Pedagogies of care for one-year-olds: A collaborative, cross-national study

Our study sought commonalities and distinctions in the pedagogical orientations of trained ECEC professionals who work with one-year-olds in England, New Zealand, USA and Hong Kong. Infant-toddler pedagogy is a growing field of study; internationally, empirical work has begun to identify and challenge concepts of quality in early childhood services (e.g. Fenech 2011, Angus & Carroll-Lind, 2011, Mathers et al 2014). We adopted an ecological paradigm (Darling 2016), taking care to respect participants and their local traditions and avoiding colonialism, ethnocentrism and intellectual provincialism (Tobin and Hsueh 2007; Alexander, 2009). We were informed by sociocultural and relational theories of early childhood practice, which situate caring for infants within educational frameworks (Dalli et al 2011; Rockel 2011, Ruprecht et al 2016, Sosinsky et al 2017). Our study was inspired by the work of Joseph Tobin (e.g. 1989, 2009) who argues that ECEC settings are sites of enculturation, which reflect continuity and change. Building on his seminal ethnographic studies of preschool in three cultures, we used 'videocued, multivocal' elicitation and layered interpretation to explicate the meaning(s) of 'pedagogies of care' in group-based settings for infants and toddlers in our four countries. We collaborated with infant-toddler teachers to create, edit, view and analyse the discussions about 15-minute 'day in the life' style videos from each country. Our complex ethical considerations included questions of ownership and power and involved openness and sensitive negotiation. We found global discourses merging with culturally-situated beliefs to shape pedagogical orientations. An international language of care has local inflections. Copyright © 2019 EECERA.