Decisions and Dilemmas of Research Methods in Early Childhood Education

Anne Keary, Janet Scull, Susanne Garvis, Lucas Walsh, Anne Keary, Janet Scull, Susanne Garvis, Lucas Walsh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780367648541
• eBook ISBN: 9781000618808
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book examines the methodological decisions made by researchers working in early childhood contexts. Viewed from a researcher's perspective, each chapter explores the journey of the researcher, capturing their decision-making processes in early childhood research.

Through themes such as the politics of ethics and how different cultural norms shape research in different localities, Decisions and Dilemmas of Research Methods in Early Childhood Education explores key questions such as: What are the ethical issues arising during early childhood research? Which research traditions and methodologies prevail and why? How are research subjects perceived and positioned within different research contexts? What interdisciplinary tensions or opportunities arise between different ways of working across early childhood research? The book critically unpacks how these decisions are made and by whom during the course of research. Each chapter includes reflections of researchers working across disciplines such as education, health and social work to understand the thinking, forces and actors that shape decisions made during the research process.

This is essential reading for researchers working in early childhood contexts in fields such as social work, health, education, criminology, psychology and more.

Part IStoried Conversations

1Exploring Conflict in Early Childhood Learning in IsraelA Multi-Vocal Case Study

Anne Keary and Julie Faulkner

DOI: 10.4324/​9781003126577-3

Introduction

This chapter provides a brief background to the kindergarten observed as part of an international professional experience for Australian preservice teachers. The kindergarten’s particularity is highlighted and discussed in relation to the event that offers a provocation to our thinking: the children’s cutting of magazine images of soldiers with guns against scenes of war conflict. We then introduce Bakhtin to ground our discussion and its deployment of a number of different ‘voices’ around the concept of children and guns. The voices emerge from policy, theory and interview data. Setting these views alongside each other, in turn, provides a richly faceted dialogue for us as reflexive researchers. Moreover, we set this dialogue within diverse methodological frameworks to further emphasise contingency. The purpose of the chapter is thus to open up, rather than settle on, further perspectives and questions around awareness, policy and pedagogies in the Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) field. We explore conflict as a vehicle for this expansion to multiple viewpoints and thus achieve more fine-grained understanding.

Background

As academic support to Australian preservice teachers on an Israeli education placement, we were fortunate to visit a bilingual Israeli-Arab kindergarten, part of a network of integrated schools and pre-schools. Our role was to orient preservice teachers to the international setting before they left and assist them as they negotiated professional demands throughout the three-week placement.

In this bilingual play-based kindergarten environment, we witnessed children interacting happily with each other and their various Arabic- and Hebrew-speaking teachers. This chapter provides us the opportunity to delve more deeply into some of the discursive complexities of ECEC and representations of war and conflict, while at the same time raising our own awareness and understanding of learning and teaching.

Neither of the researchers is of Israeli nor Arab descent. Both of us have previously visited Israel; Anne for six months in the 1980s when she lived at a kibbutz in the north of Israel and Eilat on the Red Sea in the south of Israel, while Julie visited Tel Aviv and Jerusalem in the 1970s. Anne is familiar with the policies, structures and assumptions of ECEC, while Julie’s experience is with upper primary and secondary schooling.

Our emic-etic positioning provides both strengths and limitations to the ensuing analysis of the (in)appropriateness of visible representations of war and conflict in early childhood (EC) settings.

The event

Julie’s journal entry: The group singing session is over and we are upstairs in an airy room, observing 4-year-old children engaging with a cutting activity. Our preservice teachers are helping the kindergarten teachers distribute magazines, children’s scissors, and coloured pencils among the low tables. Both teachers and children could be either Israeli or Arab in this kindergarten, and we are listening to the language they use to try and guess who might be who. But in this setting, it’s difficult to tell and it shouldn’t matter. We are here to see how bilingual education plays out in a country fraught with political tension and always on the alert.

As we wander among the children, Anne calls me over.

‘Look at this!’ she urges me in a hushed tone. I follow her to a table where a magazine lies open at a black- and-white photo of a soldier, gun in hand, walking through a war torn village. Next to the magazine is a small boy cutting up another picture (Figure 1.1). We can’t decipher the print text. Staring at the prominent magazine photograph, we wonder how images of armed conflict could be deemed suitable by teachers for very young children.

Figure 1.1 Cropped photograph of kindergarten child cutting magazine images representing war and conflict.

Some considerable time later, we are still wondering, not only about appropriateness but also about the very questions that shape what we commonly agree as ‘appropriate’. Our experience at the bilingual kindergarten offers a material provocation through which to critically examine our stance: what led to our astonishment when, in a learning environment that argues for peaceful co-existence, children were cutting up photos of soldiers at war? Was it a defensible reaction? To what extent are our judgements the products of our own personal and professional formations and, thus, open to deeper questioning over their ‘rightness’?

Bakhtin and voices in dialogue

We draw on Bakhtin to conceptualise the tensions among the voices in our scenario: Israeli and Arab EC educators, ourselves as Australian teacher educators, our Australian preservice teachers, and Israeli tertiary educators and students. Moreover, we find Bakhtinian perspectives useful to consider the various discourses embedded in our own voices as we struggle to analyse perspectives contingent on cultural and temporal factors. Bakhtin (1981) argues that it is within the movement among meanings that we forge our interpretations and generate our own sense-making. He describes the construction and reconstruction of meanings thus:

Another’s discourse performs here no longer as information, directions, rule, models and so forth—but strives to determine the very basis of our behaviour; it performs here as authoritative discourse, and an internally persuasive discourse.

(p. 345)

Bakhtin’s (1981) distinction here between the institutional (authoritative) and personal (internal) discourses serves us well in our attempts to deepen understanding. Our beliefs in relation to ECEC are shaped by ‘authoritative’ discourses (policy, research, role models), while also emerging as products of our own histories and social influences. More experienced role models, for example, are both personal and public influences, with Delp (2004) reinforcing the argument that sometimes these two discourses are not easy to distinguish from one another. Bakhtin (1981) states that internally persuasive discourses are ‘half ours and half someone else’s’ (pp. 345–346), formed from the ‘entangled polyphony’ (Choi & Nunan, 2016, p. 177) of voices and meanings. If learning dialogically involves taking up others’ ways of speaking and selectively appropriating or rejecting them, we create who we are through the choices we make as part of this process.

Furthermore, the dialogic processes in this ever-evolving search for meaning create Bakhtin’s (1981) notion of ‘unfinalisability’. ‘Reality’, in this sense, is always mutually constructed, never unproblematically given. Persuasive internal discourses are always open to recontextualisation and change, thus offering newer ways to mean. Bakhtin expresses this as an active and generative mode of interpretation:

… there can be neither a first nor a last meaning; [anything that can be understood] always exists among other meanings as a link in the chain of meaning, which in its totality is the only thing that can be real. In historical life this chain continues infinitely, and therefore each individual link in it is renewed again and again, as though it were being reborn.

(p. 345)

Within this Bakhtinian frame, we searched for a methodological approach that would support a conversation to build and inflect various forms of data and allow a productively open-ended search for meaning.

Methodology

In this case study, we aim to arrive at a denser understanding of visible representations of conflict and war in ECEC settings through a case that reflects a real-life context and is complex in nature (Punch, 2014). Yin (2009) contends that case study inquiry is inseparable from the contextual conditions within which it is located. The intent is to closely describe, document and interpret a critical event through a multi-vocal approach (Simons, 2009).

We draw on multiple strategies to offer a partial, contextualised perspective on the research process. First, we intend to be evocative, providing an enriched and, to an extent, disruptive representation of our perspectives as Australian researchers. We use Bakhtin’s dialogic approach and visual images to construct an aesthetic, as well as grounded, experience for ourselves and the reader.

This case study emerged from a broader research project on reflections and insights into tertiary students’ experiences and perceptions of terrorism. University ethics was obtained for the research. We interviewed 29 participants over a six-month period. The participants were 12 Israeli (including 3 Arab Israeli) tertiary students and recent graduates, 12 Australian preservice teachers undertaking a three-week teaching placement in Israel and 5 Israeli tertiary educators. Previously, the researchers (Faulkner, Keary and Drew, 2017) had conducted an Australian study into how preservice teachers understood terrorism and the resilience strategies they draw on to manage its risk. The Israeli study aimed to expand and deepen our understanding of how tertiary students in diverse international contexts experience and respond differently to perceived adversity. This chapter draws on interview data from aspects of this study, specifically conversations with an Israeli educator, an Israeli-Arab tertiary student, and an Australian preservice teacher undertaking teaching placement in Israel. All names have been changed to pseudonyms. Photographs and images complement the text and analysis. Photographs taken at the bilingual kindergarten have been cropped for copyright and anonymity.

In this chapter, we also explore policy documents, a theorist’s genealogical approach, interview data, our own voice as researchers and an outsider voice as a critical friend to act as a springboard for us to interrogate the event and our own reactions. Employing a reflexive approach, we are both the researchers and the researched. As distinct from reflection, reflexivity demands some sense of the other (Chiseri-Strater, 1996). Self-reflexive approaches have gained favour over the past 25 years as research methods scrutinise the processes around data selection and analysis. Patti Lather (1986), one of the earliest and most influential reflexive writers, argues that the researcher should demonstrate awareness of the filters of their workings and thus work to keep the framework critical and avoid ‘becoming the container into which the data are poured’ (p. 272).

Yet, Pillow (2003) reminds us that reflexivity can collapse into ‘self-indulgent, narcissistic and tiresome’ activity (p. 176) if not rigorously applied to qualitative research methods. She calls for an uncomfortable reflexivity that does not seek a neat ‘transcendent end-point’ (p. 193). We plan this chapter, therefore, as a

messy text … aware of [our] own narrative apparatuses, sensitive to how reality is socially constructed … [It] is many sited, intertextual, always open ended, and resistant to theoretic holism, but always committed to cultural criticism.

(Marcus, 1998, p. 392)

Using a qualitative multi-vocal approach then, designed to interrogate assumptions around childhood, conflict, ECEC and researcher positioning, we embark on our reflexive dialogue. Our first voice discusses the concept of ‘childhood’ and o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Storied Conversations
• Part II Relations with Communities
• Part III Methodology
• Part IV Working with Government and Industry
• Index