Toddlers as the one-caring: co-authoring play narratives and identities of care

ABSTRACT

An expansive view of care is vital to understanding children’s sense-making of their care experiences in early childhood education. Yet, scant literature explores how toddlers enact and express understandings of care in their play with objects and others. This article identifies play situations where toddlers enact and express understandings, and co-author narratives, of care with teachers. Discussion focuses on video data from two studies that investigated infants’, toddlers’ and teachers’ pedagogical relationships in New Zealand and Australian settings. Cultural-historical and co-authoring concepts supported analysis of toddlers’ object-centred play and caring actions. Findings show that toddlers engage teachers in co-creating caring actions while enacting and expressing care with dolls. We argue that this collaborative, object-centred play enables toddlers to co-author meanings of, and identity as, the one-caring. Implications emphasize teachers’ intentional role and joint-play actions in supporting toddlers’ initiatives to co-author care play narratives and their identity as the one-caring.

KEYWORDS:

• Care
• caring encounters
• co-authoring
• cultural-historical
• early childhood education
• toddlers

Acknowledgements

We thank the centre managers, teachers, pre-service teachers, families, and infants and toddlers who participated in the New Zealand and Australian studies. We also wish to acknowledge Maria’s co-researcher Jean Rockel for her feedback and permission to use data from the New Zealand project for this article and Australian project field research assistance from Cynthia Lopez Valenzuela.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The New Zealand research was supported by The Froebel Trust grant number [RCH-34-2017]. The Australian research was supported by Monash University internal grants: Dean ECR research grant and Advancing Women’s Research Success Grant.

Notes on contributors

Maria Cooper

Maria Cooper is a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Education and Social Work at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Her research focuses on infant-toddler pedaogies, early years curriculum, collective leadership, and qualitative methodologies related to research on early childhood education.

Gloria Quiñones

Gloria Quiñones is a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Education at Monash University, Australia. Her research focuses on infant-toddler pedagogies, play, emotions, and visual methodologies.