Relaxation and unrest: a crystallization of children’s experiences in early childhood education and care

Abstract

Relaxation is framed as a key component of children's well-being in Australia’s legislation for Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) services, yet there is little elaboration on what supporting children’s relaxation entails and likewise a dearth of research on children’s lived experiences of relaxation. The data on which this thesis draws are from the study Choosing Rest, conducted in partnership with the Queensland Government, Department of Education. The thesis contributes qualitative analyses of drawing-prompted interviews with 46 three- to five- year-old children attending ECEC, and interviews with seven ECEC educators, to build understanding of children’s experiences and, thereby, inform policy and practice actions in ECEC.This thesis includes four published works. The first two inquire: How do children experience relaxation in ECEC? I investigate children’s accounts (paper one), and policy and educators’ discourses (paper two). Findings from these two papers inform a second inquiry: How can I research and write about children in a way that disrupts dominant early childhood discourse that undermines children’s agency? I experiment with ‘Departing Radically in Academic Writing’ (DRAWing) to better represent children’s playful voices (paper three) and follow children’s lead to change my focus on relaxation to unrest, with corresponding adaptation to research methodology and writing genre (paper four). This thesis embodies a dendritic crystallization methodology, whereby each of the four papers have distinct epistemological underpinnings, methodologies, and genres of writing; yet, linked together they provide multifaceted insights into children’s relaxation and unrestful experiences in ECEC.Paper one investigates how children attending ECEC experience relaxation. In the literature, relaxation is framed as the physiological and psychological counterpart to stress and thereby constructed as a health issue. I argue that the prevalence of relaxation being conceptualised as a ‘treatment’ for stress, in absence of consultation with children, contributes to the medicalisation of children’s relaxation. Informed by the sociology of childhood, I seek to understand children’s lived experiences of relaxation. Children competently describe their understandings and diverse preferences for relaxation, which centre on sensory-rich experiences grounded in specific social and environmental contexts. Children’s conceptualisation of relaxation as enjoyable everyday experiences contrast from the dominant stress-centric and medicalised research literatures. These largely portray children as passive intervention ‘recipients’ – rather than competent subjects with agency – and underpin common ECEC practices that focus on standard, and often mandated, ‘rest-times’ as a remedy for ‘stress’.Paper two examines two dominant ECEC discourses – ‘investment and outcomes’ and ‘children’s rights’ – and how these discourses shape policy pertaining to, and educators’ accounts of, children’s relaxation. Existing literature on ECEC discourses focuses more on policy than educators’ accounts. This is the first study to explore how dominant ECEC discourses shape policy and educator discourses of children’s relaxation. Discourses are influential because they directly inform pedagogical and care practices. I find both dominant discourses are present in Australian ECEC policy; however, policy pertaining to children’s relaxation only reflects investment-outcomes discourse – implying children are passive and incompetent. Some educators reproduce the discursive tensions found in policy, vacillating between two competing discourses, while other educators push beyond these tensions. The latter group of educators provide consistent descriptions of children’s competence and agency, aligning with children’s rights discourse.In paper three I critically reflect on how the tensions in dominant ECEC discourses that I critique are infused in my writing style (conventional academic prose). Drawing upon my autoethnographic responses to an experiment: Massive and Microscopic Sense-Making in the Time of COVID, I play with DRAWing. Feminist and comical theorists guide my inquiry. I creatively and critically ‘make fun’ of qualitative research conventions, including the: ‘omnipotent narrator’; clear and predictable writing structures; gender dynamics in research and writing; promotion of children’s rights in writing that is the antithesis of childlike; and quick dismissal of ‘nonsensical’ data. I posit that writing playfully about research with children allows researchers to ‘show’, rather than just ‘tell’, children’s agency. When we show children’s agency, we can disrupt the discursive tensions in ECEC discourses, and impact readers both intellectually and emotionally.In paper four I question research conventions and begin my inquiry by being affected by children rather than with a predefined knowledge gap. Feminist theorist Sara Ahmed guides my engagement with unsaturated, unrestful, and discarded data from the study Choosing Rest: children’s gendered accounts of violence that unexpectedly arose during interviews. I write with evocative representation to show what it feels like to be affected by ‘data’, and the nonlinear and zig-zagged shape of ensuing sense-making processes. Ahmed’s concept of power as directionality is applied to critique, firstly, how qualitative research conventions have power over directing researchers’ attention and, secondly, how children’s experiences in ECEC have the power to direct them towards gendered futures. I turn over: violence in block areas; love as an explanation for hitting; gender policing; and discrepancies between boys’ and girls’ feelings, and sense of agency, towards violence.