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When thinking about what quality provision looks like for babies, our team has been wondering how to bring in more perspectives, including the voices of babies. We don’t want to talk about babies without involving babies- because who knows more about the quality of early childhood education and care than children?

While we want to find a way to draw from babies’ perspectives and experiences, Elwick, Bradley, and Sumsion (2014a) discuss how it is impossible to ‘know’ babies. Adults are only able to access what we think an infant is communicating- through a sound, through a gesture- and construct what that may mean for education and care. This is not the infant’s perspective- it is the adult construction of the infant perspective.

Within discussions of quality this poses a problem. If we cannot know how babies experience the world, how can we know how babies experience quality?

Maybe, as Elwick, Bradley, and Sumsion (2014b) suggest, tapping into infants’ experiences of quality is about remaining open and curious to what infants may be experiencing. They suggest that attending to the affective spaces between babies and adults may help us move closer to understanding their experiences (Elwick, Bradley, and Sumsion, 2014b). It’s a way to arouse ethical thinking about babies’ experiences.

Simply put, ethics is ‘a set of beliefs about what is morally right and wrong’ (Cambridge Dictionary, n.d.). Therefore, when we refer to ‘ethical thinking’, we’re talking about reflecting on how we can work with babies in a way that is ‘right’ or ‘good’. We often talk to practitioners who say they have a feeling of what’s good – they can’t always articulate it, but they can feel it. They can feel when they are getting it ‘right’ with babies, because they feel warmth, affection, attunement, responsiveness – in their bodies rather than consciously observing it.

Is quality a zip of excitement in your gut when a baby’s face lights up over a new sensory experience?

Is quality a relaxing in your shoulders when a baby falls asleep peacefully at nap time?

On the other side of this, discomfort could also point towards a particular experience of quality. There may be times when things feel uncomfortable because a baby is learning to do something new. This discomfort is not necessarily a marker of a lack of quality – in fact it might be a marker of the opposite.

Is quality a pang of worry in your chest as a child is learning to take their first wobbly steps?

What do these feelings actually say about a babies’ experience of quality? Can baby room educators’ attunement to these feelings reveal what babies are experiencing, and if so, how?

On a final note, when we foreground our felt sense of what is happening, is it possible that we are actually doing a disservice to the baby room and falling back on old, tired discourses of ‘instinct’? That some people are just good with babies, that we just know ‘in our bones’ when we’re getting it right? The quality work of baby room educators cannot be reduced to ‘just a feeling’- they are exercising sharpened skillsets around dimensions of learning, developmental knowledge, nuances of caregiving, how to navigate different stakeholders, and much more.

It seems that bringing in babies’ experiences of quality leaves us caught in a tangled web somewhere between feeling and thinking. Our hope is to stay with this complexity as we engage in ethical thinking about babies’ experiences of quality so that we may hold at the centre of this research who quality is about- the children.

Over to you!

• How do you know if a baby is having a quality experience in the baby room? Can you know?
• Have you felt quality in the baby room, and how does it feel to you?

References

Cambridge Dictionary (n.d.) Ethics. In Cambridge Dictionary Online. Retrieved on 11 November 2024 from https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/ethics

Elwick, S., Bradley, B., & Sumsion, J. (2014a). Infants as Others: uncertainties, difficulties and (im)possibilities in researching infants’ lives. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 27(2), 196–213. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2012.737043

Elwick, S., Bradley, B., & Sumsion, J. (2014b). Creating Space for Infants to Influence ECEC Practice: The encounter, écart, reversibility and ethical reflection. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 46(8), 873–885. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2013.780231