Book chapter
Reconsidering and Reconfiguring the Wisdom of Infants and Toddlers: following their lead
Learning for Wisdom in Early Childhood and Primary School Education, pp.35-50
Routledge Research in Early Childhood Education, Routledge, 1st
2027
Appears in Recent Faculty of Education Publications
Metrics
1 Record Views
Abstract
This chapter plays with misaligned perceptions of young children as naïve learners, wondering what we can learn if we learn with them and from them, rather than imposing our ideas about who we think they already are. This wisdom helps us to come to know infants and toddlers by reconfiguring identity, communications, movements, relations, actions, space and time in the coming-into-being of the world. Attending to such wisdom notes how infants and toddlers initiate activities that attune with others and the material effects of daily life. The authors contemplate the complex and underestimated world of infants and toddlers, mobilised by the potential of two philosophical approaches that the authors work with in their research and practice, namely, the Reggio Emilia approach from the infant-toddler programmes of northern Italy and post-developmental theory. Post-qualitative methodologies enable us to interrogate young children's encounters with materials through events at an early childhood centre in Australia. Through relational, embodied, and affective engagements, these young children encounter their environment, offering insights into rethinking the wisdom of these youngest learners. This chapter contributes to a growing body of work emphasising a wider lens of subjectivity with more-than-human relationships in early childhood education, which reveal possibilities for pedagogies that are responsive to new configurations about children's capabilities. Instead of offering increasingly complex adult-led solutions, we return to the baby or child, to observing them, listening to them, trusting them and following their lead.
Details
- Title
- Reconsidering and Reconfiguring the Wisdom of Infants and Toddlers: following their lead
- Creators
- Tracy Charlotte Young - Southern Cross UniversityMelanie Turkopp - Bialik College (Australia, Melbourne)
- Contributors
- Kristina Turner (Editor of compilation) - La Trobe UniversityEri Mountbatten-O'Malley (Editor of compilation) - Bath Spa UniversityZane M. Diamond (Editor of compilation) - Monash UniversityPeter J. Anderson (Editor of compilation) - University of New England
- Publication Details
- Learning for Wisdom in Early Childhood and Primary School Education, pp.35-50
- Series
- Routledge Research in Early Childhood Education
- Publisher
- Routledge; Oxon, UK
- Edition
- 1st
- Identifiers
- 991013398133602368
- Copyright
- © 2027
- Academic Unit
- Faculty of Education
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Book chapter