When and why do early childhood educators reminisce with children about their past experiences?

ABSTRACT

When children reminisce with adults about their own past experiences, they are offered a rich forum in which to develop cognitive and socioemotional skills, build their sense of self, and form emotional bonds. Little attention has been directed to reminiscing in educational contexts, however. Our aim was to explore when, how often, and why early childhood educators engage young children in reminiscing conversations. Participants included 251 Australian educators with 1–45 years of experience. Educators completed an online survey asking them (i) the number of times per day they engaged children in reminiscing, relative to other types of talk, and (ii) the times and places these reminiscing conversations were most likely to occur. While individual differences were apparent, more than 85% of educators reporting engaging children in reminiscing multiple times per day. Popular times included arrival (67.7%), meals (65.7%) and group/circle time (58.2%). Educators’ qualitative explanations suggested several important reasons to engage children in reminiscing, including to bond, establish home-centre connections, build children’s socioemotional competence, reflect on ‘centre life’ and support intentional learning activities. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Educator–child talk
• reminiscing
• past talk
• rich talk
• sustained shared thinking

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 A fourth section included two memory function scales (an adult scale and a child scale). These scales represented the first phase of longitudinal work considering the inter-relationships between adult and child memory functions. They are not the focus of the current analysis, however, and are not reported here.

2 Supplementary chi-squared analyses comparing responses by educators’ teaching context showed that ‘group/circle time’ responses were more common among educators in pre-school rooms, p < .05, and ‘change time’ responses were more common among educators in babies’ rooms, p < .05. No other differences were significant.