Researchers’ subjectivities in a study of infants & toddlers

ABSTRACT

Our purpose in this article is to examine the subjective processes of researchers while becoming conscious during the investigation of infants and toddlers (I/Ts) in educational settings. Based on the intertwining between Cultural-historical Psychology and Ethnography in Education, we followed a group of I/Ts at a Brazilian Early Childhood Education Center between 2017 and 2019. This extended length of time in the field allowed us to build a logic of inquiry with consciousness as its foundation. We focus on an analysis of four events which occurred at different times within this two-year period that make visible the researcher’s processes of becoming conscious at the center of the research process itself. Becoming conscious enabled repositioning ourselves as researchers, transforming the research process, and reorganizing the latter as a whole. In this study, we demonstrate that ‘becoming conscious’ involves considering whether the research extends beyond being an object of knowledge, and includes a meta-analysis of the research path actually taken through approximations and distancing with data, as well as the creation of new interpretations, solutions and combinations of these, as the study progressed. We argue that becoming conscious, as a relational and situated process, is an essential dimension of educational research.

KEYWORDS:

• Consciousness
• cultural-historical psychology
• ethnography in education
• early childhood education
• infants
• toddlers
• qualitative methodology

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Children between 0 and 3 years old.

2 Usually the Russian term “perezhivanie” has been translated into English as “experience”, which does not capture the complexity of this Vygotskyan notion. Thus, we have kept, in parentheses, the term “perizhivanie”, singular, or “perizhivanya”, plural.

3 Vygotsky’s name has been spelled differently in many languages. We have kept the way it was spelled in the work cited.

4 I/Ts’ ages are represented in months (m) and days (d) according to the date of the event being analyzed.

5 The digital camcorder used is a small Canon (Vixia HF R800). On this day, the observation and videorecording were made only by Luiza.

6 All of these scenes were transformed in events and were analyzed in Elenice’s thesis (2021).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Ní­vel Superior (CAPES): [Grant Number PROEX – PPGE/UFMG]; Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de Minas Gerais (FAPEMIG): [Grant Number PPM-00675-18]; Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Cientí­fico e Tecnológico (CNPq): [Grant Number 402690/2016-8].