Multi-sensitive attunement: exploring the relationship between the toddler and the nursery teacher in the institutional arrangement of early childhood education and care

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the area of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC), intersubjectivity between the child and the nursery teacher is seen as a core element of professional work. The notion of affect attunement, proposed by Daniel Stern, is central in this regard. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, I explore the relationship between the toddler and the nursery teacher within this frame. However, engaging with perspectives from Actor-Network-Theory, I argue that the interplay is more than mere reciprocal attunement between humans. Through empirical examples, I show how elements such as bibs, sandboxes, wardrobes, rules and routines, all part of the institutional arrangement, are vibrantly at play in the attunement. Thus, I propose the blurry concept of multi-sensitive attunement to point to the heterogeneous connections that make up the relationship. My ambition in exploring and proposing such a blurry concept is to expand our understanding of what goes on in ECEC and what professional work is. It is an ambition to theoretically move the relationship between the toddler and the professional out of an implicit mother-child ideal and into the formalised setting in which it takes place.