Why nurturing curiosity is an ethical endeavour: exploring practitioners’ reflections on the importance of curiosity

ABSTRACT

Several authors have argued that early childhood education and care (ECEC) is essentially an ethical practice based on certain values and conceptions about the purpose of education. Is this also the case for educational practices surrounding the highly valued notion of curiosity? While psychological approaches portray it as neutral, this article aims to explore curiosity's normative connotations. To do so, an ethnographically informed approach and video-stimulated recall focus-group interviews have been used to gather Norwegian ECEC practitioners' reflections on the importance of curiosity. The reflections have been analysed using the concept of ethical rationalities and can be grouped into four approaches to valuing curiosity: the relational approach, the virtue approach, the consequentialist approach and the essentialist approach. The analysis suggests that different practices for nurturing curiosity are constrained and others are enabled, depending on the preferred ethical rationality. To prevent the nurturing of curiosity from being based on an assumed and restricted range of theoretical and ethical perspectives, it is necessary to invite practitioners’ reflections on values associated with curiosity.

SHORT ABSTRACT

While psychological approaches portray it as neutral, this article aims to explore curiosity's normative connotations in the daily practices of ECEC. To do so, an ethnographically informed approach and video-stimulated recall focus-group interviews have been used to gather practitioners' reflections on the importance of nurturing curiosity. These have been analysed using the concept of ethical rationalities and can be grouped into four approaches to valuing curiosity: the relational approach, the virtue approach, the consequentialist approach and the essentialist approach. To prevent the nurturing of curiosity from being based on a restricted range of theoretical and ethical perspectives, it is necessary to invite reflection on its value.

KEYWORDS:

• Preschool
• kindergarten
• ECEC
• values
• ethics
• curiosity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Soern Finn Menning http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9263-4689

Notes

1 The term normative refers here to being based on values and certain assumptions about what actions should be ‘done or abstained from, praised or blamed, believed or denied, pursued or rejected’ (Schmidt 2011, 37).

2 In this article, I use the terms ‘ethical’ and ‘moral’ as synonyms to point out the close connection between ethical reflections and moral actions in educational practice, even though these two terms are sometimes used to distinguish between ethical theory and moral practice.

3 The term ‘practitioners’ includes here all working staff that had a direct influence on the practices on site, such as principals (who all worked as preschool teachers before), preschool teachers and assistants.

4 E.g. Weber (1921) differentiates social action based on different types of rationality, such as a value or a purpose-based rationality. Dewey (1891) also points out that the ethical theories should not be treated as hierarchic, but as complementary, suggesting that there are different rationalities for facing human practical decisions.

5 Translation by the author.

6 And, of course, their willingness to participate was also a factor, as not all ECEC institutions were open to inviting researchers to observe their practices.

7 All quotes are translated from Norwegian by the author.

8 For a further ethical-theoretical discussion of a relational curiosity see Menning (2018a).

9 Most of the children in this preschool would not eat pork due to their religious background.

10 For a discussion of possible value dilemmas regarding meeting children's curiosity, see Menning (2018b).

11 Here I follow the quote, which only uses the male possessive pronoun.