Research: Listening-2
Investigating sensory-motor learning in two-year-olds.
Project summary and research outputs
Research summary
- September 2019 - March 2020
The Listening-2 project explored the potential for developing a teaching practice which paid attention to two-years-olds’ sensory and affective ways of knowing. The project was inspired by Froebel’s idea that there is something unique about the way that very young children engage with the world, and that by tuning into this, adults can learn both from and with the child. In particular it explored the Froebelian concepts of ‘unfoldment’ and ’self-activity’.
Listening-2 took place in a diverse, inner-city Children’s Centre in Manchester. The familiarity of the setting, and existing close relationships between children, parents and staff, meant that researchers were able to explicitly engage parents and early years practitioners as collaborators throughout the project.
At the heart of the project was an innovative, slow-motion video-based methodology, which allowed parents to act as co-researchers, ‘listening’ to two-year-olds in a dedicated community space. ‘Listening’ here is understood as an expanded attentiveness, not just to words, but, crucially, to movement, sound and gesture.
The Listening-2 project has much to contribute to national debates around disadvantage, parenting and school readiness, by understanding parents’ engagements with their children as positive attunement rather than as parenting ‘deficit’.
Research outputs
Academic papers
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MacRae, C. and MacLure, M. (2021) Watching two-year-olds jump: video method becomes ‘haptic’. Ethnography and Education 6 (3), 263-278.
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MacLure, M. and MacRae, C. (forthcoming) Folding Froebel with Deleuze: rethinking the significance of imitation in early childhood. Global Education Research.
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MacRae, C. (forthcoming) Bringing post-humanism and Froebel into conversation with schema play, chapter in Schemas in the Early Years: Exploring beneath the surface through observation and dialogue. Editor: Cath Arnold. Taylor and Francis.
Visual outputs
Research team
Funding
With funding from
The Froebel Trust
Contact
Contact us
For general enquiries about Education and Social Research Institute’s children and childhood group, you can contact research lead Prof Rachel Holmes.
