this pair was involved. While viewing the videos we were very dependent for understanding upon the field notes and layout drawings to gain a sense of attunement with each day. Consensus was reached relatively readily on selection of passages that represented key aspects of that day that might elicit interested family reactions with respect to the child. Sometimes we later wondered if this initial consensus had been reached too readily; perhaps the worldviews represented by the distal investigators were somewhat too closely allied. We will return to this point shortly. Phase 5: Creation of compilation video Working together, the two distal investigators edited a half-hour compilation video of around six approximately five-minute clips that, in collaboration, we considered displayed a variety of the activities and kinds of interactions the child had engaged in over the day, and which seemed to tap in on the family’s striving to support the healthy

28

Introduction

development of their child. The one-half hour compilation proved an appropriate and timely elicitor of family discussion. Phase 6: Second iterative stage After scrutinizing the compilation video, the local investigators returned to the target family with it. They filmed an interview during which the participants together watched the compilation video, pausing between sections for discussions. At the beginning was a general discussion; the protocol used by the local investigators entailed first priming themselves to consider the most appropriate term for ‘the strong child’ within their own context, with its connotations of thriving health, the ability to act on her own initiative, self confidence, security, and perhaps other aspects that are valued as positive in their own setting. They were to remind the family of the international nature of the project and its goal of finding different ways of becoming a ‘strong child’. Families were thanked for their collaboration and told that the task was to review parts of the day so that they could help the researchers deepen their understanding and appreciation of (target child’s) experiences. They were then asked what they thought was involved in the idea of a ‘strong thriving child’ or an equivalent term, depending upon the circumstances. The video clips were then introduced with a protocol that is interwoven below with some indication of responses. Families were told that they would be seeing clips of (target child’s) day that seemed to the researchers to exemplify some of the ways in which the child was thriving. Mature family members were asked to explain from their own perspectives what was happening in each clip. The investigators were encouraged to try not to ask leading questions such as: ‘What is (target child) learning here?’ or ‘What was your goal?’ Families in each context responded with reactions to the selection of video data in ways that often enhanced researchers’ provisional understandings. An example of this in Canada has already been given: that during the discussion the mother declared there had been no pedagogical intention behind her construction of a birdhouse, even though she was involving her daughter. Although the Thai family stressed the desirability of obedience and family loyalty, there was only a little evidence of more focus on such values in the comportment of the daily activities of the Thai child than of the other children we observed. Parents were asked about whether there were ways in which the child was developing as a ‘strong/sturdy/thriving’ child that might have been missed in the compilation tape, and to identify the most important

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omissions. Finally, they were asked what was it like for them when they were growing up, and whether their child’s experiences were similar to their own experiences when they were children. Parents indicated that in many respects their children were being raised much as they personally had been raised, while also identifying modifications called for by contextual cultural changes. The UK family talked about the experiences of the second world war of the grandparents, for instance, and the Canadian parent emphasized the dangers to North American children of kidnappings and other societal violence not present when the parents were growing up. The Peruvian family regretted the absence of instruction in religious moral values in schools today. The Turkish parents indicated that previous generations were more protective and restrictive of their children than today’s parents tend to be. In practice the questions posed seemed to evolve quite naturally out of the discussion of their child’s day. The families demonstrably enjoyed their participation in the project, although it would certainly be true to say that, as we expected, some exhaustion or slight tensions were apparent toward the ends of a long day of videoing with some families. In the UK it was the grandparents who expressed the desire to curtail videoing before the twins’ final meal of the day. The meeting afterwards was welcome and the families appreciated their gift of the compilation tape.

Video as a visual methodology A significant strand of the methodology of this project is of course consideration of the use of video and here we presage the discussion in Chapter 2 with a few introductory observations. It is immediately apparent that this method of recording affords the opportunity to amass rich, detailed documentation of the children’s interactions in their everyday environment; the videos capture aspects of the multimodality of daily events that otherwise might go unnoted. A perspective upon communication as essentially multimodal, which is perhaps particularly striking in regards to young children (Anning & Edwards, 1999) makes a visual as well as audio record of interactivity imperative. Aspects and artefacts of the microsystem of a toddler’s life (Bronfenbrenner, 1979) that at first sight seem incidental, can reveal their salience through repeated and close observation. Young children in our study appeared to be relatively unperturbed by the persistent running of a video camera that documents their daily activities, quickly attenuating to the presence of observers and their equipment. Of course that is not to say that the

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Introduction

presence of the researchers, one with video camera and the other taking field notes, can ever be discounted even with young children, let alone their interactants. We cannot know how the process of videoing affects what might have happened otherwise, so it is vital not to forget the camera and its operator’s presence, nor that of the field note takers and their clipboards. It is possible that participants’ identities might be recognized in the professional reporting of this research and especially when active footage of the day is used. Although parental permission was obtained for such usage, the researchers still needed to use discretion with respect to the sometimes-personal nature of the intimate family day that was captured on video. The fact that we were focused on young thriving children and not on struggling children, nor on evaluating the families’ socializing practices afforded a level of confidence from the families. We communicated that we were not seeking to evaluate the child and/or the parents but rather to describe paths to well-being in context. Although we have as agreed shown video data to appropriate audiences, we decided not to permit persistent publication of video footage. The use of pseudonyms was another mechanism for safeguarding family privacy. A video record has the capacity to transport an observer into the felt sense of ‘being there’ in the cultural context. Videos are useful sources for the rich interpretation of events, allowing multiple observers to view and interpret individually or in groups (Hsueh & Tobin, 2003; Moyles, Adams & Musgrove, 2002; Tobin & Davidson, 1990). Great care must be taken to guard against assumptions that in watching we ‘understand’ more than is warranted of what is transpiring, however. To the extent this is possible, we seek to forestall prematurely solidifying interpretations through our many layers of critical conversations. As Tobin, Wu, and Davidson did in their study, Preschools in Three Cultures (1998), lay, parental, and professional reflections from viewings of footage from their recordings of Japanese, Chinese and American kindergartens were incorporated into the authors’ interpretations of the educational practices of the three cultures they uncovered. Although there are many similarities in our projects and indeed many aspects of our methodology were inspired by that study, a major difference resides in our practice of viewing and viewing again our data across contexts rather than cross culturally as they did. In the next chapter the challenges and opportunities of visual methodologies are discussed further. It may already be apparent to the reader that we view the sharing of images from our research as significant. Our images and diagrams are not offered merely as illustrations, but rather

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as a presentation of data that might assist the reader in assessing our interpretations or in some way nuancing their understandings further. We have, of course, full agreement from the families to publish the images. However, during the project we have developed a preference for not showing distinct full face close-up images of the children; this is discussed further in the following chapter. Furthermore, the size at which they are reproduced as well as the time that has passed prevent easy identification or compromised privacy. The practices explored during the two iterations of data collection, and the input of the exchanges between the families and the researchers, those between local and distal researchers, and those between the researchers and professional colleagues both in local seminars and at international conferences when footage was presented, give us a range of avenues into appreciating what might have been difficult to deduce from watching the video footage alone. To give one small yet telling example: in Peru it was clear to the local researchers that the child was often videotaped by her father while dancing; both reacted to the presence of our video camera by re-enacting this practice. The field notes were helpful in elucidating this point. Of course, there must be many ways in which we are not able to trace manifestations of such motivations. Video recording a full day in the child’s life has afforded us many ideas as to a multiplicity of discrete and even new areas for investigation that it was not possible to plan for in advance. Eating became a focus for attention as we realised in all the settings how complex and interesting it was as a site for the performance of values; yet it was plain that far from being an arena of activity where parental and social values are simply imposed on the children – they are bringing their own agendas ‘to the table’, if we may be forgiven the pun. Entirely new topics emerged for the original team: it was only when the data from the first five settings were first reviewed that the initial project team realized how salient musicality was to the lives of all our children (as indeed to all human societies [Green, 2003]). At this point we were delighted that Sue Young, a childhood music specialist, joined our team. Further, we did not at the beginning have detailed transcriptions of the verbal interactions of the children and their interlocutors for our initial inspections of the data. This planned restriction was salutary as it drove us to focus at first on the physicality of their daily interactions. However, once we had the transcriptions (and local translations/interpretations) of all the exchanges between the girls and their carers, new opportunities were invaluably available to us. Subtle changes in understanding of the contexts and emotional tone in interchanges became

32

Introduction

possible, and this was a particularly crucial motivator for us when we decided to explore humorous and playful language in familial context. As already mentioned, our approaches to analysis are inspired by Rogoff (1997, p. 275): ‘From a participation perspective, similar or contrasting processes are sought across activities, with the generalizations being in the nature of the patterns in the dynamic processes of activities rather than residing in the individuals or in the materials or tasks.’ Accordingly, the remaining chapters lay out our discoveries as analysed data across the locations, examining certain patterns of interactions. As previously discussed, a core aim is the development of the notion of a thriving child or the equivalent – how the families’ declared values are evident in their interactions with the child; how the child shapes these interactions and in turn appears to be affecting the families’ notions of their child’s strength, itself also perceptible as relating to the community’s broader social values. We believe that this project has the potential to inform understanding of cultural conceptions, affordances, and practices as they converge with a child’s personal propensities to cultivate ground for developmental well-being. In the chapters that follow, we are taking some possibly unusual angles in our exploration. We have eschewed the broadest and most familiar domains of early childhood studies such as language, familial relationships, and play as the explicit foci of attention. We have preferred to choose our topics from questions and issues grounded in the videotapes and discussions between us as researchers and the suggestions of participating parents.

The remaining chapters In Chapter 2 we pursue issues relating to the use of video and visual methodologies in the project. We explore the significance of visual selection and framing at all stages of the research process, from research design through the practicalities of data collection, organization, and analysis of data, and how it can be shared with readers and interpreted. Chapter 3, the chapter on musicality, considers sound and body rhythms, raising the point that contemporary work on multimodal methodologies has a tendency to focus on the visual and neglect the aural. Through our analyses of musicality in the days of these children we demonstrate the richness of aural channels and embodied responses for daily expression and meaning making. Chapter 4, on emotional security, brings together three perspectives on emotional security that to our knowledge have not previously been combined in research perspectives on early childhood. We review a

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recurrent perspective from developmental psychology, that of the concept of attachment, to introduce some important aspects of fostering emotional resilience. While acknowledging the useful extent to which we have been sensitized by this and other disciplinary perspectives, we seek to look afresh at those moments particularly concerned with the interactional fostering of emotional security in the days. We observed the children and their parents’ mutually satisfying rocking and swinging that provided respiteful transitional passages between high energy and quiet activity. Likewise, gentle strokes and pats highlighted similar interactional synchrony and mutual tenderness between the children and their caregivers. The children demonstrated their active agency and imaginative explorations, even transformations of their environments, as they sought out, and made their own safe places in their familial contexts. In Chapter 5, on eating, we introduce the notion of eating events by analogy with a practice-oriented approach to literacy studies. Family eating events, perhaps especially those involving young children, are complex. The young child’s desire to follow their own interests may be different from caregivers’ overriding concern to provide nourishment. The notion of ‘culture [as] evaluative conversation’ (Hammel, 1990, p. 457; see above p. 19) describes the affectionately contested boundaries as the children and companions negotiate recognition of the legitimacy of activities in pursuit of their respective agendas. Furthermore, children are manifestly learning a considerable amount about social values relating to food. Chapter 6 considers the emergence of notational systems. This chapter describes and analyses joint drawing and reading in daily activities. We show how in the natural context of the everyday flow, parents and other companions enhance the development of awareness about notational systems. Caregivers help the girls through engagement with text to develop an appreciation of print conventions, narrative forms, and the aesthetic qualities of the books and other print materials organized in their environments. The girls also engage in drawing activities, often having these modelled for them. We investigate how these moments, important as they are for developing symbolic understandings, are also significant in developing interpersonal relationships and positive affect more generally. In Chapter 7, we describe how humour and playful language is deployed and responded to by two-year-olds, enabling us to determine how mirth is interactively created, harnessing cognitive, linguistic, and mutual positive affect. We confirm that early humour is interpersonally

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Introduction

constructed and often stems from children’s making others laugh by repeating actions and language that previously elicited laughter. Our toddlers’ humorous interactions expose entwined affective and intellectual processes and reveal the place of playful communications in the development of a thriving child. Chapter 8 draws together our conclusions. In the issue of Human Development referred to earlier as one of our inspirations, Rogoff and Angelillo (2002, p. 212) conceive of culture as ‘integrated constellations of community practices’. It seems to us that the only way to see these patterns of the stars is to look, look and look again, talking and corresponding with those who are generous enough to share their own perspectives with us. Finally, in an appendix (pp. 165–179) we provide brief summaries from the field notes from each day along with the associated sketch maps of the environments in which these days are enacted. We call these ‘locators’ with the intention of situating the chronologies and locations to make plain that knowledge is formed through the processes of local interpretations. The reader may wish to turn to these first in order to gain an indicative understanding of these as potential reference materials while reading the remainder of the book.

2 Using Video Technology Roger Hancock, Julia Gillen and Giuliana Pinto

We have highlighted our intention to contribute to existing interpretive research methods in the area of childhood studies. Chapter 1 outlined the main features of our methodology and research methods, outlined the six phases of our research strategy and ended with a brief overview of our use of video as a methodological tool. Given its central place in our study, we now look more closely at the opportunities and challenges of our use of video technology to produce an observational record – a ‘filmic tracking of what takes place’ (Collier & Collier, 1986, p. 152). (Throughout this book we use ‘film’ interchangeably with ‘video’, mainly for stylistic variation as opposed to technical fidelity.) We approach our discussion through a consideration of five interrelated themes: • • • • •

Video technology and research Practical and technical considerations Focusing on the children Observer and observed Interpreting and presenting visual data

Video technology and research The use of video technology in research has been evolving in many fields, from anthropology to qualitative research traditions in education, ethnomethodology, sociolinguistics and interactional analysis. Video technology has emerged as an important ethnographic and interpretative research tool (see, for instance, Rose, 2007; Hamilton, 2006; Pink 2006a). In this chapter we focus more on the visual than the audio dimension of film, redressing the balance in the Chapter 3. Visual media 35

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Using Video Technology

can convey forms of knowledge that words cannot, and in this respect it can be ‘another way of telling’ (Berger & Mohr, 1995). This may be particularly clear when different languages and distant settings create challenges for interpretation and communication. In its overall approach and specific design, our methodology was influenced by a number of studies. Chief among these, in terms of our wish to study children across a number of cultural settings, was Tobin, Wu and Davidson’s (1989) videotaped days of pre-school classrooms in Japan, China and the US. Regarding our wish to use video records as our substantive data source, we were inspired by anthropological work using film and photographs by Bateson and Mead in Bali during the 1930s (see Jacknis, 1989) and the success of video as a research tool in many fields concerned with learning and socialization more broadly (Ochs, Graesch, Mittman, Bradbury & Repetti, 2006). One particularly rich overview became available since our fieldwork: Goldman, Pea, Barron and Derry (2007). We also related to the intimate case study approach of Taylor’s (1983) ethnographic enquiry into the home literacy-related practices of six American families. We should not forget that videos, like photographs, are artefacts, elements of visual culture, not transparent windows onto reality (Pink, 2007, p. 33). Culture in this sense may be defined as ‘the shared practices of a group, community, or society, through which meaning is made out of the visual, aural, and textual worlds of representations’ (Sturken & Cartwright, 2001, p. 3). Thus, when we speak of visual culture, we must acknowledge the varied disciplinary methods of meaning making likely to be applied to visual images. While video provides access to visual and acoustic worlds of practice and belief, it also makes available opportunities to contemplate and experience the relationship between theory and methodology. We return to this point below when we say more about our approach to interpretation. With regard to a theory of visual representation, addressing pictorial reasoning in children, Freeman suggests there is a folk philosophy of art and a folk theory of visual representation, and terms these ‘framework theories’ as a general way to think about an image or work of art (Freeman, 1995). The minimal agents or concepts for a theory of visual representation, according to him, are the artwork, the artist, the content and the beholder. In this respect, Berger and Mohr (1995, p. 7) consider photographs to be the ‘meeting places’ of these four components. We come to understand Freeman’s notions as conceptual clusters represented in our minds. The interaction of the four agents within the network can provide a dynamic platform for representing a functional construct of a theory of visual artefact.

Roger Hancock, Julia Gillen and Giuliana Pinto A

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B

P

An ‘international net’. A representational picture (P) is at the centre of relations with author (A), beholder (B) and the world (W). Adapted from Freeman (1995, p. 138).

W

How we manipulate the significance and interactions of these property nodes within a homeostatic network determines the complexity of the theory that we hold. Freeman’s explanation is attractive to us because, in addition to its psychological basis, it also has clear ecological leanings. We apply this matrix specifically to our project at two levels. The first has to do with the research process in which ‘P’ can be seen as our video record: ‘A’ representing the proximal investigators, i.e., the note taker and the cameraperson; ‘B’ the distal investigators, i.e. those of us who are primarily involved in data analysis and writing this book; and ‘W’ the family cultural and societal context. At a second level, ‘P’ is the book, this artefact; ‘A’ represents the local and distal researchers, i.e. those who interpret the ‘W’, which is the child and her family (as seen through the lens of the research culture); and ‘B’ is the reader(s). At each level of beholding a picture, we attribute a relationship between that image and its society. For example, the proximal researchers, however consciously or unconsciously, had to cope with the attunement of the specific family to video technology. This is instantiated for example in the degree to which the family self-organized like a ‘film setting’, for example adapting their movements to allow the camera direct access to the child. Because of cultural specificities in perceptions about privacy and family, the presence of a video camera in the house of a filmed child may have very different meanings for the different participants. These meanings are likely to be complex, very possibly including factors relating to the prevalence of a technology in a society, who has the rights to use it, thus issues of gender, professional identity and so on. Considering the four agents identified above, what further can be said about the theory that influences the selections made by the cameraperson (as ‘author’)? Decisions about placing and handling the camera may reflect theoretical assumptions about what will happen during

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Using Video Technology

the event and may indeed subtly influence the actions of participants. Theorization of social relations and cultural meanings always and inescapably informs the production process and frames the making of video media. Shot selection and composition, visual montage, image/sound juxtaposition and narrative sequencing are all designed to present the author’s intellectual interpretation and analysis, no matter the degree of conscious reflexivity present at the moment. So, in terms of Freeman’s ‘beholder’ or viewer, at each and every stage in the process of viewing, beholders learn to perceive images, that is, to recognize them with understanding, through the filter of their cultural experiences. An important influence must be their perception of their own role in the overall flow of the research process. Our cultural values and understandings, changing over time and place and depending on different points of view and role of beholders: researchers, parents, readers, for instance give meaning to both the content of images and their physical form. As a result, the same image can be perceived in alternative ways by people at the same time and can also be valued differently over time and in different settings. There are particularly significant stages in the filtering processes, for example, after the process of filming or authoring the day, a first ‘litmus paper’ is given by the distal researchers viewing and selecting the filming of the proximal researchers under the light of their cultural and scientific background. A second litmus paper is provided during the second iterative stage by the parents commenting and reacting to the selection, driven by their own specific cultural understandings including their perception of their role and their appreciation for their child, and so the complex process continues. We turn now to another aspect of the role of beholder in relation to our kind of video record, one that we feel is a considerable challenge yet relatively underplayed in relevant literature, albeit with some exceptions. Watching virtually unedited video demands skilled viewing; this is rarely acknowledged. Editing usually produces narrative frames that scaffold the viewer’s interpretations. Minimally edited video is difficult to watch by an unskilled audience: Experts can stay with a strip of unedited footage for a while, bringing to their viewing explicit and focussed substantive interests. But novice viewers as they try to view minimally edited footage tend to ‘zone out’ fairly quickly as they are flooded by many more information bits than they can process cognitively. (Erickson, 2007, p. 146)

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We are all habituated to strong guidance provided by video editors that structure our attention, working within genre conventions. A viewer new to this kind of data can feel a little at sea in uncharted waters; perhaps, paradoxically, the consequence of this can be an exaggerated sense of confidence. Tobin and Davidson (1990) remind us of this when they suggest that video can seduce with its appearance of being true and real. The convenience with which video data can be shared and reviewed, however remarkable, relates to what has been perhaps the most prevalent concern expressed about video research. Viewing even one videotaped session is a very powerful experience, but sometimes deceptively so. In the UK, while addressing academic audiences two of us have found (in this and other projects using video data) that it quite often happens that an extract is taken as ‘typical’. To put it another way, an assumption is sometimes made that an event shown in an extract must have occurred frequently in the raw data – or otherwise that by presenting the extract we are making stronger claims for representativeness (in whatever sense) than we actually seek to do. Even speaking to this issue explicitly is not always effective, owing to the power of this video seduction. Addressing the problem of overgeneralization by some in our audiences has been an ever-present concern for us, and remains a major issue in broadening the use of video technology more generally (Ulewicz & Beatty, 2001). We attribute this problem to deeply rooted, fundamental issues relating to human perception. We identify two aspects of perception here for analytical purposes although in practice these are inextricable. Firstly, the strong impact on sensory systems engendered with images can occupy psychological space. Sontag (2003) argues that this is a characterization of the use of the visual image more generally; that an ultimately false sense of appropriation or acquisition of knowledge is often engendered in the viewer. The multisensory experience of viewing video can to some extent overwhelm what we may as rational people know to be the case, that this is an authored product, partial in every sense. Secondly, yet related, is a naïve theory of knowledge that we need in order to navigate everyday life: that what is visible is true. What is invisible to us at any particular point may turn out to be deeply significant – and it is clear that this is a vital insight to operationalize any kind of academic endeavour – but nevertheless it takes experience and some kind of cultural training to move beyond the impact of immediate perceptions of what is visible in the here-and-now. Visual media therefore link textual argument and image. They intrinsically align theory and documentation in the tradition of print

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Using Video Technology

scholarship. They are not necessarily more or less ‘accurate’ than (relatively) monomodal communications, for all of course involve processes of representation (Bezemer, Mavers & Sidiropoulou, 2007). The impact of theory may be less immediately overt in some visual media to those with less experience in visual methodologies than a print-dominated discourse tradition, which, by and large, ‘flees the particular and takes hold of the abstract’ (Pink, 2006b, p. 288). Nevertheless works involving visual methodologies including video are, we feel, informed by and provide considerable opportunities for theoretical analysis, interpretation and understanding. In the following chapter we turn to the consequences of turning to video technology with a more aural and kinaesthetic sensibility.

Practical and technical considerations Although when we first began to video our days we hoped we would be able to overcome, with a little effort, compatibility across countries, we did not anticipate the technical challenges we would encounter and, indeed, continue to encounter. However, de Brigard (2003) reminds us that such ‘mechanical snags’ have accompanied visual research methods from the earliest days (p. 16). Easy sharing of the filmed data sets was essential to inter-researcher collaboration and talking with each other across the globe increased insights into the cultural meanings that lay behind our taken-for-granted visual interpretations (see Rose, 2007). We began our study in 2002 when the commercial switch from VHS (‘video home system’) to digital technology was still very much in process. However, running contrary to this wider trend, we did at first have digital material that was then transformed to VHS tapes. In Canada, the UK, Peru, Thailand and Italy we used a VHS format – and, depending on the country, this might be in PAL (‘Phase Alternating Line’) or NTSC (‘National Television System Committee’) formats. At this early stage we worked with multiple copies of the video cassettes. Later, with the inclusion of the children from the USA (in 2006) and Turkey (in 2007) we had ready access to digital cameras and players. All data were digitized onto CD Rom – a fairly time-consuming process given the software available to us at the time. Digital data in CD format, however, enabled each group of researchers to have a more lightweight and easily navigable data set. Because of their existing digital form, DVD copies of data from the USA was more readily achieved and distributed among the project team. Our 30-minute compilations – the only sense in which our visual record was edited into an ‘illustrative selection’

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or ‘constructed text’ (see Hockings, 2003, p. vii) – for each country’s filmed days also needed to be distributed within the project team. As we explained in Chapter 1, these compilations constituted a discrete stage of synthesis of a days data for the purposes of generating new data within the second iterative stage involving the families. They were not however used to replace the whole days in project analysis, as might of course be appropriate to some other kinds of projects where such progressive focusing is deemed appropriate. Our study draws upon two closely related but different kinds of visual data. Firstly, the nearly 60 hours of video material of seven children; secondly, the way in which this enabled us to obtain ‘frozen’ images from our data – in appearance and impact, therefore, a form of photograph. The process of grabbing a ‘still’ – what Barthes (1977, p. 67) referred to ‘as a fragment of a second text’ – requires its own software in addition to that used to watch and pause the videos. Given that video runs at 25 frames per second, grabbed stills enabled us, should we wish, to analyse a moment in time lasting 1/25th of a second. Clearly, this is a fleeting instance that could never be captured by the naked eye of an observer. In the figure below, observers would have noted the way Gai’s mother leant over the sleeping child, but they may have missed the nature and significance of her momentary finger taps.

Gai is deeply sleeping but her mother feels the need to check if she is ready to wake by quickly, yet sensitively, tapping her side. (We discuss gentle strokes in Chapter 4.)

The ability to grab stills enabled us to scrutinize our video and view data more attentively. Indeed, the stills often appeared more ‘alive’ than traditional photographs because stills, extracted from a stream of video, contain an increased sense of the life that both precede and follow them. Our fine grain observations led us to engage with Benjamin’s (1936/1973) view of the camera as an aid to perception. Over 30 years

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ago, writing of the value of film to anthropology, Asch, Marshall and Spier (1973, p. 185) stated, ‘It is the opinion of many in this field that the camera can be to the anthropologist what the telescope is to the astronomer or what the microscope is to the biologist.’ We certainly experienced the power of the video camera as a recording tool. Grabbing stills is a technique that thus helped us to incorporate a photographic kind of data and this presented an opportunity to look even more carefully than we might have done when watching moving images – and there are arguably more distractions for a viewer of movement. We used stills, therefore, to enable close examination of a child’s micro movements and expressions – indeed the process of grabbing a still is of course an act of selection and analysis in itself. Stills supported our ability to better understand children’s ‘non- and prelinguistic ways of making sense of the world’ (Ellesworth, 2005, p. 2), their interactions with the environment, artefacts and caregivers: their embodied agency. The use of stills is essential to all the publications of this project as we seek to communicate our core methodology. We appreciate that reproducing the image of a person has significance in every society with many yet varying taboos. In one community the act of photographing an individual may be regarded as an act of stealing an identity; in another the reproduction of a child’s image on the Internet may be discouraged; each attitude has in common an assumption that in some way an image can bring something of the person portrayed into mind and/or the power of the beholder. In this project, although parents have given us permission to show images of their children at conferences and in our publications, where possible in our grabbed stills we do avoid presenting close-ups of their faces. Any presentation of data to the reader involves epistemological choices (Erickson, 1986). Illustrations to texts are often presented almost as decorations, with a presence that is made subservient to the written word. In many cases illustrations are not even the primary concern of academic authors but rather inserted by picture researchers working with editors more closely than with authors. Chaplin (2006) offers a different kind of page structure in which the visual has a more independent status. In this book we use images (grabbed stills) in more conscious ways and hope that they will enable the reader to gain a richer depth of understanding than would be provided through words alone. However, we are at the same time very aware that this does not equate to enabling a transparent viewing of the data. Considerable processes of selection and editing have taken place. We have occasionally employed

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software to slightly crop images, although in the vast majority of cases we have preferred to present the image framed, as it was available to us when grabbed. On occasion, for the production of academic posters at conferences where images used were durable and sizeable, we have used software to blur images of the children’s faces. Unfortunately, publication costs have required that we turn colour images to monochrome in the present print edition of this book. For the sake of more authentic communication with the reader we would have preferred all images to be in colour. At this point we will turn right back from the end of the process, where we leave the images in the hands of the reader [the ‘beholder’, as Freeman suggests, as discussed earlier] to the very beginning of the process where we were concerned with capturing the video data itself. While we were with the seven families, there can be no doubt that placing equipment between ourselves and the children and family members being filmed served to increase a sense of separation between ongoing family activity and the research process. This might be thought about, inevitably, as connecting to notions of surveillance and even voyeurism. At the same time it had of course the more positive aspect of giving us a clear and apparent function and purpose: that of creating a multifaceted record enabling ‘diverse points of viewing [italics removed]’ (Goldman, 2007, p. 4). In itself, such an act is at least potentially capable of being thought of as an act of respect. In giving their consent to participating in the project families may have demonstrated their own perhaps mostly implicit theory about sources of knowledge, including trusting ‘viewing’ and ‘being viewed’ as powerful tools for researchers. As we have stated, the field research team consisted of two people: a cameraperson, who took responsibility for both sound and vision; and a note taker, who often switched roles after a period of time. In one location, however, the perceived status of the researchers in the eyes of the family was so different that it could not have been acceptable. In another, the academic backgrounds and experiences of the researchers led them to decide to specialize throughout the day. Continuous note taking and videoing are both exacting fieldwork activities. Videoing demands very close concentration of a researcher’s attention and constant choices of camera deployment (Tudge, 2008, p. 92). Equipment has become smaller and lighter but because of the way in which the camera needed to follow a child closely, camerapersons were invariably on their feet throughout the day, whereas note taking at least enabled the person to sit for some of the time. Videoing, on the other hand, could involve standing in one place for a considerable period of time (although in some settings

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Arriving at a UK shopping mall, Jessica recognizes the way into the mall where there is a lifesize model of Thomas the Tank Engine. She suddenly takes off independently, thus creating a challenge for the camera-person to keep her in frame.

tripods were used occasionally) and moving quickly to track the child’s spontaneous movement. Sometimes children also positioned themselves in small corners, less accessible spaces and low-down play areas. Keeping the child in frame is more challenging than following a child with the naked eye. So physical agility and alertness were needed, and stamina too. Whatever the children did and wherever they went, the camera needed to stay with them and, if possible, maintain a discrete, non-intrusive distance. Occasionally, these imperatives conflicted and a choice had to be made, such as when the camera hovered closely over the UK child Jessica’s shoulder as she ate lunch, since it was otherwise impossible given space constraints to capture the intricacies of her engagement with small items of food (see e.g., p. 110). Often, like the children we filmed, the camera needed to be in near-perpetual movement. On one occasion when filming in the US, the studied child Katy was unaware that a camera was nearby and suddenly turned around and walked into the cameraperson. Katy was not hurt, however, and carried on with her play plans, almost regardless. We need to make it clear here that the practicalities of keeping a child in the visual frame meant that our ability to capture any accompanying or nearby sound was always a second consideration. In visual anthropology, sound had a difficult birth of course, initially technically separated from vision through the use of wax cylinders. Good sound recording is still notoriously difficult to obtain in naturalistic research. We made no extra provision for sound in terms of, for instance, using boom microphones or radio mikes attached to the children and family members. Although this would have doubtless improved on the quality of the sound record we collected, it would also have increased, very considerably, our equipment’s intrusiveness as acknowledged by Tobin,

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Hsueh & Karasawa (2009). We relied on the built-in microphones linked to our cameras so our sound data was variable in quality and range. Thus we have to recognize a difference in the potentiality of our methodology from that valuable stream of research that extensively relies on verbal interactions as resources of knowledge of daily routines in families (Ochs, 1996; Ochs, Pontecorvo & Fasulo, 1996; Ochs & Schieffelin 2008). Every methodology provides some new constraints along with its affordances. However, given it is supplemented with running field notes, we feel what we have recorded is, in the main, sufficiently aligned to our purposes. Chapter 3 (Musicality) and Chapter 7 (Humour), in particular, provide evidence of the extent to which we have been able to draw upon both visual and sound in complementary ways. Gell (1992) writes of the ‘enchantment of technology’ and Ulewicz and Beatty (2001) discuss the compelling nature of visual images. Like many researchers before us who have been drawn to exploring technology’s use, we were doubtless taken by the charm of visual technology and the opportunity to capture a part of a family’s lived reality and its culture. Having been immersed in video-led research, we feel the benefits of a visual methodology far outweighed the problems. Nevertheless, as we indicate above, we needed to give time to solving a number of technical difficulties, particularly those related to compatibility between countries and efficient sharing of data sets.

Focusing on the children If we were to characterize our approach to filming the children and their families there is a sense in which we could be seen to be drawing on a number of filmic traditions including, for instance, visual anthropology, visual sociology and, to some extent, engaging with the realist intentions of documentary filmmaking. The aim of early documentary film-makers was to portray, in a naturalistic way, the lived lives of ‘ordinary’ people. In the British documentary movement of the 1920s, leading exponent Grierson said: Films could and should be employed to bring alive, with penetrating vividness, that should touch the imaginations of us all, the lives and the daily work of ordinary men and women in the new world that was growing up around us. (Grierson, 1927) Two assumptions related to realism in documentary filmmaking can be identified (see Ball & Smith, 2001, citing Ruby, 1976). As mentioned

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earlier, the first is that the camera never lies; the second is that it records reality. Relating these assumptions to our videoing approach, with regard to the first, when we reviewed and analysed our video material we became aware that, although the camera frame always featured the child being studied (except when she occasionally moved too quickly to be kept in frame), there was considerable scope for the way in which this was actually achieved. Thus, there were notable differences in terms of how each child was framed at any one time within, and, indeed, across our filmed days. The extent to which the camera was able to capture the wider contextual field surrounding a child was very much in the hands of a cameraperson at the time. As we have already intimated, making a visual record of a freely moving child is a moment-by-moment task. Despite the (admittedly varying) amounts of training involved, each cameraperson’s subjective view and personal agency always entered into the choice of data collected in various ways. For example, in Thailand there is a consistent capturing of the child in a relatively wide frame of vision as the researcher sought to capture the child’s interlocutors, where these were reasonably close to her, and the most salient features of the setting at any one time. Mostly using a tripod, she also seems to have felt that the slightly greater distance she was able to maintain contributed to a lessening of her, and the camera’s, impact on the child. With relatively less knowledge of the family’s language, it was perhaps less obvious to her than it might otherwise have been whether all the language used was captured. In contrast, in the US the cameraperson had considerable experience with video media. He also accepted virtually the same instructions but interpreted them as focusing on a more closely framed shot of the girl herself, maintaining an optimum level of detail in recording her actions and speech. It is often not possible in viewing these data to see the interlocutor at the same time as the target child. In all the locations, qualities of the settings – indoors and outdoors – influenced factors such as how close or distant the cameraperson could get at any one time. Such considerations lead Hall (2000) to suggest that, at an early stage in fieldwork, video data becomes ‘theory laden’ (p. 16). It could be suggested that we might have tried harder to impose a uniformity of approach and perhaps, in retrospect, we should ideally have ensured a more equal level of training and equipment – but this was not practically possible given the project’s resourcing and geographically distributed basis. Also, we feel that the cameraperson’s perspective on this issue is just one of the many factors that, as discussed in Chapter 1, have to be allowed for in an interpretive approach to

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research. We choose to prioritize fidelity to overall aims and flexibility according to situation over an impossible-to-achieve fidelity of detail in procedure that would in any case be amenable to diverse interpretation by participating families. Writing about the ‘context of making’ when obtaining photographs, as distinct from the context in which photographs are viewed, Adelman (1998, p. 148) states, ‘The photograph is ultimately an extension of the photographer not of the technology and technique of photography.’ With regard to the assumption that the camera records reality, as we have suggested earlier through Freeman’s analysis, a theory of meaning and interpretation would not only need to take account of the agency of the camera person, but also the cultural lens through which the video data is viewed and analysed. At this point it might be useful to conceptualize the ‘cultural lens’ in two distinct ways. The first relates to our ‘genre’, which, as we have suggested, might link to certain styles of documentary film-making in the sense of centring on a specific protagonist. We can also make use here of a distinction by Manovich between digital video consoles or computer games and other media: In contrast to modern literature, theater, and cinema, which are built around psychological tensions between characters and movements in psychological space, these computer games return us to ancient forms of narrative in which the plot is driven by the spatial movement of the main hero. (Manovich, 2001, pp. 246–247) These games are often known as ‘first person shooters’ (Dovey & Kennedy, 2006). It is possible to shift the viewing perspective between an external view, centred on the player as protagonist, to a first-person viewpoint (as if seeing through their eyes). Our method precludes the latter but is very much analogous to the first, and so we are struck by an implication from Manovich’s words that what we have here is a kind of ‘odyssey’ through one day in a child’s life, albeit on much reduced scales of time and space. Before leaving this point, we would like to mention that yet another way of focusing on a single protagonist is possible; this was implemented in the already-mentioned Barker and Wright’s (1951) study, where the stills depicted a scene the boy had been in after he had left (a simple method of preserving his anonymity while presenting features of his location). Secondly, we refer to the ‘cultural lens’ in the sense that a viewer has an impression when watching visual data of being provided with

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‘precise records of material reality’ in the words of Collier and Collier (1986, p. 10). However, we also agree with them in that when we look at such data we are anything but ‘free from bias or personal projection’ (p. 10). Pink (2006a) investigates responses to photographs employed in her study to demonstrate quite clearly that, ‘Each viewer used his or her own cultural and experience-based knowledge and moral values to give meanings to the images’ (p. 71). We pick up on this intention in terms of the way in which we tried to record one day from each of the lives of seven children and their families. We also relate to a documentary approach in terms of our wish to capture and analyse what, in Chapter 1, we referred to as ‘moments of being’ and ‘everyday routines’. Of course, we are linking here with pioneers like Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson. Their approach to filming and photographing the family life of people in the mountains of Bajoeng Gede, Bali, in the 1930s, was to shoot what happened normally and spontaneously (see de Brigard [2003] and also Barron [2007] for discussions of Kurt Lewin’s films of child interactions in the 1920s and 1930s). For us, the everyday milieus of our studied children were of considerable interest when our project was conceived; however, this interest has doubtless increased, and been confirmed as significant, as our study has proceeded. Video has recorded an aspect of the children’s reality in a highly detailed way and from this we have learned to look at and better understand early childhood in ways that we had not been able to do as researchers, psychologists and educationalists hitherto. We say more about this below. In professional film-making and photography, framing is an everpresent consideration, especially when there are opportunities for a retake – another chance ‘to get things right’. We wanted to track and video-record the children wherever they might be; re-takes would not, of course, be in the interest of naturalistic research. This meant that we had to ensure a child was always in frame and, as we have said, this required attention and application on the part of the cameraperson. The priority given to tracking a child meant that most other kinds of framing considerations came second. Refinement of focus, light, camera angle and sound were considered but needed to follow the establishment of a satisfactory visual shot of the child. In short, the task of maintaining a continuous shot of the child backgrounded a number of ‘compositional modalities’ (see Rose, 2001, p. 34). To a considerable extent, in the following close-up, the frame was determined by the fact that Nora positioned herself close to the camera rather than the other way around. Prior to this sequence, wide shots were

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Tightly framed by the camera, with mother and baby sister out of the frame, Nora eats a popsicle while bouncing on a small sofa and listening to music, ‘in moving pictures a context has to be included for the viewer to gain a sense of time and space, objects and people’ (Adelman, 1998: 155).

taken and these, plus our field notes and floor plans (see pp. 166–167), enabled us to gather the necessary contextual information (related to Nora’s baby sister and mother) to support our understanding of Nora’s actions, and to give this still meaning related to her eating and her more extended involvement in play. There were times, however, given a more sustained period of closeups on a child, when it was difficult, even with the support of our field notes and interviews with parents, to be sure of all the relevant contextual happenings surrounding that child. The ability for us to accurately discern a family narrative might be affected because this related to a number of developments ‘off camera’. Writing of surgeons seeing through a video camera when performing operations, Mondada (2003) states, ‘Video embodies ways of seeing that are embedded in the very way in which it is shot, the procedures by which the records assume an intelligibility’ (p. 60).

Observer and observed To what extent were we able to film a day of ‘naturalistic’ child and adult life? The first thing to recognize is that having two researchers spending a day with a family would obviously have an impact. It’s not easy to say exactly what that impact was but there were signs that we did have an effect – arguably, more on the adults than the children being studied. In respect of the children, the practice of being filmed may well have varied meanings for them. In Italy, for example, Beatrice is at one point apparently ‘performing’ in front of the camera: we were able to detect such a behaviour as ‘a video in the video’, wherein Beatrice performed her knowledge of how to ‘show’ herself (as very likely she already knew

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from videos of her birthdays or family holidays). On occasions it was apparent that adult members revealed to us that they had a sense of being observed as their parenting and caring behaviour showed a degree of self-consciousness when a camera was nearby – cameras classically elicit this. Set against this adult awareness was the knowledge that we were there to focus on a particular child and not on them and the cameraperson’s consistency in tracking a child’s movements would probably have confirmed this. As described in Chapter 1, our days were preceded by fieldwork including pilot sessions of filming for an hour at the time (as recommended by Erickson, 1982). There were at the very least moments, sometimes especially at the beginning, as families and researchers got a sense of how it would be to be together for a whole day, when impact seemed most obvious. It was however our experience that the children adapted to their visitors quite quickly and that there were many times when they appeared to completely forget them. Occasionally, there were attempts to involve them as in the figure below.

Having taken a book out of her rucksack, Juanita walks to the note taker and passes it to him. Previously, he had been sitting on the seat (to the left) taking notes and there had been no exchanges with him. He graciously receives the gift but in a way that doesn’t encourage Juanita to do it again.

Although we recognized that our research activities would have had some impact on the children, we had reason to feel that our data is still close to how they would have been without our presence for a number of reasons, including the families telling us so. From the interactions with them, including at pre-filming and interviewing stages, we have strong reasons to think that the families were at least ‘performing their values’. There might well be a tendency to engage more intensively or more often in an activity or style of interaction that one values just because one is being videoed and wishes to convey that evaluation to the researchers. But, within the confines of our study and the considerable interactions involved besides the videoing, we feel confident in asserting that families were not engaging in non-everyday practices that

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they did not themselves value. (Indeed, in two family sites not included in this book research was abandoned, in part, because this participatory relationship did not hold.) One factor that enabled the children to get on with life as we filmed them was their ever-present need to play and the way in which this preoccupation absorbed them in complete ways (see Chapter 5). Occasionally a child might stop what she was doing and look at us, but more with a sudden curiosity or desire to interact with a researcher rather than the selfconsciousness and ‘posing’ often displayed by those in the eye of a camera. It was not therefore an ‘engagement look’ in which self and others are knowingly and meaningfully linked (see Müller, Carpendale, Bilbok & Racine, 2006). It was as though the children were observing us without full understanding that we were observing them (see figure below). In general, the same was true of the older siblings (in the US, Thailand and Peru) when we videoed them playing alongside the studied children.

With all of our children, there was relative uninterest in what we were doing in their homes. It seemed that these two-yearolds had not yet learned to display their attention towards a camera lens, not yet developed the form of self-consciousness that many adults and older children appear to have when a camera focuses on them. Walker and Adelman (1975) write of ‘a reflexive awareness of self’ (p. 9).

Although it must have been strange for them at first, to a large extent most of the adults in the seven families quickly accepted the convention that they should try to ignore us as far as reasonably possible. Children, by and large, live in the here and now where the business of life constantly impinges; a self-absorbed playing state of being is not so easily entered into by grown-ups. As they lived through their day, caregivers therefore seemed more aware of the fact that they were on film, especially when they were closely involved with a studied child. The proximity of researchers filming and taking notes on child and adult activities may well have caused adults to adjust their natural behaviour in some ways at some times. Perhaps, for instance, in terms of finding

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ways of being more or differently involved with their children, and conscious of how they did this, for the sake of the camera. Although we were present in their homes we tried to minimize all interactions, signalling that we preferred to be forgotten. Nevertheless families naturally wished to be polite to us as visitors and social interactions occasionally took place of course (as seen in Turkey below). In perhaps any society conventional civility is a difficult aspect of daily life to forego.

In Turkey, the father has just said goodbye to his wife and two children. Selin, the studied child, is sitting on the floor on the right. As Kemal leaves, he also gestures goodbye to the researchers with his left hand.

It is important also to remember the second field researcher (note taker) who required a clear view of the child at all times but who also needed to keep out of the frame. Occasionally, this was difficult given children’s unpredictable movements. Mostly, our families quickly accepted the research convention that, as far as possible, they should ignore the presence of the two researchers and carry on with their lives. Very occasionally, the note taker unavoidably entered the frame. Here in Peru, her proximity to Juanita and carer served to remind us that what we were asking of families may not have been easy for them.

So we would conclude that our visual research method did elicit varying degrees of self-consciousness and self-monitoring by adult members of the families. However, we are still left with the belief that we were able to collect data that contained much that these adults would normally have done with their children had we not been with them if possibly at some ‘heightened’ level in some way or at some moments.

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In short, we believe that none of our families ‘staged’ their days to a significant extent so that the sense of everyday practices was lost. (An absence of a usually present person familiar to the child was one factor that led to the abandoning of research in one location.) The seven studied children written about in this book seemed relatively little affected by our presence. We therefore feel that the gaze of the camera and note taker may not have greatly influenced the capacities of the family to reveal their values and many of their spontaneous activities.

Interpreting and presenting visual data A reflexive endeavour In Chapter 1 we referred to the way in which, from its very inception, our research involved reflexivity, drawing on the perceptions and ideas of a multinational, multidisciplinary team. Collaboration in the ‘viewing sessions’, aimed towards ‘indefinite triangulation of evidence’ to use Erickson’s (1982, p. 229) terms, carried through to our approach to analysis. We would highlight three levels of interaction that impacted upon the way we interpreted our data. Firstly, the dialogue that took place between the families and ourselves that enabled us to better contextualize our visual record guided our attention and helped us understand what we were viewing. Secondly, essential were the dialogues that took place between the field researchers in each of the seven countries and ourselves as authors of this book – not forgetting that a number of us also had a field research role which informed our perceptions. Thirdly, the intersubjectivity that has developed and is still ongoing between those of us who have been presenting and writing papers on our project and authoring this book continues to be highly important in fostering new understandings. Writing these chapters ensured not only debates regarding selection, analysis and interpretation, but also robustness in terms of critical comment on each others’ writings. All of the above levels of interaction and collaboration therefore served to influence what data and themes we have attended to for this book and what we have ultimately regarded as significant in terms of ‘strong’ children. Focussing our attention As all seven day in the life video records have become available to us we have been involved in a process of familiarization with their content and identification of themes that appear to link well with our research

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interests. We cannot overemphasize the value of video in enabling us to revisit the moment-by-moment experiences of each of the studied children. As Barbash and Taylor (1997, p. 74) note, ‘film is a quintessentially phenomenological medium’ and it is our continued access to the minutiae and intimacy of a child’s day that has stimulated our ability to note significance and identify subtleties over time. As we already have indicated in Chapter 1, the ‘thriving child’ themes brought to the fore in this book are: musicality, security, eating, symbolic representation and humour. Many of these themes have a history for some of us as researchers, but some also emerged through engagement with the data and, as Barron (2007, p. 177) discusses, video-based research can, it seems, be particularly fruitful in such unanticipated outcomes. So in terms of our day in the life project, themes began to be shaped as work-in-progress conference papers, then published as journal articles, while development continued towards these book chapters. In creating new texts and interpretations around established themes, we have been intrigued by the way in which a short sequence of video can provide data to feed a number of research themes. We have already referred to the polysemic nature of video. To take just one example from our UK video record, an analysis of the following grabbed still with its surrounding footage can be used to support understanding of Jessica’s activities in a number of ways. For us, this one example points to the attraction of Freeman’s (1995) ‘framework theory’ when considering a visual artefact like a grabbed still, and also to Berger and Mohr’s (1995) notion of a photograph as a ‘meeting place’ of interests as previously referred to. Although our choice of significance was always guided by the contextual and cultural This grabbed still could have been used, for instance, to analyse: Jessica’s independence and dexterity when eating; or her ability to attend closely to and make meaning of a picture book (Chapter 6); or her knowledge of narrative language; or her easy, collaborative relationship with an adult, and so on. In Chapter 4, however, we use this still to highlight the soothing mutuality that appears to exist between Jessica and her grandparent.

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data available to us, we recognized the importance of being able to ‘surrender to the data’ (Weakland, 2003, p. 55). A day’s video data could contain indications of how a child was thriving that may not have been initially noted by us, or may not have been valued or remarked upon by a family when we discussed their children with them. In her ethnographic study of family literacy, Taylor found she was able to point out to parents hidden aspects of literacy learning that their children were involved in but which had not been noticed by the adults (Taylor, 1983). Although often referred to in manuals on research, being data-led in this way is perhaps the hardest thing for a researcher to do because it requires openness to what the data itself is communicating and also minimizing the effect of our individual ‘cultural screens’ (see Spindler & Spindler, 1992). Contextual data We should also recall the importance of the contextual texts that were collected to accompany the video records. We conceive of these texts: transcriptions of parent interviews, translations, observational notes and running commentaries, house plans, and local investigator communications, as further data, accompanying and complementary to the video data. In itself this is a principled stance that does not always apply in educational research. Compare, for example, Erickson (2006, pp. 177–178): [F]ine-grained information about the actual conduct of social interaction comes best from making audiovisual recordings of it from which either detailed transcriptions of the interaction can be prepared and analyzed or careful moment-by-moment coding can be done.… The videotape itself is not data. It is a resource for data construction.’ It seems to us that although we note cautions made by Erickson and others (see, for example, Green, Dixon & Zaharlick, 2003; Goldman & McDermott, 2007) that the visual record is neither unmediated access to the facts nor in itself provides either organization of data or analysis, the danger of this stance is that it devalues video data to the status of being the basis for a more privileged verbal dataset. It also seems to ignore the theory-laden choices that however unconsciously or otherwise have been present in the creation of the video dataset. All our records are considered to be project data. There was variation in the contextual information in the form of field notes available to us as viewers as this originated and was created in the

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Canada – part of the downstairs of the house. Given that the camera often gave us a closely framed viewed of a child, floor plans of homes (and any adjoined spaces) provided important supplementary information with regard to where exactly a tracked child was in her domestic space. (See the Appendix.)

different settings, in part owing to the project resources and the capacities of the researchers involved. As we have mentioned, these data varied in quantity and intensity from place to place. The video data records were studied for a considerable time before we became able to engage in the task of transcribing and translating the language. This has occurred at varying levels: there have been times when we have spent several hours transcribing and/or translating a short extract of perhaps five minutes; on the other hand, occasionally explanatory notes have stood in for transcription as such, depending upon our purposes. Most of the

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time we have succeeded in transcribing and translating most of the language used by and to the child at a level of reasonable lexical fidelity, that is, to a standard that would be appropriate to most social science disciplines if not to the more detailed requisites of, say, Conversation Analysis (ten Have, 1999) or the detailed analyses of children’s language appropriate to psycholinguistic studies (although, as stated, occasionally we have employed such standards). Presenting our visual data As we have said, we found video records of the children to be rich and multilayered in content. This was brought across to us, for instance, when we set about ‘translating’ even a very short sequence of video footage into a written description – and tried to do justice to the detail of the visual sequence itself. It was not easy to do this in a way that would enable a reader to truly experience a video sequence simply by reading a written description. Often, there appeared to be a dissonance between a selected video sequence and text that set out to describe it in an authentic way (see Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006). This is one compelling reason for our use of stills throughout this book. We endeavour, therefore, to explore the way in which images and texts can work in complementary ways. We feel strongly that readers should have direct access to examples of our visual data, and not just be asked to read words about that data. We employ the established convention of ‘captioning’ alongside our grabbed stills but our captions are a little more than the brief descriptors that often accompany images in books. They are more like the ‘wall texts’ that curators may place close to an artwork in a gallery. Barthes (1977), writing on the ‘rhetoric of the image’, addresses the relationship between images and verbal text. Linking with his analysis we sometimes use captions to ‘fix’ the meanings we wish to refer to within a still; sometimes captions extend these image meanings, and sometimes they elaborate on them – for instance, using an image as a point of entry for theory building. In all forms of captioning used we are aiming for a productive relationship between image and text. The text of our captions sometimes draws upon words from our interview data, sometimes quotes from the published words of other researchers, and often our own words arising from the experience of viewing and reflecting on the video data. Sometimes, too, a caption might be a mixture of these textual sources. We hope, however, that the captions serve to stimulate thinking about a still image as data, guide the reader’s attention to what is being discussed and also, importantly

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for visual research methodology, convey a sense of an image’s ‘interpretive possibilities’ (Chaplin, 2006, p. 42). It seems very important that visual research projects like ours are prepared, when discussing their findings, to explore and even reconceptualize the relationship between words and images, and look at ways of presenting findings that do not assume words take over from images. Considering how best to present the findings of her ‘Gender at home’ video project, Pink (2006b) produced a series of hypermedia representations on CD-Rom which she felt could better portray her interaction with her informants. Words alone, she felt, would not adequately convey a sense of her visual research experience and findings. One editor of our work invited us to provide online visual materials for his journal readership to view and analyse themselves. For ethical reasons, we declined as we did not feel that these visual data should be freely accessed over the Internet. In this case, a compromise was reached in which we provided careful transcriptions of the critical verbal interactions in the data set. With our combination of words and images, we can at best only attempt ‘another way of telling’ (Berger & Mohr, 1995) rather than provide any sense of unmediated access to the children and their lives. Nevertheless we trust that our endeavours to think, with a degree of candour, through the consequences of the different stages of our methodology, may assist others grappling with similar research aims.

3 Musicality Susan Young and Julia Gillen

Western knowledge has traditionally looked upon the world but, says Attali, ‘the world is not for beholding. It is for hearing’ (Attali, 1985, p. 3). In Western historical and cultural constructions of the senses, prominence has been given to the visual sense (Classen, 1993). Sight as the sense of science separates the viewer from the viewed and gives an illusion of objectivity. The visual basis of this objectivity is grounded in a very particular view of the world, a kind of ‘eye-mindedness’, which has certain limitations and conditions imposed by the characteristics of vision (Classen, pp. 6–7). The previous chapter invoked Berger and Mohr’s (1995) ‘another way of telling’ to discuss the use of video technology and yet almost entirely considered this as a visual methodology. In this chapter we approach the days with a kind of ‘ear-mindedness’, considering the video material as ethnomusicologists might, replete with sound and body rhythm. This angle too will have its own conditions and limitations, but has the potential to reveal alternative descriptions and versions. The association of knowledge with sight – which we, the authors of this chapter and our British and North American colleagues take for granted every time we say ‘I see’ to mean ‘I know’, is hardly universal. In many societies, other sensory modes are or have been more closely associated with knowledge (Classen, 1993, p. 9). For example, Geurts’ (2003) investigation of the cultural meaning system among the AnloEwe-speaking people of south-eastern Ghana revealed their sensory orientation around an internal sense of bodily awareness and balance. Such a striking and compelling example has the potential to shift our thinking. Whereas vocabulary in English often blends visual perception with understanding, the Anlo vocabulary links kinaesthesia and proprioception (the internal awareness of our body movement and how 59

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it is orientated in space) with understanding. Classen draws together this example and many others to demonstrate how vision tends to be equated with surface perception, scientific understanding and forms of ordering that are static, while sound might be more easily equated with depth perception, forms of internal understanding and dynamism, particularly articulations across time and in space. Sound, as encapsulated by Shepherd, ‘stresses the integrative and relational’ (Shepherd, 1991, p. 159). The stimulus for the writing of this chapter was the realization of initial project members at an early stage of data gathering that close examination of the days in all cases threw up many instances in which musicality was evidently highly salient to the lived experiences of the children. We use the concept of musicality in its widest sense to emphasize the richness and diversity of ways in which contoured sounds and rhythms imbued the children’s activities. Perhaps not always having access to the linguistic codes at the time of first engaging with the data brought us fresh awareness that the sharp distinction between ‘speech’ as sound and ‘musical’ vocalization is a historically invented distinction and a relatively recent one at that (Ingold, 2007). As our research developed and more translations were carried out, we certainly settled on a more conventional parsing of speech, but, we think helpfully, an awareness of embodied musicality continued to develop as reflected in this chapter. As the chapter unfolds, we add to and further develop the argument, threading through other chapters that young childhood is an intrinsically multimodal state of being. We examine ways in which the children experience themselves as shaping and are shaped by essentially musical events. Musicality for us includes not only the song singing and listening and dancing to pre-recorded music as the term more obviously implies, it also includes instances of rhythmic or vocalized activity woven into the ongoing days’ events (Campbell, 1998; Young & Gillen, 2007). Some of these instances were substantial and easily noticeable; some were fleeting and woven into other activities, so as to be almost imperceptible. We treat music as a perfectly ordinary human activity, not one that is marginal or in any sense privileged. We thus avoid the prototypical tendency of Western art music to treat music and musical practices as something set apart, floating free of context. The accounts of children contained in this book are not concerned with universalizing from particular instances, but in recognizing and staying with the specific, the small, the ordinary and day-to-day. A reintegration of auditory and kinaesthetic dimensions is part of that

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commitment. It enables us to take other soundings of these children’s lives and to go beyond the surface structures and observable behaviours which are the usual stuff of child studies. If this book is about exploring new possibilities for understanding young children, then we are mapping alternative approaches to achieving this. However, giving more prominence to what we argue are neglected senses is not about making a simple reversal of importance. We are not attempting to displace the visual, but rather to point to the crucial roles that sound, voice, melody, music and body rhythm play in our experience and understanding. Indeed, this chapter rests as much on visual information of sympathetically sensed kinaesthesia in movements of self, in actions with objects and other people, as it does on auditory information. The video data captures not only the visual surface of what happens resonant with sound, but our observing of video data has the capacity to evoke sympathetic embodied experience. When Nora in Canada bounces energetically on a child-sized sofa while singing, ‘Let’s fly a kite’ along with a music CD, we sense her exhilaration at mobilizing body, voice and mind in synchrony with the music. While we may have left the old body-mind dichotomies long behind (Bresler, 2004, p. 9), it is still another step to be able to recognize the ‘body in a state of music’ (Blacking, 1989, p. 64), so used are we to conceptualizations of music which reduce it to some kind of aural, sonic experience alone.

The experience of music is multi-modal and its performances are multimedia events of bodily rhythms; bodily contact; the visual: both within the immediate environment and the visual associated with mixed media of TV and film, as well as sounds that are instrumental and vocal. All intermingle, blend and fuse across a range of media and sensory channels. Our aim then is to arrive at a multifaceted, multisensorial approach. Widening the approach to include these multifarious phenomena we

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are calling musicality not only lays the foundations for a more realistic appreciation of music in young children’s lives but will also, we propose, contribute to a richer model of young childhood and childhood culture. Attention to musicality might not only yield rich kinds of information but might also usher in a rethinking of some theoretical and methodological issues in the conceptualization of childhoods. Before we continue, however, we pause to point out one paradox. Our aural and embodied experience of the video data will return to silence and stillness in the form of images and words in this book. The reader needs to do more than take the words and images off the page. She must attempt to imaginatively project this wider sensory experience into reading: to see, feel and hear the words and images musically. While emphasizing the particular and not wishing to arrive at generalizations that obscure diversity, music nevertheless interweaves these days in ways that are identifiably ‘patterns in the dynamic processes of activities’ (Rogoff, 1997, p. 275). We may all nowadays agree in criticizing traditional models of culture as some kind of homogenous, external reality and instead stress differentiation, multiplicity and dynamic change as we endeavoured to do in Chapter 1 above. Identifying similarities across activities does not contradict that stance, but allows us to discuss, compare and group ideas under theoretical umbrellas and to make propositions. These similarities we draw together as music in everyday lives, particularly its part in the indoor home lives of young children, music as parenting practice and music in constructing young childhoods. These themes then draw together in a conclusion which returns to the idea of a ‘strong child’ and considers how taking a musical slant on the days contributes to our understandings of these children as thriving. However, before we embark on these main themes, there are some further ideas to draw into the frame. There is a long tradition of studying children’s songs and games played out-of-doors, usually with groups of other children (see Marsh, 2008 for a comprehensive overview). In contrast, there is very little research which has studied young children’s musical activity in families and in the home; and of what little research there is, most has been collected from reports by parents and not direct observation (Young, 2008; Tafuri, 2009). It is this kind of intimate musical practice, mostly indoors and perhaps solitary or with family members that DeNora (2000) suggests is neglected by researchers. Moreover, there is little study of young children’s music that is not initiated by an interest in plotting developmental pathways and in identifying the starting points of formal education (e.g. Tafuri, 2009).

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Yet with advances in technology and their wider availability, the range of musical resources available to young children at home is increasing and diversifying (Young & Gillen, 2006) and changing the nature of the audio-musical environment in the home. With the commodification of childhood (Cook, 2004), comes the production of children’s media items, CDs, tapes and videos produced commercially for this age range. All these various factors – the patterns of family interactions, the media items, the music technologies and even the home spaces – impact considerably on the nature of musical activity and experience for young children (Young, 2008). Tacchi in her interesting studies of domestic soundscapes considers radio ‘material’ in the way that it adds an almost palpable texture to the home environment (Tacchi, 2003). Taking her notion of domestic soundscape, we listened for the textures of the audio environments the girls inhabited.

Gai’s home compound environment in Thailand allowed her the freedom to move in and out of doors between different homes and various rooms. On the balcony, a radio played and a TV sounded in one sitting room. Out of doors, we could hear birdsong and cicadas. She circulated in and out of varying, background aural environments some technological, some natural.

In Turkey, for one period of the day, the TV played in a corner of the family sitting room and the sounds of musical toys and an acoustic piano sometimes overlaid this background, creating a polyphonic texture (without implying the harmonious mix possibly connoted by that term).

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Musicality The technological capabilities to produce digitized sound have so miniaturized that sound that it can be embedded in all kinds of items invisibly producing ambient sounds, sound effects and musical events. In England, Jessica ran from the playroom to the kitchen to place a ‘laughing cow’ on the table; with several other toys it remained accessible during lunch. Recorded music, albeit in such a reduced form, can be a resource for living, entwined with everyday activity and emotions (DeNora, 2000).

Everyday music Ethnomusicologists have long documented live musical practices in societies where performed music has an integrated role in everyday life. From their work we learn how music is diverse and can fulfil a wide array of purposes, from the quite mundane and instrumental to the more elevated. Ethnomusicologists may include references to children in their accounts, but their focus in general has been on adult musical activity. Moreover, they have, until recently, tended to be more interested in music in traditional or ‘pre-industrialized’ communities. Interest in purposes for which adults use music in everyday life in diverse societies came to the fore during the 1990s through the work of two researchers working in England, DeNora (2000) and Sloboda (2005). In musical cultures where there are clear separations between performed live music and everyday uses of pre-recorded music, such studies have drawn attention to the way that recorded music is an accompaniment to daily activity. All the homes we visited had some of the common equipment for their era that played music or videos or could receive television and/or radio, sometimes housed in one media centre in a living room. This equipment was generally static, or if portable, usually too large and heavy to be portable by the children. At some points during some of the days, parents brought music to the foreground by selecting pre-recorded

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music and playing it for their daughters’ entertainment, usually from resources that are commercially produced and available for purchase. Since the parents could generally fulfil this role of supporting participation while sitting to one side of the space where the child moved to the songs or watched the TV screen, they could use music to occupy the children in a way which required only partial involvement on their part. Music in the commodified form of children’s music tapes and CDs therefore offered a useful, open-textured activity which could interweave with other activities such as driving the car, taking a break, interacting with a visiting adult, caring for a younger sibling or performing household chores. Music as self-entertainer, as a surrogate companion, sometimes even enabled the parents to withdraw completely, offering a brief respite or at least an attempt at respite from direct caregiving. In England, a collection of toys, including toys that played mixed repertoires of melodies, filled the twins’ cots in the expectation, we guess, that they might be content to play for a while on waking. There was music from CD, cassette or radio to accompany a ‘solitary’ moment in the shop for Juanita in Peru or to provide a companion for Beatrice in Italy, ‘alone’ in the sitting room while her parents carried out some chores in the kitchen. These examples add to the repertoires of ways in which music could perform various helpful functions in the day-to-day care of young children at home. It was instrumentally helpful for the parents and had practical advantages. It is, after all, quite quick and easy to put on recorded music when the equipment is already in place and the CDs or tapes usually close to hand, and its potential to engage and entertain the children was high. Canada It is mid-morning break in the family sitting room. Nora is eating a snack and her mother Catherine sits with a mug of coffee. Her mother asks, ‘Do you want to put music on?’ Nora replies, ‘And I can dance.’ ‘And you can dance, that’s right. And we have all the music that belongs to you here.’ As she is speaking, Catherine searches among the collection of CDs stored by the CD player that forms part of the family entertainment centre and puts on one she has selected (see figure on next page). It is a children’s compilation. First is the American song of 1876, ‘The Grandfather Clock’. The songs are performed by a small ensemble consisting of a male and female singer, percussion, electronic keyboard, clarinet and flute. For ‘The Grandfather Clock’, the keyboard is set to

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play the sound of a harpsichord, presumably to convey the historical, parlour feeling of the Victorian clock. For the first song, Nora joins in with the chorus, singing ‘stop short, never to go again’, and bounces energetically on her child-size foam armchair while the song plays. When the song has finished, she sings the line from the chorus once more. Catherine, sitting with her legs curled and holding a coffee mug in a nearby armchair, is watching and joins in with singing sections of the chorus. She combines sitting and listening with a number of small caring tasks for Nora’s younger sibling, and so her attention shifts frequently. During the second song, ‘Let’s Go Fly a Kite’, both mother and daughter return their attention to the song at its conclusion, singing portions of the chorus. The third song, ‘Little Brown Jug’, prompts an animated tickling bout between Catherine and Nora, around the words ‘ha, ha, ha, hee, hee, hee’. This continues into the following song, ‘The Monster Mash’, which is preceded by mock terror noises from Catherine, ‘ooh, this is the scary one’, and more tickles on the floor. As the compilation continues to play, their attention drifts away from the songs to other activities.

Parents often participated in these more engineered musical occasions by watching, singing or dancing, and encouraging forms of participation through modelling or words of guidance and praise. These were typically song or dance music tapes and CDs that from the comments of both parents and children and by the children’s responses we deduced to be familiar and pleasurable, revisited activities. Here Catherine is holding Nora while singing; in the next instant she is tickling her daughter.

Music as parenting practice Studies of music in everyday life have focussed increasingly on the way that technology enables more music of a greater variety to be thus

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self-administered to assist with managing the day. We use it to arouse or calm mood and body, to arrive at physical and mental states that are desirable and comfortable to us. The parents introduced pre-recorded music that would engender active singing and moving at times in the day when physical involvement, and being energized and stimulated emotionally seemed appropriate. Thinking about the use of music in this way connects with ideas of more specific uses of music as a parenting strategy. However, to achieve the finest adjustments of physical or emotional tone of their children, the parents drew upon their own live vocalizing and bodily movement. It was immediate, intimate and could be more finely tuned to the dynamic of the moment. Whereas active musical participation generally took place with the children standing alone in the spaces that their homes offered – a clear floor area in sitting room, bedroom or shop front, or even the space standing on a bed – these vocal, bodily musical events were also quietly contained on laps, seats and hammocks (see Chapter 4 below). There is an interesting area of research concerned with infant musicality that offers a theoretical framework within which to discuss and consider music in these young children’s lives. It has arisen from the field of social developmental psychology and, in particular, the considerable interest over the last 20 years or more in the processes of interaction between adults and infants and the clues to development that these might hold. Innate musicality, the human ability to self-regulate voice, body movement and facial expression into rhythmical contours that can entrain with another is displayed in the very earliest exchanges between infants and their caregivers. The painstaking work of Trehub and her students over many years has catalogued and provided evidence that certain core perceptual musical abilities are present from birth (Trehub, 2003). These are human abilities that enable interactive musicality. The predominant activity in this area of interest has been the descriptions and analyses of what has come to be termed ‘communicative musicality’ (Malloch, 2000) in the first year of life. Micro-analysis of video recordings of infants and caregivers interacting has revealed the synchrony of movements and vocalizations between the two and the exact timings of exchanges. However, communicative musicality does not disappear after the early months but continues on in the lap games, dancing routines and singing activities seen in many of the days. Its earliest contribution to establishing and maintaining emotional and physical equilibrium in the baby continues into older childhood. Many of the instances of communicative musicality in the days are moments of intense, affectionate interaction between the girls and their parents,

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grandparent or cousins. In focussing on this dimension of musicality, this chapter previews and complements the discussion of similar interactions in the following chapter on emotional security (see Chapter 4). In caring successfully for their children, parents intuit the need to assist them with self-regulation, to help their children to adjust their physical and emotional state. In Italy, Beatrice has just woken up and her mother plays a lap game that excites her and assists with arousing her in the transition from drowsiness to a more alert state. We follow the description of Italy with a contrasting one taken from the day in Thailand. Gai has become upset after falling with her tricycle. Rocking in a hammock with her mother, hearing soothing words and singing helps to calm her from a state of physical and emotional distress. Italy Having carefully documented and analysed their own parenting (M. Papousek, 1996), the Papouseks concluded that ‘parents sensitively respond to changes in infant emotional/behavioural state and modify singing or musical elements in their speech so as to either maintain quiet and active waking states in infants or to facilitate transitions to sleep. Thus they reduce the proportion of transitory infant states characterized by upset and a poor level of integrative and communicative abilities’ (H. Papousek, p. 50). We witnessed this sensitivity in this interaction during the day in Italy.

This short event occurred after Beatrice had taken a midday nap and was transitioning from a drowsy state to being more alert. Kneeling on her mother Lucia’s lap in the kitchen, facing her and holding both her mother’s hands, she rocks to and fro in a strong, duple metre. Lucia picks up the same strong rocking rhythm and its tempo exactly in a rhythmical chant – ‘tira, molla e lascia andar!’ Each word has an accent on the first syllable; a rhythmic characteristic of the Italian language,

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and this synchronizes with and etches the accented, two-beat rocking movement. Each short rhythmic motif arrives at a point of climax when Lucia pretends to let go when Beatrice is leaning backwards, as if she might tip backwards and fall. The third, fourth and fifth repetitions extend the pattern by an extra rocking movement and each repetition increases in intensity with longer pauses before and after the pretend moment of dropping. Lucia ratchets up the emotional intensity of the moments when she might drop her by vocalizing mock shudders of fear. Beatrice is secure that her mother will not drop her, but they both play with and enjoy this moment of risk and thrill. The game increases to a pitch of excitement with squeals from Beatrice. At this point, Lucia ceases the game, suspecting that to continue it would be to spill into over-excitement. She winds down the activity and remains physically quite still and quiet, diverting attention to Beatrice’s hair clip. Thailand While rocking, swinging and singing with her daughter, Siriwan maintains occasional dialogue with other family members nearby (not in the frame). The hammock seems to provide a sustained rhythmic framework of rocking, flexible to these networked interactions between child and mother, mother and other family members.

It is interesting to look at similarities and differences between the Italian lap game and this small rocking and vocalization event in Thailand. It starts with a moment of distress when Gai falls over her tricycle close by her mother, Siriwan, who is already swinging in the hammock strung between two trees. Siriwan scoops Gai up into the hammock and after some awkward lifting and shifting successfully arranges Gai on her lap to face outwards, cradled in the curve of her mother’s body. First Siriwan re-establishes the rhythmic swing of the hammock and at the same time vocalizes quietly to Gai. At this stage, the hammock is swinging gently, there are some softly spoken single word and short phrase exchanges and then one brief phrase or two of a song. Their exchange of words and phrases is tonally contoured and so song and speech are

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almost indistinguishable. There is much repetition of single words or short phrases between them, some of which are initiated by Siriwan and imitated by Gai and vice versa. Siriwan increases the height of the hammock swing, in this way accelerating the speed at which it moves back and forth. In rhythmic terms, the tempo is exactly the same, but the energy and space dimensions of the swing are increased. Siriwan reaches one arm down to the fallen bicycle and, at each turning point of the swing, spins one of the stabiliser wheels to create a rasping sound. This regular, rhythmic sound adds to the increasing dynamic of the swing. Thereafter, the swing is allowed to slow down. From what we see, hear and feel from the video, the aim of this exchange is to lower distress. These are two examples of musicality in intimate exchanges; multisensory, dynamic interactions involving the co-articulation of musical, verbal and gestural activity. The coordinated tempo and rhythmic impulse in embodied engagements entrain and convey intention and energy levels. The hammock swing aimed to calm and so was slower in tempo and flatter, with very gradual changes in dynamic or speed. The lap game roused Beatrice with sudden changes and surprises and an overall faster pace. They provided kinaesthetic experience through close physical contact, cradled on laps and through body movement of rocking and tipping back and forth. These body movements play with the sense of balance, the risk and excitement of losing balance and falling, and the security of knowing they are held. There is another example from England when Jessica’s grandmother, Margaret, plays a traditional lap game of Humpty Dumpty which also arrives at a final topple. The dynamic quality conveys emotion through vocalizations that vary in timbre, pitch variation and loudness. The words reinforce the inflexion, rhythmical phrasing and contour. These vocal-emotional envelopes are what Stern (1985) described as ‘vitality affects’ and Pavlicevic (1997), similarly, as ‘dynamic feeling forms’. The languages themselves, the downbeat emphasis of Italian, the softer tonal variations of Thai language and the anacrusic rhythms of English, to take these three examples, already convey certain inflexions and articulations that are language – and thereby culturally – specific. The vocalizations range from speaking to singing and every shade of chanting and lyrical speaking between those two. The exchanges are parsed into shorter units, phrases that are repeated into longer sequences or ‘narratives’. Interest in the repetitions is maintained through variation that might accumulate tension to a point of climax. In the lap game in Italy designed to arouse, the repetitions increase intensity to a climax which then threatens to spill into what the mother judges to be an over-heightened state

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of excitement and so she halts the game and diverts attention to a hair slide. Similarly Jessica asks for several repetitions of the Humpty game in England. The rocking in Thailand starts with a state of heightened arousal and decreases gradually from that point. Thus the structure of these small exchanges pivots on points of intensity. These small events – playful interactive structures that become part of parenting repertoire – are revisited, elaborated and extended over many occasions. The days are just one snapshot in the history of such events that may be presumed from evidence of apparent layers of familiarity to refer back to earlier occasions and imply future exchanges in ways that have to be occluded from our knowledge in this study. Relationships are built on such tiny rituals. They are small frameworks, vehicles for expressiveness, which establish expectations for the children in being understood by their parents or other family members (Bruner, 1990). We will return to this idea in future chapters.

Constructing musical childhoods Turkey In the sitting room of the family home, Selin’s cousin Deniz is sitting on the settee with Selin’s twin sister Fusun. Selin enters the room and climbs onto the settee to join them. They have an electronic toy, a kind of pinball machine (see figure on next page). The toy plays a variety of tunes as balls circulate in two clear outer plastic tubes. Holding a central button causes spinning balls to rise slowly in two tubes. Pressing another button produces a bird chirping and squawking sound. Selin has some measure of control over the toy as she operates different buttons. Pressing buttons halts the melodies so that they are often heard in short, disjointed fragments and incomplete phrases. As Selin enters the room, the toy plays various tunes: ‘The Entertainer’ by Scott Joplin quickly followed by ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’, Rossini’s ‘William Tell Overture’ and finally ‘Chopsticks’. The shorter melodies are complete, but the longer melodies are cut short. These are wellknown melodies, familiar across national boundaries, which have their origins in very different musical sources. The very language of the music provided by adults for children, in the form of songs sung to them, children’s CDs, TV programmes, music and sounds built into toys likewise may be said to be created in – and in turn actively creating – the image of young children in its harmonies, melodies, rhythms and timbres (see Minks, 2006, p. 217). For example, the constraints of cut-price toy production in the toy from Turkey result

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in the built-in sounds and tunes having thin sine wave timbre, monotone or simple two-part melodies. For the most part, these kinds of toys – and there were similar toys observed in the days in England and the USA – played conventional Western nursery rhyme melodies and pop classics. These features symbolize young children through the simplicities of thin, clean and pure timbres, textures and melodies. The music tapes and CDs produced for young children’s consumption reflect similar economies of lightweight instrumental production; often produced by digital equipment rather than live players and are light in texture, with higher pitches predominating. If there are singers – we heard them on CDs in Canada and Italy – they sing with folk-style voices, again adopting a lighter timbre and higher pitch. The popular culture videos that we heard in England, Peru and Italy have more elaborate theme tunes, sometimes in the richly orchestrated style of Hollywood film music. Music for young children not only ‘constructs’ young children but also locates them in particular family and cultural contexts. In an example from Peru which we describe later, the selection of music for Juanita to dance to is Peruvian café music, which has strong links with her immediate locality. The provision of such items is therefore both reflecting cultural versions of childhood, perpetuating and reconstructing them. In the Thomas the Tank Engine example that follows, the sedate melody played by an instrumental group reminiscent of a 1950s English village band conveys nostalgia. Barrett draws attention to the construction of childhood by adults as in part mythological: ‘Childhood is simultaneously our fond, adult rememberings of a time past and the

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immediacy of our own children’s lives’ (2003, p. 198; citing James, Jenks & Prout 1998, p. 59). UK It is early morning and the three children – Jessica, her brother Matthew and her younger sister Alison – are in their pyjamas with toast and drinks. They sit close to their mother Rachel on the playroom sofa to watch a Thomas the Tank Engine video. The signature tune introduces and concludes the video. Later the family visits a shopping mall where a Thomas the Tank Engine children’s ride stands in the entrance. They encounter the same music now amplified from a large-scale, threedimensional, replica engine. During the midday mealtime, a toy Thomas sits on the table and Jessica’s meal includes luncheon meat picturing the Engine’s face. As Arthur (2005, p. 167) has suggested, these intertextual connections between different media permeated by the same characters both absorb and bestow significance. One of the challenges for theorizing some contemporary musical practices in early childhood is to recognize that music is embedded in these kinds of multimedia arrays (Cook, 1998), in which it blends or blurs with visual forms on screen or page, sounds and speech, and material objects. All this is further confounded when the imagery springs out of the video to morph into other forms during the day – even edible ones – and the music is sometimes there too and sometimes not. And it is even more complex when you consider that children are engaging multimodally with multimedia in interaction with family members whose participation is also multifaceted – and permeated and nuanced by family dynamics. The participation of Juanita’s father, Cesar, is central to this next example. Peru In the morning, while still in her bedroom but up and dressed, Juanita’s father has brought in the CD player to play popular versions of traditional Peruvian café dances. Cesar encourages her to dance as the CD begins by modelling dance movements and by words of encouragement. Juanita adopts an upright body stance and arm positions which we would infer to be characteristic of this dance style and circles slowly or moves her upper body with the music as it plays. Her generously long trousers and the padded surface of the bed impede her movements a little. As one track finishes and the next is about to begin, her father calls ‘Bravo! Bravo!’ and claps. Juanita claps with him and smiles. He

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then moves forward, quite suddenly, and takes both her hands. He chants ‘Alla vi, alla voom, alla, vi va voom, T ra, ra, ra! T ra, ra, ra!’ and as he does so swings her arms rhythmically to fit the chant. It is a kind of celebratory chant. This episode of dancing was one of the longest and most formalized we observed during the days, but there were many other instances of children dancing to recorded music. Here Juanita is imitating dance movements modelled for her. In other examples, the children re-enacted movements that they either learnt from their daycare, as we learnt was the case in Italy and the US, or evolved in their own play. Nora’s vigorous settee bouncing, particularly since it was a child-sized piece of furniture, was unlikely to be adult-modelled – nor Beatrice’s spontaneous flopping on padded furniture to swing her legs in the air. Threaded through these examples, we noticed how padded furniture plays a part, like gym equipment, for launching or softening movement. The more formalized movements introduced, for the most part by adults, structured the girls’ body movement in time and in space. These structured movements introduce children to values of body-use commensurate with their families’ and communities’ practices. Formal learning values were inscribed in movements designed to represent the characters or meaning of words or to clap and count along with the song. Learning dance movements may connect with traditions of dancing belonging to the wider community – a hands-on-hip lilt while moving to a song in the US and, of course, Juanita’s local Peruvian dance movements. The messages of body-use may allow certain forms of physical freedom, in bouncing energetically, and constraint, in sitting quietly on a lap while watching and listening. Thus music-movements already inscribe on the children’s bodies the rhythms, gestures and comportments of their families and communities.

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Musical expressions of belonging In this final section we pick up the overall theme of a thriving child which threads through this book. We consider how the ‘ear-mindedness’ with which we approached the video data and the focus on musicality might contribute to this overall theme. We alluded in earlier discussion to the fact that the days represent just one snapshot in the history of the musical events we heard, felt and saw, that refer back to earlier occasions and imply future exchanges. The musical events, however brief, however fragmented, have a continuity, both through the history of each family, and through expanding connections with family, local and cultural traditions. Thus the musical events provided for young children might signify important continuities for the families. An interesting study of musical interactions with young children in families that have migrated to France in comparison with indigenous French families revealed disturbances in the immigrant families’ ‘communicative musicality’ (Gratier, 1999) and implied that these resulted from a loss of connection with extended family and their cultural resources. We might ponder Gratier’s implication and wonder if establishing musical ‘expressions of belonging’, as Gratier calls them, provides one important basis for children to thrive. On a more pragmatic level, we saw music being used as an active and practical resource in the parents’ management of their children and the regulation and adjustment of their social psychological, physical and emotional states (DeNora, 2000, p. 47). There were many instances where parents harnessed their own musicality or the musicality of recorded music to assist with transitions, to shift mood, energy level, style of movement and forms and levels of engagement. But this is not a passive process of the music acting upon the children as a mere stimulus, but an active and interactive process in which the children were agentive. And through these musical interactions the children were being introduced into socio-cultural ways of behaving when music is around, whether it is to sing and dance to it, to socialize with it and to relate to others through it, to use it as a resource for emotional self-regulation or to allow it to recede into a background and be largely ignored. Music, in this sense, structures behaviour and identity in families in ways that the children were absorbing and learning. So to bring our chapter towards its end, music for young children – whether we are talking about brief, made-up ditties, songs, recorded music, TV or musical toys – is a resource which in the broadest sense contains multifarious affordances to add to the many dimensions of creating a family environment where children may thrive. It is the

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flexibility of music, what Cross (2005) terms the ‘floating intentionality’, its ability to morph and mould contingently, its ability to carry multimodal meanings that are not fixed and stable, but polysemic and ever-ambiguous, which enables it to do this. Because its meanings and connotations are not fixed, but floating and unstable, it can connect with other sources of meaning and feeling and, in this process, bring about creative transformations. The dramatic, orchestral music of the children’s Disney cartoons heard in Italy and Peru may seem to be bringing a homogenous, global music into diverse homes, but its reception will be differently and creatively transformed by Beatrice and by Juanita. The phrased structures of traditional children’s song and lap-games may crop up in many of our families, but every rendition is unique; dynamically networked into one small moment in a day. Engaging with the videos with an ‘ear-mindedness’ – indeed, a multisensory approach – assisted us to develop greater sensitivity to everyday musical practices. We propose in conclusion that musical practices have a productive and creative capacity to shape body and mind, to shape relationships and to shape everyday home-based lives in ways that might sustain a reassuring continuity with society and life with small children within it. They offer a sense of stability, particularly stability over time and in place.

4 Emotional Security Catherine Ann Cameron, Ayshe Talay-Ongan, Roger Hancock and Sombat Tapanya

Juanita is tending a doll and stuffed rabbit that her aunt Lina has given her, with accompanying blankets, a ‘manta’ or colourfully woven cloth in which Peruvian mothers carry their babies, and a basket as staging for make-believe baby-minding, while Lina and the other adult female family members attend to routine household duties.

Juanita shows her familiarity with the format for infant care as she gently positions the doll on the blankets and sooths them when her aunt tells her they are crying.

Her understanding of routines for baby-soothing and nurturance are both explicitly being instructed (‘Careful, Juanita, pick it up’) as well as implicitly modelled for her as to how to hold and cover the ‘baby’. Juanita in her turn demonstrates her acquaintance with techniques for imparting sources of emotional security to a small being. In this chapter, we focus on elements of emotional security as evidenced in warm interactions between children and their environments, including caregivers. Having engaged with the data from a variety of perspectives, together and separately, we have come to focus particularly on what we call three pathways that we have observed that could contribute to, or facilitate, developing emotional security. One of these is the gentle 77

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pats, soothing touches, and other physical affection-giving transactions we observed between the children and their caregivers. Another path relates to their contented sharing of swings and hammocks and the rocking activities incorporated therein (Cameron, Tapanya & Gillen, 2006). A third source of comfort resides in children’s intimate geographies (Hancock & Gillen, 2007), the means they engage in and the ways they construct safe and secure spaces for their work, which of course is play. One of our aims is to demonstrate how engaging with the day in the life data has led us to reflect on the development of theories relating to emotional security. We begin by overviewing a particularly persistent and valuable, although not uncontested, theoretical perspective on relational security in early development.

Secure relationships in early development: An attachment theoretical perspective When Bowlby (1952) first articulated a theory of relationship security, it was based upon study of children whose negative early experiences had serious deleterious effects on development. His personal experiences, clinical observations of disturbed children, his deep respect for Lorenz and Tinbergen’s ethological studies of avian imprinting (birds’ early attachments to salient interactants), and for Hinde and Harlow’s primate research, convinced him to posit that humans as well as birds and other organisms have inbuilt drives for ensuring that their own basic early security needs be met (Holmes, 1993; Van Dijken, 1998; Van Dijken, Van der Veer, Van IJzendoorn, & Kuipers, 1998). These needs are met via emotional strivings for intimacy, and Bowlby suggested that these mechanisms intersect with the responsiveness of primary caregivers to protect them from lasting psychological and physiological damage caused by their early vulnerability. As a pediatric psychiatrist, Bowlby focused first upon the psychopathogenic influences of unmet relational needs, but Ainsworth, a student and associate of Bowlby’s, extended his work – as have other developmental psychologists – to include the development of positive, secure, early experiences as well as experiences of insufficient or distorted early relationships (Ainsworth, 1967; Bretherton, 1992; Main, 1990; Mayhew, 2006). A major premise of attachment theory is not simply the protection that early secure relationships provide for children in building representations of healthy relationships and mental models of self and others that are sources of emotional strength in times of trouble. It also

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posits that early relationships provide the young child with emotional strength and a notable drive to explore the environment, a critical factor in healthy social and cognitive growth (Bowlby, 1988). Subsequent research has additionally confirmed that biology is not destiny. Positive early experiences are neither necessary nor sufficient precursors of later thriving; however, favourable experiences are potential building blocks for later well being. Furthermore, we now know that early security does not ensue from a single early relationship but rather can be successfully built out of positive experiences with a number of sensitive, responsive caregivers. The keys are sensitivity and responsivity in caregiving and mutuality in interactivity. The concept of attachment security and the hypothesized impacts of early intimate experience on later thriving have not gone uncontested. Many behaviourally oriented researchers saw the concept of attachment as poorly operationalized and unnecessarily psychodynamic for use as a scientific explanatory principle or even as a valid rationale for clinical intervention (Bandura, 1997; Cameron, 2008); and, furthermore, see Cleary, 1999 on feminist concerns; Harris, 1998 challenges the notion of parental relevancy; and Kagan, 1994 on the fallacies of infant determinism. A massive search for evidence for and against the application of the notion in the past five decades, has, however, yielded strong though not necessarily incontrovertible evidence in its favour. Cassidy and Shaver’s comprehensive Handbook of Attachment (2nd ed., 2008) of the accumulated empirical research on relational security is measured and persuasive. It is currently understood that early attachment relations do not spell lifelong determination and can be ameliorated by later life experiences, and that relational styles are not rigidly handed down from one generation to the next; that is, familial relational patterns can be and are sometimes broken. More important than one’s personal history is how one understands, integrates and interprets it. Recently, attachmentbased psychotherapeutic interventions have begun to be developed and evaluated, and some have been found to be effective, especially with youth who had experienced early and severe developmental relational disruptions (e.g., Moretti & Holland, 2006; Cicchetti & Toth, 1998). Additionally, Van IJzendoorn and Sagi-Schwartz (2008) have examined the pervasiveness of the phenomenon globally, including diverse patterns of caregiving in different social communities. They reported that enculturated relational characteristics found in the community settings that promote early experiences of intimacy affected socio-emotional

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development that plays out not simply in affective health but also in cognitive and social strength.

Emotional security and resilience Research on positive development and resiliency over the past 40 years or so has also confirmed the importance in the early years of sensitive, responsive, and reliable caregiving for the exploratory impulses so critical to healthy development (for summaries of this work see Garmezy, 1991; Luthar, 2003; Cicchetti & Becker, 2000; Masten, 2001; Werner & Smith, 1992, 2001). Although much of the early research focused upon psychosocial issues of western psychology, recent cross-cultural and cultural approaches broaden understanding of the diversity of situational particularities of daily experiences that both challenge and support emotional security in context. The construct of resilience seeks to encompass positive outcomes in spite of experiential adversity. Indomitability in the face of daunting odds (Masten, 2001) has been seen as not simply unexpected favourable outcomes, but as a function of interactions between environmental good fortune along with personal and interpersonal strengths. But this notion of resilience has also not developed uncontested. While factors coalescing to support ‘invincibility’ (Werner & Smith, 1982), favourable outcomes, and contexts for surmounting adversity, have all been explored, the nature, boundaries and implicated processes involved in resiliency continue to be questioned. Evidence from research on resilience, focussing on strength-based analyses and positive features of the environment has convinced many investigators and intervention workers that a focus on enhancement of these is relevant to emotional security as well as social and cognitive outcomes (see for example Cameron, Ungar & Liebenberg, 2007; Learner & Benson, 2003). For those individuals who experience adversity in later life, early secure relationships can be experienced as a buffer in the face of that adversity, just as early insecurity in the relationship can be one risk factor in vulnerability to untoward interpersonal life events. Further, and of critical importance in our study, recent cross-cultural investigations confirm the ubiquity of the impacts of diverse demonstrations of sensitive associations between young children and their caregivers in widely diverse cultural contexts and manifestations (Van der Horst, Van der Veer, & Van IJzendoorn, 2007; Van IJzendoorn & Sagi-Schwartz, 2008). Emotional styles have been assessed for research purposes through the classic protocols developed by Ainsworth (Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, & Wall, 1978) and many others, but there are complex issues

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to be considered in the application of such taxonomies, such as those carefully described by Thompson (2008). Resilience, as a hypothesized process, being more dependant upon a broader set of cultural experiences beyond intimate relationships, such as more distal relationships, socioeconomic, educational and secular factors, does not lend itself to such operationalized definitions, and depends upon a broader range of factors present in diverse cultural contexts. Thus, a critical aspect in our project was the exploration of the families’ understandings and definitions of a secure, strong and thriving child, and the everyday initiatives they undertook to instantiate and support these beliefs in diverse settings against the backdrop of this extensive literature on security and thriving.

Parents’ many voices on attributes of thriving We interviewed the families before and after our filmed day and asked them to elaborate on their views of the factors that contribute to healthy development in children and on their notion of a thriving child. Views of the parents in the different family contexts on their conceptions of a flourishing child indicated interesting commonalities as well as variations. It is important to say that we realize that the views expressed were in a very real sense co-constructed in dialogue between local investigators and the families (see Chapter 1). So, unlike expectations of results of a standardized interview protocol, we recognize that although we did indeed operate with a semi-structured schedule, the outcomes of the discussion are not most usefully treated as exactly equivalent answers but rather as participatory interactions. Catherine, the mother in Canada felt that many parents she had come across gave their children false expectations about life and that she wanted her daughter Nora to be realistic in her goals. ‘Let her have confidence and be content with herself,’ she said, and added that ‘We all have our faults, we just have to work with them.’ For her, explicit explanations of Nora’s wants, desires or problems appeared to be significant: ‘I would find it easier if [my child] was more direct and specific in telling me her feelings.’ For this mother, it also appeared important that her daughter fit in and be adaptable, but not be introverted, and she felt Nora needed ‘to learn to be independent and stand up for herself.’ Catherine also felt that kindness was a very important attribute to cultivate in her daughter, as it was ‘key to happiness,’ but a difficult and abstract process to learn because its rewards were not readily visible.

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However, she felt that ‘you have to learn that there is a goal and that you do get a reward for being kind and that you have done your best’. She also felt that equipping Nora mentally and cognitively was very important, and providing her daughter with the opportunity to choose things that she enjoys doing like music and painting, she felt, stimulated such development. The parents in Italy explained that the attributes of a hardy child did not come with ‘recipes’. They said they believed that parents’ presence, modelling and sharing life experiences provided security over time and were fundamental. They asserted, ‘When it is possible it is very important to do things all three [two parents and child] together. … Surely we can’t give her the best directions, but nevertheless we think we are able to give her our good principles and this is a good starting point.’ Both parents thought that personal disposition and character were important as an attribute, and that Beatrice had ‘a very strong character.’ Lucia and Claudio also felt that relationships with others were very significant as building blocks in a thriving child, and they created opportunities for their daughter to meet and spend time with others. They noted that Beatrice exhibited an ‘evolution’ after she started attending nursery school in this respect, and that they had consciously decided that she go to day-care instead of being taken care of only at home, as this experience afforded her opportunities to build up relationships. Her mother also added that there must be a balance between a child’s needs and parents’ needs. The mother in the UK summed up her views on the development of healthy children with a bent towards their inborn traits in a somewhat individualised view: ‘They are their own little people, they come out that way. You can trim them a little bit – nature vs. nurture – look at boy/girl twins growing up in same environment but they are utterly different.’ The family in Peru in contrast preferred to take a step back from direct comments on their own child’s traits and expressed more of an emphasis on spiritual and moral values in general. They were concerned with a relative lack of religious emphasis in the lives of modern families and children, and they believe that neither home nor school promotes these values anymore. They felt that the parents of the previous generation were much more rigorous in this respect and that there is: ‘something missing now: the belief in God, our creator, which keeps families really united.’ Juanita’s aunt Lina further felt that while helping children cognitively and intellectually was important in school, there also needed to be a ‘course to help children with their emotions.’

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In Thailand the local researcher used the term ‘strong, desirable child’, which encompassed the overall physical strength as well as emotional strength of the child in questioning the family. Caregivers responded by identifying a number of dimensions to this strength. The responses of the family to what they deemed to be a desirable, hence strong child, they felt, included such attributes as to be ‘obedient when taught, not stubborn, and good, strong and healthy.’ Mother Siriwan added that a strong child should be confident and stay with the family, while the grandmother felt that these attributes included being ‘self-reliant and (being able to) wash clothes, take care of herself and to cook.’ Elisabeth, the mother in the USA, thought that the major forces behind a child’s healthy development were education, along with love and confidence from parents, who would foster the child’s independence to discover personal interests. It may be noteworthy that this mother, a psychologist, thought nurture was important, but felt that basic differences in personalities also existed from the beginning. Her observations were also somewhat individualized yet at the same time with a strong consideration of qualities of a supportive environment. She thought that the process of building a thriving child included ‘lots of activity, plenty of toys and books available and used in everyday life; education in diverse environments, and quality time with family. Child care providers that are first rate are also important.’ In describing her daughter Katy, Elisabeth said, ‘When she walks down, in front of the house and she’s got her shoulders back and she’s just, you know, her arms are swinging and then she’s just got this sense of like, “I can do this” … a confidence and a real strength, an inner strength that’s manifested physically I think. So that to me is a strong child.’ In Turkey, the conversation between the researchers and family focused on a general discussion as to the forces behind healthy development in children. The parents identified as important: nurturing parents, having choices, having access to quality primary care during parents’ workdays, and having parental attitudes that permit children to experiment, discover and explore – although temperament too plays a role. Mental and physical health and happiness of children are of primary importance. The parents stressed confidence, self-esteem, being at peace with oneself and with others, and having a positive view of the world as being very important, and they expressed their wish that their children were driven not by fear but love and positive motivation. With particular reference to the concept of a resilient child, mother Nurbike described a child who, ‘could find her own way; a child who could manage her own problems.’ Her father, Kemal described a resilient child as, ‘a child

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who can get up when she falls, or explore the optimum ways of being able to get up on her own.’ This brief contextualized review indicates that while there seemed to be a significant overlap in parents’ understanding of a flourishing child across our families, attributes valued in each individual family community were also in evidence. In every context, there were opportunities during the days for the functioning of what Bronfenbrenner (1979, p. 58) referred to as ‘joint activity dyads’, which are partnerships between the children and others who, when operating in synchrony, not just in physical presence, created an ‘especially favorable condition’ for the development of positive socio-emotional outcomes. It is to such synchronous dyadic events that we now turn.

A closer look: Pathways to building security; swinging and rocking, gentle pats, and secure places Upon initially viewing our extensive video data involving the day in the life of the seven toddlers, we were struck by the pervasive experience in all settings of soothing sessions of swinging and rocking: in hammocks, swings, rocking chairs and even in calming car rides. At one time or another in our participants’ busy day, they each had an experience with one or other family member of quiet soothing rocking, sometimes after a turbulent experience, sometimes after a nap; sometimes these interludes were initiated by the child and sometimes by the parent without a precursor that was obvious to the observers. What most frequently occurred immediately subsequent to the comforting interlude was a period of re-energized activity, however. In this chapter we provide three examples of these peaceful rocking sessions. A second systematic iterative examination of the days brought to light the ubiquity of gentle pats and strokes that during the interchanges between the children and their interactants similarly greased the wheels of the exchange and also helped the children’s transition from one psychosocial state to another. The pats and strokes provided encouragement when there was a certain hesitation in moving forward; or they were administered subsequent to a disappointment or sad passage in the day; or they were dispensed after a job well done; or they might even have been a way of straightening out dishevelled hair; but all seemed to be accepted as supportive indices of affectionate encouragement by the children. Furthermore, many occasions were observed of reciprocal patting or stroking and even of the children passing the similar affective

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mood on to a favoured doll, or stuffed animal. We provide glimpses of three of these transactions. Thirdly, while considering the potential sources of the evident selfconfidence and emotional security of each of these thriving little girls, the fact that they seemed to have a great mastery of their environments during play at home became very salient to us. We have previously written about the children’s uses of their home spaces as loci for rich exploratory play from a social geographic perspective (Hancock & Gillen, 2007). In this chapter we revisit some of those observations in order to reveal what seem to us the uses of spaces for further security strivings, indeed what were described as children’s ‘safe places’ (see Fry, 1987 in Hancock & Gillen). We make the case for this aspect of the children’s ecology as being yet another affective ‘root for wings’ (Cameron, Ungar, & Liebenberg, 2007) fundamental to contextual exploration and mastery. Our methodology, and particularly its visual dimensions, facilitated our observation of elements of experiences that might demarcate certain pervasive characteristics, which, in turn, could contribute to healthy and resilient growth. We observed the children in their family contexts in the wide range of locations not to make cross-cultural comparisons, as we explained in Chapter 1, but rather to document the multiplicity of experiences that can be seen as supportive of security strivings. In each location, we endeavoured to explore the perspectives of the parents and extended-family members with respect to a flourishing child as well as those of the local investigators. These views guided our observations of the filmed daily practices and interchanges. While our selection included North American and Western European children – of course, as discussed above, much research in western developmental psychology and education is rooted in observations in these communities alone – we also gained essential insights from families in Peru, Thailand, and Turkey. These days in the lives of toddlers in diverse locations provided us with an enormous amount of data to explore in inspecting and analyzing experiences that might give them ‘roots for wings’.

Swings, hammocks, and rocking chairs In Canada, Nora was a member of a small nuclear family household that comprised a mother, father, and younger sibling, living in a rural eastern maritime community. The family lived in a detached house with a large surrounding garden. The child’s day was spent almost entirely in the company of her mother and infant sister. Nora, at twoand-a-half, was recruited by the Canadian team from participants in a

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study focusing on children with early graphic representational skills. She enjoyed a considerable amount of time, in excess of 40 minutes that day, working at an easel exploring the colours and shapes, painting and drawing and attracting her mother’s attention to her work as she proceeded. There were purpose-built, child-scaled, children’s furniture and artefacts in the family sitting room including small chairs, a table and a sofa. There were many children’s toys, and even a play slide in the sitting room. It is notable, then, that within this setting so furnished with child-oriented play artefacts, the most extended game engaged in that day was an innovation created by the child in the kitchen in which she stepped into found objects and cooking pots and insisted she was ‘stuck in the mud.’ This activity, repeated many, many times, over more than 20 minutes, involved attracting her mother’s attention to ‘rescuing’ her from the ‘mud’ until she once again found herself ‘stuck’ and in ‘need’ of further physical contact. The pleasure shared in this humorous, affectionate interchange was enormous. Nora’s mother Catherine spent the majority of the day seeking to achieve her housekeeping goals while attending in tandem to the competing needs of her two young children. In the sitting room there was a rocking chair that the mother and both daughters shared on several occasions. However, in each instance, the quality of rocking and sharing seemed not to afford sustenance to Nora, the older child, as her younger sibling was positioned between the mother and the toddler. However, a clearly mutually comfortable period of this child’s day for Catherine and Nora occurred when the younger sibling was napping. Mother and older daughter carefully donned sunscreen and went to an outdoor slide and swing set in the back yard of their home.

In Canada, after the child ensured that her mother was positioned on the swing on which she wanted her to be, and after the two of them got in synchrony, swinging side-by-side, both partners at last seemed to find a harmony that allowed them to engage in a close exchange and a calm mutuality.

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This mother’s stated priority was for her child to be kind, independent and sociable, and the value she placed upon autonomy striving was a very powerful influence on this parent’s discussion of her socialization practices with her 30-month-old. This autonomy seemed to the mother to be best reinforced by the social skills she strove to encourage in her child. The child seemed to rise to her mother’s expectations, but during the day we observed, it was during the intimate swinging session that the child seemed to achieve unequivocal mutuality with her mother. Many of the child’s wishes for social interaction and attention earlier in the day were made in the context of bids for the mother’s attention in contrast to the more obviously immediate demands of her younger sibling. But it was this opportunity for a mutually achieved more peaceful synchrony that seemed particularly capable of sustaining them both. In Thailand, Gai lived next door to a family residential compound near a major northern city. She lived in a modest home with two parents and one older sibling. The family compound included a dwelling that housed her maternal grandparents, and a larger house that accommodated her aunt and uncle and several cousins, all on extensive grounds. The latter more prosperous home and its many amenities were available to the entire family during our observations. The television set in it was accessible to all, and a naptime was observed in that house as well. While the house of our participating child and her parents just adjoined the compound, the three homes and grounds seemed open to the child. Of significant note here is the extensive number of swings and hammocks on the property. Indeed, there were six partly sheltered by several tropical fruit-bearing trees: mango, coconut, jackfruit, and longan. It was tempting to select passages of the child’s day when she peacefully rode round on her tricycle, as she seemed reflectively to enjoy her own company in that activity (and her grandmother confirmed that she seemed particularly happy on her trike). However, during the hurly-burly of the day, it was the respites that she spent in swings and hammocks that most consistently seemed to sustain her. She swung alongside mother, grandmother, aunt, and cousins as the day progressed, but when tired she seemed to find particular comfort in the company of her mother. The rhythmic and auditory aspects of the swinging were enlarged upon in Chapter 3 on musicality. During the swinging time her mother also seemed at peace, a theme to which we will return. Now this child’s day was in no way sedentary. She rode the aforementioned tricycle, no small feat for a two-and-a-half-year-old. She followed

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The child and her parent seemed to achieve particular synchrony while swinging together in a hammock. Often these respites succeeded a stormy passage of events that were in turn usually succeeded by renewed vigorous positive activity, but, for a few moments, the rest achieved a common space of mutual alliance.

cousins in cooking, shop-keeping games and pretence play, engaged in television viewing, kept active watch on a frog found in grandfather’s shoe, and followed other interests. Many of the playthings she engaged with were natural artefacts of her environment. There were few plastic purpose-built toys in this situation. The day’s activities were varied and full until her father’s return from work, when the immediate family’s television set was turned on and all sat quietly viewing it. Mother and grandmother’s avowed major goals as expressed during interview in raising this little child were those of obedience, compliance, confidence, and of maintaining family connections, but there were few instances of explicit compliance or obedience demands. It is interesting that the caregivers that day most commonly urged her to cooperate with parental game plans for the day, and she was also quickly soothed when distraught and encouraged to engage in positive interactions with sibling and cousins. Much mention was made of present-day parents not having enough time with their children, but it was also acknowledged that the grandparents had worked long hours in their day, so children had not seen much of their parents in times past either. They also observed that family cohesion was successfully promoted in spite of this impediment. In the UK, Jessica’s family constellation consisted of a mother, father, twin sibling and baby sister, with the support of two sets of grandparents. As each set of grandparents was retired, they made themselves freely available for service in childcare for the twins and their closely spaced younger sibling. Although the grandparents did not live permanently in the commodious home of the nuclear family, one set of grandparents stayed in the family home from Monday to Friday every other week.

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Interspersed were weekly stays by the other set of grandparents, such that one or the other set of grandparents was consistently at hand for assistance with the children on weekdays. The grandparents we saw read, rocked, played, and accompanied the children and their mother to shopping malls and children’s attractions, and were an intimate part not simply of activities but also in discussions of their socialization and rearing. Their professional backgrounds in medicine seemed to contribute to their ability and confidence to be so involved. These grandparents drew on gendered distinctions to identify differences between the twins, viewing Matthew as physically stronger than Jessica, for example, (although the local investigators could not perceive a difference). During this day, Jessica participated in a diverse range of activities facilitated by the adults, many of which might be deemed directly educational in purpose. We highlight for this chapter the repeated, soothing reading of storybooks on grandmother’s lap in a comfortable rocking chair that is also highlighted in the following chapter. Having told the researchers that she had anticipated that this familiar activity would be called for during the natural run of the day, maternal grandmother Margaret had rehearsed paraphrasing some stories with that in mind, hoping to maximize the children’s enjoyment and appreciation of the stories. This was clearly a familiar and favourite pursuit for the child. She sat comfortably in the rocker on Margaret’s lap, casually and comfortably maintaining ongoing activities such as eating a snack and drinking from a sipping cup throughout the readings, and yet was fully attentive to the story, anticipating familiar phrases and enjoying accompanying vocalized sound effects grandmother made.

The story-reading, while the child was clearly engaged, was also a time of comforting, calming, stimulation, almost amounting to a lullaby interval in the child’s day, serving the functions we have already observed with swings and hammocks: soothing mutuality, a respite and an opportunity to regroup before a new activity.

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Having been convinced that while children are indeed, ‘their own little people,’ the impacts of nurturance on their differences were also obvious to their mother. The family’s observations of the target child included seeing her as uniquely very mobile with good physical awareness, and even seeming to be an exuberant child. Her mother reported that she encouraged Jessica’s independence: ‘When you’ve got three of them, the more they do themselves the better: she wants to do everything herself.’ Her grandmother indicated that grandparents and even a great-grandparent were important in their young children’s lives, an instantiation of this is evident in the omnipresence and comforting support of the grandparents during this day, although it is important to remember (as we discussed in Chapter 2) that being filmed may have increased the extent to which the grandparents felt they should be available for support.

Gentle pats and strokes Simple touches were employed by family members to facilitate emotion regulation during and following challenging transitions between activities. In Turkey, we observed Kemal gently, and very briefly, touching Selin’s extending hand, as he directs her toward a new activity when she had worn him out. Selin and Kemal had been playing a jumping game on the parents’ bed. Her father is lying face down, while Selin is on her feet on the bed. Kemal’s ‘hop, hop, hop, hoppa’ signals jumping-prompts which result in her kneeling and prone falling on his back at ‘hoppa’. She proceeds to ride on his back pony-style, and checks with the cameraperson in a triumphant gaze backwards. Kemal rises and the jumping game resumes. Kemal is now in ‘I’m gonna getcha’ posture, while Selin squeals in delight. Selin runs to her father with open arms, and father and daughter hug and tumble onto the bed. Kemal starts lifting Selin as high as his arms allow, and proceeds with variations of the activity; Selin is giggling and laughing. They both rise: Selin lifts her arms to Kemal, says ‘hoppa’ and climbs the bed again. Kemal is beginning to tire, but cannot refuse Selin’s open-armed gesture that conveys ‘come’ as she verbalizes it: ‘Gel.’ Father and daughter fall into an embrace again, and the jumping game continues with two kisses from Kemal to Selin as he hugs her. Jumping, hugs, and rolling on the bed continue; her father, however, reiterates he is fatigued; then she thinks she has almost tempted him back to the game as he comes out to the hallway. Kemal lingers at the kitchen door as he asks her mother and sister what they are doing; they are busy ‘cooking’ on the floor.

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Selin invites her father to play in Turkey. Kemal had declared ‘I’m feeling tired now’ and walked away. Selin gets up and goes to the living room and invites him by extending her hand to him to continue their game. Winnicott (1971) highlights the way in which play for a young child often involves much embodied excitement. Maintaining this level of physical exertion can be hard for an adult.

Selin enters the kitchen, sits on the floor with her mother and sister and joins this activity, and carries it for the next minute until she gets distracted by the sound of the piano; then she gets up to join her father in the living room by the piano.

We observed a readiness and spontaneity in the children, often showing the ability to move from one pursuit to another with relative ease. It was as though simply being alongside an adult with a joint involvement was, in itself, secure-making. It was, of course, important too in terms of receiving support for intentions.

Selin seems to love the jump and rough-and-tumble game with her father, as they sustain this activity again for several minutes. Her father similarly seems to thoroughly enjoy playing physically with her, and this becomes an occasion for closeness with many hugs and kisses. As it is not possible for Kemal to keep up with the stamina of a twoand-a-half-year-old, he finally terminates the activity. Yet Selin seems to take this without distress, without words of protest, whimpering, crying, or having a tantrum. Although she makes an unsuccessful attempt to engage her father again, she joins the cooking activity in the kitchen

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with interest and pleasure. Indeed, she seems to have the assurance that she and her father will play again in the future. She operates from that security, and makes her adjustments to the transition almost effortlessly. She is able to self-regulate, adapt to frustration and disruption, and resumes her contact with the father with no signs of anger or disappointment with him soon after. Has she shown him empathy for his fatigue? Has the secure relationship allowed her the autonomy to join another activity, albeit after attempts of resuming the interrupted one? The fact that she does not exhibit distress is indicative of the fact that she accepts transitions and self-regulates to maintain her homeostasis. Another child of her age might have reacted differently. It seems that the affection conveyed by the physical proximity, augmented by multiple opportunities for hugs and kisses, assist her to remain ‘centred.’ Selin seems to demonstrate significant reciprocity, initiative, autonomy and adaptation following an intensely joyous round of rough-and-tumble play. Of note also is her lack of fear or apprehension regarding being lifted up and other acrobatics she shares with Kemal, literally demonstrating ‘a child who could get up when she fell,’ a descriptor used by him in unpacking his understanding of a resilient child. Similarly, in Thailand, a very brief interlude moves Gai from one emotional state to another. Gai gets little tickles from her mother while in the hammock to move her along to another activity. After a long period of time with a frog in grandfather’s shoe, when Gai’s mood alternated between excitement about the frog’s brief, dynamic, appearance and frustration after it was put back in a shoe and refused to come out again, she must have been tired when she reached up to mother who was sitting in a hammock and asked to be picked up. Gai is rewarded with a five-minute snuggle with Siriwan in the hammock, complete with gentle patting on her bottom accompanied by a short lullaby. They also chatted about Gai’s father’s return from work many times as if they were expecting him to show up any minute, although in fact his return time is still distant. After over five minutes in the hammock with her mother, Gai was put down and encouraged to ride her tricycle once again. She refused and demanded to get back in the hammock. When mother complied and lifted her back up, she waited only a few seconds and asked mother to get out of the hammock so she could be alone. Her mother granted her wish, stepped aside, and arranged Gai in a comfortable position in the hammock. After that Gai asked mother to push her, and Siriwan complied. Gai was a little unsettled at first, but when her mother added a bit of tickling to her swinging the hammock and Gai started to giggle

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happily. These gentle tickles seemed to provide a transition between an unpleasurable state to one of comfort and pleasure. The figure below focuses on another context for touching that aims to reassure Gai.

In Thailand, Gai is gently stroked by her mother. Gentle touching served to enable Gai to manage more confidently and securely the transition from partial sleep to waking up.

In the USA, Katy and her family had just finished eating dinner. Katy has eaten well on her own and her mother has picked her up and carried her to a washroom sink to wash up before bed. Katy’s mother, Elisabeth, washes her daughter’s face and brushes her teeth, and lets Katy have a go, meanwhile stroking Katy’s head and running her fingers through her hair. This transition appears to be a familiar one for Katy and she accepts her mother’s wish to take a leading role at this point in the day. As mother wets the face cloth, Katy takes it upon herself to assist in the process. The face-washing is followed by teeth-brushing and mother intervenes to improve upon the efficiency of the process, and then Katy is encouraged to continue with her version of the bedtime job. Here, Elisabeth simply plays a supportive presence in the activity and so engages herself, as she has commonly done throughout the day stroking Katy’s head and running her fingers through her hair, apparently with no cosmetic purpose, but rather as a proprioceptive token of her supportive presence.

This hair-stroking seems a familiar experience for the child, and she accepts the warm gesture and propels herself forward to the next stage in

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the process, announcing, ‘It’s time for bed!’ She proactively proceeds upstairs for the next steps in that evening routine, which encompasses almost an hour for completing the business of the day: changing into night clothes, arranging her cot, ensuring that all involved have a doll to cuddle, settling down, book reading with both parents and patting her dolls and animals, and thus moving towards a transition to sleep. All this seems like a family routine entirely and reciprocally anticipated by all. So from dinner table to lights out, Katy expects numerous closures of her daily rounds. Either in spite of being tired, or because she has not the energy to protest, – and we elect to interpret her being agreeable rather than her being weary – she nonetheless regulates her own emotionality in this collaboration. While at the same time engaging in all the shut-down behaviours from cleaning up from the day, reviewing and in some case revisiting favourite play activities, she engages positively and actively in her sleep preparations. Katy pats and rocks her teddy bear as she gets ready for sleep. During the settling process, she repeats an action she has played out several times during her day. She frequently and nonchalantly picks up a doll or stuffed animal and pats as if to comfort it. At this point, she is almost ready for bed. She picks up a stuffed bear, and pats and rocks it, having just previously patted a doll and reminded herself not to take her clothes off in the night, just as she may have been warned on previous occasions by her parents. Children reciprocate nurturing, consoling, rocking and affirming touches with themselves and others. They even draw upon and extend affectionate exchanges between their caregivers and themselves towards a toy such as a doll or a stuffed animal (see Chapter 6 and Cameron & Pinto, 2009). The definition of resilience has as its cornerstone a positive adaptation within the context of adversity (Luthar, Cicchetti, & Becker, 2000). Although these little girls have yet to experience identifiable adversity, these instances of supportive, consoling behaviours being used by the child towards herself and her toys seem significant in contributing to the establishment of emotional self-regulation, confident expectations for self and others, and a positive adaptation template for future emotional engagements.

Safe and secure places In each location each child gravitated to domestic spaces that became secure personalized places to play that provided them with a stage for demonstrating and exercising mastery of their worlds.

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Peru After carrying her from her bedroom where she had been dancing on her bed, Juanita’s father puts her down in her family grocery shop, and she confidently makes her way through the shop to a low wooden gate placed between the counter and a pillar. Her parents have positioned the gate to prevent her going around into the serving area. Cesar asks Juanita’s six-year-old cousin Ana to watch over her. Juanita squats down in a corner (formed by the pillar and the gate) and plays with her stick’s rubbery attachment that earlier held an inflated balloon.

The corner appears to provide Juanita with a secure base within the context of the food shop. From this base, she ventures out into the shop’s more public areas.

Juanita often leaves her corner to visit known areas of the shop. There seem to be established patterns of movement – practiced, familiar pathways around the shop that are often repeated. Cresswell (2004, drawing on Seamon, 1980) suggests that ‘mobilities of bodies combine in space and time to produce … a feeling of belonging within the rhythm of life in place’ (p. 34). A further favourite place for Juanita is the public entrance to the shop. Here she seems to have established a second base consisting of two white chairs that are positioned close to the entrance – a base too for adults to watch the passing world. Juanita places her Juanita has established her own routinised ways of moving around those areas in the shop permitted to her, and her dancing movements are part of this. Seamon (1980) considers such emplaced habitual movements to be ‘place ballets’, which produce a feeling of belonging and attachment to a specific location.

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favourite play objects on these chairs – for instance, an empty box which she uses as a pretence cell phone. There is much to monitor on the pavement and the road but Juanita also has her own pursuits, one of which is dancing to the music played in the shop. She dances in a confident and self-contained way, much as she did in her bedroom before her father carried her to the shop. USA After the toileting and bed preparations described above, Katy’s father Fred is attempting the initiation of her bedtime story reading routine but Katy is having none of it. She announces that she needs to rock her baby to sleep and sing her a lullaby. Fred encourages her to sing but she pauses for a moment and then says, ‘I need to go to work.’ She picks up a purse and says ‘Bye’ to her father and makes off down a corridor (about six metres long), which connects the bedroom to the playroom.

Katy is off to work with a purse full of crayons. A corridor can be a connecting route way – a space that facilitates a journey, even an adventure. Through play and drama, Katy imbues this space with personalized meanings.

Once at the playroom Katy picks up a second purse and carries both purses back down the corridor to her bedroom. Her father follows. On arrival at the bedroom, she turns around and goes back along the corridor to the playroom and Fred says, ‘What’s the plan, Katy?’ She says nothing but when she gets to the playroom picks up some pencils and puts them in one of the purses. Katy then asks Fred to hold a purse. He asks her what it contains. She explains that it’s her work but Fred suggests it’s not time for work, it’s time for bed. He asks her if she wants to read Go Dog Go! (Eastman, 1961). As he speaks, she continues to put some pencils into one of the purses and then asks for his help to do this. She then goes back down the corridor with one purse and her father follows with the other. On the way down, Katy turns around as though to go back to the playroom, but then she meets Fred closely behind her. He gives her

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the other purse and they both return to the bedroom. He suggests she can play a little longer once changed into her pyjamas. She walks the baby and stroller along the corridor to the playroom. As before, Fred follows behind. Once in the playroom, Katy picks up a large bag of crayons (filled by her earlier in the evening). She then pushes the stroller with the baby back along the corridor at the same time, and, with some difficulty, carries the large bag back towards the bedroom. Her father stands in the corridor watching, patiently. As she proceeds along the corridor, she drops the heavy bag and decides to drag it and the stroller for the final few feet to the bedroom. Once there, her father puts the bag and stroller to one side and Katy voluntarily sits on her bed, ready for a story. There is an intense determination to bring the bag and stroller along the corridor and back to the bedroom. Success in achieving this seems to be part of the satisfactory completion of the journey to and from work. Katy’s play appears, helping her to make meaning of and build up intimate connections within the corridor as an available domestic space. Italy In Chapter 3 (p. 68) above we have considered Beatrice awaking from her nap, cuddling in her mother’s lap, rhythmically singing and clapping in a mutual exchange of comfort-giving. This interaction is ultimately a launching pad for a session Beatrice has on the terrace, where she engages in water play, toy washing and caring for ‘Coccolone’, her life-sized baby doll. She collects a red plastic chair and – partly pushing, partly carrying – moves it, unassisted, to the terrace that adjoins the kitchen. Beatrice places this chair next to a low seat that is already on the balcony. She then picks up Coccolone and places her on the red plastic chair.

Beatrice sits next to the doll on a low seat. Smiling, she shuffles in her low seat to establish a suitable position and then pulls the red plastic chair and doll closer to her side as though she is place-making.

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Beatrice says ‘Nice to meet you’ and holds the doll’s hand. She is aware of the video camera at this point but not in a self-conscious way. (Beatrice’s humorous wiles with respect to this situation are taken up in Chapter 7, p. 142 below.) Lucia stimulates her play in the background, suggesting that Beatrice and her doll may need to have a nappy change. Beatrice declines. Again Beatrice takes Coccolone’s hand and repeatedly kisses the doll’s cheek. Realising that her own seat has moved a little away from the balcony railings, she stands and pushes it back to locate and better secure it. Beatrice shows considerable contentedness at being on the terrace with Coccolone, and great pleasure at managing her play and equipping the space. Sometimes she chuckles and rocks on her seat, showing high satisfaction with the way in which she has established herself in this space. Tuan writes: ‘space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value’ (Tuan, 1977, cited in Cresswell, 2004: 8). Such place-making by Juanita, Katy and Beatrice, we would argue, enable rootedness and attachment to the domestic spaces within their homes.

In conclusion In this chapter, we presented and analysed interludes in each of the children’s days, demonstrating in Thailand, Canada, and the UK, hammocks, swings, and rocking chairs respectively, although we could have represented all seven little girls in gentle soothing of this sort during her day. Likewise, we discussed ubiquitous gentle touches in Turkey, Thailand, and the USA, although, again, we could as well have presented data from all locations with respect to this soothing as well. Secure relationships were reinforced in these interchanges and these clearly secure relationships establish roots for wings with these little girls. And finally, while we reported on the children in Peru, the USA and Italy in safe and secure spaces they had created for themselves that extended their play to include a wider world than they at present inhabit, so, too, could we have described similar secure spaces in all seven children’s home environments. In fact, we could make the claim here for the utility of engagement with eating events, of joint book reading, of musicality, and symbolic representations, all addressed in separate chapters of this book, as legitimate involvements that provide sources for these youngsters of solace and engagement, which can buffer adverse experiences and console in times of distress. These were the secure bases from which the children engaged in vigorous, creative, environmental exploration, the hallmark

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of a thriving, flourishing child. It has been established in many studies that parental relationship styles are often mirrored in their children’s senses of self and others (e.g., Cowan, Cohen, Cowen, & Peterson, 1996; Goodnow, 1997). It has also been shown that while there can be considerable variation in the manner in which intimate relations unfold, depending upon the context in which a child is reared, this very wide range of locations appears to foster the sorts of intimate relationships that would be recognized across cultures as emotionally secure. The vignettes we presented demonstrate the foundations for later resilience enhanced by relational security, which seem to be evidenced by active relational engagement in the days of the toddlers we investigated in all seven family contexts.

5 Eating Julia Gillen and Roger Hancock

Given the salience of practices around eating in the socialization of young children beyond infancy, it is surprising that this area appears to have been neglected in childhood studies. Calls for a broader approach to studies of children’s lives and socialization than that traditionally pursued in Western psychology are not, of course, new. However, as Nsamenang (1992) argues, it remains particularly true in the discipline of educational studies inhabited by the authors of this chapter that some aspects of everyday life remain curiously occluded from academic attention, maybe owing to the dominant focus of attention on the study of the individual in psychological research. Detailed perusal of the video and other qualitative data in our study brought eating as an activity firmly in the purview of cultural practices. Although, as discussed in Chapter 1, p. 31 above and p. 109 below, we readily admit that it took us a while to recognize its true importance for our study. Eating was another family practice that revealed both child and adult agency – another potential area for the development of a ‘strong’ child. We draw upon Bourdieu’s (1977) notion of habitus – the socially acquired, embodied predispositions – in relation to the family. Bourdieu emphasized agency in his conceptualization of practices. The family habitus provides many and varied opportunities for a set of potentialities for ways of acting, but it is for the child and family to take these up, to improvise anew (Tomanovic, 2004). As we shall seek to describe in this chapter, we found much complexity in the subtle interactions and negotiations around eating practices and indeed in the literal embodiment of these. But why should practices around eating be of particular interest to those of us concerned with processes of socialization and informal learning? Working from our interest in how children shape culture and 100

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are shaped by culture, we would identify three nested reasons. The first is that in an eco-cultural approach to studying childhood, it makes sense to consider the lived realities of daily life, in their complexity and diversity (Miller, 1996; Rogoff, 2003; Fleer, Hedegaard & Tudge, 2009). Secondly, as can be confirmed in the few studies that have looked at family eating rather than mother-infant feeding practices and dialogues around them (e.g., Newson & Newson 1968; Pontecorvo, Fasulo & Sterponi, 2001), this is an aspect of life of considerable emotional significance to caregivers and their children, an arena where dramas may be played out daily. Thirdly, we wish to pursue relations between eating and play, as facets of the child’s embodied engagements with the world. So although studies of young children’s eating practices might self-evidently be of interest to nutritionists, we would suggest that this arena of study can indeed be potentially relevant to those approaching childhood studies from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives.

Towards a notion of an ‘eating event’ Eating practices are deeply cultural. Any of us who has any experience of diversity in this respect, perhaps through visiting other countries or even merely through spending time with other families (perhaps even ‘in-laws’) where the ethos is very different, can recognize this. We suggest that there is a good analogy for working out a perspective on eating as cultural practice in notions of literacy practices. As Barton and Hamilton (1998, p. 6) observe, practices are ‘what people do’ with literacy, yet they are more than simply observable instances of behaviours. Literacy practices involve values and attitudes; they include ‘shared cognitions represented in ideologies and social identities’ (p. 7). So literacy practices emerge from activities; however, they are not merely and solely comprehensible as repeated, routinized activities but also as imbued with mutually constituted understandings of values, co-constructed over time. Searching for a way to delineate the occasions we were studying, we developed the notion of an ‘eating event’ by direct association with the more familiar concept of ‘literacy event’. In her landmark study Ways with Words, Heath (1983) defines a literacy event as ‘any action sequence, involving one or more persons, in which the production and/or comprehension of print plays a role’ (p. 386). Such a conception became necessary in the field of literacy studies when it was recognized, through observational studies of literacy practices, that the narrow conceptualization of ‘reading’ as ‘decoding the text of a book’ missed a very great proportion of authentic reading and literacy learning engagements. For

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young children, for example, studies of emergent literacy find engagements with environmental print a marked and significant feature of early literacy experiences (Hall, 1987). We are also aware that Hymes makes use of the notion of a ‘linguistic event’ – an activity in which language has a fundamental, constitutive role (see Hymes, 1974). The definition of an eating event as ‘any action sequence, involving one or more persons, in which the offering and/or consumption of food plays a role’ is, we feel, useful in making a move towards detaching ourselves from preconceptions around the consumption of food firmly anchored in our personal experiences. Additionally, in adopting the notion of an ‘event’ involving food, it is important, as with literacy, (see, for instance, Hamilton, Barton & Ivanic, 1993) not to forget the extent to which eating in families is immersed in the child’s physiological experiences but also in social contexts that provide meaning. To prefigure one selected engagement below, it might be useful here to mention an earlier experience when trying out some of the ideas presented in this chapter at a university seminar. We discussed our Canadian child Nora’s engagement with a popsicle. One university professor in our audience initially rejected this segment of data as in any way relevant to any consideration of ‘eating’ as it was ‘clearly not part of a mealtime.’ He was echoing the assumption of Newson and Newson’s (1968) longitudinal study of children in an urban English community, in that, according to prevalent social values of the day, ‘eating’, after infancy, was precisely identified with ‘mealtimes’ and therefore an ‘on the hoof’ encounter with a snack food simply remained under the radar. Such a view of eating, however tenable then, would be difficult to sustain in research practice today in family settings we have observed (beyond this study) where almost all eating activities are more or less mobile and consist of what could be called ‘processed snacks’. The conceptualization of what ‘eating’ means can be recognized as a cultural practice par excellence (Briggs, 1998) and therefore we need to ensure we are open to whatever approaches are enacted in all the family settings in our study. One final reason for making use of the concept of the literacy event is in the links discovered, again when investigating spontaneous, selfmotivated literacy engagements, with play (Hall, 1987; Barton, 1994). We note in our data a similar embeddedness of eating events within play and vice versa, or at least playful dispositions and spontaneous interests, as our analyses will reveal. Our data suggests to us that the imperative to explore and play while eating is ever-present for all five children studied in this chapter. Our data makes us inclined to agree with James, Jenks and Prout (1998), who refer to ‘play as childhood

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culture’ – a separate and preferred world which can be characterized by a distinct set of cultural practices which are best described as play. The children, it seemed, were reluctant to suspend their ‘way of being’ (see Thomson & Philo, 2004) when adults were making demands upon them with regard to eating. An aspect of caregivers’ habitus, within the five families we have selected for investigation in this chapter, was a self-conscious degree of responsibility for ensuring the child’s nutrition; fundamental to the child’s surviving and thriving. Eating as a nurturing activity has been proposed as a universal aspect of caregiving across time and place (Newson & Newson, 1968), although necessarily disturbed at times of social upheaval, war and deprivation. However, as suggested above by the mention of play – the child’s domain – this aspect of caregiving (i.e. the goal of nuturance) is not shared entirely or unproblematically by the child. The young child is unlikely to have the ‘long view’ in terms of agendas of health and growth in her approach to food. Indeed, as shall be seen, she may not be ‘hungry’ as such, or to put it more accurately, perhaps, ‘hunger’ is in itself part of the family habitus, something that has to be learned as a cultural practice. After all, adults often project plans for action in a rhythmic timeframe to include breaks for sustenance and rest (Scollon, 2005). For a child absorbed in the culture of play, a degree of hunger may not be something pressing that requires immediate attention or a projected ‘break’. One may object that there must be something ‘natural’ in a feeling of hunger – but even a moment’s reflection on the claims of epigenetic theories can cause one to remember cultural practices around even the tiniest of infants (feeding ‘every four hours’, for example), so that even ‘hunger’ can be entwined with change at the social level (Richards, 1988). From a very early period in our lives, there may be inextricable links between ‘being comforted’ and eating, setting up patterns of feedback and reinforcement. So with co-occurring intentions, interests and purposes, eating events are cultural practices, sites for the exercise of agency in negotiation with others. Following this, and to give a sense of the range of eating events in our wider study, we will describe five selected sequences from our seven families presenting some interpretation of what appear to be salient features of the activities. We utilize as data the short section of video we refer to; our contextual knowledge of the entire day and its total range of eating events; our field notes; later translations of spoken language when appropriate; and material from the interviews and iterative stage discussions with adults in the five families. The selection of the sequence concerned is not motivated as being either highly exceptional

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or ‘typical’ of the eating events. As we discussed in Chapter 1, this is not our approach. We have made these selections as in some senses characteristic of our understanding of the setting, and, taken together, as indicative of our interests in processes of interaction and negotiation that we have come to perceive as illustrative of eating events. Peru

Juanita’s aunt feeds her spaghetti and papa huancaina (potatoes with sweet cheese sauce), while her cousin brings her a hat that she has requested. It seems that eating per se is not sufficiently stimulating for Juanita; she initiates other interests and interactions whist she eats.

The family lives in a small village in central Peru. Juanita was engaged in eating events in a number of locations within the compound that was her extended family home and place of economic activity. She first enjoyed a prolonged breakfast while on her bed and also ate various small items in the shop with her mother. These were not so much bounded events reminiscent of a ‘mealtime’, more extended involvements which were interwoven with play and family life – we would, however, under our definition, regard them as eating events. The event we have selected is clearly bounded and takes place just after she has left the shop when her aunt feeds her (see above), followed by a drink. Interacting with Juanita as she eats are her aunt Lina, six-year-old cousin Ana and, towards the end of the event, her grandfather. This eating event lasted about nine minutes, shortly after midday. During these minutes, Juanita eats a considerable amount, occasionally pausing and pointing at her still full mouth to actively take part in the regulation of her aunt’s next spoonful. However there is not a rushed feel to the event, for Juanita’s diversions are tolerated and even expanded upon. For example, she calls for a nearby hat she glimpses – Ana fetches it for her to put on her head and aunt Lina repeats the word several times, possibly gently correcting her pronunciation. Indeed there is

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a feeling of ‘scaffolding’ (Bruner, 1975) to the language interactions, as Lina expands upon Juanita’s utterances and links them to her central agenda, feeding Juanita. The local researcher had emphasized the importance of nutrition in this sometimes cold, mountainous area to which some degree of prosperity had come only recently. It is possible that infant mortality continues to impact upon this family’s approach to feeding. So, as Juanita notices a bird, Lina incorporates interest in her niece’s observation with pursuit of her own nurturing purposes: ‘What? Birdie? Let’s see eat for the little bird – for tweetie, tweetie. Ok, chew more, chew, chew. Eat, Juanita.’ When Juanita expresses that she has eaten enough, a face-saving solution is negotiated for the remainder of the food that satisfies both parties: Juanita takes the remainder to her grandfather, who is apparently going to continue feeding her: he wields the spoon energetically but never actually feeds Juanita. We have the impression that this was an established eating arrangement, although varying in so many aspects such as who feeds Juanita, the location and so on, from other eating events observed in the day. Eating – the process of gaining nutrition – is clearly central to this specific event, as particularly promoted by the aunt, with the young cousin also ‘in attendance’. At the same time, Juanita effectively identifies and orchestrates additional interests to enrich this eating event. Canada Nora dances along a soft fabric snake while holding a popsicle. Her mother looks on with a drink. The portability of the popsicle means eating can be integrated with embodied explorations and imaginative play. Shilling (1993, p. 93) writes of the body as an ‘enabling property’ and we note the way in which Nora uses her whole body when exploring.

The family live in a farmhouse in a small harbour community in Nova Scotia. The selected sequence is approximately eight minutes. It’s midmorning (9.44 a.m.); Nora and her one-year-old sister are snacking, interacting with their mother and playing. Previously she has eaten

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part of a muffin but went into the kitchen, saying to her mother ‘Oh my tummy hurts, I don’t want that.’ Mother then offers her a frozen yoghurt popsicle, which Nora takes. The sequence begins when mother, Nora and baby sister return to the living/playroom. As previously mentioned in Chapter 2, p. 49 and discussed in Chapter 3, p. 61; p. 65, Nora has evolved a bouncing game on the child’s couch. This is favourite place to be and an enjoyed physical activity which, on this occasion, is integrated with eating. Rasmussen (2004) makes the distinction between ‘places for children’ (designed by adults for children) and ‘children’s places’ (a place rendered significant by children). The child’s couch seems to be the former but it has become a place that enables physical activity and play – possibly worked up over time. It is thus a place to which she attributes personal meaning although it has not actually been designed for her bouncing movements. Mother’s stillness, when sitting in a chair drinking, serves as a contrast to Nora’s active, exploratory movements and playing – pointing out the worlds of adult and child even though they are together in the same room. Catherine accepts Nora’s need for spontaneous movement – but Nora also displays moments of stillness and thoughtfulness. The popsicle seems to promote these because sucking it requires some of Nora’s concentration and there are pauses to savour its taste. The only intervention by Catherine is when Nora goes to put her foot on her younger sister. In terms of Nora’s development and learning, there seems to be a great deal happening, facilitated in some sense by the portability of the popsicle: there’s exploration, movement, music, imaginary play, social interaction and word play through a song. At one point this prolonged eating for Nora spontaneously becomes a kind of family ‘mealtime’ – Catherine is sitting in the chair helping baby Chelsea to eat a popsicle, engaging and encouraging Nora, and also has access to a drink herself. Thailand Gai’s family live on the periphery of a major city in the north of Thailand. The selected six-minute sequence shows an eating event around midday centered upon around a bowl of noodles provided by her mother Siriwan, consumed on the balcony of her aunt Wanna’s house. Gai sits on the chair at an ornate wooden table, in surroundings more spacious than those of her immediate family’s quarters adjoining the compound. She is accompanied by her six-year-old sister Pla, who shares a considerable amount of the food, although the mother has left to purchase a further portion for Pla at a nearby street stall. Gai’s aunt is inside her house, within earshot, and, potentially, sightline.

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Gai (on the right) is eating her noodles while her sister Pla, at intervals, takes some of Gai’s food and drink for herself. The interactions could be helping Gai to understand that eating in itself can be both a focused and sociable family practice.

The interaction is characterized by two sets of counter-balancing features; that is, there are two senses in which contradictory processes seem to be taking place at the same time. One is the co-existence of eating and play – here a game of spinning bottle tops between the girls down the length of the table. This requires frequent movement and is thus not immediately commensurate with the relative stillness required to eat a bowl of noodles. The second is the almost constant swinging between support and rivalry both apparently expected and enacted between Gai and her older sister – reasonably characteristic of sibling roles (Ram & Ross, 2001). Ambivalence is apparent in Gai’s interactions (often initiated by her) with her sister, expressed through words but more often actions and non-verbal vocalizations. Gai initially appears to try to elicit help in separating noodles by use of the spoon, but when Pla moves towards the food Gai wards her off. Indeed, the older sister, demonstrating particular attention to moments when adult surveillance is absent (notwithstanding the presence of the researchers), succeeds in eating some of the noodles and drinking some of Gai’s drink, yet never completely taking them over. Her intervention is not only received as negative, for Gai also picks up on Pla’s modelling of two different ways of engaging with the noodles – by hand and with a spoon. Both sisters operate with fine movements. This is shown by the length of time and number of ‘mouthfuls’ they take from a fairly small bowl, which was evidently only partly filled at the beginning. Sometimes appealing, sometimes objecting to her sister’s food-related interventions, Gai’s emotional responses shift rapidly although she never appears severely discomfited. She nonetheless manifests a more consistently positive attitude towards the bottle tops game that is also

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taking place. Family eating practices can evidently provide the locus for complex affective exchanges that have been noticed by Hérot (2002) as characteristic of more formal family mealtimes. Italy

Beatrice eats a meal of focaccia bread and meat sauce at the kitchen table while her parents encourage and participate. There is much here that reinforces the notion that an eating event can be enjoyably sociable, and, as Shore (2008) suggests, becomes a salient multisensory element in the co-construction of family memories.

The family of Beatrice, her mother Lucia and father Claudio, live in a major city in northern Italy. The eating event studied here is Beatrice’s midday meal. Lucia has already cooked pasta for her but it was ‘too hot’, so Beatrice didn’t eat very much. The selected sequence begins with Beatrice eating bread at the kitchen table; later, sauce is added to the bowl. Both Lucia and Claudio are considerably involved in Beatrice’s meal. They provide food for Beatrice and sometimes feed her, although often she feeds herself. She also chooses to give them tastes. So feeding is reciprocal. There is much conversation about food, as there is indeed during the day at other times in the kitchen. The qualities and origins of food are a point of discussion; the parents reveal concern and validation for Beatrice’s enjoyment, her likes and dislikes. Such encouragement for articulation of values has been noticed in a large scale study of families including young children in urban Italy, where the researchers noted the active role the children played in their own socialization (Pontecorvo et al., 2001). To some extent, Beatrice’s eating event has some aspects that make it particularly formal – with a beginning and end, and two people in careful attendance around the eater – something like friendly waiters. In essence, Beatrice is eating alone, although, as we have noted, she does actively draw her parents into the event through feeding them, for

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instance. They are available to be drawn in despite not actually sitting around the table for the meal. Without doubt, Beatrice’s attention to the food is sustained through the surrounding interactions. Beatrice puts a bib on her doll (assisted by her mother) and pretends to feed it. Through play, Beatrice appears to be creating a social event around an eating event, but in her own special way. Edward Sapir [1884–1939] proposed, ‘Every person has a unique culture, because, first, his personal history brings him into contact with a unique configuration of influences in a manner consistent with the unique organization of his personality.’ (cited by Mattingly, Lutkehaus & Throop, 2008, p. 5)

Looking at this extract in context, we find very strong links to Beatrice’s play. Just as she did with the pasta eating event earlier, here she shortly afterwards ‘carries over’ her personal experience of a formal eating event (and being fed) to a play situation when she does the same thing to her large doll, situated on the small outside space that is the apartment’s balcony. This event is also supported by her parents, who engage in the socio-dramatic play, for example assisting Beatrice to put a bib on her doll carefully. Beatrice feeds the doll with spoonfuls – it is as if she is re-enacting an eating event. Pontecorvo et al. (2001) propose a concept of ‘mutual apprentices’ – that just as the child is being socialized into the ways of the family, so the family is socialized into the ways of children and their preferred ways of spending time. The way that this eating event is played out in a pretence play frame seems to us to support this notion. When making the video compilation to view with the family during the second iterative stage, the two distal researchers concerned did not include Beatrice’s midday meal. This was commented on with surprise by the parents, who considered this mealtime to be one of central importance to the family; this comment in turn stimulated us to pursue the investigation reported in this chapter. It is not just the care around

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the eating, the detailed talk about the qualities of the food in terms of its origins, preparation, presentation, the attendance of the parents around the little girl (even in the body movements, the fine ways of interacting around food) that the family habitus is quite literally and visibly embodied. UK

Jessica (foreground), having lunch with her brother, supported by her mother (offering a sandwich) and grandmother (background). Although it is only the children who have plates of food, this eating event is immersed in family practices related to a formal meal.

The family lives in a large house in a new town in the south of England. Jessica and her twin brother Matthew are at the kitchen table, having lunch supplied by their mother and grandmother (who will lunch later during the children’s ‘nap’). The sequence described here is approximately four minutes in length. Initially, before the sequence begins, the children have been eating prepared plates of food (potato crisps, sausages, ham, apple, tomato, and buttered bread) that their mother has brought to the table. Rachel is sitting next to Jessica, who is playing with and eating a piece of ham. Close by is Matthew, with their grandmother Margaret sitting next to him. Jessica moves across to her mother Rachel’s lap and reaches for a small toy engine – Thomas the Tank Engine. At the same time, Rachel reaches for the plate of food. She links with her daughter’s engine play: Rachel makes a bridge with her fingers and says ‘under the bridge’. Jessica and Matthew are both coupling the train carriages to their engines. Rachel and Margaret are involved in this play but maintain the flow of the children’s eating by periodically offering them items of food. Generally, the children accept this adult feeding arrangement. The children take responsibility for leading their play; the adults lead the eating. The engines are also involved in eating too. For instance,

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at one point mother offers Jessica a sausage, which Jessica then offers to Thomas, but then places back on the plate. Shortly afterwards, a sliced sausage offered to Jessica by Rachel is then offered to Thomas after which, Jessica eats it. A little later Jessica decides to take a potato crisp from her plate for herself without her mother’s initial prompting, although this decision is noted in the response, ‘You’re going to eat your crisp?’ Matthew then feeds his mother a crisp and later Jessica does the same. We note here the integration of imaginative play with a focused eating event. Adults are drawn in to support and stimulate play ideas, chiefly around toy trains and cooperative feeding. To a considerable extent, there seems to be harmonization of adult nutritional interests and child play interests. The adults, however, are very accommodating, but their behaviour shows that eating and not play is, for them, the real purpose of the occasion. Play is tolerated and even supported in the interests of eating. Children are helped along with the eating event because they can play too – or perhaps they can be seen to be integrating the two in their preferred way. Our iterative data is revealing of the adults’ perspectives on and concerns about eating events in this family. John, the children’s grandfather, speculated that, ‘Some people might think it’s a bit odd that we let them draw or play with things at mealtimes.’ But he explained the trade-off that was behind this practice: ‘I think we’ve always let them do this, providing the eating continues.’ Margaret supported this position as she felt the children, ‘ate better when they had something else to do.’ Three months after the filmed day, Rachel expressed her concern that the existing arrangement was no longer working well: ‘because they draw and fiddle and don’t eat.’ There had therefore been a collective agreement that there was a need to be a ‘little stricter’ about mealtimes.

Discussion and conclusion What can be said about this selection of eating events, all of which show important differences in terms of food, contexts, surrounding family habitus, social structure and cultural milieu? Firstly, we would draw attention to the agendas and agency of the respective actors, all ‘agents whose nature is to purposefully transform their world’ (Stetsenko, 2009, p. 126 (emphasis as original)). Given that the five young children observed in this chapter were all eating much of the food on offer, there do seem to be tacit understandings and shared

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eating agendas between children and carers. On those occasions that are most clearly ‘mealtimes’ – those we selected here in Peru, Italy, and the UK – there is carer expectation that children will attend properly to eating. Nevertheless, despite strong carer signals about the importance of nutritional intake on these occasions, these carers are still willing to enter into subtle bargaining and trading with their children in order to maintain the flow of eating. This involved, for instance, parents’ responses to what they would regard as children’s ‘off-stage’ interests and also entering into, and even stimulating, their play associated with the eating events – as in our UK and Canadian examples. A related consideration concerned the pace of young children’s eating. In Italy, Peru and the UK, the focused nature of the eating events signalled adult expectations about the time the meal should take and therefore the rate of consumption. However, we cannot know how clearly the children sensed these individual family expectations. Time passing is an adult preoccupation. This presents a potential difficulty for carers because, conceivably, a meal could possibly be endless and undefined if adults accommodated totally to children’s interests. The sequences from Canada and Thailand offer a different view. In these eating events children themselves have control. Pace is not a consideration and both children integrate much physical movement and play into their eating. Thirdly, we note the way in which all five children were ever ready to play – indeed, much of our day in the life video footage can be seen to show the children at play or wanting to play. Mealtimes require more focus on the ‘business’ of eating and therefore could be seen as interruptions into the children’s preferred way of being. Lim (2004, p. 483) draws attention to Dewey’s emphasis on the aesthetic purpose of children ‘enjoying the moment’. Eating events – primarily routine and social events for adults – could make this difficult for children unless carers are willing to support children’s spontaneous mealtime explorations and ‘distractions’. However, the children used even focused mealtimes to pursue their interests in their many ways, supported in this by their carers and siblings. Fourthly, to what extent is our notion of an eating event an actual event for the children we studied? It seems, from our observations, that although carers might implicitly denote eating occasions as mealtimes or snack times, through the children’s eyes these seemed to be regarded as happenings that still afforded opportunities for exploration and play – business as usual. Children might carry over previous interests into the eating event (as with trains in the UK or the bottle top game

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in Thailand). They might also carry over their personal experience of eating to stimulate further play (as with Beatrice in Italy and her wish to feed her doll). It’s likely therefore that children experience eating events and play as seamless in terms of their interests, preoccupations and deep wish to carry on playing. Our study of five children from our seven specific world locations suggests that these children and their carers are approaching eating events from diverse perspectives. Adults have a distinctive focus on nutrition whereas children want to play (Alcock, 2007). Children as ‘strategic actors’ (James & Prout, 1996, p. 47) are seen to be successfully intermingling their personal interests and, at the same time, meeting the expectations of their carers to eat food. The carers in our study, for their part, also appear adept at managing and maintaining this harmony of interests. Our glimpses into the children’s worlds seem to support a generally bidirectional view of socialization (Hérot, 2002) as children and adults learn to co-construct their worlds. Yet this is not a closed system; elements of the environment come into play, perhaps especially when recruited through the children’s interests. Eating practices involving young children often, especially perhaps when harmonious, involve an imaginative flexibility. Bruner (2008) discusses whether culture must be viewed as people’s ‘way of imagining the real’. Eating events are surely a microcosm of caregiving, in that little or nothing can be more vital an imperative than the requirement to ensure the intake of appropriate nutrition. Yet the means through which this is achieved are variously represented in our data, with traces of socio-historical influences, the dynamic emergence of new family customs and the innovative contributions to the interactions offered by the five young children themselves.

6 Notational Systems Giuliana Pinto, Beatrice Accorti Gamannossi and Catherine Ann Cameron

What can we see when viewing the following pictures? They surely represent vivid examples of children’s explorations in the realm of symbolic activity, where drawing is one of the most widespread activities of children in different locations.

If we ‘zoom out’ from these pictures, we will discover a shared setting involving a child (Canadian, English, American, Turkish) handling ‘instruments’ (paint brush, crayon, felt nib pen, chalk) to make marks on a dedicated surface (paper, chalk board), under the supervision or following the model of a significant adult. In this chapter we examine the emergence of notational systems: joint drawing and book reading in the daily activities of these 30month-old girls. The capacity to create and use symbols to communicate and to structure social life is one of the most striking of human skills. Linguistic symbols, written language, mathematical and musical notations and art are objects of cultural transmission and exchange; indeed, they are part of the common evolutionary process that enables people to save significant time and effort by exploiting the alreadyexisting knowledge and skills of others (Tomasello, 1999). 114

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The behavioural and cognitive mechanisms involved in the cultural transmission of symbolic communication are situated in an environment embedded in cultural-historical features that deserve to be taken into account, as they give rise to different social practices. Different social communities put differential emphases upon and exploit varying social practices, cultural artefacts and forms over time. Each cultural group generates its own array of symbols; the particularities of the various symbolic systems come from differences among the various communities of people across the globe in the forms and functions of communications media they determine is important to use. Our broad interest in this chapter is in identifying early experiences that influence children’s acquisition of various symbolic systems, like appreciation of print and drawing activities (Bialystok, Shenfield & Codd, 2000). The term ‘literacy’ is open to many interpretations in the contemporary world, and these interpretations can be the source of considerable debate (Barton, 2007). In this respect, we refer to multiple literacies (e.g. drawing, writing, musical notation, mathematical notation), which often develop simultaneously in very young children, who embark on the adventure of symbol system literacy through scribbling and drawing and being read to. Human literacies are multiple and varied, interdependent and equivalent, related and necessary. Each system provides a way to look at things. Literacies are embedded in each other. Long before children are formally taught, they are getting ready by exploring, scribbling, talking, drawing, listening and looking, and wondering, all elements of their activities as ‘agents whose nature is to purposefully transform their world’ (Stetsenko, 2009, p. 126 [emphasis as in original]). A very important way for the child to access literacies is via a crossmodal strategy that requires a transfer of information from one mode of representation to another. For instance, a transfer of knowledge is achieved from drawing to writing. The goal of the transfer is mutual inter-influence: each mode of representation extends the other. The result is a transformation, or a new kind or level of information or understanding (Sheridan, 1997). Research into writing development is a particularly fruitful aspect of literacy research because writing represents the productive mode in textual literacy development. Thus, in early childhood, just as viewers (researchers, practitioners, parents) track what young children can do in graphic representation, they also follow with interest their emergent control over other ways that represent aspects of their experience. Of much greater importance, the viewer traces emergent control of the different meanings embedded in the graphical signs and how to shape these,

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at least as they are represented in the drawn and written modes. There is a sense in which, in learning to draw and to differentiate writing from drawing, young children also learn to represent experience, and they thereby add to their repertoire of semiotic or symbolic resources with which to represent the world (Christie, 2003). The term ‘emergent literacy’ is used to denote the idea that the acquisition of literacy is best conceptualized as a developmental continuum, with its origins beginning early in the life of a child, rather than an all-or-none phenomenon that begins when children start school (Clay, 1979, 1993). This expression appears in children’s emergent reading behaviours, suggesting awareness that literacy development begins in infancy within the informal sites of child care in family and community settings (Teale & Sulzby, 1986). The first encounter many young children have with some of the physical tools needed to learn to write is with a set of coloured pencils or crayons, and their first expressions on paper are typically mark marking and drawing (Christie, 2003). The early experiences of drawing involve some experimentation with the range of resources that very young children have available to them to order experience and hence construct and reconstruct aspects and representations of their worlds (Kress, 1997). Indeed, many parents encourage their children to draw, and it is not uncommon for parents as well as many early childhood teachers to encourage their children to ‘draw a picture’ and then to ask them to ‘write about it’; even when, strictly speaking, the children may as yet be only vestigially skilled enough to construct an identifiable graphic representation or a coherent related verbal message. There was a significant ‘leap’ in the development of the human species when it was realized that language could be thus represented, by using, for example, marks on a stone, a tablet, shell or parchment (Halliday, 1985; Donald, 2001). The activity of representing language in such a manner probably grew out of early drawing activity, though there is some debate about the origins of textual systems in different aspects of writing (Coulmas, 1989; Schmandt-Besserat, 1996). In any event, the shift into writing represented a mental shift of a quite different order of magnitude in the human species – a movement from the representation of the relatively concrete to the relatively abstract. The potential shift in cognition is enormous, opening the way for later developments in control of the more abstract patterns of written language (Jaynes, 1976). So emergent drawing and literacy are symbolic activities that are embedded at an early age in children, to become specific patterns of communication in subsequent ages.

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When very young, children begin to show appreciation for the symbolic function of pictures and drawing (DeLoache, 2004). Children’s theories of pictorial representation and drawing develop from a convergent sequence of infant and toddler social activities. Through an awareness and understanding of rules of picture perception, a slow mastery of representational rules that start out at variance with picture perception develops, and, ultimately, typical cultural drawing conventions are adopted. Drawing requires representational abilities that are different from verbal language, and can reduce certain risks of overlap between conceptual and expressive limitations. Drawing is a form of iconic representation that reflects the distinctive features of the represented experience (Bruner, 1964), a ‘graphic speech’ that conceptualizes an internal representation (Vygotsky, 1978). Children’s representations of their relationships can be considered instances of ‘spontaneous concepts’ as described by Vygotsky (1987), i.e. concepts that develop from the child’s personal experiences, not from adults’ verbal instruction, such as is the case with scientific concepts. Spontaneous concepts might in fact be best expressed at the implicit level of children’s pictorial expression, before an explicit (linguistic) mastery of them might be acquired. For these reasons, drawing can be ‘user friendly’ for young children, who are indeed often highly motivated towards graphic activity – one of their favourite common activities that can, in fact, be seen as a form of play. Drawing has been traditionally considered as a culture-free tool to assess the child’s cognitive (Goodenough, 1926) or emotional development (Corman, 1967); but the question about the extent of the universality of graphic development is still not commonly agreed upon. Two main perspectives have been proposed in the literature with respect to graphic development across societies. One perspective supports the assumption of a relatively invariant succession of stages or phases in drawing development, based mainly on the fact that the same basic schemes can be observed in children’s drawing at different ages, irrespective of their cultural background. Researchers who identify themselves with this perspective recognize that cultural differences exist, but they are seen as ‘a limited set of variations on a common underlying structure, indicating that the same rules can generate alternative models that are representationally equivalent’ (Golomb, 1992, p. 333). The other perspective, that the authors of this chapter share, does not dispute an overall trend in development from less to more complex structures, but suggests that what children draw must be interpreted in the interactive settings in which children’s behaviour is typically rooted

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(Vygotsky, 1978; Cole, 2002). According to our position, drawing is the product of culturally and socially transmitted conventions, which children come to know by seeing and reproducing the graphic models available in their life situations (Sundberg & Ballinger, 1968; Wilson & Wilson, 1985; Van Meter & Garner, 2005). This latter position then is the foundation of the approaches taken in the present analyses. In any case, the emergent knowledge of written notational systems is presumed to be a developmental precursor to mastering conventional forms of symbolic communication. In this chapter, we focus too on the emergence of shared attention towards written language, thought to be an experience that influences children’s acquisition of print literacy. The idea that children who grow up in literate societies are immersed in a notational environment, and thus have the opportunity to learn a great deal about notations before exposure to formal schooling, has been confirmed within different socio-linguistic milieux (Ferreiro & Teberosky, 1979; Pontecorvo, Orsolini, Burge & Resnick, 1996; Ravid & Tolchinsky, 2002). There is a growing research literature that focuses on the relationship between emergent literacy and formal literacy and shows that the comprehension of the relationship between written signs and meanings is a complex process that involves a multiplicity of skills and abilities. Children, of course, bring their previous knowledge and experiences to support the task of learning to read and write (Cameron, Hunt & Linton, 1996; Sénéchal & LeFevre, 2002). Pinto, Bigozzi, Accorti Gamannossi and Vezzani (2009) have recently developed a structural model of the development of literacy skills that posits the following three aspects to be critical to writing and reading from preschool through the early school years: (1) children’s print and letter knowledge (Whitehurst & Lonigan, 1998, 2002); (2) their conceptual knowledge of literacy, e.g., knowledge of the functions of print, and children’s early procedural knowledge of writing and reading, e.g., invented spelling (Sénéchal, LeFevre, Smith-Chant & Colton, 2001); and (3) their conceptual knowledge of the graphical peculiarities of their writing system with respect to other notational systems. These data support the contention that emergent literacy is an integrated and domainspecific construct. The child’s developing path to written language does not proceed with parallel, independent and diachronic acquisitions, but it is subtended by contemporary, balanced and specific contributions of knowledge about the symbolization code of written language and on the textual structure of language. It is not possible to expect the emergence of literacy without a functional and simultaneous integration of the diverse cognitive operations given by the three emerging factors

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identified above (Pinto et al., 2009). A strong association between home literacy environment and preschool-age children’s emerging literacy is broadly supported in the research literature (Weigel, Martin & Bennett, 2005). For example, in some communities an important format for children’s acquisition of such practices is joint child-caregiver book reading (Bus, 2002). In this chapter, we present evidence of different pathways through which the acquisition of knowledge of the characteristics of symbolic systems emerges in different cultural situations. From examination of videos in the DITL dataset, we show how adults in our seven families expose their child to opportunities for learning about these symbolic systems. We focus here on the way children are presented with or autonomously grasp the opportunity to draw in various locations, and on the different modalities through which they discover the relationship among drawings and the objects they stand for. We also note how more mature family members help their young child by engagement with texts and images to develop an appreciation of print conventions and narrative forms. They support and encourage metalinguistic awareness by calling attention to the difference between picture and print and between print and other notations. In the different interactions observed, we confirm the omnipresence of surroundings that previous research identified as promising for literacy experiences. In fact, in all localities drawing and written materials, shared child-adult attention, dyadic asymmetrical relationships and reciprocal involvements are found to be present.

Symbolic systems experiences From the day in the life data set‚ we identified all passages that reveal the relevance of different agents involved in the process of the child’s symbolic systems acquisition. A first object of our interest was the environment, where we looked for materials, models and artefacts revealing the attention towards symbolic systems that each place provides for the young child. Other foci of attention were the adults and older children in the home, whose attitudes were observed, to identify: • specific moments dedicated to seizing opportunities for the toddlers in engaging with symbolic systems (e.g., reading, drawing); • facilitation of the development of awareness about notational systems, noting how they call attention to print and other notation conventions;

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• use of language about written-form terms (such as ‘page’, ‘word’, ‘title’) and drawing terms (e.g., ‘pen’, ‘colour’, ‘paper’). Furthermore, we specifically observed in the children: • their attention towards written symbolic systems; • their spontaneous engagement in literacy activities; • their requests for assistance in joint involvement. Once all instances of drawing and joint book reading were identified, we extracted examples from each location in the data set that afforded an opportunity for us to observe a differentiated range of symbolic system activities. We anticipated identifying such features as those that the literature distinguishes as important for the emergent development of symbol systems, for example, the presence of written materials, shared child-adult attention, dyadic asymmetrical relationships, reciprocal involvement (Ravid & Tolchinsky, 2002) and child’s interest towards written symbols (Lonigan, 1994). But we monitored at the same time to allow for identifying other features as well as variability between the different settings (for example, different foci of the emergent literacy activity, different levels of material sharing and diverse degrees of joint interactional style). From all the identified instances of symbolic activity, we selected at least one example of each of the children when engaged in a dyad (twoand-a-half-year-old child and adult), who were living in each of the seven highly different environmental locations of Thailand, Canada, Italy, Peru, the United Kingdom, the United States and Turkey. In this chapter, we present these samples as they provide a broad range of engagement instances. Thailand In this context, there are several artefacts dedicated to symbolic activities, such as newspapers, magazines, paper, pens and pencils, and a few books that the children can access by themselves. Emergent drawing in Thailand At the beginning of Gai’s day, there is one long sequence (27 minutes) dedicated to drawing activities, taking place in the veranda of her auntie’s house. Gai is with her mother and her six-year-old sister Pla. Mother is sitting to one side, reading her newspaper.

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Pla brings drawing materials (paper and pencils in a box) to the table: she draws steadily for almost a full half hour. Gai doesn’t draw continuously: she changes the sheets she draws upon, and the different drawing implements she uses. She observes her sister, watching what she is drawing; she stands up, walks around the room and then comes back to, and sits adjacent to her sister once again, ‘Ma, I draw,’ she says. ‘Let’s see. Isn’t it pretty!’ her mother replies.

Emergent reading in Thailand Joint attention to text seems like a routine that is a somewhat common, although brief event in the child’s day. Although we had seen Gai’s mother reading a newspaper on the sidelines earlier in the day, there were not a lot of books in evidence in either her aunt and uncle’s home or in her own home but magazines and newspapers were more commonly accessed that day. There is one occasion during which her mother suggests to her older sister that reading to Gai might be a mutually welcome activity; however, a joint reading episode does not ensue.

Gai has just stopped drawing with her sister and is running in and out of the house. Her aunt, Wanna, is sitting nearby with some magazines and Gai stops to look at one of the publications with her. In a very short episode (two minutes), we see Wanna showing Gai pictures in one of the magazines. Gai then rises and runs on her selfappointed way.

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In the Thai surroundings, we can observe how adults are involved with symbolic systems: Gai’s mother reads the newspaper and provides a model of reading for her daughter, and even if there are only a few specific moments of shared book reading this activity seems to be a usual routine in this house. The aunt, another reading model for Gai, shares her written materials even as Gai is somewhat ‘on the fly’. In the drawing episodes, it is the older sister who is the most sustaining supportive presence for Gai. In fact, she is a teacher, a model and a play companion for her sister, showing her how to draw and how to use the drawing materials, and demonstrating some dedication to the task. Taylor (1983) was quite taken by the way in which literacy in her studied middle-class families was advanced by such short, sometimes fleeting, learning experiences. In contrast, she argued, schools require that children stay interested for inauthentic ‘lessons’ in reading and writing and then create an industry around how to keep children ‘motivated’. Canada In the Canadian home, there are written materials dedicated to children’s use (books, plastic letters, toys with letters and numbers), and there are also many materials that allow the child to experiment with different drawing techniques (pencils, marking pens, tempera colours, watercolours, brushes, easel, board, etc.). Emergent drawing in Canada Nora starts drawing ‘daddy’s picture’ with markers. She is very independent in drawing and only asks for help when she needs more paper or different colours (temperas); mother provides paper, colours and water, as requested. ‘Here you are, be careful with colours,’ says Catherine as she passes back and forth between kitchen and sitting room, occasionally praising Nora’s drawings and giving her feedback on the products, opining, ‘Oh, it’s very nice!’

There are several occasions in which drawing activities can be observed during this day. Nora engages in drawing activities both spontaneously

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and with help from her mother, Catherine. A lengthy sequence (40 minutes long) takes place early in the day in the living room: Nora is with her mother and her little sister, Chelsea. Mother has taped a sheet on the easel, while young Chelsea periodically looks on. Emergent reading in Canada There are no specific moments of adult-child shared book reading, but on a number of occasions when Nora seems unsure about what to do next, and is even a little restless during the day, her mother prompts her to ‘read’ one of her picture books to her baby sister. On each occasion, the activity is short-circuited by other intervening events.

There is one sequence at the beginning of the day (three minutes) where Nora is engaged with a picture book on her own. Here, Nora can be seen looking at and reading the pop-up book herself; this activity having been suggested by the mother’s ‘Why don’t you read a book to your sister?’

We can see important parallels and differences between drawing and reading activities in the child in Canada: as far as drawing is concerned, the mother provides materials for Nora to draw and encourages her to draw but without giving her specific instruction. On the reading front, it seemed clear that the mother expected a collaboration might be possible between the sisters, and assumed that the older child had had enough experience with being read to and enough confidence in her understanding of the format (Bruner, 1964) of joint book reading to be able to engage her younger sibling in it. Although that did not occur on that day, Nora was clearly interested in and comfortable with her books and chose to spend time with them on her own. Italy This home provides materials both for reading (books, newspapers, magazines, geared towards adults, and children’s books and pictures) and for media for drawing (colours, pencils, marker pens) designed especially

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for children, and there is a significant collection of drawings made by Beatrice, stored in a folder that the girl often explores. Emergent drawing in Italy There is one sequence of drawing activity on that particular day (11 minutes in length). The sequence takes place in the middle of the day in the kitchen, where her father, Claudio, seats Beatrice at the table on a high chair and provides the materials: paper and wax crayons. While Beatrice is drawing on her own, Claudio notes that she is trying to remove the paper around a wax crayon in order to eat the wax, so he intervenes, removing the crayon and giving her pencils. But she doesn’t want pencils: she asks for pens and a new sheet.

Father gives her new paper and a pen, and Beatrice continues drawing while Claudio monitors this new activity, commenting about the use of colours and space on the paper, ‘Use this side to draw. Take this colour.’

Emergent reading in Italy In the Italian context, Beatrice and her father Claudio comprise the focus dyad. At the end of the day, they are in the living room and Bea chooses the comic book ‘Amore amore’ (‘Love love’) by Mordillo (1994) from the bookshelf and starts to look at it, sitting with her father on the sofa. Also in the Italian situation, the relation between adult and child is a very significant aspect of the transmission of knowledge about symbolic systems. During the interaction, the partners are both very involved in the activity and conduct the exchange mutually. The father appears not to make adjustments to his adult language when teaching his daughter new words during book reading. Both partners are totally engaged in the activity and show reciprocal attunement in the development of these interactions. There is a high level of participation from both father and child: close positioning and maintenance of a shared focus of attention. The child is active in maintaining engagement. Father’s interaction

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Beatrice and Claudio look at the picture book together. Claudio asks his daughter the names of objects in the pictures and she asks him the names of the things she doesn’t know. Father corrects Beatrice’s mistakes and teaches her the common pronunciations of the words. The interaction continues with Claudio turning the pages and asking Beatrice to name the objects in the pictures, ‘What is this? Yes, it is a boat!’

style is directive, both in drawing and reading. He provides materials, suggests how and where to draw, turns pages and gives instruction to the child about correct word usage. Peru The written artefacts present in the context are newspapers, magazines, a wall poster and a few children’s picture books. There seem to be no spaces specifically designated for drawing activities or for storing drawing material for the young child, although her older cousin’s school supplies seem organized in her room and stored in her backpack. Emergent drawing in Peru Juanita plays with her cousin’s pencil box and brings it to her aunt, Lina, who is knitting. The aunt begins to draw on a small notebook while Juanita looks at her and continues playing with pencils. Lina shows Juanita how to colour the pictures in the notebook, putting into words instructions for drawing, and the girl hands her pencils, ‘Colour here. Yes, well done!’

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This sequence involving drawing activity at the end of the day (eight minutes in length) takes place outside the house but within the courtyard of the family compound, and actively engages Juanita and her aunt. Emergent reading in Peru Juanita and her aunt Lina engage in one of several book reading involvements during the day. During the afternoon, Lina is sitting in the family courtyard reading a book. Juanita gets a big picture book of animals from a nearby table. Lina starts a little game with Juanita, asking her niece to find where the animals are and point them out to her. The aunt gets the girl to repeat the names of the animals. The interaction continues and Lina corrects Juanita if she doesn’t answer acceptably: ‘Gatto, not gato!’ Lina turns the book’s pages and continues asking for the names of the animals.

Juanita has experience gaining knowledge of symbolic systems during the day, thanks to the consistent contributions of her aunt. During these interactions, Lina is sitting on a chair while Juanita squats in front of both the notebook and the book. The contact between the two is guaranteed by reciprocal glances. When the girl answers her aunt’s questions, she turns her head towards her and watches her intently. The aunt looks alternatively at the book or notebook and the child when she asks her questions. Both partners are very involved in their activities and when the girl becomes inattentive, the aunt calls her regard back to the written materials. Dialogues are reciprocal: the aunt always waits for her niece’s answer before posing another question. Language is not very extensively expressed, probably because there is a ‘shared way of being together’ that is drawn upon: Lina’s questions are simple and direct, and her niece’s answers are mostly one-word utterances accompanied by deictic gestures. Yet the engagement shown by both partners is high during the entire interaction. The role of Lina is directive and didactic and similar to that of the Italian father in that there is an apparent consciousness of their roles as instructor.

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United Kingdom There are many different written materials in the home that the children can access by themselves, including books specifically dedicated to children and children’s drawing materials. Emergent drawing in the United Kingdom There are many episodes of graphic activity, often associated with other activities. A sample drawing passage occurs during breakfast time, when there is a ten-minute-long drawing session commenced by father, Paul. In the kitchen, Jessica, her parents, brother and little sister are congregated while the children wait for their breakfast.

Jessica’s mother supplies drawing materials at the table (paper, pencils and markers) and Paul starts drawing a car with a trailer, while the twins periodically observe his activity. At first, Jessica is absorbed by her breakfast, then she talks with her father, giving him suggestions for the drawing, ‘Draw the trailer. Put wheels here!’ She takes a pencil and starts drawing some lines; Paul hands her his drawing and Jessica proceeds to colour it.

Emergent reading in the United Kingdom In the English reading dyad, composed of Jessica and her grandmother Margaret, there are several significant episodes in which an interaction between adult and child is mediated by written material. A representative one lasts nine minutes and takes place after breakfast when Jessica moves from the kitchen to the sitting room to join her grandmother and selects the book, Goo Goo Gorilla (Whybrow, 1998). In both these episodes Jessica’s attention is captured by the symbolic system activity. There is a very high level of participation from the girl, who is sitting close to her father in the drawing activity. She is sitting in grandmother’s arms during the book reading – as already described

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in Chapter 4 as an example of secure base activity. There is positive reciprocity in social behaviour: father draws parts of the car and Jessica adds pieces; grandmother turns pages and points out the characters of the story, and Jessica responds. The language is constituted by simple lexicon and syntax (flexible combinations of nouns and verbs with pointing). The communication with partners is organized in several verbal interchanges. Both father’s and grandmother’s interaction styles are dialogical, in fact, speech and activities are clearly complementary: father suggesting parts of the drawing to complete and grandmother imitating the cries, voices and gestures of the animals. Both give the girl her time to contribute. United States The whole house is supplied with many books for both adults and children and particularly in Katy’s playroom there are many children’s books and accessories for drawing, and she often chooses this kind of expression. Emergent drawing in the United States In the American context there are several moments where Katy is engaged with drawing activities. At the very beginning of the day when Katy first wakes up, she goes in her playroom and immediately starts drawing, the sequence is 12 minutes long and continues with a variety of paper sheets, pens and colouring devices used.

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Katy approaches an easel set up in her play-space to enable her to engage spontaneously in a graphic production. As she begins drawing with a felt pen, her mother asks her questions as to her intention and makes comments on the choice of colour and the success of the work: ‘What’s it a picture of? What is it?’ Katy describes what she is drawing: ‘A tree,’ signifying her own satisfaction at the outcome.

Emergent reading in the United States Reading activities are very much present in Katy’s day. One of many shared book moments takes place at the very end of the day when Katy is going to bed. The sequence is 13 minutes long. It is bedtime and Katy is with her father, Fred. They are both lying on a bed and Fred is reading in a relaxed fashion a book he has chosen. The girl is close by him. She answers Fred’s questions about the story, ‘Where’s Mr Paint Pig? Where’s the firemen? Where’s the fire cat?’, but mostly she listens and sometimes sucks her finger as she fondles a soft, stuffed toy.

Symbolic systems activities are very much present in Katy’s day and both moments of drawing and reading are accompanied by significant adult interventions. In the drawing activity, Katy is highly agentive, independently choosing colours and subjects for her drawings. Mother’s role is encouraging and supportive in enhancing her daughter’s symbolic activity. This episode provides confirmatory evidence that graphic representations are socially supported activities that emerge and develop from scribbles to simple forms in many children starting at a very early age (Cox, 2005). In the reading episode, the function of shared book reading with father is low-keyed in consideration of bedtime’s advent.

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Katy mostly listens to the reading but carefully follows along with her father’s Color Book (Scarry, 1976) sharing. The position of partners, lying on the bed, and the presence of soft toys, give to this moment the particular framework of book reading for preparing and calming the girl for her night’s rest. Turkey The Turkish context has a variety of materials to enhance children’s literacy activities: there are materials for drawing and many children’s books. Emergent drawing in Turkey During the day, Selin has several drawing opportunities: one of them, six minutes long, takes place in the late afternoon, when her father comes back home from work. As Kemal returns home, he joins his daughters on the terrace, where he picks up a piece of chalk and begins drawing the logos of common automobiles, quizzing the children as to which car manufacturer each represents. The questioning is light and the children are both quite engaged in the game. Selin gets interested and decides to participate after her sister and father finish discussing an illustration of the characters in the ‘Teletubbies’ television series, which sister Fusun responds to enthusiastically. Selin does not respond until Fusun does, as it is Fusun’s forte to be literate in multiple car logos and script representations. Kemal: ‘Selin what is this?’ (He has drawn their attention to a BMW logo.) Fusun: ‘Be Me We.’ Selin (quietly): ‘Be Me We … Be Me We.’ Kemal: ‘OK, what is this?’ (While drawing a Mercedes logo.) Selin: ‘Mersh.’ Kemal: ‘Yes! Mercedes.’ Selin: ‘Mersheds.’ Kemal proceeds to draw a Renault logo, and Fusun says ‘Reno’. Selin wants to erase the blackboard.

Selin remains mildly interested and not as eager a participant as her sister, who is clearly accomplished at this task. She gets distracted after a while despite the recognition and praise given to Fusun and her for their correct identifications. She appears to drift, not anxious to receive

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praise, almost conceding that her interests lie elsewhere. The activity in itself seems to be an enjoyable leisure activity and an opportunity for the father to teach his children. It seems like something of a symbol system lesson. Emergent reading in Turkey There are several occasions during which Selin reads a book alone or with an adult. A significant moment is at the end of the day before dinner when Selin is with her mother Nurbike. While Selin is reading with her mother, Fusun is unsettled in the background and Nurbike asks Kemal to help her because she is upset. Selin has opened a book to look at. She runs to her mother for a partner in reading it. She is following the story with Nurbike, guessing the pictures and guiding her mother’s finger to point to each word, and prompting for words. During the reading Selin makes ‘aaah’ sounds as she locates the animals. She pulls the book to herself as Nurbike gets more involved in conversation with Kemal. Selin points to the pictures, trying to get her mother’s attention. Nurbike asks: ‘Where is the peacock?’ Selin does not know the name of this rather unusual bird. Nurbike points and says the name of the animal again. Selin’s response is, ‘Look.’ Nurbike: ‘Where is the duck?’ Selin (pointing): ‘Duck.’ Nurbike: ‘Yeees. Where is the goose?’ Selin points to the duck. Nurbike: ‘That is a duck. This is a goose.’ Selin points correctly. Nurbike (emphatically): ‘Yees!’ Nurbike: ‘Where is the deer?’ Selin points to the goose. Nurbike: ‘This is the deer. Where is the squirrel?’ Selin (pointing): ‘Deer.’

The home environment in Turkey provides a wide array of literacy related, child oriented resources and each of the adult family members is involved at one point in the day in drawing the girl’s attention towards written and graphic materials. In the drawing episode, Kemal is very keen to teach the girls the meaning of graphic symbols. Before and after the car logo session, he uses both drawing and letters to advance the girls’ expertise in various writing and drawing symbols. The whole scene has a playful feeling, but at the same time the father uses the opportunity to teach the twins

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the meaning of letters, numbers and symbols. This episode supports the notion that drawing is the product of culturally and socially transmitted conventions, which children come to know by seeing and reproducing the graphic models available in their life milieux (Van Meter & Garner, 2005). In some contrast, the reading episode offers Selin considerable independence as mother allows her to turn the book pages, continuing with the reading and accepting the girl’s interventions and pacing of the story. However, there is a good deal of explicit instruction as well. In the example above, there is a vivid example of overextension, modified by Nurbike’s corrections which elicit repetition of a new vocabulary item, that then gets used, albeit erroneously. These parents are strong models for their girls in symbolic system development, both intentionally teaching and showing active engagement in such literacies as book reading.

Discussion and conclusion In all the observed locations, social interactional activities with reference to symbol systems appear to be common practices and loci for symbolic learning, varying only in degree of focus. In fact, each context affords materials for the children to engage in symbolic activities with energy and individual and dyadic engagement. Furthermore, children and adults interact for extended periods of time during each day, jointly attending to a third object, a drawing or a book, showing reciprocal involvement – characteristics that allow us to define these events as ‘joint attentional events’. We also identified in the various home environments locally defined specificities reflecting different foci on symbolic activities. The omnipresence of a characteristic setting for shared literacy experiences is observed in all the interactions: written materials, shared child-adult attention, dyadic asymmetrical relationships and reciprocal involvements. Nevertheless there are significant particularities in the exchanges between different adults and their child in the timing, activity length and interactional styles deployed to enhance the child’s metaknowledge of symbolic systems in interestingly unique ways. While the reading observed in our data is almost always a joint activity where the partners are acting within a special mode of interpretation of the written text, calling the child’s attention not only to the meaning but also to the particular lexicon in which the meaning was embedded, there are also many differences between the adults’ involvements in their child’s drawing activities. In all family locations, there

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are instances of the child’s choosing a book and recruiting an adult to read with them, as well as the adult’s choosing a story and their determination of the reading focus and format. Children adapted skilfully to variations in the degrees of structure in adult pedagogical styles; nevertheless, both members of conjoint pairs evidenced cognitive, linguistic and socio-emotional satisfaction in the interchanges. Drawing during the days in Canada, the United States and in Italy can be considered as representational activity, where adults set out drawing materials and the girls are left free in their productions. In the United Kingdom day, it is a parallel activity, where adults utilize drawing as a tool during mealtime. In the days in Thailand, Peru, Turkey and the United Kingdom, it is an activity performed by significant adults or an older child to which the girls are encouraged to attend and with whom they are supported in interacting. We also identified differences in the nature of the interactions in which interlocutors act as different social actors. In Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom, the adult’s role is that of the facilitator, setting out materials and encouraging the child to experiment autonomously in their drawing activities. In Peru, Turkey and Italy, the adult is an instructor in transmitting the rules both for the drawing process as well as the products. In Thailand, Peru and the United Kingdom days, the parent or sibling is a model in performing drawing activities as an expert member of the culture. We make no inferences either that the day was representative of all the child’s everyday literacy experiences, nor that these patterns are modal patterns for the societies represented here (see Chapter 1 above). Nor are inferences made on how iconographic conventions within each family play a role in orienting the selection of specific signs by means of which the mental representation are graphically transposed on the page. As mentioned earlier, while marking and drawing have been traditionally considered as culture-free tools to assess the child’s cognitive (Goodenough, 1926) or emotional development (Corman, 1967), questions related to the universal nature of graphic development are far from answered (Cox, 2005). From our perspective, we can see how the process of promoting the child’s symbolic system mastery is common to the studied settings. The cultural transmission of symbolic systems is situated in diverse environments embedded in cultural features that deserve to be taken into account, as they give rise to and exploit different socio-cultural priorities (Pinto & Bombi, 2008). In this sense, we observed the quality of processual nestedness in each place; that is, of each process being fit recursively inside itself in small, internalized models. This aspect is responsible for the self-referential

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aspects of human thought, including language. The relationship of thought to language is reciprocal (Vygotsky 1987). There was an understandable wish by families to use reading, writing and drawing activities to advance children’s learning – and, indeed, to provide direct instruction to enable this. Cross-modal exchanges, particularly visual/ verbal exchanges, are used iteratively and recursively, calling themselves back over and over in operations described as translation exchanges (Sheridan, 1997). The emergence of shared attention towards written language is thought with good reason to be an experience that influences children’s acquisition of literacy. A strong association between the home literacy environment and preschool-age children’s emerging literacy is broadly supported in the research literature (Weigel, Martin & Bennett, 2005). As Bus (2002) pointed out, joint caregiver-child book reading has a long history as a family routine. According to social-constructivist theories, book reading is a socially created, interactive activity in which the child’s interest is as much a prerequisite as a consequence of book reading. Book reading brings young children in touch with story structures and schemes and literacy conventions that are prerequisites for understanding texts; reading books to children also exposes them to modes of written language and multimodal textual conventions (Bus, van IJzendoorn & Pellegrini, 1995, Whitehead, 2002, Barton 2007), to say nothing of the reading of associated graphic representations. In her landmark study Ways with Words, Heath (1983, p. 386) defines a literacy event as ‘any action sequence, involving one or more persons, in which the production and/or comprehension of print plays a role’. Such a conception became necessary in the field of literacy studies when it was recognized, through observational studies of literacy practices, that the narrow school focused conceptualization of ‘reading’ as ‘decoding the text of a book’ missed a very great proportion of authentic literacy learning engagements (Barton, 2007). It has long been claimed by Bus, van IJzendoorn and associates (Bus, Belsky, Van IJzendoorn & Crnic, 1997; Bus & Van IJzendoorn, 1988, 1995; Bus, Van IJzendoorn & Pellegrini, 1995; Van IJzendoorn, Dijkstra, & Bus, 1995) that strong parent-child relationships are associated with efficacious, shared book reading styles that support emergent literacy. The assumption has often been that more securely attached partners are more effective joint book readers. This global day in the life study of thriving two-year-olds with its intensive examination of the interchanges associated symbol system engagements has recently led us to upend some of our perspectives

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on the associations between emotional security and the enterprise of shared book reading (Cameron & Pinto, 2009). There is no doubt that an easy relationship between partners can enhance the quality of the interchange about jointly attended-to textual or graphic representations and, especially perhaps, in the situation of early, shared picture book reading. But our close examinations of the interchanges we have observed between the toddlers we have studied and their family caregivers has raised for us a serious question as to the direction of these effects. We have noted it to be the case that while a satisfying book reading session is likely to emanate from a well-attuned partnership, the satisfaction in mutual meaning making, be it of a picture or a story, might just as easily scaffold and enhance an emotionally secure relationship between the partners as well. The co-construction of conjoint early experiences in sharing symbolic meanings may be as much a source of socio-emotional relational strength as it can be a building block for emergent symbolic understanding.

7 Humour E. Leslie Cameron, Beatrice Accorti Gamannossi, Julia Gillen and Catherine Ann Cameron

As we repeatedly reviewed the days of these young girls, we were struck by the vital role humour played in the ways they explored, interpreted, and negotiated their familial relationships. So it is this aspect of their humour that we focus on in this chapter. Let us share as an example a moment in Jessica’s day in the UK.

Jessica is eating lunch with her brother, grandmother and mother Rachel. She asks for more melon, is denied (as Rachel wants her to eat some ‘Thomas meats’), so then puts a grape half on her finger repeating in a sing-song voice, ‘This little finger’s got a hat on!’ Jessica pops the grape into her mouth, pulls her finger out and flings her hand in the air with a flourish six times, exclaiming ‘Gone!’ after eating three of the grapes. Rachel laughs gently, repeating Jessica’s words.

The cultural construction of such humour as this, used by these strong and thriving children, calls upon several types of humour as we will define them, including clowning, joking/word play, teasing and physical play. Jessica clearly enjoys this joking exchange as it allows her to 136

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navigate and explore her social and intellectual environment. These explorations are frequently supported and encouraged by familial communicative partners. We came to realize that humour, and especially that involving relational negotiations, was a common feature of many interactions that occurred during the children’s days. So we were quickly led to support Reddy’s (2001) suggestion that childhood humour is interpersonally co-constructed at an earlier age than previously acknowledged. As the above example illustrates, humour involves sophisticated cognitive and linguistic skills, is multimodal and arguably can serve a variety of both socio-emotional and cognitive functions. In this chapter, we will explore this and other examples to demonstrate how we came to appreciate that the children were using humour to accomplish a broad range of purposes. We also saw how humour is potentially a significant vehicle for socio-cognitive development. Humour development in various guises and in many ways may well be an important contributor to the development of a thriving child.

Humour and the young child What is humour? Studies of the early development of humour define it as ‘the mental experience of discovering or appreciating ludicrous or absurdly incongruous ideas, events or situations’ (McGhee, 1979, p. 6). This definition focuses on the cognitive component of humour that arises from incongruity, which is ‘the notion that something unexpected happens in a joke which serves to arouse, surprise, or mystify the listeners’ (Shultz & Robillard, 1980, p. 60). Appreciating incongruity relies on at least a certain level of cognitive maturity, although even this skill has recently been demonstrated as early as during the toddler years (Johnson & Mervis, 1997), understanding is not sufficient to determine whether an incongruity is perceived to be humorous. For example, in the context of language, humour relies on metalinguistic knowledge to appreciate and resolve verbal incongruity (Shultz & Robillard, 1980). In light of Zigler, Levine and Gould’s (1967) claim that humour responses to some extent depend upon a child’s level of intellectual functioning; the cognitive sophistication of that child, along with many other factors such as their apparent general interests and the specifics of their local contexts, should all be taken into account in order most inclusively to identify instances of early humour.

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Whereas Piaget (1970) described cognitive development as progressing genetically from inside outward, Vygotsky (1987) argued that speech served first and foremost a social function; interactions with others being stimuli for cognitive advancement. It was in the activity of joint problem solving with a more cognitively advanced partner that the child’s true intellectual potential could be identified. We will return to this perspective below, after we have examined several humorous interchanges. Other definitions of humour highlight socio-emotional aspects of humour, such as ‘any communication that leads to an emotional experience of amusement, pleasure, and/or mirth’ (Southam, 2003, p. 28). Berlyne (1972) sought to define humour by taking into account the relationship between ‘arousal boosts’ and ‘arousal jags’ (or mechanisms that elevate and then moderate arousal), and their hedonic values, timing and clues precluding seriousness. Chafe (2001) similarly indicated that some of the stimuli that produce laughter might be humorous at least to the extent that they generate a ‘feeling of nonseriousness’ (p. 39). Although many researchers have acknowledged the social aspects of humour, less research has focused on its socio-emotional functions. Loizou (2005) has recently combined cognitive and socio-emotional factors in her definition of humour. She has explicitly situated incongruity in the social realm by suggesting that toddlers find violating existing social norms to be humorous – her ‘theory of the absurd’. She further proposed that young children feel efficacious by violating expectations – her ‘theory of empowerment’. We have endeavoured to work within a framework that is as inclusive as possible, considering the widest range of behaviour that we have consensually considered to be humorous. When does child humour emerge and what types of humour are used? Until recently very young children’s humour had been underestimated. McGhee (1979), Shultz and Robillard (1980), and many others suggested that the perception of humorous events begins only at about 18 months (although Pien & Rothbart, 1980, were notable exceptions). More recent studies have demonstrated humour in younger toddlers (Johnson & Mervis, 1997; Loizou, 2005, 2007) and even in infants (Reddy, 2001), and Bergen (e.g., Bergen, 2002) has emphasized the importance of humour in many aspects of very young children’s play. In addition to underestimating the time of onset of the perception of humour, the capacity for the utilization of humour had also earlier been underestimated. While McGhee (1979) initially focused attention largely

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on verbal incongruity in child humour, others have more recently highlighted a range of types of child humour beyond verbal incongruity such as clowning, teasing, joy in mastery play, sound play, verbal reproductions and elaborations of language patterns, and other forms of incongruity such as violating social norms (e.g., Bergen, 2002; Loizou, 2005, 2007; Reddy, 2001). Furthermore, Horgan (1981) rightly noted what is still the case: that much more research is needed on what makes children funny, in addition to what they find funny.

Our approach to studying child humour We developed the following methodology for exploring humour in our day in the life dataset. We scrutinized raw video data in concert with their transcriptions, identifying all instances of humorous exchanges – that is, all exchanges that appeared to us to be intended to elicit, or fortuitously elicited, positive, ‘non-serious’, interactions with a communicative partner. Without a doubt, despite the fact that we also liaised with other project participants, one constraint on the scope of our investigations was the reality that instances of humour in those communities we four authors were most familiar with were generally more visible to us than instances in the other datasets, highlighting the importance of local cultural and linguistic knowledge in the analysis of humour. Although we made some endeavours to compensate for this constraint by engaging in detailed dialogues with co-researchers beyond the authors of this chapter at particular points during the study reported here, we also decided to utilize our local knowledge as an opportunity for exercising this heightened awareness as a strength. Accordingly, for one child (USA) we completed a full analysis of the day, recording all instances of humour, along with the time of occurrence and the people present (see Cameron, Kennedy & Cameron, 2008). For other days, in which fewer instances of humour were recorded, we fully analysed salient selected passages. It should be emphasized that we were not attempting a quantitative analysis and also we were not making comparisons between the children with respect to their humour. Rather, we noted compelling instances of humorous familial exchanges to explore in further detail, bringing diverse perspectives to bear. Further, we did not focus in this analysis on the instances of humour initiated by the children simply for their own personal amusement. Humorous exchanges were independently examined line-by-line by several members of the research team. Each instance was classified by humour type, independent of previous taxonomies in the literature, and

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we noted similarities and overlaps among the types used. This analysis led to the recognition of emergent patterns, and subsequent identification of the functions that each instance appeared to play within the exchange between communicative partners.

Types and functions of child humour We observed the use of humour in all of the days that we analysed, although humour was brought into play to varying degrees. We identified the use of four major types of humour: Clowning involves ‘acts repeated deliberately in order to re-elicit laughter from others’ (Reddy, 2001), and may or may not be motoric. They can also be repetitive speech acts. Teasing is playful mocking directed at, appealing to, or attempting to provoke a response from a communicative partner. Joking/word play includes many forms of word play and playful language. Physical play is the use of the body and other objects for amusement. Note that all of these types of humour are encompassed by the concept of incongruity, which is the discrepant use of objects, sounds or labels. As McGhee (1979) early claimed, incongruity continues to be a hallmark of humour. We identified the use of two main clusters of humorous functioning, and several categories within these clusters. Socio-emotional functioning as can be seen in the way the child engages in pleasurable social communications that allow her to solidify her social position in her familial context. Cognitive and linguistic functioning captures ways in which the child interacts in a playful fashion to explore her cognitive and linguistic ‘environment’, attempting to understand it. We revisit humour types and functions in a tabular summary on p. 149 and in a more general discussion, after describing specific examples of the children’s humour.

Selected episodes of child humour We now turn to several humorous episodes to illustrate the variety of types and functions of humour used by the girls. We use these as illustrative

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examples that display the range of types of toddler humour, their complexity and our interpretive responses. Episodes typically lasted for less than 90 seconds, although one (in Peru) lasted several minutes. UK: ‘This Little Finger’s Got a Hat On!’ In the passage of 80 seconds highlighted at the beginning of this chapter, Jessica is at the lunch table playing with her grapes – putting them on the tips of her fingers and exclaiming, ‘This little finger’s got a hat on!’ For this and the following episodes we will describe the types of humour used as well as the functions they appear to serve. Jessica’s episode reveals three types of humour. First, the repetitive or clowning aspect of her humour is evident as she repeats the phrase and action several times. She clearly means to elicit smiles and laughter from others. The act is joking/word play and simultaneously physical humour as she uses multiple modes to enact her joke. In this, as in many of the humorous instances we have analysed, jokes are frequently characterized as involving multiple types of humour. Moreover, this humorous episode reveals several functions. Indeed, Jessica apparently finds humour in the fact that grapes do not really belong on fingertips and clearly are not hats. Joking in this manner allows her to explore these discrepancies, building on her growing understanding of her environment. This joke demonstrates a cognitive embodiment of humour – it allows the child to explore what she knows or is learning about the world. The joke in this episode clearly brings pleasure to the child. Her sing-song tone of voice and accompanying smiles and chuckles reflect enjoyment on her part (joking is fun!), if not quite so much on the part of her mother. Jessica is playing with her food and is aware that this breaks with social norms and has some risks involved, demonstrating her facility to flirt with those norms. Humour allows her to ‘cover’ for this, however, by making the playing with her food into what she might think a clever act. She is not simply messing around, but rather has discovered an interesting function for grapes. Jessica is a twin and at the time of video recording was in a steady state of mutual monitoring, even friendly rivalry, for the best, that is, most valued food and attention from adults, access to playthings and so on. This instance of humour demonstrates an effort made to draw/maintain her mother’s attention and to make a connection with her mother, that is, to generate a response to her joke. This episode, like many that we have observed, demonstrates the convergence of multiple types and functions of toddler humour, a point to which we return below.

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Italy: ‘Nice to Meet You!’ It is time for a nappy/diaper change, but Beatrice, sitting with her doll on the balcony, starts a game, shaking hands with her doll, saying ‘Piacere.’ [Translation: ‘It’s nice to meet you.’] Her mother, aiming towards the nappy change, gets drawn into repeating and punning on the greeting routine with the doll. In a similarly playful fashion, she elaborates on Beatrice’s feeding routine with the doll, in a successful manoeuvre to entice her into the nappy change. The humorous setting is given both by the gesture of shaking hands and the mother’s naming a personage (Girolamo Pompetti) whose name gives a sound idea to the rhythmic hand movement. The child repeats the humorous sequence with Lucia’s encouragement, repeating ‘Piacere!’

Three types of humour are evident in this exchange, an episode of 60 seconds. First, clowning is embodied in the repetitive nature of the joke. Beatrice and her mother Lucia repeat the culturally prescribed phrase and gesture three times each. This joking/word play is enacted in the incongruous gesture of shaking hands and saying ‘nice to meet you’ to a doll, which Beatrice appears to be doing at least in part for the benefit of the adults and camera present. The act is simultaneously joking/word play and physical humour as she uses multiple modes (verbal phrases and physical actions) to act out her joke. There is also a complex linguistic aspect to this joke that her mother introduces – the name of the personage Girolamo Pompetti – and the last part of which Beatrice repeats (‘Pompetti’) apparently laughing more for the word’s sound than for the meaning associated with the hands’ movement. Nevertheless, in this playful situation Beatrice appears to learn

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something about the social custom of saying one’s name in presenting oneself. There is an instructional element to this situation, similar to the context in which she was a party to in joint book reading with her father (see Chapter 6, pp. 124–125), as her mother Lucia inserts a play on words into this already humorous little game as well as a model of social comportment. Beatrice uses her joke for many purposes. Joking is enjoyable and she laughs and squirms with delight in her chair, demonstrating her extreme pleasure. Her mother also enjoys the joke and they clearly share the pleasure – reinforcing their interconnection. The game/joke is co-constructed as Lucia extends it by introducing more word play and Beatrice follows her lead. But just as Beatrice enjoys the joke with her mother she is also testing boundaries, pushing limits and attempting to negotiate within this social situation. She does not want to stop playing to have her nappy changed and she puts off the inevitable by distracting her mother with her routine. In fact, at the end of the ‘Piacere’ episode she continues to hold Lucia off while playing with the doll, suggesting that the doll now needs to be fed.

Peru: Toothpaste Teasing In this episode of approximately ten minutes, Juanita is trying to engage her older cousin Ana in some of their accustomed play, but her cousin is under the weather on this day and is reluctant to play with the toddler. Juanita starts by picking up some of Ana’s stickers to sort and play with, ‘Look! Eh, eh? … this, this … here, ok’ she says as she organizes them on a chair. Her aunt is putting moisturizer on both girls’ faces and Juanita then tries a negative tactic for engaging Ana by pushing her and pulling at her dress. Her aunt remonstrates and her cousin removes herself by going to the bedroom she shares with her mother. But Juanita follows her, trying some new strategies. She approaches Ana, giving her some of the stickers she is playing with, one at a time. Ana reluctantly puts them in the pocket of her dress, but seems thoroughly disengaged. Juanita persists, to no constructive effect, continuing to dole out stickers. ‘Come, come, come!’ she says to Ana, wanting to play with something of Ana’s, if not her. Juanita’s aunt tells her not to play with Ana’s things, ‘No, Juanita, that’s Ana’s’. ‘That no!’ Juanita says, then ‘Mmm, mmm. That ok!’, as she lights upon a strategy that just might elicit her cousin’s attention.

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Humour Juanita picks up aunt Lina’s toothbrush and toothpaste and pretends to brush her teeth and giggles. A risqué proposition: she sucks on the closed toothpaste container and cheekily offers it to Ana. She brings a stool next to the bed Ana is sitting on, and offers more stickers to her cousin, who has, by now, hidden her head underneath a coverlet. Ana is trying to ignore Juanita, but Juanita persists. ‘I hide,’ Juanita says, putting her head under the coverlet too. She returns to her provocative strategy of brandishing Lina’s toothbrush and toothpaste and this teasing ultimately ignites Ana’s sense of fun and perhaps boldness.

She reluctantly smiles, colluding with the little game, as if she is finally enjoying a little mutual engagement at last. Both girls then return to the courtyard and work together on a joint project proposed by their caregiver, and Juanita returns briefly to the bedroom to return the toothbrush and paste to their rightful place, their having served their purpose. The humour employed by Juanita in this passage is subtle. Yet it is consistent with our framework of humorous exchanges being ‘intended to elicit pleasure from a communicative partner’. Juanita’s humorous actions can be described as light-hearted and cheerful. In terms of types of humour, she clowns in the sense that she repeats the gesture of playing with the toothbrush and toothpaste to try to get a response from her cousin. Perhaps she has done this to effect before and she is certainly aware of the riskiness of her action. This riskiness is used to tease her cousin, knowing that her cousin will also realize that these items are not toys and perhaps her cousin might intervene. The use of objects to initiate humour is physical in that Juanita uses a variety of physical objects to jest. Her playful movements with the toothbrush and then the toothpaste are representational; she is not simply cleaning her teeth with her aunt’s belongings but rather performing with them. This relatively long episode demonstrates considerable persistence on Juanita’s part. She is teasing to gain the attention of – and socialize

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with – her beloved cousin, which is clearly a primary function of using this humour. Juanita is not aiming for a guffaw, which would probably be surprising given her cousin’s state of health, but rather is attempting to initiate an interaction that she clearly desires. This has socio-emotional functions in that it provides her with an opportunity to be light-hearted in order to affiliate with a loved one. She is also amusing herself as she does so, in actions that she chooses to repeat in various formats many times. We do not know whether her aunt’s toothbrush is larger than her own, but it seems possible that an element of her delight might relate to this or in the incongruity of using somebody else’s tooth-cleaning equipment. Such play leads to further exploration of her environment and her interaction with and relation to it. Her playful interaction goes beyond imitation and involves innovative ways of involving the brush or tube and her mouth. As Vygotsky (1998, p. 87) writes: ‘The child’s play activity is not simply a recollection of past experience, but a creative reworking that combines impressions and constructs from them new realities addressing the needs of the child.’ Turkey: ‘Aydede! Aydede!’

Selin is wandering outside, dragging the end of the curtain with her and singing ‘Kemal!’ (her father’s name). She crawls onto her mother’s lap for cuddles, and, from that comfortable, safe place, she proceeds to be playful by calling everyone including herself ‘Aydede’ – referring to her uncle who is not present – when they ask her what their name is and they respond with commensurate banter.

‘Aydžn’ is Selin’s uncle’s real name, but ‘Aydede’ in Turkish means ‘Grandfather Moon’ literally, and the moon in profile figuratively. This she had learned a few days previously, and, armed with this knowledge, she moved to call her uncle a ‘Dede’ (grandfather) of sorts and to name him ‘Aydede’. The phonetic resemblance of ‘Aydžn’ and ‘Aydede’ may have triggered this, but a semantic association may also have played a

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part, as her uncle is also a greying senior member of the family. This ascription was received with warm responses from family members and the name adds to the power of her teasing and contributes to the positive tenor of her addressee’s responses to this teasing. Aydžn thus became ‘Aydede’ to Selin on a long-term basis. Selin repeats her joke numerous times – clowning and illustrating humour through incongruity, as obviously not everyone is called by her uncle’s newly allotted name (incorporating joking/word play). This is also an example of teasing – playful mocking with the adults in the room, from whom she expects a reaction. One interesting aspect of naming is that given names are, more or less, unique. On the other hand, many people can be called ‘Mum’ or ‘Dad’ (or in this case ‘Grandfather’), but only by a subset of people. Young children must learn this complex convention that governs the use of names, which varies among families and cultures. So, just as Vygotsky (1999) discusses, there is in young children’s development of language the challenge of realizing that names are essentially arbitrary symbols, but also that a word is linked with the property of the thing being denoted. ‘In order to be a sign for a thing, a word must be supported by the properties of the thing signified. Not “everything can be anything” and the child demonstrates this emerging knowledge in play.’ (Vygotsky, 1999, p. 9) This episode shows Selin’s understanding of the rules in her deliberate breaking of them. Thus, one of the functions of this humorous episode is to examine the consequences of the breaking of social, and indeed deliberately violating, maxims of conversation (Grice, 1989) by not responding in an expected or accurate way. Her enjoyment of her joke is maximized by their reciprocations. Her joke gains her some attention, some affiliation, some social status. She was well rewarded by the attention, enjoyment and affirmation of the adult members of the family. USA: ‘I pledge allegiance …’ At the time of data collection, Katy lived in a small mid-western US community with her American father and Canadian mother and six-year-old brother. Both Katy and her brother were taught the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag of the United States of America in day care and school respectively. Their mother Elisabeth objected to this on sociopolitical grounds. She had told her children that she did not think that training in such displays of patriotism were appropriate with children, especially at such an early age. So, the children had learned that they could tease their mother by reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, highlighting

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a discrepancy between home and school values and practices. The family game involved the children saying ‘I pledge allegiance …’ and Elisabeth saying ‘Don’t you say that to me!’ in a mocking, ‘how dare you?’ tone. There was excitement in the game as the children blatantly disobeyed their mother, but the consequence was laughter and mockscolding. Katy recited the Pledge of Allegiance numerous times throughout the day.

Katy’s father, Fred, has finished reading bedtime stories to Katy and tells her that he hears her mother coming up the stairs. Katy gets excited and, upon Elisabeth’s entering the room, she asks to be picked up and starts reciting the Pledge of Allegiance even before she this happens. Fred laughs loudly and leaves the room. Her mother asks Katy if she is teasing her as she tickles Katy. This recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance continues for about one minute.

We see at least three types of humour here. First and foremost, the joke is synchronizing with her mother’s sense of humour by teasing, and is primarily directed towards her mother upon whom she counts to get a reaction. Given that it is repeated within the episode and throughout the day, with the goal of making others laugh, we consider it to be clowning. Further, it is joking/word play; playful language uttered paradoxically both to taunt and to affiliate with her mother. Katy uses this joke to enhance interactions, primarily with her mother. She clearly enjoys a joke that safely flaunts local culturally prescribed patterns as it results in laughter by all family members. In this episode, Katy relies on shared family meaning, understanding that Elisabeth will react in a charged manner to her recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance. Katy uses this joke to bring her mother closer to her – physically and, we believe, emotionally. Her mother tickles her and teases her back. Katy also challenges social norms by teasingly disobeying her mother, while counting on a positive outcome.

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Revisiting types of humour We conceptualize the organization of the use of the four types of humour described above as indicated in the illustration below. A most notable feature of all of these episodes is that each encompasses several types of humour. This is important, as much research has focused on verbal incongruity to the exclusion of other types of humour employed by children, and especially very young children.

Incongruity

Clowning

Teasing Schematic representation of relationship among types of humour usage

Physical play

Joking/ word play

We observed all four types of humour (clowning, teasing, joking/word play and physical humour) employed by the children, and all of these in their various combinations can give rise to various humorous effects. Clowning and joking were ubiquitous, but we also saw teasing and physical play exhibited in their humour. Moreover, most passages involved multiple types of humour. In fact, three types of humour were seen in each of the instances described here. The table on p. 149 illustrates this point. Clearly humour is a complex system in which many forms exist and interact, even in the humour of young children. The fact that each of the instances we observed had characteristics in common with each of the others gives some grounds for noting commonalities underlying our description of our emergent taxonomy, but interesting local differences in the expressive contents of the humour leaves much room for depicting a wide range of styles of enactment of amusing exchanges, be it finding a unique function for a piece of fruit, a variation on onomatopoeia, challenging a social norm, a play on words surrounding local mythology, or a send-up of a patriotic practice.

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Classification of types and functions of humour in five episodes Episode of Humour

Types of Humour

Functions of Humour

‘This little finger’s got a hat on!’ ( Jessica; UK)

1. Clowning 2. Joking/word play 3. Physical

‘Nice to meet you!’ or ‘Piacere’ (Beatrice; Italy)

1. Clowning 2. Joking/word play 3. Physical

The Toothbrush Tease ( Juanita; Peru)

1. Clowning 2. Teasing 3. Physical

1. Cognitive; incongruity 2. Emotional; pleasure 3. Social; break norms, affiliate 1. Cognitive; incongruity 2. Emotional; pleasure 3. Social; break norms (affiliate?) 1. Social; break norms, affiliate 2. Emotional; pleasure

‘Aydede! Aydede!’ (Selin; Turkey)

1. Clowning 2. Joking/word play 3. Teasing

‘I pledge allegiance’ (Katy; USA)

1. Clowning 2. Joking/word play 3. Teasing

1. Cognitive; incongruity 2. Emotional; pleasure 3. Social; break norms, affiliate 1. Cognitive; shared meaning 2. Emotional; pleasure 3. Social; break norms, affiliate

Revisiting functions of humour The girls deployed humour, in concert with their family’s engagement, to achieve many often overlapping or interacting ends – cognitive, linguistic, emotional and social, as depicted in the representation of functions served in the below figure. Each of the above episodes functioned multidimensionally. As can be seen in the table above, cognitive

Social

Cognitive Schematic representation of relationships among functions of humour

Emotional Linguistic

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functions can signal incongruity or shared meaning; and social functions can include norm breaking and affiliation.

Emotional and social functions in the use of humour In each of these episodes, there was clear enjoyment and pleasure for the child, serving a positive emotional function. The children smiled, laughed and wiggled in their seats, demonstrating their enjoyment of the humour. Moreover, there is satisfaction in shared-meaning in the impacts of these humorous episodes. For example, in the US episode Katy understood and played on the idea that her mother would react (in a charged manner) to her recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance. In the Italian episode, not only did Beatrice manage to share the joke with her mother, but her mother even extended the joke, sending a powerful message that the joke was a good one. In the Peruvian episode, Juanita sustained a sequence of varied activities with the tooth-cleaning apparatus as she endeavoured to amuse her cousin and draw her in to play. In the episode from Turkey, Selin had fun with the understanding that both she and her interlocutors knew that her name was not, nor, really, was anybody else’s ‘Aydede’. In all of the episodes analysed here, the children were deliberately testing the boundaries of their family’s social norms, and were perhaps allowed or even in some cases encouraged to do so, providing some supportive evidence for Loizou’s (2005) theory of the absurd. In the US episode, Katy jokingly disobeyed her mother. In the UK episode, Jessica was ‘testing the waters’, exploring the extent of her powers of persuasion and seeking a positive consensus on her playful actions. The way that Juanita immediately started laughing when first putting Ana’s toothbrush towards her mouth showed some understanding of the convention that toothbrushes are not shared. Again, in the Turkish episode, Selin was deliberately violating a maxim of conversation by deliberately giving false information. Interestingly, the UK episode contained an added dimension in that Jessica’s playful behaviour did not immediately gain her the acceptance she was apparently trying to elicit from her mother. Hence it was repeated to try to persuade Rachel of its hilarity. Juanita’s playing with the stickers under the bedclothes did not elicit the favourable reaction from Ana that did clowning with the toothbrush and toothpaste shortly afterwards. Likewise, in the Italian episode, Beatrice repeated her joke and drew her mother into the joke, possibly in an effort to put off the inevitable nappy change.

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Finally, each of these episodes illustrates that the five children engage the attention of their family members with their various humorous actions, leading to positive affective connections with them. For example, for Katy, teasing initiated intense interactions with Elisabeth bringing her close physically and eliciting a warm emotional response from her family. Her use of the Pledge of Allegiance showed her knowledge of family ways, as a person to be counted upon for generating a certified family joke on the outside world, including her childcare setting, her brother’s school and her larger social environment where other children might not be encouraged to tease about something so ‘serious’. While this was one of the most salient uses of teasing we observed, we believe that it reflects an important development that can be available even to very young children. Selin also employed teasing to initiate and maintain connection with members of her family. She engaged all the interactants in her teasing about their names being that of an absent family member. Humour, and teasing in particular, seem largely to serve a familial attachment function between the children and their relatives.

Cognitive and linguistics functions in the use of humour In addition to these socio-emotional functions of humour’s use, there are also cognitive and linguistic functions. Sometimes these functions occurred in concert. For example, Katy’s playful use of language to exchange ideas and experiences dovetails with her intellectual and expressive maturation, and many cognitive advances reflect accompanying linguistic ones. Several of the instances we have explored here show the child seeming to be attracted to the complex and intriguing ‘language game’ (Wittgenstein, 1965) that humour seems to be. Wittgenstein believed there were many language games that people constantly create and feel drawn to, and that joining in means entering into a ‘form of life’ as well as being able to speak the words. There was a significant amount of repetition of each humorous episode described above. There is a wealth of developmental evidence from the psychological literature that repetition reinforces learning. For example, in the cases of humour, one of us (Gillen, 1997) demonstrated how a two-and-a-half-year-old girl found incongruity in both visual and verbal modes highly salient in her perception of humour, reworking her interpretations in repetitive interactions. Indeed, Gillen suggested that this repeated play – citing instances of routines that were repeated over several months, with, perhaps, subtle changes/adjustments – could be

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a way in which the child gradually improves her understanding of the interaction, indeed her own contribution to it. Many episodes of humour described in this chapter conform to Reddy’s (2001) depiction of clowning – actions repeated in an effort to elicit laughter. Indeed, in each of the episodes the joke was repeated numerous times. An additional benefit of clowning (besides connecting with others and making them laugh) is that it offers the child the opportunity to reinforce concepts and their associated language. Each repetition of the joke provides a chance for the child to reflect on it and to attempt to understand what made it funny, enriching the developmental opportunity that humour provides. In some instances (e.g., in Italy), the child did not appear to appreciate her mother’s full meaning of the joke, but was provided the opportunity to cogitate on it. Many developmental psychologists view such play as the work of the young child. Fully ‘getting a joke’ requires, at a minimum, cognitive sophistication that matches, reaches or exceeds the complexity of the joke. Vygotsky (1967) explained that in imaginative play activities, the young child is learning to subordinate action to meaning as she focuses on the playful dimension rather than the straightforward implementation of an everyday activity. Given the benefits of successive approximations towards congruence between humorous stimuli and a child’s level of cognitive functioning (Zigler, Levine & Gould, 1967), repetition can enhance understanding and increased sophistication can enhance the experience of humorous stimuli. Thus humour can reinforce mastered concepts and introduce new ones for the child to explore. In this way, humour and cognition can be complementary. We have observational evidence that is consistent with Gillen’s (1997) report of the use of humour over several months. Reports from their families indicate that both Selin in Turkey and Katy in the USA (with whom local investigators are still in contact) continue to use the described joke from the day a few years later. Katy continues to tease her mother with the Pledge of Allegiance and Selin continues to call her uncle Aydede. We surmise that this repetition has brought new levels of appreciation to the joke as the child has developed cognitively. Another cognitive function of humour involves, in Loizou’s (2005) terminology, empowerment. Loizou’s theory of empowerment highlights the headiness of violating or challenging social norms. Several of the instances we have explored here show the child seeming to feel that she might be pulling the wool over an interlocutor’s eyes. Humour in general, particularly when shared with others, is reinforcing. Smiles and laughter also demonstrate empowerment, accompanying behaviour

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in which mastery is being acquired, although we have not included pleasure in mastery (see Bergen, 2002) in our classification of types of humour.

Conclusions Cognitive and playful language motives are frequently deeply intertwined with socio-emotional intentions. There is a rich socio-emotional web created by humour, and the cognitive and linguistic advances made by the child appear enhanced by this contextually affective scaffolding and the ‘language game’ that humour can be seen to be (see Wittgenstein, 1965). We have been particularly intrigued by the way in which humour provides a vehicle for social functions to drive cognitive ones, as expressed by Vygotsky (1987). Building upon Vygotskian claims that social interactions importantly facilitate cognitive development, Mercer (2000) has contrasted intramental with inter-mental cognitive functioning, and, like Vygotsky, has demonstrated the importance of inter-mental (social) processing to intra-mental (individual) growth. An educational psychologist, Mercer examined students’ classroom problem-solving and suggested the great importance of providing ample opportunity in school settings for cognitive processing in what he calls Inter-mental Development Zones (IDZs). He has provided strong evidence that peer discussions enhance children’s problem solving and claims that inter-mental intellectual operations facilitate intra-mental progress. Humorous exchanges under such a lens can be seen to provide opportunities for children to observe and explore everyday incongruities collaboratively. The opportunity for playful interactions with respect to such commonplace incongruities as are the foci of much humour, provides scope for early environmental and social mastery (Rogoff, Mistry, Göncü & Mosier, 1993; McGhee, 1989). In the present work, we see a good deal of evidence of the children we observed operating in a socially rich IDZ, wherein they safely explored ways and means to expand their understanding of their familial place, their physical surroundings, their comprehension of the social power of their own and others’ words to ‘get things done’. In our data we observe that humorous interactions are a particularly rich arena for young children’s play. In these interactions we see, as Vygotsky (1967, p. 16) explained of pretence play more generally, ‘play also creates the zone of proximal development of the child. In play a child is always above his average age, above his daily behaviour; in play it is as though he were a head taller than himself’.

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We saw a good deal of evidence from the adults with whom the little girls interacted that they actively and mutually engaged with the children in their humorous play and indeed on occasion even lent an instructional hand in enhancing the themes the children initiated. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to explore the extent or the formats that the adults might have been using to model light tones and humorous expressions themselves that could indeed influence or even accentuate a tendency for the children to find and generate observations of the incongruities all around them. While both the basic types and functions of the children’s humorous exchanges had much in common, the local particularities of how those types and functions were enacted can be strikingly divergent. Selin’s play with her discovery of ‘Grandfather Moon’, the play on words, and then the game of extending the label to all has both cultural and linguistic specificities that are unique to her context, but yet can be seen to exemplify the affiliative clowning seen in many other situations. Beatrice’s ‘Piacere’, accompanied by a handshake, might not be dissimilar from Jessica’s ‘This finger’s got a hat on’ in the emotional tone of their humorous social negotiations, but the style and contents of their word plays reflect the quite different contextual and material opportunities they each have for enacting their emerging awareness of the power of humour in their daily comportment. Both Juanita and Katy wish to provoke engagement in a potential interactive partner. Katy has a tried and true method for getting a warm, affective response from her mother. Juanita has to try many strategies to engage her temporarily uninterested play partner. But both children ultimately and differently teased their way into the positive interactivity for which they were striving. Our close examination of episodes of five family practices surrounding humour highlights the role of play within families as a distinctive ‘regime of practice’ (see Grieshaber, 2004, p. 64) rather than revealing children playing and adults sometimes entering in, or adults perhaps accepting their children’s wish to play. Powerful reciprocal learning happens with regard to everyone’s sense of humour. Additionally, this observation carries an important message with respect to the educative value of the informal learning contexts that families can provide. Children with a developed sense of humour are likely to be strong children. Just as adult humour is largely social by nature, our toddlers’ humorous interactions expose entwined affective and intellectual processes and reveal the place of playful communications in the development of a strong child’s exploration, interpretation and negotiation of her familial environment.

8 Conclusions Catherine Ann Cameron and Julia Gillen

Colwyn Trevarthen (1995, p. 5) identified children’s ‘natural curiosity for meaning’ as an element of the innate need that children have to live and learn in culture, as fish swim in the sea and birds fly in the air, not to the acquired or cultivated need of the scholar to describe and explain about culture. In this book we have interpreted aspects of these children’s days while trying simultaneously not to remove or disassociate such topics for attention as gentle pats and strokes or humour from the eco-cultural whole of their lived experience.

Connecting the relational dots: ‘Five important things’ Our work with these seven young children has given us much to ponder – many insights into the rich worlds of toddlers around the globe, and into the constituencies of hardy, thriving little girls. Reflecting on the findings of relational psychology (Brown & Gilligan, 1992; Miller & Stiver, 1997; Robb, 2007), and its capacity to understand the development of girls and women, resonates with our findings in our international cultural study of a day in the life of these 30-month-olds who were our guides into their lives. See our graphic adaptation of Miller and Stiver’s (1997) ‘five important things’ on the next page. Clearly, we must be cautious about looking into the future (see Chapter 4 p. 79); but we have reason to believe that the providences they encounter down the road are likely to be met with strong, confident responses. Certainly at the time of our study these girls evidenced a zest for life, a vitality and a positive energy in reaction to the people, places and events 155

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Conclusions zest, vitality, aliveness, energy

power, effectiveness

sense of worth

knowledge

sense of connection

Five important things. Adapted from Miller and Stiver (1997)

of their situations. When presented with a challenge, they were effective mediators, using whatever strategies came to hand from interpersonal skills and awareness, sensitivity to their contexts and humour. They impacted very powerfully within their current niches. At two-and-a-half years, the girls’ communication skills were in the process of developing into what will contribute additional power to their negotiations in their daily lives. Furthermore, their environmental explorations within the security of their home geographies assisted them in their knowledge of their worlds. They knew what to expect from their days and engaged in partnership with their interactants and were building further understanding by developing ways and means and a lexicon for doing so. All their energy directed at mastery appeared to pay off in a positive sense of personal worth as well as an apparent drive to renew and extend their already rich sense of identity, which, in turn, seemed to prod them to enlarge their circle to include more extended family and peers – and even us, the researchers (‘Zack can be the big sister’ [see Chapter 1, pp. 8–9 above]).

Varying conceptions of strength We note in all the chapters of this book the many conceptions of thriving enacted in the various home settings we observed. A clear examination of interactions illuminates the families’ agency as well as that of the little girls. Lave and Wenger (1991) remind us of the value of informal, situated family learning, mostly unstructured and unplanned, learning

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in the ‘stream of family life’ (Taylor, 1983). We see the family as a powerful educational ‘institution’, very different from school, yet clearly effective. Could schools learn from the ways in which families approach learning? We welcome contemporary endeavours to make links, recently highlighted in the World Yearbook of Education 2009 (Fleer, Hedegaard & Tudge, 2009; see also González, Moll & Amanti, 2004). The chapters of this book draw upon only a small fraction of what can still be analysed of our polysemic video data. The selection of vignettes cannot be taken to imply that a practice, discussed as it happened in one day in one location, therefore does or does not happen in another case. Nevertheless, it might be helpful to recapitulate some of the moments that were examined in more detail in the chapters above in order to connect a few more of the relational dots. In the chapter on emotional security, we (for we use this pronoun in this chapter to denote all the project members rather than specifically credit chapter authorship) describe comforting interchanges between the children and family members in the form of soothing rocking in hammocks in Thailand, in a rocking chair in the UK and in a swing in Canada. There, soothing motions served to calm on some occasions, to comfort after a tumble, or to assist in the transition between sleeping and waking. We observe fleeting affectionate pats and gentle touches that encourage continuing engagement in transitions between activities, and punctuation for a request for compliance, and we also observe the children ‘pass on’ these comforting pats to stuffed animals and as returns to their parents. We find in every home little retreats or safe places where the children can go to engage in imaginative play, largely uninterrupted – transforming a balcony, a hallway and a secluded nook into a safe place for staging their daily dramas. A deep association between comforting transactions and powerful agency would be hard to ignore. We point out how much musicality is a part of the everyday embodied experience of these young children. Whether rocking, swinging or playing, rhythm and tunes are often involved. In Thailand, mother and child sing in a hammock. Rhythmical bouncing while engaging in a interlude with taped music elicited by a mother’s suggestion brings full engagement in the moment for the girl in Canada; swinging together brings a particularly peaceful interlude in the day for them. Musicality can also be a highly commodified aspect of childhood, whether present through toys, artefacts, commercial music or any other aspect of the environment. A very wide range of musical instruments, but child-directed, like drums and other sound makers, and even a rather fragile guitar and a sturdier piano, are all available for the child in Turkey to sample at will

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during her day. It was evident there that music-making was a strong feature of the family’s routine – the adults played instruments as hobbies but, far more than this, they expected music to be embedded into the everyday routines of life, welcoming their young children’s contributions. Ambient sound – for example from televisions – is a common aspect of these children’s environments and can be seen to link into the children’s multisensory explorations and recreations of culturally significant activities, whether dancing on the bed in Peru or making links between manifestations of Thomas the Tank Engine in the UK. It was repeated watching of the videos that made apparent many such links, as the way Thomas turned up on the TV, in the mall and on the luncheon plate. Eating is, of course, an area of everyday life deeply saturated with the communication of values – those of the family and those of the society in which the family situates itself (although the methodology of this project did not extend to careful investigation of broader social values except as evident in the family’s practice). In each location, we witnessed the lengths parents go to ensure their child is well nourished via exploring eating events as loci for child health support. It was notable that we witnessed considerable flexibility on the way towards the evidently successful achievement of this goal. The families honour the children’s many socio-cognitive interests while encouraging them to eat. Recall aunt Lina’s discussion of the bird as Juanita eats, poised in a doorway looking at the sky. Much of the action at meal times becomes the interplay between the child’s goals and objectives at the time, and the parents’ perspectives in the desiderata of their two-year-olds’ daily round. The child’s work is clearly seen as the business of play. Beatrice recreates her knowledge of the practices around young children’s eating in her play with a doll on the balcony. The depth of her knowledge is apparent in that she is not merely (as it were) imitating the mealtime practices that have just taken place, but, or so it seemed to us, also reflecting memories of earlier times. In Italy, the encouragement of the child to develop her own tastes was particularly apparent – not only in order to learn to eat satisfactorily but also to share in the socially approved attitudes of interest in food. This was just one instance of the communication of values around food that occurred everywhere, in different manifestations. Practices around the eating of food is also an area where families are conscious of change along with maturation, and it is not only the choice or amount of food that can develop but also the routines around it; recall, for example, Rachel in the UK saying during the second iterative stage that the family were changing their habits around the integration of drawing with eating at mealtimes.

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Literacy, of course, is a common domain for a deeply socially sanctioned watch on development as learning, as closely linked as it is with education, that institutionalised instantiation of assumptions of development as linear. The day methodology to an extent permits us to sidestep a preoccupation with development, although in our interest in concepts of thriving and resilience we admit to a constant paradox here discussed further below. In our regard for notational systems, we contribute to an awareness of the multiplicity and richness of engagements. We watch as the children draw: some freely, some under supervision; and share books with their family, who collaborate to share information on both symbolic format and content with the children. Instruction is witnessed on pronunciation in Peru and Italy and exchanges about firemen and fire cats in the USA. Grandmother Margaret develops a routine to entertain Jessica, signifying the value she places in joint book reading. Spontaneous bids recruiting ready reading partners are promptly responded to in Turkey. In both Canada and Thailand, reading with a sibling is recommended to the child, suggesting this is perhaps a common practice in these homes. Different patterns of activities surround the children’s graphic representations, in scribbling and drawing. Special locations and associated materials are stationed in the homes in Canada, the USA and Turkey. The children opt to gravitate to them as it occurs to them to do so. Adults or older children model drawing in the UK and Peru. Files of artistic products are carefully stored for Beatrice to enjoy. Pla, the older sister in Thailand, sustains drawing activities over an extended period of time, serving as a dedicated and persevering role model for her much younger sister. Conversations around drawings, colour and shapes, as with storybook themes, plots and textual conventions, are commonplace in all the homes. We suggest not only that a supportive, affectionate environment is facilitative of interactions involving books and other literacy artefacts that can be cognitively challenging and educative for the girls, but that also the interactions may themselves be supportive of the development of mutual bonds, often evident in the physical closeness of dyads: witness Fred and Katy at bedtime and Claudio with Beatrice on their sofa. Our study of humour was a relatively close focus upon a little-studied aspect of family life that of course incorporates affect and verbal communication, in an arena of sophisticated cognitive and linguistic skills. We examined how early childhood humour is interpersonally constructed, is multimodally communicated, and it can serve many socio-emotional functions, as particularly highlighted in Jessica’s analogy between a

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grape as a hat for a finger. Humorous exchanges are part of the negotiation of family relationships, at least tolerated as when a parent allows a deviation from a family script like a more formal eating event or the avoidance of a nappy change. Often such exchanges are encouraged and even extended. A clever association between a family name and a man in the moon fable elicits full family engagement in Turkey. Teasing can also elicit warm physical contact and tickling, as was a maternal routine to an unsolicited family joke around a patriotic allegiance pledge in the USA and, so again, humour ties in to a constant theme of emotional security developed through interactions, the fostering of ‘roots for wings’.

Ethics of video methods with families Our international team had as its priority a respectful observation of these thriving children and families in the course of a day in their lives. We expected to trigger sensitivities of some institutional reviewers who of course vary across locations, perhaps partly reflecting differences in evaluating the potential ethical challenges inherent in visual data collection with young children. We were therefore pleased by the support our institutions have afforded us in thoughtful, timely, ethical reviews. Of course, the day was hardly ordinary with two investigators on the scene, notes being taken and a camera running for most of its duration. However, our expressed and apparent interest in the child’s strengths may have lessened some of the strain that might otherwise have accompanied such scrutiny into the child’s engagements at home. Parents provided such locally appropriate informed consent releases as are required by institutional ethics review boards in each location, but the fact that we would be investigating the footage of the day for years to come may have been a reality that would have been hard for the family to envision fully at the start. Further, the children could not give informed assent, their being too young to comprehend the implications of our on-the-spot filming, to say nothing of our detailed distal scrutiny. Although we have returned to the families to update them on our work where possible, an important question arises with respect to such data in the investigation of growing children. An informed consent on the part of a parent of a two-year-old might take on a different meaning as the child grows; a family is an institution constantly in flux (Hedegaard & Fleer, 2009). Perhaps in their adolescence the children could become self-conscious in considering their early childhood selves. So sensitivity on the part of the recruitment team, the local investigators

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and the international team were essential for ensuring the respectful portrayal of the children. One interesting phenomenon we have encountered when reporting our ethical concerns at conferences is the question of whether we were only presenting the most positive frames of the children and not providing much attention to negative behaviours or emotions (specifically crying) during the days. In fact, we too were surprised by the lack of negative affect (either anger or sadness) or conflicts between the children and their caregivers during their days. We emphatically did not select out difficult scenes, but have thought in retrospect that perhaps because there were so many people in attendance that day, child needs were met with unusual alacrity; or, alternatively, these children were at a fortuitous equilibrium in their development at thirty months and complaints and unhappiness were simply not on the ascendance for them at that time. Maybe the parents found them going through an easy passage and that is why they so readily volunteered to be part of the study. The repeated observation of viewers of video clips of the days and the local and distal investigators who viewed and reviewed the entire days was of the children’s notable and ubiquitous agency and self-assurance as they navigated their busy days. As we highlight in Chapter 5, p. 113, we see these children very much as young ‘strategic actors’ as James and Prout (1996) would describe them, ever impacting upon their surroundings. An unanticipated issue of concern that arose was the effects of our focusing on one child in a family when there were siblings on the scene. This might have been particularly important in the case of the twins in our study. We saw the surrounding adults appearing to compensate for this and in one case we returned to the family to collect a shortened data set with a sibling to ensure he had a bit of a ‘day in the sun’ as well.

Potential future paths We are aware of many possibilities in this fertile project that have the potential for exploration still. There are two ways in which this specific project could be extended: approaches to the existing dataset that are not yet explored; and extensions of the methodology. To conclude, we will mention a related project that is underway at the time of writing. As discussed in Chapter 1, there were many possibilities for creating foci for analysis and we did not necessarily take the relatively welltrodden paths of childhood studies. We could do far more to study specific relationships in order to enhance understandings of caregiving practices. We could employ more linguistic analysis in order to enrich

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knowledge about the children’s language repertoires, perhaps contrasting exchanges with specific interactants or even comparing across the dataset at any number of levels: phonological, lexical, syntactic and discursive. We could examine these young children’s activities in terms of uses of space, time and artefacts, perhaps making new and better links between the activity domains studied and what conclusions might be reached as to common patterns of interaction in development of the ‘strong child’. Methodologically, there have been various opportunities for potentially valuable extensions. Probably the most obvious road not taken was an iteration wherein we might have exchanged compilations between research locations, so that families watched and discussed compilations from another location. We did in fact ask the families if they would be willing to do this and the proposal was met with considerable enthusiasm. However, our resources of time and money, together with the challenges of revisiting the families in a timely fashion, that is, when their own children had not become much older in the interim, prevented such a further visit and exchange of perceptions. This sort of iterative technique was used very productively by Tobin et al. (1989). In fact, it has been employed effectively in an adaptation of the methodology with adolescents in eight international locations (see Cameron, Lau & Tapanya, 2009). In this project, the first author of this chapter working with a new team has adapted the day in the life methodology to accommodate the habitus of resilient early adolescents. The teenagers’ own perspectives are elicited far more directly, from being the sole interactant with the researchers at the initial interviews, through the methods of the data collection on the day and subsequent iterative stages. They are also sharing their views on others’ days in a successful extension of the methodology to a third iterative viewing stage as outlined above. Both projects then seek to make a contribution to the emerging field of ‘global-local childhood studies’ (Fleer, Hedegaard & Tudge, 2009). We believe that broader understandings of diversity can advance appreciation of the interactive impacts of children and youth, context, material culture, and caregivers in the acculturation of strong children and thereby inform a developmental appreciation of the many paths to ‘growing up well’ across the globe and across ages. Concerns about globalization becoming synonymous with North Americanization could be attenuated by projecting light on the positive contributions of culturally sensitive studies of children in diverse settings that provide an appreciation of the multiplicity of opportunities for the development of well being in its many manifestations.

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Key paradoxes Finally, two lurking paradoxes require recognition in this conclusion. Firstly, we are focussing upon ‘moments of being’ yet also making claims about thriving that would seem to be about development over time. Are these two moves incommensurable? We hope not. We have observed the children as always in the flow of doing something. Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner and Cain (1998, p. vii) advocate such a focus on process: Cultural studies of the person … must be predicated upon continuing cultural production: a development, or interlocking genesis, that is actually a co-development of identities, discourses, embodiments, and imagined worlds. The key here (and, we hope, to understanding how we have tried to approach the notion of development in this book) is to consider thriving as a developmental process, but not in the narrow sense of distinct points of measurable achievement identified as a clear gain between points x and y in time, but as richly present and observable through consideration of a short passage of interaction. The world in a grain of sand. Identities – if they are alive, if they are being lived – are unfinished and in process. … They do not come into being, take hold in lives, or remain vibrant without considerable social work in and for the person. They happen in social practice. (Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner & Cain (1998, p. vii) These little girls are shaping their identities in the flow of everyday events. They are active agents, participants in the activities they initiate and those their companions introduce them to – although, as we have seen, there is no distinct dichotomy here, more a harmonization of interests. The children interact with artefacts, toys, drawing instruments, all manner of objects in multisensory ways, bringing to bear understandings that are drawn from their previous experience as social beings. Their families are also constantly reshaping their own environments in the flow of everyday activities. The interpretations we are making seem commensurate with Vygotsky’s dialectical explanation of human development, as enunciated by Stetsenko (2009, p. 126): According to this vision, human development is rooted in, derivative of, instrumental in, and constituted by the material collaborative

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social practices of people (i.e., human goal-directed, purposeful, collaborative activities) aimed at transforming their world. Secondly, there is a paradox that Vygotsky (1998, p. 88) drew attention to: the relationship between imagination and reality commonly thought of as opposites. Vygotsky argues this conception of the relationship is wrong. In order to reach any depth of empirical understanding, we (mature humans) need to be able to contrast what we perceive, through our senses, in front of us, with what is not present here and now. We consider what it was, or make comparisons with similar or different phenomena; we plan what we could turn it into. In short, we imagine. We, as do the girls in these days, imagine best when working with confidence: with resilient conceptions of ourselves nurtured in supportive relationships. In these conditions, the girls possess that drive to explore the environment in creative ways – to play, to work, to learn through and of symbolic systems. This drive to explore the environment in ways that are supported by others in their constellations during mutually affective moments ran through the moments of being we explored in the interpretations presented in this book like a vein of gold.

Appendix: Locating the Children This section gives very brief introductions to each of the children, recognizing that each day in the life is situated in a particular space and time. In contemplating our major analytic foci, we thought it could be useful for readers to access a short outline that is abstracted from the field notes of the events of each day and to see the associated diagrams or maps of the settings that were produced in each location, which originally served to help our project team members better visualize the children’s activities in situ. The reader may prefer either to access these accounts after reading the introductory chapters and in advance of reading the subsequent chapters, or alternatively to use them as a reference resource that may be turned to at any point while reading the book. These brief accounts are intended to offer a contextualization, a simple, unembellished, overview chronology of each child’s day in order to assist the reader in situating the children’s active engagements in location. In the diagrams of the settings, as in the field notes, there was no attempt to impose equivalency; each local investigator was simply asked to provide an account of the details of the day and a simple diagram or map of the setting, to assist others when watching the videos, and as shall be seen the results are accordingly diverse. We have obscured proper names where these were used and replaced them with project pseudonyms or other information as appropriate and most closely reflecting the original author’s intention. No cross-cultural or inter-individual comparisons are intended in bringing these locators together in one place.

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Canada – Nora When the research team, two Canadian research assistants, arrives at the rural Nova Scotian home at 8:30 a.m., the day is already under way. Nora is in the kitchen playing with Play-Doh, her mother Catherine (a graduate landscape architect) is searching for materials to construct a birdhouse, and her nine-month-old younger sister Chelsea is upstairs for a morning nap. The clay-modelling activity continues until about 9 a.m. when mother and child commence planning the birdhouse using a large piece of plywood, straight-edged ruler and felt pens while sitting on the living-room floor. Catherine measures and consults Nora on her plans for the house. Nora freely draws on the plywood. Chelsea awakens and the play now accommodates a crawling baby, so Play-Doh and sharp implements are set off limits. Between 10 and 10:30 a.m. Nora paints on an easel set up for that purpose and experiments with colour and shape effects. Her mother plays some musical audiotapes and Nora dances, rocks, and sings to the music. Catherine takes a chopping board into the sitting room and slices carrots for a luncheon soup, while the children play within her sight, until the baby’s second morning nap. Catherine and Nora go into the kitchen now, where Nora plays while her mother continues to chop carrots. At 11 a.m. Nora eats a lunch of bread, peanut butter, banana and apple juice and JellO. After lunch, a kitchen game of stepping into pots that have been pulled out of the cupboard begins. Nora walks around in the kitchen, saying, ‘I’m stuck in the mud!’ Catherine picks her up and out of the pots only for Nora to return and repeat the activity, enjoying the repetition. This lasts for some time. At noon, they move the activity first to a rocking chair for three, and then to dance once again in the living room. While her mother talks on the telephone, Nora decides to paint again at the easel. Just before 1 p.m. her mother puts sunscreen on Nora, puts the baby down to nap and takes Nora outside to play. Nora’s paternal grandmother arrives to do her laundry in the utility room off to the side of the house, declaring she does not want to engage in the filming project. She accidentally locks herself in the laundry for half an hour, much to the amusement of some. Nora rides a tricycle on the family driveway and Chelsea is up again but in between interruptions, Nora and her mother manage to put in some companionable swinging time together. Finally, at 1:30 p.m., her father Patrick returns home from his landscaping work for the noonday meal. He initiates games with both the girls, rolling a jumbo ball around on the grass. Catherine gives the baby an airplane ride, and plays a game gently using Nora as a croquet mallet by swinging her by her feet so she can hit the large ball with her head and hands. The main meal of the day begins for the entire family at 2 p.m. and afterwards the researchers withdraw as the children are expected to rest. Catherine cleans the living room; she states she feels quite weary at the end of the observation time.

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The ground floor of Nora’s house

Outside Nora’s house

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Italy – Beatrice It is 10:40 a.m. and Beatrice and her father Claudio are blowing bubbles in the living room of their compact northern Italian city flat as we commence our observations. The researchers are both academic psychologists. Lucia, Beatrice’s mother, is at work as a police officer. Her father is a white-collar municipal employee. Beatrice asks to listen to music and her father switches on the stereo and the child dances. They then look at a book of photos from her day care centre. They get out paper and Beatrice draws several pictures with pastels and pen. They move to the kitchen where Claudio commences peeling fruit and they name the fruit together as he works. The doorbell rings and Beatrice runs to greet her mother just home from work at 11:20 a.m. Lucia immediately sets to work preparing pasta for lunch. Sitting in the lounge, Claudio and Beatrice briefly watch a video before lunch is ready. At noon, the meal is served, but it’s ‘too hot’ and so Beatrice exchanges bread for the pasta. Beatrice eats bread, sausage, cheese and pasta as well. The family place great importance on their child developing a taste for good food. Lunch is over by 12:30 p.m., and the child moves to a small terrace off the kitchen where she finds several games to play largely on her own (starting with a doll) during the rest of the day. At 12:40, she goes to bed for a nap until 2:30 p.m. On awakening, Beatrice sits quietly, rocking and humming on her mother’s lap as she slowly awakens. At 3 p.m., she plays on the kitchen floor with her stuffed bear as she ‘dresses’ it with clothes. Lucia agrees to sew a dress for the teddy. They move on to the sitting room where they play with the teddy and a doll. Then they return to the kitchen where Beatrice plays with small plastic animals in a tub of water. She ultimately dons a swimsuit and gets quite satisfactorily wet until she slips and falls. It is now time to change clothing and activities so they all return to the sitting room and some quiet puzzles and puppets. Later, back in the kitchen, Beatrice eats some ice cream and Lucia gets out her ironing. While she irons, Beatrice and Claudio play together in the sitting room and move back and forth to the kitchen. They put more music on and Beatrice dances, sings and plays games with her father again. It is 5 p.m. and Beatrice and Claudio continue to enjoy the music and they read quietly together. They take out Plasticine and struggle to make a representation of a train with it, which is frustrating for Beatrice as the product does not meet her expectations. It is 6 p.m. and our visit for the day is over.

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Beatrice’s apartment

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Peru – Juanita At 9:40 a.m. filming begins in a Peruvian highland village home. Juanita is on her bed eating breakfast of French fries, bread and a glass of warm peanut water while watching television. Her father Cesar is caring for her as her mother tends her shop and bakery below. The family’s home is bright and well equipped with such electronics as a TV set, VCR, stereo and video camera. After breakfast, Cesar offers Juanita activities involving some plates and a shelf on which she neatly stacks the dishes, a game of throwing a ball, and then she bounces on the bed with a balloon in hand. This turns into an elaborate, rhythmic dancing routine to ‘saya’ music played on the stereo. Her cousin Ana arrives and helps arrange her hair, but is not feeling very well, so their usual play activities are muted today. Cesar dresses Juanita and they emerge in the very systematically organized family shop at about 11 a.m. Luisa, her mother, is baking bread and Juanita asks for an orange; one is immediately forthcoming and she peels it herself. She then insists on having a chocolate bar from the store and when she prevails, sits eating contentedly next to her mother, watching the passing street scene. Customers come and go and requests for potatoes are met by calling on her grandfather Lucho, who grows them. At noon, her aunt Lina, who is Ana’s mother and Luisa’s sister, takes the girls into the family compound. Lina gives Juanita her lunch: (spaghetti and potatoes in a sauce) at this time; chatting with cousin Ana and the little girl. Juanita is standing in a doorway, participating in conversation about birds, hats and eating. Grandfather Lucho sits nearby. Juanita then returns to the back of the shop where she is again encouraged to eat with her parents; they talk about the ice-cream poster on the wall. After her lunch(es), she entertains herself in the shop, watches passersby, and spontaneously dances the saya to the music broadcast from a radio in the store. She picks up an empty cell phone box, puts it to her ear, saying, ‘allo’. She is trusted not to put a foot on the busy road that borders the shop-door. After 2 p.m. Juanita returns to her aunt’s care; she and Juanita’s grandmother Hilda are passing the afternoon knitting, reading and watching the children. Lina provides toys (dolls, basket and blanket) for her to play with and which Juanita does with systematic maternal care. She then draws with her aunt, plays pretence and card games, and reads picture books with both Lina and Hilda. The children are then encouraged to strip yellow petals from branches, to save for scattering on the family grave. Given a new doll, she is encouraged to name its body parts. At 5 p.m. and just before dinner is served, the researchers are ushered out. Our Canadian research student (assisted by a companion engaged in Peruvian regional development studies) knows the family quite well, having stayed with them previously.

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Juanita’s house

Layout of the entire family property

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Thailand – Gai Gai was two-and-a-half when observed at the family compound of homes in a major northern Thailand town, in which her extended family of grandparents, aunt, uncle and cousin and her immediate parents and sibling dwell. They live in the periphery of a medium-sized city. Her mother Siriwan is a mail distributor at the university where the local investigator teaches, and Gai attends a nursery there as well. Chai, her father, works long hours for a commercial water manufacturing company. Her older sister Pla is six years old. Gai’s family home adjoins her aunt Wanna and uncle Preecha’s and her grandparents’ nearby homes. We first see Gai on her tricycle at the gate to the family compound as the local investigator arrives with a Canadian research assistant to begin the day’s filming at approximately 9:30 a.m. Gai waits patiently on a swing as greetings are made and plans for the day are formulated. The family moves into Aunt Wanna’s house, where Gai looks at a book, plays with and draws alongside her older sister, and eats a snack as her aunt prepares lunch for the family. Gai returns to her own home for a noodle lunch with longan fruit with her mother and sister and then returns to her aunt’s home where she settles down for an hour-long nap at about 1 p.m. while others watch television. On arising, Gai participates in playing a game of ‘house’ with her cousins and sister in the family’s outdoor cooking area. Gai ventures out to the larger open space towards her grandparent’s house, still within the compound and encounters her grandfather Boonsom who shows her that he has found a frog in his shoe. Gai and the other children spend a quarter of an hour observing the frog until it is suggested that it be encouraged to leave the shoe. The children are distressed at the frog’s immanent disappearance, so it is returned to the shoe, a reverence for its safety being an apparent motivation for wishing to keep it where it was found. Gai then returns to playing pretence cooking with dirt, water, mortar and pestle; pounding and mixing their ‘found’ ingredients. During the afternoon, there are several occasions when mother and child enjoy time together, swinging in a hammock, sometimes humming together, and on other occasions finding mutual comfort in quiet soothing. Gai’s father returns home for dinner. Gai enthusiastically greets him as she has called for him several times during the day. The family gathers in their living room, casually watching television; the parents playing with the two girls before dinner. Gai moves between grandparental and parental homes with apparent comfort and ease. The researchers leave before dinner.

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Gai’s family’s compound

Gai’s house

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Turkey – Selin It is 9:40 a.m. and the two-and-one-half year old twin Selin is ‘helping’ her father prepare for work, passing him papers and bringing him his briefcase. Both parents are medical practitioners in a coastal Turkish city and Selin’s father Kemal is just completing doctoral research studies. The television is on, and her mother, Nurbike, is sitting with Selin in the lounge, reading a book as they intermittently listen to the TV, clapping hands to the music being broadcast. All wave farewells to Kemal from the terrace at 10:05 a.m. and the children, encouraged by Nurbike, use chalk and felt-nib pens to draw on a chalkboard and then on themselves. Their day-nanny appears with breakfast, wipes them down and mother and nanny each feeds a child in highchairs situated side-by-side, while they resume watching TV, prompted to rehearse words as they eat their porridge. Back on the terrace, Selin plays with toys, many of which make mechanical noises, creating a cacophony of sound as the television set continues to broadcast in the lounge, some in English, some in Turkish. This is a musical family as both parents engage in performance ensembles. Instruments including piano, guitar, drums, xylophone abound; they are freely available to Selin as she roams from books (she frequently asks caregivers to read with her), to toys, to musical instruments that she strums, pounds, sits on, or sings and dances with. The terrace adjoining the lounge provides a fluid environment for the children and adults, including an adult cousin Deniz, there to visit that day as well as the observers (a psychologist [and aunt] and a social worker [and family friend]). A lunch of soup is briskly downed at 12:30 p.m., as with breakfast, in the high chairs to the accompaniment of TV cartoons. After lunch, Selin delights in reciprocal exchanges with Deniz; they playfully feed each other grapes until naptime, at shortly after 1 p.m. The children are put down in their cribs first with milk bottles, then pacifiers. The girls arise at 4:40 p.m.: a snack is served on the terrace. They sing and dance, find books to view and listen to (as some make sounds of the words they display visually), play with a K’NEX construction set, and Selin devotes much time alternating between drumming and dancing and playing at a guitar, including straddling and standing on it Deniz assumes note taking. Their nanny leaves at 6 p.m. and now Selin and the family friend delightedly commence another reciprocal game of feeding each other small plums. Father returns home as the family friend departs at 6:20 p.m. Now father enters the world of games and word play and a rambunctious game of climbing and jumping on the parents’ double bed commences with father and daughter. Selin then wanders into the kitchen where there is an opportunity for water play and more musical games. At 9 p.m. dinner is served to the girls, again in their high chairs, and again to the sound of television. At 9:20, the parents prepare the children for bed. Kisses all round for the researchers and lights are then out.

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Selin’s home

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UK – Jessica Jessica and Matthew, twin 30-month–olds, are greeted in their cots by their mother, accompanied by two researchers, both British educationalists, at 7:45 a.m. The children have been chatting between themselves for a few moments, and are ready for their day. Parents Rachel and Paul are in the kitchen as the children join them for breakfast. It is an active table with much to engage the children even without food. Paul is drawing a picture for their engagement. In addition to the three children, including a oneyear-old sister Alison, the family present includes their maternal grandparents Margaret and John. Each set of grandparents comes alternately to stay with the family from Monday to Friday each week, to live in and support the family with the three very young children. The family home is commodious for even such a large family. Areas of it such as the staircase and formal living room are separated off by child guards. The back garden features swings and other children’s large play equipment but as this is a wet day the children do not go outside except to and from the car. The home is situated in a new town in the south-east of the United Kingdom. These grandparents are retired general medical practitioners. Rachel has been a postdoctoral science researcher; Paul now runs his own information technology business. After breakfast, Jessica takes a currently favourite book, Goo-goo gorilla to her grandmother to read to her in a comfortable rocking chair in an informal family living room, then the children and their mother watch a video. Children are bathed and dressed and their teeth are brushed. Paul leaves for work and the children, mother and grandparents embark on a car trip to the town centre shopping mall at about 9:30 a.m. They walk, visit to the toy section of a department store and play on a coin-operated Thomas the Tank Engine toy that gives ‘rides’. At home again, the children are fed a lunch with a wide variety of food, including fruit and a Thomas the Tank Engine edible representation (meat). Again, toys including Thomas are played with at the table, stimulating much conversation. Grandmother reads Goo-goo gorilla again to Jessica and then the children are put to bed for a nap just after noon while the adults take lunch. The children arise at 1:30 p.m. Once up, the family makes a 40-minute car journey to a Children’s Play Farm (for a second time in a week), arriving at about 2:30 p.m. Jessica spends a half-hour playing in a ball pit, often intently observing other children at play. All convene at a picnic table but the children continue in sight to play with each other and other children in the Playbarn until 4:30, giving the adults opportunities to enjoy watching the children in their favourite play and exploration activities. The journey home is a further opportunity for lively conversation between the siblings and mother. Filming ceases when they get back home at 5 p.m.; grandmother has seemed to speak for the family in declaring they are now weary of the observation.

177

Jessica’s home: Downstairs

Jessica’s itinerary I

Jessica’s itinerary II

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USA – Katy Katy is two-and-a-half years’ old, having just celebrated her ‘half birthday’ the week before filming. She lives in a small mid-western American college town with her older brother James, who is six, and her two academic parents, Elisabeth and Fred. At this time Elisabeth, a Canadian, participates in the project as a parent; soon afterwards she joins the project as an investigator and is one of the authors of this book. Katy attends a child-care centre five days a week and our day of observation was on a Sunday. Two college students, trained by one of the principal investigators in the project methodology, arrive at the family home just before Katy was scheduled to awaken and so are present as she arises. Katy wakes up at 8 a.m., scrambles out of bed, pauses to pull several books out of her bookcase by the bed, and then begins collecting writing implements of all sorts and deposits them in bags, purses and other containers, an activity she engages in frequently during the day. She later identifies the endeavour as ‘getting ready for work’. She then spends a period of time drawing with felt-nib pens on paper pinned onto an easel set up previously by her mother for the purpose. She joyfully greets James, in his bed with lots of bouncing as he reluctantly awakens. The family congregate for breakfast of cereal downstairs at 9 a.m. After breakfast, Elisabeth arranges to meet friends, a mother and her three children at an indoor pool, to practice in a casual swim-time the lessons the children have been learning in weekly swimming classes. The pool is located 25 minutes away by car. Time in the car is spent listening to favourite audiotaped music, reading books and casually commenting on the passing scene. The hour in the pool involves active playtime for the children, in which the mothers played an active part, but it also provides some opportunity for the mothers to enjoy a little adult interaction between their calls for parental attention from the five children. The return trip home engages the children in casual banter, ongoing observations of local milestones and the children periodically call out for favourite songs on the audio recorder. At lunch, choices are made as to what is eaten – French toast and fruit are favourites and Katy negotiates what she eats and how she eats it. After lunch, Katy takes an unusually long three-hour nap. Upon awaking at 3:55 p.m., she entertains another two-year-old and her mother whom Elisabeth had invited over for a ‘play date’. Time is then spent with James watching videos until an ample Sunday dinner is served and Katy is an avid participant in the repast. As Katy is clearly tired, immediately following dinner, teeth are brushed and bedtime is approached first with more ‘going to work’ pretence and then joint book-reading with Fred followed by a final day’s book reading with Elisabeth and lights out at 8 p.m.

179

Katy’s house: Upstairs

Katy’s house: Downstairs

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Index Note: References to illustrations are printed in bold; kinship terms are stated and indexed in reference to the girls that are the focus of the study. Abbott, L. 10, 24 Accorti Gamannossi, B. 118 activity/activities 3–9, 12, 14–20, 22–29, 31–33, 43, 50, 51, 53, 54, 60, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 69, 70, 74, 78, 83, 84, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 100, 101, 102, 103, 106, 114, 115, 116, 117, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 138, 145, 150, 152, 157, 158, 159, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 168, 170, 176, 178 activity theory, see cultural historical activity theory (CHAT) Adams, S. 30 Adelman, C. 47, 49, 51 adolescence 160, 162 agency 33, 42, 46, 47, 100, 103, 111, 156, 157, 161 Ainsworth, M. D. S. 78, 80 Alcock, S. 113 Alison (sister in UK) 1, 73, 88, 127, 176 Amanti, C. 157 Ana (cousin in Peru) 6, 95, 104, 143–145, 144, 150, 170 analysis 15, 17, 19, 21, 26, 32, 37–38, 40–42, 47, 53–55, 57, 67–68, 80, 98, 102, 118, 139–141, 150, 157, 161 Angelillo, C. 34 Anning, A. 29 animals 7, 9, 10, 18, 88, 94, 126, 128, 131, 168 anthropology 15, 16, 19, 35, 36, 42, 44, 45 apartment 2, 7, 109, 169 apprenticeship 109 art 8, 36, 71, 114

artefacts 1, 2, 3, 9, 29, 36, 37, 42, 54, 86, 88, 115, 119, 120, 125, 157, 159, 163 Arthur, L. 73 Asch, T. 42 attachment (theory) 78–80, 134 see also Bowlby Attali, J. 59 aunt 5, 6, 9, 10, 25, 77, 77, 82, 87, 104, 104, 106, 120, 121, 121, 122, 125, 126, 126, 143, 144, 158, 170, 172, 174 Ball, M. 45 Ballinger, T. 118 Bandura, A. 79 Bang, J. 18 Barbash, I. 54 Barker, R. 20, 21, 22, 47 Barrett, M. 72 Barron, B. 36, 48, 54 Barthes, R. 41, 57 Barton, D. 101, 102, 115, 134 Bateson, G. 36, 48 Beatty, A. 39, 45 Beatrice 2, 2, 7, 49, 65, 68, 69, 74, 76, 82, 97, 97–98, 108, 109, 108–109, 113, 124, 125, 142, 142–143, 149, 150, 154, 158, 159, 168 Becker, B. 80, 94 Becker, H. 19 Belsky, J. 134 Benjamin, W. 41 Bennett, K. K. 119, 134 Benson, P. L. 80 Bergen, D. 80 Berger, J. 36, 54, 58, 59 Berlyne, D. 138 Bezemer, J. 40

194

Index Bialystok, E. 115 Bigozzi, L. 115 Bilbok, M. 51 birds 3, 9, 63, 78, 105, 131, 155, 158 Blacking, J. 61 Blehar, M. 61 body, the, see embodiment Bombi, A. 133 books 4, 7, 33, 83, 89, 94, 98, 101, 120, 123, 128, 129–130, 134, 159, 174, 178 see also picture books Boonsom (grandfather in Thailand) 172 Bornstein, M. H. 11 Bourdieu, P. 18, 100 Bowlby, J. 78, 79 Bradbury, T. 36 Bresler, L. 61 Bretherton, I. 78 Briggs, J. 16, 102 Bronfenbrenner, U. 14, 29, 84 brother 1, 2, 73, 88, 89, 110, 111, 127, 136, 146, 151, 176, 178 Brown, L. M. 155 Bruner, J. S. 105, 113, 117, 123 Burge, B. 118 Bus, A. 119, 134 Cain, C. 163 Campbell, P. 60 camera 4, 5, 7, 16, 26, 29–30, 31, 37, 41, 42, 43, 44, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 56, 98 camera person 4, 5, 8, 10, 30, 37, 43, 44, 46, 50, 90 digital camera 40 Cameron, C. A. 10, 79, 80, 85, 118, 135, 139, 162 Cameron, E. L. 139 Canada 3, 7–8, 25, 28, 29, 56, 65–66, 81–83, 85–87, 98, 102, 105–106, 112, 114, 122–123, 133, 159, 166–167 caregivers, caregiving 7, 13, 24, 27, 33, 51, 67, 77, 78, 79, 80, 88, 101, 103, 161 Carpendale, J. I. M. 51 Cartwright, L. 36

195

Catherine (mother in Canada) 3, 3, 8, 25, 28, 65, 66, 66, 81, 85–87, 86, 105–106, 122–123, 166 Cassidy, J. 79 Cesar (father in Peru) 1, 6, 73, 95, 170 Chai (father in Thailand) 10, 87 Chaplin, E. 42, 58 Chelsea (sister in Canada) 3, 85, 105, 123, 166 child-care (outside the home) 119, 178 childhood 11, 12, 13, 16–17, 25, 32, 35, 48, 62, 63, 71–73, 101, 137 Christie, F. 116 Cicchetti, D. 79, 80, 94 Clark, S. E. 10 Classen, C. 59, 60 Claudio (father in Italy) 2, 7, 82, 108, 108, 124, 125, 159, 168 Clay, M. M. 116 Cleary, R. 79 clothing 168 cognition 12, 17, 101, 115, 116, 137–138, 140, 149, 151–153 Cohen, D. A. 99 Cole, M. 15, 17, 118 Collier, J. 35, 48 Collier, M. 35, 48 Colton, K. V. 118 community 13, 14, 22, 32, 34, 36, 42, 64, 74, 79, 85, 115, 119 compound 5, 6, 9, 10, 63, 87, 170, 172, 173 see also garden Cook, D. T. 63 Cook, N. 73 Corman, L. 117, 133 Coulmas, F. 116 cousin 1, 4, 6, 9, 71, 87, 88, 95, 104, 125, 143, 144, 145, 170, 172, 174 Cox, M. 129, 133 Cowan, C. P. 99 Cowan, P. A. 99 creativity 76, 164 Cresswell, T. 95, 98 Crnic, K. 134 Cross, I. 76

196

Index

crying 77, 161 cross-cultural 12, 13, 14, 15, 80 cultural 5, 11–14, 16–17, 19, 21–22, 24–25, 29–30, 32, 36–40, 47–48, 54–55, 59, 70, 72, 75, 80–81, 111, 114–115, 117–119, 132–133, 137, 139, 142, 147, 154, 155, 158, 163 cultural historical activity theory (CHAT) 12, 17 cultural psychology 15, 16, 24 culture 5, 11, 14, 15, 16, 17–19, 22, 25, 30, 33, 34, 36, 37, 38, 48, 59, 62, 64, 100–101, 103, 111, 113, 114, 139, 163 dance 1, 7, 31, 66, 73, 74, 74, 95, 105, 168, 170, 174 daughters, see under individual names Davidson, D. 10, 30, 36, 39 de Brigard, E. 40, 48 DeLoache, J. 117 Deniz (cousin in Turkey) 4, 71, 174 DeNora, T. 62, 64, 75 Derry, S. 36 development 7, 9–13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 19, 24–25, 26, 28, 32–34, 78–80, 83, 115, 116, 117, 133, 137, 151, 152, 153, 159, 162, 163 Dewey, J. 112 digitalisation 40, 72 Dijkstra, J. 134 Dixon, C. N. 55 Donald, M. 116 Dovey, J. 47 drawing see graphical activity Eastman, P. 96 eating 1, 1, 6, 31, 33, 65, 100–113, 136, 158 ecocultural 14, 18 ecology 14, 22, 85 education 9, 16, 17, 30, 35, 62, 85, 122, 157, 159 Edwards, A. 29 Einarsdottir, J. 25 Elisabeth (mother in USA) 3, 3, 4, 8, 9, 83, 93, 93–94, 129, 146–147, 147, 150, 151, 178

Ellesworth, E. 42 embodiment 42, 59, 61, 70, 95, 105 emergent literacy, see literacy emotion emotional security 10, 25, 28, 32–33, 54, 68, 70, 77–99, 156, 157, 160 socio-emotional 79–80, 135, 138, 140, 153 England, see UK environment 5, 10, 11, 14, 17, 18, 20, 21, 22, 24, 25, 27, 29, 33, 34, 42, 63, 63, 75, 77, 79, 80, 83, 88, 98, 113, 119, 131, 132, 157, 158, 159, 163, 164, 174 Erickson, F. 38, 42, 50, 53, 55 ethics 21, 26, 30, 58, 160–161 ethnography 14, 15–17, 36 see also visual ethnography ethnomusicology 59, 64 events eating events 33, 101–111, 112–113 literacy events 101, 102, 134 exploration 5, 19, 24, 25, 33, 81, 98, 105, 112, 114, 145, 154, 156, 158, 161, 176 family 6, 26, 28, 29, 30, 37, 43, 49, 55, 65, 73, 74, 75, 83, 85, 87, 88, 90, 100, 101, 104, 108, 109, 110, 112, 132–133, 146, 147, 151, 156–157, 158, 160, 166, 170, 172, 174, 176, 178 see also aunt; brother; father; grandfather; grandmother; mother; parents; sister; uncle; entries under individuals’ names Fasulo, A. 45, 101 father 1, 2, 4, 6, 9, 10, 52, 73, 82, 83, 85, 87, 90, 91–92, 95, 96, 97, 108, 124–127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 145, 159, 166, 168, 170, 172, 172, 174, 174 Ferreiro, E. 118 Fleer, M. 101, 157, 160, 162 floor plans/layouts/maps 20, 27, 34, 165

Index

197

food 1, 5, 7, 33, 44, 73, 100–113, 141, 158, 176 see also eating, eating events Fred (father in USA) 9, 96–97, 129, 129–130, 147, 159, 178 Freeman, N. H. 36, 37, 38, 54 friends 8, 57, 174, 178 Fry, A. 85 furniture 2, 3, 74, 86 bed 1, 2, 3, 3, 64, 90, 94, 96, 129, 168, 170, 174, 178 chair 49, 85–90, 96, 97, 98, 106, 126, 159, 174 table 86, 108, 108, 110, 126, 149, 176 Fusun (twin sister in Turkey) 4, 52, 63, 71, 71, 130, 130, 131, 174

grandfather 6, 25, 88, 92, 104, 105, 111, 145, 146, 170 grandmother 2, 4, 6, 10, 87, 88, 89, 90, 110, 110, 127, 128, 128, 159, 166, 170, 176 graphic development 117, 133 graphical activity 3, 7, 8, 20, 33, 98, 114–135, 159 graphical equipment 2, 3, 8, 96–97, 114–135 Graue, M. E. 10 Green, J. L. 55 Green, L. 31 Grice, H. P. 146 Grierson, J. 45 Grieshaber, S. 154 guided participation 66, 73, 127

Gai (girl in Thailand) 2–5, 5, 28, 41, 63, 68, 69–70, 87–88, 88, 92–93, 93, 106–107, 107, 120–122, 121, 172 garden 4, 5, 176 see also compound Garner, J. 118, 132 Gaskins, S. 19 Geertz, C. 19 Gell, A. 45 geography 16, 46, 78, 156 see also place; space gesture 52, 126, 142, 144 Geurts, K. L. 59 Gilligan, C. 155 Gillen, J. 10, 24, 60, 63, 78, 85, 151, 152 girls, see under individual names globalization 14, 162 Golomb, C. 117 Goodenough, F. L. 117, 133 Goodnow, J. J. 11, 15, 99 Gratier, M. 75 Goffman, E. 24 Goldman, R. 36, 43 Goldman, S. 55 Göncü, A. 13, 153 González, N. 157 Goodnow, J. J. 11, 15, 99 Gould, L. 137, 152 Graesch, A. 36

habitus 18, 100, 103, 110, 111, 162 Hall, N. 102 Hall, R. 46 Halliday, M. A. K. 116 Hamilton, M. 101, 102 Hamilton, P. 35 Hammel, E. 19, 33 Hancock, R. 78, 85 Harris, J. R. 79 Have, P. ten 57 health 10, 25, 26, 28, 82, 83, 103, 158 Heath, S. B. 17, 101, 134 Hedegaard, M. 101, 157, 160, 162 Hérot, C. 108, 113 Hilda (grandmother in Peru) 6, 170 Hockings, P. 41 Holland, D. 163 Holland, R. 79 Holmes, J. 78 Horgan, D. 139 house 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 56, 87, 128, 166, 167, 171, 172, 173, 179 Hsueh, Y. 30, 45 humour 33–34, 136–144, 156 clowning 136, 139, 140, 141, 142, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 152, 154 incongruity 137, 138, 139, 140, 145, 146, 148, 149, 151, 153, 154 joking 136, 140, 141, 142, 143, 146, 148, 149

198

Index

humour – continued physical play 136, 140, 148 teasing 136, 139, 140, 143–145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 151, 160 Hunt, A. K. 118 Hymes, D. 102 images, see visual, visual methods imagination 33, 45, 164 infancy 100, 102, 116 Ingold, T. 60 Intermental Development Zone (IDZ) 153 internet 42, 58 interviews 9, 15, 19, 24, 25, 49, 158 Italy 2, 7, 25, 40, 65, 68, 68–69, 70, 72, 74, 76, 82, 97–98, 112, 113, 123–125, 133, 142–143, 150, 154, 158, 168–169 iterative stages 15, 24, 28–29, 162 Jacknis, I. 36 James (brother in USA) 178 James, A. 16, 73, 102, 113, 161 Jaynes, J. 116 Jenks, C. 16, 73, 102 Jessica (girl in UK) 1, 2, 25, 44, 54, 54, 64, 65, 71, 73, 88, 89, 110, 110–111, 114, 127–128, 127, 128, 136, 136, 141, 149, 150, 159, 176 John (grandfather in UK) 45, 111, 176 Johnson, K. E. 137, 138 Juanita (girl in Peru) 1, 1, 5–6, 25, 31, 50, 65, 73–74, 74, 76, 77, 77, 95, 95–96, 104, 104, 105, 125–126, 125, 126, 143–145, 144, 149, 150, 154, 170 Kagan, J. 79 Kampa (grandmother in Thailand) 4, 10, 87 Karasawa, M. 45 Katy (girl in USA) 3, 4, 8, 44, 74, 83, 89, 89, 93, 94, 96–97, 98, 114, 128, 129, 129, 130, 146, 147, 149, 150, 151, 152, 154, 159, 178

Kemal (father in Turkey) 4, 4, 52, 83, 90–92, 91, 130, 130, 131, 145, 174 Kennedy, H. 139 Kennedy, K. 47 knowledge 5, 34, 36, 39, 43, 45, 48, 49, 59, 71, 103, 114, 115, 118, 119, 124, 126, 132, 137, 139, 145, 146, 151, 156, 156, 158, 162 Kress, G. 57, 116 Kuipers, H. J. 78 Kwong, W.-M. 10 Lachicotte, W. 163 language 23, 31, 33, 34, 54, 59, 60, 102, 103, 105, 114, 118, 126, 132, 134, 146 language development 24, 32, 36, 57, 72, 116, 137, 146, 156 languages 36, 70, 103 Lau, C. 162 laughter 138, 140, 141, 147, 152 Lave, J. 156 Learner, R. M. 80 learning 15, 17, 28, 33, 36, 55, 74, 100, 101, 116, 118, 119, 132, 134, 141, 152, 154, 156–157, 159, 178 LeFevre, J.-A. 118 Leontiev, A. N. 12 Levine, J. 137, 152 Liebenberg, L. 80, 85 Lim, B. 112 Lina (aunt in Peru) 6, 77, 82, 104, 104, 105, 125–126, 125, 126, 170 linguistic 33, 60, 102, 114, 117, 133, 137, 139, 140, 142, 149, 151, 153, 154, 159, 161 Linton, M. J. 118 literacy 33, 115, 120, 132, 159 emergent literacy 102, 116, 118, 119, 120, 134 literacy practices 101, 119, 120, 122, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134 Loizou, E. 138, 139, 150, 152 Lonigan, C. J. 118, 120 Lucho (grandfather in Peru) 6, 104, 105, 170 Lucia (mother in Italy) 68–69, 68, 70, 82, 97, 98, 108, 142–143, 150, 168

Index Luisa (mother in Peru) 5, 170 Luthar, S. S. 80, 94 Lutkehaus, N. 109 Main, M. 78 Makhnach, A. 10 Malloch, S. 67 Manovich, L. 47 Margaret (grandmother in UK) 2, 6, 70, 89, 89, 110, 110, 111, 127, 128, 136, 159, 176 Marsh, K. 62 Marshall, J. 42 Martin, S. S. 119, 134 Masten, A. S. 80 Matthew (twin brother in UK) 1, 2, 73, 88, 89, 110, 111, 127, 136, 176 Mattingly, C. 109 Mavers, D. 40 Mayhew, B. 78 McDermott, R. 55 McGhee, P. 137, 138, 140, 153 Mead, M. 36, 48 Meal, see food media 1, 35–36, 38, 39–40, 46, 47, 61, 63, 64, 72, 115, 123, 130 Mercer, N. 153 Mervis, C. B. 137, 138 methodology interviews 9, 15, 19, 24, 25, 26, 28, 49, 55, 57, 74 observation 12, 16, 55, 134, 152 video as visual methodology 29–32 methodology/methods day in the life methodology 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 19, 20, 26–32, 35, 36, 40, 42, 45, 47, 52, 58, 85, 139, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162 Miller, J. B. 155, 156 Miller, P. J. 101 mind 42, 61, 76, 89 Minks, A. 72 Mistry, J. 153 Mittman, A. 36 Mohr, J. 36, 54, 58, 59 Moll, L. 157 Mondada, L. 49 Mordillo, G. 124

199

Moretti, M. M. 79 Mosier, C. 13, 153 mother 1, 2, 3–4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 25, 28, 41, 49, 65, 66, 68, 69, 70, 73, 77, 81, 82, 83, 85, 86–87, 88, 90, 92–93, 94, 97, 104, 105–106, 108, 110, 111, 120, 121, 122, 123, 127, 129, 131, 132, 136, 141, 142, 143, 145, 146–147, 150, 152, 157, 158, 166, 168, 170, 172, 174, 176, 178 Moyles, J. 30 multimodality 29, 61, 73, 76, 137 Musgrove, A. 30 music 4, 31, 32, 49, 60, 61, 62, 64–71, 75–76, 91, 97, 114, 178 musical instruments 9, 157, 174 musicality 31, 32, 54, 59–76, 98, 157 Müller, U. 51 nanny 9, 174 narratives 70 Newson, E. 101, 102, 103 Newson, J. 101, 102, 103 Nora (girl in Canada) 3, 3, 7, 8, 25, 48, 49, 61, 65–66, 66, 81, 82, 85–87, 102, 105–106, 114, 122, 122–123, 166 notational systems 33, 114–135, 159 Nsamenang, A. B. 10, 14, 100 Nurbike (mother in Turkey) 4, 83, 131, 131, 132, 174 Ochs, E. 36, 45 Orsolini, M. 118 painting see graphical activity Papousek, H. 68 Papousek, M. 68 parents see father; mother Patrick (father in Canada) 85, 166 Paul (father in UK) 2, 127, 128, 176 Pavlicevic, M. 70 Pea, R. 36 Pearson, J. L. 99 Pellegrini, A. 134 Pence, A. R. 14

200

Index

Peru 1, 5–6, 13, 25, 29, 31, 40, 52, 65, 72, 73–74, 76, 77, 82, 85, 95–96, 98, 104–105, 112, 125–126, 133, 143–145, 150, 154, 159, 170–171 Philo, C. 103 photography 47, 48 Piaget, J. 138 picture books 54, 89, 96, 123, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 135, 170 Pien, D. 138 Pink, S. 35, 36, 40, 48, 58 Pinto, G. 35–38, 94, 114–135 Pla (sister in Thailand) 106, 107, 120, 121, 122, 159, 172 place 5, 38, 43, 54, 76, 94–98, 104, 106, 153, 157, 165, 168 plants 9, 18 play 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 8–9, 51, 61, 62, 69, 78, 85, 86, 88, 91, 92, 94, 96, 97, 98, 102–103, 104, 106, 109, 110, 111, 112–113, 133, 136, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 142, 143, 146, 147, 148, 151, 153, 154, 166, 168, 170, 176, 178 Pontecorvo, C. 45, 101, 108, 109, 118 practices 12, 22, 30, 31, 36, 50, 60, 64, 73, 85, 87, 100–101, 108, 113, 132, 134, 154, 158, 161 Preecha (uncle in Thailand) 5, 172 preschool 118, 119, 134 Prout, A. 16, 73, 102, 113, 161 psychology cultural psychology 15, 16, 24 developmental psychology 11, 12, 32–33, 67, 85 Rachel (mother in UK) 1, 2, 6, 73, 110–111, 110, 136, 136, 141, 150, 158, 176 Racine, T. P. 51 Ram, A. 107 Rasmussen, K. 106 Ravid, D. 118, 120 reading 2, 7, 8, 9, 33, 89, 94, 96, 98, 101, 114, 115, 116, 118, 119, 121–122, 123, 124–125, 126, 127–128, 129–130, 131–132, 133,

134, 135, 143, 147, 159, 168, 170, 174, 176, 178 see also literacy Reddy, V. 138, 139, 140 relationships 10, 15, 32, 71, 78–80, 82, 117, 132, 134, 136, 149, 160, 161 religion 25, 29, 82 repetition 69, 70, 71, 151–152, 166 Repetti, R. 36 representation 36, 37, 40, 54, 58, 74, 78–79, 86, 98, 115–117, 129, 130, 133, 134, 135, 144 research/researcher 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 18, 19, 20, 22, 23, 24, 26, 27, 28, 30, 31, 32, 35–40, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 50–52, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 58, 60, 62, 67, 78, 79, 80, 85, 100, 102, 115, 118, 119, 138, 139, 148, 166, 168, 170, 172, 174, 176, 178 resilience 33, 80–81, 94, 159 Resnick, L. B. 118 rhythm 1, 32, 59, 60, 61, 67, 68, 69, 70, 72, 74, 87, 95, 97, 103, 142, 157, 170 Richards, M. 103 risk 69, 70, 80, 117, 141, 144, 174 Robb, C. 155 Robillard, J. 137, 138 Rogoff, B. 13, 15, 17, 19, 24, 32, 62, 101, 153 rooms bedroom 1, 6, 67, 73, 95, 96, 97, 129–130, 143, 144, 173, 175, 179 kitchen 3, 7, 65, 68, 86, 90, 91, 106, 108, 122, 124, 127, 166, 167, 168, 173, 175, 179 living room 2–3, 64, 91, 124, 166, 167, 168, 172, 173, 175, 176, 179 playroom 2, 64, 73, 96, 97, 106, 128 Rose, G. 35, 40, 48 Ross, H. S. 107 Rothbart, M. K. 138 Roxana (half sister in Peru) 6 Ruby, J. 45 Sagi, A. 79, 80 Scarry, R. 130

Index Schieffelin, B. 45 Schmandt-Besserat, D. 116 Scollon, R. 103 Seamon, D. 95 Selin (girl in Turkey) 4, 25, 52, 63, 71, 72, 90–92, 91, 114, 130, 131, 132, 145–146, 145, 149, 150, 151, 152, 154, 174 Sénéchal, M. 118 Shaver, P. R. 79 Shepherd, J. 60 Sheridan, S. R. 115, 134 Shilling, C. 105 shoes 88, 92, 172 shop 5, 7, 67, 89, 95, 96 Shore, B. 15, 108 Shultz, T. R. 137, 138 Shweder, R. 10 siblings, see brother; sister Sidiropoulou, H. 40 Siriwan (mother in Thailand) 4, 10, 69–70, 69, 83, 87–88, 88, 92–93, 93, 106, 120–122, 172 sister 4, 71, 106, 107, 120–122, 123, 130, 131, 166 skills 10, 86, 87, 114, 118, 137, 156, 159 Skinner, D. 163 Sloboda, J. 64 Smith, G. 45, 80 Smith, R. S. 80 Smith-Chant, B. L. 118 social constructivism 134 society 5, 13, 16, 36, 37, 42, 52, 76, 158 socio-cultural 12, 17, 24, 75, 133 socio-historical 22, 113 songs 62, 65, 66, 72, 75, 178 Sontag, S. 39 Southam, M. 138 space 22, 44, 47, 49, 60, 63, 65, 67, 74, 78, 85, 94, 95, 96, 98, 109, 124, 129, 162, 172 see also place speech 20, 46, 60, 69–70, 73, 117, 128, 138 Spier, P. 42 Spindler, G. 55 Spindler, L. 55

201

Stern, D. 70 Stetsenko, A. 12, 111, 115, 163 Stills, see images Stiver, I. P. 155, 156 Street, B. 17 strength see thriving Sturken, M. 36 Sulzby, E. 116 Sundberg, N. 118 swings, swinging 5, 9, 33, 69, 78, 84–90, 92, 98, 157 symbols 114, 115, 120, 131–132, 133, 146 Tacchi, J. 63 Tafuri, J. 62 Talay-Ongan, A. 77–99 Tapanya, S. 77–99, 162 Taylor, D. 55, 122, 157 Taylor, L. 54 Teale, W. H. 116 teasing 143–145 Teberosky, A. 118 technology 2, 3, 4, 6, 16, 21, 35–58, 59, 63, 64, 66, 176 see also video television 1, 4, 9, 18, 63, 65, 72, 75, 76, 88, 130, 158 temperament 13, 83 Thailand 4, 9–10, 18, 25, 28, 40, 46, 63, 68, 69–71, 83, 85, 87–88, 92, 93, 98, 106–108, 112, 113, 120–122, 133, 157, 159, 172–173 theory 36–37, 39–40, 43, 47, 54, 57, 78, 138, 150, 152 Thompson. R. A. 81 Thomson, J. 103 thriving 5, 6, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 24, 25, 26, 28, 30, 32, 34, 54, 55, 62, 75, 79, 81–85, 99, 103, 134, 136, 137, 155, 156, 159, 160, 163 Throop, C. 109 Tobin, J. 10, 16, 30, 36, 39, 44, 162 Tolchinsky, L. 118, 120 Tomanovic, S. 20, 100 Tomasello, M. 114 Toth, S. L. 79 touch 77–78, 90, 93, 94, 98, 134, 157

202

Index

toys 1, 2, 3, 7, 9, 63, 64, 65, 71, 72, 75, 77, 77, 83, 86, 88, 94, 97, 105, 109, 122, 130, 142, 144, 157, 163, 170, 174, 176 transcriptions 23, 31, 55, 56, 58, 103, 139 Trehub, S. 67 Trevarthen, C. 155 Tuan, Y.-F. 98 Tudge, J. 13, 22–24, 43, 101, 157, 162 Turkey 4, 9, 25, 29, 40, 52, 63, 71–73, 83, 85, 90–92, 91, 98, 114, 120, 130–132, 133, 145–146, 150, 152, 157, 159, 160, 174–175 twin, twins 1, 2, 4, 25, 29, 65, 71, 82, 88, 89, 110, 127, 141, 161, 174, 176 UK, 1, 6–7, 13, 25, 29, 39, 40, 44, 64, 65, 70, 72, 73, 82, 88, 98, 110–111, 112, 114, 127–128, 133, 136, 141, 150, 157, 176–177 Ulewicz, M. 45 uncle 5, 10, 87, 121, 145–146, 152, 172 Ungar, M. 10, 80, 85 USA, 3, 3, 4, 8–9, 40, 46, 72, 74, 83, 93, 96–97, 98, 114, 128–130, 133, 146–147, 150, 154, 160, 178–179 Van der Veer, R. 78, 80 Van Dijken, S. 78 Van IJzendoorn, M. H. 78, 79, 80, 134 Van Leeuwen, T. 57 Van Meter, P. 118, 132 Vezzani, C. 118 video 5, 6, 10, 14–16, 23, 26–31, 32, 35–58 compilation video 8, 15, 27–28 minimally edited video 38 video data 15, 16, 18, 28, 30, 39, 43, 47, 55, 56, 57, 61, 62, 75, 84, 139, 157

video stills 41, 42, 57 viewing video 39 see also camera; camera person visual, visual methods 16, 18, 20, 25–58, 59, 134 Vygotsky, L. S. 12, 117, 118, 134, 138, 145, 146, 152, 153, 163, 164 Wagner, J. 25 Walker, B. 51 Wall, S. 80 Walsh, D. 10 Wanna (aunt in Thailand) 5, 120–122, 121, 172 Waters, E. 80 Weakland, J. H. 55 Weigel, D. J. 119, 134 Weisner, T. 14 Wenger, E. 156 Werner, E. E. 80 Whitehead, M. 134 Whitehurst, G. J. 118 Whybrow, I. 127 Wilson, B. 118 Wilson, M. 118 Winnicott, D. 91 Wittgenstein, L. 151, 153 Woodhead, M. 11 work 4, 5, 6, 8, 11, 15, 16, 18, 19, 22, 23, 26, 27, 32, 57, 64, 78, 80, 81, 88, 92, 96, 130, 138, 144, 152, 153, 155, 158, 160, 164, 166, 168, 174, 176, 178 Wright, J. 20–22, 47 writing 8, 9, 11, 47, 49, 53, 57, 60, 115, 116, 118, 131, 134, 178 see also literacy Wu, D. 10, 30, 36 Young, S. 31, 59–76 Zaharlick, A. 55 Zelizer, V. 71 Zigler, E. 137, 152 zone of proximal development 153