Children’s Interests, Inquiries and Identities

Curriculum, Pedagogy, Learning and Outcomes in the Early Years

Helen Hedges

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780367689780
• eBook ISBN: 9781000563269
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Classroom Management

Children's curiosity about their lives and worlds motivates many interests. Yet, adults often have fixed ideas about what children's interests are and have been criticised for trivialising children's interests. This book offers a critical and accessible engagement with research on children's interests that challenges us to move beyond surface-level understandings.

Children's Interests, Inquiries and Identities argues that the powerful relationship between interests and informal learning has been under-recognised and undervalued. The book proposes new principles for understanding children's learning. It provides evidence that we need to look beyond the activities or topics children may currently be selecting to find out who and what has stimulated their interests, how we might identify and interpret interests more analytically and deeply, and how we might respond and engage with these in ways that take children's interests seriously. Moving beyond play-based activities, Helen Hedges explains and illustrates a number of ways by which children's interests can be interpreted and understood, to get to the heart of what really matters to, and for, children. The book draws on examples from research with children aged under 5 years, and young adults aged 18-25. It also includes a chapter on teachers' interests. It presents new and original models for interests-based curriculum and sociocultural curriculum and pedagogy for future examination in research and practice.

This book demonstrates that leaving behind long-standing, taken-for-granted practices that have influenced understandings of curriculum, pedagogy, learning, and outcomes allows a new perspective of children's interests to emerge. It will be of interest to researchers, postgraduate students, and practitioners in the early years, parents, and other professionals who work with young children.

1

Children’s interests

Beyond the activities of the moment

DOI: 10.4324/9781003139881-1

Jack, boats, and marine engineering

While playing with blocks in his early childhood centre, Jack, aged almost 3, described his interests to me: “I know about moons and stars and planes and boats.” He talked with me about boats, propellers, engines, and noise. He told me he had a boat at his house, a matter that a teacher, Barbara, later confirmed.

During an interview at his home two months later, Jack’s mother, Rachael, talked enthusiastically about Jack’s interest in boats:

As a family we’ve got the boating interest. We have a yacht, Rawhiti, [Māori for the compass point in the direction of the rising sun] and we went away on that a fair bit over summer. Jack’s very interested in the outboard motor and propellers on that. … [T]he thing that’s happened most recently with our yacht is it’s come out of the water and so that’s generated a whole lot of fun. He watched it coming out on the travel lift and then the straddle lift, transported and propped up, put on a truck … and it’s being restored because the boat, can you tell Helen? I don’t know whether you know this Jack, how old is Rawhiti? Rawhiti is a hundred years old this year.

Jack continued with this interest at home, where it had been stimulated, and expressed it in his early childhood experiences. When Jack was 3½, Louise (a teacher) noticed him reading a book about boats and engaged in a deep conversation with him about this. Theresia (another teacher) also had a conversation with him about the family boat and documented this in a learning story, a dominant form of narrative assessment used in early childhood education in Aotearoa New Zealand. In a “story from home” in response to Theresia’s story, Rachael explained more of Jack’s interest in and knowledge about boats to the teachers. This gave the detailed history of their restoration of the boat and the nature of Jack’s understandings.

Rachael wrote me an email, to update me on Jack, six months after completion of my year of fieldwork on this particular project. She told me that Jack had developed an interest in the Titanic, an interest that Theresia had used to encourage Jack to tackle new learning experiences such as carpentry and drawing.

His portfolio has a record of him making a wooden Titanic boat and over a month later bringing it back to kindergarten for some modifications (another funnel). Theresia also used the Titanic obsession to get Jack drawing—something he’d never been much interested in. The drawings we have from that period are my most treasured drawings from his time at kindergarten. There is a Titanic series (over 15 I would guess). They mostly focus on the funnels, with smoke and propellers with churning water. There is also one in his kindergarten portfolio of the submarines—including his first written word (other than his name) “submarine”. Titanic was also one of his first written and recognised words.

Many years later, Rachael came to my professorial inaugural address with a friend of hers, who was at that time my PhD student. She told us that Jack was now almost 18 and had decided to study marine engineering.

Why interests are important

Jack, Rachael, Barbara, Louise, and Theresia were participants in one of my projects on children’s interests. Here, in the words and actions of a child and parent, and the decisions, actions, and responses of teachers, are reasons why children’s interests might be important as a significant and meaningful focus for participation in life, learning, early childhood education, and research. Jack’s story shows ways that an interest might be sparked and continued at home by participation in family activities, and extended and utilised in education by teachers. Research that connects interests across contexts provides deeper understandings than one context alone. In years later choosing to study marine engineering, Jack’s story also offers potential insight into the longer-term value and inspiration that a strong interest might offer.

The story I have recounted will have resonance with many who are involved with children on a daily basis. You will have noticed, for example, infants’ interests stimulated by their intense observation of siblings and peers around them, their desire to emulate them, and to be part of experiences offered by adults. Toddlers’ enjoyment of stamping in puddles and creating mud, or listening to music and dancing joyously are among frequently uploaded videos on social media documenting children’s self-motivated choices of activities. Young children develop the verbal skills to engage in dialogue and debate, with peers and adults, on matters of deep interest and inquiry: fairness, friendship, and families are frequent themes in the literature. Such examples occur across a diverse range of social and cultural contexts internationally. These examples also show that children are keenly interested in almost everything in their lives.

It is likely you have heard similar stories to Jack’s. Perhaps you know a child who had an interest in fire engines and much later became a firefighter; taught a child whose parent was a guitarist in a rock band, and grew up with strong talents and involvement in music; or heard of another child whose grandparent was a famous chef and continued with a family restaurant in her footsteps. How and why do these life stories arise? What is the importance and significance of the phenomenon of interest in children’s lives? How is interest understood from different perspectives, and therefore how might interest play out in the philosophies and practices of education?

Understandings of children’s interests

Research usually sets out to investigate phenomena, and relationships between phenomena, that we know little about. In my case, the first research-related problem I have experienced is that, despite experiences of a wide range of interests, or knowing personally stories such as Jack’s, many people make assumptions and hold narrow interpretations about what children’s interests are. Without exception, I have found that, when parents, other family adults, teachers, and children themselves, are asked about children’s interests, they immediately start talking about the activities that children show a preference to participate in, or the focus of a topic of interest—often one that children know more about than adults.

Here are examples of what I have been told in my research: Imogen likes to play on the swing; Tom is always building with Mobilo; Hunter is an expert at playing the drums; Simeon wants to play soccer; Chloe enjoys trying to jump; Harry often dresses up as a princess; Campbell knows all about sharks and whales; and Hal likes to think about what lions and zebras do and eat. Adults also commonly talk about the frequent questions children have about activities and topics, or routines and events in their lives, sometimes alternately pleased and irritated with constant “Why?” questions.

In this book, however, as Jack’s story indicates, I argue that activities and topics in themselves may be important, but potentially surface-level and limiting understandings of the term children’s interests. We owe it to children to look more deeply at their motivations and learning. So we need to pay attention to what curiosities, purposes, content, and meanings lie behind what it is they are choosing to participate in, and investigate, in their families and communities. On one level, children may be individuals with a “go-to” favourite activity or topic when they are offered a choice of what to do. On another level, these favourite pursuits provide windows into children’s efforts to make sense and meaning from their life experiences with other children and adults, and learning opportunities in their families and communities. These efforts involve multiple ongoing inquiries into, and questions about, these life experiences. Interests combine personal, social, and intellectual goals, purposes, and achievements, and thus are central to learning and life. As Jack also exemplifies, interests may connect with identity development.

Alongside my intellectual curiosity about interest as a phenomenon, and its place in human lives and learning, my research programme has taken up the challenge articulated clearly by Carl Bereiter:

[T]he most profound of children’s questions seldom relate to activities of the moment. They relate to the larger issues and forces that shape the world – birth, death, good, evil, power, danger, survival, generosity, adventure. … Adults, even the most “child-centered”, tend to trivialize children’s interests, making them out to be more mundane and egocentric than they really are, and thus positing a distance between children’s interests and intellectual subject matter that is greater than it needs to be.

(Bereiter, 2002, p. 301)

Bereiter’s thinking here encapsulates further my reasons for looking for deeper, more analytical and theorised understandings and explanations of children’s interests. How do interests reflect children’s desires to understand the complexity and profundity of their worlds? How might we look more deeply at children’s interests and take them seriously? How might interests serve to connect the understandings of the childhood years and the intellectual knowledge and scientific principles that underpin established understandings and further investigations of the world?

Interests in education

In relation to education, there are more reasons why understanding interests is important. The most pertinent is that almost all international early childhood curricular documents include children’s interests as one key source of curricular decision making. More recently, as primary (elementary) and secondary (high school/college) teachers look for ways to motivate student learning more overtly, they draw on interests to trial ideas such as “inquiry projects” or “passion projects.” In short, how teachers understand and interpret the term children’s interests has major consequences for the kinds of learning experiences that children are immersed in during their education.

I have therefore also responded to the provocations of early childhood scholars through my work. Maria Birbili and Melpomeni Tsitouridou critiqued the term children’s interests as an under-theorised “catch phrase” (Birbili & Tsitouridou, 2008, p. 143); Angela Anning, Joy Cullen, and Marilyn Fleer described children’s interests as part of early childhood “folklore and practice” (Anning et al., 2009, p. 13). These criticisms indicate that children’s interests in early childhood education may be central to curriculum and pedagogy, but are taken-for-granted, under-researched, and under-articulated. The criticism also aligns with Bereiter’s challenge that children’s interests may be underestimated and undervalued.

Failing to appreciate the depth and significance of children’s interests has the potential to stifle children’s exploration of, learning about, and meaning making in early childhood settings related to the people, places, and things that they encounter in their worlds of experience. It also underestimates the potential relationship between interests and identity, a connection the case of Jack points to.

My problem space

In short, I have found adults are quite certain they know what children’s interests are. So, it is indeed a problem for educational research when you set out to research a phenomenon that many adults close to children’s experiences already have quite definite ideas about, that there is surprisingly little literature about, and where a practice is so well-accepted that challenging and shifting underpinning beliefs and assumptions might take time and energy.

Researching children’s interests—the origins of these, the ways and extent to which these are stimulated, recognised, and responded to, ways adult interactions either extend or shut down interests, and the knowledge of content and pedagogy that is brought to these interest-related interactions—has been a fascinating source of both project data and unsolicited opinion and feedback over the almost 20 years I have been following my own intellectual curiosity about interests as a learning phenomenon.

Context of my research

My research programme has taken up these challenges in the context of early childhood education in Aotearoa New Zealand, where a variety of early childhood services are available for children aged from birth to 5 years. Reflecting the international scene, not all those who have an educative role with children have teaching qualifications. A range of terminology is used globally to indicate the educative role adults take in services; in Aotearoa New Zealand the term used is from Māori: kaiako. However, the word I use consistently in this book is teacher. This usage reflects that a teaching qualification assumes a basis of professional knowledge, a valuing of research-informed practices, and having a disposition for ongoing learning to call on in interactions with children.

Te Whāriki (Ministry of Education, 1996, 2017) is the early childhood curriculum document in New Zealand. It is a well-regarded document internationally, and research related to its underpinning concepts has been taken up worldwide. While my research occurs in the context of Aotearoa New Zealand, the experiences, issues, and debates my projects are also grounded in are pertinent well beyond my country. Readers will ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Children’s interests: Beyond the activities of the moment
• 2. Interests and informal learning: A powerful relationship
• 3. Children’s interests: Debates, tensions, and possibilities in practice and policy
• 4. Understanding children’s interests: Relational, ethical research
• 5. Deeper understandings 1: Funds of knowledge as a framing for interests
• 6. Deeper understandings 2: Children’s inquiries and identities
• 7. Deeper understandings 3: Children’s working theories
• 8. (Re)Positioning teachers’ interests in curriculum and pedagogy
• 9. Interests, identities, and outcomes beyond childhood
• 10. Taking children’s interests seriously: Interests-related curriculum and pedagogy
• Index