Jack, boats, and marine engineering
While playing with blocks in his early childhood centre, Jack, aged almost 3, described his interests to me: āI know about moons and stars and planes and boats.ā He talked with me about boats, propellers, engines, and noise. He told me he had a boat at his house, a matter that a teacher, Barbara, later confirmed.
During an interview at his home two months later, Jackās mother, Rachael, talked enthusiastically about Jackās interest in boats:
As a family weāve got the boating interest. We have a yacht, Rawhiti, [MÄori for the compass point in the direction of the rising sun] and we went away on that a fair bit over summer. Jackās very interested in the outboard motor and propellers on that. ā¦ [T]he thing thatās happened most recently with our yacht is itās come out of the water and so thatās generated a whole lot of fun. He watched it coming out on the travel lift and then the straddle lift, transported and propped up, put on a truck ā¦ and itās being restored because the boat, can you tell Helen? I donāt know whether you know this Jack, how old is Rawhiti? Rawhiti is a hundred years old this year.
Jack continued with this interest at home, where it had been stimulated, and expressed it in his early childhood experiences. When Jack was 3Ā½, Louise (a teacher) noticed him reading a book about boats and engaged in a deep conversation with him about this. Theresia (another teacher) also had a conversation with him about the family boat and documented this in a learning story, a dominant form of narrative assessment used in early childhood education in Aotearoa New Zealand. In a āstory from homeā in response to Theresiaās story, Rachael explained more of Jackās interest in and knowledge about boats to the teachers. This gave the detailed history of their restoration of the boat and the nature of Jackās understandings.
Rachael wrote me an email, to update me on Jack, six months after completion of my year of fieldwork on this particular project. She told me that Jack had developed an interest in the Titanic, an interest that Theresia had used to encourage Jack to tackle new learning experiences such as carpentry and drawing.
His portfolio has a record of him making a wooden Titanic boat and over a month later bringing it back to kindergarten for some modifications (another funnel). Theresia also used the Titanic obsession to get Jack drawingāsomething heād never been much interested in. The drawings we have from that period are my most treasured drawings from his time at kindergarten. There is a Titanic series (over 15 I would guess). They mostly focus on the funnels, with smoke and propellers with churning water. There is also one in his kindergarten portfolio of the submarinesāincluding his first written word (other than his name) āsubmarineā. Titanic was also one of his first written and recognised words.
Many years later, Rachael came to my professorial inaugural address with a friend of hers, who was at that time my PhD student. She told us that Jack was now almost 18 and had decided to study marine engineering.
Why interests are important
Jack, Rachael, Barbara, Louise, and Theresia were participants in one of my projects on childrenās interests. Here, in the words and actions of a child and parent, and the decisions, actions, and responses of teachers, are reasons why childrenās interests might be important as a significant and meaningful focus for participation in life, learning, early childhood education, and research. Jackās story shows ways that an interest might be sparked and continued at home by participation in family activities, and extended and utilised in education by teachers. Research that connects interests across contexts provides deeper understandings than one context alone. In years later choosing to study marine engineering, Jackās story also offers potential insight into the longer-term value and inspiration that a strong interest might offer.
The story I have recounted will have resonance with many who are involved with children on a daily basis. You will have noticed, for example, infantsā interests stimulated by their intense observation of siblings and peers around them, their desire to emulate them, and to be part of experiences offered by adults. Toddlersā enjoyment of stamping in puddles and creating mud, or listening to music and dancing joyously are among frequently uploaded videos on social media documenting childrenās self-motivated choices of activities. Young children develop the verbal skills to engage in dialogue and debate, with peers and adults, on matters of deep interest and inquiry: fairness, friendship, and families are frequent themes in the literature. Such examples occur across a diverse range of social and cultural contexts internationally. These examples also show that children are keenly interested in almost everything in their lives.
It is likely you have heard similar stories to Jackās. Perhaps you know a child who had an interest in fire engines and much later became a firefighter; taught a child whose parent was a guitarist in a rock band, and grew up with strong talents and involvement in music; or heard of another child whose grandparent was a famous chef and continued with a family restaurant in her footsteps. How and why do these life stories arise? What is the importance and significance of the phenomenon of interest in childrenās lives? How is interest understood from different perspectives, and therefore how might interest play out in the philosophies and practices of education?
Understandings of childrenās interests
Research usually sets out to investigate phenomena, and relationships between phenomena, that we know little about. In my case, the first research-related problem I have experienced is that, despite experiences of a wide range of interests, or knowing personally stories such as Jackās, many people make assumptions and hold narrow interpretations about what childrenās interests are. Without exception, I have found that, when parents, other family adults, teachers, and children themselves, are asked about childrenās interests, they immediately start talking about the activities that children show a preference to participate in, or the focus of a topic of interestāoften one that children know more about than adults.
Here are examples of what I have been told in my research: Imogen likes to play on the swing; Tom is always building with Mobilo; Hunter is an expert at playing the drums; Simeon wants to play soccer; Chloe enjoys trying to jump; Harry often dresses up as a princess; Campbell knows all about sharks and whales; and Hal likes to think about what lions and zebras do and eat. Adults also commonly talk about the frequent questions children have about activities and topics, or routines and events in their lives, sometimes alternately pleased and irritated with constant āWhy?ā questions.
In this book, however, as Jackās story indicates, I argue that activities and topics in themselves may be important, but potentially surface-level and limiting understandings of the term childrenās interests. We owe it to children to look more deeply at their motivations and learning. So we need to pay attention to what curiosities, purposes, content, and meanings lie behind what it is they are choosing to participate in, and investigate, in their families and communities. On one level, children may be individuals with a āgo-toā favourite activity or topic when they are offered a choice of what to do. On another level, these favourite pursuits provide windows into childrenās efforts to make sense and meaning from their life experiences with other children and adults, and learning opportunities in their families and communities. These efforts involve multiple ongoing inquiries into, and questions about, these life experiences. Interests combine personal, social, and intellectual goals, purposes, and achievements, and thus are central to learning and life. As Jack also exemplifies, interests may connect with identity development.
Alongside my intellectual curiosity about interest as a phenomenon, and its place in human lives and learning, my research programme has taken up the challenge articulated clearly by Carl Bereiter:
[T]he most profound of childrenās questions seldom relate to activities of the moment. They relate to the larger issues and forces that shape the world ā birth, death, good, evil, power, danger, survival, generosity, adventure. ā¦ Adults, even the most āchild-centeredā, tend to trivialize childrenās interests, making them out to be more mundane and egocentric than they really are, and thus positing a distance between childrenās interests and intellectual subject matter that is greater than it needs to be.
(Bereiter, 2002, p. 301)
Bereiterās thinking here encapsulates further my reasons for looking for deeper, more analytical and theorised understandings and explanations of childrenās interests. How do interests reflect childrenās desires to understand the complexity and profundity of their worlds? How might we look more deeply at childrenās interests and take them seriously? How might interests serve to connect the understandings of the childhood years and the intellectual knowledge and scientific principles that underpin established understandings and further investigations of the world?
Interests in education
In relation to education, there are more reasons why understanding interests is important. The most pertinent is that almost all international early childhood curricular documents include childrenās interests as one key source of curricular decision making. More recently, as primary (elementary) and secondary (high school/college) teachers look for ways to motivate student learning more overtly, they draw on interests to trial ideas such as āinquiry projectsā or āpassion projects.ā In short, how teachers understand and interpret the term childrenās interests has major consequences for the kinds of learning experiences that children are immersed in during their education.
I have therefore also responded to the provocations of early childhood scholars through my work. Maria Birbili and Melpomeni Tsitouridou critiqued the term childrenās interests as an under-theorised ācatch phraseā (Birbili & Tsitouridou, 2008, p. 143); Angela Anning, Joy Cullen, and Marilyn Fleer described childrenās interests as part of early childhood āfolklore and practiceā (Anning et al., 2009, p. 13). These criticisms indicate that childrenās interests in early childhood education may be central to curriculum and pedagogy, but are taken-for-granted, under-researched, and under-articulated. The criticism also aligns with Bereiterās challenge that childrenās interests may be underestimated and undervalued.
Failing to appreciate the depth and significance of childrenās interests has the potential to stifle childrenās exploration of, learning about, and meaning making in early childhood settings related to the people, places, and things that they encounter in their worlds of experience. It also underestimates the potential relationship between interests and identity, a connection the case of Jack points to.
My problem space
In short, I have found adults are quite certain they know what childrenās interests are. So, it is indeed a problem for educational research when you set out to research a phenomenon that many adults close to childrenās experiences already have quite definite ideas about, that there is surprisingly little literature about, and where a practice is so well-accepted that challenging and shifting underpinning beliefs and assumptions might take time and energy.
Researching childrenās interestsāthe origins of these, the ways and extent to which these are stimulated, recognised, and responded to, ways adult interactions either extend or shut down interests, and the knowledge of content and pedagogy that is brought to these interest-related interactionsāhas been a fascinating source of both project data and unsolicited opinion and feedback over the almost 20 years I have been following my own intellectual curiosity about interests as a learning phenomenon.
Context of my research
My research programme has taken up these challenges in the context of early childhood education in Aotearoa New Zealand, where a variety of early childhood services are available for children aged from birth to 5 years. Reflecting the international scene, not all those who have an educative role with children have teaching qualifications. A range of terminology is used globally to indicate the educative role adults take in services; in Aotearoa New Zealand the term used is from MÄori: kaiako. However, the word I use consistently in this book is teacher. This usage reflects that a teaching qualification assumes a basis of professional knowledge, a valuing of research-informed practices, and having a disposition for ongoing learning to call on in interactions with children.
Te WhÄriki (Ministry of Education, 1996, 2017) is the early childhood curriculum document in New Zealand. It is a well-regarded document internationally, and research related to its underpinning concepts has been taken up worldwide. While my research occurs in the context of Aotearoa New Zealand, the experiences, issues, and debates my projects are also grounded in are pertinent well beyond my country. Readers will ...