Praxeological research in early childhood: a contribution to a social science of the social

Let us begin with Gregory Bateson (1972b) and his concern with a world view that became conventional wisdom and perpetuated the epistemological errors of our time, the errors built in our ways of thinking, and their consequences for justice and ecological sustainability. These errors led him to argue that the most important task facing us is to think in new ways (Bateson 1972b).

As a culture and a civilization we have been used to a scientific paradigm (Kuhn 1962), a taken for granted framework which organizes all perception and thinking in order to conduct scientific research. However Kuhn himself calls attention to the fact that from time to time, within the paradigm itself, there is a revolutionary shift because a new perspective is able to create better understanding of the actual knowledge.

Research conducted within a positivistic world view asserts a separation between mind and reality and defines the role for the rational human being as one of coming to know the objective world through analytical thought and experimental methods.

What does ‘scientific’ mean at the level of social science? It is a reduction of reality in order to make it amenable to a research paradigm designed for other kind of phenomena: the natural world phenomena. This is the starting point of the debate: can we research all phenomena with the same epistemological, methodological and technical approaches?

Historically the power and success of the positivism paradigm in the research of the natural world became a ‘model,’ an aspiration, a hope for the social science. Models, techniques, were imported without deeply thinking about the very central question: what is the nature of the phenomena to be studied? What are the central problems to be addressed? What is the reality to be understood? The positivistic approach of natural sciences was ‘franchised’ to the social sciences, including education.

However there has been since the 1960s a breakaway from this conventional paradigm in social science development with the clear affirmation that it has outlived its usefulness

We do not want to enter research paradigm wars; we want to enter a more productive path – that of exploring this emergent world view and new scientific paradigm for a research of education concerned with the study of change and praxis development.

Can pedagogical knowledge be scientific in the same sense as knowledge produced by natural sciences?

Does the concept scientific mean the same thing within the natural sciences as it means within the social sciences? Can individuals be studied in the same manner as natural objects? Can we aim at a unified science of both the human and the natural worlds? Can we aim at a unified science within social sciences? Within psychology? Within education? It is important to raise questions even when the history of science shows that these questions are difficult and the answers controversial.

We are not following the track of relativism but rather being reflexive about dormant questions that cannot be ignored when we want to make praxeological knowledge and research fulfil their potential for change and innovation in classrooms and schools.

The power of explanation and prediction of context independent theories of the natural sciences has been tempting for the scholars of social sciences, including education, and will continue to be. However according to Flyvbjerg (2010) cognitivism, functionalism, structuralism, and neopositivism have so far failed to produce relevant epistemic theory.

The logic of positivistic rationality is not the only logic. Bourdieu in his inspirational book – Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action – develops the idea that for humans practice has a logic which is not that of logic. Indeed educational positivistic science did not produce significant context independent, general explanatory and predictive theories. Why? Probably because educational phenomena as human and social phenomena are not amenable to be fully explained by large random samples or entire population studies or randomized control trials. This type of studies have their space, answer certain problems and questions but not other that are as important; they establish correlations and some causalities, but fail to explain clearly the most important processes.

Some voices in research begin to say that is time to stop the either/or approach to research. This amputates social science either from the context independent rule governed knowledge or from the context dependent, and the particularistic knowledge. To fully research human action we need both the general, the abstract, the universal and the context, the particular, the practical.

The articles of this special issue whose title is Praxeological Research in Early Childhood: A Contribution to a Social Science of the Social represent a wide range of praxeological problems and questions around very different change processes. All together they illuminate central issues of the fight for participative practices within classrooms and for emancipatory practices in children's centres; they speak of the struggle for social justice in early childhood education. They speak of the benefits of praxeological research networks and their joint collaboration.

The first article by Chris Pascal and Tony Bertram entitled Praxis, Ethics and Power: Developing Praxeology as a Participatory Paradigm for Early Childhood Research constitutes a significant contribution to the development of answers to the paradigmatic and conceptual questions raised in the initial part of this editorial. Indeed the article locates CREC (Centre for Research in Early Childhood) evolving processes of development of a participatory paradigm to research in the emergent movement of creating this new paradigm and makes clear the importance of collaboration within and across research teams.1

This article asserts that praxeological research has grown rapidly in recent years and it is now widely accepted as making an important and serious contribution to the knowledge base of early childhood. The authors say that praxis in itself is not enough, and that to realise authentically a participatory paradigm in research requires one to develop a worldview in which reflection (phronesis) and action (praxis) done in conjunction with others, needs to be immersed within a more astute awareness about power (politics) and a sharpened focus on values (ethics) in all of our thinking and actions.

Tizuko Kishimoto's article entitled The Integration of Care and Education: A Case Study Concerning the Problem of Noise departs from a very specific issue (noise levels in an early childhood centre) and narrates the long, assertive, collaborative effort of a praxeological research team to bring about respect for children and adults wellbeing. Aiming at the reduction of noise levels this collective journey is very impressive because it speaks of a resistant group that believes in these children's and adult's rights to a calm environment without forgetting the need of change of the municipal system as a whole. The exemplar power of this case study (from which this article presents only a small part) has already created awareness of this generalized problem and as such will hopefully make a contribution to the system as a whole. We do not want to speak of generalization of answers to the questions being raised in the study but rather about the power of a research group in the development of awareness of a serious problem (toxic noise) and it's consequences for children and adults. We believe that we can say that the dialogical power of this study may be more useful for the deconstruction of unjust educational situations and it's reconstruction than any other abstract generalized solution.

The article Research Change: A Praxeological Case Study on Toddler's Educational Contexts by Sara Araújo starts from hopes and dreams of quality education for toddlers; the author has very clear questions to guide this specific journey, centred around context based staff development. This piece of research benefits from a very rigorous initial phase of multimethodic evaluation of the quality in the activity rooms that allows us to see with neatness the gains that the processes of workplace learning will, step by step, bring to the praxeological transformation process. The scientific value of a rigorous initial evaluation is very important in all research traditions.

The coherence between the main pedagogical approach under study, Pedagogy-in-Participation, and the techniques and instruments used in the three phases of multimethodic quality evaluation is of great importance for the evaluation of praxeological change. The need for congruence between theoretical approaches to children, education and research instruments that evaluate teacher's and children's learning is being pointed in research literature as a key development to be achieved and it is present in this study.

The interactivity of professional and children's gains with this rigorous praxeological research project constitutes added evidence for the connectivity of learning journeys that has been highlighted in other studies.

The voices of their childhood: families and early years' practitioners developing emancipatory methodologies through a tracer study by Margy Whalley, Cath Arnold, Penny Lawrence and Sally Peerless addresses a key question for social justice development: the access by children and families who have less voice and less choice to early childhood services.

This is a collaborative action research study by lead staff, researchers and parents at the Pen Green Centre for Children and their Families in England. The study focuses on the factors enabling access to children's services by nine parents from family contexts with particular characteristics associated with disadvantage. This article does not assume that the response in this group is homogeneous. The critical questions were: What enabled some parents to overcome potential barriers (e.g. gender, ethnicity, language, additional needs) and to access services for their children? What was it about them personally? What was it about the Centre? And what was it about the relationship between them and the Centre that enabled access to be sustained?

Using the parents' own words, a grounded theory on the nature of access to early childhood services within a children's centre was developed. Access is a personal and organisational construction, which once made has to be sustained. The study shows clearly that praxeological research, departing from actual social problems can convoke pre-existing traditions, in this case grounded theory, to create inducted knowledge about urgent social and educational issues.

Why the Evidence-based Paradigm in Early Childhood Education and Care is Anything but Evident by Michel Vandenbroeck, Griet Roets and Rudi Roose. This challenging article analyses the history of the evidence-based paradigm from methodological, pedagogical and, ultimately, ethical and political perspectives and gives a rationale for the unique contribution of praxeological research to the early childhood field. The author assert that the evidence based paradigm, if not deconstructed, may dominate a debate about what works, about what is valid research, and what is efficient practice.

This article, along with the articles by Chris Pascal and Tony Bertram and the article by João Formosinho and Julia Oliveira Formosinho, constitute a timely discussion about other pathways to conduct research and influence policy and practice, agreeing with these authors when they say that the link between research, policy and practice is not necessarily restricted to a technical research venture.

The article proceeds presenting an experiment with participative research on early childhood with five groups of parents in Flanders showing that praxeological research is both very complex and rather unpredictable. The article reasserts the complexity of context based, situated research development and is explicit in its democratic values.

The article Question-asking and Question-exploring: A Case Study by Lorraine Sands, Margaret Carr and Wendy Lee starts with a very clear presentation of the contexts were the project started to be developed: the national context, the local context, the research context, the research team. This contributes for a situated understanding of the study to be developed which is key to action-research.

The umbrella question of the study – how does a ‘question-asking’ and a ‘question-exploring’ culture support children to develop working theories to shape and re-shape knowledge for a purpose? – is researched by combining narrative inquiry and action research.

This research shows the flexible nature of praxeological research, whose focus on questions and problems around change leads to research plural decisions appropriate to each different research context, local actors and situated action. Indeed this article makes a very creative use of the evidences of pedagogical documentation, through the use of narration of children's learning stories.

Children and professionals rights to participation: a case study by Cristina Mesquita-Pires investigates the process of praxeological transformation developed in an early childhood education institution, in Portugal, within four pre-school activity rooms. It is a single case study using action research, context-based staff development and participatory childhood pedagogy as means to change educational practices. Cristina Mesquita-Pires highlights that this has been a long and complex process involving both staff learning and children's learning where the reconceptualization of the image of the child is step by step developed in daily life situations. We can see the struggle to make real a participatory paradigm in the early years' research as sustained by Pascal and Bertram (2012, 477–492).

The Right of Young Children to Wellbeing: A Case Study of a Crèche in Portugal by Mônica Pinazza presents a piece of research that shows surprise and questions the high levels of well-being of children in a crèche context (birth to three). This group of children belongs to a childhood centre where the pedagogical approach is Pedagogy-in-Participation, the Childhood Association pedagogical approach (Oliveira-Formosinho and Formosinho 2012a).

The observation of the very high levels of well being became a challenge for the researcher: how has this been possible? What are the main contributions to these levels? Is it sustainable?

Shonkoff (2010) challenges us saying:

…the research community is to focus less on fine-tuned measurement of what we already know about the developmental process and more on […] continuous refinement of new theories of change to address significant threats in the early years of life. An exciting new era in early childhood policy, practice, and research lies at the convergence of these two agendas – an era driven by science, creativity, and pragmatic problem solving in the service of building a more humane present and more promising future for all young children and their families. (366)

This study answers some of these challenges because it does not focus on what we already know about developmental processes but rather focuses on new ideas about how to improve the lived experience of children in a crèche context. It is important to highlight the perceived importance of teachers' ownership of a participatory pedagogical approach.

Knowledge of specific pedagogical traditions, for the education of children has been again presented, in this new century, as key to quality development – pedagogically empowered teachers create favourable environments for children.

The last article Towards a Social Science of the Social: The Contribution of Praxeological Research by João Formosinho and Júlia Oliveira Formosinho analyses how the type of educational research developed initially, using the natural science model based on the positivist tradition, brought about an applicationist view of educational research. The authors claim that the natural sciences paradigm is not adequate to conduct research in social sciences because the object of the research is not an inert raw material, but a human being with agency.

They present praxeological research as being inscribed in the movement of searching for a social science of the social. This type of research has also demanding criteria for rigour and ethics – the article presents them and contrasts these criteria with those of positivist research. Rigour comes from proximity, from reflexive, ethical attachment.

The authors put a challenge to the research community: the need to develop qualitative meta-analysis that will contribute to the understanding of shared saliencies in the change processes.

Notes

Indeed this volume makes explicit the benefits of a joint search for a participatory paradigm between CREC, Childhood Association and Pen Green Research teams. The specificity of each of these praxeological research networks brings particular contributions to the development of change and innovation and its research and acknowledges shared saliencies that are made visible in this collaboration.