Abstract
This paper examines an experimental technique that uses visual narrative methodology and dialogue commentary to create an effective research methodology for a pilot project studying babies and toddlers in long day care centres and family contexts. Researchers from different cultural backgrounds using video technology, formed the team of chief investigators. One video clip was chosen to make independent descriptions, comments and interpretations of what was noticed. Later, initial visual narrative descriptions were shared and extended after reading one another’s responses. This process created a dialogue commentary that enabled data overview, interpretative analyses and synthesis supported by snapshot moments taken from video clip. One aim of the project was to visually capture the cultural worlds and transitory relationships of babies and toddlers. Researchers showed the selected video clip separately to babies’ room educator, centre director, and parents recording their responses. Using visual narrative methodology, dialogue commentary, and a shared cultural historical theoretical framework, revealed useful contradictions that raised social and cultural questions such as: How do educators recognize cultural worlds and transitory relationships of babies and toddlers? How are transitory moments related to pedagogically by educators? Integrating researchers’ personal, cultural and affective responses, affords new critical cultural perspectives. This paper draws on screen capture snapshot moments from one video clip, taken from babies’ pilot project data. These offer small windows into methodological approaches used to research the cultural world and transitory moments of three infants and their educator, located in the babies’ room of an Australian long day care (LDC) site.
Highlights
Visual methodology has been applied by many researchers to explore the world of young babies by trying to capture their ‘voices’ through viewing moments of action (Sumsion et al 2014; Bitou and Waller 2011; White 2011; Sikder and Fleer 2015)
The need to establish a theoretical gaze for “understanding what life is like for children in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) settings, from the perspectives of the infants themselves” (p.316) is flagged by Sumsion and Goodfellow (2012) who encourage researchers of infants to engage with a diversity of ways of “looking and listening in” (p.316)
When researchers attempt to capture the lived experiences and sense of everyday events from the young child’s perspective through the use of visual methodologies, they acknowledge the unspoken ‘voice’ of the child which is always present in their affective active engagement with others and the environment (Malloch & Trevarthen 2009; Rinaldi 2000; Selby & Bradley 2003)
Summary
Visual methodology has been applied by many researchers to explore the world of young babies by trying to capture their ‘voices’ through viewing moments of action (Sumsion et al 2014; Bitou and Waller 2011; White 2011; Sikder and Fleer 2015). Quiñones and Fleer (2011), argued that when researching very young children, researchers should consider looking in and listening to “verbal communication and understand the child’s many different forms of expressing non-verbal emotions and meanings” (p.127) With this in mind they suggested using ‘Visual Vivencias’ as a methodological tool to understand the young child’s emotional lived experience and sense of everyday events, thereby drawing researcher’s attention “to the dialectical relations between the unity of the child and the social environment” (Johansson 2011 p.9). When researchers attempt to capture the lived experiences and sense of everyday events from the young child’s perspective through the use of visual methodologies, they acknowledge the unspoken ‘voice’ of the child which is always present in their affective active engagement with others and the environment (Malloch & Trevarthen 2009; Rinaldi 2000; Selby & Bradley 2003)
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