Understanding the importance of university researchers working in partnership with practitioners in order to change practice at ground level, this project focused on exploring children’s concept development in everyday early childhood education practice. Concept development is taken to mean children’s construction of understandings about how the world works.
University researchers from University of Wales Trinity Saint David, Dr Jane Waters, Natalie MacDonald and Dr Glenda Tinney established connections with early childhood practitioners from a non-maintained nursery settings in one Local Authority in Wales and video recorded their everyday practice. Many non-maintained nurseries provide mixed-economy provision where attending children are funded privately and through various government funded initiatives aligned to early intervention strategies and supporting parents back to work. The age ranges within the nursery settings are mixed as is the time they spend there, with some accessing sessional care and some full day care, and we focused on children aged between 18 months to 3 years of age.
The video data was then analysed using conversation analysis by BCU professor of early years Amanda Bateman to make visible the ways in which the children participated in their own meaning-making, and how the practitioners supported such participation. Using multimodal conversation analysis (CA) to analyse day-to-day practice in early childhood works well when considering the contemporary socio-cultural approach that is now prevalent in global contexts, and relevant for the ECE curriculum in Wales (NAfW, 2019). Amanda transcribed and analysed ‘moments of interest’ identified by the practitioners as examples of when children were participating in concept development. The CA approach helps us understand the ‘how’ of interaction by allowing the identification of practices which enable children’s participation and recognising the competencies of young children (Church and Bateman 2022). The video recordings of ‘moments of interest’ and associated CA transcriptions were then shared with the early childhood practitioners and university researchers at a workshop facilitated by Amanda.
Project Team:
University researchers: University of Wales Trinity Saint David, Dr Jane Waters, Natalie MacDonald, Dr Glenda Tinney, Dr Jessica Pitman and Natasha Young; BCU Prof Amanda Bateman
Practitioners from Rachel’s Playhouse non-maintained nursery settings group.
Project Impacts:
The two main points discussed at the workshop were 1) children’s strategies for initiating participation, and 2) the role of the practitioner inviting participation. Throughout each example, attention was paid to both verbal and gestural participation, and the practitioner’s demonstration of noticing, recognising and responding to children’s interest in participating in specific ways that were relevant for each child in each episode.
Opportunities for reflecting on practice:
The practitioners involved in the research project all reported that the experience of reflection on action (Schön 1987) using the CA transcripts provided attention to the detail of ‘how’ pedagogy happens and has enabled them to plan specific changes to their own practices. The use of CA has enabled the research team to understand better the ways in which (‘how’) educators can enact conceptually oriented programs (Fleer 2009), engage children in wondering, questioning and problem-solving (Tu 2006) in order to achieve social production of wonder Fleer (2019). The practical application of CA has been a valuable tool in supporting professional learning in ECEC and developing participatory pedagogy in practice.
Project lead: Dr Natalie MacDonald and Dr Glenda Tinney
BCU contact: Prof Amanda Bateman Amanda.bateman@bcu.ac.uk
Publication:
Bateman, A., MacDonald, N., and Tinney, G. (forthcoming, 2026). ‘Participation in practice for 3-4 year olds (CHAPTER 11)’ In J. Tyrie and J. Waters-Davies (Eds.) Young Children’s Participation: Exploring Practice in Early Education and Care. London. Routledge.
