An ethnographic study about the substantive nature of feelings in early childhood care and education

This postqualitative ethnographic study situated in Aotearoa asks “how are children’s feelings enabled and constrained in their early childhood care and education (ECCE) context?” The study involved six months of autoethnographic writing followed by a further six months of participant observation in a community-based early childhood setting where children were aged two to five years of age. Perspectives drawn from psychoanalytic theory, neuroscience, posthumanism and new materialism informed understanding of the subject and have been woven into the stories gathered. Artefacts emerging from these stories have been assembled to reveal and represent new theorising emerging from this study. A key finding is that feelings possess a materiality that is both substantive and sticky. Furthermore, feelings have a malleable form and are conducted by people and matter. In this, feelings can be read as mini-stories. Reading stories in relation to their conduction is a way of attuning to children’s feelings and needs. However, while the process of conduction enables children to reveal their feelings, it also appears that some feelings remain constrained or less apparent. It is theorised that teachers’ sensitivity to feelings can involve either perceiving feelings as “glints” or hearing them as with “the bird’s call”. This requires having an antenna so feelings can be seen, heard, and felt. Highlighting the pervasive nature of feelings and their multilayered habitations provides a way forward for today and the future that is firmly anchored in understanding influences from the past.