A box of childhood: small stories at the roots of a career

Abstract

This paper emerges from a view that the growing body of self-reflective qualitative research designs elsewhere in education is insufficiently represented in early childhood enquiry. Research of this sort has a rich capacity to inform critical understanding with experiential data that reveal the remarkable within the quotidian; more specifically, it has the potential to give some access to the ‘small secret stuff’ of childhood that – though often observed in literary work – is frequently obscured in social science report. Our own experiences – not least of the world of children from which we are all graduates – are no less overshadowed in most of our critical accounts. In this paper the exploration of my own childhood provides a ground for an autoethnographic enquiry realised through nine short stories. The paper first describes the visual/sensory ethnographic process, which gave life to the accounts before presenting the stories themselves. It then argues the usefulness of reflexivity and autoethnography in early childhood education research, and a conclusion urges further reflective enquiry from the early childhood education community.