16th January 2025 - 1:00 pm to 2:00 pm
How babies contribute agency of voice in environments outside of the family home has received very little research attention to date. Very young children’s agency of voice is rarely considered when developing cultures for care and education or national policies that drive forward educational outcomes.
Thriving in nurturing early childhood settings is the intended outcome for all young children. Recent government attention to early childhood education sets to prioritise high quality early education for all children, including babies
Caroline discussed her work completed at The University of Roehampton that captured babies’ experiences of group based early childhood settings. An ethnographic study, fostering a visual methodology exposed the rich potential for relationship-based care but unearthed the nuanced and often complex landscape babies exist within when they attend early childhood settings. With proposed government expansion of early education to centre around school-based nursery places, key findings from Caroline’s study advocate for greater attention to be paid to babies’ voiced contributions when developing cultures that nurture early relationships and action to be taken to ensure national policy promotes the rights of very young children attending formal early childhood settings in England.
Links:
Guard, C. (2023). ‘It’s the little bits that you have enabled me to see’. Reconceptualising the voices of babies using the video interaction dialogue model with early years educators. Early Years, 43(3), 606–625. https://doi.org/10.1080/09575146.2023.2190498
Guard, C. (2023) Hearing the voices of babies in baby-educator interactions in Early Childhood Settings. PhD Thesis, University of Roehampton. Available online: Hearing the voices of babies in baby-educator interactions in Early Childhood Settings – University of Roehampton Research Explorer
Thinking about Babies: a Froebelian Approach (Froebel Trust)