Date & time: Tuesday 18th April, 12-1.30pm

Location: Middlesex University – College Building, Room C126

Seminar 11: Experimental research methods in early childhood

2-Curious: Jarring a Two Year Old (Kerry Moakes, Manchester Metropolitan University)

This paper will illustrate the potential of an experimental approach to continuous professional development (CPD) focussing on the entangled intra-relations that constitute being.  Using extracts of data from a CPD session involving objects in glass jars, the limits of representationalism will be examined. By embracing the intra-active relationship between discourse and matter, the paper will consider how ‘something more’ can be provoked for the practitioner, something which exceeds the confines and strictures of traditional CPD that so often privileges the accountable autocratic, practitioner who replicates technical processes of categorisation, normalisation and representation in order to stabilise and justify their position in the workforce.  (Lenz Taguchi, 2010; MacNaughton, 2005).

Affective Methodologies in Early Childhood Research: adventures in careful recklessness (Jayne Osgood, Middlesex University)

MacLure (2015) encourages us to view research as ‘an adventure requiring care and recklessness’. In a recent study concerned to reconfigure ‘diversity’ in early childhood contexts I find myself caught in a tangle of ontological insecurity when some of the old certainties associated with critical qualitative enquiry are displaced. How can we exercise care and open ourselves to reckless creative experimentation? How reckless or careful must we be when we are engaging in methodologies designed to generate, produce, and/or capture affects? Can or should we be exercising ethical recklessness?  How can and do we re-negotiate the humanist expectations that are set out for us as researchers in early childhood education. This paper attends to some of these sticky knots.

This event is free to attend and open to all, please sign up here: