Dancing with the pacifiers: infant's perizhivanya in a Brazilian early childhood education centre

ABSTRACT

This study captures the possibilities of infants’ interactions in a Brazilian Early Childhood Education Centre. It contributes to an increasing number of educational research that is capturing the specificities of how young children use their understandings of context through gestures and verbal forms of language to create meanings as they develop social relationships with their peers and adults. The meanings of these interactions are explored based on the Vygotskyan notion of perezhivanie. The research design was guided by ethnography in education principles. Participant researchers used fieldnotes and video recording to capture infants’ interactions at the centre. For the purposes of this study, events were selected that related to the use of the cultural artefact pacifier. While teachers and families regarded the pacifier as an artefact that calms infants, helping them settle into a new environment, this study expands infants use of pacifiers as they also became artefacts to be explored and part of infants’ social relations with each other. The events analysed highlight the biology/culture and emotion/cognition unities in infants’ processes of development. This study argues for expanding teachers’ practices in a process of appreciating what infants’ intentions are and what they are communicating.

KEYWORDS:

• Early childhood education
• cultural historical psychology
• ethnography
• infants
• perizhivanie

Acknowledgments

Authors would like to thank the encouragement and support from professors and students that belong to EnlaCEI (Estudos em Cultura, Educação e Infância), GEPSA (Grupo de Estudos e Pesquisa em Psicologia Histórico-cultural na Sala de Aula) and NEPEI (Núcleo de Estudos e Pesquisa em Infância e Educação Infantil). We also would like to express our gratitude to all participants from ECEC Tupi.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Vanessa Ferraz Almeida Neves is a Professor at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in Early Childhood Education. She received her doctorate in Education from Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in 2010. Her research, teaching and service have focused on Early Childhood and Elementary Education drawing on Cultural Historical Psychology, Childhood Studies and Ethnography in Education. She is currently engaged in researching a group of infants throughout its six-year trajectory in a Brazilian Early Childhood Education Centre.

Laurie Katz is a Professor at The Ohio State University in Early Childhood Education. She received her doctorate from University of Massachusetts-Amherst in 1992 with a specialization in Early Childhood Education/ Early Childhood Special Education. Her research, teaching and service have focused on teacher preparation of early childhood educators, inclusion issues, relationships between families, communities and schools, and narrative styles and structures of young children. One of the key issues that she has been addressing in teacher education programs is how early childhood curriculum and instruction can be conceptualized to incorporate the broad diversity of children (birth-8 years of age) including children from linguistic minority communities and children with disabilities.

Maria Inês Mafra Goulart is a Professor at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in Psychology of Education. She received her doctorate in Education from Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in 2005. Her research, teaching and service have focused on Early Childhood and Elementary Education, including scientific literacy, kindergarten children's science learning, learning and development in formal settings and teacher professional improvement. Her publications include Participation, Learning and Identity: Dialectical Perspectives (with W.-M. Roth, S.-W. Hwang, & Y.-J. Lee) and Science Education during Early Childhood (with W.-M. Roth, & K. Plakitsi).

Maria de Fátima Cardoso Gomes is a Professor at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in Psychology of Education. She received her doctorate in Education from Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in 2004. Her research, teaching and service have focused on Literacy from children through adults drawing on Cultural Historical Psychology, Ethnography in Education and Discourse Analysis. She is currently Head of the Graduate Program in Education, Knowledge and Social Inclusion (Programa de Pós Graduação em Educação: Conhecimento e Inclusão Social) at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais.

ORCID

Vanessa Ferraz Almeida Neves http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4094-3639

Laurie Katz http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9589-286X

Maria Inês Mafra Goulart http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8317-7746

Maria de Fátima Cardoso Gomes http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6881-3193

Notes

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

2 The notion of drama in Vygotsky is based on Georges Politzer (1903–1942) and it is related to concrete, different, and often contradictory, social roles that a person can assume throughout her life and that are essential to her higher psychological functions.

3 For further information on Brazilian ECEC see Barreto and Valverde (2007) and Campos (2018).

4 See Pires (2014) for more information on this programme.

Additional information

Funding

This project was supported by Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (402690/2016-8; 302977/2017-1; 202976/2017-3) and Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de Minas Gerais (25081).