Abstract
The articulation of desirable, or even actual (lived), infant pedagogies enacted during first transitions to early childhood education and care (ECEC) is seldom expressed despite a growing discourse on infants-as-learners. It is therefore unsurprising that the educators who participated in our International Study of Social Emotional Early Transitions (ISSEET) rarely articulated infant pedagogies (see Chap. 4). Although these pedagogies are central to educational practice with infants, their rare mention in discourse is indicative of beliefs about infants-as-learners. What gets prioritized, and is therefore made intentional (or, conversely, incidental) by educators themselves, lies at the heart of the transition experience. In this chapter, we explore some of the actual pedagogical acts that took place in the ISSEET settings before and during infants’ first day of transition and their articulations by the educators themselves. The emphasis here is not only on what educators were doing to foster (as a starting place for relational learning) a “common ground” of experience between and among infants, their parents, and families but also on how they were upholding these priorities against competing—and sometimes conflicting—priorities. While these efforts helped integrate priorities within a broader relational community network and institutional functioning, they also called on educators to use pedagogical practices that attended to infants’ social and emotional experiences. To illustrate how the educators were enacting these practices and what they “looked like” in reality, we intersperse our commentary and discussion with interview excerpts, images, and vignettes drawn from our study. Together, they paint a pedagogical picture for the enactment of first transitions across each country that participated in the study.
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White, E.J. et al. (2022). Enacted Pedagogies in First Transitions. In: White, E.J., Marwick, H., Rutanen, N., Souza Amorim, K., Herold, L.K.M. (eds) First Transitions to Early Childhood Education and Care. Policy and Pedagogy with Under-three Year Olds: Cross-disciplinary Insights and Innovations, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08851-3_5
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