Mapping the dilemmatic space of early childhood education and care practitioners when challenged by children’s curiosity

Abstract

This article explores the notion of curiosity as a gateway to value dilemmas in early childhood education and care practices. The concept of dilemmatic space (Honig) is used to highlight the complexity of educational practices. Through an ethnographic approach based on video-observation and stimulated recall interviews, the reflections of the practitioners in three early childhood education and care institutions in Norway are analysed regarding situations in which curiosity was challenging and in which explorative behaviour was stopped, transferred or adjusted. The analyses allowed the construction of several axes of dilemmatic space, such as Equality versus Supporting the Individual, Social Order versus Questioning Status Quo and Being Professional versus Being Private. This highlights the entanglement of values, which is part of the ongoing process of constructing professional identity. It is argued that even in the case of widely accepted notions like curiosity, standardised and fixed guidelines on practice cannot be the sole answer to the complexity of early childhood education and care.