This book challenges the developmentalist paradigm that dominates research into children and childhood, focusing on observation as a research method. It offers new postdevelopmental ways of conducting childhood observations which are diverse in context and theoretical orientation, and in the process, deconstructs the dominant traditions of childhood research. Written by leading scholars based in Canada, Norway, the UK, and the USA, the chapters consider observation as it is enacted in the home, nursery or classroom. Drawing on a range of theories including feminist new materialism, social semiotics, and posthumanism, the chapters cover a range of topics including reciprocal methods, photography, childhood art, and memoir.

This book argues that developmental approaches to observation in childhood pedagogy are limiting, that there is an urgent need to unsettle and reimagine observation, proposing new postdevelopmental theories and modes of inquiry for educators. Written by leading scholars based in Australia, Canada, Finland, New Zealand, the UK and the USA, the chapters consider observation as it is enacted in the home, nursery or classroom. Drawing on a range of theories including feminist new materialism, social semiotics, and sociocultural and multimodal approaches to early childhood the chapters cover a range of areas from early childhood art and observational literacy tools to intergenerational research, and using photography and video in observations.

This book challenges the developmentalist paradigm that dominates research into children and childhood, focusing on observation as a research method. It offers new postdevelopmental ways of conducting childhood observations which are diverse in context and theoretical orientation, and in the process, deconstructs the dominant traditions of childhood research. Written by leading scholars based in Canada, Norway, the UK, and the USA, the chapters consider observation as it is enacted in the home, nursery or classroom. Drawing on a range of theories including feminist new materialism, social semiotics, and posthumanism, the chapters cover a range of topics including reciprocal methods, photography, childhood art, and memoir.

In childhood research, children's art-making has typically been viewed and understood through a lens of developmental psychology and the notion that children's art-making progresses through a linear series of stages continues to dominate how we design and implement art-making experiences for young children. Postdevelopmental Approaches to Childhood Art brings together the work of theorists from around the world who have presented postdevelopmental approaches to childhood art, thereby playing a vital part in unsettling the dominance of the developmental paradigm and offering worked examples of alternative models. Drawing on sociocultural theory, Deleuzian philosophy, posthumanism and postmodernism each chapter offers a theoretical basis that challenges developmentalism, as well as an application of that theoretical basis. The contributors also consider what this shift in our perspective means for the design and implementation of art-making experiences for young children.

This New Zealand adaptation looks both at historical roots of child observation as well as various approaches to observing young children in early years settings.

Postfoundational Approaches to Qualitative Inquiry is an edited collection that aims to move beyond a critique and deconstruction of method in order to present an engagement with various postfoundational frameworks and approaches that produce new concepts and enactments. What makes this book innovative is the singular focus on postfoundational paradigms, borrowed from the humanities and sciences, that are enveloped in what is referred to as the ontological turn, the new empiricisms, and the new materialisms. Postfoundational inquiry is conceived by the editors as emergent, relational, responsive, involuntary, and inventive. While the editors name the facets of these contingent approaches and explain how they work, they do so not in order to fix a new method, but to spur new connectives. In this collection, authors take up a range of postfoundational theories such as poststructuralism, posthumanism, postcolonialism, feminist new materialism, speculative/ new empiricism, agential realism, immanent ontologies, and affect theory. Provoked by a series of reorienting questions, chapters in the book offer enactments as a way of unfurling what is unthought, not yet, and becoming. The chapters are organized according to four Openings: Atmospheres, Affects, and Hauntings; Archives, Worldings, and Sketchings; Escaping Tradition, Beginning Elsewhere, and the Politics of Doing Otherwise; Pre-personal Agencies and Thought Taking Flight. This book can be used as a standalone text in advanced qualitative inquiry courses, or as a supplementary text in courses that examine the use of theory in research.

Child Observation for Learning and Research is an exciting new text, providing a thorough grounding in the methodology, practice and interpretation of observing children. The authors draw on their experience and expertise in childcare, education, social work and research to introduce the fundamental principles and process of observation, preparing you for your first observation and building knowledge and confidence through a wide range of scenarios and activities. The book takes the unique approach of demonstrating how acquiring observational skills can serve as a key learning tool, not only helping you to understand children, but also to recognise, analyse and question theory, helping you make sense of your own learning.