Practices/1, Italy: Facilitating participation in early childhood education

This chapter concerns a way of observing activities in early childhood education. In particular, it concerns the observation of children’s active participation in interactions with peers and teachers. This observation regards three different levels of children’s participation: (1) children’s understanding (concerning what has been said and the reasons/intentions for saying); (2) children’s actions and their design; (3) communication processes involving children, as sequences of actions. An important issue in this observation is if children’s participation can also mean children’s agency. Agency means display of autonomy in action, choosing among different possibilities, which allows children’s promotion of change of communication structures, such as hierarchical and role structures. In educational activities, agency is made visible as attribution to children of rights and responsibilities in producing knowledge, i.e. as epistemic authority. The chapter analyses how children’s epistemic authority is construed in interactions, exploring some ways in which adults can enhance agency in early childhood education. In particular, the paper shows that adults’ facilitation of communication with and among children can be a way of stressing children’s epistemic authority, encouraging a dialogic form of communication with and among children. The chapter shows examples of adults’ facilitation through the analysis of transcriptions of videotaped interactions. The analysis shows that facilitation implies specific structures of roles and expectations in early childhood education.