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Abstract
Research about infants’ capacity to communicate using cries, smiles and sophisticated emotional strategies to connect with adults in their lives has predominantly emerged from the field of developmental psychology, with relatively limited attention to how babies enact such communicative practices with key adults in naturalistic settings. This article examines the emotional communicative practices infants use with educators in early childhood education and care contexts. Drawing on data from a study about educators’ conceptions of infants’ capabilities, the article frames babies’ intentional use of emotionally evocative communication as ‘emotional capital’. Transcripts of digital videos, pictures and written observations are used to illustrate how infants actively draw on reserves of emotional capital to guide the course of their relationship with educators, affording a view into how these efforts to communicate emotional messages are understood and met by their educators. Drawing on the theory of practice architectures, implications for the relationships that develop between infants and their primary carers/educators are discussed. Concluding thoughts acknowledge infants’ agency and active contribution to the dynamics within those relationships.
Introduction
Beginning from a motivation to engage and a reciprocal emotional responsiveness (both evolutionary givens for humans at least), infants may get drawn into deceiving others within engagement … or emotional dialogue. (Reddy, 2010: 230)
The sophisticated and purposeful nature of infants’ communication strategies and emotional expression is well documented in psychological literature. Research about infants’ early perception (Hains and Muir, 1996; Hood et al., 1998), developing awareness of attention and imitation (Reddy, 2003; Trevarthen, 2005), and social and communication skills (Carpenter et al., 1998; Markova and Legerstee, 2006; Selby and Bradley, 2003; Trevarthen, 1980) underpins understandings that infants come to actively use emotional communication to share their knowledge and elicit a variety of responses from familiar adults. This combination of infants’ perception, awareness of attention and developing communicative practices can guide their intentional emotional expression and development. Trevarthen (2004), for example, refers to infants as performers – very proud performers who put energy and emotion into actively engaging other people around them in their theatre. Drawing on this psychological literature, we conceptualise these sophisticated emotional communicative skills and resources as ‘emotional capital’, a form of what Bourdieu (1987) refers to as ‘symbolic capital’. Bourdieu (1987: 4) defines symbolic capital as ‘the form the different types of capital take’, grounded in competence and exerting particular effects (see Bourdieu, 1986). We argue that infants’ use of sophisticated emotional strategies to actively engage adults in the naturalistic setting of an early childhood education and care (ECEC) centre draws on infants’ competence and exerts particular effects.
Conceiving of emotional skills and resources as a form of symbolic capital is relatively new in early childhood contexts. To the best of our knowledge, in ECEC contexts and early childhood research to date, the notion of ‘emotional capital’ has only been used in relation to the work of early childhood educators (e.g. Andrew, 2015; Colley, 2006). The purpose of this article is to illuminate infants’ agentic capacity to draw on reserves of emotional capital through their cries, gaze and facial expressions to elicit recognition and responses from educators in ECEC contexts, and co-direct the course of the development of their relationships with educators. In doing so, this article seeks to extend the body of literature about infants’ emotional capabilities beyond psychological contexts; contribute to the growing body of literature about infants’ emotional capabilities and attachment relationships in naturalistic contexts; and introduce the application of the notion of emotional capital to infants.
This article first provides an overview of existing developmental literature about infants’ emotional communication. The capacity of infants to understand the nuances of emotional interactions within key relationships, and seemingly use what they know in active and purposeful ways, is outlined first. The notion of emotional capital is then discussed, first in relation to Bourdieu’s (1986) notion of symbolic capital and then more specifically as the set of emotional skills and strategies used in particular fields of study. Data is then presented to highlight a range of communication initiatives of one infant, Sophie, who used facial expressions and vocalisations in emotionally evocative ways. The data is interpreted using the theory of practice architectures as an analytical framework, in which infants’ sophisticated facial expressions, gestures and vocalisations are framed as intentional acts that elicit responses from educators in ECEC contexts. How educators’ responses to the babies’ emotional communication come to shape the interactions and interdependence between them, and the implications of different types of responses are then discussed, while acknowledging infants’ agentic role in directing the course of the developing relationship.
Development of infants’ emotional communication
Although infants are in many ways physically and cognitively vulnerable, even from birth they can exert considerable power – for example, in their capacity to cry. Newborns’ cries are said to communicate varying degrees of physical distress, conveyed by the amplitude of crying (Lock and Zukow-Goldring, 2010; Trevarthen, 2004) in conjunction with embodied actions. For example, physical expressions of infant crying incorporate overt and discreet changes in skin coloration, vocal systems and facial distortions (Bolzani Dinehart et al., 2005; Tronick, 1989). According to Bolzani Dinehart et al. (2005), infants increasingly develop the capacity to control their cries, which can demonstrate qualitative changes (Chen et al., 2009; Nakayama, 2010). Similarly, smiles increasingly come to be controlled by infants to indicate expressions of positive emotion (Bolzani Dinehart et al., 2005; Messinger, 2002; Sroufe, 1979). Infants’ emotional responses to negative and positive stimuli contribute to what Trevarthen (2004: 6) called a ‘very elaborate system of socio-emotional signaling’. However, infants’ emotional expressions are only one part of this communication system. The power of infants’ socio-emotional signals to evoke responses in adults results in ‘sequences of expressive behaviour’ (Trevarthen and Delafield-Butt, 2017: 19) – an essential element underpinning reciprocal and meaningful emotional communication between infants and their caregivers. As infants work with the contingent responses between their actions and the external consequences of their actions through other people’s responses (Bigelow and Rochat, 2006; Lock and Zukow-Goldring, 2010; Trevarthen, 2003a; Tronick, 1989), the groundwork is laid for the development of affective relationships between infants and important people in their lives.
As infants internalise the reciprocal nature of their expressions, the responses of others and the attention that comes with them, they come to develop certain expectations within the reciprocal relationships they have helped establish. In time, infants draw on the expectation that there will be a response, and make active attempts to direct others’ attention (Reddy, 1999; Rochat, 2001; Tomasello, 1995), so contributing to the course of existing and new interactions (Lock and Zukow-Goldring, 2010). In doing so, young infants seem to develop the capacity to use what they ‘know’ about their powers in relation to others in active and purposeful ways. Tronick (1989) considers this agency a part of infants’ desire to achieve particular goals, including to recruit people to share an interest in objects and aspects of their selves (Lock and Zukow-Goldring, 2010; Reddy, 2003). Reddy (2003) gives examples of how infants seem aware that the attention of others is related to the things they do. She describes infants’ efforts to actively recruit people into emotional engagement by ‘performing’ in exaggerated ways, repeating clever actions to re-elicit praise, and repeating odd actions that previously led to laughter. If infants’ use of intentional ‘knowing’ is demonstrated in their active and intentional engagement in positive affective displays, it follows that they also have the capacity to display equally evocative, purposeful demonstrations of negative affect. This is demonstrated by types of infant crying regarded as intentional (Nakayama, 2010; Reddy, 2007) and reported by mothers as ‘faking’ (Wolff, 1969: 98). Infants’ active and intentional use of a sophisticated, emotionally evocative repertoire of skills has implications for the ways that subsequent interactions with others proceed. This is conceptualised in this article as occurring through the development of ‘emotional capital’.
Emotional capital
Conceptualising infants’ agentic use of a range of emotional communication skills as ‘emotional capital’ is underpinned by Bourdieu’s (1986) notion of symbolic capital, as noted earlier in this article. According to Bourdieu, merely acknowledging one form of commonly recognised economic capital does not adequately account for the structure and functioning of the social world. He proposes that different types of capital exist – namely, social and cultural capital – grounded in the production of different kinds of power that are effective in the fields in question – that is, social and cultural fields. An important element of capital is that it accumulates over time and has ‘a potential capacity to produce profits and to reproduce itself in identical or expanded form’ (Bourdieu, 1986: 241). As such, different forms of capital can be conceived of as building on particular processes over time, which derive particular benefits, or profits, for the actors involved. Central to this process is the production of power. With these key characteristics of capital in mind, it is not hard to further conceptualise that ‘[c]apital is what makes the games of society … something other than simple games of chance’ (241) – that is, thinking through the possibilities of symbolic capital affords an understanding that the social world is actively (co-)constructed and has particular rules that can be understood and navigated.
Bourdieu’s concept of capital has been extended by Nowotny (1981) to include emotional capital, whereby emotions are regarded ‘as resources, or a set of assets, which can be circulated, accumulated and exchanged for other forms of capital within a particular field that allows those resources to “count”’ (quoted in Colley, 2006: 25). The concept of emotional capital has been used in a number of empirical studies about mothers’ emotional involvement in their children’s schooling (Gillies, 2006; O’Brien, 2008; Reay, 2000), and in theorising business and education practices (Gendron, 2004; Zembylas, 2007). Colley (2006) refers to emotional capital in relation to the emotional nature of women’s work in ECEC contexts; however, it was Andrew (2015) who first applied the notion of emotional capital to early childhood work in detailed and comprehensive ways. According to Andrew (2015: 351), emotional capital is a ‘repertoire of emotional resources’ that educators draw on to successfully navigate the emotional intensity of their work in ECEC settings. Salamon (2017) has used the notion of emotional capital in similar ways to refer to an emotionally evocative repertoire of skills infants use to effectively and actively manage their emotional ‘work’ within ECEC settings. Given, as outlined above, that capital involves active participation in the ‘games of society’ and, as previous research has shown, infants develop means for participating in and actively initiating games in their social worlds, it is timely to examine how infants use emotional capital in the social world of the ECEC setting.
The next section presents data from a case study (Salamon, 2016) that illuminated infants’ sophisticated emotional communication skills and the ways infants draw on these skills and their reserves of emotional capital to shape the relationships they co-construct with key educators.
The study
The study explored whether – and, if so, how – early childhood educators’ conceptions of infants’ capabilities manifest in educators’ practices in ways that affect the babies’ lived experiences. The study had three foci: educators’ conceptions of infants’ capabilities; educators’ practices; and infants’ lived experiences. Drawing on the theory of practice architectures (Kemmis and Grootenboer, 2008), infants’ actions and interactions in ECEC contexts are also conceived of as practices – that is, embodied sayings and observable doings and relatings (Salamon, 2017). Further details regarding practices will be outlined in the following sections.
Site, participants and data sources
The participants included four educators and a small group of seven infants aged between six months and one year at the commencement of the study, who respectively were working at and attending an ECEC setting in Sydney’s inner western suburbs. Observation visits took place over a six-month period in 2013 and focused on the typical practices of both the educators and the infants. Data was generated through written field notes, digital photographs, audio and video recordings, researcher reflections and group discussions with the educators. Additionally, data was generated by the presentation and discussion with the educators of researcher-selected video extracts that illustrated infants’ practices, using the ‘Practice Architectures Map’ (Salamon and Harrison, 2015), a simplified diagram of the theory of practice architectures (Kemmis and Grootenboer, 2008).
This article draws on data generated about the infants’ practices through detailed observations, digital photographs and audio and video recordings. In this article, we focus on data from one of the seven children, Sophie, who displayed a number of exaggerated facial expressions, gestures and vocalisations in her emotional communication with key educators. Although the other infants also displayed similarly sophisticated communicative behaviours and strategies, researcher observations indicated that Sophie did so most consistently. Sophie’s key educators confirmed that this was the case – hence the decision to focus on Sophie in this article.
Analysis
The theory of practice architectures (Kemmis and Grootenboer, 2008) was used as the analytical framework for the study. According to this theory, sites of practice are constituted by ‘practice architectures’, which exist as unique ‘arrangements’ of sites of practice that develop over time. Cultural-discursive arrangements are found in or brought to a site through language and ideas; material-economic arrangements are found in or brought to a site through objects and spatial arrangements; and social-political arrangements are found in or brought to a site through relationships (Kemmis et al., 2014). These arrangements shape (and are shaped by) the individual practices of practitioners of the site of practice – that is, sayings (shape and are shaped by cultural-discursive arrangements), doings (shape and are shaped by material-economic arrangements) and relatings (shape and are shaped by social-political arrangements).
The analytical framework of using practice architectures is consistent with Bourdieu’s (1986: 241) statement that the ‘[s]ocial world is accumulated history’, and his notions of capital. This reflection aligns with the central premise of the theory of practice architectures, as outlined above. For example, in similar ways that capital accumulates over time and derives particular benefits or profits for the actors involved, arrangements of practice can become sedimented in ways that enable and constrain possibilities for practitioners. The ‘games of society’ Bourdieu (1986) refers to could thus be conceived as among the shared arrangements that enable and constrain particular actors. Furthermore, and in line with the definition of emotional capital previously offered, infants’ emotionally evocative expressions could be conceived of as the individual sayings, doings and relatings that drive the way capital accumulates, and shape (and are shaped by) the games of the society within which they are actors.
We use the theory of practice architectures to analyse Sophie’s emotionally evocative practices in relation to the practices of other educators and the researcher (the first author). The data was categorised into Sophie’s practices – that is, her sayings, doings and relatings – and the educator’s sayings, doings and relatings (summarised in Figure 4 and presented in the discussion section of this article). Iterative analysis of the data was undertaken with the educators during the period of data collection, and a second meeting with the educators was used to check the validity of the inferences drawn and ask further questions about ideas that emerged from the transcripts. The analysis also draws on developmental literature to further inform observations of data from naturalistic contexts, and considers how Sophie’s emotionally evocative use of emotional capital can shape the dynamics of developing relationships.
Sophie’s use of emotional capital
The data presented in the following section highlights Sophie’s intentional communication of both positive and negative emotions, seemingly as a way to evoke particular responses from the educators in the room. In the first and third excerpts, the educators’ responses to Sophie’s expression of negative and positive emotions are seen to perpetuate their joint interactions. Sophie’s intentional emotional communication with the educator in the second excerpt results from her need to regulate her experience more independently.
Excerpt 1: Cuddles for Sophie
Three children (Sophie, aged 10 months; Timmy, aged 9 months; and Sam, aged 15 months) are sitting outside on a mat with an educator. The educator, who is Sophie’s primary caregiver and focus educator, is engaging with the children using plastic containers to make noises:
30 July 2013, 1.52 p.m.
Sophie begins to crawl towards the educator but Timmy moves in front of her to bang his container on a piece of wood. Sophie watches for a moment as the educator bangs two pieces of wood together then notices the educator moving Timmy across her lap to sit down at her left side. Sophie looks at the educator, crinkles up her face slightly but with eyes downturned and vocalises in a soft, whiney voice, and then reaches out to crawl towards the educator. The educator says, ‘What happened Sophie? I didn’t give a cuddle to Timmy’. The educator reaches behind her for two more plastic containers and bangs them together in front of Sophie, saying, ‘Look. I’m not giving cuddles to anyone. You can play’. Sophie reaches out to the educator [see Figure 1], looks up at her and makes a few softer cry-type sounds before bowing her head. The educator touches the top of Sophie’s head, saying, ‘You alright over there Sophie’, and puts her hands on Sophie’s forearms [see Figure 1]. Sophie continues to make soft, measured cry-like sounds while looking towards the educator, who says, ‘I can’t give cuddles all the time’. The educator moves her hands to under Sophie’s armpits and says, ‘OK, alright look’, then brings Sophie close to her in a standing-type cuddle on her right side and says, ‘too much cuddles’. At the same time Timmy is making similar whiney-type noises at the educator’s other knee with a lowered brow and turned-down mouth that he directs to me.
In this excerpt, Sophie is using a range of vocal and embodied sayings and doings to communicate and, ultimately, relate with her primary caregiver. Sophie’s vocal acts seemed more social and communicative, and their intensity seemed to be very measured and purposeful, among the range of ‘fake cries’ identified by Nakayama (2010) and Chen et al. (2009). Lock and Zukow-Goldring (2010: 407) consider that from around nine months of age, idiosyncratic gestures can convey infants’ desires, interests or targets/topics of attention – for example, ‘requesting’ objects by ‘whining and reaching towards them’. It seemed that Sophie, after watching her educator’s interactions with another child, was requesting the educator for herself. Similarly, Reddy (2008) proposes that infants use fake actions and expressions not just to get what they want, but also to lead others to themselves. The educator’s sayings – that is, ‘I can’t give cuddles all the time’ – suggest that this is not an isolated event. Even though she said no, her ultimate physical contact, a way of relating (Salamon and Harrison, 2015), further suggests that Sophie understands that enacting her emotional practices might fulfil her desires. In similar ways to the accumulation of capital becoming profitable for those involved in its formulation, it could be said that Sophie expects that particular benefits will be derived from actively using her emotionally evocative sayings and doings, and ways of relating.
Excerpt 2: Sophie manages independently
Three babies (Timmy, aged 9.5 months; Ellen, aged 12 months; and Sophie, aged 11 months) are sitting together during morning arrival time. An educator is nearby, engaged with a parent dropping their child off for the day. The children are engaging with various resources in front of them. Timmy takes a container from Sophie:
10 September 2013, 8.56 a.m.
Sophie brings her eyebrows together and vocalises softly, partly whining and partly crying out to the educator [see Figure 2], then looks back at me. Timmy and Ellen look at her, and she looks at Timmy and continues to half whine. Ellen reaches out and touches Sophie on the chest gently while vocalising assertively. Sophie screws up her face quickly, which begins to go red, looks down and makes crying sounds though somewhat more intensely than before. Sophie’s vocalisations are brief, her face is screwed up and she looks at me [see Figure 2] then towards the educator.
Ellen touches Sophie’s face. Sophie screws up her eyes, nose and face, opens her mouth wide and makes intense, measured cry-like vocalisations, first looking at the educator and then at me as she does. She stops, makes a few loud but less intense sounds, while the educator is talking to the parent but watching. Sophie continues to make ‘unhappy’ sounds on and off, kicking her legs out and looking between the educator and in front of her … the educator gets down on the floor once the parent has left, and Sophie looks down and begins to screw up her face again, softly making her ‘unhappy’ sounds and looking back up and directly at the educator. The educator changes her expression from bright and smiling and looks at Sophie and says in a sympathetic voice, ‘What’s wrong with Sophie?’ Sophie continues to look at her with chin down and holding the little bowl in her hands, her face slightly screwed up but watching as another child engages with the educator. Sophie’s face becomes neutral while she watches the interaction. She looks at another child playing in a different play space, and touches the bowl to the floor as her hand moves downward. It makes a noise, and she repeats the action a number of times then crawls towards the other child, smiling.
Sophie seems to encounter different responses to the same sayings (soft, whiney cries and crinkled eyes), doings (looks at the educator) and ways of relating (bowing her head, looking down) she used with her focus educator. When Sophie is subsequently touched, her reactions are much more intense, indicated by her red, screwed-up face, open mouth and brief, but intense, vocalisations. Sophie’s naturally occurring negative emotional responses are consistent with Bolzani Dinehart et al.’s (2005) report of intense negative emotion as involving strong eye constriction and lip-stretching. However, this educator’s doings (to remain watchful) and relatings (leaving space), which were different from the focus educator’s, resulted in different outcomes for Sophie, including increased opportunities for Sophie to relate with other children and regulate her own emotions. Thus, it seems that the way infants draw on reserves of emotional capital can have implications for their learning opportunities, which are enabled and constrained within different relationship dynamics.
Excerpt 3: Smiling Sophie
Four children (Sophie, aged 13 months; Billie, aged 17 months; Greg, aged 15 months; and Sam, aged 18 months) are sitting at the morning tea table with an educator. They are chatting about the animals in the book Billie has brought to the table. I am sitting nearby in front of a low bookshelf with my camera in my hand:
5 November 2013, 8.32 a.m.
Sophie is chewing on a pastry scroll and looking at Billie, who is turning the pages of the book. With the pastry in her hand, Sophie looks at me and screws up her nose, eyes and face in a smile before shifting her gaze back to Billie. The educator is talking with Billie about the animals in the book, saying, ‘and the duck, yep. Quack quack’ and Sophie looks towards the educator who is making a quacking noise and action. As the educator is talking to Billie, Sophie looks at me and lifts her hand towards me, saying ‘da’, looking at me as I say ‘duck’. She points to the book and says what sounds like ‘quack’. The educator is still talking with Billie about the animals in the book and is saying, ‘What can you see … the pig?’ and makes a pig sound and action. Sophie looks at the educator making the pig noise and smiles broadly, making a squeal-type sound of laughter. The educator smiles back at Sophie and laughs gently, saying, ‘Was that funny was it?’ Another child walks over and the educator talks to him as Sophie screws up her face in an exaggerated smile towards the child [see Figure 3] then turns to the educator. At the same time, the educator turns her head away, missing the smile, and Sophie looks at me half crinkling up her eyes as she continues to eat her pastry [see Figure 3].
The educator is talking to Billie, and Sophie first looks at him then lifts her face to the educator, screws it up in the same exaggerated way and vocalises again with a more purposeful, and similarly exaggerated, squeal sound. The educator turns to her when she makes her sound, smiling then laughing gently when she sees her face, saying, ‘That’s a funny face’. The camera follows Billie, who goes off to get a book, and in the background Sophie is making her squeal sound.
This third excerpt exemplifies Sophie’s exaggerated smiles, squeals and laughter as active and purposeful demonstrations of positive affect that fittingly illustrate Reddy’s (2001) clowning infant. Reddy (2008) contends that infants can show a motivation to join in shared laughter from six months old, through ‘fake’ laughter as a communicative rather than emotional act. Infants’ capacity to share humour and pleasure through exuberant gestures and actions also underpins Trevarthen’s (2004: 20) consideration of infants as ‘performers and masters of creative acts’. Sophie’s positive dramatic expressions seemed to reflect her desire to connect with and make games with those around her (Trevarthen, 2003b), which was apparent in her sayings (gestures and vocalisations, crinkling up her nose and eyes, upturned mouth), her doings (pointing to the book) and her relatings (exaggerating her smile towards the child, educator and researcher). The educator’s practices of smiling and laughing in turn demonstrate Trevarthen’s (2004: 7) ‘responsive adult’, who, seeing the child’s expression, ‘is stimulated to give an encouraging, praising kind of reply that matches the level of affect’. As described previously, this co-construction of the way infants and their significant adults relate enables and constrains particular behaviours, and also results in the babies’ production of power within those relationships – a significant feature of capital.
Discussion
Figure 4 presents a synthesis of Sophie’s emotional practices and responses by the educators and other adults, organised as sayings, doings and relatings. Following Kemmis et al. (2014), the infant and educators (or researcher) enter the interaction through their individual practices, and encounter each other in contingent arrangements that enable and constrain subsequent interactions.
Figure 4. The interdependent nature of infants’ and educators’ emotional practices. Adapted from a diagram of practices of leading in Kemmis et al. (2014: 165) © 2014 Springer Science + Business Media, Singapore (adapted with permission).
The excerpts of data represent Sophie in three different circumstances, entering interactions with others by using a variety of sayings, doings and relatings in particular ways. As indicated in the first excerpt, Sophie’s active use of sophisticated crying-type behaviours did not happen in isolation but rather as a part of the interactional dynamic she co-created with her focus educator. This idea of co-construction is supported by the psychological literature which asserts that infants modulate and control their behaviour within contingent relationships (Lock and Zukow-Goldring, 2010; Reddy et al., 2013; Trevarthen, 2005). In similar ways, the notion of symbolic capital, which is seen as developing in a social and co-constructed world with particular understandable ‘rules’, is reflected in Sophie and her focus educator’s relatings. When the rules and, so, social-political arrangements changed, however, as in the second excerpt when another educator responded to the same sayings and doings in different ways, the subsequent relatings enabled different possibilities for Sophie. For example, in response to the educator relating with space and sympathy (see educator’s relatings, Figure 4), Sophie refocused on the bowl she was playing with, continued to play and then crawled away (see Sophie’s doings, Figure 4.) towards another area of interest in the room. Sophie’s emotional communications seemed to be grounded in a ‘bank’ of contingent experiences, understandings and expectations that adults will respond in particular ways to particular stimuli. She seemed to have the capacity to adjust her expectations of a particular response within the different contingent social-political arrangements and, as such, demonstrated a legitimate competence, which underpins Bourdieu’s (1986) conception of symbolic capital. In doing so, Sophie’s example makes evident the potential for infants to develop dispositions that impact their social and emotional outlook within different contingent arrangements (Salamon, 2017), by actively drawing on emotional capital through the purposeful expression of negative and positive affect.
Concluding thoughts
Trevarthen (2003b: 58), referring to animal agency, reflects: ‘There are emotionally charged negotiations of interest and purpose with every object or subject that attracts interest’. The analysis reported in this article has illustrated an infant’s capacity as an agent of sophisticated and emotionally charged negotiations. This rich emotional repertoire is framed as emotional capital, the ‘ongoing consciousness of emotions’ and the ways in which they are used in everyday practices (Andrew, 2015: 355). The article has also demonstrated through the example of Sophie and her early childhood educators that infants’ intentional emotional practices, including facial expressions, gestures and vocalisations, can actively contribute to the dynamics of the relationship they are co-developing with adults in ECEC contexts. In doing so, it takes up Tronick’s (1989: 115) suggestion to ‘put infants’ in situations that evoke their goals, evaluations and strivings, while focusing on gestures, posture and vocalisations. Research involving infants’ interactions with key educators in ECEC settings affords a view of natural, relationship-rich contexts that evoke such intrinsic, purposeful infant behaviour, and brings new insights to the field of psychological research. Similarly, incorporating psychological literature into the interpretation of infant behaviour in ECEC research is beneficial in building deeper understandings of infants as intentional agents who draw on complex social and emotional capabilities in ways that influence the dynamics of their relationships. Knowing that infants learn through their actions on the world, and subsequent reactions from the world, has implications for understanding the major significance of how infants’ worlds are structured on their learning (Lock and Zukow-Goldring, 2010). The differential responses of the educators to Sophie’s purposeful cries, for example, bring to bear different possibilities for infants’ learning within different relationships. The emotional complexity of such relationships calls for greater awareness of the delicate balance of dependence and independence between infants and educators (Page and Elfer, 2013), and the subsequent influence on educators’ and infants’ practices.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: We gratefully acknowledge support received from the Charles Sturt University Writing Up Award in the early stages of this article.
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Author biographies
Andi Salamon is a lecturer at the Australian Catholic University, Sydney. Her experiences as an early childhood teacher and leadership roles in ECEC contexts have guided her research focus on educators’ and infants’ intersubjectivity. She focuses on making her research accessible to educators working with infants in ECEC settings, and brings her passion for upholding young children’s rights for quality early years learning experiences into her work with pre-service teachers.
Jennifer Sumsion is a foundation professor of Early Childhood Education at Charles Sturt University. Her current research interests include early childhood workforce development, curriculum and regulatory frameworks, and the education and care of infants and toddlers. She has led Australian government and Australian Research Council-funded projects in these areas, and in early childhood education research capacity-building.
Linda Harrison is a professor of Early Childhood Education at Charles Sturt University. Her research focuses on very young children’s experiences of early education and care; child socio-emotional, cognitive, and speech and language development; processes within services that underpin the provision of high-quality programs; and new methodologies for researching these issues. Recent publications include a special issue of Early Childhood Research Quarterly on the Early Development Instrument and transitions in children’s everyday lives, and an Early Childhood Australia booklet for educators and families.
